He lived a long life and was beloved and productive almost up to the very end. His death is yet another snipped thread with the past. I wrote about him when he died for my newsletter.
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.
Billy and Audrey Wilder
It’s his birthday today.
I love him for his humor, his cynical pessimistic view of human beings – which, honestly, just feels realistic, his versatility with material (noirs, melodramas, war movies, comedies). Sunset Boulevard, Stalag 17, Some Like It Hot, Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, The Apartment, the prophetic Ace in the Hole. His life spanned from pre-Hitler Vienna to the early 2000s. His entire family was killed in concentration camps. He emigrated to the US shortly after Hitler took power.
Here’s a letter to Wilder from Alfred Hitchcock after seeing The Apartment:
I love his tips for screenwriters (#6 helped me enormously when I was writing my own script and problem-solving the final scene.)
Billy Wilder’s Tips for Writers
1. The audience is fickle.
2. Grab ’em by the throat and never let ’em go.
3. Develop a clean line of action for your leading character.
4. Know where you’re going.
5. The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the better you are as a writer.
6. If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.
7. A tip from Lubitsch: Let the audience add up two plus two. They’ll love you forever.
8. In doing voice-overs, be careful not to describe what the audience already sees. Add to what they are seeing.
9. The event that occurs at the second-act curtain triggers the end of the movie.
10. The third act must build, build, build in tempo and action until the last event, and then —
11. — that’s it. Don’t hang around.
Taken from the essential “Conversations with Wilder
These two are up to no good.
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.
It’s the birthday today of the great Iranian filmmaking master. Paying tribute to him – and the country from which he sprung – feels right, albeit sad, in this terrible disgraceful week.
When Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami died at the age of 76, shock waves erupted through the film world. There was a general feeling: What are we supposed to do now? If you’ve seen just one of his films, you will know how unique they are, his radical insistence on distance (he can be very Brechtian), his deconstruction of various movie tropes, his interrogation of what is cinema – and why – and how – the recurring images and moods, with characters often driving around in cars, their faces seen through the windows, reflections of trees and buildings flowing over them like water.
Certified Copy – I reviewed the film here.
Like Someone in Love
His films defy description. The questions are more important than the answers. Seen as a whole, his is an extraordinary body of work, one of the most impressive in the last 50 years.
Kiarostami’s films that made it here (and most of them did after Taste of Cherry) were not just limited-release foreign films, or indie arthouse hits or glittering Cannes-festival winners. His films may have been SOME of those things some of the time. But what a Kiarostami film was ALL the time was an EVENT. Like Jean-Luc Godard’s films, like Terrence Malick’s films, like Wong Kar Wai’s films … there are only a few directors who inspire such reverence, such passionate interest over DECADES.
Taste of Cherry
Kiarostami was consistently inventive. He never stopped challenging himself (and us). His talent did not calcify as he grew older (as often happens with directors). Two masterful – and radically different – films as Certified Copy and Like Someone in Love coming out one after the other? It was thrilling to experience this in real time.
Shirin
Shirin
Shirin
I have written a lot about Kiarostami over the years (full archive here), although there are many of his films I still have not seen (many are hard to find, in general). He lived and worked in Iran (surviving the Revolution and continuing to make films inside the Islamic Republic afterwards – not possible for many directors). It wasn’t until the end that he made two films outside of Iran, the glittering one-two punch of Certified Copy and Like Someone In Love). At the very same time that his former assistant Jafar Panahi was being persecuted and arrested, he was flourishing in a way that other Iranian artists could only dream of.
Jafar Panahi, the talented and persecuted Iranian filmmaker, is – as everyone knows – banned from making films (he’s made 4 since the sentence came down: he is a hero), banned from traveling, and forbidden from speaking to foreigners or giving interviews (he continues to give interviews). The man is a hero. Panahi needs no introduction and if you’ve been reading me for 5 minutes you know my feelings about his work and his life.
Panahi got his start as an assistant to Kiarostami. Kiarostami wrote some scripts for Panahi to film, and was instrumental in giving the younger man his start.
In recent years, as Panahi’s situation worsened, attracting international attention, Kiarostami – who has escaped persecution – would speak out in support of Panahi as well as all of the Iranian artists either in prison or silenced. When this happens, and when it happens from the main stage at Cannes or the Berlinale: it is a political act. People in Iran are watching. People in Iran see this, hear this, and know that there are millions of people “out here” who think what is happening is appalling. And no matter how much the censors in charge there want to stop the back-and-forth flow of information: it is too late. We hear from them, they hear from us. It’s the Internet age, bitches: you cannot control it.
In 2016, when Kiarostami died, Jafar Panahi reached out – through a translator who passed it on to the outside world – with a statement of tribute for his old mentor. It’s a beautiful reminiscence about how their friendship started and what Kiarostami taught him.
My favorite bit is this.
Later that afternoon, he asked me to ride with him to another location. Along the way, he stopped and gave me a handkerchief to use as a blindfold, which I did. He continued to drive for a while and stopped again. He helped me get off the car, held my hand, and, after walking me for a couple of minutes, asked me to remove the blindfold. I opened my eyes and saw what turned out to be the final shot of “Through the Olive Trees,” that majestic landscape! As I was stunned by the view, Mr. Kiarostmi told me, “That’s my vision. That’s how I see this place.”
The experience taught me a valuable lesson. I realized the importance of having a vision and how each filmmaker needs to develop his or her vision. The spot we were standing on was Mr. Kiarostami’s vision. He didn’t tell me that was the best vantage point. He just said that was his point of view, and I realized I had to have mine.
Kiarostami was an example to other struggling Iranian artists of what could be possible. His films were not as political as Panahi’s (it was Panahi’s politics, presented without euphemism, that got him into trouble), but they did not lack for social/political commentary and – therefore – controversy. (Taste of Cherry is about a middle-class man driving around a construction site looking for someone – anyone – willing to bury his body after he commits suicide. The film won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, the first film from Iran to be so honored, but in Iran, the censors went nuts because of suicide’s centrality to the plot.) Kiarostami’s roots in the Iranian cinema tradition were strong, and he wrote scripts for other directors (including Panahi), collaborating with others in the energized and inspirational “everyone does everything” atmosphere of Iranian cinema. But Kiarostami’s reputation was not local. He was an international star. He worked with Juliette Binoche twice (in Shirin and Certified Copy), he was a regular at Cannes and the Berlinale, one of the glittering lights of the film world for decades, a true icon.
The writers at Rogerebert.com, myself included, each wrote a tribute when Kiarostami died, collected here.
His final film, released posthumously last year, was an animated film called 24 Frames. It was on my Top 10 List. Still out there on the very edge of his talent and technology, pushing us, challenging us to see the world in different ways. Not just to look, but to SEE.
It’s indicative of the power of Kiarostami’s imagery, that when I shared the below screen-grab on Twitter and Facebook upon hearing the news of his death, putting it up with no text attached, people started sharing it, liking it, leaving comments like “I’m so sad.”
“Close Up” (1999)
Because the image is instantly recognizable.
And once you’ve seen the film, that image will never ever leave you.
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.
Photo by Alfred Wertheimer, 1956
Because when you become a father, you never know how it’ll all turn out.
Vernon looks like an anvil dropped on him from the sky, an anvil in the shape of his famous son.
Mandatory Credit: Photo by Hollywood Photo Archive/Mediapunch/Shutterstock (10195161a)
Elivs Presley
Elvis Presley Archive 1973
Lisa Marie recalled the only time her dad ever spanked her.
She misbehaved, and he told her to stop. Because she was 5 or 6, she kept doing whatever it was and he gave her a light spank on the tush. She probably cried a little bit and then bounced back and rode around on her tricycle. Whatever. Moment forgotten. A blip in her day.
Much later that night – she said it had to have been 2, 3 in the morning, Elvis woke her up, all emotional, and told her how sorry he was and he’d never do it again.
He had been sitting around for HOURS worrying about what he had done.
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.
It’s his birthday today.
When I lived in Philadelphia – a million years ago, with my boyfriend who was in law school at U. Penn – I became intimately familiar with Henry Ossawa Tanner’s paintings since so many of them hang in the Philadelphia Museum of Art and we went to the museum almost every week. Or, at least a couple times a month. It’s such a great museum.
Born in Pittsburgh in 1859, Tanner was the first Black artist to break through into international fame. Although he was educated in Philadelphia at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (he enrolled in 1879, and was the only black student), he ended up living for most of his life in Paris. I believe he is buried in Paris. (He was eventually given the Legion of Honor in 1923, France’s highest honor.) Tanner did not have to wait decades for his work to be recognized, he did not die forgotten and then his work was discovered posthumously. He was here to enjoy his success.
While at the Pennsylvania Academy, Tanner met Thomas Eakins who was busy revolutionizing American Art. Eakins saw something in Tanner, recognized his gift, and “took him on” in a powerful mentor relationship. (Tanner eventually painted Eakins’s portrait, one of only a few painters who got the honor). Of course Tanner faced racism every step of the way. He was unwelcome in almost every space he entered – although in France it was a little less restrictive. It had to have taken incredible guts and stick-to-it-iveness to stay the course.
Tanner started, as many painters do, with landscapes.
“View of the Seine looking toward Notre Dame”, 1896
“The Arch” (1919) – I saw this one at the Brooklyn Museum. It may be part of the collection there, Brooklyn-ites, take note.
There are a couple of reasons, though, why his work stands out from his fellow Impressionists. For me, looking at his work as a whole it is a reminder: Bring yourself to your work. Whatever that means. Do your thing, and do it as best you can, but don’t leave yourself out of it, because the only thing that is unique about you is your you-ness. That’s it. Only one of you. So BRING IT. I learned this young, because of pursuing acting. It helps you keep your perspective during cattle-call auditions, where it feels like you’re wandering in a wilderness of hugely talented people (and this is TRUE). All you can do is believe in yourself and that your unique-ness has value and that someone will want it, and if others DON’T want it, oh well, someone else will. SO. Tanner began painting small homey scenes showing people of color living their lives, doing simple activities, like praying before dinner, etc. This shattered stereotypes of depictions of black life. Even saying that is an understatement. Basically what Tanner was doing hadn’t existed in American art before he came along – at least not to the level at which he was doing it. He had an international reputation (mostly because of his later religious paintings, which I’ll get to in a second). He was famous. His paintings went around the world, under-cutting the racist depictions of black Americans for a very wide audience.
His most famous painting, to this day, is “The Banjo Lesson”.
“The Banjo Lesson” (1893)
The painting is very beautiful, but it’s also revolutionary, in a quiet insistent way. Most importantly, the painting challenges the minstrel context inherent in banjos, etc. The normal context of banjos in the racist context is a black man performing, being a clown, being happy with entertaining others. Tanner’s painting, however, shows a tender inter-generational scene, connoting continuity and family bonds – and – even more important – brings up questions/contemplations that go far beyond what is portrayed: had the father or maybe grandfather been a slave? Considering the year “The Banjo Lesson” was painted: Most probably he was. What we see here, then, is a man – who is poor, who lives in humble conditions, etc. – but he is free, he is a man free enough to have a little bit of leisure time to spend passing on to his grandson how to play the banjo.
One thing about Tanner’s use of light: Tanner’s work features so many instances of different light sources coming into shadows or hitting black skin, light pouring in from different quadrants. Tanner’s use of light is quite intricate. My boyfriend and I used to look at his paintings and try to figure out the light sources. Look closely at “The Banjo Lesson” and try to track where all the light is coming from. Because it’s not just from one place.
Later, Tanner moved into religious territory. Many of his religious paintings could also be classified as landscape paintings, and so it makes you think about the religious stories depicted in different ways. He’s giving you a different perspective, an Impressionistic and non-literal perspective, on a very familiar story. Like here: “The Good Shepherd”:
Isn’t that just stunning?
Two more:
He did many paintings of Mary, and all of them are haunting, beautiful, moody, with deep rich colors. His work makes you re-think Mary. Like here:
And the gorgeous “Flight Into Egypt”:
I am leaving the best for last: Tanner’s painting called “The Annunciation.”
“The Annunciation” is quite literally overwhelming when you see it in person.
Look at how far beyond the normal edge of symbolic allegorical painting Tanner had gone! Seek out “The Annunciation” if you’re ever in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It’ll take your breath away. I seriously gasped the first time I saw it.
Tanner died in Paris in 1937. Happy birthday to this pioneer.
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.
“I’m very much against expressing a categorical view of the world. I hope I can continue to discover something, and not to underline or bolster up what I already know.” – Paul Muldoon
It’s his birthday today.
Like Seamus Heaney was, Paul Muldoon is a giant in modern poetry, and, also like Heaney, a rural Ulster man. He grew up on a farm in County Armagh, a Catholic in the middle of a Protestant majority. His parents tried to shield the family from the political realities of the moment, although they were nationalists. The Troubles reverberate through Muldoon’s verse. He’s published over 30 books of poetry. He is now a professor at Princeton. He’s won the Pulitzer Prize. He’s won every prize.
He went to Queen’s University Belfast, where Seamus Heaney was one of his teachers (post on him here). It was a hot time in Belfast, not just politically, but also in the literary scene, and Paul Muldoon was very much a part of that. Some of the names at the time: Michael Longley (post here), Derek Mahon (post on him here), Ciarán Carson (post here), Medbh McGuckian (post on her here), Frank Ormsby, Muldoon – they were all part of a writer’s workshop in Belfast called the Belfast Group. Much of Heaney’s earliest work came out of it.
Muldoon is a big risk-taker in his verse, just like Frost was. He is dazzling, but not showy. The pages of today’s poetry journals are filled with Muldoon imitators. Muldoon is a brainiac, as most autodidacts are. He is voracious in curiosity and scope. Information is there to be used, messed with.
With all of this, Muldoon is also an eloquent poet of “the Troubles”.
While he often writes long poems, today I’m posting a brief one. It’s only five lines. Five lines is all you need to describe an entire WORLD … if you’re as good as Paul Muldoon, that is.
Ireland
The Volkswagen parked in the gap,
But gently ticking over.
You wonder if it’s lovers
And not men hurrying back
Across two fields and a river.
Paul Muldoon:
On the other hand, at some level the mass of unresolved issues in Northern Ireland does influence the fact that there are so many good writers in the place.
Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets
He was born in Portadown, County Armagh, in 1951 and brought up near the Moy, a village to which his poems return. Muldoon’s mother was a teacher with strong literary interests, his father a farm laborer friendly to the Republican cause, a Lawrentian formula that resulted not in Sons and Lovers but in poems about complementarities and incompatibilities. Fruitful and tragic misalliances are a recurrent theme in his poems, wired and triggered by ironies that can be unexpectedly savage or heartbreaking.
Roger Conover, Eire-Ireland:
Muldoon’s is a poetry which sees into things, and speaks of the world in terms of its own internal designs and patterns.
Seamus Heaney, Preoccupations: Selected Prose, on Muldoon’s Mules:
A strange, rich second collection.
Adam Kirsch, New Republic:
If virtuosity is all that a poet can display, if his poems demand attention simply because of their elaborateness and difficulty, then he has in some sense failed.
Michael Schmidt:
[Paul Muldoon] read Frost with special attention, though the American’s impact on his prosody and narrative strategies is limited, except when he is producing, as in “The Mountain” ironic connections.
Paul Muldoon:
[Robert] Frost was important to me early on because his line, his tone of voice, was so much a bare canvas.
William Logan:
Muldoon is … in love (not wisely but too well) with language itself. … Too often the result is tedious foolery, the language run amok with Jabberwocky possibility (words, words, monotonously inbreeding), as if possibility were reason enough for the doing.
Adam Phillips, London Review of Books, on Muldoon’s lectures:
[The lectures] are about poetic influence more than anything else … Muldoon is generous and expansive in his naming of names; he is the exemplary poet as fan.
Michael Schmidt:
Muldoon often builds with baroque delicacy a trellis of ironies over the rather rudimentary themes and subjects. He likes the Metaphysicals, he likes conceits.
Clair Wills, Times Literary Supplement, on To Ireland:
[There is] something irreducibly esoteric about this trip through the weird and wonderful land of Irish letters, and the quirkiness, bordering on whimsy, will no doubt alienate many readers. This is unfortunate, because the book also contains some of Muldoon’s most forthright reflections to date on the relations of history, literature and politics.
Seamus Heaney:
Robert Frost, a poet whose roguery and tough-mindedness are admired by Paul Muldoon, once wrote about the art of filling a cup up to the brim ‘or even above the brim’. This impulse to go further than is strictly necessary is presented by Frost as the most natural thing in the world. It’s why young boys want to climb to the tops of birch trees and why grown-up poets write poems.
William Logan, on Hay:
Everyone interested in contemporary poetry should read this book … In our time of tired mirrors and more-than-tiresome confession, Muldoon is the rare poet who writes through the looking glass.
Paul Muldoon:
I suppose for whatever reason I actively welcome being put down, something which perhaps goes back to my upbringing – that accusation of not being worthy which could be laid at one’s door.
Seamus Heaney:
“This work [Paul Muldoon’s book ‘The Annals of Chile’] gives the impression of coming clean and being clandestine at one and the same time. It is Joycean in its combination of the everyday and the erudite, but it is also entirely sui generis, a late-twentieth-century work that vindicates Muldoon’s reputation as one of the era’s true originals.”
Michael Schmidt:
His formal and verbal inventiveness leads away from self. In Madoc he risks rewriting the lives of Coleridge and Southey, as if they had fulfilled the ambition of Pantisocracy and set up their community on the banks of the Susquehanna. Philosophers from the ancient Greeks to Stephen Hawking comment tersely and in character on the enterprise. It is very funny, very learned, a high-table game. He speaks for a while histor of thought, talked down, as it were, but not trivialized. “I’m interested in ventriloquism, in speaking through other people, other voices.”
Seamus Heaney:
[Muldoon is] one of the very best.
Paul Muldoon, who talks a lot about Robert Frost:
One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.
And finally:
“It’s Never Too Late for Rock’N’Roll”
By Paul Muldoon
It may be too late to learn ancient Greek
Under a canopy of gnats
It may be too late to sail to Mozambique
With a psychotic cat
It may be too late to find a cure
Too late to save your soul
It may be too late to lose the heat
It may be too late to find your feet
It may be too late to draw a map
To the high desert of your heart
It may be too late to lose the poor
It’s never too late for rock’n’roll
It may be too late to dance like Fred Astaire
Or Michael Jackson come to that
It may be too late to climb the stair
And find the key under your mat
It may be too late to think that you’re
Never too late for rock’n’roll
We have to believe a couple of good thieves can still seize the day
We have to believe we can still clear the way
We have to believe we’ve found some common ground
We have to believe we have to believe
We can lose those last twenty pounds.
It’s her birthday today. The quote in the headline was Rowlands talking about playing Mabel in A Woman Under the Influence, but it could be said about many of her roles, particularly the ones she did in her husband’s films. Far far out there on a limb, or on a mountaintop, without an oxygen tank, without a net, whatever metaphor you want. That’s how far out she goes.
I’ve written so much about her, my favorite living actress, and here’s a roundup:
For the Criterion release of Love Streams, I wrote and narrated a video essay about Rowlands’ work with Cassavetes. Here’s an excerpt from the video (the whole thing is in the Special Features on the DVD):
When Gena Rowlands received her Lifetime Achievement Oscar, I was hired to write the narration for the tribute reel played at the ceremony. Angelina Jolie read what I wrote. Unfortunately, it isn’t online. (It was a trophy moment, personally to hear “Angie” saying MY words.)
Here’s Gena Rowlands’ highly entertaining speech at her Lifetime Achivement ceremony, complete w/Bette Davis anecdote (they did an amazing TV movie together, “Strangers.”)
I wrote the booklet essay – reprinted here – for Arrow Film’s release of Another Woman (part of a Woody Allen box set) – it’s one of her best performances, and it’s rarely discussed.
Here’s my report for Rogerebert.com on a QA she did after a SAG screening of Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks, Witness to a Legend: The Career of Gena Rowlands
Also for Rogerebert.com, I wrote “Gena Rowlands: A Life in Film,” to highlight the career entire, not just the films she did with John Cassavetes.
When I interviewed Dan Callahan about his The Art of American Screen Acting, we discussed Gena Rowlands, of course.
I wrote about Minnie and Moskowitz for my Substack.
For my column at Liberties, I wrote about Cassavetes and Rowlands, Opening Night, and Tennessee Williams’ Two-Character Play: John Cassavetes, Tennessee Williams, and Intelligent Insanity
And finally, because it was only right, I wrote a tribute to her when she died: A Woman Without Peers.
Even that tribute wasn’t enough, so I wrote another one.
“Nothing will do more to change that mental attitude and raise his status than a demonstration of intellectual parity by the Negro through the production of literature and art.” – James Weldon Johnson, preface to The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922)
It’s his birthday today.
An extremely important figure in 20th century American culture, James Weldon Johnson was born in 1871 and died in 1938. He is often lumped in with the Harlem Renaissance, but he was a little bit older than that generation. His work was not really a precursor; seen in the timeline of events, it’s almost like he was “preparing the space,” he was enlarging the room to include more voices. Those clamorous years of the ‘teens and 1920s were so jam-packed with events it’s hard to tell who was influencing whom, and what came first, but seen with the benefit of retrospect, Johnson’s work was essential to basically laying down the ground rules of the Harlem Renaissance. Things were already happening, things were changing, but his project – to codify, catalog, capture, explain – was very important, because it set the stage, it gathered together voices that had been ignored and dismissed, especially from “genres” like hymns and sermons, not considered literature. Someone had to make the case for the material’s relevance and worth. This was what James Weldon Johnson did.
He did it all. He was a teacher, a civil rights activist, a diplomat, a lawyer, a poet, an editor. He served as secretary for the NAACP. He was the first African-American to be accepted into the Florida bar. He eventually became the first African-American professor at New York University. He also taught at Fisk University, lecturing on literature and art. He grew up with formidable parents, particularly his mother, who was a teacher in a public school and passed on to her two sons a love of education, language, and English literature. Just as Jean Toomer did, he spent time as a teacher in rural Georgia, a crucial experience for him, witnessing the poverty, illiteracy, racism of a backwoods world. He was responsible for extending the education in black schools in the area to the 10th grade, so that kids had options, a place to stay where learning could conceivably continue. He also traveled to Haiti, under occupation by U.S. Marines at the time, and wrote a book about it. He was appointed consul to Venezuela and Nicaragua. It’s about 10 lives in one!
I haven’t mentioned his collaboration with his composer brother, J. Rosamond Johnson!
For my Substack, I wrote about the Bloomsday celebration I’ve been going to (more or less) for 20 years, and my history with the book, and Dad, and lovable finance bro, and meeting people where the sole bond is knowing the entire score of Oliver! The piece is really about finding your people. I found mine. And I’m going to hang out with them later today, like I do every year.
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.
Happy Bloomsday to those who celebrate.
I’ve been celebrating Bloomsday for 20 years, in the real world, and here on my site. If you’ve been visiting here for any length of time, you know this. There are too many posts to count, and James Joyce has his own category. Not just a tag, but a CATEGORY. Writing about him – and his books – has been a great pleasure, especially since I am not a scholar, I’m just a reader – and writing about his books have been a really fun way to enter into them on my own terms.
But for today I’ll link to four things:
My annual Bloomsday post, where I talk about the book, the reaction to it, positive and negative, and Joyce’s place in the sphere of things.
The piece I wrote on my Substack in 2023: yes I said yes I will Yes: Families, actual and chosen, and Bloomsday
It’s about Dad, and reading the book for the first time. It’s about the Bloomsday celebration I’ve been going to since 2004 at Ulysses pub down in the financial district. It’s about finding your people. And how I found mine.
And finally: years ago, I wrote about Before Sunrise taking place on Bloomsday.
