OK.
I'm going to read two more.
The first is a prose poem, and the last
is, I consider my disco poem.
[LAUGHTER]
This one is called, the prose poem
is called "The Lonedale Operator."
"The first movie I ever saw was a Walt Disney cartoon,
The Three Little Pigs.
My grandmother took me to it.
It was back in the days when you went downtown.
There was a second feature with live actors called Bring 'Em
Back Alive, a documentary about the animal tamer Frank Buck.
In this film, you saw a python swallow a live pig.
This wasn't scary.
In fact, it seemed quite normal, a sort
of thing you would see in a movie, reality.
A little later we went downtown again to see a movie of Alice
in Wonderland, also with live actors.
This wasn't very surprising either.
I think I knew something about the story.
Maybe it had been read to me.
That isn't why it wasn't surprising though.
The reason was that these famous movie
actors, like WC Fields and Gary Cooper,
were playing different roles, and even
though I didn't know who they were,
they were obviously important for other kinds of acting.
And so it didn't seem strange that they should
be acting in a special way like this,
pretending to be characters that people knew-- already
knew about from a book.
In other words, I imagined infinite specialties for them
just from having seen this one example,
and I was right, too, though not about the film, which I liked.
Years later, I saw it when I was grown up
and thought it was awful.
How could I have been wrong the first time?
I knew it wasn't inexperience because I wasn't experienced
the first time I saw a movie.
It was as though my taste had changed, though I had not,
and I still can't help thinking that I was right
the first time, when I was still relatively
unencumbered by experience.
I forget what were the next movies I saw,
and we'll skip ahead to one I saw
when I was grown up The Lonedale Operator,
a silent short by DW Griffith made in 1911 and starring
Blanche Sweet.
Although I was in my 20s when I saw it
at the Museum of Modern Art, it seems as remote in time
as my first viewing of Alice in Wonderland.
I can remember almost none of it,
and the little I can remember may
have been in another Griffith short
The Lonely Villa, which may have been on the same program.
It seems that Blanche Sweet was a heroic telephone operator,
who managed to get through to the police
and foil some gangsters, who were
trying to rob a railroad depot.
Though I also see this living room-- small,
though it was supposed to be in a large house--
with Mary Pickford running around,
and this may have been a scene in The Lonely Villa.
At that moment, the memories stop,
and terror or tedium sets in.
It's hard to tell which is which in this memory
because the boredom of living in a lonely place,
or having a lonely job, and even of being so far in the past
and having to wear those funny uncomfortable clothes
and hairstyles is terrifying, more so
than the intentional scariness of the plot, the criminals,
whoever they were.
Imagine that innocence, Lillian Harvey,
encounters romance, Billy Fritsch,
in the home of experience, Albert Basserman.
From there, it is only a step to terror,
under the dripping boughs outside.
Anything can change as fast as it wants to and in doing so,
may pass through a more or less terrible phase,
but the true terror is in the swiftness
of changing, forward or backward, slipping always just
beyond our control.
The actors are like people on drugs,
so they aren't doing anything unusual.
As a matter of fact, they are performing brilliantly."