The Unread Authors Blog

The Unread Authors Challenge is upon us! It begins tomorrow, and I have to say that all the lists I have seen have been really inspiring. It took an iron act of self-control to keep my list from expanding every time I read someone else's.

According to the poll I conducted, the majority of challenge participants would appreciate having a group blog where they can post about their progress through the challenge and their thoughts about the book. So I have gone ahead and created one: the Unread Authors Blog.

Posting to or even reading the Unread Authors Blog is by no means a requirement for participation, so if you don't want to, that is absolutely fine. But if you would like to post your reviews and progress notes to the blog, it would mean that we could form a little community around the challenge, encourage each other, and get recommendations about even more good authors that are (as of yet) unread by us.

The link above contains guidelines for participation in the blog, as well as instructions for becoming a contributor to it. I have gone ahead and posted my "to do list" there, and I welcome everyone else to do the same. Last but not least, new challenge participants are welcome any time, even after the start date for the challenge!

The pause

I have just returned home to Connecticut after my summer in Los Angeles, and what with travel and the chores of preparing to travel/settling in, I am afraid there has been a bit of a blog pause. Sorry about that. More bloggy chatter is imminent!

"The Cranes are Flying" (1957)

Imagine that Doctor Zhivago had been a really good movie. (Oh yes, that it is the kind of combative, controversial statement I am going to start with.) Mikhail Kalatozov's 1957 masterpiece The Cranes are Flying deals with many of the same themes as David Lean's epic romance - the giddiness of love, the brutal economies of war, seemingly casual betrayals and amorous separations against the backdrop of irresistable global events. It adds in abundance, however, what Zhivago crucially lacks: a sense of self-reflection, of doubt, of a claustrophobic uncertainty that undermines mere stone-faced soldiering on.

As the film opens, we are treated to the most exuberant portrait of love I have ever seen on film: Veronika (played to the hilt by Tatiana Yevgenyevna Samoylova) is madly enamoured of Boris - hopping, skipping, jumping with an excess of love - but despite this, when the Second World War ensnares Russia, Boris immediately enlists. Veronika, annoyed, sends him away to prepare for his imminent departure, promising to come to him in time to say goodbye. Her ill humor reaps its consequences, however: her streetcar gets caught in traffic as all the new recruits and their families rush down the street to report for duty. When she arrives at the apartment, and later the rallying point, Boris has already left. This yields the first in the film's many spectacular crowd scenes, the best I have seen since the silent film The Crowd - roiling and violent and impossible for the individual to fight her way through. Veronika is stays behind, lonely and uncomprehending, bombed incessantly by the Germans and hounded by Boris's enamored cousin. She never hears from Boris, and cannot know if he is alive or dead. Even we, who know considerably more about his activities than she does, aren't completely sure after a point.

I talk about the lovers' exuberance, but perhaps I should say instead that the film is exuberant. It is utterly unashamed of the extremity of its emotions, and although this yields some very sentimental moments and some unusually over-the-top acting it is expressed with such obvious sincerity that I was willing to forgive The Cranes are Flying virtually anything. Many scenes are played to the edge of emotional possibility, almost convincing me that they were improvised, but each gesture is so obviously crucial, so necessarily choreographed that this cannot be the case. Rather I think that our reference should be to the gestural science of Meyerhold's theatre (who Samoylova's father had acted under) and the character immersion of Stanislavsky (who was related to her by blood).

This exuberance, rough and startling and sincere, is not limited to the acting - it seeps into an editing style that is abrupt, theatrical, shocking, unconventional and unnervingly modern. It is impossible (for me, at least, lacking the full vocabulary of film analysis) to describe the variety of techniques that Kalatozov develops to underscore his heroine's psychological torments, so luckily there is a brief excerpt on YouTube. This scene comes from what might very well be the film's climax, a sequence that references the (forgotten) nature of film as a series of discrete images, the Odessa steps sequence of Battleship Potemkin, and, of course, Anna Karenina, whom Samoylova would play elsewhere. Two requests: 1) if you are wary of spoilers, venture not into this excerpt, and 2) bear in mind how primally powerful this sequence is when it has the full weight of the movie behind it. At this point, Veronika has been driven to despair by the uncertainty of Boris's fate and the questionable morality of her own behavior (it is really the first minute and a half that you NEED to see - up to the point where she talks to the child by the side of the road - the events after that really have to be seen in the context of the film as a whole):



Has there ever been a film that so perfectly blended the innovations of experimental film-making with the pounding narrative drive of a nineteenth-century novel? I recommend this to you in the most urgent possible terms; if I hadn't just seen F for Fake, this would be the best movie I have seen in months.


The Cranes are Flying (1957)
dir. Mikhail Kalatozov
****1/2

• You can find this film at Amazon (The Cranes are Flying - Criterion Collection), or at most stores that sell or rent foreign language DVDs.
• Wikipedia has pages on the film itself (although their plot summary takes a unwarrantedly firm stance on the events of one of the film's most beautiful, shocking and ambiguous scenes - Veronika's encounter with Boris's cousin in their glass-strewn apartment during an air raid), as well as on Tatiana Yevgenyevna Samoylova.
• Read Chris Fujiwara's essay for the Criterion Collection DVD here. I am intrigued to see him mention the influence of King Vidor on director Kalatozov, because I had already made the connection between this film and Vidor's masterpiece, The Crowd.
• Also definitely worth reading is this short review from Images Journal.
• Information about the cast and crew can be found at IMDB.
  

Furthermore...

The most intriguing thing I read about Shakespeare today (in a fascinating article that I have read several times, Andrew Gurr's "Hearers and Beholders in Shakespearean Drama," from Essays in Theatre):

Reading silently is, it seems, a relatively new development in English history. Elizabethans were much more likely that we are to consider hearing as a vital part of learning, and thus:

Hamlet, who enters before his "To be or not to be" soliloquy reading silently, was exceptional in this as in so many of his habits. (35)

The implication, of course, is that Hamlet's silent withdrawal in a book (which he is reading while wandering about, a dangerous practice that may be familiar to some of us) is in fact an expression of his extreme self-absorption. Or isolation. Or a carefully calculated pose of nonchalance.

Oh, Hamlet! Will your motivations never be clear, you wily Dane?


~~~~~~


And yet, that is not my favorite literary reference of the week. Ah no, my favorite was infinitely more inept. It comes from an interview Karl Rove did on Fox News (you can read about it in this New York Times article), in which Mr. Rove shows evidence of how enriching his book-reading contest with the president was:

“Let’s face it, I mean, I’m a myth,” Mr. Rove told Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday” when asked about his critics. “You know, I’m Beowulf, you know, I’m Grendel. I don’t know who I am. But they’re after me.”

(Thanks to A for passing this along. It did cheer me up!)


~~~~~~


It occurred to me that some of my readers might be experiencing sonnet fatigue (or possibly even Sidney fatigue, as hard as that is to imagine) after the last two days. So today, a modern poem on an age old problem (that of sloth and work), in honor of my continuing struggle with my ^$%# dissertation.

Elizabeth Alexander's "Blues" (link is to the full poem, which is well worth a look) begins with a long description of the speaker's laziness - of daytime sleeping that leaves puffy creases on her face, of the free form of her verse, of devil-may-care eating habits and the "curdy belly" that is born of no exercise. She then reflects on the seeming paradox (or perhaps just obvious explanation for her later sloth) of her industrious upbringing, filled with moralizing about work: "There is no sin but sloth. / Burn the wick and keep moving."

But she ends on this note, both more troubled and more hopeful:

I avoided sleep for years,
up at night replaying
evening news stories
about nearby jailbreaks, fat people
who ate fried chicken and woke up
dead. In sleep I am looking
for poems in the shape of open
V's of birds flying in formation,
or open arms saying, I forgive you, all.

There is so much delightful conflict and ambiguity here, as we are given on the one hand an image of tormented insomnia (the enjoyment of her indolence troubled and even deferred by nightmares about the consequences of sloth and gluttony), and on the other an image of artistic renewal in slumber that reconciles her childhood's emphasis on work with her need to rebel against it. But there are several lovely verbal knots in the midst of these pointed simple line, their very ordinariness disguising their meaningful illogic: How does anyone (besides an anxious insomniac?) ever "wake up [pregnant pause created by line break] dead"? Furthermore, how can we interpret the poem's last word ("all")? Does it indicate the forgiveness of a group of people, or a blanket absolution for all sins, or both? What does it do to the rhythm or the meaning of the line to insert a grammatically unnecessary comma before the "all" (one of my favorite touches)?


~~~~~~


I have a long line of movies I want to review here, but lately I have just been too tired from my work-struggles. What can I say? I'm Beowulf, I'm Grendel - I don't know what I am but this chapter is after me. While eating lunch today I finished Cinema Paradiso and found it pleasing, if sentimental (self-consciously so - it is basing its model for emotional expression on classic cinema). Now, in my continuing battle with the demon of TiVo fullness, I am moving on to the Czech film The Shop on Main Street. Onward!

In other news...

Who knew rabbits were so judgmental? Not I.


~~~~~~


Persepolis is a-comin'! The film version of Marjane Satrapi's graphic novels about growing up in Iran, that is. (I can't help but feel the term I really want to use, graphic memoir, implies that it is excessively gory or sexual - which it isn't - rather than that it is expressed in the form of comics.) Judging from this review at Ogg's Movie Thoughts, it sounds like the perilous transfer from one medium to another has been navigated with grace and nuance.


~~~~~~


Sidney was so much fun yesterday, that I had to return to Astrophel and Stella today. I promise that I won't be making my way sonnet by sonnet through the cycle for the next 109 days, but after a hard day slaving over the editing of my knotty academic prose style, I had to celebrate with sonnet II:

Not at the first sight, nor with a dribbed shot,
Love gave the wound, which, while I breathe, will bleede;
But knowne worth did in tract of time proceed,
Till by degrees, it had full conquest got.
I saw and lik'd; I lik'd but loved not;
I lov'd, but straight did not what Love decreed:
At length, to Loves decrees I, forc'd, agreed,
Yet with repining at so partiall lot.
Now, even that footstep of lost libertie
Is gone; and now, like slave-borne Muscovite,
I call it praise to suffer tyrannie;
And nowe imploy the remnant of my wit
To make myselfe beleeve that all is well,
While, with a feeling skill, I paint my hell.

Why, you ask, is this a fitting way to unwind after hours of trying to untangle my endless streams of subordinate clauses? Because clearly Sidney could give me a run for my money in sentence complexity! This entire reflection on the pernicious stages through which his speaker became Love's victim is, in fact, one made up of only three sentences, divided by a truly impressive array of rhythmically deployed colons, semi-colons and commas.

What fascinates me about this poem's structure is that, although it is not a Petrarchan sonnet (a octave made of two groups of four lines each which set out a problem using two rhymes, then a sestet which resolves it using two new rhymes) in its rhymes, it is one in its argumentative structure and punctuation. In other words, if it were an exact imitation of the Italian model the first eight lines would rhyme a-b-a-b a-b-a-b or a-b-b-a a-b-b-a and the last six would rhyme in some variation of c-d-e-c-d-e or c-d-c-c-d-c. Instead it is follows the developing English language adaptation of having four quatrains before a couplet, although it doesn't seem to be at all interested in whining about how rhyme-poor English is as a language and maintains a two rhyme octave of sorts, rhyming a-b-b-a a-b-b-a c-d-c-d e-e.

What this cleverly hybrid sonnet inherits from its Italian grandparents is the structure of its argument or narrative:

• The first sentence is the first quatrain, and establishes the determination of love to conquer the speaker.
• The second is the second quatrain, which is made up with a rhythmic chain or staircase effect detailing the minute steps with which the speaker fell in love - seeing, liking, loving, obeying (and, we will learn in the next lines, ultimately enjoying the abasement of obedience).
• The third sentence is the sestet, although the sestet is here made up along the English model of a third quatrain and a witty couplet. In the sestet he explains how utterly abject it is to revel poetically in his in abjection, throwing in a bit of a contemporary anti-Russian stereotype while he's at it.

But the couplet - here's where both Shakespeare and Sidney shine in the art of quippy reversal. The couplet in an English sonnet is a thing to be savored, uttered to oneself in moments of bitter melancholy (Does no one else ever do this? Ah well.), or trotted out as a zinger at insufferable dinner parties. The motivation for writing is as darkly presented here in Sonnet II as it could ever be, with the speaker gathering to his abject self "the remnant of my wit" in the service of self-delusion. This image of poetry as the gilding of denial, "the painting of my hell" is absolutely thrilling in its cynicism.


~~~~~~


As you can tell, today was largely taken up with horrible workiness. I did, however, manage to finish Woody Allen's Manhattan, which surprised me with its delicacy. D and I also watched the first episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm and felt, I think I can accurately say, underwhelmed. Next stop: Cinema Paradiso, the film that has the distinction of having spent the longest time on our TiVo.

Furthermore...

D gets a serious case of the heebie-jeebies from the mere mention of Second Life, but in this week's installment of "Sycorax Confesses" I will admit that I find it to be a rich and utterly fascinating phenomenon. I have not, however, been so bold as to create an avatar and venture into an, um, secondary life as of yet. Perhaps once I get this life under control.

Meanwhile, it would seem to be a real boon for the arts, both in terms of marketing artists and granting easy access to people who don't live in a metropolis or cultural hotspot. William Gibson (whose Neuromancer has been lurking reproachfully in my TBR pile for a few months now) did a recent Second Life reading, which involved the creation of an avatar for him by his publisher (oh the non-ironic appropriateness of it all!). Spectators began to arrive and lurk four hours before the event began. The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic has created a Second Life replica of its concert hall where users will be able to attend a concert in September featuring a number of new classical compositions.

Is it possible that this phenomenon will create a new group (it is not homogeneous enough in age to be called a generation, I think) of arts consumers just as it seemed some genres (like classical music) were on the verge of pricey irrelevance?


~~~~~~


I am completely behind the giving of unusual names to child, being an example myself of how having a strange name DOES NOT result in rampant teasing or poor social development. I make general scornful gestures at the argument that children named Apple or Moon Unit will go through life scarred by the aggressive individuality of their monikers. So I am filled with (supportive) mirth at the news that a Chinese couple has named their child @ . As the New York Sun article linked above notes:

According to the vice director of the State Language Commission, Li Yuming, the child's father said, "The whole world uses it to write e-mails, and translated into Chinese, it means ‘love him.'"

Think how satisfying this name will be to dash off in a signature! As an image it is lovely. And, unlike Prince's moniker-of-yore, it has an easy, obvious and (as the father says), thanks to email, fairly universally recognizable pronunciation.

Robert Cottrell at Moreover has some more fascinating points to make about the naming of wee @.


~~~~~~


Oh Neil Gaiman, what a whimsical fellow you are. Thanks to avidavid62 (who posted it on YouTube) and Neil's blog, which is an incredibly generous endeavor for a writer of his busyness, today I can bring you ... The Bayeux Tapestry, animated.




~~~~~~

Speaking of whimsy, today's poem is the first sonnet from Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophel and Stella.

It presents a writer (facing a brand of amorous writer's block brought on by his excessive study of the conventions of love poetry) caught up in a comical battle between poetic inspiration (an excess of ideas and motivations) and the influence of precedent (an excess of beloved sources) - between the throes of fleshly and literary love, so to speak:

Loving in trueth, and fayne in verse my love to show,
That she, deare Shee, might take som pleasure of my paine,
Pleasure might cause her reade, reading might make her know,
Knowledge might pittie winne, and pity grace obtaine,
I sought fit wordes to paint the blackest face of woe;
Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertaine,
Oft turning others leaves, to see if thence would flow
Some fresh and fruitfull showers vpon my sun-burnd brain.
But words came halting forth, wanting Inventions stay;
Invention, Natures childe, fledde step-dame Studies blowes;
And others feet still seemde but strangers in my way.
Thus, great with childe to speak, and helplesse in my throwes,
Biting my trewand pen, beating myselfe for spite,
Fool, said my Muse to me, looke in thy heart, and write.

[Sidney is, blessedly, in the public domain, so I have copied the poem in full. For my source, or to read more of the delightful Astrophel and Stella, you can go to the University of Oregon's online edition. My only adaptation of their text was to turn the "u"s into "v"s when appropriate; all the other archaisms would, it seemed to me, be clear to modern readers, especially if the poem is read aloud.]

There is so much to love here: the early admission of a ulterior motive in writing poetry (to win the pity of the beloved out of her pleasure in his pain - nice girl, by the way) by way of a rhythmic chain of logic in the first few lines, the vivid - almost surrealist - image of the poet's "sunburn'd brain," the lovely family tree of Invention (Nature child's, but afflicted with a fairy-tale wicked stepmother in Study), the revelation of the irreducible individuality of experience ("but others feet still seemde but strangers in my way") expressed through totally conventional exclamations, the appropriation of the power and pain of pregnancy by the suffering (male) poet, and finally, as he flings himself about in a paroxysm self-indulgent angst, the impatient prescription of his no-nonsense muse: "Fool, said my Muse to me, looke in thy heart, and write."

Ah, Sidney, you had me at "sunburn'd brain."


~~~~~~


Not much news to report today. I am at work on Joan London's Gilgamesh for my Year of Down Under Project, and although it has not yet earned in full Francine Prose's comparison of the novel to Alice Munro's work (I am only 46 pages in at the moment), I can certainly see the similarities. I am enjoying it. I picked up Gilgamesh because I need less implicitly disturbing (in the way it plays on our sympathies for both victims and murderers) reading than Capote's In Cold Blood for right before bed. But the result has been that I have been unable to make time for In Cold Blood for several days. Boo to that!

"The Guardians" (2007)

Regina took her teenaged nephew Gabo into her home on the border between New and old Mexico when it became clear that, if he continued crossing the border illegally with his father according to the availability of work and their financial need, he would never finish his education. Gabo is not only smart, but painstakingly religious to the point of unostentatious martyrdom. She hopes that, after finishing high school, he will be able to legalize his status in the U.S.; he hopes (ignoring his tía's hostility towards the Church and his father's militant Marxism) to become a priest.

They go about their lives with infinite care and not a little ingenuity. Gabo befriends his parish priest (who is considering leaving the Church for a more human variety of love), as well as the younger brother of a nasty, whale-like local gangster. Regina works (well below her abilities and well beyond the contractual demands of her job) as a teacher's assistant, flirts with teacher/activist Miguel, and conjures up a startling array of ways to make extra money.

But, as the novel begins, Gabo's father goes missing, and the "coyotes" who he hired to take him across the border claim they know nothing about it.

Ana Castillo's new novel uses this loss -- all the more painful because the disappearance is so complete and plausible, leaving no body and dozens of explanations -- as a platform for her investigation of what it means to be a guardian. Vigilantes, who may or may not feel empowered to kill, guard the American border against a threat that everyone feels but few understand. While it is increasingly difficult for workers to cross the border illegally, violent criminals seem to pass with effortless ease through national boundaries, facilitating intimidation, killing, kidnapping, gang warfare and drug trafficking. Many of the characters in the novel carry the names of saints (from Regina - the queen of heaven, to Gabo - Gabriel and even Regina's friend Uriel), but that is not all they carry. Each is oppressed by the weight of guardianship, of reconciling personal will to responsibility, both that of politics and for friends and family.

This theme, the book's most (literally) crucial, is too much in the shadows, however, left to the the unambiguous allegory of character names. Although the characters are rich here, and the plot moves forward with remarkable force, what is lost is a sense of theme expressed through the richness of incident. Without this, the encounters of the novel seem just, well, incidental. This makes Castillo's endgame (don't worry, no spoilers) somewhat hard to bear, transforming into empty iconography what should have been rich with ambiguity and lost possibility.

The novel is told in four entwined voices: Regina's, Gabo's, Miguel's, and, lastly, Miguel's grandfather Milton's. The result is a novel similar in tone to a theatre of monologue (think Anna Deveare Smith's Fires in the Mirror or Eve Ensler's Vagina Monologues). While the voices that emerge are vivid and distinct, there is not the kind of choric play (I mean that the musical, rather than the theatrical sense) between them that could create narrative instability or tension to drive the piece (one character's account calling another's into doubt, for instance). Rather, the voices seem to be chosen for their ability to tell a part of the story not witnessed by anyone else; a different narrative segment rather than a different point of view. The closest we get to this is in the character of Miguel, who conceives of himself as a progressive of the highest order, but emerges (as his actions are recounted by others) as a mild misogynist who gathers a not insignificant pleasure from exerting his power as a man and an American citizen over others. It is a credit to Castillo that she evokes this subtlety of dislike in presenting Miguel without making him ultimately unsympathetic.

In Miguel's macho pronouncements on the state of the world we encounter another stumbling point for the novel: when characters hold forth on politics they tend to sound like a single person, ranting forth rather commonly held views on a blog or discussion board. Although this is indeed increasingly how people talk about politics (or how we perceive their discourse: a group of indistinct voices disembodied from character by the anonymous medium of the internet), in a novel it seems poorly integrated and motivated.

Castillo is also playing with language here, attempting to fuse English and Spanish through devices that (unlike a lot of Spanish-inflected English literature) are successful without necessarily being lyrical. This polyglot technique, in all its more or less poetic forms, should only become more common in our national literature, a literary dialect of hybridity that is available to speakers of both languages, without ostentatious contortions of translation. It is a matter of great irritation to me that this sort of strategy is not more widely used in mainstream television, creating a false gap between Spanish language channels and English language ones that doesn't reflect the linguistic tendencies of the viewing public, but may help to create a false sense of binarism in our culture (you are either one or the other, and your identity and loyalties will be determined by the choice). Ah well.

Castillo's characters, especially Regina, continually wonder over the complexity of the words their minds produce, particularly in their second language. Bilingualism (and the influence of one language upon another - which so many conservatively herald as an attack on the purity of English, as if it weren't by its very nature a mongrel language) doesn't simplify or compress language - it enriches it, providing us with an array of new linguistic choices, none of which could ever be perfect synonyms or duplicates.

This is an ambitious novel, filled with allusions that seem only incompletely realized. Consider, for instance, the naming of Miguel's abuelo Milton. What are we to make of this evocation of the great - if not appreciated by me - puritan poet in a novel filled with fallen angels, apart from the obvious? In the end, this seems a very intelligent outline of an allegorical novel dipping its toes into character-based realism (and perhaps too precipitously fallen into its eddies) - a sketch rather than the full expression of Castillo's theme.


The Guardians (2007)
Ana Castillo
***

• You can find The Guardians at Powells, Amazon (The Guardians: A Novel), or many other bookstores and libraries.
• Thanks to Random House and LibraryThing for sending me this Advance Reader's Copy through the latter's Early Reviewers program. To see the reactions of other Early Reviewers, visit LibraryThing's page for the novel, and scroll down to read their reviews.
  

In other news...

There is so much oddity that has emerged since last I posted one of my miscellanies that I have had to save some of the links I would like to share for tomorrow's post. Hurrah for oddity in abundance!


~~~~~~


I have a very good friend who works on hoaxes in American literature - that is to say she studies and writes about the idea and theory of the hoax; she doesn't generate them herself. At least I think she doesn't. But that is definitely a career path worth considering.

In fact (excuse the digression), many of my academic friends work on fascinating topics. One studies images of violence surrounding children and pregnancy in medieval literature. Another examines antitheatricality in Asian drama. A third works on print culture in situations of contact between Native Americans and (primarily British, I think) colonists - how printed Bibles were used, for instance, not only (by the colonists) to assert cultural control but also (by the tribe members who received them) to resist that control. A fourth studies the figure of the prostitute in theatre. When people at cocktail parties and holiday get-togethers ask her casually what she works on, she says "Whores." The questioner, who has a pretty good idea of what she said, but thinks that there is a not inconsiderable possibility that she said "Horse," says loudly and incredulously (not wanting to be subject to mockery if s/he is wrong), "WHORES??" And everyone in the room turns around to stare. I have (with my very own ears) heard this happen to her so often that I would be surprised if she ever gets a different response.

At any rate, one of these delightful friends works on the hoax in the works of Poe, Twain, James, etc. So naturally I thought of her when I saw that the famous "Poe toaster" who lays celebratory flowers and cognac on the author's grave every year on Poe's birthday was, in fact, a tourism-minded fabrication. Or is he? (I am assuming here that the Poe toaster can in fact be assigned a gender, which is perhaps incorrect.)

Was that my most longwinded and rambling windup to a link ever?



~~~~~~


I haven't made it very far (yet) into Derek A Badman's web comic inspired by Ovid's Metamorphoses, Things Change, but it is very intriguing indeed. A new "volume" of the project has just begun.

Also, be sure to check out Badman's blog, Mad Ink Beard, which is filled with book-lust inducing (and thus budget-breaking) reviews of comics and graphic novels of all levels of fame and newness. Mad Ink Beard is particularly concerned with the formal considerations of combining word and images, and his evocative descriptions of some of the more innovative comics he acquires have sent me on frenzied internet searches, to the accompaniment of wild muttering ("must have this must have this MUST HAVE THIS!").


~~~~~~


You may have heard this on NPR, or read about it in Vanity Fair: Arthur Miller, the man who is most famous as a playwright of empathy and iconoclastic moral rectitude, the man who wrote the words "But I think to him they were all my sons. And I guess they were, I guess they were" in one of his early successes, had a child whom he never acknowledged publicly and apparently seldom visited, because his son (Daniel Miller) was born with Down syndrome.

This is a tale of complex moral failure, but I have to feel that we must withhold or modulate our judgment (and I say this from a more specific ethical stance than a general unjudgmentalness, which I can't say I achieve with any consistency). There is much we don't know about this situation, since it comes to light only after the deaths of both Arthur Miller and his wife, and Daniel Miller is not available (and should not be harassed by journalists) for comment. The Vanity Fair article does a fairly good job (I think) of navigating the nuances of the story, acknowledging its lacunae, and placing it in the larger, often ignored context of the syndrome's history and that of its care.


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Today's poetry is from a wee, beautiful promotional booklet I acquired at my conference: A Complimentary Specimen of Poetry to Be Published in the Decadian Year of Gaspereau Press Printers and Publishers. The Gaspereau Press, based in Nova Scotia, issues both poetry and prose, and I was utterly charmed to read this in the front matter to the wee Specimen:

Unlike most trade publishers, Gaspereau Press actually edits, designs, prints and binds all of its books on its own premises. In fact, the dedicated staff at Gaspereau Press undertakes every aspect of producing these books short of making the inks and papers.

So I give you excerpts from two poems by Monica Kidd. I like them so well that I am going to look into the volume (her first of poetry) that they come from, Actualities, and her two novels, Beatrice and The Momentum of Red.

The opening lines (which leap right into the fray from the title) from "Merrill's Birthday in Tors Cove":

was a night like any other -
all the stars expletives
and God's underwear
flapping in the breeze.

And the last lines from "First Principles":

Stretch to make room for
one more impossible thing,
and you're left with a hole.

There is also a poem in this collection (one so intricately narrative that I couldn't excerpt it without wreaking havoc on its sense) called "The Well," which has all the complexity and vividness of character of an Alice Munro story. Seek it out!



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So I am back from a most frustrating trip to Vancouver, a city famous for its beauty and the ecstasy-inducing quality of its cuisine, having seen almost nothing of the city and feasted almost exclusively on pizza. And let me say, that to a New Haven-style pizza kind of girl, whose partner is a NY/NJ pizza sort of guy, the face of Canadian pizza is very strange indeed. We were staying at the remarkably isolated University of British Columbia main campus, and all its eateries were closed for the summer holidays. There was one brave (and very profitable, thanks to its monopoly on feeding the hundreds of conference-attenders) pizza joint open, but they, oddly, served only three kinds of pizza: veggie (mostly peppers, which I don't eat), meat (which was a little too exuberantly and diversely meaty for my taste, although I have been known to order bacon, sausage and pepperoni pizzas at home. Also, it had peppers on it.), and Hawaiian. So naturally I went for the Hawaiian. In Canada. Ah well.

So I returned home after only two days away (though it felt like two weeks), more conscious than ever that, although I travel constantly, I almost never go anywhere new and anxiety-inducingly unfamiliar. I have lost a lot of my travel mojo, my ability to navigate unexpected situations alone (this last adjective is crucial) and my excitement in the face of the unknown.

But at least, upon arriving home, I was immediately greeted by a new Bookmarks magazine. Although I am sometimes frustrated by copyediting errors in it, I greet each new Bookmarks with a girlish, jumping-up-and-down-and-clapping-my-hands level of enthusiasm. I devoured it last night, and have already added more than a dozen books to my BookMooch "Save for Later" list.

Speaking of BookMooch, for the first time in months I took my account off its "vacation" mode yesterday in preparation for my return to Connecticut next week, and I have already mooched four books and had three mooched from me. I will leave you with a short list of the books I am expecting my rampant mooching to deposit on my doorstep in the next few weeks:

• Crusader's Cross, the first novel in James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux series. I enjoyed the interviews with him about his most recent, Katrina-inflected book so much, that I had to move this up my "to acquire" list.
• Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters, because I loved Fingersmith.
• Terry Pratchett's The Light Fantastic - next in publication order of the Discworld series (an absurd way to approach Discworld for the first time, I know, but one I adhere to with stubborn rebelliousness. Or convention-following unimaginativeness, depending on your perspective.
• Junot Diaz's Drown. I have heard such a wealth of good buzz - no, buzz on the level of the proselytizing zeal of a new convert - surrounding Junot Diaz, who has a new book coming out next month, that I snapped up Drown as soon as I saw a copy available.
  

The Booker Project

And once the brilliance of the low pressure, long term Pulitzer Project became known, it was inevitable that the further brilliance of the Booker Project would follow!

The model (a good one) is much the same for the sister projects. The group blog, in all its glory, can be found here; participants will post reviews and discuss the prize winners there as the project progresses. There is no mandated order in which you must read the books, and there are no time pressures. Consider these lifelong projects, if you will. Click here for more information and the instructions for the project.

What follows is a listy (and even listing, in the nautical sense of leaning heavily to one side - the unread books side) account of which Booker Prize winners I have already read. Read books are on the right, as-of-yet-unread works are justified left.

I was quite shocked to find that I had read fewer Booker winners than Pulitzer winners. It is also revealing that I read quite a few winners of both prizes while I was in college, and that my immediate obedience to the prize committees' instructions has fallen off in subsequent years. I am not entirely sure, however, what exactly this reveals.

2006 - The Inheritance of Loss (Desai)
2005 - The Sea (Banville)
2004 - The Line of Beauty (Hollinghurst)
2003 - Vernon God Little (Pierre)

2002 - Life of Pi (Martel)

2001 - True History of the Kelly Gang (Carey)

2000 - The Blind Assassin (Atwood)

1999 - Disgrace (Coetzee)
1998 - Amsterdam: A Novel (McEwan)

1997 - The God of Small Things (Roy)
1996 - Last Orders (Swift)
1995 - The Ghost Road (Barker)

1994 - How Late It Was, How Late (Kelman)
1993 - Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (Doyle)

1992 - The English Patient (Ondaatje)

1992 - Sacred Hunger (Unsworth)
1991 - The Famished Road (Okri)
1990 - Possession: A Romance (Byatt)

1989 - The Remains of the Day (Ishiguro)

1988 - Oscar and Lucinda (Carey)

1987 - Moon Tiger (Lively)

1986 - The Old Devils (Amis)
1985 - The Bone People (Hulme)
1984 - Hotel Du Lac (Brookner)
1983 - Life & Times of Michael K (Coetzee)

1982 - Schindler's List (Keneally)

1981 - Midnight's Children (Rushdie)
1980 - Rites of Passage (Golding)
1979 - Offshore (Fitzgerald)
1978 - The Sea, the Sea (Murdoch)
1977 - Staying on (Scott)
1976 - Saville (Storey)
1975 - Heat and Dust (Jhabvala)
1974 - The Conservationist (Gordimer)
1973 - The Siege of Krishnapur (Farrell)
1972 - G. (Berger)
1971 - In a Free State (Naipaul)
1970 - The Elected Member (Rubens)
1969 - Something to Answer For (Newby)

Total read: 9/40

The Pulitzer Project

As you may have noticed, I am a total sucker (I might prefer the term succour, if it weren't grammatically awkward) for reading challenges, and I frankly hope I always will be. So far this year, my many reading challenges have exposed me to amazing books I would never otherwise have touched. And it has been some time since I have joined a challenge...

So here I am, leaping joyfully into an open-ended challenge, more of a long-term project really (as the name implies): The Pulitzer Project. Its goal is the reading of all of the 81 (so far) Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winners, and it carries no time constraints. More details/rules can be found here: The Pulitzer Project. Participants are free to share their impressions of the books over the years at the group blog.

I have posted my progress through the list up to now below. Books I have read are justified right, books I have YET to read (it is inevitable, really) are on the lefthand side of the page. My next attempt will probably be Empire Falls. Or Gilead. We'll see.

2007 - The Road (McCarthy)

2006 - March (Brooks)
2005 - Gilead (Robinson)
2004 - The Known World (Jones)
2003 - Middlesex (Eugenides)
2002 - Empire Falls (Russo)

2001 - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (Chabon)
2000 - Interpreter of Maladies (Lahiri)
1999 - The Hours (Cunningham)

1998 - American Pastoral (Roth)
1997 - Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer (Millhauser)
1996 - Independence Day (Ford)
1995 - The Stone Diaries (Shields)
1994 - The Shipping News (Proulx)
1993 - A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (Butler)
1992 - A Thousand Acres (Smiley)
1991 - Rabbit at Rest (Updike)
1990 - The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (Hijuelos)
1989 - Breathing Lessons (Tyler)

1988 - Beloved (Morrison)

1987 - A Summons to Memphis (Taylor)
1986 - Lonesome Dove (McMurtry)
1985 - Foreign Affairs (Lurie)
1984 - Ironweed (Kennedy)

1983 - The Color Purple (Walker)

1982 - Rabbit is Rich (Updike)
1981 - A Confederacy of Dunces (Toole)
1980 - The Executioner’s Song (Mailer)
1979 - The Stories of John Cheever (Cheever)
1978 - Elbow Room (McPherson)
1977 - None given
1976 - Humboldt’s Gift (Bellow)

1975 - The Killer Angels (Shaara)

1974 - None given
1973 - The Optimist’s Daughter (Welty)
1972 - Angle of Repose (Stegner)
1971 - None given
1970 - Collected Stories by Jean Stafford (Stafford)
1969 - House Made of Dawn (Momaday)
1968 - The Confessions of Nat Turner (Styron)
1967 - The Fixer (Malamud)
1966 - Collected Stories by Katherine Anne Porter (Porter)
1965 - The Keepers Of the House (Grau)
1964 - None given
1963 - The Reivers (Faulkner)
1962 - The Edge of Sadness (Edwin O’Connor)

1961 - To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee)

1960 - Advise and Consent (Drury)
1959 - The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (Taylor)
1958 - A Death in the Family (Agee)
1957 - None
1956 - Andersonville (Kantor)
1955 - A Fable (Faulkner)
1954 - None
1953 - The Old Man and the Sea (Hemingway)
1952 - The Caine Mutiny (Wouk)
1951 - The Town (Richter)
1950 - The Way West (Guthrie)
1949 - Guard of Honor (Cozzens)
1948 - Tales of the South Pacific (Michener)
1947 - All the King’s Men (Warren)
1946 - None
1945 - Bell for Adano (Hersey)
1944 - Journey in the Dark (Flavin)
1943 - Dragon’s Teeth I (Sinclair)
1942 - In This Our Life (Glasgow)
1941 - None
1940 - The Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck)
1939 - The Yearling (Rawlings)
1938 - The Late George Apley (Marquand)

1937 - Gone with the Wind (Mitchell)

1936 - Honey in the Horn (Davis)
1935 - Now in November (Johnson)
1934 - Lamb in His Bosom (Miller)
1933 - The Store (Stribling)

1932 - The Good Earth (Buck)

1931 - Years of Grace (Barnes)
1930 - Laughing Boy (Lafarge)
1929 - Scarlet Sister Mary (Peterkin)
1928 - The Bridge of San Luis Rey (Wilder)
1927 - Early Autumn (Bromfield)
1926 - Arrowsmith (Lewis)
1925 - So Big (Ferber)
1924 - The Able McLauglins (Wilson)
1923 - One of Ours (Cather)
1922 - Alice Adams (Tarkington)
1921 - The Age of Innocence (Wharton)
1920 - None
1919 - The Magnificent Ambersons (Tarkington)
1918 - His Family (Poole)

Total: 10/81

Vancouver

Hallo, all!

I am writing you from the lovely campus of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where I am attending a conference. Such is the sticky web of conflicting desires I have stumbled into here (Should I work on my still-overly-long paper? Go to the many interesting panels and lectures the conference is sponsoring? Actually visit some of this reputedly stunning and good-food-filled city?), and the limited nature of my internet access, that there may be a gap of a few days until I can resume regular posting (not to mention blog-visiting).

Back soon!

Furthermore...

[Eurrrghhhh! I had a lovely, long post all ready to go after about an hour's work in a very busy day, and then Blogger wouldn't save and Firefox froze. Boo to both Blogger and Firefox! So nearly the whole post disappeared. Try to believe in the former brilliance of the "lost post" while reading my attempts at reconstructing it ...]


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Critical Mass, the blog of the National Books Critics Circle (or, perhaps I should say, of their Board of Directors), has declared a project after my own heart: every week for the next 658 weeks, they will highlight one of their prize's finalists and winners with reviews, critical essays, interviews, etc. until they have reached the end of the list (which is current 658 books long). But what, I have to ask, being unusually familiar with the tricksiness of these projects, will they do as the list grows longer with every passing year? Surely, over the next 12 years this project is currently anticipated to take, the list will exceed the boundaries currently set for it. Ah, delightful.


~~~~~~


I am probably the last blogger on earth to encounter Brotherhood 2.0, two very witty brothers who have decided (after discovering that their conversations had been reduced to a series of IMs and emails) to spend a year communicating only non-textually, and specifically by means of a joint video blog. As for those of you who have yet to experience their daily video exchanges, I warn you with all possible sternness that they are utterly addictive.

And now I am filled with sadness and regret that their project is almost two-thirds of the way over. Sigh....


~~~~~~


Is the U.S.A.'s literature post-colonial? The Empire Writes Back, an influential introduction to the field of post-colonial studies, says yes, adding that "its relationship with the metropolitan centre as it evolved over the last two centuries has been paradigmatic for post-colonial cultures everywhere" (2). I myself would give this answer: it depends on the context and concerns of the specific work.

Do the novels, poems, and plays of the U.S. regularly engage with our colonial past, or with the residue left by the appropriation of land and resources by the imperial powers who settled our nation? Does American (by which I mean, in this context, U.S.) literature frequently interrogate its anxious relationship to the culture of our colonial relatives, continually questioning what the appropriate relationship to Spanish and British culture is, and whether it is superior or inferior to our own? I think the answer would have to be "no" to both of these questions, which form the foundations of what is awkwardly known as "post-colonial literature" (as if the era of exploitation is neatly contained by the past, or the topics of colonial exchange and inheritance are the only issues of any interest to the regions in question).

On the other hand, are there significant strains of American literature that do engage with these questions? Certainly. Are these works post-colonial in their concerns and references? Sure! (I am really enjoying the call-and-response-with-myself style of tonight's post. What can I say? I'm an only child. As Whitman would say, I contain multitudes.)

I would love to hear other ideas about this question - can the U.S. be included in the cultural and political designation "post-colonial"? If so, how is that reflected in our attitudes and artistic expressions?

I am reminded of the time when I advised a medievalist I knew slightly, while he was agonizing over what to say at a job talk for which he had been senselessly given the topic "Post-colonial Britain," that he should begin his lecture with this bold statement: "Britain has always been a post-colonial culture." He could then, I added, go on to talk about the Roman and Norman conquests, the Viking presence, various waves of assault and occupation, and the continued history of ethnic, linguistic and religious difference in Scotland, Wales and Ireland. His talk could then culminate in a discussion about the dynamic new cultural diversity of the U.K.'s population, and the oddly (or not) simultaneous growth of regional bonds of identity based on sport, industry, political devolution, etc.

Judging by the look on his face as I proposed this strategy to him, I am not convinced that he ultimately took me up on it....


~~~~~~


Crow's feet around the eyes are the primary indicator of a sincere smile. Who knew?

Well, cognitive psychologists, that's who.


~~~~~~


The Phrontisery is exactly what I needed when I was reading The Road. When is the next time I am going to require constant access to a dictionary of rare and obsolete words? Maybe I should start actively seeking out situations that will supply me with that need...


~~~~~~


At first today felt like it was going to be a sonnet day, but then Petrarch seemed too precious, Shakespeare too familiar, the modern sonneteers too unfamiliar and difficult for the lateness of the hour, and Sidney too absent from my usual internet haunts to be easily accessed in an immediately reliable form.

So instead I turned to a different genre of poem entirely, a new-to-me work by a favorite poet: Anna Akhmatova. Here is an excerpt from her poem "Lot's Wife," beautifully translated (although, not being a Russian speaker, I can't vouch for its fidelity) by Max Hayward and Stanley Kunitz (found in its entirety here):

A single glance: a sudden dart of pain
stitching her eyes before she made a sound . . .
Her body flaked into transparent salt,
and her swift legs rooted to the ground.

Who will grieve for this woman? Does she not seem
too insignificant for our concern?
Yet in my heart I never will deny her,
who suffered death because she chose to turn.

"Flaked," in the first of these stanzas, is such a delicate, unusual verb choice. And I had never thought, before reading the second stanza, that Lot's Wife and Orpheus and Eurydice were expressions of the same archetype - that is, of the hairline fracture of faith that is exposed and widened by exposure to sensual and emotional temptation. In Mme. Lot's case, of course, the resulting loss is of life (a return to the purely mineral, the deprived-of-choice), while in Orpheus's it is of love. In both tales, the women bear the brunt of the punishment. Or perhaps not: did Eurydice in fact want to be dragged back to the world of the living, forced to face the dread of dying yet again?

What is remarkable about the final stanza of the poem is that Akhmatova figures this archetypal turning-back almost heroically, but more pointedly as a profoundly human act of choice. The phrase "deny her" has a double meaning in English, encompassing both the sense of refusing Mme. Lot the right to choice that includes the freedom to change her mind, and the idea of repudiating any knowledge of or bond with her (as, most famously, Peter thrice denied Christ). Furthermore, this insertion of choice calls into question the motivation of Lot's wife, and, for that matter, Orpheus. Is it enough to call this "doubt" and "faithlessness"? Is it an expression of individualism? A need to verify the unfolding of events against the proof of one's own perception?

A delicate interrogation of the true nature of weakness in what we are told is an archetype of failure.


~~~~~~


This is a mad week of work, so I am still in the midst of The Guardians (but almost done, I promise). In excellent news, I received my ARC of Empire Rising from HarperCollins yesterday. More on it in a future "In other news," since I am far too exhausted to recreate this section of the great lost post. Apologies if there are more typos than usual in today's ramblings - remember the lost brilliance that was and curse the name of freezing browsers.

"F for Fake" (1974)

This is Orson Welles performing a filmic improvisation on the theme of "documentary":

He has received a heap of footage from art dealer and director François Reichenbach, who has been interviewing the world's most famous art forger (Elmyr de Hory) for a television special. They, along with Elmyr's biographer, the charismatic Clifford Irving, are all frequenters of the decadent resort community on Ibiza, and are all in some way implicated in artistic fraud.

For a time it appears that Clifford Irving - who does most of his interviews while a tiny monkey obsessively grooms his sideburns - may be the only honest man (or shall we, following one of the strands of the film's meditations on creativity, call this a "non-artist") among them, but then, as they are editing F for Fake, it is revealed that Irving's famous, exclusive biography of the reclusive Howard Hughes has, in fact, been a giant hoax. Experts are unable to detect that his letters from Hughes are in fact forgeries, representatives of Hughes' corporate empire are so baffled by their boss's inaccessibility and penchant for using doubles that they can't authenticate or invalidate the book, and when the tycoon himself arranges for a telephone interview with reporters to denounce Irving and assert that the two had never met, Irving (in a masterstroke of fakery) asserts that the interview was the work of an imposter.

Meanwhile, Welles reflects on the authenticity of Elmyr's art (which is indistinguishable from the "real thing," and is said to populate all the world's major galleries), the nature of value in the world of creativity, and his own hoaxy past (famously, in a fake news broadcast based on H.G. Wells's novel The War of the Worlds, on the day before Halloween, 1938, he convinced a significant portion of the radio audience that their nation had been invaded by Martians). What I am telling you is absolutely true, he keeps assuring us - you MUST believe this. And with every passing assurance we squirm a little more, soothed by the most beautiful of all film voices, but ever unsure that he is, in fact, trustworthy.

This was, I must admit, by far the best film I have seen in some time; the only film I have watched in several months that has generated enough excitement in me that it produced the instant need to see it several more times. The film opens with a spellbinding (ha!) sequence of magician's patter from Welles, which is so closely tied to metafilmic shots of preparations for shooting and seam-revealing editing that my very first thought was "Would that the makers of The Illusionist had paid more attention to this film before producing their own reflection of illusion and cinema."

The philosophical, aesthetic and ontological concerns of the film are thrilling enough, but the editing (combining Reichenbach's footage with later interviews and narration done by Welles) is stunning, prescient, and breath-takingly influential. It has a dizzy, associative ingenuity that hearkens back to experimental Soviet cinema and Bunuel and looks forward to the imagistic frenzy that has, perhaps, gotten a bad rap in music videos (which provide, it seems to me, one of the most reliable systems for funding experimental cinema in our culture).

But perhaps its greatest sphere of influence in the present moment and the mainstream is on the fake news philosophy and aesthetic of Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show:" where Welles, untroubled by the documentarian ethics of non-hoaxers, cuts images and statements together from disparate times and places, putting them in conversation with one another as if they shared the same space outside of cinema, Stewart uses this strategy in the service (one might say - and I will) of hoax-revelation, to unmask hypocrisy. In the face of our government's increasing feeling that anything said firmly and often enough is true (this is Stephen Colbert's famous concept of "truthiness"), Stewart uses this technique of verbal collage to juxtapose what, say, Dick Cheney - or a Democratic senator, for that matter - said two years ago, with what he tells us today he has always said. The emerging lies, hypocrisies, and squirming inconsistencies are more revealing and forthright than any other coverage we get of our leaders. They also yield a scathing satire on the state of American journalism: aren't the same journalists who claim that this sort of contextless juxtaposition is only ethically possible in comedic "fake news" the representatives of a media that routinely gives us uncontextualized quotations and actions from celebrities and politicians, all in the service of more entertaining (thus more profitable) news?

As Welles says, 'Art is a lie to make us realize the truth.' In F for Fake, hoaxes are infectious; they beget an endless stream of other hoaxes, and produce a labyrinth of (in)authenticity that demands reflection on why it is that we value the real over the (equally beautiful, equally skilled, equally entertaining) false. Is to be an artist, the film asks, essentially to be in actor (split in two between the role-playing of creativity and the shadow of your "real life"), and is to acting, fundamentally, the perpetration of a hoax? (My answer would be that it depends entirely on what the audience believes.) After all, Welles tells us, amidst the scandal of the War of the Worlds broadcast, he could have (like many other hoaxers) gone to jail; instead, he went to Hollywood.

F for Fake (1974)
dir. Orson Welles
****1/2

• You can find F for Fake at Amazon (F for Fake - Criterion Collection) or any store that rents or sells Criterion DVDs.
• Wikipedia has very interesting articles on both F for Fake and Orson Welles. I am suddenly eager to watch and rewatch all the Welles films I can, and to read Simon Cowell's multi-volume biography of the man.
• IMDB has information about the cast and crew of the film (and a knotty issue this is, too, tied up in the film's own arguments about the nature of art authorship and intellectual ownership), listed under F for Fake's French title, Verités et Mensonges.
  
• Vincent Canby's original review in The New York Times is perhaps not entirely representative of the tepid reaction the film received on its first release.
• In his very interesting and shockingly nasty review of the film (he has some choice words for James Joyce, among others) Dan Schneider rakes the author of the Criterion essay, Jonathan Rosenbaum, over the coals.
  

In other news....

A Polish author is being tried for committing a murder that exactly matches one at the center of his bestselling crime novel. I am not sure which is more terrifying, the prospect that he is guilty (and used murder as a source of literary inspiration, in defiance of all rules of prudence and shame) or the possibility that he is innocent (and the police are treating vividly written literature as "proof" in a criminal investigation). [via This Book is for You]

~~~~

Earlier in the summer, two of my closest friends got married in what I believe might have been as close to a perfect wedding as has been seen on this earth. They had planned the ceremony and the reception down the minutest detail with tremendous humor and consideration, and every reading and song, every decoration, every dish that we ate was expressive of who they were and what was important to them. I cannot even describe how fun it was to attend, and how moving it was to witness such an unusually sincere expression of love and community.

One of the most successful aspects of this very successful wedding was their choice of officiant: a friend who had both a great deal of charisma and a nuanced understanding of what the couple wanted agreed to be ordained online. Neither the bride nor the groom is religious, and it meant a lot to them to have a purely secular wedding which nonetheless was somewhat more elaborate and malleable to their wishes (which included delightful readings from children's literature, evolutionary biology, and law - this last championing the right to marry whomever one chooses, regardless of gender or sexuality) than a courthouse wedding can generally be. So their officiant chose to be ordained as a "wizard," in perfect keeping with the whimsy and affection that characterized the whole event, and he played his role to perfection, really doing honor to the tremendous love and intelligence that had gone into composing the ceremony.

Then, earlier this week, the bride read in The New York Times that (despite their having done extensive research on the legality of their plans) she might not actually be married. Why? Because Connecticut might not recognize marriages performed by ministers who were ordained online. The article quotes two lawyers from the state who, while planning their own wedding, were unable to understand what CT's stance on the issue was. What hope do those of us who have never gone to law school have?

Bring over the rant apparatus, because I am going to hop right on it. This seems to me to be an outrageous intrusion of the government into the private life of its citizens. If a couple finds that their wedding will be more meaningful if it is performed by someone they love than by a (never before seen by them) Justice of the Peace or a minister of a church that is not their own, then why would the government try to thwart their wishes? Why do we, a secular nation, grant religious officials in some states privileges (like the right to conduct state-recognized marriages) that are not permitted to laymen? Can anyone tell me what is at stake in allowing marriages to be performed by online-ordained wizards? What is the peril?

Wait, it appears that an employee of CT's government can tell me, in what has got to be the silliest, most irresponsibly hurtful remark I have read all week:

Elnora Douglas, the office coordinator of the St. Louis County marriage license department, finds it odd that couples would want to circumvent them.

“It’s like you want your favorite cousin to do a surgery, so they go online to get a medical degree,” she said.

How could surgery POSSIBLY be compared to conducting a marriage? When has anyone ever died in a wedding-officiation-turned-sour? How dare Douglas speak so condescendingly about people who, after all, are merely seeking to guarantee the sincerity and meaningfulness of a very important moment in their lives? And shame on The New York Times for quoting such a baseless, uninformative, and upsettingly flippant remark.

Hrumph. OK - rant over. We can now resume our regularly scheduled programming.

~~~~

Playwright Mark Ravenhill, famous for his (ahem) seminal play Shopping and F**king as well as for throwing the UK into a debate about the meaning and mandate of a National Theatre with a play he wrote for the NT that depicted anal intercourse, has conceived a formally innovative project for this year's Edinburgh Festival. Every morning of the Festival, he will present a new twenty minute piece, for a total of over five hours of new material, which he says takes the distinctly modern form of an epic-in-fragments.

That is newsworthy enough to my (easily excited by formal innovations in the theatre) mind, but this article from the Telegraph reveals a backstory that seems ripped from the world of soap operas. After agreeing to this grueling writing project, Ravenhill had a massive seizure (not, I believe, as a result of the Festival contract) and, while being treated for it, received a faulty anaesthetic procedure. The resulting asphyxiation forced doctors to keep him in a coma for several days, and he emerged without several weeks' worth of memories -- including all his plans for the epic-in-fragments. Take a look at the story to hear how he pieced his life and project back together.

~~~~

My very good friend J has just made his bloggy debut under the moniker of his internet alter ego, Max Renn. If I know him as well as I think I do, his blog will feature a combination of tales from academe; disquisitions on continental philosophy; reflections on film, fiction, and poetry; and maybe, if we are very lucky and well behaved, some thoughts on the world of comics. He is bound to be a source of tremendous wit and wisdom on all these subjects, so go by and give him a quick welcome to the blogosphere, when you have a chance!

~~~~

James Lee Burke seems to be in every nook and cranny of the litblog world this week, because he has a new collection out featuring several Katrina-themed stories. My "favorite thing I read this week" award goes to something he said in this fantastic interview on Critical Mass:

It's not about the storm, it's about the betrayal and abandonment of the people, the poorest of the poor. It's about greed. And the same people wage war. People who never go themselves. They use the suffering they cause to validate their deeds. They are timeless.

~~~~

Today's poem is H.D.'s "Helen," which you can find in its entirety on poets.org. Too tired to do its delicacy justice, I will simply give you the last stanza:

Greece sees, unmoved,
God's daughter, born of love,
the beauty of cool feet
and slenderest knees,
could love indeed the maid,
only if she were laid,
white ash amid funereal cypresses.

~~~~

This weekend was D's birthday, which we celebrated by cleaning obsessively all day and baking like victims of a culinary compulsion, all in preparation for having a number of friends over in the evening. As part of the festivities, I engaged in an activity that I had always avoided on the grounds that I wasn't going to partake in any activity which decadently bored aristocrats at 1920s house parties had performed. No n0, nothing shocking or flapperish - I merely played Charades for the first time. But first I had to confront that, when told that I must come up (instantly!) with a book, a movie, and a television show and scribble them down on tiny sheets of paper, my media-saturated consciousness provides me with NOTHING. Not even a single book came to mind. (This was complicated by the fact that D was on the other team, and I knew he had a good idea of what I had been reading and watching lately.)

I am in the midst of a mad work schedule in preparation for a conference this weekend, but I am still making my way through Ana Castillo's The Guardians, which is proving very readable despite my total lack of Spanish (it is constructed as a series of monologues with varying mixtures of English and Spanish slang and idiom). In mere moments, when I am done with this post, I will make an attempt at my current Netflix - 2000's You Can Count on Me. D is still at work, by the way, and it is midnight here. Ah, well.

Black Swan Green (2006)

Once a poem's left home it doesn't care about you. (146)

Jason Taylor is a thirteen year old bastion of early 80s suburban torment, child to sniping parents, terrified into sullenness by his own stammer, desperate to maintain his middle-ranking status at his comprehensive school (not cool enough to hang out with the bullies, not geeky - or noticeable - enough to be consistently targeted by them), and excruciatingly baffled by his own sexuality.

Eliot Bolivar, by contrast, is a dashing poet, published in the Black Swan Green parish newsletter, capable of transforming the torture of Jason's daily social encounters into the meat of poetic observation.

And no one knows that these two people are in fact the same - or so Jason believes.

Black Swan Green by David Mitchell - whose Cloud Atlas was so acclaimed and has sat neglected on my shelf for too long - is a detailed study of the mundane events of Jason's youth: the slow disintegration of his parents' marriage, his fear of their judgement, his daily struggle with thuggish brutes who either want to coopt him or pummel him, and his encounters with a series of flamboyant teachers. Most notable of these teachers is the forceful Madame Crommelynck, an aggressive bohemian who promises to nurture him as a poet. He is entranced by her artistic background, complete with a romantic genius of a father, a suicidal lover, and a flight from the Nazis, and pores over the artefacts and photographic remnants of that past:

A bride and groom pose outside a flinty chapel. Bare twigs says it's winter. The groom's thin lips say, Look what I've got. A top hat, a cane, half fox. But the bride's half lioness. Her smile's the idea of a smile. She knows more about her new husband than he knows about her. Above the church door a stone lady gazes up at her stone knight. Flesh-and-blood people in photographs look at the camera, but stone people look through the camera straight at you. (157)

You can see here the spareness of Mitchell's language, but also a playfulness with both word and image that we see more often in poetry than prose. Does the groom's "Look what I've got" encompass the bride, or simply the trappings of privilege - the hat, cane, fur? Is the half fox merely an item, or is it a description of him, the equivalent of her "half lioness"? The inanimate eyes of the statue can see through history straight into Jason's secrets, as if bodies that have never lived are exempt from the strictures of time and pretense.

For a time it seems that we know what kind of a coming-of-age story this will be - a tale of mentoring, in which the quirky guidance of the epigrammatic Mme. Crommelynck will guide Jason into a more honest sense of self. But then Madame is whisked away, a victim to her own secrets, and it becomes clear that in Black Swan Green as in Harry Potter, teachers can't do the working of growing up for you.

Primary school seemed so huge then. How can you be sure anything is ever its real size? (226)

At first the youthful concerns of the novel (bullying, nascent sexuality, parental approval, being perceived as cool), its diction that perches precariously between surly catchphrases ("That's epic!") and self-conscious poetry, and its gleeful insistence on reminding us just what 1982 looked like culturally, may fool you (as it did me) into thinking that it is a surprisingly slight book. But oddities recur with literary frequency. Ringing phones haunt the households Jason occupies and visits, the unheard and ignored voices on the other end implying the mundane catastrophes that lie in wait for the houses' secrets to be made known. Secrets are the core of this novel, and, it reveals, at the core of virtually every YA novel, after-school special, and coming-of-age story. Puberty is the time when, new to the capacity for certain types of abstract thought and awoken by sexuality to new dimensions of social belonging and exclusion, we are forced to make decisions (seemingly final, but not truly so) about our identity, both about how we see ourselves and how we wish others to see us.

In one of the novel's most delightful scenes, another of Jason's many teacher-figures gives her class a truly brilliant lesson on secrecy, beginning with this exchange:

"But what is a secret?"
It takes everyone a bit of time to get going after lunch.
"Well, say, is a secret a thing you can see? Touch?"
Avril Bredon put her hand up.
"Avril?"
"A secret's a piece of information that not everyone knows."
"Good. A piece of information that not everyone knows. Information about ... who? You? Somebody else? Something? All of these?"
After a gap, a few kids murmured, "All of these."
"Yes, I'd say so too. But ask yourselves this. Is a secret a secret if it isn't true?" (264)

Reputation and the construction of identities is at the core of all this secrecy. Jason's stutter is among his biggest secrets, but it quickly becomes obvious that only he considers it so. But this is because it is something he believes both defines him and should not define him. What will happen, he has to ask himself, if the bullies at school find that he is Eliot Bolivar? They will exclude and persecute him; he will never belong. But does he want to be a poet or does he want to be a bully?

There is a wooded area of Black Swan Green, a town that is a transitional hybrid between a yuppie suburb and a farming community, where the kids go to play out games of violence and connection, and to which Jason flees whenever he wants to escape the pressure of quotidian secrecy. This is truly a "green world" in Northrop Frye's usage, a liminal space to play out forbidden struggles with eros and thanatos, a parallel reality that both defies the structures of normalcy and order and provides its citizens with a place to purge iconoclastic impulses, enabling their safe return to the status quo (A Midsummer Night's Dream, by the way, is the most frequently cited example of a "green world").

The novel in fact begins in this green world, when a pond amidst the trees freezes over and Jason, left alone there, becomes convinced that he can sense all the children who have ever drowned in its waters. He seeks shelter in a cottage straight out of Germanic fairy tale, where he has an encounter so surreal it feels truly baffling, as if we really had suddenly plunged into a folkloric world of magic and madness.

And then the chapter ends, and the incident evaporates as if it had never happened. The only evidence that remains of it is a broken watch, left to Jason by his grandfather, that our hero has smacked against the ice. [My review may contain some SPOILERS about the formal construction of the novel from this point onward.] This is a frequently used strategy of the novel's: chapters end on almost cliffhanging notes of drama, and new ones begin on the next page in an entirely different mental and narrative state. Mitchell repeatedly denies us the satisfaction of resolution and anti-climax over the course of the novel, a device that I found at first disorienting and manipulative.

As the novel progresses, however, we become aware that these narrative disruptions are at least in part a result of the fact that Jason is writing this story, cathartically transforming his painful, mundane life into the stuff of folktales and adventure stories. This is a thrilling realization and it underscores the lightly experiment nature of the novel's construction. The possibility that some of the tale might be fiction and some reality, and that we as readers will never be fully aware of which is which, speaks to all the books most beloved issues of identity-creation and secrecy.

In the final chapters, however, the plot-lines that unraveled so marvelously after each of the abandoned cliffhangers are all tied neatly together. I have to imagine that this is the same feeling Jason got when he discovered, towards the end of the novel, that the forest, his rampaging and chaotic green world, is in fact about the size of a small field: the deflating knowledge that convention has triumphed over the creative richness of uncertainty.

Despite this final feeling of slight deflation, this was a novel that won me over quickly with its wit and readability. In its aftermath, I found myself wishing that I had anything even half as gripping to read. But, alas, once a book has left, it doesn't care about you.

Black Swan Green (2006)
David Mitchell
****

A Selection for my NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOKS CHALLENGE (Huzzah!)

• You can find Black Swan Green at Powells (Black Swan Green), Amazon (Black Swan Green: A Novel), or most other bookstores and libraries.
• LibraryThing's page for Black Swan Green includes user reviews, ratings, and bibliographic information.
  
• For other reviews of Black Swan Green by participants in the NYT Notable Books Challenge, visit the challenge's website.
  

Furthermore...

Last night at 1 a.m. (yes, 1 a.m. - that is the sort of mad schedule we adhere to around here, thanks to D's rather, let's say, temporally expansive job), as D was just closing his eyes to go to sleep and I was attempting to finish One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, our apartment suddenly moved about an inch to the right. Then it hopped ever so slightly up and down for about 3 seconds. Since I had been reading about delusion-laced asylum life, and at the best of times have only a tenuous hold on reality, I looked over at D, just to make sure that someone else had actually witnessed this little building-dance.

And that was how we experienced our first honest-to-goodness earthquake - a 4.6.

D ran around yelling about how the earth shouldn't move, it just wasn't right, hurricanes he could handle, he was used to hurricanes, and we needed to go to the Army Surplus Store as soon as possible to get an earthquake preparedness kit (I couldn't really get him to expand on what this would entail beyond our normal emergency preparedness kit, which - among other things - has gotten him through a snowstorm in the desert coming back from Vegas). I got online and found this very useful site, which updates every hour in seismically calm periods and five minutes after every quake.

Then, after standing dutifully in two adjacent doorways for a few minutes saying things like "Are aftershocks ever, you know, bigger than the original quake?," we went back to bed, but D still jerked awake every few minutes (whenever I shifted my position, adjusted the covers, or took a particularly deep breath) to declare with alarm that he had just felt an aftershock.

~~~~

I think we all know that the harder we try not to talk about something (sex!), the more everything we say and do becomes a commentary on the forbidden topic. So, although the Victorians have a reputation for rigid prudery, their literature is in fact quite consistently sex-obsessed. The Little Professor provides a handy guide to the code that obscures and communicates Victorian sex, complete with highly amusing examples.

~~~~

At the Wilson Center's website, and in the Wilson Quarterly, Richard Schickel reconsiders the sociology of film noir's cynical obsession with the past and the city in a post-war era that was, in many other ways, increasingly optimistic and suburban. In the article, "Rerunning Film Noir," Schickel makes one of my favorite connections (one which I have taught to theatre history students in the past), drawing out the links between expressionism, medieval dramaturgy, and film noir:

More colorfully, in a more ­self-­consciously “artistic” way, the noir city was sometimes seen as something like the hellmouth in medieval mystery plays, yawning, fiery, ever ready to swallow sinner or innocent.

I do love a good hellmouth. And not just because it gives me a chance to bring up Buffy the Vampire Slayer in classes devoted to religious drama.

~~~~

Today's poem is "An Old-Fashioned Song" by John Hollander, who I have met ever-so-briefly through department functions, and whose lovely work I should attend to more keenly. In fact, I don't believe I have read any work of his (this is true of so many poets) since my introductory literature course in college. I am especially filled with shame (shame this daily verse project is meant to dispel) about the lack of poetry in my reading rotation for the last half decade because my blogging user name is in fact a reference to poetry (whereas my blog title, which I often also go by, is a dramatic allusion. Extra credit will be granted to those who can figure out the connection between the two.). Shame!

Ok, back to "An Old Fashioned Song," which you can find in its entirety at poets.org, one of my new favorite resources for this project (There are so many aspects of the site to explore. What, I wonder, do they mean by offering you the option to "Adopt a Poet?" Will s/he come live on my couch?).

The heart of the poem, which expands between two ballad-like choruses:

This is the aftermath
Of afternoons in the clover
Fields where we once made love
Then wandered home together
Where the trees arched above,
Where we made our own weather
When branches were the sky.
Now they are gone for good,
And you, for ill, and I
Am only a passer-by.

The perfect insular amorousness of "we made our own weather"! And then, the lilting complexity of "Now they are gone for good, / And you, for ill, and I / Am only a passer-by," which takes advantage of these very short lines to sandwich that crucial "for ill," between the now defunct pair - "you" and "I." I got a wonderful sense of confusion as I read the lines, unsure how to allign the terms with one another - "for good"/"and you" and "for ill/and I" was my first, meaningful, but not best instinct.

The word "passer-by" is as perfect an ending for this section as the elegant pairing of "aftermath" and "afternoons" was a beginning, both because it evokes such a perfect sense of separation from a scene that was once defined by your presence in it, and because it is one of those fascinating words than maintains its verbal duality in unity (think of its plural - passersby).

~~~~

I am quite behind in my reviewing, in part because I am speeding through books and movies, and in part because my other work is so pressing that any dutiful blogging feels like a betrayal of other academic duties. Last night and this morning I finished off not one, but TWO books from the "1001 Books you must read before you die" list: Robinson Crusoe and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. And, in the throes of a Netflix crisis (how, oh how, was I going to receive the film I wanted to watch with D this weekend if I didn't send off a DVD in today's mail?) I watched the excellent Nights of Cabiria this afternoon. How refreshing, after the thankless drudgery of The Ten Commandments.

In culinary news, I spent a surprisingly large part of the afternoon making a lovely orzo salad (with organic red and yellow cherry tomatoes, chickpeas and fresh herbs) and a Shredded beet salad which, thanks to my inferior beet-grating skills, looks more like a particularly vivid pudding. It is quite tasty though, and I congratulate myself on having completed my first encounter with fresh-beet-cooking while leaving the kitchen looking like only a very small violent murder had been committed there. In fact, the only thing to get really beety and red were my hands (I am restraining myself vigorously from making a joke right now about being "caught red-handed" at something).

But, oh! The biggest news of the day was the long awaited arrival of my ARC of Ana Castillo's The Guardians, which I received from Random House as part of LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program. Since it finally made its way to my hands just as I finished two other books, I hopped right into the opening chapter. I will let you know how it goes.

And, as if that wasn't enough of an ARC bounty, I heard from HarperCollins today that I will be receiving my first ever book from their (apologies for this repetitive rhyme) First Look program: Empire Rising by Sam Barrone, which promises to be a fortifying change from some of the more earnest reading I am doing this month. Hurrah for ARCs and other book gifts! They couldn't possibly give me more delight.

In other news...

There is something I find dually terrifying and thrilling about my LibraryThing collection. I have been going through, trying to tag all the books in my childhood home and my apartment either "already read," "to be read," or "currently reading." What is disturbing is not simply the sheer number of books involved (bear in mind that this is the result of not only my lifetime of book hoarding, but also my parents'), but the ratio of unread to read books: I have (at this moment in time) over 1500 books labeled "to be read" and only about 750 marked "already read."

In other words, I have only read a third of the books in my library. And let's say that I read 100 books a year, without acquiring any more books or getting any books out of the library - which we know is an absolute impossibility. It would take me more than 15 YEARS to finish the unread books sitting on my shelves right now.

It's like I said: both terrifying and thrilling.

~~~~

This is International Blog Against Racism week, and an excellent time for both the blogging community and the general citizenry to which we belong to reflect on the pervasiveness of racism, its insidiousness, and its multivalence (it is often not a simple unidirectional flow of either power or prejudice, but rather a complex web which partakes in many other prejudices about class, religion, gender, sexuality, etc.).

No one is immune from its workings, no one is purely subject or purely object, and self-awareness (even self-scrutiny) is a huge step towards minimizing the poison of prejudice in our culture and our world.

Ask yourself, when you talk about race and racism, "what do I have at stake in this argument that may shape my views?". This is the perfect opportunity to examine the roots of your opinions, and what their consequences and corollaries might be.

In honor of this very worthy and provocative project, I give you a link to a fascinating and disturbing article about America's prison system, and how our penal philosophy is in horrifying dialogue with the country's history of racial prejudice: "Why are so many Americans in prison?" by Glenn C. Loury.

Loury reveals some chilling statistics in this article. A few of them, including quotations from the article (I highly recommend the piece in its entirety!):

• About my home town:

  "Between 1960 and 1990, the annual number of murders in New Haven rose from six to 31, the number of rapes from four to 168, the number of robberies from 16 to 1,784—all this while the city’s population declined by 14 percent."

• Our country is home to a QUARTER of the world's prison inmates, and the "corrections industry" employs more people than "the combined work forces of General Motors, Ford, and Wal-Mart, the three largest corporate employers in the country." In other words, we have a corporate and industrial (and thus political) stake in continuing to imprison a huge portion of the population.
  
• Consider the responsibility of drug users for social problems, as well as drug distributors:

  Significantly, throughout the period 1979–2000, white high-school seniors reported using drugs at a significantly higher rate than black high-school seniors. High drug-usage rates in white, middle-class American communities in the early 1980s accounts for the urgency many citizens felt to mount a national attack on the problem. But how successful has the effort been, and at what cost?

  Think of the cost this way: to save middle-class kids from the threat of a drug epidemic that might not have even existed by the time that drug incarceration began its rapid increase in the 1980s, we criminalized underclass kids. Arrests went up, but drug prices have fallen sharply over the past 20 years—suggesting that the ratcheting up of enforcement has not made drugs harder to get on the street. The strategy clearly wasn’t keeping drugs away from those who sought them. Not only are prices down, but the data show that drug-related visits to emergency rooms also rose steadily throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

• And here, in one of a very persuasive article's most persuasive passages, Loury asks us to consider the long term consequences of incarceration for criminals who have made very bad (although not always violent) choices, but are nonetheless human beings who need to return to families, jobs, communities, and psychological/emotional functioning:

  So consider the nearly 60 percent of black male high-school dropouts born in the late 1960s who are imprisoned before their 40th year. While locked up, these felons are stigmatized—they are regarded as fit subjects for shaming. Their links to family are disrupted; their opportunities for work are diminished; their voting rights may be permanently revoked. They suffer civic excommunication. Our zeal for social discipline consigns these men to a permanent nether caste. And yet, since these men—whatever their shortcomings—have emotional and sexual and family needs, including the need to be fathers and lovers and husbands, we are creating a situation where the children of this nether caste are likely to join a new generation of untouchables. This cycle will continue so long as incarceration is viewed as the primary path to social hygiene.

~~~~

On a lighter, more literary note, Robert Peake had some interesting thoughts on the nature of a poem's title and its relationship to the poem itself, which he expressed as part of his post on the new Poet Laureate Charles Simic:

Titles are a kind of meta-line - a line that hovers from the very beginning over every other line of the poem, coloring it. It can be a key to understanding what's going on in the poem, a one-stroke scene setup, or even perform double-duty as the first line of the poem.

Ah, my meta addiction strikes again.

~~~~

Today's poem was Adrienne Rich's "Diving into the Wreck" from poets.org. It has been many years since I have read Rich's work, so I am glad to return to her with this poem about (well, putatively about) deep sea diving and narrative making. An excerpt (the whole poem can be found at the link above):

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and away into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.
~~~~

As you have probably heard by now, the Booker Prize's long list has been released. 
It is, as The Guardian notes, both shorter than it has been in recent years, and
filled to the brim with less established authors:
 Darkmans by Nicola Barker (Fourth Estate)
Self Help by Edward Docx (Picador)
The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng (Myrmidon)
The Gathering by Anne Enright (Jonathan Cape)
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (Hamish Hamilton)
The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies (Sceptre)
Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones (John Murray)
Gifted by Nikita Lalwani (Viking)
On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape)
What Was Lost by Catherine O'Flynn (Tindal Street)
Consolation by Michael Redhill (William Heinemann)
Animal's People by Indra Sinha (Simon & Schuster)
Winnie & Wolf by A N Wilson (Hutchinson)
I have yet to read any of the long listed books, but it is definitely worth noting
that Gifted was one of the books that LibraryThing offered in the last round of
its Early Reviewers program. Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach is the bookies'
favorite right now, since he has by far the vastest reputation, but consider that
Lloyd Jones's Mister Pip was the first book in nearly 1300 reviews to receive 
an A+ from The Complete Review.  I am putting my (as of yet) totally ignorant
hopes behind a less well known author than McEwan taking the prize this year.

~~~~

I have fallen prey to some sort of lurking summer bug (or perhaps it is just
very aggressive allergies), so I have been moping about the apartment for the
last few days (well, moping more mopily than usual, I should say).  Last night
I finished Noisy Outlaws, Unfriendly Blobs..., and I hope to be done with 
Robinson Crusoe AND One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest later today. What
a perfect time this would be for my two elusive ARCs to arrive in the mail....

But there was an even bigger accomplishment yesterday -- I finally finished
the unbearably bad and immense The Ten Commandments!  Huzzah! Rejoicing
in the streets!  I would like to think that this means that I will have time to
address the increasingly dire TiVo overcrowding issue, but Nights of Cabiria
is supposed to come in today's mail.... [There is an awful lot of trailing off
meaningfully in this post, I notice, mostly because I am filled to overflowing
with poorly veiled hints for the postal service.]

"The Illusionist" (2006)

We begin with a face - the face of Eisenheim the Illusionist (Ed Norton), micro-contorted by the effort of making something (we aren't quite sure what yet) appear. He is on a stage, a bare stage, set in the midst of an indeterminately 19th century world (in which there appear to be quite good electric lights in Eastern European castles, and where color film projection was available to the police in small towns) and surrounded by people with tortured accents and the desperate need to believe that his powers aren't illusions.

As soon as a image begins to appear out of the mist beside Eisenheim and a hubbub burbles out of the audience, a police inspector (Paul Giamatti) steps onto the stage and arrests the illusionist, nearly instigating a riot in the process. He returns to his boss, the "progressive" but despotic prince (Rufus Sewell, who I adore from his work in Stoppard's plays, despite rumors that he is not a terribly nice human being), and proceeds to unfold the clunky back story of Eisenheim's humble beginnings and doomed love for the "progressive" but domestically abusive prince's fiancée.

At this point, we are five minutes into the film, and D has already lost patience. Why would they give us these melodramatic flashbacks before we have any reason to care about these characters, he asks me. I don't have a response - I too am quite irritated, but I hold out hope that the film will improve. It doesn't. It is hamfistedly edited and shot, plot-holey, lacking in character development and overly proud of its sole plot gimmick. Although it was only an hour and forty minutes long, and filled with actors we admire (not including the rather uninspiring Jessica Biel, who, poor thing, might be perfectly good in other things for all I know) we found ourselves constantly checking our watches and attempting to will time into greater fleet-footedness.

The Prestige, I assured D, who hadn't seen it, was infinitely better, although it too relied too strongly on the loopiness of its plot to ever be called brilliant. It had a greater sense, I think, of how to navigate our dual desires when seeing magic - the wish for it to be true (and thus affirm another layer of existence that will lend meaning to the material world) and the need to underscore the legitimacy of logic by believing it to be an elaborate, clever trick (thus asserting our ability to control and contain the world we perceive through our senses).

There was one aspect of The Illusionist which lent it greater depth, and which, although it was largely unsuccessful, is still worth highlighting: the way in which the film asks us to contemplate the connections between magic, illusion and film. Even if the hero's name weren't so insistently like cinematic innovator Sergei Eisenstein's that I mistype it every single time, this strategy would quickly become obvious through the film's playful use of the dwindling-circle transitions known as iris wipes and other editing strategies that self-consciously evoke early film (although certainly not films of this historical period, no matter how nebulously defined it is). In case we hadn't caught on to the subtlety of this strategy (which is known for drawing attention to the way film directs the spectator's gaze and controls it, thus preventing the audience from immersing themselves in the naturalism of a narrative, and is thus rather a bludgeoning tactic if mishandled), the film's plot draws the connection for you. While the inspector is attempting to discover how Eisenheim makes his apparitions appear, he questions some film projectionists, who show him a jerky, feeble approximation of how it could be done. He rolls his eyes.

If the intention of The Illusionist is - as the title would imply - to make us ponder the nature of cinematic magic, and consider how we are tricked into sincerity or belief by a medium that its both verisimilar and supernatural in its abilities to make things appear which are not there (to fold and layer time and place), then its downfall comes in the frequent use of contemporary cinematic magic to "realize" Eisenheim's illusions (every time I use that word, I mutter an echo of Arrested Development's failed magician Gob - "Not tricks, Dad - ilLUsions! Tricks are something a whore does for money!"). The CGI and other filmic trickery that is obviously at work makes the magic less interesting, because we as an audience are so far from the (possibly apocryphal) early cinema spectators who screamed when they saw a train coming straight towards them on the screen. Today, if something looks too real, too without flaws and obvious mechanisms, we don't assume that it is supernatural or even real, but rather that it is run-of-the-mill fakery, utterly lacking in mystery or mystique. The Illusionist would have done better to pick a style for its magic (and thus for its narrative as a whole) - glitzy contemporary trickery, or scratchily archaic mechanics - and to examine what that style's relationship is to a contemporary audience's process of belief.

The Illusionist (2006)
dir. Neil Burger
**1/2

• You can find The Illusionist at Amazon, Netflix, and most stores that rent or sell DVDs. But, really, why not get The Prestige instead?
  
• Wikipedia has a page on the film, with a complete plot summary.
• This would be, coincidentally, a very easy film to do a "connect the dots" or rather "connect the phallic symbols" type reading with: the heroine is always about to be dragged back to some sinister looming tower to be locked up, and a sword plays a crucial role in the central mystery, a role which has parallels in the amorous plotline. I'm just sayin'.
  

Furthermore...

As you have probably guessed, I am a sucker for all things meta. At Greencine, they have an intriguing article that feeds my meta addiction (as opposed to a metaddiction, which would be what - an addiction to addictions? an addiction to talking about addiction? I might have a metaddiction too.). It discusses the nature of representations of authors and the writing process on/in film - how does one make gripping drama out one of the most introspective, solitary and contemplative of processes?

~~~~

Jackie Manuel, one of my favorite Carolina basketball players of yore, and co-captain of the 2005 Championship team, has been signed by the Celtics. Hurrah! Break out the "Jackie Manuel has a Posse" tee-shirts! (You think that D and I don't own one? Pshaw!)

~~~~

Today's poem is "There is no time, she writes" by D. Nurkse, from the August 6, 2007 New Yorker. The fascinating thing about it, for me at least, with my meta addiction, is its attempt to allow the speaker of the poem to occupy the place of both reader and author/recounter. In other words, the poem's primary speaker is in fact just reporting on a missive written by another:

writing this, I pressed so hard
she says, the words are embedded
in the grain of the desk
and it is dark but I sense you
listening, trying to frame an answer
there where the dark turns inward
and a small bell chimes
in the stupefying heat. (30)

We get only traces of our primary speaker, and of his/her relationship to the writer of the missive (the secondary, but much more "present" speaker, whose voice dominates the poem, but who is separated from us by an extra degree of writing/reading): a "she writes" here, a "she says" there. We are left to triangulate the tension of the poem between these traces and the missive-writer's speculation on how her writing will be received ("I sense you / listening, trying to frame an answer"). Is she addressing us, or the cryptic speaker?

~~~~

It is a quiet weekend for me and D, who has acquired a mysterious shoulder injury that limits his movement quite severely. So perhaps today will be a day of reading and DVD watching. We are on the third disc of The Shield's second season, and despite the delightful decision to give us a prequel to the pilot episode (thus resurrecting at least three dead characters, ever so briefly), the execution continues to be somewhat hollow and shoddy (for instance, the prequel episode implies that characters who seemed to be new to the precinct and naive as new lambs in the show's pilot had actually been around for several months, witnessing the corruption and violence. Hmm.)

I am still moving through Robinson Crusoe and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, but the font of the latter is so minute for night-time reading that I decided to pick up Noisy Outlaws, Unfriendly Blobs... from McSweeney's, which has proved to be light and witty - the perfect insomniac pastime.

In other news...

Wacky Robinson Crusoe hypocrisy of the day (from chapter four, detailing the days just after the shipwreck):

I have been now thirteen days on shore, and had been eleven times on board the ship [....] But preparing the twelfth time to go on board, I found the wind begin to rise. However, at low water I went on board, and though I thought I had rummaged the cabin so effectually as that nothing more could be found, yet I discovered a locker with drawers in it, in one of which I found two or three razors, and one pair of large scissors, with some ten or a dozen of good knives and forks; in another, I found some thirty–six pounds value in money, some European coin, some Brazil, some pieces of eight, some gold, some silver.

I smiled to myself at the sight of this money. “O drug!” said I aloud, “what art thou good for? Thou art not worth to me, no, not the taking off of the ground; one of those knives is worth all this heap. I have no manner of use for thee; even remain where thou art, and go to the bottom as a creature whose life is not worth saving.” However, upon second thoughts, I took it away[....]

~~~~

Today's poem ("Liar" by Alison Luterman) is the last from the happily poem-heavy June 2007 issue of The Sun. It begins:

I'm a liar,
he offered on our first date,
as we trudged hand in hand
through sliding sand on Alameda Beach.
Naked toddlers squatted
over half-dug holes,
wielding plastic shovels.
Teenagers played frisbee
and wrote their true loves' names
in wet sepia with a stick.
Easily done, easily erased. (29)

and ends with the deeply disturbing image of "his eager, silky penis / which, in its own way, was always honest." "Eager" and "silky" conjure up nothing so much as a fabulously inbred toy dog at the Westminster Kennel Club Show.

Isn't it odd that so many of the poems I have read so far in my daily poetry project have featured the poet/speaker on a beach or looking out of a body of water? Ah, Matthew Arnold, will your image-tyranny never abate? Luterman's poem, about the refusal to believe a liar's one statement of truth (that he is a liar), seems a direct response to the cry for intimate fidelity of "Dover Beach":

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

~~~~

So, as you have probably gathered, I am still plowing my way through Robinson Crusoe, and make a slow start on One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (unsettling racist stereotypes abound in both, but in the Ken Kesey novel they seem to be part of a larger satirical strategy of extreme representation, if that makes it any better - and it might not). My two ARCs, one from a very kind fellow blogger and one from the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program, persist in NOT ARRIVING, despite the fact that I spend every day crouched by the window, looking mournfully at the path down which the postal worker does not come. Sigh. The torments of the book-expecter.

I am also becoming a bit alarmed by the state of fullness to which I have brought D's TiVo. It is one thing to fill up your own (two) household TiVos to the point of explosion and/or hard-drive failure, and quite another to fatten up someone else's until it begins deleting old programs. I may have to address some of the movies I have been recording. But how can I do that when the remaining three hours of The Ten Commandments are glaring at me with a Biblical scowl??

A little touch of Harry in the night

[This is, among other things, a series of reflections - both review and analysis- on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. It will certainly contain spoilers for those who have not read the series, and may contain spoilers for those who have not yet finished the final installment. Be forewarned!]

The poor condemned English,
Like sacrifices, by their watchful fires
Sit patiently and inly ruminate
The morning's danger; and their gesture sad
Investing lank-lean cheeks and war-worn coats
Presenteth them unto the gazing moon
So many horrid ghosts. O, now, who will behold
The royal captain of this ruin'd band
Walking from watch to watch, from tent to tent,
Let him cry 'Praise and glory on his head!'
For forth he goes and visits all his host;
Bids them good morrow with a modest smile,
And calls them brothers, friends, and countrymen.
Upon his royal face there is no note
How dread an army hath enrounded him;
Nor doth he dedicate one jot of colour
Unto the weary and all-watched night;
But freshly looks, and over-bears attaint
With cheerful semblance and sweet majesty;
That every wretch, pining and pale before,
Beholding him, plucks comfort from his looks;
A largess universal, like the sun,
His liberal eye doth give to every one,
Thawing cold fear, that mean and gentle all
Behold, as may unworthiness define,
A little touch of Harry in the night. (Henry V Act IV Prologue)

The ubiquitous all-American hero, or hero-as-America, often seems to crop up as "Jack," a name that embodies a lot of the qualities at the heart of our national self-image - straightforward, uninflected (in the American context) by class connotations, informal, unpretentious, but strong. Think of two of the most contemporary examples - Jack Bauer and Jack Shephard (the latter of whom is, like the nation he symbolizes, the offspring of a flawed but puritanically named forefather, Christian Shephard) - men of the law but above the law, who must unify those around them in times of crisis while remaining (often disastrously) heroically independent of any attempt to control or correct them. Of course, the two Jacks currently symbolizing America all over the airwaves are not alone: Tom Clancy's hero is a Jack, as are the leads in Titanic, Speed and Brokeback Mountain. It is revealing to see, in Wikipedia's list of fictional Jacks from television, the difference between the American list and the British one.

If America fictionalizes itself as the unifying but iconoclastic, strong and class-defying Jack, Britain's symbolic personification is caught between two poles of Harrydom - Shakespeare's Henry V and J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter. One thing which strikes me about the two Harrys, apart from their similarity tales of development into responsibility (more on this in a minute), is the common ground they share with their fictional/colonial descendents, the Jacks. They too occupy a liminal ground between formality (kingliness, in the Harrys' cases) and colloquial comfort, authority and popularity, enforcing the law and proving the law's exception.

I finished the last of the Harry Potter books over the weekend, and, looking back over the whole trajectory of the series, I thought I would use this idea of the two Harrys, and of symbolic Britishness, as a way to structure my reflections on the series and its culminating volume. Because, of course, as David Louis Edelman argues in his review of Deathly Hallows, the archetypal familiarity of Harry Potter is its intent, not its greatest flaw: "I’ve heard a lot of people complain that the Harry Potter novels are “too derivative.” To which I say, Yes! J.K. Rowling is derivative! And that’s the entire point. One of the things that makes these books so terrific is the fact that the author is very consciously following traditional patterns." The Harry Potter series is archetypally heroic, tapping into a transnational tradition of coming-of-age stories and epic achievements, but it is also distinctively Anglo-Saxon in its tradition, and, even more specifically, distinctively British.

The speech from Henry V that I quote above is from the "Deathly Hallows" moment of Shakespeare's Henriad. The young king, Henry, has spent the last few plays being beloved of the people, but distrusted by his father, who casts a suspicious eye on his debauched cavorting with the expansive Sir John Falstaff (another Jack - "sweet Jack Falstaff, kind Jack Falstaff, true Jack Falstaff, valiant Jack Falstaff, and therefore more valiant, being, as he is, old Jack Falstaff, banish not him thy Harry's company, banish not him thy Harry's company: banish plump Jack, and banish all the world!" - 1 Henry IV, II, iv. Apparently Jack can symbolize the world, and worldliness, as well as just America.). He has had to prove himself worthy of the kingship and of his father's love, and he does so (in a somewhat un-Potterish manner) by casting off his old life and friendships (he claims to have surrounded himself with scandal so that his later, regal behavior will shine more brightly) and setting his cap at earning military glory. In Henry V he is finally king, has gone to war on very slender grounds in France, and, with his troops, is surrounded by a vastly superior (at least in size) French army at Agincourt. The next day they will fight one of the most famous battles in British literature and history, after what I think I can accurately call the most famous pre-battle exhortation in our language - the St. Crispin's Day Speech:

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

For he today that sheds his blood with me

Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,

This day shall gentle his condition:

And gentlemen in England now abed

Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,

And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks

That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day. (IV.iii)

But this night, the night before the great battle, these fraternal bonds have not been made and the community of Britishness has not yet been cemented with hope or victory. So Henry, curious to see how the common soldier views him (not positively, it turns out) and to buoy morale, wanders the camp in disguise, giving his comrades "a little touch of Harry in the night."

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows opens at just such a moment: Harry, Ron and Hermione have left Hogwarts amidst the reemergence of Voldermort and his Death Eaters and the widespread corruption of both the media and the Ministry of Magic. Having come to adulthood, they are free of both the control and the stabilizing advice of their parents (I want to know more about Hermione's family life, by the way, which is by far the most intriguing and most cryptic of the three friends' back-stories), and they spend much of the novel, like the new Henry V before Agincourt, lurking about beneath invisibility cloaks, trying to understand the lay of the land, how they are perceived, who they can trust, and what their role is in history. Like Prince Hal/Harry/Henry V, Harry Potter's is a tale of development into leadership, and though Shakespeare's Hal takes a much more contrived, even sinister approach to forming his leaderly persona than Harry Potter does, both must contend with their reputation and the problem of forming a community of fighters in the face of widespread, gossipy mistrust. We know, even as we begin the novel, that it will end in a battle of Agincourt's proportions, a battle which will be a badge of honor and belonging. To have fought with Harry Potter on that day marks you as one of the Chosen.

I share many of the minor complaints that have already been voiced time and time again by reviewers of this last book and the series. The epilogue is both unnecessary and condescending; it displays a lack of trust in the imaginary abilities of the readers and a baffling unconsciousness of how reading works (the reader is engaged by filling in the gaps left by the text). There is an exploitative use of minor characters who are only given enough time in the book (and on this earth) to fulfill their narrative role, and then often die flippant or hollowly heroic deaths. The fact that this often happens to animals and racially and class-coded characters (like house elves, for instance - the oppressed) is even more uncomfortable. Often Rowling's characters speak not so much like teenagers as like a middle-aged woman ventriloquizing youthful diction, trying to sound hip (as in the queasy ending to Harry's otherwise intriguing encounter with his cousin Dudley).

Unlike many other reviewers, I didn't find the long, "dormant" or "liminal" first section of the novel tiresome, perhaps because I was reading it as a less calculating version of Henry V's development into leadership. There has to be a period of distrust and widespread misunderstanding, of attempting to go it alone, before community (the crucial aspect of leadership) can be established.

I will admit, that when the battle of Agicourt, er, Hogwarts began, I was on the edge of my seat, particularly delighted by the cinematic detail of the portrait subjects rushing from frame to frame in great crowds, babbling to each other about events in various parts of the school/battlefield. At that moment, I wished aloud for the last movie to have a director with a profound respect for the detail and nuance of his fictional world - a Terry Gilliam or a Peter Jackson. This is where the last film went wrong in its second half: in the rush to get through large plot points, the intricacy of character and place was lost, and this narrative is nothing without its intricacy of detail.

Oddly, I found the end of the book, from the point in which Harry finally takes on the mantle of authority and sloughs off the anxiety and doubt that have been his hallmarks for so many years, hazy and rather sluggish. I kept wishing that "the camera" (the whole novel has a very cinematic feel) would take us to some other point of view, in more lively and quip-filled part of the castle. Which is undoubtedly what many wished during Harry and Hermione's long separation from society. At the same time, I rather admire Rowling's bold choice to limit the narrative so strictly to Harry's point of view, even when he self-consciously removes himself from the heart of the action for much of the novel. This is, in fact, the most successful means of encouraging our identification with her hero's claustrophobic state of mind, and may explain why I had so much trouble letting go of the doubts and anxieties, the fascinating flaws, when Harry takes on his most heroic, adult, or authoritative role.

But what I found most interesting about this final book, and about the series as a whole, was its distinctive Britishness. What has made Harry so iconic, I kept asking myself, so much a successor to Shakespeare's Prince Hal? In part it is the fact that he is simply average yet quite extraordinary; in other words, his success is not a result of his excellence of skill, intelligence, or social grace. His success is merely the product of his success; he was born with it and needs only to grow into his aristocratic inheritance.

But another thing struck me repeatedly throughout the series - why don't the wizarding communities of other nations (America, say, or India, Japan, Turkey, etc.) care at all that Armageddon is happening in the UK? We get the vaguest mention of Fleur and Viktor Krum here, but their countrymen and -women don't seem terribly eager to join in the fight against evil, despite Voldemort's repeated incursions into their lands. There is a profound (and, I think, distinctly and archetypally British) insularity to this world, an isolation from all bureaucratic, governmental and international systems that could give aid to Harry and his friends. For all the lip service given to not condescending to Muggles in this volume of the series, the Muggles are both ignorant and helpless in the face of Death Eater terrorism. [This is perhaps connected to the fact that the novel takes place just before 9/11 and 7/7, and then (thanks to the epilogue) more than a decade after them. I am uncomfortable with the implication (which I couldn't quite get my head around) that Voldemort was defeated, and then evil and pain were gone from the world and the wizards didn't really worry about the fact that their Muggle contemporaries were dying in the streets and going off to war.] You know what would have been great to see? Muggles and wizards fighting together against Voldemort, each with their own skills. The PM working with those who were uncorrupted in the Ministry of Magic to unify the people of Britain. (Have you noticed, by the way, that wizardly Britain is MUCH less a culture of surveillance than the real-world UK? Characters are always sneaking about, accomplishing trickery that would ALWAYS have been caught on camera in the Muggle World.)

But that wouldn't be totally in keeping with what the novel is really about: isolation and learning to trust your friends, even to the point of allowing them to risk themselves for you. Harry is repeatedly betrayed by the institutions that are meant to support him throughout the series. He is slandered by the government, maligned by friends at school (even the social group meant to promote bonding - his fellow Gryffindors), abused by teachers (and often not saved by other, helpless teachers who know of the abuse), attacked by the press, deprived of familial protection/advice, and consistently denied the full story about his life and responsibilities. It is, in many ways, a residue of the Blitz mentality in all its power and defensiveness: first Harry must learn how to be alone, how not to look outside himself for help, and then he must learn to let go of some control, to trust in friendship, the (only) social bond of belonging that will create a community capable of enduring and even defeating evil. This is not a unification of the whole country, or certainly the whole world - rather, it is the triumph of we few, we happy few, we band of brothers.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2007)
J.K. Rowling
***1/2

• You can find Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7) at both Amazon (the link above takes you there) and Powells, as well as at most libraries and independent bookstores (especially if you are willing to get at the back of a very long queue for a library copy!). I just figured out how to become a partner at Powells, and am excited to be able to include an alternate link to Amazon's!
  
• The internet is filled with reviews of this novel, so I will leave it to you to find your favorites, but here is Wikipedia's entry.
• I wanted to mention, by way of postscript, that this is by far the most cleverly titled of any of the Harry Potter books. The Deathly Hallows manage to represent, all at once, the fear of death (often mistaken for Death itself) with which all heroes must (archetypally) battle and overcome, and the unrecognized power of children's stories to contain and transmit great truths (as well as values, both sinister and enlightening) through the ages. I would also like to praise Rowling effusively for including a quotation from The Libation Bearers as the epigraph to the novel. Snakes, and parent issues, and fleeing the past, oh my!
• LibraryThing is holding a Harry Potter review contest which will reward both 1) the highest rated reviews and 2) members who participate in both sides of the reviewing/rating system (by posting a review and rating others' reviews). So go to the Deathly Hallows page before Monday, August 6, when the contest ends, post your reviews, and vote for your favorites! [You have to be a member to participate, I believe, but membership is free, so don't hold back!] My review (plug plug plug) can be found here.
  

Furthermore...

And there was a great rejoicing, because Philip Pullman is writing another book in the world of "His Dark Materials"! The trilogy, made up of The Golden Compass (Northern Lights, to British readers), The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass, is possibly my favorite set of young adult books ever written (although I might have experienced existential despair if I had read them in the throes of my early teens) and certainly high up on the list of my favorite fantasy and alternative history novels.

~~~~

The idea of The Full Monteverdi (a film, and previously a stage performance, that sets Monteverdi's Fourth Book of Madrigals in a coffee shop, sprinkling actors amidst singers and - in the original - spectators in a quintessentially contemporary environment) is so strange and lovely that I just had to share the YouTube trailer:



Moreover describes the production in greater detail.

~~~~

The most thought-provoking thing I read today, from an interview in the June 2007 issue of The Sun with Sister Joan Chittister, feminist and member of the Benedictine order (I give rather a rather long excerpt to underscore the unhistrionic complexity of her stance on this fraught issue):

I am opposed to abortion as a birth-control method. At the same time, I ask myself how it is that the Catholic Church can hold that all abortions are equally, gravely sinful at all times, but that death may be inflicted in other circumstances without always being equally, gravely sinful. The Church teaches you that you may kill to punish, to defend yourself, or to defend the state, and you are not committing a sin. In areas where men are most often in charge of life - as they are in the justice system or the military - they may kill by the thousands, and the Church won't say a word about it. But when a woman is in charge of that decision, as she is when it comes to abortion, the Church pronounces that it is always, under all circumstances, gravely immoral and deeply sinful. My question is: why aren't we equally committed to life once it is born?
[...]
I am not impressed by people who say they are pro-life but who don't want to pay taxes to provide housing and food and education and healthcare for those who need them. That's not pro-life; it's pro-birth. (10)

~~~~

Today's poem was (again) from the June 2007 issue of The Sun. It is the pithy, aphoristic "Eight Love Songs" by Sparrow, and for once I will let this excerpt speak for itself:

LOVE
Love
is the
first
word
we don't
say to
everyone.

A PHRASE ONE NEVER HEARS
"My lover and I are doing our taxes." (23)

~~~~

Well, great Netflix progress was made today, when I forced myself to watch Bresson's A Man Escaped early enough in the morning to pop it into the mailbox before the noon pickup. Triumph! And the film proved not nearly as portentous as I had feared. What's more, I finished the first book of August this evening, David Mitchell's Black Swan Green. At first I found its hedging about reality and imagination quite baffling, but in the last hundred pages it won me over with its careful wackiness and unpretentious literary complexity.

Meanwhile, I slog away at Robinson Crusoe (nearly 1/5 of the way through it - huzzah!) , which is proving to be one of the most casually brutal books I have ever read. It is actually quite appalling. Perhaps it will be less racist and dehumanizing as it goes on? Or perhaps the massive selfishness of Crusoe is the point here. Yeah, ok - that is the bobbing wreckage of an argument I am going to use to keep me afloat for the rest of this reading experience, although I have no confidence in it floating me anywhere safe.

A Man Escaped / Un condamné à mort s'est échappé (1956)

You may recall that I have been avoiding Robert Bresson's purportedly minimalist film, A Man Escaped, for the better part of two weeks, despite the piles of Netflix guilt that has this neglect has accrued (I admit quite boldly to being a Netfix compulsive, who feels excruciating guilt for every day that goes by without returning an envelope). I suppose I feared that it would be coma-inducingly slow, somehow dragging out its hour and a half of narrative out for much longer than all three and a half hours of the spectacularly bad Ten Commandments (which I haven't been able to make it more than 45 minutes into so far).

I am happy to say that it was not nearly as somnolent or eventless as I feared. Not to say it was a rollicking action-fest - every bit of action, in fact, is clearly emblematic of spiritual struggle - but neither could the film be described as truly pensive, in my opinion. It is non-stop spiritual tussling from beginning to end.

I would like to give a more dignified summary of the film's concerns and narrative than that, but first I have to ask myself whether it is possible to spoil a minimalist film. I think the answer is, as for every other type of art, yes and no. It is obviously about more than its plot, but there is considerable value in having a "virgin experience" of the unfolding of the narrative. So if that appeals, beware of the rest of my short review.

A Man Escaped is based on the true story of André Devigny, who escaped from a Nazi prison in France, and on the director's own experience in a POW camp during WWII. In it, the prisoner Fontaine is accused of terrorism, but while he waits for his turn with the firing squad, he hatches intricate plans to break out, cannibalizing every part of his minimalist environment to form a basic, but effective, engine of escape. Naturally, since this is Bresson, the director also cannibalizes the material of the true story for the makings of a spiritual metaphor, and Fontaine befriends a priest in the prison who nudges him to confront issues of free will, destiny, and the extent to which God can be left to save the apathetic or inertly faithful.

Despite the urging of this man of faith, who is eager for him to "break free" of his bondage, and the painstaking readiness of all his preparations, Fontaine displays a remarkable (but understandable) reluctance to take the final step of actually initiating his escape. After much procrastination, and the deaths of several friends, he is called in by the Nazi administrators and told of his death sentence. That very day, another prisoner appears in his cell: a young boy with a Franco-German name and the uniform of a collaborator. Fontaine is forced to decide not only whether he can trust this suspicious newcomer (think Kiss of the Spiderwoman), but whether he will take the boy along or kill him.

There are a number of spiritual issues at work here, and although I have always found narratives and allegories of religious and psychic struggle somewhat tiresome (I'm not one for Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, I have to admit), one central, fascinating question did emerge from my viewing of Bresson's masterpiece: does knowledge in fact deprive you of choice? [Once Fontaine's young cellmate knows about the planned escape, for instance, neither of them has a choice any longer: Fontaine MUST go through with it, and the boy MUST come along.] In other words, is the choice to acquire or give knowledge our first and last decision? This question certainly has an interesting relationship to Genesis and Judeo-Christian mythic narrative of the Fall. But the answer, as nearly as I can get at it, is "not entirely": knowledge narrows the path, but it does not foreclose the capacity to betray, and it is the capacity to betray that makes trust both possible and miraculous.

I have a few questions about the title of the film. First, why is it in the past tense? Is this meant to privilege the historical fact of the events (their past-ness) over the immediacy of our experience of the film or the universality of religious symbolism (their presence)? If so - very odd. Also, why is the man singular? Surely it is fairly vital to the complexity and power of the film that his escape must involve trust, persuasion, and cooperation. And that, in fact, it accomplish more than just his own salvation. It is also worthy noting, while discussing the title, that the French version included an explicitly religious subtitle - Le vent souffle où il veut - that speaks directly to the central issue of choice and volonté.

A Man Escaped / Un condamné à mort s'est échappé or Le vent souffle où il veut (1956)
dir. Robert Bresson
****

• You can find A Man Escapedon Amazon, Netflix, or at most stores that sell or rent foreign language DVDs.
• Wikipedia has a short page on the film, and a longer one on Robert Bresson.
• I am intrigued by this assertion from the Bresson page:

  Bresson's early artistic focus was to separate the language of cinema from the theatre, which often heavily involves the actor's performance to drive the work. With his 'actor-model' technique, Bresson's actors were required to repeat multiple takes of each scene until all semblances of 'performance' were stripped away, leaving a stark effect that registers as both subtle and raw, and one that can only be found in the cinema..

  Surely live repetition (in rehearsal as well as performance) as a means of smoothing away artificiality has a longer theatrical tradition than a cinematic one? It seems myopically antitheatrical to equate stage performance with artifice. Any Bresson experts want to weigh in on how accurate a representation of his philosophy and process this is?
  
• Information on the cast and crew of the film can be found at IMDB, and Rotten Tomatoes provides a summary of the film's critical reception.
• In his review, Kevin Hagopian focuses on Bresson's lauded use of sound in the film, arguing that in many ways it is a film "about sound." Sadly, my rather muffled television speakers didn't communicate the brilliance of the sound work (although the effectiveness of Bresson's use of Mozart was more than evident). That revelation will have to wait for another viewing.
• Hagopian also notes one of the most fascinating aspects of the movie's process - it was filmed on location in the very prison that Devigny had escaped from, a prison that (in what is something between a respect for evidence and a curious act of relic-making) kept the ropes and hooks with which he escaped, and was able to provide them to Bresson's prop-makers as models to be copied exactly.
  
• Bosley Crowther's original review for The New York Times can be found here. Although it is filled with praise for director and actors, he warns: "This is not the sort of picture that one should view without knowing what it is."
• Last but certainly not least, in François Truffaut's reflections on the film, he agrees with me about its unsedate pacing (great minds, eh?), and makes fantastic observations on the anti- (or at least un-)theatricality of the editing, the lack of viewerly sympathy for Fontaine, the almost classical unity of the piece, and our less-than-limited omniscience about the world with which our protagonist engages.
  

July Goals - A Clear-Eyed Assessment

Well, this month was moderately more successful, reading-wise, than travel-mad June, but I still see room for improvement. Which is why, of course, I have EVEN MORE books on my August "To Read" list, including a few lightweights like Ulysses.

The list below was my July "To Read" list. Capitalized works are ones I completed, links are to reviews.

• New York Times Notable Books Challenge
• Black Swan Green by David Mitchell - I am about two thirds of the way through this at the moment.
  
• Gate of the Sun by Elias Khoury
• Year of Down Under
  
• ALICE SPRINGS BY NIKKI GEMMELL
  
• The Cardboard Crown by Martin Boyd
  
• 52 Plays/52 Weeks Challenge
• Let's be serious, now: at least 10 plays this month. [I accomplished FOUR. Sigh. But at least that was the one a week the challenge originally exhorted me to!]
  
• Non-fiction Five Challenge
• WATCHING THE ENGLISH BY KATE FOX
  
• In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
• Chunkster Challenge (FINISHED! Only one month late. Ah, well!)
  
• Watching the English (see above)
  
• DAVID COPPERFIELD BY CHARLES DICKENS
  
• Book Groups
• THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER BY CARSON McCULLERS (Classic Lit)
• The Vision of Emma Blau by Ursula Hegi (21st C Fiction)
• The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami (Beyond Reality)
• Hard-boiled Wonderland by Haruki Murakami (Beyond Reality)
• The Bone People by Keri Hulme (Book Awards)
• Black Swan Green (see above) (Booker Prize)
• SLEEPLESS NIGHTS BY ELIZABETH HARDWICK (Slaves of Golconda)
• David Copperfield (see above) (Inimitable Boz)
  
• Preparing for teaching next year
• The Iliad by Homer
• As much Euripides as I can fit into my 52 plays project. [One play - ALCESTIS]
  
• Unaffiliated Reading
• THE FARTHEST SHORE BY URSULA K. LE GUIN
  
• TEHANU BY URSULA K. LE GUIN
• THE BOOKMAN'S WAKE BY JOHN DUNNING
  
• Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy (which has been sitting on my "currently reading" list for far, far too long)
• One unplanned book, which should have appeared on my August Reading Goals list, but would not stop opening my eyes, jumping into my hands, and creeping into my brain:
• HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS BY J.K. ROWLING

So, all in all, this is what we come up with:

• 13 books total, of which 4 were plays, 1 was a mystery/thriller, 3 were fantasy, and 1 was nonfiction
• 3 authors who were completely new to me.
• A sad failure to address my book groups (sniff!) and my increasingly neglected challenges. Things have got to change.
• Nonetheless, a significant improvement on last month's 5 books read. FIVE!?!? And, need I mention the fact that quite a few of this months reads were chunksters?
  

In other news...

The Washington Post has an intricate examination of the five second rule of eating dropped food. Apparently Clemson has done a (truly groundbreaking) study revealed that food can acquire bacteria from the floor in less than five seconds. But, the article argues, this rule is more about desire than about reality.

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Those of you who know me in the extra-bloggery world know that, in defiance of the facts that I am in my late twenties, have lived a significant period of my life in the south, and spent quite a bit of time in Los Angeles in recent years, I am a non-driver. I am not in possession of a driver's license, although I did, for a terrifying time, have a learner's permit. If I were in some kind of serial-killer-chasing-me-have-to-escape-in-this-car-right-now type situation, I could drive - I have the ability to operate a motor vehicle, either standard (although it has been a while) or automatic - but in every other life situation I do not, for reasons having to do with profound anxiety, lack of extreme need, persistent pennilessness, and, um, environmentalism (this last is severely undermined by how frequently I fly. Which may, come to think of it, have something to do with how penniless I am). So, with the much appreciated help of very indulgent friends who take me to the grocery store and airport from time to time, I have become increasingly savvy about how to get through life in a profound state of carlessness. In fact, from time to time, when visiting D or family, I realize that I haven't actually been in a car in months, a realization that is mostly triggered, I am sad to say, by extreme motion sickness.

This long preamble is meant to introduce a quite fascinating (especially if they move forward on some of their promised innovations) website called Walk Score, which will assess your neighborhood for its walkability. Unfortunately, they define walkability by proximity to various facilities (stores, restaurants, schools, parks, etc.) rather than by safety, prevalence of pedestrian usage, size of streets and other (harder to fit into an algorithm) factors. This might be why our LA neighborhood scored in the very reputable high 70s, despite being right in the middle of one of the world's most unwalkable cities. Nonetheless, I have been waiting for the web to pay more attention to pedestrians for many years (when will there be a website along the lines of Google Maps or Mapquest that tells you how long it would take a sedately paced person to WALK from one point to another instead of driving???), so I am delighted to get a hold of Walk Score.

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I have mentioned before how fascinating I find the examination of the relationship between reading's public and private aspects in the Dogeared Project. An endeavor called Book Inscriptions provides a different approach to the same issue, providing photographs of notes and missives written inside books that have later wandered free of their original owners. The inscriptions are enthralling, and I felt a curious sense of intrusion reading them, as if I was trespassing into someone's private correspondence. At the same time, I am aware that books are artifacts that roam more freely and publicly than any private papers ever could/should - they survive their original owners and (unfaithful things) go on to form new relationships quite heartlessly.

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My favorite thing I've read today, from an interview with Simon Van Booy at Estella's Revenge:

I was robbed in Athens at gunpoint. It was midnight and I took a different path from my usual route, through a park. They held a gun to me and patted me down, stripped me of everything they considered valuable. I don’t know if the gun had bullets, but the man who took my wallet came back. After the man who held the gun on me left, he came back and gave me the picture of my girlfriend from my wallet.

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There have other daily experiences of verse since I last wrote, but let me give you instead the beginning of today's poem, "I Choke on Mortality and Wish for Something Less Orange" by Maggie Rowe (from the June 2007 issue of The Sun):

A week before reading of the sad incident in the paper
I have a dream in which I pick orange day-lily petals from the floor,
try to eat them, and choke. According to my friend Clare
I am already dead, unable to swallow the fact of the brevity of life: yes.

In the park my dog and I examine a butterfly as blue
as human milk, rows of jet points pricking
out the edges of its wings. My dog twitches forward
and swallows it. [...]

Wonderful (and frought) relationship to color this poem has, most pointedly in the very odd simile involving human milk. For a poem about death, there is a tremendous amount of fecundity floating about (perhaps unsurprisingly). And then, of course, there is the prevalent image of swallowing, choking, accepting knowledge (accepting the world) into your consciousness figured as accepting it into your body.

It is also possible that I have a soft spot for the poem because I once (teenaged) wrote a sonnet involving tiger lilies that I thought (at the time - it is now lost, mercifully) was a piece of intricate brilliance. One of the most charming things about my teenaged years was that I used to while away the hour of physics class writing sonnets. Am I a totally different person now?

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Ugh. So today is devoted to revising a writing sample/article, and I am feeling both efficient and battered (I am about halfway through my task). Since last I wrote I have finished two works of epic scale (David Copperfield and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows). The review I started of the latter has stalled out after several paragraphs in which I somehow managed to talk exclusively about Shakespeare, and barely mention J.K. Rowling's novels. Now I am working and lurking (a surprising effective combination), waiting for the mail to bring the first two ARCs I have ever received (when, oh when, will they arrive??).