Lance Mannion

Thoughtful Marilyn

Marilyn Monroe, Lincoln Steffens, James Baldwin, Carl Sandberg, Abraham Lincoln…No, this is not a game of One of These Things Is Not Like the Other.

One of James Wolcott’s few weaknesses as a writer and blogger is his ability to summarize something he’s read, a book, an essay, a blog post, or something he’s watched, a movie, a TV show, a dance, in such a way that you feel you’ve read it or seen it yourself and don’t need to follow his link.

Yes, of course, I’m being a wiseguy. That’s one of his great strengths.  But you should still follow the links.  For instance, the link to this article in the London Review of Books, A Rumbling of Things Unknown, by Jacqueline Rose.

It’s been fairly widely accepted that Marilyn Monroe was much smarter than her onscreen persona, that in fact her onscreen persona was much smarter than her onscreen persona was taken to be by those who took it at face value.  It’s also well-known---at least I think it is---that Monroe was a voracious reader and something of an aspiring intellectual and that she was both before she met Arthur Miller, who used to be given credit for “educating” her.  But in her essay Rose makes the case that Monroe was better than smart and something more interesting than a would-be intellectual.

She was thoughtful.

And she was studious and not just of books, of life and people.

And one of the subjects she thought hardest about and studied most intently was the affinity between her personal unhappiness and the unhappiness of most people. 

Wolcott gets to the heart of the matter:

It's as if Monroe instinctively, empathetically practiced the liberalism that husband Arthur Miller grandly professed. It isn't that Miller didn't practice what he preached when it came to liberalism, but that everything with him seemed to emanate from his mountain brow; with her, injustice seemed to resound metabolically, her own inner bruising and estrangement.

Rose’s essay is a long-read but worth the time, even after you’ve read Jim’s post.

So why don’t I just send you straight to London Review of Books and skip the middle-Jim?

Because then you’d miss lines like this:

[Rose’s essay] makes a fine antidote to the candy-shop sentimentality of My Week with Marilyn, in which the best performance was given by Michelle Williams' right eye between strategically drooped blonde curls as everyone else fussed about in several coats of Masterpiece Theatre furniture polish.

And that’s all you need to know about that movie.

Links.  Wolcott’s post.  Rose’s essay.

The Gospel of Izaak Walton as laid out in Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

Three eccentrics, a sheik, a scientist, and an investment broker (Amr Waked, Ewan McGregor, and Emily Blunt), plan to bring fly-fishing to the desert in Lasse Hallstrom’s not quite Local Hero-ish comedy, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen.

Our choices for Friday night's feature for Family Movie Night were Fargo and The Hunt for Red October.  The decision depended on whether Oliver Mannion wanted to turn Family Movie Night into homework.

He didn’t.

Sometimes we have themes for Family Movie Night. Couple summers back we watched a string of baseball movies. There was another stretch that was all Cary Grant. Sometimes our choice of features is based on something that came up in a talk around the dinner table. Sometimes it's connected to a family outing. We watched Thirteen Days after visiting the JFK Library. Sometimes it's connected to what the guys are studying in school.  We watched Much Ado About Nothing because Oliver's English class had wrapped up their reading of Othello by watching the movie version starring Lawrence Fishburne and Kenneth Branagh and Oliver was impressed by Branagh’s Iago.  (He liked what Branagh did as Benedick, but Michael Keaton as Dogberry made a mark. He has since memorized one of Dogberry's speeches which he delivers in his best Keaton impression.) That didn’t count as homework though. If we’d ended up watching Hunt for Red October it would have been for an assignment in his history class.  They just finished the Cold War and have to watch a movie set during the period and write about how it compares to or makes use of actual history. They were given a list.  The Hunt for Red October is on it.  So is Red Dawn. Oh well.

Sometimes we'll watch a movie at home to prepare for one we’re going to see in the theater.  This might mean that next week we’ll be watching a triple feature of Thor, Iron Man, and Captain America. For the two Family Movie Nights before this past one, we geared up for Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, which we saw last Sunday, with We Bought a Zoo and then Local Hero.

Judging by the trailer, I thought Salmon Fishing in the Yemen was going to be like them, a quirky character-driven comedy about a community of eccentrics coming together to solve a problem.  I like this type of movie and usually find a way to compare them to Northern Exposure, although really Northern Exposure owes everything to Local Hero and the form precedes Bill Forsyth’s classic. Robert Altman specialized in these kinds of films and, going back, so did Preston Sturges, and if we'd had more lead time I probably would've lobbied for Cookie’s Fortune or The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek or both. It turned out though that Salmon Fishing isn't quite in this vein.

It’s quirky, all right, and full of eccentrics. There's a satirical edge and much of the humor derives from the fact that sometimes even the best people can be motivated by pure selfishness and don't always behave very well.  There are stretches where seemingly nothing is happening to advance the plot but where the point is to just enjoy watching people going about the business of being themselves.  But it's missing something essential to other movies of the ilk.

In these Local Hero-ish, Northern Exposuresque films, the characters are protected by each other’s company.  Even in movies as bleak and cynical as Nashville and The Player, there’s comfort in knowing that people are here to look out for each other. To one degree or another, they all subscribe to what Clarence writes in the flyleaf of the book he leaves under the Christmas tree for George Bailey in the quintessential movie of this type, It’s A Wonderful Life: “Dear George, remember, no man is a failure who has friends.”

There’s no community in Salmon Fishing in Yemen and that makes for a sadness at the heart of the movie, despite the comedy, and a lonely coldness almost as chilly as in Altman’s darkest films.

Instead we have several communities that have either failed to come together or that have come apart.  A marriage that has not become a family or a partnership.  A workplace full of people who don’t work together---it’s a collection of isolates mostly trying to avoid each other and who rub each other the wrong way whenever they are forced to interact.  A couple whose romance is torn apart by war.  And, on a very large scale, a nation that has turned itself over to be governed by a gang of half-witted narcissists whose only competent member is a merry sociopath who sees all problems as PR opportunities or disasters.

Against all this is a dream.

A Yemeni prince dreams of introducing fly-fishing to his country.  Sheikh Muhammad is an Anglophile and an angler-phile. He maintains an estate in Scotland mainly to have brooks and streams to wade into with his rod and reel.  Fly-fishing has brought him so much peace and happiness that he has come to believe in it as a civilizing  force. He's described as a visionary, but what he is is a missionary.

He's not looking to indulge his hobby. He means to share it.  He plans to spread the gospel of fly-fishing as laid out in The Compleat Angler and A River Runs Through It.  Fishing is an act of faith for him, but it’s not a religion in a Christian or Muslim sense. It's like Buddhism, a moral practice, a way to discipline thought and action, to live in the moment without ego or id.

An oil gazillionaire, he has the money to realize his dream. What he needs is the practical expertise. There are all sorts of technical and scientific problems to solve, not least of which is transporting 10,000  cold water-loving Atlantic Salmon to the desert mountains of Yemen.  He hires a London-based investment firm to find him that expertise and they put a young and merry broker named Harriet Chetwolde-Talbot on it.

She sets out to identify the best man for the job, locates him in the Department of Fisheries, Dr Alfred (Fred) Jones, a scientist and fly-tying genius turned bureaucrat, and puts the plan to him. He promptly proves to himself and, he thinks, to her that she's got the right guy by scoffing at the scheme as "plainly ridiculous" and turning her down flat.  We immediately suspect he's rejecting her offer because accepting it would interrupt his routines, drag him out of his office, and force him to confront the fact that there are people living and enjoying lives far more interesting and exciting than the one he's stuck in. Harriet, for one. She irritates him by being an attractive and intelligent woman who takes him seriously and insists on liking him.

As Jones, Ewan McGregor starts off as a humorless fusspot with a shrill and tetchy Scots burr that makes him sound like Maggie Smith as Hogwarts’ Professor McGonagall catching Harry and Ron staggering home from Hogsmeade after one too many butterbeers. He’s prissy, priggish, and prickly, seemingly permanently baffled by other people’s expectation that he care about anything other than fish.

He’s also obviously unhappy and tortured by self-doubt and self-loathing.

His job requires his expertise but it doesn’t engage his talents or his skill. He’s a scientist but he doesn’t do science.  He evaluates the science done by others.  His work keeps him inside and at a desk but if he ever knew this about himself he’s forgotten it: as a fly-fisherman he’s at heart an outdoorsman.  And he’s locked in a dull and loveless marriage.  But since Fred regards himself as a very boring person, he counts himself lucky to have married someone willing to be bored by him.  And he does bore her.  That, however, doesn’t seem to be his wife’s complaint with the marriage.  Her trouble is that from time to time he forgets that he’s boring and expects her to find him interesting or at least to find what he finds interesting interesting, which is mainly fish and fishing.  This is irritating because he interrupts her thinking or her work to talk to her. Worse than that, he sometimes gets interested enough in himself that he attempts to make decisions that serve his purposes and not hers.

Trapped by his own sense that he doesn’t deserve anything better, he’s not just resigned himself to a life without joy or adventure, he’s become addicted to it. 

McGregor’s Dr Alfred Jones reminded me of an even more buttoned-down version of Dr David Huxley, Cary Grant’s buttoned-down paleontologist in Bringing Up Baby.  One of the beauties of Grant’s performance in that movie was that even as David loosens up under the twin influences of Katharine Hepburn’s zaniness and sex appeal and becomes more dynamic and sexy himself, he retains much of his original fussiness and nerdish awkwardness. 

McGregor does something similar here.  The difference is that a pair of glasses and a lab coat can't hide the Cary Grant inside David Huxley waiting to burst forth, but a sweater vest and a bad haircut nebbishize the Obi-wan right out of Fred.

To Fred’s surprise and, initially, to his terror, Harriet sees something in him he didn’t know was there and brings it out in him.  She isn’t at all bored by him.  She finds him immediately interesting.  And she’s impressed by him.  This isn’t something special she does for him.  This is how she is.

As Harriet Emily Blunt has been given the standard Manic Pixie Dream Girl's job of bringing to joyful life a stuffy, repressed, and emotionally deadened male.  I don't know if she's the Hollywood prototype, but Katherine Hepburn's Leopard-taming Susan in Bringing Up Baby is the earliest movie version I know of.  Blunt's Harriet isn't much like Susan, except in being irrepressibly cheerful and optimistic and able to energize the other characters around her, particularly her leading man. But Harriet is a fully fledged grownup, well-grounded, serious-minded, and competent.  She brings out the best in Fred by treating him as what she takes him to be, which turns out to be what he truly is.

She knows he's an expert so she assumes he's good at what he does and everything he does and says confirms her high opinion of him. In trying to explain to her why the project is unworkable, he lists all the technical problems that would have to be solved to make it work, and all she hears is him coming up with ideas on how to solve those problems.  It takes him a while, but faced with her adamant refusal to dismiss him as the boring nerd he takes himself to be, he begins to hear himself as he sounds to her.  He thinks the timid but realistic bureaucrat is making an irrefutable argument for dropping the whole idea, but it's really the case that the eager and adventurous scientist who's been bottled up inside him has been trying to shout the bureaucrat down.

Blunt is one of the most beautiful actresses working today, but her actually off-beat features are just cartoonish enough that she can fool us into thinking she’s just ordinarily pretty.  Harriet is ordinary in a number of ways, but she’s extraordinary in her cheerfulness and that, not her looks, is the source of her beauty.  Harriet enjoys being alive and that means, to her at least, enjoying the company of other people and seeing the best in them.  In this she is not at all naive or vulnerable.  In fact, it’s part of her strength.  And Harriet is strong.  Even when she’s devastated by news of her soldier boyfriend’s death in Afghanistan we know we don’t have to worry about her.  She gives in to her grief the way you give in to the flu.  While it’s hard watching her suffer, we know she has it in her to get better on her own.  She doesn’t need Fred to save her from her sorrow and despair.

He needs her to need him in order to bring him out of himself and make him learn how to treat another human being as a human being and not a technical problem to be solved.

Harriet, then, despite her troubles, is no damsel in distress.  In fairy tale terms, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen is the flip side of a retelling of Snow White or Rapunzel---a Frog Prince or Beauty and the Beast.  Harriet is the heroine who has to rescue the enchanted nerd from himself.

Harriet and Fred are the romantic leads, but Sheik Muhammad is the movie’s hero and as the Sheik Amr Waked gives Salmon Fishing in the Yemen much of its heart and soul.

We’re not told much about the Sheik.  He’s Muslim, obviously, and enough of a traditionalist that he’s unselfconsciously and unapologetically multiply-married. Otherwise he doesn’t appear to be particularly religious.  His political and social positions within Yemen are undefined.  His authority within his own sheikdom appears to be challengeable, but maybe that’s him.  In his dealings with people at home, women as well as men, he comes across as a natural democrat.  He’s a prince, that’s all we need to know, and asking after the particulars is like asking the prince in any fairy tale where he stands on the issues of troll emancipation and the export of magic potions.

As a hero-prince, the Sheik’s job is to save the day and Waked makes it feel as if the day is saved every time he enters the frame.  He makes the Sheik everything a hero-prince ought to be, intelligent, kindly, compassionate, protective, modest, full of self-effacing good humor, but aware of his strength and not afraid of it, courageous, and quietly but effectively determined to do good. Oh, and handsome, charming, and sexy.

Waked hasn’t been given all the best lines but he makes every line he’s been given sound like the best, infusing his dialog with mild authority and wit.

Among the supporting cast of eccentrics, the most appealing and entertainingly although dangerously eccentric is played by Kristin Scott Thomas.

As Patricia Maxell, the British government’s public relations czarina, who convinces the prime minister to support the salmon fishing project as a way to distract the media from a recent military disaster in Afghanistan, Thomas is, as long as I’m using fairy tales to make points, like a demented fairy godmother with her own agenda granting all the wrong wishes.  She charges through the film at full throttle, tossing off killer lines like a cocky carrier delivering newspapers, confident they're  landing smack on the doorstep but too intent on getting to the next house to look back to check.

It’s a rollicking, hilarious performance and it’s fun to watch Thomas, a romantic leading lady all her career, freed by a few touches of age to become a a comic character actress. It’s as if Eve Arden had started out as Loretta Young.

At work, Patricia’s single-minded devotion to her job has made her something of a sociopath for whom other people are valuable only to the degree they can be used to tell the “story” she wants the press to swallow.  That goes as well for the prime minister whom she appears to think works for her.  At home, she is a loving and self-denying, if often distracted, wife and mother.  Patricia has solved the problem of a careerist with a family by neatly and cleanly bifurcating her life and her personality.  There’s a great scene in which she’s on the phone, simultaneously solving problems for work and for her kids, with both sides of herself functioning at top speed and competence, while neither side cares what the other is doing, if either side notices the other at all.

What both sides have in common is they are tough and good at what they do and they get done what needs to be done. That's good for her family. Questionable for Great Britain since what needs to be done from her point of view isn't policy but PR.

This makes Patricia representative of the one threat to the project Fred didn’t foresee and doesn’t have the expertise to solve and the threat to the Sheik’s dream of building a community that for all his money and his charisma he’s not strong enough to resist.  Politics.

Politicians, director Lasse Hallstrom seems to be saying, whether of the liberal, progressive type (Patricia and her gang seem to be Tories or Liberal Dems but liberal and progressive are relative terms), who regard communities as resources to be exploited for votes, or of the authoritarian, totalitarian and reactionary type represented here by Islamic fundamentalists, who prefer tribes to communities because tribes answer to chieftains and their pet shamans while the members of a community answer to each other, are the natural enemies of community.

Since I mentioned it:  My review of We Bought a Zoo, Liking the animals, loving the humans.

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, directed by Lasse Hallstrom, screenplay by Simon Beaufoy, based on the novel by Peter Torday, starring Ewan McGregor, Emily , Emily Blunt, Amr Waked, Tom Mison, and Kristin Scott Thomas. Now playing in theaters.

Regular readers know that I didn’t have the best movie-going experience when we went to see Salmon Fishing.  I wish we’d known to wait because it has since moved to one of our favorite local theaters.  If you’re in our neck of the woods, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen is now playing at the Downing Film Center.

“Everything falls faster than an anvil.”

Homework.  Study and memorize the Cartoon Laws of Physics.

Pay special attention to Cartoon Law IV:

The time required for an object to fall twenty stories is greater than or equal to the time it takes for whoever knocked it off the ledge to spiral down twenty flights to attempt to capture it unbroken.

Also be prepared to explain the Stooge’s surcease as defined by Isaac Newton.

All ten laws plus amendments listed at The Funny Pages.

“I’m not sure I agree with you a hundred percent on your police work there, Lou.”

Mannion Family Movie Night.

Pull up a chair, grab some wings and a slice, and join us. Fargo is available to watch instantly at Amazon.

Lance Mannion for Sheriff

I like living in our little town and I count as my friends the folks at the post office, the hardware store, the library, the bank, and the convenience store, and having to go out and about on various errands always puts me in a good and benign mood.  Some days while on my travels I’m so friendly and folksy and helpful and full of good advice that I’m amazed I haven’t been elected sheriff and assigned a nervous deputy who can be trusted to carry only one bullet that he has to keep in his shirt pocket.

The Poet writes in

In celebration of National Poetry Month, a guest post from our old friend Steve Kuusisto, poet, essayist, memoirist, and would-be baseball umpire.

There’s a free book offer at the end. No box tops required.

Why Study Creative Writing?

(Originally posted at Planet of the Blind, June 2011)  I am teaching this week at the MFA Writing Program at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon. I've been on the faculty of this "low residency" graduate writing workshop for the past four years and every time I come to Pacific I'm reminded of what it felt like when I was in my early twenties and in love with poetry for the first time. Maybe I should say "with all of literature for the first time" but I tend to let poetry stand for every literary genre--that's how it is inside my cave of making.

Voted one of the top five low residency MFA programs in the country by the Atlantic Monthly, the PU workshop earns its stripes because of its riverboat quality--there's a blending here of teaching excellence alongside the life experiences of the students. I could say "the talent of the student body" but you don't get into a graduate program in literary writing without that and, more to the point, it's experience that mulls the hard knocks and unexpected joys of life, thereby giving you something to write about. The students at Pacific have plenty to write about. Most of them have day jobs that would prevent them from going to a residential full time grad program in Iowa City or Gainesville--there are great programs at most major American universities--it's just too hard to leave the adult world entirely behind to study literature. Of course in these steep times one might argue that studying literature is hardly a necessity--why bother, one might ask--why trouble yourself to become what Charles Dickens described as "an ink stained wretch"?

I can't answer that question, never could. When I was twenty I read a poem by Robert Bly, a short lyric poem from his first book entitled Silence in the Snowy Fields and that was it for me. I was instantly a stolen boy, the one who is taken into the woods by a troll and who, ever after picks the wild lingonberries and drinks a private brand of tea. One fine day the poem takes you across the lake just as a sermon once took your grandfather or a Scottish song, heard by chance, entirely by chance, kept your great grandmother alive. All the words are mysterious, pregnant and weird as isotopes. The word passes through you and nothing is ever the same.

I was a college student when I discovered Robert Bly's work and soon I was reading everything I could get my hands on: Emily Dickinson, James Wright, Robert Lowell, Ann Sexton, Frank O'Hara, Marvin Bell, W.C. Williams, H.D., man I was hooked. I was lucky to be at a liberal arts school where my father was on staff and accordingly I was getting a free education. I didn't feel any guilt for reading poetry all night. I'd been stolen by "La Belle Dame sans Merci" and that was that. Another way to think of this is that I understood early on that there was really nothing I'd rather do in this life than read and write. I also saw that I'd be useless at any other activity. And it goes without saying that being blind might have helped me know this with more certainty than others might--I wasn't going to drive a truck or study astronomy.

But what if I did have a career or a domestic life to fall back on? Would I have taken it, sallied forth onto the highways, had a job to make ends meet, and all the while still have had the brandy colored eyes of Emily Dickinson staring at me in my private moments--always knowing that I was secretly in love with her and not with the corner office or the suburban yard filled with tricycles and garish swing sets? You see how it is. Not everyone is as lucky as I was--twenty years old and largely certain that poetry was it. Most of us have to make do and put away childish things. Then we talk privately all our lives, whispering to Emily Dickinson that we're sorry, we're really sorry to have left her all alone in her white dress--Emily, half blind herself, standing at the northern window of her bedroom, watching the sun go down with her one clear eye. Emily, we're sorry. But we have to go get the brakes aligned and pick up the kids at daycare and then we have to get the dry cleaning. We're so sorry.

This is of course what I love about teaching the students at Pacific. While some are in their twenties, most are a smidgen older--most have spent their days saying how sorry they are to Emily. I'll argue that the students in low residency MFA programs like the one at PU are alive inside, alive in ways that many Americans are too afraid to uncover. They are people who decided that their secret love is still there, still waiting for them. Criticize me for sentimentality if you wish, but this is true.

Why study writing? Because it's a pleasure, a romance with ideas. And because much of our national life will steal this from you hour by hour. Because we need more poems and stories, more essays that defend the environment, memoirs and narratives about cultural history, personal history, surprises and safe homecomings.

***************

Professor Stephen Kuusisto, blind since birth, is the author of “Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening” and the acclaimed memoir “Planet of the Blind”, a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year”. He has also published “Only Bread, Only Light“, a collection of poems from Copper Canyon Press. As director of the Renee Crown University Honors Program and a University Professor at Syracuse University, Steve speaks widely on diversity, disability, education, and public policy.

In celebration of National Poetry Month, Steve is giving away one free autographed copy of his book, “Only Bread, Only Light" (Copper Canyon Press), to a reader of this blog. To take advantage of this offer, leave a comment below then Contact Steve to leave your (confidential) contact info. Your name will be entered in a random drawing. The winner's name will be posted below.

People weren’t made to be cogs in the machine

Looked at one way, the usual way, a factory is a building housing machines.  Looked at another, a factory is a machine.  The building is merely the casing and almost everything inside it is a component of the machine, including most of the human beings working there.

Their function is to help drive the machine.

Simple machines enhance what it means to be human.  They make us stronger, faster, and, lately, smarter.  They provide the brute force we need to work (or play) harder.  But when machines became more complex, they started being able to do the work for us.  Some of it.  They couldn’t do all of it because they couldn’t see, they couldn’t feel, they couldn’t think, they couldn’t remember.  To function, they needed components that could see, could feel, could think, that had memories and, incidentally, opposable thumbs.  So their designers and engineers built into them those components.  Those components are called workers.  But they might as well be called widgets.

Some jobs in the factory don’t require the humans holding them to meld with the machine.  Managers, engineers, skilled operators stand apart, actually running the machine.  Some jobs require special skills and those jobs use the machines the way machines should be used, to enhance what it is to be human.  But most of the jobs aren’t even really jobs.  They’re functions.  The humans performing them are basically carbon-based components of the machine assigned specific and limited tasks in the process.  They enhance the machine.  They are cogs in the machine.

There are increasingly fewer of all these jobs, not just because factories are closing but because the machines don’t need them or as many of them to function.

Computers.

Robots.

This is a good thing, in the grand scheme of things.

It’s not what people are for.

We weren’t put here to make the machines go.

In the grand scheme of things, it will be a great day when the idea of a human being working on an assembly line will strike us as curious and quaint and primitive a notion as the idea of one pushing a plow.

At one point machines saved people from being essentially livestock.  At some point they will save us from being widgets.

At some point.

Unfortunately, that point is a long way away.

In the meantime, as Mr Pierce keeps reminding us, people got no jobs, they got no money.

We have to do something about that.

But what?

Ideally we need to shore up our manufacturing base, bring jobs home from overseas, build new factories, expand the ones we still have.

We could jump-start new industries that would open new factories and require old ones to refit and retool and remodel and expand.  (I probably don’t need to point out to you, though, which political party seems hellbent on making sure that doesn’t happen.  Light rail, anyone?  Green energy?  Keeping the auto industry alive?)  But even if we manage all that, those factories will need fewer human components to make them run than the old ones.

Computers.

Robots.

They aren’t going away.

One thing we can do is show people who want and need the work that there are other paths in life than the one that leads up to the factory gates and help them take those paths.

One of those paths is called education.

The prosperous suburb I grew up in was next door to a city that was in serious decline when I was a kid.  Schenectady had relied on two industries.  General Electric and the American Locomotive Company.  ALCO closed long before I was born.  I wasn’t aware of it but GE was in the processes of shedding jobs by the thousands.  And there was a neighborhood we passed through on our increasingly less frequent trips to what was left of the city’s dying downtown that had been working class but which had become working poor, at best, just plain poor for the most part.  You’ll know what to picture if I tell you that you’d be able to tell at a glance that most of the young men and women who lived there were unemployed or underemployed.  (Sadly, I feel I have to point out that the neighborhood was predominantly white.)  And I don’t know where I came up with the idea, if I overheard some adult say it or if I thought it up myself, but I used to describe it as a neighborhood full of people sitting around waiting for the ALCO plant to re-open.

Mean, callous, harsh.  Basically true.

Even though the young men and women in the neighborhood had been small children, even babies when the plant closed, they knew their parents and grandparents had worked there and made good livings doing so.  And since parents of all classes tend to raise their children to grow up to be versions of themselves, most of them had probably grown up thinking of themselves as factory workers in the making, even though there was no factory for them to work at.

Of course they knew that and while they wished it was otherwise and hoped “times” would change, they didn’t just sit around if they could help it.  They made do.  But they didn’t know what else to do beyond making do.

College wasn’t in their thinking, and not just because it wasn’t within their financial reach.  They didn’t see college as a path for people like them.

In high school, I got to know some kids my age from that neighborhood through occasional interactions between my school and theirs.  I was surprised that they regarded our two schools as bitter rivals and generally loathed and despised us.  I didn’t know anybody at my school who gave their school that much thought, which of course tells you a lot that’s not flattering about us.  But I was naive and blind and didn’t understand why they were so mad at us.  I knew they thought we were rich, which, comparatively, I suppose we were.  They thought were spoiled, and I’m sure we were that.  They thought we were privileged, and that was definitely true.  But they also thought we were all weenies. (Is that still a word?)

They sneered at us because we were going to college.

That I really didn’t get.

I get it now, of course, but at the time all I could think was, Why aren’t you going to college?  Why don’t you want to go to college?

These kids seemed smart to me.  Many of them were hard-working and ambitious, more hard-working and ambitious than I and many of my classmates were even.  But the ambitious ones all seemed to aspire to blue collar jobs (that weren’t there) and careers or at least temporary careers in the military.  This was true even of kids who had talents that could have taken them into the whitest collared of white collar jobs. I knew potential lawyers, doctors, college professors, and artists who dreamed only of jobs as spot welders and thought those dreams were out of their reach.

I’m guessing now that they just couldn’t see themselves as college material and they didn’t know how to make themselves into college material, whatever they thought that was, and, even if they did, they didn’t know how to begin to go to college.

But more to the point they probably didn’t have many examples in their lives of people like them going to college as a way up and out.

In his thin-skinned and narcissistic response to the President’s “silver spoons” remarks, Mitt Romney missed the point completely.  But then Mitt is very touchy on the subject of his money and privilege.  The President wasn’t talking about him and definitely wasn’t talking to him.  He was talking to young people like the kids I knew from that neighborhood.  The country is dotted with neighborhoods and even whole towns full of people waiting for the ALCO plant to reopen.  The President was, as he often is, talking to the children and young adults in those neighborhoods and towns and telling them that they can do more than sit and wait.  He and Michelle are very conscious of themselves as role-models.  The President is pointing out to those kids that they have options.  They can do something.  They can be like him.

“If I could do it, you can do it.”

What else did you think he was saying when he said Yes, we can?

He’s offering hope in the form of himself and Michelle and their family as examples of what to hope for.  He’s showing them how they can realize those hopes for themselves.

You would think his would be a message conservatives would embrace whole-heartedly.  Work hard, study hard, better yourself.

But then, again, I don’t have to remind you which Party denigrates education these days and is working to make it harder for anybody but the children of the rich to go to college.

I think Rick Santorum was being a lying hypocrite when he accused the President of being elitist when he encourages people to go to college.  Santorum believes that people should stay in their God-appointed places and some of us are appointed to be cogs in the machine and we should thank the Lord He granted us even that.  (Mitt thinks this way too, only probably without as many layers of pietistic nonsense. There are winners and there’s the Help. It’s as simple as that.)  But never mind what Santorum really thinks.  The implication is that the President has contempt for manual labor and work done outside an office and for the people who do it.  And of course that’s a lie.  The President knows those jobs are important and he respects the dignity and the hard work of the people who do them.  He is trying to create more of those jobs.  He’s trying to open new factories.  He’s trying to create construction jobs.  If he had his way no city or town in the country would be forced to layoff cops and firefighters and janitors and plow drivers and school cafeteria workers.

All the President is saying is that there are other ways up and out.  What he wants to do is make those ways more available and more navigable for more people.  The President knows that even if and when the new factories open and the old factories re-tool and expand there still won’t be the need for as many carbon-based components to keep the machines functioning as there used to be.

Computers.

Robots.

Life will be better for those who find other ways up and out or, at any rate, by some measures statistically probably will be.  But there’s a benefit for those who go to work in the factories. 

The fewer people lining up for those jobs the better the chances the people in line have of getting one.  Some of those jobs will be as managers, engineers, operators, technicians, and other skilled workers doing what the machines can’t do even with the help of robots and computers. (Jobs that, not incidentally, Rick, require college degrees or some form of education beyond high school.)  But most of those jobs will be as human components in the machine.  BUT…even though there will be fewer of those jobs, if there are fewer people willing to work as cogs in the machine, the ones who are become more valuable to the machine’s owners.

You can put people to work as cogs in a machine but if you know you’re going to have a lot of trouble replacing those cogs you’re more likely and willing to treat them something more than cogs.

Maybe even as human beings.

You’ll pay them well, treat them well, offer them benefits and the prospect of a secure retirement.

And I don’t have to remind you which Party is doing its damnedest to see that we don’t get to that point.

Mental Health Break: Jimpressions

They’re all terrific, but some, like his Garrison Keillor, are so good they’re spooky.  I especially like his Woody Allen, though, because he gives him the lines Woody might have written himself.

Also I think this is an underappreciated soliloquy from Richard III and Meskimen actually does it justice and shows why you don’t give the part of Clarence to just any pretty boy who looks good in tights.

And check out Twas The Night Before Christmas too.

Movie Theater Management 101

More grumpery.

Sunday afternoon the gang of us piled into the car and drove off to go see Salmon Fishing in the Yemen at a movie theater we don’t usually go to because it’s really out of range.  But it was the only place within fifty miles where the movie was playing.

The price of a ticket was $2 more than at our usual multiplex.  The price of a large soda was $2 more than at our usual multiplex.  The price of a large popcorn was $2 more than at our usual multiplex and the popcorn was served in a bag that didn’t look as though it held as much as the large buckets at our usual multiplex.  On the wall behind the concession counter were banners advertising “deals.”  One of the deals was a large popcorn and two large sodas for $18.75, which was a savings of 25 cents.

We went into the theater snackless.

But not until after I went looking for a manager.

I worked in a movie theater in college and I know things haven’t changed all that much since.  Movie theaters make practically nothing off ticket sales.  They make their money off the popcorn and soda they sell at an astronomical markup.  I thought I should let the manager know that his or her theater had made no money off of us today.

The manager I found was a guy about my age.  His age is only important here because it means he’s old enough to know better than to say what he said after I said calmly and politely and with a friendly smile, “I know you aren’t responsible for the pricing, but I’m amazed at how much more expensive everything here is and maybe you could pass it up the chain that it’s costing you customers because we won’t be coming back here any time soon.”

I didn’t really expect it’d be passed up the chain.  I just needed to vent.  But I also didn’t expect the manager to say:

“I understand.  But let me explain to you something about how the business works.”

Here’s a tip from Retail Management 101: When dealing with a disgruntled customer, do not try to explain to him why he’s being ripped-off and why he should lump it if not like it.

His next move was to try to sell me a coupon book which I could buy online after registering.

Oliver, Young Ken, and the blonde managed to drag me into the theater by my belt.

Heaven is a state of mind

I’ve been down this road before, but I’m feeling grumpy, so…

Atheists who feel a need to proselytize and testify strike me as no different than the God-botherers who proselytize and testify.  Both think they’re saving me in some way but both just sound to me like they’re bragging about how they’re going to a heaven inside their heads.

How Albany novelist William Kennedy got to be very big in Havana

Ernest Hemingway and friends in Spain around the time he was not meeting with novelist William Kennedy in Miami or anywhere else but was meeting in Havana with the hero of Kennedy’s latest novel in his Albany Cycle, Chango’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes.

“I’m sick of Hemingway. We got too much Hemingway.”

Young journalist named Bill Kennedy, working for the Miami Herald in the late 1950s, wanted to do a story on Ernest Hemingway and got that response from his editor.

To be fair, the paper already had a reporter on the unofficial Hemingway beat.  He was friends with Hemingway, went fishing with him, with sailing with him on his boat, the Pilar.  But Hemingway was one of Kennedy’s idols and Kennedy had a chance to meet him---“maybe.”  A call came in one day when he was at work, Kennedy didn’t know the caller, but whoever it was told him Hemingway was in town and at a bar on the north side of town.  Kennedy called the bar.

“Is Hemingway there?”

“Who?”

But Kennedy figured nobody would tell him if Hemingway was there.  He ran to his editor.

His editor shot him down.

“I’m sick of Hemingway.  We got too much Hemingway in the paper.”

Looking back, the now eighty-four year old Pulitzer Prize winning novelist William Kennedy told a crowd gathered last night at the Kleinart/James Arts Center in Woodstock to hear him talk about his work and read from his new novel Chango's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes as part of this year’s Woodstock Writers Festival, “I should have found an excuse to ‘go to lunch.’”

Kennedy never got to meet Hemingway and to this day kicks himself for the missed opportunity.  But that meeting that never happened formed the basis of the opening of Chango’s Beads. The book begins in Albany, New York in 1936 but then quickly skips ahead twenty-one years to Havana in 1957 and a meeting in a bar between Hemingway and Kennedy’s alter ego, a young reporter who’s just quit his job at the Miami Herald, Daniel Quinn.

Like Kennedy himself did, Quinn has been covering the build up to the revolution from Miami, interviewing revolutionaries, gunrunners, smugglers and spies. But Kennedy sends Quinn to Cuba while Kennedy wound up as editor of a paper in Puerto Rico where he hired Hunter Thompson who'd recently been fired from a newspaper in upstate New York. But that's another story or three.

Quinn banters with Hemingway, talks writing and women with him, then stands aside while Hemingway punches another man for singing a song Hemingway doesn't like.  One hundred pages later, with the Revolution underway, Quinn scores an interview with Fidel Castro. Kennedy never bantered with Hemingway, but he did get to talk with Fidel.  Thirty years after he has Quinn doing it.

It happened at the Havana home of the Nobel Prize winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  He and Kennedy had become friends when Kennedy interviewed him in Spain shortly after the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Garcia Marquez had come to Cuba to open a film school. Castro had donated an old public school building.  Kennedy had just finished work on the screenplay of The Cotton Club for Francis Ford Coppola.  The movie version of his novel Ironweed was about to go into production. Garcia Marquez invited him down to talk about movies with the students at the school.

So there's Kennedy in Havana, sitting in a rocking chair in Garcia Marquez' house when the phone rings.  When GM returns from answering it he tells Kennedy they're going to have a visitor.  He also tells Kennedy he'll have to find another place to sit.

"The Comandante likes the rocking chair."

A little while later Castro is occupying the rocking chair.

He occupies it for the next three and a half hours.  He and the two writers talk movies and books while the platoon of soldiers acting as the Comandante's body guard amuse themselves in the back yard.  Castro wears his field jacket buttoned up to his neck the whole time, Kennedy surmising a bulletproof vest underneath.  Castro speaks Spanish but he understands Kennedy's English well enough to correct the translator at several points in the conversation. Fidel tells Kennedy he owns copies of Kennedy's novels, the three translated into Spanish at the time, Legs, Billy Phelan's Greatest Game, and Ironweed.  He promises Kennedy he’s looking forward to reading them.

"Do you know if he ever read them?" Kennedy was asked.

Kennedy feigned annoyance at the questioner's impatience. "That's part two of the story."

Here’s Part Two.

Some while down the road, Kennedy met with Castro again. By this time, Castro had read the three books.  He liked Ironweed and Billy Phelan's Greatest Game but not Legs because it was about a gangster. Castro didn't enjoy reading about gangsters, which Kennedy finds ironic but understandable. As a college student, Fidel had been something of a gangster himself.

The other two books, though, Castro thought very good.  He especially liked the main character of Ironweed. He thought Francis Phelan was a fascinating character, worth another book, and urged Kennedy to write about him again.  Very Old Bones isn't dedicated to the Comandante but maybe it should be.

As for Billy Phelan's Greatest Game , what was on Castro's mind was Billy Phelan's greatest game. Castro was an avid bowler. In the novel, Billy bowls a 299. Castro asked how he pulled that off. He confided to Kennedy that his own high game was 169.

Billy Phelan was based on Kennedy’s uncle, a gambler and pool hustler, who once really did bowl a 299.  For that matter, Kennedy himself once really did bowl a 299.  He rolled eleven straight strikes but on his last roll he left one pin standing.

“The number 4 pin never moved.  It was like it was cemented there.  Never even wobbled.”

When Kennedy told him about that, Castro sat there in silence for a few long seconds then changed the subject.

To duck hunting.

Castro liked to hunt ducks.

On one outing he killed 102 ducks.

With 99 shots.

The Comandante seemed confident Kennedy would understand that that beat bowling a 299.

The important thing, though, is that Castro read and admired Kennedy’s novels.

As far as Kennedy knows, that’s more than any American President has done.

“Elmore Leonard, that guy who writes the James Bond books?”  Them they’ve read.  “William Kennedy?”  Kennedy pulled a long face and shook his head.  Then, his eyes lighting up with mischief, he added, “But I’m very big in Havana.”

Photo of Hemingway in the Plaza del Castillo courtesy of LiteraryTraveler.net.  Photo of William Kennedy at Woodstock Writers Festival by yours truly.

Local Hero

Mannion Family Movie Night.

The whole movie is available on YouTube, if you feel like joining us.

Soul Men on the Porch

Elwood and Jake taking a break from their mission from God.  Woodstock, New York.  This evening, around. 7:30.  April 20, 2012.

Fenway

Nun Day at Fenway Park. Circa 1967.

 

Love the shades.

Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox---properly pronounced Fenway Paahk and Bahstin Red Saks or Bawstin Red Sawks, depending on whether you’re from Southie or Eastie---celebrates its 100th birthday today.

Photo above courtesy of the Boston Red Sox by way of the Boston Globe which has included it in a slideshow of pictures of iconic moments from the past century.  Oddly, no pictures of Bucky F. Dent or Bill Buckner.  Also, oddly, I’m not in any of them.

I was there often enough.  Almost any given shot of Dewey Evans firing one in to second from deep right field or Bob Stanley warming up for another late-inning shellacking in the Sox bullpen could have caught me in the crowd in the right field bleachers.

For four happy summers (and the tail end of a fifth), Fenway was part of my neighborhood.  Boston proper is so small and compact that you can make pretty much the whole town your neighborhood. But one year I had an apartment that was three blocks from the park and another year I actually worked inside it.  I didn’t sell hot dogs or beer.  You had to know someone to get one of those gigs.  I had a job as a stockboy for an office supply company that operated out of one of the several storefronts built into the park’s red brick facade.  It was a dusty, Dickensian little place owned and staffed and patronized by characters out of novels by George V. Higgins.  I spent most of my day loading and unloading delivery trucks but that was fine because the loading dock was on the far side of the park from the store and I had to push my hand trucks along ramps that ran underneath the grandstand with branches that led up to the field.  If there was no game that afternoon those side ramps would be left open and that routinely meant, if the Sox were in town and playing at night, I could stop along the way and stroll up to the entrance ways to watch the team take batting practice.  Boston had just acquired Tony Armas from Oakland.  Armas was supposed to give the Sox some needed power to protect Jim Rice and Dwight Evans but he had a reputation for hitting a lot of pop flies and one afternoon early that season I watched him drive pitch after pitch into the top of the batting cage.

Boston went 78 and 84 that year and finished sixth in the East.  Armas hit .218 but he had 36 homers and drove in 107 runs.  I wasn’t too happy because Boston had traded Carney Lansford, my favorite player after Evans, to get Armas.  But the Sox had this new kid at third they were pretty high on.  Had a funny name, Tom Selleck mustache, ate a lot of fried chicken.

Dade Frogs? Cade Logs?

At any rate, in those faraway days, you could walk up to the ticket window on Landsdowne Street a few hours before game time and buy bleacher seats without thinking about it, the game was not going to be sold out.  I forget how much tickets cost but it couldn’t have been more than a few bucks.  And I always had a hot dog and a soda.  Sorry.  A tonic.  Pronounced tawnic or tahnic, again depending on whether you’re from Eastie or Southie.  Back then I could make it through a weekend on ten or fifteen dollars, have had a good time, eaten and drank well, and still have some change in my pockets come Monday morning. Of course it helped that I had another job as a movie usher and one of the perks of that job was free tickets at every theater in town, which made a lot my dates cheap dates, though I didn’t tell the girls that.  On Saturday mornings---the Sox still played most of the Saturday games at home in the afternoons---I’d go to the park early and pick up tickets for myself and any friends who were going to meet me later and then wander over to a nearby diner that had a baseball themed name, the Batter’s Box, I think, and have breakfast.  Life wasn’t so hard for a poor student then.

Still, I probably didn’t get to more than ten games a season and the Sox were relentlessly mediocre.  Yaz wasn’t even in the twilight of his career anymore. The moon was rising.   Jim Rice was entering that phase of his career that explains why it took the sportswriters so long to give him his plaque in Cooperstown.  He was still hitting, but the ball wasn’t coming off his bat as hard or as fast or traveling as far as it used to, and he didn’t seem to be playing with any intensity only with irritability.  Dennis Eckersley, the pre-Hall of Fame reliever Eckersley, and Mike Torrez were Boston’s best pitchers.  Oil Can Boyd was fun to watch but he’d have been a lot more fun if he’d, you know, won some games.  Roger Clemens was still in college.  And it was just beginning to sink in that the team had something special in that kid at third, what was his name?  Frayed Toggs?

So I don’t have many good baseball stories from my Fenway days.  I did see Yaz’s 2,994th, 2,995th, and 2,998th hits while hoping to be there to see his 3,000th.  He hit that one on a night I had to work at the movie theater.  I saw Rice hit a lot of home runs and I didn’t care that they weren’t as hard hit or carrying as far as they “should” have.  In a game against the Blue Jays he tied it up with a homer to deep right and then won it with another homer that I swear landed in the exact same spot in the bull pen as the first one.  And I was there when what’s his name---Trade Clogs?---played his first game at Fenway.  He hit a home run, giving fans a very wrong impression of the kind of great hitter he was going to be.

I do have one great story about Fenway, though, but it isn’t mine.  It’s my friend and fellow Red Sox fan Steve Kuusisto’s, who, as many of you know, is blind.

Ok.  One summer, Steve’s in Boston on business but he has time to take in a game.  He’s there early and his guide dog Corky’s getting a little restless, so the security guards give him the ok to take her on a little walk around the warning track.  As you know they still have a hand-operated wooden scoreboard out in the left centerfield fence.  Steve and Corky are walking along and they find the door to the scoreboard open.  They poke their heads in.

“Hi,” Steve says to the two operators inside. “I’m the umpire for tonight’s game.”

“The way he came out of the crate”

Updated: He's gone.

There’s this guy, a musician, you’ve probably heard of him, lives not far from here, up in Woodstock:

"He is a musician, through and through," said John Simon, producer of The Band's first two albums, "Music From Big Pink" and "The Band." "He was born that way; that's the way he came out of the crate. Others may labor their whole lives through and never attain the natural level of musicianship that Levon has. It's his essence. He may be 87 percent flesh and bones and 13 percent blood and spit, but he's 100 percent musician."

That musician provided the beat on all those legendary Band tunes, singing on "Up on Cripple Creek" and "The Weight," among others. Memories of those songs flooded the Internet and news outlets Tuesday. Celebrities responded to Helm's status with wishes for recovery, prayers and love. Even Robbie Robertson, his former bandmate and enemy of the past three decades, spoke well about Helm, telling fans through his Facebook that he visited him Sunday in the hospital.

"Levon is one of the most extraordinary, talented people I've ever known and very much like an older brother to me," Robertson wrote. "I am so grateful I got to see him one last time and will miss him and love him forever."

Levon Helm is something of an institution around here.  As much of an institution as a man like him will allow himself to be. 

The Arkansas native, whose fertile voice and on-the-money drumbeats graced such Band classics as "The Weight" and "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" — as well as his three recent Grammy-winning solo albums — is just one month shy of his 72nd birthday. It's a birthday that was scheduled to be celebrated — minutes from his wood-and-bluestone home/studio — at UPAC in Kingston, with some of the musicians who have made his weekly Midnight Rambles at his home, down a winding dirt road, "the center of the musical universe," said Jimmy Vivino, a member of Helm's band.

Helm…was called "the greatest drummer" by Ringo Starr, and "one of the best singers ever, right up there with Ray Charles" by Kris Kristofferson, has been in the midst of a career revival. That's thanks to those Rambles that have attracted stars like Kristofferson, Elvis Costello, My Morning Jacket, the Black Crowes, Bob Weir and Phil Lesh to the woodsy room with a fireplace and worn oriental rugs.

And as you’ve probably heard, he’s not well. He’s in “the final stages of his battle with cancer.”

The local paper has some nice tributes posted.  Levon Helm slipping away, family says by Steve Israel. Fans, musicians pay tribute to Helm by Timothy Malcolm.  And then this appreciation of his career, Levon Helm’s fine musical moments.  Bunch of videos with that last one.  Check them out.  (Registration suggested, especially for regular readers of this blog.)

Updated:  The Times Herald-Record has all its coverage on one page now.  Excellent stuff.

Photo by John DeSanto of the Times Herald-Record.

We Bought a Zoo: Liking the animals, loving the humans

Matt Damon and friend in Cameron Crowe’s Local Hero-ish, Northern Exposuresque comedy We Bought a Zoo.

We Bought A Zoo is exactly the kind of sentimental nonsense that slips neatly and nimbly around my defenses and stabs me straight through the heart.

I hate when that happens.

But knowing I’m like that, I don’t automatically rule out seeing movies with plots that can be summed up like so:

Widowed young father with two children desperate to start a new life impulsively buys a rundown zoo staffed by quirky but lovable misfits and a gorgeous but no nonsense zoologist who happens to look like Black Widow from The Avengers.  The work required and the cost of the upkeep are more than he bargained for and can afford but he realizes that in saving the zoo he might be saving himself and his family from the grief that’s overwhelming them all. Along the way broken hearts are mended and lessons are learned about life, love, and courage.  And, oh yeah. Lions and tigers and bears!

Well, a bear.

And maybe just the one lion. That’s left unclear.

But definitely more than one tiger.  At least two, maybe three.

The reason we didn’t see We Bought a Zoo when it was in the theaters at Christmas was that we had a lot of holiday stuff going on and there were too many other movies we wanted to see first.  Now it’s available on DVD and VOD and so it was last week’s feature for Mannion Family Movie Night.  I’m not sorry we didn’t see it on a big screen.  It fits perfectly on the TV.  In fact, if it didn’t star Matt Damon and Scarlett Johansson, it could be the pilot for a TV series, like Northern Exposure except with peacocks and lemurs instead of a moose and not as edgy.

Damon plays Benjamin Mee, a star reporter for a newspaper that might very well be the Los Angeles Times. His wife Katherine has been gone for six months and he still misses her terribly, but he seems to be doing ok, holding himself and his family together. His teenage son Dylan's a mess, locked up in his anger at his mother's death and lashing out at life by slacking off on his schoolwork, perverting his considerable talent as an artist---he draws and paints images of decapitated heads and severed limbs. "They're very good," his worried but still proud father can't help boasting.---defying all authority, and, a new twist, starting to steal.  Troubling, but we don't get the sense that Benjamin won't be able to cope.  This isn't a case, like The Descendants, of a detached and clueless father suddenly having to learn how to be a responsible parent. Benjamin is already a good father. He’s just facing a situation he wasn’t prepared for and that there’s no way he could have prepared for.  Still. It'll take time and some experimenting, but we know he'll figure it out.  Director Cameron Crowe, who co-wrote the screenplay with Aline Brosh McKenna, doesn’t try to put us in suspense about that. Dylan isn’t Benjamin's main problem.

Neither is his seven year old daughter Rosie who seems to be handling things beautifully.  She's sad, of course, but she doesn't expect to stay sad.  And she's a very practical little person, as practical as a second grader can be, at any rate.  As far as she's concerned, all problems are manageable. All you have to do is...well...manage them.

So Benjamin appears to be doing about as well as can be expected.  But there are signs.  It's understandable that he's not gotten around to cleaning out his wife's drawers and closets, but not that he hasn't thrown out her unfinished medicine bottles.  He's letting the casseroles and other dishes friends and neighbors have prepared for him and the kids stack up in the refrigerator while the family subsists on the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches Rosie makes. 

He's relying too much on Rosie, generally, and not just to keep the house running. For company. Dylan is troubled. Rosie's in danger.  Benjamin is taking advantage of her helpful and practical good nature, unconsciously pushing her towards taking over for her mother as the family's mainstay, putting her in danger of becoming the good daughter, the child who never causes problems because she never acts on her own wants or desires.

He only leaves the house when he's obligated to or when his brother drags him out and then he refuses to go to most restaurants and coffee shops because they bring back too many memories of his wife.  And he's stopped working.  He goes to the office but then just sits there. To the bemusement and dismay of his good-hearted editor.

At this LA Times-like paper Benjamin has carved out a career very like the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristoff. He travels across the country and around the world on assignment, flying through hurricanes, interviewing dictators, getting up close and personal with killer bees.   Nice work if you can get it, but he was able to get it because his wife was there to handle things on the domestic front.  Without her, he's grounded.  But his editor still needs him and has plans for him that will allow him to do his job close to home. Benjamin quits.

It turns out that it wasn't just that because of Katherine he was able to do his job. He did it for her.

The Descendants was about a family discovering they're better off without one of its members. I thought it was a serious flaw in that movie that it seemed to be trying to run away from this fact about itself.  If we were going to be forced to watch George Clooney cry, we should have at least been allowed to wonder why he was crying.  Damon cries in We Bought A Zoo, but we know why. We may wonder why he ever stops. The Mees are far worse off without their wife and mother. We don't learn all the ways she held them together, but one thing she did is clear. She got Benjamin out the door. She inspired him and gave him the courage and the stories he reported were gifts he brought home for her. Without her, he's stuck.  And he's begun to sink in place.

Fortunately, he senses this about himself and once again taking heart from Katherine's example he decides to sell their house and pack up and move, figuring that a change of scenery will do him and Dylan good. (He assumes Rosie will like it too. Then he makes her his partner in house hunting. You see the trouble developing here?) After a whole day of rejecting potential new homes, they work their way out into the country where they find a farmhouse they fall immediately in love with.

Only it's not on a farm.

They're buying a zoo.

For reasons that don't bear much thought---something to do with the park being home to several endangered species---the place has been in the custody of the federal government. Which has done minimal maintenance.  There's a skeleton staff, headed by that gorgeous zoologist who happens to look like the Avengers' Black Widow. The staff is in serious need of a morale boost. The place is in a general state of disrepair.  Some of the star attractions are sick.  One of the tigers is dying.  The grizzly bear is depressed.  But Benjamin is determined to buy the house and the Feds will only sell to new owners who promise to take it over as a zoo and bring it back up to working order.  Benjamin happens to be somewhat rich, thanks to a hefty inheritance from his late father, and still buoyed by his wife's memory---apparently buying a zoo is just the kind of move she’d have embraced as a great adventure---Benjamin signs on the dotted lion…um…line.

So, to save himself and his family, he needs to save the house. To save the house, he needs to save the zoo. To save the zoo, he needs to save the animals. To save the animals, he needs to save their keepers, including the gorgeous zoologist who happens to look like you know who.

All this saving provides most of the film's action. Crowe approaches it matter-of-factly. Cages---“enclosures."  Benjamin has to be continually reminded of the proper terminology---have to be remodeled or rebuilt. Supplies must be bought. Bills must be paid. Animals have to be fed and medicated. Personnel issues have to be resolved. An upcoming government inspection has to be prepared for.

As you'd expect, a romance begins to bloom between Benjamin and Kelly, the gorgeous but no nonsense zoologist played by Johansson, who to her credit allows herself to not look all that much like Black Widow. Crowe treats the romantic possibilities matter-of-factly too. The big obstacle is that Benjamin has not gotten over Katherine and probably never really will.

But while we can see how both of them would be happier if they get together we can also see that won't be a disaster for either if they don't. This would present a problem for other filmmakers. How do you make a love story about a pair of potential lovers who are content not to fall in love?  But then Crowe isn’t telling a love story. He's telling a story about the fascinating quirkiness and contrariness of human behavior.  What's going on---or not going on--- between Kelly and Benjamin is important for what it reveals about human nature and not for how happy it might make us the audience if love triumphs in the end.

As Kelly, Johansson does her best not to look like Scarlett Johansson, and by that I don't just mean that she doesn't look like the cat suit wearing Black Widow. That's easy. What she does is look like someone who wouldn't know how to wear a cat suit. Kelly is one of those working class kids who without training or guidance find their own way onto career paths that will take them out of their parents' blue collar world and into what's been awkwardly termed the creative class.  A lot of these kids wind up as artists, but many land in the sciences, usually by being already out in the field when the trained scientists arrive.  Kelly has gotten where she is by following her own path and relying on herself and trusting her own judgment.  She's not someone who's used to making herself pleasant for others or attractive to men.  And she's not about to throw herself at somebody just because he has a good heart, great hair, and looks like a movie star.

But Kelly has plateaued, emotionally as well as professionally.  In a way, she is like Ben. She's become stuck and is in danger of sinking in place.

Johansson is still too much the ingénue and not yet a leading lady and although she straddles her legs, folds her arms, roughens her voice, swigs her beers, wears her hair in a tangled bob, and allows herself to look thin, almost skinny, not in the bony way of an actress who’s been overdoing it with the dieting but in the rangy way of someone who does a lot of hard physical work outdoors and is regularly too busy to eat a proper meal, she doesn't quite convey the necessary rough and readiness of a scientist in the field making it up as she goes along.   What she does a good job of capturing is Kelly's fears.

Her fear of screwing up. Her fear of being a fraud and being found out. Her fear that she is not good enough for the kind of people she's now supposedly the equals of and even the boss of.  With Benjamin, she feels like the goose girl who has fallen in love with a prince.

Johansson  lets us see Kelly's neediness, her chagrin at being needed, and her hurt at not being needed back. She also makes us see the courage and independence and toughness that will see her through if things don’t work out with Benjamin or the zoo but which are also getting in the way of those things with Benjamin from working out.

Of the three leading men currently at the tops of their games who are most like old-fashioned matinee idols---Damon, Clooney, and Pitt---Damon may be the one putting together the most solid body of work.  I'm not saying he’s the best actor of the three. I think that's Clooney. But that's a debate that could go on all day and well into the night.  But I think that as things are going when all's said and done, Damon will have made the most good movies and delivered a wider and more varied set of good performances, mainly by virtue of adhering to the Michael Caine Principle: work often, don't be too picky, have fun, give it your best, and move on quickly to the next project.  We Bought A Zoo probably won't rank as one of his best films.  But it shows off some of his best qualities as an actor.  His ease in front of a camera, his intelligence, his timing, his restraint, and his modesty.  Damon is always willing to step back and let others take over the screen and he builds a sense of self-deprecation into all his roles, even a superhero like Jason Bourne.  The old actor's adage, never work with children or animals doesn't appear to have crossed his mind while working on we bought a zoo.  He seems to be enjoying having scenes stolen from him by his juvenile and nonhuman co-stars.

Damon makes Benjamin a regular guy who finds it kind of funny that he's been stuck inside a movie star's body without being given a movie star's personality or ego. When someone reacts to him as if he's a Matt Damon character---that is either as an action hero or a romantic lead---he's either amused or perplexed. Mostly though he thinks it's plain wrong, but he's too polite and kind to correct them.  So he just changes the subject as quickly as he can.

Plays hell with the flirting.

Damon's big scenes are with Johansson and the young actors playing Dylan and Rosie, but his best scenes may be with the dying tiger.

Spar is seventeen years old.  It's his time.  He's in pain and he's frightened.  But Benjamin refuses to have him put down.  He's convinced Spar can be saved and he's determined to try.  This can be read symbolically, as if in saving Spar he's reaching back in time to save his wife. Or he's saving himself or his son.  Or as if Spar is a stand-in for the whole zoo.  But I think it's best if it's taken at face value, as straight as Crowe has it played. Benjamin wants to save Spar for Spar's own sake.  Benjamin likes and admires the tiger and has even come to think of him as a friend.  And, although Crowe doesn't push the anthropromorphication, Spar seems to like Benjamin back or at least intuit that this human cares in different way than any of the others.

As Rosie, the very tiny and angelic Maggie Elizabeth Jones delivers her lines as if repeating advice she knows is sound because she trusts its source.  She doesn’t come across as wise beyond her years so much as in possession of a gift---she’s in contact with the amazing grown-up she could become if her father gets it together and takes her cues from her future self.  Colin Ford puts just the right amount of terror behind Dylan’s anger.  His voice, expression, and posture are those of a determinedly obnoxious teenager but in his eyes we can see the little boy who doesn’t understand what’s happening to him and is crying out to his father to save him.  Elle Fanning is a constant delight as Kelly’s niece who confuses and frustrates Dylan by insisting on liking him as if he’s still the person he was before his mother died and not the rude and surly aspiring juvenile delinquent he’s aspiring to be.

John Michael Higgins plays the outwardly smug and condescending government inspector whose professionalism is offended by the zoo’s crew of people he regards as amateurs and dilettantes but who can’t hide his annoyance at himself for rooting for them to fail. As the zoo’s chief carpenter and engineer, Angus Macfadyen is the embodiment of P.G. Wodehouse’s dictum that it is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.

And J.B. Smoove steals several minutes of film as a nervous rookie realtor whose honesty and concern for Benjamin and his family compel him to try to scuttle his first big sale, the zoo.

But the movie’s scene stealer-in-chief is Tomas Haden Church who  plays Duncan Mee, Benjamin’s older and in his own mind more worldly-wise brother.  Duncan is an accountant but, given what we observe of his temperament and footloose and fancy-free lifestyle, his career choice seems to be on par with that of vegetarian becoming a butcher.  Still, he is full of advice, financial, spiritual, practical, parental, romantic, and zoological which he delivers with the confidence of a man wholly incapable of practicing what he preaches.  Church has many of the movie’s best lines, some of which Crowe may actually have written.

Church is notorious for never delivering a line as written and never repeating an adlib from take to take.  He’s a mad genius of improv and for that reason he’s one of Oliver Mannion’s favorite actors and we had fun guessing which of his lines Crowe wrote and which sprang from Crowe typing something like “Here Duncan misses his ex-wife” or “Here Duncan worries about Benjamin’s financial future.”  Our favorite of what we’re pretty sure was one of the latter was, “I see you working in a field in Bolivia for angry men with large mustaches.”

But there’s at least one line he delivers straight from the script, although he gives it a slightly looped reading that saves it from becoming a sentimental catchphrase and turns it into a hearty and joy-filled summing up of the movie’s central theme.

“Hell,” said that French ray of sunshine, Jean-Paul Sartre, “is other people.”

No, says Crowe through Church, the company of other people is a wonderful adventure.

“I like the animals,” Duncan declares, “but I love the humans!”

Right through my heart.

______________________

The blonde’s blurb: “Surprisingly good!”

_____________________

My review of The Descendants: The man can move.

_____________________

Crowe reportedly modeled We Bought a Zoo on several of his favorite movies by other directors including Bill Forsyth’s wonderful Local Hero.  So be sure to note who plays Benjamin’s editor at the newspaper.

______________________

We Bought a Zoo is based on a true story.  The real Benjamin Mee is British and the zoo is in England.  Dartmoor Zoo is still thriving and you can visit its website.

Mee’s memoir of his family’s adventure is called…We Bought a Zoo.

_______________________

We Bought A Zoo, directed by Cameron Crowe, written by Cameron Crowe and Aline Brosh McKenna, based on the book by Benjamin Mee, starring Matt Damon, Scarlett Johansson, Thomas Haden Church, Angus Macfadyen, Elle Fanning, Colin Ford, Maggie Elizabeth Jones, J.B. Smoove, Patrick Fugit, and Peter Riegert. Now available on DVD and to watch instantly at Amazon.

________________________

Speaking of Black Widow.  May 4th...

The Three Stooges: Victims of Soycumstance

“Nyah-ah-ahhh!!!”  Larry, Moe, and Curly (Sean Hayes, Chris Diamantopoulos, and Will Sasso) react to their latest disaster in the Farrelly Brothers’ The Three Stooges.

Yeah, I went.  What’s it to ya?

Have to admit I didn’t feel right about it.  Sitting there in the theater, waiting for it to start, I was feeling uneasy and a little guilty. 

I was sure that as soon as the lights went out my mother would come charging into the multiplex, dash up to the projection booth, and turn off the projector.

Mom Mannion hates the Stooges. Always has.

When I was a kid one of the local TV stations used to broadcast an hour of Stooges shorts and Popeye cartoons every weekday morning starting at six.  And every morning at five thirty I’d be up, make myself a bowl of cereal, take it into the living room and settle down to watch the end of Sunrise Semester and then the Stooges.  I loved the Stooges.  But I was careful not to laugh.  And I kept the sound way down.  Because I knew.

If so much as a nyuk or a woob or an Oh, a wiseguy made its way upstairs, Mom Mannion would snap awake and come flying downstairs to turn of the TV.

Like I said, Mom Mannion hated the Stooges.  Everybody’s mother did.

So please don’t tell her I went to the movie.

Which I enjoyed, if you want to know.  And I’m guessing you do, cause why else are you reading this?  I had a blast.

Ok.  I’m not about to recommend it, exactly.  I’m just telling you I enjoyed it.  I can’t tell you if you will.  You have to use your judgment.  If you’ve never liked the Three Stooges you probably won’t like The Three Stooges.  (You should ask yourself, though, if you really don’t like them or you just feel you shouldn’t like them.)  If you loved the Stooges, that’s another question.  You might feel too loyal to the real Stooges to give these boys a chance.  You might feel like film critic Tony Dayoub who told me in a Twitter exchange a while back that he was hoping to give the movie a skip because he never liked when the third Stooge was anybody but Curly, so why would he want to watch three replacements?

The answer to that is Shemp (and I have a soft spot for Shemp), Joe Besser, and Curly Joe DeRita were not Curly while Will Sasso is.  Just like Chris Diamantopoulos is Moe and Sean Hayes is Larry.  Boy, is he ever Larry.

If at this point you’re moved to point out that the Stooges were never the comic geniuses the Marx Brothers were, save it.  Next time I’m in McDonalds enjoying a Big Mac, stop by and you can tell me how much better the burgers are at Carl’s Jr.

The main and maybe the only reason to see the movie is the performances of the three leads, who are brilliant. What they do goes beyond dead-on impersonations.  They don’t do Moe Howard, Jerry Howard, and Larry Fine doing Moe, Curly, and Larry.  They play the characters the Howards and Fine created.  I never felt reminded of the Stooges.  I felt I was watching the Stooges.

The effect is helped by the Farrelly Brothers’ faithfulness to the spirit of the Stooges’ two-reelers.

To start with, there’s a plot.

The best of Stooges’ shorts told stories, slight ones but they told them solidly and as if the outcomes mattered.  Something was at stake and often not for the Stooges themselves but for someone else whose cause they'd adopted.  The plots weren't excuses for the boys to hit, slap, poke, and wallop each other. They didn't need excuses for that.  They encountered problems they had to solve and the fun and the funny was in watching them try to solve them or fail to solve them.

In the movie, Mo, Larry, and Curly set out to raise money to save the orphanage where they grew up and somehow manage to enmesh themselves in the plot of Double Indemnity which leads them to invading a hospital, starting a salmon farm on a golf course, crashing a party at a mansion, and joining the cast of Jersey Shore.

Along the way there’s the expected amount of eye-poking, ear, nose, and hair-pulling, tongue-biting, head-knocking, belly-bumping, wall-thumping, heavy object dropping, pratfalling, and general mayhem creating.

No pie-throwing, amazingly. An oversight the Farrelly Brothers regret, I’m sure.

Much as I loved the Stooges when I was a kid, I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of their oeuvre and it’s been years since I've watched any of their shorts all the way through.  But I'm pretty sure the Farrellys worked in at least nods to most of their best recurring gags, tropes, and routines, including a variation that nicely ups the ante on one of my favorites, Moe drawing a saw across Curly's skull, Curly's cry of pain “Oh oh oh oh” turning into a cheerfully surprised “Oh look”!, and the camera closing in to show that all the saw's teeth are bent.

And while the movie is set in the thoroughly undisguised present, the plot takes the boys into settings and situations that haven't much changed since the 1930s.  A hospital nursery, a golf course, a zoo, a fancy party at a mansion. All places the original Stooges could bumble and stumble into to cause mischief without having to cope with any future shock.

I also liked how they found ways to get the boys into different costumes.  Every short began with the Stooges in a new line of work. They were firemen, plumbers, auto mechanics, carpenters, farmers, big game hunters, ice men, cowboys, Union spies in the Civil War, private eyes, doctors.  (“Calling Dr Howard, Dr Fine, Dr Howard!”) There'd be no explanation for the career change or the time travel or their sudden acquisition of actual competency at whatever enterprise they were putting their hands to. But then every short was complete unto itself.  It didn't matter that they were soldiers in this episode after having been college professors in the last one.  But the movie is a single long story and the Stooges are who and what they start off as throughout, so the trick the Farrellys have to pull off is how to get them dressed like carpenters and farmers and doctors and TV stars and society swells while keeping them inside the plot.  They pull it off.

One thing disappointed me.  They don’t give Curly his due.  Curly was often the hero of the Stooges shorts.  The plots would center around him and it would be up to him to save the day.  And in many of the shorts we got to see Curly on his own, dealing with supporting characters, and even all alone, working out a problem, his solutions causing more trouble than they saved, of course.  Curly was the most gifted physical comedian of the three and he had the best timing.  Moe knew this and made sure bits were built around his brother to showcase his talents as a mime and an ad-libber.  Sasso is given a couple of brief moments to shine on his own, but the Farrellys really should have let him have at least one extended solo routine like the original Curly’s classic ice shaving scene in An Ache in Every Stake.

Knuckleheads.

But that’s just a way of saying again how perfectly Sasso---and Hayes and Diamantopoulos---recreate the originals.  And, like I said, the three leads are really the reason to see the movie.  Plus, it’s actually funny.

As for the supporting cast…it’s fun to see Jane Lynch playing it in a very non-Jane Lynch sort of way as a nun.  Jennifer Hudson’s best moment comes near the end of the credits, so stick around.  A little bit of Larry David as Sister Mary Mengele goes a long way and fortunately the Farrellys don’t let him take it too far beyond that.  Craig Bierko takes his punishment well.  Sofia Vergara wears her tight dresses in a way that makes you understand why men would want to kill for her.  And Snooki and the rest of the cast of Jersey Shore do a good job parodying their self-parodies.

The real standouts are the three young actors who play the Stooges as ten year old kids, Lance Chantiles-Wertz as Larry, Robert Capron as Curly, and, especially Skyler Gisondo as Moe.  And they get to deliver the Stooges’ signature musical Hello.

Now, one more thing that the Farrellys got right, and this brings me back to Mom Mannion.

They made the Stooges good guys.

Mom didn’t want us watching the Stooges because she was worried we would hurt ourselves imitating them.  She didn’t think we were dumb enough to bop each other with hammers or rake saws across our skulls.  But she did think we might try to pretend like they did and poke each other in the eye or bonk each other over the head or knock our knuckleheads together accidentally while “rehearsing.”

What I could never make her understand is that, well, yeah, I enjoyed the slapstick, but the reason I liked the Stooges was that I liked the Stooges.

They were good guys.

At least they were in my favorites.  I didn’t like the ones in which they were just jerks or dopes.

In my favorites, they were well-meaning and good-hearted and they took the side of the weak and the downtrodden and the down on their luck and the nice and the decent  and the honest against the rich and scheming and powerful and mean. 

And they looked out for each other.

You might remember that Moe rarely called either Larry or Curly (or Shemp) by their real names.  When he wasn’t calling them knuckleheads or other insults, he called them…

Kid.

Which is what a Depression era movie big brother would call the younger brothers he loves and worries about and who love him and worry about him back.

Like the originals, these Stooges love each other.

They just have a funny way of showing it.

The Three Stooges, directed by Peter Farrelly and Bobby Farrelly, written by the Farrellys and Mike Cerrone, starring Chris Diamantopoulos, Sean Hayes, Will Sasso, Larry David, Jennifer Hudson, and Jane Lynch.  Now in theaters.

________________________

I mentioned how the Farrellys managed to work in nods to the original Stooges’ best recurring gags and classic routines.  They missed one of my favorites though. “No, limboiger!”

Lions and tigers and Stooges

Not like you’re waiting around for me to tell you what to watch this weekend, but please allow me to recommend

If you’re looking for something to rent, We Bought A Zoo.

And if you’re heading for the multiplex:

No, I’m not being a wiseguy.  I liked it. Of course you have to use your judgment.  If you never liked the Stooges you probably won’t like the movie.  If you loved the Stooges, and I mean loved the Stooges, you might not give the new boys a chance, plus you have issues you’d be better off spending your time working on.  And if you liked the Stooges just the right amount but preferred Shemp, we have nothing to talk about.

I’m working on reviews of both.

Character vs. “Character”

I guess I should count myself lucky that I’m not in a position where I’m regularly in the company of vivacious and admiring twentysomething women, because apparently no matter how smart and competent and otherwise sound of judgment a guy my age is, all that needs to happen is for one of these vivacious and admiring twentysomethings to smile at him and he immediately becomes a complete idiot.

No, I’m not talking about Bill Clinton, although he’s still the pre-eminent example.  I’m talking about Bobby Petrino, the no longer head coach of the University of Arkansas football team.

It’s right that Petrino was fired.  Not because he cheated on his wife and not even because he was an idiot.  He violated his contract six ways from Sunday.

The only reason he wasn’t summarily shown the door is that there are procedures that have to be followed in cases like this and, oh yeah, winning coaches who can turn a school’s program around in a hurry are hard to come by.

The athletic director’s decision was complicated by his knowing that in canning Petrino he was probably sending the team back to loserville for next season and fans, alumni, and donors wouldn’t like that and would scream bloody murder.

Lance, are you suggesting that something besides the moral and ethical considerations might have figured in this?

You mean, like money?  You bet I am.  Because of course it did.

Everybody knows that above a certain level college sports are all about the Benjamins, right?

So, tell me this wasn’t written seriously: (Yahoo Sports’ Dr Saturday posted it over the weekend before Petrino was fired):

If Petrino does stay Arkansas' coach, it's going to be difficult for him to earn the respect he once had. How can he go into a recruit's home and tell parents he can teach their son morals and make him a man. If his own wife can't trust him, how can parents? They can't and Arkansas football will suffer because of it if he stays.

This is what Division I coaches do when they visit a top recruit’s home?  Preach about their programs’ moral uplift?  And the parents believe them?

This is one of the reasons I prefer following pro sports to college.  The hypocrisy factor is smaller.

In the pros everybody knows it’s all about money and winning (and winning equals money so it’s all about money).  Oh, sure, people talk about “character” and how it matters, but it’s part of the show and nobody over the age of twelve takes it seriously. Well, almost nobody.  The Tebow phenomenon annoyed me because suddenly you had lots of people, commentators and reporters who knew better, talking about football as if “character” and morality did matter or mattered more than talent and skill or were the equivalent of talent or skill.  Reporting on the Broncos began to sound like…college football.

The big schools have to pretend that they are just as concerned about character  and academics as any Division III school that doesn’t give sports scholarships.  They have to pretend that their main lookout is the moral uplift and academic success of their “student”-athletes.  What’s frustrating and confusing is that some schools and their coaches really do care and really do worry and really do go out of their way to take care of the students playing for them but because it’s very hard to know which schools and coaches those really are, you either have to swallow the nonsense whole or shrug and assume they’re all equally corrupt.  Either way, it takes a lot of the fun out of the games, for me, at any rate.

But with the pros, because it is all about the money and winning, not only can you just enjoy the games for the game’s sake, the view is clearer.  “Character” may not matter in the sense of its deciding who wins, but it’s easy to see characters and judge their character or not judge them, as suits your mood.  You can tell the good guys from the assholes and enjoy that as something unto itself apart from the game.  But mainly what you see is that games are decided not by “character” but by talent, intelligence, and skill, not to mention luck.

In my review of Scott Raab’s The Whore of Akron, I mentioned some of the reasons I had trouble sympathizing with Raab’s anger at LeBron James.  Mainly it was because I didn’t grow up rooting heart and soul for a losing sports franchise. But there was something else.  Raab wrote about LeBron’s “character” as if it mattered and as if LeBron, and by extension every great professional athlete, has an obligation to be a better person than not just he himself actually is but than any fan manages to be.

Raab seems to believe that if only LeBron had made himself a better man he’d have made himself a better player and then brought Cleveland, the team and the city, a championship at last.

But LeBron’s “character” had little to do with it.  It wasn’t James’ fault that the Cavaliers’ owners didn’t know how to build a winning team around him and probably couldn’t have afforded it even if they had been able to figure it out.  It wasn’t his fault that they didn’t have the savvy or the money.

I keep putting “character” in quotes because a lot of times people use the word when they mean temperament or personality.  And there is one aspect of character---no quotation marks---that does affect games.  It’s a matter of virtue, though, not morality.  A particular virtue.  Diligence.

As a virtue diligence isn’t simply the willingness to work hard.  It’s the ability to discipline oneself.  Success in a sport often depends on the player’s ability to keep his or her personality in check, at least on the court or the field or the rink.

It’s a useful virtue in your personal life as well.

As Bobby Petrino has just learned or re-learned.

For all I know, Arkansas is one of those schools and Petrino is one of those coaches who do care about more than money and winning.  That wouldn’t have changed just because Petrino had responded to a smile by becoming an idiot.  But he had to be fired.  Not because of the vapid nonsense that a guy who can’t be trusted to stay faithful to his wife can’t be trusted on other important matters.  But because, like I said, he violated his contract.

Despite what the moralizers say, the basis for civilization isn’t religion or morality or family or church or other such pious nonsense.

What holds civilization together is people abiding by their contracts.

As far as it matters to the University of Arkansas, Petrino didn’t cheat on his wife as much as he cheated Arkansas.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go mind my own business, which sadly but probably fortunately will have me going about unsmiled at by vivacious and admiring twentysomethings.

The many movie faces of Allen Ginsberg

Speaking of Jack Kerouac, On the Road, and the Beats…

Yes, I was.  Last month.  Weren’t you here for this part?

Speaking of Jack Kerouac, On the Road, and the Beats, there’s another movie in the works featuring characters based on Kerouac and his friends, only they’re called by their real names and the story is true.  It’s called Kill Your Darlings and the story it tells is of a murder committed by one of their gang when Kerouac, Ginsberg, and William Burroughs were students together at Columbia:

THE scene of the crime, Riverside Park at the foot of West 115th Street, is in full spring bloom, carpeted in the butter-colored flowers of lesser celandine. It was here 68 years ago, on a slope descending to the moonlit Hudson River, that Lucien Carr, 19, the Beat Generation’s charismatic, callow swami, buried a knife in the heart of David Kammerer, 33, his besotted, dauntless hometown stalker.

Carr is often characterized as muse to the Beats, but he was more than that. Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg were acolytes, captivated by Carr’s profane rants about bourgeois culture and the path to transcendence through pure creative expression — his “New Vision,” after “A Vision” by Yeats.

Carr’s “honor slaying” of Kammerer, as The Daily News called it, served as an emotional fulcrum for the group a decade before Kerouac, Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs published their seminal works; the violent death in their midst lent credibility to the tortured-soul narrative they yearned for.

Interesting article in the New York Times giving background to the story and touring the Columbia neighborhood to find places where the group hung out: Where Death Shaped the Beats.

Check out the slideshow that goes with the Times’ story too.

Sounds like it might be a good movie.  Carr and Kammerer appear to be the main characters but Ginsberg is important enough to rate being played by this guy:

I wouldn’t have seen it until I saw it, but it looks like it’ll work. 

Another case of Ginsberg being played by a movie star far handsomer than he ever was---and he was kind of handsome when he was young---still somehow managing to look like him.  The other case is James Franco in Howl.

I haven’t seen Beat which features Ron Livingston as Ginsberg.

There’s a movie from 1980, Heart Beat, starring John Heard as Kerouac, Nick Nolte as Neal Cassidy, and Sissy Spacek as Carolyn Cassidy and in that one Ray Sharkey played Ginsberg, except that he was called Ira because Ginsberg was still alive to sue.

What strikes me as funny and perfect, however, is that in Kill Your Darlings Ginsberg’s father is played by David Cross and I’ve always thought Cross really does look a lot like Ginsberg.

You don’t see it?

No?  Maybe it’s just me.

Video added after reminders from Dennis Perrin and David Ehrenstein. Thanks, guys.

Welcome TAPPED readers

Getting a lot of traffic from the American Prospect.  Folks clicking through from an old post of Charles Pierce’s from 2006 about the egregious and fortunately now nearly irrelevant Ann Coulter.  Mr Pierce graciously referenced a post of mine but linked to the blog and not to the post itself.  So for those of you who are wondering what that was about, here’s the link:

The King is a Fink!

And the President roared his terrible roar…

President Obama reading Where the Wild Things Are at the White House Easter Egg Roll.  Photos by Susan Walsh of AP,  gif created by Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg for the Atlantic.  Via the Queen of all Wild Things, Wev McEwan.

Paul Ryan discovers that the Catholic Church is all about storing up treasures on earth

Dear Congressman Paul Ryan,

Fellow Catholic here  I saw online that you think your budget is consistent with the Church’s teachings on issues of social justice.  Interesting.  I must have missed class the day the nuns taught us to shaft the poor, leave old people to suffer without necessary medicines and surgeries, tell parents they can’t take their kids to the doctor or buy them a hot lunch at school or send them to college, so that the already very rich can store up more treasures on earth.

I do remember Jesus saying something about selling everything to follow him to the rich young man who asked what he must do to be saved.  But maybe I got that mixed up.

Or maybe, knowing the value the Church places on good works and charity, you designed your budget to encourage both by giving people nothing to rely on in times of trouble except the charity of their neighbors?  Is that it?

Or maybe you got mixed up and confused Ayn Rand, the prophetess of your true religion, Selfishness, with St Francis of Assisi and Atlas Shrugged with the Sermon on the Mount.

Oh well. I’m sure the bishops will correct you if you’re wrong.

Yours in Christ,

Lance Mannion

PS.  Sister Mary Jacinta did teach us how to do basic math. We weren’t allowed to balance equations by declaring “Here magic happens.”  What did they teach at your school?
________________________

Because he just won’t go away, this from a year ago today:  Ayn Rand and the God-less Republican budget.

Paperback writer: The Wilder Life by Wendy McClure

Another good one now out in paperback, The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie .  Here’s a repost of my review from last June, A little book about the little books about the little houses on the prairie and other places.

A reconstruction of the little house on the prairie depicted in the novel by Laura Ingalls Wilder at the Little House on the Prairie Museum in Independence, Kansas, one of the stops along the way in Wendy McClure’s new memoir, The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie.

On my desk sit several library copies of the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder and I can’t sit down to work or even walk by without a twinge of guilt.

I checked them out to have on hand to refer back to while I was reading Wendy McClure’s The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie , and I’ve been doing that, going back and forth from McClure’s book to Wilder’s books like a responsible book reviewer and blogger ought to.  But I keep thinking of the little girl who can’t read them while I have them.

I don’t know if I’m preventing her from re-reading her favorites or if I’m getting in the way of her discovering books that will become her favorites.  I don’t even know if she is a little girl.  I’m sure there are little boys who love these books too.  I just haven’t met any.  That includes my own sons who, despite being voracious readers from a young age with expansive tastes and a willingness to follow the adventures of female protagonists, never showed any interest in the wanderings of the Ingalls family.

But even if there are boys out there who are missing the books I have out of the library, I think the Little House books are girls’ books, not in their being about “girl” things, but in their being special to girls because they are so much about being a girl.  They are about being a daughter and a sister and, eventually, a young wife.  And, although nothing particularly or explicitly is made of it, they are about navigating through the world from inside a body that happens to be female.

I knew this about these books, knew they were special,  special for girls, long before my sisters read them.  I knew it without, as far as I recall, having read them myself when I was young.  I don’t even remember being aware that they existed when I was a kid. But I must have known about them.  I must have read them or some of them or parts of at least one of them.  How else would I have known, known both that they were so well-written and that they weren’t written for me, not the way Tom Sawyer and Treasure Island and The Last of the Mohicans were written for me.  Not even Farmer Boy, the one book without Laura, the one with a boy as its main character, was written for me.  How’d I know?  I just did.   Somehow I knew about them and understood what they were when the TV series premiered and I knew that show was different and in a way lesser.

So I’m not surprised that a little girl who loved the Little House books has grown up to write her own book about how much those books meant and still mean to her.

For a while I had a close imaginary friendship with the Laura of On the Banks of Plum Creek, who felt closest to my age in those books.  I was eight or nine; I had knowingly conjured her up to talk with her in my head.  I daydreamed that she’d shown up in the twentieth cenruty and I had to be her guide…

…I wanted to take Laura to North Riverside Mall.  In my mind I ushered her onto escalators and helped her operate a soda machine.  I took her with me on car trips and reassured her when the station wagon would pull onto the expressway ramp and accelerate to a speed three times faster than the trains she rode, faster than she would have ever imagined a human being could travel.  It’s okay, Laura, I’d tell her.

But Wendy McClure’s The Wilder Life is more than a nostalgia trip in the guise of a literary appreciation.

It’s McClure’s journalistic account---part memoir, part travelogue, part nostalgia trip---of her attempts to reconnect with the world the Little House books had created in her imagination and the little girl who was her heroine and imaginary friend and to discover how much of that world was real and reachable.

It starts with an almost accidental re-reading of Little House in the Big Woods, indirectly inspired by her mother’s death from cancer.  From there, McClure moves on to re-reading the whole series and then the books Wilder wrote that were not part of the series and the columns she wrote for a local newspaper and the books and short stories written by her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, who was for a time the famous author in the family, biographies, scholarly appreciations, a travel book called The Little House Guidebook---a guide to all the Ingalls family homesites, of which, if you only know The Little House on the Prairie through the TV show, you’ll be surprised to learn there are many, the Ingalls moved around a lot, usually to leave another bout of bad luck behind---which McClure gives the subtitle “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Driving Out to Remote Locations in the Upper Midwest to Find Your Childhood Imaginary Friend But Were Afraid to Ask,” and even a cookbook.  The next thing we know, McClure is buying a butter churn off eBay and churning her own butter in the kitchen of her apartment in Chicago and baking recipes from the cookbook.  McClure is pleased to report that her Vanity Cakes didn’t turn out half-bad.

One of the things McClure is surprised to discover in her outside reading is that Laura Wilder played around with the chronology of Laura Ingalls’ life.  In reality, Wilder was too young during the time her family lived in the little house on the prairie to remember what happened there, so she made herself older in the telling of The Little House on the Prairie.  In other words, that book is more of a work of fiction than McClure believed it to be and finding that out caused her to wonder how much of the other books were made up as well.

Her curiosity makes her more determined to take the next step in her plan to connect with Laura World.  She sets to visit the places where Wilder lived as a girl and see for herself if what Wilder says Laura saw is there to be seen.

Her trips take her to all the sites of all the places Laura calls home in the Little House books and to a couple of places she lived that don’t get mentioned in the books and finally to a home that is the subject of one whole book but where, significantly, Wilder herself never lived or ever even visited.

Along the way McClure visits museums, observes a Laura Ingalls lookalike contest, spends a night in a covered wagon not sleeping through a tremendous and terrifying prairie thunderstorm, learns that there is a deep divide between Laura fans who grew up loving the books and those who grew up knowing only the TV show---although she was just the right age for it, McClure says she never watched the show when she was a kid and doesn’t even remember connecting it to the books she loved, despite the shared title---interviews various people with their own professional and personal reasons for wanting to connect with Laura World, and buys herself half a dozen sunbonnets of the kind she wished when she was a girl she could wear or rather not wear, like Laura, with the bonnet fallen off the back of her head and the ribbons flying as she ran through the tall prairie grass.  And, along the way, her researches and explorations, require her to dabble in anthropology, archaeology, meteorology, cartography, psychology, and even theology, dabbles McClure recounts with both humor and purposeful attention.

Three of the liveliest and most enlightening (for McClure as well as for her readers) sections of The Wilder Life deal with side-trips she makes, two to places not directly connected to the Little House books while the third is connected psychologically.

A visit to American Girl Place has McClure observing that one of the things she loved about the Little House Books was the thing-ness of it all, the “stuff” that helped make up Laura’s world.  Looking at all the stuff available to buy to help make up your American Girl doll’s world, McClure observes:

Something about [the displays of stuff], with their images of doll-sized treasure, always buoyed me.  I loved the simplicity these miniature things evoked, the way they called to mind uncluttered lives where each carefully crafted object shone with significance.  Kristen’s quilt, Molly’s locket---they exuded something of the same aura with which things in the Little House books appeared; I could see them with a bit of the charmed sight of Laura World.  On some level I recognized that things on display at the American Girl store purported to be as cherished as Ma’s china shepherdess, Charlotte the rag doll, and the butter mold with the carved leaves and strawberry.

She also considers the question of whether or not the Laura of the books is a tomboy.  McClure emphatically concludes she was not.  And she reluctantly admits a sneaking admiration for the quintessential mean girl, Nellie Oleson or at least a covetousness towards Nellie’s stuff.

McClure’s professional and feminist approval of the books for sale at American Girl Place had me wishing there was such a store for boys.

The second side-trip is to a farm where the couple who own it and work it offer weekend workshops in “homesteading” crafts and skills such as weaving, canning, soap-making, and blacksmithing.  McClure goes to get a more hands-on sense of what it was like to live the life of pioneers in post-Civil War America.  She’s stunned and a little frightened to discover that most of the other people visiting the farm that weekend are Christian fundamentalists and End-Timers there to learn how to survive in a post-apocalyptic America that they’re actually looking forward to.

The third side-trip isn’t to a place so much as into a personality, that of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s daughter, Rose Wilder Lane.

It occurs during McClure’s visit to the one house still standing that Laura Wilder could truly call home, the farmhouse in Missouri where she lived out the bulk of her life as an adult with her husband Almanzo and where she wrote the Little House books, which, I was surprised to learn, she didn’t begin to do until she was in her sixties.

Rose was already a successful and well-known author, journalist, and political activist in her own right at that point and it’s a matter of cantankerous debate how much help she gave her mother in the writing of the Little House books, with some Rose partisans arguing that she contributed so much that she deserves credit as co-author.  Rose herself never claimed any more credit than the records indicate she deserves---she was her mother’s first and most vigorous editor and her writing teacher, but, when all was said and done, the Little House books were Laura Wilder’s creations not Laura and Rose’s.  Still, McClure finds herself deeply intrigued by Rose, who, she concludes, must have been a difficult character for anyone, including her mother and father, to get along with.  Despite her fame and her success, Rose appears to have spent her life unsatisfied, uneasy, and unhappy with herself and to have borne an undefined but lifelong grudge against her mother whom she nonetheless loved, was devoted to, and devoted herself to helping turn into the famous author she became.

It’s also at the Missouri farmhouse where McClure gets the best sense of what it was like to live the life of Laura.  But it’s the wrong Laura!  The grown-up and very real writer Laura Wilder, not the girl who was the creation of that writer.

McClure’s travels take her to Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Kansas, and South Dakota where she visits the sites of Laura’s many homes or where those sites are supposed to be.  As I said, none of those homes are still standing.  McClure has to content herself with recreations of the log cabins and shanties and sod house and none of them quite do the trick.  One of the sadder moments in the book is when McClure finds herself string wistfully at a dip in the prairie where the dugout featured in On the Banks of Plum Creek probably was.

It turns out that McClure comes closest to finding what she’s looking for during a visit to a house she came close skipping on her tour.

This is the farmhouse in far upstate New York where Laura Ingalls Wilder’s husband Almazno Wilder grew up, the setting for the one Little House book McClure felt and feels the least connection to, not just because Laura herself doesn’t appear in Farmer Boy, but because the Wilders’ life as depicted in the book came across to McClure as just a little too perfect.

As a girl, McClure found it easier, and somehow more natural and more fun, and even comforting, to identify with the deprivations and hardships of Laura’s still happy girlhood than with the ease and contentment of Almanzo’s happy boyhood.  As a grown-up, her feelings towards the Wilders bordered on resentment.

Pa and Ma Ingalls struggled to put food on the table and keep a roof over their family’s head and were not always or even routinely successful at it.  Mr and Mrs Wilder were adept at whatever they turned their hands to and were rewarded for their efforts.  Laura grew up learning how to make do or do without.  Almanzo grew up having to learn when to say when.  The Ingallses almost never had enough of anything.  The Wilders were always on the brink of having, comparatively, too much.  This didn’t make them pretentious, show-offy, smug, or self-satisfied.  The Wilders were not only rich, or at least relatively rich compared to the Ingallses, they were good.

Strangely, and to her chagrin, it’s while she is in the homey yet for its time well-appointed and well-stocked kitchen of the Wilder farmhouse that McClure feels her affinity with Laura most strongly:

With all its over-the-top dinner scenes and constant allusions to the Wilder family’s good fortune, literal and otherwise, Farmer Boy wasn’t really the smug when-I-was-your-age sermon I’d originally made it out to be, but more of a wistful dream conjured up by a woman who’d spend much of her life enduring deprivation.  It was a love letter to the original promise of success and prosperity that had so eluded her husband in his adulthood, when, like countless other settlers, he’d found out the hard way that the farming methods from back East were no match for the dry land of Dakota Territory.

Suddenly it all made sense---Farmer Boy was Laura Ingalls Wilder’s own Laura World, an ideal realm she’d imagined, a homesickness for this place she’d never been or seen.  On my trip west I’d been trying to get to the furthest reaches of a word I thought I knew.  Without even expecting it, I’d found the most secret and remote part of it here.  I knew it wasn’t the house itself, here in this almost impossibly green and lush countryside; it was more that this place marked the spot in the other world, designated the place where this amazing Farmer Boy, the Child Who Always Had Enough, lived in Laura’s head…

At a certain point in her book McClure has to give up looking for Laura, feeling that she’s come as close as she can and thinking, forlornly, that the harder she tried, the more distant from Laura and Laura World she was feeling.  And at that point, The Wilder Life stops being about McClure’s attempts to connect with the spirit of Laura Ingalls or even with the little girl McClure was, the little girl who loved Laura.  It might be more accurate to say that the book stops appearing to be about either of those themes and it becomes openly about what it’s been about all along, a middle-aged writer named Wendy McClure writing about being Wendy McClure.  We leave Laura World for Wendy World.  And to put it bluntly, Wendy World isn’t going to be as interesting to readers who are reading The Wilder Life in order to visit Laura World.

Wendy World is a world of relative privilege and carefully protected privilege, at that.  McClure was able to write The Wilder Life because the McClure Life is a writer’s life.  Writing is McClure’s job and visiting the museums and window-shopping at American Girl Place and teaching herself how to churn butter are things she needed to do to do her job.  But from the outside it might look as though she’s being paid to take little vacations and indulge a hobby.  Nice work if you can get it, but it means Wendy World contrasts mightily with Laura World in a very important way---the Ingallses were not privileged.  They were mostly either poor or living on the brink of poverty.  Their lives were full of risks that they took out of necessity and desperation.  The natural and logical connection you’d expect a grown-up following Laura’s family’s trail to inevitably make would be to the grown-ups in Laura World, to Ma and Pa Ingalls.  You’d expect---ok, I expected---that it would begin to weigh on McClure how lucky she was not to have been born Laura or a Laura, that she’d have something to say about how hard Charles and Caroline Ingalls had it, how hard they had to work just to put a single meal on the table while she’s free to waste entire days churning butter (in a churn she bought off eBay without, apparently, much worrying about where the money for it would come from) just for the fun of it.

It doesn’t happen.  McClure never relates to Charles and Caroline as fellow adults.  They remain to her Ma and Pa, with poor Ma seen as something of a humorless killjoy and quiet scold.  In the end, McClure presents herself as resolutely and possibly perpetually a daughter.

She finishes her travels and the book vaguely disappointed with the whole experiment and I can’t help feeling that the disappointment stems from her avoiding the obvious conclusion---that the reason she could not reconnect with Laura World in the way she’d hoped was the same reason her namesake from Peter Pan couldn’t return to Never-land.

This really isn’t any of my business and it only mars the last chapter or two of what has been for the most part a fun and likeable book.  It just seems to me the obvious place to have gone with it and McClure needed somewhere to go.  She hasn’t come up with any other ending and after the trip to the last Ingalls landmark the book doesn’t conclude so much as just wind down.

What did bother me all the way through The Wilder Life was that McClure didn’t take more opportunities to let us to hear the voice of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

There are places in the book where a direct quote from one of the Little House books would not only fit in nicely but positively cry out to be included, and when McClure writes her way right on by those places it’s as if we’re watching a scene in a musical in which the leads build up to a song and then decide not to bother to sing it.

The wind was blowing steady and strong.  Not a cloud was in the huge sky, and far and wide on the immense land there was nothing but shimmering light passing over the grasses.  And down wind came the sound of many men’s voices, singing.

The teams were coming into camp.  In a long, dark, snakelike line as they came over the prairie, horses plodding side by side in their harness, and men marching, bareheaded and bare-armed, brown-skinned in their striped blue-and-white shirts and gray shirts and plain blue shirts, and all of them were singing the same song.

They were like a little army coming across the vast land under the enormous sky, and the song was their banner.

Laura stood in the strong wind, looking and listening till the last of the column came into the crowd that gathered and spread around the camp’s low shanties, and the  song blurred into the sound of all their hearty voices.  Then she remembered the water pail in her hand.  She filled it from the well as quickly as she could, and ran back; slopping water on her bare legs in her hurry.

That was from By the Shores of Silver Lake.  The most direct way to connect to Laura Ingalls’ world is through her own writing, but if McClure had done that, if she’d stayed home and read her way through the series for us, The Wilder Life would have been a very different sort of book, a work of literary criticism instead of journalism.  But, considering her continual frustration at not being able to find Laura in the museums at the vanished homesteads, it’s a bit surprising that she doesn’t take another tack and try to find Laura in the landscape that Ingalls wrote about with such passion and attention to detail.

Despite her love for the outdoor world Wilder depicts with such loving detail in her books, McClure keeps looking for Laura World inside.  There are good reasons for this, one being that Wilder was as passionate about the interiors of her world as she was about the exteriors and her descriptions of those snug, cozy, and above all safe places, full of love and shared joy, are among the best things she wrote.  (Little House in the Big Woods and The Long Winter are largely inside books.)  Another, of course, is that it’s inside where the stuff that drew McClure into Laura World---the oil lamps and corncob dolls and strings of onions and Ma’s china shepherdess---the touchable things that could provide her with a physical connection to Laura herself were to be found inside.

But the interiors don’t exist anymore.  The exterior world, the landscape, does. And the best field guide to it was written by Laura Ingalls herself.

This is what has always jumped out at me from Ingalls’ writing and probably what I thought would interest my sons about the books, her skill at evoking a sense of place, of capturing how the weather was, how it felt to stand in the prairie grass or under the trees in the big woods of wade into Plum Creek.

If you’re going to put yourself in Laura’s place, stand where she stood, then it makes sense to compare what she says she saw to what you’re looking at and note what’s changed and what’s still there.

And since McClure says that part of what drove her out to the woods and the prairie and the banks of the creek was to see how much of the world Wilder wrote about was real, it’s even more baffling that she doesn’t show herself testing what Wilder wrote against what’s actually out there.

I wondered about this.  I wondered if it was simply that McClure thought that her likely readers wouldn’t need to have quoted to them passages they knew by heart, although I don’t know anyone who doesn’t enjoy hearing their favorites read back to them again and again.  I wondered if she assumed that they’d be reading her book the way I was, with Wilder’s books within reach.  I wondered if it was the case that she was afraid that if she started she wouldn’t be able to stop.  I certainly could understand that.

It turns out to have been a question of rights.

Under the fair use laws, writers of more scholarly works are freer to quote liberally from their sources than writers of books intended for more popular audiences like The Wilder Life.

But since I didn’t know that while I was reading The Wilder Life, the missing quotes---missing as in I missed them---had me asking some questions.  What does McClure, as a writer and editor, think of the books and of their author’s talent?  Does she like them as books?  Does she think Wilder could write?  Maybe McClure thinks the yeses she’d answer to those questions are such givens it would be redundant to bring them up.  After all, if the writer whose travels she’d been following was Mark Twain, how often would she have had to stop her narrative in its tracks to tell us, That Sam Clemens, boy, could that guy write!

But I think the authors of children’s books need all the puffing they can get because a lot of adults take it for granted that writing for children and young adults is a lesser art form.

I think Wilder could write, beautifully.

Wilder’s plain, naturalistic prose of mostly unadorned declaratives is appropriate to the story of a country girl who grew up with little in the way of material comforts and had to make do by taking comfort in whatever she did have and find happiness in the company of her little family and delight in the sensual beauty of whatever small plot of ground her father was homesteading for what was usually an unsettlingly small time.

But it’s far from artless.  And it reminds me of the another author’s deceptively simple style, a writer who was her daughter Rose’s near contemporary, a writer who was pretty good himself at telling how the weather was.

I assume you’re reading this with a copy of In Our Time within easy reach so you can leaf through to Big Two-Hearted River and see if you can’t find passages that remind you of this one from Little House in the Big Woods:

After awhile there was sunshine in the woods and the air sparkled.  The long streaks of yellow light lay between the shadows of the tree trunks, and the snow was colored faintly pink.  All the shadows were thin and blue, and every little curve of snowdrifts and every little track in the snow had a shadow.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to return some books to the library.  Somebody’s missing them.

The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie by Wendy McClure, published by Riverhead Trade, is available from Amazon. There’s a Little Edition for Your Kindle as well.

Excerpt: Wendy McClure on Nellie Oleson’s evil superpowers.

All hail Nellie Oleson, New York-born daughter of a Walnut Grove mercantile proprietor, later the most exquisitely dressed country girl in Dakota Territory!  With her utterly scrumptious nastiness she completes the spectrum of Little House girlhood types, from good Mary to not-so-good Laura to bad, bad Nellie.  from the moment she’s introduced she gets right down to her bratty business, wrinkling her nose, sticking out her tongue, and yanking hair.

Fine, so it’s not much of a repertoire---even by nineteenth-century school-yard standards these seem like awfully basic moves.  What really gives Nellie her evil superpowers, though, are the enviable shiny details of her life---her ribbons and lawn dresses and wax dolls and candy sticks---all of it paraded before Laura and Mary when they visit her awesome carpeted house in the “Town Party” chapter of On the Banks of Plum Creek.  While I’m fond of the sweeping prairie grassed of my Laura World, somewhere in my sub-conscious dwells a Nellie World, too.

Which, well, looks an awful lot like American Girl Place.  Though while Nellie Oleson is exactly the kind of girl who would own an American Girl doll, had they existed during her timek, she herself could never be an American Girl character.  Really, one of the most brilliant things about the American Girl marketing concept is that Felicity, Kristen et all are like nice Nellies, friendly girls who wouldn’t yank their possessions away from you, the way Miss Thing in Plum Creek snatched back her doll from Laura…A visit to American girl Place always satisfies the secret hope that I used to have reading that chapter as a kid---my wish that Laura would just suck up a little and try to work things out with Nellie so she could play with her stuff. (Pathetic, I know.)

---from The Wilder Life by Wendy McClure.

Great Expectations as fairy tale, Miss Havisham as the Snow Queen

“This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.” ---from A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.

Charles Dickens was the greatest writer of fairy tales.  His novels might as well begin, “Once upon a time.”  (One famously does.) His characters aren’t caricatures and grotesques.  They are elves and demons and trolls crawling out from under bridges to cause mischief and heroic dwarfs protecting children lost in the woods.  Enchanted princesses and exiled princes. Wizards, witches, ogres and dragons.  Young men named Simple and brave little tailors (and one brave little seamstress) and pure-hearted and sharp-witted young women who in other versions of their stories are named Snow White and Rose Red.

Of course Dickens is doing a lot more than working his way towards “and they all lived happily ever after.”  And it’s important to note that the happily ever aftering is mostly reserved for the young lovers and a couple of the eccentrics who treated them kindly as they followed the bread crumbs to their cheerful little bowers of bliss where they can live safely and happily apart from the world.  A few other good characters share partially in the happiness, but others are excluded entirely and still others die before the happy ending, in a few cases in order to bring about the happy ending.

Oscar Wilde observed that “One must have a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell.”  But no one laugh’s when Smike dies or Little Paul Dombey or Dora Copperfield or Steerforth or Ham or Jo the Sweep or Richard Carstone or Sidney Carton or Betty Widgen or…

You see what I’m getting at?

Dickens was a teller of fairy tales and fables, but he was also a great comic writer and a satirist and a social commentator and a realist and he mixed it all up, the comedy and the satire and the realistic social commentary and the fairy tales, and sometimes it’s hard to see the magic forest for the talking trees.

But if you read his stories as fairy tales then his melodramatic plots aren’t so melodramatic because you know to read them symbolically---or you know not to try to take them as realistic and your subconscious does the rest of the work.  It’s the same with his characters.  His heroes and heroines become more complex, his grotesques less grotesque, their complicated natures more profoundly human.  Dickens psychological insights have to be understood symbolically.  Like fairy tales, his novels are peopled out of dreams.

And it’s the case that the novel many people regard as his best, Great Expectations, is the one that’s most nakedly a fairy tale.  In fact, although I don’t know if Dickens consciously intended it, Great Expectations is a re-telling of a particular fairy tale.

The Snow Queen.

Dickens and Hans Christian Andersen, the second greatest writer of fairy tales, knew each other and admired each other’s work---Andersen, the elder by a few years, hero-worshipped Dickens. Dickens’ feelings about Andersen were a little more mixed, as you can tell if you accept that Uriah Heep is meant to be a caricature of Andersen---and Dickens must have read The Snow Queen.

In his re-telling, he’s reversed the genders, so that it’s the girl, Estella, whose heart has been pierced and eyes blurred by splinters from the troll mirror and who has been carried away to the frozen palace of the Snow Queen and it’s the boy who comes to the rescue.  Dickens complicates things by having Miss Havisham place splinters of the mirror in Pip’s eyes and heart and he has to shake himself free of their influence first.  (Like so many heroes and heroines of fairy tales and myths he has to die and be reborn to free himself from an evil influence.)   And one of the few things I like about the BBC’s new adaptation of Great Expectations---Part One ran last Sunday on PBS Masterpiece, Part Two airs tonight---is that the director and the cinematographer and designers have made it clear, visually, at any rate, the Miss Havisham is the Snow Queen and Satis House is an ice palace.

When Pip meets her for the first time he notices she’s barefoot---Dickens has her wandering around Satis House one shoe off and one shoe on---and he worries that her feet look cold.  She barely seems to comprehend his concern.  She replies, “All of me is cold,” as if pointing out a fact that should be so obvious it’s strange that Pip bothered to bring it up.

I also like that Miss Havisham is played by Gillian Anderson as still somewhat young and beautiful.  In most adaptations Miss Havisham is portrayed as already old when Pip comes to Satis House.  Dickens doesn’t specify her age but he does say she was a young woman on her wedding day and we learn later that was only about four years before Pip was born.  That makes her probably around fifty by the end of the book but she could be as young as 45.  This matters because it means that when we meet her she could still have her whole life ahead of her, if she could be rescued from her own magic spell.

Dickens draws her as withered, dried up and desiccated like the flowers for her wedding she’s had left as they were arranged at the moment she received word that her fiance was jilting her.  But in this production she’s still in her bloom, as far as we can see, and we can’t see clearly because she appears (an illusion created by diffused lighting, ghastly makeup, and gauzy costuming) to be coated with a thin layer of frost and carrying about with her a fog of ice crystals. But to Pip she’s weirdly beautiful and he is fascinated.  Which gives him another reason, a noble one, to keep coming back to see her.

Pip goes to Satis House because his sister makes him.  He goes back because he’s fallen in love with Estella.  He continues to go to promote his own fortunes.  But he also goes because he grows to like Miss Havisham and feel sorry for her.  But in the book and in productions featuring an elderly Miss Havisham, that’s where his feelings end, in pity.  Pip is not repelled by the strange old lady for the same reason that, after he gets over his initial terror, he’s not repelled by Magwitch.  He’s an essentially kind and generous little boy.

But here it’s not just that he isn’t repelled, he’s attracted.  Weird and scary as she is, he can see her as being as much a damsel in distress as sees Estella and he wants to come to her rescue.  He’s too young to have any idea how to go about.  But for a time there can be the question, Will he warm her heart before she freezes his?  By making her only old enough to be his mother (and remember, Pip is an orphan who never knew his mother) instead old enough to be his grandmother, the show opens up the possibility that Pip falls in love with her, the way boys often fall in love with mother-figures in their lives, like teachers.  To him, she can be Estella grown-up (and of course later it will turn out that Pip finds Estella on the brink of becoming another Miss Havisham) and rescuing Miss Havisham would be a way of rescuing Estella in the future.

Looking at it like this helped me tolerate what was actually pretty annoying, Anderson’s exaggerated girlishness. 

A friend noted that with her glassy-eyed, dreamy-voiced vagueness and moonbeam coloring Anderson seemed to be channeling Luna Lovegood from the Harry Potter movies.  Luna is aptly named as she is not of this world because she is too good for it.  She looks down on it with a loving and forgiving detachment, tied to the earth---well, specifically, to one of its heroes---but in an orbit of her own.  She is a true-innocent, pure of heart and utterly without guile or craft.  Which gives her the ability to see into hearts and touch and bring out the best qualities inside.  And as it happens there is a Luna Lovegood character in Dickens’ novel.  That is, a character who fills the same fairy tale role of the sister-friend who reminds the hero of his goodness and helps keep him on the right path or at least points out which is the right path.  That’s Biddy, the young woman who comes to the forge to take care of Pip’s sister after Orlick bashes her head in and stays on to marry Joe after Mrs Joe dies.  She’s been eliminated from this production, a mistake I’ll get to in a bit.

Miss Havisham isn’t innocent or pure of heart.  But it makes sense that she would pretend to be and try too hard when she does.

Because she’s nuts.

The other older Miss Havishams are cold in the manners and cruel in their intentions, although they are not heartless.  They are also sane.  They know that they haven’t stopped time just by stopping the clocks in the house.  They know that wandering around in their wedding dress is silly, that leaving the table set for the wedding banquet and the cake out and ready for cutting is ridiculous, some of them know it is wrong.  They know what they plan for Estella is wrong.  But they are determined to continue, not only in seeking revenge on men through Estella---that could be done without the stopped clocks and the cobwebs and the mice-infested wedding cake---these Miss Havishams are determined to punish themselves for having allowed themselves to be made fools of by their jilting fiance and his partner in stealing her fortune, her conniving step-brother, by devoting every minute of every day to reliving the moment of their humiliation.

This Miss Havisham presents one of the worst cases of denial in the annals.  She has frozen herself at that moment in order not to have to face the next moment, when her heart breaks and her pride is shattered.  The others know they are aging.  But Anderson’s Miss Havesham can’t let herself know.  She must stay as she was on that day, at that moment, the moment before, a young woman, even a girl. 

The trouble is that after all this time she has forgotten what that young woman was like.  Possibly, she doesn’t want to remember.  Dickens lets us know that that young woman wasn’t very nice and that she wasn’t so much an innocent victim as a fool and a dupe who set herself up to be conned through her stubbornness, vanity, and pride.  (It’s an irony that in training Estella as her weapon of vengeance she is teaching her how to be the same sort of person she was with the same weaknesses that brought her to grief.)  Whichever it is, whether she’s forgotten or adding to her denial, she’s pretending to be someone she’s not.  She’s acting a part that’s been badly written for her by herself and the act is strained and convincing only to herself and to Pip.

All of this takes up no more than fifteen minutes of the first episode’s fifty minutes.  The rest of the time is devoted to showing that Pip’s life is grim.

And Grimm.

I’ll follow up on this after I watch Episode Two.

Episode One is available to watch online.  Episode Two airs tonight, Sunday, April 8, at 9 PM Eastern on PBS.

Portrait of Dickens by Daniel Maclise. Illustration from Great Expectations by Marcus Stone, via Philip V. Allingham at the Victorian Web.  Still from Great Expectations courtesy of PBS.

__________________________

She was dressed in rich materials - satins, and lace, and silks - all of white. Her shoes were white. And she had a long white veil dependent from her hair, and she had bridal flowers in her hair, but her hair was white. Some bright jewels sparkled on her neck and on her hands, and some other jewels lay sparkling on the table. Dresses, less splendid than the dress she wore, and half-packed trunks, were scattered about. She had not quite finished dressing, for she had but one shoe on - the other was on the table near her hand - her veil was but half arranged, her watch and chain were not put on, and some lace for her bosom lay with those trinkets, and with her handkerchief, and gloves, and some flowers, and a prayer-book, all confusedly heaped about the looking-glass.

It was not in the first few moments that I saw all these things, though I saw more of them in the first moments than might be supposed. But, I saw that everything within my view which ought to be white, had been white long ago, and had lost its lustre, and was faded and yellow. I saw that the bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress, and like the flowers, and had no brightness left but the brightness of her sunken eyes. I saw that the dress had been put upon the rounded figure of a young woman, and that the figure upon which it now hung loose, had shrunk to skin and bone. Once, I had been taken to see some ghastly waxwork at the Fair, representing I know not what impossible personage lying in state. Once, I had been taken to one of our old marsh churches to see a skeleton in the ashes of a rich dress, that had been dug out of a vault under the church pavement. Now, waxwork and skeleton seemed to have dark eyes that moved and looked at me. I should have cried out, if I could.

---from Great Expectations by Charles Dickens.