The Write Advice 202: ALEXEI SAYLE

 

To be a successful comedy writer you have to have a continually fertile imagination, that's what stops you from being a here today, Bros tomorrow, flash in the pan.  Unfortunately, imagination is not something that you can turn on and off like a tap.  Nor is it something that you can direct with pinpoint accuracy, unlike 12% of the missiles produced by the British Aerospace Industry.  No, the same powers of imagination that make you think up exquisite jests and apposite drolleries are exactly the same powers of imagination that make you think that a dollop of egg mayonnaise left over from lunch that has fallen on your arm is in fact skin cancer.  The same qualities of invention which help one to create this hilarious comedy are the same qualities of invention that induce in me the paranoid feeling that my pets are conspiring against me.  In fact, I know they are because whenever I come in the room, they stop talking...

 

Interview [Source unspecified]

 

 

 

Use the link below to listen to the podcast of British comedian, actor, writer and astute social commentator ALEXEI SAYLE:

 

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-alexei-sayle-podcast/id1540500007

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Think About It 047: ALEXEI SAYLE

 

 

The Write Advice 102: MARY RAKOW

 

 

The Write Advice 022: GEORGE ORWELL

 

 

Words for the Music 027: DORY PREVIN

 

 

 

DORY PREVIN

 22 October 1925 – 14 February 2012

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 CHILDREN OF COINCIDENCE

DORY PREVIN

from the 1976 Warner Records LP

We're Children of Coincidence

and Harpo Marx

 

 

 

 

 

CHILDREN OF COINCIDENCE

 

 

If I hadn't made a left-hand turn

If you hadn't made a right

If I'd waited just a moment more

If you'd missed the light

If that car had never blown its horn

If that friend had stopped to talk

We'd have never met at all

If I didn't take that walk

I'd have gotten there too early

You'd have gotten there too late

We are childen of coincidence

Coincidence and fate

Crossed connections

Lost connections

Empty corners

Crowded intersections

Accidents

And incidents

We're children of coincidence 

And chance

If he hadn't stopped to pick it up

If she hadn't dropped her book

When she took it if she'd noticed him

How come we never look

If she hadn't been so very white

If he hadn't been so black

Would she smile and say hello to him

Would he have turned his back

If she cancelled her appointment

Would he break his other date

We are children of coincidence

Coincidence and fate

 

 

Crossed connections

Lost connections

Empty corners

Crowded intersections

Accidents

And incidents

We're children of coincidence 

And chance

 

 

If the planets were in perfect place

If your sign was on the rise

If my stars were in complete accord

But the sun was in your eyes

You'd have only seen my shadow

As I passed you on the street

And it might have been a hundred years

Before our souls would meet

And we would still be strangers 

Too early and too late

We are children of coincidence

Coincidence and fate

 

 

Crossed connections

Lost connections

Empty corners

Crowded intersections

Accidents

And incidents

We're children of coincidence 

And fate

 

 

 

 

Words and music by

DORY PREVIN

 

© 1976 Warner Records/Rhino Music

 

 

 

 

 

Dory Previn, who was born Dorothy Langan on 22 October 1925, began her career as a cabaret performer and lyricist, initially working most frequently with pianist and composer André Previn, the man who became her second husband in 1959.  

 

The couple wrote a number of well-received songs together while working under contract at MGM studios, garnering their first Academy Award nomination for The Faraway Part of Town that was performed by Judy Garland in the 1960 film Pepé and a second nomination for their 1962 song Second Chance which featured in Two For The See-Saw, a popular film starring Robert Mitchum and Shirley Maclaine.  

 

The next six years saw the couple compose many more cinema-related songs together including You're Gonna Hear From Me (recorded by Frank Sinatra among others) and five witty, tongue-in-cheek titles for the 1967 adaptation of Jacqueline Susann's scandalous 1966 bestseller Valley of the Dolls.  This is all the more impressive given that Dory Previn suffered a psychiatric breakdown in 1965 that saw her briefly hospitalized to undergo treatment for severe depression.

 

Previn's transition from witty Broadway-style lyricist to 1970s singer/songwriter was triggered by the second breakdown she experienced after learning that her husband, who had gone to the UK to work as the conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, was having an affair with actor Mia Farrow and had fathered a child by her.  Previn's breakdown began on the aircraft she had boarded, despite her lifelong fear of flying, to take her to the English capital where she hoped to somehow salvage her doomed marriage.  

 

Writing, specifically about herself and her emotions, became a key component of her therapy and led to the creation of the songs that would appear on her critically acclaimed 1970 LP On My Way To Where.  (This was her second album, preceded by a jazz-based recording of original material titled The Leprechauns Are Upon Me that she released under the name 'Dory Langdon' in 1958.)  The album, which featured her accompanying herself on guitar along with other musicians, included the song Beware of Young Girls, a thinly veiled attack on Mia Farrow who married her former husband that same year, an event which saw Previn re-hospitalized to undergo another course of electro-convulsive therapy.  

 

The LP also featured the chilling cut With My Daddy in the Attic that spoke indirectly of Previn's difficult and possibly incestuous relationship with her father, an Irish-American World War One veteran who had been gassed in the trenches and was prone to episodes of extreme paranoia that, at their worst, saw him become violent toward his wife and children and, at one point, keep them literally imprisoned inside the family home for several months.  Despite this and his destructive habit of alternately overindulging and ignoring her, Previn's father was supportive of her decision to become a performer after she displayed genuine talent as both a singer and a dancer in her youth.

On My Way To Where was followed by six more LPs of original singer-songwriter material including Mythical Kings and Iguanas (1971), Reflections In A Mud Puddle (1971), the concept album Mary C Brown and the Hollywood Sign (1972), the self-titled Dory Previn (1974) and what was to be her next to last solo effort We're Children of Coincidence and Harpo Marx (1976).  She also found time to write two autobiographies, a television screenplay, a song for the controversial 1973 film Last Tango in Paris in addition to releasing the double LP Live At Carnegie Hall that went on to become her most enduringly popular recording.  

 

All of Previn's music features startlingly honest and strikingly original lyrics, many of which are as good as any of those penned by her 1970s singer-songwriter contemporaries, and clever arrangements that make the best use of her limited vocal range.  She was never afraid to tackle taboo topics like incest, artistic failure and the bogus spiritualist movement of the 1970s, often disarming listeners with her combination of high intelligence and what, on occasion, could be dark and even macabre humor.

 

Previn spent the 1980s focusing on stage work, often appearing under the name Dory Previn Shannon, and writing short stories and a novel titled Word-Play With An Invisible Relative.  All this work did not prevent her from co-writing the theme song for the 1980s sitcom Two Of A Kind for which she and her songwriter partner Jim Pasquale received an Emmy award in 1984.  That same year she married actor and artist Joby Baker, going on to collaborate with him on an illustrated edition of her 1970s song lyrics that appeared in 1995 as The Dory Previn Songbook.  

 

Two years later Previn revived her professional partnership with her former husband André Previn, collaborating with him on The Magic Number, a piece he composed for orchestra and solo soprano.  She allegedly contacted Woody Allen after the comedian was accused of sexually molesting his adopted daughter Dylan in 1992, suggesting that Mia Farrow had based the story of what had been done to Dylan inside the Farrow home on the lyrics of her song With My Daddy In The Attic.  Nor is it without significance that, like the decidedly menacing father figure in the song, Allen also plays the clarinet.

 

Despite suffering a series of minor strokes which affected her eyesight, Previn continued to work and managed to release a final LP — another conceptual work about the environment and the threat of nuclear war titled Planet Blue — in 2002, a decade before her death at the age of eighty-six on 14 February 2012.  

 

 

 

Use the link below to listen to more great music by lyricist, composer and cabaret/stage performer DORY PREVIN: 

 

 

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=dory+previn

 

 

 

 

Special thanks to everyone who takes the time to upload music to YouTube.  Your efforts are appreciated by music lovers everywhere.

 

 

 

 

 

Use this link to read a long post by JUSTIN LEVINE about the connections between DORY PREVIN and the more lurid aspects of the ALLEN/FARROW scandal:

https://levine2001.medium.com/the-woody-allen-controversy-reader-did-dory-previns-song-lyrics-influence-mia-farrow-in-accusing-6cb1f83038fe

 

 

 

 

 

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Words for the Music 006: DAVE FRISHBERG

 

 

Words for the Music 008: LORENZ HART

 

 

Words for the Music 021: BOBBIE GENTRY 

 

The Write Advice 201: GWYNETH LEWIS

 

My great fear was that I'd never be able to write sober because I'd now become too dull and boring.  I was making a common mistake among writers — confusing chaos with creativity.  Of course you can manage the odd piece of good work in the midst of a crisis — a fluke — but this is the exception rather than the rule.  The truth is, it's far easier to lead a colourful, 'poetic' life than actually write poems.  The former requires a good liver and seedy friends, the latter all the discipline of a civil servant.

 

Sunbathing in the Rain: A Cheerful Book About Depression (2002)

 

 

 

Use the link below to visit the website of Welsh poet and writer GWYNETH LEWIS:

 

 

 

http://www.gwynethlewis.com/index.shtml

 

 

 

 

 

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The Write Advice 151: MAGGIE O'FARRELL

 

 

The Write Advice 117: JENNIFER EGAN

 

 

The Write Advice 067: BARBARA PYM

 

 

Think About It 099: DAVID HANSCOM

 

The universal problem of being human is what I call, 'The Curse of Consciousness.'  Recent neuroscience research has shown that threats in the form of unpleasant thoughts or concepts are processed in a similar area of the brain as physical threats with the same chemical response.  The 'curse' is that none of us can escape our thoughts, so we are subjected to an endless stress chemical assault on our body.  This translates into more than 30 physical symptoms and many disease states.  These include auto-immune disorders and early death.  However, the worst symptom is relentless anxiety.

      Since this unconscious survival mechanism is hundreds of thousands of times more powerful than your conscious brain, it isn’t responsive to rational interventions to manage or control it.  The solution lies in the fact that this is an unsolvable problem.  Without anxiety that is unpleasant enough so as to compel you take action, you wouldn’t survive.  Neither would you or the human species survive without the drive to seek physiological rewards.

      Is 'relaxed' a diagnosis?  No.  Is 'anxious' a diagnosis?  No!  To read your body’s chemistry gauge, you first have to allow yourself to feel.

 

 

Anxiety Is a Symptom [Psychology Today, 20 November 2019]

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to read the full article by North American spinal surgeon DAVID HANSCOM:

 

 

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/anxiety-another-name-pain/201911/anxiety-is-symptom

 

 

 

 

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Think About It 075: KATHERINE S NEWMAN

 

 

The Write Advice 200: ANTHONY BURGESS

 

Novelists, like poets, work in the medium of human language, but some may be said to work in it more than others.  There is a kind of novelist (conveniently designated as Class 1), usually popular, sometimes wealthy, in whose work language is a zero quantity, transparent, unseductive, the overtones of connotation and ambiguity totally dumped… Such work is closer to film than poetry, and it invariably films better than it reads.  The aim of the Class 1 novel can only properly be fulfilled when the narrated action is transformed into represented action:  content being more important than style, the referents ache to be free of their words and to be presented directly as sense-data.

      To the other kind of novelist (Class 2) it is important that the opacity of the language be exploited, so that ambiguities, puns and centrifugal connotations are to be enjoyed rather than regretted, and whose books, made out of words as much as characters and incidents, lose a great deal when adapted to a visual medium.  Drugstore bestsellers, which overwhelmingly belong to Class 1, sometimes nevertheless admit the other category, but only when the lure of the subject-matter –– invariably erotic –– is stronger than the resistance that the average novel-reader feels towards literary style.

      Needless to say, there are stylistic areas where the two classes of fiction overlap.  Transparent language… can be elevated to a high level of aesthetic interest through wit, balance, euphony, and other devices of elegance.  Elegance, however, is the most that Class 1 prose can achieve; for dandyism one must go to Class 2 writers.  But opaque language can be so self-referring that the reader, legitimately seeking some interest of character and action, may become resentful.  A novelist who has brought his reader to the brink of action only to put off the action while he engages in a virtuoso prose cadenza is indulging in the ultimate dandyism, which makes the clothes more important than the body beneath.  If the promised action is of a violent nature, and the author decides to enjoy a digression on the word itself, finding violent, because of its phonic associations with violet and viol, a somehow unviolent term, then murmurs about artistic irresponsibility will probably be in order.  A Class 2 novel, in fact, does not have to be a better work of fiction than a Class 1 novel, but it usually has a better claim to be regarded as literature.  The beginning of literary wisdom, at least in the field of the novel, lies in a realisation that Class 1 and Class 2 novelists have somewhat different aims…

 

Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce (1973)

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to visit the website of THE INTERNATIONAL ANTHONY BURGESS FOUNDATION, an English-based organisation which 'encourages and supports public and scholarly interest in all aspects of the life and work of Anthony Burgess.'  It also operates an archive/performance space in his home town of Manchester.

http://www.anthonyburgess.org/

 

 

 

 

 

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Poet of the Month 093: HALINA POSWIATOWSKA

 

 

HALINA POSWIATOWSKA, c 1955

 

 

 

 

I LIKE LONGING

 

 

I like longing

climbing up the railings of sound and colour

catching into my open mouth

the frozen scent

 

I like my loneliness

suspended higher

than a bridge

embracing the sky with its arms

 

and my love 

walking barefoot 

over the snow

 

 

 

Dzien dzisiejszy

[Present Day]

1963

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I LACK FORMER TENDERNESS

 

 

I lack former tenderness for my body

yet I tolerate it like a beast of burden

useful though it requires much care

it brings pain and joy and pain and joy

sometimes inert from pleasure

sometimes shelter for sleep

 

I know its twisted hallways

can tell which way exhaustion comes

which tendons laughter tenses

and I remember the unique taste of tears

so like the taste of blood

 

my thoughts — a flock of frightened birds

feed on the field of my body

I lack my former tenderness towards it

yet feel more acutely than before

that I reach no further than my outstretched arms

and no higher than I can rise on the tips of my toes
 

 

Oda do rak

[Ode To Hands, 1966]

 

 

 

 

Both poems translated by

MAYA PERETZ

 

 

 

 

 

Halina Poswiatowska (née Myga) was born in the southern Polish city of Czestochowa on 9 May 1935.  During the 1945 liberation of the city from Nazi occupation she and her parents were forced to seek shelter in a damp freezing basement for a prolonged period of time, leading her to develop the chronic heart condition that would prematurely end her life on 11 October 1967 at the age of thirty-two. 

 

Obliged to spend much of her childhood in hospitals and sanitoriums, she developed an early interest in writing and poetry.  In 1954, against the cautionary advice of her doctors, she married her fellow hospital patient, the artist and apprentice filmmaker Adolf Rzszyard Poswiatowska.  The marriage lasted two years, ending with her husband's death in 1956.

 

Two years later the young widow traveled to the United States to undergo heart surgery, a journey largely funded by donations received from sympathetic Polish-Americans.  1958 also saw her publish Hymn balwochwalzy [Idol Worship], her debut volume of poetry.  This was followed by two more collections — Dzien dzisiejszy [Present Day, 1963] and Oda do rak [Ode to Hands, 1966] — and her final collection Jeszcze jedno wspomnienie [One More Memory] which appeared posthumously in 1968. 

 

Rather than return to Poland after undergoing her dangerous but life prolonging operation, Poswiatowska chose to remain in the United States, living a hand to mouth existence while she applied for a scholarship to study philosophy at Smith College in Massachussetts.  (She did this despite having no fluency in English at that time.)  She graduated from Smith in 1961 and, after refusing an offer to continue her studies at Stanford University in California, returned to her homeland where she enrolled as a philosophy student at Jagiellonian University in Krakow.  She was working on her doctorate, a study of the ethical principles of black civil rights activist Martin Luther King, when she died eight days after undergoing a second major heart operation which she had hoped would improve her rapidly deteriorating health.

Never a mainstream poet, Poswiatowska's work gained little recognition during her lifetime, only coming to be fully appreciated after her death — a reappraisal that has continued in subsequent decades and now sees her regarded as one of Poland's leading modern poets.

 

 

Use the link below to read more poems (in English) by Polish poet HALINA POSWIATOWSKA:

 

https://allpoetry.com/Halina-Poswiatowska

 

 

 

 

 

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The Write Advice 199: ANNE LAMOTT

 

To be a good writer, you not only have to write a great deal but you have to care.  You do not have to have a complicated moral philosophy.  But a writer always tries, I think, to be a part of the solution, to understand a little about life and to pass this on… As we live, we begin to discover what helps in life and what hurts, and our characters act this out dramatically.  This is moral material… In order to be a writer, you have to learn to be reverent.  If not, why are you writing?  Why are you here?… Think of reverence as awe, as presence in and openness to the world.  Think of those times when you’ve read prose or poetry that is presented in such a way that you have a fleeting sense of being startled by beauty or insight, by a glimpse into someone’s soul.  All of a sudden everything seems to fit together or at least to have some meaning for a moment.  This is our goal as writers, I think; to help others have this sense of — please forgive me — wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break in on our small, bordered worlds.  When this happens, everything feels more spacious.

 

Bird By Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1995)

 

 

 

Use the link below to read an interview with North American writer, activist and educator ANNE LAMOTT:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/ng-interactive/2024/may/07/anne-lamott-author-interview

 

 

 

 

 

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The Write Advice 036: JOHN STEINBECK