tongue and groove

screenwriting

this is a fascinating interview with screenwriter Aaron Sorkin. Happy Oscars Sunday!

TECLOPOLIS

if you can spare 12 minutes, this is a beautiful stop-motion film. gorgeous visuals. brilliant storytelling.

Poetry the movie

Poetry looks like a beautiful film. from the NY Times review: "The importance of seeing, seeing the world deeply, is at the heart of this quietly devastating, humanistic work from the South Korean filmmaker Lee Chang-dong."

here's the trailer:

i feel as if i've been holding poetry at arm's length lately...pretending i don't even know it. for me, poetry requires a quiet engagement...a diving-in that on the surface can feel like a simple act...yet one that requires my willingness to open to expansiveness.

which poets have you been reading lately?

La Salonniere recap

i can hardly believe it's already been 10 weeks since i  launched my interview blog, La Salonniere. in lieu of a new interview this week, i'm doing a recap of the first nine interviews. what a wonderful group of talented and creative people! if you missed any of their interviews over the last couple of months, i hope you'll take a moment to catch up because each one is chock-full of insights and tips on how to lead a more authentic, creative life.

thank you for reading. more great interviews are on the way!

and now, here's the recap.

what questions should i be asking myself?

for decades i've been joking with friends, "why can't someone just pay me to be me?" so imagine my glee when i read this quote in Maira Kalman: Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World):

"Basically I get paid to be myself--and for my imagination. My job is to be as creative and as eccentric as I can possibly be, and my job changes every day because I'm obsessed with changes."

dream job, right? except it's not as easy as it sounds:

"Not trying to be anything other than who you are. That's an absurdly difficult thing to do, and it takes many years."

no shit.

this morning i had the sudden thought: maybe i should make a list of all the things i say i should be doing, but don't do. like writing, for example. for probably 25 years, people (the infamous "people") have been telling me that i should write. given that i have nothing but time on my hands these days, it seems like if i really wanted to write, i'd be doing it. (more than the occasional blog post, i mean.) do i say i want to write because i actually have the desire, or do i tell myself i should have the desire because others tell me i might have a knack for it?

at the library the other day, i spotted an anthology of essays, Mentors, Muses & Monsters - 30 Writers on the People Who Changed Their Lives. in the opening essay, the book's editor Elizabeth Benedict writes of her mentor, Elizabeth Hardwick, someone she studied with in 1970's:

She had been a towering figure to us when we were very young, the first real writer any of us knew at a time that's hard to imagine now, when "women writers" were an exotic species, and when wanting to grow up and be one put you in far more exclusive company than it does today. It was not as rare as wanting to be President--which no one wanted to do--but for either sex, it was far from the bustling, vocational school industry that it is today.

suddenly i was 17 again, in Miss M's junior English class and being handed back my modern, satirical take on the Cinderella fable. she'd given me an A- on the story and written in the margin: "The minus is because I doubt its originality." i felt like someone had kicked me in the solar plexus. she thought i'd plagiarized it? although i'd slogged through the horrible 500-word essays sometimes assigned to us in high school English classes about books i loathed (so-called classics), this was the first piece of original writing i'd ever dared to attempt. i can still remember lying on my twin bed in my childhood bedroom and smiling when it was done because (ohmygod) i think it might be actually sort of good and maybe even funny. my dear friend who sat next to me in class saw how crushed i was about the teacher's remark and tried to console me by telling me i should feel flattered that my writing would seem like a professional's. but i didn't feel flattered--i felt invisible. it felt like the message was loud and clear: you are not capable of doing this. and i didn't write again until i was 30.

going back to Benedict's description of wanting to be a writer in the 70's, it did seem exotic and rare to have those desires back then. (i was 17 in 1972.) i lived in a small town with a single father who to this day, i've never heard utter the words "creative" or "creativity." "art" was for a very select few and in those days i think i equated art with painting. (i had two friends whose dads were painters.) i'm not sure it occurred to me that performers were artists, even though i'd been performing (often secretly) since i was little, let alone that art could be associated with words. i wasn't a reader back then. in fact, i hated to read except for Seventeen magazine and i loved Seventeen for the images, not the articles.

in November i began keeping a 'spirit notebook' after seeing this video by Lori-Lyn (she talks about her spirit notebook beginning at the 1:30 mark). the other day i realized that there are more collages in mine than anything else. (i realize we call them dreamboards now, but i've been making them for 30 years so still think of them as collages.) ;) i've always been powerfully drawn to images, yet i often try to do most of my communicating in a more linear fashion with words. today i'm asking myself: do i do that because that's what feels most natural, or do i often use words rather than images because i think that's what others expect of me?

scrolling through all of the lovely messages left on my Facebook wall on my birthday earlier this month, it jumped out at me that the only two people who remarked on my humor or wit were two old high school friends, one of whom was the friend who tried to console me over that A-. the three of us reconnected at Facebook about 1-1/2 years ago and write to each other a couple of times a week there, so my humor is on display for them on a regular basis. in Mondo Beyondo we were asked to do an exercise to come up with our core values. humor is one of mine. that secret performing life i kept as a child? a big part of it was practicing my stand-up and impersonations. i live for humor, yet i'll bet most people who read here would be surprised to learn that. i don't often display my humor here because when i've tried to do that in the past (on any of my blogs), it's often been misinterpreted. so i keep that part of myself offline for the most part.

it's only just now occurred to me that Miss M not only snatched away my dream of writing, she may have also snatched away my dream of humor because the thing i loved most about that essay i'd written was its humor. the other day i read a post by Martha Beck, 20 questions that could change your life. number 10 stopped me in my tracks: "What's so funny?"

people are surprised when i say that i never had a teacher along the way who inspired me. the response is usually: well, surely there must have been one...? no. i had a lot of adults along the way tell me what i couldn't do and often what i should do, according to their beliefs and/or their perception of me. i think that's why sometimes i feel bothered by some things i've seen emerge in the blogosphere over the years. do we take on certain likes, activities and pursuits because they're really what we desire, or do we adopt them to fit in? do we choose our tribe, or do we let our tribe choose us?

the #1 question in that list of 20 from Martha Beck? "What questions should I be asking myself?" i guess i just answered that.

for my people

all i could think while watching this video was: that chair is my life...and i'm trying to live within its confines. that thought sat there through the whole video...and i allowed myself to enjoy watching a dancer who's close to my age move her body so beautifully. i let my dancer (i'm sorry i buried you so long ago!) revel in the pleasure of this.

expertise is overrated

"I just kind of started doing it...My lack of knowledge in the beginning really helped and really just made me refine what little I knew."  ~The Sartorialist

whatever it is...that secret idea you've had squirreled away for someday...take it out, dust it off, let it see the light of day. breathe some life into it. don't wait for permission or for someday...just start doing it...now.

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if you missed it earlier this week, i hope you'll check out my La Salonniere interview with the very talented musician and filmmaker Eric Shiveley.

there's a brand-new interview--and a surprise--coming on Monday!

Maeve Brennan

as i crawled into bed last night, i grabbed the tall stacks of softcover books off my bedside table and began going through them to see which one i wanted to read next. i'd gone through about two-thirds of them when i came upon The Springs of Affection by Maeve Brennan. i remembered that i'd purchased it because of the glowing reviews on the cover, since i'd never heard of Brennan. i'd been thinking about Ireland recently, what with the financial woes the nation is facing, so i decided that next up on my reading queue would be Irish author Maeve Brennan.

i got settled into bed with the covers just so, opened the book and a folded-up newspaper clipping fell out of it. i'd purchased the book at the thrift store and hadn't noticed the clipping at the time, but i often find things inside of books i've purchased there...postcards, bookmarks, receipts, etc. the clipping was an oversized page from The Irish Times Magazine dated November 15, 2003. it was an essay from the High Life section entitled "In From the Cold" written by Angela Bourke. i began reading it and was astonished to learn that Maeve Brennan had once been the toast of New York. she had worked at the New Yorker for more than 30 years. the book of short stories i was about to read had been published after her death in 1993 through the efforts of  a book editor at Houghton Mifflin who had tracked them down. as you can see from this photo, Maeve Brennan was very beautiful, and by all accounts, a very talented writer. before the New Yorker, she had worked as a fashion copywriter for several years at Harpers Bazaar. it appears she was brilliant, witty, stylish and maybe even ahead of her time.

her life took a very sad turn. she succumbed to alcoholism and mental illness. she ended up homeless and at one point was reduced to sleeping in the women's restroom at the New Yorker offices. she died in obscurity in New York at the age of 76. at the time of her death, she was unknown in both the U.S. and Ireland. it made me very sad to read how her life turned out, since it sounds like she might not have received the help she needed for her illness.

Angela Bourke (who wrote the article i found in my book) wrote a biography of Brennan in 2004, Maeve Brennan: Homesick at the New Yorker. here's a January 2005 review of it at Bookslut.

you can read more about Brennan at her Wikipedia page, and here's an April 2010 post about her at Colin Broderick's blog. at the end of both you'll find this remarkable tidbit:  Angela Bourke suggests Brennan may have been the inspiration for Truman Capote's Holly Golightly character in Breakfast at Tiffany's since they had worked together at both Harpers Bazaar and the New Yorker. we can never really know, but for it even to be put forth as a possibility suggests that Maeve Brennan must have been one-of-a-kind.

The Revolutionary Yardscape

this morning i read this article about a new book by Matthew Levesque, The Revolutionary Yardscape.  i *love* the idea of repurposing materials in the yard or garden. Levesque has taken repurposed landscaping to a whole new level at his home. check out the photos! there are links at the end of the article to resources where you can find repurposed materials in your area.

i went to Flickr and searched for the tags "garden" and "repurpose." here's a slideshow of how some folks are repurposing materials in their yards. would be curious to hear if you're using repurposed materials in your yard and how you're using them.

enlivened

this past weekend, i read this profile of Debra Winger in the New York Times Sunday Magazine.  i've always loved Debra Winger's work as an actress. we're the same age and her performances in "Urban Cowboy"* and "An Officer and a Gentleman" were big touchstones for me as a young woman and don't even get me started on "Terms of Endearment"...her Emma never fails to reduce me to heaving, wracking sobs. ;)

i admire Winger for how she stepped away from the Hollywood machine years ago...and for how she's managed to not confuse acting with celebrity. in recent years i've been thrilled to see her working again.

i haven't read her book, but i'm curious to check it out.

this morning i watched this PBS interview with her from two years ago conducted by the editor of Texas Monthly. it's about 25 minutes long and well worth a look. she tells a hilarious story about an incident at Magic Mountain when she worked there as a troll. in talking about the internet, she reminds us that if we're constantly locked into our Blackberries, we're not engaging with life. near the end of the interview, she's asked if she's happy at this juncture of her life. she says, "the word 'happy' for me is almost meaningless. i feel very enlivened by life right now..." enlivened means to make lively or spirited. and, really, what more could we ask for from life? who wants to reach "happy" and then flatline? give me lively and spirited any day.

Debra Winger has enlivened my life through her work. if you feel the same, you'll enjoy this talk with her.

 

 

 

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*i once found myself stranded overnight, along with five other intrepid souls and the cleaning staff, at Gilley's in Paradise, Texas where they shot "Urban Cowboy"...but that's a story for another post.  ;)