I only listened to this 90-minute Audible Original “condensation” of Gabriel Byrne’s memoir Walking with Ghosts because I had viewed his series QuirkeI only listened to this 90-minute Audible Original “condensation” of Gabriel Byrne’s memoir Walking with Ghosts because I had viewed his series Quirke based on Benjamin Black’s mystery series, though at a glance I can see that many of my Goodreads friends loved this book. I’ll say that many people think that actors are really articulate, but in fact there is no guarantee of that, in that they are on stage or screen speaking the words of others. But Bryne is actually a terrific writer, and having him perform his own words makes this a special treat, and it has convinced me to read the book in its original form.
Byrne is lyrical, self-deprecating, sometimes melancholy, often hilarious, as he tells a version of his life story mainly centered in Dublin, usually loving family and friend and school stories, but there’s a few tough stories, one involving childhood sexual abuse, one of his dear sister’s mental illness, and the story of his long struggle with drinking and depression.
"My depression, it seems, was often linked to my drinking."
When drinking, “I was a me that I liked. . . But that was before it betrayed me. . . had become that drunkard on the street."
He talks about different jobs he did before coming to acting (plumber, dishwasher, toilet attendant), which he came to in spite of the fact that he was always shy and self-conscious. And working with Richard Burton, whom he met and immediately got drunk with, both of them denying they were drunkards (he plays the alcoholic pathologist, Quirke, in the tv series).
Note to self: I am reading all these books on ghosts but did not read this deliberately because of the word “ghost” in the title. I just always assume a memoir with the word ghosts in it refers to one looking back on memories, that we are always inhabited by the “ghosts” of the past.
“I begin to apply my makeup. My mask. Our tragedy, O'Neill said, is that we are haunted not just by the masks others wear but by the masks we wear ourselves. We all act all the time. Life makes us necessary deceivers. Except maybe when we are alone.” ...more
"He's a real nowhere man Sitting in his nowhere land Making all his nowhere plans for nobody"--The Beatles
King of Nowhere is The Grass Kings by Matt Kin"He's a real nowhere man Sitting in his nowhere land Making all his nowhere plans for nobody"--The Beatles
King of Nowhere is The Grass Kings by Matt Kindt and Tyler Jenkins, but on acid. Both are off-the-grid world stories, with a group of isolated people. A stranger, Denis, for no apparent reason leaves his wife and baby and walks into a bar, and begins drinking with a fish named Jed.
"Anywhere i set my foot… it all goes to shit”--Denis
After bad news Nowhere Man Dens strolls into Nowhere, for some reason murders multiply. Why? Se above. Dunno. A guy with a nail gun is the bad guy, somewhat reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. In Nowhere, a woman sheriff looks to clean up the town, she's our hero. Most of the inhabitants are like Jeff Lemire's Sweet Tooth world--people with antlers, the sheriff with fuzzy ears, a fish, a bird.
The town is, for no obvious reason, not Nowhere, but NOrth WeHEREk. So?
"The more you know, the less you understand"--Repeated throughout, and you know, it is kind of a theme that captures the crazy narrative.
Early on it is obvious this is an acid trip, or an alcoholic nightmare, something that is very much like Prince's The Ice Cream Man except it is drawn in Jenkins's sketchy style. Not remotely psychedelic ice cream colors. But gradually we learn that this desert location was the site for some kind of nuclear exposure--thus all the birth defects and chemical mutilati0n. But then again, all three of the main characters are alcoholics, so chemical addiction is also somehow a factor in the story, for reasons that are never really clear, but there's a lot of alcohol consumed in this volume. And no acid, except probably by Prince.
Prince is a clever writer, generally, bringing a sense of humor to his stories. At one point the outsider says he saw a deer driving out of town, and a local says, "Wait, you saw John Doe?!" Regarding the fish there are fish jokes all through. So it's mildly chaotic and sort of confusing what it is all about. I don't know why I am rating it three instead of two point five stars, exactly. Maybe because it is the first volume of a series and maybe somehow, eventually, the Purple Haze might briefly lift and we'll enter the Age of Aquarius and enlightenment....more
While we are waiting for the next installment of the Megg & Mogg saga, we get this big collection of a decade of stories out of their world, which is While we are waiting for the next installment of the Megg & Mogg saga, we get this big collection of a decade of stories out of their world, which is two things, basically, a gross-out, hilarious stoner comic, and a horrifying cautionary tale about these out-of-control friends drinking and smoking themselves to meaninglessness and death. Twenty-something, sideways, lost in space chaos. But can it be both, alternating between stoner goofiness and everyday death spiral? I say yes.
This collection doesn't give us anything we didn't know before: Megg and Mogg are struggling; Megg turns to Booger for release; Werewolf Jones is the worst and most irresponsible human being (and father) we can imagine, and everyone is mean to Owl. Culled from a collection of work spanning ten years and found in zines, alternative comix rags, alternative newspapers, and so on, it is still a must-have for Simon Hanselmann completists. It's hard to read, as it is in very small print to make the book marketable, but worth the effort, most of the time. There are what amounts to "outtakes" and experimental sketches, even some sci-fi tales. Psychedelia, of course. A range of sketchy self-published work to gorgeous full-color nightmare paintings.
Let's see, some highlight/lowlights: There's no food in the house, so Werewolf Jones suggests that they go trick or treating, and get candy to eat. It's not Halloween, so nobody plays along wiht the joke, people aren't home, so WWJ plays tricks on the homeowners. They all get away except Owl, of course.
WWJ wants the money from a Princess contest, so he forces two of his sons to dress up in drag. They win the contest.
There's really gross stuff I'm not telling you about, sexual stuff, anything involving a range of bodily fluids, which will either turn you off forever, juvenilia, or make you laugh until you cry. (I also just read Samantha Irby's Meaty, and I am musing on a theory of humor as body humor/outrage I see in both of their works).
But the images that stick with me, really, are the contrapuntal ones of Megg in tears, torn by depression, eyes in horror. Madness. Hanselmann is one great cartoonist, both alt-comix guy in the wacked-out, drugged-out sixties tradition of Crumb and Tijuana Bibles and Beavis and Butthead AND a glimpse into the nightmare side of it all. Quite an accomplishment, really....more
“Just tell the truth, and they'll accuse you of writing black humor”--Charles Willeford
I began reading Willeford only fairly recently, though as it tu“Just tell the truth, and they'll accuse you of writing black humor”--Charles Willeford
I began reading Willeford only fairly recently, though as it turns out I actually read this book and maybe a couple others many many years ago. The recent Willeford reading was of his later, more comic novels, written in the eighties. Willeford preferred his early, hard-boiled books to the later ones, the Hoke Moseley series that made him way more money, as some of them were made into popular movies. (An anecdote related to one of those books, Sideswipe: Willeford got a package in the mail, a copy of Sideswipe that someone had shot six times, and a note, written in all-caps, saying “It’s a crime to charge $15.95 for shit like this.” It was signed, “A Dissatisfied Customer.” Funny, right?)
I picked up Pick Up (see what I did there?!) based on the salacious, pulpy cover, hoping to read a trashy hard-boiled mystery, expecting to see macho perspectives subverted as I encountered in all of his other books, but it was less fun and more somewhat nihilist noir, beautifully written, so no complaints. The book grabs you right away through the main character, Harry, who works the counter at a restaurant and drinks the rest of his day. Harry meets a woman, Helen, who also drinks all day, and says to her, as they fall into bed together:
“I’m pretty much of a failure in life, Helen. Does it matter to you?”
“No. Nothing matters to me.” Her voice had a resigned quality and yet it was quietly confident. There was a tragic look in her brown eyes, but her mouth was smiling. It was the smile of a little girl who knows a secret and isn’t going to tell it. I held her hand in mine. It was a tiny, almost pudgy band, soft and warm and trusting. We finished our drinks.
Sound fun enough yet? Willeford writes a taut and compelling post-war damnation of the world available for the lost and alienated and broke such as are Harry and Helen. Harry is also a failed artist and former art teacher, now in a kind of Leaving Las Vegas despair:
“As far as I was concerned the world we existed on was an overly-large, stinking cinder, a spinning, useless clinker. My life meant nothing to me and I wanted to go to sleep forever and forget about it.”
But drink first; Harry is a big drinker, and Helen is an alcoholic.
At one point, Harry compares himself to a car without a driver, a machine, without feeling or desire. And this feeling of alienation in part comes from this post-war Capitalist drive to success:
“The Great American Tradition: You can do anything you think you can do! All Americans believe in it. What a joke that is!”
I love it how Harry increasingly sees things through the conventions and history of the art world that deserted him. Elsewhere, the former art scholar Willeford also writes about the art world in the more satirical Burnt Orange Heresy.
I think this is a terrific book, one of the best of a series of noir indictments of American society that I have read. I guess I was more interested in the Helen and Harry scenes than the hospital scenes with its fifties rejection of psychology, and you know, there is a murder in the book, though I’d hardly call it a mystery. But there are a couple of real surprises, twists, the greatest happening in the last two lines, maybe in the last five words where an aspect of Harry's identity is revealed which makes you rethink every single thing in the book. And because it is such a surprise, I of course can’t tell you what it is, though at this very moment that is the main thing I want to talk about.
Oh, and that sleazy cover that seduced me? I learned that Willeford, working with often low-end presses, had little control over the covers or marketing in general of his books, especially early on. Sometimes even the titles were changed. This book is not really focused on the "pick-up" tease in the title, though the girl featured on the cover is somewhat suggestive (ahem!) of Helen in a bar, on a few occasions, when drunk, which is always. But it's not as pulpy or outrageous or sexy as you'd expect, or maybe hoped for; false advertising! It's an actual serious novel, damn it!...more
“When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn’t have you by the throat.”
You wouldn't think this would be a four star book,“When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn’t have you by the throat.”
You wouldn't think this would be a four star book, a posthumously collected series of anecdotes and poems focused on one of Buk's two central loves, drinking and writing, though the two went hand in hand (one hand with a beer, one hand typing) for him. They are most often excerpts from his various books, but they are thoughtfully arranged, mostly chronological, so a kind of arc emerges from the seven decades of drinking, where the early years seem funnier and the later years sadder. Like a night of drinking, itself!
Unapologetic, outrageous, mainly played for laughs, but you get some self-reflection. Though never with regret, even when he describes hospital stays, near-death experiences. .Early on as I listened to it on a few walks, I actually laughed aloud a number of times, and smiled most of the time.
Here's some quotes that will be familiar to his fans:
"That's the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen."
"being drunk at the typer (typewriter) beats being with any woman I’ve ever seen or known or heard about like Joan of Arc, Cleopatra, Garbo, Harlow, M.M. or any of the thousands that come and go on the celluloid screen or the temporary girls I’ve seen so lovely on park benches, on buses, at dances and parties, at bull fights, mud wrestling, roller derbies, pie sales, being drunk at this typer beats being with any woman I’ve ever seen"
“Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of everything being the same. It yanks you out of your body and your mind and throws you against the wall. I have the feeling that drinking is a form of suicide where you’re allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day. It’s like killing yourself, and then you’re reborn. I guess I’ve lived about ten or fifteen thousand lives now.”...more
A Hunter S. Thompson novel (made into a movie featuring Johnny Depp), which he began writing at the age of 22, about an AFear and Loathing in San Juan
A Hunter S. Thompson novel (made into a movie featuring Johnny Depp), which he began writing at the age of 22, about an American journalist working in San Juan. I am sure this is not a favorite in Puerto Rico, as it features a series of Ugly American journalists who loathe San Juan and loathe their jobs, and drink constantly. The writing is very good, very lean, pre-acid Thompson, All Rum All The Time, where our anti-hero Kemp lusts after his abusive colleague's girlfriend. That is ostensibly the backbone, such as it is, of this narrative: Can Kemp get the girl? They refuse to pay a bar tab and get beat up, jailed. Sort of morose hijinks.
This has some noir influence, like The Stranger's Meursault on rum instead of wine, disaffected, full of late fifties hipster (but not quite Beat) ennui. Bukowski drinking territory. Raymond Carver. There's a kind of dark carnival scene that would be a lite version of the Day of the Dead festivities in Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano.
The thing that makes it less than fun is that there's some physical abuse (slapping) by the friend of Kemp of the (hopeful) girlfriend, and then she dances naked in a bar one night and is gone missing for a couple days, with no real explanation of what seems to be ominous events we can only guess at. The boys don't endear themselves to the locals with their arrogance. . . I think of Graham Greene's foreign journalist stories such as The Quiet American, or Hem's drunken Pamplona novel, The Sun Also Rises. Sound bleak? I would have liked it more at 25 than I did, but Thompson reveals lots of good writing chops here that makes it engaging.
Now on to Bukowski on Drinking, then back to Quebec for croissants and champagne with Louise Penny's crowd. . ....more
"I'm going to walk away slowly and not look back. Now we're getting somewhere"--KIm Addonizio
I have read a few collections of poetry by KIm Addonizio, "I'm going to walk away slowly and not look back. Now we're getting somewhere"--KIm Addonizio
I have read a few collections of poetry by KIm Addonizio, whose memoir is entitled Bukowksi in a Sundress (someone had characterized her as such in a review). That works for her, obviously, since she took it as a tltle, a compliment (or confession), and so do I. I love Tell Me and This Thing Called Love, and I very much also like this book; they all call on similar themes: booze, sex, hilarity, despair. She seems to be struggling more than usual with the grim state of the world, but the textures in her poetry are still wild, sometimes reaching the point of gutter exhilaration, as Bukowski herself does. You can't look away, and partly because some of the trainwreck she's driving is beautiful.
Here's one whole poem:
Stay
So your device has a low battery & seems to drain faster each day. Maybe you should double your medication.
You might feel queasy, but also as if the spatula flattening you to the fry pan has lifted a little.
So your breath comes out scorched, so what.
Inside, trust me on this, there’s a ribbon of beach by a lake,
in the sand, fragments of a fossilized creature resembling a tulip.
Back in the Paleozoic, online wasn’t invented yet so everyone had to wander alone & miserable through the volcanic wastes
or just glue themselves to a rock hoping someone would pass by.
Now you can sob to an image of your friend a continent away & be consoled.
Please wait for the transmissions, however faint.
Listen: when a stranger steps into the elevator with a bouquet of white roses not meant for you,
they’re meant for you.
And then there are poems with dark, self-deprecating humor, as with Bukowski, or in this case another smart-ass inspiration, Dorothy Parker:
Resume
"Families shame you; Rehab's a scam; Lovers drain you; They don't give a damn; Friends are distracted; Aging stinks; You'll soon be subtracted; You might as well drink"
More on booze:
"You stand in a shallow creek & your reflection floats slowly downstream without you. Alcohol is your emotional support animal."
"Writing is like firing a nail gun into the corner of a vanity mirror or slowly shaking a souvenir snow-globe of asbestos & shame to quiet an imaginary baby."
Ex
"When I think of him now I think of the money he stole from me I remember the mice in his couch & the dying fish in his aquarium & also feeling like a gilded royal barge was ceremoniously moving through my blood. . .
Some things are destined to be ruined Cheap dresses student housing self esteem romantic projections Ice sculptures of dead jazz musicians turning to mush in the rain"
The Truth
"You could spend all day bored and unhinged, counting to a thousand, closing the windows, terrified by leaves. Look at your hand, it won't open to reveal what's coming"
Not always a life of quiet desperation, but desperation, for sure. Girls just want to have fun? Not quite! Addiction poems close to despair, and also addicted to language and poetry: "I Can't Stop Loving You, John Keats." Poetry as therapy? Maybe. Poetry as lifeline, for sure.
"Oh as usual all I can see is time & death Everything is already lost & not coming back"
Though these poems do, for sure, I say, come back, and I to them....more
I had been reading Chekhov’s major plays—now doesn't that sound elegant and literary?—and thought I needed something inelegant and unliterary to folloI had been reading Chekhov’s major plays—now doesn't that sound elegant and literary?—and thought I needed something inelegant and unliterary to follow it up, and found something on audiobooks I hadn’t read before, from Charles Bukowski, a collection of stories, and it is obvious at a glance that the two writers are very different—what do we know about Buk? Wine, women, horseracing, boxing, brutality, usually funny, often obscene, stripped-down prose that is decidedly unpretentious, straightforward—but I have to say, just having read Uncle Vanya, with its panoply of unhappy people, some of whom are drunken philandering men, I begin to see Anton and Charles as distant brothers at a century’s distance.
Both are realists, associated with a sometimes bleak/comic existentialist approach. True, Buk is profane at times, crass, sometimes offensive, but in Hot Water Music the main point is to explore honestly the world of the down and out. Bukowski talks simply and profoundly about the underbelly of the working class without raising judgement. Oh, he's hard on the rich and pretentious, but not about the poor.
Chekhov also sided with the working class and wrote in largely straightforward, unadorned fashion. And like Bukowski Chekhov also describe the world without judging anything in it unless those things are boring or pompous. I have enjoyed more Factotum, Pulp, Ham on Rye, and Post Office, longer works, but I like the art in some of the Henry Chinaski stories here. It is true that the collective focus of these stories is on booze, writing, and sex, and there's a kind of sameness, but one of his characters responds to this criticism:
"You seem to write about sex a lot." "Yeah, what do you expect me to write about? The stock market? Who wants to read about that?!"
The more absurd stories such as “You Kissed Lilly” and “I Love You, Albert,” are silly fun but admirably shaped. Some of the clever—and yes, ultimately literary—ones to check out are “The Upward Bird,” “Beer at the Corner Bar,” “The Death of the Father II,” and “Head Job,” which is actually from the perspective of a woman (!). Okay, Chekhov did a better job depicting women than Bukowski, I’ll give you that, but I’ll say Chekhov’s strongest characters generally also tend to be men, not women. So, brothers from different planets? Just a th0ught....more
I have a small collection of quirky drink books and this will go in that collection, by Brooklyn bartender, illustrator and activist Grashin (maybe a I have a small collection of quirky drink books and this will go in that collection, by Brooklyn bartender, illustrator and activist Grashin (maybe a perfect book for her to write, given her interests?!) Every drink recipe features a feminist, a key quote, a short anecdote, and a name for the drink that puns, such as the title Women's Libation featuring a Rosie the Riveter type hefting a bottle, so it's just fun, but hey, you can make the drinks when you favorite feminists come over!
*Morning Glory Steinem "A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle." *Anne Sexton the Beach * Margaret Sanger-ria *Saison Beer Anthony
and on and on. The recipes are familiar, don't seem to be her special take on them, just funny names, but this is a sweet novelty book. To Gin-cess Leia! (Gin Fizz).
This is another one I have, Hemingway's (also punning title!), To Have and Have Another:
I love this poem about the drunken Charles Bukowski, written by Raymond Carver, depicting (fictional?) Buk speaking to a bunch of creative writing stuI love this poem about the drunken Charles Bukowski, written by Raymond Carver, depicting (fictional?) Buk speaking to a bunch of creative writing students, in “You Don’t Know What Love Is”:
A “factotum” describes someone who does a range of "low-level" (meaning low-paid) work. This short novel I listened to, which makes it a bit like a guy telling you his life story while drinking you under the table (oh, he always could, and even now, years gone, could probably still do it). I was driving while listening to it, and not drinking as I was driving, for your information, thanks. The story is really a prequel to Ham and Rye, which was about the early years of Henry Chinaski, Bukowksi’s mostly (I am told) autobiographical main character. If Ham on Rye is about Chinaski's lost youth, Buk's second one features Chinaski's lost twenties about booze, terrible jobs, women, and drunken brawls. Because of the title, there might be a greater focus here on all the soul-killing, mind-numbing jobs he worked to pay for flophouse rent and booze, almost all of them from which he was fired, sometimes after only a day.
In one job, he got paid by a bar owner 5 bucks and all the shots of whiskey he could drink to clean a total of six window blinds, which as it turns out took him all day, and in the end required—because he was of course drunk—the help of all his fellow bar patrons, for whom he used the five bucks to buy a round (this was the fifties, when five bucks could actually almost buy a bar full of patrons a round; well, almost. In the end he had to put $8.50 on the tab he owed the bartender).
Bukowski also worked at Sears FIVE different times during this period, fired each time for stealing and various other infractions. Usually for not showing up for work while he was on a three-day bender with some girl, or healing from some fight. Hey, I worked at Sears, in the stockroom, for a year or so! Boring job, in which I hid out and read books during long evening shifts. Did I ever sneak in a bottle of wine for me and my fellow misery-suffering-warehouse rats? I seem to recall I may have done this once or twice, but you ain't a priest, and this ain't no confessional booth.
Factotum doesn’t quite have the innocence of Ham and Rye, when he actually just lusted after various girls and women, when he was just a kid. In this book he actually has a lot of sex, some of it funny, all of it described in gloriously vulgar detail, though finally, as with the jobs, it’s really mostly misery, all the time. He’s going nowhere fast. And it feels like the well-told raucous romp of a million alcoholics. And a guy who is during this time often an unapologetic asshole. I think you could ask any of the women he was “with” during this period for their view of him and it would not be positive (though when they were drinking with him, at least, I am sure they had fun).
But can I turn away and stop listening? Nope. Bukowski will be hilarious for some, and too offensive for many, but he sure can tell a story. The poverty and squalor of Factotum is not quite as fun as it was in Ham and Rye, but at his best, Bukowski is worth the offense, imho:
“It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?”
Who in working class America cannot raise a glass to that? In the end, Bukowski reveals himself in all his assholism to be in the company of other great and painful stories of the ravages of booze, such as Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, or any Kerouac, or Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Bukowski almost convinces you that the pursuit of drunkenness as a way of coping with reality is a kind of spiritual pursuit:
“If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery—isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is.”
Factotum is not for everyone, I warn you, or welcome you, depending on your love of the tales of the down and out....more
What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore— And then run? Does it stink likHarlem Langston Hughes
What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore— And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over— like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode?
“I just tried to find the nicest place for the least amount of money for my family”--Mama
“Americans suffer from an ignorance that is not only colossal, but sacred”---James Baldwin
A Raisin in the Sun, by Lorraine Hansberry, first produced in 1959, is one of the great American plays, set in Chicago and pertaining to racist housing practices, something Hansberry’s family actually experienced when they moved, suffering rocks through their windows and a (failed) lawsuit against their moving in. Hansberry faced years of no one wanting to publish this play, then no one wanted to produce the play, then no one actually wanted to rent space for a theatrical production of the play, but when it was finally produced it met popular and critical acclaim, the first commercially successful play by an African American author.
One can actually say this play helped to create some of the conditions for The Fair Housing Act of 1968 that prohibits discrimination concerning housing based on race, religion, national origin or sex. The Fair Housing Act is one of the great legislative achievements of the civil rights era. Yet in 1975, the cast of Raisin, the musical, became involved in defense of a family whose home in Queens, New York City, had been fire-bombed, and the 1972 City Commissioner of Human Rights Report became public, citing “eleven cases in the last eighteen months in which minority-owned homes had been set afire or vandalized, a church had been bombed, and a school bus had been attacked”—and all this in presumed-left-leaning New York City alone.
What’s the play about? Mama, Walter and Ruth, Beneatha, Travis, living in a dingy south side Chicago apartment and their American dream to buy a house with some inheritance money. And some pushback they get from their new white “neighbors.” It’s also about Beneatha’s growing feminist and Africanist identity and her dream to become a doctor. It’s about Walter’s (he’s described as a volcano) dream to run a liquor store after years of driving a limo. It’s about Mama’s dream to keep the family together.
It’s about questions of assimilation, and hair and identity.
It’s also a play of crackling dialogue:
Walter: There you are. Man say to his woman: I got me a dream. His woman say: Eat your eggs.
Walter: Sometimes it’s like I can see the future stretched out in front of me—just plain as day. The future, Mama. Hanging over there at the edge of my days. Just waiting for me—a big, looming blank space—full of nothing. Just waiting for me. But it don’t have to be.
Mama: Son—how come you talk so much ’bout money? Walter (With immense passion): Because it is life, Mama!
This play is a kind of cultural forum on the black experience in the late fifties as a foundation for the black power movements of the sixties. And is still mightily relevant today. I read it with my English teaching methods class in conjunction with ninth graders who were also reading it in a school near my campus.
Ruth: Clybourne Park? Mama, there ain’t no colored people living in Clybourne Park. Mama: Well, I guess there’s going to be some now. (Neighbor) Mrs. Johnson: You mean you ain’t read ’bout them colored people that was bombed out their place out there?
Later, after Johnson leaves, Beneatha: Mama, if there are two things we, as a people, have got to overcome, one is the Ku Klux Klan—and the other is Mrs. Johnson.
Walter’s liquor license deal falls through, somewhat predictably, and he nearly gives up, in despair, but it is his confrontation with Mr. Lindner of the “Welcoming Committee” that gives the ending it’s peculiar hopefulness. Family!
In Raisin, wrote James Baldwin, “never before in the entire history of the American theater had so much of the truth of black people’s lives been seen on the stage.” It paved the way for the cycle of plays from August Wilson, and many others. Racist killing in Buffalo? It's as if the war never ended; because it hasn't....more
“Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and “Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually. Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken.”
From about 8:30 to midnight on a day in August 1912 the family Tyrone--Husband and wife Maty and James, adult sons Jamie and Edmund--meets at their Connecticut home: One long day’s journey into night.
This is a semi-autobiographical--call it autodrama, these days?--play that was written in the forties but not published until after playwright Eugene O’Neill’s death, and it won the Pulitzer Prize--his fourth--in 1957, and the Tony Award. O’Neill knew it was personal so didn’t want it public in his lifetime, but most people loved it as soon as they saw it, and most critics think it is his masterpiece. A few years after his death his reputation seemed to decline, and he’s hardly known today, I think.
I think there is a lot of misery in American literature, but this one is a kind of brutally honest expose/confessional about one family’s struggle with miserey, with addiction--alcoholism, morphine--tuberculosis, all of them pushed to the very edge, the moment of truth. Raw, visceral, it’s considered one of the great plays in the annals of American theater.
“Life is a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.”
It presaged other great moments-of-family crisis plays such as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County (which I think owes a lot to this play). Powerful theater, which I only listened to this time. I don't like it quite as well as the Miller or the Albee, but it is the really strong to hear or see. ...more