July 31, 2008
The Book Inscriptions Project
I know I've posted a link to this site before, but here it is again. I love everything about it. It makes me aware of the fragility of the moment, of our ties to one another, but it also is one of those wonderful sites that celebrate the evidence we leave behind. I have a ton of books from my first boyfriend - and we would always leave notes of significance in the front pages. These act as ghost-stories now ... they almost seem written in code. I've lost the key. But at the time, they were potent. I also love the images of the book covers. I have bought books because of the inscriptions (this one is probably my most treasured - mainly because it is the oldest) - but I love them all. Fragments of relationships, gifts, private messages ... captured in the first pages of a book, and now captured in the Book Inscriptions Project. What also strikes me - when I flip through the archives, reading them all - is the generosity of everyone. The need to give something to someone: "here, you might like this", "read this and thought of you", "this book reminded me of you ..." Note after note after note. It's a really special site.
The Books: "By Myself" (Lauren Bacall)
Farewell, fiction bookshelves! Actually, there are already many fiction books I have bought since I started the excerpts that I didn't include because I hadn't read them yet (but now I have) ... so the book excerpt thing I do on my blog is one of those things that will keep on giving. I'll swoop back around and do my fiction bookshelves again at some point, picking up the ones I didn't feature before. But for now - we reached the end. There's still so much to do and it makes my OCD self really happy!! I decided to totally switch it up and move to my shelf that has biographies and autobiographies of famous entertainers - actors, directors, writers ... Should be fun! As should be obvious by now, I don't have a lot of random books on my shelves that I am either indifferent to or I haven't read. Most books I own I have read, and most books I am keeping for a reason.
My "entertainment biography" bookshelf is a goldmine. I dip into it all the time. For my film reviews, for my writings on specific actors or directors - I cross-reference events (oh, so Howard Hawks said that shoot was THIS way, what did Katharine Hepburn say?) - it's a true library, and I cherish it. Almost as much as I cherish my US Presidents/US history library.
So, onto the first book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:
By Myself
The first of her three autobiographies. She wrote every word. You can tell. You can hear her voice. This is my favorite of the three. Lauren Bacall grew up in a Jewish family in New York, with a powerful mother - lots of powerful women in the family - and very early on, it was discovered she had an aptitude for this acting thing. She was obsessed with movies, Bette Davis in particular (and there are VERY funny stories of her and a girlfriend cutting class to go sit in the balcony of a movie theatre to watch a Bette Davis movie, and they would sit up there and "cry and smoke".) There is also a very funny story of how she basically stalked Bette Davis, and ended up alone with her in an elevator, quaking in her shoes. Now things happened quickly for "Betty" Bacall - after all, she made her debut (perhaps one of the most spectacular movie debuts of all time) at 19 in To Have and Have Not. There's a sense of destiny about it. Bacall was studying dancing and acting, she was in class with Kirk Douglas - a young hottie - (I love, too, how boy-crazy Lauren was - and still is ... she loves men ... but it's also amazing, when you see that performance in To Have and Have Not, and all its subtle sexy knowingness - to know that it was a virgin playing that role. An untouched teenager. What?? Howard Hawks really COACHED her ... and so did Bogie ... but lots of people are "coached" and the results come out stilted, they look coached. That role looks natural. She was an amazing study.) Bacall did some modeling, nothing big, mainly trying on clothes for people in private rooms in Loew's and things like that - and somehow she came to the attention of the powerful and innovative Diana Vreeland. Vreeland put Bacall on the cover of Harper's Bazaar:
Pretty striking, isn't it? That cover was what caught the attention of Slim Hawks, gorgeous elegant wife of director Howard Hawks, out in Hollywood. Slim Hawks said, "You need to look at this girl." She knew the "type" of girl Howard liked, and that sullen-eyed red-lipped girl was it. Look at that cover. If you know the style of the day, the magazine cover style, then it will be immediately apparent that the Bacall cover of Harper's Bazaar was something different entirely. The photo was about HER and the flat look in her eyes - a look that predicts the "runway walk" expression of models today (but not at all models then). That photo is way ahead of its time. Models, then, were more often than not personality-less. Supermodel-mania was far in the future ... but Vreeland took Bacall and brought out her personality ... It wasn't about showcasing the CLOTHES ... it was about the face, and the look in Bacall's eyes. Bacall never felt she was any good as a model, because she was too skinny. But Vreeland wasn't interested (in that cover anyway) in having a bodacious girl in a push-up bra showing off the latest fashions. There stood teenager Betty Bacall, staring directly at you, shadowy figures behind the glass wall, serious, doing something else other than run-of-the-mill modeling. Without that Harper's Bazaar cover, none of her career would have been possible. Howard Hawks took notice. He wanted to be a Svengali - he wanted to 'create' his type of woman (more on the "Howard Hawks woman" here) and he wanted to do so from scratch. If he could pluck someone from obscurity, and tell her how to dress, how to walk, how to react ... he could then have the ideal woman for his very specific pictures about the male-female dynamic. Lauren Bacall was the one. Hawks contacted her, flew her out to Hollywood (she was, what, 17?? Never been away from home - it was a huge deal) - met with her, had her spend time with his wife Slim (because he basically wanted Bacall to BE his wife), and did some screen tests with her. Howard Hawks put Lauren Bacall under contract with him. He OWNED her. So no, she didn't immediately go to work at the studios, playing small parts, or walk-ons, or bit roles - like every other starlet. Hawks held her back, until the time was right. He had her try on clothes, he had her work on her speech, he manipulated EVERYTHING about her. Bacall barely knew what hit her. Hawks was thinking, thinking, thinking ... what male would be good to pair his new creation with? What actor would showcase her perfectly? He said to Bacall, "I am thinking of putting you in a movie with either Cary Grant or Humphrey Bogart." Bacall, ever the boy-crazy teenager, thought to herself feverishly, "Oh please let it be Cary Grant!!" We don't always know what's best for us.
To Have and Have Not is based on an unsuccessful Hemingway novel - and one drunken afternoon in Florida, Hemingway had said to Hawks, "I bet you can't make a movie from my worst novel!" Hawks, always a gambler, said, "You're on." Hawks engaged the services of William Faulker to do the screenplay (so that makes To Have and Have Not the only film where two Nobel Prize winners are listed as the authors) ... To Have and Have Not was the result. Hawks switched up the original story, placed it in a different setting, punched up the romance ... you know, basically took all the elements and made them "Hawks"-ian. And he cast Lauren Bacall as "Slim" (huh! Her name is Slim in the flim - imagine that!!) - the hustler stranded on the island, who ends up involved with Steve, played by Humphrey Bogart. "Slim" is a woman on her own, with a shady past, we aren't clear why she is in that hotel - but we do know she can't leave, because she has no money. So she strolls through the piano bar, chatting up men, and stealing their wallets. It would be difficult to overstate what a "good girl" Lauren Bacall was, in real life. I love that performance of hers - because it is so striking, so specific - and it is NOTHING like who she is in real life. It's "acting". Terrific performance.
Humphrey Bogart was married at the time, to a hellcat named Mayo Methot - and the relationship was volatile, with the two of them beating the crap out of each other (literally) on a nightly drunken basis. It was a notorious relationship, and she sounds truly unstable, probably as a result of alcoholism. It was his third marriage, so Bogart obviously did not have a good track record.
Lauren Bacall, obsessed as she was with pleasing Mr. Hawks, did not at first consider Bogart as anything other than a giant movie star - who was very kind to her on her first big picture. But soon ... very soon ... as the filming went on, other things began to creep into their relationship. Bogart was much older than she, she was basically untouched - maybe she had kissed Kirk Douglas as a kid, because they went to high school together and dated a bit ... but the difference between Bogart and Bacall was enormous. That was probably part of the attraction for Bogart, trapped as he was in a marriage with a used-up bitter woman. Who was this fresh-faced skinny kid? This funny fabulous girl from New York? He was from New York, too. Who knows. Anyway. They began a romance, Bogart began divorce proceedings - and they were married soon after To Have and Have Not and the rest is history.
Bacall's book details her life, through these ups and downs, with an emotional clarity and immediacy that I found compulsively readable. She can write. It's not just a "tell all" ... she doesn't reveal too much, she keeps some things private - which I very much respect ... and the snapshots she gives of all of these people I have heard so much about, Hawks, Slim Hawks, Bogart ... make indelible impressions. The book was a smash success - it won a National Book Award in 1980. Bacall, with her reverence for writers, said that that award meant more to her than any of her acting accolades put together. Brava.
Here's an excerpt. It involves the shooting To Have and Have Not.
EXCERPT FROM By Myself
One day a couple of weeks before the picture was to start, I was about to walk into Howard's office when Humphrey Bogart came walking out. He said, "I just saw your test. We'll have a lot of fun together." Howard told me Bogart had truly liked the test and would be very helpful to me.
I kept Mother up to date on developments, sending lists of people to call with the news - Diana Vreeland, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Nicky de Gunzburg, Tim Brooke - with instructions to keep it to themselves. I couldn't write to anyone - only Mother!
Call Fred Spooner - tell him I saved $48 this week and will try to do the same next week. Had to spend $20 on a new clutch for my car ... Send me slacks ... Send me this - that - everything ... Sat opposite Bette Davis in the Greenroom the other day - she stared at me - maybe she thought I looked familiar - Ha! Ha! Went to dinner and to see Casablanca! - watching Bogie [whom I barely knew]. The picture isn't scheduled to start until Tuesday now - but frankly I don't think it'll begin until a week from tomorrow [that would be the next Monday]. They have to change the locale from Cuba to Martinique. Political difficulties, because as it stands now, characters and story don't reflect too well on Cuba. Have been working hard at the studio every day. I think I'm going to do my own singing! [I'd been having singing lessons every day.]
The picture didn't begin until the following Tuesday. I had tested the wardrobe - hair - makeup. Sid Hickox had photographed them with Howard present, experimenting as he went, as Howard wanted me to look in the movie.
Walter Brennan had been cast in a large part, Marcel Dalio, Walter Surovy (Rise Stevens' husband), Sheldon Leonard, Dan Seymour - of course Hoagy. I went into the set the first day of shooting to see Howard and Bogart - I would not be working until the second day. Bogart's wife, Mayo Methot, was there - he introduced us. I talked to Howard, watched for a while, and went home to prepare me for my own first day.
It came and I was ready for a straitjacket. Howard had planned to do a single scene that day - my first in the picture. I walked to the door of Bogart's room, said, "Anybody got a match?", leaned against the door, and Bogart threw me a small box of matches. I lit my cigarette, looking at him, said, "Thanks," threw the matches back to him, and left. Well - we rehearsed it. My hand was shaking - my head was shaking - the cigarette was shaking. I was mortified. The harder I tried to stop, the more I shook. What must Howard be thinking? What must Bogart be thinking? What must the crew be thinking? Oh, God, make it stop! I was in such pain.
Bogart tried to joke me out of it - he was quite aware that I was a new young thing who knew from nothing and was scared to death. Finally Howard thought we could try a take. Silence on the set. The bell rang. "Quiet - we're rolling," said the sound man. "Action," said Howard. This was for posterity, I thought - for real theatres, for real people to see. I came around the corner, said my first line, and Howard said, "Cut." He had broken the scene up - the first shot ended after the first line. The second set-up was the rest of it - then he'd move in for close-ups. By the end of the third or fourth take, I realized that one way to hold my trembling head still was to keep it down, chin low, almost to my chest, and eyes up at Bogart. It worked, and turned out to be the beginning of "The Look".
I found out very quickly that day what a terrific man Bogart was. He did everything possible to put me at ease. He was on my side. I felt safe - I still shook, but I shook less. He was not even remotely a flirt. I was, but I didn't flirt with him. There was much kidding around - our senses of humor went well together. Bogie's idea, of course, was that to make me laugh would relax me. He was right to a point, but nothing on earth would have relaxed me completely!
The crew were wonderful - fun and easy. It was a very happy atmosphere. I would often go to lunch with HOward. One day he told me he was very happy with the way I was working, but that I must remain somewhat aloof from the crew. Barbara Stanwyck, whom he thought very highly of - he'd made Ball of Fire with her, a terrific movie - was always fooling around with the crew, and he thought it a bad idea. "They don't like you any better for it. When you finish a scene, go back to your dressing room. Don't hang around the set - don't give it all away - save it for the scenes." He wanted me in a cocoon, only to emerge for work. Bogart could fool around to his heart's content - he was a star and a man - "though you notice he doesn't do too much of it."
One day at lunch when Howard was mesmerizing me with himself and his plans for me, he said, "Do you notice how noisy it is in here suddenly? That's because Leo Forbstein just walked in - Jews always make more noise." I felt that I was turning white, but I said nothing. I was afraid to - a side of myself I have never liked or been proud of - a side that was always there. Howard didn't dwell on it ever, but clearly he had very definite ideas about Jews - none too favorable, though he did business with them. They paid him - they were good for that. I would have to tell him about myself eventually or he'd find out through someone else. When the time came, what would happen would happen, but I had no intention of pushing it.
Howard started to line up special interviews for me. Nothing big would be released until just before the picture, and everything would be chosen with the greatest care. Life, Look, Kyle Crichton for Collier's, Pic, Saturday Evening Post. Only very special fan magazines. Newspapers. I probably had more concentrated coverage than any beginning young actress had ever had - due to Hawks, not me.
Hoagy Carmichael had written a song called "Baltimore Oriole". Howard was going to use it as my theme music in the movie - every time I appeared on screen there were to be strains of that song. He thought it would be marvelous if I could be always identified with it - appear on Bing Crosby's or Bob Hope's radio show, have the melody played, have me sing it, finally have me known as the "Baltimore Oriole". What a fantastic fantasy life Howard must have had! His was a glamorous, mysterious, tantalizing vision - but it wasn't me.
On days I didn't have lunch with Howard, I would eat with another actor or the publicity man or have a sandwich in my room or in the music department during a voice lesson. I could not sit at a table alone. Bogie used to lunch at the Lakeside Golf Club, which was directly across the road from the studio.
One afternoon I walked into Howard's bungalow, and found a small, gray-haired, mustached, and attractive man stretched out on the couch with a book in his hand and a pipe in his mouth. That man was William Faulkner. He was contributing to the screenplay. Howard loved Faulkner - they had known each other a long time, had hunted together. Faulkner never had much money and Howard would always hire him for a movie when he could. He seldom came to the set - he was very shy - he liked it better in Howard's office.
Howard had a brilliantly creative work method. Each morning when we got to the set, he, Bogie, and I and whoever else might be in the scene, and the script girl woudl sit in a circle in canvas chairs with our names on them and read the scene. Almost unfailingly Howard would bring in additional dialogue for the scenes of sex and innuendo between Bogie and me. After we'd gone over the words several times and changed whatever Bogie or Howard thought should be changed, Howard would ask an electrician for a work light - one light on the set - and we'd go through the scene on the set to see how it felt. Howard said, "Move around - see where it feels most comfortable." Only after all that had been worked out did he call Sid Hickox and talk about camera set-ups. It is the perfect way for movie actors to work, but of course it takes time.
After about two weeks of shooting I wrote to my mother - she'd read one or two things in newspapers about my not having the first lead opposite Bogart -
Please, darling, don't worry about what is written in the newspapers concerning first and second leads. You make me so goddamn mad - what the hell difference does it make? As long as when the public sees the picture they know that I'm the one who is playing opposite Bogart. Everything is working out beautifully for me. Howard told Charlie the rushes were sensational. He's really very thrilled with them. I'm still not used to my face, however. Bogie has been a dream man. We have the most wonderful times together. I'm insane about him. We kid around - he's always gagging - trying to break me up and is very, very fond of me. So if I were you, I'd thank my lucky stars, as I am doing and not worry about those unimportant things. The only thing that's important is that I am good in the picture and the public likes me.
July 30, 2008
I kinda can't even express ...
... how much I am looking forward to reading this book. I am frothing at the mouth.
(Also, gotta say: I'm in heaven. Evelyn Waugh is EVERYWHERE now. Have you noticed?? Not a day goes by that there isn't SOME op-ed or article or book review about him. Thrilling!)
Yeah, whatevs.
I'm just chillin'. I don't know what's so out-of-the-ordinary about that. I don't know why you have to point that THING at me so incessantly when all I am doing is taking my 11th nap of the day!
Alex and Chrisanne:
The earthquake story - a relationship in microcosm.
I was racing around the house like the Road Runner.“Hide between the coffee table and the couch, Meep Meep! Hide between the coffee table and the couch, Meep Meep!”
I tend to panic in life threatening situations.
In my defense, this was a quote from a letter we received only months ago from my Aunt and Uncle who live in Huntington Beach on “How To Survive An Earthquake And Not Die”. Chrisanne, of course, not only read this thing from top to bottom, but since that day has packed the trunk of the car with supplies: water, canteens, sleeping bags, blankets, tool kits, and if I’m not mistaken, a mechanic named Tony. We’re not only set for an earthquake, we’re set for a trip to the Himalayas.
The Books: "The Bonfire of the Vanities" (Tom Wolfe)
Unbelievably, Bonfire of the Vanities is my last book on my adult fiction shelf. I have been working on "this shelf" since April 9, 2007 - when I started off with Hitchhiker's Guide. April 9, 2007! What - am I nuts? Where the hell did the time go?? And now I've gone through the alphabet and I am at the last book of this particular "genre". Which shelf will we go to next? Will it be memoir? Poetry? Biography? Literary analysis? Acting textbooks? Wouldn't you like to know.
For now: Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt:
The Bonfire of the Vanities
It's a rare book that is an event. I remember when Bonfire of the Vanities came out - I remember reading it with my boyfriend, neck and neck - I remember everyone - EVERYONE - talking about it. It was an event. A zeitgeist moment. A truth-telling bolt from the heavens, truths that lots of people didn't want to hear. It appeared to tell us what was happening as it was happening ... Lots of books try to do that, and some books do do that but don't hit the public in the sweet spot that turns it into an event. Bonfire of the Vanities hit the sweet (tender, angry, overly sensitive, paranoid) spot. I can't think of another book in recent years that has done such a thing. At least not a fiction book. It was one of those events that, at the time, i just felt I had to participate in. Whether or not I liked the book was irrelevant. If everyone - and I mean EVERYONE - was talking about it, then I had to get in on the action. To be honest, Bonfire of the Vanities is not really my cup of tea, in terms of fiction. But at the time of its release, personal preference also became irrelevant. I had to read it. It was about "how we live now".
New York City has always been in my life. I have always known people who lived here, and as a kid would take trips down to visit my aunt. This was the late 70s. New York in the late 70s was not the mall-ed out Disneyfied New York that you see now, set up to make tourists feel comfortable and cozy. New York was the wild west. I saw my first penis on one of those trips, because a homeless man walked right up to me and whipped it out. Yeah, I'm 10 years old, douchebag, get the fuck away from me. The subways were covered in grafitti - which gave them a strangely violent and anarchic look - God, remember that? The lunatics had taken over the asylum. People jumped the turnstiles all around you. If you were in New York in the 70s, then you know this is true, and how widespread it was. You'd go up to the turnstiles with your token and all around you people were hurdling through the air over them. There was no police presence that you could feel. If you followed the rules and DIDN'T jump the turnstiles, it was only because you were determined to maintain your OWN sense of morality, in the midst of a crime-ridden atmosphere. I could totally have jumped the turnstiles myself (or crawled under them, as a 10 year old). 8th Avenue was lined with peep shows and hookers and live go-go dancers. When I moved to New York, in 1995, 42nd Street was still in the grip of that past ... The Lion King hadn't moved in yet (although it was about to), and that theatre, the building of that theatre by Disney, was going to change everything. In 1995, the buildings were baroque, cobbled together, many of them boarded up, because the peep shows were already being zoned out of the neighborhood. But nothing had come in to replace them yet. So 42nd Street. A major tourist attraction. Looked like a deserted movie set on some dusty backlot. Imagine that. I try to imagine the throngs of tourists on 42nd Street today, going into the Applebee's that is there (gross), or the Chevy's ... I try to imagine them dealing with that urban desolation that had no interest whatsoever in making THEM feel comfortable. That's the New York I grew up with. I still loved it. In fact, I loved it BECAUSE it felt dangerous. Yeah, whatever, I'll pay lip service to cleaning up the streets, but I didn't move here to live in Disneyland. I miss the hookers, frankly. I miss the smut. (Thank God I was able to capture the last gasp of it before it was torn down - one of my favorite buildings on 8th Avenue). As a kid, I didn't understand the smut - I just knew that "ladies" were on the street barely wearing any clothes. But of course I didn't hang out on 8th Avenue. My aunt took me to Broadway shows, we went to the Metropolitan Museum, she took me to Central Park. All of THOSE areas were fine for a child to be in, but on the fringes, was an obviously criminal element - which threatened to overrun the social order. You could feel it. Like I said: the subways were COVERED in grafitti, much of it spectacularly sophisticated art. Beautiful. But that wasn't art sponsored by some corporation. That wasn't art that came out of some city-wide initiative. That was done on someone's own time, with their own materials, in the dead of night. Even as a kid, you could just sense that.
The Bonfire of the Vanities is not so much about the New York of the 70s, but the New York of the flush materialistic 80s - HOWEVER: the fringes of the 70s still existed, which is what made New York during that decade so freaky. In the 70s, everyone was broke. But in the 80s came the "yuppies", and the new money - but 8th Avenue remained the same (and the folks on 8th Avenue probably made a nice buck too, because people had MORE money to spend on hookers and peep shows). So there was this huge weird gap - and if you were in New York in the 80s, you'll know how strange it was. All bubbles burst. And that was a huge bubble - unreal, with its own rules, not meant to last. The Central Park jogger incident happened in 1989 - 2 years after Wolfe's book came out -and that was an event, too, that told the lie about how "safe" New York had become - New York "seemed" safe (although it never ever seemed safe to me, still doesn't) - but it "seemed" safe to those who didn't know better - It "seemed" safe because Wall Street was doing great, and MBAs from around the country were now flocking there, fresh-faced and full of senses of entitlement. The Central Park jogger case was the end-moment of that Zeitgeist - 1989 was the beginning of that bubble bursting ... and Wolfe was writing about the mid-80s, the true insanity of a world living by its own rules, the enormous gap between the Sherman McCoys and the folks hanging around the courtroom in the Bronx ... It was a third world kind of gap. Insane. Like I said, you could FEEL it when you were there at the time. In many cities, the segregation (not racial, but economic) is so acute that sometimes you are unable to sense where the hell all the poor people are. In New York, you always knew.
Tom Wolfe deserves a more in-depth post but for now, I'll just leave it at that. I like knowing he's around. I like knowing what he's thinking about. I also like the fearless truth-telling in the book, whether it's in the racist epithets thrown around by, uhm, mostly everybody - the casual misogyny at the higher levels of society - the observations of the beginning of the tabloid frenzy that was taking over the national consciousness - and the fact that everybody hates everybody else. BUT: somehow, even with all that, the social order is maintained. Wops, spics, Kikes, we all manage to get along, even if we hate each other, because this is America, and whatever, we can't legislate being an ASSHOLE out of existence. It is only when Sherman McCoy, Master of the Universe, meets his destiny on a dark scary night on the Cross Bronx Expressway - that the hatreds are given an opportunity to express themselves, and become irreconcilable. The fans flamed higher and brighter by opportunists like the Al Sharpton-type character ... there are those who have a vested interest in all of us NOT getting along. Because if we all decided to 'get along' (even though we fucking hate each other deep down) - then that person would be out of a goddamn job.
It's a cynical book. There is no hope or redemption (which is why the movie, with its casting of Morgan Freeman as the judge - was so cautious and fearful. Nope. The second you cast HIM as the judge, just admit that you aren't doing Tom Wolfe's book. I don't know what the hell you're doing, but it's not THAT). Nobody is exempt. Tom Wolfe is an equal-opportunity hater, like Jonathan Swift. Any time you think he's about to make some point that lets someone off the hook - any time you think you can relax and go, "Oh, okay, he's saying MY side is LESS of an asshole" he'll pull a jujitsu move, leaving you high and dry. It's a coincidence that the following entry ends with a praise of Irish courage. With Tom Wolfe, you can never relax. Besides, he's ALSO saying that the Irish are animals. So seriously, if you think that's "praise", you're nuts.
I haven't read this book since it first came out. Many of the scenes are emblazoned in my brain forever. It's just that kind of book. The characters are archetypes - in their own weird way - and stand, immobile, as the forces of the late 20th century whirl around them, knocking them this way, that.
I wanted to pick a section of the book that highlighted Tom Wolfe's ear for dialogue, New York-ese in particular. So here it is.
EXCERPT FROM The Bonfire of the Vanities
Kramer and Andriutti were of the new generation, in which the terms triceps, deltoids, latissima dorsae, and pectoralis major were better known than the names of the major planets. Andriutti rubbed his triceps a hundred and twenty times a day, on the average.
Still rubbing them, Andriutti looked at Kramer as he walked in and said: "Jesus Christ, here comes the bag lady. What the hell is this fucking A&P bag, Larry? You been coming in here with this fucking bag every day this week." Then he turned to Jimmy Caughey and said, "Looks like a fucking bag lady."
Caughey was also a jock, but more the Triathlon type, with a narrow face and a long chin. He just smiled at Kramer, as much as to say, "Well, what do you say to that?"
Kramer said, "Your arm itch, Ray?" Then he looked at Caughey and said, "Ray's got this fucking allergy. It's called weight lifter's disease." Then he turned back to Andriutti. "Itches like a sonofabitch, don't it?"
Andriutti let his hand drop off his triceps. "And what are these jogging shoes?" he said to Kramer. "Looks like those girls walking to work at Merrill Lynch. All dressed up, and they got these fucking rubber gunboats on their feet."
"What the hell is in that bag?" said Caughey.
"My high heels," said Kramer. He took off his jacket and jammed it down, give-a-shit, on a coatrack hook in the accepted fashion and pulled down his necktie and unbuttoned his shirt and sat down in his swivel chair and opened up the shopping bag and fished out his Johnston & Murphy brown leather shoes and started taking off his Nikes.
"Jimmy," Andriutti said to Caughey, "did you know that Jewish guys - Larry, I don't want you to take this personally - did you know that Jewish guys, even if they're real stand-up guys, all have one faggot gene? That's a well-known fact. They can't stand going out in the rain without an umbrella or they have all this modern shit in their apartment or they don't like to go hunting or they're for the fucking nuclear freeze and affirmative action or they wear jogging shoes to work or some goddamn thing. You know?"
"Gee," said Kramer, "I don't know why you thought I'd take it personally."
"Come on, Larry," said Andriutti, "tell the truth. Deep down, don't you wish you were Italian or Irish?"
"Yeah," said Kramer, "that way I wouldn't know what the fuck was going on in this fucking place."
Caughey started laughing. "Well, don't let Ahab see those shoes, Larry. He'll have Jeanette issue a fucking memorandum."
"No, he'll call a fucking press conference," said Andriutti.
"That's always a safe fucking bet."
And so another fucking day in the fucking Homicide Bureau of the Bronx Fucking District Attorney's Office was off to a fucking start.
An assistant D.A. in Major Offenses had started calling Abe Weiss "Captain Ahab", and now they all did. Weiss was notorious in his obsession for publicity, even among a breed, the district attorney, that was publicity-mad by nature. Unlike the greaet D.A.s of yore, such as Frank Hogan, Burt Roberts, or Mario Merola, Weiss never went near a courtroom. He didn't have time. There were only so many hours in the day for him to stay in touch with Channels 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, and 11 and the New York Daily News, the Post, The City Lights, and the Times.
Jimmy Caughey said, "I was just in seeing the captain. You shoulda--"
"You were? What for?" asked Kramer with just a shade too much curiosity and incipient envy in his voice.
"Me and Bernie," said Caughey. "He wanted to know about the Moore case."
"Any good?"
"Piece a shit," said Caughey. "This fucking guy Moore, he has a big house in Riverdale, and his wife's mother lives there with 'em, and she's been giving him a hard time for about thirty-seven fucking years, right? So this guy, he loses his job. He's working for one a these reinsurance companies, and he's making $200,000 or $300,000 a year, and now he's out a work for eight or nine months, and nobody'll hire him, and he don't know what the hell to do, right? So one day he's puttering around out in the garden, and the mother-in-law comes out and says, 'Well, water seeks its own level.' That's a verbatim quote. 'Water seeks its own level. You oughta get a job as a gardener.' So this guy, he's out of his fucking mind, he's so mad. He goes in and tells his wife, 'I've had it with your mother. I'm gonna get my shotgun and scare her.' So he goes up to his bedroom, where he keeps this 12-gauge shotgun, and he comes downstairs and heads for the mother-in-law, and he's gonna scare the shit out of her, and he said, 'Okay, Gladys,' and he trips on the rug, and the gun goes off and kills her, and - ba-bing! - Murder Two."
"Why was Weiss interested?"
"Well, the guy's white, he's got some money, he lives in a big house in Riverdale. It looks at first like maybe he's gonna fake an accidental shooting."
"Is that possible?"
"Naw. Fucking guy's one a my boys. He's your basic Irish who made good, but he's still a Harp. He's drowning in remorse. You'd think he'd shot his own mother, he feels so fucking guilty. Right now he'd confess to anything. Bernie could sit him in front of the videocamera and clean up every homicide in the Bronx for the past five years. Naw, it's a piece of shit, but it looked good at first."
Kramer and Andriutti contemplated this piece a shit without needing any amplification. Every assistant D.A. in the Bronx, from the youngest Italian just out of St. John's Law School to the oldest Irish bureau chief, who would be somebody like Bernie Fitzgibbon, who was forty-two, shared Captain Ahab's mania for the Great White Defendant. For a start, it was not pleasant to go through life telling yourself, "What I do for a living is, I pack blacks and Latins off to jail." Kramer had been raised as a liberal. In Jewish families like his, liberalism came with the Similac and the Mott's apple juice and the Instamatic and Daddy's grins in the evening. And even the Italians, like Ray Andriutti, and the Irish, like Jimmy Caughey, who were not exactly burdened with liberalism by their parents, couldn't help but be affected by the mental atmosphere of the law schools, where, for one thing, there were so many Jewish faculty members. By the time you finished law school in the New York area, it was, well ... impolite! ... on the ordinary social level ... to go around making jokes about the yoms. It wasn't that it was morally wrong ... It was that it was in bad taste. So it made the boys uneasy, this eternal prosecution of the blacks and Latins.
Not that they weren't guilty. One thing Kramer had learned within two weeks as an assistant D.A. in the Bronx was that 95 percent of the defendants who got as far as the indictment stage, perhaps 98 percent, were truly guilty. The caseload was so overwhelming, you didn't waste time trying to bring the marginal cases forward, unless the press was on your back. They hauled in guilt by the ton, those blue-and-orange vans out there on Walton Avenue. But the poor bastards behind the wire mesh barely deserved the term criminal, if by criminal you had in mind the romantic notion of someone who has a goal and seeks to achieve it through some desperate way outside the law. No, they were simpleminded incompetents, most of them, and they did unbelievably stupid, vile things.
Kramer looked at Andriutti and Caughey, sitting there with their mighty thighs akimbo. He felt superior to them. He was a graduate of the Columbia Law School, and they were both graduates of St. John's, widely known as the law school for the also-rans of college academic competition. And he was Jewish. Very early in life he had picked up the knowledge that the Italians and the Irish were animals. The Italians were pigs, and the Irish were mules or goats. He couldn't remember if his parents had actually used any such terms or not, but they got the idea across very closely. To his parents, New York City - New York? hell, the whole U.S., the whole world! - was a drama called The Jews Confront the Goyim, and the goyim were animals. And so what was he doing here with these animals? A Jew in the Homicide Bureau was a rare thing. The Homicide Bureau was the elite corps of the District Attorney's Office, the D.A.'s Marines, because homicide was the most serious of all crimes. An assistant D.A. in Homicide had to be able to go out on the street to the crime scenes at all hours, night and day, and be a real commando and rub shoulders with the police and know how to confront defendants and witnesses and intimidate them when the time came, and these were likely to be the lowest, grimmest, scurviest defendants and witnesses in the history of criminal justice. For fifty years, at least, maybe longer, Homicide had been an Irish enclave, although recently the Italians had made their way into it. The Irish had given Homicide their stamp. The Irish were stone courageous. Even when it was insane not to, they never stepped back. Andriutti had been right, or half right. Kramer didn't want to be Italian, but he did want to be Irish, and so did Ray Andriutti, the dumb fuck. Yes, they were animals! The goyim were animals, and Kramer was proud to be among the animals in the Homicide Bureau.
July 29, 2008
John Banville's alter ego
Amazing interview with John Banville in The Washington Post.
Banville fans know him well (he has passionate fans), and know that he also has been having a sort of catharsis - writing crime-noir books under the name Benjamin Black. Meanwhile, in his John Banville serious Irish literary persona, he won the Booker prize for The Sea in 2005. Since then, he has been writing noir thrillers under the name Benjamin Black and seems to be having a ball. FASCINATING. I am loving his journey - and all the interviews with him are very illuminating (he meditates for sometimes years over his "Banville books" - choosing every word, carefully ... he writes his Benjamin Black books in sometimes a couple of months). He's found it freeing.
I can't WAIT to read the two new Benjamin Black books. I loved Christine Falls
But the best thing about being a reader and a fan of his writing is that I don't have to choose. He is free to have a preference. But I get to eat it ALL up and that makes me happy.
It's rare that a writer comes along who actually excites. It all began with my dad's regard for Banville - Banville has always been on my radar because of his continuous presence on the bookshelves of my parents' house, and basically ... once you start paying attention, you will see that the name "John Banville" is everywhere. It was that way with my journey, too.
Here are a couple of my favorite excerpts from Wash Post article:
"You know, artists don't really have all that much experience of life. We make a huge amount out of the small experience that we do have."
I guess I just found that so ... encouraging. I've been having a lot of problems lately. I won't go into it. My life has been upended, and there are areas in my life where I have become paralyzed. To know that I can "make a huge amount out of the small experience" that I do have ... It just helped me to stay strong and know that I was (am) doing the right thing.
(Oh, and I LOVED his story about getting Dubliners
And here he is talking about The Sea
"It seems to me to be packed with plot," Banville says. "I don't know what they want in the way of plot. I really don't."
I'm with him on that one. What on earth do these people THINK is plot? Car crashes? Torrid love affairs? Political intrigue? To say that The Sea has "no plot" is to completely misunderstand what the damn word "plot" means.
Then, here he is on his "Benjamin Black persona" and how much he loves "being" Benjamin Black ... I don't know, this quote makes me laugh. It strikes me as particularly Irish, it's something I completely get:
"This, of course, is worrying. To enjoy writing is deeply worrying. I must be doing something wrong."
Keep on doing that wrong thing, Mr. Banville/Black. I'll follow you whereever.
Some of my posts on John Banville:
Excerpt from The Sea, by John Banville
John Banville:
Benjamin Black:
It's so hard to know what to do ...
... when the toy that has been tormenting you psychologically from all over the apartment, the toy you have been chewing on, batting about, chasing, ambushing ... is suddenly sitting there, ominously, BEHIND YOU.
How DARE that little ball just SIT THERE STARING AT ME like that? What nerve! What arrogance!
I will make it pay for its behavior.
I don't know how yet, but I will. Its days are numbered. But for now. I remain still. Coiled. Alert. Keeping that dastardly toy in my sight at all times because you just don't know WHAT will happen next in such a situation.
The Books: "Lighthousekeeping" (Jeanette Winterson)
Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt:
Lighthousekeeping
After about a decade of reading books by Winterson that were a bit of a yawn, I tore through Lighthousekeeping like a crazy person. I read it WAY too fast ... much of it was lost to me ... But I couldn't contain myself. I was so excited. Here was a story that WASN'T the story of a love triangle (man, woman, redheaded woman) ... it was something different altogether. It did not (on the whole) get good reviews, and many of the criticisms are ones I have made myself. There is something repetitive about Winterson's work. She only has a couple of themes, and she keeps hashing them out. She is not, say, John Irving, or Annie Proulx - people who are interested in creating other human beings. Winterson doesn't do that. When she's at her best, she creates other memorable worlds and realities, set-pieces that stick in the brain and imagination. When she's at her worst, she drones on and on in overly poetic prose that can't ever be pinned down. Her books can feel like upended poems, fragments of verse - clipped together. It can be quite tiresome. Don't be mistaken: I don't look for Winterson to write a big novel like John Irving does, or Michael Chabon. That's not her thing. But sometimes I read her stuff and I wonder what it must have been like to have success come so early. To hit it as huge as Winterson did, so early on. Maybe she really does only have one story to tell. Who knows.
But I found Lighthousekeeping to be captivating. Here's the stunner of an opener, classic Winterson:
My mother called me Silver. I was born part precious metal part pirate.I have no father. There's nothing unusual about that - even children who do have fathers are often surprised to see them. My own father came out of the sea and went back that way. He was crew on a fishing boat that harboured with us one night when the waves were crashing like dark glass. His splintered hull shored him for long enough to drop anchor inside my mother.
Shoals of babies vied for life.
I won.
I lived in a house cut steep into the bank. The chairs had to be nailed to the floor, and we were never allowed to eat spaghetti. We ate food that stuck to the plate - shepherd's pie, goulash, risotto, scrambled egg. We tried peas once - what a disaster - and sometimes we still find them, dusty and green in the corners of the room.Some people are raised on a hill, others in the valley. Most of us are brought up on the flat. I came at life at an angle, and that's how I've lived ever since.
I don't know, I think that's pretty damn marvelous.
The orphaned girl of Lighthousekeeping is named Silver (same name as the heroine in Tanglewreck - excerpt here ... See, that's what I mean about the same-ness of Winterson's work ... she even repeats lines from story to story ... and it doesn't seem just like a personal lexicon. It sometimes feels like she has run out of invention. To me, "what you risk reveals what you value" BELONGS in The Passion (excerpt here), where it first appeared. It probably appears in 5 out of 6 of her books after that. Like: no, Jeanette! Don't do that! You're weakening it!!) Sorry, tangent: Silver is orphaned. She goes to live with a blind man named Mr. Pew who keeps a lighthouse. Mr. Pew tells the little girl stories of a man named Babel Dark, an 19th century clergyman - and the story flows back and forth from the present-day at the lighthouse (which never feels like the present-day - it is a grim and bleak existence) back to the mid 1800s when Babel Dark lived. Babel Dark's journey becomes intertwined with Silver's, and - as usual - we aren't sure what is "real" and what is imagined.
I really liked the book. I liked the worlds she presented to me. I love the house built into the cliff, where groceries fall out of the cupboards, and Silver has to be strapped into her hammock so she won't fall out and go plummeting down the house. I just love stuff like that. It truly IS inventive.
But please, Jeanette: no more "what you risk reveals what you value", okay? You said it once and it really meant something. It still does. Just let it be!!
Here's an excerpt.
EXCERPT FROM Lighthousekeeping
The Pews have been lighthousekeepers at Cape Wrath since the day of the birth. The job was passed down generation to generation, though the present Mr. Pew has the look of being there forever. He is as old as a unicorn, and people are frightened of him because he isn't like them. Like and like go together. Likeness is liking, whatever they say about opposites.
But some people are different, that's all.
I look like my dog. I have a pointy nose and curly hair. My front legs - that is, my arms, are shorter than my back legs - that is, my legs, which makes a symmetry with my dog, who is just the same, but the other way round.
His name's DogJim.
I put up a photo of him next to mine on the notice board, and I hid behind a bush while they all came by and read our particulars. They were all sorry, but they all shook their heads and said, 'Well, what could we do with her?'
It seemed that nobody could think of a use for me, and when I went back to the notice board to add something encouraging, I found I couldn't think of a use for myself.
Feeling dejected, I took the dog and went walking, walking, walking along the cliff headland towards the lighthouse.
Miss Pinch was a great one for geography - even though she had never left Salts in her whole life. The way she described the world, you wouldn't want to visit it anyway. I recited to myself what she had taught us about the Atlantic Ocean ...
The Atlantic is a dangerous and unpredictable ocean. It is the second largest ocean in the world, extending in an S shape from the Arctic to the Antarctic regions, bounded by North and South America in the West, and Europe and Africa in the East.
The North Atlantic is divided from the South Atlantic by the equatorial counter-current. At the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, heavy fogs form where the warm Gulf Stream meets the cold Labrador Current. In the North Western Ocean, icebergs are a threat from May to December.
Dangerous. Unpredictable. Threat.
The world according to Miss Pinch.
But, on the coasts and outcrops of this treacherous ocean, a string of lights was built over 300 years.
Look at this one. Made of granite, as hard and unchanging as the sea is fluid and volatile. The sea moves constantly, the lighthouse, never. There is no sway, no rocking, none of the motion of ships and ocean.
Pew was staring out of the rain-battered glass; a silent taciturn clamp of a man.
Some days later, as we were eating breakfast in Railings Row - me, toast without butter, Miss Pinch, kippers and tea - Miss Pinch told me to wash and dress quickly and be ready with all my things.
'Am I going home?'
'Of course not - you have no home.'
'But I'm not staying here?'
'No. My house is not suitable for children.'
You had to respect Miss Pinch - she never lied.
'Then what is going to happen to me?'
'Mr Pew has put in a proposal. He will apprentice you to lighthousekeeping.'
'What will I have to do?'
'I have no idea.'
'If I don't like it, can I come back?'
'No.'
'Can I take DogJim?'
'Yes.'
She hated saying yes. She was of those people for whom yes is always an admission of guilt or failure. No was power.
A few hours later, I was standing on the windblown jetty, waiting for Pew to collect me in his patched and tarred mackerel boat. I had never been inside the lighthouse before, and I had only seen Pew when he stumped up the path to collect his supplies. The town didn't have much to do with the lighthouse anymore. Salts was no longer a seaman's port, with ships and sailors docking for fire and food and company. Salts had become a hollow town, its life scraped out. It had its rituals and its customs and its past, but nothing left in it was alive. Years ago, Charles Darwin had called it Fossil-Town, but for different reasons. Fossil it was, salted and preserved by the sea that had destroyed it too.
Pew came near in his boat. His shapeless hat was pulled over his face. His mouth was a slot of teeth. His hands were bare and purple. Nothing else could be seen. He was the rough shape of human.
DogJim growled. Pew grabbed him by the scruff and threw him into the boat, then he motioned for me to throw in my bag and follow.
The little outboard motor bounced us over the green waves. Behind me, smaller and smaller, was my tipped-up house that had flung us out, my mother and I, perhaps because we were never wanted there. I couldn't go back. There was only forward, northwards into the sea. To the lighthouse.
Pew and I climbed slowly up the spiral stairs to our quarters below the Light. Nothing about the lighthouse had been changed since the day it was built. There were candleholders in every room, and the Bibles put there by Josiah Dark. I was given a tiny room with a tiny window, and a bed the size of a drawer. As I was not much longer than my socks, this didn't matter. DogJim would have to sleep where he could.
Above me was the kitchen where Pew cooked sausages on an open cast-iron stove. Above the kitchen was the light itself, a great glass eye with a Cyclops stare.
Our business was light, but we lived in darkness. The light had to be kept going, but there was no need to illuminate the rest. Darkness came with everything. It was standard. My clothes were trimmed with dark. When I put on a sou'wester, the brim left a dark shadow over my face. When I stood to bathe in the little galvanised cubicle Pew had rigged for me, I soaped my body in darkness. Put your hand in a drawer, and it was darkness you felt first, as you fumbled for a spoon. Go to the cupboards to find the tea caddy of Full Strength Samson, and the hole was as black as the tea itself.
The darkness had to be brushed away or parted before we could sit down. Darkness squatted on the chairs and hung like a curtain across the stairway. Sometimes it too on the shapes of the things we wanted: a pan, a bed, a book. Sometimes I saw my mother, dark and silent, falling towards me.
Darkness was a presence. I learned to see in it, I learned to see through it, and I learned to see the darkness of my own.
Pew did not speak. I didn't know if he was kind or unkind, or what he intended to do with me. He had lived alone all his life.
That first night, Pew cooked sausages in darkness. No, Pew cooked the sausages with darkness. It was the kind of dark you can taste. That's what we ate: sausages and darkness.
I was cold and tired and my neck ached. I wanted to sleep and sleep and never wake up. I had lost the few things I knew, and what was here belonged to somebody else. Perhaps that would have been all right if what was inside me was my own, but there was no place to anchor.
There were two Atlantics; one outside the lighthouse, and one inside me.
The one inside me had no string of guiding lights.
July 28, 2008
Oh, say can you see ...
Actually, you can't at this moment, because it hasn't happened yet - but it will tonight!
My wonderful cousin Kerry will be singing the National Anthem this evening at Fenway Park before the Red Sox-Angels game. She's an old-hand at this by now ... Here she is singing the anthem before a Celtics game ...
But still: it's kind of thrilling. Kerry is one of the most fanatic Red Sox fans I know, so what a thrill to sing in such a setting!!
And Jean and Pat will be there!
OH FOR A TELEPORTING MACHINE.
Go, Kerry and Go Sox!!
Camouflage
Although Hope may appear benign in this photo, she is about to bust out a can of Whup-ass on my receipt from Barnes & Noble. She lies on my rug, blending into its colors, making her body all flat and terrifying ... staring down that receipt. Staring it DOWN. The receipt doesn't stand a chance. It is about to be ripped to SHREDS. It should be AFRAID FOR ITS LIFE. Because there's a new Sheriff in town, and she is a bad-ass, and she also has the ability to subtly blend into her surroundings, so that you never ever see her coming.
The Books: "Tanglewreck" (Jeanette Winterson)
Actually, this book is a book for kids - but in the interest of keeping an "author together" - I have shelved it with Winterson's adult books. So: Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt:
Tanglewreck
This is Jeanette Winterson's first book for kids.There is much here to praise - a fast-paced story, with time travel, and little kids on the run, and evil villains ... A lot of it feels quite derivative, however. It's obviously Winterson's voice but unlike her other books - which I barely can compare to anything else - this is full of things that reminded me of other books. Wrinkle in Time, Harry Potter ... It doesn't quite work. A great children's book is also a great book for adults. I count something like Good Night Moon in that. There is such a thing as perfection - and it's the same for kids as it is for adults. Good Night Moon wouldn't hold up as an adult NOVEL, of course - but the standard of excellence is the same, as far as I'm concerned. Madeleine L'Engle said a great thing once: "You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children." LOVE that. That's why her books are so transportive. I never get sick of them. Tanglewreck is a wee bit too didactic ... but in this case it feels sneaky, like Winterson is trying to sneak in a message in such a subtle way that the kids won't be bored - but she's trying to get her point across. I rolled my eyes at some of these. Winterson is a big environmentalist. Nothing wrong with that. But she tried to put that into the book ... and again: nothing wrong with that, but it felt sneaky, like she was trying to get away with it, and I didn't like that. Kids don't like to be condescended to. If you have a message, then find an inventive way to weave it into the book so that it is inevitable, rather than snuck in. Compare that to Madeleine L'Engle's Ring of Endless Light (excerpt here here) - perhaps my favorite of all of her books (I fluctuate) ... and its vision of a summer working at a marine biology lab, and hanging out with dolphins - in captivity and also in the wild ... The things learned about dolphins that summer transcend marine biology concerns, and makes the book about (on some level) the necessity of ongoing scientific research - that science that has a practical GOAL is not the only kind of science ... There's way more ... but in general, it's about the importance of dolphins, and how they should be protected, studied, loved, whatever. But do you ever catch Madeleine L'Engle trying to preach ANY of that to us? Do you ever catch her trying to sneak in her message, hoping we won't notice? Or, no - it's not "hoping we won't notice" ... Winterson tries to sneak in her message hoping it will work on the kids in a subconscious way ... that the kids will be swayed to her point of view through osmosis. Something about that did not sit well with me, reading Tanglewreck. It is obvious L'Engle's love for dolphins, and her belief that preserving dolphins, and studying them, and protecting them, should be a priority. But she only does that through telling the story of Vicky and Adam working in the lab. L'Engle isn't trying to sneak anything past us! Winterson also assumes that her audience will all feel the same way about America, so her main villain is American, a representative of a huge multi-national corporation, and the most ambitious person in the galaxy. Winterson relies on a shorthand here (American = bad, not to be trusted) that feels very "right now" to me. Yeah, I know, the world has always hated us (but whatever, when you all want to escape the tyranny in your own lands, where do you go?? Yeah. I thought so.) Back to my point: I know "anti-Americanism" is nothing new. I mean, if you go back and read some of the things George III said about us, way back when, when the US was first starting out, you can see the contempt. Nothing has changed. It's been there since the beginning for us. (So to imagine we could "go back" to a time when we were universally admired ... Yeah, uhm, so when would that be? Learn your history, people.) But a children's book needs to be, on some level, universal. If you want kids to read it not just in this generation but others. I can feel the world of 2006 and 2007 in Tanglewreck, even though that's not what it's about at all. I can feel the global warming debate, I can feel the Iraq war, I can feel the anger at America's power, I can feel the "green" movement ... all in a book that has nothing to do with any of that. I guess what I'm saying is: Winterson is not at the top of her game here. Frankly, I don't think she would have tried to "get away" with any of this if it were a book for adults - and THAT is why the book sometimes feels condescending. Winterson has NEVER come across as didactic to me ... she's too much of a free spirit. But here she does.
However, on the flip side: The classic Winterson imagination is at work here, and I very much liked the weaving of truth with fantasy. Like, we're in this magical story where "Time Tornadoes" have sprouted up all over England, ripping people into the past, future, whatever ...but there are certain things that still ground us to reality. I liked that.
Silver lives in a big 500 year old house called Tanglewreck. Her parents and little sister disappeared one day. She now lives with an evil aunt, who stays with her at Tanglewreck, and doesn't take good care of Silver at all. Silver has to fend for herself. She loves her house, it feels alive to her. These Time Tornadoes start to swoop through London, and suddenly, things start to shift and change. A man named Abel Darkwater shows up at Tanglewreck, talking about a specific clock that was left in her parents hands - an essential clock called The Timekeeper ... Mr. Darkwater, a clock fanatic, and an ambitious man, knows that whoever has this Timekeeper will control Time. Something has happened to disturb Time. Huge forces begin to converge on Tanglewreck ... there is a Timekeeper hidden there ... it goes back centuries ... and Silver needs to hand it over. Silver has no memory of any Timekeeper. She is 11 years old. Just a kid. Abel Darkwater takes her to his house in London, but she escapes - and eventually joins up with a tribe of people who live in the tunnels beneath the city ... They call themselves "The Throwbacks". For whatever reason, they are immortal. Time has somehow "forgot" them ... most of them were inmates in Bedlam, the famous mental hospital of old in London, and are scarred forever by the experience. Turns out Abel Darkwater, too, is immortal ... and his connection with the Throwbacks is an unhappy one, and goes way back. But they save Silver - and they realize the urgency of keeping the Timekeeper out of Abel Darkwater's hands ... and so begins a chase - not just across England but across the galaxy ... to, first of all, find the Timekeeper, and to then hide it from people who would use it for ill.
It's a quick read. The slight annoyances didn't stop me from enjoying it. It just didn't have that "oomph" that great children's books need to have. I guess I felt a bit of distance from it. It feels like a lot of Winterson's other intellectual exercises ... ruminations on quantum physics and Schrodinger's cat and Einstein ... all fascinating stuff, and I ate it up here ... but I do wonder if a kid would be bored by it all.
Just to prove my point from yesterday about some of her more rabid fans: One of the reviews on Amazon (I think for the British version of the book) states that she feels she knows Winterson so well that "if we were to meet we would be on a first-name basis". Okay. First creepy clue. Then she goes on to list her problems with the book (and many of them were my problems as well) - but finally she is MOST disappointed in the fact that Silver, an 11 year old girl, appears to "fall in love" with Gabriel, a young Throwback BOY ... and that particular reader was SO disappointed that Winterson chose to have it be a heterosexual thing and missed an opportunity "to teach kids it's okay to be gay." Oh, great: let's add one MORE didactic message to the book! Why are you looking to Winterson, an artist, to "teach kids it's okay to be gay"?? In a book that has nothing to do with that? Winterson struggles with that kind of thing - people expect her to be a mouthpiece for them, rather than herself. Tanglewreck has no obligation to be anything other than itself. To look for it to show "kids it's okay to be gay" when ... it has nothing to do with that, you would never put such a pressure onto another writer - you only put the pressure on Winterson because she is gay - but that's the kind of narrow-minded thinking Winterson has always fought against. Do NOT label her as a gay writer. Or, whatever, go ahead and label her - but just know: that by labeling her, you limit her. It reminds me of Ted's story about directing Virginia in Chicago and being told on a radio interview that he wasn't qualified to direct a play about Virginia Woolf because he was a man. It also reminds me of the recent (and ongoing) kerfluffle between Clint Eastwood and Spike Lee about Eastwood's film about Charlie Parker and how Spike Lee thinks only a black man should have directed that film. Clint Eastwood was like, "But nobody else did it! I did! Get over yourself." I like Spike Lee a lot, but that kind of nonsense is ... well, nonsense. This is a level of art that I cannot stand. Where group identity politics trumps artistic considerations and imagination. Oh, so only a deaf actor can play someone who is deaf? Personal experience trumps imagination? Well, sorry, but that goes against everything I believe in. You don't need to be a prince to be able to imagine yourself into Hamlet - and to put that kind of literal consideration onto any artist is fucking stupid. Winterson is gay - therefore she can only write about gay things? How boring! Thank God Winterson appears to be easily bored, and continues to try new things, not listening to those who need her to be some posterchild for gay rights. Winterson obviously, with Tanglewreck, wanted to write a story about the things that interest her (and always have): quantum mechanics, space, transformation, alchemy ... To read her book and be disappointed that it doesn't have a gay person in it, is to be moronic. It makes me sad. It makes me hope that Winterson just keeps on keeping on ... writing what SHE wants to write. Every book may not be successful - and that's, actually, one of the most interesting things about Winterson. Even her failures are interesting. She does not play it safe. Or - no, that's not right. I feel she DID play it safe in books like Gut Symmetries (excerpt here) and The PowerBook (excerpt here) - same ol' same ol'. I suppose the fans who only want one thing out of her were tremendously pleased by those books. Those books validate THEM. I don't look for Winterson to validate me. I want her to follow her star, and I will always be right behind. Wherever she goes. When she plays it safe, she gets boring. So when she tries something new (Art & Lies (excerpt here), Tanglewreck) - sometimes it doesn't completely work - but I find that just as fascinating, and admirable. It takes guts to fail. It takes guts to put yourself out there, to know you might be out of your element ... but to understand that being out of your element is exactly where you need to be. To quote Winterson herself: "What you risk reveals what you value." And then, sometimes, she takes a risk (like with Weight - her story of Atlas and Heracles - excerpt here) - and she triumphs. That's what's exciting. Not to mention the fact that her first three books - Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (excerpt here), Sexing the Cherry (excerpt here) and The Passion (excerpt here) - are all HUGE risks ... and she knocked them out of the park. So keep taking risks, Winterson. Keep trying to please yourself - not those who have something specific they need of you ... and I'll always be a reader.
Well, I'll always be a reader, regardless. I'm no fair-weather fan! And I suppose - like the woman on Amazon - I have certain "needs" of Winterson, too. I am always curious as to what the hell she is getting up to (she has a new book out - The Stone Gods - a sci-fi book, and I haven't read it yet ... I'm not a big sci-fi fan, but I can't wait to read it ... just to see what she's doing) ... and I hope that my expectations of her are not unfair, or limiting. I know when I'm bored, and I trust that response ... but I also know that Winterson is a wild card. She's made her name on being unpredictable. I'm a fan for life, that's just the way it goes.
So although Tanglewreck is not quite a success, I do admire it because of the risk she took in writing it. She had to know people would be displeased. She wrote it anyway. Awesome! It is only by doing what she wants to do ... that she will continue to grow and flourish as an artist. She has the money. Her books are huge successes. She can please herself. That's what I like about following her career. I never know where she will go next.
Here's a section where Silver sits in the tunnels beneath London with the tribe called The Throwbacks. She is on the run from Abel Darkwater.
EXCERPT FROM Tanglewreck
Gabriel began to teach Silver how to find her way through the labyrinths, and where to come Upground. They told each other stories about their lives, and Silver promised Gabriel that whatever happened, one day she would take him to Tanglewreck.
'I should be glad to see the place that you love,' said Gabriel. 'Nothing matters but those things that matter, Micah says.'
And Silver thought she understood.
In the timeless, ageless space of the Throwbacks, Silver felt happy again, happier than she had been for years. She remembered that with her parents and Buddleia at Tanglewreck, every day had stretched into every day, and she had been free, just like this. She started to sleep on her back, instead of curled up in a ball. She had no sense of how much time was passing - perhaps all of it. Perhaps none.
One day, finding Micah on his own in the Chamber, smoking his pipe, she asked him what he had meant by the 'Experiments'. His face grew dark.
'They be alchemists - him and Maria Prophetessa.'
'That's the beautiful woman called Regalia Mason?'
'Yes.'
'Is an alchemist a sort of magician?'
'Yea, in sort.'
And Micah explained how hundreds of years ago, science and magic were nearly the same thing. Nobody studied physics or chemistry, they studied mathematics or astronomy, and they studied alchemy. Astronomers were also astrologers, who predicted what would happen by measuring the movement of the stars. Even Isaac Newton, who studied mathematics, and discovered gravity, was an astrologer.
'And Isaac Newton, he be a member of a secret society called Tempus Fugit.'
'Time Flies!' said Silver. 'Abel Darkwater's shop!'
'Yea,' said Micah. 'Many of the alchemists spent all their lives labouring to turn metal into gold, but some, like Isaac Newton, and Abel Darkwater, and Maria Prophetessa, and a very powerful magician called John Deem they laboured to make Time.'
'You can't make TIme,' said Silver, thinking, even as she said it, how grown-ups were always saying they had to make time, usually for their children.
' 'Tis why he be alive and not dead in the earth,' said Micah.
'But you are all alive too,' said Silver.
'Yea,' said Micah. 'He experimented on us in the lunatic asylum in ways that would curdle your heart, but when we escaped we discovered that we be not dying as Updwellers do. Have you not noticed something about Abel Darkwater?'
Silver thought about his marble eyes, his round body, his shadowy face ...
'He be like us who don't want the light. If our kind do go in the light, as Updwellers do, we die. Abel Darkwater is cleverer than we; he don't die in the light, but he can't be in the light for long. The dark slows death down, like hibernation. Like animals who sleep all winter.'
'What else slows it down?' asked Silver.
'Cold,' said Micah. 'You put a piece of meat in your cold safes - fridges, you call them. Yea, in the cold safe it does not decay. In the sun it decays.'
'Dark and cold,' said Silver.
'Yea,' said Micah. 'Dark and cold. Come.'
Micah hoisted Silver up on to the warm shaggy back of a bog pony and led her through a short maze of tunnels.
Silver hung on to the pony's thick mane, and felt his warmth on her fingers. Now she understood why Abel Darkwater's house was so cold. It wasn't because it was an old house like Tanglewreck; it was to keep him alive. That was why he had no electric lights, and that was why Mrs Rokabye complained a lot, even for her. Silver didn't feel the cold much. They had hardly any heat or electricity at Tanglewreck because their parents couldn't afford it. Only Mrs Rokabye had electric fires and electric blankets, and even an electric headscarf that she wore in the winter.
'Behold!' said Micah.
They had come to a round corral where half a dozen cattle were contentedly munching hay. The temperature was freezing, and a haze of cold hung over the cows.
Silver shivered and wrapped her legs round the pony. She looked up and saw that the opaque natural light and the steaming cold were coming from a perfectly round sheet of what looked like frosted glass. But it was perhaps fifty metres in diameter.
'In thine own world that be an ice-skating pond,' said Micah. 'A great marvel, for it remains frozen the whole of the year, and through your four season.'
'It's an ice-rink,' said Silver.
'We depend on it for our cattle. These cattle be bred by Abel Darkwater in 1805. We keep them in calf for milk, and we eat the calves for meat.'
'When will they die?' asked Silver.
'I know not. None of us knows when we shall die. But that is true of thine own world too.'
Silver and Micah made their way back to the Chamber.
'Why are you still afraid of Abel Darkwater?' said Silver.
'For the chains and the beatings and the blood-lettings and the faintings, and the dissections and anatomies he performed, and the great cold he kept us in, and the darkness where we dwelled before we be made different by him and her, and that he was my Master. He could destroy us still. He does not destroy us for reasons of his own, but I know them not.'
'Why does he want the Timekeeper?'
Micah stopped as he was walking. 'Abel Darkwater never must find the Timekeeper. If truly you know where it be ...'
'I don't know where it be, I mean, where it is,' said Silver.
'He must not become Lord of the Universe, for that is his wish, and his many lifetimes' work,' said Micah, his face grave.
'How can we stop him?' asked Silver.
'He cannot do it without the clock.'
'But he says I will lead him to the clock.'
Micah was silent. 'It may be that you must dwell with us for the remainder of your days.'
Silver gasped at this. 'What, and never see Tanglewreck again?'
'It may be. If you be the Keeper of the Clock, it be your duty to keep it safe.'
'But I DON'T KNOW WHERE IT IS!'
'That may be the means of keeping it safe,' said Micah.
July 27, 2008
Man on Wire
Lauren Wissot gets a wonderful interview from documentary filmmaker James Marsh and Philippe Petit (the highwire artist subject of Man On Wire) - One brief excerpt from the interview:
Philippe Petit: Everything I do I feel is completely honest, completely felt, completely generous and sincere. At the same time I have to seduce, I have to steal, I have to lie, I have to convince, I have to acquire things, I have to force, I have to impose. This is what an artist should do regardless of the rules, if he has a pure heart and wants to do something beautiful.
I can't wait to see it. I've been hearing amazing things about it.
The Books: "Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles" (Jeanette Winterson)
Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt:
Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles
Part of the ongoing Myths Series from Random House (which I adore) - Winterson takes on the myth of Atlas and Heracles. I mentioned in another post that I think Winterson could definitely be a kind of post-modern Edith Hamilton. I have always felt that her strength, as a writer, lay in the evocation of magic and myth and fairy tale in the middle of more straightforward narratives. It's what I most love about her. Because even with all her invention and unconventionality - she actually is one of the most traditional of writers. Meaning: she respects tradition. She ADORES it. It lives and breathes around her, and she finds new ways to put those traditions and old tales into her stories - because they mean that much to her. It's not an act or a gimmick (having read her book Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery
Her imagining of the myth of Atlas and Heracles is marvelous - and is representative of what I am talking about her. I really get the sense, with this book, that Winterson was able to retreat to a private space (in her mind, I mean) - where she is most creative, most in touch with her dreams and her thoughts, and wrote from that place. Sometimes Winterson's work is self-conscious. Nothing wrong with that. Virginia Woolf was a self-conscious writer. James Joyce was a self-conscious writer. Being aware of you, the artist, in the act of creation is part of the 20th century literary tradition. Winterson can sometimes go off the deep end with it, and the references become lost - it becomes a truly private work, not accessible to me, the reader - but here, with the myth of Atlas and Heracles, she is in true storyteller mode. She is sitting around the fire with members of her tribe, telling a tale they all know well, but never get tired of hearing about. Because there are lessons in it for all ... Winterson has truly thought about this myth, and its larger metaphors ... and so she goes for it.
I had been vaguely disenchanted with Winterson's books for a couple of years. Burnt by Art & Lies
More than anything, I just got the sense that Winterson had a BALL writing this. Like she could have kept writing forever, it was that fun and satisfying to her. It's a really fun book - I highly recommend it. If you're into Greek and Roman mythology, then the "Myths Series" is something you should definitely check out. I haven't read all of them - just Winterson's and Atwood's - but what a great idea, I think.
EXCERPT FROM Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles
The war between the gods and the Titans was a war we had preferred to avoid. There are several versions of this war. One thing is certain; what began as just cause became just excuse. We fought for ten years.
Some say that my father was Uranus and that my brothers and I, especially Cronus, plotted to attack him and castrate him. It is certain that Cronus cut off the genitals of Uranus, and then took power himself. It is certain too, that Cronus bore a child, Zeus, who likewise dethroned his father and gained control of the heavens. Zeus had two brothers, Hades and Poseidon, and while Zeus became Lord of the Sky, Poseidon had his kingdom in the waves, and Hades was content with what lies beneath. The earth was left to mankind.
It was mankind who attacked quiet Atlantis, and Zeus who helped them to destroy my people. I escaped, and joined the revolt against the heavens. I was the war-leader, the one who had lost most and little to fear. What can a man fear with nothing to lose?
In the long fighting, most of us were killed, and my mother, out of her secret nature, promised victory to Zeus. What Titans were left were banished to Britain, where the cold inhospitable rocks are worse than death. I was spared for my great strength.
In a way I was allowed to be my own punishment.
Because I loved the earth. Because the seas of the earth held no fear for me. Because I had learned the positions of the planets and the track of the stars. Because I am strong, my punishment was to support the Kosmos on my shoulders. I took up the burden of the whole world, the heavens above it, and the depths below. All that there is, is mine, but none of it in my control. This is my monstrous burden. The boundary of what I am.
And my desire?
Infinite space.
It was the day of my punishment.
The gods assembled. The women were on the left and the men were on the right. There's Artemis, worked muscle and tied-back hair, fiddling with her bow so that she doesn't have to look at me. We were friends. We hunted together.
There's Hera, sardonic, aloof. She couldn't care less. As long as it's not her.
There's Hermes, fidgety and pale, he hates trouble. Next to him lounges Hephastus, ill-tempered and lame, Hera's crippled son, tolerated for his gold smithy. Opposite him is Aphrodite his wife, who loathes his body. We've all had her, though we treat her like a virgin. She smiled at me. She was the only one who dared ...
Zeus read out his decree. Atlas, Atlas, Atlas. It's in my name, I should have known. My name is Atlas - it means 'the long suffering one'.
I bent my back and braced my right leg, kneeling with my left. I bowed my head and held my hands, palms up, almost like surrender. I suppose it was surrender. Who is strong enough to escape their fate? Who can avoid what they must become?
The word given, teams of horses and oxen began to strain forward, dragging the Kosmos behind them, like a disc-plough. As the great ball ploughed infinity, pieces of time were dislodged. Some fell to earth, giving the gift of prophecy and second sight. Some were thrown out into the heavens, making black holes where past and future cannot be distinguished. Time spattered my calf muscles and the sinews in my thigh. I felt the world before it began and the future marked me. I would always be here.
As the Kosmos came nearer, the heat of it scorched my back. I felt the world settle against the sole of my foot.
Then, without any sound, the heavens and the earth were rolled up over my body and I supported them on my shoulders.
I could hardly breathe. I could not raise my head. I tried to shift slightly or to speak. I was dumb and still as a mountain. Mount Atlas they soon called me, not for my strength but for my silence.
There was a terrible pain in the seventh vertebra of my neck. The soft tissue of my body was already hardening. The hideous vision of my life was robbing me of life. Time was my medusa. Time was turning me to stone.
I do not know how long I crouched like this, petrified and motionless.
***
At last I began to hear something.
I found that where the world was close to my ears, I could hear everything. I could hear conversations, parrots squawking, donkeys braying. I heard the rushing of underground rivers and the crackle of fires lighted. Each sound became a meaning, and soon I began to de-code the world.
Listen, here is a village with a hundred people in it, and at dawn they take their cattle to the pastures and at evening they herd them home. A girl with a limp takes the pails over her shoulders. I know she limps by the irregular clank of the buckets. There's a boy shooting arrows - thwack! thwack! into the padded hide of the target. His father pulls the stopper out of a wine jar.
Listen, there's an elephant chased by a band of men. Over there, a nymph is becoming a tree. Her sighs turn into sap.
Someone is scrambling up a scree slope. His boots loosen the ground under him. His nails are torn. He falls exhausted on some goat-grass. He breathes heavily and goes to sleep.
I can hear the world beginning. Time plays itself back for me. I can hear the ferns uncurling from their tight rest. I can hear pools bubbling with life. I realise I am carrying not only this world, but all possible worlds. I am carrying the world in time as well as in space. I am carrying the world's mistakes and its glories. I am carrying its potential as well as what has so far been realised.
As the dinosaurs crawl through my hair and volcanic eruptions pock my face, I find I am become a part of what I must bear. There is no longer Atlas and the world, there is only the World Atlas. Travel me, and I am continents. I am the journey you must make.
Listen, there's a man telling a story about the man who holds the world on his shoulders. Everybody laughs. Only drunks and children will believe that.
July 26, 2008
And then sometimes
... after a long day, and an even longer night, in the middle of a heat wave, with feet that hurt because you've been on them all day, you slog your way through the 42nd Street subway station, dripping in sweat, wishing you could teleport yourself back into your cool bed, after a long cold shower ... and suddenly:
you see an angel.
And your mood changes. It really does.
Oh man, I needed the laugh
This is one of the funniest threads I have read in a long LONG time.
Sars does an advice column - so it starts out serious - but one of the questions involves age-appropriate sex information for little kids - and the thread becomes a long involved truth-telling session about funny things kids say at inappropriate times. I am crying with laughter.
Highlights:
-- When I was 5 I was riding the subway in Boston with my mom and asked in that piercing voice only toddlers have "But Mom, how does the sperm get OUT of the penis?"
-- When I was about 7 my mom dragged me inside after hearing me scream at the neighbor "You're just mad because your girlfriend won't give you the blowjob!". I had NO IDEA what it meant, I had just heard older kids talking about it and probably wanted to sound more worldly. Around the same time I called my dad a "dildo" and was asked where I had learned these words. Needless to say, I wasn't allowed as much freedom to hang around with the older kids in the neighborhood.
--My 4 year old cousin: "Gramma, why do you have 2 chins?"
Grandma: "Well honey, that's because Gramma is fat."
Cousin: "That's ok Gramma, I like that you're squishy!"
-- I learned how babies are made at the age of 5, when my brother, 12 years older, got his ex-girlfriend knocked up. Imagine what my parents must have been going through–the eldest about to be an un-wed teen father, and suddenly having to explain to a 5 year old how babies are made, why they are sometimes a "surprise," why some mommies and daddies don't live together, and that even though brother was grounded for life, we were happy about the baby and love the baby.
-- There's a story about my brother at the Natural History Museum when he was about three. One of my parents pointed out a big fish, vegging out near the bottom of the tank, to my brother, something like "Oh, look at that big fish!" and my brother responded "Lazy fucker!" Heh.
-- My niece was three when, after told it was bedtime, proceeded to strip completely naked in front of me, my mom, and my boyfriend at the time, and dance around the room chanting "look at my body! look at my body!" My BF was blushing to beat the band and trying to look anywhere BUT at the tiny stripper-in-training. Who then proceeded to stomp her foot and demand loudly, "Look. At. My. Body!"
-- The time my mother wanted to disown my three-year-old self, we were at the doctor's office. She was scheduling a follow-up appointment and I was wandering around the waiting room looking at people. I saw a lady with some dark whiskers on her lip and asked, "Did you know you have a moustache?" She ignored me so I asked again quite shrilly, "HEY I ASKED IF YOU KNOW YOU HAVE A MOUSTACHE? DO YOU KNOW?"
-- My mother was very into Les Miserables when I was about 11 and my sister was about 5. The family went on a lot of road trips and the soundtrack to the Broadway show was a popular source of entertainment in the car. It was not such a popular source of entertainment for anyone (except perhaps other shoppers) when my sister broke out into a couple of lines "Lovely Ladies"–the prostitutes' song–in the middle of a department store, musically announcing to one and all that she was "ready for a thick one or a quick one in the park."
And I think this one is my favorite of all - I cannot stop laughing about it:
-- Another time, at the same shopping mall, I somehow got lost and ended up at the Wanamakers business office. I told them my name was Diane, and an announcement went out over the loudspeaker for anyone looking for a little girl named Diane. Quite some time later, after my harried mother had figured it out from the clothing description, she came to collect me.
Mom: "Linda, why on earth did you tell them your name was Diane??"
Me: "Because I didn't want anyone to know I was stupid enough to get lost."
Definitely go read the whole thing!
The Books: "The PowerBook' (Jeanette Winterson)
Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt:
The PowerBook
Ali is the narrator of The PowerBook. She is a storyteller. She sells her services online to tell stories for others. Any story you want. It can star you ... or you can inhabit another story (the story of Lancelot, the story of Mallory on Everest, whatever you like) - you give Ali your qualifications, your desires, and she tells the story. She does warn you that you may come out the other end of the story - altered, changed. Stories are not benign or harmless - they have the power to change you. You may not be the same person. People are willing to pay, however. Fantasy is a powerful thing. And it takes someone who is a WRITER who can make a story come alive. There's a bit of ego in this book (obviously) - and it is not clear at all that "Ali" is separate in any way from Jeanette Winterson, the writer. The voice is, as always Winterson's voice. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, and there is much that is lovely and fanciful in this book.
From what I remember, there is one particular woman, out there in cyberspace, who keeps coming back for Ali's stories. She re-invents herself time and time again. It is a shape-shifting universe, the universe of online romance and sex, you can be whoever you want to be. That is Ali's job; to make it become real and alive.
My favorite parts of this book are the stories. You, as the reader, enter the different stories, and there are times when it seems they will go on forever. There is no way out. That is part of Ali's warning to her customers. A story is a story. You can't ask what you will "get" out of a story because the story has its own rules and has to go where it has to go. Ali makes no promises of a specific result.
Here is an excerpt. You can certainly see Winterson's gift for romantic narrative here. She just goes for it. She is not cynical. She is not afraid of being hokey or overblown - because that is, indeed, how love feels like. At least in the beginning. I really admire that about her.
EXCERPT FROM The PowerBook
There is no greater grief than to find no happiness but happiness in what is past.
This is the story of Francesca da Rimini and her lover Paolo. You can find it in Boccaccio. You can find it in Dante. You can find it here.
My father's castle is built of stone. The stone is thick as darkness. Darkness is to the inside what stone is to the outside of this castle; impenetrable, unscalable, a stone-dark, heavy as thought.
The dark stone weighs on us. Our thoughts bear us down. We roll the dark in front of us down the icy corridors, and in the rooms the darkness accumulates, sits in our chairs, waits. We wait.
The castle is a pause between dark and dark. It fills the space between a man's thoughts and his deeds. My father made the design for the castle himself. It is as though we are living inside him.
Inside the castle, the furniture is black oak from Spain. In the one room where we keep a fire there is a long black table with candlesticks. At this table, for the first time, I saw Paolo.
Paolo il bello ...
***
My father Guido had long been at war with Malatesta, Lord of Rimini. A marriage was planned as a condition of peace, and Paolo rode in retinue to wild Ravenna to fetch me.
We lit the dark hall with candles, which forced the darkness off a little, made it crouch in strange shapes, like a thing whipped.
We dressed ourselves in black, my mother and I, for my father told us that every day is a day of mourning. I wore no adornment, but my hair is as loose and flowing as the cataract that roars under my window, and just as the cataract is tamed to the waterwheel, my hair is tamed to the braid, but both escape.
I bound myself as tightly as I could and went downstairs.
There was a curious light in the room. It was not the fire nor the candles nor the effect of the storm outside. I did not dare raise my eyes to discover the source, but walked mute and downcast towards the table, where my father presented me to Paolo.
I did not look up. I offered him my hand and he kissed it and placed a ring on my finger.
Through our meal my father talked only to the envoys and said nothing to Paolo or myself. I heard Paolo's voice talking to my mother, and the music of it was like a flute or a pipe. I wanted to see him, but I had not the power.
At the end of our meal my mother and father and all the envoys and servants left the room abruptly. None of the dishes had been cleared and the wine was left spilt on the table. I could sense Paolo looking at me.
There was a low rumbling noise, like a scaffold being wheeled out, and from the shadow on the floor, I understood that a great canopied bed had been pushed into the room.
I did not raise my eyes, but my skin was as cold as wax.
I heard Paolo get up and, coming round to my side of the table, he took my hand and bade me stand up.
'Francesca,' he said, 'let me see your breasts.'
I could not move, but his hands were sure as falcons and he soon had me pinned under him.
We lay on the bed and he kissed me - nothing more - one hand on my breast, the other gently stroking himself, until he felt my kisses meet his, and then he took my hand to where his own was active, and now freed, began to open my legs.
The pleasure was as shocking as the thought of pleasure.
The next morning, both dressed in white, we passed through the walls of my father's castle as easily as ghosts. In my whole life I had never been beyond the shadow of the castle. The shadow-tip of the flag marked the limit of my walks and my own shadow followed me wherever I went.
Today was not like that.
Today was sun and sky and birdsong and open faces, and I blessed my father's war, which had made this love.
As we rode, the light went with us. He was the light.
Paolo il bello.
My lover, my loved one, my love.
***
I need not tell how we passed our days as we rode in splendour along the coast. There was such lightness in me that I had to be tied to the pommel of the saddle to keep myself from bird height. I was bold as a starling. You fed me from your own plate. My eyes were always watching you. I thought you were one of the angels from the church window. We flew together, your wings in gold leaf from the sun. Time flew with us, and very soon we were in sight of your father's lands.
I noticed a change in you - a dampening and a quiet that I did not understand. I thought you were ashamed of me, but you shook your head, your beautiful head like an angel, and asked me to wait.
I did wait. I had waited before now. Waited all my life, it seemed. 'What is life,' my father had said, 'but a waiting for death?'
Then there were trumpets and running feet and crowds gathering and pennants and a team of white horses in silver harnesses and the white horses drew a carriage and in the carriage was a strange swarthy misshapen man, dressed all in leather, his fingers full of rings.
You turned to me and your voice was breaking as water breaks against a rock it cannot wear away.
'That man is to be your husband,' you said. 'That man, my brother.'
Oh, Paolo, il bello, why did you lie to me?
Say you are lying to me now.
The wedding took place that afternoon.
My husband was scarcely four feet tall and as twisted in body as Paolo was straight. These things need not have been laid to his fault, but his heart was his own making and his heart was as unformed by kindness as his body had been neglected by beauty. He cared for nothing but hunting and women, and he lashed his dogs and his whores with the same strap.
The horrors of my nights with him might have been bearable if I had not been taught a different way. The grave of my childhood life and the grave of my married life might have crumbled into one another without distinction, if Paolo had not kissed me and raised me from the dead for those few wide-open days.
Then, months later, when my husband was away, Paolo came into my room. He suggested we might read together to while away the time, and this was approved with a short nod from my waiting woman who was paid to be my gaoler.
Every morning Paolo came to me, and we read together the story of Lancelot du Lac, and his love for Queen Guinevere.
We read out loud, and there were many pauses, many broken sighs and swift glances, and as we bent our heads lower and lower over the page, to scribe a perfect world, our cheeks met, and then our lips, and he was honey in my mouth as I kissed him.
There was no more time for reading that day.
You contrived it - oh, I don't know how - to be together, along with our book, though we never turned another page.
Paolo, your love for me was a clear single happiness, and I would not give it up to save my soul.
He caught us. You know he did. Perhaps he trapped us. He might have done.
We were in bed together, naked, hot, Paolo inside me, when Gianciotto burst through the door with his men. I saw his face, triumphant, malign, and I saw him raise his terrible hand. He had a hand made of iron that he had fashioned into a spike. It was his hand that he ran through Paolo's smooth back, and through into my belly and my spine, and into the flock of the mattress. The force was so great that it lifted him up and pinned him above us like a weathercock.
I put my hands to Paolo's bleeding body, and he said to me, so that only I could hear -
'There is no love that does not pierce the hands and feet.'
He was dead then, and I dead under him, and hand in hand our souls flew down the corridors and out of his brother's palace as easily as our bodies had done when we left my father's house.
I have never let go of his hand.
We are as light now as our happiness was, lighter than birds. The wind carries us where it will, but our love is secure.
No one can separate us now. Not even God.
July 25, 2008
Hope Update (for David, because it is almost his birthday)
Hope seems to feel that if she lies curled up in the bathroom sink she will be as close to the angels and the Heavenly Father as she possibly can be. She cannot stay away. I have a very small bathroom sink, and if she just plops her body down into it, it kind of envelops her and insists that she curls up. It doesn't have a flat bottom, it's all one gentle curve - which works for her, if she's in a sleey mood.
She sits on the bathmat, staring up at the sink, trying to decide whether or not to go for it. Once she's up there, she's happy and immediately succumbs to the curve-y forces of gravity. But it takes some time to make the move. Not because she is afraid or trepidatious. I think it is because it is difficult when you love something like that. It is hard to accept love of that intensity. She decides to go for it. Up she leaps, into the sink ... and she turns ... and turns ... and turns ... her feet sliding on the tile sides, until finally she collapses, head resting on her paws, hidden from view.
I forget sometimes that this love affair with the sink is going on - so I lose track of her in my small apartment - and she seems to have disappeared. I call out, "Hope? Where are you?"
What a stupid question. Of COURSE she is in the sink. She gives me a tired arrogant look from over the side of the sink, like, "Haven't you caught on yet? I loves me this sink. Mkay?"
Last night I was in the kitchen and I could hear her purrs from within the sink all the way down the hall.
I am not sure why a cold white tile sink would generate such a rapturous response, and I am sure it has something to do with the coolness of it, in these hot dog days of summer, but I like to think there is something more. I like to think that the shape itself pleases Hope. That it is a welcoming circular space, perfect for curling up in, nothing to adjust to, nothing you have to work with ... a perfect space for a sleeping cat. I like to think that there is some connection there that makes Hope lie asleep, purring so ferociously that it makes me laugh out loud to hear her. "Uhm ... wow Hope. That's a loud purr. Are you, by any chance, happy right now? Because honestly. That purr is out of control."
And so I am happy for Hope. And the sink. I'm glad they finally found each other.
"Calling Barranca!"
"Movie prop" plane found - and featured on Antiques Roadshow. The guest on the show, who had found the plane, describes coming across it at a swap meet - and the guy selling it said it was from a movie with a name like "The Wings of an Angel." The guest decided not to purchase (having never heard of such a movie). And then:
So as I was walking away he just said, "Oh, the only other thing I know about it is is that Cary Grant starred in the movie." And as soon as he said that, I knew exactly what movie it was. I knew it was "Only Angels Have Wings." And I knew that it was a Howard Hawks film. I knew that Jean Arthur and Cary Grant and Rita Hayworth were in it. But what I couldn't remember was, in the story line, the name of the airline. I ultimately bargained with him, got the price down to $195, and I loaded it in my car and I drove about as fast as I could around the corner to a local bookseller and I ran up the stairs and I found the first biography I could of Cary Grant and I flipped it open to "Only Angels Have Wings," and there it was, Barranca Airlines.
Turns out it was one of the model planes used in Only Angels Have Wings. Jim Emerson blogs about it (and also provides a clip of one of the action sequences in the film which still has the power, even to my modern-day eyes, to take my breath away). I love it. "Movie prop"!!
Here's a post I wrote about the first 10 minutes of Only Angels Have Wings - a long pantomime through a crazy third-world street ... no dialogue really ... but man, what atmosphere. What a world is created - immediately.
Here's one of my many posts about Howard Hawks.
"Who's Joe?"
"Never heard of him."
Images of Moby Dick ...
Some are the famous Rockwell Kent illustrations (I have the copy of the book with those images in it - and more haunting images you will never see! He has created the looming leviathans of nightmares) ... others are from other versions of the book ... book covers, artist renditions, etc.
I love to see all of the different viewpoints of the artists. Everyone is trying to capture - or imagine themselves into - a single event. There's something beautiful about that. (Reminds me of this post I did way back when.)
The Books: "The World and Other Places" - 'Turn of the World' (Jeanette Winterson)
Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt:
The World and Other Places: Stories
The kind of writing and imagination on display in this story is my main attraction to Jeanette Winterson. It's the kind of bravery that allowed her to tell the story of a woman whose heart was actually taken (in The Passion - excerpt here), and the story of princesses who flew out of their window at night (in Sexing the Cherry - excerpt here). It's not that she's re-inventing the wheel. It's that she allows magic to be a part of her books in a way that is not hokey, or strictly sci-fi. She's more into myth. The element of myth playing a part in our lives. And fairy tales: the eternal truth of them. What can Hansel and Gretl or Rapunzel tell us about how we live? Winterson is truly inventive in this regard. She's not like anybody else.
"Turn of the World" describes four islands that lie "at the turn of the world". The names of the islands are Fyr, Hydor, Aeros and Erde. She describes each island - how they work, what their defining characteristics are. The story reminds me very much of Gulliver's Travels (excerpt here). Each island obviously represents one of our four elements. The worlds she creates you will not forget (the drowned island, the volcanic fiery island, etc.)
My favorite is the island of Erde. Obviously "earth" - because the entire island is based on mines, and jewels. But on this particular island the values are opposite from our own.
I don't know what it all means - that is sometimes the case with Winterson. She states her case, describes the world, and you are left with: So ... what does it all mean? What should I think about this? Sometimes that means that Winterson's writing is purposefully opaque, which can get boring - but in this case, it just means she's writing on a mythical magical level ... where meaning is never certain. It's just something to think about. You can charge in and say, "Oh - this is what this MEANS ..." but you may be missing the point. Winterson wants engagement. She wants us to meet her halfway. Otherwise, she is not interested.
Here's an excerpt.
EXCERPT FROM The World and Other Places: Stories
The island of Erde.
Here are mines and jewels. The climate of Erde is blustery and damp with frequent snow fall in the long winter. To keep warm, the inhabitants have perfected a cast-iron stove that burns diamonds. Diamonds are the cheapest fuel source on Erde. The coal seams are so ancient and undug that their carbon is no longer carbonaceous rock but crystallised carbon. Anyone who foots a spade into the earth will find a shovelful of uncut diamonds, which will burn unattended for two weeks.
It is true that certain mines on the island are still young, and these are highly prized. The richest women wear coal earrings and coal necklaces and the coal merchants of Erde are the wealthiest men in the world. Tourists are taken round the filthy, black coal-cutting studios near the mines, and marvel at the treasures on display. The King of Erde has a crown made entirely of coal, including the largest lump of coal ever brought up from the coveted mine. The cut lump is two feet by three feet and weighs as much as a Tamworth Sow. On state occasions, when the precious crown is carefully blacked and sooted, four men must walk beside the king to support thie fabulous glory. To be covered in coal-dust is thought a great honour.
For the most part though, the people are modst and content, sitting quietly by their winter fires, poking the diamonds.
Visitors to the island come for the caving and the hunting. The underground passages of Erde are hung with stalactites and furnished with stalagmites. Carving is a national hobby, and the growths of minerals, deep in the caves, have been fashioned into beds and chairs, elephants and whales, making a world within a world. Cavers drink their coffee out of fossil cups.
Beasts of every kind still roam Erde and hunting parties are organised throughout the season. The guides and beaters are strict; no one must stray from the route. If the prey reaches the interior, it is given up for lost.
There have been stories of foolhardy hunters who have rushed ahead into unmarked places of Erde, and they have never returned. The guides are silent. No search party is sent out. The guides themselves would not return.
What is the mystery of Erde? It is said that when a man or a woman of that place has done all they wish to do in the world, they set off, without warning, drawn as if by a magnet, towards the interior.
If the people of Hydor are known for clairvoyance, the people of Erde are known for prophesy. It is said that the Norns live in the interior, weaving their fateful rope.
Perhaps they do. The traveller has seen three sisters beckoning to him, as he nears the magnetic pole of the island. There is a tree there, whose top stretches up to heaven and whose roots push down to hell. The tree is eloquent. In its branches seem to be the tracings of the whole world. The traveller rubs his hands against the thick bark and his hands are sapped with time. He puts his head against the tree, glad to rest, and hears the rumble of history coursing through the trunk.
Perhaps it is the World Ash Tree. Perhaps it is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Perhaps it is the alchemists' tree, under whose shade the self will grow again. The traveller does not know but he starts to climb.
July 24, 2008
War and Peace: An entire society ...
...described in one paragraph:
Part Four: Chapter IIIOn the 3rd of March all the rooms of the English Club were full of the hum of voices, and the members and guests of the club, in uniforms and frock-coats, some even in powder and Russian kaftans, were standing meeting, parting, and running to and fro like bees swarming in spring. Powdered footmen in livery, wearing slippers and stockings, stood at every door, anxiously trying to follow every movement of the guests and club members, so as to proffer their services. The majority of those present were elderly and respected persons, with broad, self-confident faces, fat fingers, and resolute gestures and voices. Guests and members of this class sat in certain habitual places, and met together in certain habitual circles. A small proportion of those present were casual guests - chiefly young men, among them Denisov, Rostov, and Dolohov, who was now an officer in the Semyonovsky regiment again. The faces of the younger men, especially the officers, wore that expression of condescending deference to their elders which seems to say to the older generation, "Respect and deference we are prepared to give you, but remember all the same the future is for us." Nevitsky, an old member of the club, was there too. Pierre, who at his wife's command had let his hair grow and left off spectacles, was walking about the rooms dressed in the height of the fashion, but looking melancholy and depressed. Here, as everywhere, he was surrounded by the atmosphere of people paying homage to his wealth, and he behaved to them with the careless, contemptuous air of sovereignty that had become habitual with him.
From War and Peace
Comparisons are odious.
Yet also inevitable.
I have had many cats in my life. I've been around cats since I was a skinny little thing in a Red Sox T-shirt.
My first boyfriend and I had two cats: Cosette and Maxie. He inherited them with our "divorce". I then moved on to Sammy - widely known as "the best cat in the world". Everyone agrees. Everyone.
Here's Sammy.
I got Sammy in 1992 and he died in 2003. We were BUDS, man. I still miss him. We moved all over the place together. He was truly unique - almost like a mentally disturbed DOG rather than a cat. (I got him at the pound in Chicago, and I am convinced he had been abused before me. He had a worried look in his eyes at all times, bless his heart.) But you know, I got to know him and his personality intimately. I could predict his moves.
So even though I have had many cats - I can't help but notice the differences between Hope and Sammy. This isn't a bad thing. I love that they have different personalities and ways of being. Also preferences. It's been 5 years since Sammy died, and still now - with Hope - she'll do something and I'll think: "Wow. Sammy would never do that!"
I'm still adjusting to another cat (which just goes to show you how awesome Sammy really was).
So. Here are some differences I have noticed:
-- Sammy adored draping himself around my neck as though he was a fur stole ... and would stay up there as I did chores. I would vacuum my living room, with Sammy draped around my neck.
-- Hope would not be caught dead imitating a fur stole. She tolerates being held.
-- Sammy had a nervous breakdown any time I busted out the can opener because that meant, to him, TUNA. He would come running from another time zone if he smelled tuna. Or if he even heard the drawer open where he knew I kept the can opener. Even now - years later - I still feel like something's missing when I open a can of tuna ... and nobody comes running.
-- Hope is indifferent to the can opener as well as only MILDLY interested in the smell of tuna.
-- Hope is really into beating the SHIT out of her little bizzy balls, going nuts, getting all flat (I looove it when cats get all flat, ready to pounce), and once she has it grasped in her top paws, goes to town on the pesky thing with her back paws, trying to tear its guts out. She is fierce, and rather frightening. Her eyes are so insane and focused that I feel embarrassed for her vulnerability in that moment. But I am proud of her warrior spirit.
-- Sammy never got into playing. I think it meant too much separation from me. I would toss a bizzy ball off into the distance and he would stare up at me worried, like, "Do you want me to go that far away from you?? Just to retrieve a bizzy ball? Are you out of your mind?? I want to stay RIGHT HERE draped around your neck, thankyouverymuch."
-- Sammy would sleep on my head. He could never ever get close enough. I would wake up in the dark of night and Sammy would be staring straight at me, eyes glimmering through the black. He only slept when he knew I was WATCHING. Because that made him feel safe. I have no idea. All I know is, whenever I opened my eyes from sleep, Sammy was right there, staring at me. I wished he could have learned to chillax but by the time I got him it was too late. Best I could do would be to give him as much love as possible so that maybe - maybe - he would learn to trust again.
-- Hope is not so much about sleeping in the bed with me. But she does curl up on the windowsill right next to my head, and I am guessing she sleeps there all day. I am happy for her (especially when I remember her horrible small cage at the shelter). There have been times when she has crawled into my lap and relaxed, falling asleep and being all luxurious and decadent when I pet her. That is nice.
-- Sammy was not a lick-er. He might have licked my hand once or twice - but that was only out of a sense of obligation and vague worry. He felt he had to, so that I wouldn't disappear into the ether forever ... not because he wanted to.
-- Hope is OCD about keeping me clean. When I first went cat-"shopping" at the adoption shelter - I caught sight of her in her cage, which was below eye-level. She sat on a shelf in her cage, curled up, her eyes drowsy and sleepy. There was something nice about her. I asked if I could "meet" her. The woman at the shelter opened the cage. Hope opened her eyes, wondering what was happening. I gently reached my hand in, to let her sniff me. She immediately began licking my fingers, and my heart cracked. This behavior has only continued.
-- Sammy would howl with despair when I would leave the apartment. I would walk down the stairs to leave, and hear him yowling as I left. It was awful.
-- Hope is usually busy being all flat and pounce-y when I leave. She has not plummeted into grief yet when I leave. She rolls around on the floor, being all fierce with her bizzy ball or one of my pens and barely notices me walking out.
Similarities?
Both: affectionate, sweet, and filled with purrs.
Both: follow me from room to room, never (apparently) wanting to be out of my sight. I used to trip over Sammy all the time, because he would place himself right under my feet. Hope is the same way. I think: Where's Hope?... and then trip over her.
Both: seem to feel safe and relaxed in my presence, and totally okay with falling into deep REM slumbers.
Both: yearn to kill a bird. They stare out into the green world beyond the window, dreaming of bloodthirsty conquest.
Sammy will always have the softest of spots in my heart, because of who he was, and how much time we had together. But I have loved many cats. Hope rolls around on my rug as though she belongs there, as though the shelter is a long-distant memory. She seems to be getting used to me. She's really cute.
The Books: "The World and Other Places" - 'Orion' (Jeanette Winterson)
Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt:
The World and Other Places: Stories
Excerpt from the story 'Orion'.
Judging from this story and her book about Atlas, I think Jeanette Winterson should publish a whole book of Greek myths. She could be the next Edith Hamilton! She imagines herself into those old myths, puts her own spin on things, teases out metaphors and thoughts ... and it's all very Winterson-esque. What are the themes of the story of Orion? What is the theme of someone like Artemis? What can we learn from her? Depending who you are, the answers will probably be different. Winterson comes at it from her perspective, her interest in time and how it moves and curves (something that comes up in many of her books), her interest in sex and love, and also a sort of fanciful imagination that helps her flesh things out. Winterson, I think, is a very positive writer, despite some of the dark elements in her work. I don't get a misanthropic feeling from her at all. She's also not a humanist - she's far too self-centered ... she doesn't write books with a million different characters in them ... Only one or two or three show up. The same ones every time, only with different names. But there's something about writing the myth stories out that sets her free. It's like it's a starting point, something to riff off of - and she is free to go ... Perhaps because the narrative is already written and well-known, it's a myth after all ... so she can improvise. Winterson is great at improvising (when there's a POINT to her improvisation, I mean).
Here's an excerpt from her story about Orion (and, later, Artemis):
EXCERPT FROM The World and Other Places: Stories
Every 200,000 years or so, the individual stars within each constellation shift position. That is, they are shifting all the time, but more subtly than any tracker dog of ours can follow. One day, if the earth has not voluntarily opted out of the solar system we will wake up to a new heaven whose dome will again confound us. It will still be home but not a place to take for granted. I wouldn't be able to tell you the story of Orion and say, 'Look, there he is, and there's his dog Sirius whose loyalty has left him bright.'
The dot-to-dot log book of who we were is not a fixed text.
For Orion, who was the result of three of the gods in a good mood pissing on an ox-hide, the only tense he recognised was the future continuous. He was a mighty hunter. His arrow was always in flight, his prey, endlessly just ahead of him. The carcasses he left behind became part of his past faster than they could decay. When he went to Crete he did no sunbathing. He rid the island of all its wild beasts. He could really swing a cudgel.
Stories abound: Orion was so tall he could walk along the sea bed without wetting his hair. So strong he could part a mountain. He wasn't the kind of man who settles down. And then he met Artemis, who wasn't the kind of woman who settles down either. They were both hunters and both gods. Their meeting is recorded in the heavens, but you can't see it every night, only on certain nights of the year. The rest of the time Orion does his best to dominate the skyline as he always did.
Our story is the old clash between history and home. Or to put it another way, the immeasurable impossible space that seems to divide the hearth from the quest.
Listen to this.
***
On a wild night, driven more by weariness than good sense, King Zeus agreed to let his daughter do it differently. She didn't want to get married and sit out some war, while her man, god or not, underwent the ritual metamorphosis from palace prince to craggy hero. She didn't want children. She wanted to hunt. Hunting did her good.
By morning she had packed and set off for her new life in the woods. Soon her fame spread and other women joined her but Artemis didn't care for company. She wanted to be alone. In her solitude she discovered something very odd. She had envied men their long-legged freedom to roam the world and return full of glory to wives who only waited. She knew about history-makers and the home-makers, the great division that made life possible. Without rejecting it, she had simply hoped to take on the freedoms that belonged to the other side. What if she travelled the world and the seven seas like a hero? Would she find something different or the old things in different disguises?
She found that the whole world could be contained in one place because that place was herself. Nothing had prepared her for this.
The alchemists have a saying: 'Tertium non datur'. The third is not given. That is, the transformation from one element into another, from waste matter into best gold is a mystery, not a formula. No one can predict what will form out of the tensions of opposites and effect a healing change between them. And so it is with the mind that moves from its prison to a free and vast plain without any movement at all. Something new has entered the process. We can only guess.
July 23, 2008
Under-rated movies #17: Waking the Dead
I have Ted to thank for bringing this lovely delicate and wrenching film to my attention. It is next up in my "under-rated movies" series.
There's a cliche at the heart of Waking the Dead which will make it difficult to describe its power, and why it escapes being maudlin. I have some theories as to why the movie works so well, and why it dodges its own traps so deftly, but I'll get to that later.
Waking the Dead tells the story of Fielding Pierce (played by Billy Crudup) and Sarah Williams (played by Jennifer Connelly). They are an unlikely pair.
He is a working-class boy who got a scholarship to Harvard. He joins the Coast Guard on leaving college. It is the height of the Vietnam War. So far he has escaped having to serve in the jungles of Southeast Asia. He is a boy with his eye on the ball. His family has made sure of that. From the day of his birth - from the very name he was given - his family marked him for greatness. Great expectations are piled upon his head. This is not something he minds. He sees it as an obligation to make everyone proud. He believes in America and its ideals (not a popular thing to do at that time) and comes from a long line of blue-collar Democrats who are dedicated to the democratic process. He wants to go into politics. He sets his eye on being a Senator but his real dream, the one he's had since he was a little boy, was to be President. And you know, the more you get to know Fielding Pierce, the more feasible it seems. It's not just that he believes in the process, and has positions on all the issues ... it's that he has a streak of ruthlessness in him that is an essential qualification for that particular job. It's hidden, at first ... but eventually, through the course of the film, that ruthlessness begins to show itself more and more clearly.
Sarah Williams is a Catholic girl from Louisiana. She works for Fielding's brother who runs some kind of left-wing publishing house - which is how she meets Fielding. There is an immediate animal attraction between the two, although you can tell she is a bit stunned by his Coast Guard uniform, she is not sure how to deal with it. She has moved to New York, perhaps to go to college, and becomes involved in activism - not just of the student-protest variety. She is pretty hard-core. Her thoughts on the Vietnam War are clear. But you can tell, from how she talks, that she is not just a one-issue kind of girl (like many of the activisits at that time were). She's an idealist - same as Fielding is - but her perception is different. She's basically a hippie Catholic girl. Much of the activism she does is through the Catholic Church. She wanted to be a nun when she was a little girl. Fielding asks her what happened, why she didn't become one. Sarah bursts into laughter and says, "Puberty."
Now. There is the cliche. All set up. Left-wing activist and dude who wants to be President start a love affair. Sounds cliche, right?
But not how it is filmed, not how it is written, and certainly not how it is played.
This is not a spoiler. The film opens with this scene: Fielding sits in a dark room watching television. The camera is close on his face. The old-fashioned TV glimmers blue. A news report is on. There is a burning car. Chaos. The newscaster speaks of the Sanctuary Movement, a group of Catholic activists who were traveling down to Chile to rescue priests and political prisoners. And the car on fire had 2 Chilean nationalists in it, and one American woman. All three were killed. "The American woman, a Sarah Williams ..." drones the newscaster - and suddenly there is a grainy photograph of Jennifer Connellly on the screen ... It is all quite banal. But Billy Crudup, when he sees her face, begins to clutch at his head, the pain shattering his calm surface, he is howling with grief. It's an extraordinary opening to a film.
The film goes back and forth in time - from the mid-1970s when Fielding and Sarah meet - to the early 80s - when Fielding is running for Congress. Sarah was killed in 1974. He has never completely recovered. And suddenly, during his election season, he begins to think he sees Sarah. Everywhere. She is always in a long grey and brown poncho, with long dark hair. She is on the sidewalk, at the airport, glimpsed in crowds ...
He starts to be convinced that she actually DIDN'T die back in 1974. He begins to think she survived and is now living underground. From what he knew of Sarah, her commitment to her principles, it would make sense. Her death was a fake, in order to generate more outrage towards the abuses happening in Chile. (If an American died, then we REALLY must do something!)
The more he tries to talk to the people in his life about his growing conviction that Sarah survived a decade ago - and that she has been seen ... the more nervous people get. After all, he is now running for office. Hal Holbrooke plays the bigwig who "sponsors" his campaign, a cigar-chomping Russian Jew, who is relatively humorless, and ambitious as hell.
There will be no "radical dead girlfriend come to life" bump in the road in any campaign HE runs. Also, the fact that Fielding was once involved with such a flaming radical is problematic enough. Best to just let Sarah be dead. The pressure begins to build in Fielding. He is now completely surrounded by people who do not understand, who do not even hear him ... and he begins to, for all intents and purposes, go mad.
The film is not told chronologically. We flip back and forth, and I think some of the cliched feeling underlying everything comes from this non-chronological format. We see the apartment he lived in with Sarah - warm red colors, quilts, homey, homespun ...
and we segue to the apartment he lives in with Alice, the niece of Hal Holbrooke - his current day girlfriend - and it's all sleek and hardwood floors and modern furniture ... You know, he's lost his soul. He's lost a bit of his humanity. I think that the production design could have been a bit more subtle in that regard. The film already works - because of the great scenework done by Crudup and Connelly - we already know that they love each other, that life with one another may have been strenuous and annoying - but it was also passionate and engaged. MUCH has been lost in Crudup's life with the loss of Sarah. That is clear. We don't need to see that Fielding now lives in a glorified interior decorating magazine to get that point. It was too on the nose for me.
Fielding and Sarah go out on a date, their first date, where they talk about politics, the war.
She is one of those people who cannot understand why anyone would ever ever want to join the "system". He thinks that if he is INSIDE the system, then maybe he can do some good. She wants to work against the system, because the system itself is the problem.
I'm making this sound dryer than it actually is. Their conversations buzz with sexual attraction and frustration. He wants her, he thinks she is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. They begin a romance.
She starts to work for a local Catholic church, and through a priest there, becomes involved with the dangerous events in Chile. She travels to Chile, even though it is very dangerous and Fielding doesn't want her to go.
These two characters - both with passionate beliefs - opposed to one another ideologically - and yet in love with the other's conviction - have, as is obvious, a rather difficult time. Fielding begins to climb higher and higher within the ranks of the Democratic Party in Illinois. She supports him, because she loves him, but she - a hippie Catholic girl - who doesn't shave her underarms, completely does not fit in at the political events.
There are some GREAT scenes between them.
She starts to move further and further over to the Left. Fielding, a Democrat, thinks she has lost her mind, and thinks the people she hangs out with are self-righteous superior assholes.
What the movie really is about is their love. But there's so much more in there. It's about America - it's about politics - it's about, to some degree, what happened to the best and brightest of the Left, during the Vietnam War. How so many of them became so disenchanted that they had to check out entirely. They stopped being a part of the conversation in this country. One way to look at all of this is as an extended metaphor (although the movie is subtle, and does not hit you over the head with it): Here is this Democrat Congressman-to-be, haunted by his radical Left girlfriend, killed by her political beliefs. The Democrats, haunted by that side of their party, by that fringe element - the Democrats haunted by the ghost of the Vietnam War. But that's just an interpretation.
The movie doesn't really take sides - we see both viewpoints. Fielding is the true narrator of the piece, so I suppose there is some bias there. But in some scenes, he is right. In other scenes, she is right. They both misbehave. They both lose their cool in inappropriate settings: she, at a political cocktail party - when she berates a writer for his "reprehensible" article in Newsweek about the situation in Chile - and he, at a church dinner honoring the two Chilean nationals who are helping to organize the Sanctuary Movement. Their contempt for America ends up pushing Fielding over the edge, and he starts shouting about, 'Isn't it interesting that even though everyone hates America - everyone ends up washing up on OUR shores ..." The best parts about these scenes is the aftermath - when the couple tries to come down from what happened, and they talk things out. These are long intense scenes, often done in one take (there's a great scene on a Chicago "L" train - all one take. Just watch these two actors listen and talk! Amazing!)
They are not wholly in opposition. She senses he might want to change her. He insists that that is not true. But she has some misgiving. Fielding has a sense of destiny. He feels he must "lead". Well, she has a sense of destiny, too. How on earth will that ever work? Could she ever be First Lady, for example? With her political convictions? She doesn't see how that will ever happen. But she loves him. "You are the only man I have ever loved," she tells him.
She never comes off as being insane. She just wants to do good. Just like he does. She believes in God, she believes in a just universe. She also, because she loves him, believes that if anyone could do any good in politics, Fielding would be the one. Fielding believes in the political process. "Of course our government plays rough. All governments play rough," he says. But he doesn't believe that opting OUT of the process is helpful. Because then that would just leave politics to the WORST that America has to offer. He wants to get "inside", to try to do some good. She feels that the system itself is corrupt.
So, on some level, she holds him in contempt.
And on some level, he holds her in contempt.
Wonderfully, and rarely, the film holds neither of them in contempt. We love them both.
Their scenes together, talking all this out, are spectacular. Both actors are at the top of their game. There is an improvisational feel to their conversations. You feel you are watching something real. It is not "positional", even though it may sound like it is. It's not a question of being diametrically opposed (although, as the relationship goes south, they do become more extremely opposite). They love each other. She supports him and reads his papers that he writes for law school, they argue about the issues. She is not so dogmatic that she is obnoxious. There's one beautiful scene where they lie on the couch, and they're talking about revolutions. He insists that revolutions have terrible track records, you have to take that into account. She argues that it is still worthwhile to support the democratic revolutions going on at that time, in Latin America, Africa. They really talk. It feels real. He listens. She argues. She listens. At one point, she says, "You're going to be a brilliant lawyer. You just have to put up with me as your Jiminy Cricket, okay?" He grins at her, and you can see her suddenly get nervous. Nervous about the future, and how this dynamic will play itself out. She grasps onto him, pulling him close, begging, "Is it okay?" It's a gorgeous moment. In that moment, she is not her political beliefs, her opposition to the system. In that moment, she is a girlfriend, nervous that she is being too much of a pain in the ass and he will leave her because of it.
The movie is full of moments like that.
There is one scene where she comes home from a long day working at the Church. He sits at the table in their apartment. He has been studying all day. He is angry that she is late. "You spend all your time at the church," he says. She is gentle in response. "You spend all your time studying ..." What is great about the way this particular scene is written is that it does not become a petty argument. This is not a petty couple. At first it seems he's just being pissy because she's late. But it eventually comes out that he is nervous about her having a life outside of him. That could so be played in an obnoxious sexist way, but that's not what this movie is about. It's about love. Which is often messy. She's the one who gets that. He's going on about how she spends too much time at the church ... she says to him gently, "You can't be everything to me, Fielding." There's a long pause as he thinks that out. He says, quietly, he knows she speaks the truth but he has to say what's on his mind, "But I want to be." Now please watch the symphony of a response that goes over Jennifer Connelly's face. It stops her in her tracks. She looks at him, ruefully, sad, almost, and whispers, "Oh, dear." You have no idea what this woman will say next. Then, a soft smile comes over her face ... and she says, "I love that you just said that."
You see? Life is complicated. We are not JUST our positions on things. And yes, it is true that one person cannot be everything to the other. But isn't it wonderful when someone wants to be?
Connelly is a revelation in this part. I cannot imagine any other actress being as effective. She's so herself. Also I love to see a film that is so open and yet so deep about sex. Their sex scenes are not about writhing Olympic-level gymnastics. There's one scene where they are just face to face, that's all you see ... and as they make love, one tear slowly falls down the side of Connelly's face. I have never seen a sex scene that is so connected, so raw, so real.
In the later sections of the film, after her death, things start to go slowly wrong ... even as everything clicks into place for him, in terms of what he has always wanted. He's campaigning. But he sees Sarah in the crowds. He sees her everywhere. The way this is handled in the film is fantastic. Sometimes you can tell it actually is Jennifer Connelly. Other times it's a little girl with long dark hair. Other times it starts out being Jennnifer Connelly, and then on a closer look, you see that it is not her at all.
There is a terrible scene where he is walking through a hallway in an airport, and he sees someone approach, wearing a big woollen poncho, with long dark hair, and he thinks it is her. Then he sees it is not her. Then he sees another poncho-clad girl coming at him ... and then another ... and then another ... until the entire hallway is filled with various versions of the girl he once loved, the girl he still loves.
He becomes convinced that she actually did not die in that car. He became convinced that her death was faked, that it was a political move engineered by the far-Left. That she actually is still alive somewhere, in the underground (like Running on Empty.)
It is never clear in the movie whether he is actually losing his mind, or whether there might be some truth to these fantasies. We are totally in his point of view throughout. Things fade in, fade out. We see fragments of things, reflections. He stands at his window, staring out into the snow, and the landscape looks frighteningly empty. Because she is not in it. You feel that at any moment, a small poncho-clad girl is going to stroll through the streetlamp light below. She could be anywhere. And therefore, she is everywhere. Even in her absence.
This is a film about loss.
The last scene knocked the wind out of me the first time I saw it. I wouldn't dream of revealing it here. But it left me with questions, breathless and urgent. Did she die? What was real? Is it possible she survived? Living in the underground? Is she a ghost? Has he gone mad?
The film does not answer those questions. I have my own ideas about it. I think that yes, she did survive. But you could make a case for the opposite as well. That she did die (after all, a coffin came back from Chile, didn't it? Wasn't there a funeral and everything?) - and Fielding is haunted by her. He thinks he sees her. He does not know what is real anymore.
There are a couple of break-down scenes with Crudup that are as good as it gets, in terms of film acting. It's uncomfortable. He gets so discombobbled that there are moments when you feel like he, the actor, might have forgotten his lines. But isn't that how it is with us, when we are beyond the pale in terms of being upset? Grief isn't neat or articulate. He's so wonderful.
And she, with her bushy eyebrows, her sensuous long hair, her awkward attempts at wearing makeup for his political events, emerges as a truly real person. The film begins with a report of her death. But she is omnipresent through the whole film. It is Crudup who is in every scene. But she dominates.
Through her absence.
More in my Under-rated Movies Series:
This post covers 5: Ball of Fire, Only Angels Have Wings, Dogfight, Zero Effect and Manhattan Murder Mystery
The Books: "The World and Other Places" - 'The 24-Hour Dog' (Jeanette Winterson)
Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt:
The World and Other Places: Stories
A collection of short (sometimes very short) stories by Jeanette Winterson. I loved seeing her in the shorter form, because much of the boring-ness of her last couple of books was not there (for the most part) - and she seemed to have taken the reins off. These stories are not just about infidelity, and love triangles involving redheaded women. There are fairy tales here, fantastical worlds ... and it's not JUST about love. It's about all kinds of things. Come to think of it - the title of the collection (which is the title of one of the stories) is perfect. It is about the world and other places. Some of the stories don't work for me ... some of the writing has a blunt showoff-ish tone that makes me roll my eyes ... but other times, Winterson dives right in to her made-up worlds, and transports me. She really can be dazzling. I love her imagination. These aren't typical short stories. The narratives often are not recognizable, in terms of that particular form. There is no kitchen-sink reality here. Most of her characters do not have names. Most of the stories are first-person narration - and the "voice" is not distinct. It's Jeanette Winterson's voice. Every voice she writes in is her own (which, I think, is why some of her lesser stuff can be so boring.) BUT: her own voice is exciting enough, and interesting enough ... When she puts it in service of a story that works, it's perfect.
I won't excerpt from all of the stories ... just a sampling.
The first story in the collection is called 'The 24-Hour Dog'. The plotline is simple (almost too simple - there's not much to it. It's really about the THOUGHTS she has ... not the events that take place): a woman who lives on a farm decides to get a dog. She goes and picks him up. He is a puppy. The puppy fills her with a joy - she loves him - But there is something else going on. His love for her, unconditional, unnerves her. She feels "found out". She cannot hide from this dog. It is almost too confronting to have him around. What does it mean to be loved unconditionally? How on earth can she bear it?
I am particularly moved by this story right now ... because of my new furry companion who stares up at me, trying to figure me out, loving me even though she doesn't know me yet.
Here's an excerpt. I love how she guesses at the dog's perspective.
EXCERPT FROM The World and Other Places: Stories
I had collected him that morning from his brothers and sisters, his mother, his friends on the farm. He was to be my dog, shot out of a spring litter, a coil of happiness. Bit by bit he would unfold.
He liked my sports car until it moved. Movement to him was four legs or maybe two. He had not yet invented the wheel. He lay behind my neck in stone-age despair, not rigid, but heavy, as his bladder emptied his enterprise, and the blue leather seats were puddled under puppy rain.
We were home in less than five minutes and he staggered from the car as though it were the hold of a slave ship and him left aboard for six months or more. His oversize paws were hesitant on the gravel because he half believed the ground would drive off with him.
I motioned him to the threshold; a little door in a pair of great gates. He looked at me: What should he do? I had to show him that two paws first, two paws after, would jump him across the wooden sill. He fell over but wagged his tail.
I had spent the early morning pretending to be a dog. I had crawled around my kitchen and scullery on all fours at dog height looking for toxic substances (bleach), noxious hazards (boot polish), forbidden delights (rubber boots), death traps (electric wires), swallowables, crunchables, munchables and saw-the-dog-in-half shears and tools.
I had spent the day before putting up new shelving and rearranging the cupboards. A friend from London asked me if I was doing Feng Shui. I had to explain that this was not about energy alignments but somewhere to put the dog biscuits.
I rerouted the washing machine hoses. I had read in my manual that Lurchers like to chew washing machine hoses but only when the machine is on; thus, if they fail to electrocute themselves, they at least succeed in flooding the kitchen.
The week before I had forced my partner to go into Mothercare to purchase a baby gate. The experience nearly killed her. It was not the pastel colours, piped music and cartoon screen, or the assistants, specially graded into mental ages two to four and four to six, or the special offer, one hundred bibs for the price of fifty, it was that she was run down by a fork lift truck moving a consignment of potties.
I fitted the gate. I tried to patch up my relationship. I spent a sleepless night on our new bean bag. I was pretending to be a dog.
The farmer telephoned me the following day.
'Will you come and get him now?'
Now. This now. Not later. Not sooner. Here now. Quick now.
Yes I will come for you. Roll my strength into a ball for you. Throw myself across chance for you. I will be the bridge or the pulley because you are the dream.
He's only a dog. Yes but he will find me out.
Dog and I did the gardening that virgin morning of budding summer. That is, I trimmed the escallonia and he fetched the entire contents of the garage, apart from the car. It began with a pruning gauntlet which he could see I needed. There followed a hanging basket, a Diana Ross cassette, a small fire extinguisher, a hand brush that made him look like Hitler, and one by one a hoarded collection of Victorian tiles. Being a circular kind of dog he ran in one door to seek the booty and sped out of another to bring it to me. He had not learned the art of braking. When he wanted to stop he just fell over.
I looked at the hoard spread before me. Perhaps this was an exercise in Feng Shui after all. Why did I need a Diana Ross tape? Why was I storing six feet of carpet underlay? I don't have any carpets.
The questions we ask of the universe begin and end with questions like these. He was a cosmic dog.
July 22, 2008
The youthful curly-haired beauty of William Holden
... as boxer/violinist Joe Bonaparte in Clifford Odets' Golden Boy (1939):
Things I have learned about Hope in our 2 full days together
-- She thinks lying in the middle of the floor, all stretched out, is the best thing in the world.
-- She also enjoys curling up in the dirt of my huge potted plant. I have scolded her but she stares at me, unmoved.
-- Pens are awesome and must be fought to the death.
-- The crisper in the refrigerator is a magical world that one can only glimpse at brief brief intervals, but oh ... if she could only get INTO the crisper, all of the secrets of the universe would suddenly be revealed to her.
-- She enjoys licking my toes when I brush my teeth.
-- She follows me from room to room. "Hey, we're hanging out in here now! Cool! Oh. She's going in THAT room. Then I must go in there too!!"
-- Watching her stretch is to be a witness to a moment of perfect contentment.
-- Sitting on the windowsill staring out at the strutting robins and occasional stray cats in my backyard is part agony part joy. Occasionlly she puts her paws up on the window pane, staring out at the backyard, as though it is that scene when Billy's girlfriend comes to visit him in the Turkish prison in Midnight Express.
-- I stand washing the dishes and she snakes herself in and out and around my ankles, purring so loudly that I am almost embarrassed for her.
-- She's happy when I come home. Then she gets over it and goes back to sleep, smack dab in the middle of my floor.
"I thought to put together heavy metal music and a Capucin friar was strange, to say the least."
An Italian Capucin monk went to a Metallica concert 15 years ago and his life was forever changed. He is still a Capucin monk, only now he is also the lead singer in an Italian heavy metal band. The quote in the subject line is from one of his band-mates.
The monk says: "I am religious. I am a priest. But I don't play to draw people closer to Christ, or the church, or to religion. I do it to convert people to life."
Rock on, friar.
Clip below the jump.
(Thanks for pointing to this, Ernie.)
The Books: "Gut Symmetries" (Jeanette Winterson)
Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt:
Gut Symmetries
Yeah, so, right around here I stopped caring. It all started feeling the same. It's all about infidelity, love triangles, and bisexuality. Not that there's anything wrong with those topics - it's just that Winterson seemed to be treading water, going over the same territory. Perhaps there was crap in her personal life she needed to work out, I have no idea ... and again, that's fine - much great art comes from a writer wrestling with personal demons. But for whatever reason, Gut Symmetries feels strangely passionless, almost like an exercise. Which is so bizarre when you compare it to her vibrant pulsating earlier works like The Passion (excerpt here) or Sexing the Cherry (excerpt here). In those books, Winterson had larger contexts in which to place her stories: Bonaparte, the reign of Charles II, plague, war ... As she moved along in her writing career, larger contexts disappeared almost completely - and she went completely into the personal and subjective. Winterson sees herself as part of the Modernism tradition, as well she might - and Virginia Woolf is one of her inspirations (for this work in particular, with its Waves-esque ruminations). But I don't think it works as well. It's not that books NEED to have a larger context, or the outer world somehow captured in them. There are plenty of books that do not have that, and they are fine. The description of subjective experience is very very challenging - and only the great writers can manage it. Winterson had been brilliant in that regard early on, but with Gut Symmetries it feels re-hashed. At least with Art & Lies (excerpt here), unsuccessful though it was, she was trying something new. In Gut Symmetries - even with its newer elements of physics (Grand Unified Theory - ie: "Gut") and the Tarot cards ... feels like same ol' same ol'. Almost like Winterson is trying to imagine herself back into a narrative but can't quite get there.
Gut Symmetries tells the story of a love triangle. Alice is our narrator. She begins an affair with Jove - a man already married to a woman named Stella. When the affair with Jove goes south, Alice and Stella begin an affair.
All the voices sound the same in this book. It ends up feeling quite monotone. A voice droning on and on. Droning?? The sparkling brilliant Winterson? Well, yes! I was truly disappointed in Gut Symmetries and its lack of imagination ... I almost felt apprehensive, like: "Could it be that Winterson, despite the early promise, is really just a one-trick pony??" I was sad about that. I am invested in her, as is probably obvious. I know I was not alone in seeing the similarities in Gut Symmetries to her earlier books - yet without the passion and interest. In The Passion there is a love triangle - between Villanelle (obviously bisexual herself) and a married woman ... but there it feels treacherous, shattering, urgent. Here, in Gut Symmetries, I think: "Okay. This feels the same as The Passion, only now I don't care. What is missing??"
As I have mentioned before, Winterson recently came out with two books - one is a re-telling of the Atlas myth, and the other is about a keeper of a magical lighthouse - and I am so so happy to say she is back to form. And by "back to form" I mean: unpredictable, imaginative, unexpected, thrilling.
But for a good 10 years there, I struggled with my affection for her. I wondered if I would have to eventually let her go. How long can a fan hang on? (It is identical to my journey with Tori Amos ... and what a thrill, what a total thrill, to hear her latest album. Yay!!)
I can say, without a doubt, that I am, hands down, the best fan I know. Without tipping over into stalker behavior ... If I love you once? I love you always. I give you multiple chances. I am in it for the long haul. I can't say this about everybody. But with some people? It's a relationship. I will have a "relationship" with Jeanette Winterson forever. It will ebb and flow, and I've had to adjust ... I've had to let HER be in charge, because - after all - it is HER that is doing all the writing. And I will still count the days to her next book. I always will!
I chose an excerpt from Gut Symmetries that I actually like - not one of the long boring sections about love and regret and desire (which sound like all her other writings on the topics). I chose a story that gives a glimmer of who Winterson is as a writer, and why I love her so much.
EXCERPT FROM Gut Symmetries
My mother, big with child, had strange longings; she wanted to eat diamonds. This gastronomic extravagance could hardly have been more than a fantasy for all but the very rich and Papa could not afford a Guggenheim bagel. We were not rich, nor were Papa's many friends but some of them were diamond dealers, trading silently, secretively in a huddle of patched-up buildings around Canal Street and the Bowery.
One evening, when I was six months old, pre-born, bouncing my hands and feet off Mama's womb wall, I heard the voices of Papa's business friends, talking quietly in our warm low kitchen. Mama shouldn't have been present at all, but she cared very little for the strict protocol of his Orthodox friends and banged about the kitchen, sometimes openly hostile, sometimes serving towers of blinis tall as the Empire State. She did as she pleased and no one dared to challenge her because she had saved Papa's life and risked her own. They called her Rahab.
Somewhere from deep inside their coats, their jackets, their shirts, their vests, their skin, their bones, the men unfolded felt pouches and spread the contents, glittering. It was not their value that they were discussing with Papa, it was their capacity to stimulate the soul's deeper life. To a Jew, stones have meaning beyond value. The twelve jewels of the High Priest's breastplate were energy not hoard. The stones live.
Mama turned round from her usual awning of aluminium saucepans and saw the diamonds. I saw their light and pressed myself as close as I could to the membrane of my genial prison. The light struck through Mamas belly and fed me.
She stepped forward, picked up a diamond between thumb and finger, and swallowed it.
Then she swallowed another, and another, a voluntary force-feeding into a priceless pate: Mama's oesophagus larded with light.
Papa's people are a patient people who have known adversity. They have wept by the waters of Babylon. They have crossed the Red Sea. They have sat in the desert with their camels and their concubines. They have wandered in the wilderness for forty years. They have bargained with their God. Yet not even Job in all his affliction had his inheritance eaten by a woman with child. There was some debate about what to do next.
Papa's people are a patient people. They agreed that Papa would lock the door to our only lavatory on the landing and persuade Mama to use a commode.
A twenty-four-hour watch was rota'd in the kitchen and one of the off-duty men went out to buy surgical gloves.
Mama had no objection. She wanted only to eat the diamonds not to digest them. No one thought about me.
And I did not think, turning in the weightless water, charmed by cut faces of light.
At last it was over, hats off, sleeves rolled up, sweat on their beards, and the much travelled diamonds shining again on their sterilised cloths.
'a'dank! mazel tov! bo'ruch ha'bo! Schnapps!'
'What? One missing? Oy oy oy oy oy! Oy va-avoy! Vai!'
Castor oil. Enema. Glycerine suppositories. Salt water colon irrigation. Cabbage soup. Schnell, kroit zup!
No use. No use at all. I had captured it or it had captured me. After a night of prayer this was revealed to the Elders in a dream. 'We will attend the birth,' they said, at belly level, directly to me, usurper of jewels, infant smuggler of precious stones.
At night, when Mama slept and the lights were out and the night was dark, Papa stood over her in his shawl and guiltily lifted her nightdress. He had never seen her naked, not seen the gentle demands of her, the map that she was where he might have travelled.
He put out his hand but he was afraid. Her belly shone.
"I remember glancing out the window and thinking to myself that someone must have erased the sky."
My friend Alex is directing Lanford Wilson's Balm in Gilead right now (excerpt here), and one of the actresses asked her, "What's it like to do heroin?"
July 21, 2008
"I was a director for hire. I needed the job."
Joe Valdez has another movie review up - and this time it's about one of my favorites: Robert Altman's The Player. I did not know that Sidney Lumet was originally attached as a director, and that Robert Altman did the job "for hire". Amazing. I need to see it again.
The new Brideshead and the whole Waugh thing in general
Really interesting article about the so-far-unsuccessful attempts to bring Evelyn Waugh's various books to the screen (big and small). I remember the Brideshead miniseries - anyone who was alive at that time HAD to be aware of it - it was kind of like the Roots miniseries. Unless you were freakin' Amish, you were at least aware that it was going on.
I've been on a Waugh kick lately. Hadn't ever read anything by him, and now I am making my way through all of his stuff. Read Scoop, Decline and Fall and The Loved One. Next one I think will be Vile Bodies. I love him.
Now here is what I remember from the mini-series of Brideshead: Jeremy Irons slouching around in white linen. A melancholy. There was a homoerotic thing going on that I did not pick up on ... but I did get a sort of dissipated energy from everyone involved - showing the decay of that world, of course, and etc. I remember the settings - the white colonnades and the gardens and all that.
So THAT has been my impression of Evelyn Waugh. No wonder I never read him. I'm not saying the mini-series wasn't good - i watched every second of it and was mildly obsessed with the languid sulky-eyed Anthony Andrews ... but it seemed a bit, well, ponderous. Precious, in that very English way (Eddie Izzard makes fun of those kinds of movies. "What is it, Sebastian? I'm arranging matches." Etc.)
Imagine my surprise when I picked up Scoop (excerpt here), and found myself laughing so hard in public that I frightened other people on the bus. Imagine my surprise when I read Decline and Fall (excerpt here) and found myself MOPPING the tears of laughter off of my face at a couple points. And imagine my surprise when I read The Loved One and found myself in a satire of Hollywood as biting and ridiculous as anything that Fitzgerald ever wrote about show business.
I have not read Brideshead Revisited yet, and it is that image from the miniseries of dissipated white linen and tubercular love affairs that has kept me away, but now that I know the true character of Evelyn Waugh's prose, I will definitely read it.
I loved this observation from the article above:
The essence of Waugh is his economy of style. He is Hemingway bearing a bumbershoot. The writing may be far more Latinate, but it's every bit as efficient. "It is the cinema which has taught a new habit of narrative," Waugh wrote in 1948. Like Hemingway, he learned from the movies the value of the camera-eye view: the description that takes in without belaboring.What makes the books either so relentlessly funny, acidly sharp, or both is a simple equation: the more outlandish the situation or personage, the more precise and lucid the writing. Waugh's true cinematic equivalent is Howard Hawks, not Merchant-Ivory. Each is a master of pace and control: moving things right along and never getting in the way of his material.
Yes!! Howard Hawks, not Merchant-Ivory. Howard Hawks could have filmed Scoop (and in a way, he did - with His Girl Friday and its frenetic insane observations about the newspaper business) - and could have not only reflected the PACE of the book (that's what really surprised me about Waugh - how fast his books move ... I guess because that mini-series from my childhood seemed to go on forever!) but the humor and the absolute absurdity of the situations the characters find themselves in. (Like Cary Grant bemoans in Bringing Up Baby: "How could so many things happen to one person??" That's very Evelyn Waugh-ish!)
Another very good observation about the film adaptations of Waugh's stuff which I think is quite perceptive:
Waugh's Hollywood sojourn exemplifies the basic problem with movie adaptations of his work. Without exception, Waugh's heroes are outsiders - as he was in California. Each novel's capacity for comedy or tragedy comes from its hero's being at variance - whether as a Catholic, innocent, or bounder - with the society around him.The Waugh adaptations all plant themselves firmly on the inside, reveling in the dense social knowingness that comes of membership in an Oxford college, Pall Mall men's club, or aristocratic family. Ultimately, Waugh's books are about a search for redemption. Waugh adaptations are about decor.
It's that outsider thing that I've written about before, with Waugh (he, as a gay man, was the ultimate outsider) putting a total outsider smack-dab into the middle of a world whose rules he does not understand. It is not a full-immersion experience, his books ... because we always have one eye at how ABSURD these people are behaving. It's a subtle difference in tone and outlook, but it seems to me to be an extremely important element in how his books are filmed.
That's why the Howard Hawks suggestion is so superb, I think. (And, I don't know ... I've seen the previews, and the new Brideshead looks very drippy and British and all "Sebastian, I'm arranging matches ..." but I'll hold off until I see it.)
The Books: "Art & Lies" (Jeanette Winterson)
Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt:
Art & Lies
Okay, so this is where Winterson started losing me. It was only in the last couple of years that I felt her return to form. I do not mind experimentation but Art & Lies feels less like experimentation and more like masturbation, or some sort of overly long burlesque show featuring a not-very-good dancer. I am only guessing here but Winterson burst onto the literary world like a meteor - she was greeted with accolades the likes of which one can only dream of ... Her reviews, her press, for those first couple of books, were amazing - and well-deserved. She became a star. It feels to me, especially in Art & lies that Winterson lost her way a little bit with the whole fame thing. I think she felt she could do whatever she wanted - she could "riff" on something, and it would be applauded because isn't that what already happened? Art & Lies is an extended boring riff - and at some point, very early on, I lost interest completely and I only finished it because it was Winterson who wrote it, and I'm weird that way. If you hook me in once, I'm more likely to give you a couple of chances. If Art & Lies had been the first thing I'd read by Jeanette Winterson, I would never have gone on to read another one of her books. It's that tiresome. The thing is: there is some good writing in there; of course there is, it's by Winterson. It just becomes irrelevant in terms of the actual book. You don't know what the hell she is doing in Art & lies, but it felt like showing off, to me. It felt like a big blowhard taking up an entire conversation at a dinner party, dominating, and not letting anyone else speak. And it's just not good enough. I have no problem with sometimes baffling books written by egomaniacs. Obviously I don't. But you had better have a point - you better not JUST want to hear the sound of your own voice ... because otherwise it's just a bore. Art & Lies ends up feeling like a huge wash, a blurred-out painting, nothing distinct stands out. Perhaps Winterson felt that she was riffing - like a jazz musician - or like Jack Kerouac at a poetry reading ... sounds following sounds, meanings inverted, an extended riff ... But riffs must be somehow grounded in the original theme. You need something to riff off OF, in other words. There is the theme, the melody, whatever - and the musician veers off into a riff ... but that's my point. I felt that Winterson had nothing to veer off FROM here. It was just a riff, a writing exercise. It flat out doesn't work.
Not to mention the fact that it's confusing - and not in a good way. There are three main characters. Their names are Handel, Sappho and Picasso. Handel is a surgeon. Picasso is a painter - only it's a woman. And Sappho appears to be Sappho. There's a long train ride. They are three separate narrators - but to be honest, it's all the same voice. It ends up having a deadening effect on me, the reader. I don't know why Handel is named Handel, I don't know why Picasso is a woman, I don't know what the hell is going on!!
Art & Lies got terrible reviews. I think a lot of the anger I sense in the reviews had to do with feeling disappointment because her first books had been so promising. Now ... any writer who has had success will have to deal with that. You cannot please everybody. You need to write to please YOU and hope that it will find readers. However: Art & Lies didn't please ANYone. I know that Winterson stands by her book. Of course she does. She wrote it. But it was a huge bore to me, almost an affront to have to keep reading it ... I was mad. I got over it, of course. But I was like: where's the STORY. What are you DOING.
Oh, and here's another thing. Maybe she was going for something Joycean here - because he is KING of the "riff".
But Art & Lies is actually not hard enough to be considered Joycean. The things revealed, the thoughts, the ruminations - are all pretty run of the mill. It is nothing new. And they are expressed in a banal way. Winterson? Banal?? How on earth did that happen? If you want to write a big difficult book - in a Joycean manner - you had better have your shit together. And you had better be so OCD that you yourself can tolerate all the graphing and codes and stuff that you have to make sense of in order to write your own book. Ulysses is hard. That's as it should be. It is appropriate for what Joyce was going for. He didn't have to write things that were so hard - look at the stories in Dubliners which are all straight-forward narrative, impossible to misunderstand. So the content dictated the form. And Joyce's thoughts on language got more complex as he got older and that needed to be reflected in his writing. Winterson is riffing on NOTHING here ... and her "riffs" on language feel amateurish when compared to other "riffers". It is not successful. She really went off the rails here.
It would be years before she wrote another book that thrilled me the way her early books did. Years. Art & LIes was the start of something, a downturn - the reviews she got were so bad, that it is my sense that she did retreat a bit. To regroup, whatever. Her next couple of books were not the big mess that Art & Lies is - but they go over completely familiar territory: gender-bending narrator falls in love with married woman. It began to feel less like creation and more like biography - or, as I said earlier, masturbation. I think getting the kind of press she got for Oranges (excerpt here) and The Passion (excerpt here) can definitely turn your head. Many writers have fallen into that trap, and come out with some gasbag horror in the wake of their earlier successes. I am not interested in Winterson for her extended riffs (and I know I am in the minority on that) - I like Winterson for her Swiftian evocation of other weird worlds, worlds that work logically, and do not come across too much as metaphors. I like the fairy tales. I like her freedom with form. But in Art & Lies all of the things that are GOOD about her writing are taken to excess, expanded, stretched out - so that it loses all substance altogether.
Obviously Art & LIes was published because it was Winterson writing it. It would never have been published if she was untried or unknown. I would love to know the conversations at the publisher's house, as they tried to make sense of her manuscript. I wonder what fights went down. I'd be very curious to know.
Here's an excerpt.
EXCERPT FROM Art & Lies
This is the nature of our sex: She takes a word, straps it on, penetrates me hard. The word inside me, I become it. The word slots my belly, my belly swells the word. New meanings expand from my thighs. Together we have sacked the dictionary for a lexigraphic fuck. We prefer to ignore those smooth, romantic words, and dig instead for a roue's pleasure. The mature word, ripe, through centuries of change, the word deep-layered with associative delights. The more the word has been handled, the better we like it. For me, the perverted challenge of re-virgining the whore. Aren't we a couple? Two successive lines of verse that rhyme with each other? Press your eye to the keyhole and you can see us, one on one, swiving at the perfect match of dactyl and spondee. The coupling-box where we must make ends meet. My well-coupled filly, me, her rider in mid-air.
See me. See me now. I'm not a r(R)omantic, I'm a true C(c)lassical. I don't believe in love at first sight. I'm not falling for you, but one step forward, and you might fall for me.
What things fall?
Once, an angel, leaping out of heaven to find new worlds, his hands snagged on a zigzag of stars. Lucifer, whose cuts bled light ...
*
The thunderbolt, Zeus-hurled, through the timid clouds, the comet's head, nuclear discus gold-thrown.
The Dead, down to Tartarus, black poplars by a black stream. The black shaft smooth-sided and the jag-toothed dog.
Icarus, the flying boy, his body sun-glazed. His sun-glazed body that shattered the glassy sea.
Autumn. Long leaves of bright undress.
Hermes. Star-spurred.
Fall for me, as an apple falls, as rain falls, because you must. Use gravity to anchor your desire.
She fell like a choirboy on a stave of lust. Head back, throat bare, breaking body, breaking voice in an ecstasy of praise. Praise out of the mouth and out of her thighs, aesthetic and ecstatic in a garment of flame.
Pull the shirt over your head, drop it, drop it into my arms, lovers have no need of time. Aphrodite murders Cronos. Drop through the long cylinder of our hours. Ours this time not Time's. Here, there, nowhere, carrying white roses never red.
There was no colour in the sky when she walked along the beach.
The white shells sea-glazed shone. She put one to her ear and heard the strange moaning of the sea. She looked out to where the light skimmed the water. The light that balanced on the narrow crests of the waves. The light that tumbled in the water's concaves.
The light whipped up the dull foam and threw it in petals over her feet, her feet glassed in by the shallow water.
The water, dashing the past at her feet, the water dragging her future behind, the hiss and pull of the waves.
Driftwood on the sands. She picked up a wedge, too light for its size, its substance beaten away. It was only the past, a hollow thing in her hand, only the past, but a shape and a smell that she recognised. The comfortable old form its uses dead.
Clouds in the sky. She wanted a view but the clouds were pretty. Vague, pink, well known. Weren't driftwood and clouds enough? Memories, and what she still had, enough? Why risk what was certain for what was hid? The future could be just as yesterday, she could tame the future by ignoring it, by letting it become the past.
She began to run. She ran out of the day that coiled round her with temperate good sense. She ran to where the sun was just beginning the sky. A thin rung of sun within reach. She leapt and grabbed the ladder bar with both hands and swung herself up into the warm yellow light.
The train was crowded. Is that Sappho, both hands hanging off a neon bar?
July 20, 2008
After many years of living alone ...
I now have a roommate.
Her name is Hope.
She's a little bit needy, so far. Frankly, she's all over me. It's a bit much. I also caught her following me from room to room at one point.
But I think it'll work out just fine.
Meet Hope!
She came with the name. I got her at a shelter. If it had been a name like "Barbie" or something like that, I would have changed it. Maybe to Stockwell, or Calavicci or something more appropriate to my lifestyle. But I felt it would be very bad karma to change the name "Hope" to something else. So Hope it is.
She is now lying on my windowsill staring out at the green hot world outside and her purr fills the room.
She is only a year old.
I love her so much!
"It is to be a bond of the spirit only.”
William Butler Yeats
Maud Gonne
Fantastic article about the new Yeats exhibit going on at the National Library in Dublin - which will (pretty please) eventually come to the States, if a library/museum steps up to the plate to host it. (That's one of the best things, I have to say, about living where I do - even though it's the stinky sticky sweaty summer and there is much to bitch about, I know that IF the Yeats exhibit makes it to the US, there's a good chance that it will be in New York.)
But anyway, back to the exhibit - which sounds incredible. Yeats' lifelong infatuation with Maud Gonne is well known, one of the most famous romances in history - even though they were never married. He proposed to her, oh, probably 387 times over their lives together. She married someone else. She had a daughter. When the daughter was of age, Yeats asked permission to marry the daughter! Like: if I can't have the mother, at least I can have her offspring! But that ended up never happening - and Yeats did eventually marry (when he was in his 50s) - NOT Maud Gonne ... but you know, a passion like that doesn't just go away. Maud Gonne was not a huffy standoffish person ... she had her reasons for repeatedly refusing him, but they were kindred spirits, obviously - perhaps not meant to be married, but obviously spiritually connected in some way. She was one of his greatest inspirations. Well, Gonne - and Ireland itself. Anyway, I grew up hearing stories about Maud Gonne - my father's bookshelves are lined with books about Yeats and the forming of the Abbey Theatre and his poems and plays and letters ... The exhibit puts on display some of the Gonne-Yeats letters (and there's also a touch-screen digital display which sounds fantastic ... not quite as wonderful as seeing the object itself - but still - pretty cool) ... and I am really dying to have a look at some of it. Gonne and Yeats felt they were "synchronized" through time and space - having the same dreams or visions on the same day, despite being in separate countries, whatever ... They were truly interested in exploring their connection on that level - writing feverishly to each other, "I had a dream last night ... Tell me if you dreamt it too." Maud Gonne was not just a cypher - someone we only know through Yeats' interpretation/obsession with her. She is not Shakespeare's Dark Lady, a mysterious being that we can project our own longings and hopes onto. She was a fiery memorable being in her own right, a feminist, Home Rule activist, actress, intellectual, nationalist - with a mystical streak (of course. She was Irish after all) - and in a funny way (although it might have been quite tragic for Yeats) - the literary world should probably thank her for NOT accepting Yeats' 592 proposals. Perhaps a happy and satisfied Yeats would not have had such a writing impulse, such a need to get it out. Who knows. Yeats was obviously a genius, his later poems show that - but we all have to follow a star, we all have unresolved things in us that cannot be reconciled. Yeats never gave up on Gonne, and accepted another kind of marriage - more worldly and earthbound - in place of the spiritual connection he felt with her. But their connection lasted always, to his death. It's nice to see the two of them together again, reunited in the glass cases of the National Library in Dublin.
From the article in the Times:
Until nearly the end of his days he and Gonne kept an eye on each other. In 1938 he wrote “A Bronze Head” about her frequent appearances at political funerals, a “dark tomb-haunter,” so transformed from the light, gentle woman of his memory.Almost from the beginning she had been a figure of memory. In the opening pages of the 1908 notebook he looked backward: “She said something that blotted away the recent past & brought all back to the spiritual marriage of 1898. She believed that this bond is to be recreated & to be the means of spiritual illumination between us. It is to be a bond of the spirit only.”
Here's a link to the exhibit itself.
Here's a post I wrote about Yeats. Maud Gonne comes up. Of course she does. How could she not?
The Books: "Written On the Body" (Jeanette Winterson)
Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt:
Written on the Body
In Written On the Body (perhaps Winterson's one of best-loved books - it's not at all my favorite, as a matter of fact I started losing interest right around reading this one - but I know I am in the minority!) we have an unnamed narrator - and we do not know the gender. It could be a man, could be a woman. Can't tell. The narrator is a womanizer - a ladies' man/woman ... But, surprisingly, the narrator falls in love with a married woman named Louise (naturally a redhead - all of Winterson's objects of desire are redheads). Louise is married to a cancer researcher, but it is through the eyes of the narrator that we fall head over heels for her. The narrator ends up breaking off the affair with Louise when it is found out she has cancer. This becomes Winterson's extended metaphor: the body, and its systems ... and how each system/part reflects an aspect of love, or loss. Winterson, in this book, seems interested in excavating loss - and how the memories of a loved one remain, for better or for worse ... one of the recurring questions in the book is something along the lines of "Why is the measure of love loss?" I've got to say: Winterson, in this book, in her writing on love, and what it feels like to lose someone and be haunted by that person - puts other writesr to shame. She seems paramount to me. She is a grandiose and romantic writer - but never sappy. There are lines where you actually have to put down the book and take a moment. Or at least I did. And if I know anything I know that the measure of love is LOSS. She is able to write about that particular brand of sadness in a way I find captivating, and completely real. She speaks directly TO her audience ... and in breaking down the body (we get to know Louise's body intimately), and focusing on this or that ... she keeps the whole thing from being too literal. Anyone who's read her books will know what I mean. Nicholas Sparks, for example, may THINK he's writing about love - but he's only re-stirring some lukewarm pot of sappy sentimentality and rehashing "ideas" about soulmates for an adoring stupid public who wouldn't know real romantic writing if it knocked them on the ucipital mapilary. And yet his reputation is that of a guy who writes sweeping romances. Baffling. To me, Winterson - by avoiding telling a straight-out story - by holding back on certain expected things (even the name or gender of her narrator) - she puts us into the realm of poetry and experience, rather than "and then this happened, and this happened." She's a poet. The title of Written On the Body is perfect because that is exactly what Winterson does here. The body is a canvas. When you love someone you write yourself ON them. And love, at that intense level, is not separate from desire, or lust, or whatever. It's all the same. I've had that kind of love. You know. Where fucking is the same as a deep philosophical conversation or laughing hysterically about Young Frankenstein - there is no separation, it is not "here we are naked, and here we are clothed" - because you're that connected, it's all one. That is love.
Here, in Winterson's world, love is a visceral palpable thing. But it is only in the context of LOSS that we can even really perceive love - and that's something that sucks big-time.
Like I mentioned before - my favorites of Winterson's books are the fairy-tales ... This is more of a contemplation, and to me it takes on a same-ness, after a while - whereas something like Sexing the Cherry (excerpt here) never feels "the same". But again, that's just me. In the lexicon of Jeanette Winterson - Written On the Body is probably her most beloved book, and got her her most devoted audience. I may not be in that group, but that is neither here nor there. Based only on The Passion, I'll read whatever this woman writes. And there are sections of Written On the Body that rank with the best romantic writing of the last 20 years, certainly. No contest.
Here's an excerpt.
EXCERPT FROM Written on the Body
Into the heart of my childish vanities, Louise's face, Louise's words, 'I will never let you go.' This is what I have been afraid of, what I've avoided through so many shaky liaisons. I'm addicted to the first six months. It's the midnight calls, the bursts of energy, the beloved as battery for all those fading cells. I told myself after the last whipping with Bathsheba that I wouldn't do any of it again. I did suspect that I might like being whipped, if so, I had at least to learn to wear an extra overcoat. Jacqueline was an overcoat. She muffled my senses. With her I forgot about feeling and wallowed in contentment. Contentment is a feeling you say? Are you sure it's not an absence of feeling? I liken it to that particular numbness one gets after a visit to the dentist. Not in pain nor out of it, slightly drugged. Contentment is the positive side of resignation. It has its appeal but it's no good wearing an overcoat and furry slippers and heavy gloves when what the body really wants is to be naked.
I never used to think about my previous girlfriends until I took up with Jacqueline. I never had the time. With Jacqueline I settled into a parody of the sporting colonel, the tweedy cove with a line-up of trophies and a dozen reminiscences about each. I have caught myself fancying a glass of sherry and a little mental dalliance with Inge, Catherine, Bathsheba, Judith, Estelle ... Estelle, I haven't thought about Estelle for years. She had a scrap metal business. No, no, no! I don't want to go backwards in time like a sci-fi thriller. What is it to me that Estelle had a clapped-out Rolls-Royce with a pneumatic back seat? I can still smell the leather.
Louise's face. Under her fierce gaze my past is burned away. The beloved as nitric acid. Am I hoping for a saviour in Louise? An almighty scouring of deed and misdeed, leaving the slab clean and white. In Japan they do a nice virgin substitute with the white of an egg. For twenty-four hours at least, you can have a new hymen. In Europe we have always preferred a half lemon. Not only does it act as a crude pessary, it also makes it very difficult for the most persistent of men to drop anchor in what may seem the most pliant of women. Tightness passes for newness; the man believes his little bride has satisfyingly sealed depths. He can look forward to plunging her inch by inch.
Cheating is easy. There's no swank to infidelity. To borrow against the trust someone has placed in you costs nothing at first. You get away with it, you take a little more and a little more until there is no more to draw on. Oddly, your hands should be full with all that taking but when you open them there's nothing there.
When I say 'I will be true to you' I am drawing a quiet space beyond the reach of other desires. No-one can legislate love; it cannot be given orders or cajoled into service. Love belongs to itself, deaf to pleading and unmoved by violence. Love is not something you can negotiate. Love is the one thing stronger than desire and the only proper reason to resist temptation. There are those who say that temptation can be barricaded beyond the door. The ones who think that stray desires can be driven out of the heart like the moneychangers from the temple. Maybe they can, if you patrol your weak points day and night, don't look don't smell, don't dream. The most reliable Securicor, church sanctioned and state approved, is marriage. Swear you'll cleave only unto him or her and magically that's what will happen. Adultery is as much about disillusionment as it is about sex. The charm didn't work. You paid all that money, ate the cake and it didn't work. It's not your fault is it?
Marriage is the flimsiest weapon against desire. You may as well take a pop-gun to a python. A friend of mine, a banker and a very rich man who had travelled the world, told me he was getting married. I was surprised because I knew that for years he had been obsessed with a dancer who for wild and proper reasons of her own wouldn't commit. Finally he had lost patience and chosen a pleasant steady girl who ran a riding school. I saw him at his flat the weekend before his wedding. He told me how serious he was about marriage, how he had read the wedding service and found it beautiful. Within its confines he sensed happiness. Just then the doorbell rang and he took receipt of a van-load of white lilies. He was arranging them enthusiastically and telling me his theories on love, when the doorbell rang again and he took receipt of a crate of Veuve Clicquot and a huge tin of caviare. He had the table set and I noticed how often he looked at his watch.
'After we're married,' he said, 'I can't imagine wanting another woman.' The doorbell rang a third time. It was the dancer. She had come for the weekend. 'I'm not married yet,' he said.
When I say 'I will be true to you' I must mean it in spite of the formalities, instead of the formalities. If I commit adultery in my heart then I have lost you a little. The bright vision of your face will blur. I may not notice this once or twice, I may pride myself on having enjoyed those fleshy excursions in the most cerebral way. Yet I will have blunted that sharp flint that sparks between us, our desire for one another above all else.
July 19, 2008
Snapshots
-- Damn, it's hot.
-- Having just spent an entire week where I took lengthy swims maybe 5 times a day, I have decided I need to have more swimming in my life. So 2 days ago I joined the Y. I'm excited to get started and there's a class every Wed. night called "AQUA JOG" and I am INCREDIBLY intrigued. I'm going this Wednesday.
-- Had a great girl group last night - and drove from Englewood Cliffs to Livingston New Jersey to get there - my first experience (for realz) on the New Jersey turnpike/freeway system - and I nearly had a heart attack. I've driven on the damn 401 in LA and wasn't as confused as I was yesterday. There was one moment when I actually got frightened, like if I made a mistake I would find myself in an industrial wasteland with scary gang-bangers watching me drive by and I would be unable to correct my error. Ha. But I made it to my destination - although a 45 minute drive took me over 2 hours, due to traffic on the 280. But girl group was worth it. I need my lady friends. I love those women. We've been meeting once a month (off and on) for 8 years now. They are dear friends, and touching base with them is a great relief. We all get to talk - we take turns - we contribute, listen, laugh hysterically, tell stories to fill everyone in ... we save stuff up for girl group. Oh, and Jill's husband gave me directions to get home that were so kick-ass that they should be given an award. I was dreading my ride home - but it was easy, simple, and he cut out most of the confusion I had experienced getting there. Beautiful.
-- I am still reading War and Peace but I have so much work to do offline that I've only been able to read a page or two a day (since I got back from vacation).
-- Thank you, David, for putting in my air conditioner. You are a dear friend, and now that the real dog days have hit - I am SO GLAD to have it.
-- Hearing Tim Gunn say, "The judges will think you all are slackers!" to the new group of contestants on Project Runway made me so happy. I did love the winning dress - I thought it was retro, cute, girlie - and very very creative. I mean, vacuum cleaner bags! And coffee filters!!
I LOVED all the comments about the first dude eliminated and his outfit. "It looks like a nurse who's about to go on a murdering spree." hahahahaha
-- I was feeling a little bit lost and forlorn the other night. So I perked myself up by sitting in bed, laptop out, and watching, oh, about TWO STRAIGHT HOURS of Judge Judy on Youtube. I do not think it is possible to love her more than I do. I find her so refreshing. I felt so much better after spending that time in her presence. I felt like: Okay. I am making the right decisions. They do not necessarily feel good, and I am NOT having an easy time of it, but I am taking responsibility for myself, and I am not a complete and utter moron. God, I love her. I want her to approve of me.
-- I'm a little bit in love with my dentist. I am getting a ton of work done in the next year (nothing major - just replacing all my fillings, and getting a mouthguard because apparently I'm "a grinder". Who knew? I mean, it makes sense because I am, hands down, one of the most stressed-out people I know. So of course I lie asleep at night grinding away. Of course.) ... and we set up a plan, for me to get the work done gradually, so it wouldn't be financially prohibitive for me - and he's so calm and gentle and funny (with a toe-curling Australian accent) that I feel safe in his presence. Awesome dentist. If you live in the New York area, and want a recommendation for a dentist, please shoot me an email. He's the best!
Mobile Me = Mobile DOG DOO-DOO
The new "Mobile Me" from Mac sucks so bad that I am considering giving up my dotmac email address and throwing in the towel. Because you know what? It kind of sucked ANYway, but I cut it some slack because I paid for it and blah blah blah - but this is bullshit. And their response has been bullshit. Or I should say non-response. If you don't have an iPhone, you're screwed, basically, and I have no plans on getting an iPhone. So if I want to stop in at an Internet cafe to check my email, they had BETTER have Firefox or Safari as Internet options (and there are reports that Firefox has been frozen by Mobile Me) - otherwise I will not be able to check my email. I have a blackberry - so that's good - at least I am "mobile" and can receive emails wherever I am ... but honest to God. What a crap release. 2 days outage. No explanation. "Everything you love about Mac and more ..." they said. Uhm, no. Not EVERYTHING. Talk to the people who miss the iCards that you took away with no warning. If it were "EVERYTHING" then the iCards wouldn't have disappeared. I have spent HOURS on the forums at Macrumors, etc., and am trying to come to a decision, based on the complaints of others, and my own. And to be honest, dotmac was never great shakes, anyway. It's such a pain to change email addresses, but seriously, Mac: this new application is retarded. Pathetic. Not to mention I hate the cutesiness of the "look" of it. I hate the cloud. I hate the "me", in general. It sounds infantile. It would be much more Apple-ish to call it "iMobile". But then, of course, nobody asked me and there are all these Apple bulldogs on the forums saying stuff like, "Well, I'm sure if YOU were in charge, everything would be perfect." hahahaha In a way, I am enjoying the drama - the forums are awesome reading (and actually there is a lot of great information handed out, too - thank God, because Apple's support for this has SUCKED.) Anyway. I hate "Mobile Me" which sounds like it is made for tweens, and just basically was released way too early. There are way more problems with it than I can even list - because I don't use a lot of the applications - but the whole "Push" thing has been a disaster for some people, and blah blah blah. An issue too is that there are some out there who think that complaining is somehow "unfair" to Apple. Guys. Grow up. They are a company. They are a business. They must be held accountable like any other business for things that go epically wrong. That's all. I love my Mac too. I'm not ever going back to a PC. But to call a spade a spade is not being "unfair". Your loyalty is clouding your judgment. I guess I'm not that much of a fanatic that I will protect a company - even when it goes wrong. The main problem for me is the web application, and not being able to get mail from certain locations with IE. I get that IE is strolling into the tarpit. I hate IE. I prefer Firefox. But to deliberately develop Mobile Me (gag) to not be compatible at ALL with the existing browser on the majority of PCs - that's just bad business. I know it's also cutting edge, I get that. I know they are pushing the envelope. They are looking ahead. Fine, look ahead. But making sure your stuff is compatible with things a year, 2 years, 3 years ago - is part of developing new technology. Eventually things will be phased out - but we're not there yet. So I'm in a public library doing research, say. And I don't have my blackberry. And I need to check my email, to send something out, or whatever. I do a lot of my personal business through email. We all do. Unless that public library has Safari and Firefox (and, well, my local library does NOT, I'm just saying) - then I am screwed. That is bad, Apple. You should at least have kept the .Mac going alongside of Mobile Me (I can't even say that without gagging) - so that 1. you could work out the MULTIPLE bugs in Mobile Me and we could all still get emails while you worked it out and 2. just for good will between you and your customers. I read some poor dude who works in Africa in the Peace Corps and relies on his dotmac to keep in contact. He has no iPhone. Of course there is not going to be deluxe Safari or Firefox browsers in the Peace Corps office. The guy is screwed. He's going to gmail. Which also has the benefit of being FREE. Why should I pay for this bogus Mobile Me crap when it doesn't work? I ain't buyin' an iPhone, Apple. If you're trying to force my hand here, you will fail. And lemme tell you something, Apple: it really doesn't help your cause to be snotty in response to complaints.
Basically I am just resisting changing my email again because it's such a pain. I already have 4 or 5 email addresses, which I realize is excessive - but I am OCD and I have to compartmentalize. Blog emails go one place, acting/writing/business emails go another place, personal emails are dotmac ... But I am now rethinking my strategy. To be honest, my Mac email was ALWAYS buggy. Maybe I just drank the Koolaid too. If my Yahoo account - a FREE account - was that buggy, I would get rid of it. Here I am paying for Mac email, and it's buggy and unreliable ... and I put up with it. That's my psychological issue.
To have email (that I am paying for) be down for 2, 3, almost 4 days is insane. Thank God I have multiple emails and can get done what I need to get done, although it is not ideal. My brother and I would try to pick up our emails at the local library and Nope. No go. Next day. Nope. No go. It was obviously a major debacle had occurred - but it wasn't until the new Mobile Me (BAH. I HATE SAYING IT) launched for real that I realized how much I hated it and how much I yearned for my .Mac mail to be back. I'm not against new technology. But you had best make sure your new technology freakin' WORKS before launching it on loyal customers and taking away what DOES work without replacing it with something better. Bush league!
That is all.
July 18, 2008
Staring you down.
Just look at that screenshot. Gena Rowlands stops me in my tracks. Time and time again.
There's something jagged in her. Something ultimately unresolved.
Catharsis - in its classic sense - does not exist for her (or for us, in watching her). Because catharsis implies release, ending, or at the very LEAST a breather. Gena Rowlands, in her best and most enduring roles, has no such breathers built into her work. It is not messy or self-indulgent - but she is an actress on the edge (or, should I say, under the influence ...)Her emotions do not line up in easily classifiable buckets: sadness, joy, rage. Everything is mixed up. She cries but you don't feel grief being released. She laughs and you hear only the wince of pain behind it, no joy whatsoever. She expresses anger and all you want to do is burst into laughter at how absurd she is. Things get a little scary. And yet she is nothing less than 100% specific. Ragged edges and all.
And yet again: in her personal life, she would retreat to Connecticut to the home she shared with husband John Cassavetes and live the quietest of suburban lives - raising her kids, disappearing for sometimes years on end, gardening, driving kids to soccer practice, whatever. There was nothing tabloid-worthy, nothing dramatic even, no divorces or car crashes ... Her husband was an alcoholic, but that's certainly not just a famous person's disease - lots of people are alcoholics. The two of them fought like cats and dogs (from day one), but they loved each other, too, and respected each other. She did not yearn for the spotlight, she did not keep her name in the papers. She retreated, making sandwiches and playing in the pool with her kids. Before emerging again to put all of that other stuff she had going on, all of that crazy she had going on ... into her next role. I love that about her. Her pillbox hat and neat upswept hair, her 1960s fur hat, her white gloves and her kids and her dog ... the whole image - compared to what she was able to portray in, say, Opening Night. Holy shit. I LOVE the dichotomy. It is classic Rowlands.
Nobody like her. What is also truly astonishing is that she doesn't only play crazy. Just watch her as the repressed elegant homewrecker in Woody Allen's Another Woman to get the sense of how GOOD she really is. The material dictated her acting. She knew how to dial down the crazy, eliminate it all together, and play that part (to perfection, I might add - it's one of my favorites of all of her roles). I'll let Roger Ebert say what I'm trying to say:
There is a temptation to say that Rowlands has never been better than in this movie, but that would not be true. She is an extraordinary actor who is usually this good, and has been this good before, especially in some of the films of her husband, John Cassavetes. What is new here is the whole emotional tone of her character. Great actors and great directors sometimes find a common emotional ground, so that the actor becomes an instrument playing the director's song.Cassavetes is a wild, passionate spirit, emotionally disorganized, insecure and tumultuous, and Rowlands has reflected that personality in her characters for him - white-eyed women on the edge of stampede or breakdown.
Allen is introspective, considerate, apologetic, formidably intelligent, and controls people through thought and words rather than through physicality and temper. Rowlands now mirrors that personality, revealing in the process how the Cassavetes performances were indeed "acting" and not some kind of ersatz documentary reality. To see "Another Woman" is to get an insight into how good an actress Rowlands has been all along.
Absolutely.
She's my favorite actress.
Happy birthday, Clifford Odets
Clifford Odets (playwright in the 30s and 40s - inspiration to Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, a generation of playwrights - and he inspires still although some of his plays have dated badly) kept a journal throughout his tumultuous life.
One year of that journal has been published - 1940 - and the title of the book is "The time is ripe: The 1940 journal of Clifford Odets
A couple biographical notes:
Clifford Odets was catapulted into fame in the early 30s with his play Waiting for Lefty. He became a resident playwright with the influential Group Theatre - and they put on many of his plays - which are now considered classics: Awake and Sing, Paradise Lost, Golden Boy - just to name a few. He was the voice of the Great Depression, of the angry radical, the Jewish New Yorker, the downtrodden, the hopeful. Odets was a Zeitgeist kind of guy. It's one of the reasons why he found his later career so strenuous and difficult ... when you tap into a Zeitgeist of a certain time and place (and not just tap into it - but give voice to it) it can be nigh on impossible to translate that into another time/place. I love all of Odets' plays - not just his famous 1930s plays - I love Big Knife, I love Country Girl, I love The Flowering Peach ... but his time, his PLACE, was the mid-1930s. And that's IT. Without context, Odets' work does not translate. HIs writing does ... and he is imitated to this day. Sylvester Stallone counts Odets as an influence in writing Rocky (and you can totally hear it - the street poetry, the rough edges) ... Tony Kushner ... everyone. Odets was the start of that kind of playwriting in this country.
His work is very much of a time and place - although the writing is good enough for ALL times. But his plays all have "the Great Depression" as an extra character. Without understanding that context, his plays may seem ... trite, or small, or naive. His theme is how the individual man can maintain his dignity, his human worth, in the middle of a capitalist society. He has written lines like, "Is life written on dollar bills?" WORTH has nothing to do with money ... but when you have no money, it sure as shit is difficult to remember that. His plays in the 30s insist upon human dignity, but also (like in Golden Boy) insist on the fact that there is compromise, and tragedy. This is where he can seem, to modern eyes, a bit naive - but it is essential to place him in his context.
But what remains (for me anyway) is not so much the thematic elements, the snapshot of urban life in the 30s - but the language. Odets' language!! It's raw, it's poetic, and it's not realistic. It's street poetry.
We got the blues, Babe -- the 1935 blues. I'm talkin' this way 'cause I love you. If I didn't, I wouldn't care ...
Or
You won't forget me to your dyin' day -- I was the first guy. Part of your insides. You won't forget. I wrote my name on you -- indelible ink!
Or this, from the same scene = I love this line:
So I made a mistake. For Chris' sake, don't act like the Queen of Romania!
Or
Yes, yes, the whole thing funnels up in me like a fever. My head'll bust a vein!
Or
A sleeping clam at the bottom of the ocean, but I'll wake you up. I'm through with the little wars: no more hacking, making a pound in a good day. Like old man Pike says, every man for himself nowadays, and when you're in a jungle you look out for the wild life. I put on my Chinese good luck ring and I'm out to get mine. You're the first stop!
And then this famous exchange from Golden Boy, immortalized in millions of acting classes across the country:
JOE. What did he ever do for you?LORNA. [with sudden verve] Would you like to know? He loved me in a world of enemies, of stags and bulls! ... And I loved him for that. He picked me up in Friskin's hotel on 39th Street. I was nine weeks behind in rent. I hadn't hit the gutter yet, but I was near. He washed my face and combed my hair. He stiffened the space between my shoulder blades. Misery reached out to misery --
JOE. And now you're dead.
LORNA. [lashing out] I don't know what the hell you're talking about!
JOE. Yes, you do ...
Excerpts from his plays:
The Flowering Peach
The Country Girl
The Big Knife
Rocket To the Moon
Golden Boy
Paradise Lost
Till The Day I Die
Awake and Sing
Waiting For Lefty
Harold Clurman wrote about Odets:
Odets wrote some of the finest love scenes to be found in American drama. An all-enveloping warmth, love in its broadest sense, is a constant in all Odets' writing, the very root of his talent. IT is there in tumultuous harangues, in his denunciations and his murmurs. It is by turns hot and tender. Sometimes it sounds in whimpers. It is present as much in the scenes between grandfather and granson in Awake as in those of Joe and Lorna in Golden Boy. It is touchingly wry in Rocket. This explains why these scenes are chosen by so many actors for auditions and classwork.
The Group Theatre lasted almost a decade - from 1931 to 1940.
Odets' first play was Waiting for Lefty. He had been ignored by Strasberg (the leader of the Group) when he kept saying he had plays he wanted to be put on. He just wasn't seen as serious. As the left-wing political world heated up in the early 1930s, Odets became involved in various Communist organizations - and found that his talents were actually wanted in that world. The Group Theatre actors were also looking for ways to become involved - and Odets wrote this play called Waiting for Lefty - which was going to be performed at the Civic Repertory Theatre, one-night-only - as part of a larger programme - It was a benefit for New Theatre magazine. The play was rehearsed on its own, Strasberg had nothing to do with it ... but all the Group actors were involved. Kazan, Ruth Nelson, Carnovsky, Phoebe Brand, John Garfield (known as "Julie" then) ...
Waiting for Lefty was performed for the first time at the benefit on January 6, 1935. It is a night that has gone down in American theatrical history. One of our most important events. In it, the "new theatre" was, indeed, born. Yes, many others at the time were also pushing the boundaries and breaking down the oh-so-polite and witty and high-class themes to be seen on Broadway. Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre - the "voodoo Macbeth" - there were theatrical EVENTS in those days ... when an audience, struggling with the Depression, with hard times, were looking for something else ... were looking for a change of tone from the Philip Barry Noel Coward material so popular at that time. Nothing against those masters of their craft ... but in 1935, their time was done. It had grown stale. There was a Depression going on ... where was that being expressed in the theatre? Waiting for Lefty occurred like a lightning bolt from another planet - the planet of Truth.
January 6, 1935 is a crucial day in our cultural history in this country. Almost up there with the opening of Glass Menagerie on an ice-drenched night in Chicago a little over a decade later.
Wendy Smith, in her comprehensive book on The Group
NOW. Onto that historic night in 1935:
Lefty was one of several works scheduled as part of an evening organized by the League of Workers Theatres to aid New Theatre. The benefit staff assigned it no particular importance: the mimeographed one-sheet program simply said, "Waiting for Lefty, presented by the cast of Gold Eagle Guy," with no mention of either author or individual actors. The stage manager, Robert Riley, who booked the entertainment and decided the order of appearance, believed that Anna Sokolow's troupe of dancers was more important than a new play by an unknown actor/writer, and he announced that they would appear last. Odets was furious, arguing vehemently that his play deserved the favored final spot. Riley gave in, only to encounter a new problem. The Group hadn't warned him that the show required lighting cues; he had to work them out hastily with the electrician during the intermissions between the other acts. When the lights went up on the bare stage, with Morris Carnovsky as the corrupt union leader directly addressing the audience as if they were his rebellious membership, no one expected anything except another casual piece of agitprop thrown together for a good cause.Within moments everyone in the theatre knew better. As the actors began to speak Odets' stingingly authentic language - so radically different from either the affected patter of the Broadway show-shops or the wooden sloganeering of agitprop - audience members found themselves swept up in a drama they seemed to know intimately, from deep inside themselves, even though they'd never heard a word of it before.
They gasped when Ruth Nelson as the angry wife said, "Sure, I see it in the papers, how good orange juice is for kids ... Betty never saw a grapefruit. I took her to the store last week and she pointed to a stack of grapefruits. 'What's that,' she said." They cheered when Tony Kraber, playing the scientist who refuses to develop poison gas, punches his evil boss (Carnovsky again) in the nose. They murmured sadly when the young lovers Phoebe Brand and Julie Garfield were forced by poverty to part. They jeered at Russell Collins as a company guy and applauded when Gadget Kazan exposed him as "my own lousy brother!" They laughed sympathetically at Bill Challee as a desperate young actor too ignorant to know what a manifesto is and took Paula Miller to their hearts as the tough producer's secretary who gives him a dollar to buy some food and a copy of The Communist Manifesto, telling him, "Come out in the light, Comrade." When Luther Adler, playing a young doctor fired because he is a Jew, closed his scene with the communist salute, more than one person answered him from the auditorium with a clenched fist thrust in the air. It was beyond politics. They used the CP salute as Odets defined it in Lefty's last scene: "the good old uppercut to the chin," a rejection of all the forces that hurt people and kept them down, a commitment to fight for a better life.
To Kazan, seated in the auditorium waiting for his cue, the response was "like a roar from sixteen-inchers broadside, audience to players, a way of shouting, 'More! More! More! Go on! Go on! Go on!'" Swept up by the passion they had aroused, the actors were no longer acting. "They were being carried along as if by an exultancy of communication such as I have never witnessed in the theatre before," wrote [Harold] Clurman. The twenty-eight-year-old playwright was awed by the emotional conflagration he'd ignited. "You saw theatre in its truest essence," Odets remembered years later. "Suddenly the proscenium arch of the theatre vanished and the audience and actors were at one with each other."
As the play mounted to its climax, the intensity of feeling on and offstage became almost unbearable. When Bobby Lewis dashed in with the news that Lefty has been murdered, no one needed to take an exercise to find the appropriate anger - the actors exploded with it, the audience seethed with it. They exulted as Joe Bromberg, playing the union rebel Agate Keller, tore himself loose from the hired gunmen and declared their independence: "HELLO AMERICA! HELLO. WE'RE STORMBIRDS OF THE WORKING-CLASS ... And when we die they'll know what we did to make a new world!"
"Well, what's the answer?" Bromberg demanded. In the audience, as planned, Odets, Herbie Ratner, and Lewis Leverett began shouting "Strike!" "LOUDER!" Bromberg yelled - and, one by one, from all over the auditorium, individual voices called out, "Strike!" Suddenly the entire audience, some 1,400 people, rose and roared, "Strike! Strike!" The actors froze, stunned by the spontaneous demonstration. The militant cries gave way to cheers and applause so thunderous the cast was kept onstage for forty-five minutes to receive the crowd's inflamed tribute. "When they couldn't applaud anymore, they stomped their feet," said Ruth Nelson. "All I could think was, 'My God, they're going to break the balcony down!' It was terrible, it was so beautiful." The actors were all weeping. When Clurman persuaded Odets to take a bow, the audience stormed the stage and embraced the man who had voiced their hopes and fears and deepest aspirations. "That was the dram all of us in the Group Theatre had," said Kazan, "to be embraced that way by a theatreful of people."
"The audience wouldn't leave," said Cheryl Crawford. "I was afraid they were going to tear the seats out and throw them on the stage." When the astounded stage manager finally rang down the curtain, they remained out front, talking and arguing about the events in a play taht seemed as real to them as their own lives. Actors and playwright were overwhelmed and a little frightened by the near-religious communion they had just shared. Odets retreated to a backstage bathroom; his excitement was so intense he threw up, then burst into tears. The dressing room was hushed as the actors removed their makeup. They emerged onto 14th Street to find clusters of people still gathered outside, laughing, crying, hugging each other, clapping their hands. "There was almost a sense of pure madness about it," Morris Carnovsky felt.
No one wanted to go home. Sleep was out of the question. Most of the Group went to an all-night restaurant - no one can remember now which one - and tried to eat. Odets sat alone: pale, withdrawn, not talking at all. Everyone was too dazed to have much to say. It was dawn before they could bring themselves to separate, to admit that the miracle was over.
There had never been a night like it in the American theatre. The Group became a vessel into which were poured the rage, frustration, desperation, and finally exultation, not just of an angry young man named Clifford Odets, but of every single person at the Civic Rep who longed for an end to personal and political depression, who needed someone to tell them they could stand up and change their lives. The Group had experienced the "unity of background, of feeling, of thought, of need" Clurman had said was the basis for a true theatre: during his inspiring talks at Brookfield, at the thrilling final run-through of Connelly, in some of the best performances of Success Story. Never before had they shared it with an entire theatre full of people, never before had it seemed as though the lines they spoke hadn't been written but rather emerged from a collective heart and soul. Theatre and life merged, as Clurman had promised they could.
Waiting for Lefty changed people's ideas of what theatre was. More than an evening's entertainment, more even than a serious examination of the contemporary scene by a thoughtful writer, theatre at its best could be a living embodiment of communal values and aspirations. Theatre mattered, art had meaning, culture wasn't the property of an affluent, educated few but an expression of the joys and sorrows of the human condition as they could be understood and shared by everyone.
Goosebumps. No matter how many times I read that (or descriptions from anyone who was there that night - either in the audience or up on stage) - I get goosebumps.
No wonder Odets had a sharp fall later in life. How on EARTH could anything he would EVER do top such a debut??
The Time is Ripe describes the year of the Group's demise. Night Music, Odets' latest play (which I ADORE - it is very difficult to find, and never produced anymore - my dad found it for me in the library and Xeroxed me a copy - Great play.) - was a huge flop. This was devastating for Odets - the critics were very cruel. They had built Odets up - and man, they loved tearing him down.
The theatre ensemble folded.
All members scattered to the 4 winds - John Garfield, Franchot Tone, Frances Farmer, Morris Carnovsky, Stella Adler, Lee Strasberg, Elia Kazan - and yet they were forever linked, they forever had a relationship with one another - because of their experiences in the 1930s.
In honor of his birthday, I've posted a bunch of excerpts from his journal below. Some are funny, some are thought-provoking, some are lyrical - he is at the height of his powers here. He is about to go into his long decline - which is sad, because he has such fire and energy here. In 1944, he made his directorial debut with None but the Lonely Heart - starring Cary Grant. This was the second part Grant was nominated for an Oscar for - mainly because of the big crying scene at the end. (The fact that Grant would not be nominated - then or now - for his performance in His Girl Friday - is just indicative of how silly those awards can be!!)
He and Grant were friends until the very end - and Odets had a particularly sad end. The guy had a long way to fall, and boy, did he fall. Grant would lend him money, or go and sit with him and talk and laugh and try to help his friend. None but the Lonely Heart is obviously Odets-ian - the themes, the compromises (it's always about choosing money or love, choosing money or humanity) - but what's really interesting about it is how great it LOOKS. The MOOD of the movie is really the reason to see it. It has an almost Fritz Lang-ish feel to it, eerie, melancholy, big empty urban streets, the alienation of urban life made manifest in the dark cobblestones - it's a great looking movie.
But now, in honor of his birthday, some excerpts from his journal from 1940. Obviously Clifford was all about Beethoven. Beethoven, and thoughts on FORM. Great stuff.
January 21, 1940
I am growing uneasy -- a new play is coming on. For me, this creative uneasiness excuses everything. Otherwise my inability to follow up assumed personal responsibilities would be another strong item to make my life unhappier than it is. Everything-for-the work is practically the only way I can feel and think -- notice that I put the word feel before think. Right now, these days and weeks, I am very clear in my relationships with the theatre, friends and intimates, almost the world. And that clarity of relationship is the prime necessity for doing good work.Loneliness -- the business of living alone -- seems to have one of two results for a man. Either it makes him excessively romantic; or it makes him sour and bitter. Sometimes, however, there is a curious blending of both, a tart personality emerging, a sort of eccentric. In fact, all three results add up to an eccentric.
January 23, 1940
The period of courtship, in any matter, gets to be a shorter and shorter affair with me. This is because I am getting shorter and shorter on self-delusion. Let us get to the heart of the matter, I feel, and let us get there quickly and put things on a working basis. I am anxious for results and impatient, unfortunately, with the steps which lead up to the results. This is growth from one point of view; from another it is sheer backsliding.
January 21, 1940
John Barbirolli conducting the Schubert Seventh this afternoon, on the radio. An English musician or conductor! -- the very words are contradictory! Although there are some good words to say for [Sir Thomas] Beecham, who seems to have lifted himself into the top ranks of conductors by sheer will. He plays everything with great muscularity, forcing the music. Particularly true is this of his Mozart. He has discovered the "demon" in Mozart and will have the demon out even if he breaks the orchestra apart! But he really has his points, Beecham.But Barbirolli? We went over on the same ship when we went to London with Golden Boy...He scowled and strode darkly through the passageways of the ship, romantic and glamorous, or trying to be. It's easy to hear, in his conducting, that he is quite a mild fellow, so mild that I keep looking to see what is holding up the music from behind. The symphony board here, in the case of Toscanini -- since they claimed that people came to see and hear only T. -- erred on the side of distinction. Then they got Barbirolli, whose personality would not overshadow the aggregate personality of the orchestra ... and they erred on the side of extinction!
March 24, 1940
Form, form. I go crazy when I hear some of these goofs say I have no form! Debussy had no form? Certainly not -- he had none of Beethoven's form! And some of Beethoven's last piano sonatas had no form. Yes, none of Mozart's form. These idiots do not realize that there is no such thing as abstract form! Form is, like style, an intensely personal thing. The trust is that my plays have much more form and shape and pattern than thousands of well-made American plays which are simply a scaffolding holding up nothing. I am a talented individual, seeing and handling material in an individual and creative way. And these so-called critics do not understand that when they ask for a ready-made form from me they are simultaneously asking for the death of my talent.Well, everything is your own fault -- you read what those stupid men write!
April 8, 1940
In the music of Berlioz you will find something petulant, like a man with a toothache. I write this because I am thinking of the "Roman Carnival" overture which I played this afternoon. There is something historical about this piece, some strange and new outburst -- the "peeve" has come into art, the sense of personal rejection, the man unwanted and unheeded. What a strange sad man Berlioz must have been. Aaron Copland says the music of Berlioz is strange too, in the sense that one never knows where it is going or what the artist's intention is (if I am reporting correctly) but I don't understand what Aaron means: the music is followable enough to me. One might almost say that the nerves and hysteria of the modern man have come into the art with Berlioz, too.
April 25, 1940
Every [movie] studio has its own style in writing. A Warner Brothers picture always has an interesting linear quality about it, but is always dead in parts. The picture I saw last night, Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet, In some ways it is such an ordinary picture that one is apt to overlook the remarkable assembly and compression of the machinery, for it is a piece of machinery, dead all over, inhuman, but machinelike in its precision and use of parts. Characters never have any doubts which pull them two ways -- they are one thing, one color, good or bad, moving only in one direction, on one dimension. In a word, they are not dialectic -- they are without those contradictions which are in themselves the source of the deepest human drama.But I most not forget the superb old German actor, [Albert] Basserman, who played Koch, the great German scientist, in this picture. He had only several small scenes in the picture, but he immediately made every American or English actor in the cast look like a boy. How he did this I am unable to say, perhaps with great repose, a WHOLE grasp of the character, really talking to the other characters instead of acting talking. He was well aware of the meaning of every situation in which he found himself and it was to that meaning he gave himself, never to something abstract, never to, for instance, nobility in general. In a word, he acted, he was active, he understood, he dealt with!
April 17, 1940
In the early evening went to Lee Strasberg's house for dinner. Paula's mother was there [Ed: Paula was Lee Strasberg's wife - an INFAMOUS individual - Marilyn Monroe's controlling acting coach - the bane of John Huston's life - there's a whole story in there], preparing the dinner, and I understood a great deal about Paula from seeing her mother's weak face. For the first time in ten years the tensions are down between Lee and myself -- so we were both able to relax.He spoke of what he called "the blight of Ibsen", saying that Ibsen had taught most writers after him how to think undramatically. He illustrated this by an example. A man has been used to living in luxury finds he is broke and unable to face life -- he goes home and puts a bullet in his head. That, Lee said, any fair theatre person can lay out into a play. But it is not essentially a dramatic view of life. Chekhov is dramatic, he said, for this is how he treats related material: a man earns a million rubles and goes home and lies down on them and puts a bullet in his head.
I LOVE that!!
April 12, 1940
Perhaps the main activity of the romantic, often idealist, is that of giving, that of offering himself up, of throwing himself at the world. The trouble beings when the world coldly refuses him. Nothing daunted, again the leap, again the throwing of the self. Again repulsed, again and again! Finally, you have a tired, embittered, and frustrated man, or one of resignation, or one who has learned to modulate his behavior and values to those of the world.In Beethoven we have the glorious exception to all the rules.
He never stopped the fierce activity of throwing himself at the world, of demanding attention for his values above all others, of insisting on the validity of what he was above all current social values.
This persistence created, finally, one of the greatest bodies of art the world has ever seen, but it cost the man dearly -- it cost him his life, his home, his friends, all ordinary comforts and amenities. It crippled him almost beyond recognition. But even on his deathbed he suddenly started up and threw himself at the world with a clenched fist.
April 9, 1940
Mozart, in his best work, has the profound sadness of a man trying to break out of a form not his own personally: which is to say a man trying to break out of prison. Child and man of his age, he was above it by being underground in it. On the other hand, the personal tragedy of Beethoven, the man, is that HE DID BREAK THROUGH THE FORM! (In Mozart's case it is like the Negro who walks around, personal life in him, contained in a social form which he did not make and from which he can never escape!)In certain periods where the forms of art are breaking down (because of social breakdowns and changes) it is a bondage, a sign of servility, to work within those forms when one's content is in advance of the times. It was between these two worlds that Mozart was beginning to be caught by the time he had reached the age of independent manhood. Against him was ranged the entire world of common usage of the artist, represented by his employers and his very own father, a perfect servant and minor diplomat. The overlords did not want to know or hear what he was feeling and sensing; they wanted only the shell of his genius, never the substance. Here, in the simple and natural protection of his genius, is where Mozart began a subtle change in his life.
He pretended a servility (as Haydn did not have to pretend) by retaining the old decaying forms. And this is how he went underground -- he moved around in these forms freely, saying exactly what he wanted to say, loading them with a rare precise vehemence (which Beethoven was later to bring up into daylight!), often expressing all sorts of censorable materials behind opera masks.
He is a man of great elegance in his art, not all of it natural to his nature. His technical equipment is excellent and enviable. His playing contains a contained feeling of which he is somewhat afraid; and he possesses, when you think of it, little quality of the spirit. His name is Heifetz, and you know all of this when you hear him fiddle Mozart.
March 29, 1940
The man of genius walks, talks, sleeps, eats, loves, and works with a load of dynamite in him. If he carries this load carefully -- balance -- its power for good work and use is enormous -- it can landscape a whole mountainside. Abuse -- out of balance -- is suicide and a bitter grave.It is in this sense that the artist, if he makes a proper amalgam, is beyond good and evil, for everything in him is for creation and life.
For example, let us say that Dostoevsky had impulses of rape in his heart.... See how a great artist held this part of himself within his recognition and acceptance of what he was. Its creative uses were enormous. It gave him work, tone, feeling, anguish, a wealth of feeling. Finally, it was just such "weaknesses" which gave Dostoevsky's novels their religious ecstatic fervor.
In other words ... inner contradictions are not solved by throwing out half of the personality, but by keeping both sides tearing and pulling, often torturing the self, until an AMALGAM ON A HIGH LEVEL OF LIFE AND EXPERIENCE IS ACHIEVED! For the artist there is not "bad". He must throw out nothing, exclude nothing, but always hold in balance. When he has made this balance he has made and found his form.
March 25, 1940
Life was mysterious and impressive to Beethoven, and like a true artist, he was gratified when it showed his face to him. The caprice of fortune he understood very well, the uncertainties of life were always with him. This is clearly in all of his music. What is the romantic temperament? It is amazed, impressed, delighted and enraged by the caprice of life. It is impulsive, swaggering, remonstrating, scolding, pleading, straining, sulking, appealing, denouncing the unfairness of life. It is the romantic who cries out that he is out of harmony with life -- by which he means that life is not in harmony with his vision of the way he saw it as a youth with moral and idealistic hunger to m ix his hands in it and live it fully and deeply. The classic art is to accept life, the romantic to reject it as it is and attempt to make it over as he wants it to be. The classic accepts the forms and conventions of life around it, the romantic breaks them down, rejects, and rebels against them -- they do not fit him -- they were made for the dead and let the dead clutch them in the graves! Yes, with the romantic it is all self-discovery and self-exploration. The injustice and coldness of life is constantly throwing him back on himself, and it is from this center of the expanding demanding growing ego that the romantic functions. The romantic's nature inwardly is one of chaos; this is because there are no accepted or standard values for him -- he will not and does not accept a code made by others. Everything must be tested and measured by his own experience -- anything else is rejected.It is typical that Beethoven scorned the teachings of Haydn and only when much older was able to return to those lesson books and say that he should have paid attention in his youth to the lessons. But to have paid attention would have implied not a Beethoven but a Haydn! The roar of pain which comes from the romantic is real pain, albeit often a pain self-made.
Beethoven roars, Chopin complains, Brahms is resigned and sad. But in each case their pain comes from this real meeting: their ideal vision of life met the reality of life, and they are left with this utterance, "What, is that all it is? Is this all? Nothing else? Down with it!"
True, there is something vastly self-destructive in the essential nature of the romantic, but when he is a good artist he builds a form to gird him in, to prevent the scattering of his life -- his art teches him a way of life and he lives it! Simply that he insisted till the moment he died that his ideal vision of life, of the conduct of men and their interrelationships, was the correct and most valid way to live -- his world was better, and he was willing to fight and die for this belief: he did!
The romantic of the Stendahl type is rare. He understands what has happened to him and his aspirations -- HE DOES NOT ASPIRE IN HIS WORK -- and this detached sense of what has happened later forms the basis of his work, writing, in this case. But this is possible only when the man waits for a good ripe age before setting to work. Stendahl, if we chose, we could call a "romantic iconoclast", the romantic turned ironist, psychologist who looks underneath to reveal with contempt the pitifully paltry forms of life and convention around him.
March 24, 1940
You cannot live in old forms, or work in them, when your life has brought you ahead to a new point. Try better to keep a child in last year's coat. It is simply an intolerable contradiction which must be resolved consciously in order to bring the life and/or work up for a higher level of creativity. Otherwise the spirit dies a death and sterility is the only outcome.Beethoven is the only man or artist I can think of at the moment who never once faltered in this difficult task: he was a fanatic! He hacked and chopped, twisted and tortured, but he did not EXCLUDE a drop of his experience from his work; in each phase of his life he found the right form for an increasingly higher and deeper experience. That is Beethoven's final lesson, if an artist may teach a lesson. Life is a series of rebirths, year after year more difficult, never to be refused, but always to be worked with, coped with, understood, used and used by, never going back, but always moving ahead and higher. Which is what Beethoven did. Easy words to write, these!
Why is Brahms an inferior artist, all other things equal? Because his last period is given over to "resignation" and acceptance. he did not have that same passion of the HEART which was Beethoven's. That is why any last Brahm's work is child's play compared to any last Beethoven work.
Beethoven's work, it must be said, represents the deepest expression of man's faith in life which has ever been written by a man. No artist before or since has expressed so deeply the will to live and accept every fact of life, to be both figuratively and literally crucified for his belief that the way to conquer life is to live without ever once relenting or letting up in that living.
It was Beethoven who understood the passion of Christ, not Bach, for he lived it and experienced it while Bach heard about it in a sort of secondhand way. What some writer once said is true: Bach sacrificed the Church, Beethoven sacrificed himself. His last quartets, a record of his sacrifice (or crucifixion), are more moving to the modern man than any page in the Bible.
March 17, 1940
The bad reviews of Night Music threw me back on myself, but that was good, that is very good, that is as it should always be! But the self independent, resolute! Let there be light, an inner light, a personal light, a light which touches unconscious negative plates of the plays to come with exactly the correct intensity. Keep away from those sensitive negative plates all light from the outside, but all! Later there will always be time to respond to the outside beams.
In this entry he describes the out-of-town tryout of his new play "Night Music" - It would be the last play the Group Theatre did as a company. The failure of "Night Music" was the death knell for the ensemble - despite the fact that it is a LOVELY play. But Odets - radical revolutionary playwright of the early 1930s - wasn't supposed to write lovely comedic romances. The audience wouldn't forgive him for it. It was seen as a BETRAYAL, not just a play they didn't like.
February 22, 1940
The performance of the play was tip-top -- the cast had never been better. The play suffered from what had always been wrong with it because of a certain lack in the direction -- a lack of clear outlining of situations, a lack of building up scenes, a certain missing in places of dramatic intensity. But none of these things was enough to do vital harm to a beautiful show, smooth, powerful and yet tender, fresh, moving, and touching, with real quality in all the parts. But I could see during the first act that the audience was taking it more seriously than it deserved; and I knew that the old thing was here again -- the critics had come expecting a King Lear, not a small delicate play. It all made me very tired, but at the end I thought to myself that it didn't matter, for the show was more or less what I intended; it was lovely and fresh, no matter what the critics said. And I knew, too, that if another and unknown writer's name had been on the script, there would have been critical raves that day.People surged backstage after the curtain -- they all seemed to have had a good time. There were the usual foolish remarks from many of them -- "Enjoyable, but I don't know why," etc., etc. Also a good deal of insincere gushing from a lot of people who would like nothing better than to stick a knife in your ribs, God knows why!
I invited some people down to the house for a drink. Along came the Eislers, Kozlenkos, Bette, Julie [John] Garfield, Boris Aronson, Harry Carey and his wife, Morris [Carnovsky] and Phoebe [Brand] later, Harold [Clurman], Aaron Copland and Victor [Kraft], Bobby Lewis and his Mecican woman, etc., etc. We drank champagne, Scotch when the wine ran out, talked, smoked, filthied up the house, listened to some music. Then they went and I dropped into bed, dog-tired, unhappy, drunk, knowing what the reviews would be like in the morning. In and out I slept, in and out of a fever -- all of modern twentieth-century life in one day and a night.
February 22, 1940
Stella Adler was there with a party, smoke-eyed and neurotic -- usually when you are dying she is more dramatic about the event than you are!
February 1, 1940
In the Moussorgsky songs, if you do not have the emotion you do not have the song, not even the shadow of the song. Chekhov could hope to find and did find actors to play his plays; where can the talent of Moussorgsky find singers to sing his songs? For the point of each of M's songs is not in the notes, not in the words, but between them, a sort of suggested emotional line without which the song simply does not exist. Here is where the conventional songsinger is shown up for what he is, a tracer on glass, a sharper or duller instrument at his use, but not more. The trouble with the damn singers, unless they are fat and fifty, is that they do not give themselves a chance. They don't listen to the songs, they are not open to the music and what it emotionally suggests. Leaving aside the emotional significance, they can't even play with humor, with charm, deftness, alertness. Their backsides should be kicked off till they ache!
January 27, 1940
Perhaps this constant uncovering of the self is one of the prime impulses in the creative mechanism, it and the constant effort to relate the self to persons, things -- a woman -- outside of the self. All of the characters in my plays have the common activity of "a search for reality". Well, it's my activity before it's theirs. And before it was mine it was the activity of almost any serious artist who ever lived, from the breakdown of feudalism till today. When you say an artist died still looking for his form, as, for instance, Beethovern and Cezanne did, you mean he died still looking for his reality.A man named Turner wrote a book on Beethoven and was very smart -- he called the book "Beethoven -- the search for reality." Woe to the artist who is able someday to look at his life and say, "Yes, this is it. Here I rest."
January 23, 1940
But one must make sure to write from a firm core even though, in my opinion, an attempt to reach as broad an audience as possible should always be taken into consideration. I thought once that it would be enough to play in a small cellar, but I soon saw that those who would come to the cellar were not the ones in need of what I could say.
January 17, 1940
Much of love for me is in giving. Unfortunately, I am not one of the receivers in life. I receive badly, restlessly, shamefully.
That last one kills me. I am the same.
Happy birthday, Clifford. And thank you thank you for your plays.
The Books: "The Passion" (Jeanette Winterson)
Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt:
The Passion
The Passion is one of my favorite books of all time. It's one of those books, too, that I can read, and read again, and again, and never get sick of. It always weaves its spell. Fantastic. To me, it is Winterson at the height of her powers. When she started getting introspective (in my opinion), when her imagination started turning inward - I lost interest a bit. Not forever, mind you - but I kept waiting for, you know, a story - in her next couple of books - something that was on the extraordinary level of Sexing the Cherry and The Passion ... and it wasn't there. Now, Winterson has no obligation to me, specifically. It is just my taste speaking. She obviously had other things to say, and wanted to try other things in her writing - and kudos to her for feeling free enough to do that. Winterson is nothing if not ambitious and fearless. I guess it's tough when you count a book as your all-time favorite, one of your beloved books. I don't THINK I sat around waiting for her to write another Passion - that's not really my thing either ... Oh well. Who knows. All I can say is: The Passion is a terrific novel and a book I hold very dear to my heart. There are characters in those pages - Villanelle, Domino, Napoleon - who will stay with me forever. Winterson creates scenes that will forever be emblazoned on my memory: the frigid Russian winter, the casino in Venice, the eerie prison/mental hospital on the island at the end ... These are WORLDS she creates. A writer really is like a god in that way - she creates worlds. Winterson's world has logic and magic, walking hand in hand ... and you may not believe something happens logically - but you believe in the magic. It's just great stuff - and I can't recommend The Passion highly enough. I love love love this book.
There are two narrators: Henri, a young kid who ends up being Napoleon's personal cook - and Villanelle - a cross-dressing web-footed red-headed woman from Venice. Napoleon Bonaparte has begun his World Takeover Campaign and Henri, a farm boy with no life experience, finds himself swept up in it. He believes in Napoleon. Napoleon is his hero (although you can kind of tell, from the prose of his narration, that his idol has fallen off the pedestal ... and he is writing about this in some kind of terrible retrospect). Henri believes in what Napoleon says. It is after the winter campaign - going in to Russia - when Henri realizes that Napoleon is mad, that any ends justify the means ... and that his idol is actually a maniac. You get the sense that Henri is actually quite fragile. He has not recovered, emotionally, from losing his idol. There is something terrible in a world that crashes your idols. But anyway, that's part of Henri's side of the story.
Villanelle is one of the great literary creations. I find her, frankly, impossible to resist. So I guess I'm like all the men (and women) who fall down like ninepins at her feet, dying for love of her. She lives in Venice with her mother and stepfather - who is a simple kindly baker. The sections on Venice - and what Venice is like, and what it means to Villanelle (whose family have been Venetians for centuries) - and how the city is a shape-shifter, the watery alleys and roads never in the same place, a city to get lost in ... anyway, the Venice sections are among the most spectacular in the book. Winterson (Villanelle) seems to be writing about a fantastical place where magical things can happen ... not an actual city on the globe ... but that is how Villanelle sees it. She was born under strange circumstances - and she knows that there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio (etc.) ... She, too, is a shape-shifter. At night, she dresses up as a boy and goes and works in a huge casino. She puts a beauty mark on her face, to kind of mess with gender expectations ... and she pickpockets people to get extra cash. Men fall in love with her/him. Perhaps they look at the boy working the roulette wheel, or the blackjack table ... and find something appealingly feminine about him ... who knows what ... and they find themselves rubbing up against her. Women openly fall for this small red-headed boy ... and Villanelle enjoys a rich (if insane and complicated) sexual and romantic life. But it is not until she meets one particular elegant woman at the casino that all hell starts to break loose. Villanelle has never been in love. She has plenty of experience - but no experience of the heart. She meets a woman in the casino and is immediately smitten. This woman is married - to a distracted man, a shipbuilder (if I remember correctly) - and Villanelle and she begin a passionate affair.
Okay, so there's that.
Meanwhile. Napoleon is still on his rampage. He has taken over Venice. This, to Villanelle, is sacrilege. Disgusting to her. Things begin to break down with the woman of her heart - perhaps she is not willing to risk all, who knows ... but their liaison begins to end, and Villanelle realizes that her heart has been stolen. Literally. She puts her hand on her chest and feels no heart beat anymore. She becomes convinced that it is SOMEWHERE in her ex-lover's house, and she must get in there to get it back.
Villanelle never knew her father. Her father was one of the mysterious class of people known as the "Venetian boatmen" - those who propel the gondolas through the streets and alleys, and have been doing so for centuries. The boatmen have their own rites, as secret as the dead, and stories - terrible and beautiful - are passed down through generations. The legend is that all boatmen have webbed feet. But if anyone outside the charmed boatman circle ever SEES the webbed feet - they will go mad. There are stories of such encounters. Villanelle's mother found herself pregnant - and before the baby was born - the father disappeared. When the baby was born, alas - it was a girl (women are not allowed to carry on the boatman tradition) - with red hair ... and ohmygod - webbed feet. In the entire history of the Venetian boatmen, there has never been a woman with webbed feet. So it is apparent from Day One that things will be different and difficult with this small red-headed girl. Villanelle's mother marries again - this time a baker - and they seem to accept that every night their daughter puts on men's clothes and stays out all night in casinos.
Villanelle's love affair eventually crashes and burns, and she finds herself without a heart. Nothing matters anymore, so she joins up with Napoleon's army - or, should I say, becomes one of the throngs of prostitutes who follow the men around, from country to country. Love doesn't matter anymore. And her country has been taken over by an insane Frenchman. Nothing matters. Villanelle is a gambler at heart. Her whole thing is: "You play. You win. You play. You lose. You play." That's it. THAT is the game of life.
It is in her time as a prostitute that she meets Henri.
Henri, like many men before and probably after, falls head over heels in love with her - although his true love is, of course, Bonaparte.
You just get the sense that whoever ends up being with Villanelle will have to be worldly, in some way. Henri, with his sweet farmboy innocence, has no idea what he is getting himself into. But isn't that how "passion" often is? Passion is not safe. Passion does not hedge its bets. Passion doesn't look before it leaps.
I hesitate to say anymore about this book - the way it all unfolds has a terrible inevitability ... and Winterson really has things to say about love. Her voice (like I mentioned) is distinctive. No one can write about love and come up with anything new. Impossible. But to find a way to write about passion (sexual, romantic) that feels new - well, that is quite an accomplishment.
There are scenes of Villanelle - at midnight, 1, 2 a.m., in her gondola, parked outside of her ex-lover's house - where the ex-lover is ensconced with her husband - Villanelle knows that her heart is in there somewhere and life cannot continue for her until she gets it back ...
You know. That feels new. It is logical, too. Winterson writes the fantastical as though it is the most normal thing in the world.
It is my favorite of all of her books. I'll probably do one or two excerpts.
But here is the opening of the book. It is Henri's first section. I read this even now - even after reading the book multiple times - and I want to keep reading. It's hypnotic. What on EARTH is going to happen?
EXCERPT FROM The Passion
It was Napoleon who had such a passion for chicken that he kept his chefs working around the clock. What a kitchen that was, with birds in every state of undress; some still cold and slung over hooks, some turning slowly on the spit, but most in wasted piles because the Emperor was busy.
Odd to be so governed by an appetite.
It was my first commission. I started as a neck wringer and before long I was the one who carried the platter through inches of mud to his tent. He liked me because I am short. I flatter myself. He did not dislike me. He liked no one except Josephine and he liked her the way he liked chicken.
No one over five foot two ever waited on the Emperor. He kept small servants and large horses. The horse he loved was seventeen hands high with a tail that could wrap round a man three times and still make a wig for his mistress. That horse had the evil eye and there's been almost as many dead groom sin the stable as chickens on the table. The ones the beast didn't kill itself with an easy kick, its master had disposed of because its coat didn't shine or the bit was green.
'A new government must dazzle and amaze,' he said. Bread and circuses I think he said. Not surprising then that when we did find a groom, he came from a circus himself and stood as high as the horse's flank. When he brushed the beast he used a ladder with a stout bottom and a triangle top, but when he rode him for exercise he took a great leap and landed square on the glossy back while the horse reared and snorted and couldn't throw him, not even with its nose in the dirt and its back legs towards God. Then they'd vanish in a curtain of dust and travel for miles, the midget clinging to the mane and whooping in his funny language that none of us could understand.
But he understood everything.
He made the Emperor laugh and the horse couldn't better him, so he stayed. And I stayed. And we became friends.
We were in the kitchen tent one night when the bell starts ringing like the Devil himself is on the other end. We all jumped up and one rushed to the spit while another spat on the silver and I had to get my boots back on ready for that tramp across the frozen ruts. The midget laughed and said he'd rather take a chance with the horse than the master, but we don't laugh.
Here it comes surrounded by parsley the cook cherishes in a dead man's helmet. Outside the flakes are so dense that I feel like the little figure in a child's snowstorm. I have to screw up my eyes to follow the yellow stain that lights up Napoleon's tent. No one else can have a light at this time of night.
Fuel's scarce. Not all of this army have tents.
When I go in, he's sitting alone with a globe in front of him. He doesn't notice me, he goes on turning the globe round and round, holding it tenderly with both hands as if it were a breast. I give a short cough and he looks up suddenly with fear in his face.
'Put it here and go.'
'Don't you want me to carve it, Sir?'
'I can manage. Goodnight.'
I know what he means. He hardly ever asks me to carve now. As soon as I'm gone he'll lift the lid and pick it up and push it into his mouth. He wishes his whole face were mouth to cram a whole bird.
In the morning I'll be lucky to find the wishbone.
There is no heat, only degrees of cold. I don't remember the feeling of a fire against my knees. Even in the kitchen, the warmest place on any camp, the heat is too thin to spread and the copper pans cloud over. I take off my socks once a week to cut my toe-nails and the others call me a dandy. We're white with red noses and blue fingers.
The tricolour.
He does it to keep his chickens fresh.
He uses winter like a larder.
But that was a long time ago. In Russia.
Nowadays people talk about the things he did as though they made sense. As though even his most disastrous mistakes were only the result of bad luck or hubris.
It was a mess.
Words like devastation, rape, slaughter, carnage, starvation are lock and key words to keep the pain at bay. Words about war that are easy on the eye.
I'm telling you stories. Trust me.
July 17, 2008
Vintage posters
As should probably be obvious, I love all things vintage. I barely have interest in anything after 1965, to tell you the truth. Which is hysterical - because I was born after 1965.
I'm not against progress. I love things like air conditioning and gay people not having to be in the closet and direct deposit. It's just that I also enjoy wearing saddle shoes. I like stockings with seams. I think movies look better in black and white. I love men in hats. I think smoking can be sexy. I love to be called a "dame".
Etc.
Which is why I love this site of vintage posters. I love the old travel posters (I mean, isn't this awesome??) - but I also adore the old WPA posters, with public service announcements (it's all syphillis all the time, apparently), and stuff like that. Here's the page of WPA posters. And I used to have a lunchbox with this image on it. Where the hell did it go?
This one is particularly good, I think (or maybe, being so blind, I just relate to it):
A man who works with a hoe ....
We love playing Taboo. It's one of our favorite group games. We had a rousing round of it on our vacation ... and there were many hilarious moments (Schindler's List is a children's movie? Who knew?? Or Bren trying to get Jean to say the word "Iron" - so he started off with the slam-dunk clue "Robert Downey Jr." and Jean promptly replied, "Junkie." Like- WHAT??? We all sat around howling with laughter, lounging around on the big curvy couch, after a long stressful day of swimming and reading and paddle-boat-ing.)
So.
I was trying to get Jean to say "Manure" ... WITHOUT using the words "farm" "field" "cow" "farmer" or ... you know, you get the idea.
I began with the clue:
"Poop from an animal."
I SO thought that my clue would make this a done deal. There was no way on earth that anyone could ever say anything other than "manure" in response to my BRILLIANT clue!! I had NAILED it! I was so ready to go on to the next card! Ba-da-BING - ba-da-BOOM!! Slam dunk!
Jean said, "Scat."
And it was downhill from there. We all started just laughing (not that "scat" isn't correct - it was my own certainty that "manure" was the ONLY thing she could say ... and how it so derailed me into madness) - and everything just started going nuts - and so now I had to turn myself inside out to get her to say "manure".
My next clue was:
"A man who works with a hoe ..." (I was not allowed to use "farmer", you understand ... ) and I had more to say about that "man working with his hoe" - because I needed to paint a more detailed picture - but before I could go on, Jean said:
"A pimp."
A man who works with "hos" is CLEARLY a pimp!
I never recovered. It was a lost round of Taboo. We are still laughing about it.
"Poop from an animal!"
"Scat."
"A man who works with a hoe ..."
"A pimp."
Put a "hoe" in Sheila. This round of Taboo is over.
The Books: "Sexing the Cherry" (Jeanette Winterson)
Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt:
Sexing the Cherry
A strange and wonderful book. I haven't read it in years, and just flipping thru it this morning made me want to pick it up again. It's truly bizarre ... with elements of history (it's set during the reign of Charles II in a pestilential London) mixed with straight-up fairy tale (princesses flying out of their bedroom windows at night). There are dual narrators. One is a semi-horrible yet benign woman named The Dog-Woman - a fat filthy character who has a throng of dogs living with her ... and the other is her foundling son, Jordan. Jordan (if I am remembering correctly) has wanderlust - and has a small boat, he rides around on the Thames watching the sun rise. He befriends a man who is somehow in service to the King - and this man was responsible for bringing the first pineapple to England. This sort of thing makes Jordan dream of other places, other worlds. Could he get there without actually traveling? Much of his travels appear to take place in his own mind - but again, with Winterson, you can never be sure.
Jordan has fallen in love with someone from afar - a dancer - and he has set his heart on finding her again. His search takes him far and wide, and it seems that he must be just day-dreaming, he can't actually believe that princesses fly out of their windows at night, can he? But in this world of pestilence and fire, of brand new fruits like pineapples, of time seeming like something that is fluid as opposed to fixed - anything is possible.
Like I said, much of the detail is lost to me, although I remember the structure quite well. It was mesmerizing to me the first time I read it. I know just where I was. I bought it in a beautiful bookshop across the Golden Gate bridge from San Francisco. We were in a cute little town and there was an outdoor cafe. I had been living in a van for 2 months. (No, I was not trying to be like "Ooh, I was homeless once" Jewel.) I was, myself, outside of time and space. At least it felt that way. For 2 months, I had no address but that Westfalia, all my stuff was in boxes in my parents attic - and it's quite an interesting (and at times disorienting) position to be in. You are unmoored. No way back because where would you go?? We were near the end of our unmoored journey and things had gotten very bad for me. I was reaching what I call the "wordless time" - when everything slowed to a standstill, and pretty much stopped - until the damn Westfalia broke and I found myself shouting at cops in Woodland Hills, California, and showing them my empty wallet and how I couldn't pay for the tow. And within a month, I had moved to Chicago. Sight unseen. Broken up with my boyfriend of 4 years, leaving him behind in San Francisco ... wondering what the hell had happened to his girlfriend. I'm not saying that Sexing the Cherry had anything to do with my descent into wordless paralysis. I just know that I read it right before I went under. It's a vivid memory. The book is a small book, not even 200 pages, but it sucked me in. I read it in a day, probably. There are no rules in the book. I found that refreshing. I was sick of rules. Rules were killing me, strangling me. I couldn't play by the world's rules. They didn't "fit" for me. I was losing it. Sexing the Cherry swoops into 17th century England - and there are times you feel you are reading historical fiction - with the civil wars and trials and all that ... and then there are times when reality unhinges itself, and anything at all can happen. You are in a Swiftian world, like Gulliver visiting the floating island in the sky land ... these alternate realities have their own rules they must obey. Things are logical - yet they are also fantastical.
I found that such a refreshing point of view, after being so trapped in logic nothing but logic. To me, ONLY logic makes no sense at all. I need the fantastical in order to breathe. Seems that Winterson understands that. I love her sensibility.
Here's an excerpt. You'll see what I mean about not being sure what is real and what is not. It is clear, from a couple of words, that Jordan is daydreaming about visiting this place - but the description of this town is so detailed, and goes on so long, that it takes on the trappings of something that is real, and actual. If there is anything I truly love about Winterson's writing - it is THAT ability of hers.
I know many people find her to be one of the best writers about love that is out there. That is true. But for me, that's not the hook (although I recognize her skill in that area). For me, the hook is the magical-reality thing that she does, weaving in illusion with down-and-dirty fact - seamlessly ... making you question things, and also making you succumb, like a good reader should, to the logic of the fairy tale. Because, in the end, there is NOTHING more logical than a good fairy tale. It's Winterson's fairy-tale esthetic that gets me every time. Love it.
EXCERPT FROM Sexing the Cherry
The shining water and the size of the world.
I have seen both again and again since I left my mother on the banks of the black Thames, but in my mind it is always the same place I return to, and that one place not the most beautiful nor the most surprising.
To escape from the weight of the world, I leave my body where it is, in conversation or at dinner, and walk through a series of winding streets to a house standing back from the road.
The streets are badly lit and the distance from one side to the other no more than the span of my arms. The stone crumbles, the cobbles are uneven. The people who throng the streets shout at each other, their voices rising from the mass of heads and floating upwards towards the church spires and the great copper bells that clang the end of the day. Their words, rising up, form a thick cloud over the city, which every so often must be thoroughly cleansed of too much language. Men and women in balloons fly up from the main square and, armed with mops and scrubbing brushes, do battle with the canopy of words trapped under the sun.
The words resist erasure. The oldest and most stubborn form a thick crust of shattering rage. Cleaners have been bitten by words still quarrelling, and in one famous lawsuit a woman whose mop had been eaten and whose hand was badly mauled by a vicious row sought to bring the original antagonists to court. The men responsible made their defence on the grounds that the words no longer belonged to them. Years had passed. Was it their fault if the city had failed to deal with its overheads? The judge ruled against the plaintiff but ordered the city to buy her a new mop. She was not satisfied, and was later found lining the chimneys of her accused with vitriol.
I once accompanied a cleaner in a balloon and was amazed to hear, as the sights of the city dropped away, a faint murmuring like bees. The murmuring grew louder and louder till it sounded like the clamouring of birds, then like the deafening noise of schoolchildren let out for the holidays. She pointed with her mop and I saw a vibrating mass of many colours appear before us. We could no longer speak to each other and be heard.
She aimed her mop at a particularly noisy bright red band of words who, from what I could make out, had escaped from a group of young men on their way home from a brothel. I could see from the set of my companion's mouth that she found this particular job distasteful, but she persevered, and in a few moments all that remained was the fading pink of a few ghostly swear-words.
Next we were attacked by a black cloud of wrath spewed from a parson caught fornicating his mother. The cloud wrapped around the balloon and I feared for our lives. I could not see my guide but I could hear her coughing against the noxious smell. Suddenly I was drenched in a sweet fluid and all returned to lightness.
'I have conquered them with Holy Water,' she said, showing me a stone jar marked with the Bishop's seal.
After that our task was much easier. Indeed I was sorry to see the love-sighs of young girls swept away. My companion, though she told me it was strictly forbidden, caught a sonnet in a wooden box and gave it to me as a memento. If I open the box by the tiniest amount I may hear it, repeating itself endlessly as it is destined to do until someone sets it free.
Towards the end of the day we joined with the other balloons brushing away the last few stray and vagabond words. The sky under the setting sun was the colour of veined marble, and a great peace surrounded us. As we descended through the clean air we saw, passing us by from time to time, new flocks of words coming from the people in the streets who, not content with the weight of their lives, continually turned the heaviest of things into the lightest of properties.
We landed outside the , where the dons, whose arguments had so thickly populated the ether that they had seen neither sun nor rain for the past five years, welcomed us like heroes and took us in to feast.
That night two lovers whispering under the lead canopy of the church were killed by their own passion. Their effusion of words, unable to escape through the Saturnian discipline of lead, so filled the spaces of the loft that the air was all driven away. The lovers suffocated, but when the sacristan opened the tiny door the words tumbled him over in their desire to be free, and were seen flying across the city in the shape of doves.
July 16, 2008
Master and Margarita as graphic novel
Fantastic idea - and take a glimpse at the artwork by Andrzej Klimowski. WOW. Beautiful!
Here's my favorite image from that slideshow.
Just looking at it gives me the creeps, remembering that awful cat in the book and how much I wanted to kick him under the streetcar.
Some of my thoughts on this great great book here - but I definitely need to check out the graphic novel. I am intrigued.
(via Book Slut)
Okay, this is getting ridiculous
Over our family vacation - we were all joking about how Jeff Donovan and promotions of Burn Notice were everywhere. Commercials on television, ads in magazines ... Jeff Jeff Jeff Jeff Jeff. You could not (and cannot) escape. People would open up the NY Times to do the crossword and see Jeff's huge mug staring back at them. Or you'd have the paper opened up, and across the back - a double spread - JEFF!! It became a joke. "Uhm, not sure if you're noticed, but Jeff Donovan is freakin' everywhere right now."
Jeff is my brother's friend - kind of an honorary O'Malley - I've known him for years. He's fun, funny, and loyal. He's beloved by his huge rowdy group of buddies, all of whom have been tight-knit and close for years. And he is really nice to Cashel (who even got to go to one of the screenings of Jeff's films - AND got to ask a question at the QA after the screening!) . So you know what? Being nice to Cashel is all I need to know about a person, as far as I'm concerned. I met Jeff right after Blair Witch 2 came out - which, naturally, did NOT go over as well as he had hoped - although he had a pretty humorous attitude about it - so now, to see him hit it huge with Burn Notice is damn cool.
Last year, you could kind of feel it coming ... I'd be walking down the street and see something like this go by and I'd think: Uhm ...okay ... that was Jeff going by, for God's sake ... I think this is gonna be huge ...
Burn Notice was picked up again for Season 2. Posters have started appearing everywhere - even more intensely since it's now a returning hit - so the subway stations are filled with Jeff, and I see Jeff float by on the sides of busses on a daily basis. One morning I got into an elevator at 30 Rock and nearly had a heart attack because Jeff's enormous face was all over the interior elevator walls - larger than life - a promotion for the show in every single elevator at 30 Rock.
And today I go to my traffic Sitemeter for my blog.
This is what I see.
Jeff. You are now omnipresent.
Congrats.
The Books: "Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit" (Jeanette Winterson)
Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt:
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
Oh, Jeanette Winterson, you crazy egomaniacal sometimes-brilliant sometimes-infuriating lesbian ... how I love you and how you drive me crazy! My relationship with you is akin to my relationship to Tori Amos. I was so into Tori's early albums and then she went off the deep end for a good decade - and now - hoorah - she's back - I LOVE her latest album ... but I loved her earlier albums so much that I stuck with her, through her experimental years, as boring as I found all of that. There aren't too many artists I do that for. Margaret Atwood is another one. I'll read all your books, lady, even when you bore me to tears - just based on, oh, Bodily Harm alone (excerpt here)!!
Jeanette Winterson burst onto the literary scene like a comet shooting towards earth from another galaxy. At least that's how I remember it. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is her first book and it won the Whitbread prize for "first fiction" - and her novels that followed (which I'll get to when I get to) were mind-blowing. She became a star. A huge star. She writes with absolute certainty of her own gifts. She's a writer, sure, but more than that: she's a showman. She glories in her own powers of creation. She can be like Joyce in that way. She was asked once who her favorite writer was - and she said, "Jeanette Winterson." Reminiscent of Joyce's response to the question: "Who is your favorite writer in the English language?": "Well, aside from myself I don't know." It is not popular to be so openly arrogant. It rubs people the wrong way. But that's okay. It's not the artist's job to be a nice polite person who plays by society's rules. And so sometimes (in her later books) that showmanship turns into an obnoxious quality - especially when the book in question doesn't hold up ... but those first couple of books? Holy shit. You read them and just follow her on her magical path - you can't help it. Just surrender. You really have no choice. She'll strong-arm you into loving her, either way. The New York Review of Books said about Oranges:
The overwhelming impression of her work is one of remarkable self-confidence, and she evidently thrives on risk…. As good as Poe: it dares you to laugh and stares you down.
It does have a very aggressive quality to it, her writing. Self-confidence as aggression. And yes, she seems to follow her own star - which involves risk. She doesn't care about how books are supposed to go ... she does her own thing. Oranges is, for all intents and purposes, a memoir - about her childhood growing up with evangelical missionaries - knowing that she was "called" to spread the word of God ... but then discovering that she liked girls, instead of boys. Perhaps that means that she is even more called to greatness, since it goes against the grain - but her fanatic parents do not see it that way, and her discovery of her sexuality and her preferences destroys the family. She ends up running away.
Now with Jeanette Winterson, you can never be sure what is true and what is not true. And it ends up not really mattering. (Perhaps because she's a way better writer than, oh, Mr. James Frey.) The narrator of Oranges is named Jeanette. And her early author biographies in her first books are very funny snarky paragraphs - like: "Jeanette Winterson thought she would be an evangelical Christian her whole life, but then ran away and joined the circus." I'm exaggerating - but not all that much. She seems to thrive on self-creation, meaning: her persona, as a writer, is bold, funny, irreverent - and untruthful. You cannot trust her. But you do not care. (This becomes a main theme of my favorite of her books: The Passion. In that, the web-footed cross-dressing redhead keeps assuring us, the reader, "I'm telling you the truth. Trust me.")
The press that she got in the beginning, the reviews, were the things authors dream of. She was compared to Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The greats. She did not seem to limit herself. She was not bound by the so-called laws of fiction. She would intersperse her narratives with haunting fairy tales, quite terrifying, or stories that sound like Biblical parables. She had no fear.
I LOVE her early stuff. I have friends who really dig her "middle" stuff - which I find interminable and self-indulgent ... but that just goes to show you that it is very difficult to be neutral about Jeanette Winterson. She is polarizing. And judging from some of the stories about her real life, and her dramas (posing nude for one of her author photos) - she's a trip. The first book of hers that I read was The Passion and it remains, to this day, one of my favorite books of all time. It was enough to make me a Jeanette Winterson fan forever. Through thick and thin, girl. I'll read you.
I am so so glad to read her last two books - which seem to be a reversion to what she does best (in my opinion): create magical realities, mixing fairy tale and present-day settings ... but I'll get to those.
Jeanette Winterson weathered the storms of her bad reviews - which began with her book Art and Lies - it was like people were disappointed by her, and took her experimentations personally. I wasn't sure she would be forgiven. But she just kept writing what she wanted to write. On the strength of her earlier books, her reputation remained, despite the fact that she seemed to have gone a bit nuts (there was a huge Vanity Fair piece about her, I recall, which made her sound like a walking-talking psychodrama) - and, what can I say, I'll read whatever that lady writes. And sometimes I'm bored, sometimes I'm pissed ... but anyone who can write a book like The Passion will have my attention forever. Seriously.
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a coming-of-age story. Jeanette's mother is completely wacko. Jeanette grows up in a hothouse Jesus Camp atmosphere in the Midlands of England ... homeschooled, and sent out every weekend to stand on street corners passing out tracts. Eventually, she is forced to go to school ... and it is then that she begins to realize her attraction to her own sex. All hell begins to break loose. But it's not the story that is the stand-out here. It's the writing. It's not poetic writing, or flowery, or nostalgic ... it's not beautiful. It's one of those rare rare moments in life when you read a writer and you think: Wow. This is truly a distinctive voice.
Jeanette Winterson has her own voice, and I feel like I would recognize it anywhere. She lulls you into a sense of complacency, making you feel like, "Oh, okay, I know where I am, I know what kind of book this is ..." and then, with a quick jujitsu move, she rips out the carpet, and tells you a fairy tale. That ends horribly. Or she suddenly adds a magical element - and you are not sure what is real anymore.
I can't believe I haven't written more about Jeanette Winterson - and I'd be VERY interested to hear thoughts from other people like myself who have been reading her for years. She has PASSIONATE fans (of which I am one, despite my reservations about those damn middle books) ... and people really give a shit about her, and what she's working on. She's one of the few writers where I hear she has a new book coming out, and I pre-Order it, to make sure I get it on the damn day it comes out. There can be no waiting for Jeanette Winterson. I cannot WAIT around for the right time to buy her book. I must have it first. And I will drop everything else to read it.
She's not like anybody else.
Here's an excerpt.
EXCERPT FROM Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
It was in this way that I began my education: she taught me to read from the Book of Deuteronomy, and she told me all about the lives of the saints, how they were really wicked, and given to nameless desires. Not fit for worship; this was yet another heresy of the Catholic Church and I was not to be misled by the smooth tongues of priests.
'But I never see any priests.'
'A girl's motto is BE PREPARED.'
I learnt that it rains when clouds collide with a high building, like a steeple, or a cathedral; the impact punctures them, and everybody underneath gets wet. This was why, in the old days, when the only tall buildings were holy, people used to say cleanliness is next to godliness. The more godly your town, the more high buildings you'd have, and the more rain you'd get.
'That's why all these Heathen places are so dry,' explained my mother, then she looked into space, and her pencil quivered. 'Poor Pastor Spratt.'
I discovered that everything in the natural world was a symbol of the Great Struggle between good and evil. 'Consider the mamba,' said my mother. 'Over short distances the mamba can outrun a horse.' And she drew the race on a sheet of paper. She meant that in the short term, evil can triumph, but never for very long. We were very glad, and we sang our favourite hymn, Yield Not To Temptation.
I asked my mother to teach my French, but her face clouded over, and she said she couldn't.
'Why not?'
'It was nearly my downfall.'
'What do you mean?' I persisted, whenever I could. But she only shook her head and muttered something about me being too young, that I'd find out all too soon, that it was nasty.
'One day,' she said finally, 'I'll tell you about Pierre,' then she switched on the radio and ignored me for so long that I went back to bed.
Quite often, she'd start to tell me a story and then go on to something else in the middle, so I never found out what happened to the Earthly Paradise when it stopped being off the coast of India, and I was stuck at 'six sevens are forty-two' for almost a week.
'Why don't I go to school?' I asked her. I was curious about school because my mother always called it a Breeding Ground. I didn't know what she meant, but I knew it was a bad thing, like Unnatural Passions. 'They'll lead you astray,' was the only answer I got.
I thought about all this in the toilet. It was outside, and I hated having to go at night because of the spiders that came over from the coal-shed. My dad and me always seemed to be in the toilet, me sitting on my hands and humming, and him standing up, I supposed. My mother got very angry.
'You come on in, it doesn't take that long.'
But it was the only place to go. We all shared the same bedroom, because my mother was building us a bathroom in the back, and eventually, if she got the partition fitted, a little half-room for me. She worked very slowly though, because she said she had a lot on her mind. Sometimes Mrs White came round to help mix the grout, but then they'd both end up listening to Johnny Cash, or writing a new hand-out on Baptism by Total Immersion. She did finish eventually, but not for three years.
Meanwhile, my lessons continued. I learnt about Horticulture and Garden Pests via the slugs and my mother's seed catalogues, and I developed an understanding of Historical Process through the prophecies in the Book of Revelation, and a magazine called The Plain Truth, which my mother received each week.
'It's Elijah in our midst again,' she declared.
And so I learned to interpret the signs and wonders that the unbeliever might never understand.
'You'll need to when you're out there on the mission field,' she reminded me.
Then, one morning, when we had got up early to listen to Ivan Popov from behind the Iron Curtain, a fat brown envelope plopped through the letter box. My mother thought it was letters of thanks from those who had attended our Healing of the Sick crusade in the town hall. She ripped it open, then her face fell.
'What is it?' I asked her.
'It's about you.'
'What about me?'
'I have to send you to school.'
I whizzed into the toilet and sat on my hands; the Breeding Ground at last.
July 15, 2008
The Books: "Breaking and Entering" (Joy Williams)
Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt:
Breaking and Entering
Wonderful book! It's amazing to me how many voices Joy Williams can assume. In this book, people talk and talk and talk. It's a book about drifters, and the people they encounter along the way. These people have stories to tell, and sometimes they talk for 2 or 3 pages. The voices are all completely distinct - you would never mistake one for another. Joy Williams is channeling, basically. The chorus of different voices is one of the best things about this book.
Liberty and Willie are a couple. They have been together since high school, and they are now married. They live in the Florida Keys. For "fun" (although it doesn't seem really fun - it seems more like a compulsion), they break into people's houses when those people are assumed to be away (mail piled up, cars gone, etc.) - and live there for a week or so. They never stay in one house for long. Willie is in charge of the timing. He's the one who looks around and decides, time to be moving on now. Liberty seems rather passive. Somewhat sad. We don't know why yet. She is connected to Willie - not just because of a marriage license but because of their shared history - much of which is quite dark (it unfolds slowly throughout the book). At times, it is not clear why Liberty stays with Willie. But Willie is not a loser. He has a glitter about him. He's handsome. People are attracted to him. When they break into people's houses - he likes to take even more risks: living in a house that is not theirs, picking up an invite out of the piled-up mail to some dinner party - and he and Liberty will go, saying they know so-and-so, cousins from out of town, whatever ... They do not worry about covering their tracks. Willie wants the people to KNOW that "they" were there when they return. He makes sure to leave their head dents in the pillow. He takes photographs of Liberty with their camera, and leaves the film inside, undeveloped. It's a risk-filled life. It seems to fill some abyss of emptiness. Liberty is a follower. She doesn't try to put the brakes on Willie, because what would be the point of that. Liberty has a dog - a big huge white dog with creepy eyes the color of ice cubes. The dog's name is Clem. Clem is a conversation-starter. People see him and stop in their tracks. Nobody wants to pet him. People are almost afraid of him. What he represents is dependent upon the person looking at him. It's like he's a blank screen onto which people project their longings, fears.
Willie and Liberty do this breaking and entering thing almost as a vacation. It's not that they are homeless. They have a home. It's a small home, nothing fancy - but a home nonetheless. It's that there's something between them - an abyss - something - that makes it difficult to just sit on the couch at night and be together. There is no ease between them. Over the course of the book you realize what it is that has gone down ... Liberty is a depressive, that much is obvious ... and Willie appears to look upon his role as caretaker. He leads her around. Perhaps because he feels he owes her that much, who knows.
I love this book. I love every word. I love all the crazy people they meet - the nightguards, the neighbors ... I love the mystery in the prose, how it doesn't reveal all ... I love the deep sadness that is apparent in the book, only Williams never comes out and states it openly. It's just a mood. A sense. There's a lot of talk in the book - like I said, most of the book is long conversation ... There's something about Liberty and Willie that makes people open up, and want to divulge all. Especially Willie. People look at Willie and somehow feel that he might save them. But from what? Willie senses this trend as well and figures he should go with it, and inhabit whatever it is that people want to see ... If people look at him and see a savior (not in a religious sense - but a moral sense, perhaps even a physical sense) ... then who is he to deny them that? Liberty stands back, watching how people are drawn to Willie, and she loves him, too ... but from her perspective, perhaps she sees more of a con artist at work. Who knows. The irony is that Willie, even though he knows her best, cannot save her. He failed her. This is his greatest tragedy, and I'm not sure he can forgive himself.
This is a wonderful book - hauntingly written, at times quite funny - and also nervewracking. They hang out in these houses, taking baths, having sex, walking around, trying on the people's clothes ... and you want to tell them to knock this shit OFF - you could get caught!!
I suppose that is the point, for them.
Highly recommended book, my favorite (so far) of all of Williams' stuff.
EXCERPT FROM Breaking and Entering
The Umbertons had many possessions. The house was heavily furnished. They had glass torcheres, leather couches, massive sideboards, thick carpets. And then the house was cluttered with small objects. The objects were of a different quality, as though the Umbertons had bought them for somebody else and then took them back after a quarrel. The kind of objects intended for a recipient who died before the occasion of giving.
On the leather-topped desk in the living room was a framed photograph of the Umbertons on their wedding day. They were standing on marble steps, he one step above her. He had a crew cut, her dress a long train. On the desk too was a picture of a large orange cat in front of a Christmas tree. It was obvious that a superior choice had been made that year in the selection of the tree, for in an album photos of many previous Christmas trees were mounted. The kitchen cupboards were filled with an assortment of nourishing and sensible canned goods. Large clothes hung in the closets in predominant colors of blue and beige. There was a cabinet off the bath that was filled with nothing but toilet paper.
"This is how some people prepare for nuclear attack," Willie said, staring in at the treasure of white two-ply.
The Umbertons could be imagined as tall. The sinks and counters were set several inches higher than usual. Perhaps they had even become giants since their wedding day. The beds were oversized, the coffee mugs. Everything was heavy duty.
The Umbertons could be imagined as loving games. In one of the roofs was a pool table and a pinball machine. On the walls of this room hung a series of coconut shell heads, loonily embellished. An entire community of coconuts, masculine and feminine, mean and happy, hanging on the wall, contemplating the Umbertons' life of leisure. In the kitchen it was clear that the Umbertons loved their Cuisinart, for which they had many attachments, and their orange cat, who had a box full of toys. Clem looked the box over. He selected a rubber pig, which squealed, and went off with it.
The sofas had pads under the legs to protect the rugs. The toilets had deodorant sticks to protect the integrity of the bowls. There was plastic on the lamp shades to protect them from dust and on the mattresses to shield them from nocturnal emissions. The Umbertons were waging a sprightly war against decline. They protected their possessions as though they had given birth to them.
"How about cutting my hair?" Willie asked Liberty. "Just a trim."
She knew his intention and shook her head. He would gather the hair up and put it in the middle of the rug when they left, or on the table, in the center of something. Nothing would be missing, nothing out of place, but addressing the Umbertons when they returned, would be a mass of hair.
"You can't read my mind," Willie said. "I just wanted my hair cut."
"It doesn't need it," Liberty said. "It's fine the way it is, it looks good, I like it."
"I could write your diary," Willie said.
"That's a terrible thing to say," Liberty said. Then she said, "That's not true." Finally she said, "I wouldn't keep a diary."
Beyond the windows the bay winked greenly. It was sick, filling up with silt. Each day there was less oxygen in the water than the day before. It labored against the cement wall the Umbertons had erected between them and it.
Liberty went into a sewing room off the kitchen. There were patterns and folds of fabric, a sewing machine and a dressmaker's dummy. The room was snug and painted a placid peace. A calendar on the wall showed tittering bunnies and kittens playing musical chairs in a wholesome meadow. The room was obviously Mrs. Umberton's tender retreat from the large life she shared with Mr. Umberton. Liberty sat on a hassock covered with a cheerful chintz and felt the top slip slightly. Removing the lid, she found inside a well-thumbed paperback with a torn cover. He plunged his head between her spread thighs, Liberty read. Lunging and licking, he thrust his tongue in her sea-smelling channels and velvet whorls tasting the wine which is fermented by desire. He drew back and she whined in pleasure as she saw his glistening shaft ...
Liberty threw the book back into the hassock and went into the living room. Willie was holding his hands above a spray of plastic flowers in a bud vase as though he were warming them there.
"What are we looking for here," Liberty asked, "just in general?"
"You know, when anesthesia was first invented, many doctors didn't want to use it," Willie said. "They felt it would rob God of the earnest cries for help that arose from those in time of trouble."
"Anesthesia," Liberty said. "You can't rob God."
"I keep having this dream," Willie said. "It's a typical prison dream. I'm wandering around, doing what I please, choosing this, ignoring that. And then I realize I'm locked up."
Liberty looked at Willie, who was turning and folding his hands. Her own hands were trembling, and her mind darted, this way and that. Once, on a sunny day, much like this day, she had been driving down the road in their truck and she had seen a male cardinal that had just been struck by a car. It lay rumpled, on the road's shoulder, and the female rose and dipped in confusion and fright about it, urging it to continue, to go on with her. Liberty's mind moved like that, like that wretched, bewildered bird.
***
During the night, it rained. The rain came down in warm, rattling sheets. It pounded the beach sand smooth, it dimpled the bay, it clattered the brown fronds of palms where rats lived. It entered the lagoons and aquifers and passed through the Umbertons' screens. Willie was playing pinball. Liberty could hear the flap of the paddles and the merry bells. She lay on her stomach on a rug in another room, glancing through the only other reading material in the house, a newspaper, several weeks old.
The local paper was highly emotional and untrustworthy. Trust was not a guarantee made to the paper's readers, but certain things could be counted upon. One could expect, on any given day, a picture of a lone, soaring gull, a naked child holding a garden hose, or a recipe for a casserole containing okra. The editors took paragraphs from the wires for international affairs and concentrated on local color and horror - the migrant worker who killed his five children by sprinkling malathion on their grits; the seven-car pile-ups; the starving pet ponies with untrimmed hooves the size of watermelons. In this particular edition, there was one article of considerable interest, Liberty thought. It was an article about babies, babies in some large, northern city.
A nurse had made the first mistake. She had mixed up two newborn babies and given them to the wrong mothers for nursing. A second nurse on a different shift switched them back again. The first nurse, realizing her initial error, switched them a third time, switched the little bracelets on their wrists, switched the coded, scribbled inserts on their rolling baskets. At this point, the situation had become hopelessly scrambled. Three days passed. The mothers went home with the wrong babies. This was not a Prince and Pauper-type story. Both mothers had nice homes and fathers and siblings for the baby. Four months later the hospital called and told the mothers they had the wrong babies. They had proof. Toe prints and blood types. Chemical proof. They had done the things professionals do to prove that a person was the person he was supposed to be. The mothers were hysterical. They had fallen in love with the wrong babies and now they didn't want to give their wrong babies up. But apparently it had to be done. It seemed to be the law.
Liberty put the paper aside, closed her eyes and listened to the rain. It rang against the glass like voices, like the voices of children screaming in a playground. Children's voices sounded the same everywhere, a murmurous growth, a sweet hovering, untranslatable, like wind or water, moving.
Liberty and Willie were wanderers, they were young but they had wandered for years, as though through a wilderness, staying for days or weeks or months in towns with names like Coy or Peachburg or Diamondhead or Hurley. Then larger towns, cities, still as though through a wilderness, for there was no path for them or way - West Palm, Jacksonville, Sarasota. There was always a little work, a little place to stay, and then there was this other thing, this thing that was like an enchantment, this energy that kept them somehow going, this adopted, perverse skill of inhabiting the space others had made for themselves. For they themselves were not preparing for anything, they were not building anything, they were just moving along, and Liberty was aware that this house thing, this breaking and entering thing - time for the thing, they'd say, let's do the thing - became more frequent, accelerated, just before they left a town.
The rain increased, it fell in shapes, its voice children's voices.
Seeing Stalag 17 on the big screen:
Tonight I joined up with my cousin Liam (full of frenzy about War and Peace - he's about 100 pages ahead of me and his book has MAPS and lists of characters and I am tremendously envious of that), his wife Lydia (pregnant - yippee!!), and my cousin Kerry (who, yes, can be seen in a crucial scene in M. Night's The Happening, not to mention singing the National Anthem at Fenway in August, I mean - come ON) met up at The Walter Reade Theatre at Lincoln Center this evening to see Stalag 17, part of the William Holden retrospective going on.
A couple of observations:
-- I have never seen this film on the big screen. It was awesome. And it's a terrific theatre.
-- There was a deaf ancient woman sitting behind us who whispered at certain points in the loudest stage whisper ever known to man, "That's William Holden" or "That's Otto Preminger ..." ... in case any of us were unsure on those points.
-- Seeing William Holden in action on the big screen (and Wilder, I have to say, is really stingy with the close-ups - he does NOT rely on them as shorthand, he holds back - most of the scenes are group scenes - so when he moves in close, boy oh boy, does it mean something) was a revelation. He is even more powerful than can possibly be imagined when you're watching his movies on a small screen in your apartment. He is a true movie star. Marvelously entertaining.
-- When watched alone, Stalag 17 can be rather unbalancing. And I suppose it was tonight as well, in a larger group. It's a comedy but it has moments of true tragedy and bleakness. Long sections occur with no shenanigans or hijinx. It's a "comedy" about filthy prisoners of war. It's an odd mix. But it works. What was great watching it tonight - in that huge theatre - with a packed house - was realizing how funny it is, and how the movie still works so well as a comedy.
-- I've seen the movie a bunch of times, and certain elements become clearer to me in different viewings - but this particular time - there's an ongoing "bit" where William Holden lights his match off of another person. It's one of his main adversaries - the wonderfully scruffy and modern anti-hero Duke (played by Neville Brand) - with the hair falling in his face, and the great beefy body. Yum. Duke spends the entire film suspicious of Sefton (Holden) and having to be held back from outright attacking him. Holden, at three separate points throughout the film, takes out his cigar, and a match - and - with the utmost contempt - lights the match off of Duke. It's such classic Billy Wilder - and in this he is imitating Lubitsch as well: those tiny details, recurring, that make a movie make sense, even when it is totally improbable. You can rely on them. They ground the action. And so the last time when Sefton lights his match off of Duke, he reaches out - and does it against Duke's cheek - hahahaha - and just the dead pan way Holden does it, and you feel like you SHOULD have seen it coming a mile away, but it still has a beautiful and inevitable surprise about it (Wilder/Lubitsch in a nutshell) ... the audience roared with laughter. I guess I had missed that "bit" the last couple of times I saw the film. I hadn't remembered it. So this go-around, watching it on the big-screen, the lighting-the-match bit was my favorite part.
-- The guy who plays Colonel Schulz - the bumbling laughing IDIOT in charge of their barracks - who wants to be the prisoners' best friend, and yet who is also filled with treachery - is the wonderful actor who plays Dutchie in Only Angels Have Wings- I just located him tonight. I knew that voice was familiar but tonight I put it together. Marvelous character actor. - Sig Ruman Made a great living. He's hilarious in Stalag 17, and yet somehow is also totally malevolent. The film walks that line - and it's a difficult line. I know Wilder had great trouble with the studio, bringing this film to fruition ... what's funny or entertaining about prisoners of war, up to their necks in mud? What is funny about Schulz? Without being a total caricature, Sig Ruman manages to be a total boob, and also a worthy enemy. That is NOT easy.
-- The dude who does imitations of actors struck me as SO MUCH MORE FUNNY on the big screen than he does on the small. I was HOWLING about it. Kerry and I were dying at the random Cagney and Gable imitations ... such goofy delicious humor ... and that guy was hilarious.
-- But all praise to William Holden, the cynical anti-hero of the ages. The guy who would never dare be caught doing anything for the good of anything else. Like he says to the other barracks guys, "This isn't the Salvation Army. This is every man for himself." He's even more magnificent on the big screen. And also: more funny.
July 14, 2008
Rhode Island boys ...
... up to no good ...
You know, same ol' same ol'.
So cute!
Redrum
A great post from Jim Emerson about the color of red in movies and what it signifies - memorable bloodbaths, and great trivia (the bit about Scorsese and the red at the end of Taxi Driver is new to me). I agree that the kind of rusty red in that culminating shootout is somehow far more disturbing and documentary-like than bright-red would be, which can seem movie-ish.
My first emotional thought having to do with red in the movies is Don't Look Now (my thoughts on it here). Hard to pin down what it is that makes that film so supremely unbalancing ... but the fleeting (and repeated) glimpse of red through the streets of Venice certainly adds to that sense of unease. Danger.
Posts that really hit home
I have already edited this post probably 3 times over. It's a work in progress. And thank you - to my friends and family and other readers - who have already emailed me in regards to this post and shared a bit of yourself in response to me ... your feedback to what I wrote, and also your own stories. It's really moving to me. I haven't responded to all yet - but I've read them all.
This one - from Megan - who is blogging again, hooray!
The reason you start to believe you are unloveable is because of the evidence. There's, like, so much evidence. There's the part about how you're single. It is hard to deny that part, on account of how there is no one else in bed with you at night. There's the part about how you really liked that guy, and you also liked that other guy, and both times things were promising, but then they didn't choose you. And your longterm boyfriends didn't choose you either, or else you'd be married now, wouldn't you?
And here is AWB's thoughtful response to it (not to mention the people who commented. Lovely.)
Mitchell said to me recently, when we were talking about my lack of love life and all of my problems in that area, "You know what, Sheila? You've just had shit luck."
It was very freeing when he said that - and reading Megan's post really gave me a bit more clarity as to why. Not that there aren't ways I can improve and all that ... but some of it is just shit luck, and to add onto the misery with "You aren't working hard enough on your self-esteem, you aren't being awesome enough ... " and all that - is highly toxic and actually dangerous to me. I am hard enough on myself as it is. I don't need to pile on.
I wish I felt comfortable keeping comments open for posts such as this one - because I have a lot of good friends reading me (people I have met and not met) who, I am sure, could add gentle and thoughtful and non-toxic comments to the conversation. They would add. They would not go for the jugular. But I need to protect myself right now.
98% of my life is off my blog. I protect it. I don't share it here. Those of who know me (through our blogs or otherwise) know where I'm at.
But when you write an open post, a vulnerable post - where you put your heart on your sleeve - and a reader shows up and says, bluntly, "You're a stupid c***" - well. It makes one a little cautious to give other people a sounding-board, now doesn't it?
I can't solve that problem but I do know I MUST write openly here. And because of some of the blogs who link to me approvingly (blogs that shall remain nameless, sort of), I still have a lot of angry resentful people reading me, who cannot understand why I am not The Wall Street Journal, and they resent it when I get open, they have kneejerk hostile responses to ambiguity, uncertainty, or even anything that is NON-positional. They have to sweep in and tell you what to think, try to fix you, or tell you what you are too stupid to realize because you're so self-centered, etc. ... but what these people don't understand is that blogging is one of the most self-centered hobbies you can have - and it is WHY I do it. I AM self-centered. I LOVE writing about myself, and my thoughts. It is WHY I do it. If you don't like that kind of writing, then that is totally cool - but don't get angry at me because I don't sit in a pile of my own outrage every day after reading the New York Times and then blog about it. That is not what I am doing. That is not the kind of blog this is. Stop expecting it and stop punishing me for NOT being like that. (I must be the only person who cringes when a certain Insty "pundit" links to me. I cringe when he links - nothing against him - I do like quite a bit of what he does - but I cringe because I know here comes another round of nitpicky pissy know-it-alls who have a misogynistic thing going on, and GIANT chips on their shoulders. Especially when it comes to women and women admitting their openness, vulnerability, or anything even approaching dissatisfaction. And forget about posting about the men in your life. These guys jump all over you. "You women are all the same ..." etc. That's a typical comment from this type of man. Not at all the audience I'm looking for. Just keepin' it real, folks. If you found my blog from one of his links and are NOT a douchebag, then congratulations. You are in the minority.) In comparison, Pioneer Woman linked to me and every single person who came to me from her site has been warm, funny, accepting of me, lovely - into sharing her/his own stories in a funny and open manner - and not one of them has showed up and derailed conversations into bickering or inappropriate political ranting. They "play well with others". I don't mean to make generalizations but I've been blogging for, what, 6 years now? I recognize the patterns. I have a unique perspective as well - starting out as a conservative weblogger and then completely ditching that (not my views - but the focus of my blog) to focus on movies, books, and boys and stuff like that. Not an easy transition -but one I felt I had to make. To make this even MORE complex, I am quite proud that my content attracts all kinds - and I find no contradiction ... in my feelings about government and then my feelings about art and movies. I don't know ... it doesn't baffle me at all, but boy, do others have a hard time with it. So I don't want only one type of person reading me ... but I do need readers who are gentle with others, and who have an ability to celebrate things and not just complain ... and who also do not see things only thru a political filter. I like things to be real. I don't like bickering. I don't like belittling someone when that person is working something out. I cannot stand self-righteousness.
I like to NOT be sure, and I like to see what i really think about things by putting it all into writing. It's a messy process. There is no black and white. It's a process, not a destination. This drives some people up the WALL. The uncertainty drives them batshit and they lash out at me. It's the men who come to me, dripping with condescension ... I don't know ... that "element" has been a constant since I started my site, and I've despised it. Don't get it. I certainly didn't cultivate that audience!!
Not sure what to do about it.
UPDATE: In response to Nightfly's post (and THAT'S what I'm talkin' about, my friends: sharing and being open and ... you know ... uhm ... HUMAN. Thank you for that, nightfly!) : It's not that I am not sure about ANYthing. It's that I don't like to write from that place. I find it boring. This is not an opinion blog - although what I am sharing is my own life. I would call this blog experiential, and I find it far more interesting to NOT be positional when talking about my own experience. To share your own life, but to also be receptive to other people sharing. I have very strong opinions and I am CERTAIN that I am right about certain things. But it's just that that's not the stuff I choose to write about. /clarification over
I just know I can't deal with that element right now. I do not need to be in the position of defending myself from strangers when I am vulnerable, or hurting, and expressing my feelings ... when all I am doing is trying to work things out. In writing.
But some people have a problem with that. They not only resent it and get prickly - but they also get downright hostile (ie: "you stupid c***"). I can't have that. But I also want to keep writing. So not giving people the chance to comment appears to be the best solution.
This is the Internet. I know I'm not safe here. Safety is over-rated anyway - and feeling "safe" can produce a lot of SHIT writing. The best writing I do is when I sense the risk. That post above that really disturbed that commenter was a risk. I could feel it as I was writing it. And naturally - someone had to show up and do exactly what I "feared". It was almost comforting. Yup. I expected a hostile reaction from SOMEONE so it was good to get it over with. I wonder if that person is aware of how much I was expecting him and how unoriginal he really is. Strange. David and I had a big conversation about it and what exactly it was in that particular post that would make some bitchy man go off the ledge. I have theories - but also I have to say: that particular response is not at ALL "new" to me. There's a lot of free-floating anger out there and I have dealt with it from the beginning of this blog. A certain type of man becomes utterly unhinged when reading me ... hahahaha - and now I can recognize him from his first so-called "benign" comment. I flag him as "someone possibly insane to keep an eye on" ... (or my friend Beth helps me out and emails me: "That new commenter is a freak. Be very wary of him." hahahaha But she has ALWAYS been right!! Any person she has expressed hesitance about has eventually revealed himself to be pretty much a lunatic. A possible stalker. Stay away. Her instincts have been impeccable so I consider her my online bodyguard and henchman. But my instincts in this regard have been pretty good as well. They were not so good when I started blogging and I had a couple bad experiences letting FREAKS close to me whom I could not then get rid of ... but that rarely happens now.)
Someday I should write a post about these guys who have gotten obsessed with me from the very beginning of my blog. Through making mistakes, I learned to protect myself, and "screen" people for psychotic or too-needy qualities that I wanted to steer clear of. But that's not what this is about. I try to be cautious - but at the same time, my need here is to reveal. I am NOT a "pundit". That's not me. My need is to be honest, even if it makes me look bad. But in the environment on my site - there are those who would show up on such posts and pile it on - as opposed to sharing a bit of themselves, or being open and vulnerable ... Most would show up and say, "Yes. You DO look bad in this situation." I can't have that. I'm not fragile, but I'm sensitive. I get hurt really easily.
It's too bad because I do know many people out there who would love to have a conversation about love and having shit luck and the sadness of being single. Trying to deal, be strong, buck up, be open, stay hopeful, but realistic ... etc. etc.
But this is not the venue for that. To those of you (and you should know who you are) who want to chat more about this, please send me an email. That's the best way to have open conversations of this nature - and the emails and comments I have gotten about, oh, this post, for example, confirms to me that there are so many people out there who want to go deep, who have stories to share, who thank me for sharing mine, who are gentle towards others ... who are not afraid of opening themselves up. I get emails from people like that all the time, and it's awesome. Makes me feel like my openness here on the blog is something to be proud of - because it provides something for other people. A catharsis. Whatever you want to call it. THESE are the people I REALLY write for.
And speaking of posts I really relate to:
The wonderful Sarah Hepola writes an essay that feels like it could have come streaming out of my own consciousness. Yes, yes, yes.
And yes, to go back to Megan's post. I do feel unlovable. This, despite the fact that I have the best friends in the world - always have - my life is RICH with friendship - my siblings are all friends as well, dear friends ... I am not unable to love. I love deeply. But I have never been chosen. I have different stories than other women - some women are the "stopping ground" before a guy goes back to his ex, some women are the other women, whatever. I am the "one that got away" - that is usually my MO, and is one of the reasons that my ex-boyfriends (with one notable exception) all want to stay in my life, refusing to slip away in the past. However. It is not that I have never been loved. God, no. I know what being loved feels like. It is just that I have not been the one chosen.
And yes. It can give one a complex. And working on your self-esteem and concentrating on loving being single and being okay with being alone becomes, eventually, irrelevant.
Because there is so much evidence. The evidence stacks up.
Shit luck.
Charles Lamb laughing ...
A wonderful anecdote about Charles Lamb busting up laughing at his friend William Hazlitt's wedding. So charming!!
“…I am going to stand godfather; I don’t like the business; I cannot muster up decorum for these occasions; I shall certainly disgrace the font. I was at Hazlitt’s marriage, and had like to have been turned out several times during the ceremony. Anything awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a funeral.”
Having read both Lamb and Hazlitt, there is something so amusing to me imagining all of that.
"Let conflagration rage; of whatsoever is combustible!"
The storming of the Bastille - July 14, 1789
Thomas Carlyle's majestic intimidating The French Revolution
To describe this Siege of the Bastille (thought to be one of the most important in history) perhaps transcends the talent of mortals. Could one but, after infinite reading, get to understand so much as the plan of the building! But there is open Esplanade, at the end of the Rue Saint- Antoine; there are such Forecourts, Cour Avance, Cour de l'Orme, arched Gateway (where Louis Tournay now fights); then new drawbridges, dormant- bridges, rampart-bastions, and the grim Eight Towers: a labyrinthic Mass, high-frowning there, of all ages from twenty years to four hundred and twenty;--beleaguered, in this its last hour, as we said, by mere Chaos come again! Ordnance of all calibres; throats of all capacities; men of all plans, every man his own engineer: seldom since the war of Pygmies and Cranes was there seen so anomalous a thing. Half-pay Elie is home for a suit of regimentals; no one would heed him in coloured clothes: half-pay Hulin is haranguing Gardes Francaises in the Place de Greve. Frantic Patriots pick up the grape-shots; bear them, still hot (or seemingly so), to the Hotel-de-Ville:--Paris, you perceive, is to be burnt! Flesselles is 'pale to the very lips' for the roar of the multitude grows deep. Paris wholly has got to the acme of its frenzy; whirled, all ways, by panic madness. At every street-barricade, there whirls simmering, a minor whirlpool,--strengthening the barricade, since God knows what is coming; and all minor whirlpools play distractedly into that grand Fire-Mahlstrom which is lashing round the Bastille.And so it lashes and it roars. Cholat the wine-merchant has become an impromptu cannoneer. See Georget, of the Marine Service, fresh from Brest, ply the King of Siam's cannon. Singular (if we were not used to the like): Georget lay, last night, taking his ease at his inn; the King of Siam's cannon also lay, knowing nothing of him, for a hundred years. Yet now, at the right instant, they have got together, and discourse eloquent music. For, hearing what was toward, Georget sprang from the Brest Diligence, and ran. Gardes Francaises also will be here, with real artillery: were not the walls so thick!--Upwards from the Esplanade, horizontally from all neighbouring roofs and windows, flashes one irregular deluge of musketry,-- without effect. The Invalides lie flat, firing comparatively at their ease from behind stone; hardly through portholes, shew the tip of a nose. We fall, shot; and make no impression!
Let conflagration rage; of whatsoever is combustible! Guard-rooms are burnt, Invalides mess-rooms. A distracted 'Peruke-maker with two fiery torches' is for burning 'the saltpetres of the Arsenal;'--had not a woman run screaming; had not a Patriot, with some tincture of Natural Philosophy, instantly struck the wind out of him (butt of musket on pit of stomach), overturned barrels, and stayed the devouring element. A young beautiful lady, seized escaping in these Outer Courts, and thought falsely to be de Launay's daughter, shall be burnt in de Launay's sight; she lies swooned on a paillasse: but again a Patriot, it is brave Aubin Bonnemere the old soldier, dashes in, and rescues her. Straw is burnt; three cartloads of it, hauled thither, go up in white smoke: almost to the choking of Patriotism itself; so that Elie had, with singed brows, to drag back one cart; and Reole the 'gigantic haberdasher' another. Smoke as of Tophet; confusion as of Babel; noise as of the Crack of Doom!
Blood flows, the aliment of new madness. The wounded are carried into houses of the Rue Cerisaie; the dying leave their last mandate not to yield till the accursed Stronghold fall. And yet, alas, how fall? The walls are so thick! Deputations, three in number, arrive from the Hotel-de-Ville; Abbe Fouchet (who was of one) can say, with what almost superhuman courage of benevolence.These wave their Town-flag in the arched Gateway; and stand, rolling their drum; but to no purpose. In such Crack of Doom, de Launay cannot hear them, dare not believe them: they return, with justified rage, the whew of lead still singing in their ears. What to do? The Firemen are here, squirting with their fire-pumps on the Invalides' cannon, to wet the touchholes; they unfortunately cannot squirt so high; but produce only clouds of spray. Individuals of classical knowledge propose catapults. Santerre, the sonorous Brewer of the Suburb Saint-Antoine, advises rather that the place be fired, by a 'mixture of phosphorous and oil-of-turpentine spouted up through forcing pumps:' O Spinola-Santerre, hast thou the mixture ready? Every man his own engineer! And still the fire-deluge abates not; even women are firing, and Turks; at least one woman (with her sweetheart), and one Turk. Gardes Francaises have come: real cannon, real cannoneers. Usher Maillard is busy; half-pay Elie, half- pay Hulin rage in the midst of thousands.
How the great Bastille Clock ticks (inaudible) in its Inner Court there, at its ease, hour after hour; as if nothing special, for it or the world, were passing! It tolled One when the firing began; and is now pointing towards Five, and still the firing slakes not.--Far down, in their vaults, the seven Prisoners hear muffled din as of earthquakes; their Turnkeys answer vaguely.
Wo to thee, de Launay, with thy poor hundred Invalides! Broglie is distant, and his ears heavy: Besenval hears, but can send no help. One poor troop of Hussars has crept, reconnoitring, cautiously along the Quais, as far as the Pont Neuf. "We are come to join you," said the Captain; for the crowd seems shoreless. A large-headed dwarfish individual, of smoke- bleared aspect, shambles forward, opening his blue lips, for there is sense in him; and croaks: "Alight then, and give up your arms!" the Hussar- Captain is too happy to be escorted to the Barriers, and dismissed on parole. Who the squat individual was? Men answer, it is M. Marat, author of the excellent pacific Avis au Peuple! Great truly, O thou remarkable Dogleech, is this thy day of emergence and new birth: and yet this same day come four years--!--But let the curtains of the future hang.
What shall de Launay do? One thing only de Launay could have done: what he said he would do. Fancy him sitting, from the first, with lighted taper, within arm's length of the Powder-Magazine; motionless, like old Roman Senator, or bronze Lamp-holder; coldly apprising Thuriot, and all men, by a slight motion of his eye, what his resolution was:--Harmless he sat there, while unharmed; but the King's Fortress, meanwhile, could, might, would, or should, in nowise, be surrendered, save to the King's Messenger: one old man's life worthless, so it be lost with honour; but think, ye brawling canaille, how will it be when a whole Bastille springs skyward!--In such statuesque, taper-holding attitude, one fancies de Launay might have left Thuriot, the red Clerks of the Bazoche, Cure of Saint- Stephen and all the tagrag-and-bobtail of the world, to work their will.
And yet, withal, he could not do it. Hast thou considered how each man's heart is so tremulously responsive to the hearts of all men; hast thou noted how omnipotent is the very sound of many men? How their shriek of indignation palsies the strong soul; their howl of contumely withers with unfelt pangs? The Ritter Gluck confessed that the ground-tone of the noblest passage, in one of his noblest Operas, was the voice of the Populace he had heard at Vienna, crying to their Kaiser: Bread! Bread! Great is the combined voice of men; the utterance of their instincts, which are truer than their thoughts: it is the greatest a man encounters, among the sounds and shadows, which make up this World of Time. He who can resist that, has his footing some where beyond Time. De Launay could not do it. Distracted, he hovers between the two; hopes in the middle of despair; surrenders not his Fortress; declares that he will blow it up, seizes torches to blow it up, and does not blow it. Unhappy old de Launay, it is the death-agony of thy Bastille and thee! Jail, Jailoring and Jailor, all three, such as they may have been, must finish.
For four hours now has the World-Bedlam roared: call it the World-Chimaera, blowing fire! The poor Invalides have sunk under their battlements, or rise only with reversed muskets: they have made a white flag of napkins; go beating the chamade, or seeming to beat, for one can hear nothing. The very Swiss at the Portcullis look weary of firing; disheartened in the fire-deluge: a porthole at the drawbridge is opened, as by one that would speak. See Huissier Maillard, the shifty man! On his plank, swinging over the abyss of that stone-Ditch; plank resting on parapet, balanced by weight of Patriots,--he hovers perilous: such a Dove towards such an Ark! Deftly, thou shifty Usher: one man already fell; and lies smashed, far down there, against the masonry! Usher Maillard falls not: deftly, unerring he walks, with outspread palm. The Swiss holds a paper through his porthole; the shifty Usher snatches it, and returns. Terms of surrender: Pardon, immunity to all! Are they accepted?--"Foi d'officier, On the word of an officer," answers half-pay Hulin,--or half- pay Elie, for men do not agree on it, "they are!" Sinks the drawbridge,-- Usher Maillard bolting it when down; rushes-in the living deluge: the Bastille is fallen! Victoire! La Bastille est prise!"
Oh, and it's also my dear brother's birthday. So happy birthday, Bren!!
The Books: "State of Grace" (Joy Williams)
Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt:
State of Grace
A fantastic writer - very hard to pin down (especially when you look at the style and content of Breaking and Entering - my favorite of her books). Williams seems (to me) to channel completely different energies and voices, depending on the structure of what she is writing, and I'm mesmerized by it. She hasn't written all that much, and there were YEARS in between books. She just came out with another book - maybe 2 or 3 years ago, but for many years I only had State of Grace and Breaking and Entering on my shelves. State of Grace was published in 1973, but when the whole Vintage Contemporary "movement" started happening in the late 80s, early 90s, it was re-released in a snappy new paperback, and that's how I came across it. I'm not sure why it appealed to me. I write the date of purchase on the title page of every book I buy and State of Grace was bought in January of 91. That tells me quite a bit. A bleak time for me. Awful. Living in Philadelphia, feeling completely lost - and worse than that: voiceless. I had lost my power of self-expression. I was frozen. There are no journals for about a year of that time in my life, I had nothing to say - even to myself. Something in State of Grace - with its poetic description of a paralyzed (emotionally) young woman, on the run from her past, trying to re-invent herself desperately: sorority girl, wife ... but the past is stronger than any present-day affiliations and it comes to claim her. She has not the stamina to resist.
Kate grew up in a rigid Bible-thumping family - whose mother hated her and her father ... I can't remember if her father is a preacher, or just a fanatic - but he has a hold on his daughter's mind, his standards for her behavior are impossible ... and there's something too-much about the whole relationship. It is like Kate is expected to be her father's sweetheart. They are connected. Two peas in a pod. Kate goes off to the South, to Florida - for college ... and it's unclear (you'll see what I mean in the excerpt below - Williams doesn't give anything away too literally, it's a true "mood" book) whether or not her father is aware of where she is. What is she running from? Kate tries to slip into the hot Southern world of college and sororities - she has sex (as Kate writes about her sorority: "all the sisters fuck like bunnies") - she doesn't follow the teachings of her childhood, but goes off the deep end. None of this is spelled out in a chronological way in the book - we start smack-dab in the middle - with Kate pregnant, sitting in a trailer with her husband Grady - and we have to back-track to figure out how she got there.
State of Grace is almost like a stream - or a river - with many different estuaries - branching off, coming back, surging together, branching off again. Kate, our narrator, is NOT a reliable narrator. She sits in the trailer, she wonders where she is, she is haunted by her father, she loves her husband, but she seems to have no center. Nothing grounds her. And her writing reflects that. Eventually, Kate - the first-person narrator of the first half of the book - goes away - and we get a cold quiet third-person narrator later on in the book, who looks down on Kate, and her father, and their meanderings. It is as though whatever Kate is wanting to describe, whatever Kate is really thinking and feeling - is too awful and too intense for her to even attempt to tell it herself. She needs an omniscent narrator.
It's been years since I've read this haunting book - but the poetry and dreamlike quality of Williams' prose here has stayed with me. I remember some of the lines by heart; they have become quite important to me. ("Don't become impatient. Here is the time.") Kate looks around at the landscape and sees that it is alive. She speaks to us, in a voice which is at times strangely disconnected, hallucinatory - but then she'll switch, with no warning, and take on an almost commanding voice - telling us what to do, what to think, what to look at. It's like a montage, the first half of the book. We don't know where Kate wants us to go, we have to piece together her story ... and somehow Williams manages to suggest that Kate is aware of her father, at all times - whatever she does, is somehow in reaction to her father. And so even her marriage to sweet Southern boy Grady lacks substance, lacks reality ... because all along it is her FATHER who will win the battle. She will never be able to escape him.
I need to read this book again. Breaking and Entering, her next book, is a book I love - and have read a couple of times - but there's something so raw about State of Grace, and it reminds me of that raw wordless time in my life ... I have stayed away from re-reading the book again. Ghosts, you know?
Here's an excerpt from the first chapter.
Williams is something else.
EXCERPT FROM State of Grace
I wake early, as a rule. I try to remember what I've told him. There's no way of being sure how much he knows. Sometimes, when we are walking through the woods together, I am quite at peace and even believe that any terror I previously felt is merely an aspect of my parturient condition. I know that he is thinking. I know that he is trying to decide what to do. I wait for his decision as nothing can proceed without it. It is the choice between life or death, between renewal or resumption. I have no fear of him. We are in love. Of course I could only hope that he would kill us, that is, Daddy and me, because I have a feeling, though I know it's mad, that we are going to go on forever. But it's too late for that now. I must be realistic. Even if he traveled there, he would not find Daddy. Even if he did, even if Daddy made himself available, he would not be able to deal with him. God and the Devil are the whole religion and Daddy has both on his side.
I have not offered to leave but he does not think of this. Several times he has suggested traveling together far away. I would agree to anything but he dismisses his suggestions instantly, almost before they are uttered, as though he was not the one who made them. No possibilities are open to me. As I say, I wait. What is going to happen waits with me. We have always been reluctant companions.
And in the meanwhile, time, as always, passes or fails to. To the eye, we have proceeded with it. We have our little willfulnesses and quirks. For example, I have terrible eating habits. He eats almost nothing now. He used to saw away at a huge side of pork that he brought down himself and prepare that in a variety of ways. But the hog is gone now, as is the reason for his killing it. Or at least we have always liked to believe that the hog was the same that butchered our hound, though the woods are full of hogs, shaking the land with their mean rooting and rutting. But the hog is gone now and the dog and our hopes for living simply, on the land and on our love. Once he liked grits with syrup and pecans that we'd shake down from the trees but now he cannot even be comforted by memories. I, on the other hand, have a terrible hunger. I love awful foods. Children's cereals, cupcakes and store pies, that wonderful gluey bread Dixie Darling, yes, two long loaves for only 21 cents. Once, before I moved out here, I ate nothing for three weeks but Froot Loops. It became hallucinogenic after a few days. Anything will. If you breathe in too much basil, a scorpion will be born inside your head. If you eat too much roe, you'll probably die. Why not? I had to stop the Froot Loops. Everything was so enormous and I was becoming so small. My gums bled. The girls became lecherous and outraged even though I was curious about them as well. Everything smelled rancid in that big house even though the girls washed themselves constantly and all the food was kept in jars. They were so boring about their hygiene, their hair and fingernails. They were healthy enough I suppose. The lint-free pussy plombs employed! The cases of disposable M'Lady Tru-Touch HandSavers ...
Once, for an infraction of the rules, I was forced to clean the shower drains. I also had to change all the beds ...
I do little here in the woods. I assimilate the soundlessness. We pursue the meager life with a few garish exceptions. I have my Dixie Darling products, which, I might add, have never disappointed me, and he has his Jaguar. An old faithless and irrational roadster, black, and in perfect running condition. It is so fast and inside it is a warm cave and smells delicious. It is parked beside the trailer and often, in the afternoon, I go out and sit in it and have a drink there. It calms me. The leather is a soft dusky yellow from all the saddle soap he works into it. It smells like lemons and good tack.
After that singular Fourth of July, Daddy never had a car, although there once were two. Daddy and I walked everywhere. On Sundays, we would skate across the pond to church - two sweethearts, my hand in his, in the other glove, ten pennies for the offering plate. Slivers of ice flew up beneath my skirt, my eyes wept. We skated quickly, seriously, lightly on Sunday mornings, barely leaving a mark behind us ...
He loves the Jaguar - the skill and appreciation it takes to enjoy it. He is Grady. I shall make myself clear. Grady, my husband, a country boy with brown face and hands and blond matted hair low on his brow. The rest of him is long, white and skinny. He knows a great deal about hunting, fishing and engines. He loves the Jaguar and he also takes an abashed pleasure in this dank trailer which is his. It cost $10. He bought it from Sweet Tit Sue who now lives farther upriver. She wrote out a bill of sale which we keep in Rimbaud's Illuminations. At the moment, it happens to mark the spot you know, Andthenwhenyouarehungryandthirstythereissomeonewhodrivesyouaway. It is not always there. We move it about for amusement, to tell our fortune. He used to enjoy that. All those words with their imminence and no significance. He always saw luck in these woods.
He gets angry at me often now. I'm afraid it's the way I keep house. I don't keep house. His face becomes rigid and he speaks so softly I can barely hear him. The place is so soiled that nothing can be found. It smells. It doesn't bother me. What is the purpose of order?
Each morning I am ravenous. I eat with a lamp on and my feet in a pair of his socks. The mice have left their turds all over everything, in the sink and in our shoes and in the dog's dish. It doesn't bother me.
I am chewing on this bread ... I must admit I eat this garbage because I want to insult myself. We think as we eat. Our brains take on flavor and scope. What I want is to slow down my head and eventually stop it. I strive for a brain friendly and homogenized as sweet potato pie.
July 13, 2008
Field of Dreams: the title
Phil Alden Robinson (director of Field of Dreams) adapted WP Kinsella's Shoeless Joe for the screen, ruthlessly chopping it up, streamlining the many stories into one - Ray's journey to reconcile with his father. Throughout the entire time of filming, the project was called Shoeless Joe. Robinson was incredibly attached to the title, because of his affinity for the book, and his deep heartfelt wish to embody the work faithfully.
Filming completed and the studio started to do test previews. Immediately, it became apparent to the higher-ups (ie producers) that the title was a problem. Audience members thought the movie was going to be about a homeless person. Ha!! Or, people with a bit more baseball knowledge thought that it was going to be a historical picture with Costner playing Shoeless Joe. There was much confusion going in. The title didn't work. It did for the book, but not for the movie.
So Larry Gordon, one of the producers, suggested a new title to Robinson: Field of Dreams.
Robinson was horrified. He thought it was a terrible title. It sounded like a commercial for something else - Field of Dreams - with 50% less calories! No, no, no - this movie, which he had now worked on for up to 5 years, including his time working on the adaptation, HAD to be called Shoeless Joe!!
But Larry Gordon insisted. The audiences weren't getting it. It didn't have resonance. Field of Dreams it had to be.
So Robinson eventually caved - but first, he made a cringing embarrassed call to Kinsella (who, all along, had been totally happy with what Robinson had been doing - loved the adaptation, thought everything was great, he's a pretty laidback hippie type of guy).
Robinson gets Kinsella on the phone and says, "Well, I have some bad news ... I've been told that Shoeless Joe doesn't work as a title. The title has to be changed."
Kinsella replied breezily, "Oh, that's fine. Anyway, the publishers forced me to call it Shoeless Joe. My original title was Dream Field."
The Books: "The Writing Class" (Jincy Willett)
Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt:
The Writing Class
Second novel by the absolutely delicious Jincy Willett (she has a collection of short stories out too) ... I can't get enough of this writer!! I love her sense of humor, her intelligence, and the sense that she really is writing exactly the way she wants to write. It's a voice. There's a confidence there, a surety - an unselfconsciousness ... I don't get the sense that any of it is a "put on", or an act. I sensed it in Winner of the National Book Award (excerpt here) - and it's in full form here. Her prose is an absolute joy to read. Laugh out loud funny at times, but then with lines of piercing insight and pain and recognition where you (or, I should say, I) feel recognized and named. She's an intense writer. All heart. In all its mess and humor and pain. I'm with Carrie - who wrote in June - that Writing Class "finally, finally out and available". It's that repetition of "finally" that really captures my own excitement about Jincy Willett - that her new book is "finally, finally out". Yes!!
The Writing Class tells the story of Amy, a one-time author - now a teacher of writing classes in extension courses at a college. Many of her students are serious writers - others not so much ... The book gets into each of her students, their writing styles (Jincy Willett's evocation of all of their different styles is nothing short of brilliant!) - their insecurities (one of her students continuously complains about the portrayal of women in whatever story they read each week), their pomposity, and their humanness. Amy is a sad loner, but she has come to terms with her sad loner status. She's prickly and anti-social, but she's also obviously a wonderful teacher. It is through that engagement with her students that she stays connected - to creativity, to herself. She was married twice - once to her gay best friend, who died of AIDS, and then to another guy, who was basically a rebound from her friend/husband dying - and she can't really remember anything about her second husband, except that it was because of him that she moved from Maine to San Diego. She thought a change of scenery would be good for her. Now, though, she is fat, lives alone with her dog, drinks by herself - and yet she's not a bleak character, somehow. Willett manages to suggest a truly eccentric character in Amy ... that her life, in a weird way, suits her - as long as nobody gives her a hard time about it. She has trouble sleeping. She is very lonely, but she is more comfortable being lonely than being artificially attached to another person. Hmmm. Guess I relate to her. I love how Willett portrays Amy. You love her. You love her in the role of teacher - and you love her as the loner woman, haunted by her past. She had a novel published when she was 23 and it hit huge - she had a couple of follow-up books ... but then everything slid to a standstill. All of her books are out of print now. So here she is, teaching adult students what she knows about writing ... trying to run away from her own potential. Oh! And, at the suggestion of a friend, Amy sets up a blog. To at least get out some of her ideas. The description of blogging is so spot ON - the random douchebags who show up to critique you, out of nowhere ... the random folks who fall in love with you without knowing you ... the weirdos, the awesome people, the Google searches .... it's all a new world to Amy, and it baffles her ... she tries not to take it seriously, after all it's not REAL writing ... but it does somehow fascinate her. Who ARE these people?? She loves it.
The book is structured around the classes themselves - First Class, Second Class - and what Amy focuses on in each class. And very quickly, by the Third Class, Amy realizes that there is a malevolent force in her class, someone who is trying to sabotage the rest of the group. Evil-sounding parodies of people's pieces are sent to them (really mean stuff) - and Amy begins to feel she is losing control of her class. Someone is wreaking havoc. The book becomes a sort of murder mystery as Amy (and a sympathetic - or so we hope - regular student) try to figure out which one of the students is pulling these pranks (which get more and more dangerous). Eventually, the class is canceled - due to the shenanigans of the prankster - and the students decided - Screw THIS, we want to continue - so they convince Amy to continue holding classes, this time rotating locations. Things get distinctly bizarre. Amy tries to rein in the class - one of whom is STILL being a douchebag - only we don't know who!! Amy tries to keep the class focused on the WRITING ... Meanwhile, she goes home at night and obsesses on who would do such a thing ... She tries to piece together the identity of the "prankster" from the person's writing style ... she comes up with some conclusions, all of which end up being false.
People end up getting killed. What the hell is going on?? Which would-be writer wants the others dead? What issues of envy and rage are at work here? Will Amy ever discover the identity of the malevolent student? Or will she be caught in a trap of her own making??
A wonderful book about creativity, loneliness, and the writing impulse. Great stuff. I loved every word.
All of the "types" in the writing class are just awesome: the overly sensitive obese woman who only writes when taking a class, the guy taking the class to pick up women, the feminist, the really talented no-nonsense older woman who really understands literature, the sci-fi fan (who can't write a word worth reading if he tried), the mysterious macho guy whose name is actually Charlton Heston (ha!!) - who is kind of a wild card and who ends up being tremendously good at writing - without any fanfare or pretentiousness - there's the Book Club afficianado who ONLY has good things to say about EVERYTHING - she balks at criticism of any kind, and seems to look at every moment in life as a potential Oprah moment ... makes it difficult to have a class discussion of what DOESN'T work ... all of these people just come to life. I love it. Also, Amy - despite the fact that she is a "failure" as a writer - does not come off as bitter towards other writers. You really get that. She ends up LOVING this class - they're a "good group", she keeps saying - because they really want to dig in and critique and get to the bottom of things. This is not the story of a bitter has-been who has lost the joy of her craft. No. That's one of the reasons I was so moved by The Writing Class: the flame of love can be kept alive, even without any validation from the outer world. It really can.
Oh - and another great thing about the book: You think you have some of these people pegged. The annoying PC-obsessed reader, the pompous doctor, whatever ... but by the end, you realize that you have been wrong wrong wrong. It's the best kind of character development and makes me realize how much we judge others - and "pigeonhole" someone as "that type" - when there is no such thing, not really. That's part of Willett's point - in this book of writing about writing. Be very very careful when you judge. First of all, you cut yourself off from being surprised - either pleasantly or unpleasantly - and when you are incapable of surprise you truly embody the term "Douchebag". And second of all, you really may just be coming from your OWN bias and be totally misreading something because you are predisposed to see it a certain way ... That happens in the book as well. It's all great fun!
Here's an excerpt.
EXCERPT FROM The Writing Class
Dot Hieronymus led off discussion of Code Black with breathless compliments. Spurred by the doctor's muscular prose ("Black struggled to maintain an impassive countenance, but not even he could quieten the vein that throbbed visibly in his left temple."), she had already torn through half the novel and couldn't wait for the rest of class to catch up. Dot belonged to three book clubs and had read "every medical thriller that ever came down the pike," and Code Black ranked with the best of them. For all Amy knew this was true.
"Before we begin," Amy said, "I want us to notice that this piece of fiction, as opposed to Marvy's, is part of a larger whole. So it's a fragment, and therefore more difficult to talk about than a short story. We can't complain about loose ends, for instance. We can't demand to understand everything that's going on. At this stage, it would be disastrous if we did get the whole picture, wouldn't it? It's the writer's job, in his opening chapters, to draw his readers in. If, by the end of an opening chapter or two, we don't understand why a character is behaving the way he is, or what somebody meant when he said what he did, that's probably good. We'll keep reading to find out."
"So what can we complain about?" asked Frank. His copy of Surtee's manuscript had taken a beating and was covered with pen scribbles. Frank looked eager to complain about lots of things.
"Oh," said Amy, "you can always complain about cliches. And not just language, either. A character can be trite, or a setting."
"Well, here's this black-belt babe-magnet neurosurgeon --"
"Hey," said Ricky Buzza, "that's not a cliche. I mean, I never read about a black-belt neurosurgeon --"
"Come on, he's a type, a superhero type, and you just know there's going to be a vast conspiracy --"
"Don't spoil it!" said Dot.
"And a big shoot-out, or lobotomy tournament --"
"Don't forget the Illuminati," added Chuck.
Edna Wentworth and Ginger Nicklow smiled and stayed out of it. Tiffany jumped in with Frank and Chuck. Harold Blasbalg, who Amy recalled was supposed to be working on a horror novel, weighed in on Dot's side, as did Syl Reyes, and the rest sat still and watched the show.
Because he was a big shot and because his storytelling, however absurd, was essentially competent and had a surface gloss, Amy had expected Surtees to get a free ride. So she was pleasantly surprised by the raucous upbraiding, but after fifteen minutes, during which the doctor took a real pummeling, she figured it was time to even the field. Extension instructors were paid, execrably, to avoid alienating their customers. "As I was saying," she said, "before I was so rudely interrupted --"
"It's not supposed to be Shakespeare," Dot said. Her color was high, and she had managed to smudge printer ink on her ivory jacket. Sometimes people couldn't take debate, rough-and-tumble or no; they either weren't used to being disagreed with or never stuck their necks out in the first place. But Dot seemed invested in Surtees himself. While she lauded and then hotly defended his silly book, she glanced reflexively at the back of his head (Surtees remained composed throughout) as though hoping for a glance back. Sometimes people, usually women, took extension courses to meet singles. "You're not being fair," she said.
"As I was saying," said Amy. The class reluctantly attended to her. "You can reasonably complain about cliche characters, settings, even cliche scenes. Tying somebody to the railroad tracks and all. But you can't fairly complain about cliche plots."
"Why not?" asked Ricky Buzza. Ricky was Amy's enabler this quarter.
"Because all plots are cliche. There are no new plots."
Ginger Nicklow spoke up. "I read somewhere, I'm sure it was in college, that there are two basic plots: Cinderella and Jack and the Beanstalk."
"Sex and death," said Chuck Heston.
Syl Reyes wondered what the heck that was supposed to mean.
"Search me," said Amy. "I've heard of this one myself, and I've always wondered. I guess it means you have the quest story and the erotic unveiling story. Most adventure stories, including this one, are quest stories. Although you could obviously have an interior quest, a search for spiritual enlightenment, or a search for the identity of your father's killer, or whatever."
"So Jaws is what?" asked Pete Purvis.
"An aquatic unveiling," said Frank, and even Tiffany P.C. Zuniga laughed.
"Getting back to my point," said Amy, "I love it that you guys have gotten so passionate about this piece, but I need to make it clear that it is, as Dot says, not fair to slam Code Black for having a trite plot. Whether or not it's unfair to compare it to Shakespeare I leave for another time."
"Okay," said Frank, "but can't we call Black Jack a cliche character?"
"Not yet," Amy said. "For all we know he may have quirks and depths we just haven't learned about in the first two chapters." Sure he does.
"What about an erotic quest?" asked Chuck.
"There you go," said Frank.
"For this reason," Amy continued, "critiques of fragments - novel chapters, unfinished stories - often center more on language than on structure. Language is the one thing we can safely criticize. A bad sentence can't be redeemed in the last chapter."
Amy led the class through Surtee's manuscript page by page. She landed pretty hard on the dialogue, though without calling it "wooden," and spent a great deal of time trying to convince them that fictional characters should almost always say or ask their lines, rather than hiss, shout, breathe, huff, or spit them. "There's way too much snarling going on here," she said, and when Pete and Dot defended the snarling as vivid she slapped them down smartly. "Even if you were right about this it wouldn't help you," she told them. "The dogs at the gates of publishing houses, called 'readers', have all been trained to toss unsolicited manuscripts at the earliest opportunity, and they all use the same checklist, fair or not fair. One of the surest ways to turn them off is to have your character purr 'Good morning,' snarl 'Get lost', or opine anything whatsoever."
Surtees's cheerleaders reacted sullenly to this speech, but Surtees did not. He was taking notes.
Amy disliked being generous to students like Surtees, who had so little need of her generosity. She had hoped, even expected, that the class would go easy on him, so she could be the one to jump up and down on Code Black, but instead she was forced to be the good cop, and actually heard herself praising, however faintly, his attention to physical detail, and the way his characters traveled sure-footed through time and space, and the fact that every scene ended pretty much when it should, and was bound to the scenes before and after it by a neat causal chain. Code Black had what creative writing teachers called narrative pull. That the tale itself wasn't worth putting down on paper wasn't something Amy was allowed to mention.
In the end all she could do was allow Tiffany Zuniga five full minutes to excoriate the doctor's obligatory sex scene, in chapter two. Tiffany hated that the untamed woman had "voluptuous curves", yowled like a jaguar "at her moment of ultimate release", and "slipped smilingly out the door" when it was all over. "I mean," said Tiffany, "how convenient is that."
Dr. Surtees, seated in the front row directly ahead of Tiffany, actually smirked.
"Worst of all," said Tiffany, "he uses bed as a verb. I hate hate hate hate that."
"Good for you," said Amy, and meant it.
July 11, 2008
Holden:
More on William Holden and the Holden retrospective going on at Lincoln Center in July.
Liam, Lydia, Kerry and I are going to see Stalag 17 on Monday.
Can't wait!
Books:
Bren: re-reading Kavalier and Clay
Jean: reading The End of the Affair, and also Milkweed by Jerry Spinelli
Dad: reading The Far Side of the World (he finished Treason's Harbor)
Siobhan: reading White Noise
Cashel: reading The Egypt Game (thank you, Lisa!!) ("I really relate to those kids!" raved Cash)
Me: finished The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh, finished Evil Genes by Barbara Oakley, finished The Writing Class by Jincy Willett - and now I am 250 pages in to War and Peace - trying to catch up with my cousin Liam!! It's such a huge book but it's really quite easy to read. The SIZE is daunting but once you start it's hard to put down. To imitate Cashel: I really relate to poor Princess Marya. Loving it.
Samurai call this ...
For some reason, yesterday morning Jean became a samurai calesthenics instructor - and was making Cashel and me laugh so hard that we were close to drowning at certain points. We had to stop playing the game becaue Cashel was guffawing so loudly he was drinking the entire lake.
"Samurai call this ... the albatross ..." she would intone, and then do some goofy "calesthenics" with her noodle. (We've been all about the noodles. We can't stop talking about them. "Hey - could you grab me a noodle?" "Where's my noodle?" "Do we have any more noodles?")
"Samurai call this ... great dog ..." and Jean swam off away from us, pushing the huge noodle along with her nose.
We played Samurai Calesthenics Instructor for about 45 minutes. It's a game that keeps on giving.
Watching Field of Dreams with Cashel
At the sight of Shoeless Joe in the field at night, Cashel cuddled up to Bren, whispering, "This is like a horror movie!"
I think Cash's favorite part was James Earl Jones chasing Kevin Costner out of his apartment saying, "You're from the 60s! Go back to where you belong!" Cashel couldn't stop laughing about that. The sound of Cashel's unselfconscious laugh is the best sound in the world.
Cashel on Frankenstein:
"I read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and every other WORD was 'melancholy'. The melancholy sky, the melancholy smile ... EVERYTHING was 'melancholy'! And it was 200 pages before he built the monster!"
So, Mary, could you dial down the melancholy, please? A 10 year old in 2008 is bored by the repetition. Thanks.
JLTA
Somehow, we cannot trace our steps, we made up a story that Julio Lugo has set up a tango school in the Dominican Republic, called The Julio Lugo Tango Academy. But you can just call it "JLTA". I have no idea how this joke came up but at some point we all were just crying with laughter about it. Saying to Julio, hesitantly, "You know, Julio, it's really great that you're so committed to tango ... it's really awesome to have outside interests ... but ... uhm ... don't you think you should concentrate on your game??"
But no. He cannot stop tango-ing. Tango is his life.
"I must pass on my love of tango to the younger generation."
"Yeah, but, Julio ... you've been making a lot of errors ... maybe you should put the tango on the back burner for a bit?"
"Tango is my life."
"Uhmmmm, okay, Julio, whatever you say."
We love our stupid jokes. We get so much mileage out of them.
Similar to the "Keep it goin' Dougie Fresh" 4-part harmony we would sing anytime Doug Mirabelli would come up to bat a couple summers ago. We still sing "Keep it goin' Dougie Fresh" ... because it is still funny to us. And yes, we all are still convinced that it was our singing that caused him to get a home run that sweltering night years ago. I mean, if you heard 4 siblings singing "Keep it goin' Dougie Fresh" in staggered harmonic lines of melody - wouldn't YOU hit a home run (even if it was just to make us stop??)?
"So You Think You Can Dance" - the Bollywood number
This is seriously one of the happiest most joyful things I have ever seen. We can't stop talking about it. I can't even break it down - the parts I love best ... it's all just (to quote Mitchell) "sheer liquid joy", as far as I'm concerned. I can't get enough.
July 6, 2008
The Books: "Winner Of The National Book Award: A Novel of Fame, Honor, and Really Bad Weather" (Jincy Willett)
Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt:
Winner of the National Book Award: A Novel of Fame, Honor, and Really Bad Weather
I am so glad I discovered this book. And Jincy Willett has just come out with another book - and I'm so excited to read it. I was hooked by her prose within page One of Winner of the National Book Award - it is distinctive, it really is: funny, assured, specific - kind of hilarious, there's a madcap feel to it ... but it's also rather dark. I love it. Winner of the National Book Award takes place mainly during a hurricane in Rhode Island - it's a big Rhode Island book - and I am not sure of Willett's assocations with Rhode Island or what her deal is, but she gets my home state so right. It's difficult to explain Rhode Island sometimes - AND much of what you say is a surprise to someone who doesn't know the state well ... so you're dealing with people's preconceived notions, rather than an open mind. If you're a Rhode Islander, you'll know what I mean. What IS Rhode Island? How can we be defined? I love my home state, I am really proud of it, and love coming from there.
Winne of the National Book Award tells the story of two sisters: a slut (Abigail) and a spinster (Dorcas). I mean, look at those names. They come from upstanding Yankee stock - and there is an absolutely hilarious anecdote about their troublemaking ancestor - the only person who came over on the Mayflower, took one look around, and said, "Take me back home!" One is a librarian (guess which one), and the other is a ravaging whore who ruins lives. She eventually is imprisoned for murder - and a feminist writer interviews her and turns her story into a book - some kind of feminist manifesto - which eventually wins the National Book Award. The librarian, who grew up with her sister, knew her amorality and selfishness, is highly skeptical of the book - Her sister? A feminist? Are you kidding me??
While Abigail is a total nightmare, she is also absolutely entertaining. The whole book is entertaining. I LOVE Willett's writing style.
There's a slight tang of bitterness to the book - after all, it is narrated byDorcas, the one who never ever could get any attention for herself as long as her sister was in a 3 mile radius ... but Dorcas also doesn't really WANT a relationship. She has seen what relationships can do - and what wreckers they can be - in the life of her awful sister, and she doesn't want any of THAT, thankyouverymuch.
Brilliant character descriptions. Conrad Lowe: one of Abigail's many lovers - a creepy psychopath of a man, outwardly charming, smiling, and many women find him disarming - but Dorcas sees right through him, and he can't stand that. He MUST conquer Dorcas. Willett's breakdown of his character traits is brilliant. I've known a couple smiling psychopaths like Conrad Lowe, and she gets it perfectly right.
Dorcas sits down one hurricane-y day, and breaks open the book about her sister - meaning to read it, finally. But she knows it's going to make her angry, since it will all be self-serving lies. She waits out the hurricane, drinking scotch, reading the book (we get to read some excerpts from it - and it's hilarious: florid obvious made-for-Oprah prose - spinning this horrible story of a woman with no conscience into some kind of uplifting morality tale) - and living out the memories of her life in the shadow of her sister.
This all may sound very prosaic - BUT: it's the WRITING that is the standout in this book. It's got a voice, a distinctive voice - and Willett is a joy to listen to. I love the voice of this book. Here's another book that made me laugh out loud. Kudos.
Not to mention the whole takes-place-in-Rhode-Island thing. She just gets it sooo right.
EXCERPT FROM Winner of the National Book Award: A Novel of Fame, Honor, and Really Bad Weather
Mark Twain was right: New England weather is a literary specialty, not a science. He gave a more reliable forecast in 1876 than those boobs on channel ten.
Probable nor'-east to sou'-west winds, varying to the southard and westard and eastard and points betewen; high and low barometer, sweeping round from place to place; probable areas of rain, snow, hail, and drought, succeeded or preceded by earthquakes and thunder and lightning.
I woke up this morning with a hurricane headache and turned on the stupid TV and there they were, one of each sex, babbling in front of a huge weather map. "We're going to get it," the man said, and the woman added that "the only question is how it's going to hit. Pandora is on the way." Last night these same people were promising she'd miss us by a hundred miles
A hurricane headache is no guarantee. The big one is out there somewhere, that's all, eyeing your neighborhood. You're on her list, and the atmospheric pressure plummets, skyrockets, some damn thing, and the air is humid, smelly, ominous, and your head feels caught in a padded vise. You want to crawl right out of your skin.
We had a bad one here, in Rhode Island, in 1938, the year of our birth, and another bad one in '54, which I remember, and that's it. Rhode Island is not Key West.
Many have noticed this.
Hurricane headaches make you feel antsy and doomed, but they can be gotten around, like the premenstrual whim-whams. You just remind yourself that your emotions are physical in origin, and ignore them. I'm good at that.
"How bad it's going to be is anybody's guess." The man in the red blazer, Ernie, was unable to act convincingly as though this were bad news. "We're going to get it for sure."
"The main thing right now," his partner added, "is not to panic."
"And remain calm. I repeat. Hurricane Pandora is on the way. I repeat. Pandora is coming."
"And not just her tail."
"Nope. Head to toe!"
"Full body slam!"
"She's got us in her sights!"
"We're staring right up her gun barrel!"
"She's made a shambles out of Cape Hatteras!"
"Heading straight for us at thirty-seven per!"
"But don't panic!"
From my bay window in the living room I could see at least two people dutifully panicking already. Old Mrs. McArch had just about covered all her windows with masking tape, and John and Marie Bucci were squeezing children and beagles into the station wagon.
The Buccis always headed out. They headed out in '68, when we were supposed to get the race riots. I asked John then where he was going, and John stopped and thought and said, "Burlington?" I pointed out (I was only thirty, I had more energy then) that (a) we weren't going to get any riots, and (b) if we did they'd be in Providence, where Negroes actually live, and not way out here in Frome. John shrugged. "Yeah, I know," he said, reddening, staring down at two bulging suitcases, "but hey." John's a nice guy. I always wish him luck. John is my bellwether, and John was heading out.
Today was supposed to be my day off. I had scheduled my Saturday crew, T.R. and Gloria, to man the library without me, and particularly to catalogue that three-foot pile of new books standing on the floor beside my desk. Usually I do these myself, the new books. Usually I want to. Of all my duties, opening brand-new books is the most pleasurable. When it comes to books, I am a sensuous woman. Usually. But not today, and so, naturally, today is Panic Day, and the Saturday people have flown away home, and I have had to come in myself and face it. The new book pile.
I knocked on Anna's door and told her about the forecast, and asked, did she want to come with me. She was already awake, listening to her clock radio, and said she'd stay here by herself. "I've always wanted," she said, "to batten down the hatches." How a twenty-year-old could have "always wanted" to do anything was a puzzler, but her decision was just as well. Today I didn't need the company. I poured some scotch in our father's old silver flask, put on jeans and a white shirt, filled three grocery bags with towels, and drove out to the Star for cold cuts and bread.
I'm not a drunk, by the way. It's going to be a long day, that's all.
I waved to John and Marie as I backed out the driveway. John shouted that they were heading up to Portland. "But the storm is moving north," I said. "I know," Marie said, and John said, "We know. But hey." We all had a nice laugh, and I wished them luck.
It was six thirty a.m. and twenty people stood outside the locked glass doors of the Star, watching the manager and a couple of checkers shuffle around inside. When I joined them they greeted me like a family member. I had forgotten about this. Rhode Island gets so few near misses, so little natural drama, that I forget from one time to the next about this phenomenon: what Conrad Lowe called "the disaster factor".
Rhode Island natives, including those born overseas, are under ordinary circumstances so shy and mistrustful around people they don't know as to seem almost deranged. They never look a stranger in the eye, or if they do, they unfocus their own eyes. I don't mean a stranger you pass in the street, I mean a stranger who's lived next door to you for twenty-five years, or a stranger you ask directions from or hand his dropped wallet to or knock down with your car.
This probably has something to do with the tradition of overcrowding, of living cheek by jowl for two hundred years. Whatever the cause, we have no stage presence at all, no Southern theatrics, Midwestern irony, Western hyperbole, New York cynicism. We don't even have the famous and overrated Maine understatement. We have instead an Unfortunate Manner.
We literally don't know how to act. We have no roles to play. We are the nakedest of Americans, and when native strangers, themselves naked and ashamed, make even innocuous demands of us - How much is this? Would you please get off my foot? - we panic and writhe, we shamble and fumble with our buttons, we mutter even as we back away. We make inappropriate noises. I've seen man-on-Weybosset-Street interviews on TV, and they're really too painful to watch. A stout woman with anxious haunted eyes, asked for her New Year's predictions, blurts, "I think we're going to have World War III!" and giggles like a toddler. She stands for all of us, an awkward cipher, silly or rude, or silly and rude, and inside, clearly glimpsed in the frightened eyes, some poor trapped soul screaming for help.
Our body language, of course, is wonderfully complex. We know a thousand different shrugs.
We are so lonely here, with only our loved ones for company. We kill, maim, insult our loved ones, or dream of doing so, to keep from going mad. And then disaster strikes. God, how we love disaster.
Let the storm come and flatten us, please, let the poor riot, let our houses burn (we have a terrific arson rate), let our president fall, our spaceships explode. What we wouldn't give for an LNG holocaust or a freeway sniper. Anything. I used to think we were just a big bunch of cowards, but that isn't it. We panic early, and we panic hard and long; but we love every minute of it. Rhode Island: The Panic State.
Panic frees us, to look around openly at one another. Disaster makes us friendly, in a demented opportunistic fashion all our own. We stumble toward one another, hilarious with terror, crazy with all the possibilities, like hibernating grizzlies injected with speed and shoved out into the light. We go berserk with candor. We lose it, big time, and oh, what a sweet relief that is.
***
Except for us Yankees, true and false (us Yankees do have stage presence), everybody waiting outside the Star was burdening the stranger on his right with the intimate details of his private life. The running theme of the conversation was "We're really going to get it now," and around us the wind picked up, and green maple leaves, plucked before their time, eddied in the parking lot, batted around in the smelly air as though by a bored child who, though already strong enough to rip down tree branches, had only leaves to play with for the moment.
The stranger to my right, a squat wide-rumped blonde in turquoise bermudas, asked me if I had filled my tub this morning, and I said yes, to take a bath. "You're not saving water?" I shook my head. "You tape your windows?" No. "You here for candles? Batteries?" "I'm here for my lunch."
Her face fell, and I felt bad about ruining her good time. She looked back up at me in a bold, speculative way. "I seen you someplace," she said. This is what passes for polite inquiry around here.
"I'm the head librarian at Squanto," I said.
"Nah," she said, shaking her head. "That's not it."
She was distracted then when the manager opened the glass doors. We wished each other luck, my new friend and I, and then we all squeezed through the single door in discrete lumps of ten. It took great effort not to panic along with everyone else. Men and women grabbed carts and began cruising down the aisles, like contestants on that old game show where you had five minutes to load up and the one with the biggest total won.
I concentrated so hard on strolling that I got to the deli counter second, behind a ruddy, big-chested yachting type, probably from Little Compton and somehow stuck inland, who had obviously decided that cold cuts were the way to go in the coming apocalypse. Soon there was a small crowd around him, and he gave them a big show, ordering corned beef, proscuittini, smoked turkey, even olive loaf, in thinly sliced two-pound units. No one but me resented the way he was hogging the counter and showing off his money. I ended up buying a jar each of dried beef and mayonnaise, a package of stale burger buns, and an old head of iceberg lettuce.
By the time I got to the checkout the two lines were twenty deep and festivity was at its height. Shoppers sighting bare acquaintances across the way abandoned their lines to embrace one another; and when they returned, their places remained open to receive them. Most people were giddy and riotous but here and there stood someone badly frightened by all the excitement. A tiny old woman cried and was comforted by a family of Portugese; a pregnant teenager with a Cro-Magnon forehead and hair bleached to the color of driftwood bellowed like a steer every time someone bumped into her cart, "Quit hittin' me, you retard!" Joe Hiltebrand, retired Frome Junior High School principal, turned around in line in front of me and addressed us. "This lady," he said, pointing to an old woman whose elbow he held, "just has two boxes of candles. Surely we can let her in ahead of us." We all nodded except for the cave-preggo, who said, "Fuck huh." The line turned toward her as one. "Fuck all a youse."
The woman in back of me, who had been talking in my ear, an academic type Not From Around Here, probably a Brown University wife, spoke soothingly to the girl, as though she were a zoo animal. "We're all scared, dear," she said, and so forth, carefully using monosyllables, but she didn't get far. "Fuck you," said the girl, and the woman Not From Around Here turned away without losing poise and whispered in my ear. "Two eloquent arguments for abortion rights, right there." Academics always spot me for an educated woman. What is it? How can I avoid it? "I'm a nun," I told her. She laughed unconvincingly, and turned to the woman in back of her. "Isn't it fascinating," she said, "to see what other peopel buy in times of crisis? I see you're loading up on packaged mixes. An interesting choice." "Yeah, I guess so," said the humiliated housewife From Around Here, who obviously wanted to shield the contents of her cart with her body. Even during Panic Time it is inexcusable to comment on someone's groceries. We all stared rudely into the academic woman's cart, which brimmed with wheels of cheese and bags of whole wheat flour. Miraculously, the woman sensed hostility. "Brie is the perfect hurricane food!" she said, in her too loud Midwestern voice. "It can't spoil! It can only get runny and smelly and yummy!" "Fuck huh," said the preggo. Indiania, Illinois, Ohio. Somewhere out there. Well, we all have to come from someplace.
I come from Rhode Island.
July 4, 2008
Another day, another meme
Got this from Ted:
Five snacks I enjoy in a perfect, non weight-gaining world:
Cheese cake
Chips and salsa
Choclate ice cream with chocolate jimmies
Cheese and crackers
Pita and hummus
Five snacks I enjoy in the real world:
Yeah, so, see above. But okay, I'll play along:
Carrot sticks and hummus
Weight Watchers ice cream sandwiches
Peaches (my favorite fruit ever)
Dannon Light 'n Fit yogart (either vanilla or strawberry/kiwi)
Slices of bell pepper with balsalmic vinaigrette
Five things I would do if I were a billionaire:
Travel. Mainly to third world countries in the Middle East and Central Asia. Places I would go: I would spend no less than a year in Iran. I would travel through Iraq, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Mongolia, Afghanistan, Syria, Kazakhstan ... any "stan" at all, I'm there.
Buy a couple houses. I would buy an apartment in New York - either on the upper West or in Tribeca. I would buy a cottage in County Mayo. I would buy a beach house in Rhode Island. I'd keep an apartment in Chicago.
Support a theatre company. There are so many - so I would have to think specifically about which one I wanted to invest in. Maybe the Arden Theatre in Philadelphia, a company I admire. Or maybe another one. Who knows. But I would invest in a company, an ensemble, doing work I believed in. Along with that, I would set up scholarships for young actors.
On a frivolous note, at one of my homes, I would have the best roller coaster on the planet built in my backyard. I would ride it every day.
I'd set up a trust fund for Cashel
Five (non-academic) jobs that I have had:
-- AOL chat host backstage at Comic Relief
-- Factory worker
-- Library page
-- one-night-only lingerie model at a private party held at some random house where the lingerie company hosted a party for husbands to come and buy crap for their wives (one of the funniest and bleakest nights of my life)
-- waitress
Five habits:
Waking up at 5:30 a.m.
writing (journal, blog, whatever)
Some OCD behavior that I don't care to share
making my bed
idolizing/idealizing whomever I am in love with
Five places I have lived:
San Francisco
Philadelphia
Los Angeles
Chicago
New York
Five people I want to get to know better
I think this is supposed to be bloggers I tag with the meme - but I don't really tag people (consider yourself tagged) - so I'll take it another way:
Dean Stockwell
Jason Beghe
Angelina Jolie
John Banville
Gene Hackman
The Books: "Scoop" (Evelyn Waugh)
Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt:
Scoop
I read this book because of Christopher Hitchens' review of it, I think in The Atlantic. Hitchens' review made me laugh out loud, so I immediately went out and bought a copy and read the book last year. To say this is a funny book is to completely under-state the situation. It is so funny that I found myself on the bus one night, reading it, and my face was literally frozen in a comedy mask of laughter for the entire ride, tears streaming down my face. It was unbearably funny. It's hard to describe why something is funny - and humor, of course, is a subjective thing. What's funny to me may be just "silly" to someone else. To me, Scoop is in the top 5 funniest books I have ever read in my life. Some books are amusing, they have a light and hilarious tone, that puts you into an easygoing comedic mood. But Scoop is beyond that. I GUFFAWED reading this book. I had to put it down occasionally, because I just needed a break from the laughter. I couldn't breathe. I probably scared my neighbors. "Why is she whooping and guffawing all by herself over there?" It's not always comfortable to have your face literally FROZEN into a Greek comedy mask!! It makes you look like a lunatic!
Scoop is the best lampoon of journalism (especially foreign correspondents) I have ever read. It is 100% absurd, from beginning to end, but at the same time (and this is Waugh's genius), all you can do is see how right ON his observations are ... how true the whole thing is, and that he seems to be only exaggerating a little bit. It is not a book for idealists. It is a book for those of us who look around, see craziness, and wonder if we are all alone. Does anyone else see how INSANE this all is?? There's a sort of Wag the Dog thing going on here - Scoop reminded me quite a bit of that film, only it took as its target journalism. But you get into the realm in Scoop where "truth" is the LAST thing anyone cares about. If it's in print, it's true. And so the foreign correspondents race around trying to beat each other to the punch - but it's all bogus anyway, and what on earth is the point?
The best part about this book is its protagonist. Scoop flat out would not work if the lead character was fully ensconced in that kind of journalism, and knew the rules, and accepted them. No. We need the outsider. We need the baffled "nature writer" who has never been outside of England to suddenly find himself in a foreign country in the middle of a civil war, surrounded by INSANE foreign correspondents ... in order for the book to work. He's sort of like Paul Pennyfeather, in Waugh's Decline and Fall, a guy who doesn't have a lot of ego, he's not running around trying to prove himself, or defend himself ... He just quietly negotiates the insane world he is in, and tries to behave like everyone else does. But because he doesn't understand the WHYS of all of the rules, he just mindlessly imitates what he sees ... and so the misunderstandings that come about because of that are hilarious.
William Boot lives with his family on a rambling old estate called Boot Magna. He rarely leaves. He is not married. He writes occasional pieces about otters and flowers and such for London papers. And through a grave misunderstanding - there's another Boot afoot in London journalism, a young glittering up-and-coming star ... William Boot is assigned to go cover the civil war in Ishmaelia, a fictional country in Africa. So just imagine the mix-up (which is never ever discovered): William Boot sits at his moldy desk in the country, painstakingly writing about how the flowers are coming out in the country, and how the birds are flying south. And suddenly, with no explanation, it is demanded of him by his newspaper that he drop everything and go to get the "scoop" on what is happening in Ishmaelia, a place he has never even heard of. It would be like someone who writes about fashion suddenly having to go to Chechnya and figure out what's happening. William Boot never questions the assignment. He doesn't say, 'Are you sure it's me you want? Could there be another Boot running around that you are thinking of??" He just starts to prepare for his trip.
Hijinx ensue at every stage of the way. He packs enough stuff that he needs to have servants trailing behind him. He doesn't know how to file a dispatch. You have to pay by the word - but he doesn't know that, and sends NOVELS of words back to the main office ... none of which have anythign to do with NEWS. Scoop is a deeply cynical book.
William Boot has NO IDEA what he is doing. He is tossed into the thick of the world of foreign journalists, hanging around aimlessly in this godforsaken African country, waiting for something to happen. Boot meets a couple of people who realize very quickly, wow, this guy has no idea what he is doing - and show him the ropes. But of course it's a very competitive atmosphere - everyone waiting for THE scoop that will put THEIR paper on top, make their paper be the first to report such and such. William Boot has no ambition. He doesn't care about any of that. He misses his home. He misses the creek in his yard and his flower garden. And yet, through various coincidences and misunderstandings, William Boot ends up getting the scoop to end all scoops. But he doesn't even realize it.
Scenes upon scenes of correspondents racing about Ishmaelia, in a long lunatic caravan, trying to beat each other to the story. But the best thing is: the entire thing, you can tell, is pretty much being invented by the journalists. It's wag the dog. What is really happening in Ishmaelia? Well, by the end of reading Scoop, you know that that is the most irrelevant question of all.
The characters are awesome. There's one renegade journalist, a star, who doesn't run with the pack. He gets amazing scoops and no one quite knows how he does it. William Boot does not understand the rules - and he NEVER understands the rules. He continues to send back novel-length dispatches - which all basically say, "Nothing happening here!" which, of course, is not what his paper wants to hear. If nothing is happening in Ishmaelia, then why are we paying for you to be there? Something BETTER happen in Ishmaelia. But William Boot is a true innocent. Full of guile. He has no scheming or wheeling or dealing in him. He just follows events. He reports on things he does not understand. He interviews people and writes what they say - but you can tell - by both his questions and the answers - that William Boot has no idea what is going on. He has ZERO context.
To imagine his hardened Fleet Street editors reading those ridiculous reports back in London ... to picture all of them looking at each other like, "Huh?" is one of the funniest images in the book. ESPECIALLY because they all still think that William Boot is the OTHER Boot, the genius journalist Boot - so they are predisposed to give him the benefit of the doubt, and to think to themselves, "Well, maybe this is just how he works ... maybe we need to just hang back and let him do his thing ... everyone says he is the best in the business ..." So everyone is basically in a torment of confusion and misunderstanding.
Even just writing about the book makes it sound less funny. All I can say is; for one of the most insightful cynical relevant angry hilarious books about journalism ever. I laughed from beginning to end.
There's one chapter which describes a Communist Revolution that occurs in Ishmaelia - but it only lasts for one night. That chapter was like a Benny Hill episode.
Here's an excerpt from the first part of the book - William Boot finds himself in a whirlwind. He is a simple country farmer, and suddenly he has to go report on a war. He has to go request Visas from two separate embassies (one of the recognized government of Ishmaelia, and one of the revolutionary government). William Boot has never even heard of Ishmaelia. He doesn't even care, frankly. He's not openly bitter or skeptical - but he honestly has no curiousity about African wars or any other wars. He doesnt' understand why he has been chosen, a man who writes about his own flower garden, to sail off to Africa and report on a war, but he moves ahead with the plans. This is smart smart humor. Waugh has a slam-dunk ending to each of these chapters. It's the "ba-dum-ching" of all great comedy. There is no escape from his absurdist worldview. So don't even try.
Please notice the blunt incomprehension of all of William Boot's replies.
EXCERPT FROM Scoop
2.
At the Passport Office next morning they told William that he would want a visa for Ishmaelia. "In fact you may want two. Someone's just opened a rival legation. We haven't recognized it officially of course but you may find it convenient to visit them. Which part are you going to?"
"The patriotic part."
"Ah, then you'd better get two visas," said the official.
William drove to the address they gave him. It was in Maida Vale. He rang the bell and presently a tousled woman opened the door.
"Is this the Ishmaelite Legation?" he said.
"No, it's Doctor Cohen's and he's out."
"Oh ... I wanted an Ishmaelite visa."
"Well, you'd better call again. I daresay Doctor Cohen will have one only he doesn't come here not often except sometimes to sleep."
The lower half of another woman appeared on the landing overhead. William could see her bedroom slippers and a length of flannel dressing-gown.
"What is it, Effie?"
"Man at the door."
"Tell him whatever it is we don't want it."
"He says will the Doctor give him something or other."
"Not without an appointment."
The legs disappeared and a door slammed.
"That's Mrs. Cohen," said Effie. "You see how it is. They're Yids."
"Oh dear," said William, "I was told to come here by the Passport Office."
"Sure it isn't the nigger downstairs you want?"
"Perhaps it is."
"Well, why didn't you say so? He's downstairs."
William then noticed, for the first time, that a little flag was flying from the area railings. It bore a red hammer and sickle on a black ground. He descended to the basement where, over a door between two dustbins, a notice proclaimed: --
LEGATION AND CONSULATE-GENERAL
If away leave letters with tobacconist at No. 162b
William knocked and the door was opened by the Negro whom he had seen the evening before in Hyde Park. The features, to William's undiscriminating eye, were not much different from those of any other Negro, but the clothes were unfrogettable.
'Can I see the Ishmaelite Consul-General, please?"
"Are you from the Press?"
"Yes, I suppose in a way I am."
"Come in. I'm him. As you see, we are a little understaffed at the moment."
The Consul_general led him into what had once been the servants' hall. Photographs of Negroes in uniform and ceremonial European dress hung on the walls. Samples of tropical produce were disposed on the table and along the bookshelves. There was a map of Ishmaelia, an eight-piece office suite and a radio. William sat down. The Consul-General turned off the music and began to talk.
"The patriotic cause of Ishmaelia," he said, "is the cause of the coloured man and of the proletariat throughout the world. The Ishmaelite worker is threatened by corrupt and foreign coalition of capitalistic exploiters, priests and imperialists. As the great negro Karl Marx has so nobly written ..." He talked for about twenty minutes. The black-backed, pink-palmed, finlike hands beneath the violet cuffs flapped and slapped. "Who built the Pyramids?" he asked. "Who invented the circulation of the blood? ... Africa for the African worker, Europe for the African worker, Asia, Oceania, America, Arctic and Antarctic for the African worker."
At length he paused and wiped the line of froth from his lips.
"I came about a visa," said William diffidently.
"Oh," said the Consul-General, turning on the radio once more. "There's fifty pounds deposit and a form to fill in."
William declared that he had not been imprisoned, that he was not suffering from any contagious or outrageous disease, that he was not seeking employment in Ishmaelia or the overthrow of its political institutions, paid his deposit and was rewarded with a rubber stamp on the first page of his new passport.
"I hope you have a pleasant trip," said the Consul-General. "I'm told it's a very interesting country."
"But aren't you an Ishmaelite?"
"Me? Certainly not. I'm a graduate of the Baptist College of Antigua. But the cause of the Ishmaelite worker is the cause of the Negro worker of the world."
"Yes," said William. "Yes. I suppose it is. Thank you very much."
"Who discovered America?" demanded the Consul-General to his retreating back, in tones that rang high above the sound of the wireless concert. "Who won the Great War?"
3.
The rival legation had more spacious quarters, in a hotel in South Kensington. A gold swastika on a white ground hung proudly from the window. The door of the suite was opened by a Negro clad in a white silk shirt, buckskin breeches and hunting boots, who clicked his spurs and gave William a Roman salute.
"I've come for a visa."
The pseudo-consul led him to the office. "I shall have to delay you for a few minutes. You see the Legation is only just open and we have not yet got our full equipment. We are expecting the rubber stamp any minute now. In the meantime let me explain the Ishmaelite situation to you. There are many misconceptions. For instance, the Jews of Geneva, subsidized by Russian gold, have spread the story that we are a black race. Such is the ignorance, credulity and prejudice of the tainted European states that the absurd story has been repeated in the press. I must ask you to deny it. As you will see for yourself, we are pure Aryans. In fact we were the first white colonizers of Central Africa. What Stanley and Livingstone did in the last century, our Ishmaelite ancestors did in the stone age. In the course of the years the tropical sun has given to some of us a healthy, in some cases almost a swarthy, tan. But all responsible anthropologists ..."
William fingered his passport and became anxious about luncheon. It was already past one.
" ... The present so-called Government bent on the destruction of our great heritage ..." There was an interruption. The pseudo-consul went to the door. "From the stationer's," said a cockney voice. "Four and eight to pay."
"Thank you, that is all."
"Four and eight to pay or else I takes it away again."
There was a pause. The pseudo-consul returned.
"There is a fee of five shillings for the visa," he said.
William paid. The pseudo-consul returned with the rubber stamp, jingling four pennies in his breeches pocket.
"You will see the monuments of our glorious past in Ishmaelia," he said, taking the passport. "I envy you very much."
"But are you not an Ishmaelite?"
"Of course; by descent. My parents migrated some generations ago. I was brought up in Sierra Leone."
Then he opened the passport.
July 4, 1826
It was the 50th anniversary of July 4, 1776. Both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had been invited to attend huge celebrations in honor of the anniversary, but due to illness - both had sent their regrets and also best wishes, saying they would not be able to come. Thomas Jefferson's letter to the mayor of Washington, declining the invitation, ended as follows:
May it be to the world, what I believe it will be (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition and persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government ... All eyes are opened or opening to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few, booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately by the grace of God. These are the grounds of hope for others; for ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.
Adams was too ill to put pen to paper. The light was going out. For both of them.
These two men, two of the main architects of the American Revolution, long estranged due to political differences, (and Jefferson referring, in public, to "political heresies" among some of his colleagues - a clear dig at Adams - and a clear sign of Jefferson's belief in some political orthodoxy, which was the breaking point for the overly sensitive Adams) had finally reconciled. The reconciliation had been engineered by Benjamin Rush, who thought it a shame that these two great patriots, once dear friends, would go to their graves without making up. Benjamin Rush had a dream that Adams and Jefferson became friends again (I wonder if he really had that dream? Or if it was just a fabrication in order to move things along). Rush wrote to Adams,
"And now, my dear friend, permit me again to suggest to you to receive the olive branch which has thus been offered to you by the hand of a man who still loves you. Fellow laborers in erecting the great fabric of American independence! ... embrace - embrace each other!"
Adams and Jefferson began to correspond ... and it lasted over a period of 12-years ... a correspondence that has to be read to be believed
When they finally began corresponding again, Rush (who had also been writing to Jefferson, urging him to make peace) wrote to Adams, and you can feel his excitement in his words:
I rejoice in the correspondence which has taken place between you and your old friend Mr. Jefferson. I consider you and him as the North and South Poles of the American Revolution. Some talked, some wrote, and some fought to promote and establish it but you and Mr. Jefferson thought for us all.
And then ... on the same day in 1826 ... which happened to be July 4 ... which happened to be the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence ... John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died. Within hours of each other.
David McCullough writes in his biography of John Adams:
That John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had died on the same day, and that it was, of all days, the Fourth of July, could not be seen as a mere coincidence: it was a "visible and palpable" manifestation of "Divine favor," wrote John Quincy Adams in his diary that night, expressing what was felt and would be said again and again everywhere the news spread.
John Adams' last words were either "Jefferson ... still lives." or "Jefferson ... survives."
I will never get tired of thinking about that, wondering, contemplating, shaking my head. I think I know what it means, and WHY Adams said it, and then I realize - No, I have no idea - and I prefer it that way. I prefer the mystery of it, the question, the subtlety - I prefer to just think about it, and wonder about it . I love it.
Amazingly, though, Jefferson actually had died a couple of hours earlier. Which makes this an even more amazing story. Like ... twins who live on opposite sides of the planet, and one twin knows when the other twin scrapes his knee. There are things that cannot be sufficiently explained. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Thomas Jefferson's last words are in dispute - but there are enough similarities to suggest that something along these lines occurred. (I love the discrepancy, by the way - I love it because it just adds to the mystery.) According to Robley Dunglison, the attending physician, Jefferson dozed through the day on July 3rd, and woke up in the early evening, saying as he awoke, "Is it the Fourth?" (A lump in my throat ...) Dunglison said to him that it soon would be. Nicholas Trist, married to Jefferson's granddaughter, remembers it this way: Jefferson woke and said, "This is the Fourth?" Trist remembers pretending not to hear the question, because he didn't want to tell Jefferson that it was still only the 3rd of July. But Jefferson asked again, "This is the Fourth?" Trist caved, and nodded - and he felt very bad about his lie. Virginia Randolph, his granddaughter, remembers it differently. She remembers him waking and saying, clearly, "This is the Fourth." No question. A statement. Jefferson faded out after that, and the next day, the Fourth, he called out for help at one point - and someone remembers him saying, at one point, "No, doctor. Nothing more." But it is his question/statement about what the date was that has passed down through the years as Jefferson's final words. In the end, it doesn't really matter, of course, although the story itself is one I treasure, in all its different details.
Did he wait? When he found out it was still just the Third, did he wait? To die on the Fourth? I wouldn't put it past him, he always loved symmetry.
Yes, Mr. Jefferson. It is the fourth. And thank you. Thank you both. Thank you for thinking for us all.
Happy 4th of July, everybody!
July 3, 2008
One word only, one word only, come on, big baby, come on
Questions to be answered with one word only - and no word can be used twice. (got this from Cullen)
1. Where is your cell phone? Purse
2. Your significant other? Hitachi
3. Your hair? Graying
4. Your mother? Amazing
5. Your father? Love
6. Your favorite time of day? Dawn
7. Your dream last night? Ernie
8. Your favorite drink? Coffee
9. Your dream goal? Meaning
10. The room you’re in? Abode
11. Your ex? Loved
12. Your fear? Sameness
13. Where do you want to be in 6 years? Married
14. What you are not? Peaceful
15. Your Favorite meal? Schmatzas
16. One of your wish list items? Mirren
17. The last thing you did? Moisturize
18. Where you grew up? RI
19. What are you wearing? Sundress
20. Your TV is? Nonexistent
21. Your pets? Future
22. Your computer? Mac
23. Your life? Intense
24. Your mood? Anxious
25. Missing someone? Yes
26. Your car? Hyundai
27. Something you’re not wearing? Underwear
28. Favorite store? Marshall's
29. Your summer? Busy
30. Your favorite colour? Purple
31. When is the last time you laughed? Earlier
32. When is the last time you cried? Today
33. Your health? Okay
34. Your children? No
35. Your future? Hopeful
36. Your beliefs? Acceptance
37. Young or old? Middle
38. Your image? Invisible
39. Your appearance? Mediocre
40. Would you live your life over again knowing what you know? Oui
Today in History: July 3, 1776
John Adams, in a July 3, 1776 letter to Abigail, after the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 2 in Philadelphia:
The Delay of this Declaration to this Time, has many great Advantages attending it. The Hopes of Reconciliation, which were fondly entertained by Multitudes of honest and well meaning tho weak and mistaken People, have been gradually and at last totally extinguished. Time has been given for the whole People, maturely to consider the great Question of Independence and to ripen their Judgments, dissipate their Fears, and allure their Hopes, by discussing it in News Papers and Pamphletts, by debating it, in Assemblies, Conventions, Committees of Safety and Inspection, in town and County Meetings, as well as in private Conversations, so that the whole People in every Colony of the 13, have now adopted it, as their own Act. This will cement the Union, and avoid those Heats, and perhaps Convulsions which might have been occasioned, by such a Declaration Six Months ago.But the Day is past. The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfire and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.
You will think me transported with Enthusiasm, but I am not. I am well aware of the Toil, and Blood, and Treasure that it will cost Us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States. Yet, through all the Gloom, I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see that the End is more than worth all the Means, and that Posterity will triumph in that Day's Transaction, even though We should not rue it, which I trust in God We shall not.
The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America.
He was off by just 2 days.
The Books: "Decline and Fall" (Evelyn Waugh)
Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt:
Decline and Fall
I just read this book a month or so ago (thoughts about it here). It made me laugh out loud. From page one. It was Evelyn Waugh's first novel and it's unbelievable to think that - because it's so assured, so unbelievably ridiculous - openly absurd ... He has such confidence in his own tone. It just GOES. Everything in the book depends on a terrible misunderstanding that happens in the first chapter - and it is NEVER "righted". Paul Pennyfeather is expelled from Oxford for running across the quad wearing no pants. The incident occurs during a notorious night where everyone plays pranks - but Waugh makes it clear that Paul Pennyfeather sits alone in his room, he's serious, he's studying to be a minister, and he's not one of the rampaging idiots wreaking havoc on the campus. But somehow, one of the pranksters steals Paul Pennyfeather's pants (from off his body) and, mortified, he runs across the quad, under the eyes of the Dons. So it seems as though HE is the instigator of the madness - and he is expelled. Paul Pennyfeather doesn't even explain himself or try to defend himself. He is quite passive. Perhaps he senses that the series of coincidences that led to him running pants-less in a public place would be too bizarre or difficult to explain, so all righty then, no hard feelings, I'll pack my bags and go!
The ministry is now out of the question for someone expelled for indecent exposure. So Paul Pennyfeather gets a job at a ridiculous boarding school for boys in the Welsh countryside. Every teacher who works there is legitimately insane. The headmaster is a lunatic. The boys are terrors. Paul Pennyfeather was hired to teach German and music - even though he doesn't speak German and he can't play an instrument. But the school assures him that that doesn't matter. And the amazing thing is: IT DOESN'T.
Waugh skewers education in this book. Academia is his target. Paul Pennyfeather is really the only sane one in the book - but nobody congratualtes him for it because, after all, if everyone is insane then the only sane one is going to seem the MOST insane.
Paul Pennyfeather ends up getting fired - due to another series of coincidences - and then he ends up having a romance with this woman who basically convinces him to become a slave trafficker - but he doesn't even know that that is what he is doing. She runs a theatre in Buenos Aires or something like that and all of her showgirls are stranded throughout Europe with Visa problems so she begs Paul to go get all the girls. Paul does. He flies through Europe, talking to embassies, getting girls out of hock, all the while having no idea that he is behaving like a criminal mastermind. He eventually is arrested for slave trafficking. How on earth do you traffic in slaves and not know it? Perhaps Paul understands that the world is a tremendously complex place and there is no way he could understand his part in it ... so he accepts all of these disasters with passive aplomb. He is thrown in jail, and he finds that he really enjoys jail. And what do you know ... many of his old teacher friends are also in jail by now, for this or that crime ... so he knows a lot of people. It's like he keeps running into the same band of lunatics.
The entire book is hilarious. It never stops. The comedy is relentless. But at the end, there's a monologue by one of the characters that cuts through the bullshit, the lunacy, and makes the points Evelyn Waugh has been making all along. Only now he goes from covert to overt. It's brilliant. Evelyn Waugh had SUCH a good eye for ridiculous-ness, pomposity, pretentiousness ... Paul Pennyfeather is not congratulated by the world for having integrity. He is the one who takes the fall. His entire life is ruined. Yet he seems to not mind all that much. Isn't that how life sometimes is? You start out wanting to be a minister and before you know it you are trafficking slaves across Europe, and you aren't sure how you got from A to B.
The excerpt below is during the games day at the boarding school. The parents of the boys (lunatics, all of them) show up to watch their kids run relay races, etc. But the whole thing is mayhem, because nobody really cares about sports - none of the teachers do - they don't even understand why anyone would WANT to leap over hurdles and run around a track ... Paul Pennyfeather is in charge of much of this, and again, he has no qualifications. But that doesn't seem to matter.
Very funny book. Amazing (again) that it's only a first novel.
EXCERPT FROM Decline and Fall
"So you're the Doctor's hired assassin, eh? Well, I hope you keep a firm hand on my toad of a son. How's he doin'?"
"Quite well," said Paul.
"Nonsense!" said Lady Circumference. "The boy's a dunderhead. If he wasn't he wouldnt' be here. He wants beatin' and hittin' and knockin' about generally, and then he'll be no good. That grass is shockin' bad on the terrace, Doctor; you ought to sand it down and resow it, but you'll have to take that cedar down if you ever want it to grow properly at the side. I hate cuttin' down a tree - like losin' a tooth - but you have to choose, tree or grass; you can't keep 'em both. What d'you pay your head man?"
As she was talking Lord Circumference emerged from the shadows and shook Paul's hand. He had a long fair moustache and large watery eyes which reminded Paul a little of Mr. Prendergast.
"How do you do?" he said.
"How do you do?" said Paul.
"Fond of sport, eh?" he said. "I mean these sort of sports?"
"Oh, yes," said Paul. "I think they're so good for the boys."
"Do you? Do you think that?" said Lord Circumference very earnestly; "do you think they're good for the boys?"
"Yes," said Paul; "don't you?"
"Me? Yes, oh, yes. I think so, too. Very good for the boys."
"So useful in case of a war or anything," said Paul.
"D'you think so? D'you really and truly think so? That there is going to be another war, I mean?"
"Yes, I'm sure of it; aren't you?"
"Yes, of course, I'm sure of it too. And that awful bread, and people coming on to one's own land and telling one what one's to do with one's own butter and milk, and commandeering one's horses! Oh, yes, all over again! My wife shot her hunters rather than let them go to the army. And girl's in breeches on all the farms! All over again! Who do you think it will be this time?"
"The Americans," said Paul stoutly.
"No, indeed, I hope not. We had German prisoners on two of the farms. That wasn't so bad, but if they start putting Americans on my land, I'll just refuse to stand it. My daughter brought an American down to luncheon the other day, and, do you know ...?"
"Dig it and dung it," said Lady Circumference. "Only it's got to be dug deep, mind. Now how did your calceolarias do last year?"
"I really have no idea," said the Doctor. "Flossie, how did our calceolarias do?"
"Lovely," said Flossie.
"I don't believe a word of it," said Lady Circumference. "Nobody's calceolarias did well last year."
"Shall we adjourn to the playing fields?" said the Doctor. "I expect they are all waiting for us."
Talking cheerfully, the party crossed the hall and went down the steps.
"Your drive's awful wet," said Lady Circumference. "I expect there's a blocked pipe somewhere. Sure it ain't sewage?"
"I was never any use at short distances," Lord Circumference was saying. "I was always a slow starter, but I was once eighteenth in the Crick at Rugby. We didn't take sports so seriously at the 'Varsity when I was up; everybody rode. What college were you at?"
"Scone."
"Scone, were you? Ever come across a young nephew of my wife's called Alastair Digby-Vaine-Trumpington?"
"I just met him," said Paul.
"That's very interesting. Greta, Mr. Pennyfeather knows Alastair."
"Does he? Well, that boy's doing no good for himself. Got fined twenty pounds the other day, his mother told me. Seemed proud of it. If my brother had been alive he'd have licked all that out of the young cub. It takes a man to bring up a man."
"Yes," said Lord Circumference meekly.
"Who else do you know at Oxford? Do you know Freddy French-Wise?"
"No."
"Or Tom Obblethwaite or that youngest Castleton boy?"
"No, I'm afraid not. I had a great friend called Potts."
"Potts!" said Lady Circumference, and left it at that.
All the school and several local visitors were assembled in the field. Grimes stood by himself, looking depressed. Mr. Prendergast, flushed and unusually vivacious, was talking to the Vicar. As the headmaster's party came into sight the Llanabba Silver Band struck up Men of Harlech.
"Shockin' noise," commented Lady Circumference graciously.
The head prefect came forward and presented her with a programme, beribboned and embossed in gold. Another prefect set a chair for her. She sat down with the Doctor next to her and Lord Circumference on the other side of him.
"Pennyfeather," cried the Doctor above the band, "start them racing."
Philbrick gave Paul a megaphone. "I found this in the pavilion," he said. "I thought it might be useful."
"Who's that extraordinary man?" asked Lady Circumference.
"He is the boxing coach and swimming professional," said the Doctor. "A finely developed figure, don't you think?"
"First race," said Paul through the megaphone, "under sixteen. Quarter mile!" He read out Grimes's list of starters.
"What's Tangent doin' in this race?" said Lady Circumference. "The boy can't run an inch."
The silver band stopped playing.
"The course," said Paul, "starts from the pavilion, goes round that clump of elms ..."
"Beeches," corrected Lady Circumference loudly.
" ... and ends in front of the band stand. Starter, Mr. Prendergast; timekeeper, Captain Grimes."
"I shall say, 'Are you ready? one, two three!' and then fire," said Mr. Prendergast. "Are you ready? One" -- there was a terrific report. "Oh, dear! I'm sorry" -- but the race had begun. Clearly Tangent was not going to win; he was sitting on the grass crying because he had been wounded in the foot by Mr. Prendergast's bullet. Philbrick carried him, wailing dismally, into the refreshment tent, where Dingy helped him off with his shoe. His heel was slightly grazed. Dingy gave him a large slice of cake, and he hobbled out surrounded by a sympathetic crowd.
"That won't hurt him," said Lady Circumference, "but I think some one ought to remove the pistol from that old man before he does anything serious."
"I knew that was going to happen," said Lord Circumference.
"A most unfortunate beginning," said the Doctor.
"Am I going to die?" said Tangent, his mouth full of cake.
"For God's sake, look after Prendy," said Grimes in Paul's ear. "The man's as tight as a lord, and one one whisky, too."
"First blood to me!" said Mr. Prendergast gleefully.
"The last race will be run again," said Paul down the megaphone. 'Starter, Mr. Philbrick; timekeeper, Mr. Prendergast."
"On your marks! Get set." Bang went the pistol, this time without disaster. The six little boys scampered off through the mud, disappeared behind the beeches and returned rather more slowly. Captain Grimes and Mr. Prendergast held up a piece of tape.
"Well, run, sir!" shouted Colonel Sidebotham. "Jolly good race."
"Capital," said Mr. Prendergast, and dropping his end of the tape, he sauntered over to the Colonel. "I can see you are a fine judge of a race, sir. So was I once. So's Grimes. A capital fellow, Grimes; a bounder, you know, but a capital fellow. Bounders can be capital fellows; don't you agree, Colonel Slidebottom? In fact, I'd go farther and say that capital fellows are bounders. What d'you say to that? I wish you'd stop pulling at my arm, Pennyfeather. Colonel Slybotham and I are just having a most interesting conversation about bounders."
The silver band struck up again, and Mr. Prendergast began a little jig, saying: "Capital fellow! capital fellow!" and snapping his fingers. Paul led him to the refreshment tent.
"Dingy wants you to help her in there," he said firmly, "and, for God's sake, don't come out until you feel better."
"I never felt better in my life," said Mr. Prendergast indignantly. "Capital, fellow! capital fellow!"
"It is not my affair, of course," said Colonel Sidebotham, "but if you ask me I should say that man had been drinking."
"He was talking very excitedly to me," said the Vicar, "about some apparatus for warming a church in Worthing and about the Apostolic Claims of the Church of Abyssinia. I confess I could not follow him clearly. He seems deeply interested in Church matters. Are you quite sure he is right in the head? I have noticed again and again since I have been in the Church that lay interest in ecclesiastical matters is often a prelude to insanity."
"Drink, pure and simple," said the Colonel. "I wonder where he got it? I could do with a spot of whisky."
"Quarter Mile Open!" said Paul through his megaphone.
July 2, 2008
At long last: William Holden
That project I have kept alluding to over the past 2 or 3 weeks:
My William Holden tribute is up at House Next Door!
Go check it out!
"And I will create toilets in French camping sites ..."
Eddie Izzard on God creating the world. (I adore how God continues to be James Mason.)
He just sold out Radio City. Amazing! He did much of the material he did back in February when Caitlin and I went to see him. Oh - and Caitlin was there at Radio City - jealous!
The Books: "Possessing the Secret of Joy" (Alice Walker)
Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt:
Possessing the Secret of Joy
I read this wrenching book in a couple of days in a cold winter when I was living in Chicago. I remember particularly sitting on the Clark Street bus, travelling uptown, reading the excerpt below and feeling a burning sensation in my heart and chest, like I thought I might have to get up and get off the bus. I will never read this book again. I don't have to. And sometimes I feel like I want to throw it out, or give it away ... why keep it around? But, like a couple of books on my shelves, it is completely representative to me of a certain time in my life, a difficult time, and sometimes I like to have those books around, just as a reminder. Not just of a bad time in my life, but of how far I have come. I was in agony when I read the book. I cannot remember how it came to me, or who recommended it. I'm not a big Alice Walker fan. I had read The Color Purple in high school, and yes, I remember it moving me - but it didn't propel me on to read all of her stuff. She wasn't that good. She wasn't, say, Max Shulman (excerpt here)!! No, just kidding. A friend of mine in high school was a huge Alice Walker fan. I remember sitting in the library with her, during our first period, and the announcements and Pledge of Allegiance were coming over the loudspeaker from the principal, and my friend sat at our table, with tears streaming down her face because she had been reading The Color Purple. It just didn't hit me, in the way it did her. But somehow Possessing the Secret of Joy came into my life during that grim winter, and I'll never forget my experience reading it. I felt named by the book. That has not happened often. It's not that I "related" to the book. It is, after all, about an immigrant woman from Algeria. It has nothing to do with my life. But its message named me. It called out to me. Specifically. That's why I almost had to get up and get off the bus. It was unbearable.
It tells the story of Tashi, an African woman who has emigrated to the United States. Many of the details are lost to me. She has married an American man - Adam. She had fled the oppression and war in Algeria, and is now living a comfortable American life. But she is on the run from her memories. The book is told in different voices - her voice, Adam's voice, her friend Olivia - there are a couple of more characters who chime in as well. Alice Walker's strength is not in realistic writing, obviously - she's more of a political writer, more interested in the points she wants to make, rather than creating a realistic framework. That's one of the main reasons why I can't get into her work. I like more realistic stuff. But in Possessing the Secret of Joy it works, because all of the different voices (and they actually AREN'T different voices - they may be different characters but they all have the same voice) pour every side of the argument into a big pot in the middle - nothing is left out ... So it's a deeply complex book, in a way (and I don't think complexity is Walker's strong suit) - and I think is essential reading for anyone interested in learning about female circumcision (the topic of the book). Of course there's plenty of non-fiction stuff available too, but Walker's book - with its solemn Greek chorus of differing views and opinions - is a huge part of the literature. Tashi's sister bled to death during her circumcision "ceremony". Tashi herself somehow did not have the procedure done - but instead of feeling relief that she had escaped such a fate - it starts to bother her. It becomes a political and cultural symbol to her, especially living in the West. Africa is in upheaval and so Tashi, in an act of solidarity that is insane (if you look at it rationally), goes back to her village and has the procedure done. Things go downhill pretty quickly and Tashi goes mad. The thing about the book that can be grating but is also its greatest strength is the multitude of voices weighing in on Tashi's choice - her husband, her friend, her husband's lover - all of these people are invested in what has happened and, of course, have different views - not just about Tashi's choice but about the tradition, in general. My memories of the book are vague, in terms of specifics - I mainly just remember that burning sensation on the bus, with the fogged-up windows and the snowy sidewalks going by outside ... but I do know that Tashi returns, again, to Africa and murders M'Lissa - the village woman in charge of clitoridectomies. She's an illiterate ancient woman, but puffed up with her position of upholding the tradition. She is the one who allowed Tashi's sister to bleed to death. The book goes back and forth between the trial of Tashi for murder - and all the events leading up to the murder.
Much of the book has to do with the inherent danger in even talking about any of this. Now, with people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and many others, writing openly about their experiences - it doesn't seem to be as taboo. Or, of course it still is taboo - it is a hot hot topic - but it can be talked about. Alice Walker was writing about a character who felt guilty about "revealing" the fucked-up nature of her native culture. Who was she to live in America and JUDGE Africa? No. This is her tradition. It has always been done. There are reasons. It is part of her culture. Having not had it done, she feels somehow outside of her own traditions. This is craziness talking, of course - but that's the whole thing ... The book makes you ponder your genitals. I mean, that sounds ridiculous - but it's true. Not in a sexual way - just in the FACT of them ... and in doing so, we come to the heart of who we are. I'm not talking about being defined by them - but they are hugely important and the book is so relentless it made me openly BAFFLED at the hostility towards the genitals and what they represent ... The book certainly makes you cherish them, and thank God you have them (in the same way that Ayaan Hirsi Ali's books do - you just read some of that crap and think, 'Thank you, Lord. Thank you for making me live HERE and not in Somalia or the Sudan") And to contemplate being robbed of them ... for what? for why? why is female sexuality so feared? so LOATHED? Whether or not clits are cut off, that feeling is "out there" ... I had internalized it. It was mine as well. The pleasure one can get during sex - the way everything works ... seems to me to be a gift from God. It is to be cherished. But I was tormented back then, and that was one of the reasons I felt named by the book. It went down into the very core of identity. Who we are, who I am. ... But I won't go into that further. Tashi knows that by even opening up the conversation - by talking about what a bogus "tradition" this really is - perpetrated mainly by old ignorant women - she will be seen as betraying her culture. Telling the secrets to a world that will not understand. She takes that risk. The book becomes about "taboo" - and what it means to break taboos. You are rarely congratulated for it. And Tashi loses her mind after breaking that cultural taboo. She is not sorry she murdered M'Lissa. It was long overdue, as far as Tashi is concerned. But that, in its way, is madness as well.
It's one of those books I can't ever stand back from and evaluate, saying, "This worked" or "That didn't work". It's a tough book to take, and I suppose the Greek chorus aspect of it would be tremendously boring to some - but for me, it just pierced through the pain I was in, speaking directly to it - in a profound way that truly changed me. So I can't really evaluate a book like that. I put it down, when I finished it, feeling like I had been crying for a week straight, even though my eyes were dry. I was drained, depleted. "Good" book? Seems like an irrelevant question when my experience had been the kind that it was. There aren't too many books I can say that about.
Here's an excerpt. This is what almost made me get up and exit the bus. I was dreading coming to this book on the shelf. I had no idea what to say. So I will press Post now without over-thinking it or reading it again.
EXCERPT FROM Possessing the Secret of Joy
Tashi-Evelyn
At night The Old Man played music for us. Music from Africa, India, Bali. He had an amazing record collection that occupied one wall of his house. He showed us grainy black-and-white films, made on his trips. It was during the showing of one of these films that something peculiar happened to me. He was explaining a scene in which there were several small children lying in a row on the ground. He thought, first of all, that they were boys, which I could see straight off they were not, though their heads were shaved and they each wore a scanty loincloth. He assumed, he said, he had inadvertently interrupted a kind of ritual ceremony having to do with the preparation of these children for adulthood. Everything, in any case, had stopped, the moment he and his entourage entered the ritual space. And what was also odd, he said, was how no one spoke a word, or even moved, as long as he and his people were there. They literally froze as the camera panned the area. The children on the ground in a little row, lying close together on their backs, the adults simply stopped in midactivity, unmoving, even, it appeared, unseeing. Only - he laughed, relighting his pipe, which had gone out, as it frequently did, while he talked - there was a large fighting cock (which we now saw as it stepped majestically into the frame) and it walked about quite freely, crowing mightily (it was a silent film but we could certainly perceive its exertions), and that was the only sound or movement while we were there.
The film ran on, but suddenly I felt such an overwhelming fear that I fainted. Quietly. Slid off my chair and onto the bright rug that covered the stone floor. It was exactly as if I had been hit over the head. Except there was no pain.
When I came to, I was in the guest bedroom upstairs in the turret. Adam and the old man were bending over me. There was nothing I could tell them; I could not say, The picture of a fighting cock, taken twenty-five years ago, completely terrorized me. And so I laughed off my condition and said it was caused by too much happiness, sailing in the high altitude.
The Old Man looked skeptical and did not seem surprised when, the next afternoon, I began to paint what became a rather extended series of ever larger and more fearsome fighting cocks.
And then one day, into the corner of my painting, there appeared, I drew, a foot. Sweating and shivering as I did so. Because I suddenly realized there was something, some small thing the foot was holding between its toes. It was for this small thing that the giant cock waited, crowing impatiently, extending its neck, ruffling its feathers, and strutting about.
There are no words to describe how sick I felt as I painted. How nauseous; as the cock continued to grow in size, and the bare foot with its little insignificant morsel approached steadily toward what I felt would be the crisis, the unbearable moment, for me. For, as I painted, perspiring, shivering, and moaning faintly, I felt that every system in my body, every connecting circuit in my brain, was making an effort to shut down. It was as if the greater half of my being were trying to murder the lesser half, and as I painted - by now directly onto the wall of the bedroom, because only there could I paint the cock as huge as it now appeared to be: it dwarfed me - I dragged the brush to paint each towering iridescent green feather, each baleful gold fleck in its colossal red and menacing eye.
The foot grew large too. But not nearly as large as the cock.
When The Old Man looked at it he said: Well, Evelyn, is it a man's foot or a woman's foot?
The question puzzled me so profoundly I could not answer, but only held my head between my hands in the classic pose of the deeply insane.
A man's foot? A woman's foot?
How could one know?
But then later, in the middle of the night, I found myself painting a design called "crazy road", a pattern of crisscrosses and dots that the women made with mud on the cotton cloth they wove in the village when I was a child. And I suddenly knew that foot above which I painted this pattern was a woman's, and that I was painting the lower folds of one of M'Lissa's tattered wraps.
As I painted I remembered, as if a lid lifted off my brain, the day I had crept, hidden in the elephant grass, to the isolated hut from which came howls of pain and terror. Underneath a tree, on the bare ground outside the hut, lay a dazed row of little girls, though to me they seemed not so little. They were all a few years older than me. Dura's age. Dura, however, was not among them; and I knew instinctively that it was Dura being held down and tortured inside the hut. Dura who made those inhuman shrieks that rent the air and chilled my heart.
Abruptly, inside, there was silence. And then I saw M'Lissa shuffle out, dragging her lame leg, and at first I didn't realize she was carrying anything, for it was so insignificant and unclean that she carried it not in her fingers but between her toes. A chicken - a hen, not a cock - was scratching futilely in the dirt between the hut and the tree where the other girls, their own ordeal over, lay. M'Lissa lifted her foot and flung this small object in the direction of the hen, and she, as if waiting for this moment, rushed toward M'Lissa's upturned foot, located the flung object in the air and then on the ground, and in one quick movement of beak and neck, gobbled it down.
July 1, 2008
The Books: "The Accidental Tourist" (Anne Tyler)
Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt:
The Accidental Tourist
I have so many personal associations with this book that I'm not even sure how to write about it - as a book, I mean. It's really what brought my first boyfriend and me together ... 5 million years ago. I still have the copy he gave to me in that long-ago summer with a note from him in the front. He was older than I was - not by much - 6 or 7 years - but I was 20 years old, so that's a HUGE age difference. Now it wouldn't be anything. Hell, 20 years is no longer a big age difference - but back then it was. I was in college, he was in law school, totally different times in our lives. We had known each other for years - I had met him when I was 16. See? I have to talk about all of this before I talk about the book itself. To me, he was a glamorous older guy - my good friend - but not someone I would have thought of romantically. Mainly I felt he was out of my league. You know, I was 20 years old. A late bloomer. A virgin. I had had a boyfriend in college, sort of - but nothing serious or lasting. The guy who would be my first serious boyfriend seemed way more grown-up than me, and always was dating some hot intimidating WOMAN, so I never "crushed" on him because - what would the point of THAT be? But we were good friends, and one summer we started hanging out a lot. Having a blast. (He was such a fun person.) He happened to be reading The Accidental Tourist at the time. I was working 2 or 3 jobs, and he would show up at my place of work, just to say Hi. He would bring me ice coffee. We spent entire days at the beach. We had adventures in a small outboard motor, tooling around Newport, pulling up to docks alongside gigantic YACHTS - and going into whatever bar was there and having a Bloody Mary. I had a cocktail dress in my bag, so we would stroll up the dock, in our flip-flops and shorts, towards some glamorous restaurant, slip into the bathrooms, change into our dress-up duds, and meet at the bar. Then we would go back to the restrooms, change back into our flip-flops and shorts and go back into our outboard motor, and put-put over to the NEXT bar to do it again. Bar-hopping via outboard motor. I was so naive that I had no idea I was being courted. Antonio (that was his name) told me later that it was reading The Accidental Tourist, with its two misfit lead characters, that made him take another look at me, and start to fall in love with me. Much later, I would see that as an insult. Oh, so, I'm a MISFIT, THAT'S WHAT YOU'RE SAYING?? But at the time, it was that book that brought us together. He begged me to read it. He gave me a copy with a blunt note in the front ... something that made me think (FINALLY): "Huh...... is something going on here???" Well, there was, and I read the book, and loved it, and Antonio eventually made his move, and whatever, we were together for four years. Ancient freakin' history. The interesting thing is: Antonio was very much like an Anne Tyler character. He had his "way" of doing things and anything that deviated was a deviation - not just a different way of doing things. He considered his way the default. I am, to put it mildly, not that way at ALL. Who cares if you cut the bell pepper longwise or crosswise? I honestly would need a bone marrow transplant in order to give a shit about stuff like that. I think Antonio saw himself in that book - and saw that maybe it would be okay if he let himself fall in love with the freckled crazy girl in glasses who had messy handwriting and was kind of clumsy. I mean, I think that's how he saw me! He loved me, don't get me wrong - and we actually still love each other - he's one of my favorite people ever, always will be ... but he had to convince himself that a "deviation" from his norm would be okay, that I would be safe, he would be okay with me. He had never dated anyone like me. His girlfriends were either breezy sophisticated types wearing colored heels and sundresses or hard-bodied tomboy types who liked to ski and windsurf and bungee jump. Uhm, yeah, so, I was neither. I liked to read Anne of Green Gables and I liked to write in my diary, and I enjoyed going skinny dipping in the ocean after my shift at the pizza joint. I was loyal to my family on an almost tribal level. Still am. I was an actress. I had a depressive streak. I had great friends. This whole thing was a "deviation" for Antonio and it stressed him out. I am still convinced that we were not meant to be together - and I'm shocked it lasted as long as it did - my not giving a crap about which way to cut the peppers became a metaphor for our differences. NOW I would have no problem handling the situation and telling someone to chill out, don't tell me how to cut a pepper, I'm a grown woman, there's not only one way to do things. But then I couldn't defend myself. It was a mess. BUT. In that first summer, it was all tremendously exciting!! Still one of the best summers I've ever had.
Anne Tyler is the storyteller of people with Asperger's, basically. All of her characters are fussy, a bit antisocial, and have OCD-level organizational skills. I've read some of her other books, but never really got into them because The Accidental Tourist was such an important book to me - my experience with Anne Tyler kind of began and ended there. I know she's a big deal, one of the most successful American writers writing today ... and she's marvelous, she really is - The Accidental Tourist is a terrific book. Heartbreaking. The film made of the book was not too bad, either! I feel like the film really got what it was about those two people that made them fit so perfectly together, eventually. It's an odd pairing and on the face of it makes NO sense.
Macon Leary is a lonely man, who has split from his wife in the wake of their son's murder. All of the underlying problems in their marriage (he is a systematic OCD kind of guy - she is impulsive) come screaming to the forefront once their son is gone (he was murdered in a Burger Bonanaza during a field trip at summer camp). Macon Leary lives alone, and we get scenes of him washing dishes - in his own particular way (he has a "way" for everything) - and he keeps imagining that his ex-wife is watching him at all times, kind of smirking at his fussiness, and shaking her head in contempt. Macon kind of fell into travel writing - the details are lost to me - but he got some assignment to write a travel piece, and the way he wrote it was so funny that the editor asked him to do a series. Basically, he writes about travel for reluctant fearful travelers. Macon Leary does not enjoy travel. He finds it unbearable. For such a rigid guy, all of that change - and having to figure things out in a foreign land - are unbearably stressful - and he writes his travel pieces in that tone. It's all about comfort. Where is the McDonalds in Amsterdam? You can get Sweet 'n Low in Beijing, you just have to ask. Make sure you stay here at this hotel, because it looks most like a Holiday Inn in Iowa. You know: looking for signs of home even in another country. His travel pieces hit a nerve, and so he has written a series of books for "The Accidental Tourist". He writes for people who want to pretend they have never left home.
Macon can't stand the travel, but he loves the writing part of it. Not a happy man. Full of regrets and fear. He comes from a family of fussbudgets - his sister alphabetizes her spice rack, it is desperately important - and marriage doesn't seem to really be "for" these people. Macon's marriage was an anomaly. So now that he is back to single status, he goes over to his siblings' house and they play cards, and it's like they're back in childhood now - only they are all middle-aged.
It's kind of disturbing.
In the middle of all of this, Macon brings his dog to an obedience school - where he meets Muriel, a dog expert. She's got frizzy hair. She's rather kooky. And she doesn't have many boundaries. Like, she calls Macon at home. Macon is so rigid that anything deviating from his small path of normal feels like a threat, or unbearably painful. After all, he couldn't protect his son from going on a simple outing to a burger joint. The world is a tremendously dangerous and unpredictable place. Better to just hunker down, walk in a straight line, and don't disturb anyone. Muriel doesn't play by those rules. She wants to talk about his dog.
And you know, the details are lost to me ... but slowly, inevitably, Macon starts to fall in love with Muriel. But because he's Macon - because he's an Anne Tyler character - love actually feels like stress, rather than love. That was not something I personally related to as a 20 year old girl ... but boy is it something I relate to now. Love feels like stress ... I know it's not ... but this is not a rational thing we're talking about here. We're talking about matters of the heart. If you're a rigid person, stuck in your ways (and I am) - then anything that comes along and pushes you, or messes up your schedule ... feels wrong. It takes Macon forever to realize that Muriel is not wrong, and that stress is actually love.
Tyler is a wonderful writer (as you'll see in the excerpt below) - and quite funny. She has great compassion for her Asperger's-syndrome characters - she's probably got a lot of those qualities herself, she writes about it so well.
I've only read the book once, way back then, during that sunny endless summer when I fell in love for the first time. It seems caught in that moment in time, for me. I have no desire to re-read it - and actually considered skipping it for my Daily Book Excerpt - because it's so potent and such a carrier of memories. But I've got my own OCD going on, and what I call adult-onset Asperger's, and I felt I couldn't skip the book, even with all the associations, so here it is.
Here's an excerpt. Macon is having dinner with his siblings.
EXCERPT FROM The Accidental Tourist
When his brothers came home from work, the house took on a relaxed, relieved atmosphere. Rose drew the living room curtains and lit a few soft lamps. Charles and Porter changed into sweaters. Macon started mixing his special salad dressing. He believed that if you pulverized the spices first with a marble mortar and pestle, it made all the difference. The others agreed that no one else's dressing tasted as good as Macon's. "Since you've been gone," Charles told him, "we've had to buy that bottled stuff from the grocery store." He made it sound as if Macon had been gone a few weeks or so - as if his entire marriage had been just a brief trip elsewhere.
For supper they had Rose's pot roast, a salad with Macon's dressing, and baked potatoes. Baked potatoes had always been their favorite food. They had learned to fix them as children, and even after they were big enough to cook a balanced meal they used to exist solely on baked potatoes whenever Alicia left them to their own devices. There was something about the smell of a roasting Idaho that was so cozy, and also, well, conservative, was the way Macon put it to himself. He thought back on years and years of winter evenings, the kitchen windows black outside, the corners furry with gathering darkness, the four of them seated at the chipped enamel table meticulously filling scooped-out potato skins with butter. You let the butter melt in the skins while you mashed and seasoned the floury insides; the skins were saved till last. It was almost a ritual. He recalled that once, during one of their mother's longer absences, her friend Eliza had served them what she called potato boats - restuffed, not a bit like the genuine article. The children, with pinched, fastidious expressions, had emptied the stuffing and proceeded as usual with the skins, pretending to overlook her mistake. The skins should be crisp. They should not be salted. The pepper should be freshly ground. Paprika was acceptable, but only if it was American. Hungarian paprika had too distinctive a taste. Personally, Macon could do without paprika altogether.
While they ate, Porter discussed what to do with his children. Tomorrow was his weekly visitation night, when he would drive over to Washington, where his children lived with their mother. "The thing of it is," he said, "eating out in restaurants is so artificial. It doesn't seem like real food. And anyway, they all three have different tastes. They always argue over where to go. Someone's on a diet, someone's turned vegetarian, someone can't stand food that crunches. And I end up shouting, 'Oh, for God's sake, we're going to Such-and-Such and that's that!' So we go and everybody sulks throughout the meal."
"Maybe you should just not visit," Charles said reasonably. (He had never had children of his own.)
"Well, of course I want to visit, Charles. I just wish we had some different program. You know what would be ideal? If we could all do something with tools together. I mean like the old days before the divorce, when Danny helped me drain the hot water heater or Susan sat on a board I was sawing. If I could just drop by their house, say, and June and her husband could go to a movie or something, then the kids and I would clean the gutters, weatherstrip the windows, wrap the hot water pipes ... Well, that husband of hers is no use at all, you can bet he lets his hot water pipes sit around naked. I'd bring my own tools, even. We'd have a fine time! Susan could fix us cocoa. Then at the end of the evening I'd pack up my tools and off I'd go, leaving the house in perfect repair. Why, June ought to jump at the chance."
"Then why not suggest it," Macon said.
"Nah. She'd never go for it. She's so impractical. I said to her last week, I said, 'You know that front porch step is loose? Springing up from its nails every time you walk on it wrong.' She said, 'Oh, Lord, yes, it's been that way,' as if Providence had decreed it. As if nothing could be done about it. They've got leaves in the gutter from way last winter but leaves are natural after all; why go against nature. She's so impractical."
Porter himself was the most practical man Macon had ever known. He was the only Leary who understood money. His talent with money was what kept the family firm solvent - if just barely. It wasn't a very wealthy business. Grandfather Leary had founded it in the early part of the century as a tinware factory, and turned to bottle caps in 1915. The Bottle Cap King, he called himself, and was called in his obituary, but in fact most bottle caps were manufactured by Crown Cork and always had been; Grandfather Leary ran a distant second or third. His only son, the Bottle Cap Prince, had barely assumed his place in the firm before quitting to volunteer for World War II - a far more damaging enthusiasm, it turned out, than any of Alicia's. After he was killed the business limped along, never quite succeeding and never quite failing, till Porter bounced in straight from college and took over the money end. Money to Porter was something almost chemical - a volatile substance that reacted in various interesting ways when combined with other substances. He wasn't what you'd call mercenary; he didn't want the money for its own sake but for its intriguing possibilities, and in fact when his wife divorced him he handed over most of his property without a word of complaint.
It was Porter who ran the company, pumping in money and ideas. Charles, more mechanical, dealt with the production end. Macon had done a little of everything when he worked there, and had wasted away with boredom doing it, for there wasn't really enough to keep a third man busy. It was only for symmetry's sake that Porter kept urging him to return. "Tell you what, Macon," he said now, "why not hitch a ride down with us tomorrow and look over your old stomping ground?"
"No, thanks," Macon told him.
"Plenty of room for your crutches in back."
"Maybe some other time."
They followed Rose around while she washed the dishes. She didn't like them to help because she had her own method, she said. She moved soundlessly through the old-fashioned kitchen, replacing dishes in the high wooden cabinets. Charles took the dog out; Macon couldn't manage his crutches in the spongy backyard. And Porter pulled the kitchen shades, meanwhile lecturing Rose on how the white surfaces reflected the warmth back into the room now that the nights were cooler. Rose said, "Yes, Porter, I know all that," and lifted the salad bowl to the light and examined it a moment before she put it away.
They watched the news, dutifully, and then they went out to the sun porch and sat at their grandparents' card table. They played something called Vaccination - a card game they'd invented as children, which had grown so convoluted over the years that no one else had the patience to learn it. In fact, more than one outsider had accused them of altering the rules to suit the circumstances. "Now, just a minute," Sarah had said, back when she'd still had hopes of figuring it out. "I thought you said aces were high."
"They are."
"So that means --"
"But not when they're drawn from the deck."
"Aha! Then why was the one that Rose drew counted high?"
"Well, she did draw it after a deuce, Sarah."
"Aces drawn after a deuce are high?"
"No, aces drawn after a number that's been drawn two times in a row just before that."
Sarah had folded her fan of cards and laid them face down - the last of the wives to give up.
Macon was in quarantine and had to donate all his cards to Rose. Rose moved her chair over next to his and played off his points while he sat back, scratching the cat behind her ears. Opposite him, in the tiny dark windowpane, he saw their reflections - hollow-eyed and severely cheek-boned, more interesting versions of themselves.
The telephone in the living room gave a nipped squeak and then a full ring. Nobody seemed to notice. Rose laid a king on Porter's queen and Porter said, "Stinker." The telephone rang again and then again. In the middle of the fourth ring, it fell silent. "Hypodermic," Rose told Porter, and she topped the king with an ace.
"You're a real stinker, Rose."
In the portrait on the end wall, the Leary children gazed out with their veiled eyes. It occurred to Macon that they were sitting in much the same positions here this evening: Charles and Porter on either side of him, Rose perched in the foreground. Was there any real change? He felt a jolt of something very close to panic. Here he still was! The same as ever! What have I gone and done? he wondered, and he swallowed thickly and looked at his own empty hands.