Tag: true story

Last Meals: transcript for Goethe research

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Link to the video essay: https://youtu.be/7m0oJRAywZ4

Transcript and Sources:

My choice of a last meal used to be enchiladas and negro modello, bottle wrapped in a wet paper towel and frozen, based on a dinner I had on a vacation where my partner and I went to random places around the country on an aimless week long road trip.
But that doesn’t feel right anymore. I had been researching the idea of last meals for a short story, a fact I’m going to mention again in this video because I made this out of order, haha, and I think I need an update. Something more me now and less me in my 20s.
That meal doesn’t have the connotations it used to.

When my great grandfather came to the United States he came with a copy of Dante’s Inferno and it wasn’t until I started researching last meals that I realized Faust has the same level of cultural relevance and importance to Germans that Dante has to Italians. I mean, most of our popular ideas of hell come from Dante’s Inferno, not Christian doctrine, and Faust has just as much significance.

A quick tour for those not familiar with Doctor Faustus and the many versions of his tragedy, most popularly I’m going into site Goethe’s Faust; Faust is a protagonist of the German legend based on the historical Johanna Georg Faust.

The general jist is that Faust, an academic and narcissistic man, becomes dissatisfied and depressed, and after an attempt on his own life, he calls on the Devil to make a bargain–hence the term Faustian. Mephistopheles, a demon, appears, and makes a bargain with Faust for knowledge and pleasure in exchange for his soul.

The historical Faust was an alchemist, magician, and scholar of the German Renaissance, born sometime in the mid 1400s, there’s some discrepancy on when. There’s scattered mention of him in first hand sources for the next hundred years, often performing magical acts or giving horoscopes to important officials and royals, only to be banished for being a freaky mystic. He is thought to have died in 1540 or 1541 as the result of an explosion in his alchemical lab. There are many written works in the early 1500s ascribed to Doctor Faust, detailing magical incantation, some of them falsely ascribed to being written during his lifetime.

Goethe’s Faust has a romantic bent and proclaims that Faust gained his metaphysical and esoteric knowledge from the aforementioned deal with the devil. But the story is, in a way, truly about Gretchen.

Gretchen is also based on a historical figure, Susanna Margaretha Brandt, a woman who famously convicted of and executed for infanticide, claiming that she was under demonic possession. She had been drugged and raped, conceiving the child, then got rid of it once it was born. Goethe was familiar with Brandt as several friends and family members were directly involved in her court case and the young Goethe lived in very close proximity to her. He worked her story into the story of Faust, saying that the principal reason she Was led astray was by Faust, selfishly pursuing carnal and secular pleasures, and that while both were temped by Mephistopheles, Gretchen is the character whom repents and is therefore absolved.

The historical Susanna Margaretha Brandt has a famous last meal, which she refused and instead only drank water, giving the meal to the guards.

Out of kindness, the guards then lied to her, saying her head would not be impaled after her execution, but she was beheaded and gibbeted to serve as a deterrent.

In the story by Goethe, this young woman he was familiar with was vindicated and allowed into heaven for turning away the selfish, depressive, and miserable Faust and shunning bargains with him a Mephistopheles when she could have evaded her fate, she chose to face it. For the real Susanna Margaretha Brandt, however, she suffered a brutal death at the hands of men, because of the actions of men.

Access Esoteric Works Attributed to Johann Georg Faust at:

https://books.google.com/books?id=ESpXAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA7#v=onepage&q&f=false

https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_v-tXAAAAYAAJ/page/154/mode/1up?view=theater

Das Kloster (full title Das Kloster. Weltlich und geistlich. Meist aus der ältern deutschen Volks-, Wunder-, Curiositäten-, und vorzugsweise komischen Literatur ) is a collection of magical and occult texts, fairy tales and legends of the German Renaissance compiled by Stuttgart antiquarian Johann Scheible in 12 volumes, 1845-1849. Vols. 3, 5 and 11 are dedicated to the Faust Legend.

Edgar Allan Poe was a feminist,

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Among the many reasons to love him.

Hello, it’s another theme month. This month I’ve decided to hook my claws into a different author each week, beginning as I ought with dear Edgar.

A million years ago now when I was in middle school I did a project on Edgar Allan Poe and every time I went to write about him the power went out, computers broke, lightning struck; it all felt very clandestine. I was amused and spooked enough I considered telling my teacher that he didn’t approve.

I recently saw some artwork of Ligeia and decided to reread it, which took me elsewhere with Poe since I’ve always had a thing for him. I wrote a short story ten years ago now which got some movement and consideration where I put a fictional Poe on the day of his death, stumbling about. He had a sad death. I think from time to time I ought to rewrite it.

Speaking of Ligeia, a short story of two dead wives and will power over death, Ligeia is given credit for composing ‘The Conquering Worm’ which has long been one of my favorite poems. 

Poe’s famous for his morbidity, but his greatest contribution to fiction is the detective story. Poe wrote C Auguste Dupin, the first layman applying considerable intellect and imagination to solving crime as a private individual, first appearing in ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’. Dupin was a huge inspiration toward later private detectives, namely Sherlock Holmes.

But I called this ‘Edgar Allan Poe was a feminist’ for a reason. Poe wrote repeatedly morbid stories about death, will power over death, and the romanticism of women dying of tuberculosis not because he was someone who fetishized tuberculosis—as was very common at the time—but because he had experienced so much loss of the women in his life. 

Poe was raised by his adoptive family, the Allan’s, after his mother’s death from tuberculosis when he was three years old.

 When Mrs. Allan also contracted tuberculosis and Mr. Allan began overt efforts to remarry before his wife had died, Edgar Poe viciously fought with him for the respect and rights of his foster mother to the point of being disowned and consequential financial ruin.

Poe continued to lose. Often financially in dire conditions, he struggled, joined the military, took various names and aliases. His first sweetheart married another; his wife (and cousin) Virginia Clemm died aged twenty-four after eleven years of marriage (yikes) of …yes , more tuberculosis. Worse yet, Virginia took five years to succumb to the illness, leaving Poe to watch her struggle and wax and wane in health. His optimism and pessimism hinging on Virginia’s well being, much of his writing and fixation on death in fiction mirror descriptions he wrote of Virginia’s illness in letters to friends and family. 

Virginia also was said to resemble many of his female heroines, particularly Ligeia—the much loved wife of the unnamed narrator who possesses the body of the next, less loved wife. Indeed, implying that remarrying would have just been a poor attempt at rekindling feelings that had died with Virginia.

In life, Poe never remarried.

He was known in his lifetime primarily as a critic rather than as a writer, his writing becoming more popular after his death, and he was also known as responsible for several hoaxes. (The Facts in the Case of M Valdemar, a short story about, yep, resisting natural death through mesmerism and willpower, was so convincingly written that many people at the time mistook it for a medical paper, requiring Poe to publicly declare it as a hoax). While known for the horror it’s encased in, a prevailing theme of his work, outside of death itself, was the reverence he had had for the women he’d lost. 

Review: How We Live Now

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I picked this one up sometime after reading Insomniac City, also by Bill Hayes. This book is a small snapshot of New York City during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, in the early days of quarantining, and is both a love letter to the city and to community.

It discusses all of the things missed, with more of Hayes’ beautiful photography, and how we pang for community when it’s been unexpectedly stripped of us.

Like all of Hayes’ work I’ve interacted with, it’s sentimental and raw, honest and blunt.

I had seen some negative reviews of it from people who misunderstood what the book was about –expecting some intensive description of the COVID-19 pandemic and not one artist’s experience of it. The book is a diary in many ways and beautifully composed, written at a time when no one knew what was going on and what the future held.

Review: I’m Glad My Mom Died

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TW: Childhood abuse, eating disorders

I read this one back in November 2022 and sat on it a while. I think the issue I had, which was nothing to do with the book at all, was that people said it was funny. They remarked, favorably, on the humor and care that went into the book. I apparently just read it differently. I think anyone who was been in some of the same situations would.

First of all, I loved this book. When I picked it up I’d been in a rut and was doing this thing of reading mindlessly. I would skim books then put them down. This book, however, I read every word. I am one of those people who downloads samples of books, first chapters, before I decide to commit. I downloaded this one impulsively while being my insomnia self and within twenty-four hours I had read the whole thing.

Jeannette McCurdy carefully details a dream so many impoverished families have–that one of their kids makes it. Big. In spite of the odds. And that includes a parent who will do anything to make it happen. I was struck by the tenderness McCurdy describes her mother with, particularly in a few biting scenes—her mother’s fond joy when McCurdy becomes concerned that she may age out of her Nickelodeon stardom and happily teaches her about calorie restriction to prevent growth. McCurdy describes it as something her mother seemed to have been waiting for all along. McCurdy details some of the techniques and rules, being taught to lie to doctors and how, by her mother, to support her eating disorder. She also describes casually pulling out one of her own teeth later on.

Another stand-out scene was McCurdy firing her therapist, someone she had come to rely on and confide in who accompanied her to events as an adult to help her manage her bulimia I’m public, after a particularly emotional trigger. She simply walks off and never speaks to her again because the painful power of the trigger outweighs the benefit of her support system.

There are so many points in the memoir where you think ‘well what else can happen to her’ and I didn’t particularly find it funny at all, more like I saw that vein of humor that many of us with abusive childhoods and eating disorders adopt. 

I that what’s most significant about the book is the conversations it starts and the depiction of poverty in America that is all too common and too rarely displayed for what it is.

Review: The Mayor of Macdougall Street

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I like Dave Van Ronk. I have forever. Still, the book took me forever to read. Not because I didn’t enjoy it, I very much did, but because, as always, Dave Van Ronk is surprising.

I wasn’t expecting a chapter devoted to anarchy, activism, or the confiscation  of the term and re-appropriation of libertarian-ism quite so early on. This was stupid of me. I know who Dave Van Ronk is, after all. And I know he had things to say.

My favorite answer to that question is: Dave Van Ronk was a folk singer who was out to dinner the night of the Stonewall Riots, saw people throwing bricks and heard the commotion, and excused himself from the table to join. Famously quoted, “…I figured, they can’t have a riot without me!”

If for whatever reason you doubt Van Ronk’s intelligence, you needn’t. Everything discussed shows a highly intelligent, curious, thoughtful man who carefully plodded through his politics and his craft. These are perhaps his two most comfortable topics. He, like so many men laboring against patriarchy long before it was popular or even a term, runs into that barrier of having to define what patriarchy is without many allies. He knows that there is injustice, that he seems to be somehow benefit from the status quo, yet he wants to raise up the others around him. He believed in true equality —which is goddamn hard when you’re getting started in the 1950s as if it isn’t still hard today.

There’s a cancer of hyper individualism that sees people with amazing work lives or intellectual lives who have very turbulent personal lives. Van Ronk is one of them, a proud race of people trying to navigate the society he’s in and the values he has.

Also, his descriptions of music and honing his skill leaves me jealous. He was someone who put his head down and learned, meticulously, leaning heavily on the influences around him to be a school and not something he merely took from. 

Review: My Mother was Nuts

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I know what you’re thinking. Dany, you read another comedian memoir? Yeah, I did.

This time around it was Penny Marshall’s My Mother Was Nuts which opens with the fun story of the modern-era (now deceased) Ms. Marshall’s house being broken into by two young kids dressed as ninjas with samurai swords.

A promising opening.

It definitely grabs your attention. And unlike Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher which I read earlier this year, Penny Marshall has a lot to say about her friendship with Carrie Fisher. Carrie must have forgot to mention that while married to Paul Simon she accidentally set up her best, oftentimes oblivious, friend with Art Garfunkel who then went on to keep unwittingly inviting the famously toxic duo to the same places.

That seems to be my overall review of Ms. Marshall. She seems to stumble into being funny.

The book loses some traction midway when Ms. Marshall just begins recounting the details of her career. There’s some interesting facts about Hollywood history, particularly around her directing Big and A League of Their Own, but these are just interesting facts. It becomes almost a list of accomplishments, like she needs to make sure that you know why you’re here. I found the really interesting and insightful parts of the memoir to be just that–when she remembers to talk about herself.

There is a sense that fame and success changed Ms. Marshall, but not in the way it changes anyone else. Instead of becoming big headed or indifferent, she becomes a series of sighs. A long, unending line of ‘and, well, then this happened. What are you gonna do?’

Review: Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life

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I remember a copy of Cruel Shoes that belonged to my father sitting on the bookshelf and feeling compelled to read it–in large part because my father hates Comedians. My father does not trade in Comedy, that’s my mother’s sole business, so it always struck me that Steve Martin must be somehow special.

I remember Cruel Shoes very vaguely because I was a lot younger when I read it and I remember it as sort of a sparse humorous collection of jokes or bits. It wasn’t very memorable for me, I’m sorry to say, more memorable that my father owned it.

Given my partner’s own predilection for Steve Martin, and this errant book on the shelf, I always sort of assume some mythic quality to Steve Martin. Reading Born Standing Up it is a much more genuine look at him, his career, and what informs his choices—not just throwing up jokes as a deflection. At one point after discussing his father Martin notes that if you’re required to experience pain and abuse in order to get into comedy as a business, you need not worry about his qualifications.

The book was very somber and honest, detailing how ideas were developed as well as panic attacks and hypochondria, not lingering on any one problem but always moving forward to the next thing, the next bit, which I’ve found to be a pattern in the memoirs of funny people.

I think that’s the real lesson to come away from an honest, relatively short blip of a book. Steve Martin knows his limits and what could drag him down, then turns and walks in the opposite direction.

I read Elton John’s autobiography!

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It’s called “Me” which is both on the nose and a manifesto.

I feel like if I could get books right as they come out I’d love to do a ‘I read this so you don’t have to!’ but I’m always behind the curve.

I get the distinct impression that whatever editors and ghost writers and cleaners-up-heroes came in to lend a hand had a full-time gig with Elton John. He writes the way he speaks, which is darling, and he isn’t afraid to take the piss at all. He’s aware, exactly, how he’s behaved historically and he’s determined not to be ashamed of it. The man has an excellent sense of humor and humility, particularly in the face of his addictions. I found his abusive romantic relationships, played up as a central theme of the Rocketman film, are lacking. He doesn’t linger. Elton John is all about accountability, particularly his own.

He doesn’t have a bad thing to say about one single person he’s known in his life, just a string of ‘life goes on’ sighs, occasional disappointments, but primarily a lot of gratitude. I was struck particularly by the way he reaches out to people if he’s heard they’ve had a difficult time that he can relate to– celebrities, people in the news, anyone he comes across’s story, he’s willing to be a friend. Some people may find that claim of his to be self aggrandizing or insincere, but I’d disagree. He talks about reaching out to addicts in the music industry and offering his advice and it strikes me like a lot of men of his generation I’ve talked to, a touch sad and wishing someone had done the same for them.

He strikes me as a good guy and also a bitch, which he fully agrees–not afraid to talk about his ego, his outbursts, his own ridiculousness, or the way he yells just like his mother. There is one picture that struck me which he captioned ‘George Michael wanted a somber affair and so naturally I am dressed as Donald Duck’.
The man is very self aware, and yeah, he does whatever he wants.

I found out after I’d read it that his former wife, Renate Blauel, had sued him over the book. I wondered if I had then read a changed or edited copy as it’s been on shelves for two years now. He honestly only has lovely things to say about her, and how sorry he is that she was dragged into his mess. That seems to be the big theme of the memoir —sorry I’m like this, thanks for coming.

if I’m being honest

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I wasn’t taught how to read until I was about eight or nine years old.

I went to a private Catholic school and it was in second grade, when she realized that none of us knew what she was talking about, a teacher finally caught on to the fact that we hadn’t been taught anything. She’d have us come in an hour early every morning and a group of us got extra lessons so we could catch up. I don’t know if having no real idea of what I’m doing is a boon or not, ultimately. A lot of people who write or read extensively have these mystical stories about having done it at a very young age, I don’t have that sort of luck. I can’t go backwards and make it happen. People thought I could read because of how I talk, I talk how I do because I spent most of my time with old, old men. Most of them immigrants and traditionally uneducated themselves. I talked how they did. Which tends to be decisively.

My mother played radio for me, trying to keep things on classical stations because she thought it would make me smart. She wasn’t aware that at midnight this radio station that she had constantly going switched over to stock projections. My little brain got blasted with numbers most of the time. Everyone thought I knew how to read because there wasn’t a reason not to.

My oldest kid was showing me their homework and I had no idea what I was being shown. I was never taught grammar. That, I think, is obvious to anyone. It’s not clear if it’s because I was never properly taught it the way most people are or if I’m just vaguely dyslexic, but I can’t spell for a damn. I had a teacher in highschool, I had to explain to her, it just doesn’t make sense to me. Sometimes a word I’ve used a thousand times comes out like some phonetic, new creature. I don’t know any tricks of how to make a sentence. I don’t know how to tell whether a vowel is going to be long or short or whatever the hell. I just write how I talk and rely on meticulously editing it down to make sense after the fact. I ask other people to look at it and tell me what I’m doing.

In fifth grade I used to carry around a copy of Twelfth Night. People thought that it was very smart of me. Shakespeare never bothered me, with weird spellings and grammatical differences or whatever, because I already didn’t know how anything was spelled or metered. It just sounded all right out loud. That’s all I need. And what no one realized was I wasn’t carrying around the book to read it. I carried it around because it was the oldest book we had in our house. It had the date it was bought, sometime in 1897, and I thought that was reason enough to like it. I didn’t know anything or anyone that old.

One of my great grandfathers left behind everything in Italy except a suitcase of some clothes and a copy of Dante’s Inferno. He taught himself English by translating it back and forth. Maybe it’s some generational ingrained memory that that was what I was supposed to do to figure out English. I’m always carrying a book.

Review: In The Dream House

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I am not sure I could tell you how much I adored this book.

In The Dream House, by Carmen Maria Machado, in an agonizingly beautiful memoir about domestic violence , acknowledging the complexity and the difficulty of addressing domestic violence in same sex relationships out of fear of promoting stigmas against the LGBTQIA+ community. It’s heart wrenching, each chapter reflecting a different trope explored within the fantastical setting of the Dream House.

Machado’s abusive partner is only referred to as ‘The Woman in the Dream House ‘ and the book is written in second person, addressing the audience as Machado, bringing you into her seat of power and disempowerment, while walking through various memories and scenes that inform Machado’s growth and development into an adult and in her relationships. It was a deeply vulnerable and presumably honest exploration of Machado as you, the reader. It’s clear she’s a short story buff and she doesn’t shy from fictionalizing herself.

It is excellent, viscerally written and Machado’s style continually grounds the reader into her experience.