Activitism

Posted on July 4, 2026 by Admin

That’s not a word. I just made it up. One of the most important lessons of writing fiction, whether in a novel, short story, screenplay or play, is the word “active.” The characters, especially the main character, must be active.

The simple breakdown is that we aren’t interested in the man sitting at a bar talking about everything he didn’t accomplish. We are interested in the man who tried. Whether he succeeded or not is irrelevant. When you go a little deeper into our interest in other people, it often begins, at least in story telling, with characters who have some nagging doubt. In other words — I’m using someone else’s words here — “We are not interested in whether a character drinks his coffee with milk or sugar, or reads the newspaper, or buys an apple in the morning. We are interested in those aspects of his daily experience that he may have doubts about being able to value.”

In some stories we often aren’t sure who the main character is, because it has a great deal of “ensemble” about it. But these are usually stories about a place. Right now I’m thinking of three Los Angeles movies, “Magnolia,” “Crash,” and “Little Miss Sunshine.” (The last is a more of a road trip that ends up in Los Angeles.) In “Magnolia” there are a few characters (well many, actually) that stand out to me — I’ll just name the actors: Tom Cruise, Jason Robards, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Julianne Moore, John C. Reilly, William H. Macy, Melora Walters, Philip Baker Hall. But the link between all of them is, more or less, the Tom Cruise character. He also has the furthest to go, emotionally, between the start of the movie and the end. His journey is reflected on almost all the other people in the different stories. They are all versions of his. Crash was a turd dressed up as a debutante so I won’t bother with that. And with “Little Miss Sunshine,” it is not Frank, the brother whose attempted suicide opens the show, nor Wayne, the self-imposed mute who wants to go to flight school, nor even Olive, whose desire to be in the Little Miss Sunshine pageant is what the story is all about. It’s Richard, the father of Olive, the husband of Cheryl, brother in law of Frank, step father of Wayne, and son of “Dad” or “Grandpa.” He is the one trying to sell his self help system, and not succeeding. He is the one who decides that they will all drive to California to take Olive to the LMS pageant. And he makes the greatest change. By the end of the film he has embraced his “loserdom,” joining all the others. Wayne, also, goes through a very dramatic change when he discovers he’s colorblind is now a “loser” like the rest of his family, but he doesn’t drive the action. In a very literal sense, Richard is the driver of the run down VW bus, and he is the driver of the story.

All of this is to say that you “figure out” who the main character is by deciding who is the most active in both a physical and emotional sense. Because often, that action is also what drives the story. And at the very essence of a story is the question, “Why are you telling this to me, now, at this moment in time.” And because of that — because of our impatience in a sense, we don’t tell the story about Hansel and Gretel at home, having a nice supper, going to bed, falling asleep and having sweet dreams. We tell the story about a famine, and a woodcutter with a wife who insists he take the children to the woods and let them fend for themselves, and the children who stumble upon a house made of gingerbread and candy, and a witch inside who, (with logic that only works in stupid fairy tells), is starving and wants to eat the children. But the boy isn’t fat enough, so the witch feeds him (again, why doesn’t she feed herself) to fatten him up, but he uses a bone to pretend he’s still too thin. Ultimately, the children push the witch into an oven or cauldron, burn her alive, escape with the help of a swan, and are reunited with the father, while their hateful mother has died of some unknown reason.

That is the difference between an active character and a passive character. In this story, the passive character is actually the father. The villain is the same person in different forms: the mother “IRL” and the witch in the gingerbread house. The active character is actually Hansel, not Gretel. Gretel is unfortunately imprisoned in the basement and Hansel is the most active: earlier in the story, he had saved some white pebbles to mark his way back home; he cleverly uses a bone to fool the witch into thinking he isn’t ready to eat, etc.

Anyway, I am actually working, even though it may not look like it, because I have an enormous of thinking to do about this particular story. It’s based on someone I once knew, informally — in fact if he were alive today he probably wouldn’t remember me — who burned himself to death in Prospect Park as a protest against fossil fuels. He was an activist — a civil rights attorney and later an environmental activist — who decided to end his life early. As far as I can tell, he did not tell his partner or the rest of his family, or his mentee, or any friends he may have had. I have been thinking about this constantly because a) I realized that it’s never going to be possible to come up with a definitive answer of why he did this and whether or not he was “depressed” or otherwise mentally anguished; and b) I have a friend who is currently going through the dying process as I’ve come to call it — (I’m borrowing the phrase from the movie “Arrival,” which is what the aliens, who can see both the future and the past, call it.) My friend is dying passively. She is letting it happen to her. She has mostly given up on all the things that kept her engaged while alive, which was primarily television, the phone and her dog. (Her dog had to be put down, but only because she hadn’t done it herself and it was in a dreadful state — riddled with tumors, etc.) She gets up as late as they let her. Sometimes they make her do some physical therapy. She eats. She sits in her room. She goes back to bed. I think they give her some sponge baths now and then. They help her with the bathroom. She has no interest in life and she has “given up” you could say, living. There is no one who could bring her back. Sometimes she finds some energy in being angry at people. And I don’t think she’s happy at all, but I also don’t think she’s depressed. She is waiting.

David was distressed during the first Trump administration when they immediately started destroying the environmental protections that we had worked for so many decades to put into place. He was already tired, physically, from the enormous strain that running a “hot composting” center put on his body, as well as his time. I believe he had also just suffered an injury in his back. A hot compost requires watering — daily I believe — and he had the watering system behind a lock, which only he had a key to. Before he burned himself, he had given the key to his mentee, and had repeated the schedule. These were some of the signs that he had made up his mind to destroy himself. But I think, besides being distressed, he was not in a depressed state. I think he probably saw the writing on the walls of where this country was going, with Trump and with the forces that created him, and because he was an activist — always had been an activist — he took action in a way that an “older” guy like himself could do.

I’ve come to the conclusion that he probably went with a great deal of hope in his heart. It may have been delusional. But I recently saw a movie that Steven Spielberg made called “Disclosure Day,” and the climactic moment of that movie is when the entire world stops what they’re doing and watches their phones to see “The truth” that aliens are living on our planet. That is utterly naive, to think that people would stop playing their games, working, running around etc., and believe what they were seeing was real. Half the world would immediately call it A.I., another quarter would call it liberal conspiracy. Why would they believe these video recordings when we just saw the same recording in the movie theatre but don’t immediately think, “Oh that must be actual footage Spielberg found.” In other words, why is “Disclosure Day” a fictional movie? That is Spielberg’s naivete showing, in much the same way that Woody Allen’s New York movies don’t look anything like New York.

David may have been as naive about the impact of his action or the reverberations. Perhaps he went to his death thinking that his sacrifice would alter the course of history. But as was tragically made clear, it just ended up with a bunch of people on Facebook calling him a liberal idiot, or sympathizing with the enormous pain he must have been in, and with calls to contact a local suicide prevention hotline, and trigger warnings.

But he was an activist and he was active. That is something that I keep returning to — probably because I have so many doubts about whether or not I am active or passive. I tend to think that I’m more passive — and generally I’ve tried to defend passivity wherever I can — because it is so looked down upon. And you can even flip passivity onto its head and, in a convoluted way, like Martin Luther King, turn passivity into action. “Actively passive,” I think is the term.

But its central to living, I think. And story-telling. A passive creature cannot survive. This is why people like my 89 year old friend who are going through the dying process start playing a waiting game. They do not wish to kill themselves. They may be afraid of it. Maybe they don’t believe in it. Maybe they still enjoy a little bit about being alive. But they also can’t be active anymore, in whatever way that was for them.

In a way, no one is actually passive if they are alive. but when it comes to stories, we look for the active moments — the small, sometimes very small, moments in our lives when are in pursuit, or trying to save ourselves, or save the world, or, in David’s case, call attention to the something.

Just thoughts. Never thought a short story would cause this much thinking.

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Lines

Posted on June 28, 2026 by Admin

Sometimes I’ll read something by a well-known, lauded author and have absolutely no idea what he or she is talking about. I just finished an old review by John Updike of an Alan Hollinghurst novel. I couldn’t tell if it was a good review or a bad review. But I think it was mostly a complaining review: that because Hollingurst’s novel was mainly about homosexual males, it was dull. This was the last line of his review.

Perhaps the male homosexual, uncushioned as he is by society’s circumambient encouragements to breed, feels the isolated, disquieted human condition with a special bleakness: he must take it straight.

I don’t know what “he must take it straight” means, in this context. Or was he just trying to be clever by using the word straight and got away with a meaningless clause? The gist of the review was that he, Updike, couldn’t relate to a bunch of gay guys that didn’t have to worry about such things as children (Updike calls it breeding), marriage, and family. The sentence would make more sense if it didn’t have the “he must take it straight” attached. “Perhaps gays feel the human condition with a special bleakness.” Perhaps we do. I don’t think we do, but it’s a possibility and I could consider it in the same way that people in a cult might claim to be happier than people who are not. Maybe they are.

But then you have to look at the assumption he makes: “uncushioned as he is,” and “by society’s circumambient encouragements to breed.” He assumes that the pressure society puts on people to marry and have children is a cushion rather than some sort of Iron Maiden. This, to me, is absolute lunacy. But it does express the feelings of many people — perhaps a majority of people — who prefer to live under systems of control: they know what they can do and can’t do. They know the limits. They know what they can get away with. They know what to pursue and what not to bother with. They know the world will treat them well if they have 2 1/2 children.

If this is what he talking about, then taking it straight must mean “taking life’s bleakness” without any mixers or dilutions, as in a drink. A straight whisky, for example, as opposed to “neat” or “on the rocks” or “with a twist.”

I think this is a good example of why English literature studies decided to reject “Dead White Men” or in other cases, the “Straight white male.” Updike’s inability to relate to a bunch of gays who aren’t concerned with heterosexual lives implies that all things must relate, somehow, to the straight white man. Like if it doesn’t interest a straight white guy, then it’s not worth publishing. I realize this is a terrible simplification, and all based on a review of a forgotten book. But it’s kind of exemplary of the difficulty we, all of us, have in finding interest in cultures outside our own. It’s well documented and even if you did your own friend-survey you’d probably find a couple or maybe even a handful of women who read novels, but no men. And if any of your men friends do read, they will probably read non-fiction books about wars, science, technology, history. Religious people will read about their own religion — (which is the wrong thing to do. If you’re interested in spirituality, you should read about other people’s religions.). But if you ask men, “Are they interested in women’s stories,” they will probably say no. But if you ask women, they will say they are interested in both women’s and men’s stories. Women propelled one of the most popular gay novels into the upper ranks, “A Little Life,” and also, recently, “Heated Rivalary.” The former I couldn’t stand and almost pulped my copy of it. The latter I haven’t read and probably won’t. But it isn’t men making these books into huge successes.

Straight white men have always been interested in straight white men. Shakespeare, our first and probably the only writer absolutely necessary, other than, perhaps, Homer, actually did show an interest in both male and female lives, as well as other races and religions. But he had to write “on the down low” in some sense. He was writing under a totalitarian government, so there is no contemporary criticism of his own era. Every single play of his takes place in another country, or in another time. But he also gave life to more female characters that remain alive today in our consciousness: more than Virginia Woolf or Aphra Behn or his own contemporary Christopher Marlowe. Think of Lady MacBeth, Cleopatra, Juliet, Ophelia, Beatrice, or Claudia. I’m probably missing some. They are all women (and one girl) in their own right. We can think of them as their own personalities — not as appendages to men.

But for the most part, straight white men have written about straight white men. And Updike is the same. When confronted with a lifestyle he could not stomach or conceive, he complained about it. Condemned it as particularly bleak. (And this, despite his own life, being an absolute mess of serial infidelity and chaos).

The review is from 1999 so it’s now ancient history already. But actually, it was in the 80s when people started to question the “dead white men” aspect of literature studies. In a way, he was still stuck in the 60s when he was forced to read and review this novel.

The book, by the way, was “The Spell,” which I didn’t read and might have disliked as much as Updike did. I read “The Swimming Pool Library,” and thought it was terrific. But “In the Line of Beauty,” I couldn’t even read 10 pages. Hollinghurst has always been a little hit or miss for me.

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A line

Posted on June 28, 2026 by Admin

I was walking down the street and passed the playground of a public school. The teachers had apparently told all the children to line up, with the boy at one end of the line and the girls at the other. As I walked down the sidewalk, I noticed that many of the boys were doing muscle man type poses — flexing their tiny muscles. Then, when I reached the girls end of the line, the girls were all hugging each other.

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Bully

Posted on June 24, 2026 by Admin

I’m going to the library today because I realized, from the small class I took, that you must absolutely have a place or a space to go when you want to write. Sometimes, when you’re younger, that “space” can be the corner of your couch. But for me, nowadays, I must seclude myself to do work. So I’m going to start today with the library.

I want to work on this story which is essentially a story about bullying, but it’s about bullying that comes from a different angle. I don’t want to do the thing where you would talk about how awful bullying is, and it seems to me that almost all of human interaction could be taken as a form of bullying. When someone yells at someone, even for legitimate reasons: “You blocked my driveway you asshole,” or “For the umpteenth time, my last name is xyz,” that might be bullying.

But what happened with the classroom comments is that this one particular guy — an awful person — said, “Oh for God’s sake, it’s been 50 years, can’t you get over it.” He was talking to the character, not to me. But I thought, “Well that actually just proves my point.” Because every bullied person who tries to talk about the trauma of being bullied, always gets that answer. I can almost guarantee that every single person in the world who has been bullied and traumatized has been told to “get over it.”

This is the same attitude that women all over the world tried to battle with the MeToo movement. People thought that what they were describing was either “bad sex” or dates that didn’t go well.

I told 2 people, I think that was the extent of it, that my first… what I would call “genital experience” was oral rape. Both of them gay men, they laughed and I decided I would never again tell anyone that being orally raped created a trauma that I still have. It didn’t destroy my sex life — in fact, even after the incident which happened when I was 18, I still kept walking around wondering about when I was going to lose my virginity. I had been trying to “lose it” for a couple of years, but high school was impossible, so then I began college and still kept thinking about it. I never thought about a woman. It was always a man. I was one of those that never, as far back as I can remember, ever had a doubt.

But, in a weird incident that lasted about 30 seconds, someone walked into a public bathroom, into my stall, shoved his dick in my mouth, held my head against his stinking crotch, ejaculated, forcing me to swallow it, and then ran away after quickly zipping up. He had a small dick because I didn’t choke or vomit, which I would have if it had been larger and reached that gagging area.

It was Burned into my brain. And from then on, I could not use my mouth to do very much except kiss — and even kissing I really didn’t like too much. It really depended on how aggressive the guy was being, and men tend to be very aggressive. I had trouble being touched, by anyone more or less, whether friendly or not. And I could never initiate. I was watching a rerun of a show recently and the contestants were told to do something that resembled a date that they had had. And I realized that I don’t think I ever went on a date. That aspect just never was “in there.” It was never anything that came up as a desire. Sex was always there — at least in a form that I could tolerate. And pornography also became something that kind of helped in a bizarre therapeutic way. I would be able to watch, for example, men use their mouths in a way that was impossible for me. In a way, what I was unable to do physically, became erotic when I could watch it in someone else.

But yea, since I started working on this bullying piece, and especially since that asshole in Florida made that comment about “just get over it already,” I’ve encountered so many instances of bullying that it seems to me it is just as terrible a problem as it ever was. Thanks to computers and the Internet, we now have online bullying and, in probably what the best episode of “Black Mirror,” the episode called “Hated In The Nation,” which begins with a journalist bully, getting bullied herself and murdered by what appears to be an internet hashtag. The truth is much more convoluted — that’s why it’s a good mystery.

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New Born, by Ella Hickson

Posted on June 20, 2026 by Admin
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This got a tremendous review from the New York Times, and it was mostly sold out — you could get a seat here and there on different nights, which is how I got a single seat toward the back of the theatre.

Fortunately, The Minetta Lane is not a large theatre, so there aren’t really any bad seats in the house. I believe, but I’m not sure, that the last show I saw there was either Other People’s Money or a production by Jennifer Manocherian called “The Palace of Amateurs” which got a scathing review in the New York Times and closed in one day, I think. It was hard to find any info online because, I imagine, everyone would like to just forget it happened. But everyone involved went on to greater things. Ms. Manocherian has invested or participated in many great productions. Laura Dern — this was her stage debut — is still acting and is as admired as just about any woman in Hollywood. And her boyfriend at the time, Kyle MacLachlan, has just finished playing a part in Silo, the game-based series on some streaming service that everyone’s loving. This story was kind of interesting: apparently when they were casting Gone With the Wind, young girls from all over the country showed up in Hollywood and began standing on street corners, in hoop skirts, all hoping that they’d be noticed and cast in Gone With The Wind. There was never a chance for any of them, and it strikes me as a particularly American phenomenon — this delusional thinking that is. [I’m not going to waste my time searching, but thousands of people applied for Mary Richard’s television job on the Mary Tyler Moore show after they all got fired on the last episode.] Anyway, that was a diversion, so I will put it in parenthesis and align it to the left. (I’m doing everything I can to confuse AI, which I doubt even knows my web site exists, but why make it easy. That’s why I’ll go off on rambling, Pynchonesque like tangents.)

This play was not as good as The Times’s review. It was 3 monologues and, I’m not 100% how the title relates to the 3 different monologues. But they were extremely well written and the acting was superb. Of course Hugh Jackman was the big draw, and his monologue is last which is fortunate. But the best monologue was the first, and acted by Sepideh Moafi, an actress I’d not known before this. What really amazed me about this monologue and her acting is related to the stated purpose of the Audible Theatre, which now controls The Minetta Lane Theatre. Audible, as most people know, is a kind of book on tape company, except it’s primarily books on download. So the most new productions that they boast of are also productions with no sets, only the barest of lighting, hardly any makeup, if any, and just about no costumes. There are no people to change sets. There’s a little bit of sound. But essentially, they are doing theatre that is meant to be listened to and not watched. I don’t exactly understand the purpose of doing it in the theatre, except that whenever you have an actor and an audience in a live space (not zoomed or usurped by the camera or screen), something goes on between the two that is, I would venture to say, liminal. They talk about it all the time in terms of energy: an older, matinee audience can have very low energy which, in turn, is difficult for the actors to work with. The actors, after two days rest, can have an enormous amount of energy on Wednesday, which is why I usually try to see Wednesday performances. That, in turn, creates an energy in the audience. There’s this mutual thing going on.

So the monologue she performed is the first one and she played a new mother who had some sort of degree — can’t remember if it was physics or philosophy or literature. But she hasn’t had a complete night’s sleep in 2 years and so when she gets a moment, she lies down on her bed and scrolls through her screen, reading about the stupid lives of famous people. She knows it’s a waste, but she justifies it by blaming her fatigue. Most of the story/monologue, concerns itself with this unusual accident of actually meeting one of those famous people — in this case a rock star woman who obviously has a genuine attraction to women — and how they become friends, etc., as long as this star is in pursuit. When they get to the point where the protagonist is actually at the point of having to decide whether or not to have sex with this rock star, she chooses fidelity to her husband and — it’s not clear — maybe the understanding that she’s not really attracted to women. Her refusal, basically, is the end of the friendship and after a lot of unreturned calls by the Madonna-type rock star, the mom goes back to her life staring at the screen during her downtime and remembering the excitement of her short time being on the other side of that screen. So she’s walking her now 8 or 10 year old kid to the park, staring at the screen, and she doesn’t notice when her child stars running down the sidewalk. She looks up just in time to see him run into traffic as a racing car bears down…

People — mainly women — in the audience screamed. In the story, the car doesn’t hit the child and the child is okay, but when she’s looking at her 10 year old son — or maybe he’s older — she realizes that she completely missed his childhood. His youth. “I missed it.” I think that was the last line of the monologue. And it was moving and effective and beautifully written and acted.

But that scream is what stayed with me. Because of the type of production it was — a play that could be listened to — I realized that everyone in that theatre, at that moment, SAW with their own eyes, something that happened only in their imagination. It spoke to the truly awesome power of one’s ability to imagine oneself into a state of hypnosis. Ironically, it is a form of hypnosis that keeps everyone glued to their phones — to the point where people actually can’t stop thinking about them, even when they’ve turned them off.

To close with a philosophical thought that has nothing to do with the above. When people talk about “going to heaven,” or “seeing loved ones in heaven,” etc., and this is probably why Christopher Hitchens could not agree with so many religious people: they are inevitably talking about the past. Hitchens saw “heaven” as a form of torture — being forced to sing praises for all eternity for an idiot God. Most people see heaven as a reunification, which means they are picturing something from the past. They are picturing their mom and dad as healthy vibrant people of whatever age they remember them best — not as the doddering idiots they became or as the babies they once were. The hijackers that flew the planes into the Word Trade Center, and many Muslims and Terrorist Martyrs I imagine, see heaven as a kind of erotic Pleasure Dome, or harem. Perhaps this is because they deny their sexuality here on earth. Even the Mormons, who believe that what we do on earth is “practice” for a heavenly form of it — another nightmare as far as I’m concerned — are still imaging that heaven is a place where the past is reincarnated. When they are old and dying, they are going to go their past place, which they tried to make perfect and patriarchal.

Buddhists, at least most I think, don’t have to imagine a heaven — but they do, at least as far as I understand, imagine an increasingly better form of life until reaching the Nirvana stage where one is removed from the suffering caused by existence.

But I don’t think Hitchens is right in the sense that most people imagine heaven to be a place where they will actually be sitting around worshipping Jesus for all eternity. What they want is to believe that some form of this life — usually the people that they love — will exist again.




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Rage quitting and other perils of the modern world.

Posted on June 17, 2026 by Admin

One thing I learned from my recent “Intro to Fiction” class, where they teach the absolute basics of attempting to write fiction, and which I took as a last ditch effort to kick-start myself back into a writing mode, is that what ended up blocking me was “The Business.” Yesterday’s lesson was all about “the business” of writing, and as the teacher went on talking, and also including his own experiences in the business, I began to get increasingly angry, until the feeling was so awful I realized exactly what it was that ended up blocking me from doing any sort of writing for the last 3 and possibly 4 years. It was the relentless hardship — and, more importantly, jealousy — caused by wanting to be a published writer. It was the hardship, the jealousy, and probably a kind of life-despair — a feeling I had always hoped I’d never have: that I should have lived my life differently. I had a wacky old therapist, now dead, who used to say, “Thou shalt not should on thyself.” Shoulda woulda coulda. That’s what he says in the back of the taxi in “On The Waterfront.” I could’ve been a contender.

I could’ve been a contender. It’s what every drunk stooped over a beer in a bar says to the bartender or the guy sitting next to him. In Brando’s case — his character threw a fight which ended, forever, his boxing career. He had to for some reason I can’t remember. He had no choice. That’s why he is able to pin the blame on someone for the life he didn’t get.

For me, there is no single point like that, where I could blame my failure on a person or a day when I made the wrong choice. It’s something more along the lines of what Fran Leibowitz once said about the loss of so many gay men to AIDS: that the greatest artists (and the greatest audience) all died of aids because they were having a lot of sex. After them came the 2nd tier, 3rd tier, 4th tier. So in that scenario, because I didn’t die of AIDS, I am 4th tier.

Except I never really got past the first round of a televised contest. I’m not even sure I got into the contest. I’ve been watching Top Chef Seasons 9 through Infinity and the first people who are told to pack their knives and go almost always say that they didn’t have a chance to show themselves. Well, wrong. They did. They just lost. But along those lines, basically, I stood in line for hours to audition and never made it past the first gate keeper.

In my case, there’s several additional issues that I think maybe other, younger, writers don’t have to face. And I’ll get to that.

This is the “homework” I wrote for our last class, which I thought we were meant to turn in. But it turned out it was for our benefit only, so I made it a tiny bit longer than 500 words.

GWW homework for 6/17

Although I’ve been ridiculously busy in the last year for a reason very similar to your story “My Mother Eternally Reheats Her Coffee,” the class illuminated several things for me that I probably was never able to consciously grasp since I developed writers block about 3 years ago.

This block didn’t happen suddenly. I was taking novel workshop courses with Susan Breen for a number of years and I had about 70 pages drafted of a novel I titled, “People I Don’t Talk To Anymore.” But I started slowing down – coming up with fewer and fewer pages until my last submission when I only turned in about five pages. After that I gave up and I had no idea why.

But in the class I realized that “The business” of writing caused me a great deal of anger, stress and something I didn’t want to admit: the monster of jealousy which, for me, is a feeling worse than guilt or remorse, and probably something I suppress if I ever feel it.  Gore Vidal claimed to have said, “Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.” I had always wanted to believe something more Buddhist about myself, like, “A friend’s happiness is a blessing.” Proust wrote extensively about jealousy, but he also took it as something that helped intensify love – that enhanced competitiveness and focused our desires. Maybe it does, but for me it is a terrible feeling and leaves me feeling depressed – even more than someone who doesn’t like my work. It makes me physically sick.

I also realized from a remarkably small comment, that people will interpret actions in exactly the way they want to interpret them, whether or not there is anything on the page or even, sometimes, in contradiction to what is written on the page. In this case it was a throw-away line the protagonist made about a former “utterly forgettable partner.” Many people interpreted the partner’s action as a loving action, without knowing anything about the partner. This, I realized, meant that they did not trust the protagonist to be telling them the truth, which meant that to them, he was an untrustworthy narrator. That was not my intention. That’s something I wouldn’t have picked up four years ago because most people can’t tell you when their own ethics or morality are playing a role in how they interpret what they read. At the same time, it is much much easier to recognize your own experience in someone else’s story, as was the case with “My Mother Eternally Reheats…” In my case, it’s my friend’s freezer full of ice cream which she insists we are not allowing her to eat.

The 3rd thing I realized over the course is that one, or I at least, must absolutely have a place to go, away from my apartment, without interruptions – meaning the cellphone. Any work I was able to do I achieved by disconnecting and even shutting off all the lights except the ones I needed. At an old writers’ space where I used to work (it’s still there, having survived the Covid shutdown), someone who was making comments on a new renovation it had undergone, complained that there were not enough nooks and crannies. “Writers,” she said, “like nooks and crannies.” And she was right. The other thing it didn’t have and which they installed after my suggestion, were side panels that could flip out, kind of like the sun visors in cars, in order to prevent peripheral movement from distracting you.

The one thing they had an endless problem with was the God damned fucking cellphone, and I think that’s because somehow the cellphone has entered our consciousness as something that’s necessary – required – for our safety and for emergencies. It doesn’t matter that there was a time when the cellphone didn’t exist or that, during the great depression, a lot of people didn’t even have a phone. I remember some boys who were horsing around stole a boat in City Island and took it out into the bay around City Island and were trying to take it over to that island where the city buries the unidentified bodies. The potter’s field of NYC. Well they capsized and drowned – I think maybe one of the boys managed to swim to the potter’s field island. The big stink in the newspapers was that there was no cell phone coverage in the bay and that the city was to blame. Little blame was assigned to the young thieves.

In any event, I think “detaching” from one’s phone is going to become, if it’s not already, an aspect of writing.

Posted in Media, Politics | Comments Off on Rage quitting and other perils of the modern world.

Greed was good.

Posted on June 7, 2026 by Admin

Michael Douglas was attractive. I don’t know that was ever a great actor but he had a style which is primarily what famous and good looking actors really need.

He is most famous for playing the role at the left.

Gordon Gekko, the Wall Street tycoon who lectured a bunch of neophytes that “Greed is good,” because greed, he felt, drove the economy. At least that’s what I presume he was saying. He believed that greed was a prime mover of humanity.

I’m not really sure he (meaning Oliver Stone, who wrote the character) is wrong. Ghandi almost said the same thing at the outbreak of the second world war. He is quoted somewhere as saying something like , ‘”‘you will never stop war until you solve the problem of human greed.’

As an aside: Virginia Woolf was asked, as a premise to Three Guineas (a fictional essay which is structured as a response to a letter received from an educated gentleman), how “we” might solve the problem of war. She turned the question on its head, and essentially didn’t answer the question, by pointing out that men were educated and almost no money was spent on a woman’s education, and what was spent, was spent mostly on teaching her domestic duties. It’s almost impossible to believe, but this argument is still absolutely relevant today.

I’ve been thinking about greed lately, because someone recently said to me, “What’s the matter, don’t you love money,” and I was almost physically repulsed by the question. It was like someone had thrown rotten and stinking food on me. I recovered by trying to say something silly, like, “I love wasting money.” But I can’t stop thinking about the smile on that person’s face as he talked about money (the money we were going to get). And to a lesser extent, greed in general.

Greed is pernicious. Philosophically, it is nearly identical to the question of evil. With evil, we are always trying to decide, from a philosophical point of view, whether or not evil is a real thing. This is because we can divide the world into good and bad, but stretching it to evil and — I suppose the opposite might be “divine” — is when what we call good and bad, which is purely an earthly phenomenon, starts to take on characteristics of religion or spiritual. So we have a car accident which results in someone’s death, which we label “bad,” but then vehicular manslaughter, which we label “evil.” Both are caused by a 2-1/2 ton motorized machine running over a soft body. One, however, has an intent that the other doesn’t. That’s why it’s hard to define “evil” and relatively easy to define “bad.”

Greed is similar. But I think it’s got it’s own — I don’t know — personality, maybe. And it would probably be good for all of us, in this western world, to think about how we have lived in a world dominated by greed since about 1980, when Ronald Reagan inaugurated an era of unregulated and unshackled greed. The exact quote in the movie is, “Greed, for a lack of a better term, is good.” That movie, “Wall Street,” was released in 1987, and the film opens in 1985 which means Oliver Stone probably wrote it somewhere around 1984/1985. Reaganism had taken over by then and he was just into his second term. In 1985 Margaret Thatcher was about 6 years into her long run. They both, perhaps because of the influence of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics, gave people, including a young Donald Trump, that the pursuit of more and more money was a good thing.

The orange menace is full on greed. He’s all in for greed. He loves it. He is not a Gordon Gekko, who was also a thinker and probably a great Wall Street business person. No, the Orange Menace is one of those people in the audience, who only ate the fried chicken on his lunch plate because he hates vegetables, who daydreams of being admired simply for being rich and having beautiful woman hang on him, all day long.

What’s happening now, imho, is the death throes of greed. Even the 2025 project which they are still trying to implement — though it’s failing everywhere — is basically a treatise for embracing greed. Greed asks stupid questions. Greed ignores logic. Greed asks, “Why share money with people who are too stupid to work?” “Why should the government tax the wealthy when the wealthy could get richer by keeping that money?” “Why shouldn’t the tax code be rewritten and rewritten, for the benefit of the rich?”

But greed is insidious. It gets inside us. It gets inside all of us.

Trump’s multi-faced and ham-fisted attempt to imprint himself on everything in Washington is a sexual gift basket for a man who has made Greed his life’s work. He wants to be able to drive around Washington and see his photo everywhere, and gold plated statues of himself, and see his name on things like the White House Blahroom and the Arch De Disaster. This is where Greed ends, goes back underground. And it will continue with many more outrages which will make it seem like it’s never ending. But there is nothing more than this for Greed. This is the last stage of Greed — the stage when King Midas touched everything and it turned to gold, including a grape he wanted to eat and his daughter when she entered the room and he hugged her. Online, it’ll tell you that the story of Midas is about how we become slaves to our desires. I don’t think that’s the case. He wasn’t a slave. He was just gripped by greed.

With Trump, if he were, to say to himself, this dictator chic is awful and weird, I’m going to start giving away my money. Even then, I don’t think he could be redeemed from Greed. Midas begged the Gods to remove the curse of his golden touch, and they gave him a typical mythological type formula that got rid of it by washing his hands in a river. He went on to live a happy life and was beloved by his people. And I can almost see Trump being that type of person. He’d have to do a lot of penancing to get there — perhaps even public self-flagellation, but I could almost see it.

But it’s too late for him, and for us. As we call the kettle black, turn our back on our ancestors, and blame the immigrants for all our problems, we will continue to cover statues in gold. And pretend that the greed Ronald Regan and Margaret Thatcher brought into this world has nothing to do with it.

Posted in Money, Politics | Comments Off on Greed was good.

The minutiae of a writer’s life

Posted on May 15, 2026 by Admin

This is so typical of the scraps to which writers must cling in order to convince themselves that they are writers, and not hobbyists or imposters. I don’t know why actors have no problem with this. An actor may never have had a gig in his or her entire life, but she will still proudly call herself an actor. Writers are almost the opposite: we can’t even begin to call ourselves writers without feeling a sense of shame and braggadocio. The best description I read was in the Times — might have been the magazine section — where the very astute writer observed that writers must look to the tiniest of accomplishments: “I wrote a line for a movie;” “I got a job teaching at a community writing center;” or, in my case, “Once, I was a finalist in a New Millennium Fiction Award.

The prize for being a finalist in the 39th season was a copy of the anthology where all the first place winners works were published, and where the finalists’ names appeared on one of the pages. The thing is, I don’t know what story I submitted. I think the contest (it happened twice a year) was in 2015 or 2016. I suspect it was a story I wrote about a woman whose mother possibly kidnapped her from her father when she was a toddler, and then lived their lives on the run from the law and capture.

But I’m sure it made me happy at the time. Little things.

Posted in Arts, Writing | Comments Off on The minutiae of a writer’s life

Art Isn’t Easy, by Daniel Okrent

Posted on May 14, 2026 by Admin

I’d have to go through my playbills and figure out when it was that Stephen Sondheim and his husband sat down next to my friend. He (Sondheim, not my friend), died in late 2021 so I’m thinking it was before Covid and not because of Covid. Anyway, what struck me during the performance was how loud Sondheim was with his reactions. He was the type of person who would annoy me, if I hadn’t known who he was — someone who gasps loudly at an obvious plot reveal in a movie. Or worse, someone who sighs very loudly when they’re bored.

But, like the time I sat across from Philip Seymour Hoffman on a subway, I realized that certain artists live with a natural intensity of observation that most people don’t utilize. Shirley Maclaine was also described as having this quality by Pete Hammill, who dated her, in his memoir “A Drinking Life.” I think, in Sondheim’s case, just from observing him, he approached watching a play (even a revival) as a completely new experience. Every laugh or revelation was completely brand new and he responded with the eagerness of a child listening to a story being told by a parent.

I think it also annoyed his partner, who stood up and walked out and never came back, even after intermission. But it was also telling to me that Sondheim didn’t seem to give an absolute shit. He enjoyed the second act as much as the first, and was just as engaged. He was famously unable to commit until extremely late in life — not until his sixties. He was married in 2017 to Jeff Romley, at the age of 87. Romley was 37. But it worked for them. When Romley walked out of the theatre that night, it seemed, as an observer knowing nothing at all about them, that they were having a relationship spat and nothing more.

The title “Art Isn’t Easy” is one of the lines from the song “Putting It Together,” from the show “Sunday In The Park With George.” Despite his status as a giant of the musical theatre world (and I have to add it is one of the nastiest and bitchiest of all the professions available, so don’t do it, if you have any sense. And it’s also dying a slow sad death as it prepares for a Phoenix.) he didn’t actually have a lot of great hit shows and he had only one song that “crossed over” to the radio, “Send in The Clowns.”

His greatest show and achievement was “Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street.” That was 1979. But then there’s some confusion or controversy about what’s considered “his show” and what’s considered a show that he contributed to. This book adds more flesh to the story but I don’t think it’s definitive, if a collaborative art can ever be definitive or defined as “someone’s” show. For example, the music for West Side Story is by Leonard Bernstein. The lyrics are Stephen Sondheim. Book is by the piece of trash Arthur Laurents. Original play is by Shakespeare, who borrowed his story from one Matteo Bandello, an Italian short story teller who wrote something called (in translation) The Tragical History of Romeus and Julieta and in the original Italian language as “The Unfortunate Death of Two Most Wretched Lovers.” Shakespeare, as was his genius, added some characters: namely the Mercutio and Paris.

Nevertheless, Gypsy came along and the lyrics, again, are written by Sondheim but the music is by Jule Styne. This is solely because Ethel Merman refused to have a “new” songwriter do the work on a show that was designed specifically for her to play. It sort of begs the question or thought as to what that song list would have looked like had Sondheim been allowed to write it. I’d be hard pressed to say that Sondheim would have written better songs (tunes) than Jule Styne, who is one of the GOATs. “Some People,” “Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” and so on.

Sondheim was both composer and lyricist on “A Funny Thing Happened on the way to the Forum,” but it wasn’t until “Company,” that he finally refused to write lyrics without also writing the music.

And then it was all hit and a miss, almost in alternating order. (This is something the book doesn’t really discuss too deeply. Sondheim’s many failures.)

“Company” was a hit. “Follies” was a miss. “A Little Night Music” was a hit. “Pacific Overtures” was a disaster. “Sweeney Todd” was a huge hit and has remained so. “Merrily We Roll Along” failed after 9 nights. “Sunday In The Park With George,” “Into The Woods”: hits. “Passion”: failure. “Assasins”: failure. “Road Show/Bounce”: No one’s heard of it. By now he said he was too old — that the juices weren’t flowing anymore. There was a posthumous production called “Here We Are,” which was dreadful, in my opinion — like copying the script of a movie and then presenting it with some background music.

Almost all his failures have been revived and sometimes rewritten in a way that has brought them up to a certain level of great. “Follies,” in particular, has grown in people’s eyes — especially with the help of Cameron Mackintosh in London and The Roundabout Theatre Company in New York. “Merrily We Roll Along” has been rewritten so many times it’s hard to list, but the recent production with Daniel Radcliffe was an enormous success. I suspect that “Passion” will ultimately find its way to brilliance.

My first Broadway show “A Chorus Line” and the second was “The Wiz” — both in 1978. I saw “Sweeney” in 1980 (I think) and I might even still have the Playbill. I was on a class trip, and I also saw “Talley’s Folley” by Landford Wilson. My classmates thought I was crazy.

But I think with Sondheim, pulling off the layers of cult-madness that adorn him, what you find is a very talented writer and composer — he was actually more interested in composition than in lyric writing — who was animated by revenge and had the gay man’s ability to be an absolute bitch. But one thing I will always be grateful for, is that when he and the stupid slimy usurper named Arthur Laurents — a poser if there ever was one — “reconciled,” Stephen Sondheim still told him “You’re just smart enough to know how mediocre you are.”

I have my own personal reasons for hating Arthur Laurents but that in no way affected any of my feelings about this short, terrific, biography, part of the “Jewish Lives,” series. And if you believe that, there is a president who would like you to join his fan base.

Posted in Arts, Biography, Book Review, Theatre | Comments Off on Art Isn’t Easy, by Daniel Okrent

Midnight Cowboy, by James Leo Herlihy

Posted on March 4, 2026 by Admin

For an unsuccessful novel, it has certainly been published enough times. According to Goodreads, there are 60 editions of this short and intense novel and I suppose it’s almost certainly because of the amazing movie that was made of it, with Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight, which gave us the almost quintessential New York scream. “I’m walkin’ here!”

I wanted to read this because both Hoffman and Voight read it to prepare for their roles and they both realized that the characters were gay. I’m not sure and I’m not sure that sexuality was actually the point.

It’s probably important, when discussing the novel, to emphasize that the character Joe Buck is the protagonist. It is not Rico “Ratzo” Rizzo, even though Dustin Hoffman plays him so well and so memorably. Joe goes the longest distance, makes the most difficult choices and goes through the most change. By the end, I think what you come to feel is that even the unlikeliest person can end up bringing meaning to our lives — and specifically, the meaning that you get by caring for someone.

When Joe starts off on his journey, all he really knows is that he has a big dick and that women like it. He has this fantasy of becoming a gigolo in New York City and is fairly quickly disabused of that notion. The movie and the script of the movie makes it seem like he goes into a “downward” sort of spiral, and ends up on the street, hustling for gay men. But that level of hustling, if you want to call it “low” and being a gigolo to rich ladies as “high,” happens very early in the novel and I don’t think it’s really meant to be seen as a kind of degradation. What degrades him, in a sense, is having to suffer in New York City.

I was reminded by this of how often New York has been depicted as a dangerous, tough, and dispiriting place: a place that will beat you down and that you must conquer. It really wasn’t until Seinfeld, and to a lesser extent, Friends, that New York started to take on the character of something that could be fun. And then of course Sex and The City was like an earthquake in that sense. People started coming here to enjoy their Sex and The City tours.

Are they gay? I don’t know. I’m not sure that it matters. Toward the end of the book, in order to get enough money to take Ratzo a bus down to Miami, Joe does some serious gay bashing which the victim seems to like and accept as a kind of punishment for indulging in his desires, smiling as he’s beaten. He doesn’t differentiate too much in his own mind about the difference between a woman and a man, although I don’t think he ever penetrates the men — he lets them, as he puts it, “hang off his pole.”

And then there’s just the plain stupidity. Joe is a dumb person — might even have a learning disability.

But it saddens me that James Herlihy killed himself at the age of 66. He seemed to have had a number of books published as well as some plays performed. He was also friends with Tennessee Williams and Anais Nin so it wasn’t like he was just an obscure writer with nothing to his name. He’s the kind of writer that I think should have had a small biography written — nothing large or too major — just enough to give us a sense of his life. Not every biography needs to be 1,000 pages. But 30 or so — that might have been useful.

Posted in Book Review, Gay Literature | Comments Off on Midnight Cowboy, by James Leo Herlihy