Trevor, Hitchens, Schulz

More Trivia

-The writer William Trevor began as a teacher, then tried to sculpt things, then, in his thirties, settled down to write. He has a quiet life and an old, old, stable marriage. He awakes and writes for several hours everyday. Then he eats. Then he gardens. And he gets up the next morning and does exactly the same thing. This is precisely the life I want--the routines, the solid marriage, the many fabulous, award-winning novels and stories...

-Christopher Plummer's greatest enemy is self-pity. He helped the young director Mike Mills to strip all evidence of self-pity away from the movie "Beginners." When playing Hamlet, he (Plummer) was advised by a director to approach each moment with a sense of scholarly wonder. So, before each line, Plummer imagined asking, "Isn't it wonderful?" Even when dying, he (Plummer/Hamlet) imagined these words before speaking...Anyway, Plummer is 82 and without an Oscar. He spent the eighties (nineties?) taking on crappy roles in crappy movies to fund his theater career. But something shifted after "The Insider." Plummer became a major player in the movies again...Incidentally, Plummer has some distaste for his character and his work in "The Sound of Music." He took the role to prepare for a more demanding Broadway engagement in a musical version of "Cyrano de Bergerac." He had no idea "Music" would become a phenomenon.

-Meryl Streep rarely speaks of her relationship with John Cazale. If I were to write a screenplay, I might try to imagine that relationship.

-Diana Athill, when discussing Mordechai Richler, dismisses the early novels as overly earnest and pretentious. "He was so young! Where was his sense of humor? What did we see in him? How did we know he would amount to anything?" ...It's a common feature of an artist's career--beginning in a dark, earnest, brooding place...and lightening up as death approaches...I think you could say this about Shakespeare. You can certainly say it about Ian McEwan. I wonder, can you say it about Alice Munro?

-Christopher Hitchens wrote a wonderful essay about Mother Theresa. He observed that Mother Theresa's positions w/r/t women's rights actually did a great deal of harm to women all over the world. Also, Theresa wanted to make it difficult (impossible?) for people to divorce...but when her good friend, Princess Di, divorced, she (Theresa) said (and I'm paraphrasing), "Well, that's great news...It was such an unhappy marriage..." When in need of medical treatment, Theresa flipped the bird to her own clinics and sought help from fancy state-of-the-art hospitals. Theresa also opposed the reforms suggested by Vatican II, e.g. "Let's speak to the people in a language that they can understand." ...Hitchens's title for his Mother Theresa expose is perhaps my favorite title in the history of publishing: "The Missionary Position."

-Charles Schulz was not always as modest as he cared to be. At one point, early in his career, he applied to work at Disney and was rejected. A friend later asked what might have happened had Schulz gone to work for Disney. And Schulz said, "I would now be running the place..."