“It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.” — Oscar Wilde

oscar-wilde

It’s his birthday today. One of my heroes.

His mother, Jane Speranza Francesca Wilde (aka Lady Wilde, aka “Speranza”) was an incredible woman, in the Irish literary history canon, and there before her son. (She has a cameo in a great book I read recently about Irish revolutionary, Thomas Francis Meagher, The Immortal Irishman. Her life was the sort which leads, inevitably, to endless cameo appearances in other peoples’ biographies.) My father knew a lot about Speranza, of course. She was a poet, a radical, an Irish nationalist. In 1864, the dedication in a new edition of her poems reads:

Dedicated to my sons Willie and Oscar Wilde

‘I made them indeed
Speak plain the word country. I taught them, no doubt,
That country’s a thing one should die for at need’

Wilde’s father William was a physician specializing in the eye and ear (to this day there are procedures name-checking him, like “Wilde’s incision”, for example, or “Wilde’s cone of light”, dating back to the mid-1860s, when he was practicing in Ireland). Like his wife, like his son, he was also a writer, publishing books on all kinds of things. He published a catalog of antiquities from one particular archeological site in Ireland: that book now sits in the National Museum of Ireland. He published books on folklore, legends, wives’ tales – things his patients told him, their received history, home “cures” for their ills.

Before we go any further, I’d like to link to my review of Rupert Everett’s The Happy Prince, about Oscar’s sad final years – it’s not a perfect movie, but Everett has insight and empathy for Oscar, as well as a personal understanding coming from the inside. Well worth seeking out.

Our world right now is filled with loud unrepentant dehumanizing Marquesses of Queensberry. Oscar Wilde took the fall and I’ll be damned if we bring back the world which destroyed him.

More after the jump:

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“Quite frankly. I was all talent and no looks.” — Angela Lansbury

It’s her birthday today.

Even if you came to Gaslight clean, without knowing a thing, which is hard to believe, but let’s just pretend: Even if you knew nothing about it, it would be instantly obvious that the teenage girl who plays the maid is almost stealing every scene she’s in (and with Ingrid Bergman giving one of the great performances in cinema, this is no small feat), and you probably might think something like, “Wow. That teenage actress is probably going to work all the time.”

But could you predict an almost-80 year uninterrupted career? A career crossing mediums to an unprecedented level? That that dead-eyed manipulative teenage maid would conquer film, television, and – most of all – Broadway? That she would headline a hit television show when she was in her 50s and 60s? (Again: WHEN does this happen? If it happens NOW, then that teenage actress in 1944 is a large reason why those glass ceilings were cracked.) The teenager’s later television show would be a staple in audience’s lives for almost two decades.

As talented as she obviously was as a teenager, who could predict something like this? As good as she is in Gaslight, who – in their wildest dreams – could imagine a career like the one Angela Lansbury actually had? There were no models for Angela Lansbury. She had to just make it up herself.

If you think there is another career like Angela Lansbury’s – if you think a comparison can be made to somebody else’s career – you’re wrong. There IS nobody else. If Judy Garland were still around today, doing television and movies and Broadway, then MAYBE. But other than that: Lansbury stood alone. She never rested on her laurels, she never stopped working. She was never the same. She was a character actress but she didn’t represent a “type”. She was bone-chilling in The Manchurian Candidate. She was sassy and insouciant as Elizabeth Taylor’s teenage sister in National Velvet. She was Auntie Mame, for God’s sake. She was Mrs. Lovett, for God’s sake. She was Jessica Fletcher, dammit.

And … let’s not ever forget: She played Elvis’ tipsy Southern belle mother in Blue Hawaii.

My friend Dan wrote a very insightful and emotional tribute to Lansbury at Rogerebert.com and I recommend you read the whole thing, but I want to pull out one paragraph:

Watch her even in the most obscure television episode or movie and there will likely come a moment when Lansbury faces the camera and exposes all the knockout passion and yearning in her soul. She could convey a sense of enormous loss in a way that offered no relief or closure for that loss, and this was the wellspring of her creativity.

Yes. YES. I thought instantly of an afternoon in Chicago, a long long time ago, when Mitchell and I turned on the television, and the 1992 TV movie Mrs. ‘Arris Goes to Paris was on. This was when, you know, you had to watch whatever was on. We were happy though: Omar Sharif and Angela Lansbury? Count us in! We settled in to watch. We were totally charmed by it.

But then … There’s a scene where Mrs. ‘Arris (Lansbury) sits on a park bench and breaks down in tears. The sobs tear up out of her very depths, and it is real and it was impossible to keep our distance from it. Mitchell and I watched the scene in silence – her crying was a gut-punch – and when the scene ended, we glanced at each other and saw that we both were sobbing openly. The movie went on, five minutes passed, ten, and neither of us could recover. Mitchell sobbed “I’m trying to get past it … but I can’t …” I sobbed, “I can’t either.”

Dan wrote:

She could convey a sense of enormous loss in a way that offered no relief or closure for that loss.

That’s it. That was exactly what was going on, and it’s why Mitchell and I had such a visceral response. There was no relief or closure, for her or for us. Her crying like that was unbearable to watch. There were so many great moments in her career, but the crying on the park bench in Mrs. ‘Arris Goes to Paris stands out as one of her finest.

Lansbury and Bea Arthur literally taking over the Tony Awards with a duet of “Bosom Buddies” is a moment for the ages, and every gay man I know knows every aside, every gesture, every quip, by heart. In my crowd, loving this clip – loving the two of them – is non-negotiable. What’s so incredible to me is how LITTLE they do, really. They shimmy a bit, they cross-around walk, they do a little step-touch with a shoulder bump … and the audience roars, and the clip will live forever. THAT’S being a star. And of course, they’re not “doing” much but … look at what they ARE doing. Their energy fills a theatre. Their mere presence is exhilarating. They are PROS.

Watch closely. This kind of thing doesn’t exist anymore. It’s part of a lost world. We are losing a connection with something precious with the passing of Angela Lansbury. She was going to turn 97 next week. Almost a century old. She worked in every decade of her life.

She conquered every medium at the highest possible level.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

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“You cannot write and answer the phone.” — Paul Durcan

Today is his birthday. I love him. He died in May of this year.

Paul Durcan’s poems are chatty, observant, scathing, often very funny. He uses long humorous titles: “The Divorce Referendum, Ireland, 1986”, or “Irish Hierarchy Bans Colour Photography”. (The humor, of course, just sharpens the points he makes.) Durcan has a strong sense of life’s absurdity, and makes merciless fun of humorless prudes.

He had a rather horrifying time of it as a young man. His father was a judge, and their relationship was very challenging. To please this difficult man, Durcan went to UCD to study law, but whatever happened his first year in college was traumatic and his family essentially kidnapped him and institutionalized him. He was drugged up and given electric shock therapy. 45 years later Durcan said:

I ended up in St John of God in a ridiculous way. There was nothing the matter with me. I’m sure you saw the film One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Well, I was one of the luckier ones, one of the ones who flew over the cuckoo’s nest and survived it. I didn’t get a leucotomy, which would have finished me off completely, but I did get massive amounts of barbiturates, the whole Mandrax and every lethal tablet you could ever name. I think I came out of it with a kind of melancholia.”

The “cure” made him sicker.

His mother was the niece of John MacBride, an Irish revolutionary, executed after the Easter Rising in 1916. MacBride married Maud Gonne. A legend. And so Durcan was born into this legacy, the myth of Irish nationalism and martyrdom.

More, after the jump:

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“I mean, that’s the community of what we do, the difference between me and a streaming service. You actually know it’s me.” — Bob Mould

For about a year, I posted all the music writing my brother Brendan O’Malley did on his old blog, because my brother is such a good writer, and these pieces are all so great I wanted to highlight them. I called it Music Monday, for obvious reasons. First, I posted every essay in his 50 Best Albums series. Then I posted the series where he wrote about every concert he went to – or at least the most memorable ones – and he clustered them by club/venue.

Today is the birthday of legendary Hüsker Dü frontman Bob Gould. My brother wrote two essays about them.

The first is an essay on Hüsker Dü’s album, Zen Arcade, on Brendan’s 50 Best Albums list.

The second is about Bren going to see Hüsker Dü at the Living Room, a legendary rock club in Providence, RI. If you grew up in a certain era, The Living Room is featured heavily in your memories. Bren captures it all.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

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Frankenstein book cover reveal!

In the last year, there’s been so much I haven’t been allowed to talk about – those NDAs are powerful! I had to pretend I went to Scotland on vacation! I couldn’t post anything! Now it’s all coming out. I received my advance copy of the book last month – and they’ve been keeping it under lock and key, because the images in the book all come from the film, which hasn’t been released yet. This morning, they released a first look at the book cover.

I must shout out the genius Mike Hill, who did the cover art. Not only did he do the cover art, but he designed the creature for Guillermo’s film, and also built the prosthetics – hundreds of them – and applied them to Jacob Elordi (a 9-hour process!). Mike is an amazing artist. Look at that cover. It’s so intense. The tear in the creature’s eye. I opened the book and saw the cover for the first time and had to sit down. My interview with Mike for the book was extensive. He’s so damn creative. Inspired, really.

Seeing my name on the cover was, no word of a lie, the first time this felt real.

You can pre-order the book at Insight Editions.

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“Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination…think twice before you think.” — E.E. Cummings

ee-cummings

It’s his birthday today. I responded to E.E. Cummings in a visceral way when I first had to read his stuff in high school. I didn’t know what it was all about, but I loved the syntax, the unmistakable look of his poem on the page. (You could tell a poem was his without reading a word of it.) I liked puzzling the poems out. Thinking about them. I still do.

Speaking of the “syntax of things”:

since feeling is first

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

More on Cummings after the jump:

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September 2025 Snapshots

Attended some of the press screenings at the New York Film Festival. I haven’t been in a couple of years, for various reasons, and it’s been so sad for me. I loved getting up in the morning and heading to Walter Reade, surrounded by colleagues, to watch these gorgeous films. Or, not so gorgeous. Whatever. It doesn’t matter. Films by Claire Denis, Radu Jude, Hong Sang-soo. It was glorious. I sat with Keith, I sat with Glenn – whom I haven’t seen in a couple of years. I loved catching up. Gossiping. Of course. Keith and I sat outside at the Lincoln Center plaza, having lunch, one eye on the clock.

The biggest day, of course, was getting a copy of my book in the mail. Still under wraps until publication (Oct. 28). Happy and proud. It’s been a long tough journey.

Frankie lies in my dad’s chair and warms his feet in the sun.

Frankie, in presidential profile (or what used to be a presidential profile, it pains me to say). The two watercolors behind him are by my mother, both based on photos I took – one of Alexander Hamilton’s statue in Weehawken, with lower Manhattan (pre-freedom tower) across the river. (the photo’s at the bottom of this post.) Granted, Hamilton wasn’t President, but he had an impressive profile. I used to live right around the corner from there, as old-timers know. I probably wrote more about Alexander Hamilton than I wrote about Cary Grant. And this was PRE-Lin Manuel Miranda. I was ahead of the game. Glad you all caught up. The bottom watercolor is based on a picture I took at dawn of Court Square Park in Memphis. Because it was 2013 and I was wandering around before the dawn through Memphis. Not smart. I met a pimp. I wrote about that. I love my dawn photos of Memphis. I didn’t even know these watercolors existed until early 2024. I was visiting Mum and she pulled them off a shelf, like “Oh here, look at these.” They were just loose pieces of paper. I am so happy to have them.

Petty. Meaningless. But honest, and therefore satisfying.

David came over and helped me hang these things, because I just couldn’t get it done. He brought his level and measuring tape – he has an algebraic brain. My place has not felt the same without Elvis and John and Gena in prominent positions. (And check out my new television.) The picture of John and Gena was taken by Sam Shaw, and I ripped it out of an Interview magazine interview with Gena Rowlands back in 1993 or 1994. I was in Chicago, at any rate. I ripped it out – you can still see the rip – and went to Xerox and had a copy made. It’s sepia-toned at this point, it’s been on my wall ever since then, but I will never EVER get rid of it. (I wrote a long post about this particular photo – and the ripped-out picture – back when I got my first gig for Criterion, writing on Gena for the release of Love Streams.)

I drove up to Boston so I could see One Battle After Another in VistaVision. I think only three theatres in the country are showing the film in VistaVision. The theatre was packed. It was a blast. Loved the film.

When the boat returns to the side yard, you know it’s fall.

My mother and I walked the sea wall on a perfect day. The water was green and blue, the tide was low(ish), it was windy, but not too much, the sun was warm. We saw a precariously placed rock on the rocks below us.

We gathered at a little Italian restaurant in North Providence to celebrate Steven’s birthday. My brother and I went together. Old old friends. Since we were teenagers. Very warm atmosphere, and a happy event. It’s been a rough rough year for all of us. Serious illnesses, life changes, caretaker duties, nonstop. And the year’s not over yet.

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Upcoming dates: Frankenstein

On November 2nd, at 2 p.m., I’ll be doing a book signing event at the Barnes & Noble in Warwick, RI. Joining me will be Judith Swift, whose career is lengthy and illustrious, but I know her from her time as the chairperson of the theatre department at URI, when I was an acting student there. She’s known me since I was 16 years old so this is really special for me, and I’m thrilled she’s going to be there to have a conversation about all things Frankenstein.

On November 14, at noon PST & 3pm EST, I’ll be doing a live virtual event with the Poisoned Pen bookstore in Phoenix, AZ. You can see all the details here if you’d like to join the event (via Facebook Live or YouTube Live). I’ll be chatting with Jen Johans (I’ve been a guest on her excellent podcast Watch with Jen a couple of times). You can also order my book through Poisoned Pen.

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Getting unstuck

From a 2023 interview David Simon gave with Ari Shaprio at NPR:

SHAPIRO: Okay, so you’ve spent your career creating television without AI, and I could imagine you today thinking, boy, I wish I had had that tool to solve those thorny problems …

SIMON: What?

SHAPIRO: …or saying …

SIMON: You imagine that?

SHAPIRO: … boy, if that had existed, it would have screwed me over.

SIMON: I don’t think AI can remotely challenge what writers do at a fundamentally creative level.

SHAPIRO: But if you’re trying to transition from scene five to scene six, and you’re stuck with that transition, you could imagine plugging that portion of the script into an AI and say, give me 10 ideas for how to transition this.

SIMON: I’d rather put a gun in my mouth.

Same, David, same.

Here’s the deal. If you get “stuck with that transition”, like really stuck, and your first thought is running to AI, then maybe reconsider calling yourself a writer. Everyone gets stuck. When a real writer gets stuck, they put the work away, take a walk, go out to dinner, or sometimes they clean their whole apartment in a frenzy of procrastination. All real writers know this behavior. Look at me PROCRASTINATE. Then the writer comes back with fresh eyes. Maybe you’ll have to rewrite scenes five and six in an attempt to make them fit together. Maybe you try and it still doesn’t work. Maybe you try write a small new scene you call “5B” to put between the two – maybe this will fix it? But it doesn’t. You get up, you go for a walk, you play with your pet, you clean your apartment again, even though it’s, at this point, spotless. You take a nap. You have a cocktail or a cup of coffee. You exchange morose texts with another writer friend about being stuck and frustrated. Then you come back to the desk, you look the piece over and realize “Huh. Actually it’d be cool to do these scenes without a transition”. And so you end up where you started. Nothing has changed. But the process had to be gone through to come full circle. You only reach this point after trying five other solutions. That’s creativity. That’s hard work. That’s being a real writer. Wanting to skip the “being stuck” part takes the fun (and agony) out of it. And it is agony. It’s the WORST. When you finally land on something that works – when things click – when you are happy with the result – and it’s all you who did it – you and your hard work and stick-to-it-iveness and determination – there is no better feeling. To quote Dorothy Parker: “I hate writing; I love having written.”

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“Where am I coming from? Where am I going? A fusillade of question marks.” — Ciarán Carson

It’s Ciarán Carson’s birthday today. He died in 2019.

Paul Muldoon’s name invariably comes up when Carson is mentioned (post about Muldoon here). They share similarities (Northern Irish settings/concerns, long chatty lines, postmodern accumulation of detail, the use of humor, and an encyclopedic approach -names, dates, places – but there the similarities end. Paul Muldoon is the “famous” one. Was there room for Ciarán Carson in the already-and-always crowded landscape of Irish poetry? Obviously there was, but it’s always a question. The recently-published volume of Ciaran Carson’s collected poems runs to almost 600 pages and got reviewed everywhere.

Carson grew up in Belfast. Irish was the sole language spoken in his household. This gave him a distinct perspective on language, a central concern in most Irish poetry. He was careful not to sentimentalize it.

Growing up in, say, County Mayo in the 1940s or 50s, it wouldn’t be that unusual to only speak Irish, but it was quite unusual in Belfast. Eventually, understandably, as a bilingual person, Carson took on translations: he is often compared to Joyce, whose language-obsession was so intense he spent 17 years writing Finnegans Wake, a book which is basically one long word-game. Carson was born in 1948. This put him in the thick of things in Belfast as events unfolded in that troubled city. Unlike many of his contemporaries, and unlike many Irish poets going back to Yeats and back, Carson did not view rural life as the key to Irish identity. He was an urban poet. Much of his work is violent and frightening, an accurate reflection of Belfast’s environment. In Carson’s early collections, Belfast is a place of interruptions – barricades, barriers, walls, ramps – never able to get from here to there in a direct line.

While there is an internal structure, Carson’s lines spill over, creating an impressionistic chaotic effect. It feels the way people talk. Read his poems out loud. His poem “Dresden” is probably his most well-known. Seek it out. Eventually, he abandoned the long line, going in for short sometimes one-word lines. The later poems are almost like lists, details, fragments.

The death of Ciarán Carson was a great loss.

There are some poems by Ciarán Carson here. Also, years ago, I wrote a post about Seamus Heaney’s essay on “Midnight Court”, which Carson translated.

But today I’ll share his poem “H”. To a Northern Irish person the letter “H” would need no explanation. His poems (to me) sound the way people actually speak. But it’s hard to get that effect, I imagine.

H

The Powers-that-Be decreed that from the—of—the sausage rolls, for reasons
Of security, would be contracted to a different firm. They gave the prisoners no reasons.

The prisoners complained. We cannot reproduce his actual words here, since their spokesman is alleged
To be a sub-commander of a movement deemed to be illegal.

An actor spoke for him in almost-perfect lip-synch: It’s not the quality
We’re giving off about. Just that it seems they’re getting smaller. We’re talking quantity.

His ‘Belfast’ accent wasn’t West enough. Is the H in H-Block aitch or haitch?
Does it matter? What we have we hold? Our day will come? Give or take an inch?

Well, give an inch and someone takes an effing mile. Everything is in the ways
You say them. Like, the prison that we call Long Kesh is to the Powers-that-Be The Maze.

QUOTES:

Ciarán Carson:

I write in English because the Irish that I spoke was the Irish of the home and I wouldn’t be able to write in the same way in Irish as I can in the English I have. If I were to write in Irish I’d have to go back and learn it all over again very well. And I feel at times that the idea that I should write in Irish because it’s the language of the Irish soul or something like this is a bit off, anyway.

Irish poet Rita Kelly:

I am reminded of Keats, Wordsworth too, especially the Prelude, the long and winding narrative to take the reader beyond the first few lines, not to mention the first movement. This ability and need to tell the longer narrative in verse is refreshingly rare, in times where compression is all. We are at pains to squeeze the lyric poem in general and the sonnet in particular down to a very significant couplet. None of that attempt is bad in itself, it just makes the tumbling, breathless, overspilling lines of Carson’s alexandrines exciting to say the least. This poet is in love with language – Latin, English, Irish, perhaps not so much Greek. He loves the exact word for everything, an Audi Quattro, a beehive, hair-do, breeze-block walls, bakelite, bread farrels, couplings, between carriages, flak, caesurae (which he rhymes with ‘slate-grey’ to echo an old Irish metre), sheepshank and clove hitch knots, cleats and staves. You are taken up in his excitement, tossed on the ‘Briny Say’ of his rich and rollicking imagination full of voices and vignettes, ‘Catestants and Protholics’ and all the vistas and views, sounds and sensations of Belfast… Carson is certainly in the ambit of Joyce, the teeming detail, the love and adoration of that which is so well-known and absorbed into the sinew of memory. The rhythm is closer to the spill and tumble of Finnegans Wake than anything else.”

Barra Ó Séaghdha, in 2002:

[Paul] Muldoon has always had the knack of inspiring awe among his peers and his elders. Ciarán Carson testifies to having written very little between 1976 and 1985: “Paul Muldoon was doing the thing so well, so why bother?” It is extraordinary that someone with Carson’s already proven gifts should have felt this, and fortunate that he was able to re-invent himself in collections like The Irish for No and Belfast Confetti.’ Further, Ciaran Carson has worked on 19th-century French poetry rather than on his contemporaries. It is arguable that there was a greater knowledge of European culture and languages among Irish writers of the pre-cappuccino era than among today’s young writers. In any case, it is worth asking just what our alleged Europeanness amounts to.

Ciarán Carson:

For years I’ve had a series of recurrent dreams about Belfast – nightmares, sometimes, or dreams of containment, repression, anxiety and claustrophobia …often, I’m lost in an ambiguous labyrinth between the Falls and the Shankill; at other times, the city is idealised and takes on a Gothic industrial beauty.

Ciarán Carson:

I get bored and angry with those who protest that traditional music, compared with the ‘big’ tradition of classical music, is limited. By the same token a lot of classical music is histrioniic and vulgar. I often think that people don’t listen enough, or that their education has made them incapable of listening […] and the same thing can apply to poetry – a lot of poets, it seems to me, are unaware of the beauty and sophistication of ‘ordinary’ speech.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

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