Stuff

--------------------------How to know you're out of it

Photos: Popular TV Celebrities

Leighton Meester
Minka Kelly
Kris Allen
Audrina Patridge
Adam Lambert
Blake Lively

Ed here: This popped up on Yahoo this afternoon. Popular TV celebrities? I've never heard of any of them.


--------------------------Celebrity Poets Daily Beast

The Daily Beast has a feature today about, yup, celebs who write (and publish) poetry. I'm no snob. I'm sure there are celebrities who just might be pretty decent poets. But I'm also sure that the singer Jewel (appealing as she is) ain't one of them. When she was paid one million dollars for two books including a volume of her poetry I had to thumb through it in a bookstore. Yow. I wonder if any real poets killed themselves when they heard the news about her advance.


--------------------------The Literature of Death

The LA Times Jacket Copy has an interesting piece today about writers who address their imminent death in their work. John Updike and Raymond Carver are cited. Both men (I believe) died of lung cancer, a damned bad way to go. Updike's poem struck me as too mechanistic as if he didn't want to quite address his mortality head on. He talks about the modern process of dying, the almost Phil Dickian way hospitals and tests and surgeries as grotesque intrusions. As somebody who has incurable cancer, I've thought about writing a long autobiographical piece ending with my own forthcoming demise (I'm hoping that's a ways off yet) but then I realized that it's already been done by writers far better than I'll ever be. So finally I'd go with Raymond Carver's simple summation of his time in this vale of tears:

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

-------------------------Peter Lorre

Cinema Retro has a long and extraordinary piece--speaking of sorrow and death--on the actor Peter Lorre. In the course of talking about his career the writer mentions that Lorre tried to regain his status as a serious actor by gong back to Broadway in the early Fifties. Fine and dandy. The problem was that his co-star was Miriam Hopkins a fetching devilish bratty actress of real and sometimes reckless talent. Man poor shambling Lorre didn't stand a chance. They despised each other at their first meeting. The play never recovered the enmity.

http://www.cinemaretro.com/index.php

Hopkins,