When Tom Waits was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, he said, "We all love music and we want music to love us, too." It's a thought that haunted me after watching the glorious documentary 20 Feet From Stardom.

The movie starts on a sunny note as a trio of backup singers reunite after not having seen each other for decades. The tracks of songs they sang are played underneath, and you notice the names of different girl groups appear for each song. Their voices were everywhere, it seems, but they remained anonymous.

"20 Feet" tracks the fortunes of several singers from the first generation of girl backup singers. The first half of the film is fun, vibrant, and star-studded: the girls sing backup for the big names of rock and roll, with occasional solo duties on the records or duets with the stars. Mick Jagger, Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, and Sting contribute both raves for the singers who work with them and grounded, thoughtful perspectives on the life of a backup singer and why stardom sometimes eludes them.

Because, make no mistake, these singers gave everything they had to music and -- not without reason -- they'd like something back. As the girls grow into women, and the '60s become the '70s and the '80s, their attempts to crack the mainstream become more and more futile and their feelings about music turn bitter. The movie becomes heartbreaking by slow degrees. There's a particularly disquieting moment when the camera pans down a stack of solo albums by backup singers who saw these records as their ticket to mainstream success -- none of which were successful.

Did they not work hard enough? If you love something enough that you give up your life and youth for it, isn't it supposed to pay off? Where's the line between persistence and banging your head against a wall? Or is it also, as Sting and Springsteen say, a matter of luck, circumstance, and a thousand other variables that no one can control? The up-and-coming singer Judith Hill, who was all set to break out into superstardom, suffers with a tragic setback that she could not have planned for or even imagined. The movie follows her as she continues trying to execute her solo career, while also accepting backup jobs when she has to or wants to.

One of the profiled singers, Lisa Fischer, is at peace with her life as a backup singer. She knows the price big stars pay for their stardom, and she's happy that she never paid it. The occasional moments of her singing solo showcase a deep, jazzy voice; the respect that the other artists in the movie have for her and her voice are strong and stirring. She may not be out front, but she's never taken for granted.

The movie, however, belongs to two women: Merry Clayton, a powerhouse singer with a "kill spirit" who worked single-mindedly to become a star and who still feels the frustration that her dream eluded her, and Darlene Love, whose voice was used in dozens of hits produced by Phil Spector, who cruelly exploited her talent. Darlene's story has a happy ending, of sorts, but I could not shake the story of her years away from music and how narrowly she missed the chance to be welcomed back into its arms.

I picked up this book in Kenosha on my vacation, and it jibes well with Michael Neill's The Inside Out Revolution. This is not surprising as both describe the 3 Principles, which was conceived of and taught by Sydney Banks. But Slowing, written by Richard Carlson and Joseph Bailey, was originally published in 1997, long before the Web and podcasts made it easier to disseminate Banks' spiritual and psychological teaching. Carlson and Bailey focus on a rather narrow piece of the 3 Principles philosophy, without ever mentioning the principles by name, and citing Banks only once. Neill's book, by contrast, was published in 2013; he discusses all the principles and frequently cites Banks' words and teaching stories. That sounds like I'm sniffing at the book, and I don't mean to. Slowing Down to the Speed of Life is quite good at emphasizing a few key points and then reiterating them, ringing changes on them, showing how they can apply in many different areas of life. The section on Work and Office is terribly skimpy, though the chapter on Family Relationships is terrific. It's quite readable and I sped through it on the train to Chicago and in my spare moments.

Instead of writing an exhaustive and exhausting review, here are the key things that got my attention.

Key Takeaways

1. It's not what you think, it's that you think. A lot of self-help books, methods, and training -- such as cognitive behavior therapy -- teach you to dispute the contents of your thinking and disprove them. However, what's most relevant is that your mind is kicking up a thoughtstorm of beliefs, feelings, expectations, etc. When an event happens, the feeling you experience is not about the event; rather, what you're experiencing is your feeling about the event. It's as true for internal moods as it is for any external event. When the water in a pond is agitated, you can't see to the bottom -- it's doesn't matter why it's agitated. When the water in the pond is still, it's easier to see to the bottom.
2. We have two primary thinking modes: analytic and free-flowing. The analytic mode is our typical Western habit of thinking it through, figuring it out, and so on. It works great when the problem is well-defined and logistical. But it's a tool we use to solve most every problem we see (if we think that what we see is a problem -- it's all thought, remember). The free-flowing mode is the slower, deeper, not-much-on-your-mind thinking that is where you should stay as much as possible. This is where all of your good ideas come from when you're in the shower, while driving, etc. When you put things on the back burner, the free-flowing mode is where they're processed until you pull them out to examine them again in analytic mode. Know which mode you're in; you'll feel better in free-flowing mode. Trust it.
3. Thinking=feelings. As Neill says often, we don't live in the feeling of the world, we live in the feeling of our thinking. If we're feeling anxious, we're thinking anxious thoughts. If we're feeling stressed, we're feeling stressed thoughts. Using analytical thinking to figure out why you're feeling crappy will only make you feel more crappy. You're stirring up an already agitated system. Realize that your feelings are like the weather -- wait a while, let your mind and thoughts calm down, and your feelings will also settle down. With those distracting feelings settled, your free-flowing thinking has a better chance of offering you a solution to your problem.

Key Action Steps

1. There are no action steps except to stay in the moment, notice your thinking, and calm down. Isn't it frustrating to read a book only to find that there's really not much you can do? Neill's book avoids any prescriptive advice. Slowing provides a few bits of simple advice, but the message is consistent in both books: the key is in recognizing when you're caught up in a thoughtstorm. When you recognize that you're thinking, Carlson and Bailey repeatedly say, you'll almost instantly feel better; the storm will subside and your internal system will reset. I've not found that to be consistently true in my case. I can recognize that I'm in a low mood, I can know my thinking is causing it, but it will still take a week for the cloud to pass before I  feel better.
2. Practice gratitude. They don't mention this one, but it's one I use to interrupt my low moods. I used to write a daily gratitudes list and tried avoiding the easy ones like "my loving wife" and "I have a job." The lower the mood I'm in, sometimes the deeper I have to dig. It turns my attention outward and interrupts the thought spiral.
3. Set aside time to just sit, with no input. Feel your breathing. Listen to what you can hear in your house, in your backyard, in the world. Feel where the weight of your body is pressing against the chair and the ground. This is like meditation, but maybe a little more natural. When I feel my thoughts about the past or the future, I know I'm not present in the moment. Calming down and being present in the moment can mean simply focusing on doing one thing at a time rather than multitasking.  I'm trying to get out to the back porch more to just sit and look at the yard, the birds, the garden. I leave the iPod and Kindle inside and let my brain and mind relax from all the input I stream into it.I find this can extend time for me, and life slows down, in addition to my thinking.

Jim Rash, Charlotte NC-native and UNC-CH alum -- best known to the world as Dean Pelton on Community -- has been exercising other talents the last few years. He and his co-writer Nat Faxon won an Oscar for their screenplay of The Descendants (with Alexander Payne) and the pair have created a great, light, summertime coming-of-age comedy, The Way, Way Back.

An interesting nugget from this article about the film is that the opening scene was drawn from a conversation the 14-year-old Rash had with his own step-father. Which is pretty appalling all on its own. Another appalling fact is that this pleasant, funny,  innocuous screenplay sat on a desk for years because, though it was admired, no one wanted to invest the money to film it.

The movie follows the adventures of the sullen Duncan as his mother, her boyfriend, and his daughter occupy a summer cottage near a Massachusetts beach area, in an attempt to foster a "family holiday" vibe. The boy's awakening to his own potential is charmingly done, and I liked that the almost-romance with the girl next door was part of the story but not the whole story.

The all-star cast members -- Toni Collette, Steve Carell, Amanda Peet, Maya Rudolph -- show relatively little of what they're capable of (except for Jim Rash, who gives himself a colorful cameo). The movie is largely driven by the other characters' reactions to Liam James' brooding Duncan or they're behaving in those baffling ways lost adults do when they want to torture their sensitive offspring. James walks around like a slumping caveman; his knuckles would drag the ground if his arms were long enough. So when he starts to look around and participate in the world around him, his delight and excitement is warming to watch.

That said, two performances really got my attention: Allison Janney's brash and boozy next-door neighbor and Sam Rockwell as the fast-talking, mouthy owner of the Water Wizz amusement park where Duncan finds a haven. Rockwell's character is a lazy slacker, but he's accepting of all the misfits who drift through the water park. His needling, cajoling, and ribbing of Duncan bring the boy out of his shell; his loyalty and support of Duncan are quietly done and deliver exactly what I want in a feel-good summertime movie.

Article: Oscar-winning Charlotte native plunges into directing with ‘The Way Way Back’ | Movie News & Reviews | NewsObserver.com.

I can’t remember how I ran across Markson’s novel This Is Not A Novel, but I found it so fascinating an experiment that I scooped up and read his other novels that followed the same disconnected yet mosaic-like form.

Colin Marshall has written an appreciation of Markson, who recently died, that takes in all of his novels, and the comments led me to this post on the author’s death, written in the late-Markson style.

It’s a potent style that’s quite seductive to adopt. And of course I adopted it in 2009 when writing about Markson’s last books for UNC-CH’s School of Information and Library Science’s in-house zine, The Galley, and which I’ve included below. (I had a stringent word-count to meet, hence its painful brevity.)

Suggested headline: This Is Not A Book Review

Commuting from the Park & Ride lot, I read these books, one by one. You can read 10 pages in a very short time.

Unusual they are, with sometimes awkward syntax. With about 14 one- or two-sentence blurbs to a page. Sometimes only fragments.

Every page filled by remembered passages of verse or prose, quotations, anecdotes, the detritus and gossip of artists’ sad lives. The “residue of a lifetime’s reading,” says the back-cover blurb.

A melancholy book. With one or two jokes thrown in.

You’re left to intuit what’s really happening at its center. Rather like contemplating the negative space in a painting. It’s weirdly fascinating and absorbing.

Markson claims that not one fact is repeated among all the books.

Reader’s Block and This Is Not A Novel are the first two books, and are the best. Markson has found a new, challenging, avant-garde form, and plays with this odd new toy.

But the third book, The Last Novel, feels too deliberate and planned.

Give them a try. They’re at Davis Library. I bet you’ll read more than 10 pages at a time.

Updated on 2026-04-13

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mj5IV23g-fE&hl=en&fs=1&w=300&h=242]

Thanks to the glory of Netflix, Liz and I saw this documentary that I can assure you never visited  the Carolina Theatre. It's a bio-doc on the writer Harlan Ellison, 72 years old at the time of the movie's release in 2007, and covers an impressive sweep of his life, with samples of him reading from his stories, talking heads quotes from friends and other writers about his influence and the impression he's made on their lives, and various NSFW-language interviews that evoke the man's history, philosophy, irritations, annoyances, and, now and then, joys. (The YouTube video here is from the movie; it's HE in his most typical mode of full-flow righteous anger--well-deserved, in this case.)

I was introduced to HE as a sophomore in high school and didn't look back for nearly 15 years; his personality and writing were vivid, electrifying, throat-grabbing--uncompromising, is the word that leaps to mind. Uncompromising to the point of lunacy, sometimes, but all in the name of dignity, self-respect, and justice, which for HE are paramount virtues.

"Dreams with Sharp Teeth" was a real test, as Liz had never experienced Harlan and was put off by his abrasive and, it must be said, obnoxiously show-offy personality. But she said she grew to like him better as the movie went on; you see the grit, energy, anger and just plain orneriness (an old-fashioned word that Harlan would love) that took a bullied little kid from Painesville, OH (a metaphorical town name, if ever there was one) to Los Angeles and success, of a sort. The movie confronts the fact that, although his writing has always been admired by his peers and lauded by fans, his career never really took off. His labor in the vineyards of genre fiction, teleplays, and short stories won him many writers' awards, but not mainstream success.

The documentary recognizes the respect that is paid to his longevity and his highest writing achievements--especially some of his most important short stories from the 1960's, such as "Repent Harlequin, Said the Ticktockman" and "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream." But he still remains a marginal literary figure, it seems to me, a miniaturist in a culture that likes The Big Novel, the province of a dedicated few. His legacy, in addition to his thousands of stories and awards, may be more in the writers he has inspired who've gone on to produce Babylon5, the revamped Battlestar Galactica, and other TV series, or had more commercially successful writing careers themselves (such as Dan Simmons and Neil Gaiman, who pay tribute to HE).

As Gaiman says in the interviews, HE's greatest creative act has been this character called "Harlan Ellison." Partly sincere, partly schtick, with a freakish a memory for cultural and historical details, a fast-talking patter, and in-your-face energy--an electrical storm front on legs--driven by a hair-trigger temper and a determination to prove he's better and smarter than the bullies around him.

He says, in a poignant reflection, that being beaten up every day by bullies makes you an outsider. I think that, in many ways, large pieces of him are still hurting and still wants a happy childhood.

Another legacy of his childhood is that he sees the world as a big bully that shouldn't be let off the hook. In fact, the bully should be shamed, kicked where it hurts, and his nose should be rubbed in it. ("Revenge is a good thing," he says in a 1981 TV interview.) It powered his writing and his political and civil rights activism, his numerous lawsuits against studios and networks, and made him a fiercely loyal friend and ally. But it also meant he couldn't pick and choose his battles because everything--from a Writers Guild contract to the wrong brand of yogurt at the grocery store--demands a shouting confrontation, and if you cross him, then get ready for screaming phone calls.

While he never got to be one of the writers of great movies, as I think he dearly wished to be, it's hard to imagine him being happy on a movie set. To have the sort of control he wants, he'd have to do what his acolytes have done: become the producer and helm the entire enterprise. But that would mean he'd have to be the boss, and I'm guessing he'd not enjoy that role. He considers writing his holy chore, not producing or directing. Although I think he'd love meeting and kibitzing with the actors (his life's wealth could be said to be the devoted friendships he's gained of rich and famous people), he'd be driven to mania and a rusty chain saw by the thousand compromises and trade-offs that are a major movie production.

And also, he's always been an outsider; to be a producer/director would mean having to work inside the system, and he couldn't flatter and cajole the suits whose primary concerns are the budget and the schedule, not the story. HE knows his confrontations and lawsuits have  poisoned the studios and investors against him and made him virtually unemployable except by a few younger-generation writer/producers who see him as a mentor who inspired them when they were teenagers. He says he has accepted that condition--though it's hard to be sure. Regret and disappointment are other  major themes in his work.

The movie is a wonderful hagiography of Ellison (much better than the similar "The Mindscape of Alan Moore" in 2005) though it does assume that he's loved by his fellow writers, which isn't always the case. "The Last Dangerous Visions" issue is lightly touched on and then set aside. There has been some criticism of the movie because none of his enemies are interviewed--HE reportedly told the director, Erik Nelson, that he's known by his impressive enemies list and they should have a hearing in the documentary--but Nelson replied that HE was his own worst enemy.

I've grown up seeing HE's image in photos and television interviews, and it's poignant to see how he has aged. The geeky kid in his teens becomes the slim, handsome, dynamic ladies' man in the 1970s and 1980s, and now is a round matzoh ball who looks like Larry "Bud" Melman. The fire is still there, but the heart attacks, surgeries, chronic fatigue syndrome, and other maladies (none of which are described in the documentary) are catching up with him.

I came to HE's writing first via The Glass Teat, which a high school friend introduced me to. For the next 15 or so years, I became an Ellison fanatic, read all the stories, interviews, columns, etc. His last great book of stories, to my mind, is Strange Wine. He's written some remarkable stories afterward--"The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore" was selected for Best American Short Stories 1993--but I've not enjoyed them as much as I did his early work. His art has evolved from pulp genre fiction, to his own brand of fantasy, to, in the last 20 years, a Borgesian lyricism and vision, with non-linear stories that are collages, impressions, prose poems, descriptions of mood and interior states rather than character. That I can't connect to this vision--which eschews the traditional short story and plot props I'm accustomed to--I will take the blame for. As an artist, HE  continues to evolve and follow his muse where it leads him; not all of his old fans can do the same.

I was often struck by the fact that HE wrote two or three novels during his years as a pulp writer, but none afterward. I think this was a shame and a missed opportunity. It could be that his inclination was more for the pointed message, the singular effect, the impatient prophet--maybe he had too many things to say--a sprinter, rather than a marathoner. Of course, the screenplays he wrote (such as his famous unproduced screenplay for "I, Robot") also took as much time and measured energy to write as a novel. But I think movies called to him as an artist in a way novels couldn't.

The documentary features television interviews from his heyday in the 1970s and 1980s, and a small tour of his remarkable pop-culture museum of a house, which is stuffed to bursting with books, ephemera, and toys. It struck me as the magical treehouse his 8-year-old self would have wanted to live in, a very safe and cozy Xanadu (complete with secret passageways and pizza) that's retreat and recharging station and probably everything HE would have ever wanted.

It will be odd the day I wake up and hear that Harlan is not part of the landscape. I wonder whether he will see death as a bully or a friend.

Where to start. For the fiction,  The Essential Ellison is a good but large and baggy collection; Deathbird Stories is an earlier and more compact volume that contains many of his classics. Dangerous Visions is his groundbreaking SF anthology; I've not read it in decades but still remember some of its stories. His Dream Corridor comics are interesting curios, but not essential.

I daresay that his reputation, like Gore Vidals, may rest on his essays, which are remarkably supple yet all of a piece. It's in these essays (and the introductions to his stories) that the Harlan Ellison voice and "character" were forged, and I can recall more happy moments reading them than I do his fiction. Sleepless Nights in the Procrusteam Bed is the best nice-sized volume that shows his range. The Harlan Ellison Hornbook reprints his 1960s essays and they're all immediate and throat-grabbing. Harlan Ellison's Watching contains his fugitive movie criticism; The Glass Teat and The Other Glass Teat contain his classic dissections of network teevee in the 1960s--truly a snapshot of another era and full of opinions that are still scarily relevant.

In the 1980s, he started a fan club thing called The Harlan Ellison Record Collection, which made available recordings of him reading his work. (This was pre-Internet days, kids -- it was all done by mail and Pony Express.) Listening to him performing (not reading, performing) "Prince Myshkin, or Pass the Relish" and "Waiting for Kadak" are more fun than reading them. I also hugely enjoyed the 60-min interview of his "Loving Reminiscences of the Dying Gasp of the Pulp Era"; he clearly has a great nostalgia for that period of his young manhood, and there are times he can sure sound today like a cranky old man lamenting the good ol' days.

But it's the recordings of his public lectures that are the most entertaining. Of the On The Road series, my friend Scott says that the preferred order would be vol. 2, then 1, then 3.

This blog’s subtitle, “Oddments of High Unimportance,” comes from Arnold Bennett’s journal entry for 23-July-1907:

In the afternoon I seemed to do nothing but oddments of high unimportance.

I went on a Bennett binge last year. I suppose I first became aware of him through posts on the Zhurnalwiki site (now Zhurnaly.com), whose proprietor has several admiring pages devoted to Bennett’s writings on stoicism and what Bennett called (in one of his essay collections) “Mental Efficiency.” And in fact it’s in his essays of self-help (which ran originally as a series of newspaper articles) that I first made my acquaintance with him.

You can find more on Bennett and his work with just a little research or reading some of his works online, but here’s the potted history:

• Born 1867 in the Potteries district of England; primarily industrial, working-class, a family of genteel poverty and not always pleasant relations with his immediate family.
• Eventually becomes a journalist and through sheer hard work, remakes himself as a literary man who lived by his pen.
• Writes novels, short stories, plays, book reviews, literary journalism, “self-help” articles, and even headed England’s war propaganda dept in WWI, for a time.
• His most famous novel, and the one that made his name, was The Old Wives Tale.
• He wrote too much, really. The “peanut butter” school of energy management says that when you spread the peanut butter too thin, it loses its flavor. Likewise, the more he wrote, particularly fiction, the more thin and less interesting his material became. His style of novel-writing slowly antiqued under his fingers.
• As he grew more successful and rich (and despised by the younger literary elite for his success, money, and “old-fashioned” writing style) he grew more distanced from the material that really fed his fiction. Still, late in his life, he wrote Riceyman Steps, a study of a miserly bookstore owner, which surprised the literary world and rejuvenated him for a bit. The old dog still had a few tricks left in him. (I read “Riceyman” last year; some quite unbelievable moments, but good details here and there and a few mind-popping scenes, as when the miser has to decide whether to give a charity a few dollars in his hand, and look beneficent in front of his new wife, or hold on to those few dollars for dear life.)
• He was a director of the Savoy Hotel, whose chef named an omelette for him.
• Along the way, Bennett republished as books collections of articles on what he called his “pocket philosophies”: self-help, mainly, on staying calm in the storm, not working so hard against yourself, keeping an even keel, and so on. He was a Stoic and extolled Epictetus and Aurielius. These were mainly collections of articles he’d written and were read by many lower- and middle-class people who didn’t read or know about his fiction. (These articles were published as series in newspapers but under anonymous byline, I think.) Selections include How to Live on 24 Hours a Day and The Human Machine.
• If you riffle through Margaret Drabble’s biography of Bennett, you’ll soon see that his philosophies were harder to live by than to package and sell. He made a disastrous first marriage (she never granted him a divorce), and in his second relationship, left his companion and their daughter almost paupers.
• He was of that generation which the new literary lions, i.e., The Bloomsbury Group, despised. He and Virginia Woolf crossed swords in a series of book reviews, and Woolf dealt Bennett’s reputation a death blow in her essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.” Though they met later at parties and seemed to get on well (her thoughts of Bennett in her diary are touching), her essay lived on and stamped his literary reputation for decades.
• When he was dying of typhoid in 1931, Scotland Yard put straw on the streets outside his residence to dampen the sound of carts and vehicles. He was the last “great man” for whom this was done.
• There is no recording of Bennett, despite many other authors of his time giving recorded interviews. His severe, lifelong stutter no doubt inhibited him from making any recordings.
• Not long after his death, the Depression and changing literary fashion made Bennett forgotten within a matter of only a few years.
• His books (the major ones anyway) were still read for decades after, but he’s regarded nowadays as one of those bestselling authors of yesteryear whose books are unreadable today.

Some of his nonfiction essays on travel, theater, art, politics, etc., were collected in privately circulated books that he gave to friends at Christmas, and are by and large quite readable, I think. He tends to lead the reader by the hand quite a lot, but his prose is clear and he links his ideas so that anyone can understand them. This is probably why he sold so many of the pocket philosophies. I found his travel writings a little boring after a while and the essays on the current state of politics or theatrical management less than interesting. But when he got on to writing about literature or art, my interest revived and he was a most congenial companion.

In addition to all the other writing he did, he also kept a journal off and on (mostly on) from 1896 to his death. Local used bookshops in our area have several copies of this, and I’ve been dipping into it as my breakfast-table reading. I imagine it would make nice bedtime reading also, as it’s settlement pick-uppable and put-downnable. He also seems, from the writing, a genuinely nice and sensible man, with a generous nature, a tart sense of humor, disdainful of stupid and unthinking behavior, solid opinions but with the ability to change his mind, and it’s quite nice to spend a few minutes with him.

Here’s a quote from one of his most famous novels to go out with:

In front, on a little hill in the vast valley, was spread out the Indian-red architecture of Bursley - tall chimneys and rounded ovens, schools, the new scarlet market, the high spire of the evangelical church……the crimson chapels, and rows of little red houses with amber chimney pots, and the gold angel of the Town Hall topping the whole. The sedate reddish browns and reds of the composition all netted in flowing scarves of smoke, harmonised exquisitely with the chill blues of the chequered sky. Beauty was achieved, and none saw it.

Clayhanger (1910)

Addendum:

• A shortish bio of Bennett by his friend Frank Swinnerton is here, but with Bennett’s name misspelled (sigh).
• Patrick Donovan wrote an excellent, up-to-date 2022 biography, Arnold Bennett: Lost Icon. My post on Donovan’s book.. Donovan’s talk to The Arnold Bennett Society.
• And some choice Bennett quotes.
• Two minutes of Gyles Brandreth on Bennett, which must have been the introduction to a never-completed documentary, only 20 minutes of which were produced.
• A video production from the Arnold Bennett Society on Bennett’s relationship with the Potteries where he was born and bred. Though he was glad to be rid of the Potteries and the memories of his upbringing, his life there provided the material for his best novels.

This post updated on 2026-08-08.