DREAMS OF SANTA FE TRAIL
“The house I dream of is gone. It caught fire decades ago, then someone else rebuilt it — same address, same general shape — but it became something my sleeping mind refuses to recognize. My psyche keeps the blueprint of the original, and it always returns to a floor plan that no longer exists anywhere on earth except behind my own eyes. It means the only place I can still meet my parents as they were then is one that has ceased to be. I find this unbearably sad, but also a mysterious gift. The house I lost to fire is the one house I am never able to lose.”
FINDING JIM
“We stood there at the graves of our ancestors; these people who died 120 years ago. What is there to say, after all, about people we’ve never met? And yet…we are them. They came from County Cork and County Clare, which already tells you something: two Irish traditions, two counties, brought together in the diaspora that flung people from the old world through Erie and Iowa and the Dakotas, scattering them like seed. They stopped here, in Perkins County, in a place called Seim. Down the hill from where we stood, the reservoir was calm and silver in the afternoon light. Seim is somewhere underneath it. That’s the kind of ending a place can have in the American West.”
BEBO ON THE BEAT
“Betty Bob Buckley—Bebo, to those who knew her best—was a reporter until the very end, and she always wanted to know what came next. She lived to be 99, which means I spent almost seventy years never knowing a world without her.”
REMEMBERING MY MOM
“A friend of mine read our mother’s obituary, and the list of her many accomplishments, and he said to me, “Norm, your mom stomped the earth” —and I like that image. She indeed joyfully stomped the earth. She came to participate. And she left everything on the field.”
GRIEF AT FIVE YEARS
“There’s something we all know but can’t define. We call it love, we call it God, we call it science, we call it nature, we call it the mystery. It really doesn’t matter what we call it, because it is ineffable. It grows and expands with our consciousness and our willingness to open up to its unfolding depth. But we must open up to all of it, if we are to be conscious, and all of it includes loss.”
ON VARIOUS BOOKS ABOUT DIRECTING…
“I’m frequently asked for suggestions of books about directing–by students, and others who want to direct. Here are some of my favorites, which hopefully provide a good place to start.”
FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH, MY ADVICE…
“A friend used to say to me–free advice is worth exactly what you pay for it, which is nothing. However, that doesn’t seem to stop people from asking and I find that I say the same things over and over. So here goes: my advice here on my blog, where I can direct people to read it when they come knocking…
These are some random thoughts–some specific, some more general–but hopefully some of you will find some of it helpful.”
HITCHCOCK’S MID-CENTURY AMERICAN MAN
“Even Hitchcock films that are considered lighter entertainment—like NORTH BY NORTHWEST—can be analyzed for their insightful examination of human behavior. After all, what is the journey of Roger Thornhill (played by Cary Grant), if not the journey of a man towards self-realization?”
TO WANT AND NOT TO HAVE – AN ANALYSIS OF “A PLACE IN THE SUN”
“Indeed her effect on him was electric—thrilling—arousing in him a curiously stinging sense of what it was to want and not to have—to wish to win and yet to feel, almost agonizingly that he was destined not even to win a glance from her.” –Theodore Dreiser
STILL HERE WITH ME — MEDITATIONS ON THE FILM “BIRTH”
“Perhaps this film affects me so much because it feels so personal to me. In 1988 my first significant other died, when he and I were both 32. It was a shattering loss for me and completely upended my sense of reality. For a very long time, my grief enveloped everything and colored the way I looked at the world. Years passed before the wound could heal–grief takes a long time to transform, to give birth to something else.”
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