Sweet Judy Blue Eyes

Judy Collins' memoir Sweet Judy Blue Eyes tells the fairy tale story of a talented woman's career in the music business beginning in the early sixties when middle class women were largely raising families or otherwise standing by their man. But it also details the undertones of an adulthood spent in denial of alcoholism and depression and in living a public life posing as an invulnerable person when Collins was anything but on the inside.

In a breathy and candid style, Collins talks about her marriage at 19 and a long custody battle for her only child of that marriage, son Clark Taylor, who committed suicide in 2003. She discusses, with some regret, her need to earn money after her divorce from Clark's father which resulted in intermittent living arrangements with Clark as he was growing up. Collins' self-portrayal is one of a tenacious woman who succeeds in using her talent to both earn a living and work for the social and political change she so ardently believed in.

Judy Collins writes openly about her battle with alcoholism, her many affairs with talented men, including Stephen Stills who wrote for her the brilliant and heartfelt tribute Suite: Judy Blue Eyes. From photographs included in the book, as well as snippets of conversation from Collins' perspective, it appeared they were madly in love and perfect for each other but needed to part for the sake of their respective careers. It was also a west coast/east coast sort of dilemma. Stills living and working in Laurel Canyon and Collins wanting to remain in New York City close to the folk scene in Greenwich Village and to her son who visited from Connecticut.

When writing about her relationships, Collins used good judgement and restraint. Always a class-act.  Here is what Collins wrote about the night she and Stephen Stills broke up and how he shared the song Suite: Judy Blue Eyes with her:

 "It would have been enough that he could spell out the troubles in our love affair, but the song itself was so glorious, so transporting, that had it not been about me, I would have dreamed it might have been - it was a triumph of writing, of feeling, of his deep melodic gifts. I had heard a lot of songs and sung some that had become hits. I knew I was listening not only to my story but also to a song that was going to be for all times, not just for ours. It was a classic and it broke my heart."

As a reader, I was happy to be transported to the canyons of Southern California and the Greenwich Village folk music scene of the time. Many names from both coasts and beyond are dropped in the book - Dave Van Ronk, Phil Ochs, Peter Seeger and of course, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez.  Collins discusses her friendship with Leonard Cohen and muses as to why they were never lovers.  (I'd be wondering, too.) Collins mentions Joni Mitchell several times, once describing her at a party in west L.A. this way:

"From time to time a certain look would pass over her face as she caught the eye of someone or noticed something she didn't cotton to, but then, like the sun peeking out from the clouds, she would break into a smile or even a song." 


Once, when in the company of Janis Joplin, the latter leaned over the table to Collins and said "You know, one of us is going to make it and it's not going to be me."

My only objection to Sweet Judy Blue Eyes besides the icky-goo title is...urrr...the airbrushed and exaggerated photo that was chosen for its cover.  A naturally beautiful woman like Judy Collins shouldn't feel the personal or public pressure to look perfect. If one looks inside the jacket to read her story, it soon becomes obvious that the life of Judy Collins was anything but perfect.





The Judy Collins Website

My next book was going to be Truman Capote's In Cold Blood from 1966, but a very special book fairy sent me this book and so Truman will have to wait.  I need to be right here, right now.  :-)  

Sunday Snippet - Aphrodite, A Memoir of the Senses

One of my favorite books about food and eroticism is Isabel Allende's Aphrodite - A Memoir of the Senses, an unpretentious, witty, and earthy collection of stories, lore and recipes taken from history, art, literature, and life experience itself. I've snipped from this book in two or three previous posts but I lack the energy and time right now to link you to them, though you can, if you wish, do a search on the blog.

Below is an excerpt from Aphrodite about the perceived difference between eroticism and pornography, in the form of a letter written by Anaïs Nin to a consumer of pornography, with an introduction by Isabel Allende.

“Erotica is using a feather, pornography is using the whole chicken"

~ Isabel Allende

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

 About Eroticism 

 In the forties, Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller survived for a while by writing erotic stories for a man who paid them by the page. This client, known to them only as the Collector, remained anonymous, piquing the indignant curiosity of the two great authors who lent their talents and their pens to satisfy his caprices. This collector of pornography did not appreciate style and repeatedly asked them to "cut the poetry" and concentrate on the sex, because that was all he was interested in. Nin wrote him a letter in which she masterfully defines the essence of eroticism:

Dear Collector:

     We hate you. Sex loses all its power and magic when it becomes explicit, mechanical, overdone, when it becomes a mechanistic obsession.

      It becomes a bore. You have taught us more than anyone I know how wrong it is not to mix it with emotion, hunger, desire, lust, whims, caprices, personal ties, deeper relationships that change its color, flavor, rhythms, intensities.

     You do not know what you are missing by your microscopic examination of sexual activity to the exclusion of aspects which are the fuel that ignites it. Intellectual, imaginative, romantic, emotional. This is what gives sex is surprising textures, its subtle transformation, its aphrodisiac elements. you are shrinking your world of sensations. You are withering it, starving it, draining its blood.

     If you nourished your sexual life with all the excitements and adventures which love injects into sensuality, you would be the most potent man in the world. The source of sexual power is curiosity, passion. You are watching its little flame die of asphyxiation. Sex does not thrive on monotony. Without feeling, inventions, mood, there are no surprises in bed. Sex must be mixed with tears, laughter, words, promises, scenes, jealousy, envy, all of the spices of fear, foreign travel, new faces, novels, stories, dreams fantasies, music, dancing, opium, wine.

     How much do you lose by this periscope at the tip of your sex, when you could enjoy a harem of distinct and never-repeated wonders? No two hairs alike, but you will not let us waste words on a description of hair; no two odors, but if we expand on this you cry: Cut the poetry! No two skins with the same texture, and never the same light, temperature, shadows, never the same gestures; for a lover; when he is aroused by true love, can run the gamut of centuries of love lore. What a range, what changes of age, what variations of maturity and innocence, Perversity and art.

    We have sat around for hours and wondered how you look. If you have closed your senses upon silk, light, color, odor, character, temperament, you must by now be completely shriveled up. There are so many minor senses, all running like tributaries into the mainstream of sex, nourishing it. Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy. 

 Egon Schiele

Embrace

"The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware."

~ Henry Miller

Sunday Snippet: Running with Scissors

In the early 2000's Augusten Burroughs' memoir Running with Scissors became an instant sensation. Locally, its popularity went over the top, as Burroughs was brought up in Amherst and Northampton. The talk around the book was great enough that I avoided it until after the hype wore off. It was hard to avoid learning things about the book and the author's strange and dysfunctional upbringing. I stuck to my guns, though, as I don't like to read a book or see a film when there is so much of other people's attention focused on it. I like to have a clear and open mind as a reader and draw my own conclusions based on the work itself and not on the swirl of opinions held by others.

Nine years passed and I forgot all about Running with Scissors until a couple of weeks ago when I heard that Burroughs' (that is his nom de guerre) mother Margaret Robeson, much written about in Running with Scissors, had published a memoir in her own defense. A few years ago I  read Burroughs' brother's memoir Look Me in the Eye, about his lifelong struggle with Asperger's, a form of autism. After finding Running with Scissors at my local library, I am now halfway through it and really enjoying it.

The NPR story on The Long Journey Home, Margaret Robeson's recently published memoir, intrigued me for a couple of reasons. Firstly, that three people in the same family should have quite distinct and at times very different perspectives on the same set of events. This is a testament to the complexity of individual experience and its resultant memories and how we interpret both. Secondly, I'll admit to being fascinated by Burroughs' characterization of his mother, who identified herself as a poet and had high ambitions of having her work published in The New Yorker. I'm waiting for inter-library loan of her book to arrive and I'm sure it will be a long wait, as local fans of Burroughs book clamor for it as a means of comparison.

Most memoirs have the feel of vindictiveness or are self-pitying portraits of betrayal and disappointment. Augusten Burroughs' doesn't strike me as self-pitying or vindictive, just as a story he had to write and publish, perhaps as a way of making sense of his strange childhood circumstances. It is also very funny without compromise to the seriousness of child neglect and the dangers of psychological quackery.

 Just a bit of background on the snippet, taken from the chapter Pure Projection: at the age of thirteen, Augusten Burroughs was sent to live and eventually became the legal charge of his mother's psychiatrist, given the name Dr. Finch in the memoir. Dr. Finch had several children, both teens and adults, some of them the children of former patients or patients themselves, living with him in his massive Victorian home. In this excerpt, Burroughs discusses how anger was addressed in the Finch household.

The most excellent fights involved five or more people. Eventually, the fight would be resolved the way all disputes were resolved:  Dr. Finch. He would be called at the office or the arguing group would travel en masse to his office, a hostile collective gang, and oust whatever patient he was seeing at the time. "Family emergency," someone would say. And the patient, whether a potential suicide or somebody suffering from a multiple personality disorder, would be transferred to the waiting room to drink Sanka with Cremora while Finch solved the dispute.

Finch believed that anger was the crux of mental illness. He believed that anger, unless it was expressed freely, would destroy a person. This explained the constant fighting in the house. Since they were tiny, the Finch children had been encouraged not just to sing , dance and jump rope but also to vent.

Anger was like the ground hamburger of our existence. Its versatility was inspiring. There was Anger Turned Inward, Repressed Anger, Misguided Anger. There were Acts Made in Anger, Things Said in Anger and people who might very well die if they didn't Face Their Anger.

So we screamed at each other constantly. It was like a competition and the prize was mental health. Every so often Finch would say, "Hope has been expressing a lot of healthy anger lately. I truly believe she's moved up to the next level in the stages of her emotional development. She's leaving the anal and moving into the phallic." So then everybody hated Hope because she walked around being so smug and emotionally mature. 

I can't wait to read Margaret Robison's memoir to see what she made of Dr. Finch who, by the way, died before the publication of Running with Scissors.