…People who manipulate are expressing their internal hurt and confusion in the context of their relationships by attacking instead of reaching out or insulting instead of apologizing, blaming instead of accepting responsibility. They aren’t able to deal with the unhappiness inside themselves, so they project it onto others. This is often true in the case of borderline personality disorder, where the sufferer experiences profound disruptions to his or her sense of self, while his or her close relationships are hit with the collateral damage. Persons with borderline personality organization may feel deep-rooted and extreme needs for love and acceptance, but find that these needs are perpetually stymied by the typical challenges that relationships present. The result is a kind of emotional hypersensitivity and over-reactivity, as well as a reversion to primitive defense mechanisms, like denial. In response to the frustration and anger they feel when they cannot satisfy their powerful internal needs, persons with borderline personality disorder resort to the manipulative behaviors described above.
'15 Ways Manipulative People Control You, and Why They Do It' [Psychology Today, 26 June 2018]
Use the link below to read the full article by North American psychologist LOREN SOEIRO:
Love songs are as old as music itself and their golden age was arguably the Broadway/Tin Pan Alley era which endured from roughly the beginning of the twentieth century until the end of the 1950s. This was a time when popular music was dominated by white male composers and lyricists –– Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, Cole Porter, Johnny Mercer and their contemporaries –– whose work would go on to form what, for want of a better term, is collectively referred to as 'The Great American Songbook.'
Billie Holiday, who was born Eleanora Fagan in Baltimore on 7 April 1915, was one of the finest interpreters of this material who ever lived, a singer blessed with a voice that, while neither as supple nor as soaring as that of her rivals Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan, was nevertheless swinging, deeply soulful and, once heard, impossible to forget.
But what makes Holiday such an unusual artist for her time –– she recorded steadily between 1933 and her death at the age of forty-four in 1959 –– is the fact that she was a black female performer who occasionally wrote her own material and managed to record it when this was a largely unheard of practice even among the most popular white male vocalists.
While Holiday was only able to record a handful of her own compositions,the few she did record –– Fine and Mellow, God Bless The Childand Billie's Bluesare other deservedly famous examples of her overlooked skill as a lyricist –– are the artistic equivalent of anything produced by anybody working in the Broadway/Tin Pan Alley tradition, notable for their emotional truthfulness in an age when the majority of love songs were written to a standardized formula which took the form of either a celebration, a lament or an exercise in the creation of appealing romantic fantasies. (Think of a tune like Pennies From Heaven, with its depiction of an idealized world in which storm clouds literally rain money onto the earth –– an understandably attractive image to those living through the Depression where finding a job, let alone enough to eat, could be a constant daily struggle for many people.) Socially unacceptable activities like adultery were never mentioned and nor was the idea that a lover would or, more scandalously still, should be willing to accept the philandering of a partner despite the fact that many people in all walks of life did precisely that every day of their lives.
It is this willingness to speak the plain undiluted truth that makes Don't Explain such a landmark example of the songwriter's art. As Holiday recalled in Lady Sings The Blues, the 1956 autobiography she co-authored (or at least claimed to have co-authored) with writer William Dufty:
One of the songs I wrote and recorded has my marriage to Jimmy Monroe written all over it… One night he came in with lipstick on his collar… I saw the lipstick. He saw I saw it and he started explaining and explaining. I could stand anything but that. Lying to me was worse than anything he could have done with any bitch. I cut him off, just like that. 'Take a bath, man,' I said, 'don't explain.'
That should have been the end of it. But that night stuck in my crop. I couldn't forget it. The words 'don't explain, don't explain,' kept going through my damn head. I had to get it out of my system some way, I guess. The more I thought about it, it changed from an ugly scene to a sad song. Soon I was singing phrases to myself. Suddenly I had a whole song.
I went downtown one night and sat down with Arthur Herzog; he played the tune over on the piano, wrote down the words, changing two or three phrases, softening it up just a little.
This is one song I couldn't sing without feeling every minute of it. I still can't. Many a bitch has told me she broke up every time she heard it. So if anybody deserves credit for that, it's Jimmy, I guess –– and the others who keep coming home with lipstick on their faces.
When that stops happening, Don't Explain will be as dated as the Black Bottom [a popular dance of the 1920s]. Until then, it will always be a standard.
It is, of course, much more than simply its lyrics which have made the song a standard. The melancholy tune and Holiday's wearily restrained delivery of it, pitched somewhere between that of a French chanteuse and the female torch singers so popular during her childhood in the 1920s, are impeccable as is her phrasing which replicates the rhythms of ordinary human speech without descending to the kind of histrionic shmaltz so beloved of vocalists of earlier generations. It is an adult song performed in an adult manner for an adult audience –– something else that was unusual in the ultra-conservative recording industry of 1945. It demonstrates what a uniquely gifted vocalist Billie Holiday was and proves the theory that when it comes to composing meaningful and affecting song lyrics, less is invariably more.
Use the link below to read more about the life and music of North American jazz vocalist and songwriter BILLIE HOLIDAY (1915–1959):
What can forgive us for the clothes left lying and the rocking journey, flashing poles and pylons standing into fields of air, in flooded fields?
Something flew out of our hands, the cup incomplete, air of invasions and land of defeat. There was the tree felled in another valley, behind the flown carpet and nothing left to remember, all to forgive.
Nothing to remember but the windows slammed against the cold, the helmet crushed down on the eyes.
And who, beside the darkened station lamp, remembering, started back.
? 1949
Eithne Wilkins, born on 12 September 1914 in the New Zealand city of Wellington, was a poet and Oxford graduate best remembered today as the co-translator, with her Austrian/Hungarian Jewish husband Ernst Kaiser, of the first English version of Robert Musil's epic fin de siécle novel Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften [The Man Without Qualities](1930–1943).
Wilkins met her future husband, who had fled to England following the annexation of Austria by the Nazis on 12 March 1938, in 1946 while working as a publisher's reader and concurrently as a lecturer in German at the University of London. They married three years later and, after returning to Austria, published many co-authored translations of works by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Franz Kafka, Lion Feuchtwanger, Ernst Wiechert, Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, the artist Oskar Kokoschka and the composers Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg. But it was their tireless work as the translators and champions of Musil –– activities which involved extensive editorial research and saw them become instrumental in having the collection of the writer's private papers relocated to Vienna's National Library from their previous home in Rome –– that established their respective academic reputations both in the UK and internationally. (Kaiser's other career as a novelist was largely unsuccessful, with many of his manuscripts remaining unpublished at his death.)
The couple returned to England in 1968 after Wilkins was offered a new lecturing position at the University of Reading. Kaiser was appointed an Honorary Research Fellow at the same university, where for the next four years they worked side by side supervising and coordinating the activities of the Robert Musil Research Unit. Kaiser died on 1 January 1972 at the age of sixty, with Wilkins following him to the grave on 13 March 1975. While a handful of her poems were published in magazines and anthologies between 1937 and 1949, they were never collected or published in book form.
As of March 2020 Eithne Wilkins does not have a Wikipedia entry of her own. Nor are there any photographs of her available to view online.
** UPDATE **
27 November 2022
EITHNE WILKINS now has a Wikipedia entry thanks to the efforts of MICHEL CASTAGNÉ(who also kindly passed along the photograph posted above). Use the link below to view the page he created:
Use the link below to read three more poems by New Zealand poet, translator and academic EITHNE WILKINS posted on the consistently interesting 'forgotten literature' website NEGLECTED BOOKS:
WEDNESDAY AUG. 19 –– Resumed work. Did *10*– difficult pages and have about 10 to go yet. I'm learning now that the 'artist' like every other kind of worker must work on schedule, push himself, hurry as much as he can, or, like any other worker, he'll never GET anything and really enough done. It's a lot of bull about the artist's –– having all the leisure in the world to 'work.' Work is involved with time; you can't waste time building a house at leisure or you'll never move in. The Utopia for 'artists' fits in with the inherent core of art-work… laziness and putting-off. So now I know this, after lingering as long as I have on the sea-chapter. I must knock off the final chapter starting tomorrow with the same urgency as the others in the novel, or it will stink, when eventually finished, with the smell of sloth. This is what makes a Hemingway spend ten years between novels –– even a Joyce. Dostoevsky wrote massively –– Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed, and The Brothers Karamazov inside of 12 years, 3 years on an average for each work. And take Shakespeare and Balzac, they had interior deadlines, they wanted to get things done, they wanted to live, not loaf. I am going to start another novel soon. Well, that is, soon –– Journal Entry [19 August 1948]
Use the link below to visit The Kerouac Center at the University of Massachusetts in the writer's home town of Lowell, 'a collaborative, interdisciplinary engagement center broadly focused on the work of Lowell, Massachusetts native Jack Kerouac, as well as the cultural, political, and intellectual history shaping Kerouac during the post-World War II period.'
