“If I could say it in words there would be no reason to paint.” — Edward Hopper

Posted on July 22, 2026 by sheila

It’s his birthday today.

I wrote about Edward Hopper quite a bit in my Present Tense column at Film Comment, detailing the Hopper-y vibe of Tom Noonan’s great film about urban loneliness, What Happened Was… In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that Karen Sillas’ deep-rose-colored dress might be inspired by this painting. Her apartment is all windows, too, in the movie.

I love the loneliness in Edward Hopper’s work. The insomnia. The urban midnights. The voyeurism. The emptiness. If you’re heartbroken, Hopper is your kindred spirit. I find his paintings very sad, sadness you can wallow in. Many (most?) people do what they can to avoid loneliness. I have never been able to pull it off. All the lonely people, where do they all come from?

Living in a major metropolitan area, you are constantly up against other people’s lives. People have private moments in public. You can peek into people’s windows as you walk by. You give each other privacy as best you can. People can weep on the subway, and nobody freaks out. Everyone clams up, goes into their own private head-space, and the weeping person may as well be in her own room for all the attention she gets. Believe me: having been that weeping person, there’s a comfort in anonymity. There is nothing quite like the freedom to be left alone.

At the same time, there is the sense of being privy to other people’s secrets. There are just so many damn windows. How do other people live? How are they managing?

Sometimes, if you’re alone, and feeling your alone-ness acutely … seeing glimpses of other people living their lives, through windows, connects you to something human. Reminds you you are a human being, you are real. It doesn’t eradicate loneliness. The kind of loneliness I’m talking about can’t be eradicated. I wonder if there are some people who have never felt loneliness like that. Loneliness that literally wakes you up at nights. Like Laing writes in her great book The Lonely City, where Edward Hopper is featured prominently, loneliness like that is like being hungry.

I found a really wonderful article about Edward Hopper’s paintings of movie theatres.

Hopper evokes a world gone by, and yet not all that unlike our own. People are people, no matter the era.

I have been all of these women.

Even when Hopper moves out into the country, the loneliness follows him. Or maybe this is just me projecting. That’s the power of his work. There’s a blankness there somewhere, a nothing-ness, giving great permission to the viewer to place herself into the painting, to see her own life there. Or not. I grew up in a beach town. My first kiss was on a foggy beach. The ocean is the background to most of my childhood memories. So I look at these two, and yes, I wonder what they might be talking about, but I also wonder if they aren’t talking at all, if they are just listening to the sound of the lonely surf breaking on the beach below?

“Maybe I am slightly inhuman … All I ever wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.” — Edward Hopper

Terrence Malick knew his Hopper, that’s for sure.

So does Tommy Lee Jones.

Only Edward Hopper could turn a gas station into an image piercingly sweet and sad. Pungent and poetic. I don’t feel like analyzing why. These are feelings that hurt, not particularly pleasant, but they’re familiar. I’ve had them since I was very very young, before I understood anything about love and loss. It’s a human-inheritance kind of thing.

As I observed in the article linked at the top: one thing to note about his most famous painting: The diner has no door. No way in, no way out.

Loneliness is not pleasant. People go to mad extremes to avoid being lonely; it’s that excruciating an experience. Loneliness has ruined long stretches of my life. I look back and wish to spare myself. But at least I had some company. Edward Hopper had already been there.

Last year, Allison and I went to the stunning Edward Hopper exhibit at the Whitney. I had been hearing about it for months and watching enviously as friends attended (via their Instagram feeds). Allison and I finally went. And we lost ourselves to the world. What an AMAZING exhibit. Edward Hopper’s New York. It was not just the usual suspects, although I got to see those too. It dug into his early advertising work, lots of that on display – so different! – his sketches – the sketches of “Nighthawks” – and also his relationship with movies/theatres. We wandered around, sometimes together, sometimes alone. There were so many people there, which – after the last couple of years we had – did my heart good. People clustering before famous paintings. Edward Hopper’s paintings are stories. You can “read into” them. I ended up talking with two other women about one of the paintings. We talked about what we saw. We read into the behavior. It was so awesome.

Allison and I both saw some Hopper-in-real-life visuals DURING our time there. We weren’t together when we saw these things, but we both noticed and both took pictures, of the exact same thing. We are kindred spirits. See if you can spot them.

I was so excited I got to see that one. ^^

I got full-body goosebumps when I saw that one in person. ^^

 
 
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.

Posted in Art/Photography, On This Day | Tagged , , , | 36 Comments

Happy Birthday, Edward Herrmann

Posted on July 21, 2026 by sheila

primary_Ed_H2

With a career as long and diverse as Edward Herrmann’s there is much to discuss. When he died, I wrote a piece for Ebert, focusing on just one moment in Warren Beatty’s Reds, a moment that (in its small way) helps make the whole thing possible.

That’s the job of a character actor.

Just one line: Edward Herrmann, 1943-2014

 
 
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.

Posted in Actors, Movies, On This Day | Tagged , | 2 Comments

“The rhythm is jazz.” — Hart Crane

Posted on July 21, 2026 by sheila

“What I want to get is … an ‘interior’ form, a form that is so thorough and intense as to dye the words themselves with a pecularity of meaning, slightly different maybe from the ordinary definition of them separate from the poem.” — Hart Crane

It’s his birthday today.

There are good poets. There are major poets. And then there are the ones who disturb the waters, who disrupt, who create new space in their chaotic wake. Walt Whitman. T.S. Eliot. Yeats. And Hart Crane. His life was so short and yet his influence seems to just grow in intensity as the years pass. He was the inspiring force for a whole new generation of writers, each of whom struggled to get out from under his shadow (as Crane struggled to get out of Eliot’s shadow). Tennessee Williams was honest about his feeling of debt to Crane. He used Crane quotations as epigraphs in many of his plays, and dedicated many of his plays to Crane. He kept a picture of Hart Crane over his writing desk for decades. They did not know one another.

Continue reading →

Posted in Books, On This Day, writers | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

“When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes, and that is my idea.” — Ernest Hemingway

Posted on July 21, 2026 by sheila

Paris Review interview, 2007:
Interviewer: Is it possible [Hemingway] showed a generation how to get emotion into a sentence without mentioning emotion?
Norman Mailer: Yes, and he did it more than anyone ever had before or after. But he’s a trap. If you’re not careful you end up writing like him. It’s very dangerous to write like Hemingway, but on the other hand it’s almost a rite of passage. I almost wouldn’t trust a young novelist – I won’t speak for the women here, but for a male novelist – who doesn’t imitate Hemingway in his youth.

It’s his birthday today.

A writer challenged Hemingway: Write a story in 6 words. Hemingway was a gambler, a risk-taker, and would never walk away from a challenge. The problem obsessed him. 6-word story … it obsessed him for a couple of days. What he came up with is quite famous (and way better than the milque-toast imitations):

For Sale: Baby Shoes. Never Used.

Hemingway said later he thought it was the best thing he ever wrote.

And … maybe he’s not wrong.

Of course I’ve read all his stuff. I like Moveable Feast best of all, although I recognize, of course, the revolution that was his pared-down fictional prose. In acting classes – at least in the ones I took back in the day – it was common for actors to work on Hills Like White Elephants, which is a story – not a play – but it’s mostly dialogue and – crucially – almost no subtext (maybe none at all?) He tells the story and allows you to INFER by the dialogue what is going on, perfect for actors to work on. I think that short story is also at the top of the list of his accomplishments as a writer. I also like the sex “scene” in For Whom the Bell Tolls, something about the earth moving beneath the sleeping bag and/or tent? Sorry, it’s just a sentence but it’s hot as hell. It’s a perfect example of what he did best, when he was really cooking: less is more. It can’t touch the hottest sex scene of all, in James Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice:

“I had to have her if I hung for it.
I had her.”

But still, I think you can learn a lot from Hemingway. You have to be careful though.


Dean Stockwell and Ernest Hemingway

Continue reading →

Posted in Books, On This Day, writers | Tagged , , , , , | 11 Comments

July 20, 1969: Tranquility

Posted on July 20, 2026 by sheila

0720_big

President Kennedy to the joint session of Congress on May 25 1961:

“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.”

Here’s an incredible photo of their approach to the landing spot, taken from the lunar module:

Buzz Aldrin to NASA, after landing on the moon:

“This is the LM pilot. I’d like to take this opportunity to ask every person listening in, whoever and wherever they may be, to pause for a moment and contemplate the events of the past few hours and to give thanks in his or her own way.”

Neil Armstrong to Mission Control:

“Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”

The Walter Cronkite telecast as it all happened gives me goosebumps. Of course I didn’t see it at the time, but it puts you right back there.

From The New York Times article on July 21, 1969:

His first step on the moon came at 10:56:20 P.M., as a television camera outside the craft transmitted his every move to an awed and excited audience of hundreds of millions of people on earth.

Neil Armstrong reporting back as he stepped out onto the moon:

“The surface is fine and powdery. I can kick it up loosely with my toe. It does adhere in fine layers, like powdered charcoal, to the sole and sides of my boots.”

moonwalk_791701c
Buzz Aldrin

And Buzz Aldrin describes what he sees, in my favorite phrase of that momentous day:

“Magnificent desolation.”

 
 
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.

Posted in On This Day | 18 Comments

“The reality is you don’t arrive, you don’t have a crone ceremony and suddenly get wisdom.” — Olympia Dukakis

Posted on July 20, 2026 by sheila

“I recognize that the real pulse of life is transformation, yet I work in a world dominated by men and the things men value, where transformation is not the coinage. It’s not even the language! Winning is everything in Hollywood. The ‘deal’ is everything. I understand the competitive thing because I had a real battle with it as a young woman. Because of my ethnicity, I felt I had to prove I was better – not as good as, but better – than others. Thankfully, it became clear to me that when I compete, I lose my connection to the passion I have for my work. Every once in a while, I come across a man who has the desire to collaborate and be conciliatory. But if I want to continue acting and have the potential for financial prosperity – something that came to me very late in life – I have to live with these competitive values.” — Olympia Dukakis

The quote above comes from an extraordinary interview with Dukakis I came across – which is actually a chapter in the book In Sweet Company: Conversations with Extraordinary Women About Living a Spiritual Life, by Margaret Wolff. I highly recommend reading the whole thing.


Husband and wife Louis Zorich and Olympia Dukakis in The Seagull, Williamstown Theater Festival

The first thing I thought of when I heard the sad news of Olympia Dukakis’ passing was the compulsive sighs emanating from her Oscar-winning performance in Moonstruck. She would let out these little exhalations of air from time to time, sometimes in conversation, sometimes not, standing at the stove cooking, a mournful short quick sigh. It was a “tic” of the character – we all have “tics” like this – but Dukakis didn’t do it as a “tic”. The character needed to let tension and anxiety. So much was in the sigh. A lifetime was in the sigh.

Only a great actress could pull it off.



The second thing I thought of was an interview she did for a wonderful book called The Actor’s Chekhov (about the company of actors who came to Williamstown Theatre Festival every summer while Nikos Psacharopoulos was artistic director, people like Christopher Walken, Laila Robins, Blythe Danner. It’s a fantastic book, particularly for student actors because these people know how to WORK. It’s one of the best “acting process” books in my entire collection, because none of it is theoretical. It’s ALL practical.

As a young actress, the following passage blew my mind because it showed just how detailed you had to be when going through the script, how you could take NOTHING for granted. You had to be so curious! Don’t be obedient and passive: you must be active as an actor, you must ask questions about every single thing your character says.

This is one of the BEST examples I have ever seen of how to ask questions in the early stages of working with a script.

Listen to how Dukakis tries to figure out why her character says one line in particular. It’s a seemingly banal line, a “nothing” line, filler, just chit-chat. (But, as my very first acting mentor Kimber Wheelock used to drill into our heads: In acting, nothing can be “just”. You aren’t “just” sad. You aren’t “just” walking out of the room. You are sad. You are walking out of a room for a reason. Any time you hear yourself saying the word “just” – and this doesn’t just go for actors – take a second to stop and ask yourself why. You’re lying to yourself somewhere Find the lie, and remove the “just”.) So here, watch how she goes about solving the problem of the moment. You have to know why you’re saying something because once you know the WHY you then know the HOW. Otherwise you’re just being GENERAL. Human beings do this naturally, without thinking. We are SPECIFIC as humans, we aren’t GENERAL. You don’t have to think, “Wait, why am I saying this again?” as a regular human being. But actors do. Actors have to make choices. What seems like a throw-off line is a huge PUZZLE to Dukakis, and it was a problem she needed to solve. Not just for herself but ALSO for the audience. Chekhov wrote a “moment” here – it’s not random, NOTHING is random – so what IS the moment (a) and (b) how do I PLAY that moment?

Olympia Dukakis, along with her acting career, was an acting teacher all her life. You can see here why she was such a great one. I cannot even explain how much the following anecdote influenced me in my own work. Transformative:

Something very interesting happened the first time I did Paulina in The Sea Gull. She comes to them in the third act, and says, “Here are the plums for the journey.” And when I was researching it I thought, why is she giving him plums for the journey? It always seemed like she was a batty person! And then I began reading what it was like to go on a journey then. There was a long time on the train, it was very difficult, the food was very bad, people would get diarrhea, constipation. And when I read that I knew what it was! Bowel movements! So, I mean, I could play that! That’s something that’s a private thing, you don’t announce it to everyone. I mean, if I came up to you and you were going on a trip and I said, “Here’s some Ex-Lax,” I wouldn’t make a big announcement! I would try to be confidential about it. So that helped me with how the moment should be acted. But even then, I thought the audience doesn’t know this, they don’t know that that’s what plums are about. The line should be prunes! An audience will know prunes.

Now the word in the text is plums, there’s no getting around it, the specific literal translation was “plums”. At least that’s what I was told again and again by Kevin McCarthy. Because Kevin had been in that production with Mira Rostova, he considered himself the big Chekhov expert among us. He didn’t think it should be changed. As usual I didn’t go up to Nikos and say, “Listen, I think we should change this, blah blah blah.” I just did it one day in rehearsal. Nikos fell over with laughter! Kevin was apoplectic. But I felt – it’s not the specific word, that’s true, but this is the spirit of it, this is what’s intended, this is what Chekhov wants the audience to know the woman is doing.

Nikos waited till Kevin had given me my scolding and left the room and then he came over and said, “Keep it in.”

Olympia Dukakis came and spoke at my grad school. One of the things she said really struck me. She was 70 years old or something like that, and someone asked her something about becoming famous later in life, and the gist of the question was that since there weren’t as many elderly actresses, it might be easier to become famous later because there was less competition.

Dukakis – nobody’s fool – and actually rather scary in an exciting way – said, with no bitterness, but her tone was like “let me just shred up that illusions for you right now, kiddo”: “Listen, every script that comes to me has been offered to Gena Rowlands first. I get the script and Gena’s fingerprints are all over it. Any role I get it’s only because she’s turned it down.”

The way she said “Gena’s fingerprints” had such a tough hard edge – it was very funny the way she said it. “Lemme guess. Gena turned this one down, right?” In her tone was massive respect for “Gena”. Of COURSE they’re gonna offer it to Gena first. Olympia wasn’t complaining, wasn’t saying “I should be first in line.” She was acknowledging reality: As long as Gena Rowlands is topside, I will always be second choice.

It was a good lesson. As an actor, you can’t trip about things like that. About being a director’s second choice, or third choice, or whatever. Competition never ends, not even when you’re old. You’re never “in the clear”. Be good at what you do. Be grateful Gena turned it down.

No, thank 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.

Posted in Actors, Movies, On This Day, Theatre | Tagged , | Leave a comment

R.I.P. Jennifer Finch

Posted on July 19, 2026 by sheila

Jennifer Finch’s death has really hit me. She has inspired so many but my experience is completely subjective. The sound of L7 was part of the soundtrack of my 20s and 30s. And L7 is never far from me. They’re always on rotation to this day. I just can’t believe it. I’m sorry, I haven’t been able to write much these days. Something seems to have happened to me. I can’t find the words. Here’s her obit in Rolling Stone. I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge her passing. She was huge for me. Thank you, Jennifer. You are free now. No more pain.

Posted in Music, RIP | 2 Comments

“I think something once broken and put back together is even stronger.” — Jared Padalecki

Posted on July 19, 2026 by sheila

It’s his birthday today.

Jared Padalecki talks a lot about his process (when he’s asked, which is not too often unfortunately). He reads the script over and over again, reciting the lines over and over, as he takes a run, as he drives, as he walks around. He doesn’t just get “familiar” with the lines. My interpretation of this process is that the lines are IN him as a rhythm, he doesn’t need to think about it consciously.

Padalecki started working as a teenager, and absorbed lessons on the job. He was a cute late teenager, floppy hair associated with early-2000s boys. The BANGS. He has spoken about the trend for young American actors at the time: it was all about introspective brooding, inspired in part by Jared Leto on My So-Called Life. Hair/bangs/brooding. Padalecki is many things, but he is not a brooder. He has told funny stories about his initial audition for Sam Winchester in Supernatural, and how he went in there brooding like Jared Leto. This wasn’t the right vibe for Sam at all. Creator Eric Kripke wasn’t keen on Jared. Padalecki’s manager gave Jared the feedback: “Sam is smart. We’re looking for someone who seems smart.” A pretty brutal note, but Jared took the coaching for the callback, abandoned the brooding and came in just as himself. And it shows.

There’s very little difference between the audition and the pilot. There he is, there’s Sam!

The audition I want to see is the “chemistry read” between Jensen Ackles and Jared, but it’s not available. During the filming of the pilot, they commiserated in private: “This is … really good, actually. We might get picked up.” Never could they have guessed the show would be on for the next fifteen years.

In the first half of the first season, Jared was finding his way. Gilmore Girls didn’t really prepare him for Sam Winchester or for long-form season-wide arcs of torment/anguish. Supernatural was dark and emotionally complex, and – at least in the first season – the show was a two-hander. It was a heavy load. He’s in every scene. The characters were, at first, broadly drawn: Dean is the tough wise-cracking older brother (Han Solo), Sam is the intellectual idealistic younger brother (Luke Skywalker).

The brother conflict as presented in the first half of the first season are pretty on the nose, and Jared hits the conflict hard. This is not a criticism. This is an acknowledgement of the challenges in the material, and also acknowledging how young he was. This was new ground: he had to step into this new space, where he had more room to maneuver than he had on Gilmore Girls. Season one, you just watch Jared Padalecki grow as an actor, and it happens really fast. You can actually see him expand in confidence and subtlety as an actor. By “Asylum” you are watching him really step into this new space as an actor.

On the heels of “Asylum” comes “Scarecrow” and “Faith”. These episodes show Sam finding himself and his voice, his own leadership abilities, but it’s happening with the actor too.

As a viewer, “Nightmare” was where I first felt Jared Padalecki step into the role and into his own talent and strengths. In my massive re-cap of “Nightmare”, at one point I said “From here on out it’s the Jared Padalecki Show”. It was a revelation for me. I suddenly SAW him and I SAW what he brought. Most of this has to do with listening: listening is active, and in the power of Padalecki’s listening IS his objective (Sam’s objective). This is esoteric actor stuff but it’s super important when we are trying to understand what an actor is DOing. (My acting teacher at the Actors Studio always said, “The name of the job is ACT-or. Not FEEL-er.”)

The way Jared listens to “Max” in “Nightmare” is so active it’s an object lesson in the concept. I’ve said it so many times it’s probably tiresome but:

All great actors are good listeners. There are no exceptions.

Let’s take a moment to remember Paula, a community member here, a member of the Supernatural fandom, and one of the best Sam-interpreters we had. We miss you, Paula.

Often, Jared’s funniest moments aren his REACTIONS. (This recalls John Wayne’s famous comment: “I’m not an actor. I’m a RE-actor.” Jared is such a great example.) There are moments in Supernatural when something absurd happens and the “button” on it is Jared’s reaction. It’s not schtick. It’s organic. There’s a moment in a later season – I think “Paper Moon” – where Sam and Dean are trapped by a pack of werewolves, who force them at gunpoint to kneel, and Dean says something grandiose and macho, a wisecrack in the face of death, and Jared flashes him a look like, “Oh God that was corny.” It looks involuntary. I would bet it is involuntary. (And perhaps is an example – of which Supernatural has many – where the two talented leads subverted the lines, adding shadings that might not be there in the actual text. Jared laughing at the corniness of the line.)

I think my favorite moment of his in Supernatural comes in Season 6’s “Like a Virgin”. Castiel (Misha Collins) spills the beans about what happened to Sam during the previous whatever months. Sam had no idea. He’s shocked and upset, but he has to pretend like he already knew, mostly so he won’t alarm Castiel. He wants Castiel to keep talking. Tears flood his eyes, but on top of the emotion is this faux-casual expression, placed over the depths which have been STIRRED. Jared plays so many different things, simultaneously, in this small moment. My friend Dan Callahan, who writes about acting, says that so much of good acting is about proportion. A lot of bad or ineffective performances are mostly because the actor gets the proportions wrong. This small moment is in perfect proportion.

Jared is well-known for his advocacy for mental health awareness and is disarmingly open about his own struggles. He has had to advocate for himself to get a handle on his anxiety. When he is able to draw on this in his acting, it’s immensely powerful. (The final section of season 8 in Supernatural, the section in season 7 where he hasn’t slept for weeks and is running on fumes.) This is not to say that art is autobiographical: I really dislike such assumptions. Jared is an ACTOR, and he thinks clearly and deeply about Sam. But when you play the same character for 15 years, it’s hard to separate: they are you, you are them, you have distance, you have no distance – it’s all the same.

In the mid-2000s, Jared did a Christmas movie with Peter O’Toole. At one point, he got overwhelmed by the emotions in a scene and was teared up between takes. O’Toole intervened, telling him to give all that emotion to the character. It belongs onscreen, otherwise it’s just you. This advice from a veteran like O’Toole blew Jared’s mind. You cry real tears, you feel real feelings, but put it all into the story. It’s not about you.

I feel him do that, consciously, in those “sequences” I mentioned in Supernatural. He had to go to a very dark place. It’s difficult to even look at him in the “insomnia” section in Season 7, and the “trials” section at the end of Season 8. By then, he was a veteran actor himself. He knew how to work. He can be incredibly buoyant, and goofy, and his laugh is huge and free and joyful. Emotions come easily to him. He can go deep fast. He’s got easy access to what’s going on down there. A lot of people don’t.

When he broods now, it’s because he’s lived it. My doctor told me once during the period when I was trying to get well, that I was going through life trying to drive with the emergency brake on. I could only go so far, I could only accelerate so much. I had to get the right diagnosis and get treatment before I could finally pick up some momentum. Once you face the monster, once you actually are brave enough to look at it and say “No” to it … you can accelerate. It’s such a good analogy.

We’ve watched that happen with Padalecki, unfolding in real time, evident in his personal appearances as well as in his performance onscreen. But struggle, as it tends to do, has left its mark. It is part of what makes him him as an actor.

Posted in Actors, On This Day | Tagged , | 17 Comments

“Didacticism is the death of art.” — poet Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson

Posted on July 19, 2026 by sheila

“In every race, in every nation, and in every clime in every period of history there is always an eager-eyed group of youthful patriots who seriously set themselves to right the wrongs done to their race or nation or… art or self-expression.” — Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson

Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson wrote about the intersections in her mixed-race identity: Native-American, Caucasian, Black and Creole – in various books (of poetry and prose), as well as in her diary. She was very devoted to writing and determined to be successful, and it didn’t quite work out that way – but she remained true to her goal. In recent years her work has been resurrected – particularly her diary. Women who kept journals were rare, almost unheard of in that era: women were busy with other shit (that was the point?), like having children, keeping a home, washing, cooking, whatever. Not much time left over for contemplation, introspection, quiet time with a pen and a notebook. This is why first-person “artifacts” from women are so precious, so rare. Dunbar-Nelson’s diary is even more of a rarity: I read somewhere that only two diaries written by Black women survived that era, and hers was one of them. It was finally published in 1984, almost 100 years after she was born.

She was born in New Orleans in 1875, just 10 years after the ending of the Civil War. She was in the first generation to be born free. Her mother was a former slave, and her white father worked on the ships coming in and out of New Orleans. She took full advantage of the often meager opportunities available to people of color at the time. She went to college and became a teacher. Her first book of poetry, Violets and Other Tales was published in 1895, when she was just 20 years old.

She married celebrated poet Paul Dunbar (my post on him here), after a lengthy correspondence. She wouldn’t be the first person to be fooled by a correspondence, sucked into the intimacy of that form of communication, only to be shocked and disillusioned by who the correspondent was in person. Dunbar had tuberculosis (he died young), and was a depressed man. He was violent. To put it bluntly, he beat the shit out of her, once so badly she ended up in the hospital. She was an out lesbian, or as “out” as the time permitted, and this, too, was a problem for him. She eventually left him. She lived in Boston, New York, D.C. She co-founded a home for girls. She continued to teach before finally deciding to take a step back, and out of the daily grind, to get her Master’s. She was accepted to Cornell. Her thesis was on John Milton and William Wordsworth (some of her poems in Violets and Other Tales show the influence Wordsworth – and his benign view of nature – had on her. My post on him here. She loved the old forms, like sonnets – another Miltonic influence). I’d love to get my hands on that thesis. It’s an important reminder that culture – all culture, wherever it comes from – belongs to everyone. The past is a rich treasure trove of inspiration for all of us.

As the ‘teens and ’20s unfolded, Dunbar-Nelson devoted more of her time to journalism, writing articles and op-ed columns, addressing the issues facing Black women, looping in those issues to larger national contexts like America’s involvement in WWI. She also got editor gigs. She had a very difficult time as a journalist. First of all, there were very few women journalists, period, let alone Black women. Journalism requires mobility and access. You have to travel to the hot spots, you have to get people to talk to you. This was challenging for her. And yet she stuck at it: I really admire her tenacity. She barely made a dime from writing, something she wrote about over and over again, crankily, in her journal. (hashtag relatable). She worked mainly as a freelance stringer. She wrote regular columns for The Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP.

I do want to mention one more thing. In my research into this interesting woman, it became clear that WWI weighed heavily on her mind. She paid very close attention to what was happening with soldiers, particularly Black soldiers who were – at first – shut out from service. As people were getting drafted, there were white Supremacist senators resistant to expanding the draft to include men of color. The Senators made fiery racist speeches about the importance of segregation. But the War Department ignored the Senators, and expanded the draft to include black men. Over 2 million Black men ended up being drafted. Pacifists may not see that as a victory, but in the ‘teens it was a huge victory – both symbolic and actual – in terms of equality. Dunbar-Nelson wrote on the subject at length: She felt so strongly about the issue she wrote a one-act play called Mine Eyes Have Seen (such a great title!). I can’t find any information on whether it was produced or not, but it was published in a magazine. Mine Eyes Have Seen is about the brave soldiers returning from the war, to face racism and often lynching in their home towns. It was a huge issue. The play also predicts what eventually happened: Black veterans would come home and demand full equality. At the close of WWII, decorated veterans returned home to a land that treated them like shit – whereas in Europe they were treated like heroes. This jarring unfair experience saw the slow birth of the formal civil rights movement, which would grow in power over the next decade. You can’t put the genie of freedom back into the bottle.

Dunbar-Nelson died in 1935 at the age of 60.

I thought it would be interesting to post two wildly different poems by this writer. Both are sonnets, her preferred form. She loved the “old” (remember her Master’s thesis subject). I also wanted to post these two since it shows how diverse her interests were. The first one is beautiful and mournful, and very Wordsworthian. The second is a tribute to Madame Curie. It makes me want to cry.

Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson should be much more well-known.

I Sit and Sew

I sit and sew—a useless task it seems,
My hands grown tired, my head weighed down with dreams—
The panoply of war, the martial tred of men,
Grim-faced, stern-eyed, gazing beyond the ken
Of lesser souls, whose eyes have not seen Death,
Nor learned to hold their lives but as a breath—
But—I must sit and sew.

I sit and sew—my heart aches with desire—
That pageant terrible, that fiercely pouring fire
On wasted fields, and writhing grotesque things
Once men. My soul in pity flings
Appealing cries, yearning only to go
There in that holocaust of hell, those fields of woe—
But—I must sit and sew.

The little useless seam, the idle patch;
Why dream I here beneath my homely thatch,
When there they lie in sodden mud and rain,
Pitifully calling me, the quick ones and the slain?
You need me, Christ! It is no roseate dream
That beckons me—this pretty futile seam,
It stifles me—God, must I sit and sew?

Sonnet

I had not thought of violets late,
The wild, shy kind that spring beneath your feet
In wistful April days, when lovers mate
And wander through the fields in raptures sweet.
The thought of violets meant florists’ shops,
And bows and pins, and perfumed papers fine;
And garish lights, and mincing little fops
And cabarets and soaps, and deadening wines.
So far from sweet real things my thoughts had strayed,
I had forgot wide fields; and clear brown streams;
The perfect loveliness that God has made,—
Wild violets shy and Heaven-mounting dreams.
And now—unwittingly, you’ve made me dream
Of violets, and my soul’s forgotten gleam.

To Madame Curie

Oft have I thrilled at deeds of high emprise,
And yearned to venture into realms unknown,
Thrice blessed she, I deemed, whom God had shown
How to achieve great deeds in woman’s guise.
Yet what discov’ry by expectant eyes
Of foreign shores, could vision half the throne
Full gained by her, whose power fully grown
Exceeds the conquerors of th’ uncharted skies?
So would I be this woman whom the world
Avows its benefactor; nobler far,
Than Sybil, Joan, Sappho, or Egypt’s queen.
In the alembic forged her shafts and hurled
At pain, diseases, waging a humane war;
Greater than this achievement, none, I ween.

 
 
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.

Posted in Books, On This Day, writers | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

“Free Enterprise. The American Dream. Horatio Alger gone mad on drugs in Las Vegas. Do it now. Pure Gonzo journalism.” — Hunter S. Thompson

Posted on July 18, 2026 by sheila

Hunter_S_Thompson_Pic1_1297867615

One of my favorite writers of all time. It’s his birthday today.

Here he is on his favorite meal of the day:

“I like to eat breakfast alone, and almost never before noon; anybody with a terminally jangled lifestyle needs at least one psychic anchor every twenty-four hours, and mine is breakfast. In Hong Kong, Dallas, or at home — and regardless of whether or not I have been to bed — breakfast is a personal ritual that can only be properly observed alone, and in a spirit of genuine excess. The food factor should always be massive: four Bloody Marys, two grapefruits, a pot of coffee, Rangoon crêpes, a half-pound of either sausage, bacon, or corned-beef hash with diced chilies, a Spanish omelette or eggs Benedict, a quart of milk, a chopped lemon for random seasoning, and something like a slice of key lime pie, two margaritas and six lines of the best cocaine for dessert …Right, and there should also be two or three newspapers, all mail and messages, a telephone, a notebook for planning the next twenty-four hours, and at least one source of good music … all of which should be dealt with outside, in the warmth of a hot sun, and preferably stone naked.”

Some random scattered passages from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, with the understanding that Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail is probably even more of a masterpiece, and certainly one of the best books about the American political process. Everything is in there. It reflects the past, it predicts the future, it calls a spade a spade, it’s also hilarious as only Hunter can be hilarious. I’ve read everything he’s ever written. I loved it when he was writing for ESPN online. It was “appointment television” of the online variety.

But the book for which he will always be known is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

p. 11

“You Samoans are all the same,” I told him. “You have no faith in the essential decency of the white man’s culture. Jesus, just one hour ago we were sitting over there in that stinking baiginio, stone broke and paralyzed for the weekend, when a call comes through from some total stranger in New York, telling me to go to Las Vegas and expenses be damned – and then he sends me over to some office in Beverly Hills where another total stranger gives me $300 raw cash for no reason at all … I tell you, my man, this is the American Dream in action! We’d be fools not to ride this strange torpedo all the way out to the end.”

p. 21

The radio was screaming: “Power to the People – Right On!” John Lennon’s political song, ten years too late. “That poor fool should have stayed where he was,” said my attorney. “Punks like that just get in the way when they try to be serious.”

“Speaking of serious,” I said. “I think it’s about time to get into the ether and the cocaine.”

p. 56

One of the things you learn, after years of dealing with drug people, is that everything is serious.

p. 63

Ignore that nightmare in that bathroom. Just another ugly refugee from the Love Generation, some doom-struck gimp who couldn’t handle the pressure.

^^^ The contempt of the above … the accuracy … He hated hippies.

And here, in an extended sequence on page 66, he elaborates:

Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era – the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run … but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of the time and the world. Whatever it meant …
History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time – and which never explain, in retrospect, what really happened.
My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights – or very early mornings – when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L.L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder’s jacket … booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) … but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that ….
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda … You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning …
And that, I think, was the handle – that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting – on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave …
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark – that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

Magnificent. Fear and Loathing came out in 1971, remember, so the days he is discussing were only a couple of years before. Not much time had passed at all, and it took many people a much longer time to sift through the debris. But those paragraphs read as though they were written with a decade or two of retrospect and reflection. What he describes is the very short space between Easy Rider and Two-Lane Blacktop. Easy Rider contains the prophecy of the moment’s end: “We blew it.” To repeat a cliche: it’s just one step from Woodstock to Altamont.

p. 178

But what is sane? Especially here in “our own country” – in this dumbstruck era of Nixon. We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled the Sixties. Uppers are going out of style. This was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary’s trip. He crashed around America selling “consciousness expansion” without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him too seriously. After West Point and the Priesthood, LSD must have seemed entirely logical to him … but there is not much satisfaction in knowing that he blew it very badly for himself, because he took too many others down with him.
Not that they didn’t deserve it: No doubt they all Got What Was Coming To Them. All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours, too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create … a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody – or at least some force – is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel.

Brutally honest. Let’s not forget that Hunter Thompson wrote one of the three meanest obituaries of the 20th century for Richard Nixon. (The other two are HL Mencken’s obituary of William Jennings Bryan and Christopher Hitchens obit for Mother Teresa). Here’s Thompson’s obit for Nixon.

And finally, the POINT of all of this:

p. 179

One of the crucial moments of the Sixties came on that day when the Beatles cast their lot with the Maharishi. It was like Dylan going to the Vatican to kiss the Pope’s ring.
First “gurus.” Then, when that didn’t work, back to Jesus. And now, following Manson’s primitive/instinct lead, a whole new wave of clan-type commune Gods like Mel Lyman, ruler of Avatar, and What’s His Name who runs “Spirit and Flesh.”
Sonny Barger never quite got the hang of it, but he’ll never know how close he was to a king-hell breakthrough. The Angels blew it in 1965, at the Oakland-Berkeley line, when they acted on Barger’s hardhat, con-boss instincts and attacked the front ranks of an anti-war march. This proved to be an historic schism in the then Rising Tide of the Young Movement of the Sixties. It was the first open break between the Greasers and the Longhairs, and the importance of that break can be read in the history of SDS, which eventually destroyed itself in the doomed effort to reconcile the interests of the lower/working class biker/dropout types and the upper/ middle Berkeley/student activities.
Nobody involved in that scene, at the time, could possibly have foreseen the Implications of the Ginsberg/Kesey failure to persuade the Hell’s Angels to join forces with the radical Left from Berkeley. The final split came at Altamont, four years later, but by that time it had long been clear to everybody except a handful of rock industry dopers and the national press. The orgy of violence at Altamont merely dramatized the problem. The realities were already fixed; the illness was understood to be terminal, and the energies of The Movement were long since aggressively dissipated by the rush to self-preservation.

XJXWl

Thompson’s suicide note:

No more games. No more bombs. No more walking. No more Fun. No more swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun — for anybody. You are getting Greedy. Act your (old) age. Relax — this won’t hurt.

Damn you, Hunter.

 
 
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.

Posted in Books, On This Day, writers | Tagged , , | 10 Comments