Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2001
From:  Lee Lady
To:  Mon Amie en France

>Thank you for the link,
>
>and it was good to talk with you the other night,:-)

Yes, it was very good talking to you guys.  Interesting: so often I don't really have a lot to say to other people; I let them do the talking and I just listen. But then sometimes I suddenly have a lot of things to say, and I realize that I'm doing all the talking and not giving other people a chance, but I just let myself do that anyway.

It was especially good talking to David about my fiction and especially "The Existential Café." It made me think afterwards about my writing and why I don't write more fiction. "The Existential Cafe" is really about the last important thing I've written and that was, oh, I don't know, four or five years ago. When I was on sabbatical in 1997-98, I wrote several chapters of a novel, and they're okay, but that was mostly just an exercise in writing very fast. And then last year I was working more seriously on a novel, but... Oh, I don't know. It's just never reached the point of being something I feel I've worked seriously on.

I remember, though, on "The Existential Cafe," I wrote it for a writing workshop, and I had to just keep telling myself that my only objective was to have something finished. I kept writing subject, verb, object ... subject, verb, object. Forget about whether the sentences are good or not, just get more sentences written. And the final product... Yes, it doesn't really have really great sentences. It's mostly the content, not the "voice" that's important in that story. There's all sorts of parts of it that seriously need to be rewritten, but somehow the story turned out to be powerful in its way.

Talking to David about it... It's like there's been a sequence of experiences recently, and that was a part of it. There was the movie Pollock I was talking to you guys about, about Jackson Pollock. And about the art world of that time, the Forties and early Fifties, which I briefly had contact with in the late Fifties. I knew this woman artist, I know I've told you before, Sheri Martinelli. And she wasn't really famous, and maybe she wasn't even very good, but she knew a lot of people. She'd been a protegé of Anaïs Nin. So I got to know painters and writers and the like. Especially after Sheri moved to San Francisco and I visited her there briefly, stayed with her and her husband in fact, during the end of the Beat era. (I was 19 years old.) She knew Allen Ginsburg and most of the San Francisco Beats, but I never got a chance to meet any of the really famous ones, except for briefly saying hello to Lawrence Ferlinghetti once in a cheap movie theatre. (A triple feature for 99 cents!)

Anyway, after I saw Pollock, the next day I saw a documentary at the Art Academy called Frank and Ollie, about two of the old animators at the Disney studio. They worked on all the major Disney productions, starting with the very first one --- Snow White --- and all the way up to The Jungle Book, the first one made after Walt Disney died. I've never been a big admirer of Walt Disney. When I was young, I thought of Disney films as too childish and cute and sugary. And to some extent, I still feel that way. But listening to these guys talk about the way they worked, it was interesting, learning that every film had been a major artistic challenge. And that a lot of the same attitudes I admire so much in writing and art were involved in creating the Disney films. Disney characters may seem much too cute, but in order to create them and make them as alive as they were, the animators had to be very keen observers of real people and the way real people move and express themselves. So that they were actually actors with their pencils. And they did actually act out the scenes before they drew them. Very interesting film.

And then this evening I was watching a videotape, a very short film by David Mamet showing him directing a stage production of two of his plays. And this is another thing that always fascinates me: the way actors go about creating a character. That's a part of my life I think you don't know, that when I was in college I was involved in the University theatre, but always working behind the scenes --- back stage. Working on props or lighting or stage crew. And although I never acted myself, I was always fascinated by watching the actors work and the whole process by which one starts out, sitting around a table and reading aloud from the script, and then over a period of weeks gradually brings a play to life, so that one is finally doing it on stage with scenery and costumes and everything.

Anyway, my conversation with you and David was one piece of this sequence of experiences I've been having. And reminding me of that heartbreak inside of me: that these were the sorts of experiences and sorts of people that always interested me, but I never followed that path --- being involved in the arts --- because I was brought up to believe that the most important thing in life was to have a steady job that one could count on to earn one's living.

And I was always genuinely interested in science too, so it seemed so much more sensible to follow that path. But now, when I see a film about the world Jackson Pollock was part of, or David Mamet, or even Frank and Ollie, I think.... Damn! That's the world I wanted to belong to.

To some extent, I do the same sort of thing in my teaching. Only a little bit of it, but there's that same process of taking raw material and shaping it into something that is .... Well, the final product is certainly not a work of art. And yet it's something I've created. Because I look at the book I'm teaching out of and I think, "Wow, this is all really very boring and it doesn't make that much sense," and then I try to find some way of my own to look at it. Because that's the only way I can get interested in it enough to be able to manage to walk into the classroom and teach it. But lots of the time, my students don't really benefit by it. In fact, sometimes it just confuses them and they have no idea what I'm talking about, and then one of them will tell me later, rather apologetically, "I thought it was easier to understand the way they explained it in the book."

Well, anyway, it was good talking to you guys. I'll call you again in a few weeks.

Love & kisses,
--Lee