What is the point. That is what must be borne in mind. Sometimes the point is really who wants what. Sometimes the point is what is right or kind. Sometimes the point is a momentum, a fact, a quality, a voice, an intimation, a thing said or unsaid. Sometimes it’s who’s at fault, or what will happen if you do not move at once. The point changes and goes out. You cannot be forever watching for the point, or you lose the simplest thing: being a major character in your own life.

—Renata Adler, “Brownstone”

A lady lifted the lid of her toilet tank and found a small yachtsman, on the deck of his boat, in a bowl. They spoke of detergents. A man with fixed dentures bit into an apple. A lady in a crisis of choice phoned her friend from a market and settled for milk of magnesia. A hideous family pledged itself to margarine.

—Renata Adler, “Speedboat”

That “writers write” is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers who write at all.

—Renata Adler, “Castling”

In the 1960s, John Waters was an admirer of a lesbian stripper in Baltimore named Lady Zorro. “She just came out nude and snarled at her fans, ‘What the fuck are you looking at?’ To this day,” Waters writes in his splendid new book, “Zorro is my inspiration.”

The rest of my review of his new book is here.

I was probably 13 when I realized there was this whole, huge, unexplored and exciting expanse of guys who were mainly adventurers with talents that they were hoping to connect into the Hollywood carcass while there was still time. I remember the day it hit me. I was standing across the street from what is now Cyrano’s on the Strip when, from out of the West a white, top-down Jaguar pulled an illegal U-turn and an incredibly stylish, tousled, white-teethed, blue-eyed, sun-bleached, eyelashed young man reined in his car and was silent for a moment in front of me before saying, “Oh, you’re just a kid,” and making another noisy U-turn before he continued on his way. I was 13, it was 1956, I was wearing my leopardskin bathing suit and eating a Will Wright’s chocolate burnt-almond ice cream cone, and I suffered a broken heart.

–Eve Babitz

Related: Does Mark Jude Poirier have special psychic powers? Here’s an excerpt from his story of February 4, weeks before the recent events at SeaWorld Orlando:

We drove to Wildwood Aquarium, left Alice at her apartment, even though it had been her idea to go. The week before, a German visitor to the aquarium had been killed, bitten in two by Sammy, the angry orca, as he held a fish for it. The crowd had cheered when the water turned red, then pink. People posted videos and photos on the Internet, but they had barely mentioned it on the news because the garbage strike was in full force then, and the city smelled like death.

You can read the rest of “Aquarium Souvenir” at Significant Objects.

Originally our flight was supposed to leave at 1:50 pm, but the snow had been coming down all day. None of the planes were coming in or out, but KLM hadn’t cancelled the flight to Amsterdam so we still had to trek out to the airport. If we ever got to Amsterdam, we’d be taking another flight to Berlin for the film festival. L. had a short film premiering there and meetings scheduled for her feature.

The flight got pushed back to 11:00. Whatever lulling effects there’d been from the to-go cups disappeared. We went to an airport spa, sat in the big brown beanbaggy massage chairs, and listened to the most annoying person in the world have the most annoying cell phone conversation in the world while someone painted her toenails.

I tried to figure out the controls for the massage chair so its mechanized gears would stop jabbing me in the kidneys and I wondered if the same principle was at work with massage chairs as with overhearing other people’s cell phone conversations. That is, it’s better to get an actual massage from an actual person than to get a massage from a chair. Just as it’s better (less annoying) to overhear two actual people having a conversation than it is to hear one person having a conversation with an invisible and inaudible party.

The most annoying person in the world was talking about a wedding she was going to and a costume—she really did say “costume”—of boy shorts and a bra and how she’d gotten in touch with someone from high school on facebook. Having to listen to someone talk about facebook on a cell phone while in an airport is one of the soul-numbing lows of life in the early 21^st century. Whether it makes it better or worse to be in a massage chair is unclear. Maybe better for the body but somehow I think it’s worse for the soul.

The flight got pushed back to 11:30. Then to midnight. And then somehow we were actually on the plane. The pilot explained we still had to wait for the de-icing. We were sitting by the wing and I could see it was completely coated in ice.

Inside the cabin it was ridiculously hot. Hot like if I could have managed to have thought processes I might have wondered at what temperature your brain starts to stew inside your skull. Both L. and I fell asleep for a while. An uncomfortable feverish sleep. We didn’t have fevers but the plane did. I woke up later to a harsh light in my eyes, like the lamp the optometrist shines. By then it was 1 or 2 in the morning. L. was still asleep, face flushed from the heat. Out the window I could see a headlight glaring in the dark. It rose suddenly, telescopically, and a stream of liquid shot out, spewing across the wing, eating away at the blanket of ice.

Over the past Christmas we watched Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, and I tried to think of why the de-icing machine was making me think of that now, but I was too groggy to figure it out. I stared at the ice melting away. There was something was satisfying about that. Steam rose up. I wondered about what kind of chemical properties were involved. And then I was thinking of Batman and James Bond and vats of acid and cackling villains. The headlamp swiveled again, the nozzle turned in a new direction. Most of the wing was clear of ice and it seemed like we were really going to leave.

I took half a lorazepam. The plane was on the runway, and then it was in the air. But the drugs weren’t kicking in so I read some of Christopher Isherwood’s Prater Violet. Eventually I did fall asleep for most of the flight. We got our connection in Amsterdam and arrived in Berlin where the festival people put us in a cab to our hotel, which had fireplaces on the TV monitors in every room. That was soothing.

But back to Prater Violet. Here’s the the flap copy: “Originally published in 1945, Prater Violet is a stingingly satirical novel about the film industry. It centers around the production of the vacuous fictional melodrama Prater Violet, set in nineteenth-century Vienna, providing ironic counterpoint to tragic events as Hitler annexes the real Vienna of the 1930s. The novel features the vivid portraits of imperious, passionate, and witty Austrian director Friedrich Bergmann and his disciple, a genial young screenwriter—the fictionalized Christopher Isherwood.”

I liked this:

“You see, the film studio of today is really the palace of the sixteenth century. There one sees what Shakespeare saw: the absolute power of the tyrant, the courtiers, the flatterers, the jesters, the cunningly ambitious intriguers. There are fantastically beautiful women, there are incompetent favorites. There are great men who are suddenly disgraced. There is the most insane extravagance, and unexpected parsimony over a few pence. There is enormous splendor, which is a sham; and also horrible squalor hidden behind the scenery. There are vast schemes, abandoned because of some caprice. There are secrets which everybody knows and no one speaks of. There are even two or three honest advisers. These are the court fools, who speak the deepest wisdom in puns, lest they should be taken seriously. They grimace, and tear their hair privately, and weep.”
“You make it sound great fun.”
“It is unspeakable,” said Bergman, with relish.

And this:

“On rare occasions, the microphone itself somehow manages to get into the shot, without anybody noticing it. There is something sinister about it, like Poe’s Raven. It is always there, silently listening.” (See this mic in the shot from a 1974 episode of “Dolemite.”)

Prater Violet is based on Isherwood’s experience as a screenwriter on Little Friend, a 1934 film directed by Berthold Viertel. Viertel’s wife Salka is known for writing Queen Christina and his son Peter for writing White Hunter, Black Heart—as well as being rumored to be the model for Robert Redford’s character in The Way We Were. There’s not a lot online about Berthold, though. Daniel Cairns has a nice piece at The Auteurs about the film Viertel made with Conrad Veidt, The Passing of the Third Floor Back (1935), and you can see a youtube clip from it here.

Little Friend, the movie Isherwood worked on with Viertel, doesn’t sound anything like the period piece described in Prater Violet. It actually sounds more like What Maisie Knew, at least according to IMDB: “A girl becomes an unwilling witness in her parents’ scandalous divorce case.”

The opening sequence is quite trippy, foreshadows of the kind of psychedelic menace that crops up in The Wizard of Oz, Vertigo, Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, and plenty of other films. It’s posted below.

“Do you know what the film is?” Bergmann cupped his hands, lovingly, as if around an exquisite flower. “The film is an infernal machine. Once it is ignited and set in motion it revolves with enormous dynamism. It cannot pause. It cannot apologize. It cannot retract anything. It cannot wait for you to understand it. It cannot explain itself. It simply ripens to its inevitable explosion. This explosion we have to prepare, like anarchists, with the utmost ingenuity and malice….”

(1945)

From an article in today’s New York Times about the emerging field of sentiment analysis:

a preponderance of adjectives often signals a high degree of subjectivity, while noun- and verb-heavy statements tend toward a more neutral point of view.

One of my recurring frustrations with entertainment biographies is overdocumentation. Concert dates, recording sessions, studio memos pile up as if the profusion of unmediated data will ultimately transmit a deeper understanding of the performer. Usually, though, all that minutiae just ends up obscuring the subject. That you learn a singer took a fifteen-minute break during a recording session tells you that the biographer has been doing research but not a lot else.

Another hazard of the genre, as Jenny Diski points out in “Queening It,” her review of David Brun-Lambert’s biography of Nina Simone in the London Review of Books, is the prevalence of authorial speculation that relies on shallow psychology, and it’s this that leads Diski to a pretty radical conclusion. (The full article is here and requires a subscription.)

Increasingly I wonder if we wouldn’t do better without biography. Of course we want to know other people’s stories and to roll around in distant tragedy, but the pairing of talent and life too often suffers from banal, received assumptions based on ghastly popular psychology. The thing about Simone isn’t her mental illness, whatever that might have been, or her bad temper; the thing about Simone to anyone who didn’t know her personally, is her recordings, or having witnessed one of the really good concerts she gave. Reading this biography and knowing much more about her life hasn’t improved her music one bit. That’s what she had to offer, her claim on our attention, even now. It might be better for everyone if we took what there was for what it was. The superficial has its place. She was a stylish, sometimes stunning singer who could hold an audience. Perhaps it should be left to fiction to worry about why and how, because fiction has the possibility and the freedom to be original in a way that dogged biography doesn’t.

This made me think of Zachary Lazar’s terrific novel, Sway, which I read about a year or so ago and found incredibly compelling and original in its treatment of the Rolling Stones, not to mention Kenneth Anger, Bobby Beausoleil, and Charles Manson. Lazar does worry about why and how a singer holds an audience. He also manages to capture something so familiar and yet still take the reader somewhere new:

An electric bass thuds out a pattern of syncopated triplets and eighth notes, matching the repetitive pounding of the drums, and with each notes comes a twitch in Mick’s legs, a jangle of his spine, a definite lifting of his chin, a hundred little signs to let you know that it’s not fake this time, that for the three minutes of this song the god will be real. He raises his arms, all sinew and muscle. The decade will pass, forty years will pass, and maybe you’ll hear a snatch of it through a car window, the sound of it still a surprise over a stranger’s radio, the old song sent around the planet in waves that never end.