MONDAY, 16 JUNE 2003
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Poem: "An Argument," by Thomas Moore from A Book of Love Poetry (Oxford University Press).

An Argument

I've oft been told by learned friars,
That wishing and the crime are one,
And Heaven punishes desires
As much as if the deed were done.

If wishing damns us, you and I
Are damned to all our heart's content;
Come, then, at least we may enjoy
Some pleasure for our punishment!

Literary Notes:

It's the birthday of Joyce Carol Oates, born in Millersport, New York (1938). She's known for novels and short stories in which people's lives are torn apart by violence. She's the author of books such as Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (1990) and We Were the Mulvaneys (1996). The book that had the most profound influence on her life and her writing was Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. She read it when she was about ten years old, and loved how Alice was calm and rational when facing nightmarish situations. She said that Alice's calmness made a strong impression, and ever since she has tried to write about nightmares and bizarre things in a coherent, calm way.

Today is Bloomsday, celebrating James Joyce's novel Ulysses, which takes place on June 16th, 1904. Today in Dublin, people will celebrate the book by reading passages aloud, visiting all the places mentioned in the book, and eating the favorite foods of the character Leopold Bloom, such as kidneys and other innards of beasts. Joyce chose June 16th, 1904 for his novel because on that day he went on his first date with the love of his life, Nora Barnacle. A few days before, he had seen a tall beautiful woman with long red hair walking on Nassau Street. He stopped and talked to her, and they got together on the evening of June 16th. They walked out on the wide fields by the banks of the River Dodder as the sun was setting, and Joyce fell in love with her. The following October, just a few months after they'd met, they left Ireland together. She came from western Ireland, which most Dubliners considered the backward part of the country. Some people thought she wasn't smart enough for him, but Joyce loved her unrefined ways. He often wrote down things she said. She once said of a rundown apartment, "That place wasn't fit to wash a rat in." They lived like nomads in Rome, Zurich, Trieste, and Paris. He started writing Ulysses when he was thirty-six years old. It took him seven years to finish. He wanted to describe Dublin as accurately as he could. He wrote letters to friends asking for a list of shop names, street awnings, the number of steps leading down to 7 Eccles Street, and how long it took to walk from one part of the city to another. He used rhyming dictionaries, maps of Dublin, street directories, and Golberts "Historic and Municipal Documents of Ireland." For the final "Molly Bloom" section of the book, he borrowed Nora's unpunctuated writing style and quoted from many of her letters. By the time he finished, his eyesight was so poor that he had to write in different colored inks to see what he had written. The book ends with Molly's soliloquy: "O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."

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TUESDAY, 17 JUNE 2003
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Poem: "The Fortune Cookie Man," by Ron Padgett from New and Selected Poems (David R. Godine, Publisher).

The Fortune Cookie Man

Working for ten years now at the fortune cookie factory and I'm still not allowed to write
any of the fortunes. I couldn't do any worse than they do, what with their You Will Find
Success in the Entertainment Field mentality. I would like to tell someone that they will
find a gorilla in their closet, brooding darkly over the shoes. And that that gorilla will
roll his glassy, animal eyes as if to cry out to the heavens that are burning in bright
orange and red and through which violent clouds are rolling, and open his beast's mouth
and issue a whimper that will fall on the shoes like a buffing rag hot with friction. But
they say no. So if you don't find success in the entertainment field, don't blame me.
I just work here.

Literary Notes:

It's the birthday of poet Ron Padgett, born in Tulsa, Oklahoma (1942). He's the author of collections of poetry such as Triangles in the Afternoon, (1979), How to Be a Woodpecker (1983), and You Never Know (2002)

It's the birthday of poet James Weldon Johnson, born in Jacksonville, Florida (1871). Over the course of his life he was a teacher, school principal, journalist, lawyer, songwriter, diplomat, novelist, poet, civil rights crusader, anthologist, and professor. There was no high school in Jacksonville for black students when Johnson was growing up, so his parents sent him to Atlanta University to finish his secondary education. He returned to Jacksonville to work as a teacher, and eventually built a high school there. At the same time, he was studying law and in 1898, he became the first African American since Reconstruction to be admitted to the Florida bar. In 1901, Johnson went to New York with his brother to write songs and perform in a ragtime song and dance act. He wrote more than 200 songs, including "Lift Every Voice and Sing" which has been called the Negro National Anthem. He also got involved in politics and worked for the Teddy Roosevelt Administration, as an American consul in Venezuela and Nicaragua. In 1912, Johnson published a novel called The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912). It was about a light-skinned black man who passes for white. Johnson worked for the NAACP. He lobbied for the anti-lynching bill that was killed by a filibuster in the Senate, and he investigated war crimes that had been committed by the United States in Haiti. Between his travels and bureaucratic work and speech writing, he managed to compile anthologies such as The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922), which was the first collection of poetry by African Americans ever made. He also edited the The Book of American Negro Spirituals (1925). Many critics consider his masterpiece God's Trombones (1927) in which he wrote seven poems based on sermons. He had always loved the way black preachers talked, and he wanted to use that style in his poetry. In one of his poem-sermons, Johnson wrote,

"And God stepped out on space,
And He looked around and said,
"I'm lonely-
I'll make me a world."

It's the birthday of novelist and journalist John Hersey, born in Tianjin, (TYAHN-jin), China (1914). His parents were missionaries in China and Hersey learned to speak Chinese before he learned English. After college Hersey became a war correspondent to China and Japan, and he covered World War II for Time and Life magazines. He became known for describing real people as though they were characters in a novel. In 1945, Hersey began to do research for a book about postwar Japan. He found a document written by a Jesuit missionary who had survived the atom bomb that had been dropped on Hiroshima. Hersey found the priest, who was recovering from radiation sickness, and the priest introduced him to many more survivors. Hersey chose six survivors from the many he talked to, and told their stories as simply and factually as he could in a book called Hiroshima (1946). Hiroshima was incredibly popular. Albert Einstein ordered 1000 copies and distributed them personally to everyone he knew. When Newspapers serialized it, Hersey donated all the proceeds to the American Red Cross.

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WEDNESDAY, 18 JUNE 2003
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Poem: "My Father's Neckties," by Maxine Kumin from Selected Poems 1960-1990 (Norton).

My Father's Neckties

Last night my color-blind chain-smoking father
who has been dead for fourteen years
stepped up out of a basement tie shop
downtown and did not recognize me.

The number he was wearing was as terrible
as any from my girlhood, a time of
ugly ties and acrimony; six or seven
blue lightning bolts outlined in yellow.

Although this was my home town it was tacky
and unfamiliar, it was Rabat or Gibraltar
Daddy smoking his habitual
square-in-the-mouth cigarette and coughing
ashes down the lightning jags. He was
my age exactly, it was wordless, a window
opening on an interior we both knew
where we had loved each other, keeping it quiet.

Why do I wait years and years to dream this outcome?
My brothers, in whose dreams he must as surely
turn up wearing rep ties or polka dots clumsily
knotted, do not speak of their encounters.

When we die, all four of us, in
whatever sequence, the designs
will fall off like face masks
and the rayon ravel from this hazy version
of a man who wore hard colors recklessly
and hid out in the foreign
bargain basements of his feelings.

Literary Notes:

It's the birthday of Amy Bloom, born in New York City (1953). She's the author of the novel Love Invents Us (1996) and the collection of short stories A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You (2000). She is a practicing psychotherapist and began writing fiction in her spare time. Many of the characters she writes about suffer from mental illness. She says that psychotherapy and writing are both about using small details to find out what's going on as opposed to what people say is going on. She says that both fiction and psychotherapy are about putting your hands on people lives, to be intimate.

It's the birthday of novelist Gail Godwin, born in Birmingham, Alabama (1937). She's the author of A Mother and Two Daughters (1982) and The Good Husband (1994).

It was on this day in 1983 that Dr. Sally Ride became the first American woman in space, aboard the Challenger for a six-day mission. She said, "The thing that I'll remember most about the flight is that it was fun. In fact, I'm sure it was the most fun I'll ever have in my life."

It's the birthday of film critic Roger Ebert, born in Urbana, Illinois (1942). He dropped out of graduate school at the University of Chicago to become a journalist for the Chicago Sun Times and he became the newspaper's film critic. In 1975, he became the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism. He's the author of many collections of movie reviews, including I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie (2000). He said, "No good movie is depressing, all bad movies are depressing."

It's the birthday of children's author and illustrator Chris Van Allsberg, born in Grand Rapids, Michigan (1949). He's the author of the children's books Jumanji (1981) and The Polar Express (1985).

Today is the anniversary of the day in 1815 that Napoleon Bonaparte lost his final major battle near Waterloo Village in Belgium. One of the most famous Emperors of all time, there are an estimated forty-five thousand books about him. He's one of the only historical people we remember by his first name. Napoleon took command of the French army after the French revolution, and was the first military leader in Europe to use commoners as officers. He believed that in order to inspire his men, the officers of his army should be dressed in beautiful uniforms, and they should all carry the same flag. In 1799, Napoleon became dictator of France, and in 1804 he declared himself emperor. From 1805 onward, he started invading and attacking almost everyone in Europe. England, Germany, Russia, Spain. His invasion of Russia became the subject of Tolstoy's novel War and Peace. After a series of defeats, Napoleon abdicated the throne and went to live on the island of Elba. He took long salt baths and read "The Arabian Nights". After a year in exile, he got bored and went back to France. He gathered an army and marched north toward Belgium at Waterloo, where the allied armies of England and Germany were waiting for him. A heavy rain fell the evening before the battle, so Napoleon delayed his attack until the morning of June 18th. His army and the English army fought for ten hours, and Napoleon would have won, but the rain delay allowed the Prussians time to arrive and help the British win the battle. Napoleon lost twenty-five thousand men. He signed a second abdication in Paris and went to live on the remote island of St. Helena off the coast of Africa.

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THURSDAY, 19 JUNE 2003
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Poem: "Sun and Rain," by W. S. Merwin from Flower & Hand (Copper Canyon Press).

Sun and Rain

Opening the book at a bright window
above a wide pasture after five years
I find I am still standing on a stone bridge
looking down with my mother at dusk into a river
hearing the current as hers in her lifetime

now it comes to me that that was the day
she told me of seeing my father alive for the last time
and he waved her back from the door as she was leaving
took her hand for a while and said
nothing

at some signal
in a band of sunlight all the black cows flow down the pasture together
to turn uphill and stand as the dark rain touches them

Literary Notes:

It's the birthday of short story writer and memoirist Tobias Wolff, born in Birmingham, Alabama (1945). He joined the Army and served in Vietnam. When he returned to the United States, he supported himself with odd jobs. In 1976, the Atlantic Monthly accepted his story "Smokers" which was the first story he ever submitted for publication. He went on to write several collections of short stories, but he's best know for This Boy's Life, (1989), a memoir about his childhood that was made into a movie with Robert DeNiro and Leonardo DiCaprio.

It's the birthday of film critic Pauline Kael, born in Petaluma, California (1919). She was the film critic for the New Yorker magazine for almost twenty-five years. In college at the University of California at Berkeley she majored in philosophy, and then bummed around, getting involved in experimental filmmaking and unsuccessful playwriting. She published her first movie review in 1953 in the San Francisco magazine City Lights. Her first review was of Charles Chaplin's Limelight, which she called "Slimelight." After that her work began to appear in Partisan Review and Film Quarterly. She supported herself working as a seamstress, cook, and textbook ghostwriter, among other jobs. Afraid that she would end up a secretary, she never learned to type, and wrote all her reviews on a notepad in pencil. In 1965, she published a collection of movie reviews and essays on film criticism called I Lost It at the Movies, and it became a bestseller. In 1967, she got a job as the critic for the New Yorker, and she tried to persuade the readers of the magazine that the most important thing a movie should provide is pleasure. She always made a lot of noise while she was watching movies: laughing, sighing, and gasping if she liked the movie, or loudly making jokes if she didn't.

It's the birthday of Salman Rushdie, born in Bombay, India (1947), two months before India's first day of independence. He comes from a wealthy Muslim family. He started going to school in England as a teenager, and he didn't get along with his classmates, who made fun of his accent. While he was in school, life was growing more dangerous for Muslims in India. Rushdie's parents moved to Pakistan, and Rushdie was crushed. He didn't like England, he didn't like Pakistan, and now he couldn't go home to Bombay. He tried working as a journalist in Pakistan, but there was too much censorship, so he went back to England and tried to become a writer. After his first novel Grimus (1975), didn't do well, he decided he needed to write a book about India. The novel was called Midnight's Children (1981). It was about a man who was born on the precise moment that India gained independence, and it tells the story of his family and the story of modern India. The book was a huge success, among Westerners and Indians. It won the Booker prize, and Rushdie became the leader of so-called "post-colonial literature". Later when Rushdie published the Satanic Verses in 1987, most western critics didn't notice that it would be offensive to Muslims. In the book, Rushdie makes a lot of obscure jokes about the Islamic religion, he names the whores in a Mecca brothel after the Prophet Muhammed's wives, and he suggests that the Koran was not the direct word of God. The book was banned in some places and burned in others. There were bomb threats called into the publishing house. People in Pakistan read the offensive passages on the street. There was a riot in Kashmir over the book, and The Ayatollah Khomeini saw scenes from the riot on Iranian television in which police shot demonstrators. The Ayatollah announced that "all zealous Muslims of the world" should try to find Rushdie wherever he was and kill him. Rushdie went into hiding for nine years.

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FRIDAY, 20 JUNE 2003
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Poem: Divine Mathematics," by Ginger Andrews from Hurricane Sisters.

Divine Mathematics

In her second month of a three-month-long virus,
which, according to half a dozen fellow victims,
does not respond to antibiotics, my sister apologizes
for needing to take her third nap of the day
on my sofa. Homeless and divorced, she's relieved
to know that a trip to the doctor most likely wouldn't
do her any good, especially since she has no insurance
coverage of any kind, except on her '78 Ford Fairmont,
with its brand new master cylinder, which thanks to God
and Les Schwab's low monthly payment plan,
should be paid for by the end of the year,
at which time she hopes to get a rotation,
two new tires, and a badly needed front end alignment,
all for just under a hundred bucks.

Literary Notes:

It's the birthday of poet Paul Muldoon, born in Portadown, Ireland (1951). He's the author of many collections of poetry including Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry this year.

It's the birthday of Vikram Seth, born in Calcutta, India (1952). He's the author of the novels A Suitable Boy (1993) and An Equal Music (2000).

Today is the anniversary of the day in 1893 when a jury in New Bedford, Massachusetts found Lizzie Borden innocent of the murders of Abby and Andrew Borden. It was one of the first widely publicized murder trials in the United States, and it inspired the nursery rhyme:

Lizzie Borden took an ax
and gave her mother forty whacks.
When she saw what she had done
she gave her father forty-one.

Lizzie Borden was the youngest daughter of the family, but she was in her thirties at the time of the murders. She never married and lived at home. She spent her time volunteering at the local hospital and teaching Sunday school. Her father was the president of a bank and one of the richest and stingiest men in town. Despite his wealth, he and his family lived in a small cramped house with no running water. He liked to pick up junk on the road and resell it for extra cash, and there was a broken padlock in his pocket on the day he died. On a Thursday morning, August 4, 1892, Mr. Borden went to work in the morning. He came home a few hours later and took a nap on the couch. At about 11:15 AM, Lizzie began calling out to her neighbors saying that her father had been killed. When the police arrived, his wife's body was found upstairs, also dead. Mrs. Borden had actually received eighteen whacks with a hatchet, and Mr. Borden had received ten. By 2:15 that same day, the local newspaper had already published a story about the incident. Two days later, newspaper reporters began to speculate on the guilt of Lizzie. She had been in the house at the time of the murders, she had a lot of money to gain, and it turned out that she had recently tried to buy poison at the pharmacy. The case soon became a national story, covered by newspapers all over the country. The police based their case entirely on circumstantial evidence, and they failed to convince the jury. Lizzie was acquitted on June 20, 1894. Some people believed that a jury was simply unwilling to condemn a woman to hang. No one else was ever tried for the murder. After the trial, Lizzie bought herself a three-story mansion, where she had running water for the first time in her life. The town of Fall River, Massachusetts was ashamed of her until her death, but the house where the murders occurred is now a bed and breakfast and museum. Lizzie Borden has been the subject of a Broadway play, an opera, a novel, and a ballet. The nursery rhyme about her appears in an English textbook for Japanese students, where it is credited to Mother Goose.

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SATURDAY, 21 JUNE 2003
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Poem: "The Way Things Are in Eastside," by Ginger Andrews.

The Way Things Are in Eastside

So these two smart, slick dudes from South Africa and Romania
somehow get hold of our credit card number and e address,
charging up hundreds of dollars which screws
our banking and puts a stop to any check writing
on the very evening I'd planned on Chinese take-out.
Just my good fortune, I find a six serving size frozen dinner entrée-
Salisbury steak, wedged behind the ice trays in my freezer-especially
since my favorite nephew happens by, hungry and broke,
and then my sister who's never eaten right, so I
somehow feel blessed anyway, until my husband comes home
frowning, wound tight because he hit a deer on his way to work,
busting up the whole front end of his Nissan-this, just a week after
dropping full coverage because the truck's finally paid off. I tell him to sit, eat,
take my car to the police station to file the computer fraud claim. Speaking
of foreign countries, my nephew says, How are your friends in Russia doing?
He wonders if they might find him a nice Russian gal who'd be willing to come
to Coos County and marry him. My sister almost chokes on her baked potato.
I'm telling you, he says, there ain't no good women left in Eastside, Oregon.

Literary Notes:

Today is the Summer Solstice and the first day of summer in the northern hemisphere. On this day at noon, the north pole of the earth is tilted as far toward the sun as it gets during the course of the year: twenty-three degrees twenty-seven minutes north latitude.

It's the birthday of Ian McEwan, born in Aldershot, England (1948). He's the author of the novels Enduring Love (1997) and Amsterdam (1998).

It's the birthday of Albert Hirschfeld, born in St. Louis, Missouri (1903). He had always been interested in drawing, but got a job working for Warner Brothers studios. One night, while watching a play, he sketched a picture of the leading actor on his playbill. He showed it to a friend who showed it to a friend, and it was the beginning of Hirschfeld's career as a professional caricaturist for many newspapers and magazines.

It's the birthday of Jean-Paul Sartre (SAR-truh), born in Paris, France (1905). His father died when he was fifteen months old. He said, "The death of [my father] was my greatest piece of good fortune. I didn't even have to forget him." In college he fell in love with philosophy and literature. He kept a portrait of James Joyce on his dorm room wall. He met Simone de Beauvoir (beau-VWAHR) there, who became the love of his life. Sartre became a teacher. In his spare time he began to write a novel called Nausea (1938). The book was his first major success, and it made him famous. People called him the French Kafka. At the start of World War II, he joined the army as part of the meteorological division. He loved the army. He spent most of his time sitting around and writing. He worked simultaneously on a novel and a war diary, and he wrote several letters to friends every day. Sartre was taken prisoner by German soldiers on his thirty-fifth birthday. While in prison he wrote and directed plays for his fellow prisoners. Released in 1941, he then joined the Resistance, writing for underground publications. Before the war, he had thought of his work as separate from politics, but after the war, he decided that everything was political. He went on to write Being and Nothingness (1943), about the meaning of freedom. It is considered his most important work of philosophy. He wrote, "Hell is other people."

It's the birthday of author Mary McCarthy, born in Seattle, Washington (1912). McCarthy's grandfather sent her to boarding school and she went on to study at Vassar College. She worked for a while as a drama critic for the Partisan Review, and developed a reputation for being tough and mean. She was one of the only women who could hold her own with the male intellectuals at Partisan Review. She once called art critic Meyer Schapiro "a mouth looking for an ear." She was also sexually liberated, and didn't mind who read about it in her books. She was one of the first American women to describe sex from a woman's point of view in her fiction. When she published her collection of stories, The Company She Keeps (1942), the poet Delmore Schwartz said it should to be retitled "Tidings from the Whore." McCarthy published several novels, including The Group (1963) about a group of Vassar students, but she had a hard time making things up, so most of her novels are autobiographical. She said, "What I really do is take real plums and put them into an imaginary cake." Most critics believe that her best book is the memoir Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957).

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SUNDAY, 22 JUNE 2003
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Poem: "In Praise Of My Bed," by Meredith Holmes from Shubad's Crown (Pond Road Press).

In Praise Of My Bed

At last I can be with you!
The grinding hours
since I left your side!
The labor of being fully human,
working my opposable thumb,
talking, and walking upright.
Now I have unclasped
unzipped, stepped out of.
Husked, soft, a be-er only,
I do nothing, but point
my bare feet into your
clean smoothness
feel your quiet strength
the whole length of my body.
I close my eyes, hear myself
moan, so grateful to be held this way.

Literary Notes:

It's the birthday of the theater producer Joseph Papp, born in Brooklyn, New York (1921). His parents were Polish immigrants. They rarely talked at home, and when they did, they never talked about the past. Papp learned to communicate with them without speaking. Sometimes, to get his mother's attention, he would just stop breathing. He got interested in drama when he started going to a movie house where there was always a stage show before the movie started, with singers, jugglers, and magicians. Papp was in the Navy during World War II. Within a month of his arrival at the naval base, he was organizing the men into skits to amuse himself. While on the ship, his captain let him use an elevator as a stage, and he put on musical comedies for the other sailors. Later, the Navy assigned him to a special entertainment unit, traveling from ship to ship performing for the troops. When he got home, the GI Bill allowed him to study acting and directing at the Actors Laboratory Theatre in Hollywood. He went on to found the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1954 at the Emmanuel Presbyterian Church at 729 East 6th Street in New York City. The early productions were staged on almost no budget, and in many cases the actors worked without pay. Because Papp believed that art should be available to everyone, the admission was free. Eventually, the Shakespeare Festival moved to Central Park, and became known as Shakespeare in the Park.

It's the birthday of novelist Erich Maria Remarque (A-rikh mar-EE-a reh-MARK), born in Osnabruck (AWE-snuh-brook), Germany (1898). He's the author of the well-known novel of the First World War, All Quiet on the Western Front (1929). He was drafted into the German military during World War I, but because his mother was sick, he was allowed to visit her often and didn't see much fighting. In one of the only battles he did take part in, he suffered shrapnel wounds, and spent the rest of the war in the hospital. After the war, he took a teacher's course offered to veterans by the government, but quit after a year. He worked as a test-car driver, a gravestone salesman, an organist in an insane asylum, and eventually got a job writing for an athletics magazine. He wrote All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) in his spare time, and it was a huge success. The book describes trench warfare during World War I, told by a young man in the German army. He says: "I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow." It sold more than a million copies in Germany in its first year. Nazis were beginning their rise to power at the time, and they hated the book because it portrayed World War I as misguided and pointless. It was one of the books they publicly burned in 1933. When the film version of the book premiered in Berlin, Nazi gangs attacked the theater. Remarque lost his German citizenship in 1938 and eventually moved to the United States.

It's the birthday of filmmaker Billy Wilder, born Samuel Wilder in town of Sucha, which is now part of Poland (1906). He went to school in Vienna and worked for a while as a reporter for a tabloid. In 1926, he went to Berlin to write movie scenarios. To make extra money, he also worked as a male escort, dancing with older women at the Eden Hotel. After Nazis took power in Germany in the 1930's, Wilder moved to the United States because he was a Jew. He learned English by going out on dates with any American woman who was willing, and started writing screenplays for Fox Film Corporation. Wilder liked to work with a partner writing screenplays. He said that writing alone was "suicidally boring." He would walk around the room shouting and gesturing and his partner was supposed to take notes. After working on a script with Wilder, Raymond Chandler said, "[it was] an agonizing experience and has probably shortened my life." He became a director because he got sick of watching his best dialogue get cut from the movies he worked on. He made all kinds of movies: musicals, comedies, dramas, but most of his movies are about hypocrisy. His first major success as a director was Double Indemnity (1944), and he also directed Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Some Like It Hot (1959).