Category Archives: love

“Imagining…is better than remembering something”

“Imagining…is better than remembering something”
POST CREATED BY JENNIFER KILEY
ILLUSTRATED by j. kiley
Created May 23rd 2013
Posted May 24th 2013

garp book cover

“Imagining something is better than remembering something.” — John Irving

garp and helen outside house predisastered

“Sometimes it is the only worthwhile product you can salvage from a day: what you make to eat.” — Garp, “The World According to Garp”

“Oh FUCK the longings and agonies of youth.” – T.S Garp

garp and helen on bleechers

Q: What is your thoughts on the future of books? asking John Irving “If you are careful,’ Garp wrote, ‘if you use good ingredients, and you don’t take any shortcuts, then you can usually cook something very good. Sometimes it is the only worthwhile product you can salvage from a day; what you make to eat. With writing, I find, you can have all the right ingredients, give plenty of time and care, and still get nothing. Also true of love. Cooking, therefore, can keep a person who tries hard, sane.”

“You know, everybody dies. My parents died. Your father died. Everybody dies. I’m going to die too. So will you. The thing is, to have a life before we die. It can be a real adventure having a life.” — John Irving; The World According To Garp

jenny with young garp

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP — FILM TRAILER

glenn close as jenny fields in “the world according to garp”

“A part of adolescence is feeling that there’s no one else around who’s enough like yourself to understand you.” — T.S. Garp, The World According to Garp

dean of garp's school has head injury. jenny is telling him about how she conceived garp. he is shocked. 642x366

dean of garp’s school has head injury. jenny is telling him about how she conceived garp. he is shocked. his verbal response, being in a state of shock, “you raped a dying man!” now you will have to read the book or see film to find out why this is so hysterically funny.

Between Helen and Garp, the Under Toad became their code phrase for anxiety. Long after the monster was clarified for Walt (‘Undertow, dummy, not Under Toad!’ Duncan had howled), Garp and Helen evoked the beast as a way of referring to their own sense of danger. When the traffic was heavy, when the road was icy – when depression had moved in overnight – they said to each other, ‘The Under Toad is strong today’.

‘Remember’, Duncan asked on the plane, ‘how Walt asked if it was green or brown?’

Both Garp and Duncan laughed. But it was neither green nor brown, Garp thought. It was me. It was Helen. It was the color of bad weather. It was the size of an automobile.” — John Irving in The World According to Garp

helen at gym watching wrestling practice

John Irving – 2009 National Book Festival The World According To Garp
The Hotel New Hampshire
The Cider House Rules
A Prayer From Owen Meanie
In Own Person
Last Night In Twisted River“You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.” — John Irving, The World According to Garp

The amazing John Lithgow as Roberta Muldoon in “The World According to Garp,” a film based on John Irving’s novel of the same name. The 1982 movie includes John Lithgow as a transsexual ex-football player, Robin Williams as the writer T. S. Garp, and Glenn Close as Garp’s mother. Lithgow’s heartfelt performance won him an Academy Award nomination! The trailer from YouTube.

garp with roberta muldoon former football player on nfl now jenny’s bodyguard

“Imagining something is better than remembering something.” — John Irving, The World According to Garp

“Perhaps in every writer’s life there needs to be that moment when some other writer is attacked as unworthy of the job.” — John Irving, The World According to Garp

“Don Whitcomb would remember that Garp told him what the act of starting a novel felt like. ‘It’s like trying to make the dead come alive,’ he said. ‘No, no, that’s not right – it’s more like trying to keep everyone alive, forever. Even the ones who must die in the end. They’re the most important to keep alive.’ Finally, Garp said it in a way that seemed to please him. ‘A novelist is a doctor who sees only terminal cases,’ Garp said.” — John Irving, The World According to Garp

John Irving At Home Excerpt From: The World According To Garp:

Before we go to the story of the under toad I would like to quote one of my favorite lines from the book and the film. Garp says it to his son, Duncan, who is inside a baby carriage at the time. “Don’t be a baby Duncan, say ‘Da-Da.’ This line makes me laugh every time I hear it. Now to the Under Toad.

The Under Toad Is Strong Today

It was Walt’s fourth summer at Dog’s Head Harbor, Duncan remembered, when Garp and Helen and Duncan observed Walt watching the sea. He stood ankle-deep in the foam from the surf and peered into the waves, without taking a step, for the longest time. The family went down to the water’s edge to have a word with him.

“What are you doing, Walt?” Helen asked.

“What are you looking for, dummy?” Duncan asked him.

“I’m trying to see the Under Toad,” Walt said.

“The what?” said Garp.

“The Under Toad,” Walt said. ” I’m trying to see it. How big is it?”

And Garp and Helen and Duncan held their breath; they realized that all these years Walt had been dreading a giant toad, lurking offshore, waiting to suck him under and drag him out to sea. The terrible Under Toad.

Garp tried to imagine it with him. Would it ever surface? Did it ever float? Or was it always down under, slimy and bloated and ever-watchful for ankles its coated tongue could snare? The vile Under Toad.

Between Helen and Garp, the Under Toad became their code phrase for anxiety. Long after the monster was clarified for Walt ( “Undertow, dummy, not Under Toad!” Duncan had howled), Garp and Helen evoked the beast as a way of referring to their own sense of danger. When the traffic was heavy, when the road was icy – when depression had moved in overnight – they said to each other, “The Under Toad is strong today.”

“Remember,” Duncan asked on the plane, “how Walt asked if it was green or brown?”

Both Garp and Duncan laughed. But it was neither green nor brown, Garp thought. It was me. It was Helen. It was the color of bad weather. It was the size of an automobile.

(Excerpt from The World According to Garp by John Irving)

garp and helen in bed pre-cheating maybe

“‘Death, it seems,’ Garp wrote, ‘does not like to wait until we are prepared for it. Death is indulgent and enjoys, when it can, a flair for the dramatic.’” — John Irving; The World According to Garp (1978)

The World According to Garp by John Irving

The World According to Garp is a comic and compassionate coming-of-age novel that established John Irving as one of the most imaginative writers of his generation. A worldwide bestseller since its publication in 1978, Irving’s classic is filled with stories inside stories about the life and times of T. S. Garp, novelist and bastard son of Jenny Fields—a feminist leader ahead of her time. Beyond that, The World According to Garp virtually defies synopsis.

John IRVING on InnerVIEWS with Ernie Manouse
“Another thing I noticed while rereading was how clear Irving’s writing is, sentence by sentence. Critics don’t give Irving much credit for his prose style, maybe because his zany plots and characters overshadow it. (Or maybe it’s his enthusiastic use of italics and exclamation points.) But I was impressed by how gracefully he writes, even when he’s being “unsubtle.” There is a transparency to his exposition that is not easy to achieve, but Irving does nothing to draw attention to his effort. In contemporary fiction, this lack of preciousness is rare. Irving’s style has only become simpler over the years. It’s almost as if he decided to keep his prose straightforward so that his plotting could become more elaborate.” — Hannah Gersen, ”Collision Courses and Castration Anxiety: Rereading John Irving.”

helen in black could be when she is telling student she has to end their affair

roberta hugging jenny

garp reading mom’s jenny fields book

“Jenny had read enough stories to know that hers didn’t sound like the good stories in her memory. She wondered what could be wrong, and she frequently sent Garp on errands to the few bookstores that sold books in English. She wanted to look more closely at how books began; she had quickly produced over three hundred typed pages, yet she felt that her book never really started.” — John Irving, The World According to Garp

The World According to Garp (John Irving 1978)

This is the life and times of T. S. Garp, the bastard son of Jenny Fields—a feminist leader ahead of her times. This is the life and death of a famous mother and her almost-famous son; theirs is a world of sexual extremes—even of sexual assassinations. It is a novel rich with “lunacy and sorrow”; yet the dark, violent events of the story do not undermine a comedy both ribald and robust. In more than thirty languages, in more than forty countries—with more than ten million copies in print—this novel provides almost cheerful, even hilarious evidence of its famous last line: “In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.”

garp in drag at his mom’s memorial service. no men allowed.

“A few windows are open, a few refrigerators are humming. There is the faint, trapped warble from some televisions tuned in to The Late Show, and the blue-gray glow from the picture tubes throbs from a few of the houses. To Garp this glow looks like cancer, insidious and numbing, putting his world to sleep. Maybe television causes cancer, Garp thinks; but his real irritation is a writer’s irritation: he knows that wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn’t reading.” — John Irving, The World According to Garp

garp with roberta at jenny’s memorial

“Imagining something better than remembering something.” — John Irving, The World According to Garp

“He wrote once that a novel was ‘only a place for storage – of all the meaningful things that a novelist isn’t able to use in his life.’” — John Irving, The World According to Garp

garp in bed depressed

John Irving talks sex, social misfits, and writing

Why do you keep returning to the politics of sexual identity in your work?

When I finished “The World According to Garp” in 1978, I was naïve enough to think that I will never write about this subject again; that our intolerance of our own sexual differences will surely go away, and that Garp will be seen someday as a relic of the post-sexual-liberation days, when men and women still literally were killing one another. In that book, a man is killed by a woman who hates men. His mother is murdered by a man who hates women. It’s a kind of dual sexual-assassination story, a cynical way of saying: well you think there was a sexual revolution, how come men and women hate each other?

But there isn’t anything that extreme in your latest novel.

True, but it’s still the same damn subject. It’s still about our obstinate intolerance to sexual differences. It explores our lingering suspicion, distrust, dislike, and non-acceptance of our sexual identities.JOHN IRVING’S novel, “In One Person”, is narrated by Billy Abbot, a bisexual author, who recalls coming of age in a small New England town in the 1950s. As a thoughtful, tormented teenager, Billy takes a fancy to various people, such as his stepfather, his friend’s mother, the captain of the school wrestling team, and the local librarian, Miss Frost (who reveals to Billy an important secret about her own identity). The mood of the latter half of the book darkens when Billy moves to New York in the 1980s and witnesses the tragic fallout of the AIDS epidemic.

Mr Irving published his debut novel “Setting Free the Bears” in 1968. But it was “The World According to Garp”, his fourth book, which made him an internationally renowned bestselling author. Four of his books have been adapted for the screen, including “The Cider House Rules”, for which Mr Irving won an Academy Award for the adapted screenplay in 2000In a conversation with The Economist, Mr Irving talks about discovering his own sexual identity as a teenager, how Ronald Reagan ignored the AIDS epidemic, and why he always champions the outsider in his novels.

What interested you in giving a voice to a bisexual male in this novel?

I think there is often a “what if” proposition that gets me thinking about all my novels. I find my way into a lot of characters by thinking ‘what would that be like?’ The character of the sexual misfit—someone out of step with what society’s expectations of sexual relationships are—is very familiar to me.

Did you ever think you might be bisexual?

Growing up in the ’50s and ’60s, I spent more time imagining sex than actually having it. There was a period in that time where I was frightened of half of my sexual fantasises. I was attracted to my friend’s mothers, and I did have an occasional crush on a boy in the wrestling team. [But] I liked girls in my life, and it proceeded in a normal, unchallenged course.

Why do you keep returning to the politics of sexual identity in your work?

But there isn’t anything that extreme in your latest novel.

Do you represent outsiders and social misfits because mainstream culture fails to? Or do they simply have more nuances as characters?

Both. It’s not very interesting to establish sympathy for people who on the surface are instantly sympathetic. I guess I’m always attracted to people who, if their lives were headlines in a newspaper, you might not be very sympathetic about them.

Did having an absent father growing up help you to fictionalise him in your novels?

That’s a great way to put it. I use to tease my mother when I decided that I wanted to be a writer, and say: well if you don’t tell me things about who my dad was, I’m going to just make things up. I wouldn’t say this made me a writer. But it was constructive as a teenager to be left to my imagination about who this guy was.

What influence did Dickens have on you?

“Great Expectations” was an important novel in my adolescence. It was very much one of those emblematic novels that made me wish I could write like that. It helped that my models as a writer were dead over a hundred years before I began to write. They were safe people to imitate. There was no way I could sound like Dickens or Hardy if I tried.

What writers from New England influenced your work?

Melville made a huge impact on me. Reading him encouraged me to write about what I most feared, or what I hope never happens to me or anyone I love. I think in every novel of mine there is cloud which you, the reader, knows is coming. Well that comes from Melville.

“In One Person” describes the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. What’s your opinion of how the Reagan administration responded to the crises?

For seven out of eight years of his presidency, Regan did not utter the name of the disease. What is even more incriminating is that it’s hard to imagine that we ever had a president—or will ever have again—who personally knew as many gay guys as he did. He was in the movie business for Christ’s sake. The attitude was: it’s only drug addicts and gay guys who are getting this disease. That wasn’t just said among heartless homophobes, it was actually said by people who were in Reagan’s administration, while Reagan maintained a silence.

Did you have many friends who died of AIDS?

Yes. I was living in New York in the 80s, and as a straight guy I had many gay friends, but I also had friends that I subsequently found out were gay, because they were dying. Similarly, parents found out about their children being gay, because they were dying from AIDS.

When you finished writing “The Cider House Rules” in 1985, were you hopeful that attitudes to abortion rights in the United States would change?

No. I thought this is going to get worse. That minority of people who hate abortion rights, they will always hate it. It’s no surprise that most people in the United States who oppose abortion rights also oppose gay rights too. It’s coming from an element of sexual disapproval. Their attitude is, I don’t like this, therefore it shouldn’t be allowed. It’s what I call in America, the old prohibition instinct: you don’t like drinking, nobody should do it, you don’t like abortion, no one should have one.

What do you rate as the most technically important aspect to your novels?

I think my approach with writing toward a pre-existing ending, knowing what a story is before I begin the first chapter.

Are you referring to your method of writing the last line of the novel first?

Sometimes it can be the last line, maybe the last few paragraphs, or even the last couple of pages. I write the last line, and then I write the line before that. I find myself writing backwards for a while, until I have a solid sense of how that ending sounds and feels. You have to know what your voice sounds like at the end of the story, because it tells you how to sound when you begin.

This is the life and times of T. S. Garp, the bastard son of Jenny Fields, a feminist leader ahead of her time. This is the life and death of a famous mother and her almost-famous son; theirs is a world of sexual extremes, even of sexual assassinations. It is a novel rich with lunacy and sorrow, yet the dark, violent events of the story do not undermine a comedy both ribald and robust. In more than thirty languages, in more than forty countries–with more than ten million copies in print–this novel provides almost cheerful, even hilarious evidence of its famous last line: “In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.”

garp quote: “we are all terminal cases” over jenny fields nurse’s uniform

How I’d sell The World According to Garp in a few sentences

It is a gripping book that connects you to every character in the story. In the end, it manages to encompass and successfully interweave themes that are central to the politics and societal issues of both the old and modern worlds and it explores paradigms of feminism and sexual roles in a concentrated manner.

Read it.

Be advised, though. This book is not for those who are prone to lightheartedness at the mention of bodily limbs gone awry/gone, period.

For those of you who would rather watch a story play out on the big screen, there’s a 1982 film based off the book starring Robin Williams as T.S. Garp, the namesake of the novel, and Glenn Close as his mother, Jenny Fields.

“They were involved in that awkward procedure of getting to unknow each other.” — John Irving

“Life is an X-rated soap opera.” — John Irving, The World According to Garp

QUOTATIONS by JOHN IRVING:

“…but writers, Garp knew, were just observers – good and ruthless imitators of human behavior” — John Irving from The World According to Garp. (I can’t stress how important this quotation is to me. J.I.)

garp says: i’ll stay up and think weird thoughts for awhile

“Not only were certain types of arrogance tolerated by the society of the Steering School, certain kinds were encouraged; but acceptable arrogance was a matter of taste and style. What you were arrogant about had to appear worthy- of higher purpose- and the manner in which you were arrogant was supposed to be charming.” — John Irving, The World According To Garp u

“Crazy people made him crazy. It was as if he personally resented them giving into madness – in part, because he so frequently labored to behave sanely. When some people gave up the labor of sanity, or failed at it, Garp suspected them of not trying hard enough. ” — John Irving

“I feel like Irving has a sense of reality that is so spot on, despite the fact that his subject matter feels almost fantastical. How he manages to meld these opposing qualities in such an imaginative way is just beyond my understanding, but man does it make for good reading.”– Unknown

“She felt if she ever had children she would love them no less when they were twenty than when they were two; they might need you more at twenty, she thought. What do you really need when you’re two? In the hospital, the babies were the easiest patients. The older they got, the more they needed; and the less anyone wanted or loved them.” — John Irving (The World According to Garp)

“If you don’t feel that you are possibly on the edge of humiliating yourself, of losing control of the whole thing, then probably what you are doing isn’t very vital” -John Irving

“In this dirty minded world you are either somebody’s wife or somebody’s whore—or fast on your way to becoming one or the other. I wanted a job and I wanted to live alone. That made me a sexual suspect. Then I wanted a baby, but I didn’t want to have to share my body or my life to have one. That made me a sexual suspect too.” — John Irving, The World According to Garp

“There are always suicides among people who are unable to say what they mean.” — John Irving

“As for Jenny, she felt that women—just like men—should at least be able to make conscious decisions about the course of their lives; if that made her a feminist, she said, then she guessed she was one.” — Jenny Fields (The World According To Garp)

“Garp has to die; it’s what the book is about, a double assassination of a mother and her son. More to the point: a woman who is killed by a woman-hating man and a man who is killed by a woman who hates men.” — John Irving, on the end of The World According to Garp.

“It is only the vividness of memory that keeps the dead alive forever; a writer’s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as our personal memories.” — John Irving (The World According to Garp)

“I may have written this novel twenty years ago, but I go back there almost every day—back to those fears. Even the smallest detail of The World According to Garp is an expression of fear; even the curious pockmark on the face of the Viennese prostitute—it is also an expression of that most terrible fear. “The silvery gouge on her forehead was nearly as big as her mouth; her pockmark looked to Garp like a small, open grave.” A child’s grave …

When Garp was published, people who’d lost children wrote to me. “I lost one, too,” they told me. I confessed to them that I hadn’t lost any children. I’m just a father with a good imagination. In my imagination, I lose my children every day. — John Irving

“Garp would say that the autobiographical basis – if there even was one – was the least interesting level on which to read a novel. He would always say that the art of fiction was the act of imagining truly – was, like any art, a process of selection.”– Unknown

“He wrote Helen that a young writer needs desperately to live with someone and he had decided that he wanted to live with her; even marry her, he offered, because sex was simply necessary but it took too much of one’s time if one had to be constantly planning how one was going to get it. Therefore, Garp reasoned, it is better to live with it!
Helen revised several letters before she finally sent him one that said that he could, so to speak, go stick it in his ear. Did he think she was going through college so rigorously so that she could provide him with sex that was not even necessary to plan?” — from Garp — John Irving

“Don’t you want to know how I die?” Garp asked them.
They didn’t say anything.
“I kill myself,” Garp said, pleasantly. “In order to become fully established that seems almost necessary. I mean it, really,” Garp said. “In the present fashion, you’ll agree this is one way of recognizing a writer’s seriousness? Since the art of the writing doesn’t always make the writer’s seriousness apparent, it’s something necessary to reveal the depth of one’s personal anguish by other means. Killing yourself seems to mean that you were serious after all. It’s true,” Garp said, but his sarcasm was unpleasant and Helen sighed; John Wolf stretched again. “And thereafter,” Garp said, “much seriousness is suddenly revealed in the work—where it had escaped notice before.” — From “The World According to Garp,” by John Irving

‎”Your memory is a monster; you forget – it doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you – and summons them to your recall with will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!” — John Irving – The World According To Garp

“Human sexuality makes farcical our most serious intentions.” — Garp in The World According to Garp by John Irving

“It is an important distinction to note that she looked not only as if she had taken good care of herself, but that she had good reason to have done so … She looked to be in such total possession of her life that only the most confident men could continue to look at her if she looked back at them. Even in bus stations, she was a woman who was stared at only until she looked back.” — The World According To Garp

“a manner betraying both carelessness and intense perfection” — Unknown

Nora Ephron’s Lessons About Love: Today She Would Be 72

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Nora Ephron’s Lessons About Love:
Things The Legendary Writer And Director Taught Us
Huffington Post Matthew Jacob
Posted May 19th 2013
Post Created by Jk the secret keeper
Posted May 20th 2013

HAPPY BIRTHDAY 72 NORA EPHRON MAY 19th 2013
Today 72 Years Old if she hadn’t died from Leukemia

Sleepless In Seattle Trailer
Had she not died of leukemia last summer, Nora Ephron would have turned 72 today. The universally loved writer, director, producer and HuffPost contributing editor spent nearly 30 years in the thick of the movie industry, becoming synonymous with modern romantic comedy thanks to quirky and immensely successful movies like “When Harry Met Sally…,” “Sleepless in Seattle” and “You’ve Got Mail.”

Along the way, all disciples of the Ephron bible of love learned a thing or two about modern-day relationships, both romantic and platonic. Ephron advocates hang on to the many saccharine observations about life that poured out of the mouth of Meg Ryan — who starred in four of the 13 movies Ephron directed — or any of the other A-list players who frequented Ephron’s filmography (Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep, Rita Wilson, Billy Crystal, Steve Martin).

Sleepless In Seattle— Finally Meeting
Nearly a year after her passing, Hollywood and the literary community are still commemorating Ephron’s life. A spate of tributes celebrating the “Julie & Julia” scribe’s life have emerged from the likes of Lena Dunham, Tom Hanks, Mike Nichols and her own son Jacob Bernstein, who recounted her final hours in a touching New York Times Magazine piece.

But amid all the kind words and continued accolades (we haven’t forgotten the three Oscar nominations she received for Best Original Screenplay), what’s most remembered about Ephron are the lessons she bestowed upon us through her characters. With that, we celebrate her 72nd birthday with what we learned about love thanks to the one and only Nora Ephron.

Fake Orgasm Scene in “When Harry Met Sally”
QUOTATIONS: NORA EPHRON

“I love that you get cold when it’s 71 degrees out. I love that it takes you an hour and a half to order a sandwich. I love that you get a little crinkle above your nose when you’re looking at me like I’m nuts. I love that after I spend the day with you, I can still smell your perfume on my clothes. And I love that you are the last person I want to talk to before I go to sleep at night. And it’s not because I’m lonely, and it’s not because it’s New Year’s Eve. I came here tonight because when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.”
Harry Burns (Billy Crystal) in “When Harry Met Sally…”

“Destiny is something we’ve invented because we can’t stand the fact that everything that happens is accidental.”
Annie Reed (Meg Ryan) in “Sleepless in Seattle”

“When you’re attracted to someone, it just means that your subconscious is attracted to their subconscious, subconsciously. So what we think of as fate is just two neuroses knowing that they are a perfect match.”
Dennis Reed (David Hyde Pierce) in “Sleepless in Seattle”

“You gotta learn to laugh — it’s the way to true love.” Michael (John Travolta) in “Michael”

“I’ll have what she is having.” — “When Harry Met Sally”

The Sessions

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The Sessions
Film Review
Written By Jennifer Kiley
Illustrated by j. kiley
Created May 19th 2013
Posted May 19th 2013

poster for the film 'the sessions' 636x938

poster for the film ‘the sessions’ leading roles: helen hunt – william h. macy – john hawkes

This all started with the Oscar-winning film, “Breathing Lessons,” about the life of Mark O’Brien. He contracted polio in childhood and lived life in an Iron Lung which enabled him to breath. His story in this film inspired the new movie “The Sessions,” starring William H. Macy, Helen Hunt, and John Hawkes. Mark O’Brien felt: “The two mythologies about disabled people break down to one: we can’t do anything, or two: we can do everything. But the truth is, we’re just human.” O’Brien was a frequently published journalist and poet, and he contributed to National Public Radio. He fought against illness, bureaucracy and society’s conflicting perceptions of disability for his right to lead an independent life.

william h. macy as father brendan – john hawkes as mark o’brien confessing

The film, “The Sessions” is a powerful and emotional film. You’re rooting for him as he moves through the issues of his life that challenge every moment. But it shows that he is human and has the same needs and wants that most humans want from their life. It breaks down your emotions and all the way through shows an understanding and honest and intimate portrayal of a complex, intelligent, beautiful and interesting person, who happens to be disabled.

There is a poem, that Mark O’Brien wrote, that is used in the film that speaks to the soul. The words reflect his inner feelings that will melt your heart. In the poem they used , it is so descriptive of what he feels inside, and how he would express those feelings. Throughout the film, he has long, intense conversations with a new priest to his parish and within the film it is made obvious his extremely strong belief in God.

william h. macy in “the sessions”

Which at times made him question every decision he would make in order to satisfy his goals in life. One in particular, he has been feeling the strongest need to accomplish. The same kind of goal most humans want to achieve and satisfy. That goal has to do with being loved and in the expression of that love, to be able to be intimate with another human being. The Sessions is a provocative film which helps to define life. Its questions and its meaning.

The Sessions Movie CLIP – Poem (2012) – Helen Hunt Movie HD

love poem by mark o’brien – poster by j. kiley © jennifer kiley 2013

The biggest question on Mark’s mind is whether he will live his entire life never knowing the sexual intimacy with another person. In his case, the love and sexual satisfaction of sharing a complete sexual experience with a women. This is where the film takes on the most caring elements ever. The performances of Helen Hunt and John Hawkes are so believable and intimate. You weren’t sure what to root for. Helen’s role is that of playing a sexual surrogate. She has a family. It is an endearing profession that she has chosen. Quite confounding and compassionate maintaining a personal life and a professional life where it is inhuman not to have natural human feelings surface, both physical and emotional, as well as spiritual.

If you want to see a film, where the characters are real, and you feel their reality as they are living it out on the screen, this is the film for you. You need to check any moralistic judgement at the door. That wasn’t a problem for me. I felt what was happening was essential, human, caring, loving and a necessary sharing for all those directly involved.

THE SESSIONS Trailer 2012 Movie – Official [HD]I don’t want to give any of the film away but it is brilliant, intimate, humourous, makes you want to cry and smile all at once. You really aren’t sure who or what you should be encouraging. You feel their feelings so tenderly. I have now seen this film, The Sessions, and took from it a feeling that one can be healed. I am not talking about his polio, but his inner being. I will not say what happens but I will recommend this film. As Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel use to say: “Two Thumbs Up.” Get this film. Buy It. Rent It. Stream It. Watch It On Demand. If you haven’t seen it in a theatre or if you have, see it again. Sometime in the near future it will become part of our collection. It is a film that has great value in seeing it more than once.

I will add it teaches you something about your own body, that if you didn’t already know, it deserves to be honoured and loved as part of your whole self. How to reach that union is something that I think many of us would like to do that have not really experienced that complete connection. I’m not saying that in the case of this film, what happens, but it does teach as well as gives the viewer a magnificent experience of looking inward. It is delightful that you get to share the joys, discussions, fears, anxieties, hopes, rejection, being ignored, having no power, being human and frail and tough and fighting to survive every minute of your life.

helen hunt as cheryl a sexual surrogate in bed with mark in ‘the sessions’

Whether we need to be in an Iron Lung most of our lives or have lived a life that has been traumatized through other means or to have lived whatever life you have lived, this film will show you the way to what being equal is all about and that having a disability does not take away your being human and having human needs, wants, desires, beliefs, dreams, imagination, satisfaction, creativity and so much more. We are in this all together. We need to support one another. If one thing, Mark O’Brien, may have been put in an Iron Lung when he was a child, but he kept on living as if that Iron Lung was just something he had to accept. His life continued with all a humans’ hopes and dreams.

After watching this film, I would say he attained so much more than most people would expect. If for just sheer curiosity, to see a film that has the issue of sex right out there on the table, that alone should peek your cat like instinctual drive, this film is AMAZING. It is more than it could be and nothing less than it should be.

helen hunt and john hawkes in ‘the sessions’

I intend to see it again some time soon. I do need to still make it through the rest of the Oscar/BAFTA nominated films. I saw “Hitchcock.” The one surrounding the making of the film “PSYCHO,” that kept people out of the shower for quite some time. I was way too young when I first saw it at the neighbor’s house across the street. The girl who lived there walked me to the middle of the street. We lived in a cul de sac, so there wasn’t any traffic.

We stood there, afraid to move from that spot. Until we decided we would count to three and go to our own houses. One. Two. Three. We tore to the kitchen doors of our houses, screaming the entire way and rushed into our houses slamming the doors behind us. Both having been too young and terrified to watch such a film as PSYCHO, alone, in the dark, watching bloody murders being committed. I still cannot watch that damned shower scene or pretty much most of the rest of the film after Janet Leigh arrives at the Bates Motel.

Helen Mirren played the role of Alfred Hitchcock’s wife opposite, the unidentifiable, Anthony Hopkins. She deserved the Oscar and I do believe she won the BAFTA, will have to check. But she played the second in command, who without her I firmly believe that Hitchcock’s genius would not have been held so firmly. She deserved credit in the film CREDITS but now everyone knows who have seen HITCHCOCK and THE GIRL. “The Girl” was made for HBO. The very British, Sienna Miller played Tippi Hedren, the actress who starred in Hitchcock’s “The Birds” and “Marnie.” Read my post on Tippi Hedren to find out more on that subject and the post, “Alfred Hitchcock: Man or Beast.” Do feel free to use the search box to locate anything related to all and anything located on “the secret keeper.”

the elements of power

So, sorry, got a bit distracted. It made me realize I need to spend more time reviewing films on “the secret keeper.”

Anyway, back on track, do see THE SESSIONS. You will never know what you have missed if you do not. And you would have missed TOO MUCH. 5 * * * * * Review by Jennifer Kiley with the Help of Jk the secret keeper

Maksim Mrvica – Tonci Huljic: Passionata QUOTATIONS on INTIMACY/TOUCHING/FEELINGS:

“Fall off the edge of the earth and crash into euphoria.” — Unknown

“I mean you can leave it at love and attraction, or can you can make it complicated, like most people do” — “The Sessions”

“The meaning of love. Love is a journey.” — “The Sessions”

“I never expected it. Nor did she. But that’s often how things turn out” — “The Sessions”

“Let me touch you with my words
For my hands lie limp as empty gloves
Let my words stroke your hair
Slide down your back and tickle your belly
For my hands, light and free-flying as bricks
Ignore my wishes and stubbornly refuse to carry out my quietest desires.
Let my words enter your mind, bearing torches
Admit them willingly into your being
So they may caress you gently within.”
— “The Sessions” by Mark O’Brien

“Sex makes everything complicated. As much as people want to believe sex can be carefree and casual, someone always gets attached. It’s inevitable.” — unknown

Once In Your Life

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Once In Your Life
Collage Created by j. kiley
Created May 17th 2013
Posted May 17th 2013
Nesta Robert “Bob” Marley, OM (6 February 1945 – 11 May 1981) was a Jamaican singer-songwriter and musician best known for his Reggae records. He was the rhythm guitarist and lead singer for the ska, rocksteady and reggae bands The Wailers (1963-1974) and Bob Marley & The Wailers (1974–1981). Marley remains the most widely known and the best-selling performer of reggae music, having sold more than 75 million albums worldwide. He is also credited with helping spread both Jamaican music and the Rastafari movement to a worldwide audience. He was a poet, philosopher, prophet, Rastafarian, vegetarian, an advocate of love and peace. He had eleven children. Because of his religious beliefs when it was discovered he had a melanoma in his toe he refused for it to be amputated and continued on with his tours and music. Eventually, the cancer was catching up with him and he tried natural treatments which were unsuccessful and on the way home from Germany to Jamaica, they made a stop over in Florida to seek emergency medical treatment. He died at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Miami (now University of Miami Hospital) on the morning of 11 May 1981, at the age of 36. The spread of melanoma to his lungs and brain caused his death. His final words to his son Ziggy were “Money can’t buy life”. Marley received a state funeral in Jamaica on 21 May 1981, which combined elements of Ethiopian Orthodoxy and Rastafari tradition. He was buried in a chapel near his birthplace with his red Gibson Les Paul or a Fender Stratocaster. His music is so alive as though his spirit were possessing it still today.

only once in your life by j. kiley (c) jennifer kiley

The LEGEND of Bob Marley Only once in your life, I truly believe, you find someone who can
completely turn your world around. You tell them things that you’ve
never shared with another soul and they absorb everything you say
and actually want to hear more. You share hopes for the future,
dreams that will never come true, goals that were never achieved
and the many disappointments life has thrown at you. When some-
thing wonderful happens, you can’t wait to tell them about it, know-
ing they will share in your excitement. They are not embarrassed to
cry with you when you are hurting or laugh with you when you make
a fool of yourself. Never do they hurt your feelings or make you feel
like you are not good enough, but rather they build you up and show
you the things about yourself that make you special and even beautiful.
There is never any pressure, jealousy or competition but only a quiet
calmness when they are around. You can be yourself and not worry
about what they will think of you because they love you for who you
are. The things that seem insignificant to most people such as a note,
song or walk become invaluable treasures kept safe in your heart to
cherish forever. Memories of your childhood come back and are so
clear and vivid it’s like being young again. Colours seem brighter and
more brilliant. Laughter seems part of daily life where before it was
infrequent or didn’t exist at all. A phone call or two during the day
helps to get you through a long day’s work and always brings a smile
to your face. In their presence, there’s no need for continuous conver-
sation, but you find you’re quite content in just having them nearby.
Things that never interested you before become fascinating because
you know they are important to this person who is so special to you.
You think of this person on every occasion and in everything you do.
Simple things bring them to mind like a pale blue sky, gentle wind or
even a storm cloud on the horizon. You open your heart knowing that
there’s a chance it may be broken one day and in opening your heart,
you experience a love and joy that you never dreamed possible. You
find that being vulnerable is the only way to allow your heart to feel
true pleasure that’s so real it scares you. You find strength in knowing
you have a true friend and possibly a soul mate who will remain loyal
to the end. Life seems completely different, exciting and worthwhile.
Your only hope and security is in knowing that they are a part of your
life. LOVE IS OUR DESTINY Bob Marley

This is a tribute to the legendary prophet, poet, philosopher, mystic
and Rastafari Nesta Robert Marley. He was one of our divine
messengers. Rest in Peace…The LEGEND of Bob Marley
QUOTATIONS on LOVE:

“I’m selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can’t handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best.” ― Marilyn Monroe

“You know you’re in love when you can’t fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.”
― Dr. Seuss

“A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you” — Elbert Hubbard

“we accept the love we think we deserve.” ― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“Only once in your life, I truly believe, you find someone who can completely turn your world around. You tell them things that you’ve never shared with another soul and they absorb everything you say and actually want to hear more. You share hopes for the future, dreams that will never come true, goals that were never achieved and the many disappointments life has thrown at you. When something wonderful happens, you can’t wait to tell them about it, knowing they will share in your excitement. They are not embarrassed to cry with you when you are hurting or laugh with you when you make a fool of yourself. Never do they hurt your feelings or make you feel like you are not good enough, but rather they build you up and show you the things about yourself that make you special and even beautiful.” — Bob Marley

“Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.” ― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

“Love is like the wind, you can’t see it but you can feel it.” ― Nicholas Sparks, A Walk to Remember

Light and Cloud-Shadows

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Light and Cloud-Shadows
“In Truth There Is Love”
A Special Message
by Jennifer Kiley
from: Letters To A Young Poet
Excerpt: from Letter #8
Rainer Maria Rilke
Post Created by jk the secret keeper
Created 05.15/16.13
Posted May 16th 2013

in truth there is love by amhein, elvira

light and cloud-shadows by j. kiley

daumesnil lake paris france

Philip Wesley — Light and Shadow
QUOTATIONS on GROWTH:

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” ― Anaïs Nin

“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.” ― Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky

“We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.”
― Anaïs Nin

“Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but – I hope – into a better shape.” ― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“The only way that we can live, is if we grow. The only way that we can grow is if we change. The only way that we can change is if we learn. The only way we can learn is if we are exposed. And the only way that we can become exposed is if we throw ourselves out into the open. Do it. Throw yourself.”
― C. JoyBell C.

“Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?” ― John Keats, Letters of John Keats

“Often, it’s not about becoming a new person, but becoming the person you were meant to be, and already are, but don’t know how to be.”
― Heath L. Buckmaster, Box of Hair: A Fairy Tale

“Pain is a pesky part of being human, I’ve learned it feels like a stab wound to the heart, something I wish we could all do without, in our lives here. Pain is a sudden hurt that can’t be escaped. But then I have also learned that because of pain, I can feel the beauty, tenderness, and freedom of healing. Pain feels like a fast stab wound to the heart. But then healing feels like the wind against your face when you are spreading your wings and flying through the air! We may not have wings growing out of our backs, but healing is the closest thing that will give us that wind against our faces.” ― C. JoyBell C.

The Great Gatsby

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The Great Gatsby
Film Review
Character Analysis
Film Trailer
Post Created by j.kiley
Posted May 10th 2013
Passages
“When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more of the riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction–Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life…This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of “creative temperament”–it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such that I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No–Gatsby turned out all right in the end; it was what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elation’s of men” (Fitzgerald 6-7).

This passage, located in the first chapter, is a reflection of Nick’s feelings after the summer of 1922. The unique organization of the book placed this reflection before the actual events, so that it serves to foreshadow what will come. After his summer of parties, decadence and intrigue Nick is disgusted by the modern culture and society. After only one summer, he is prepared to return to the comfort of routine and familiarity that he associates with his home. The only person who has not diminished in his sight is Jay Gatsby, because, in spite of Gatsby’s lavish lifestyle, there was a vitality and enthusiasm about him that impressed Nick. This passage summarizes the final phase of Nick’s emotional and intellectual transformation. Nick experienced interest, involvement and finally disgust. This feeling of disgust and disillusionment with the roaring twenties is a strong sentiment throughout the book.
“They had forgotten me but Daisy glanced up and held out her hand; Gatsby didn’t know me now at all. I looked once more at them and they looked back at me, remotely, possessed by intense life. Then I went out of the room and down the marble steps into the rain, leaving them there together” (Fitzgerald 101-102).

This passage presents a scene in which Nick visits with Gatsby and Daisy, but is completely eclipsed by their love for each other. They see nothing beyond themselves and their own love. Nick leaves unnoticed and un-missed. This self-absorption is apparent in many of the characters throughout the book and contributes to the confusion and sorrow that ultimately occurs. Everyone is working for themselves, with little to no consideration for the feelings or needs of others. In this scene, Nick notes the vitality of the two lovers. It is Gatsby’s passion and enthusiasm for life that particularly impresses Nick, but it is this vitality that ultimately destroys his relationship with Daisy. Both these elements of passion and selfishness create an atmosphere that allows for the careless destruction of lives and people.Characters
Nick
The narrator of the story, Nick Carraway, is a self-described “tolerant” and “open-minded” man. From a wealthy and long-established midwestern family, Nick was educated at Yale and is an astute and perceptive individual. Quiet and a good listener, Nick frequently plays the role of confidante, and unwilling witness to the secrets and ambitions of his acquaintances. His own actions and ambitions are insignificant when contrasted with the observations of Gatsby and the Buchanan’s. The reader’s sense and understanding of Nick’s character comes largely from his reactions to the actions of his friends. He is not an impartial judge, and makes his sentiments known. Like Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, Nick’s experiences alter his perspective on the world. He observes the actions of those around him, and is not unmoved by them. Like Scout, he finds much to repulse him and disappoint him in his fellow humans. Where Scout was repulsed by racism, Nick is sickened by the vices and excesses of the Roaring Twenties. Nick, unlike Scout, is an educated adult, but this does little to prepare him for the atmosphere of wild abandon he finds in New York society.

Daisy
Daisy Buchanan is a distant cousin of Nick’s, who enchants and attracts people with her sensual personality as well as her beauty. On the exterior, Daisy seems to have achieved complete success with her marriage to the wealthy Tom Buchanan, and her popularity within the higher social circles. In reality, Daisy is stuck in a faltering marriage with an adulterous husband, and little true enjoyment. With the arrival of Gatsby, her former love, Daisy experiences a short period of passionate happiness and feeling. This only serves to heighten her internal confusion, as she struggles to determine what type of life she wants to lead and with whom she wishes to spend that life. This struggle demonstrates Daisy’s weakness of character and her malleability. Daisy is supposedly based on Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda. Like Zelda Daisy is a winsome and attractive woman, but she has a love for the material things of life. She is fairly superficial, and her outward graces cover a love of money and position.

Tom
Tom Buchanan, Daisy’s husband, is a domineering and determined fellow. Defined by strong and stubborn opinions and feelings that are often ill-founded, Tom’s character is a destructive one. He marches recklessly and heedlessly forward without consideration to the trouble he causes for others. Engaged in an affair, he is unfaithful in marriage and makes Daisy’s life terribly unhappy. He shares many characteristics with Stanley from A Streetcar Named Desire. Both men demonstrate primitive qualities and a propensity for anger and aggression. They are physical and bestial men. Unconcerned with the destruction they create, both hurt the women that they love and offend those with whom they interact.

Gatsby
Jay Gatsby is the mysterious and wealthy neighbor who becomes the subject of Nick’s attention all summer. A self-made man from a poor background, Gatsby is brimming with life and enthusiasm. His passion and energy amaze Nick as well as his other acquaintances. He is the constant subject of speculation and gossip because of his intense nature, odd habits, and lack of established history. As Nick discovers, the driving force behind Gatsby’s actions is his love for Daisy. In his mind Gatsby has transformed Daisy into an angel, and his love for her has fueled his drive to be successful. Gatsby is much like the Rhett Butler figure in Gone with the Wind, because like Rhett, he is mysterious and constantly confounding convention. He has worked hard to establish his fortune, and his reputation has grown to extreme proportions. His love of Daisy motivates him, in much the same way that Rhett’s love of Scarlet dictates his actions. By admitting this love, both of these characters are demonstrating a vulnerability uncharacteristic of them, or at least of their reputation. Gatsby, the tragic lover, remains a mystery throughout, even when confiding in Nick.

Carey Mulligan & Leonardo Dicaprio

The Great Gatsby
A grandiose, colorful, pleasure-drenched night at the movies.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
By Dana Stevens|Posted Thursday, May 9, 2013, at 6:34 PM
Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan in The Great Gatsby.

As Nick Carraway, the mild-mannered but eagle-eyed narrator of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, observes in the book’s early pages, “Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope.” So it was with a Zen mind that I tried to approach Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of the book, which, intelligent debunkings aside, I really do regard as one of the great American novels of the 20th century—and probably inherently unfilmable. Literary adaptations of books in which the language is all—particularly the work of high-modern prose stylists like Fitzgerald, Proust, Nabokov, Woolf—seem doomed to either plodding literalism or airy insubstantiality. (Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita had a nasty sense of humor all its own, but the script, written by Nabokov himself, dispensed almost entirely with the narrative voice that makes the novel so perversely seductive.)

Then there was the fact that Baz Luhrmann, the Australian director of such grand-scale entertainments as Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge, and Australia, was the one who would be turning Fitzgerald’s economic tone poem of a novel into a big, glitzy 3-D spectacle. I’ve never been fond of Luhrmann’s films, and have only been able to tolerate a couple. (I think I walked out of Moulin Rouge, back when I wasn’t a film critic and could indulge in such luxuries.) His mania for heaping one visual excess atop another—look at this! No, look at this!— strikes me as a form of directorial ADD, an inability to let himself or the audience rest. And as a member of that winded audience, I sense an implicit condescension in Luhrmann’s tendency to flag and then re-flag a film’s major themes as his films go on—themes that were not introduced subtly the first time around. In Baz Luhrmann movies, ideas arrive with an ensemble.

But of course, The Great Gatsby is the story of a supremely unsubtle man given to bold gestures and flashy set pieces, so maybe Luhrmann was born to adapt it. At any rate, his Great Gatsby was nowhere near as terrible as I feared. It is, as I suspected, a gargantuan hunk of over-art-directed kitsch, but it makes for a grandiose, colorful, pleasure-drenched night at the movies. And far from betraying the spirit of Fitzgerald’s novel, Luhrmann (along with his co-screenwriter Craig Pearce) treats the book with a loving mix of straight-ahead reverence and postmodern playfulness. During the huge, highly choreographed party sequences that structure the story (this isn’t a musical, but the recurring music- and dance-heavy sequences make it feel like one), you’re more likely to hear Jay-Z, Kanye West, and Lana Del Rey than you are a tinny vintage recording of “Ain’t We Got Fun?”, the flapper-age standard that figures in a scene in the novel and that played at the end of the stillborn 1974 Robert Redford version. Luhrmann’s use of contemporary pop may spring mainly from a desire to sell soundtrack albums, but the notion of using hip-hop as a backdrop for Jazz Age euphoria makes sense: With his new wealth, loud pink suit, and impossibly sweet crib, Gatsby is a rap star before his time.
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Dance-floor playlists aside, this Gatsby unfolds in a fairly conventional period setting (though this is the ’20s as seen through a distorting kaleidoscope, everything a little bigger and louder and lusher than life). In a klutzy frame story that’s absent from the novel, we meet Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) at a sanatorium where he’s recovering from “morbid alcoholism” and assorted mental maladies. He begins to tell his story to a benevolent, Santa Claus-like shrink, who provides him with a pen and paper with which to write it down. Later Nick will trade these tools in for a typewriter; whatever writing tool he uses, the words will occasionally drift up around him on the screen, then break apart and drift around him in a cloud of floating 3-D letters. It’s a hokey device, but the Nick-as-author conceit gives us an excuse to listen some choice passages of Fitzgerald’s prose, which Maguire, giving a surprisingly quiet performance at this chaotic movie’s heart, delivers beautifully. Thematically, though, it does seem a mistake to turn The Great Gatsby into a self-referential bildungsroman about a young man’s journey to healing through authorship. When Nick finally pens in “The Great” over his manuscript’s original title Gatsby, we don’t so much feel pride in his accomplishment as annoyance at his smugness—he’s supposed to be telling us this story out of necessity, not ambition.

The story Nick has to tell is one that anyone who’s graduated high school in the United States surely knows, at least in Cliffs Notes form: The mysterious tycoon Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio) owns a gaudy estate next door to Nick’s rented cottage in the fictional Long Island village of West Egg. At one of his extravagant all-night flapper blowouts, Gatsby asks Nick to arrange a meeting with Nick’s cousin Daisy (Carey Mulligan), a dazzling former debutante whom Gatsby once loved and lost as a younger, poorer man. Daisy lives directly across the sound in old-money East Egg with her rich brute of a husband, Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton), and is constantly flanked by her best friend Jordan Baker (Elizabeth Debicki), an icy-cool golf champion. Over the course of a summer, Nick is drawn into the orbit of these wealthy, powerful, lost people, whom he recognizes as a “rotten crowd” only after their unthinking cruelty has already caused irreparable harm.

Every image and set piece you remember from the novel—the crumbling oculist’s billboard that looms over the action with judging eyes; Gatsby flinging his collection of custom-made shirts at an overcome, weeping Daisy (and, thanks to the 3-D format, directly at us); the hot afternoon at the Plaza Hotel when the rivalry for Daisy’s affections comes to a head—is rendered in broad, operatic gestures. There were many moments when that broadness made me cringe: Does the CGI-aided camera always have to race at jet-ski speed across the water toward the symbolic green light on Daisy’s dock? Must Gatsby’s face really be seen for the first time against a backdrop of fireworks, as the climax of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” surges on the soundtrack? And yet for every slab of processed cheese, there’s another moment whose visual inventiveness pays off. In an early scene, Luhrmann turns one image in the novel—Nick looking out the window at a party, “simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life”—into a clever Rear Window-style tableau of a Manhattan apartment building bursting with untold stories.

Leonardo DiCaprio makes as good a Jay Gatsby as any living actor I can think of—he captures the character’s fixed-in-time boyishness as well as his innocent hucksterism, and he looks like a (dubiously ethical) million bucks in the splendiferous costumes by Catherine Martin, the director’s wife (who also designed the dizzyingly lavish, champagne-and-confetti-drenched production—she must have been one tired woman by the time shooting ended). But DiCaprio’s physical presence seems almost superfluous in some key scenes, as Maguire’s voice-over narrates the idealistic striver’s actions faster than he can complete them. Our first glimpse of Gatsby, before even the Gershwin-accompanied debut described above, is a shot of his be-ringed hand reaching toward that oft-revisited green light as Nick describes watching his enigmatic neighbor … reach for a green light off a dock. Luhrmann doesn’t just gild the lily, he spray-paints it with glow-in-the-dark sparkles.

Somehow the connection that’s established between Gatsby and Nick—the charismatic gangster and the shy young banker he dubs “old sport”—feels more vital and convincing than the illicit love between Daisy and Gatsby, which, despite Carey Mulligan’s sensitive performance, remains more of a narrative conceit. Perhaps the sweet-faced Mulligan is a little too sensitive for this part—there’s a hard, narcissistic edge to Daisy that we don’t glimpse until very late in the film (which also, disappointingly given Luhrmann’s literalness, misses the chance to work in Gatsby’s observation that “her voice is full of money”). Many of the actors in smaller roles—especially Isla Fisher and Jason Clarke as Tom Buchanan’s working-class mistress and her duped mechanic husband—seem to be straining to fill their limited screen time with the most theatrical, Punch-and-Judy style performances possible. If there’s a discovery in the cast, it’s the Australian actress Elizabeth Debicki, who plays Daisy’s enabling pal Jordan. In the novel, Nick describes the implacable Jordan as looking “like a good illustration, her chin raised a little jauntily, her hair the color of an autumn leaf.” Debicki’s cool, reserved performance captures the stillness of that description—when she’s onscreen there’s a moment of respite from the noise, a sigh of relief that there’s someone in this feverishly over-self-explaining movie we may never understand.

The Great Gatsby — Leonardo DeCaprio and Carey Mulligan QUOTATIONS on CLASS:

“Class is an aura of confidence that is being sure without being cocky. Class has nothing to do with money. Class never runs scared. It is self-discipline and self-knowledge. It’s the sure-footedness that comes with having proved you can meet life.” ― Ann Landers

“It’s okay. We aren’t in the same class. Just don’t forget that some of us watch the sunset too.” ― S.E. Hinton, The Outsiders

“Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, went bang in the noonday sun.” ― Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“The few own the many because they possess the means of livelihood of all … The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labor. The majority of mankind are working people. So long as their fair demands – the ownership and control of their livelihoods – are set at naught, we can have neither men’s rights nor women’s rights. The majority of mankind is ground down by industrial oppression in order that the small remnant may live in ease.” ― Helen Keller, Rebel Lives: Helen Keller

“History is written by the rich, and so the poor get blamed for everything.” ― Jeffrey D. Sachs

Letters of Import: Visions Of A Future 8

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Letters of Import: Private Writings to a Psychoanalyst
Visions Of A Future 8
Written by Jennifer Kiley
Illustrations & abstract digital art by j. kiley
© jennifer kiley 2013
First Posting 03.19.13
Posted Weekly Early Tuesday Morning
Eighth Posting 05.07.13 Tuesday, November 19th, 2007

Dear Annie

It was your first solo flight today Annie. That was the most excellent group. The best group I have ever attended. My bias is being put aside and my words are honest and direct. You brightened up that group session. Everyone spoke without having to be coaxed out of any shells. No one was hiding. The quiet ones who regularly sit there and Mr. Xxx has to be the one who says what they can’t say. Not that he really makes one want to open up or gives them a chance too. You made everyone feel your enthusiasm, even though the subject was a rough one. Talking about not wanting to be touched or barely being able to let your spouses or mates try to kiss you. Forget about sex or making love; you really brought out the toughest subject.

I know you didn’t open the session with that in mind. Lisa wanted to talk about her partner. Being a lesbian myself, it is hard to believe that being sexually abused by men when you are a child would effect so strongly an intimate relationship with another woman. You would think that would be safe. In my case, I had such mixed signals. My mother was a sadist. My grandmother, the gentlest woman I have ever known. Everything about her was soft and tender. I never felt anything threatening about her. She was pure love and generosity with me. There were no doubts with her. She loved me up until she died and even then she visited me all the time from the other side. Many dreams we would sit together with her sitting in a chair on her home’s porch and my head resting on her lap. She would always just stroke my hair. She was so tender and I felt so bonded with her. It was like she never died, I got to visit with her more often after she died than when she was alive.

I wanted her to live forever. It never entered my mind she would die. She told me that it would happen. I didn’t believe her. I told her No! That would never happen. I wanted her to always be with me. But I was so wrong. She did die. It was only a short time after that conversation. She was gone.

Her dying wasn’t my first contact with death. A five year old boy drowned. He lived across the street from our family. He was so sweet. Everyone in our neighborhood loved him. He was a little angel, so sweet and innocent. The other child with him, when it happened, left him alone, dead or drowning in the water, while he ran home and didn’t tell anyone what had happened. The search was awful. Everyone was frantic. The whole neighborhood that loved him went out on the search. It brought down a great sadness over everyone after he was found.

Nothing could be done. It was too long. Could the other boy have saved him if he ran for help? No one could answer that question. It did eventually come out about what happened. The whole truth, they were in a place that was dangerous even for adults. The little boy tried to balance as he walked across a narrow crossing and fell into the deep water new the waterfalls. Neither boy knew how to swim. The other boy didn’t want to get into trouble. Children were forbidden to go this place by the pond. When asked if he had seen this boy that drowned, he lied and told everyone No when asked.

Somehow his conscience ate at him enough to break his silence. He told the truth after hours had passed. But it was way to late. It was over. The little five year old boy was way past drowning. Shock and blaming the boy who was alive followed him around for a longtime. That boy wasn’t trusted by the people of our neighborhood. Most people were very judgmental of his entire family. They were crude and socially unacceptable and most of all they never went to church. Ours was a God fearing group except them and one other family that everyone thought were Communists. It was all rather ridiculous. It was so devastating to the boys family, especially his mother. I felt bad for them. I wasn’t that old myself and I loved the little boy who drowned. He was like a little angel. It was all very sad.

My grandmother dying, though, was a different kind of devastation. She was my protector and the only person I could communicate with. We created a special alphabet. It was secret. We could write and no one could read what we sent to the other. She was my only physical contact that was good touch. Everyone else abused me, either sexually or through physical beatings. Which was worst? Both, they overlapped in their sexual abusive nature. Subliminally, it could all be traced back to sexual submission. Whippings. Beatings. Rapes. Forced touches. Kidnapping. Bondage. Child pornography. None of these were by any choice that I made. It was all against my will.

I was a sex slave and exposed to all kinds of physical and sexual brutality, including the denial of nourishment. The greatest pain was being denied the right to express any emotions or sounds. In particular, I was beaten harder if I uttered any sound. The worst sound, that I could make and that received the worst of the punishment, was to cry. I was forbidden to cry. Crying brought out the worst wrath of the Shadow Mother. She would whip me or hit me with all sorts of objects until I would stop crying. I was filled with tears. I needed to cry. It was part of my nature to cry. I cried all the time. But she hated it. She was determined to drive it out of me. She worked on this mission for many years until she found success. My grandmother’s death was her day of success. That was the day I was told not to cry for the last time. As I wad holding my grandfather’s hand, after having just returned from looking into the coffin at what was once the warm body of my loving grandmother. I kissed her cold forehead. She wasn’t there.

My grandfather’s hands were warm. We needed contact but my uncle was a mean bastard. He helped my mother to kill her. He put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed it like a clamp and told me not to cry and added that I was upsetting my grandfather. My grandfather was crying with me. But I listened to him. He was just echoing the rant I’d heard from his sister, the Shadow Mother, throughout my bruised childhood. I stopped crying and I did not cry after that moment ever, with this one exception, unless someone I loved deeply died suddenly. Then I would lose control. But if I just want to cry I cannot do it. The tears are trapped. What will release them naturally, I just don’t know. I’ve tried for year. Doing therapy since I was 19 years old has not been able to breakdown that barrier. Would you, Annie, like to have a go at it. Do you think you can find the secret passage inside of me where the barrier has the door closed, locked and barricaded?

The gentleness in your voice carries an echo of a hypnotic ability. I feel that you could coax someone who is so closed off from her feelings, like I am. I need someone sensitive but emotionally strong and gentle to draw out the one who holds onto the tears so tightly. I really want you to be the one who breaks through my barriers. I know they are built very strong and they are extremely thick. Behind the wall, it is dark and scary. We want to be released from where the Shadow Mother has us locked up. She holds the key. So, only someone who can perform magical and mystical feats will be able to break through and cause the blockade to crumble down and set me free. I need magic. White magic with a great deal of power.

A great many curses of the Black Arts have been cast on me. Their demons keep me closely guarded. Trust me, when I tell you that it is not madness talking. This is all quite real. The demons haunt me almost constantly. They torture me with lies. They try their damnedest to confuse my mind so that I will doubt my reality. At times, I know that what I perceive as real is false. I know when they are trying to trick me but I can’t stop it from effecting me. They take over my mind. I fight it so I still have a glimpse of the truth. It takes so much strength to not feel madness trying to take over.

I must rest. How I will be able to trust you with all of this information and hope you do not think we are certifiably mad, stark raving loony. We are not crazy. We couldn’t be more sane. But right now we need sleep. We’ll write more again soon.

You did a fantastic job being a great psychotherapist today. I can see the future and I see you helping me. I feel you are the one I need right now. You are perfect you may be a novice but you have a strong connection to the soul. Your spirit has a great power. That is one of the things we need as a weapon. That is all for right now. I must rest.

Regards,
Madison

Ps. The force is strong in you. That is good until next week.This note is to assure the strictest of confidence.

To Annie,

At this moment I am not trying to be a coward, but I feel if I hold back now or never send this to you, then I am freeing myself up to write whatever I wish without need of censorship. Maybe someday, when I am feeling more familiar with just who you are and what you might mean to me, this parameter will be altered and a copy of this and future letters will be relayed to you. For now I want to maintain secrecy, to protect you, Annie, and to protect myself from over testing the boundaries between us and to record the development of our relationship.

I want Annie Haskell to trust me. I want you to know I am trying to protect you and also myself from any humiliation. Writing to you in this way frees up my words as I speak them onto the page. Some future date, if I feel trusting enough, I will release to you what I have written in honesty. Right now, I will keep my words confidential. On my honour, no others shall see these pages, I promise you that.

Regards,
Madison Taylor

Annie Haskell --- Madison Tayler's Psychoanalyst's Office

Madison Tayler’s Fantasy of Annie Haskell’s Office as a Psychoanalyst. Not real.

Maksim — Somewhere In Time — Theme Song #1 For “Letters of Import”

Philip Wesley—Two Souls(1980 Theme Song # 8 for Letter of Import: Visions Of A Future 8

the labyrinth called “wandering wonderland.” it is where madison, scottie and their cats, patrick, sparky and toker loves to escape to

madison’s “woods of imagination” where she takes long walks to reflect. it is starts just past the labyrinth

LE CHATEAU DE ROCHER

le chateau de rocher is the home of madison and scottie & their three cats sparky toker & patrick

QUOTATIONS from: LETTERS of IMPORT: Private Writings to a Psychoanalyst

“A Dream

The beginning always starts out with a dream.
It is all a dream
And we are all players
In our own nightmares”
— Madison Taylor

“For that fine madness still he did retain,
Which rightly should possess a poet’s brain.”
~Michael Drayton~
(1563-1631)

“Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?”
Christopher Marlowe for “Hero and Leander”

“A therapeutic relationship is often more psycho-emotionally intimate than a marriage, or a romantic attachment. I know things about my patients that they would never dream of revealing to their spouses or families. Why is that? One word — trust. If you do not have a connection with a therapist, you cannot trust them. If you do not have trust, you will not expose yourself, and if you do not expose your innermost being, what good is the therapy?” — unknown but ask any great therapist

“Men have called me mad, but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence…whether much that is glorious–whether all that is profound–does not spring from disease of thought…” — Edgar Allan Poe
QUOTATIONS of VISION:

“If I paint a wild horse, you might not see the horse… but surely you will see the wildness!” ― Pablo Picasso

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.” ― Albert Einstein

“Writing is…. being able to take something whole and fiercely alive that exists inside you in some unknowable combination of thought, feeling, physicality, and spirit, and to then store it like a genie in tense, tiny black symbols on a calm white page. If the wrong reader comes across the words, they will remain just words. But for the right readers, your vision blooms off the page and is absorbed into their minds like smoke, where it will re-form, whole and alive, fully adapted to its new environment.” ― Mary Gaitskill

The Secret Keeper Opened Up Two Years Ago

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The Secret Keeper Opened Up Two Years Ago
WordPress Sent Me A Notification Moments Ago
Written by Jennifer Kiley
Created & Posted 05.06.13

Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself
Was Posted On May 6th 2011

moon watching over all — artist unknown 5.6.13 it was two years ago today

Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself
by jen kiley “the secret keeper”
Posted May 6th 2011

This is an excerpt from a manuscript that I started writing while I was seeing M. who I felt was the best psychotherapist I ever worked with. She is my inspiration and muse. The stages that it is in now are more like a patchwork quilt of writings from notebooks and poems and letters and emails and role playing screenplays that I have written and continue to write everyday. I choose this blog site as a place where I can be open and honest with my thoughts and feelings and be the real person that I am in all the multiple facets of my psyche. I am hoping I will be able to post open and honest writings that help me develop and release what has and is happening in my life. Truth is what I am seeking and the revealing of secrets and recalling of memories are only some of what I want to express here on this blog. Hopefully, it will not all be serious. My new therapist wants me to laugh more and encourages me to watch shows and films that do just that, make me laugh. Modern Family and The Big Bang Theory are the best shows at creating that overwhelming feeling in me to feel hysterically silly and to laugh so hard I can barely catch my breath. I leave you to read what I am sharing. Be kind. I am new to this kind of truthful exposure.

9.20.10 – 2:15 am – monday

Reality…love…animals first…people…therapist before other people but S.O… my bird… my main kitties…fur…petting…loving…trusting…wanting love…wanting attention… petting…my bird sharing my meals…nothing better than that…sharing my juice… climbing all over me…getting up on my hand…sitting and resting on my shoulders or stomach for hours…nothing like it…sleeping with me while I write or work on the computer…hanging out together…my little buddy…my bird…my beautiful multi-colored protector…the most wonderful creature in the whole world…I feel that way about her …and I feel special ways about my special kitties too…snuggling with them…sleeping with them at night or when they sleep in my lap or draped over my arms in my chair …I love the feeling…I live for the moments…I live for those moments when M. smiles at me and tells me I am a good person and that I did good… when we looked into each others eyes when she was trying to get me to reach the child inside me…we both tried to get me there but it is a long distance inside to that place…

<3 Love <3

Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself
But if your love and must needs have desires,
Let these be your desires:
To melt and be like a running brook
That sings its melody to the night.
To know the pain of too much tenderness.
To be wounded by your own understanding of love;
And to bleed willingly and joyfully.
To wake at dawn with a winged heart
And give thanks for another day of loving;
To rest at the noon hour and meditate love’s ecstasy;
To return home at eventide with gratitude;
And then to sleep with a prayer
For the beloved in your heart
And a song of praise upon your lips.
~ by Kahlil Gibran ~

Mozart – Lacrimosa

the 9th – the day I found out that M. was leaving, no longer to be my therapist. I found out later during our last session we would not be able to have any contact at all with each other for two years.

I dedicate the first post on “all is one” to M. (It didn’t take me long to change her name to “the secret keeper” and she is all mine to do with what I feel she needs to do.) She taught me that we are all connected no matter where we are in our lives. She is gone now – left abruptly from my life. It has caused me a great deal of pain and continues to do so. I love this woman more than can ever be expressed in words. Even Kahlil Gibran only comes slightly close to how I feel. We did some intense work together unearthing some of the memories of the abuse from my childhood and we tried to confront the issues that I am going through today. I am now seeing a new therapist that M. chose for me. She is quite good but I miss M. terribly and my psychological issues are only compounded by the loss of her in my life and in our therapeutic relationship. I stay connected to her through my writing. She continues to be my inspiration and my muse and I write to her in my notebooks to enter into my manuscript everyday and every night. She is there with me in those moments. It was because of her that I returned to my writing and she also brought me back to my roots in meditation. When she left I pulled back from meditating and certain music because it strongly reminded me of her and the level of pain and depression and suicidal thoughts I had were too difficult to experience in all of their intensity. She abandoned me. I miss her hugs; her voice; the way her eyes looked into mine; her gentleness; her understanding; her peacefulness and calmness and most of all her love. She is connected to my soul. I will love her always and forever.

This is just the beginning of writing here. If someone passes through and should happen to read any of what I have written I will tell you that there will be more and the depth I intend to fathom shall hopefully be expressive, thoughtful and revealing in honesty.

I add to what I wrote over two years ago, that I feel that I have followed the path that I stated back then and try to bring honesty and feelings to what is post on “the secret keeper.” I, also, try to have fun when there is a need for that. There is always a need to laugh and to cry. The first is laughing and I do that as often as possible. The second, crying, I still haven’t found the door that allows me to open it and the tears to be released. Only when something traumatizing occurs do I lose control of what holds back the tears. The Shadow Mother, the name I give my birth mother who is gone now, is the one who put my child in that prison many years ago when I was a defenseless child. I couldn’t fight her. Instead I would apologize to her and beg her forgiveness for punishing me. She forced that child to go to the deepest darkest dungeon inside my unconscious where there is no light for her to find her way out.

Those who have experienced or are experiencing brutality, remember and remind yourself that you didn’t do anything to deserve this kind of horrendous treatment. You need healing with the right person or people. I have been fortunate to have met different people in my life that have tried to help me. I feel, though, that I am very close to people in my life who are giving me a great deal of help with their love and support. It helps when you are surrounded by love and understanding. Love is so very important in everyone’s life. I feel that in my life now.

Writing “the secret keeper” has expanded my world and I feel so lucky to have met the people who I found through this world. One could say it is a very magical and mystical world where the unknown and impossible is knowable and possible.

I wondered why my muse wanted to watch movie trailers. She was stalling me until the announcement came through from WordPress, otherwise, I would never have realized the two year anniversary. I suppose I should send out a thank-you to “M” for leading me into the world of blogging. Honestly, I had another blog that I did for a short time. It was the oddest thing. I found myself on WordPress. I do not even remember why and the next thing I knew I had signed up to write a blog. My reaction: “I DID WHAT?” I was wondering what was I thinking about when I did that. I don’t know anything about writing a blog. I let it sit. Then one day I started to write. I wasn’t really myself when I was doing that blog so I gradually diminished its place in my life and that is when I realized I needed to create what eventually became “the secret keeper” but once was called “all is one” — that was named that for my meditative self but not who really needed this blog to be hers. I needed the healer and the to be healed to be what this blog was for and about. “the secret keeper” is for those who have secrets they need to reveal or for those who need a place to open up and have their secrets kept just that “secret.” Some secrets need to be shouted out loud and others need to be shared in a quiet way. The “evil” doers need to be exposed, those in pain need to know they are not alone.

I want to be able to write about any content that needs to be discussed. Hopefully, I have been doing that over the past two years, more being in the last year plus several months. I have made a commitment to myself to post something everyday. So far I have been doing that for awhile now. Doing a post a day has been good for me. It keeps my mind focused and for those who follow me and that I follow, it has been an experience to keep connected with all of you.

I keep growing and learning something all the time. One, that there is not enough time in one day for everything, but you try to fit it all in but find it exhausting and close to impossible but I am not saying it isn’t attempted. We are still learning about that one.

Did my muse or I find anything interesting in the movie trailers? Well, there is a movie with Robert De Niro, Diane Keaton and Susan Sarandon are in that is out now. The Big Wedding and I remember seeing Tom Cruise in one that is rather spooky and takes place in the future. No humans left on Earth as far as I can tell. Oblivion. Then some scary, creepy crap in between. The devil wants a baby. Probably Zombies. I wasn’t playing close attention. In fact, think I was eating cereal at the time. Put “The Big Wedding” trailer on again and it looks funny. Well, the trailer makes me laugh. Oh, the next trailer I do remember now. The movie titled: MUD has feeling of STAND BY ME but more law involved. Stars Matthew McConaughey & Reese Witherspoon and two great kid actors. Roku has some of the wildest choices of channels.

Thank you all for following and hope you find something here that you want to read, listen to, like, or have a comment you’d like to make, or just follow in your own quiet way. Anyway that you like, you are welcome. by Jennifer Kiley j.kiley jk the secret keeper jk the SK

first star on the right — abstract digital art

Metallica — Nothing Else Matters
(One of Several Videos I Posted In My First Month as “the secret keeper” Two Years Ago)

QUOTATIONS on PAST:

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” ― Søren Kierkegaard

“You realize that our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past.” ― Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

“The past is never where you think you left it.” ― Katherine Anne Porter

“Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin.” ― Mother Teresa

“When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche

“It’s being here now that’s important. There’s no past and there’s no future. Time is a very misleading thing. All there is ever, is the now. We can gain experience from the past, but we can’t relive it; and we can hope for the future, but we don’t know if there is one.” ― George Harrison

A Child Needs Love Forever

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A Child Needs Love Forever
Written by Jennifer Kiley
May 4th 2013
Illustrated by j. kiley
Posted May 5th 2013

A Child Needs Love Forever
Written by Jennifer Kiley
May 3rd & 4th 2013

A child grows with love, the unconditional kind.
Loving them with innocent touches,
Plenty to give them their strength to grow,
Make them feel good, let them know you care,
Giving attention, showing you love them,
Knowing that you’re there.
Let them enjoy life with you,
maintaining their innocence,
While the child needs you there.
Help her discover her own identity.
Love her as a child till she grows,
Until it’s time to set her free.
When that time comes,
She’ll find someone she wants to love,
To love someone who will give her love that is true.

This is the way that love ought to be,
Something you share as a mother and child.
Her time to choose someone to love,
Making sure the touching is tender.
Wanting it to be real,
As your child falls into someone else’s arms.
Making sure she feels the warmth through and through,
Never wanting those feelings to stop being soft and tender,
Hoping they won’t, that the love will remain real and true.
You want them to be loving and deep, caring and lasting,
Loving with proven truth, with the trust you taught her.
With trust comes feelings so free, inside your sweet daughter’s body.
She will feel acceptance, when the touches are the rare kind.
When they feel so right, her body will accept them joyfully.
She will find the love that is real,
From someone who wants to love her and to care.

butterfly elegant yorkshire rose

Teach Your Children Well — Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young QUOTATIONS on CHILDREN:

“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” ― Albert Einstein

“Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.” ― Margaret Mead

“Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them” ― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“Young people don’t always do what they’re told, but if they can pull it off and do something wonderful, sometimes they escape punishment. ” ― Rick Riordan

“Critics who treat ‘adult’ as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.” ― C.S. Lewis

“The soul is healed by being with children.” ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“Accept the children the way we accept trees—with gratitude, because they are a blessing—but do not have expectations or desires. You don’t expect trees to change, you love them as they are.” ― Isabel Allende

“All children, except one, grow up. They soon know that they will grow up, and the way Wendy knew was this. One day when she was two years old she was playing in a garden, and she plucked another flower and ran with it to her mother. I suppose she must have looked rather delightful, for Mrs Darling put her hand to her heart and cried, ‘Oh, why can’t you remain like this for ever!’ This was all that passed between them on the subject, but henceforth Wendy knew that she must grow up. You always know after you are two. Two is the beginning of the end.” ― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

“Adults constantly raise the bar on smart children, precisely because they’re able to handle it. The children get overwhelmed by the tasks in front of them and gradually lose the sort of openness and sense of accomplishment they innately have. When they’re treated like that, children start to crawl inside a shell and keep everything inside. It takes a lot of time and effort to get them to open up again. Kids’ hearts are malleable, but once they gel it’s hard to get them back the way they were.” ― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

Silver Linings Playbook & the Stigma of Bipolar

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Silver Linings Playbook & The Stigma of Bipolar
Written by Jennifer Kiley
Film Review taken from Salon
Post Created with a short comment at the end
by jk the secret keeper
Posted 05.01.13

Bradley Cooper, star of Silver Linings Playbook, an Oscar-nominated film about a man living with bipolar disorder. His recent film is making progress toward removing the stigma of mental illness. I am changing the two words to Mentally Creative or Mentally Interesting. The medical community is trying to move away from diagnosing Bipolar or other issues with the brain as “Mental Illness.” They are Brain illnesses or diseases. They are not behavior problems or mental problems. Not should they be stigmatized. When you have the flu you treat it in order to get better. When you have Bipolar you treat it so that you have a better control of what is causing the patient to exhibit the brain illness. There are a variety of ways to treat bipolar as there are people that have that brain dis-ease. I don’t use medications with the exception of one. My thoughts are that you treat bipolar the way that is best for you. I try to work on what helps me keep it under better control. I am still new at it and not very good at following the ways that work the best. But bipolar tends to make you stubborn sometimes. That I have to work on, also. But to stigmatize anyone for having something they were born with or inherited or just woke up one day and there it is bipolar or any other brain illness. You don’t back away from someone with cancer or Parkinson’s or any other physical ailment. Well, bipolar is a physical part of you that is not functioning in a manner in which makes your life easier to live. by jk the SK

Silver Linings Playbook is a film that is a personal movie for David O’Russell and when the group all came together to do the film, it became a personal movie for all of them. Tiffany, played by Jennifer Lawrence, serves as a catalyst and she’s the first person who actually sees who Pat is. Pat is played by Bradley Cooper. That’s the thing that this film has done, people around this country who have seen this film say “this film actually sees who I am” because bipolar is heavily stigmatized, its not a very treatable disease and it’s a condition that is diagnosed way too late. So hopefully, a movie like this will help it become less stigmatized in the onset. The best thing about this movie is that it will be able to reach out and make people feel included. ~ Bradley Cooper

“Silver Linings Playbook” with Bradley Copper

I watched the film last night. My reaction immediately was to think of a way to make a film, write the script for a film, where instead of the mentally creative or mentally interesting being the center and the ones stigmatized, that it wouldn’t be that way at all, instead those that are stigmatized are the folks we consider “normal,” they are the ones we feel uncomfortable around and they are the ones who are put in the outskirts of society and the ones who are stigmatized. If you think about it, those who have bipolar feel uncomfortable around people who are “normal,” those who think they are above those who have problems with the brain. Bipolar isn’t a behavior problem or a mental illness, which I find to be an offensive term. Those with bipolar have the fortunate or unfortunate DNA or the brain misfirings that cause some of the “bipolar reactions” the world has toward bipolar or any other person who is mentally interesting or mentally challenged. Why do “normal” people feel that they have any better a grasp on the truth of life on how to live it than someone who has been “blessed” with the gift of bipolar.

Bipolar is something that is extremely difficult to live with, where every moment or split second could change in your reaction to your world and the way you relate to the people around you. You can fly off the handle and lose your temper from a slight change in your environment. Is that really something to be afraid of? I don’t think so. “Normal” people have moods, also. Yes, bipolar, there are mood changes, the thoughts race around your mind because you have so many ideas firing off in your brain at any given time. Life is exciting. Creating art is a major benefit that can be quite satisfying and comes at one in a rapid firing sort of way. It can be exhilarating. But in that same split second you may find yourself triggered by something you are unaware of that pushes you close to the edge of falling into a dark hole. And most times, you aren’t going to be able to catch a hold of something that will keep you from falling in. It’s an endless fall, like in Alice In Wonderland, except she eventually reaches the bottom and there usually is light there. Bipolar, the lights have gone out.

Finding your way in the dark, when you are feeling nothing but pure tortuous emotional, physical, psychological and spiritual pain, is overwhelming and blinding. Eventually, bipolar will take you to the edge that starts the voices up that make you want to kill yourself or harm yourself. If you have found a discipline when you reach this bottom level like writing or creating art, you usually start that up immediately. And you keep writing or doing your visual arts until you create something that satisfies your opinion that you have succeeded. This may be enough to level you out temporarily and you then may be able to sleep. But even then, you turn on the Walkman with the ear buds in, so not to disturb anyone else with the loudness of your music. The loudness is so that you can only hear the sound of the music and nothing else. It doesn’t usually shut out the death march. That goes on. The thoughts haunt you but you must think them. Bipolar takes you on a journey until you fall asleep.

Hopefully by morning the feelings are under control. Of course, that sleep may take you to 15 or more hours from when you close your eyes. It’s the only way to get back on track. Most likely you haven’t had any sleep in the past day or two. The benefits are that you may not go down that road of bipolar. If you are fortunate you may go down the high one where what you create makes you feel giddy and everything is delightful and light and the demons are sleeping, which means they are leaving you alone. In that bipolar world everything is happy and you laugh and you want the classical or light music to play and you want to create the uplifting poems or stories or art. You want to keep doing projects, to keep creating. So why is the world so afraid of that.

Being mentally creative or interesting isn’t contagious and bipolar people as a rule could care less about harming anyone else except maybe themselves depending on the mood. The mentally creative have been given a stigmatic bum’s rap for the violence of those who take guns and go off on the innocent of the world. Those people are not doing that because they have a brain disease, they are doing that because they are violent individuals or groups that hate themselves and the people that are in their world. Bipolar tends to want to just take care of themselves and stay away from people that judge them. They may yell suddenly and then settle down and forget about it and may want to throw things when they get frustrated but mostly they don’t have any thoughts of hurting anyone and if they get into a down spiral it is usually themselves they are wanting to harm.

So stigma is all in the mind of those who are afraid of people being real and usually afraid of themselves being real. The “normal” people don’t want their reality being touched by anything that might resemble the actual behavior of someone who is alive in any way that might make them have to have a real thought or feeling. I don’t think “normal” people know what they are. Aren’t they usually following the latest dogmatic leader that tells them how to think and how to feel about someone they don’t like. And what about all those people that don’t want to make the rich pay their fair share of taxes because in their “normal” brains they think that it might be them someday who is rich and when they get there they don’t want to have to pay high taxes. I would say the “normal” are the ones who are a bit deluded and can’t think for themselves. And the ones who are bipolar or any other mentally creative individual are the free thinkers and the ones who don’t judge and the ones who want to help support the world and all the people in it.

Maybe it is about time to take a closer look at who the good guys are and who are the ones fucking up the world. And it’s about time to stop stigmatizing and showing people with mentally creative brains as a threat to the safety of society and to see them as contributors in the way of artists and those with original ideas who will move the society and culture forward. Yes, we may get off the path every so often but doesn’t everyone need to do a walk about now and again. Stop judging everyone and start co-existing in peace. Accept difference don’t try to make everyone identical to who you are.
by Jennifer Kiley

Silver Linings Playbook – EXTENDED FEATURETTE HD (2013)Special Features

HERE IS A REVIEW FROM SALON FOR THE FILM: SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK

Friday, Nov 16, 2012 01:01 PM EST
“Silver Linings Playbook” is gold
Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence face love and mental illness in the rich, manic new romantic comedy
By Andrew O’Hehir

We get thrown right into the middle of Pat Solitano Jr.’s troubled life story, without any of the usual context or background. Played by Bradley Cooper in a major departure from his customary sleek pretty-boy roles, Pat is the unhinged, overly intense and not always likable protagonist of David O. Russell’s manic, inventive and rewarding “Silver Linings Playbook.” When we first meet him, he’s standing in the corner of his spartan room in a Baltimore mental hospital, talking to himself. His mom, played by the terrific Australian actress Jacki Weaver, has shown up from Philadelphia to sign him out, against doctor’s orders and without having consulted her husband. What did Pat do that got him locked up in the first place? What’s going on with this family? Why do Pat’s wife and the school where he used to teach have restraining orders against him?

Answers to those questions won’t come into focus for a while, although you may rapidly reach the conclusion that the doctors were right and Pat would be better off heavily medicated and under psychiatric care. Back in the family’s Philly neighborhood, with its slightly desperate upper-fringe-of-the-working-class feeling, Pat Sr. (Robert De Niro) has no idea his younger son is returning home. One of the best and unarguably funniest roles of De Niro’s recent oddball supporting career, Pat Sr. fronts as an Italian-American tough guy but is more like a barely glued together mass of neuroses, a failing bookie with a penchant for disastrous side bets and an intense OCD relationship with the Philadelphia Eagles. (His wardrobe gets better and better as the movie progresses; I can’t stand football, but I want Pat Sr.’s Eagles-green cardigan.)

As for Pat Jr., whose apparel frequently involves a shapeless gray track suit topped with a black garbage bag – so he can sweat off weight as he runs – his first item of business is studying up on the high-school English syllabus his estranged wife, Nikki, is teaching, in hopes of impressing her at some unspecified future date. (Nikki plays an important role in Pat’s story, but almost entirely through her absence.) This leads, however, to Pat flinging a copy of “A Farewell to Arms” through a closed window at 4 o’clock in the morning, and awakening his parents with a maniacal rant against Ernest Hemingway. (He refuses to apologize, blaming Hemingway. Pat Sr. says, rather mildly, “Tell Ernest Hemingway to come down here and apologize to us in person.”) I can’t help detecting a genre commentary of sorts here, whether it originates with Russell (who also wrote the script) or Matthew Quick, author of the original novel: Hemingway was writing one kind of story, which purports to depict the tragedies of the real world in the 20th century and does not demand a happy ending. This is the other kind of story.

In fact, “Silver Linings Playbook” is a romantic comedy, even if it doesn’t feel like one at first. Furthermore, it’s a rom-com that succeeds in revitalizing that discredited genre where so many others have failed, injecting it with the grit and emotion of realist drama rather than with amped-up whimsy or social satire or montages of people walking on the beach while whiny emo-pop plays on the soundtrack. As he did with the boxing movie in “The Fighter,” Russell proves that you can breathe new life into one of the hoariest forms in the Hollywood lexicon. He takes a movie where everyone in the audience knows how it will end and makes us suspend our disbelief and fall in love all over again. (After an entire decade in the indie-film wilderness following his 1999 breakthrough with “Three Kings,” Russell seems to have found himself a niche reinventing classic movie genres.)

It helps, of course, that we’ve got a dynamite couple to fall in love with. Russell has long had a flair for unexpected casting combinations, but I really didn’t expect Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence to be such a combustible duo. (Yes, in real life, there’s a significant age spread between these two: Cooper is 37 and Lawrence 22. At the risk of sounding like a total sexist pig, it doesn’t play that way on-screen.) Finally getting unleashed from his immensely lucrative “Hangover” roles and a series of tepid leading-man movies, Cooper gives a twitchy, physical, marvelously alive performance as Pat Jr., who’s barely aware how poor his impulse control is and doesn’t seem to notice that his face is often marred with mysterious scars and bruises. As for Lawrence, she’s been in so many movies lately that she’s in danger of being overexposed but I only wish her chaste and cautious performance as Katniss Everdeen had one-third of the fire she shows here as Tiffany, a grieving widow going through a spectacular meltdown of her own.

There have been dozens if not hundreds of other movies about two damaged people who find each other, and quite a few that try to wring bittersweet laughs out of the painful struggle with mental illness. But it’s always wonderfully satisfying to see a conventional or archetypal story structure handled with this level of craft and enthusiasm. “Silver Linings Playbook” never feels like a movie you’ve seen before, even if Pat and Tiffany’s ultimate destination is clear the moment they meet. It seems clear to us, of course, but not to them; Tiffany assumes he’ll just be another entry on her long list of recent sexual partners, while Pat clings like a drowning man to the idea that his marriage to the invisible Nikki – which ended in an act of disturbing violence, as we eventually learn – can still be redeemed.

During Tiffany and Pat’s disastrous first date (which Pat insists isn’t a date, because he’s getting back together with Nikki any day now) they eat Raisin Bran at a diner while she regales him with steamy tales about sleeping with all her co-workers (male and female) at her last job. Pat isn’t literally wearing his garbage bag in that scene, but he might as well be. All the crockery ends up on the floor, along with the remnants of Raisin Bran, and we’re left with the realization that these two people are falling in love but may be too screwed-up to deal with it – a phenomenon that afflicts many of us at one time or another, from you and me to David Petraeus and that lady with the upper arms.

There’s no point denying that “Silver Linings Playbook” is shameless cornpone, given that the bumpy course of Pat and Tiffany’s romance includes such elements as a ballroom dancing competition, a crucial showdown between the Eagles and the Dallas Cowboys and a parlay bet orchestrated by Pat Sr. that links the two. Not to mention a deceptive epistolary exchange straight out of classic French theater. But where most American romantic comedies are either made by talentless hacks or by Hollywood pros who can barely conceal their contempt for the material and the audience, this one was made by a leading American director at the height of his powers who’s paying attention to every emotional beat, every cut and every frame. Great cinema? Hell, I don’t know. But one of the most satisfying movies, that much is for sure.

ADDED NOTE BY jk the secret keeper: I need to watch the film again. Somewhere in the middle I thought the film was over and dropped off and came back before the film was over. So I watched the beginning and the end but missed the middle. My partner, Shawn, thought the film was great. What I saw I agree with her. Make a lot of noise in the middle of the night. So you get woken up by someone yelling and he happens to be bipolar. I don’t think that’s enough to threaten to someone that their behavior is going to get them thrown back into the institution. Only in America does one live under that threat if one is not strictly staying in between the lines. Freedom is another word for nothing left to shout about. SINCE WHEN. THERE ARE LOTS OF THINGS TO SHOUT ABOUT. Why do we have to be quiet to keep ourselves from being locked away. I do realize, and I am not going to give away a spoiler, that the main character has done something that makes the law question his behavior more carefully but the extreme I think everyone takes it seems too extreme to me and especially in society those who are different in their brain and act differently. These are not the dark ages and those with brain problems don’t deserve to be treated as lesser citizens. GO RENT THIS FILM. IT IS A QUIRKY ROMANTIC COMEDY. THE ACTORS ARE BRILLIANT. JENNIFER LAWRENCE DESERVED HER ACADEMY AWARD AND IT DESERVED TO BE NOMINATED FOR BEST PICTURE AT THE ACADEMY AWARDS. jk the secret keeper

Whitney Houston — I Look To You
QUOTATIONS on BIPOLAR:

“If I can’t feel, if I can’t move, if I can’t think, and I can’t care, then what conceivable point is there in living?” ― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

“When you are mad, mad like this, you don’t know it. Reality is what you see. When what you see shifts, departing from anyone else’s reality, it’s still reality to you.” ― Marya Hornbacher, Madness: A Bipolar Life

“Creativity is closely associated with bipolar disorder. This condition is unique . Many famous historical figures and artists have had this. Yet they have led a full life and contributed so much to the society and world at large. See, you have a gift. People with bipolar disorder are very very sensitive. Much more than ordinary people. They are able to experience emotions in a very deep and intense way. It gives them a very different perspective of the world. It is not that they lose touch with reality. But the feelings of extreme intensity are manifested in creative things. They pour their emotions into either writing or whatever field they have chosen” ― Preeti Shenoy, Life is What You Make It

“It was as if my father had given me, by way of temperament, an impossibly wild, dark, and unbroken horse. It was a horse without a name, and a horse with no experience of a bit between its teeth. My mother taught me to gentle it; gave me the discipline and love to break it; and- as Alexander had known so intuitively with Bucephalus- she understood, and taught me, that the beast was best handled by turning it toward the sun.” ― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

“Manic-depression distorts moods and thoughts, incites dreadful behaviors, destroys the basis of rational thought, and too often erodes the desire and will to live. It is an illness that is biological in its origins, yet one that feels psychological in the experience of it, an illness that is unique in conferring advantage and pleasure, yet one that brings in its wake almost unendurable suffering and, not infrequently, suicide.” ― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

“Depression is a painfully slow, crashing death. Mania is the other extreme, a wild roller coaster run off its tracks, an eight ball of coke cut with speed. It’s fun and it’s frightening as hell. Some patients – bipolar type I – experience both extremes; other – bipolar type II – suffer depression almost exclusively. But the “mixed state,” the mercurial churning of both high and low, is the most dangerous, the most deadly. Suicide too often results from the impulsive nature and physical speed of psychotic mania coupled with depression’s paranoid self-loathing.” ― David Lovelace, Scattershot: My Bipolar Family

“Compared to bipolar’s magic, reality seems a raw deal. It’s not just the boredom that makes recovery so difficult, it’s the slow dawning pain that comes with sanity – the realization of illnesss, the humiliating scenes, the blown money and friendships and confidence. Depression seems almost inevitable. The pendulum swings back from transcendence in shards, a bloody, dangerous mess. Crazy high is better than crazy low. So we gamble, dump the pills, and stick it to the control freaks and doctors. They don’t understand, we say. They just don’t get it. They’ll never be artists.” ― David Lovelace, Scattershot: My Bipolar Family

“Crazy isn’t a condition it’s a place and it exists somewhere between Love and Oblivion” ― Stanley Victor Paskavich

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the secret keeper

finding truths; creativity; bipolar; love; child abuse; fantasy; art; poetry; haiku; music; films; writing; inspiration; animals; psychotherapy; secrets; news

Category Archives: love

“Imagining…is better than remembering something”

Nora Ephron’s Lessons About Love: Today She Would Be 72

The Sessions

Once In Your Life

Light and Cloud-Shadows

The Great Gatsby

The Secret Keeper Opened Up Two Years Ago

A Child Needs Love Forever

Silver Linings Playbook & the Stigma of Bipolar

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