"It's not for you to know, but for you to weep and wonder/When the death of your civilization precedes you."
--Neko Case
"The insane are always mere guests on earth, eternal strangers carrying around broken decalogues that they cannot read."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
"We are accidents/Waiting to happen."
--Radiohead
Archive
The fact that a gay guy painted the Sistine ceiling is not nearly as dumbfounding as the papacy’s protection of pederasts in spite of their official attitude toward such “objectionable” practices—one of which ought to be the ceiling itself, for if anything is unnatural, for them, genius is.
— William H. Gass, “The Literary Miracle,” acceptance speech for the 2007 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism.
At night I feel her panting in her sleep. Her paws twitter as she runs toward or away from an image in her dream. Sometimes she wakes me up with her quiet dream-yelp and I watch her ride out the nightmare and break free of it on her own. She is always confused when she first wakes up. As she reenters the world, the light in her eyes is dull and demented. She sniffs the bed, gets a drink of water, and shakes it off. When she returns to the bed, she brings her nose close to my mouth and sniffs the particular fragrance of my breath. Okay, she decides, it’s *you*. Satisfied, she turns around and curls up in my arms, pushing herself against my body so that every inch of her spine is touching me. She licks my hands and returns to the even breath of sleep. I don’t need to know what she dreams of. It is what everyone dreams of: being helpless, being chased, losing a loved one, getting lost. Relics of her traumatic past mingle with common details of the present day—squirrels and broomsticks, her mother and me.
— Domenica Ruta, With or Without You.
I don’t remember many of the details now. But that can happen to any memory, toxic or not. If you can remember anything, it’s already wrong. The image or event has changed, just as you have—minutely, chemically, through the passage of time between then and now. Something happens to you, and then it’s gone. It becomes a memory that becomes shrapnel. Shards of experience still hot with life singe the brain wherever they happen to get embedded. Sometimes I swear I can feel the precise location of my memories like warm, tingling splinters under my scalp. Pictures with no sound, feelings with no pictures, the lost and found, mostly lost.
— Domenica Ruta, With or Without You.
![Tracy finished the [final] monologue on May 19, 1967, just five days before the end of production on Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. He had one more scene to shoot, but his relief was palpable. “I’ve been looking over the script,” he told his director [Stanley Kramer]. “You really don’t need me after tomorrow. If I die on the way home, you and Kate [Hepburn] are in the clear. You’ll get your money.” The next day, he returned, visibly haggard, for his final scene… When his work was complete, assistant director Ray Gosnell turned to the crew and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, this was Spencer Tracy’s last shot.” “When he said that,” says Karen Kramer, “Stanley cried. It was the first and last time I ever saw him cry.” As the crew burst into applause, Tracy didn’t say anything. He just stepped out of the prop car, smiled broadly, waved, and walked slowly off the soundstage. Kramer watched him go and then said softly, “That is the last time you will see Spencer Tracy on camera.”
—Mark Harris, Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood.
(Tracy died on June 10, 1967.)](http://25.media.tumblr.com/19c189348968f17103ea00a7d816a8b2/tumblr_mmai894zT11qzwqdio1_400.jpg)
![“After twelve hours, it was over. Hoffman shook hands with the director, ‘and [Mike] Nichols’s hand was so damp that I really got nervous because I realized how nervous he was.’ Hoffman shoved his hands back into his pockets; when he pulled them out again, several subway tokens flew out. ‘Here, kid,’ said an exhausted and annoyed crew member, picking them up. ‘You’re gonna need these.’”
—Dustin Hoffman’s disastrous screen test for The Graduate, as related in Mark Harris, Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/c0f3faebad4d3ee71c04375871f91ab1/tumblr_mlxx9l68Su1qzwqdio1_400.jpg)
