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.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)