James Cihlar

Wordrunner eChapbooks | Summer 2012

Rancho Nostalgia ...... 1 ’Til We Meet Again ...... 3 Night Song ...... 5 Lonely, Deeply ...... 7 Light and Dark...... 9 The Face Behind the Mask ...... 10 Johnny Guitar ...... 12 Undercurrent ...... 15 Nora Prentiss ...... 18 King Arthur and His Mob ...... 19 The Normal Lives of Good People ...... 20 English Poem ...... 21 The Projectionist ...... 22 Man Proof ...... 23 The Reality Show ...... 24 Modern Maturity ...... 25 Epistemology Roadshow ...... 26 Nostalgiarama ...... 27 Let’s All Chant ...... 28 Rancho Nostalgia II ...... 30 About James Cihlar ...... 32 Acknowledgements ...... 33 Author’s Notes ...... 34 Rancho Nostalgia

No one knows where I went. From the Ace of Hearts to the Pesos Saloon, when they remember me they either laugh or spit.

I could ride a man as well as a horse, canter him up to the bar and down a shot of whiskey while he bucked. After I won at birdcage, I bought a ranch close to the border, where the light is good. A place to step outside of time, to grow my hair and nails, to let my teeth get long.

Tell the girls to wear their crinolines or twirl their parasols. It’s hard work being beautiful, being someone else’s pipe dream in blue denim or a birthday dress. I needed a break from singing, from my face aging in the mirror, from hate, murder, and revenge. My rules are simple:

No one asks any questions, and I get ten percent of everything. I went from the Eastern Seaboard to the old Southwest in search of an education,

1 ’Til We Meet Again

longing for one man to change me En route to San Quentin, the convicted murderer from water to wine. I found my alchemy scotches his escape while docking in Honolulu the day I set foot in Chuck-a-luck. to humor his shipboard romance. I knew at once A superfi cial fool for love, cursed everything the town would not tell me, with terminal illness, she wants nothing more than to recline in his arms the way color fl oods the wrecked sky against a limpid sky silhouetted by palm trees. over the desert. I didn’t waste time with worry. I learned with my body. Everyone on this ship is in love. I was as smooth on the ground The incorruptible Irish cop promises as on the back of a horse. the con artist with a heart of gold they will have a long talk one day. I listened to my blood stream, Dropping the French to reveal a Brooklyn and I recognized the town’s complicity accent, she admits she is putting up with silence. Everything was fi ne her mother in a small place in South Dakota. until Lucky came along, nursing a broken heart for his girl Even Louise, the long-suffering maid, loves her simpering employer, whose confi dant outraged and butchered by Kinch, shoots meaningful glances at the private dick who spared her nothing. escorting the con. Shipboard, Lucky was always standing monumental increments cohere, making in doorways. He was always using his eyes. disassembly impossible. Each move I wished he would go away of the pewter icon on the line from Hawaii

and come back ten years ago. to California overwrites the previous, immortalizing We all get taken sooner or later. the most mundane deceptions. Casual observers would note That’s the bargain we make with time. simply a man and a woman in love. After years of steady stewardship, How could they know that he knows she’s dying we let our guard down once, but she doesn’t know he knows, meanwhile she knows he’s about to be executed and it is enough for the whole enterprise but he doesn’t know she knows? to crash to the ﬂ oor. Let it be known I’ll go along with dying at the end, Fixed by our love of knowledge and our knowledge of love as long as it’s understood we assume that, offscreen, Binnie Barnes’ Comtess de Bresac that my death is the result of a mistake. will reunite with Pat O’Brien’s Lieutenant Steve Burke, and Geraldine Fitzgerald’s Bonny Coburn will ﬁ nd Freddy.

2 3 Night Song

In the closing frames, two champagne glasses Merle Oberon is a vessel of light. spontaneously shatter She has the brains to go with the diamonds. under the weight of our expectations. She gives up a jillion dollars and a pretty boyfriend for the love of music.

When we ﬁ nd what we can’t have, the whole body hurts, the tongue hurts,

the skull like a teapot. It starts in the eyes.

If you want to ask something, ask it. If you want to do something, do it.

Live like that. My vistas are framed by pine boughs.

Waves on the lake tick like a clock. I know what I’m entitled to have.

When I am blind, you are blind. We are two blind people in a city full of eyes.

You take me for walks on the beach. Stand in smoke and light in front of Carnegie Hall.

The boiled wool of the Great Plains trundles past our too-big windows on the train.

Light me a torch, will you chum? I trade boogie-woogie for beer and hamburger.

Music is all I have to live for. My heart’s an old wastepaper basket.

4 5 Lonely, Deeply

Merle’s face asleep on a plane, My mother’s life is my life. a child tucked into bed. My friend’s life is my life. Here is what the city gives me: The symphony’s over. You can let your hair down and become human again. A boyfriend at a bus stop. Silver towers against an ivory sky. Granite skin and steel sinews.

The arrangement of mass follows its own logic, I in my babushka and bangs

in the cave of the crowded bus, the kaleidoscope of gray as we push through revolving doors,

Van Johnson’s long eyelashes, Mama’s face eroded by grief, my arms an afterthought.

The distributor of time answers to no one. The war has never ended,

the candles ignite themselves at St. Patrick’s. Lou Gehrig’s trim ﬁ gure bounds from depth of ﬁ eld

on the left side of the frame. The lovers’ faces are monuments to light in the brownstones’ shadows.

They have faith that gravity won’t change, our bodies won’t go ﬂ ying in the air, and the music of the spheres is as present

6 7 Light and Dark

as Franz Waxman’s score. The city’s neon shines on everything, Put a little love in it, Alan King advises. the factory, the rooms to let, the cavernous dive. Today is a day made out of diamonds. Mirrors on the dancehall girls’ top hats reﬂ ect off the men’s faces,

the way pain ﬂ ashes through parts of the body randomly, and what is ﬂ at becomes deep,

a sense of vertigo. This is prewar, inky black around the frame, cigarette smoke revealed unfurling

like a poltergeist in the sweeping spotlight, the dancer’s placid face ﬁ lling center frame,

or daylight pooling like phosphorescence on Maureen O’Hara’s hat brim

in the grim canyon of boarding houses, the castles of Central Park rising

at the end of the street, doors opening and closing: the pageant in the closet, the hero in the elevator,

the dime in the gutter, the music of rain. When Tiger Lily White twirls her furs and chiffons

on stage before the black suits, the whole world is ugly. The ﬂ ash of the camera bulb at Café Ferdinand

dissects the ﬁ lm into pieces, like amputated limbs. The city watches out for us, silver skyscrapers

soft at the edges like feathers, the evening star above the Brooklyn Bridge.

Talent is a stooge for greed. Dancing means everything to me.

8 9 The Face Behind the Mask

When I met him on the pier at night, but Jeff and the mob held my feet to the ﬁ re. Street lights’ reﬂ ections wriggling Even then, shot and thrown from a car, on the embankment last thing I did before dying was call and warn him, like some crazy static, Don’t turn on the radio, beware of what you love.

I told him, a mangled face, It can kill you. Like I said on the pier, that ain’t nothing. I smiled at him I’m looking at you, and I’m talking to you. like we was on a date, even though, Hey, you’re pretty lucky slinking along in a black fedora to ﬁ nd a guy like me.

and his collar up, he was in the ﬂ esh the monster from under the bed. I knew what he was thinking before we met. I was back there

ﬂ ipping a coin to see if I’d stop him or if I wouldn’t. Oh, it was just some sporting interest. Heads he jumps and tails he doesn’t. Heads I saves him and tails I doesn’t.

My name is Dinky, what’s yours? Janos, he told me, Janos Szabo. What do you get out of being dead, I said. Laying in a grave ain’t my idea of life.

We was meant for each other like his face was meant for that mask. We wanted the same things. A good hot and cold water hotel,

four square meals, music. I took care of him, and he took care of me. I didn’t want to squeal on him and Helen, trading in a life of crime for a house with green shutters,

10 11 Johnny Guitar

I. III. In the ofﬁ ce politics of the American West Everything here is as it seems. you have to hate someone you don’t know. The abandoned mineshaft under the saloon

I’d like to say Emma burns down Vienna’s saloon that Johnny Guitar and Vienna because she loves her and can’t admit it, use to escape

but that’s not the case. They love the same thing. is known to all. Even the Dancing Kid’s hideout, Not the Dancing Kid, but power, success. which he reaches

Each will ﬁ nd it her own way. by passing through a waterfall, That’s why they hate each other. is at the top of a hill, in plain sight.

II. Before the railroad comes to this desert, as in any work place, Emma is more man than woman. She makes other ranchers no one doubts the truth of what we don’t talk about. feel like less than men. When she tortures a confession IV. out of an innocent boy, You’d think once the ranchers learn they back her up that Vienna’s hired hand

like a church choir. is really a sharpshooter “Young Goodman Brown” they’d give him some space.

meets ﬁ fties Western kitsch. Instead they set him up, After Vienna kills her, they throw him under the bus, I mean,

they punch their timecards they stab him in the back. like workers on the clock. Ignoring the muscular strength

of his neck shaft, they issue an ultimatum. Get out in twenty-four hours.

12 13 Undercurrent

Just long enough for two seasoned professionals, I. Crawford and Hayden, It is not so hard to believe to ignore their childish coworkers that one’s husband and ﬂ irt like mature adults. has murdered his brother

V. once you have time to get used to the notion, I held up no stagecoach. Jayne Meadows I robbed no bank. tells Katherine Hepburn Why do you come here? in Vincente Minnelli’s I knew you would. But why? dizzying ﬁ lm noir.

I know, and I know you know, II. I’m innocent. With his ﬁ ne eye That’s why I sit here in my spotless white gown, for the details of women’s clothes, playing my spinet piano. It’s my job. her husband

For the last half of the movie, has transformed Hepburn’s my saloon will burn on Main Street sporty tomboy from confi dent screwball my story heaped upon it with everyone’s before me to stylish, mature victim. As her silhouette who was sacrifi ced for greed. has sharpened Let the others reap the benefi ts. her confi dence has eroded. I gave up the Dancing Kid Even her crisp diction a long time ago. I like being by myself. has softened with confusion.

III. Her husband, a munitions magnate, murdered a Jewish refugee

14 15 in his employ V. and took credit for his invention This is our inheritance, that defeated the Nazis. our ancestors’ legacy, the mid-century formula Because we could not love Katherine Hepburn if she loved for adulthood, a world a man whose deeds are so evil, whose largeness and corruption is beyond our grasp. the movie asks us to believe she loves her husband’s brother instead, The modes of the past even though she has never met him. conﬁ gure into masks we assume in the course of a day. IV. A life without fear, At the end of the movie, her husband vows. the husband is dead His fear has transformed and the wife is with the brother.

into anger. Either Here’s to the apocryphal insertion, he must tell his wife the inherent appeal of the alternative spiral, or kill her. incendiary in the helix of our DNA.

When he offers her a cup of coffee at breakfast,

the camera looks at her as if through water, the manifold planes

of her raw-boned face blurred, a woman on the verge of drowning.

16 17 Nora Prentiss King Arthur and His Mob

Her alabaster cheekbones rise out of the shadows A ﬂ oat of femininity, Bangles Carson rides the white upright as if out of well water, through the Horseshoe Cabaret, accompanied by her trio

Ann Sheridan’s bedroom eyes slipping on a violin-shaped barge pulled by two little men in bellboy uniforms. off the sides of her head, I’ve got to be where I am, and do what I do. Her odalisque back drips off the edge of the piano, her shimmering fi gure moving through dark liqueur, the black sequins slide down her thighs with her hands, pulling us into the inky frame, light twinkles and bubbles, and the jazz pours inside us making the doctor leave his family like Coca Cola. I’m a black sheep who’s blue. as effortlessly as she makes us love her. The hoi polloi smile indulgently, Baked cement towers above the black enamel streets, café society laughs knowingly, and the ragamuffi n the Plymouth’s slide is a constellation of white dots worships her up close, crabbing her act. Her fl oat is wisdom. Even the Black Knight can’t help but dance. During the divorce, in concert against a midnight backdrop. The city’s grind and shriek, roil and glow my father called my mother unfi t, and it was like casting a spell. She fell into another plane of being, a woman under water surrounds the coolness of clubs, stale hotel rooms, unlighted hallways and offi ces, mouthing words, gesturing with her hands for help. Bangles stomps through the rest of the movie in a confection of tulle, sparking like a transistor panel. Desperate for weeks. a storm of feathers, an organdy collar off of a Pierrot costume. Be with people. Hear some music. Maybe I’ll dig up a guy who’ll give and let me keep. Open the fl oral curtains and the dark room dissolves into fl ames. Sir Sorry buys a better home for Shirley Temple. Passed around His disfi gured face breaks into gray diamonds, like a sack of potatoes by the gangsters guessing her weight,

refracted like a kaleidoscope, dazzling as a funhouse mirror, thrown from a horse at a party, she ﬁ nds safety in the underworld. the lover in jail, a monster behind a screen. My mother’s face surfacing from sleep in the hospital. Who knows how many lives she swam through on the other side. Bangles sings Shirley a lullaby. Thank your lucky stars you’ve got a bed. You’ll grow up to ﬁ nd it all a racket. I propose as follows: You go to sleep.

18 19 The Normal Lives of Good People English Poem

Her face is the Wrigley Building lit at night, Ward Pottery business card holder. her eyes billboards, the ponderous A gray rabbit looks quizzically at the space where name and title should appear. tilt and nod, the reverent. Somewhere, a starlet lies murdered. A kiss can last an hour, while People I’ve helped who help me now. The gap between train and platform, her husband’s plebeian love crashes over her reality and expectation, time is running in waves of monotone sentiment, oblique. The Victorians believed a disembodied voice that haunts her walk four humors ﬂ ow through all of us, through the impassive. Things must be handled slowly, an ocean of bile, islands of ﬂ esh.

touched carefully, the objects larger than our hands, Dresden was an answer to Coventry. If history her son’s composition notebook a Victorian novel, is a country we can visit, then Hitler, Roosevelt, and Churchill are rag dolls in the future’s toy box, the nightclub party the Nuremberg Trials, while the starlet’s blood seeps into the carpet. trading cards in the same hologram deck. Julian of Norwich asked to be bricked in a wall Something’s got to give. One day Chicago in order to get to heaven sooner. will slip into the lake. When the ediﬁ ce of her face Visitors fed her through a gap in the mortar. I believe that evil sinks to the table, everyone in Arnelo’s turns belongs together, Mussolini and the Lockerbie bomber to watch beauty part her lips. sitting at the same lunchroom cafeteria table,

and that everything that survives deserves our love. Salvation is on the other side of the world. I promise that a detour is a diversion

as surely as I know that we will someday ﬂ y outside the atmosphere for faster travel. Today a team of English scientists discovered

a monster star ten million times brighter than our sun. Hell falls away the moment when the boaters on the lake wave to the tourists on the shore.

20 21 The Projectionist Man Proof

Is it pathetic to see the insides outside? Color is in the air between us. Call it Spiritus Mundi Matthew Arnold thought the sea was sad, or the collective unconscious, it is the teal and salmon then he realized it was him. of the upholstered headboard, the ivory of the sheers around the four-poster bed, the Windsor blue and Persian cream I don’t know how the world works, of my dressing gown’s ﬂ oral print. What type of girl am I? how a friend becomes a stranger, what a murder looks like on the face, I’ve been neither one thing nor another. The world you see is not the world I live in. No silver balloon ﬂ oating on a string a hurricane. Brush lightly as you pass. behind the white stripes of Venetian blinds abstracting the frame. Sometimes an age just ends. For me it is primary red, an ache of the in-step, A monarch dies somewhere, Franchot Tone sweating under the lights.

an angel gets his wings. I’m nothing but a nothing. Let’s mock the barbarians in the ring. There are 1,649 shades of gray. No matter if they look like John Garﬁ eld and William Holden, All you can do is keep your pathways clear. or W.B. Yeats and C.G. Jung. Maybe someday I’ll see my face up there. Forgiveness is okay. I want the story to end before it becomes a story. Life happens. Celluloid culture Hello, Mother. I’ll wager I look great in a blonde wig. becomes cellular culture. Anita Hill’s college students You talk and I’ll listen. Franchot Tone folds like a bad hand. Tell the story backward and the balloon recedes behind a door. didn’t know who she was. My memory is your memory, my dreams are your dreams. We all get ahead on someone else’s pain. If I am standing on a cliff, then you are on the other side. Goodbye, Once you start rewinding, Mother. It was a good ﬁ ght, and the better man won. Anyone got a ducat? you have to go back to the beginning. Everything we touch becomes infected. I won’t end like that. No rosebud,

no I don’t give a damn, no lovers on the beach. Dial it back to Paul Henreid in a white dinner jacket. It’s good to feel generous.

22 23 The Reality Show Modern Maturity

Nervous and too public, Tillie smothers Emily with anxious love, The appeal of the slightly rancid smell of loose meat and onions, shufﬂ ing her off to the convalescent home for teens the Pony Burger at Bronco’s Drive In.

at the bidding of the zeitgeist. I cannot become cold My attempt to eke out a living in front of the blackboard, my shins covered in sequins. in an indifferent locale. There must be a world beyond the world, When Maxine’s nameless aunt brought shame to the family a door at the intersection of Saddle Creek and Leavenworth through illegitimate pregnancy, the villagers pillaged the farm, that I haven’t tried yet. Baker’s Supermarket is the place to be. murdering pigs, chickens, and cows. More of the economic pie for me, the rapist said afterward. It’s not the doctors, Before the baby boom, everyone thought being old was cool. Looking through a movie book and the lawyers, and the factory bosses themselves. I see how Casablanca was advertised. It’s what ﬂ oats in the air that rules us, our mad attempts The sophisticated portrayal of the problems of two world-weary adults who smoked cigarettes to ﬁ gure out the puzzle, to guess our positions on the board and liked old tunes. Sleek line drawings of the principals and jump ahead. In spite of the Cold War, Emily becomes and the caption, Have you seen it yet?

a gifted actress. Maxine counsels veterans in sunny California. Too cheap for fast food, my dad Pointing my fi nger at individuals while I address the group, drove us past the fi fties’ leftover franchise, its atomic architecture intact. Someday, I speak the language of people living on subtlety. this would be my guilty pleasure. It is a long road to moxie. Clad in a coat of eyes, As a kid I expected authority to see past appearances we bear the headache of injustice, our every movement and recognize talent raw. On the fourth fl oor of Central High part of the record, writing stories backward to make sense. I thought I could be quiet and alone but my work in Studio Art would bring me attention. The visiting artist, a weaver, praised my selection of yarn colors.

The present tells the truth of the past. Lying on the bunk beds in my room, my divorced mother whispered conﬁ dences to me: what if one day the men you trusted walked out, and suddenly, you woke up?

24 25 Epistemology Roadshow Nostalgiarama

Wind busies the bare branches. So much elegant suffering. And always the birds diving the feeder. The mute girl in The Spiral Staircase. The shapely maid who says to her boyfriend, Phrases from an antiques program: Oh darling, I’m so unhappy. folly, ephemera, provenance. How I wanted to say that to someone. The author of Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff When I got the chance, he tired of hearing it. died unexpectedly at age forty-ﬁ ve. I measured time by how far away I could live.

China sleeps in my basement. A dog-eared paperback, Joanna Russ’s The Female Man. I write without seeing. What if the Great Depression never ended? We’d all be wearing fedoras and zoot suits Querulous Paul Lynde says good-bye snoods and rats, spending ration stamps. to wife Imogene Coca My mom used to empty out the attic. in Under the Yum Yum Tree, My dad took everything in the divorce. “See you at lunch. I can’t wait.” All the stuff I’ve saved. Sheer drapes and cut glass. Everything from the decree. Keep reaching into the past I asked for the quilt back. It was in rags. to grab something new. We wish not to stop the passage of time, Here is the spine of the poem: but the ending of eras. My dad used to say, I will ﬁ nd worth there. children should be seen and not heard, quoting Queen Victoria in a Midwestern bowling alley. I will hold worry like a rocket. A friend bought two copies of Madonna’s Sex, one to read, one to save. I’ll kick it in the sand. Living in one place long enough, I will lay it down. scary monsters in the basement join us in the living room, I will bring my case their mojo switched off. to the table. We’ve got to drop it. This is all we get, living through and not after I will ready myself what happens to the body. for an appraisal.

26 27 Let’s All Chant

I. II. In the theater This day has taken many years Barbara Streisand’s disco voice to shed the morning, careened around several half notes yet I need more time. before rhythmically pounding the chorus. When the parking lot hit my friend’s forehead, As Laura, a ﬂ eshy, mature Faye Dunaway she lost six months. in slit skirts, slouch hats, and shawls layered There is enough over coats ran down New York Streets alone. electricity in the brain to burn She saw through the eyes of a killer a forty-watt light bulb. before the murder happened. Medical science should try bringing up the energy, When the Michael Zager Band not taking it down. began caterwauling, Laura told the blue-eyed male model Sometimes the physical world to recline on the edge of the pool as if dead. is against us. I hope I kept the body safe. He never looked so good. Coming off the exit ramp mid-ﬁ ght, my husband screamed to get my attention Not ready to absorb sex before I merged into a speeding car. I had no choice but to sit still I accompanied my cat and hope no one noticed me. to the vet’s operating room Adult challenges lay ahead, while she drew urine from his side the change in direction with a hollow needle. the color wheel took after my parents A friend is covering his body put me to bed at night. with writing. He has had two surgeries A story doesn’t need words on his brain. I began remembering for everyone to know it. the day after I was born. When I replace a cut with words, it doesn’t hurt. Enforced Laura’s models understood the pleasure retirement, I call it, mandatory nostalgia. of giving each other topless backrubs, When no bare skin is left, we die. delicately snorting a line on the job. Sophistication pulls us into sex, not the raw drop and roll, the sticky bang bang of our cells talking to each other.

28 29 Rancho Nostalgia II

“My room, bumpkin. I’m pooped.” It is still alive. He makes me remember myself —Daffy Duck, The Scarlet Pumpernickel a long time back.

So, you’re going to put up a ﬁ ght, Nostalgia for the past’s future. Sure, I’m tired. the diner says to her steak. We’ll take turns resting our heads

I wanted something nice, on death’s pillow. Look at me now, haters, a girandole, a nocturne, not commenting on, but living.

not a pink necessary chair or a map of injustices.

A synthetic CEO, I’ll parade down Wall Street

wearing a diadem of wheat, waving a scepter of corn.

My stock in trade is memory, exchanging shares of Time for Life magazine.

Nostalgia occurs when affection for some past self overcomes the will to create a new one.

The mind’s enterprise is to erode the surfaces of objects until they become words.

There is no subsidy program for the factory of the self.

Just some feelings overlaid by others. Giving an answer to a previous moment of failure.

What about that moment when the body was a vessel for the future’s operation?

30 31 About James Cihlar Acknowledgements

Thanks go to the editors of the following journals where some of the poems in A City Full of Eyes previously appeared, sometimes in different form:

• 1110: “Lonely, Deeply” • American Poetry Review: “The Projectionist,” “King Arthur and His Mob” • The Awl: “Night Song,” “English Poem” • Court Green: “Light and Dark” • Fogged Clarity: “Modern Maturity” • Forklift, Ohio: “Nostalgiarama” • Labletter: “Undercurrent” • Mary: “Rancho Nostalgia II” Photo by Brad Stouffer • Mastodon Dentist: “Let’s All Chant” (as “Laura’s Models and Time’s Quick Exits”) James Cihlar is the author of the poetry books Rancho Nostalgia • Midway Journal: “The Normal Lives of Good People” (Dream Horse Press, forthcoming in 2013), Undoing (Little Pear • Prairie Schooner: “’Til We Meet Again,” “The Reality Show” Press, 2008) and chapbook Metaphysical Bailout (Pudding House • Prime Numbers: “Nora Prentiss” Press). His work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, • Rhino: “Epistemology Roadshow,” “Rancho Nostalgia” The Awl, Court Green, Smartish Pace, Prairie Schooner, Lambda • Shaking Like a Mountain: “Johnny Guitar” Literary Review, and Forklift, Ohio. His poems are included in the anthologies American Tensions: Literature of Identity and the Search for Social Justice (New Village, 2011), Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Writers on Faith, Religion, and Spirituality (Sibling Rivalry, 2011), Divining Divas (Lethe, 2012), and American Society: What Poets See (FutureCycle Press, forthcoming). The recipient of a Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship for Poetry and a Glenna Luschei Award from Prairie Schooner, Cihlar teaches at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. He is on Twitter at https://twitter.com/#!/JamesCihlar and Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/james.cihlar.7

32 33 Author’s Notes

These poems riff on multiple texts, including but not limited “King Arthur and His Mob”: Little Miss Marker, 1934, to the following fi lms, books, and more, all recommended directed by Alexander Hall and starring Shirley Temple. viewing, reading, and listening: “The Normal Lives of Good People”: The Arnelo Affair, 1947, “Rancho Nostalgia” and “Rancho Nostalgia II”: Rancho directed by Arch Oboler and starring John Hodiak, George Notorious, 1952, directed by Fritz Lang and starring Marlene Murphy, and Frances Gifford. Dietrich, Arthur Kennedy, and Mel Ferrer. “English Poem”: With thanks to Éireann Lorsung for the “’Til We Meet Again”: The 1940 fi lm of the same name, information on Julian of Norwich, and more. directed by Edmund Goulding, and starring Merle Oberon and George Brent. “Man Proof”: Man Proof, 1938, directed by Richard Thorpe and starring Myrna Loy, Franchot Tone, and Rosalind Russell. “Night Song”: The 1947 fi lm of the same name, directed by John Cromwell and starring Dana Andrews and Merle “The Reality Show”: “I Stand Here Ironing,” 1961, Tillie Oberon. Olsen, and No Name Woman, 1976, Maxine Hong Kingston.

“Lonely, Deeply”: The 1956 fi lm Miracle in the Rain, directed “Nostalgiarama”: The Spiral Staircase, 1945, directed by by Rudolf Maté and starring Jane Wyman and Van Johnson. Robert Siodmak, and starring Dorothy McGuire, George Brent, and Ethel Barrymore. First published by Bantam in “Light and Dark”: The1946 fi lm Dance, Girl, Dance, directed 1975, The Female Man is a feminist science fi ction novel by by Dorothy Arzner and starring Lucille Ball, Maureen Joanna Russ. O’Hara, and Ralph Bellamy. “Let’s All Chant”: The song, “Let’s All Chant,” 1978, by the “The Face Behind the Mask”: The 1941 fi lm of the same Michael Zager Band, is featured in the movie, The Eyes of name, directed by Robert Florey and starring Peter Lorre. Laura Mars, 1978, directed by Irvin Kershner, and starring Faye Dunaway. “Johnny Guitar”: The 1954 movie of the same name, directed by Nicholas Ray and starring Joan Crawford, Sterling Hayden, and Mercedes McCambridge.

“Undercurrent”: The 1946 ﬁ lm of the same name, directed by Vincente Minnelli and starring Katharine Hepburn, Robert Taylor, and Robert Mitchum.

“Nora Prentiss”: The 1947 movie of the same name, directed by Vincent Sherman and starring Ann Sheridan.

34 35