Although Luis Alberto Urrea is the award winning author of five books of non-fiction, three books of poetry and two other works of fiction, I am ashamed to confess that until I began reading his third novel, “The Hummingbird’s Daughter,” I had never so much as heard of him, let alone read any of his work, but if this third novel is in any way representative of his previous work, that is truly my loss. Luckily it is a loss that is reparable, if not at the local library than perhaps at Amazon or Barnes and Noble.
Set in rural Mexico in the last third of the nineteenth century, “The Hummingbird’s Daughter” tells the story of Teresa Urrea, the illegitimate daughter of a poor Indian woman and a philandering wealthy rancher. Abandoned by her mother, Teresa is left in the care of an unfeeling aunt who treats her much in the fashion of the storybook wicked step mother, until the girl is taken under the wing of an older Indian woman healer who sees in the her a great destiny. Even as a child, Teresa seems marked as someone special. She is inquisitive and learns quickly, even insisting on learning to read. A natural healing heat seems to emanate from her hands, and she can affect others with her mind. She is a guileless child of nature, who will grow from this fairy tale beginning into a healer revered as a saint, a champion of the poor and the powerless, and a symbol for a people’s revolution.
On a personal level, she must not only discover her destiny, but she must learn to accept it, as must those who are close to her. It is not easy to be a saint, nor is it easy to live with one. For people like her father, Thomas, a sinner and a cynic, her saintly faith and sacrifice are perhaps beyond comprehension. For people like Gabriela , her father’s mistress, simple and sensual, her saintly miracles spur fear and estrangement. For people like Segundo, her father’s loyal foreman, a practical man of action, her saintly notoriety is more nuisance than anything else. Still, in spite of that, a father must love; a friend must stay true, a retainer, devoted.
Teresa’s story is the archetypal initiation myth characteristic of the great hero. It follows her from her birth as she slowly distinguishes herself from the other Indian children. She learns the wisdom of her Indian ancestors from Huila, the old healer, and the wisdom of the modern world from her father’s friend, Aguirre, a great engineer: from Huila, herbs and cures, from Aguirre, the mysteries of the printed page. Already as a child she demonstrates her strength of character as she walks boldly into the forbidden territory of the rancher father’s house to try to discover who she is. She learns to see in her dreams a world more real than the physical world around her; she discovers the force of spirituality. And then after a kind of death and resurrection, she manifests at nineteen, the saintliness that has been her destiny. It is a story both mystical and miraculous.
But the power of the novel is less in its plot, than in its form and language. A good many of the most sensationalistic events–rape, torture, murder--are left to happen offstage in a fashion that reminds the reader of the ancient Greek tragedies. Indeed, Urrea artfully appropriates many of the techniques and forms associated with the most elemental literary expressions, those early masterpieces of world literature that characterized and defined their peoples and civilizations for the ages to come. He combines folk elements–tales, proverbs, home remedies, superstitions–with literary techniques drawn from the classics–epic lists, metaphysical imagery, irony and understatement, and he does it all with a poetic style that is always sensual and often startling in its originality.
There are the simple adages of the people: “If you were born to be a nail, you had to be hammered.” “Honey wasn’t made for the mouths of donkeys.” There are the folk remedies: tobacco juice for bee stings, manzanita tea to clean out the birth canal, vervain to open the black nipples to suckle the newborn. There are the superstitions: a campfire on the south side of the road is “a good omen–north was the direction of death.” “A five-fingered foot that looked like a human hand” found in a dried up turd is the remains of a devil eaten by a coyote. There is the tale: a hunter shot a doe and followed the trail of blood to a pool, “where he found a beautiful maiden with her breast pierced by his arrow.”
Complementing these primitive elements are the more sophisticated literary techniques. Long lists reminiscent of the warriors in Homer or the fallen angels in “Paradise Lost” lend a heroic stature to somewhat more mundane concerns. For example, there is this catalogue of the contents of a wagon driven North by an Arab and his family:
“A Singer sewing machine.
Cans of peaches, pears, and stewed prunes.
Bolts of cloth.
A case of repeater rifles.
One thousand rounds of long bullets.
One slightly rotten burlap bag of new Burbank potatoes.
Jujubes wrapped in wax paper.
Twenty pounds of sugar.
Five huge tins of lard.
A tin of Nestle’s Infant food: the newest sensation advanced
science.
Cotton unmentionables, parasols, stockings. . . . .”
And so on for another ten or so items.
There are metaphors and similes that seem to descend in their exotic range from the Metaphysical poetry of seventeenth century England. “In Sinaloa, café with boiled milk, its burned milk skin floating on the top in a pale membrane that looked like the flesh of a peeled blister.” “And a bowler hat squatted on his head like a dirty turtle.” If these images are not the extended conceits of a John Donne or a George Herbert, they are at least as original and startling. Moreover there are descriptive passages that echo the elaborate comparisons used by the epic poets. For example there is this description of the fall of evening:
“The peaks grew heavy with night, the points flaring
orange, then impossible molten copper. Red like a deep infection
crept down the cliffs and the arroyos, heavy and somehow fluid,
until it spilled purple across the plain, drowning wagon after
wagon, crawling up the legs of horses until only their backs
were left in light, like small oblong islands in a shallow sea.
Horse by horse, night conquered the plain. Fires blinked to
life, and soon the stars above and the fires below looked the
same, as if a slice of the sky had been stretched out on a drying
rack so they could eat it in the morning.”
Much like the epic lists these expansive images elevate the stature of what might otherwise be considered mundane or pedestrian. It is almost as if Urrea, like Arthur Miller in “Death of a Salesman,” is saying that these more sophisticated literary elements are not only appropriate for the rich nobility. They are suitable for the common man as well. In effect there is nobility, heroism, in all men, and the heroic style is no more to be limited to the upper classes than in the heroic character. The style then reflects the themes of a novel focused on a lowly Indian girl who becomes the heroic symbol of a people’s revolution.
This use of classic techniques for a more modern agenda is reinforced by an intermittent note of ironic understatement that runs through the novel and begins on its very first page:
“On that October day, the fifteenth, the People had already
begun readying for the Day of the Dead, only two weeks away.
They were starting to prepare plates of the dead’s favorite
snacks: deceased uncles, already half-forgotten, still got their
favorite green tamales, which due to the heat and the flies, would
soon turn even greener. Small glasses held the dead’s preferred
brands of tequila, or rum, or rompope: Tio Pancho liked beer, so
A clay flagon of watery Guaymas brew fizzled itself flat before
his graven image on a family altar. The ranch workers set aside
candied sweet potatoes, cactus and guayaba sweets, mango jam,
goat jerky, dribbley white cheese, all food they themselves would
like to eat, but they knew the restless spirits were famished, and
no family could afford to assuage its own hunger and insult the
dead. Jesus! Everybody knew that being dead could put you in
a terrible mood.”
Thematically the novel, in still another echo of classical literature, is at least on one level concerned with the age old question of destiny (fate) and individual responsibility. Teresa has a destiny she must fulfill, but she is also responsible for making the choices necessary to meet that fate. It is not merely that, like and Oedipus, she must take responsibility for those choices, rather she must actively pursue those right choices. This may well be the difference between the tragic hero and the saint. In a dream (and in dreams, the right kind of dreams, there is truth) she sees herself floating in bubbles in space–countless Teresas in countless bubbles, all representing possibilities for every second of her life. “You are always in a universe of choices,” she is told by her teacher. “Any moment of your life can go in any direction you choose.”
Urrea tells us that the novel is based on the life of a real person and a distant relation of his, but this is a novel, not a biography. The Teresa Urrea of “The Hummingbird’s Daughter” is a mythical figure. There is a real Joan of Arc and there are Joans created by Shaw and Anouilh. Urrea’s Teresa has her analogs in the latter.
“The Hummingbird’s Daughter” is a beautifully written novel, filled with passion and insight. It shows men at their best and men at their worst. It recognizes that there is brutality in life, but it also recognizes that man is capable of rising above that brutality to something sublime. What is possible for a bastard Indian child is no less possible for each and every one of us.
Friday, January 29, 2010
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Book Review: The Bad Book Affair, by Ian Sansom
There are the hard boiled detectives who stalk the pages of Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane. There are the rational logicians who look to their little grey cells while traveling on the Orient Express or breakfasting at Baker Street . There are the disillusioned police officials, the scientific sleuths, the high brow elites playing sometimes seriously, sometimes not, at police work. And of course there is the amateur detective: the rabbi who takes time out from his preaching to find killers, the crime fiction writer more adept at solving crimes than any detective she creates, the rare book specialist, the forensic psychologist, the elderly spinster, and so on.
It is to this latter group, that Israel Armstrong, the somewhat anti-hero of Ian Sansom's Mobile Library Mystery series belongs. An English, Jewish, vegetarian librarian working on a mobile library in a small village in Northern Ireland, Armstrong is as unlikely a crime solving candidate as any amateur sleuth in the pantheon. As The Bad Book Affair, the fourth in the Mobile Library series begins, Israel is in a depressive funk. He is approaching his thirtieth birthday. He has been dumped by his long time girl friend, and is feeling himself the proverbial fish out of water stuck in the Irish backwater, humdrum Tumdrum. Not only is Armstrong an amateur, he is something of a 'nebish.' A 'nebish' is the Yiddish equivalent of the naif who always seems to be saying and doing the wrong thing, who is constantly being taken advantage of, who never seems to have a clue. Although, in this case, Israel Armstrong in one 'nebish' who despite his inadequacies manages to get it right in the end.
As mysteries go, The Bad Book Affair is rather innocuous. If you're looking for murder and mayhem, this is the wrong book. The actual problem doesn’t even show its face until a hundred or so pages have passed, and even then it isn't a problem that is going to compete with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. What we've got here is no violent who done it, but more realistically a fairly gentle what happened. In fact, Sansom, it would seem is much less interested in any crime plot, than he is in things like character, tone and style.
The book is filled with as quirky a cast of characters as you'd be likely to find in even a Dickens novel. There is Ted, Israel's co-worker at the library, who doesn't seem to have a last name, and who doses Israel with commonsensical prescriptions that more often than not make absolutely no sense. He speaks home spun words of wisdom in a language all his own. "What's the point of having a dog and barking yerself, eh?" He invents words: "deedlin'," as in if you were driving, you'd be "deedlin'." "Jandies," as in "Ye give me the jandies." Linda Wie is Israel's jargon spouting, Chinese lesbian boss. Maurice Morris is an adulterous politician looking to get back into the government. There is a landlady named George, well on the way it seems to be a new love interest for Israel, and she is complemented by a Bible spouting fire and brimstone grandfather. There is a free thinking Presbyterian minister and a breakaway charismatic leader. It is these characters and Armstrong's interaction with them, rather than the somewhat piddling mystery that serves for plot, that is the central interest of the novel.
In general the tone of the book is satirical. Like a naïve Candide, Israel wanders through his world bumping into all sorts of behavior worthy of censure and ridicule: from a doctor who has no interest in his patients to a fish and chips Bible quiz, from a hidden shelf of 'bad' books to be kept out of the sight of impressionable youth to a teenage Wikipedia editor who has no knowledge of what he is editing. He pokes fun at religion, politics, literary icons like Harry Potter, artistic pretension, vegetarianism, journalism and almost anything else you can think of.
He likes the occasional play on words: a restaurant is called the Thai Tanic. Someone comes into the library and asks to borrow the De Saurus, the book with words. All books have words, Israel tells him. As a stylistic matter, it's the kind of thing that either makes you chuckle or makes you groan. Me? I chuckle. He also infuses his prose with allusions, both, classical and modern, literary and pop. So at the novel's opening, Israel in his depression is reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. Later he reads from Madame Bovary to his dying friend. He talks about his ideal of living in a Brooklyn brownstone like Paul Auster and asks "who cares about Five People You Meet in Heaven with Morrie?" He has Romanians upset because people don't know Ionesco. Meanwhile, he clearly knows his readers will be sure to recognizeGrand Theft Auto, Dawson's Creek, Buffy , Lurch and Morticia. When it comes to allusion, eclecticism is the rule.
The Bad Book Affair is a whimsical entertainment that never hesitates to take potshots at a good many modern targets, and more often than not hits the bull's eye.
It is to this latter group, that Israel Armstrong, the somewhat anti-hero of Ian Sansom's Mobile Library Mystery series belongs. An English, Jewish, vegetarian librarian working on a mobile library in a small village in Northern Ireland, Armstrong is as unlikely a crime solving candidate as any amateur sleuth in the pantheon. As The Bad Book Affair, the fourth in the Mobile Library series begins, Israel is in a depressive funk. He is approaching his thirtieth birthday. He has been dumped by his long time girl friend, and is feeling himself the proverbial fish out of water stuck in the Irish backwater, humdrum Tumdrum. Not only is Armstrong an amateur, he is something of a 'nebish.' A 'nebish' is the Yiddish equivalent of the naif who always seems to be saying and doing the wrong thing, who is constantly being taken advantage of, who never seems to have a clue. Although, in this case, Israel Armstrong in one 'nebish' who despite his inadequacies manages to get it right in the end.
As mysteries go, The Bad Book Affair is rather innocuous. If you're looking for murder and mayhem, this is the wrong book. The actual problem doesn’t even show its face until a hundred or so pages have passed, and even then it isn't a problem that is going to compete with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. What we've got here is no violent who done it, but more realistically a fairly gentle what happened. In fact, Sansom, it would seem is much less interested in any crime plot, than he is in things like character, tone and style.
The book is filled with as quirky a cast of characters as you'd be likely to find in even a Dickens novel. There is Ted, Israel's co-worker at the library, who doesn't seem to have a last name, and who doses Israel with commonsensical prescriptions that more often than not make absolutely no sense. He speaks home spun words of wisdom in a language all his own. "What's the point of having a dog and barking yerself, eh?" He invents words: "deedlin'," as in if you were driving, you'd be "deedlin'." "Jandies," as in "Ye give me the jandies." Linda Wie is Israel's jargon spouting, Chinese lesbian boss. Maurice Morris is an adulterous politician looking to get back into the government. There is a landlady named George, well on the way it seems to be a new love interest for Israel, and she is complemented by a Bible spouting fire and brimstone grandfather. There is a free thinking Presbyterian minister and a breakaway charismatic leader. It is these characters and Armstrong's interaction with them, rather than the somewhat piddling mystery that serves for plot, that is the central interest of the novel.
In general the tone of the book is satirical. Like a naïve Candide, Israel wanders through his world bumping into all sorts of behavior worthy of censure and ridicule: from a doctor who has no interest in his patients to a fish and chips Bible quiz, from a hidden shelf of 'bad' books to be kept out of the sight of impressionable youth to a teenage Wikipedia editor who has no knowledge of what he is editing. He pokes fun at religion, politics, literary icons like Harry Potter, artistic pretension, vegetarianism, journalism and almost anything else you can think of.
He likes the occasional play on words: a restaurant is called the Thai Tanic. Someone comes into the library and asks to borrow the De Saurus, the book with words. All books have words, Israel tells him. As a stylistic matter, it's the kind of thing that either makes you chuckle or makes you groan. Me? I chuckle. He also infuses his prose with allusions, both, classical and modern, literary and pop. So at the novel's opening, Israel in his depression is reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. Later he reads from Madame Bovary to his dying friend. He talks about his ideal of living in a Brooklyn brownstone like Paul Auster and asks "who cares about Five People You Meet in Heaven with Morrie?" He has Romanians upset because people don't know Ionesco. Meanwhile, he clearly knows his readers will be sure to recognizeGrand Theft Auto, Dawson's Creek, Buffy , Lurch and Morticia. When it comes to allusion, eclecticism is the rule.
The Bad Book Affair is a whimsical entertainment that never hesitates to take potshots at a good many modern targets, and more often than not hits the bull's eye.
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Book Review : “Beginner’s Greek” by James Collins
Talk about coincidence: gathering dust near the top of my “to read” pile is a copy of James Collins’ debut novel, “Beginner’s Greek,” and I’m listening to the February 22 podcast of the N.Y. Times Book Review, and who is Sam Tannenhaus, host and editor of the Review, about to interview? You guessed it. None other than the first time novelist himself. Coincidence, you ask? Where is the coincidence in a novelist being interviewed on a broadcast devoted to books? But then this is the N. Y. Times Book Review, and isn’t this a first time novelist? Well alright, it may not rank with the convergence of the twain, but it is a little spooky.
Talk about coincidence: Peter Russell, the hero of James Collins’ debut novel, “Beginner’s Greek” is sitting on a plane bound for L.A. on business.. The seat next to him is empty, and as he waits for its occupant he dreams that a lovely intelligent woman will appear to fill it, that they will make an immediate connection, that they will fall in love and live ever after happily. And who should plop down next to him: the lovely intelligent Holly (no last name as yet), and they do make an immediate connection, clicking as only mutual admirers of “The Magic Mountain”can. Falling in love is undoubtedly inevitable when she gives him her number and he promises to call. But. . .there has to be a but. . .Peter loses her number, and, you will no doubt remember from the prior parenthetical, the beautiful, intelligent Holly has no last name.
Talk about coincidence: four years pass and Peter, back in Manhattan, is invited to a party to meet the new girl friend of his best friend, a cad of a novelist, and who does this new girl friend happen to be. Give that reader a Kewpie doll. But now Holly is his friend’s girl, and Peter is a noble fellow; besides though he still feels the attraction, he has no idea how Holly feels about him. Life has a way of throwing monkey wrenches into dreams. Peter keeps quiet. Holly and the novelist eventually marry. Peter is the best man.
Talk about coincidence: I could go on, but it wouldn’t do to give away the plot of the novel, which, if you have no problem with coincidences, is undoubtedly quite entertaining. And, after all, why should you? Although there was a time when novelists were criticized for relying on coincidence to resolve their plots (one thinks of Dickens, for example, managing to have the little Oliver Twist get caught stealing by Mr. Brownlow), critics have long since concluded that coincidence may well be less a crutch to move along a recalcitrant plot than it is an indication of a particular vision of life(at least in some novels). There are no such things as coincidences, one might argue; what happens in life is indeed what is supposed to happen (at least in some novels, by some novelists).
And it is certainly arguable that it is just this fatalistic word view that suffuses Collins’ novel. Note the reference to Greek in the title. What happens to Peter and Holly is no more random happenstance, than what happens to Oedipus or Antigone. It is an elemental step in a greater cosmic plan. The universe described in this novel is as deterministic as any in a Thomas Hardy novel, if, all in all, a much more pleasant place. If Peter and Holly were meant for each other, they will get each other; if not, not. If however, whatever will be, will be, there is still the question of whether what will be is somehow determined by anything we human beings may do. Is there some relation between a person’s moral behavior and a person’s fate? Does the good guy get the girl? Does the bad guy get his ‘come upance?’ Do good guys finish last? In some sense, this is the question “Beginner’s Greek” tries to answer.
On another level, the novel is a kind of adult fairy tale which the reader has to pursue to the end to find out if the prince and Cinderella get to live happily ever after. And appropriately it is peopled with a cast of supporting characters straight out of the Grimm Bothers. There is a fairy godmother surrogate of sorts, an adulteress whose own story is much too delicious to spoil for the prospective reader. There is an evil dwarf in a sub-plot concerning Peter’s job with a prestigious Wall St. financial firm. There is a powerful king who, if benevolent, can make all well; but if tyrannical, can ruin everything. There is a wolf in sheep’s clothing who can charm the pants off every female he comes near, and usually does. There is a crazy old man who is often wiser in his insanity than the worldly cynics around him.
It is set in the world of the upper East side of Manhattan, a fairy tale world where people have boxes at the opera, live in lavishly furnished mansions and fly off for weekends on the islands in helicopters. It is filled with the beautiful people, the movers and shakers, the power elite. And if Peter is not yet quite there, not yet at the top of the mountain, he surely aspires to get there, and one imagines that as a bright young man, he may well manage to do so (if, that is, it is in the stars?).
Every once in awhile Collins seems to question the conspicuous consumption of his characters, as for example, when Holly demands that the money spent for an expensive necklace be donated to a hospital for children with cancer. Although, even then, it is made clear that while too often charity is little more than an enabling crutch, in the case of child hood cancer that is certainly not the case: compassionate conservatives at work. This may be the kind of thing that Tannenhaus is referring to in his interview when he makes the point that the book combines romance with more serious concerns, moral and social concerns. Collins, for his part, agrees. He adds that he was trying to add elements of characters struggling with issues as well as elements of satire.
While there is some truth to this assertion, there are some barbs thrown at the world of high finance, there some punches at the idle rich, there are even some sneers at literary ladies and randy novelists. There is certainly the whole philosophical question the book raises about determinism and morality. Nevertheless, when you come right down to it, the overwhelming import of the book is its romance. No one is going to read it for its social criticism or its philosophical discourse. One is inclined to think that the whole issue is a less than subtle attempt to distinguish “Beginner’s Greek” from what is too often dismissed as “chick lit.”
However, as romance, the book certainly has its charms. Collins prose is sharp and pointed. He is adept at the arresting metaphor. Tears fall on a letter like bullet holes. People who are supposed to be friends but who don’t quite connect have keys that don’t quite fit each other’s locks. When a beautiful person joins a group, the tome changes like a film going from black and white to color. It plot is filled with twists and unexpected turns, so that pages keep turning almost on their own. It provides insights into a social world inaccessible to most readers, and it gives the impression that the author knows whereof he speaks. These are no mean accomplishments.
Besides, if you want philosophy, you can always read “The Magic Mountain.”
Talk about coincidence: Peter Russell, the hero of James Collins’ debut novel, “Beginner’s Greek” is sitting on a plane bound for L.A. on business.. The seat next to him is empty, and as he waits for its occupant he dreams that a lovely intelligent woman will appear to fill it, that they will make an immediate connection, that they will fall in love and live ever after happily. And who should plop down next to him: the lovely intelligent Holly (no last name as yet), and they do make an immediate connection, clicking as only mutual admirers of “The Magic Mountain”can. Falling in love is undoubtedly inevitable when she gives him her number and he promises to call. But. . .there has to be a but. . .Peter loses her number, and, you will no doubt remember from the prior parenthetical, the beautiful, intelligent Holly has no last name.
Talk about coincidence: four years pass and Peter, back in Manhattan, is invited to a party to meet the new girl friend of his best friend, a cad of a novelist, and who does this new girl friend happen to be. Give that reader a Kewpie doll. But now Holly is his friend’s girl, and Peter is a noble fellow; besides though he still feels the attraction, he has no idea how Holly feels about him. Life has a way of throwing monkey wrenches into dreams. Peter keeps quiet. Holly and the novelist eventually marry. Peter is the best man.
Talk about coincidence: I could go on, but it wouldn’t do to give away the plot of the novel, which, if you have no problem with coincidences, is undoubtedly quite entertaining. And, after all, why should you? Although there was a time when novelists were criticized for relying on coincidence to resolve their plots (one thinks of Dickens, for example, managing to have the little Oliver Twist get caught stealing by Mr. Brownlow), critics have long since concluded that coincidence may well be less a crutch to move along a recalcitrant plot than it is an indication of a particular vision of life(at least in some novels). There are no such things as coincidences, one might argue; what happens in life is indeed what is supposed to happen (at least in some novels, by some novelists).
And it is certainly arguable that it is just this fatalistic word view that suffuses Collins’ novel. Note the reference to Greek in the title. What happens to Peter and Holly is no more random happenstance, than what happens to Oedipus or Antigone. It is an elemental step in a greater cosmic plan. The universe described in this novel is as deterministic as any in a Thomas Hardy novel, if, all in all, a much more pleasant place. If Peter and Holly were meant for each other, they will get each other; if not, not. If however, whatever will be, will be, there is still the question of whether what will be is somehow determined by anything we human beings may do. Is there some relation between a person’s moral behavior and a person’s fate? Does the good guy get the girl? Does the bad guy get his ‘come upance?’ Do good guys finish last? In some sense, this is the question “Beginner’s Greek” tries to answer.
On another level, the novel is a kind of adult fairy tale which the reader has to pursue to the end to find out if the prince and Cinderella get to live happily ever after. And appropriately it is peopled with a cast of supporting characters straight out of the Grimm Bothers. There is a fairy godmother surrogate of sorts, an adulteress whose own story is much too delicious to spoil for the prospective reader. There is an evil dwarf in a sub-plot concerning Peter’s job with a prestigious Wall St. financial firm. There is a powerful king who, if benevolent, can make all well; but if tyrannical, can ruin everything. There is a wolf in sheep’s clothing who can charm the pants off every female he comes near, and usually does. There is a crazy old man who is often wiser in his insanity than the worldly cynics around him.
It is set in the world of the upper East side of Manhattan, a fairy tale world where people have boxes at the opera, live in lavishly furnished mansions and fly off for weekends on the islands in helicopters. It is filled with the beautiful people, the movers and shakers, the power elite. And if Peter is not yet quite there, not yet at the top of the mountain, he surely aspires to get there, and one imagines that as a bright young man, he may well manage to do so (if, that is, it is in the stars?).
Every once in awhile Collins seems to question the conspicuous consumption of his characters, as for example, when Holly demands that the money spent for an expensive necklace be donated to a hospital for children with cancer. Although, even then, it is made clear that while too often charity is little more than an enabling crutch, in the case of child hood cancer that is certainly not the case: compassionate conservatives at work. This may be the kind of thing that Tannenhaus is referring to in his interview when he makes the point that the book combines romance with more serious concerns, moral and social concerns. Collins, for his part, agrees. He adds that he was trying to add elements of characters struggling with issues as well as elements of satire.
While there is some truth to this assertion, there are some barbs thrown at the world of high finance, there some punches at the idle rich, there are even some sneers at literary ladies and randy novelists. There is certainly the whole philosophical question the book raises about determinism and morality. Nevertheless, when you come right down to it, the overwhelming import of the book is its romance. No one is going to read it for its social criticism or its philosophical discourse. One is inclined to think that the whole issue is a less than subtle attempt to distinguish “Beginner’s Greek” from what is too often dismissed as “chick lit.”
However, as romance, the book certainly has its charms. Collins prose is sharp and pointed. He is adept at the arresting metaphor. Tears fall on a letter like bullet holes. People who are supposed to be friends but who don’t quite connect have keys that don’t quite fit each other’s locks. When a beautiful person joins a group, the tome changes like a film going from black and white to color. It plot is filled with twists and unexpected turns, so that pages keep turning almost on their own. It provides insights into a social world inaccessible to most readers, and it gives the impression that the author knows whereof he speaks. These are no mean accomplishments.
Besides, if you want philosophy, you can always read “The Magic Mountain.”
Friday, January 22, 2010
Book Review: The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios by Yann Martel
Readers who have come to Yann Martel through his magical account of Pi Patel’s epic journey across the Pacific Ocean in an open boat with his beastly companion will welcome this reissue of his 1993 collection of four short stories: The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios. Although they may not have the almost mythical aura that transforms young Pi’s voyage, the stories are rewarding pieces of fiction and rich augers of what was to come.
In an introduction to the volume, Martel talks about his early work and explains how he decided that writing fiction was for him the one thing needful. “There was something deeply compelling about creating a setting, inventing characters, giving them dialogue, directing them through a plot, and by these means presenting my view of life.” Much of his early work–plays, short fiction, a novel–he rejects as ‘awful,’ ‘bad,’ ‘none of them good,’ the work of a writer learning his craft. Slowly with practice, he finds his voice. He discovers what it is that in his mind makes for a good story: “My developing sense was that the foundation of a story is an emotional foundation. If a story does not work emotionally, it does not work at all. The emotion in question in not the point; be it love, envy, or apathy, so long as it is conveyed in a convincing manner, then the story will come alive. But a story must also stimulate the mind if it does not want to fade from memory. Intellect rooted in emotion, emotion structured by intellect–in other words, a good idea that moves–that was my aim.” The four stories collected in this volume presumably represent those in which the author, at least, felt his aim was true.
The idea that literary value lies in some sort of emotional investment balanced by an intellectual distancing is not particularly novel. In the late eighteenth century, the great English Romantic poet William Wordsworth was writing about poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquility,” the tranquil recollection no doubt meant to supply the kind of intellectual structure that Martel is talking about. Of course Wordsworth is speaking of poetry, still the application to other genres is not necessarily inappropriate. A few years later, Wordsworth’s contemporary, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was to describe the function of the imagination in terms of the synthesis of opposites, much in the manner of Martel’s blending of feeling and idea–heart and mind. Such balance of opposites would then would seem to be a reasonable standard by which to judge these stories.
The title story of the collection, “The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios,” is perhaps more a novella than a short story. It is a first person account of young man’s attempt to cope with the process of dying, as he watches a friend succumb to the ravages of AIDS, a disease he contracted from a blood transfusion after an accident while with his family vacationing in Jamaica. The story, written at a time when an AIDS diagnosis was akin to a death warrant, describes a scheme developed by the narrator to help himself and his friend endure the hours and days of dying. Taking his cue from Boccaccio’s Decameron, in which a group of people tells stories to pass the time while they try to escape the plague, he proposes that they too should create stories to help pass the empty time. “The transformative wizardry of the imagination. Boccaccio had done it in the fourteenth century, we would do it in the twentieth; we would tell each other stories. But we would be the sick this time, not the world, and we wouldn’t be fleeing it, either. On the contrary: with our stories we would be remembering the world, re-creating it, embracing it. Yes, to meet as storytellers to embrace the world–there, that was how Paul [the AIDS stricken friend] and I would destroy the void.”
The plan they develop is to create stories about an imaginary family in Helsinki, Finland–the Roccamatios. Each story will take as its inspiration a factual event from one year in the twentieth century beginning with 1901 and ending in 1986, the year in which the story is set.
The specific events, the “facts,” will not be the subjects of the stories, rather they will serve as metaphorical catalysts, much in the manner that Homer’s Odyssey serves as a metaphorical–perhaps intellectual–structure for James Joyce’s Ulysses. Martel does not include the actual Roccamatio stories. Instead what he provides are the “facts” that inspired those stories. These are intertwined wi th an account of the ups and downs of Paul’s condition, his highs and lows, and presumably metaphorical indicators of what is happening in his life.
There would also seem to be a further metaphor implicit in the analogy between what is happening to the individual and what is happening in the larger world–microcosm as emblem of the macrocosm and vice versa. Paul has his good days and his bad; the century has its great discoveries, its wars. One day Paul is improving: “He has an appetite and hardly any diarrhoea.” Another day, “Paul has a fungus called Cryptococcus neofomans in his spinal fluid.” In 1928 Mickey Mouse stars in Steamboat Willie; in 1925 Adolph Hitler publishes the first volume of Mein Kampf. The emotional journey of the characters is in this sense tied intellectually to the journey of mankind in the twentieth century. The emotions and the facts complement one another. Form and content blend organically.
“The Time I Heard the Private Donald J. Rankin String Concerto with One Discordant Violin, by the American Composer John Morton” is the second story in the volume. The narrator, a Canadian philosophy student (much like the narrator of the first story), is wandering around Washington, DC when he comes across an old dilapidated theater in a decaying neighborhood which is advertising a concert the following evening featuring a number of Baroque works and the world premiere of the “Rankin Concerto.” Intrigued, although he maintains that he is not particularly musically knowledgeable, he returns the next night to find a wreck of an auditorium in the process of being demolished and an orchestra of amateur musicians, all veterans of the war in Viet Nam.
Yet despite what would seem to be an unpromising situation, surrounded by the decaying wreck of what was once a center of culture with the prospect of a mediocre performance by marginally skilled artists, the concert proves to be a transforming experience, especially the Rankin Concerto. Even though the musicianship isn’t always equal to the demands of the music, there is something about the performance that transcends its flaws.
John Morton is both composer and soloist. But though his playing is inadequate, still, “the full force of the Rankin Concerto was expressed through Morton’s inept playing. His every false note hinted at impregnable perfection, his every falter was liberating. . . .there was no robotic flawlessness here.” There is something mechanical about perfection; it is in the passion of a man trying to go beyond his abilities that emotion is “perfectly translated from the keenly felt to the heard to the keenly felt again,” or as the poet has it–a man’s reach must exceed his grasp. “The Rankin Concerto wasn’t long, not ten minutes, and they didn’t play it right, nor did they finish it the way they were supposed to, but during those few minutes everything in my life that is waste, torment and drivel was swept away–the clouds parted–and I beheld the sublime.”
The last two stories in the book are somewhat less emotionally charged, much more dominated by their intellectual concern with form. “Manners of Dying” is a collection of letters from a prison warden to the mother of a prisoner describing the details of his last hours. Each is a form letter with variations, different meals, different reactions to religious counseling, different deaths, but each talks about the same prisoner. “The Vita Aeterna Mirror Company: Mirrors to Last Till Kingdom Come” deals with a machine that makes mirrors out of memories spoken into them, no doubt suggesting the reflective qualities of art holding the mirror up to nature. In both stories, however, concerns with form get in the way of the emotional content, rather than meshing in the same kind of imaginative synthesis that characterizes the first two stories. They seem more self conscious. When Martel does manage to balance emotion and idea, form and content, as he does in the first two stories, there is none better, and if he doesn’t always quite manage that balance–well remember the Rankin Concerto.
In an introduction to the volume, Martel talks about his early work and explains how he decided that writing fiction was for him the one thing needful. “There was something deeply compelling about creating a setting, inventing characters, giving them dialogue, directing them through a plot, and by these means presenting my view of life.” Much of his early work–plays, short fiction, a novel–he rejects as ‘awful,’ ‘bad,’ ‘none of them good,’ the work of a writer learning his craft. Slowly with practice, he finds his voice. He discovers what it is that in his mind makes for a good story: “My developing sense was that the foundation of a story is an emotional foundation. If a story does not work emotionally, it does not work at all. The emotion in question in not the point; be it love, envy, or apathy, so long as it is conveyed in a convincing manner, then the story will come alive. But a story must also stimulate the mind if it does not want to fade from memory. Intellect rooted in emotion, emotion structured by intellect–in other words, a good idea that moves–that was my aim.” The four stories collected in this volume presumably represent those in which the author, at least, felt his aim was true.
The idea that literary value lies in some sort of emotional investment balanced by an intellectual distancing is not particularly novel. In the late eighteenth century, the great English Romantic poet William Wordsworth was writing about poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquility,” the tranquil recollection no doubt meant to supply the kind of intellectual structure that Martel is talking about. Of course Wordsworth is speaking of poetry, still the application to other genres is not necessarily inappropriate. A few years later, Wordsworth’s contemporary, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was to describe the function of the imagination in terms of the synthesis of opposites, much in the manner of Martel’s blending of feeling and idea–heart and mind. Such balance of opposites would then would seem to be a reasonable standard by which to judge these stories.
The title story of the collection, “The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios,” is perhaps more a novella than a short story. It is a first person account of young man’s attempt to cope with the process of dying, as he watches a friend succumb to the ravages of AIDS, a disease he contracted from a blood transfusion after an accident while with his family vacationing in Jamaica. The story, written at a time when an AIDS diagnosis was akin to a death warrant, describes a scheme developed by the narrator to help himself and his friend endure the hours and days of dying. Taking his cue from Boccaccio’s Decameron, in which a group of people tells stories to pass the time while they try to escape the plague, he proposes that they too should create stories to help pass the empty time. “The transformative wizardry of the imagination. Boccaccio had done it in the fourteenth century, we would do it in the twentieth; we would tell each other stories. But we would be the sick this time, not the world, and we wouldn’t be fleeing it, either. On the contrary: with our stories we would be remembering the world, re-creating it, embracing it. Yes, to meet as storytellers to embrace the world–there, that was how Paul [the AIDS stricken friend] and I would destroy the void.”
The plan they develop is to create stories about an imaginary family in Helsinki, Finland–the Roccamatios. Each story will take as its inspiration a factual event from one year in the twentieth century beginning with 1901 and ending in 1986, the year in which the story is set.
The specific events, the “facts,” will not be the subjects of the stories, rather they will serve as metaphorical catalysts, much in the manner that Homer’s Odyssey serves as a metaphorical–perhaps intellectual–structure for James Joyce’s Ulysses. Martel does not include the actual Roccamatio stories. Instead what he provides are the “facts” that inspired those stories. These are intertwined wi th an account of the ups and downs of Paul’s condition, his highs and lows, and presumably metaphorical indicators of what is happening in his life.
There would also seem to be a further metaphor implicit in the analogy between what is happening to the individual and what is happening in the larger world–microcosm as emblem of the macrocosm and vice versa. Paul has his good days and his bad; the century has its great discoveries, its wars. One day Paul is improving: “He has an appetite and hardly any diarrhoea.” Another day, “Paul has a fungus called Cryptococcus neofomans in his spinal fluid.” In 1928 Mickey Mouse stars in Steamboat Willie; in 1925 Adolph Hitler publishes the first volume of Mein Kampf. The emotional journey of the characters is in this sense tied intellectually to the journey of mankind in the twentieth century. The emotions and the facts complement one another. Form and content blend organically.
“The Time I Heard the Private Donald J. Rankin String Concerto with One Discordant Violin, by the American Composer John Morton” is the second story in the volume. The narrator, a Canadian philosophy student (much like the narrator of the first story), is wandering around Washington, DC when he comes across an old dilapidated theater in a decaying neighborhood which is advertising a concert the following evening featuring a number of Baroque works and the world premiere of the “Rankin Concerto.” Intrigued, although he maintains that he is not particularly musically knowledgeable, he returns the next night to find a wreck of an auditorium in the process of being demolished and an orchestra of amateur musicians, all veterans of the war in Viet Nam.
Yet despite what would seem to be an unpromising situation, surrounded by the decaying wreck of what was once a center of culture with the prospect of a mediocre performance by marginally skilled artists, the concert proves to be a transforming experience, especially the Rankin Concerto. Even though the musicianship isn’t always equal to the demands of the music, there is something about the performance that transcends its flaws.
John Morton is both composer and soloist. But though his playing is inadequate, still, “the full force of the Rankin Concerto was expressed through Morton’s inept playing. His every false note hinted at impregnable perfection, his every falter was liberating. . . .there was no robotic flawlessness here.” There is something mechanical about perfection; it is in the passion of a man trying to go beyond his abilities that emotion is “perfectly translated from the keenly felt to the heard to the keenly felt again,” or as the poet has it–a man’s reach must exceed his grasp. “The Rankin Concerto wasn’t long, not ten minutes, and they didn’t play it right, nor did they finish it the way they were supposed to, but during those few minutes everything in my life that is waste, torment and drivel was swept away–the clouds parted–and I beheld the sublime.”
The last two stories in the book are somewhat less emotionally charged, much more dominated by their intellectual concern with form. “Manners of Dying” is a collection of letters from a prison warden to the mother of a prisoner describing the details of his last hours. Each is a form letter with variations, different meals, different reactions to religious counseling, different deaths, but each talks about the same prisoner. “The Vita Aeterna Mirror Company: Mirrors to Last Till Kingdom Come” deals with a machine that makes mirrors out of memories spoken into them, no doubt suggesting the reflective qualities of art holding the mirror up to nature. In both stories, however, concerns with form get in the way of the emotional content, rather than meshing in the same kind of imaginative synthesis that characterizes the first two stories. They seem more self conscious. When Martel does manage to balance emotion and idea, form and content, as he does in the first two stories, there is none better, and if he doesn’t always quite manage that balance–well remember the Rankin Concerto.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Book Review: Dead Boys, RichardLange
Lives of noisy desperation might not be a bad description of the characters that people the twelve stories in Richard Lange’s debut collection, “Dead Boys.” At best they are people who get by at dead end jobs they despise, at worst they wallow in misery in drugs and alcohol. They live in shabby apartments in run down neighborhoods where a child’s wading pool can’t even be left out in the yard over night. They live in sleazy motels where the desk clerk sits caged behind bullet proof glass and the room next door echoes with prostitutes plying their trade. More often than not their marriages have failed or are failing. They are as like as not estranged from their families. If they have friends, male or female, those friends are likely to be as miserable as they are if not worse. Their hopes and their dreams, if they still have them, are bubbles just about ready to burst. All of this is to say: the world of Dead Boys is not what you would call a pleasant place to be spending your life.
These are helpless people caught up in the web of a deterministic universe: they wriggle and they writhe, they moan and they complain, but they cannot escape, Most of them have given up even trying. Here’s one of his narrators (all twelve stories have first person narrators) forecasting his future: “Christina’s sister will crash at my apartment for a few days, and it will be fun and all, but we’ll finally come to our senses. I’ll tell her to leave, and she’ll try to stab me with a broken tequila bottle. After that I’ll be lonely for a good long while, but then things will get better. I’ll find a job, lose it, find another. A few years form now I’ll come into enough money to take a trip to Hawaii. I will not enjoy it.” In another story, the narrator’s relationship with his wife is described as running in circles as he waits for her to come home from some party where he’s sure she’s seeing someone else. In a third story the narrator is haunted by the memory of his wife who jumped from a highway bridge. He blames himself for her suicide, and he blames her ghost for everything that has gone wrong in his life since–everything from his car breaking down to his inability to keep a decent pair of shoes. “She wants me to suffer, and I have obliged, but the price of peace remains a mystery.” There is no peace for any of the people in these stories.
They are set for the most part in Los Angeles, but although there are the stars on the Walk of Fame and every once in awhile someone gets a view of the Hollywood sign, they might as well take place on another planet. The L.A. Lange describes is “a rough neighborhood, graffiti twisting like angry black vines up the sides of the buildings, half the streetlights shot out,” where the grocery market is a “windowless bunker that’s been tarted up with a thin coat of hot pink paint.” In the meat department pig snouts are on sale, and “a fly that’s succumbed to the cold lies belly-up on the hamburger.” The dining spots of choice are Macdonalds and donut shops. Far from the Beverly Hills Hotel, Lange’s people step into lobbies where “a few men are hunched on the spavined couches, rapt before a silent television chained to a shelf up near the ceiling.” The man next to you smells like “yeast and moth balls.” The hotel sits on streets that the “sun never quite reaches. . . .and those who have chosen to live in this constant twilight collide with those who have no choice and those who are simply, in one way or another, lost.” Forget maps to the homes of the stars: “The sky out this way is a map of hell–blood and fire and gristly bruised clouds.” This is not red carpet; this is filthy motel shag.
Society’s dregs caught in the lower depths–there was a time, over a hundred years ago now, when this kind of thing was innovative and startling, scandalous even, for an author to turn to the social under belly for his subject matter. This was the time of Emile Zola and novels like “Nana,” of Stephen Crane and his Maggie. That time has long gone, taken the last of the exits to Brooklyn. Authors have long since freed themselves from the confines of the genteel and the socially acceptable. There is no class of people, no actions of these people, no language to describe them and their actions that has not been mined for it potential ore. There is a good deal of ugliness in the world and it has been a long time since writers have chosen to ignore it.
Given this truism, it isn’t saying much about the quality of Lange’s stories to say they are gritty pictures of the seamier side of life in glamorous L.A. To say this is merely to place them in a tradition, what gives them their life and their power is the author’s ability to create characters, who despite their many failures and flaws, despite their depravities and cruelties, can still manage to stimulate a reader’s compassion. Sometimes they can even seem likeable. To take weak, unpleasant, and even evil characters and have your reader coming away perhaps finding something to like in them, this is no mean feat.
All the first person narrators are flawed in some way. They drink away their problems. They subject themselves to faithless women. They take advantage of friends and relatives. They blind themselves with illusions. Yet listening to them is much like sitting at a bar next to a slightly tipsy stranger rambling on about his life and loves in the pleasant glow of a warm buzz. You know deep down he’s only a seedy drunk, but you can’t help kind of liking him. So when the narrator of “Bank of America” talks about robbing banks to set up a nest egg for his family, the last thing you do is make moral judgments. He seems like such a nice guy, he just wants “a Subway franchise somewhere quiet with good schools.” When the narrator of “Blind-Made Products” describes how he treats his blind girlfriend at first, you can almost forgive him the way he treats women in general, if not quite his slimy treatment of her at the end of their affair. It’s not that his drunks and his dopers are loveable, it’s just that they’re all too human. And if they are bad, and they are, there are so many others that are worse.
Moreover, they speak so well. They are nothing if not articulate. Sometimes one has to wonder if they are perhaps not too eloquent, if their descriptive abilities are a bit too articulate.
The speaker in “Blind-Made Products” talks about the difficulty he has trying to describe things to his blind girl friend. Yet he doesn’t seem to have any problem describing things to the reader.
A drawer full of panties is “arrayed like the lustrous black and blue and red pelts of small exotic creatures.” He talks about the hands of blind people preparing their coffee as “seeming to have an intelligence of their own.” A sheet of black plastic blowing up against a car’s windshield “flaps and billows in the wind like and ugly ghost.” And he is not the only narrator with the gift of language. They all seem to have it. Razor wire looks like the skeleton of a snake chewing on its own tail, according to the security guard telling the story of “Loss Prevention.” In “Telephone Bird,” the narrator describes a marihuana high: “How nicely th couch cradled me then, like the softest cloud. I lost touch of the game, charting the snaky creep of darkness across the rug and up the wainscoting. The black tide slopped over onto the wallpaper, drowning the roses row by row, and I was right there when it reached the ceiling, the only witness as night overtook us.”
Sometimes the figurative language echoes the kind of fanciful indulgence of the 17th century metaphysical poets: “The rain comes down so hard it cracks the night into a million pieces. All I can see through the windshield is glistening shards of cars and blacktop and the kaleidoscopic whorl of a woman skedaddling across the parking lot.” This is brilliant description–literate and precise, but is it appropriate for someone starting on his first night as a security guard in a ghetto market, even if he did go to college? I don’t know what the answer is. I do know I wouldn’t want to lose that gem of description.
Often the author lays a symbolic leitmotif over the narrative. The smoke and ash from an out of control fire that covers everything in “Fuzzyland” parallel the haze and dirt that pervade the character’s lives. The stench from the decaying body of the suicide in Room 210 that fills “Love Lifted Me” is a constant reminder of the decay which surround us all and compliments the
running theme of the suicide the narrator’s wife. The bird who mimics the telephone ring with its false promises, the brick wall that the one window of a tiny apartment faces, the action figure of a man who finds out he’s a robot: all develop into significant comments on the narrators and their lives. Perhaps none more so than the running fantasies of Scarlet Johansson in “Loss Prevention.” She represents the kinds of dreams that get a lot of people through the smoke and ash covered night,” marihuana, alcohol, Scarlet Johansson.
Finally, Lange’s narrators often add a touch of irony to their stories that seems to put things in just the right perspective. When killing a bird brings no divine retribution, the narrator observes: “I knew the disappointment some criminals feel when their most daring transgressions fail to make the papers.” Or as he later observes: what’s the good of being crazy if you still feel shame? There is the Yuppie in a dead end job who ends up putting on his ex-con brother’s T-shirt and socks. The narrator of “Love Lifted Me” deflates the Jesus spouting father of a street punk by asking him how long it has been since he’s seen his son. “The guy’s smile goes mushy at the edges,” he tells us. “It’s the kind of reaction I was looking for. I’m fucked that way.”
On the one hand one might argue that such insights nd such literary eloquence in general is out of character for the kinds of people who are supposed to be speaking, yet this has always been the paradox of literary naturalism unless it is presented by some third person observer more literate that the characters described. Not everyone, however, can have a Huck Finn speak like a Huck Finn. After all who wants to read transcripts of the conversations of alcoholics and petty criminals. The real question is does the author manage to get the reader to forget the chasm between the speakers and the way they say what they say. Nothing is duller than the stories of drunks when you’re sober. It is art that makes these drunks interesting. It is art that makes us realize that attention must be paid. And it is the art of Richard Lange that he manages to do just that.
These are helpless people caught up in the web of a deterministic universe: they wriggle and they writhe, they moan and they complain, but they cannot escape, Most of them have given up even trying. Here’s one of his narrators (all twelve stories have first person narrators) forecasting his future: “Christina’s sister will crash at my apartment for a few days, and it will be fun and all, but we’ll finally come to our senses. I’ll tell her to leave, and she’ll try to stab me with a broken tequila bottle. After that I’ll be lonely for a good long while, but then things will get better. I’ll find a job, lose it, find another. A few years form now I’ll come into enough money to take a trip to Hawaii. I will not enjoy it.” In another story, the narrator’s relationship with his wife is described as running in circles as he waits for her to come home from some party where he’s sure she’s seeing someone else. In a third story the narrator is haunted by the memory of his wife who jumped from a highway bridge. He blames himself for her suicide, and he blames her ghost for everything that has gone wrong in his life since–everything from his car breaking down to his inability to keep a decent pair of shoes. “She wants me to suffer, and I have obliged, but the price of peace remains a mystery.” There is no peace for any of the people in these stories.
They are set for the most part in Los Angeles, but although there are the stars on the Walk of Fame and every once in awhile someone gets a view of the Hollywood sign, they might as well take place on another planet. The L.A. Lange describes is “a rough neighborhood, graffiti twisting like angry black vines up the sides of the buildings, half the streetlights shot out,” where the grocery market is a “windowless bunker that’s been tarted up with a thin coat of hot pink paint.” In the meat department pig snouts are on sale, and “a fly that’s succumbed to the cold lies belly-up on the hamburger.” The dining spots of choice are Macdonalds and donut shops. Far from the Beverly Hills Hotel, Lange’s people step into lobbies where “a few men are hunched on the spavined couches, rapt before a silent television chained to a shelf up near the ceiling.” The man next to you smells like “yeast and moth balls.” The hotel sits on streets that the “sun never quite reaches. . . .and those who have chosen to live in this constant twilight collide with those who have no choice and those who are simply, in one way or another, lost.” Forget maps to the homes of the stars: “The sky out this way is a map of hell–blood and fire and gristly bruised clouds.” This is not red carpet; this is filthy motel shag.
Society’s dregs caught in the lower depths–there was a time, over a hundred years ago now, when this kind of thing was innovative and startling, scandalous even, for an author to turn to the social under belly for his subject matter. This was the time of Emile Zola and novels like “Nana,” of Stephen Crane and his Maggie. That time has long gone, taken the last of the exits to Brooklyn. Authors have long since freed themselves from the confines of the genteel and the socially acceptable. There is no class of people, no actions of these people, no language to describe them and their actions that has not been mined for it potential ore. There is a good deal of ugliness in the world and it has been a long time since writers have chosen to ignore it.
Given this truism, it isn’t saying much about the quality of Lange’s stories to say they are gritty pictures of the seamier side of life in glamorous L.A. To say this is merely to place them in a tradition, what gives them their life and their power is the author’s ability to create characters, who despite their many failures and flaws, despite their depravities and cruelties, can still manage to stimulate a reader’s compassion. Sometimes they can even seem likeable. To take weak, unpleasant, and even evil characters and have your reader coming away perhaps finding something to like in them, this is no mean feat.
All the first person narrators are flawed in some way. They drink away their problems. They subject themselves to faithless women. They take advantage of friends and relatives. They blind themselves with illusions. Yet listening to them is much like sitting at a bar next to a slightly tipsy stranger rambling on about his life and loves in the pleasant glow of a warm buzz. You know deep down he’s only a seedy drunk, but you can’t help kind of liking him. So when the narrator of “Bank of America” talks about robbing banks to set up a nest egg for his family, the last thing you do is make moral judgments. He seems like such a nice guy, he just wants “a Subway franchise somewhere quiet with good schools.” When the narrator of “Blind-Made Products” describes how he treats his blind girlfriend at first, you can almost forgive him the way he treats women in general, if not quite his slimy treatment of her at the end of their affair. It’s not that his drunks and his dopers are loveable, it’s just that they’re all too human. And if they are bad, and they are, there are so many others that are worse.
Moreover, they speak so well. They are nothing if not articulate. Sometimes one has to wonder if they are perhaps not too eloquent, if their descriptive abilities are a bit too articulate.
The speaker in “Blind-Made Products” talks about the difficulty he has trying to describe things to his blind girl friend. Yet he doesn’t seem to have any problem describing things to the reader.
A drawer full of panties is “arrayed like the lustrous black and blue and red pelts of small exotic creatures.” He talks about the hands of blind people preparing their coffee as “seeming to have an intelligence of their own.” A sheet of black plastic blowing up against a car’s windshield “flaps and billows in the wind like and ugly ghost.” And he is not the only narrator with the gift of language. They all seem to have it. Razor wire looks like the skeleton of a snake chewing on its own tail, according to the security guard telling the story of “Loss Prevention.” In “Telephone Bird,” the narrator describes a marihuana high: “How nicely th couch cradled me then, like the softest cloud. I lost touch of the game, charting the snaky creep of darkness across the rug and up the wainscoting. The black tide slopped over onto the wallpaper, drowning the roses row by row, and I was right there when it reached the ceiling, the only witness as night overtook us.”
Sometimes the figurative language echoes the kind of fanciful indulgence of the 17th century metaphysical poets: “The rain comes down so hard it cracks the night into a million pieces. All I can see through the windshield is glistening shards of cars and blacktop and the kaleidoscopic whorl of a woman skedaddling across the parking lot.” This is brilliant description–literate and precise, but is it appropriate for someone starting on his first night as a security guard in a ghetto market, even if he did go to college? I don’t know what the answer is. I do know I wouldn’t want to lose that gem of description.
Often the author lays a symbolic leitmotif over the narrative. The smoke and ash from an out of control fire that covers everything in “Fuzzyland” parallel the haze and dirt that pervade the character’s lives. The stench from the decaying body of the suicide in Room 210 that fills “Love Lifted Me” is a constant reminder of the decay which surround us all and compliments the
running theme of the suicide the narrator’s wife. The bird who mimics the telephone ring with its false promises, the brick wall that the one window of a tiny apartment faces, the action figure of a man who finds out he’s a robot: all develop into significant comments on the narrators and their lives. Perhaps none more so than the running fantasies of Scarlet Johansson in “Loss Prevention.” She represents the kinds of dreams that get a lot of people through the smoke and ash covered night,” marihuana, alcohol, Scarlet Johansson.
Finally, Lange’s narrators often add a touch of irony to their stories that seems to put things in just the right perspective. When killing a bird brings no divine retribution, the narrator observes: “I knew the disappointment some criminals feel when their most daring transgressions fail to make the papers.” Or as he later observes: what’s the good of being crazy if you still feel shame? There is the Yuppie in a dead end job who ends up putting on his ex-con brother’s T-shirt and socks. The narrator of “Love Lifted Me” deflates the Jesus spouting father of a street punk by asking him how long it has been since he’s seen his son. “The guy’s smile goes mushy at the edges,” he tells us. “It’s the kind of reaction I was looking for. I’m fucked that way.”
On the one hand one might argue that such insights nd such literary eloquence in general is out of character for the kinds of people who are supposed to be speaking, yet this has always been the paradox of literary naturalism unless it is presented by some third person observer more literate that the characters described. Not everyone, however, can have a Huck Finn speak like a Huck Finn. After all who wants to read transcripts of the conversations of alcoholics and petty criminals. The real question is does the author manage to get the reader to forget the chasm between the speakers and the way they say what they say. Nothing is duller than the stories of drunks when you’re sober. It is art that makes these drunks interesting. It is art that makes us realize that attention must be paid. And it is the art of Richard Lange that he manages to do just that.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
DVD Review: Surrogates
It was in 1920 that Karel Capek, a Czech writer, first used the word robot in a play called R. U. R., the initials standing for Rossum's Universal Robots. His robots were humanoid machines that in the course of the play developed the capacity to love, so that not only were they human-like externally, but internally (at least as far as emotions are concerned) as well. The implication was that they were no longer machines, but had become human like us. They were a new Adam and Eve.
Since that first appearance, robots of all kinds have invaded both fiction and the cinema screen. There have been threatening mechanicals and cute little droids. There have been servants to man and servants to man gone berserk, computer-like know-it-alls and dogged garbage cleaners. There have been diabolic humanoids and perfected human idealizations. The surrogates in the eponymous Jonathan Mostow film are robots from this last category.
In a world in the not too distant future humans have taken to living vicariously through perfected humanoid surrogates controlled by their thoughts as they, themselves, lie prone in their homes. The surrogates are all good looking, all young, all physically strong and athletic, supermen and women. Surrogates work for their controllers; they play for them. They love for them. All interaction between people is between surrogates: even, it seems, between husband and wife. Life is beautiful for everyone in a world where everyone is beautiful and nothing seems beyond human capacity through the agency of these surrogates. But when suddenly two surrogates are destroyed by a secret weapon, and even more significantly, their controllers are killed as well, this utopian paradise begins to reveal some fissures.
Enter Bruce Willis as F.B.I. agent Tom Greer; it is up to him to find out what is going on. This is the set up of Mostow's Surrogates based on the comic series by Robert Venditti now available on DVD. Willis plays both a bald grizzled human version of himself and his wavy haired surrogate, and he plays them both with more or less the same kind of intense commitment we have come to expect from the hero of the Die Hard franchise. He is aided by Radha Mitchell as his surrogate F.B.I. agent partner. Ving Rhames does a supporting turn as the dreadlocked leader of a sect of surrogate refuseniks and James Cromwell shows up as the discarded inventor of the surrogates. In general all their performances are workmanlike, if not award winning.
Indeed, workmanlike is an apt description of the whole film. The plot is perhaps overly complex. Too often action sequences, car chases, crashes, surrogates leaping onto roofs of buses, substitute for dramatic content. Nevertheless the film is effectively paced and beautifully photographed. And if its themes are not as compellingly elaborated as they might be, they are still worth thinking about. After all the idea of a world in which we can all be the beautiful people we want to be and do all the exciting things we wish we could deserves some consideration. Although one might well wonder how it is that in a world capable of inventing surrogates, the surrogates still have to get around in cars and buses. A little more futuristic thinking might have been welcome.
Still, if you missed it in the multiplex, Surrogates is certainly worth a spot in your Netflix queue (if only to see Bruce Willis with hair). Besides, the DVD includes a commentary by director Mostow, and a well done music video, "I Will Not Bow," with a collage of scenes from the movie, by Breaking Benjamin.
Since that first appearance, robots of all kinds have invaded both fiction and the cinema screen. There have been threatening mechanicals and cute little droids. There have been servants to man and servants to man gone berserk, computer-like know-it-alls and dogged garbage cleaners. There have been diabolic humanoids and perfected human idealizations. The surrogates in the eponymous Jonathan Mostow film are robots from this last category.
In a world in the not too distant future humans have taken to living vicariously through perfected humanoid surrogates controlled by their thoughts as they, themselves, lie prone in their homes. The surrogates are all good looking, all young, all physically strong and athletic, supermen and women. Surrogates work for their controllers; they play for them. They love for them. All interaction between people is between surrogates: even, it seems, between husband and wife. Life is beautiful for everyone in a world where everyone is beautiful and nothing seems beyond human capacity through the agency of these surrogates. But when suddenly two surrogates are destroyed by a secret weapon, and even more significantly, their controllers are killed as well, this utopian paradise begins to reveal some fissures.
Enter Bruce Willis as F.B.I. agent Tom Greer; it is up to him to find out what is going on. This is the set up of Mostow's Surrogates based on the comic series by Robert Venditti now available on DVD. Willis plays both a bald grizzled human version of himself and his wavy haired surrogate, and he plays them both with more or less the same kind of intense commitment we have come to expect from the hero of the Die Hard franchise. He is aided by Radha Mitchell as his surrogate F.B.I. agent partner. Ving Rhames does a supporting turn as the dreadlocked leader of a sect of surrogate refuseniks and James Cromwell shows up as the discarded inventor of the surrogates. In general all their performances are workmanlike, if not award winning.
Indeed, workmanlike is an apt description of the whole film. The plot is perhaps overly complex. Too often action sequences, car chases, crashes, surrogates leaping onto roofs of buses, substitute for dramatic content. Nevertheless the film is effectively paced and beautifully photographed. And if its themes are not as compellingly elaborated as they might be, they are still worth thinking about. After all the idea of a world in which we can all be the beautiful people we want to be and do all the exciting things we wish we could deserves some consideration. Although one might well wonder how it is that in a world capable of inventing surrogates, the surrogates still have to get around in cars and buses. A little more futuristic thinking might have been welcome.
Still, if you missed it in the multiplex, Surrogates is certainly worth a spot in your Netflix queue (if only to see Bruce Willis with hair). Besides, the DVD includes a commentary by director Mostow, and a well done music video, "I Will Not Bow," with a collage of scenes from the movie, by Breaking Benjamin.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Book Review: Kazan on Directing by Elia Kazan
When you talk about the great directors of the middle of the twentieth century, whether of the stage or the cinema, one name is bound to come up, Elia Kazan. After all, this is the man who was responsible for iconic productions of modern American classics like Death of a Salesman on stage, On the Waterfront on the screen and A Streetcar Named Desire on both. He worked not only with playwrights like Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, but others like William Inge, Thornton Wilder, and Archibald MacLeish. He directed Brando and James Dean, Vivien Leigh and Jessica Tandy, Lee J. Cobb and Raymond Massey, and, well many too many others to mention. So any book that gathers together his analyses of his individual works, his thoughts and advice about the directing process, and his characterizations and evaluations of those he worked with is bound to be a gold mine for anyone concerned with the art of directing.
Kazan on Directing is just such a gold mine. Edited with scholarly care and erudition by Robert Cornfield, it collects original material about each of Kazan's major productions from interviews, his production notes, journals, and letters to collaborators. It provides insights into the way he went about analyzing the work he was directing, the way he worked with actors and playwrights, and the values he sought to communicate to his audience. The book is neither a systematic presentation of a coherent aesthetic, nor a practical guide for the student director. What it is, is a miscellany of bits and pieces, a hint here and a suggestion there, and every once in awhile an aphoristic precept or two about how to go about the business of directing thrown in for good measure.
So, for example, the director's first job, he tells the reader, is to find a 'center' or 'spine' of a play to give his direction "organic unity." The 'spine' of Arthur Miller's All My Sons "has something to do with how to live in this age and in this civilization." The spine of Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth is to "show with pride the lasting power of the human race." Within the spine of the play, each character has his own or her own spine. In A Streetcar Named Desire for example, Stella's spine "is to hold on to Stanley;" Mitch's spine is to escape his mother's control. It is necessary for the director to get the actor to find the spine of his character on his own, but he must make sure that the spine the actor finds is the one the director has determined is there. The director is always manipulating, always in control.
Directorial control is no less essential when shooting a movie. In one of the two lengthier pieces in the collection, "The Pleasures of Directing" (the skeleton of a more systematic approach to the subject that Kazan never got around to completing), he talks about the necessity for the director to enforce his own vision of the film on all his collaborators. The director should be willing to listen to other points of view, especially those of the technicians—the camera men, the costumers, the designers—but he must always have the last word. He must not allow commercial concerns to affect his decisions. He must not allow those who are financing the film to dictate what he does. He must demand final cut at all costs, even at the price of walking away from the project. As the editor notes, when Kazan's films began making money, he demanded control of all aspects of filming and he got it. When his films didn't do that well, he had trouble getting the kind of control he wanted.
Again and again, he mentions the fact that most people considered him an actor's director. In a sense this is true, often he was able to get memorable performances from his actors, but this was not always because he coddled them. The most important thing for a director is to cast the right actor for the part. He, himself, liked to look for actors who had something in their personality or life history that paralleled something in the character they were to play. He chose Ed Begley to play the father in All My Sons because he was a reformed alcoholic and his guilt over this mirrored the guilt of the father in the play. He liked Peggy Anne Garner in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn because the young girl was experiencing pains and uncertainties in her real life which came through on the screen. When he found there was a real antagonism between Raymond Massey and James Dean on the set of East of Eden, he stoked it whenever he could, because it worked for what he wanted on the screen. On the other hand, when it came to Marlon Brando, he says it was best to let him work things out on his own. The best way to handle him was to leave hands off.
Kazan on Directing is an incisive look into the mind and method of a theatrical genius. The more the reader knows about Kazan's films and plays, the more meaningful this look will be, but an encyclopedic knowledge of Kazan's work is not essential. The editor manages to provide an abundance of background material to make everything in the volume intelligible to even the least knowledgeable of readers. There is an introduction, a critical afterword, a chronology, and there are editorial introductions and interpolations for each of the individual entries. This is a book that belongs on the shelf of anyone interested in the stage or the cinema from the professional to the novice, the actors on the stage and members of the audience.
Kazan on Directing is just such a gold mine. Edited with scholarly care and erudition by Robert Cornfield, it collects original material about each of Kazan's major productions from interviews, his production notes, journals, and letters to collaborators. It provides insights into the way he went about analyzing the work he was directing, the way he worked with actors and playwrights, and the values he sought to communicate to his audience. The book is neither a systematic presentation of a coherent aesthetic, nor a practical guide for the student director. What it is, is a miscellany of bits and pieces, a hint here and a suggestion there, and every once in awhile an aphoristic precept or two about how to go about the business of directing thrown in for good measure.
So, for example, the director's first job, he tells the reader, is to find a 'center' or 'spine' of a play to give his direction "organic unity." The 'spine' of Arthur Miller's All My Sons "has something to do with how to live in this age and in this civilization." The spine of Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth is to "show with pride the lasting power of the human race." Within the spine of the play, each character has his own or her own spine. In A Streetcar Named Desire for example, Stella's spine "is to hold on to Stanley;" Mitch's spine is to escape his mother's control. It is necessary for the director to get the actor to find the spine of his character on his own, but he must make sure that the spine the actor finds is the one the director has determined is there. The director is always manipulating, always in control.
Directorial control is no less essential when shooting a movie. In one of the two lengthier pieces in the collection, "The Pleasures of Directing" (the skeleton of a more systematic approach to the subject that Kazan never got around to completing), he talks about the necessity for the director to enforce his own vision of the film on all his collaborators. The director should be willing to listen to other points of view, especially those of the technicians—the camera men, the costumers, the designers—but he must always have the last word. He must not allow commercial concerns to affect his decisions. He must not allow those who are financing the film to dictate what he does. He must demand final cut at all costs, even at the price of walking away from the project. As the editor notes, when Kazan's films began making money, he demanded control of all aspects of filming and he got it. When his films didn't do that well, he had trouble getting the kind of control he wanted.
Again and again, he mentions the fact that most people considered him an actor's director. In a sense this is true, often he was able to get memorable performances from his actors, but this was not always because he coddled them. The most important thing for a director is to cast the right actor for the part. He, himself, liked to look for actors who had something in their personality or life history that paralleled something in the character they were to play. He chose Ed Begley to play the father in All My Sons because he was a reformed alcoholic and his guilt over this mirrored the guilt of the father in the play. He liked Peggy Anne Garner in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn because the young girl was experiencing pains and uncertainties in her real life which came through on the screen. When he found there was a real antagonism between Raymond Massey and James Dean on the set of East of Eden, he stoked it whenever he could, because it worked for what he wanted on the screen. On the other hand, when it came to Marlon Brando, he says it was best to let him work things out on his own. The best way to handle him was to leave hands off.
Kazan on Directing is an incisive look into the mind and method of a theatrical genius. The more the reader knows about Kazan's films and plays, the more meaningful this look will be, but an encyclopedic knowledge of Kazan's work is not essential. The editor manages to provide an abundance of background material to make everything in the volume intelligible to even the least knowledgeable of readers. There is an introduction, a critical afterword, a chronology, and there are editorial introductions and interpolations for each of the individual entries. This is a book that belongs on the shelf of anyone interested in the stage or the cinema from the professional to the novice, the actors on the stage and members of the audience.
Monday, January 18, 2010
On Bathrooms and Books
When Jane Austen was struggling over some recalcitrant passage in her account of the romantic entanglements of the Dashwood sisters or Elizabeth Bennet, did she imagine, I wonder, that some couple of hundred years down the road, some appreciative reader would be perusing the results of that struggle wedged comfortably in a three foot nook between bathroom sink and wall, happily ensconced upon the porcelain throne. Would she blush at the image? Would she turn up her nose at the vulgarity? As an artist would it offend her either her sense or her sensibility?
I had an idea for a one act play.
Jay, an author–refined and elegant–enters from Phil’s bathroom. In his hand he waves a copy of his latest tome, a volume on which he has presumably toiled with loving care. He holds it up for Phil who is already on stage to see.
Phil: Your book.
Jay: In the bathroom.
Phil: I was reading–
Jay: In the bathroom?
Phil: Yes, I was–
Jay: In the bathroom.
Phil: Right. I was reading–
Jay: But the bathroom.
Phil: What’s wrong with the bath–
Jay: Well, it wasn’t exactly defecation entertainment I had in mind when I–
And so on.
Would Jane have felt the same sense of outrage to find a copy of “Pride and Prejudice” next to some squire’s chamber pot? Imagine a modern day Milton flush from his success in justifying the ways of God to man, emerging from the toilet with a copy of his “Paradise Lost.”
A Flaubert with his “Madame Bovary;” a Longinus with–well you get the idea. How offensive is it to think of some ur-reader “instresspassing” the sprung rhythms of Gerard Manly Hopkins dedication to his creator while engaging in the perhaps most human of bodily functions? Would that spark gash, gold vermillion?
I, for one, never if I can help it, enter the toilet unaccompanied by some literary companion–preferably whatever book I happen to be in the midst of at the moment nature calls (a collection of essays by the novelist John Barth sharing the honors most recently with Charles Dickens’ “Martin Chuzzlewit”), although any handy volume will do in a pinch. Over the years (I, having lived a good many years, have had more than my share of opportunity) I have been accompanied by a good many of the great and a great many of the good novelists, poets, philosophers, historians, biographers, literary critics and even a dramatist or two, to say nothing of the even greater number of mediocre and bad writers. Although it is arguable that, with this latter group at least, the toilet may well be the most appropriate place to meet. Reading in the bathroom has become habit with me, as essential as breathing, and it has never occurred to me to make distinctions between what might or might not be appropriate in those circumstances. Shakespeare or Stephen King–any port in a storm.
As an author, however–
On the one hand, having labored long and painfully–it is not without reason that the metaphor most often employed for the act of writing is that of birth, my book, my child, is the writer asking too much to hope for an easy chair by a roaring fire or a lamp lit table in the reading room of the New York Public Library? Any reader with any sense of decency would seem to owe the writer and his child some modicum of respect. On the other hand, should not the writer be thrilled that some fellow being is willing to spend even a few of the precious minutes that make up a life reading what comes from his pen, whatever the circumstances of that reading might be? To take offense at finding one’s work sitting on the hamper opposite the commode is either excessively squeamish or extremely vain. Or both.
In my unwritten play, I had intended to make Jay, my author, a pompous finicky sort, overly impressed with himself, a man guilty as charged of this kind of other hand ingratitude. After all were he to find himself in my house in need of the conveniences, he would more than likely emerge waving that copy of his tome. But as I was writing the “first hand” considerations began to kick in. I began to think that perhaps there is something graceless and crude about mixing beauty with excrement, the sublime with the gross. Perhaps my character would be wrong in attributing beauty or sublimity or even value to his own work, but the general principle would still be true: a place for everything, and everything in its place. Intentions being what they are, I found myself unable to continue.
As an author, I myself would be plenty happy, overjoyed to have someone reading my work, reading this, wherever the hell his or her backside happened to be squatting, even if I can also feel for my fellow writer filling every rift with ore and wanting something more from his reader. So I stopped writing my one act play, but with the law of conservation of energy in mind (as well as waste not, want not), I opted for this essay instead.
I am reminded of more than forty years ago when a professor of mine at New York University had published a three volume life of Lord Byron, his life’s work, only to find it sitting in the window of a remainder book store on West Eighth Street in the Village which he passed every day on his way from the subway to the school. I suspect that were I that professor, my own preference would have been to find one of those three volumes with a book marker at page 183 sitting on the cabinet of some avid reader’s bathroom sink. So for myself, dear reader, if you are reading this in your bathroom, thank you. If you are reading it in the unisex lavatory where you work, thank you. If you are reading it an outhouse next to a Sears and Roebuck catalogue, thank you.
And, by the way, if you are reading this on the internet, you are welcome to print a copy, take it to your toilet, drop your pants and enjoy. And if the paper you printed it on is soft enough–
But, remember, that’s just me.
I had an idea for a one act play.
Jay, an author–refined and elegant–enters from Phil’s bathroom. In his hand he waves a copy of his latest tome, a volume on which he has presumably toiled with loving care. He holds it up for Phil who is already on stage to see.
Phil: Your book.
Jay: In the bathroom.
Phil: I was reading–
Jay: In the bathroom?
Phil: Yes, I was–
Jay: In the bathroom.
Phil: Right. I was reading–
Jay: But the bathroom.
Phil: What’s wrong with the bath–
Jay: Well, it wasn’t exactly defecation entertainment I had in mind when I–
And so on.
Would Jane have felt the same sense of outrage to find a copy of “Pride and Prejudice” next to some squire’s chamber pot? Imagine a modern day Milton flush from his success in justifying the ways of God to man, emerging from the toilet with a copy of his “Paradise Lost.”
A Flaubert with his “Madame Bovary;” a Longinus with–well you get the idea. How offensive is it to think of some ur-reader “instresspassing” the sprung rhythms of Gerard Manly Hopkins dedication to his creator while engaging in the perhaps most human of bodily functions? Would that spark gash, gold vermillion?
I, for one, never if I can help it, enter the toilet unaccompanied by some literary companion–preferably whatever book I happen to be in the midst of at the moment nature calls (a collection of essays by the novelist John Barth sharing the honors most recently with Charles Dickens’ “Martin Chuzzlewit”), although any handy volume will do in a pinch. Over the years (I, having lived a good many years, have had more than my share of opportunity) I have been accompanied by a good many of the great and a great many of the good novelists, poets, philosophers, historians, biographers, literary critics and even a dramatist or two, to say nothing of the even greater number of mediocre and bad writers. Although it is arguable that, with this latter group at least, the toilet may well be the most appropriate place to meet. Reading in the bathroom has become habit with me, as essential as breathing, and it has never occurred to me to make distinctions between what might or might not be appropriate in those circumstances. Shakespeare or Stephen King–any port in a storm.
As an author, however–
On the one hand, having labored long and painfully–it is not without reason that the metaphor most often employed for the act of writing is that of birth, my book, my child, is the writer asking too much to hope for an easy chair by a roaring fire or a lamp lit table in the reading room of the New York Public Library? Any reader with any sense of decency would seem to owe the writer and his child some modicum of respect. On the other hand, should not the writer be thrilled that some fellow being is willing to spend even a few of the precious minutes that make up a life reading what comes from his pen, whatever the circumstances of that reading might be? To take offense at finding one’s work sitting on the hamper opposite the commode is either excessively squeamish or extremely vain. Or both.
In my unwritten play, I had intended to make Jay, my author, a pompous finicky sort, overly impressed with himself, a man guilty as charged of this kind of other hand ingratitude. After all were he to find himself in my house in need of the conveniences, he would more than likely emerge waving that copy of his tome. But as I was writing the “first hand” considerations began to kick in. I began to think that perhaps there is something graceless and crude about mixing beauty with excrement, the sublime with the gross. Perhaps my character would be wrong in attributing beauty or sublimity or even value to his own work, but the general principle would still be true: a place for everything, and everything in its place. Intentions being what they are, I found myself unable to continue.
As an author, I myself would be plenty happy, overjoyed to have someone reading my work, reading this, wherever the hell his or her backside happened to be squatting, even if I can also feel for my fellow writer filling every rift with ore and wanting something more from his reader. So I stopped writing my one act play, but with the law of conservation of energy in mind (as well as waste not, want not), I opted for this essay instead.
I am reminded of more than forty years ago when a professor of mine at New York University had published a three volume life of Lord Byron, his life’s work, only to find it sitting in the window of a remainder book store on West Eighth Street in the Village which he passed every day on his way from the subway to the school. I suspect that were I that professor, my own preference would have been to find one of those three volumes with a book marker at page 183 sitting on the cabinet of some avid reader’s bathroom sink. So for myself, dear reader, if you are reading this in your bathroom, thank you. If you are reading it in the unisex lavatory where you work, thank you. If you are reading it an outhouse next to a Sears and Roebuck catalogue, thank you.
And, by the way, if you are reading this on the internet, you are welcome to print a copy, take it to your toilet, drop your pants and enjoy. And if the paper you printed it on is soft enough–
But, remember, that’s just me.
Friday, January 15, 2010
Book Review: Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace
(Originally published in The Compulsive Reader)
Whether he is considering lobsters or the porn industry, John McCain campaigning in South Carolina or an “as told to autobiography” of Tracy Austin, David Foster Wallace has created a voice for himself that is erudite without pedantry, critical without stridency, humane but not preachy. He has created a persona that more often than not focuses on the ironic contradictions inherent in his subject–appearance and reality, theory and practice, form and substance, a persona that is, more often than not, amused rather than indignant at these ironies. Moreover, since the whole idea of persona, both as it applies to a writer and as it can be used to denote the public face people try to present to the rest of the world, is one of the major themes in the various essays, it is probably a good idea to pay some attention to that face that Wallace creates for himself and perhaps ask as he often does himself what does it all mean.
Persona is the term used to describe the voice a writer uses to speak to his readers. Sometimes, most usually in fiction, he creates a character other than himself to speak for him. This would include narrative voices such as Nick in The Great Gatsby, the governess in The Turn of the Screw, Gulliver telling of his travels. These are voices recognizably distinct from those of the author. Sometimes he speaks in a voice that seems to be his own, at least not a voice identified with any other character, yet it seems clear to the reader that some distinction needs to be made between the speaker on the page and the author in his study. The voice may be something very much like what both he and his readers consider his actual voice to be (so close indeed that the reader may well imagine it not a voice at all); it may be a complete fabrication, a creation of a persona with a personality and world view separate and distinct from that of the author even though it speaks in the first person. Perhaps the Henry David Thoreau of Walden at the one extreme, the Jonathan Swift of “A Modest Proposal” at the other. Voice, mask, face (as in prepare a face to “meet the faces that we meet”) are more or less synonyms for persona.
No matter the term used, implicit in the idea of the persona is a desire on the writer’s part to hide what he considers his real self [whatever that my mean (with apologies to Wallace)] behind this created voice. His motive may be privacy, modesty, embarrassment at what his writing may reveal about himself. As for example Robert Browning’s famous resolution to write in “so many voice not my own” after reading John Stuart Mill’s review of the confessional “Pauline.” It may be an attempt to present himself to the world as he would like the world to see him–noble, witty, sincere, sarcastic, adventurous, idealistic, worldly, pragmatic, objective, sensitive (or even erudite, critical and humane). Consider the epigrammatic wit of Oscar Wilde in “The Decay of Lying,” the sensitive sincerity of Frank McCourt in Angela’s Ashes; the visionary preacher of Martin Luther King’s speeches, the indomitable strength of Churchill’s. More than likely the author’s motive will be at least in part rhetorical. He will want to affect his audience, and he creates the face that he supposes most likely to do the job..
David Foster Wallace’s persona is fair minded. He is constantly labeling footnotes and interpolations as editorial, opinion rather than fact. He is quick to make the reader aware of any axes he may have to grind. When he writes about McCain, he confesses that he voted for Bradley (which may also explain the constant references to McCain’s opponent as Shrub). While he admits to qualms about live lobster boiling, he recognizes that those qualms are not strong enough to prevent him from partaking, preferably with melted butter. Although recognizing that there are certainly political implications underlying the concept of Standard Written English, he is more than a little inclined to defend both its practical usefulness and even its aesthetic value. Besides it makes it abundantly clear he is a “snoot” (defined in a footnote as the reviewer’s “nuclear family’s nickname a clef for a really extreme usage fanatic. . . .”).
He tends to be modest, somewhat self effacing and open to learn from others. He culls political wisdom from the electronic technical support people traveling with the McCain entourage. He tags along with two of the “marginal print journalists” from the “sorts of men’s magazines that sit shrinkwrapped behind the cash registers of convenience stores.” He picks the brains of talk show screeners and producers. He warns us a number of times that what follows may be a lot more than we might really be interested in knowing, but than goes on to tell us anyway, whether he is expounding on the biology of the lobster or taking us “substantially farther behind the scenes” of the McCain campaign than we’re “apt to want to be.” On a variety of occasions he tells us that what we’ve just read or what we are going to read is unlikely to survive the editing process. All of which is to suggest an authorial voice very much like the reader himself, someone who has found out all this interesting stuff and can’t help but want to share it with others very much like himself. In other words, Wallace rarely (although sometimes when writing about language and literature) presents himself as an expert writing down to his audience.
He manages this self deprecating ordinary guy mask despite the fact that almost everything else about his essays cries out a voice anything but ordinary. His choice of vocabulary (e.g. apsidal, ayotolloid, amentia, cancrine, Euthyphotically, luxated) will have readers back and forth to the dictionary with regularity. He uses quotations and phrases from other languages without bothering to translate. He tosses around labels like deconstruction and structuralism. He disparages the prose of academics, especially that of English professors, while obsessed with footnotes and footnotes within footnotes, parenthetical asides and parentheticals within parantheticals [readers should be advised that often embedded in the small print of the foonotes (tiny as it may be) there may well lurk a gem]. He is as comfortable, if not more so, writing about Dostoevsky and Kafka as he is about talk radio and porn starlets.
In effect then he has created a paradoxical persona that seems both elite and ordinary at the same time. It is a persona one suspects is adopted for his readers in the same way that the various writers and public figures he talks about in his essays have adopted their voices and faces for their audiences. The elaborately made up, sexily clad porn queens at the Consumer Electronics Show, dress in “baggy jeans and cotton halters and big fuzzy slippers” in the privacy of their hotel suite. The self assured cocky combativeness of the talk radio hosts is unlikely to have anything in common with their off air personalities. He even speculates about whether John McCain’s campaign image as someone who will always tell the truth and never pander to the voters is not merely a cynical ploy to create the kind of persona that he and his handlers have determined will appeal to that disaffected portion of the electorate that dismisses all politicians as crooks.
In a sense, then, there is something dishonest in the very idea of the persona. Isn’t the persona–whether in the politician, the porn queen, and yes, even the essayist–simply a way to manipulate the public? On air personalities, Wallace opines, are adopted by talk show hosts to “heighten the sense of a real person behind the mike.” In other words, to make himself seem more true, the host creates a fake personality. In this sense the idea of the persona suggests that what is false may seem more true than what is true. On the other hand, what if the creator of the persona is not only manipulating his audience, what if he is manipulating himself? Does McCain tell the truth because he is a truthful man or because he wants to think of himself as a truthful man so that voters will think of him as a truthful man? This is an ethical problem which Wallace crystalizes in an interpolation in his essay on Dostoevsky (what more appropriate place):
“**Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person,
or do I want only to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will
approve of me? Is there a difference? How so I ever actually know whether I’m bullshitting myself, morally speaking?**”
Does true goodness depend on the reason for being good? To be good is not enough, in a sense one must be good for the right reasons.
Unless. . .. What if the perception is the reality? There is no reality other than the persona. Persona is everything. What you present to the public is what you are. What you think you are is in some sense irrelevant.
The essays collected in “Consider the Lobster” were written in the 1990's and in the early years of the new century. They were written for periodicals as diverse as Gourmet, Premiere, the Atlantic Monthly and the Village Voice Literary Supplement. Some are book reviews, others are editorial assignments. All of them look at their subjects with a freshness and insight, in a style that is innovative and original.
Wallace has an eye for the telling detail that gives the reader the sense that nothing escapes him, large or small. Whether it’s a starlet’s inflatable implants or the reward for the waiters at the end of the adult film awards banquet, the problems with the bathroom door on one of the McCain campaign busses, or what the call screener is watching on TV while the host chats on air, he spotlights the kind of intimate details that reinforce the reader’s feeling that here is someone who knows what he’s talking about.
But, ultimately, Wallace is concerned with the larger issues raised by his subjects. “Authority and American English,” ostensibly a review of A Dictionary of Modern American Usage by Bryan A. Garner, is more importantly an analysis of the great language wars of the past few decades against the backdrop of language theory and linguistic politics. His essay on McCain uses his account of his week with the campaign to examine the whole issue of politics and image. An essay on the reaction to 9/11 in a small Mid-Western town contrasts the reactions of more or less average ‘apple pie’ Americans with that of more jaded intellectual types like himself. “Consider the Lobster,” the title essay uses a Maine Lobsterfest to question the ethical treatment of animals, to question the morality of inflicting pain on animals and using them for fodder. Is this something people even consider? If not, why not? Talk show hosts, the adult film industry, Dostoevsky and John Updike, there are always similar questions to be asked.
David Foster Wallace’s essays range over the broad expanse of contemporary American culture. He analyzes. He explains. He critiques. And always he questions. Whatever the topic, what he has to say is original and well worth reading. His voice, his real voice or the voice he has created for the readers of Rolling Stone, is a voice that demands attention.
Whether he is considering lobsters or the porn industry, John McCain campaigning in South Carolina or an “as told to autobiography” of Tracy Austin, David Foster Wallace has created a voice for himself that is erudite without pedantry, critical without stridency, humane but not preachy. He has created a persona that more often than not focuses on the ironic contradictions inherent in his subject–appearance and reality, theory and practice, form and substance, a persona that is, more often than not, amused rather than indignant at these ironies. Moreover, since the whole idea of persona, both as it applies to a writer and as it can be used to denote the public face people try to present to the rest of the world, is one of the major themes in the various essays, it is probably a good idea to pay some attention to that face that Wallace creates for himself and perhaps ask as he often does himself what does it all mean.
Persona is the term used to describe the voice a writer uses to speak to his readers. Sometimes, most usually in fiction, he creates a character other than himself to speak for him. This would include narrative voices such as Nick in The Great Gatsby, the governess in The Turn of the Screw, Gulliver telling of his travels. These are voices recognizably distinct from those of the author. Sometimes he speaks in a voice that seems to be his own, at least not a voice identified with any other character, yet it seems clear to the reader that some distinction needs to be made between the speaker on the page and the author in his study. The voice may be something very much like what both he and his readers consider his actual voice to be (so close indeed that the reader may well imagine it not a voice at all); it may be a complete fabrication, a creation of a persona with a personality and world view separate and distinct from that of the author even though it speaks in the first person. Perhaps the Henry David Thoreau of Walden at the one extreme, the Jonathan Swift of “A Modest Proposal” at the other. Voice, mask, face (as in prepare a face to “meet the faces that we meet”) are more or less synonyms for persona.
No matter the term used, implicit in the idea of the persona is a desire on the writer’s part to hide what he considers his real self [whatever that my mean (with apologies to Wallace)] behind this created voice. His motive may be privacy, modesty, embarrassment at what his writing may reveal about himself. As for example Robert Browning’s famous resolution to write in “so many voice not my own” after reading John Stuart Mill’s review of the confessional “Pauline.” It may be an attempt to present himself to the world as he would like the world to see him–noble, witty, sincere, sarcastic, adventurous, idealistic, worldly, pragmatic, objective, sensitive (or even erudite, critical and humane). Consider the epigrammatic wit of Oscar Wilde in “The Decay of Lying,” the sensitive sincerity of Frank McCourt in Angela’s Ashes; the visionary preacher of Martin Luther King’s speeches, the indomitable strength of Churchill’s. More than likely the author’s motive will be at least in part rhetorical. He will want to affect his audience, and he creates the face that he supposes most likely to do the job..
David Foster Wallace’s persona is fair minded. He is constantly labeling footnotes and interpolations as editorial, opinion rather than fact. He is quick to make the reader aware of any axes he may have to grind. When he writes about McCain, he confesses that he voted for Bradley (which may also explain the constant references to McCain’s opponent as Shrub). While he admits to qualms about live lobster boiling, he recognizes that those qualms are not strong enough to prevent him from partaking, preferably with melted butter. Although recognizing that there are certainly political implications underlying the concept of Standard Written English, he is more than a little inclined to defend both its practical usefulness and even its aesthetic value. Besides it makes it abundantly clear he is a “snoot” (defined in a footnote as the reviewer’s “nuclear family’s nickname a clef for a really extreme usage fanatic. . . .”).
He tends to be modest, somewhat self effacing and open to learn from others. He culls political wisdom from the electronic technical support people traveling with the McCain entourage. He tags along with two of the “marginal print journalists” from the “sorts of men’s magazines that sit shrinkwrapped behind the cash registers of convenience stores.” He picks the brains of talk show screeners and producers. He warns us a number of times that what follows may be a lot more than we might really be interested in knowing, but than goes on to tell us anyway, whether he is expounding on the biology of the lobster or taking us “substantially farther behind the scenes” of the McCain campaign than we’re “apt to want to be.” On a variety of occasions he tells us that what we’ve just read or what we are going to read is unlikely to survive the editing process. All of which is to suggest an authorial voice very much like the reader himself, someone who has found out all this interesting stuff and can’t help but want to share it with others very much like himself. In other words, Wallace rarely (although sometimes when writing about language and literature) presents himself as an expert writing down to his audience.
He manages this self deprecating ordinary guy mask despite the fact that almost everything else about his essays cries out a voice anything but ordinary. His choice of vocabulary (e.g. apsidal, ayotolloid, amentia, cancrine, Euthyphotically, luxated) will have readers back and forth to the dictionary with regularity. He uses quotations and phrases from other languages without bothering to translate. He tosses around labels like deconstruction and structuralism. He disparages the prose of academics, especially that of English professors, while obsessed with footnotes and footnotes within footnotes, parenthetical asides and parentheticals within parantheticals [readers should be advised that often embedded in the small print of the foonotes (tiny as it may be) there may well lurk a gem]. He is as comfortable, if not more so, writing about Dostoevsky and Kafka as he is about talk radio and porn starlets.
In effect then he has created a paradoxical persona that seems both elite and ordinary at the same time. It is a persona one suspects is adopted for his readers in the same way that the various writers and public figures he talks about in his essays have adopted their voices and faces for their audiences. The elaborately made up, sexily clad porn queens at the Consumer Electronics Show, dress in “baggy jeans and cotton halters and big fuzzy slippers” in the privacy of their hotel suite. The self assured cocky combativeness of the talk radio hosts is unlikely to have anything in common with their off air personalities. He even speculates about whether John McCain’s campaign image as someone who will always tell the truth and never pander to the voters is not merely a cynical ploy to create the kind of persona that he and his handlers have determined will appeal to that disaffected portion of the electorate that dismisses all politicians as crooks.
In a sense, then, there is something dishonest in the very idea of the persona. Isn’t the persona–whether in the politician, the porn queen, and yes, even the essayist–simply a way to manipulate the public? On air personalities, Wallace opines, are adopted by talk show hosts to “heighten the sense of a real person behind the mike.” In other words, to make himself seem more true, the host creates a fake personality. In this sense the idea of the persona suggests that what is false may seem more true than what is true. On the other hand, what if the creator of the persona is not only manipulating his audience, what if he is manipulating himself? Does McCain tell the truth because he is a truthful man or because he wants to think of himself as a truthful man so that voters will think of him as a truthful man? This is an ethical problem which Wallace crystalizes in an interpolation in his essay on Dostoevsky (what more appropriate place):
“**Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person,
or do I want only to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will
approve of me? Is there a difference? How so I ever actually know whether I’m bullshitting myself, morally speaking?**”
Does true goodness depend on the reason for being good? To be good is not enough, in a sense one must be good for the right reasons.
Unless. . .. What if the perception is the reality? There is no reality other than the persona. Persona is everything. What you present to the public is what you are. What you think you are is in some sense irrelevant.
The essays collected in “Consider the Lobster” were written in the 1990's and in the early years of the new century. They were written for periodicals as diverse as Gourmet, Premiere, the Atlantic Monthly and the Village Voice Literary Supplement. Some are book reviews, others are editorial assignments. All of them look at their subjects with a freshness and insight, in a style that is innovative and original.
Wallace has an eye for the telling detail that gives the reader the sense that nothing escapes him, large or small. Whether it’s a starlet’s inflatable implants or the reward for the waiters at the end of the adult film awards banquet, the problems with the bathroom door on one of the McCain campaign busses, or what the call screener is watching on TV while the host chats on air, he spotlights the kind of intimate details that reinforce the reader’s feeling that here is someone who knows what he’s talking about.
But, ultimately, Wallace is concerned with the larger issues raised by his subjects. “Authority and American English,” ostensibly a review of A Dictionary of Modern American Usage by Bryan A. Garner, is more importantly an analysis of the great language wars of the past few decades against the backdrop of language theory and linguistic politics. His essay on McCain uses his account of his week with the campaign to examine the whole issue of politics and image. An essay on the reaction to 9/11 in a small Mid-Western town contrasts the reactions of more or less average ‘apple pie’ Americans with that of more jaded intellectual types like himself. “Consider the Lobster,” the title essay uses a Maine Lobsterfest to question the ethical treatment of animals, to question the morality of inflicting pain on animals and using them for fodder. Is this something people even consider? If not, why not? Talk show hosts, the adult film industry, Dostoevsky and John Updike, there are always similar questions to be asked.
David Foster Wallace’s essays range over the broad expanse of contemporary American culture. He analyzes. He explains. He critiques. And always he questions. Whatever the topic, what he has to say is original and well worth reading. His voice, his real voice or the voice he has created for the readers of Rolling Stone, is a voice that demands attention.
Thursday, January 14, 2010
DVD Review: Lo
Lo, a comic horror flick written and directed by Travis Betts' will be available on February 10 on DVD from SKD USA. According to the film's publicity release, Lo was a winner at the 2009 Las Vegas International Film Festival, 2009 Honolulu International Film Festival and 2009 Shriekfest Film Festival and was an official selection at the 2009 Austin Film Festival, 2009 Boston Underground Film Festival, 2009 Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival and 2009 Indianapolis International Film Festival.
Set in a darkened apartment where the hero of the film, Justin, played by Ward Roberts, spends nearly all of the 83 minutes of his screen time perched in the center of an elaborately drawn pentagram, Lo tells the story of a nerdy young man who summons up a demon named Lo, to bring back the love of his life, April Oak, who has been 'girlnapped' to hell by the demon, Jeez. Although Justin is somewhat clumsy about it, he does manage with the aid of an ancient book of spells and rituals to get not only Lo to appear, but Jeez as well, only to discover that demons are a snarky bunch who would just as soon lead you down the garden path as follow your commands. Lo more often than not, after a terrifying opening gambit, comes off like a stand-up comic putting down a heckler. Jeez is at his horrifying best as the lead singer in a lounge act.
As demons go, these two would have a hard time with the crew from Paradise Lost, but of course that is the idea. The world of the twenty first century is a world in which young girls fall all over vampires, zombies are funny and Frankenstein's monster is a song and dance man. Why should demons be any different? They may be able to mash your face. They may be able to make off with the woman you love. They may be able to tear your chest up a bit on a cheese grater in hell. But when all is said and done, despite their appearance, they do seem to add a little spice to what would otherwise be a kind of dull life. That can't be all bad.
In flashbacks presented as little set pieces acted on a tiny theater stage that appears on one of the walls of the darkened apartment, we learn that Justin works for the corporate HateMyJob. He meets April while he is on lunch break, eating a rather lame salad, and doodling dreamily. As played by Sarah Lassez, she is quirky and pretty and despite some strange behavior (she scarfs down his salad; she doesn't understand that she should have gotten him a Christmas Present), she entrances the bemused Justin. Roberts manages to get enough needy naivete into his character to make the whole thing believable. In typical post-modern fashion, the theatrical artifice of these flashbacks is emphasized by camera angles that show what's going on in the wings as April and Justin go through their little scenes. Nameless characters kiss, light cigarettes, or just plain stand around.
In a sense the whole film seems to emphasize artifice as opposed to realism. The blackness of the darkened apartment surrounding the candle lit pentagram is like nothing so much as a black box theater space with a spotlight on the action. Demons make entrances crawling from the darkness out into the light of the circle, while the space around remains dark. Souls suffering in hell writhe and moan, black shadows behind symbolic red curtains. This is a film that seems imprisoned in the claustrophobic mise-en-scene of the theater. It has the feel of a stage play.
While demonic makeup reveals just enough of human eye to deconstruct the horror effect and underline comic intention, the heavy makeup leaves little room for acting nuance. Everything must be done vocally. Jeremiah Birkett's Lo manages a surprising range of emotional expression under the mask. His performance is specific and layered. Devin Barry's Jeez is less successful, perhaps because his mask is much less malleable. On the other hand, his turn as a lounge singer is one of the high points of the picture. There is nothing to compare with a demon that can sing and dance.
Lo is the kind of movie that has cult potential. Think The Rocky Horror Picture Show If its demons wouldn't quite fit in with Milton's Satan or Goethe's Mephistopheles, they may well make some headway with the fit though few. Check out the trailer on You Tube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kmw3DWxgCgw);see if you qualify.
One note: the DVD includes no supplementary material.
Set in a darkened apartment where the hero of the film, Justin, played by Ward Roberts, spends nearly all of the 83 minutes of his screen time perched in the center of an elaborately drawn pentagram, Lo tells the story of a nerdy young man who summons up a demon named Lo, to bring back the love of his life, April Oak, who has been 'girlnapped' to hell by the demon, Jeez. Although Justin is somewhat clumsy about it, he does manage with the aid of an ancient book of spells and rituals to get not only Lo to appear, but Jeez as well, only to discover that demons are a snarky bunch who would just as soon lead you down the garden path as follow your commands. Lo more often than not, after a terrifying opening gambit, comes off like a stand-up comic putting down a heckler. Jeez is at his horrifying best as the lead singer in a lounge act.
As demons go, these two would have a hard time with the crew from Paradise Lost, but of course that is the idea. The world of the twenty first century is a world in which young girls fall all over vampires, zombies are funny and Frankenstein's monster is a song and dance man. Why should demons be any different? They may be able to mash your face. They may be able to make off with the woman you love. They may be able to tear your chest up a bit on a cheese grater in hell. But when all is said and done, despite their appearance, they do seem to add a little spice to what would otherwise be a kind of dull life. That can't be all bad.
In flashbacks presented as little set pieces acted on a tiny theater stage that appears on one of the walls of the darkened apartment, we learn that Justin works for the corporate HateMyJob. He meets April while he is on lunch break, eating a rather lame salad, and doodling dreamily. As played by Sarah Lassez, she is quirky and pretty and despite some strange behavior (she scarfs down his salad; she doesn't understand that she should have gotten him a Christmas Present), she entrances the bemused Justin. Roberts manages to get enough needy naivete into his character to make the whole thing believable. In typical post-modern fashion, the theatrical artifice of these flashbacks is emphasized by camera angles that show what's going on in the wings as April and Justin go through their little scenes. Nameless characters kiss, light cigarettes, or just plain stand around.
In a sense the whole film seems to emphasize artifice as opposed to realism. The blackness of the darkened apartment surrounding the candle lit pentagram is like nothing so much as a black box theater space with a spotlight on the action. Demons make entrances crawling from the darkness out into the light of the circle, while the space around remains dark. Souls suffering in hell writhe and moan, black shadows behind symbolic red curtains. This is a film that seems imprisoned in the claustrophobic mise-en-scene of the theater. It has the feel of a stage play.
While demonic makeup reveals just enough of human eye to deconstruct the horror effect and underline comic intention, the heavy makeup leaves little room for acting nuance. Everything must be done vocally. Jeremiah Birkett's Lo manages a surprising range of emotional expression under the mask. His performance is specific and layered. Devin Barry's Jeez is less successful, perhaps because his mask is much less malleable. On the other hand, his turn as a lounge singer is one of the high points of the picture. There is nothing to compare with a demon that can sing and dance.
Lo is the kind of movie that has cult potential. Think The Rocky Horror Picture Show If its demons wouldn't quite fit in with Milton's Satan or Goethe's Mephistopheles, they may well make some headway with the fit though few. Check out the trailer on You Tube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kmw3DWxgCgw);see if you qualify.
One note: the DVD includes no supplementary material.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Book Review: Certainty by Madeleine Thien
(Older review originally published in The Compulsive Reader)
If it is true as some literary critics have declared that there are only so many possible stories to be told--a fixed number of general forms in which details and specifics may change but the general shape ( boy meets girl, boy loses girl, etc.) remains the same, it poses something of a dilemma for the modern story teller. If all the stories have been told, told over and over again, how is the ‘novelist come lately’ to find something new to say, something original enough to get the attention of all those readers who have most certainly heard it all before? How does one avoid simply repeating what has already been done with different names in different places?
For many budding authors faced with this problem, the solution lies less with the content of their story, than with the shape into which they mold it. What they tell you may be well worn or time honored, as the case may be, but they way they tell you that story will be new and original. As early as the ancient Greeks, writers, knowing how familiar their audiences were with the tales they were telling, were already concerned with the way their stories were told. Aristotle, in the Poetics, sets forth the classic form for the portrayal of a story’s action. It has, he says, a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning is that which requires nothing come before it. The end is that which requires nothing come after it. The middle is that which follows from the former and leads inevitably to the latter. Aristotle is after all nothing if not your model for common sense. But even as he was laying down the law in the Poetics, he was well aware that the actual story tellers were playing fast and loose with the structure–their middles, their ends, their beginnings--of their plots. They were starting with their hero sulking away from the battle, rather than with how the whole war began. They had their hero awaiting the return of a messenger from an oracle with the solution to the problem, before explaining what the whole problem was. The action of a story may well have a beginning, but as early as the Greeks, it was clear that it was not necessary that the one telling the story absolutely start with that beginning. And this before there was any such thing as a novel.
Genesis my well start in the beginning, but there is no reason that a writer can’t start somewhere else and return to the beginning at some other time, start with something perhaps more interesting, perhaps more important. Later the reader can be caught up with all that he needs to know. The author can do this all at once. She can do it in dribs and drabs limiting what the reader knows and when he knows it, and thus creating mystery and suspense. There may be something artificial about telling a story in this fashion, but isn’t art what story telling is all about?
All this is not meant to imply that Madeleine Thien’s debut novel Certainty is a stale rehash of a much told tale. It is simply to say that her story, like all stories, is a variation on a basic universal pattern. A boy and a girl are friends in childhood. They are separated, meet again years later, and fall in love only to be separated once again. Over the years, both are tormented by what might have been, and their torment affects all those around them, but when they meet again they realize that their time has passed. While it is no doubt unfair to reduce the many facets of Thien’s novel to such a bare bones outline, such a formula illustrates that it is the way she tells the story that sparks with originality, rather than the story she tells.
Certainty begins with “chaos.” In Vancouver, Gail Lim, a Chinese radio producer born in Canada, has died unexpectedly of cancer. Although some months have passed, her lover, a heart specialist, and her parents are still in deep mourning. Thien moves back and forth from the present to the past, narrating little snippets to show relationships and indicate how they develop.
Very quickly, the reader finds himself in North Borneo (modern day Malaysia) in 1945. World War II is winding down and the Japanese occupiers of the island are evacuating. A young boy of ten and a girl a few months older are wandering around in the war torn devastation. The boy is Matthew, the son of a Chinese plantation manager who has been collaborating with the enemy. He will grow up to be Gail’s father. The girl is Ani. She will become the love of his life, despite the fact that he will marry another.
Thien does not simply shuttle the reader back and forth between Matthew’s past and modern day Canada. Instead she moves apparently randomly over the more than fifty years of the story focusing on moments of time, incidents past and present not only in the lives of Matthew and Gail, but in a variety of other characters all affected by as well as affecting them: Clara, Matthew’s wife; Anselm, Gail’s lover; Ani, Matthew’s lost love; Sipke, the man Ani marries. Each adds a little piece of information, another insight that gradually fleshes out the whole of the story much like the separate tiles in a mosaic coalescing to create a picture.
Thien provides her own model for her method when she describes the way Gail works on her radio scripts: “In radio, in the countless scripts that she has written, Gail works in the belief that histories touch. Follow the undercurrent and you will arrive at the meeting place. So she weaves together interviews, narration, music and sound in the hope that stories will not be lost in the chaos of never touching one another, never overlapping in any true way. Each element a strand, and the story itself a work of design. Out of the disparate pieces, let something pure, something true, emerge.” Her formal choices, then, are not simply arbitrary nor are they merely for the sake of suspense; there is presumably a design, meaning in what seems like chaos.
Indeed the need to find design and meaning in the chaos that is human life may well be the glue that hold all the different strands of her story together. Life is a search for the truth, for the Certainty of truth. It is a quest that each of the characters in the book must make, each in his or her own way. Matthew and Ani must find out, after all the years that have passed, the truth about their feelings for each other. Clara must find out how much of Matthew is still tapped in the past. Gail must find out both the truth about her father and whether she can put complete trust in a relationship with Anselm. And what she discovers, what they all discover is that trust in a person one loves is an act of faith. Is it possible to know another person, she asks of Sipke who she meets late in the novel. His answer: “Think of knowing like beauty. The lines that we see are clear, we can trace them, study them in minute detail. But the depth that emerges is still mysterious. How to explain why it reverberates in our minds? When we know another person, I think it is just as mysterious. Knowing another is a kind of belief, an act of faith.” Love is an act of faith.
Not the least significant part of Thien’s mosaic is the multiplicity of settings from the rubber plantations of Malaysia to the streets of Jakarta. Hong Kong, Vancouver, the Netherlands, all provide her with a rich multi-cultural canvas for her eclectic cast of characters. She is able to invest her story with all kinds of fascinating exotica. There is the Indonesian creation myth about a bird that foments a quarrel between the sea and sky. There is the fisherman who rolls over the side of his boat into the water so he can listen for the sounds of the fish. Each species, he says, has its own sound. There is the Chinese mother burning squares of paper with pieces of gold foil at the center at the grave of her daughter to help pay her way through the other side. There are the whales following a Russian ice breaker through the Bering Strait to the tune of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” There is the description of the road to Schokland in the Netherlands, a road that was once the bottom of the sea. Such elements give the novel a rewarding textual richness that more than complements the story itself. They add a colorful background to her mosaic.
Certainty is a novel with something to say, and it says it with originality. Madeleine Thien speaks with an infectious vitality coupled with a powerful artistry that keeps the reader involved both emotionally and intellectually. .
If it is true as some literary critics have declared that there are only so many possible stories to be told--a fixed number of general forms in which details and specifics may change but the general shape ( boy meets girl, boy loses girl, etc.) remains the same, it poses something of a dilemma for the modern story teller. If all the stories have been told, told over and over again, how is the ‘novelist come lately’ to find something new to say, something original enough to get the attention of all those readers who have most certainly heard it all before? How does one avoid simply repeating what has already been done with different names in different places?
For many budding authors faced with this problem, the solution lies less with the content of their story, than with the shape into which they mold it. What they tell you may be well worn or time honored, as the case may be, but they way they tell you that story will be new and original. As early as the ancient Greeks, writers, knowing how familiar their audiences were with the tales they were telling, were already concerned with the way their stories were told. Aristotle, in the Poetics, sets forth the classic form for the portrayal of a story’s action. It has, he says, a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning is that which requires nothing come before it. The end is that which requires nothing come after it. The middle is that which follows from the former and leads inevitably to the latter. Aristotle is after all nothing if not your model for common sense. But even as he was laying down the law in the Poetics, he was well aware that the actual story tellers were playing fast and loose with the structure–their middles, their ends, their beginnings--of their plots. They were starting with their hero sulking away from the battle, rather than with how the whole war began. They had their hero awaiting the return of a messenger from an oracle with the solution to the problem, before explaining what the whole problem was. The action of a story may well have a beginning, but as early as the Greeks, it was clear that it was not necessary that the one telling the story absolutely start with that beginning. And this before there was any such thing as a novel.
Genesis my well start in the beginning, but there is no reason that a writer can’t start somewhere else and return to the beginning at some other time, start with something perhaps more interesting, perhaps more important. Later the reader can be caught up with all that he needs to know. The author can do this all at once. She can do it in dribs and drabs limiting what the reader knows and when he knows it, and thus creating mystery and suspense. There may be something artificial about telling a story in this fashion, but isn’t art what story telling is all about?
All this is not meant to imply that Madeleine Thien’s debut novel Certainty is a stale rehash of a much told tale. It is simply to say that her story, like all stories, is a variation on a basic universal pattern. A boy and a girl are friends in childhood. They are separated, meet again years later, and fall in love only to be separated once again. Over the years, both are tormented by what might have been, and their torment affects all those around them, but when they meet again they realize that their time has passed. While it is no doubt unfair to reduce the many facets of Thien’s novel to such a bare bones outline, such a formula illustrates that it is the way she tells the story that sparks with originality, rather than the story she tells.
Certainty begins with “chaos.” In Vancouver, Gail Lim, a Chinese radio producer born in Canada, has died unexpectedly of cancer. Although some months have passed, her lover, a heart specialist, and her parents are still in deep mourning. Thien moves back and forth from the present to the past, narrating little snippets to show relationships and indicate how they develop.
Very quickly, the reader finds himself in North Borneo (modern day Malaysia) in 1945. World War II is winding down and the Japanese occupiers of the island are evacuating. A young boy of ten and a girl a few months older are wandering around in the war torn devastation. The boy is Matthew, the son of a Chinese plantation manager who has been collaborating with the enemy. He will grow up to be Gail’s father. The girl is Ani. She will become the love of his life, despite the fact that he will marry another.
Thien does not simply shuttle the reader back and forth between Matthew’s past and modern day Canada. Instead she moves apparently randomly over the more than fifty years of the story focusing on moments of time, incidents past and present not only in the lives of Matthew and Gail, but in a variety of other characters all affected by as well as affecting them: Clara, Matthew’s wife; Anselm, Gail’s lover; Ani, Matthew’s lost love; Sipke, the man Ani marries. Each adds a little piece of information, another insight that gradually fleshes out the whole of the story much like the separate tiles in a mosaic coalescing to create a picture.
Thien provides her own model for her method when she describes the way Gail works on her radio scripts: “In radio, in the countless scripts that she has written, Gail works in the belief that histories touch. Follow the undercurrent and you will arrive at the meeting place. So she weaves together interviews, narration, music and sound in the hope that stories will not be lost in the chaos of never touching one another, never overlapping in any true way. Each element a strand, and the story itself a work of design. Out of the disparate pieces, let something pure, something true, emerge.” Her formal choices, then, are not simply arbitrary nor are they merely for the sake of suspense; there is presumably a design, meaning in what seems like chaos.
Indeed the need to find design and meaning in the chaos that is human life may well be the glue that hold all the different strands of her story together. Life is a search for the truth, for the Certainty of truth. It is a quest that each of the characters in the book must make, each in his or her own way. Matthew and Ani must find out, after all the years that have passed, the truth about their feelings for each other. Clara must find out how much of Matthew is still tapped in the past. Gail must find out both the truth about her father and whether she can put complete trust in a relationship with Anselm. And what she discovers, what they all discover is that trust in a person one loves is an act of faith. Is it possible to know another person, she asks of Sipke who she meets late in the novel. His answer: “Think of knowing like beauty. The lines that we see are clear, we can trace them, study them in minute detail. But the depth that emerges is still mysterious. How to explain why it reverberates in our minds? When we know another person, I think it is just as mysterious. Knowing another is a kind of belief, an act of faith.” Love is an act of faith.
Not the least significant part of Thien’s mosaic is the multiplicity of settings from the rubber plantations of Malaysia to the streets of Jakarta. Hong Kong, Vancouver, the Netherlands, all provide her with a rich multi-cultural canvas for her eclectic cast of characters. She is able to invest her story with all kinds of fascinating exotica. There is the Indonesian creation myth about a bird that foments a quarrel between the sea and sky. There is the fisherman who rolls over the side of his boat into the water so he can listen for the sounds of the fish. Each species, he says, has its own sound. There is the Chinese mother burning squares of paper with pieces of gold foil at the center at the grave of her daughter to help pay her way through the other side. There are the whales following a Russian ice breaker through the Bering Strait to the tune of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” There is the description of the road to Schokland in the Netherlands, a road that was once the bottom of the sea. Such elements give the novel a rewarding textual richness that more than complements the story itself. They add a colorful background to her mosaic.
Certainty is a novel with something to say, and it says it with originality. Madeleine Thien speaks with an infectious vitality coupled with a powerful artistry that keeps the reader involved both emotionally and intellectually. .
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
On City Room by Arhtur Gelb
Reading Arthur Gelb’s 2003 memoir, City Room, today in the current gloomy newspaper environment with its dire predictions for the future of print journalism is a little like reading the eulogy for an old friend just about to be lowered into the grave. It is a loving testament to a day that is going fast despite the fact that some of the Jeff Jarvis persuasion might well say good riddance.
Gelb began as a copy boy and steadily moved up the ladder—reporter, rewrite, editor—straight to the top echelons of what was then arguably the world’s most influential news organizations. And while he was climbing that ladder, he had a front row seat for many of the great events of the middle years of the twentieth century. City Room is something of a tourist’s guide to those events and to the people great and small, who moved and were moved, shook and were shaken. Whether it was investigating police corruption in New York City or the election of Harry Truman, the riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King or the prison riots in Attica, he seemed to be around to report, oversee, and direct. A Renaissance man: he covered the police beat; he covered theater and culture; he covered politics.
All the journalistic stars are there, sketched out, sometimes with reverence, sometimes with their warts exposed, but always with love: Scotty Reston, Abe Rosenthal, Punch Sulzberger. There hardly is a name he doesn’t drop. Indeed the book is as much a love letter to the institution to which Gelb devoted his life as it is the story of his life, and it is only fitting, because from the very start journalism was less a profession than it was a passion for the young Arthur Gelb. Always a lover of the theater, Gelb’s vision of the newspaper world was as much formed by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur as it was by the realities he eventually encountered.
The Front Page, Hecht and MacArthur’s 1928 comedy, painted a romantic picture of the crusading reporter fighting for truth, justice, the American way—and just maybe the scoop of the lifetime. It is a picture sure to enchant, investing as it does the world of journalism with the kind of feisty refusal to bow down to authority that is the stock of youthful rebellion. The journalist speaks truth to power. What more could any young, ambitious man want? The city room that Gelb describes, at least in its essence, could well have been the set for The Front Page. There were the hard drinkers. There were the hot shot reporters with connections all over the city. There were the ethical idealists who couldn’t be bought off a scoop or beat out of a story. Here was the idyllic vision made real. It is not often that a man is lucky enough to live out his fantasies; City Room certainly makes clear that Arthur Gelb was one of the lucky ones.
Still, there is no doubt that this is a eulogy. The world Gelb describes is gone. Newspapers are downsizing when they are not outright going out of business. Younger audiences are getting their news from the internet, and newspaper publishers have not figured out how to use the internet for their own profit. Perhaps, however, it is too soon to write the obit. As Tina Brown, the tamer of The Daily Beast, agreed on a recent BBC Americana podcast, internet news sources other than those of the newspapers themselves have not yet managed the kind of local, national, and international reportage readers have come to expect from an organ like the New York Times. There may be hope for print journalism yet.
Meanwhile, Arthur Gelb provides a look back at its rich past, filled with enough anecdotes and insights to make of his book something more than a nostalgic trip down memory lane. The reader can only feel how fortunate it was for Gelb that he got out of the business before what may be its decline, if not its fall.
Gelb began as a copy boy and steadily moved up the ladder—reporter, rewrite, editor—straight to the top echelons of what was then arguably the world’s most influential news organizations. And while he was climbing that ladder, he had a front row seat for many of the great events of the middle years of the twentieth century. City Room is something of a tourist’s guide to those events and to the people great and small, who moved and were moved, shook and were shaken. Whether it was investigating police corruption in New York City or the election of Harry Truman, the riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King or the prison riots in Attica, he seemed to be around to report, oversee, and direct. A Renaissance man: he covered the police beat; he covered theater and culture; he covered politics.
All the journalistic stars are there, sketched out, sometimes with reverence, sometimes with their warts exposed, but always with love: Scotty Reston, Abe Rosenthal, Punch Sulzberger. There hardly is a name he doesn’t drop. Indeed the book is as much a love letter to the institution to which Gelb devoted his life as it is the story of his life, and it is only fitting, because from the very start journalism was less a profession than it was a passion for the young Arthur Gelb. Always a lover of the theater, Gelb’s vision of the newspaper world was as much formed by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur as it was by the realities he eventually encountered.
The Front Page, Hecht and MacArthur’s 1928 comedy, painted a romantic picture of the crusading reporter fighting for truth, justice, the American way—and just maybe the scoop of the lifetime. It is a picture sure to enchant, investing as it does the world of journalism with the kind of feisty refusal to bow down to authority that is the stock of youthful rebellion. The journalist speaks truth to power. What more could any young, ambitious man want? The city room that Gelb describes, at least in its essence, could well have been the set for The Front Page. There were the hard drinkers. There were the hot shot reporters with connections all over the city. There were the ethical idealists who couldn’t be bought off a scoop or beat out of a story. Here was the idyllic vision made real. It is not often that a man is lucky enough to live out his fantasies; City Room certainly makes clear that Arthur Gelb was one of the lucky ones.
Still, there is no doubt that this is a eulogy. The world Gelb describes is gone. Newspapers are downsizing when they are not outright going out of business. Younger audiences are getting their news from the internet, and newspaper publishers have not figured out how to use the internet for their own profit. Perhaps, however, it is too soon to write the obit. As Tina Brown, the tamer of The Daily Beast, agreed on a recent BBC Americana podcast, internet news sources other than those of the newspapers themselves have not yet managed the kind of local, national, and international reportage readers have come to expect from an organ like the New York Times. There may be hope for print journalism yet.
Meanwhile, Arthur Gelb provides a look back at its rich past, filled with enough anecdotes and insights to make of his book something more than a nostalgic trip down memory lane. The reader can only feel how fortunate it was for Gelb that he got out of the business before what may be its decline, if not its fall.
Monday, January 11, 2010
From the Green Room: Kate Who?
There's nothing like being the only person in the room to understand an allusion in a forty year old play to make you feel your age. We are gathered for the read-thru for an upcoming production of Woody Allen's 1966 comedy, Don't Drink the Water. We come to the entrance of Walter Hollander, the character I am playing. "We're Americans," he yells (he is being chased into the American Embassy by a Communist mob), and to prove it he screams out some familiar bits of Americana, American icons presumably familiar to all. He mentions Willy Mays; no problem. He mentions Hershey Bars, also no problem. Then, out pops the last of his icons, Kate Smith. Kate Smith? It seems that every face in the room is looking askance. Kate Smith?
Now while I have very vivid memories of this very large woman—the one I always picture when the fat lady has to sing before it's over--most famous for her rendition of God Bless America, I am quite certain that I am very likely the only one with such memories. And while I probably have a good twenty years on the oldest of group, never mind the youngest, not all of them are kids. You would think at least some of them would remember the woman. What is it the poet says about snow and yesteryear?
Some years ago—another example--I was playing the drunken ex-professor, Dr. Lyman, in William Inge's Bus Stop, and I remember the young girl, a college student at the time, playing Elma, the counter waitress asking the director about a name Inge alluded to in one of her lines. Elma tells Cherie, the 'chanteuse,' that Bo, the cowboy that has scooped her out of the dance club, "looks a little like Burt Lancaster." She wanted to know who Burt Lancaster was. Burt Lancaster? If there are those in the twenty first century that need a footnote for Burt Lancaster, what can Kate Smith hope for.
And if Kate Smith can't manage to escape Lethe, what about What's My Line, The Ed Sullivan Show, Mr. Anthony, Sergeant York, Edsels, Walter Lippman, "a foggy day in London town," Chock Full O'Nuts, John Birch, and Zippos. All of which come up during the read-thru, and all of which evoke the ubiquitous blank stare on almost every face in the room, except one.
In November, in the Theater Factory's production of On Golden Pond, an old rotary dial phone—one of those blocky black behemoths that used to grace all our homes back in the fifties—and the thirteen year old computer whizz who was playing the young Billy needed an explanation of how it worked. He had never seen one before. When Norman Thayer, the octogenarian English professor talks trash about the Nash automobile he once owned, he's talking about the company that made the first car I ever owned: a 1962 Nash Rambler American, but he's talking about something that means absolutely nothing to the young lady playing his daughter, a mother of two in real life. She's not thirteen.
Allusions are only useful if they mean something to the audience. They are worthless if they go over everyone's head. This is the reason why we have a professorial industry devoted to the annotation of Shakespeare, for example. They can make us aware that Hamlet is punning when he verbally sends Ophelia off to a nunnery. They can relate all the details of the story of Pyramus and Thisbe. They can explain the differences between the magic of Sycorax and that of Prospero. From the reaction of the rest of the cast to Kate Smith, it seems the time may at hand for an annotated Woody Allen to sit on the shelf beside the bard.
Trouble is, when it comes, it will only make us gray beards feel that much older. 'We don't need no annotations.' After all like Walter Hollander, Dr. Lyman and Norman Thayer, not only do we remember Kate Smith, weMy Short Modeling Career remember When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain and The White Cliffs of Dover as well.
Now while I have very vivid memories of this very large woman—the one I always picture when the fat lady has to sing before it's over--most famous for her rendition of God Bless America, I am quite certain that I am very likely the only one with such memories. And while I probably have a good twenty years on the oldest of group, never mind the youngest, not all of them are kids. You would think at least some of them would remember the woman. What is it the poet says about snow and yesteryear?
Some years ago—another example--I was playing the drunken ex-professor, Dr. Lyman, in William Inge's Bus Stop, and I remember the young girl, a college student at the time, playing Elma, the counter waitress asking the director about a name Inge alluded to in one of her lines. Elma tells Cherie, the 'chanteuse,' that Bo, the cowboy that has scooped her out of the dance club, "looks a little like Burt Lancaster." She wanted to know who Burt Lancaster was. Burt Lancaster? If there are those in the twenty first century that need a footnote for Burt Lancaster, what can Kate Smith hope for.
And if Kate Smith can't manage to escape Lethe, what about What's My Line, The Ed Sullivan Show, Mr. Anthony, Sergeant York, Edsels, Walter Lippman, "a foggy day in London town," Chock Full O'Nuts, John Birch, and Zippos. All of which come up during the read-thru, and all of which evoke the ubiquitous blank stare on almost every face in the room, except one.
In November, in the Theater Factory's production of On Golden Pond, an old rotary dial phone—one of those blocky black behemoths that used to grace all our homes back in the fifties—and the thirteen year old computer whizz who was playing the young Billy needed an explanation of how it worked. He had never seen one before. When Norman Thayer, the octogenarian English professor talks trash about the Nash automobile he once owned, he's talking about the company that made the first car I ever owned: a 1962 Nash Rambler American, but he's talking about something that means absolutely nothing to the young lady playing his daughter, a mother of two in real life. She's not thirteen.
Allusions are only useful if they mean something to the audience. They are worthless if they go over everyone's head. This is the reason why we have a professorial industry devoted to the annotation of Shakespeare, for example. They can make us aware that Hamlet is punning when he verbally sends Ophelia off to a nunnery. They can relate all the details of the story of Pyramus and Thisbe. They can explain the differences between the magic of Sycorax and that of Prospero. From the reaction of the rest of the cast to Kate Smith, it seems the time may at hand for an annotated Woody Allen to sit on the shelf beside the bard.
Trouble is, when it comes, it will only make us gray beards feel that much older. 'We don't need no annotations.' After all like Walter Hollander, Dr. Lyman and Norman Thayer, not only do we remember Kate Smith, weMy Short Modeling Career remember When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain and The White Cliffs of Dover as well.
Thursday, January 7, 2010
My Short Modeling Career
Whenever I visit a Target or a Rite-Aid Drugstore, whenever I visit the greeting card store in the local mall, whenever I visit any establishment that sells American Greeting Cards, I always make it my business to check the racks of humorous cards. I'm not looking to make a purchase. I'm not looking for a quick laugh at some clueless remark ballooning out of the mouth of our last president or some eloquent bromide from our present leader. I'm not even looking to kill time while my wife shops (although that is often one of the unintended consequences).
What I am looking for is myself.
Let me explain. Some four years ago in December and then again in May, I drove up from Pittsburgh to Cleveland, a trip many Steeler fans like to make every year, not for football, but for a photo shoot at the official headquarters of the American Greeting Card Company which is located in the home of the Browns. I was on my way to what I hoped would be a lucrative career as a male model—a male model for the geriatric set. It's not that I consider myself particularly photogenic. It's not that I consider myself a senior hunk. It is simply that my agent had sent them my headshot along with more than likely fifty others, and someone who presumably knew what they were doing had picked mine. Whatever they wanted, I had it. Whoever they wanted, I was it. So, who was I to argue.
"Bring some short sleeve shirts," my agent said, "Bring Bermudas," "You got any with loud patterns?"
"It's December," I said.
"You got any with like a Hawaiian print?" he asked in a second phone call.
Hawaiian print and Bermuda shorts, obviously you know they're not looking for Brad Pitt; Sean Connery neither. What they're looking for is one of the old funny looking guys, maybe the one with a suppository in his ear. His friend says to him, "What are you doing with that suppository in your ear?" "Eh," he says. What they're looking for is an old coot with skinny legs and sagging jowls. Like I said, they're looking for me.
In the December shoot, I and another elderly Tyson Beckford wannabe, each dressed in checked Bermuda shorts, shirts from the Waikiki Beach collection, sandals and black socks , are posed sitting on a bench in front of an American Greeting Card store, they have set up either for visitors to the Greeting Card campus or as a set for shoots like ours. They pose us for two hours: him on the left, me on the right; me on the right, him on the left; him smiling, me frowning, him frowning, me smiling; him straight faced, me—well, you get the idea. The captions that will go with these photos, they don't tell us, but it is fairly easy to imagine they aren't going to be very flattering. I've seen the cards with the guys with their bellies hanging out.
When the agent calls in May, he tells me to bring one of those sleeveless undershirts. "You know," he chuckles, "a wife beater."
"They want Marlon Brando?"
This time what we are shooting is a Poker game. There are five of us: me, and four aged lovelies. The ,photographer decides against the wife beater, opting for the shirt from the Waikiki collection—who knew that the Hawaiian shirt was the AARP's equivalent of the little black dress. Again there are two hours of posing: the blue haired ladies and I in a variety of combinations, dealing cards, holding cards close to our chests, grabbing for chips, peeking at each other's hands, and so on. "We're not doing strip poker," the producer quips, "this time." The ladies giggle. The gentleman, yours truly, blushes. Once again, we leave with no idea what they mean to do with the pictures. At least I know that they won't be working with pictures of my sunken chest festooned beneath the wife beater I leave in the dressing room.
And so whenever I visit a Target or a Rite-Aid drug store for over four years now, I search for whatever it was—embarrassing and undignified or cute and cuddly--that might have come out of these photo shoots. Whenever I visit the card shop in the local mall I look for four ladies and an old guy playing poker on somebody's birthday or anniversary. Whenever I go into any store that sells American Greeting Cards, I search for two old farts sitting on a bench in what looks like a mall saying who knows what for Father's Day or maybe telling each other to get well.
It's more than four years now, and I've yet to find them. Sometimes I wonder if perhaps the pictures were so terrible, they were unfit for use, not even good enough to be bad enough to laugh at, but if that were true, I reason, why would they call me back five months later? Why would they pay me to come all the way out to Cleveland for another set of worthless prints?
There is only one answer. They are holding them back, saving them, waiting for the right moment to unleash them on the card buying public. So I keep looking, waiting for the day they send them forth. And when they do, when you see a semi-dignified, elderly gentleman in Bermuda shorts, sandals and socks, and a lush Hawaiian shirt, perhaps with a suppository in his ear, gracing the shelves of your local Target, you may well be looking at America's Next Top Model—Geriatric Male Division.
What I am looking for is myself.
Let me explain. Some four years ago in December and then again in May, I drove up from Pittsburgh to Cleveland, a trip many Steeler fans like to make every year, not for football, but for a photo shoot at the official headquarters of the American Greeting Card Company which is located in the home of the Browns. I was on my way to what I hoped would be a lucrative career as a male model—a male model for the geriatric set. It's not that I consider myself particularly photogenic. It's not that I consider myself a senior hunk. It is simply that my agent had sent them my headshot along with more than likely fifty others, and someone who presumably knew what they were doing had picked mine. Whatever they wanted, I had it. Whoever they wanted, I was it. So, who was I to argue.
"Bring some short sleeve shirts," my agent said, "Bring Bermudas," "You got any with loud patterns?"
"It's December," I said.
"You got any with like a Hawaiian print?" he asked in a second phone call.
Hawaiian print and Bermuda shorts, obviously you know they're not looking for Brad Pitt; Sean Connery neither. What they're looking for is one of the old funny looking guys, maybe the one with a suppository in his ear. His friend says to him, "What are you doing with that suppository in your ear?" "Eh," he says. What they're looking for is an old coot with skinny legs and sagging jowls. Like I said, they're looking for me.
In the December shoot, I and another elderly Tyson Beckford wannabe, each dressed in checked Bermuda shorts, shirts from the Waikiki Beach collection, sandals and black socks , are posed sitting on a bench in front of an American Greeting Card store, they have set up either for visitors to the Greeting Card campus or as a set for shoots like ours. They pose us for two hours: him on the left, me on the right; me on the right, him on the left; him smiling, me frowning, him frowning, me smiling; him straight faced, me—well, you get the idea. The captions that will go with these photos, they don't tell us, but it is fairly easy to imagine they aren't going to be very flattering. I've seen the cards with the guys with their bellies hanging out.
When the agent calls in May, he tells me to bring one of those sleeveless undershirts. "You know," he chuckles, "a wife beater."
"They want Marlon Brando?"
This time what we are shooting is a Poker game. There are five of us: me, and four aged lovelies. The ,photographer decides against the wife beater, opting for the shirt from the Waikiki collection—who knew that the Hawaiian shirt was the AARP's equivalent of the little black dress. Again there are two hours of posing: the blue haired ladies and I in a variety of combinations, dealing cards, holding cards close to our chests, grabbing for chips, peeking at each other's hands, and so on. "We're not doing strip poker," the producer quips, "this time." The ladies giggle. The gentleman, yours truly, blushes. Once again, we leave with no idea what they mean to do with the pictures. At least I know that they won't be working with pictures of my sunken chest festooned beneath the wife beater I leave in the dressing room.
And so whenever I visit a Target or a Rite-Aid drug store for over four years now, I search for whatever it was—embarrassing and undignified or cute and cuddly--that might have come out of these photo shoots. Whenever I visit the card shop in the local mall I look for four ladies and an old guy playing poker on somebody's birthday or anniversary. Whenever I go into any store that sells American Greeting Cards, I search for two old farts sitting on a bench in what looks like a mall saying who knows what for Father's Day or maybe telling each other to get well.
It's more than four years now, and I've yet to find them. Sometimes I wonder if perhaps the pictures were so terrible, they were unfit for use, not even good enough to be bad enough to laugh at, but if that were true, I reason, why would they call me back five months later? Why would they pay me to come all the way out to Cleveland for another set of worthless prints?
There is only one answer. They are holding them back, saving them, waiting for the right moment to unleash them on the card buying public. So I keep looking, waiting for the day they send them forth. And when they do, when you see a semi-dignified, elderly gentleman in Bermuda shorts, sandals and socks, and a lush Hawaiian shirt, perhaps with a suppository in his ear, gracing the shelves of your local Target, you may well be looking at America's Next Top Model—Geriatric Male Division.
My Short Modeling Career
Whenever I visit a Target or a Rite-Aid Drugstore, whenever I visit the greeting card store in the local mall, whenever I visit any establishment that sells American Greeting Cards, I always make it my business to check the racks of humorous cards. I'm not looking to make a purchase. I'm not looking for a quick laugh at some clueless remark ballooning out of the mouth of our last president or some eloquent bromide from our present leader. I'm not even looking to kill time while my wife shops (although that is often one of the unintended consequences).
What I am looking for is myself.
Let me explain. Some four years ago in December and then again in May, I drove up from Pittsburgh to Cleveland, a trip many Steeler fans like to make every year, not for football, but for a photo shoot at the official headquarters of the American Greeting Card Company which is located in the home of the Browns. I was on my way to what I hoped would be a lucrative career as a male model—a male model for the geriatric set. It's not that I consider myself particularly photogenic. It's not that I consider myself a senior hunk. It is simply that my agent had sent them my headshot along with more than likely fifty others, and someone who presumably knew what they were doing had picked mine. Whatever they wanted, I had it. Whoever they wanted, I was it. So, who was I to argue.
"Bring some short sleeve shirts," my agent said, "Bring Bermudas," "You got any with loud patterns?"
"It's December," I said.
"You got any with like a Hawaiian print?" he asked in a second phone call.
Hawaiian print and Bermuda shorts, obviously you know they're not looking for Brad Pitt; Sean Connery neither. What they're looking for is one of the old funny looking guys, maybe the one with a suppository in his ear. His friend says to him, "What are you doing with that suppository in your ear?" "Eh," he says. What they're looking for is an old coot with skinny legs and sagging jowls. Like I said, they're looking for me.
In the December shoot, I and another elderly Tyson Beckford wannabe, each dressed in checked Bermuda shorts, shirts from the Waikiki Beach collection, sandals and black socks , are posed sitting on a bench in front of an American Greeting Card store, they have set up either for visitors to the Greeting Card campus or as a set for shoots like ours. They pose us for two hours: him on the left, me on the right; me on the right, him on the left; him smiling, me frowning, him frowning, me smiling; him straight faced, me—well, you get the idea. The captions that will go with these photos, they don't tell us, but it is fairly easy to imagine they aren't going to be very flattering. I've seen the cards with the guys with their bellies hanging out.
When the agent calls in May, he tells me to bring one of those sleeveless undershirts. "You know," he chuckles, "a wife beater."
"They want Marlon Brando?"
This time what we are shooting is a Poker game. There are five of us: me, and four aged lovelies. The ,photographer decides against the wife beater, opting for the shirt from the Waikiki collection—who knew that the Hawaiian shirt was the AARP's equivalent of the little black dress. Again there are two hours of posing: the blue haired ladies and I in a variety of combinations, dealing cards, holding cards close to our chests, grabbing for chips, peeking at each other's hands, and so on. "We're not doing strip poker," the producer quips, "this time." The ladies giggle. The gentleman, yours truly, blushes. Once again, we leave with no idea what they mean to do with the pictures. At least I know that they won't be working with pictures of my sunken chest festooned beneath the wife beater I leave in the dressing room.
And so whenever I visit a Target or a Rite-Aid drug store for over four years now, I search for whatever it was—embarrassing and undignified or cute and cuddly--that might have come out of these photo shoots. Whenever I visit the card shop in the local mall I look for four ladies and an old guy playing poker on somebody's birthday or anniversary. Whenever I go into any store that sells American Greeting Cards, I search for two old farts sitting on a bench in what looks like a mall saying who knows what for Father's Day or maybe telling each other to get well.
It's more than four years now, and I've yet to find them. Sometimes I wonder if perhaps the pictures were so terrible, they were unfit for use, not even good enough to be bad enough to laugh at, but if that were true, I reason, why would they call me back five months later? Why would they pay me to come all the way out to Cleveland for another set of worthless prints?
There is only one answer. They are holding them back, saving them, waiting for the right moment to unleash them on the card buying public. So I keep looking, waiting for the day they send them forth. And when they do, when you see a semi-dignified, elderly gentleman in Bermuda shorts, sandals and socks, and a lush Hawaiian shirt, perhaps with a suppository in his ear, gracing the shelves of your local Target, you may well be looking at America's Next Top Model—Geriatric Male Division.
What I am looking for is myself.
Let me explain. Some four years ago in December and then again in May, I drove up from Pittsburgh to Cleveland, a trip many Steeler fans like to make every year, not for football, but for a photo shoot at the official headquarters of the American Greeting Card Company which is located in the home of the Browns. I was on my way to what I hoped would be a lucrative career as a male model—a male model for the geriatric set. It's not that I consider myself particularly photogenic. It's not that I consider myself a senior hunk. It is simply that my agent had sent them my headshot along with more than likely fifty others, and someone who presumably knew what they were doing had picked mine. Whatever they wanted, I had it. Whoever they wanted, I was it. So, who was I to argue.
"Bring some short sleeve shirts," my agent said, "Bring Bermudas," "You got any with loud patterns?"
"It's December," I said.
"You got any with like a Hawaiian print?" he asked in a second phone call.
Hawaiian print and Bermuda shorts, obviously you know they're not looking for Brad Pitt; Sean Connery neither. What they're looking for is one of the old funny looking guys, maybe the one with a suppository in his ear. His friend says to him, "What are you doing with that suppository in your ear?" "Eh," he says. What they're looking for is an old coot with skinny legs and sagging jowls. Like I said, they're looking for me.
In the December shoot, I and another elderly Tyson Beckford wannabe, each dressed in checked Bermuda shorts, shirts from the Waikiki Beach collection, sandals and black socks , are posed sitting on a bench in front of an American Greeting Card store, they have set up either for visitors to the Greeting Card campus or as a set for shoots like ours. They pose us for two hours: him on the left, me on the right; me on the right, him on the left; him smiling, me frowning, him frowning, me smiling; him straight faced, me—well, you get the idea. The captions that will go with these photos, they don't tell us, but it is fairly easy to imagine they aren't going to be very flattering. I've seen the cards with the guys with their bellies hanging out.
When the agent calls in May, he tells me to bring one of those sleeveless undershirts. "You know," he chuckles, "a wife beater."
"They want Marlon Brando?"
This time what we are shooting is a Poker game. There are five of us: me, and four aged lovelies. The ,photographer decides against the wife beater, opting for the shirt from the Waikiki collection—who knew that the Hawaiian shirt was the AARP's equivalent of the little black dress. Again there are two hours of posing: the blue haired ladies and I in a variety of combinations, dealing cards, holding cards close to our chests, grabbing for chips, peeking at each other's hands, and so on. "We're not doing strip poker," the producer quips, "this time." The ladies giggle. The gentleman, yours truly, blushes. Once again, we leave with no idea what they mean to do with the pictures. At least I know that they won't be working with pictures of my sunken chest festooned beneath the wife beater I leave in the dressing room.
And so whenever I visit a Target or a Rite-Aid drug store for over four years now, I search for whatever it was—embarrassing and undignified or cute and cuddly--that might have come out of these photo shoots. Whenever I visit the card shop in the local mall I look for four ladies and an old guy playing poker on somebody's birthday or anniversary. Whenever I go into any store that sells American Greeting Cards, I search for two old farts sitting on a bench in what looks like a mall saying who knows what for Father's Day or maybe telling each other to get well.
It's more than four years now, and I've yet to find them. Sometimes I wonder if perhaps the pictures were so terrible, they were unfit for use, not even good enough to be bad enough to laugh at, but if that were true, I reason, why would they call me back five months later? Why would they pay me to come all the way out to Cleveland for another set of worthless prints?
There is only one answer. They are holding them back, saving them, waiting for the right moment to unleash them on the card buying public. So I keep looking, waiting for the day they send them forth. And when they do, when you see a semi-dignified, elderly gentleman in Bermuda shorts, sandals and socks, and a lush Hawaiian shirt, perhaps with a suppository in his ear, gracing the shelves of your local Target, you may well be looking at America's Next Top Model—Geriatric Male Division.
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