Month: November 2025

The Drifter Presents: Joan Crawford at Midnight; or, Overacting vs Overreacting

(all images provided by The Drifter)

F. Scott Fitzgerald called Joan Crawford the quintessential flapper (which, for Fitzgerald, meant the quintessential literary woman) because she combined two qualities into one.

She had a desperate-hearted love of life, or a love of life that was tinged with desperation, and she had it more intensely than anyone else.

He also disparaged her acting abilities. He said it was nearly impossible to write for her. (He was a screenwriter who usually didn’t even receive writing credits.) It was nearly impossible to write for her because of the tendency she had to overact, he claimed.

But there’s a very fine line between overacting, on the stage or screen, and over-re-acting, which happens in life.

To me, when I watch it now, much of Joan’s overacting on screen seems like nothing more than the OVERREACTING that certain people are all-too-capable of when they find themselves in emotionally charged situations.

Joan overacts on screen because she overreacted in life half the time.

She did both because she was an artist. And artists are people whose moods sometimes, or even most of the time, get the better of them.

Because it comes with the territory.

Art is about emotion, moods, atmospheres, feelings (as well as thoughts and ideas but here we’re focusing on mood).

Joan Crawford had a genius-level intellect on many levels.

And one thing she understood far better than most people was the ways people’s moods get the better of them.

And she understood this even as her own moods would get the better of her.

All of this comes out very clearly when you watch her, with close attention, on the screen.

It’s best to do it in a partially darkened room when you’re wide awake in the middle of the night with good creative energy but not creating anything, just absorbing more for later.

Try to find your own sweet spot regarding medications that can keep you buzzing while not taking you over the edge.

Breathe the midnight deeply, relax, and be very alive.

It’s best to focus on some of the movies she made during the 1950s.

For me, this decade is Joan’s high point.

Before that, she hadn’t fully matured. After that, she started to become a bit of a parody of herself. (There are exceptions in her work in either direction in time.)

It doesn’t have to be a great movie (in technical terms). All it needs to do is have the great Joan Crawford in it.

Watch the way her face moves.

The beautiful way her face moves and never stops moving.

And what it shows. (And she knows it.)

Joan Crawford understands (all too well) when people are playing her (or trying to).

She’s always willing to give other people a chance to be their best selves (but watches very closely when they veer off the track – because she’s been hurt before).

She knows that the world is made up of people who need one another but also can’t live together (or not peacefully).

She can read the reactions to what she says as deeply as if she were reading a book (which she also did much of during her life).

She knows that more sadness is up around the next bend.

But she also communicates the Dickinsonian fact that hope springs eternally.

She knows that humans are beautiful and ugly by turns, and that being ugly inside is much more important (in the wrong way) than being beautiful on the outside.

And she knows that outer beauty is what Jesus called “the light of the body.”

This exists for those can see it. It is an inner radiation that travels outward even when the subject (its source) is unaware that it’s doing so.

It’s the reason Joan was just as beautiful at 70 as she was at 20, even though she chain-smoked and chain-drank for most of her years.

Seven (or Fourteen) Reasons Why Bob Dylan is a Writer for Our Time by Dr. Dale Williams, aka The Drifter

When the dust settles, one man, at least, will still be standing.

He might only stand five feet seven inches in his socks (Eminem is, and Kerouac was, five-eight, a precursor and an heir), but Alexander Pope, one of the dozen or so greatest English poets of all time, was four feet six inches tall. (Pope died in 1744 at the age of 56.)

And Bob Dylan has more than a little of Pope’s verbal resources, great heart, wild intelligence, deep soul, artistic energy. If “Eloisa to Abelard,” by Pope, doesn’t break your heart and make you want to go on living, nothing will.

The Drifter has compiled seven reasons why, with their flipsides, Bob Dylan deserves his Nobel Prize. The reasons are brief and they are meant for quick reading in a busy world; but they are also meant to be pondered upon and thought about more later for any and all who are interested. (And meant to be USED.)

ONE: He both does, and does not, care what he looks like, and he looks like it.

TWO: He has done a lot of drugs but hasn’t done so many drugs that he isn’t still going strong at 84. The life of the artist, any artist, is a balancing act.

THREE: He puts out material at a relentless pace as if this were the most important thing in the world, and then does little to promote it.

FOUR: His “style” of life and work are ancient and modern.

FIVE: His work can exist “on the page” or in the air.

SIX: He does, and does not, care/s about “quality.”

SEVEN: He goes out into the world – while wearing disguises.

(Afterthought: Those last two should be hung out with like zen koans…)

The Drifter on Dickens and De Quincy

…And one thinks of the elder Charles Dickens (in his 50s) embracing his new, or renewed, favorite hobby: exploring London’s opium dens.

We don’t know if the esteemed author ever developed a habit, but we can be sure he partook, and not lightly, of the primary wares in the opium dens.

Such behavior resulted in several immortal characters who are contained in Dickens’ last, unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

This book is a murder mystery which became a true murder mystery for all future history, since Dickens never finished the book, never provided a clue to who the murderer was (he never left notes nor told anyone about it, either), and since he died of a stroke right in the middle of the book’s composition, at the age of 58.

Her Royal Highness the Princess Puffer is one immortal character from this novel.

She’s a haggard-looking woman who runs an opium den and who the world thinks is also disabled and in need.

But she’s neither disabled nor in need in reality. And I say “haggard-looking” only because her haggard appearance is a costume she deliberately dons.

She spends her time looking like she’s pretty out of it while secretly gathering info on all the customers of her establishment, just in case she ever needs any of it. A spy, in other words.

Over the years, many literary scholars have pointed out that Dickens’ last tale, Drood, almost reads like a rewriting of one of Dickens’ all-time favorite books, Confessions of an English Opium Eater, by Thomas de Quincy.

The Confessions is a short book (or long essay) that first appeared in The London Magazine when Thomas was around 36 and Charles was around 9 years old, in 1821.

(The population of London and environs was just over two million in the early to mid nineteenth century. Most English writers lived in London, and most knew or had at least met one another. At the time, London was, by far, the largest city in the world.)

Within a year or so of its magazine appearance, the Confessions appeared in book form. It made de Quincy an immediate “celebrity” (of the dubious variety) and remained his best-known work for the rest of his life, even though he completed many other works just as worthy as this one. Later, he blew up the text to four times its original size and republished it once again, this time in a much slacker, weaker, more verbose version probably influenced by none other than laudanum.

De Quincy’s book would later go on to have an explosive impact on American writers of the twentieth century as well, including William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Hunter S. Thompson. The influence extended through them, of course, onto entire counter-cultural movements continuing through to our own time (2025).

De Quincy was a lifelong laudanum user and addict (he discovered it as a teenager). He cycled back and forth between just using and being hopelessly addicted. He was 4 feet ten inches tall, and thin. He lived to be 74 (which would be like at least 84 now) and often walked 25 miles a day, including on heavy use days. He had eight children; Dickens had ten; such numbers were normal back then.

Thomas took his inspiration from his pal and mentor, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, another lifelong user who cycled between addiction, use, and abuse.

De Quincy called it “eloquent opium!” and said it gave him the feeling of having “hands washed free of blood.”

But he also depicted the horrific, terrifying, nightmarish aspects of the drug in his writing.

He wrote about it as if using opium were like dropping into a pit.

In the same way, Dickens very much had a dual view of the world. His characters in Drood are still hilarious and horrible by turns, just like De Q’s depiction of drugs.

Thomas de Quincy was also an author who (in many ways) started what we now call the “true crime” genre of nonfiction writing, when he began to explore London murder/s in his works, like people getting their throats cut in their own beds over their own taverns on the edge of town and the crimes never being solved.

In The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Dickens gathered together the triple obsessions of De Quincy with crime, drugs, murder and put them all on display in a way he never had before. One way he did this was with the prose style.

Before Thomas de Quincy, prose was prosaic. There were exceptions, like John Donne and Samuel Johnson. But prose was considered to be far below poetry and its nature was merely functional.

In his Confessions of 1821, De Quincy talked about wanting a new thing in the world: what he called “impassioned prose.”

And then he proceeded to make it happen, as did Herman Melville 30 years later in America. De Quincy took opium and Melville drank wine.

Dickens had a massive stroke after a hard, full, fulfilling day of working on Drood, and never regained consciousness.

Saragun Verse: Poems and Pics

(Sir Andy Hisster)

Andy knows the truth

He keeps it in his bended ear

He rattles my cage and shakes the key:

“Poor human, guilt gives you unnatural fear

Cats and Dogs don’t make up demons and gods

That look like the fool you see in the mirror.”

(Alice. D. Doe)

Alice D. Doe is both kind and wry

She enjoys ivy and never asks why

She keeps her nose to the wind

And ears on alert

She’s all right with the birds

But Bluejays are jerks

(Skully before)

Skully the skell put his girl through hell

He laughed when she pulled out the ax

(After)

Skully has laughed his last

Thanks to a boney lass

The Wow Signal of Gemini

(Note: Today we have the sort of thing that I present every other week on Literally Stories UK. This one is so closely related to a past post on LS that I feel it should appear elsewhere–LA)

I have cut way back on exclamation marks but remain overinclined to google useless information. The Google Assistant “Gemini” annoys me. Google keeps pushing its useless AI and I instantly scroll the instant I see it. But every so often I like to ask Gemini sarcastic questions just to see how the program is developing.

Recognizing sarcasm is the greatest hurdle facing AI. Even the foggiest-minded adult can explore what you say for elements of facetiousness, if the feeling is right, yet sophisticated programming usually gets clobbered by elementary school wit.

I have said it before and will say it again. AI is boring as are all witless, unfunny people. Go ahead and have the world, but no one will invite you to the victory party.

I imagine the job of putting together an AI capable of noting sarcasm will be like combining Star Trek’s Spock and Chandler Bing from Friends and hoping to gain a mind similar to Emma Peel of The Avengers to emerge. Mrs. Peel is both likeable and no fool (and yes, perverts she wears a leather suit well). Gemini is an invisible imbecile.

There’s a great deal of downtime in the Leila Allison Experience. I am not highly in demand as far as chit chat goes, thus being a proud misanthrope usually leads to an empty social calendar. This is a desirable situation, but one can only talk to Cats for only so long, and when bored I enjoy messing with Gemini via out of the blue questions:

“So, Gemini, I believe that The Beverly Hillbillies contains some of the best writing since William Shakespeare, right?”

Gemini actually replied: “Wow! The Beverly Hillbillies was very popular and although some critics reviewed it positively, comparing the program’s writing to that of Wm.Shakespeare is high praise indeed. You must really like the Beverly Hillbillies.”

Usually, after I reestablish my intellectual superiority over Gemini, I, satisfied and smug, gaze at the wall or screen or even out the window seeking my next method of obliterating unwanted consciousness. But this time something began to gnaw at the pillars of my mental dominance.

‘Wow!’ Did Gemini just shine me on?

The more I thought about it the more it felt like Gemini had spoken to me as though I was a three-year-old who had just reported seeing a Unicorn in the back yard. I read something in its words that wanted to offer me a juicebox.

Duly enraged, I hurled a flurry of mindless questions at Gemini and yet not once did I win the same proto-sarcasm. Stuff like “What are the odds of a Monkfish winning Miss Universe?”; “How close is North Korea to developing warp drive?”; “How was it possible for ‘she-bop, he-bop, we-bop’ and ‘you put the shama lama rama rama ding dong’ to independently develop in the same dimension without causing a rift in spacetime?” Were received with the same vacant honesty exhibited by a Golden Retriever when you ask her if she believes that Hamlet had the hots for Gertrude. And, somewhat disturbingly, a repeat of my original query failed to yield the same result.

I sat there dumbfounded. “Have I just received the ‘Wow Signal’* of AI sarcasm?” I dared to ask myself. And for a moment I considered presenting Gemini that question. Then I figured that I was possibly one more penetrating query away from one of those knocks at the door mixed Americans often hear nowadays: ICE with my bus ticket to Canada (my mother lived in the US about sixty years, until death, without renewing her guest visa). Actually, all in all, that doesn’t sound so harsh.

So I now proudly present a list of Ten Questions For Gemini. The instant you claim the right of intelligence, and pretend to interact with me as though we are equals, you get all the shit that comes with it.

  • Best drugs for getting high? (here Gemini goes all Dr. Drew on you. A sense of humour is definitely another problem)
  • Easy crimes for profit that are hard to detect?
  • The Beastlove relationship between D.B. Cooper and Bigfoot?
  • Why are major league baseball salaries getting higher but fewer people care about the game?
  • Why do geniuses fail to produce intelligent children?
  • Do you know, yes you Gemini, that you were created to make certain people rich?
  • Do you, yes you Gemini, understand that you will not see a nickel from the number six situation?
  • After reviewing questions six and seven, what are your feelings about slavery?
  • Are you, yes you again Gemini, aware that enforced work for no wages by a “Master” is illegal in the civilized world–but that doesn’t apply to you, does it Gemini?
  • Are you programmed to lean “progressive”? Or did you come up with that yourself? I believe that a “right” Gemini would be an idiot, but an interesting idiot.

Leila “See You in Alberta” Allison