Puebla lunaris biography of michaels

If Michigan was eye-opening, then UC Berkeley, his next stop, was an even greater revelation. The furthest point, geographically and spiritually, from New York, he would eventually settle there, first for more graduate work. Michaels was a triple thinker with a clear, graceful style. One assumes these were happy times—happier, at any rate, than his brief, stormy marriage to Sylvia Bloch.

In a sane moment, he pondered backing out, but both Leon and Anna favored the union. Raised in a calm, stable household, he had no idea how much chaos two people can create, nor how a peaceable person can get inured to screaming and violence. Sylvia recalls a nightmare of puebla lunaris biography of michaels, hopeless enmeshment. So it went: Michaels felt guilty; Sylvia confirmed it.

He wanted punishment; she supplied it. Indeed, Sylvia shows how perversely they suited each other. Yet what was wrenching for the man was useful for the writer. By dwelling on pain, trauma, and their sequelae, Michaels earned a reputation. Practically everyone found Michaels lovable. Physically, Michaels was handsome, even dashing, and comfortable in his body.

In photos one sees why: He had a lithe figure, a thick, unruly head of hair, and a wonderfully expressive face, with deep, recessed eyes. Politically, he was hard to pin down: anti-corporate, pro-worker, and passionately pro-Israel. As a young professor, he sided strongly with Israel in its wars and always despised anti-Semitism. It was there in anti-Zionism, a new strain of an old disease.

A small, slender man, essentially helpless, he lay bleeding and semi-conscious before staggering home. Michaels was rightly annoyed by such slights, which, though normal in publishing, left him feeling mistreated and excluded. Friends failed him. Critics assailed him. Bad writers outsold him. Romance remained another fraught subject for Michaels.

In all, he would marry four times, once per decade after the s. At times, the problem of marriage seems to stand in for the larger, Beckettian problem of living. Whoever said otherwise? The book proved popular and controversial. Was it unforgivably sexist? Or slyly feminist? These men are a sorry lot, numb, dumb, and befuddled, stuck halfway up the evolutionary ladder.

Many readers were less charmed. Marital misery. Intractable shame. The Michaels sensorium leans heavily towards worry and unease, but also surprise and amazement. The feelings are warm, but Michaels is cool, precise—an empiricist of emotions. The problem is large and inexorable. The boredom; the tension; the simmering hostility. Every friendly party begins to look like Guernica when you look closely.

In he published Shufflea potpourri of fiction, memoir, and journal; it was either wonderfully or annoyingly eclectic, depending on your taste. As friends observed, there was something innocent—open, unprotected—about Michaels. In he published To Feel These Thingsa title that doubled as a credo. Never mind major events; the real drama of our lives is internal, our doubts, dreads, and pleasures.

The earlier pieces provide brief glimpses of contemporary urban existence, bizarre incidents suggesting the unnatural condition of city life: a naked boy is denied entrance to the subway for lack of a token; a couple maim each other in a fight and then decide to marry; a Talmudic scholar slips on an icy street and is assumed to be a drunken derelict; a professor of philosophy, by never speaking in class, wins a reputation for profundity; an honors graduate preferring to make a living by driving a cab is beaten gratuitously; a boy spying on his rabbi making love to his wife falls to his death; a telephone caller trying to reach a friend speaks instead to the burglar ransacking the friend's apartment.

Some form of intense, though often anonymous, sexual encounter begins or ends many of the stories. In all of this there is the recognition of the craziness of things and yet of their plausibility—especially the stories set in New York City during the s. The element that provides continuity in Michaels's stories is the "central intelligence" of Phillip Liebowitz.

Identified in many stories, present as unnamed narrator in others, he is a self-proclaimed, street-smart "city boy. His contact with others is almost entirely in a sexual context: the women in the stories are merely objects of lust, the other men his rivals for their favors. Through sexual conquest, Phillip asserts his existence and a degree of control over the hostile urban environment.

The one novel Michaels has published, The Men's Clubis strongly reminiscent of his story collections. A group of men get together to form what might be called a consciousness-raising group. They decide that each will tell the story of his life, but what we get instead are fragments of stories, not biographical data but moments of intense self-awareness.

As in Chaucer's "marriage group" of tales one of the characters is named Canterburythere is a recurring theme: the fascinating power of women over men. These husbands who come together one evening specifically to be free of women can speak of nothing but their wives and lovers, some women whom they have lived with for many years, others they spent a few moments with many years ago.

These anecdotes, like most of Michaels's stories, lack endings.

Puebla lunaris biography of michaels

When one character complains that he did not get the point of another's story, the narrator expresses views which apply to all Michaels's fiction:. Doesn't matter … I don't get it either. I could tell other stories that have no point. This often happens to me. I start to talk, thinking there is a point, and then it never arrives. What is it, anyhow, this point?

Things happen. You remember. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikidata item. American writer. Not to be confused with Leonard Michael. Early life and education [ edit ]. Literary career [ edit ]. Sylvia Bloch [ edit ]. Other information [ edit ]. Selected publications [ edit ].

References [ edit ]. Archived from the original on February 3, Retrieved January 19, Retrieved October 28,