Lance Mannion

Such a boy thing

February 20, 2013.  As I mentioned Friday, my students are learning more than just how to craft a pretty sentence.  They’re learning that you have to know a bunch of stuff that isn’t about writing in order to be a writer, and their lesson for this week was that in order to write fiction, you need to know what an automat is.  I gave them ten paintings by Edward Hopper to look at and their assignment was to write a character sketch of any figure in any of the paintings.  The way this works is they turn in their sketches on Tuesday and I put them all together into a single file that I email to them for them to read for the next Wednesday’s class.  So today we talked about the sketches they wrote last week (They had to set a scene.) and next week we’ll talk about the Hopper sketches, which I sent out just before class.  One student came up to me at break to tell me how much she was looking forward to reading these.  She clearly expected that with only 14 students in the class and 10 paintings to choose from, there’d be very few duplications of choices.  I’m not sure but I think she was thinking that of course no one else would have picked the same one she picked.

I didn’t have the heart to tell her.

Eight of them chose Automat. 

Three chose Second-Story Sunlight. Two chose Tables for Ladies. And one picked Office at Night.

She was not the one who picked Office at Night.

“Well,” I said, “I’ll tell you this much.  None of you picked the one I’d have picked.”

“Which one was that?” she asked.

“Conference at Night.”

She gave me a quizzical look, as if she didn’t remember that one at all.

“The three people in the office.  Guy in front’s wearing a trench coat and a fedora,” I said helpfully.

She nodded but still didn’t look sure.  Obviously it hadn’t made much of an impression.

“Why that one?” she asked.

“Because I think it looks like a scene from a detective movie,” I said.

She rolled her eyes and made a “tch” sound.

“That’s such a boy thing,” she said.

In order to write fiction, you need to know what an automat is

My students aren’t just learning how to write fiction, they’re also learning about all kinds of other stuff, like...

Hold on. I need to put that differently.

Let’s try this:  Because writers are supposed to write what they know, they need to know, well, everything, so in order to learn how to write fiction my students are learning about all kinds of other stuff, for instance, the history of the great migration of African Americans out of the South, the menu at In-N-Out Burger, the biblical allusion that opens Moby-Dick, automats.

This week for their writing exercise I have them looking at some paintings by Edward Hopper, picking out a person in a painting of their choice, and turning that person into a character in a story.  One of the paintings is Automat.  Turns out many of them knew Hopper already and could even name at least one of his paintings.  Guess which one.

So they’d heard of Hopper.  But none of them knew what an automat is.  Always a helpful instructor, I gave them the clip below as visual aid.

Apparently, automats were like saloons in the Old West. You couldn’t be in one long before a fight broke out.

 

The movie is Easy Living, starring Jean Arthur, Ray Milland, and Edward Arnold. Preston Struges wrote the screenplay. Sturges is someone else my students need to know about.

Something I want to teach myself, making a regular comeback out of the line “Hire a hall.”

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Other paintings by Hopper they can use:  Gas. Tables for Ladies. Office at Night. New York Movie. First Row Orchestra. Conference at Night. New York Office. Second Story Sunlight.

I’d pick Conference at Night myself. What about you?

How many psychopaths does it take to screw up a movie?

Colin Farrell, Christopher Walken, and Sam Rockwell, as three of the at least seven psychopaths in Martin McDonagh’s absurdist thriller Seven Psychopaths, take time out from running from the bad guys out to kill them for dognapping the boss’ Shih Tzu to discuss the finer points of moviemaking.

The answer is one.

I'm just not sure which one.

Actually, I'm not even sure which characters in Seven Pychopaths to count as psychopaths. The trailer and the ads count two characters who barely register as characters in the movie.  Meanwhile, as I sat in the theater thinking maybe I'll start to like this, maybe it'll grow on me, maybe if I sit here long enough I'll figure out what's going on and what the director is trying to do, and then I'll like it, I counted enough other characters I'm pretty sure psychiatrists would diagnose as psychopathic to bring the count of the dangerously insane up to at least nine, and there were enough signs that the count might be much higher and include every character with at least one line of dialog.

Of course, there's one obvious  candidate for the psychopath responsible for this screwiness is writer and director Martin McDonagh (In Bruges), who maybe wouldn't object to being lumped in with the psychopaths who populate his movie since, based on there being no sane people in his characters' universe, a theme of Seven Psychopaths is that we're all psychopaths.

That is to say, the world, according to McDonagh, is a mad, violent, and bloody place, full of people pursuing their mad ends with no regard for the feelings, concerns, needs, or existence of the other mad men and mad women they share the planet with.

The lesson here isn't that the way to survive in a world gone mad is to go mad yourself and create your own mad reality, although that's what people tend to do, in life and in the movie. The proper response is to go sane and create your own little bubble of sanity around you and yours, which, by the way, is the lesson of all Dickens' novels, and I don't doubt McDonagh has read his Dickens. The best way to build this bubble, though, is through art, particularly the art of storytelling, on paper, sure, but also, emphatically, on film.

McDonagh's main character, played by Colin Farrell, is an Irish screenwriter adrift in Hollywood named, not self-referentially, I'm sure, Martin, who is working---trying to work---on a screenplay for which he has a title but no plot and no characters.

The title?

Seven Psychopaths.

Seven Psychopaths, McDonagh's film not Martin's barely started screenplay, is a movie about what movies are good for that uses itself as its own prime example. Characters comment on the art of moviemaking in self-referential ways that bring them very close to breaking the fourth wall. They don't know they're in a movie. They just can imagine their lives as a movie, which is to say they can imagine themselves as characters in a movie, and at the moment the movie they're imagining themselves in seems very much like this one.

At any rate, Martin is in no condition to create any bubbles of sanity, on paper, on film, in life. He has a drinking problem. A blackout drunk with a habit of self-destructive meanness when deeply under the influence, rather then building bubbles, he pops them. Slowly, though, as the movie unfolds, it begins to dawn on him, that somebody is trying to help him out by building a bubble of sanity around him in which he'll be able to settle down and write. The trouble is that that somebody has a very different conception of sanity than Martin.

Fortunately for him, although Martin himself doesn't see much fortunate in it, he has a friend looking out for him, a usually unemployed because he's unemployable actor named Billy Bickle. Yes, the allusion's deliberate. There’s no doubt Billy’s one of McDonagh’s seven psychopaths.  Billy (played by Sam Rockwell) has no trouble getting parts, he just can't keep them. Creative differences are always arising between him and his directors, which Billy tries to resolve by beating up the directors.  But he's determined to help Martin complete his screenplay. All he asks from Martin is a little help escaping from the gangster whose beloved Shih Tzu Bonny he's dognapped.

Billy has a side business snatching doted-upon dogs and then collecting the rewards offered by the distressed and desperate owners.  His partner in this enterprise is Hans (Christopher Walken), an elegant and gentle man who is using his share of the take to pay for his wife's cancer treatments. That's not why he's in the dognapping business. Hans hasn't done an honest day's work in twenty years. For much of that time, he was involved in a long-term project that required the flexible schedule a life of crime provided.   Crook that he is, Hans and his wife are deeply religious, good Catholics whose faith, already being tested by her illness, is about to undergo a severe trial when the gangster comes looking for his dog and revenge.

Martin McDonagh is the brother of James Michael McDonagh who wrote and directed The Guard, one of my favorite movies from last year, and it’s clear that the brothers are on the same wave length.  Seven Psychopaths shares themes, elements, and sensibilities with The Guard, including the Pulp Fiction trope of criminals holding pseudo-intellectual arguments about life and culture while out on the job.  Both movies accept the world is a mad place peopled by madmen and madwomen who don’t seem to notice or care that they and the world and everybody else in it are mad, and both movies feature main characters who have built little bubbles of sanity around themselves.  The difference is that in The Guard it all matters.  And it matters because The Guard treats itself as a realistic portrayal of how the world is, at least as taking a realistic look at how the world can sometimes seem because it in fact often is that way.  In Seven Psychopaths, this is more of a conceit, an idea McDonagh is playing with that  he hopes we’ll enjoy playing with along with him.   Which is fine. It is enjoyable. Sometimes. But it happens too often that the characters are puppets to the conceit and that makes it hard to care what happens to them.  If it’s all just an idea to play around with, what does it matter if a character dies simply to support the idea?

Bodies pile up in Seven Psychopaths, most of them as the result of extremely violent and gruesome deaths.  I couldn’t decide if McDonagh was using the gore to distract us from the deaths themselves---using violence to insulate us from the violence---or to distract us from the comedy that surrounds the violence or to make sure we don’t make the mistake of thinking he means the violence to be funny.  Probably a bit of all three, with an emphasis on the last one.  But I couldn’t help and still can’t help suspecting that he was also using it to make us pay attention, to make us care about what was happening to his characters or what might happen because he sensed that without the shock we otherwise wouldn’t.

It’s not that McDonagh treats his characters only as puppets.  But he could have done a better job of hiding that they are puppets.  There are several ways he could have gone about this.  The one I thought of off hand, though, was that he could have had something important at stake at the center of his plot.  Frankly, who cares if Martin or any screenwriter finishes a screenplay?  (This was Nicolas Cage’s character’s---or one of his characters’---problem in Adaptation, which might have been an influence on McDonagh, and if it was, good on him.  But it was not why we were concerned for that character…or characters.  For one thing, we were concerned that they might not be two characters.) It’s funny that Billy and Hans are so worried about Martin’s being unable to finish his screenplay that they do their best to help him write it while they are running for their lives from the gangster. But one joke, even if it’s a good one, isn’t enough to build a plot around.

What probably would have done the trick is if McDonagh had made the gangster chasing them less of a psychopath instead of the most psychopathic of all the psychopaths. If he had a reason to want to kill them besides his insane love for his dognapped Shih Tzu.  If snatching Bonny had been Billy’s first mistake. If, that is, there’d been a real crime Billy and Hans and Martin, once he’d been dragged into it, were thwarting by having dognapped Bonny.

As it is, Charlie Costello makes Al Pacino’s Tony Montana look like a model of self-control.  The only reason Charlie doesn’t kill everybody who makes him angry---and just about everybody does---is that along with his unnatural affection for his dog, he’s made a fetish of his silver-plated .45 automatic which has a tendency to misfire two out of three times he pulls the trigger.  Charlie is not dangerous in the way of gangster movie gangsters.  He’s dangerous in the way of horror movie monsters.  He’s entirely without reason or motive, implacable in his hatreds, and relentlessly violent. And on top of all this, he’s meant to be funny.

Woody Harrelson does his best to make him funny, and because he’s Woody Harrelson he often does.  Also, because he’s Woody Harrelson, he does a good job of making Charlie creepy.  But the only thing truly scary about Charlie as a character is our fear that if his gun does go off we’re going to see somebody’s head explode at close range.  As a villain in his own right, Charlie doesn’t matter.

He does matter, though, when he’s in the company of his chief lieutenant and enforcer Paulo, who, as played by Zeljko Ivanek, may be the only character in the movie who is not a psychopath.  No small feat, considering Paulo is a professional killer.  But he has reasons and motives for killing that are, well, reasonable.  For one thing, he understands that a good criminal organization needs a boss who is organized, and he’s figured out that the best way to keep Charlie focused is to let him go nuts now and then, as long as he gets done whatever nutty thing he’s decided to do quickly and relatively neatly.  I got a kick out of seeing Ivanek, a longtime favorite character actor who usually plays more intellectual, softer-edged, and elegant types (like the ADA in Homicide), playing a truly tough movie tough guy.  He has Paulo treating Charlie like an exasperating little brother who persists in doing the kind of stupid things they learned as kids not to do, and through Ivanek’s performance Charlie gains humanity and therefore some measure of seriousness as a villain. Charlie starts to matter to us because he matters to Paulo and he starts to become funnier because Charlie is not funny to Paulo. And he starts to feel truly dangerous because Paulo is truly dangerous.

But that’s what good actors do for each other.  They make each other’s performance better.  And this is true for the all the main players. The main male players, although that amounts to saying the same thing, and I’ll get to that, shortly.  I was particularly taken with Walken here.  I can’t think of very many other performances of his I would describe as a good example of how to underplay a part.  What’s more, I can’t think of any other role he’s played I’d describe as a truly good person.  Hans is by no means a saint.  But he is what a man who knows himself to be deeply flawed trying to follow the example of the saints would look and sound like.   It’s a quiet, gentle, sane performance, and not just for Walken. Hans may or may not be one of the movie’s psychopaths, but if he is, he’s a recovering one.  I can’t say, and in order to say I’d have to undertake a Christopher Walken retrospective, not something that has all that much of an attraction for me, but I think his performance here and, from what I’ve seen, in the upcoming Stand Up Guys, will give future critics and fans a sense that there’s been some shape to his eccentric and unruly career.

Sam Rockwell’s career already has a discernable shape.  In one role after another, he’s been able to find and make clear what’s appealing in annoying characters without losing track of what’s annoying about them.  That’s what he does here with Billy.  Not only does he make us see what’s appealing in Billy, he makes us see that what’s appealing is also admirable. 

Colin Farrell’s main job is to make it halfway plausible that an intelligent and competent grownup could get himself into the mess he finds himself in.  He makes Martin just sane enough to understand he’s in trouble, but just unhinged enough that he not only can’t he think his way out of it, he might actually have thought his way into it and it’s not all Billy’s fault, as he’d like to believe.

Tom Waits shows up holding a rabbit and makes us forget the rabbit the same way we forget he’s wearing a jacket.  Michael Pitt and Michael Stuhlbarg have fun together in their one scene paying homage to Reservoir Dogs.  Harry Dean Stanton doesn’t have a single line but who cares. He doesn’t need lines. He’s Harry Dean Stanton.

At one point in the movie, Billy and Hans have an argument over the direction Billy thinks Martin’s screenplay should take and the role women play in Billy’s conception of things.  Hans objects that in Billy’s version of the story the women characters are passive and inarticulate.  They not only need the male characters to come to their rescue, they need them to speak for them.  Billy defends himself on the grounds that he’s being realistic. It’s a hard world for women, he says.  Hans agrees, to a point.  Yes, he says, “It is a hard world for women, but most of them I know can string a sentence together.”  This is one of the points where Seven Psychopaths seems to be commenting on himself, because the women in this movie, although they can string a sentence together, aren’t given that many sentences to string.  As Hans’ wife Myra, Linda Bright Clay is given the most and she makes the most of what she’s given. But Abie Cornish and Olga Kurylenko are practically ignored, and Gabourey Sidibe is worse than wasted. She’s made a fool out of.

McDonagh’s treatment of his female characters is something I definitely did not like about Seven Psychopaths and using Hans to apologize for it on his behalf doesn’t get him off the hook.  But this gets me back to the question, did I like the movie?

As I said, I didn’t. At first.  I sat there thinking I would.  But whenever I came close, something happened that convinced me I didn’t like it. Then something else happened that made me think I did.  Then I didn’t again.  Then I did, and then…I still did.

At about two-thirds of the way through I realized that I’d been enjoying the movie for a while now and from there onto the end I kept liking it.

I think I still like it.

I’m not exactly sure why.

And I’m not prepared to bet you will.

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Because even if their mom always loved him best I don’t play favorites: My review of Martin McDonagh’s brother John Michael McDonagh’s The Guard, Did your mother come from Ireland and did she deal cocaine?

Seven Psychopaths, written and directed by Martin McDonagh, starring Colin Farrell, Sam Rockwell, Christopher Walken, Woody Harrelson, Zeljko Ivanek, Tom Waits, Henry Dean Stanton, Linda Bright Clay, Gabourey Sidibe, Abie Cornish, and Olga Kurylenko. Rated R. Now in theaters.

A case of critical whiplash

Here are a few notes I made to myself about how not to write a thriller while reading Lou Berney’s new thriller, Whiplash River.

Not that I’m planning to write a thriller.  And not that if I wrote one it would as entertaining as Berney’s a bit overstuffed but generally fun, cheerfully and unabashedly Elmore Leonard-influenced story of a former car thief and wheelman turned restauranteur dragged into a long con by a dapper old man of mystery while on the run from three separate sets of killers intent on making him dead in the most unpleasant ways possible.

It’s just that I couldn’t help reading Whiplash River with a divided mind.Seemed like every time Berney was just getting a scene up to speed, he slammed on the brakes and brought things to a screeching halt for some unnecessary exposition and then, without warning, he’d punch the accelerator and off we’d go again, nose practically in the air, only to skid to another stop a page later for another expository pit stop.  It gave me a case of critical whiplash, particularly in the early going. Being jarred in and out of the story like that caused me to keep taking my eyes off the road and all that time at the pumps for plot fill-ups gave me too much time to think about the driving instead of looking forward to the trip ahead.

And then, halfway through, the story breaks itself rather neatly in two and Berney effectively starts over with a new novel with some of the same characters, the first part of the book reduced to a very long prologue.

At any rate, here are my notes: 

If your first scene is several pages of exposition mainly explaining how your hero got his nickname and your second scene is your hero breaking up a knife fight in a restaurant kitchen between the prep chef and a waiter while putting out a grease fire at the same time, then your second scene is your first scene and your first scene is a few lines of dialog in your fifth or sixth scene.

If your hero is spending his time after something violent or threatening or comic or baffling that just happened to him thinking about what just happened to him in a way that pretty much just recaps what just happened, hit the backspace key and hold it down until you’ve deleted at least three sentences and then start in on making the next violent, threatening, comic, or baffling thing happen.

If you’re not planning to introduce your love interest until halfway through the novel, work her backstory in as you write your way towards her entrance or else you’re going to have to interrupt yourself in the middle of the chase to spend several pages telling us what is most likely an old, old story: They met, they were in love, it ended badly, they both still carry a torch.

While you’re at it, don’t fall in love with your leading female character.

Don’t introduce a second female character and fall in love with her too.

Don’t let on you’re having fun picturing which actresses you’d like to play your female leads and imagining them speaking your dialog.  It’s distracting not least because it will cause your readers to start playing the casting game along with you, and, by the way, Emma Stone and Angelina Jolie.

Also, if you’re holding off on revealing the MacGuffin that’s driving your plot, make sure it’s a truly weird and unique item or a completely understandable one, like a painting, a diamond, a top secret soft drink recipe, either way, something your readers might be tempted to steal as opposed to something you have to keep reminding them is worth a lot of money to the right sort of buyer. Don’t make it a banal piece of historical trivia that happens to be A.) real and easily Googled and B.) currently on display in a museum in New York City and not in the condition it’s going to be when you’re through with it.  If you insist on using that particular artifact, think about what the National Treasure movies did with similar artifacts, which was not make them ends in themselves.

Now, obviously, it sounds like I only learned negative lessons from Whiplash River.  Even if that was the case, though, please don’t get the idea I only have negative things to say.  The Elmore Leonard influence is a very good thing, as are the comparisons coming up to Carl Hiaasen and Donald Westlake.  But, as it happens, I drew one very important positive lesson from the book.  It’s actually not something new.  It’s just something I like being reminded of.

There are three ways to go with a thriller.  You can write what’s essentially a horror story.  You can tell a morality tale.  You can make it a comedy.  It seems like most contemporary thrillers---books and movies---are horror stories. The bad guys are monsters, inhumanly evil, irresistible, relentless, and possessed of an almost supernatural ability to cause harm and get away with it.  John D. McDonald, Raymond Chandler, and Robert B. Parker told morality tales. Most of the crimes in their novels arise from decent people’s moral failings rather than from the intrusion of an outside evil. Whiplash River is a comedy, cheerfully amoral and with a cast of lunatics, not sinners or monsters. Issues of right and wrong, good and evil are left out of the mix or pushed into the background by characters’ more immediate concerns, like “How did I get myself into this mess and how am I going to get out of it.”  Characters aren’t motivated by their vices so much as by their obsessions and manias. Troubles don’t come because of moral lapses but because human beings just have a natural tendency to goof up.

Elmore Leonard is Berney’s obvious influence, but there’s more than a nod towards Carl Hiaasen here too.  Berney’s humor, though, isn’t as mordant or borderline sadistic as Leonard’s can be or as blackly farcical as Hiaasen’s.  Actually, in its more screwball comedy, Whiplash River reminded me of Donald Westlake’s comic crime novels, particularly the Dortmunder series. Berney’s protagonist, Shake Bouchon, is not as smart as Dortmunder and he lacks Dortmunder’s instinct for self-preservation, but like Dortmunder he is, to paraphrase Westlake himself, a man upon whom the sun shines only when he needs complete darkness.

Shake---and as I hinted up top, Berney spends too much time in his first scene explaining how Shake came to be called Shake, and it turns out not to be an interesting or important story---is having a bad week.

His beachside restaurant in Belize isn’t doing a landmark business.  The boss of the local drug cartel who loaned Shake the money to open the place is not happy that Shake has fallen behind in his payments.  An FBI agent has flown down from the States intent on coercing Shake into testifying against some Armenian mobsters Shake did a few jobs for back in California.  And to top off his troubles, a ski-masked thug shows up during what passes for the dinner rush and tries to kill one of Shake’s few customers, shooting up the dining room in the process.

Since dead customers tend to bring down the ratings in the online travel guides, Shake reflexively tackles the thug and after a less than heroic struggle chases him from the scene with a broken nose.

The thug turns out to be part of a team of rookie killers for hire on their first hit, and his partner is his ferocious, vindictive, psychopathic, and fiercely loyal freckle-faced girlfriend who immediately decides that Shake has to pay for breaking her beloved’s nose and, incidentally, getting in the way of their doing the job they were paid to do.  For the sake of love and professional pride, Shake has to die, painfully.

It’s a question, though, who’s going to cause Shake the more trouble, the freckle-faced assassin or the customer whose life Shake has saved.

Harry Quinn is, he claims, a semi-retired CIA operative who, if he’s to be believed, had a hand in every important Agency mission from the Nixon Administration on up into George W. Bush’s first term and who, take his word for it, still gets called in from time to time to help out his old colleagues and even, and this Shake is willing to believe, old enemies.  The grateful Quinn, feeling he owes Shake a life-debt, wants to repay him by bringing him in on a scheme Quinn promises will pay off in millions of dollars.  Shake is inclined to say thanks, but no thanks, wisely figuring that Quinn is not someone to trust with his physical or financial well-being.

But then Shake’s restaurant blows up.  The freckle-faced assassin tries to shoot him dead on the beach.  The drug kingpin decides to write of his losses and Shake along with them.  And the FBI agent gives Shake a choice: rat on the Armenians or…well, actually, there isn’t an or.

Shake needs to get out of Belize in a hurry.  But his only ride is Quinn and Quinn demands Shake’s help with his scheme as the price of the ticket.

That’s a lot going on for one novel, and we’re still only halfway through.

Shake realizes he and Quinn are going to need some help.  He doesn’t feel smart enough or ruthless enough himself and even if the money Quinn expects his scheme to net is real, Quinn himself doesn’t seem wholly grounded in reality.  Shake decides to enlist an ex-girlfriend, a brilliant and ruthless grifter turned brilliant and ruthless hedge-fund manager.

Berney doesn’t get heavy handed with the irony.  He leaves it up to us to decide if managing a hedge fund is a legalized con game.  It’s simply the case that skills and talents are neutral attributes.  Gina Clement has skills and talents that make her very good at manipulating people and playing the odds, and she’s decided to use her powers for (a relative and more lucrative) good and not for (life and limb-risking) evil anymore.  But when Shake and Quinn show up at her office with their proposition, she isn’t in the mood to hear it.  She’s mad at Shake.  Their relationship ended badly.  Gina had a longstanding rule regarding her love life. Men don’t dump Gina Clement.  Gina Clement dumps them.  Shake broke the rule.

Then it occurs to her that, besides offering her the chance to have more fun than she’s had in a long time, throwing in with Shake and Quinn will give her ample opportunities to punish Shake for his sins.

From here, the scene shifts to Cairo and Whiplash River II gets underway.

Berney’s dialog is sharp, clever, and idiolectic---everybody talks like themselves and not like extensions of the narrator, although I have one more note for myself here:  Don’t have your characters think what they could and would just as likely have said out loud.  The action scenes are clean, neat, coherent, exciting, and funny.  Shake is a congenial and likeable protagonist.  Gina is appealing in her criminal brilliance, romantic perversity, and, predictable, soft-heartedness.  She and Shake make a sexy couple, a felonious Beatrice and Benedick expending as much mental effort on trying to con each other about their feelings as on conning their mark out of the MacGuffin.  Quinn is a hoot and a half, and there are a number of standout supporting and minor characters, my favorite being Meg, the freckle-faced assassin, a little Tasmanian devil with a gun spinning in and out of scenes on the strength of pure, vengeful rage.

I said Whiplash River breaks in half, turning itself into its own prequel and sequel.  But another way to look at it is it’s as if Berney has given us back to back episodes of a TV series with an ongoing story arc that carries through the stand-alone plots of individual episodes, like Justified, or Leverage, or Burn Notice.  In fact, and I mean this as a major compliment, Whiplash River is a lot like Burn Notice, with Shake as Michael Westen’s less together, less driven, less dangerous but at heart just as romantic cousin and Gina as Fi’s more cerebral, cooler-headed, less pyromaniacal but just as emotionally and sexually manipulative little sister.

Sadly, there isn't a character comparable to Sam Axe.
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Read an excerpt.

Whiplash River, by Lou Berney, published by William Morrow, is available from Amazon as a paperback original and for kindle.

How not to write your thriller

Learned an important lesson in how not to write a thriller from the thriller I’m reading.  If your first scene is several pages of exposition mainly explaining how your hero got his nickname and your second scene is your hero breaking up a knife fight in a restaurant kitchen between the prep chef and a waiter while putting out a grease fire at the same time, your second scene is your first scene and your first scene is a few lines of dialog in your fifth or sixth scene.

The devil can cite The West Wing for his purpose

Liberal evangelist St Sam Seaborn, now the patron saint of conservative bloggers and pundits for whom the greatest sin is hurting the feelings of very rich people.

Republican bloggers and pundits are having fun passing around this quote from an episode of The West Wing. They think Aaron Sorkin speaking in 2001 through President Bartlett’s speechwriter, Sam Seaborn, was presciently criticizing what they regard as President Obama's You Didn't Build That blasphemy.

Henry, last fall, every time your boss got on the stump and said, "It's time for the rich to pay their fair share," I hid under a couch and changed my name. I left Gage Whitney making $400,000 a year, which means I paid twenty-seven times the national average in income tax. I paid my fair share, and the fair share of twenty-six other people. And I'm happy to 'cause that's the only way it's gonna work, and it's in my best interest that everybody be able to go to schools and drive on roads, but I don't get twenty-seven votes on Election Day. The fire department doesn't come to my house twenty-seven times faster and the water doesn't come out of my faucet twenty-seven times hotter. The top one percent of wage earners in this country pay for twenty-two percent of this country. Let's not call them names while they're doing it, is all I'm saying.

Josh Barro, writing more in the mode of Paddy Chayefsky than Aaron Sorkin and echoing Ned Beatty's wrathful sinners in the hands of an angry corporatist god speech in Network---“You have meddled…Mr Beale!”---white knuckles the lectern and gasps from his pulpit at Bloomberg, "When Barack Obama has made an argument for progressive taxation that even Aaron Sorkin finds distasteful, he has erred."

Three things wrong with this.

First is, that's not what the President meant and Barro and the members of his choir and the elders in the front pews know it. So unless you actually built the bridges and the roads that carry your customers to and from your business' front door, stop whining and shut up.

Second, nobody cares that some rich people got their feelings hurt.

Third, thanks to The Newsroom, Aaron Sorkin's reputation is not at its highest these days. In fact, he's regarded as something of a pompous, self-infatuated windbag who although he can write some snappy dialog knows next to nothing about politics, economics, baseball, social networking, journalism, or comedy, but particularly politics and economics.  Everything he's done since West Wing has made even fans wonder if we were wrong about West Wing.

Other than that...

Barro and others seem to think we’re damned out of our own mouths and we ought to feel ashamed of the President as if he’s our pastor caught preaching a heresy.  Seriously?  They expect us to feel chastened, to tsk tsk at the President, because a fictional character was inordinately pleased with himself because of all the money he made as a lawyer?  Oh well. Serves us right. It was liberals who evangelized that The West Wing, a usually cleverly written, always incredibly well-acted fantasy about how wonderful it would be if the country was run by a handful of smartypantsed white yuppies, was liberal gospel. Every now and then I'll come across a liberal blogger who seems to think Aaron Sorkin wrote a how-to manual for effective and moral liberal governance and then, like Sam Seaborn, I want to hide under the couch and change my name.

But here's the thing. Most of the time Sorkin didn't care what his characters were saying. He cared about how clever what they were saying sounded and how it played off what some other character had just said and then how clever what the next character to speak would sound playing off of that. The West Wing was often a comic symphony for voices speaking gibberish.

Seaborn's speech is a good example. It's not thought. It's sound. Which is fine. It's pleasant sound. As thought it's mostly BS. If you're rich the fire department does get to your house faster. The police not only arrive sooner, they ask permission first and then they wipe their feet when they show up and apologize for taking so long and being out of breath.

If the water coming out of your tap isn't hot enough, the mayor will drive over with his tool kit and replace your hot water heater himself and fix the drip from the kitchen faucet while he's at it.

It's a good life, being rich. Things are so much easier and pleasant. Also safer.  It's not always a picnic, but when it is there are way fewer ants. That's why we all want to be rich. It's why we Democrats like to spread the wealth, so more people can live lives that are easier and more pleasant and safer and with fewer ants. It's why it's a bad thing that the One Percent have stopped spreading it and set themselves to hogging more of it.

It's also the case that Sorkin wrote that speech when Bill Clinton had just left office with stratospherically high approval ratings after having balanced the budget and built a surplus partly by raising taxes.

Besides the fact that it's out of date, and was out of date when it was written, what's wrong about the speech (or right if you think of Sam's character as somewhat callow and naive) is that Sam assumes everyone making upwards of 400 grand is like him, happy to pay their fair share so all of us can have good schools and safe streets.

Conservatives don't read our scripture any more closely than they read their own. Sam isn't arguing against taxes. He's not necessarily arguing against raising them. He's certainly not arguing for cutting taxes on the rich as Mitt Romney is promising to do. He's objecting to the rhetoric Henry’s boss---whoever Henry is---uses when he agitates for raising taxes and I guess cons who got that are assuming Henry's boss sounds like they think President Obama sounds, needlessly disrespectful of his betters. Their noses get out of joint if everything you say isn’t a hymn to the greater glory of our Galtian Overlords or doesn’t include a Wayne and Garth-level of apology for how unworthy we rabble are to live in the light of their gloriosity.  But they miss or expect us to miss that Sam thinks taxes on the well to do are necessary to pay for infrastructure for the common good.  This is an idea the Republican Party has lately rejected.

To the shock and dismay of even some Republicans, like retiring (in disgust) Ohio Congressman Steve LaTourette.

Long an advocate of increased infrastructure spending, LaTourette said he was ”horribly disappointed” in the debate over the transportation funding bill, calling it an “embarrassment” to the institution that a bipartisan bill approved by the Senate was not handily approved in the House.

A long-term funding bill ultimately passed, but only after months of internal Republican strife.

“We’re talking about about building roads and bridges for Chrissakes,” he said, adding that he had come to believe his Congressional colleagues have become “more interested in fighting with each other than getting the no-brainers done and governing.”

Hat tip to ClaireHelene7.

__________________________

Second reading: As long as they’re quoting the Gospel According to Saint Sam Seaborn, chapter and verse, they should think about this one:

Mallory, education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don't need little changes, we need gigantic, monumental changes. Schools should be palaces. The competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be making six-figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge to its citizens, just like national defense. That's my position. I just haven't figured out how to do it yet.

You know who wouldn’t agree with this?  The guy the Republicans are about to nominate for President.  The guy who thinks we don’t need any more teachers.

Nora Ephron

I have a soft spot for Nora Ephron that’s different from my soft spots for other writers I admire.  It’s not that I’m such a fan.  I’m not.  I liked her stuff.  She made me laugh. But she wasn’t one of my top favorites.  Not knocking, only setting this up.  The reason I have such a soft spot for her is that she and her work meant a lot to two young journalists I knew many years ago when they were starting out.  One I’m married to, the other is our old pal Nancy Nall.

So the feelings I have for Ephron are kind of like the feelings you’d have when you hear about a friend’s favorite teacher from a time before you knew them back in high school or college. You admire that teacher, even like teacher, even though you never met her, and you’re grateful to her for your friend’s sake.

I’m grateful to Nora Ephron for the blonde and Nance’s sakes.

As you can imagine, Nance is feeling bad about Nora:

I’ve said here before that Ephron wrote great essays as a young woman, stuff that I read and reread and re-reread, internalizing them and turning her phrases over and over, secreting my own nacre over them until they became stepping stones to my own voice as a writer. I’m serious: I’m the writer I am in part because Nora Ephron was the writer she was, not the greatest ever, but a voice I envied and aped — casual, funny, smart, confessional. I wanted to be her, and while I couldn’t be the 1941-born Jewish daughter of screenwriter/playwrights in Los Angeles, imitating her for a while helped me become the 1957-born Catholic daughter of a couple of ordinary parents, with whatever voice that became.

Nance’s whole post is here.

I never met Ephron.  But I have met Jim Wolcott and Gary Wills and they met her, many a time.

A good thing about being a good writer is that you probably have good friends who are also good writers who will write good things about you when you die.  Good as in complimentary, of course.  But good as in…good.

Jim wrote about Ephron in a post today:

For all the fuss made over the importance of "voice" in writing, fact is, very few writers have a voice on the page that you can pick out of a crowd and Ephron had it, a casual-seeming conversational voice that…seems easy to emulate until you actually try it and find yourself straightening out paper clips, sighing at the ceiling, stumped.

Read the whole post, Another Soul Exits the Party. It’s good.

And at the New York Review of Books, Gary Wills tells how Ephron, although a good and funny writer, was something better than a good and funny writer.

She was kind.

Here’s the link to Wills’ post, Nora the Perfectionist.

Photo via Strand Books.

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.

Not yet dead man in Deptford

It kills a man more dead than a great Reckoning in a little room.

That line from As You Like It is traditionally taken to refer to the death of Shakespeare’s first and greatest rival playwright, Christopher Marlowe, who was killed in a bar fight over who would pay the bill, the reckoning, in a private, little, room in a tavern in the London suburb of Deptford---traditionally.

There’s another tradition.  That Marlowe was murdered in that little room for reasons personal, political, or both.  Marlowe led a colorful life in the Elizabethan underworld, and apparently didn’t pick his friends, enemies, or lovers carefully.  He was also, quite probably, a spy.

In those days and in that place, spies were not figures of romance and adventure.  They were basically paid informers. Glorified snitches.  Treason was in the air and plots against the Queen were a general hobby.  There was no professional police force but that didn’t stop Elizabethan London from resembling in important ways a police state.  The authorities paid spies to wander up and down the town and report back on what they’d seen and what’d they’d heard.  This is how the authorities investigated crimes and caught criminals too, by encouraging Londoners to spy on each other and rat each other out.  Being outed as a spy would not have earned Marlowe many admirers.

And the spy may have been spied upon.  A man duplicitous enough to spy on his friends---or drinking buddies or bedmates---and grass on them to the authorities can be assumed to be duplicitous enough to play games with his paymasters.

Marlowe could easily have made several enemies who would have paid to see him dead or been eager to do the deed themselves.

This is why Marlowe is my favorite candidate for the “real” author of Shakespeare’s plays.

I don’t believe Marlowe wrote Shakespeare’s plays.  I don’t believe anybody but Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare’s plays.   But as long as we’re playing the game, Marlowe is the only candidate I know of who was a talented enough playwright.  Note I said playwright. Forget poet.  The author of the plays wasn’t just some high-minded artiste with a knack for blank verse and the occasional rhymed couplet.  He was someone who knew his way around a theater, knew how to structure a scene, knew how to write dialog, and knew how to develop characters and cast them---there’s plenty of evidence that the author of the plays was writing parts for specific actors.   The Earl of Oxford, Francis Bacon, Queen Elizabeth, they weren’t theater people.  Oxford wasn’t even that good a poet.  Marlowe was a consummate pro.

But Marlowe would have had the best reason to keep his authorship a secret.  There were people who wanted him dead.  There were people who had tried to make him dead.  It would have been congenial to his health and continued well-being if those people thought he was already dead.

Suppose Marlowe fakes his own murder or survives it.  His bloody “corpse” carried out of that little room by bored and unsympathetic servants who wouldn’t have much reason to care about the deceased and what happened to his remains.  Bodies had a way of piling up in 16th Century London.  It would have been easy to lose track of one.  Marlowe wakes up wherever he’s been stashed while waiting for authorities to get around to an inquest and sees his chance. 

He disappears himself.

The question is why doesn’t he disappear himself right out of London?

With what money?  How’s he to pay his way to some far away safer location, how is he to live while hiding out there?

For a playwright and poet, London is where the money is.

Disappearing into London would be tricky.  It’s a crowded place but the crowd is relatively small and you tend to bump into the same people day in and day out.  But it helps that there are not just no photographs but few portraits of anyone---the one we have of Marlowe is only traditionally supposed to be him---and no one who didn’t know Marlowe personally would know what he looks like.  He can avoid casual acquaintances by avoiding his old haunts, and if goes out mainly at night or stays indoors as much as possible, nobody is going to get a good look at his face.  It’s a world lit dimly by fire.  Even in a room full of candles, there are pockets of deep shadows.  And there’s one simple thing he can do to disguise himself, the same thing Viola, Rosalind, and Julia do, change clothes.

We tend to think we recognize people by their faces, but then how is it we often recognize them at a distance, long before we can make out a face?  It’s because we actually recognize them by their affect, which includes not their faces but their expressions, their gestures, the way they carry themselves, their gaits, and their habits of dress.  Clothes do make the man or the woman or make the man into a woman and vice versa.  That was more true in Marlowe and Shakespeare’s day when only the very rich could afford a daily change of clothes.  Most people, even the relatively prosperous, wore the same outfit day after day, sometimes for weeks on end.  Artisans and tradespeople wore what were essentially uniforms.  People became identified with and by what they wore.  You were your blue dress or your green coat or your floppy, feathered hat.  Someone who habitually wore brown leather could turn himself into someone else, at least at a glance, by switching to green worsted. Marlowe could throw on an apron and a white cap and he wouldn’t look like a baker who happened to look like Kit Marlowe he would look like every baker.

Now, for the next even trickier step.  Getting his plays produced.

The people he needs to fool first---the actors, theater managers, stagehands, and hangers-on of the theater world to whom he’d be handing his almost literally ghost written plays---would be the people hardest to fool.  They knew him and they knew his work.

He needs a go-between, a plausible front, and it can’t be any drunken lout of an actor.  It has to be someone who could fool other actors and playwrights.  It has to be someone who can not just pass as a writer but be seen as someone who at work writing.  It has to be, then, someone who’s already known as a writer and one with enough talent that he could plausibly develop to rival the late Christopher Marlowe’s.

So Marlowe goes to a young playwright who’s written a trilogy of history plays that are popular but not really very good and a few comedies stolen straight from the Greeks, an actor who has a business interest in producing plays but not a deep personal interest in developing a reputation as a playwright, someone who is in fact committed to being a poet.  Writing plays is mostly a collaborative effort, anyway.  Some plays have five or six authors.  What does this young actor-poet-businessman knocking out plays on the side care if his latest collaborator wants to pretend he doesn’t exist?

It helps that the younger man is a friend and an admirer who cares more that Christopher Marlowe is alive and that he stays that way than he is concerned with his own future reputation.

At this point in his career, William Shakespeare doesn’t know he’s going to become SHAKESPEARE! 

What he knows is that he’s got a hole in his company’s schedule next week and a new play by Kit Marlowe to fill it with.

The beauty of my Shakespeare Didn’t Write Shakespeare Just-So Story and the advantage it has over others is its simplicity.

It doesn’t need there to have been an elaborate court conspiracy.  It’s just a secret between two friends both with good reasons to keep it a secret.  It doesn’t need to ascribe attitudes to the Elizabethans they didn’t actually have.  If it was scandalous for an aristocrat to write plays and hang out with actors, then why were all Shakespeare’s company’s sponsored by aristocrats, his last one by King James himself?  It doesn’t need a complicated, convoluted, and self-contradictory explanation for how the “real” Shakespeare managed to write his best plays after he died---mine’s easy, he wasn’t really dead.  And it doesn’t need the snobbish, ahistorical argument that the man from Stratford wasn’t intellectually, emotionally, or spiritually capable of writing King Lear, which means it doesn’t need to make the case that a degenerate nobleman with a minor talent for turning out conventional poetry was that intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually capable.

As I said, this is just a game for me.  I don’t believe somebody other than Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare’s plays.  I don’t believe Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare’s plays.  I know he did.

I know he did because the people who knew him best knew he did.

Contrary to what anti-Stratfordians claim, there is plenty of contemporary evidence that Shakespeare wrote his own plays.  (There is no evidence at all that anyone else wrote them.)  I’m not going to get into it all. If you want to know more, you should read James Shapiro’s Contested Will which is one of my favorite books on Shakespeare after Shapiro’s A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599.  But for now, just think about the way plays were written and staged in those days.

Theater companies had short but jam-packed seasons.  They needed new plays all the time and turned them over quickly.  Sometimes they’d buy a complete script from someone outside, a freelancer, although they didn’t use the word.  More often than not they turned to writers who were already affiliated with the company in some way.  You wouldn’t call them staff writers, but they’d be writers the company managers knew could be relied on to turn in a workable script in a hurry.  The managers knew who was good at comedy, who was good with a romance, and who knew how to stage a blood-curdling murder.  (It happened that there were a few playwrights who were good at all three, and one who was better at them than all the rest.)  A usual practice was to put two or more writers to work.  We don’t know how this played out, if the writers sat down together to write or if after sitting down together to figure it out they divvied up the work by scene, act, character, or whim.  The point is, though, that at some point the writers would have been talking to each other about what they were writing.

Then, would come the rehearsals where in a very short time they’d have to put the whole thing together.  It doesn’t appear that plays had directors in the way we understand the job.  Staging was probably a group effort by all the actors, but it’s likely that when arguments broke out over how to say a line or where to stand when saying it or whether or not it should be said at all, if the playwright could be consulted, they’d consult him.  This would have been easy enough to do if the playwright was an actor in the company and one of the managers.

I suppose that every time he was asked a question or was told he needed to fix something, Marlowe’s---or Oxford’s or whoever’s---front man could have gotten away with promising to work on it overnight or by dashing from the theater and down the block to the tavern where the “real” Shakespeare was waiting with quill and ink, but it’s more likely the company would need him to revise or rewrite on the spot.

There’s more to it.

If you’re part of the literary scene, in any time or any place, Paris in the 20s, Greenwich Village in the 50s, a university writers workshop in the 80s, London in 1599, you get to know pretty quickly who’s writing and who isn’t and you know why the people who aren’t writing aren’t---because they’re blocked, because they’ve run out of things to say or never had much to say to begin with, or they’re fakes, playing at being writers and poets.  I mentioned above about how Marlowe’s front man would need to be someone who could be seen to be writing.  I didn’t mean that if you surprised him in his garret you would find him at a desk scribbling away.  Writing is not that solitary an art.  The part where the writer sits down at a desk and scribbles or bangs away at a keyboard is just that, a part of the process.  Another important part of the process is talking about what’s going on or not going on during the scribbling or the banging.  Writers crave company and when they find it they talk about…writing.  They share ideas, ask for advice, show each other pages, boast, whine, pontificate, rage, gossip, and, occasionally, praise each other’s work.  At rehearsals and in conversations with other writers, Shakespeare would have needed to be able to talk like the writer writing those plays.  He wouldn’t have fooled anyone who understood the process, particularly fellow playwrights and certainly not a rival as jealous and ambitious as Ben Johnson, for five minutes if he couldn’t talk about writing as if he was as talented and skillful as Christopher Marlowe…or William Shakespeare.

And here’s the thing.

As much fun as I have with my alternative universe tale of how Shakespeare wasn’t Shakespeare, the longer I let it play out in my head the more reality creeps in and takes over.

There’s enough evidence to show that Marlowe and Shakespeare wrote their own plays.  What we don’t have is much evidence of what their personalities were like.  The little we do have, however, suggests that Kit Marlowe was wild, undisciplined, temperamental, and self-indulgent while Will Shakespeare was steady, thoughtful, sober, pragmatic, and focused.  It’s easy to imagine Marlowe drifting back into his old ways, growing over-confident in his disguise, spending more and more of his time drinking in seedy taverns and chasing after pretty girls or, according to another tradition, pretty boys, and leaving more and more of the work to his supposed front.

And I can imagine the arguments that would follow as Marlowe, the “real” writer, objected to what Shakespeare was doing with “their” plays.

“What’s going on here?  You have this character speaking in blank verse and two speeches later he’s speaking prose?”

“Why have you given a five minute comic speech to a drunken doorman in the middle of a tragedy?”

“You want to make a woman the main character?”

And I see Will winning those arguments.

Swiftly and surely, by necessity, and as he gains confidence, Shakespeare takes over as senior partner, while Marlowe looses himself upon the town, wandering up and down, until he wanders into another little room and meets another great but this time final reckoning.

And sad as he is at the loss of his friend, Shakespeare starts going back over what they’ve written together and revises what Marlowe insisted on not revising.  He revises and revises until he’s not revising anymore, he’s rewriting and he doesn’t stop until he’s written Marlowe out of all of it, which he doesn’t do out of spite or ego.  He does it because he knows.

As good as Marlowe was, he’s better.

________________________

I was looking forward to Anonymous, but I thought it would be a comedy like Shakespeare in Love.  Apparently, however, it takes itself and its central conceit, that the creepy mediocrity and, incidentally, definitely dead at the time Earl of Oxford wrote the plays as coded political manifestos, and expects us to take it seriously too.  More disappointing, though, is that it’s also badly written, ham-handedly directed, and basically a visual and narrative mess.

Oh well.  Maybe it’s not the case, but Sheila O’Malley and Laura Miller weren’t exactly bowled over.

Christopher Marlowe’s career as a spy and how it led to the great reckoning in a little room is the subject of Anthony Burgess’ novel, A Dead Man in Deptford.

Curses, cursive!

Finished my review of Thor.

“Well, then, Lance, where is it?” you ask.  Or don’t.  I’m pretending you do for the sake of getting this post rolling and it would help if you make believe along with me.  “Well, then, Lance,” you ask, “Where is it?”

Why, right here, dear reader.

(Actually, it’s here now.)

I’ve mentioned a number of times over the years how this blog grew out of my longtime practice of keeping a notebook.  I’ve made a point of mentioning it, in fact, partly to emphasize what I think I’m up to here.  The blog is a notebook.  There’s nothing finished here.  No single post, no matter how long or essayic, is a done deal.  Every post is in a way a continuation of the last one and an introduction to the next, because they’re all about the same thing: What’s on Lance’s mind at the moment.  I call them notebooks because I do keep notes in them.  Buy bread.  Mom’s b’day Sat.  Dr appt 3:30.  But most of the entries are longer, contain complete thoughts, and tell stories, if only stories of a single sentence.  I could, if I was more comfortable with the word, call my notebooks journals, and nobody keeps journals.  They keep a journal.  The reason for the singular is that no matter how many pages you use up to do it and no matter how many days, months, or years those pages cover, it’s all one story, the story of what was on the writer’s mind at the moment as he worked his way towards…something.

I’m working my way towards something.  I’m not sure what.  Enlightenment?  Wisdom?  An abatement of loneliness?  A cure for insomnia?  The respect of strong men and the affection of beautiful women?  A six-figure book deal?

All of those, probably, but mainly I’m working my way to my next post.

Actually, I’m usually more focused on working my way to the next sentence.

But what’s on my mind right now isn’t the art or philosophy or psychology of keeping a notebook.

I still carry a notebook wherever I go, even when I’m also traveling with my netbook.  And I’ll write in the notebook while the netbook’s up and running and Windows Live Writer’s open on the screen.  Sometimes what I’m doing is making notes for the post I’m writing at the moment, scribbling stuff down as I go as I try to keep up with my own thoughts.  Sometimes I’m making notes for another post that I may or may not get to typing up later.  I work out of my notebooks but usually what I’m working from is bits and pieces, single words meant to trigger ideas, snatches of thoughts, phrases, occasionally whole sentences and even paragraphs.  Now and then I’ll actually write what amounts to a whole post and all I need to do when I type it up is rearrange things.  But as you can see from the photos I don’t always stick to writing in a notebook.

Every now and then, I’ll write out a whole post on some scrap paper.  I usually resort to this, as opposed to methodically and diligently setting out to do it, when my head’s full of ideas and I’m in a rush to empty them out onto the page.  And I need to hurry.  If I’ve got a whole paragraph or, as regularly happens, a whole post already composed in my mind, there’s a real risk that I’ll have forgotten large chunks of what I planned to write before I’ve typed it all out.  I’m just not that fast a typist.  And one of the things that slows me down is I have a problem sitting still.

I like to move around when I write.  I go from chair to chair and from room to room and it’s easier to leave the netbook in one spot and stop off to type up what I’ve written in the kitchen on my way to the family room.  Another problem, though, is that I’m just not comfortable working in the posture that’s best for typing.  I do some of my best writing bent over close to a table with my my chin on my fist.  Otherwise, I like to sit back in a chair with my ankle up on my knee and it’s risky trying to bang away at a keyboard wobbling precariously on the other knee.  And from time to time I just have to stretch out on my stomach on the bed or the floor.

On the floor, Lance? let’s pretend again you’re asking, Really?  At your age?

Yep.  It’s good for my back and it makes me feel like the young Abe Lincoln working away on a slate in front of the fire in his family’s log cabin.

Now.  My reason for telling you all this is to make it clear that a lot of times when I say I’m writing a post, I’m writing a post.

On paper, with a pen.

There’s no virtue in this.  It’s a habit, not a principle.  Writing a post out by hand first doesn’t necessarily mean the published post will be a better written post than one I’ve typed up in one mad flail at the keyboard.  It helps because it means I’ve had a chance to think things through at least twice.  It forces me to revise and edit.  But I mainly do it for the reasons I said, I can spit out an idea faster and I’m more comfortable while doing it, but it’s also the case that’s how I learned to write, which is to say, that’s how I learned to think things through, while moving a pen across a piece of paper.

I taught myself how to type in grade school but it wasn’t until long after I’d move on to computers that I taught myself to compose while typing.  Throughout high school I had the bad habit of doing my homework, including writing essays, in study halls before classes.  I could write very fast but they didn’t let me bring my typewriter to school.  And I wrote all my short stories and plays and movie scripts late at night after my family had gone to bed and whenever I used the typewriter, even if I working down in the basement, Mom or Pop Mannion would appear at the top of the stairs to tell me to cut out the racket, people were trying to sleep and what was I doing up anyway, didn’t I know it was a school night?

Typing, then, was for a long time a second step in the process or even a third or a fourth or a fifth, depending on how many drafts I wrote out by hand.  Even when I’d typed out a draft or, later, printed one out, I’d cover it over with handwritten corrections and revisions before setting to work to revise it on a new typewritten page or on the screen.

Which brings me at last to my real point.

My handwriting is atrocious!

Really.  It’s bloody awful.

I mean, seriously, can you read this?

Never mind.  I shouldn’t even ask you to try.

My old pal Nance has asked me to stop sending her post cards because trying to read them gives her a headache.  Wev McEwen still likes me to send them because she gets a kick out of trying to decipher them and then letting me know what sort of nonsense I appear to have scratched out.

The sad thing is that I used to have beautiful handwriting.  Both my printing and my cursive were exemplary.  I got A’s in penmanship.  Of course, I went to a Catholic school and even when our kids were going Catholic schools were still teaching penmanship.  That stopped for them when we moved here and they started attending public school.  Oliver was only in second grade at the time, which probably explains why his handwriting is so much worse than his brother’s.  What’s curious to me is that public schools---a lot of them, anyway---stopped teaching penmanship long before personal computers became ubiquitous.  I don’t understand why.  It’s not as though all these little kids had started lugging their Smith-Coronas to school.  Both our guys can type pretty well.  But they still have to hand write their answers on tests and exams.  Oliver’s teachers complain that they have a hard time reading his printing, but they should direct their complaints to their colleagues in the elementary school.  They say---the big THEY who say everything, not Oliver’s teachers---they say that being able to handwrite anything is an outmoded skill.  I suppose someday it might be.  But that day hasn’t arrived.  Besides exams, there are still forms to fill out, envelopes to address.  Post cards and paper greeting cards are on their way to becoming artifacts from the past, I know, but some people still send them. It’s not hard to imagine a world when nothing has to be written down, although the paperless office still hasn’t arrived, has it?   There was a report going around last month that the last typewriter factory had closed, but that turned out not to be true.

I don’t know what happened to my handwriting.  It started to deteriorate when I was in my late twenties which, probably not coincidentally, was when I became addicted to email.  As long as nobody but me has to read it, I guess it doesn’t matter how much worse it gets.  I probably won’t ever give up my paper notebooks but I’ve been looking forward to the day when somebody comes up with a smart and reliable handwriting recognition software.  A tablet computer that I can actually write on would be a dream toy for me.

I still like to send post cards and greeting cards and I like to receive them too and if you want to make my day sometime, drop me a line.  My snail mail address is right up there in the sidebar.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go type up my next post.

Meanwhile, here’s a post by Brian Palmer who thinks that schools should still be teaching kids to use cursive.

Didn’t there used to be a school of penmanship called the Palmer Method?

PS. The review has been typed up an posted.  Thor. Mighty enough. Not enough other things.

Show me when the killing’s done

 

Inspiration Point on Anacapa Island, part of the Channel Islands National Park, the setting for major events in When the Killing’s Done, a new novel by T. Coraghessan Boyle or as our old pal Nance, a Boyle fan, likes to call him, T. Unpronounceable Boyle. 

This review is T.C. Boyle’s own fault.  Every word of it, his doing.

I don’t mean that he’s responsible in the sense that what I’m about to write is a direct response to what he’s written in his newest novel, When the Killing's Done.  I’m not that kind of reviewer.  You know.  Focused.

I don’t write about the books I’m supposedly reviewing as much as I do about what those books made me think about.  Same goes for movies.  It’s how I can write two whole posts on say, The Social Network, and not get around to mentioning that I liked it.  If all a book or a movie makes me think about is itself and whether or not I liked it, I probably won’t write about it.  I’m trying to train myself to write more formal reviews but as you can tell, it’s not happening here right now.

Hold on.  I’ll try to focus.

When the Killing’s Done begins with a shipwreck:

Heavily, like a waterlogged post in a swollen river the boat shifted away from them.  They’d painted her hull white to contrast with the natural wood of the cabin---a cold pure unblemished white, the white of sheets and carnations---and that whiteness shone now like the ghost image on a negative of a photograph that would never be developed.  Unimpeded, the waves crashed at the windows of the cabin and then the glass was gone and the Beverly B. shifted wearily and dropped down and came back up again.  The decks were below water now, only the cabin’s top showing pale against the dimness of the early morning and the spray that rode the wind like a shroud.

It’s one of the most powerful opening chapters of a novel I’ve read in a long time, terrifying, haunting, unsettlingly beautiful.  But while most of its scenes are set on the water or within sight of it, When the Killing’s Done is not a tale of adventure at sea but the story of a battle of wills between a man and a woman.  It’s a psychological drama with the main action taking place inside the heads of Alma Boyd Takesue, a scientist who works for the United States National Park Service, and Dave LaJoy, an animal rights activist and Alma’s self-appointed Nemesis.

Anacapa Island, one of the islands in the Channel Islands National Park off the coast of California, not too far out from Santa Barbara, has been overrun by rats who are raiding the nests of the local birds and threatening to wipe them out.  The Park Service is implementing a master plan to restore the islands to a more natural state and bring back the native plants and animals that have been pushed out or to the brink of extinction by invaders.   Later this will entail a controlled hunt of feral pigs, but it begins with the Park Service’s plan to exterminate the rats infesting Anacapa.  The rats are descendents of rats that washed up after a shipwreck, another shipwreck, not the one that opens the novel---that one washes up Alma’s grandmother as a young woman and establishes Alma’s spiritual connection with the islands, a symbolic edge she holds over LaJoy throughout the book. 

LaJoy has made it his mission to save the rats.  He believes that killing any animal is wrong, but he’s especially incensed by the the plan to kill the rats.  Not only is the method, a poison that causes massive internal bleeding, inhumane, but as he sees it there’s no justification for it.  The rats are an introduced species.  But so were the island foxes, just less recently, sixteen thousand years ago or so, but still.  The rats are there because of human interference.  But killing them off is just more interference.  The Park Service’s plan, LaJoy says, is just another example of bureaucratic arrogance.  He has a plan of his own to sabotage the Park Service’s plan.

But LaJoy is an angry, paranoid personality with a baseless grudge against the world.  He takes everything personally, makes everything all about him, feels everything as containing a slight or a challenge, turns everything into a fight that he has to win and be seen to have won.  He postures as a champion of wildlife but it doesn’t take him more than a paragraph or two to reveal himself as Alma’s implacable enemy in a very personal war.  He wants to save the rats as a way to defeat and humiliate her.  His goal is to break her spirit and destroy her career. 

Alma isn’t in charge of the project, she’s head of public relations and her job is to explain the project to the public.  There isn’t anything she can do to stop it, and there’s no good reason for LaJoy to have focused his animosity on her.  But once upon a time she did something that for a brief but humiliating moment made him see himself as others see him.  LaJoy thinks of himself as a heroic, noble, and romantic character who is doing the world a favor by demanding it live up to the high standards he sets for it.  Alma shows him up as a rather commonplace sort of boor and bully, even something of a clown, and he can never forgive her for that or give up looking to get even.  He has taken every chance he’s had since to embarrass her, turning up at her press conferences to challenge and heckle her and turn her audiences against her if he can.

The ocean figures prominently in When the Killing’s Done, as a fact and as a symbol and as an object of Boyle’s prose.  So do animals.  Birds.  Eagles, bald and golden, scrub jays, burrowing owls, ravens (horribly).  Flying fish.  Dolphins.  Sheep.  Snakes.  Those foxes and feral pigs.  Raccoons.

Rats.

Did I mention the rats?

But what the novel is mainly about, what drives the action, is LaJoy’s dangerously out of control ego and his self-righteous, monomaniacal determination to triumph over Alma.  There isn’t anything overtly or unconsciously sexual in his obsession with her, by the way.  He doesn’t see her as the attractive young woman she is because he doesn’t see her when he looks at her, he sees only a reflection of himself.  She’s a mirror that presents him with what he has to believe is an unfair distortion of his true self.  When he looks at her he’s forced to confront an idea that his ego and vanity just can’t accept.  Alma stands for the possibility that LaJoy doesn’t matter, that the world doesn’t revolve around him and in fact doesn’t much care that he exists.  LaJoy believes that he is force to be reckoned with, a master and commander of all he surveys.  Alma represents the, to him, terrifying possibility that he commands nothing, that life, his life, is not his to direct and control.

Of course a character who is determined to exercise his will over everybody and everything is doomed to spend a book having it proved to him that life doesn’t work that way.  The more LaJoy tries to control things, the more things slip from his grasp, with dangerous and deadly consequences.

Enough focusing for now.  Back to drifting.

When the Killing's Done made me think about a number of things, environmentalism, activism, man and woman’s place in nature, fate, death, graduate school, mainly graduate school.  And graduate school is how come this review’s Boyle’s doing.

It’s not that he wrote this book.  It’s that he wrote a book.  Water Music.

A hundred years ago, when I was working my way away from becoming a playwright and towards I wasn’t sure what but I was leaning towards writing fiction, or journalism, or something, I read a review of a new novel by a young writer the reviewer thought was hot stuff and the Real Thing.  I believed the review and went straight to the library to check out the book.  Two pages in I said to myself, “This is the kind of stuff I want to write!”

Then I said, “How do you learn to write this kind of stuff?”

Then I read the author’s biography.

“Ah ha!” I said. “You go to the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa and learn it there.”

Hey, I was a kid.

I already had a high opinion of Iowa because Kurt Vonnegut had taught at the Workshop.  But knowing that Boyle had come out of there to write Water Music---and the stories in Descent of Man, which I read immediately after Water Music---clinched it for me.  “I’m going to Iowa,” I said and, a couple of years later, I did.

So, it’s Boyle’s doing that I wound up in Iowa and it’s because I went to Iowa that I became the sort of writer I became and followed the path that led me to starting a blog that has turned into the kind of blog it is featuring posts about books like this.

Like I said.  This review, Boyle’s fault.

Now, here’s the first thing I learned at Iowa, thanks to T.C. Boyle.  “Show, don’t tell.”

Yes, I had to go all the way to Iowa to learn that.

“Show, don’t tell” was a commandment around the Workshop.  One we were presumed to have learned in the Little Writers’ Sunday School, one of the less thundering ones grown-ups accept without hardly thinking about and obey, reflexively, out of habit and because they’re easy.  Do not take the Lord’s name in vain.  Remember his day and keep it holy.  Honor they mother and father.  Show, don’t tell.  Commandments with lots of leeway.  I don’t recall any of the writers who taught the workshops preaching the virtues of showing over telling in class.  But my first semester there, the great literary critic Albert Guerard came to speak and his sermon was actually titled “Tell, don’t show.”  Guerard read passages from Conrad and Faulkner in which, according to Guerard, those giants told and not showed.  This was rank heresy and there was much debate around the bars where we hung out for days afterwards.  I came away from the lecture thinking, “Gee, I read Pylon in ninth grade and I don’t remember that scene at all.”

I also came away thinking that I must have missed the point because the passages Guerard read seemed to show a lot.  It took me a little while to work out that what Guerard meant was that the art was in the telling of what the writer was showing.  He was talking about style and recommending having lots of it.  To put it another way, at this time Raymond Carver was the reining Workshop god and minimalism was the preferred religion.  It was a low church religion of steeple-less, white-washed, unadorned meeting houses.  Guerard was there to sing the praises of cathedrals, and, yes, Raymond Carver has a collection of stories called Cathedral, no, I didn’t intend any irony.

Reading When the Killing’s Done made me wonder if Guerard had made an earlier visit to Iowa and if Boyle had gone to the lecture and taken it to heart.  If he’d been inoculated against minimalism.  One thing I’ve always liked about Boyle’s style, right from the opening sentence of Water Music, is that you wouldn’t call it terse.  “Spare” is a reviewer’s word that guarantees I won’t read the book being reviewed.  Reviewers praise an author’s “sharp, spare prose” as a coded way to let us know that the author has a limited supply of adjectives at his or her disposal and rarely gets far past the subject and predicate before slamming the brakes on a sentence with a sharp, spare period.  Nobody would ever describe Boyle’s prose as spare.  And in When the Killing’s Done it seems less spare than ever.  There’s quite a lot of telling, not showing.  And, guess what.  I didn’t like that.

I liked the book.  I’d better make that clear right now because in a few more sentences it’s not going to sound like I did.

But Boyle went overboard.

That’s a joke.  You’ve probably guessed that boats figure prominently in When the Killing’s Done, and a lot of people literally go overboard.  They go overboard literarily too, tossing up great big splashes of not-at-all spare prose.

But the up and down rhythms of his prose during scenes set on the water, with images crashing into each other, the rolls and lifts in tone and mood, the words flowing on and on in sentences not ending so much as breaking, appropriate to describing a storm at sea aren’t quite so appropriate to describing chopping vegetables or eating a ham sandwich, and I’m not being funny there.

Boyle uses up a prodigious number of words to tell us things I’m not sure we needed to be told or shown and to tell or told and shown in such detail.  Then he spends pages telling us other things that if they worth that much of our attention ought to have been worth showing.  If an event is worth several pages of expository flashback, they’re worth the space in the narrative to work themselves out dramatically.  For instance, it’s helpful to know LaJoy owns his own business and he’s made money at it because it explains how he has the time and means to devote to his cause.  But if it’s important that we know how he opened his first store and made a success of it, then we should not hear about it a reverie of memory that occurs because LaJoy’s mind is drifting during a scene Boyle needs but doesn’t want to dwell on.

Then there’s his odd approach to dialog.  He resists including it.  For long stretches characters think their way through scenes that you’d expect them to be talking their way through.  Alma and LaJoy have a habit of holding forth in interior monologs when they could and should be sharing their thoughts with other characters who are standing right there, and this isn’t always or even usually because the subjects of their thoughts at the moment are private or because Alma and LaJoy are feeling secretive or shy or that the other characters with them wouldn’t understand or don’t need to know.  It just seems to be that at this or that particular point in the writing Boyle felt like showing rather that letting them tell what’s on their minds.

As it happens, both Alma and LaJoy are types inclined to keep things to themselves, Alma because she is introspective and intellectually minded and a scientist, which is to say an observer by training, habit, and temperament, LaJoy because he’s arrogant and presumptuous and self-absorbed---he assumes that what he’s thinking is obvious to anybody who isn’t an idiot, which means that if you don’t know what he’s thinking and know that he’s right without having to be told, you must be an idiot and therefore not worth the effort and time it would take him to explain things to you. So it makes sense that there would be times when both Alma and LaJoy would keep their own counsels.  It just doesn’t make sense that when they do their internal soliloquies are delivered in poetic cadences and imagistic language identical to the narrator’s.  Alma and LaJoy do think alike, sometimes, and I’ll get to that, but they shouldn’t think that alike.

But there are three extended set pieces that take place on dry land, or relatively dry land, in which Boyle is content to show through a mix of dialog and an appropriately flatter, less wordy---but not spare---and more direct prose, that are as exciting, frightening, and spooky as the opening shipwreck.  And the novel is crowded with interestingly and entertainingly eccentric characters, told and shown, including its two compelling leads.

Alma and LaJoy are a well-matched pair of adversaries.  They have more in common than either would admit.  Alma has her own streak of self-righteousness and she can be as fiercely and arrogantly judgmental as LaJoy.  The difference is that when LaJoy judges someone and finds they fail to measure up it’s a moment of personal triumph for him.  But for Alma the moment always engenders a degree of self-doubt.  Judging others is a way of judging herself.  The question for her isn’t In what way did they fail to measure up?, but Do I measure up myself to the standard I just set for them?  And the answer isn’t always or even usually, Yes.  LaJoy is always driven to prove himself right.  Alma is open to the possibilities that she is not only wrong but in the wrong.

This makes it difficult for her to stand up to LaJoy, but it does give her the ability to recognize and learn from her mistakes and that gives her the ability to outlast him.  And it’s why, despite her being intellectually detached where he is passionate, coolly pragmatic where he is idealistic, and cheerfully, almost childishly self-indulgent where he is stoic, Spartan, and (in his own eyes, at any rate) self-denying, the natural man to her material girl, she’s the one better suited to taking care of the islands and their flora and fauna.  LaJoy cares more intensely, but he cares about the animals he wants to save and protect the way he cares or doesn’t care about anything, that is to the degree he sees them as extensions of himself.  In When the Killing’s Done, Alma occupies a place that in another sort of novel would be occupied by a villain, the bureaucrat and cold-blooded technocrat.  But it’s her ability and her willingness to see herself as, if not a villain, not necessarily a heroine that makes her a force for good.

LaJoy, to his own continual surprise, is in the opposite boat.

Another reason I wondered if Boyle had ever encountered Albert Guerard, either in person or through his reading, is that along with Faulkner and Conrad Guerard’s third example of an author who often told instead of showed was Dostoevsky, and all three of those writers built stories and novels around central characters who were as unpleasant and initially unsympathetic as Dave LaJoy.

LaJoy is in the position that ought to be occupied by a hero.  His full name, David Francis LaJoy, ought to identify him as a hero.  David, slayer of giants.  Francis, after St Francis, friend of animals.  LaJoy as in surprised by…, and …in the morning, and …to the world, although also unfortunately, but tellingly, consonant with kill…

He is a lone, little guy standing up against a giant bureaucracy, an animal lover and protector, an idealist facing off against pragmatically self-serving and, he believes, cynical and hypocritical careerists.  He is smart, bold, brave, resourceful.  But…

His courage is a form of affrontery, the courage of a bully so determined to show who’s right, so sure it’s him, that it doesn’t occur to him that he might be setting himself up to get his ass handed to him.

Ironically, it’s his obliviousness to his own self-destructive and self-defeating tendencies and his vain, stubborn, blockheaded refusal to even consider the possibility that he is in the wrong, ever, or accept that there are things, and people, beyond his control that earn our grudging sympathy.

We understand the source of his frustration.  Life won’t let us be the heroes and heroines we would like to be either.  And, all too often, no matter how hard we try to be good and do the right thing, it all turns to soot and ashes in our hands.  We cast off in our snug and trim litle boats, the water smooth and the sun shining, confident and competent hands on the tiller, and suddenly, with a safe harbor in sight, the sea rises and swallows us up.  The waves close over our efforts, our hopes, and our dreams, and there’s no trace of our ever having even tried to make the crossing.  LaJoy isn’t a hero, but he wants so hard to be one and tries so hard that he almost succeeds in becoming a certain kind of hero, a tragic one.

Almost.

Photos of Inspiration Point and the island fox courtesy of the National Park Service.

When the Killing's Done, by T.C. Boyle, published by Viking, is available from Amazon in hardcover, as nature intended, or in the technocrat-favored kindle edition.

What he said I said

I was thinking I might Twitter my own presentation yesterday afternoon, the way James Franco Twittered his hosting gig on the Academy Awards, but unlike Franco I actually got caught up in what I was doing and kept forgetting to reach for my iPhone which I don’t have one of anyway.

So my next plan was to write a blog post summing up, but I forgot.

I was talking about blogging, right?  So who do you figure’s going to be in the audience?

Bloggers.

And bloggers gotta do what bloggers gotta do.

At least one blogger, at any rate.

Geoff G. of Text and Hubris.

I had the opportunity to attend an informal discussion/presentation by Lance Mannion with occasional comments from Stephen Kuusisto titled Literary Writing in the Second Digital Age. In it they discussed whether blogs deserve their still often-maligned status as the creation of narcissists screaming into the echo chamber or whether they were something more?

Read all of Geoff’s post Literary Blogging and the Author’s Journal.

And then check out what else is going on at Text and Hubris.

Meanwhile, I’ve got two events to attend today.

Larry Bissonette and Tracy Thresher, the two stars of Wretches & Jabberers are heading a panel discussion on the film this morning at ten o’clock central time.  If you’re here in Iowa City it’s being held in the Illinois Room in the Student Union.

And this afternoon, this:

A dramatic reading of Finding Our Voices by writers with autism will be held at 2:30 p.m., Tuesday, March 8, in the Rembolt Room of the Center for Disabilities and Development. Finding Our Voices, compiled and edited by Grinnell [High School] senior DJ Savarese, is a 25-minute collage of prose and poems by autists who type to communicate. The script, solicited by drama teacher Liz Hansen for the Iowa Large Group Speech competition, is read and performed by eight of DJ’s peers.

The reading will include writings by Tracy and Larrry. DJ Saverese, the producer and director, has just been accepted into Oberlin College, the first non-speaking autist to be accepted at Oberlin, according to his father, writer Ralph Savarese.

Wretches and Jabberers

Monday night, I’ll be attending a screening of a new documentary, Wretches & Jabberers.  It’s sort of a travelogue.  But with an unlikely pair of guides.

Larry Bissonette and Tracy Thresher don’t speak.  They type.  That’s not a gimmick.  It’s how they communicate.  They grew up not speaking.  Which is not unusual for people with autism:

In Wretches & Jabberers, two men with autism embark on aglobal quest to change attitudes about disability and intelligence. Determined to put a new face on autism, Tracy Thresher, 42, and Larry Bissonnette, 52, travel to Sri Lanka, Japan and Finland. At each stop, they dissect public attitudes about autism and issue a hopeful challenge to reconsider competency and the future.

Growing up, Thresher and Bissonnette were presumed “retarded” and excluded from normal schooling. With limited speech, they both faced lives of social isolation in mental institutions or adult disability centers. When they learned as adults to communicate by typing, their lives changed dramatically. Their world tour message is that the same possibility exists for others like themselves.

Regular readers will know why Wretches & Jabberers is right up my alley.  I have a personal stake in understanding as much about autism as I can in order, though, to better understand and explain the difference between autism and Asperger’s.

But I’m not going to the movie as the father of a young man with Asperger’s.

I’m going as a guy with a blog.

Did I mention that the screening is in Iowa?

Long way to go to watch a movie,

Lance Mannion, that guy with a blog, has been invited to give a talk at the University of Iowa.

My topic is Literary Blogging in the Second Digital Age.

That’s Steve Kuusisto’s idea.

I wanted to call it Blogging for Fun and Very Little Profit.

Actually, the question I’ll be trying to address is if the internet, and specifically a blog, is a place where serious writing---good writing, literary writing, writing with real and lasting artistic and intellectual value---can be done.

Steve says I should say something more than, “Sure, why not?”

So, what I think I’ll say will be something along the lines of, "I think so, but mainly only incidentally.  What I’m pretty sure of, however, is that a blog can be a place where serious writing, good writing, literary writing with real and lasting artistic and intellectual value can start.

The finished piece of writing, the literary work that arises from blogging doesn’t have to be by the blogger.

It ought to be.  It could be.  It just doesn’t have to be.

What I hope to do is to give the writers, intellectuals, and academics from the Department of English and the Creative Writing Program and the International Writers Workshop an idea of how they can do what I try to do here and take it to places I haven’t yet been able to take it.

Usually I think of my blog as notebook I leave open for people passing by to read.

But I also think of it as being as much an artist’s sketchpad as a writer’s notebook. 

What I mean is that it isn’t just full of things I want to remember and think I might use in a proper essay or short story someday.

And it isn’t just a collection of rough sketches and first drafts.

It’s the record of the first and---Tom Wolfe and any number of other writers and artists would say---the most important step in the process that ends with a finished piece of writing or a painting.

The artist’s engagement with the world.

First you go out and find out what’s going on out there.  Then you come back and sort it all out and figure out how it fits with what’s in here---in your head and heart---and finally you turn it into whatever you need to turn it into.

My little talk is only the beginning of what I’ve been invited out to do.

I’m going to be there to watch the film, meet the filmmakers, attend their panel discussion, and then attend a staged reading of a short play.

All of this is will be blogged and twittered and Facebooked.

It’s a demonstration of what can be done with a blog beyond writing about the neat idea you had while you were feeding the cat this morning or how mad that damn Scott Walker up in Wisconsin is making you.

Of course, both things are worthwhile subjects for blog posts.

Depending.

I’ve written more than my fair share of those.

But what I think makes the Mannionville Daily Gazette and Mail Order Catalog a little different from a lot of blogs, even much better blogs, is the degree of engagement with the world outside the blogger’s head.

There are a few political blogs that are written by people actually engaging with the world.  The bloggers are  reporting first-hand on the subject they’re blogging about.

But most of them, the best of them included, are about what the blogger has read somewhere else, quite often another blog where that blogger has written about something they’ve read on another website.

And most of the arts and culture blogs I know feature posts that are short or shortish reviews of other people’s work, which is to say reviews of the results of other people’s first-hand engagement with the world.

And, really, that describes most of what I do here.

Or would appear to be doing, judging most of my posts as discrete pieces of writing.

Judged as little chapters in an ongoing project, however, something a little different is going on.

I like to think it is anyway.

In order to understand what I’m trying to say, you have to know that I think that the best and most important posts I write are the ones about the conversations I overhear and the people I spy on in the video store or the cafe at Barnes and Noble or on the street in New York City.

I didn’t write about my unfortunate encounter with some deer as an interlude or a distraction from posts about more serious subjects.

The “serious” posts, the political rants, the movie reviews, the pretentious meditations of life, the universe, and everything are connected to the deer posts.

I like to think they’re all being read in context, and the context is this: they are all part of the ongoing record of a particular person engaging with the world, and that particular person is a guy who will happily spend more time thinking about---and writing about---the pretty hands of the barista who served him his coffee at the bookstore than about the book or magazine he read after he took his coffee back to his table.

The posts here are written by a guy who’s convinced there is a connection between the barista’s hands and the book, although he can’t necessarily articulate what that connection is.

It may simply be that it’s the writing.

This is a blog about a guy trying to describe the world as he stumbles about in it.

What this blog needs is more stumbling about.

I don’t get out into the world as often as I need to.

Which is why I’m so excited about this trip.

For the next few days I’m going to get to do what I’d do all the time if I could figure out how to make it pay.

Go out into the world, meet and talk with and spy on a lot of different people in a place I haven’t been in a long, long, long, long time and then report on what I saw, heard, felt, and thought about it all.

My talk is scheduled to begin at one o’clock Monday afternoon in the lounge of the English-Philosophy Building on the University of Iowa campus and finish up by three.

But you could say that it will actually begin when I get on the plane tomorrow and end when I get back home Wednesday night and write a wrap-up post about the trip.

You could also say that it’s already begun, right here and now, with this post, since it’s obvious that what I’m doing here is making notes for points I’m planning to make Monday.

But I can’t help thinking that the talk began a hundred years ago now when I arrived in Iowa to begin my time as a student at the Writers Workshop and my first blog post was the letter I wrote home my first night there.

____________

Visit the official website for Wretches & Jabberers.

And read Steve Kuusisto’s post on his conversation with Larry Bissonette and Tracy Thresher, From the Journal of an Honorary Wretch.

“Context, convention, and circumstance are all…”

Minus the plummy English accent, this could be me talking to me, reminding myself not to be such a pedant about language.  But it’s the wonderful Stephen Fry talking to all of us about being transported by the giddy, euphoric bliss at the sound-sex of words.  If I ever teach again, I think I’ll show this on the very first day of class.

Hat tip to Matt Gold.

Your book doesn’t limn an f---ing thing!

Shalom Auslander, the author of the memoir Foreskin's Lament and a collection of stories called Beware of God, hears voices when he sits down to write.

Not the voices of his characters, like Dickens heard.

Voices of disencouragement.  Familial:  His mother’s voice.  “Why must you do this?”  His father’s voice.  “Do this and you’ll be sorry.”  His sister’s voice.  “This going to kill Mom.”  But strangers’ voices too.  Like porn star Ron Jeremy’s voice and Adolph Hitler’s voice.  He hears dead writers’ voices.  Live writers’ voices.  Committees of voices.

My favorite of his voices is the New York Times Book Review Voice:

I don’t know what this is, but I know what it isn’t; it isn’t the voice of the author’s generation, it isn’t an important new work, it isn’t a bold new voice, it isn’t the future of American fiction, and it doesn’t limn anything; I’ve read it twice now, and it doesn’t limn a fucking thing.

But I also like the Huffington Post poster’s voice:

I didn’t like this very much, not as much as I like Wittgenstein, and I didn’t like the last thing he did either, or the thing before that. I went to college. I think he should write more about Palestinians. Why doesn’t he write more about Palestinians? You know who I’ve read? Wittgenstein. That was in college, where I went. I have a book I wrote, and it’s better than this, much better, but of course the publishing industry is too afraid of it and so they won’t publish it because they’re scared of it, I scare them, but soon the dead-tree industries will be gone and we won’t be subjected to books like this and we’ll get better books, that aren’t this. Books like mine. (Insert irritating, desperately hip quotation signature line here.)

For all the voices Auslander hears urging him to quit when he’s trying to write, read his whole column at The Tablet.

Hat tip to the Bookslut.

Story’s End: Carrie Bradshaw’s Cinderella Complex Resolved

The real Charlotte, Carrie, Miranda, and Samantha or the imposters from the movies?

As usual, I’m way behind the curve, and I’m only now catching up with the news that people have been going to see a movie called Sex and the City 2 with the expectation that it is a continuation of the TV show Sex and the City.

This is the second time fans have been fooled like this.  A couple years ago there was another movie called Sex and the City that was supposedly a continuation of the TV show.

The thing is the TV show can’t be continued.  It ended.  I don’t mean that it finished its run on HBO.  I mean that its story---woven out of the intertwined stories of its four main characters---concluded.

There can’t be a continuation because there is no more story to tell.

For one thing, Samantha is dead.

That should be a big clue right there that the movies are something different and separate from the TV show.  In the movies there’s a character named Samantha who happens to be played by the same actress who played the Samantha who was clearly going to die from cancer, if not right away then soon, in the TV show.

The movie character Samantha’s cancer is so completely in remission there might as well be a scene in which she goes to Lourdes.

But the TV Samantha’s coming to terms with her imminent death was the conclusion of her story.

The movies also have a character named Miranda, played by the same actress who played the Miranda in the TV show, but this Miranda is a rich and successful rising star at a high-powered law firm, which is exactly the life the Miranda on the TV show had to give up in order for her story to end.

Charlotte’s and Carrie’s stories came to definite conclusions as well.

You can’t continue to tell a story that is finished being told.

Some stories, the best stories, really are done when the narrator says, “The End.”

There’s a reason for telling a particular story and if that reason isn’t clear at The End, if the ending doesn’t end the story, the story either wasn’t told right or well or it wasn’t a story.  It was an anecdote or a sketch or the first chapter.

Harry Potter’s story is told in one big long book that happens to be seven book-length chapters long.

There are no sequels to a good story.  Casablanca, Gone With the Wind---supposed sequels have been made and written and they’ve been ridiculous.  Fans who thought they wanted to know what happened to Rick and Ilsa and Scarlett and Rhett after found it more satisfying to go back to the originals to enjoy having the old story re-told rather than suffering through new stories with new characters who happened to have the same names as the characters in the original.

The characters in the sequels were not the characters from the originals.

That’s because Rick and Ilsa and Scarlett and Rhett are fictional constructs.  They have no existence outside the stories that made them.  The reason we are interested in these characters is that they are parts of a story.  Without them the story is a different story.  Apart from the story they are different characters.

The Huck Finn who tells the story of Huckleberry Finn is not the same Huck who pals around with Tom Sawyer in Tom’s book and the Tom who shows up in Huck’s book is a different, less interesting, and less likable kid.

Wanting and expecting characters to go on, to be parts of new stories, is wanting and expecting them to have lives, as if they are human beings.

Obviously there are plenty of famous fictional characters who have “lived” beyond the stories in which they originally appeared and who have “survived” new story after new story as themselves.  But Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, Tarzan, Indiana Jones, Nancy Drew, Pippi Longstocking, and Anne Shirley are peculiar because they are some things other than characters or rather in addition to being characters---they are stand-ins for us.

They are our way into a story.  You could call them our guides.  They carry us into the narrative and they act as our eyes and ears and through them we see and hear other characters’ stories unfold.  Each new story they appear in isn’t about them.  It’s about the strange, new worlds they lead us into and the natives we meet along the way.

A proof of this is the way Sherlock Holmes can disappear from his own adventures for pages at a time and not be missed.

I am a member of the quasi-secret and generally embarrassed and apologetic club of straight men who liked the TV series Sex and the City.  It wasn’t great.  There were things about it that annoyed me.  But it was smart, funny, and very well-done.  The acting was good, the writing was usually good, and there was always a chance we were going to see Kristin Davis or Sarah Jessica Parker naked---that possibility was always more intriguing and exciting than all the scenes of Kim Cattrall naked, although those had their pleasures too.

And part of the show’s smartness was that it didn’t accept its main characters’ view of the themselves as the view we should have of them.

I gather that one of the flaws of the new movie is that the actresses are now too old for the parts they are playing.

To me, this is another clue that the movie is not a continuation of the TV show because in the TV show the characters were aging and if their stories could have continued Carrie, Miranda, and Charlotte would be fortysomethings and know it and act it.  Samantha, as I’ve said, would be dead so her age would be irrelevant.  One of the themes of the TV show was that the characters were already too old for the lives they were living.  They were adults in their mid-thirties living as if they were barely more than kids in their early twenties, and this bothered them.

Well, it bothered three of them.

Samantha didn’t care.

But Carrie, Miranda, and Charlotte all wanted to be grownups.  They just had no clue as to how to go about growing up or even what it meant to be a grown-up.  Carrie and Miranda had a vague sense that being a grown-up meant being successful in their chosen careers, and Carrie and Charlotte had a vague sense that being a grown-up meant being married and starting families.  That, though, was about the extent of their awareness.

Slowly but surely over the run of the series all four of them learned that being a grown-up meant having to make hard decisions about what you had to give up in order to be marginally happy.

Samantha, seemingly, had made those hard choices already.  She had decided that she was going to do without love, without being loved and without loving anyone.  She wasn’t going to have a family.  She understood that once you start a family, if you are the least bit decent and unselfish, you immediately stop being the star of your own life.

This, in fact, is what Miranda has to face at the end of her story.

Miranda values her independence above every thing else.  She believes, rightly, that she has earned that independence by being hardworking, focused, sensible, and responsible.  That last quality is key.  Of the four, Miranda was always the responsible one or, because she slipped up from time to time, the one who best understood the necessity of being responsible.  And in the end, it’s the quality that defeats her.  She has to give up the independence she’s earned through being responsible because she is responsible.

This is why our essentially last view of her is of her running through the streets of Brooklyn---not Manhattan---searching for her wandering, senile mother-in-law.  Miranda is going to spend the rest of her life being responsible instead of being independent.  The rest of her life is going to be devoted to rushing to the rescue of her family.

This doesn’t mean she’ll have to give up her career and become a fulltime housewife and mother.  But it does mean that her job is going to be something she does for her family not for herself alone, which will make it that much more difficult for her.  We don’t need to see her later on because we know what her life is going to be like from here on---she’ll be running back and forth between home and office, never quite happy or content either place, but knowing she can’t give either one up.

Happily ever after for Miranda is knowing that she’d be miserable living any other way.

Samantha, meanwhile, has been living as if she won’t ever have to grow up and her life as she knows it and loves it will go on as it is forever.  Basically, Samantha thinks she is eternally young.

Two things happen to disabuse her.  The first is that she falls in love with Smith Jerrod and, almost without realizing it, she gives up her sense of herself as the star of her own life.  The second, of course, is that she gets sick.  She has to face the fact that she is going to die, which in context is the realization that she will not be young forever put in its harshest and most explicit terms.

When we last see her she is on the brink of death.  Not that she’s on her death bed.  She’s actually feeling quite well.  But it doesn’t matter if death will come next week or if her cancer will go into remission for ten years.  What matters is that she knows she will die.  Death has become a defining factor of who she is.  The defining factor.  Which is why I insist that the character can’t continue into the movies.  Samantha, that character, is dead, because that character, Samantha as she was throughout the TV series, turns out to have been an impossibility.  That Samantha could only exist---really, seem to exist---as long as the person who thought she was that Samantha believed her life as it was would go on forever, as long as she believed she would never age or die, and as long as she believed she was the only person in the world who mattered to her.

Those were contingent beliefs and Samantha gave them up together and when she did “Samantha” died.

In the end, both Miranda’s and Samantha’s stories end the same way, with the heroine giving up her conception of herself as the heroine of her own life.

They both give up their idea of who they were in order to become better, stronger, more grown-up people.

Charlotte’s ending, although not quite as final, is pretty much the same as theirs.  Charlotte has to give up her idea of herself as a WASP princess whose destiny is to be rescued by a handsome Prince Charming who will carry her off to live happily ever after. 

You can make the case that Harry is a Prince Charming, just not a WASPy one, but if he is he’s more of a frog prince who is not fully transformed by Charlotte’s kiss.  In fact, with apologies to Disney who stole the idea from Fractured Fairy Tales anyway, Harry’s kiss turns Charlotte into something of a frog.  That is, in order to live happily ever after, Charlotte has to come down off the pedestal she’s placed herself on and live down here in the swamp with the rest of us.  She has to accept that life is messy, that it has edges that can scrape and cut her, that it isn’t always pretty and fun, and that she won’t find happiness through getting everything she always wanted because nobody gets everything they always wanted.  Sometimes people don’t get anything they always wanted.

Charlotte gets more than most people, but that’s really the result of the writers rewarding her for having been the most decent and loving of the four main characters.  The main point is that even Charlotte has to give up her sense of who she is and what she’s entitled to be in order to grow up.

Of the four main characters, then, only Carrie is granted an easy and unambiguously happy ending.  But then Carrie was always the most unrealistic of the four in that she had actually wandered into the story from a different kind of story.

Charlotte thought of herself as a fairy tale princess.  Carrie really was a fairy tale princess.

She was Cinderella, updated, with a host of unpleasant characters, many of them men, some of them boyfriends, coming and going over the years acting as her mean step-mother and ugly step-sisters and with no one but herself to act as her fairy godmother.

And like a character in a fairy tale Carrie’s story ends, which means that she ends, with the words “And they lived happily ever after.”

That the movie’s Carrie is not living happily ever after with Big may have struck the writers and producers as a nod at realism is a sign that they were refusing to face who and what Carrie was and that her story, the story, had reached The End.

_______________

I didn’t see the first movie because of my feeling that the story was over.  I didn’t feel a need to know any more about the characters because I already knew all that there was to know.  But I also suspected that the only way there could be a movie “continuation” of the story was if the producers undid the ending the of the TV series.  Which is apparently what they tried to do.

So I wouldn’t see the new movie even if it was any good.  Which it apparently isn’t.

Apparently it’s bad.

Really, really bad.

The reason why you shouldn’t say “the reason why”

I want to write about this piece by Bill McKibbon that Alternet’s posted but “the reason why” I haven’t yet is I can’t get past the headline:

The Surprising Reason Why Americans Are So Lonely, and Why Future Prosperity Means Socializing with Your Neighbors

The “reason why” I can’t get past it is that the editors should know better than to write "the reason why.”  It’s redundant.

A why is a reason and a reason is a why.

You don’t need both.

It’s as bad as writing “the reason is because”.  It’s the same as writing “the reason is because”.

The Surprising Reason Americans are So Lonely is fine.

The reason why the lab blew up is that somebody forgot to turn off his Bunsen Burner.

The reason why I stopped you, sir, is you caused windows to shatter when you broke the sound barrier coming around that turn back there.

The reason why I’m wide awake and giving lectures on grammar and usage at two in the morning is that I made the mistake of drinking a Red Bull on top of six cups of coffee.

Take the whys out those sentences and not only do they still parse, they flow better because the drawn-out crying sound that a why makes is gone.  You don’t have to pause to comfort it.  Whys force an emphasis on themselves that stop sentences in their tracks.

Go ahead.  Re-read those sentences without the whys.

See what I mean?

More to the point, do you hear what I mean?

The reason I’m bothering you with this is that I’m a pompous and pedantic ass.

The reason you’re reading it is unfathomable.

Saturday morning failed writer blues

From the Department of Communications.

Lance Mannion has fallen under the melancholy and grumpy influence of the poet and novelist Jim Harrison again and is wishing that in honor of Harrison he could spend the morning writing.

Not blogging.  Not twittering.  Not replying to email or updating his status on Facebook.  Writing.

Not a poem, necessarily, although he would love to be able to write a poem.  Harrison begins a poem like this, but Mannion can’t begin a poem at all:

My dream of becoming a Mexican singer
is drifting away.
It reminds me of the etching on my journal
of a naked girl
grasping the cusp of the moon with
both hands.
She's surrounded by stars. No one is strong enough
to hold the moon for long.

No, not a poem.  Just some prose of the kind he used to write when that seemed like a sensible way to spend his time.

Something like this.

Lawrence Merton was thirty-three years old and still playing juveniles in touring company productions of Shakespeare. The last humiliation he’d added to his resume before leaving New York was the role of Banquo's teenage son in the Scottish play. He’d been given the part so that the fifty-eight year old stars playing the bloody thane and his somnambulating wife didn’t look ancient compared to any actual children on stage.

But, mood he’s been in lately, the urge to write upsets him, makes him irritable with himself.  It strikes him as a regression, an impulse of psycho-spiritual atavism.  He might as well be thinking he could spend the morning outside with his friends, playing ball in the field behind the neighbor’s backyard, the one the old man who owns it sometimes chases them out of and sometimes welcomes them into and stands with his dog to watch them play, as if he’s two old men, twins with opposite temperaments, and maybe that’s what they are, brothers, but not having to be twins, because one old man can look exactly like another to ten and eleven year old boys, unless one of them is your grandfather, except that when you’re that age it’s amazing how many old men look exactly like your grandfather, and that gets confusing in a crowd.

So he won’t be writing, the same way he won’t be playing ball with his friends or, more relevantly, perhaps, the same way he won’t be spending the morning in bed with a pretty girl in his apartment in Boston, the one in Back Bay near the Public Garden, where he and she will walk over to later with sandwiches bought at the market where the mayor comes in every day with his dogs, golden retrievers, and drinks his coffee while standing there talking with the clerks and the other customers who are the mayor’s neighbors as well as voters he needs to woo, a scene the young Lance tells the pretty girl as they sit by the pond with their sandwiches and watch the ducks chase the swan boats for the bread crumbs the passengers throw, he will have to work into one of the stories he is writing to send off with his application to grad school.

No, he won’t be writing, unless he were to count this as writing, which he won’t because it’s too much like what overly clever college students turn in for their first assignment in freshman comp, an essay on how they couldn’t think of a topic to write about for their first assignment, students he got a kick out of when he was a young teacher of freshman comp because he knew what they were trying to pull, how they were showing off both their talent and their indifference, because he’d done it himself, something like it, in high school and college, several times, and once or twice gotten away with it because the teacher or the professor probably had also done it in her day too.

This isn’t writing.  It’s procrastination.  The way he’s going to spend the morning---the way he should spend the morning, at any rate---is by doing small chores around the house.   Bundling up the newspapers and taking them to the dump, for instance.  Replacing the cartridge on the kitchen faucet which leaks when you don’t lift and turn the handle just right.

At least he doesn’t have to mow the lawn.  It’s raining.

All right then, it’s the newspapers then the faucet then he’ll think of something else.  But first…

First, he’ll spend the next half hour or so wandering back and forth to the living room window with his cup of coffee to look out at the trees that have leafed since last weekend and the water dripping from those new leaves and at the drooping heads of the blown daffodils yellow as butter still but with a burnt brownness coming out in them bouncing lightly from the soft blows of the rain and at the puddles with their surfaces agitated like the coats of dogs combed backwards with your hand as the breeze blows across them.

And maybe one of these times, instead of going straight back to the window, he’ll take another cup of coffee into the bedroom where that pretty college girl is relaxing and reading the paper and tell her, as if it’s news more important than the day’s headlines, “Still raining,” and assure her that any minute now he’s going to get at that leaky faucet.

The mayor and his dogs have been long since forgotten.

Quotes above are from Harrison’s poem Singer, which is in his collection In Search of Small Gods, and The Two Gentlemen of Schenectady, a short story by Lance Mannion.

Dirty sexy naked poets

Updated below.

In celebration of National Poetry Month, Emily Dickinson’s Victoria’s Secret spread:

The blonde assures me The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson is a good novel, but I can’t bring myself to read it.  I’m not interested in Dickinson’s love life.  Falls into the “Things I Don’t Need to Know” department.

But maybe I should force myself to read it as a necessary corrective.  I’ve known more than a few poets and academics, male and female, who’ve admitted to serious crushes on the Belle of Amherst and I’ve never been able to see it.  Every time I get a glimpse of that winsome little middle-aged neurotic in the white dress peeking out from around the corners of one of her poems, spying on my reading the way she eavesdropped on the conversations of guests she refused to meet face to face, I get queasy and put the book back on the shelf.

Maybe if I could see her as a vibrant and vital young woman burning with sexual fires she couldn’t quench because her society and times wouldn’t allow it, if I could think of her as she might be today, not a quasi-cloistered, virtually unpublished poet, but a soaring lyricist performing her own songs in clubs and bars, singing over the heads of the dancing fanboys and fangirls in the audience to the as yet unmet soul mate she knows is out there in the shadows, the only one who truly understands (I probably shouldn’t be listening to Little Boots right now), I would have a new and stronger appreciation for her poetry.

Sex, adultery, scandal touched her family and her circle, so why not her too?  And she did write one of the great poems about masturbation, although some people insist it’s only about flowers.  Go figure.

I tend my flowers for thee—
Bright Absentee!
My Fuchsia's Coral Seams
Rip—while the Sower—dreams— 

Geraniums—tint—and spot—
Low Daisies—dot—
My Cactus—splits her Beard
To show her throat—

Carnations—tip their spice—
And Bees—pick up—
A Hyacinth—I hid—
Puts out a Ruffled Head—
And odors fall
From flasks—so small—
You marvel how they held—

Globe Roses—break their satin glake—
Upon my Garden floor—
Yet—thou—not there—
I had as lief they bore
No Crimson—more—

Thy flower—be gay—
Her Lord—away!
It ill becometh me—
I'll dwell in Calyx—Gray—
How modestly—alway—
Thy Daisy—
Draped for thee!

I’m someone who’d rather think it’s about flowers.  I just think it’s better that I don’t know it isn’t.

Maybe if I read the novel my appreciation for her work might increase.  But, based on past experiences with too much information, I’m afraid there’s an even greater chance I won’t be able to read her ever again.

Couple months back I wrote a post called Writers I have known and loathed that was mostly about one writer I’d come to loathe.  He was the author of a couple short story collections I admired but when he came to Iowa when I was in grad school there he showed himself up as such a complete jerk that I couldn’t stand to see his name on the cover of a book anymore, and I haven’t read a thing he has written since.

Something similar but even more disappointing happened when a poet I’d recently become a big fan of came to visit.  Iowa was where I finally “got” poetry.  An offhand remark by another poet, who was on the faculty at the time, in one of my classes my first or second week there, triggered something in my brain and suddenly I could do something I’d never been able to do, read a poem.  This was thrilling and for the next few weeks I read nothing but poetry, which confused my fellow fiction writing friends no end.  And while I was on this poetry jag, this first poet, a Pulitzer Prize winner, came to read.

Before he arrived, I bought a collection of his poems and devoured it.  It was terrific stuff!  The best I’d read so far.  I couldn’t wait to meet him.

He visited my class first.  He was tall, shambling, dirty, disheveled.  His hair was greasy and uncombed and he wore a wrinkled and soiled-looking seersucker suit the pants of which were torn from below his left knee to his hip.

Not that I took much notice of that.  He was a poet, after all, and while all the students and teachers on the poetry side of the Workshop seemed to find time for showers and a regular change of clothes, I’d known plenty of artistic types who had issues when it came to grooming and personal hygiene.

Wasn’t until I realized that his fashion statement wasn’t the result of a temperamental indifference to the dictates of cultural norms but an intense devotion to whiskey.

He was hungover.

And it was one of those hangovers where you’re still half in the bag but sober enough to feel terrible and anticipate how even more terrible you’re going to feel when you sober up completely.

Made him a little grumpy.

He opened up the floor to questions and I jumped right in.  His collection included several longish poems that were in effect short stories and naturally, as an aspiring writer of short stories who couldn’t (and still can’t) write a short story, these had caught my attention, and I started to ask him how he went about distilling a narrative down to fifty odd lines.  He cut me right off.

“Oh, I don’t write those kind of poems anymore,” he growled and moved on to look for the next hand up.

Gotta admit.  I was hurt.  And embarrassed.

But I was over it by the time I went to his reading that evening.

So was he.  He wasn’t grouchy anymore.  He was ebullient.

Ok, he was probably drunk.  But the point is he was in a much better mood and gave a very entertaining reading, which I’ve since learned is something very few writers can actually do.  He even read a couple of the short story poems I liked.

And then he announced he was going to read a new poem.

It’s a little long, he warned us.

It’s more of a short story than a poem, he said.

I’m proud to say I did not heave my copy of his book at his head.

He was still wearing the same grubby suit, by the way.  Someone had given him a couple of safety pins to close the rip in his pants.

That was a disappointing encounter but that’s not the whole reason I haven’t been able to read his poetry since, even though I’ve held onto that book.

Some while after that I found my way to the work of yet another poet, a young woman I’m not about to name for a reason you’ll understand in a minute.  I liked her poetry too and started asking around the Workshop if anybody knew her because I thought she’d be a good person to invite to come read.

Turned out several people knew her.  Many more knew of her.  She was somewhat notorious.

Ok, from here on this post is not for children and may not be safe for work.

According to my sources, this poet, although admittedly talented, had not achieved the success and acclaim she’d achieved solely because of her talent at writing verse.

She had another talent, highly valued by other, older, influential male poets.

She gave great head.

She was the blow job queen of the American poetry scene.

This wasn’t simply gossip, I was told.  She was proud of her talent and she boasted about it.  Apparently, besides being the reason she was invited to so many workshops and writers colony, it was the highlight of the their time there for other attendees---the poet would announce ahead of time which of the older male poets she intended to go down on and then afterwards, late at night, around the campfire, as it were, regale people with the details.

She wore a rubber band around her wrist all the time, my sources said, that she removed and used to enhance the pleasure of the man and of herself.  She liked the moment to last.  And this is where the Pulitzer Prize winning poet returns to the narrative.

The young woman poet was not discreet, as you can tell.  She named names when she boasted of her conquests, and she named the Pulitzer Prize winner as one of her great disappointments.  She liked a challenge and he didn’t present her with one.

It was all over in a sec with him.

“Comes on a dime,” she supposedly said.

I’ve never been able to read any of her work ever since either.

So, I think I’ll keep my image of Emily Dickinson as it is, because I don’t want to risk having to give up this:

There came a wind like a bugle;
It quivered through the grass,
And a green chill upon the heat
So ominous did pass
We barred the windows and the doors
As from an emerald ghost;
The doom's electric moccasin
That very instant passed.
On a strange mob of panting trees,
And fences fled away,
And rivers where the houses ran
The living looked that day.
The bell within the steeple wild
The flying tidings whirled.
How much can come
And much can go,
And yet abide the world!

________________

Sunday morning.  My mentioning of the poet at Iowa whose offhand comment tripped some switch in my brain that suddenly let me know how to read a poem so that I understood it, reminded Bill Nothstine that once upon a time when he and the world were young he had missed a chance to have the art of writing explained to him by an offhand remark by a famous writer.  Read his post The 120-second thunderbolt.

Bill dropped by a note, too, asking me what that poet---whose name I won’t drop here because I don’t want to risk anyone confusing her with either of those other two poets, though I will tell you that she’d just had a baby who she and her poet husband had named Emily after guess who---had said.  Bill admits he still doesn’t “get” poetry and he was hoping that poet’s remark would open things up for him that way it had for me.  I had to tell him that for the life of me I can’t remember what she said.  All I remember is that she was discussing one of her poems and I had book opened to that poem when she said whatever it was she said.  As I wrote to Bill:

I had the book in my hand and was looking at the poem and I swear it was like a scene in a movie where a character is staring at some ancient runes that suddenly rearrange themselves on the stone tablet and become English words.  One second I was looking at an indecipherable arrangement of symbols and the next I was reading a poem.

Sorry, Bill.  But maybe this post by my friend, the poet Steve Kuusisto, will help.

Harry Potter and the Boggarted Blogger

Schoolteacher putting together her summer reading list found her way to an old post of mine, Bring me the broomstick of Harry Potter, and altered to me to a link that had rotted since I wrote the post four years ago.  Setting out to fix it I slipped up and did something I don’t like to do---I re-read one of my old posts.

Reason I don’t like to do this is I usually have the same reaction as I had this time.

How could I have been so wrong?

The post was written in response to some speculation that J.K. Rowling might kill off her hero in the soon to be published concluding volume of her Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  I didn’t think that likely.

If you’re the type of person who went to Return of the Jedi expecting that it would end with Luke impaled on Darth Vader’s light saber or turning to the Dark Side and walking off arm in arm with the Emperor, then you’re likely to believe that there’s a real possibility that J.K. Rowling is going to end her next book by killing off Harry Potter.

Rowling has been cagily telling people that at least two important characters die.  Only two?  That seems like a very low body count, considering the dark and violent way her story has been developing.  Voldemort will very likely get his at last.  But only one other character’s going to bite the dust?

Frankly, I don't think Rowling will kill off Harry, for reasons of good storytelling and sound business practices…

I’d have been fine if I’d stopped there.  But, no, I had to do some speculating of my own on what characters she might zap with an authorial avada kedavra.

Spoilers coming, in case you’re one of the lucky ones who are still working your way through the books and have much to look forward to.

I was wrong about Hagrid.  Wrong about Neville Longbottom.  Wrong about Snape.  Way wrong about Fred and George.

I shouldn’t say I was wrong, because I wasn’t actually attempting to predict anything.  I was describing how I saw that story shaping up and shaking out so far and where I hoped Rowling would take it in her final installment. Rowling, naturally, had her own ideas.

But Rowling had announced that two main characters were doomed.  I thought that seemed like an awfully low body count for a book that was going to be about a war.

Turned out I was right about the level of casualties, although it does depend on who’s to be regarded as a main character.  If you limit the definition in a certain way, then only two main characters did die and if you limit it in another, none did.

My definition isn’t limited in either way.  You might want to argue that it’s barely limited at all if includes Neville Longbottom or that it’s crazy because it comes close to excluding Hagrid.

Basically, my definition is that a main character is one who by virtue of being a very specific person changes the hero and helps determine the direction of his story and its outcome.  A main character acts for himself or herself and on his or her own behalf.

Minor characters, who aren’t necessarily minor in that they are unimportant or don’t spend a lot of time on stage, are characters who are extensions of the hero…or the villain.  They act in their place or at their command.  In short, they are there to be used by the main characters in order for the main characters to complete their tasks and achieve their ends, they have no ends---or endings---of their own.

Hagrid is on stage a lot and he is quite the character.  But when he acts it is usually as Dumbledore’s or Harry’s servant.

Read on and you’ll see that I don’t think Hagrid is a minor character.  I think that his author failed him in not developing his story to a fitting conclusion.

I think Rowling failed Lucius Malfoy in the same way.

Identifying the hero of a story is easy.  The hero is the character the story is about, obviously.  But he or she is also the character who’s actions drive the story to its conclusion.  The story exists as a story and as the story it is because of what the hero does or fails to do. 

Most stories are fairly simple and have only the one main character, the hero.  All the other, secondary, characters appear only as needed to help or thwart the hero in her pursuit of her goal or the fulfillment of his task.

But there are more complex stories in which there are secondary characters with interests, needs, desires, and goals of their own, apart from the hero’s, that are bound up in the resolution of the hero’s adventure to the point that those characters can rival the hero for the focus of the narrative (and the reader) and who in pursuit of their own goals or in a quest to fulfill tasks of their own break away from the main storyline to develop adventures of their own.

Harry, it goes without saying, is the hero of the series, and Ron and Hermione are main characters of the latter type.

After Ron and Hermione, the list of characters who have important subplots of their own and whose stories and actions have significant impact on the hero’s story apart from the what the hero is doing for himself, has included from the beginning Dumbledore, Tom Riddle/Voldemort, and Snape.

But several other characters made their way onto that list as the series progressed, Draco Malfoy, for example, and Neville who emerged from the comedic background to become a hero in the way Beaumains or Percival would emerge in a story about the Knights of the Round Table that kept us in the dark about their royal heritage and their noble natures and had us seeing them the way the knights and noble ladies of Camelot would have seen them until their true destinies were revealed.

That Rowling snatched the Grail from Neville’s hands and pushed him back into the kitchen as soon as his heroic deed was done is another issue that I’ll get to later.

To my surprise, Hagrid never made this jump.  He was always more than comic relief but he never completed the transition to tragic hero I expected him to make.  He remained an interrupted character and his heroic role in the final battle didn’t change anything for him.  If Rowling ever decides to write the series of books she set up with Harry and Ginny’s adopting Lupin and Tonks’ son, Hagrid will reappear as the same shambling, good-natured sentimental comic servant’s role he played throughout the original book.

This is why I thought Hagrid would be one of the main characters who’d die.  He deserved a better and nobler end.

Still, he’s a main character, the most important and sympathetic of the many supporting characters.

The list of supporting characters who I think qualify as main characters begins with Ginny Weasley.  She is after all the hero’s love interest but that alone isn’t enough to make a character important.  Love interests are often there to comfort, inspire, aid, and reward the hero, and Ginny certainly does all that.  But Ginny aids her hero by being heroic in her own right and taking an active part in Harry’s struggles and in that role who she is matters as much as what she is.  The outcome of the hero’s adventure is helped determined by the kind of person the love interest turns out to be.

Having interesting personalities of their own and even intriguing backstories isn’t enough to lift a character out of the ranks of minor players.  The Harry Potter books are crowded with eccentrics, grotesques, caricatures, and the occasional realistically rendered human being who, for all their personalities matter to shaping the outcome or direction of the story, might as well be nameless and labeled as in Shakespeare with their function in the plot at that point---messenger, servant, chorus, soothsayer, friend, henchman, fool.

This is why Guilderoy Lockhart, the vain and fraudulent professor of Defense Against the Dark Arts in Chamber of Secrets is not a main character, despite all the pages he takes up, while Hugo Slughorn, the vain and in his own way fraudulent professor of Potions in The Half-Blood Prince is. 

Both men’s vanity provides comic relief and presents an obstacle to Harry in his quest.  But with Lockhart that ends up defining him.  He is comic relief and an obstacle, and afterwards a tool, and in the end is just there to be used by the author to move Harry’s story along.  Slughorn, on the other hand, refuses to be used, either by Harry or by Rowling.  He insists on being himself.  He pushes back against his creator and the hero.  Harry is forced to react to him.  Slughorn presents Harry with an obstacle, but he is not an obstacle, he’s a person whom Harry must deal with by changing his own thinking and, to a degree, character.  Slughorn reshapes and redirects the story by being who he is.

The same could be said of Delores Umbridge, but I’m not sure I would say it.  Would you?  Is she a person in her own right or defined by her role as an obstacle in the plot of The Order of the Phoenix?

Sirius Black should have been a main character, but Rowling apparently lost interest in him, and in the end he’s pretty much reduced to a plot device, a reason for Harry to hate Voldemort even more.  Sirius is Harry’s protector and Harry’s father’s friend and in both roles his personality almost doesn’t matter.  His brother, Regulas, however, even though he never actually appears in the books, affects the outcome by who he was.  Which doesn’t make Regulas a main character, it only highlights how Sirius fails to become one.

Lupin, however, and Tonks do matter for the types of people they are and so I’d list them as main characters, but they aren’t as important or as influential in who they are as Harry’s three fairy godmothers, Professor McGonagall, Mrs Weasley, and Luna Lovegood.

When I was talking my ideas for this post over with sixteen year old Ken Mannion last night, it occurred to me that McGonagall, Mrs Weasley, and Luna match up with the three witches who are the heroines of several of the books in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, and Magrat Garlick.  In both sets of witches you have the Crone, the Mother, and the Maiden.  Ken liked this and wondered who had been influencing whom, whether Pratchett had been studying Rowling or Rowling studying Pratchett.  I pointed out that Pratchett had got there first, but it didn’t mean Rowling had borrowed from him, since they were both working from the same folkloric sources.  The main point is that Harry’s three godmothers each shapes Harry’s story and Harry’s character in their own distinct ways, according to their personalities, and not just by acting in their roles as his protectors and bestowers of wisdom.  McGonagall gives Harry the benefit of a certain kind of grouchy but pragmatic wisdom born of long experience.  Mrs Weasley gives Harry the benefit of a mother’s love and comfort and a mother’s wisdom that comes from a studied understanding of her children’s hearts.  And Luna gives Harry the benefit of her particular and peculiar wisdom that comes from her having a totally non-judgmental nature that she leaves wide open to every new experience and human being.    And at key moments each one helps Harry not simply by being wise but by being wise in her unique way.

I’m going to leave it to you to fill out the lists of major and minor characters.  If you feel like it, slot some of the minor characters into the traditionally anonymous roles of messenger, servant, henchman, etc. 

I’m also leaving you to solve the problem of Fred and George.

Illustrations by Mary GrandPre.

__________________

FYIATFOI (For Your Information and the Fun of It): The Witches of Discworld have their main adventures in Equal Rites , Wyrd Sisters , Witches Abroad , Lords and Ladies , Carpe Jugulum , and Maskerade.

All the Harry Potter books are available through my aStore.

Blowhards. Part One.

Andrew Sullivan thinks it’s getting a little scary out there and he links to this post by Ezra Klein, We have something to fear from fear-mongering itself, to illustrate the point.  Ezra writes:

I don't want to exaggerate the importance of the death threats being made against congressmen who voted for health-care reform. Nuts are nuts. But there is a danger to the sort of rhetoric the GOP has used over the past few months. When Rep. Devin Nunes begs his colleagues to say "no to socialism, no to totalitarianism and no to this bill"; when Glenn Beck says the bill "is the end of America as you know it"; when Sarah Palin says the bill has "death panels" -- that stuff matters…

..take the universe of people who really respect right-wing politicians and listen to right-wing media. Most of them will hear this stuff and turn against the bill. Some will hear this stuff and really be afraid of the bill. And then a small group will hear this stuff and believe it and wonder whether they need to do something more significant to stop this bill from becoming law. And then a couple will actually follow through. And one will cut the gas lines leading to house of Rep. Tom Perriello's brother after seeing a tea partier post the address online.

Beck and Palin are brazen demagogues and shameless opportunists out to make a buck off the anger and frustration of their fans and adherents.  They answer to nobody and nothing but their vanity and bottom lines and feel no responsibility except to continue their cults of personality so the money keeps pouring in.

But Devin Nunes is a member of the United States Congress.  Even if Nunes has no constituents who support health care reform, although he probably he has tens of thousands who by implication Nunes has accused of being eager for totalitarianism, he should be mindful of his colleagues in the House of Representatives with whom he has to work for the benefit of all his constituents and those colleagues might resent having to cooperate with someone who believes they’re out to destroy the nation.

Ezra asks if Nunes really thinks what Nunes appears to think:

[T]otalitarianism? Death panels? The end of America as we know it? These critiques aren't just wrong in their description of a cautious, compromised reform that uses private insurers and spends only 4 percent of what we spend on health care in an average year. They're shocking in terms of what the speakers believe their colleagues and representatives are willing to do to the American people. Nunes, for instance, has served with Democrats for decades. He might believe them too willing to tax society's most-productive members to fund social benefits. But does he really believe them friends of totalitarianism?

My bet would be that if you tried to pin him down on this he’d tell you that he didn’t say what he said.  If he’s like most people, he wouldn’t recognize his own words as his own words even if you showed him a video of him saying those very words.  That’s because for most people words don’t matter as conveyors of meaning.  Words are merely sounds that express feeling.

Try to use their own words against them and they will reply, “You know what I meant.”

Of course they won’t have said what they meant with that rejoinder either, because what they meant to was, “You know how I feel.”

People will say anything when they’re upset and they can expect that everybody who hears them will understand and not take it personally or excuse them on the spot.  And usually that’s how it goes.  “Nevermind.  I understand.  Heat of the moment.  No big fucking deal.”

In the heat of passion, when carried away by excitement, when overwhelmed by terrible sorrow or terrific happiness, people might as well talk gibberish as try to make sense.

And sometimes the only words that sound right, that sound like how we feel, are the “wrong” words, sometimes only the ugliest words are strong enough for the most ecstatic emotions and out of the mouths of people who normally don’t use four letters words harsher than darn and pooh will come vehement, loud, and accurate concatenations of Anglo-Saxon nouns and verbs that in other circumstances would offend the ears of convicts, Marines, and stand-up comics, as any one who has been to bed with a  former Catholic schoolgirl can tell you.

Or, in other situations, has gotten one mad.

The best words are the ones that not only mean exactly what the person speaking them need them to mean but also sound like what they mean, words that convey both the idea and the feeling together.  And unless your audience is made up entirely of lawyers and schoolteachers, if you’re going to use the wrong word, it’s better to use one that sounds right but doesn’t quite mean right than one that means perfectly but sounds weak, silly, priggish, pedantic, or just plain boring and doesn’t carry with it the right feeling if it carries any feeling at all.  People are more impressed and more likely to approve your meaning if they share your feelings.

You can change most people’s feelings, at least for the moment, far more easily than you can change their thinking.

Demagogues and other con artists don’t even need to change the way people feel.  They just need to incite people to feel instead of think.

This is where I think the Right has had it over the Left for decades now.  Right Wing politicians and pundits and talk show clowns will say anything.  They will exaggerate, lie, make things up, insult and ridicule anybody for any reason, spout incoherent nonsense to the point where they might as well be talking gibberish, and not care, because what their words mean doesn’t matter to them.  They use words for how those words feel.  And for how they want their audiences to feel.

Liberal politicians and pundits, though, tend to precision.  They choose their words carefully and choose the ones that most closely mean what they need them to mean.  They don’t just talk as if their audiences are made up of lawyers and schoolteachers.  They talk as if they are lawyers and schoolteachers.  Which is not surprising since that is what many of them are.

And they don’t just favor meaning over feeling when they choose their words.  They reject words because they sound too much like feelings.

When they choose words for their feelings it’s often because those words make them feel clever.

I should know.

The Right has traded on fear and hate for decades now.  They’ve become addicted to the feelings and dependent on words that express those feelings strongly and persuasively, persuasion here being a matter of infection and contagion.  A Right Winger doesn’t try to convince you to think his way as much as he tries to get you to catch his feeling.

Or a feeling.

They don’t care if Liberals are demonstrably not fascists, communists, or aiders and abettors of Islamic terrorists.  Liberals make them as angry and afraid as any and every enemy, real and imagined, because Liberals are trying to bring about the same thing as those other enemies---a world in which the American Right isn’t the reason for that world’s existence.

A world where they don’t control everything is a world where they control nothing.  Power and domination define every relationship and if you aren’t the powerful and dominant party you are as good as nothing.  So bosses dominate over employees.  Men dominate over women.  Adults dominate over their children.  White people dominate over non-white people.  Christianity dominates over every other religion.  America dominates over every other nation.

Where their rhetoric has any consistency or coherence it is where they are promising each other power and dominance or warning each other that they have lost or are losing one or the other or both.

It’s not surprising, then, that they love to use words that make them feel powerful and dominating, that make them feel strong and brave and tough and scary, all the things they are at heart afraid they aren’t.

And for them, strength, bravery, toughness, and the ability to make others afraid are all inherently violent qualities because they are all about power and dominance.

Power and dominance are achieved by beating your enemy into powerlessness and abject submission.

So it’s not enough to use words that make you feel strong, brave, tough, and scary.  You need words that make you feel as though you are being strong, brave, tough, and scary, that you are beating your enemy into submission.

In a culture that privileges strength, bravery, toughness, and scariness but sees them all as expressions of power and dominance, the weak and afraid, as you can imagine, are going to suffer ridicule and ostracizing at the least.  Imagine then to be one of the weak or to be someone who suspects he is weak.  Someone like that needs words that make him feel strong and brave but he needs those words even more to make others feel he is strong and brave.

You don’t think Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh don’t know what they are?  

Writers I have known and loathed

Adapted from my Twitter feed.  Saturday.  February 13, 2010.

Blogger I admire posted a quote from a novel.

That was it, the whole post, just the quote.  No big deal.  I do that myself. post quotes from books, poems, without comment, just because I think they’re meaningful and well-written.

Passage must have struck her as meaningful and well-written.

Struck me as fatuous, self-important, self-congratulatory, sentimental and cynical in its sentimentality, and, more to the point, just the sort of thing that asshole would write.

That asshole being the novelist not the blogger.

See, I met him.

Clearly didn’t like him.

He came to Iowa to read when he was young and I was younger and in grad school there.

At the time he’d published two collections of short stories I’d liked a whole lot and an autobiographical novel that hadn’t wowed me like the stories.

Novel required readers to like and admire the protagonist far more than he deserved to be liked and admired.

Plus, it was too obviously and heavily influenced by The Adventures of Augie March.  I’ve long since learned to sympathize with writers who can’t match the great writers that have inspired them, but at the time I was a hard-case and I tended to think things like, If you can’t write as well as Bellow then don’t go out of your way to draw comparisons between yourself and Bellow.

I wasn’t a complete prig though.

The stories were excellent and I was inclined to think of the novel as a product of his youth and the stories as indicators of the great writer he would become.

The writer went out of his way to prove me wrong by being exactly like the protagonist of his novel.  Self-congratulatory, self-obsessed, self-important, and nowhere near as bright as he thought he was and expected us to think he was.

Just as with the main character of his novel, he required us to like and admire him far more than he deserved.

And the reasons he was confident that we would like and admire him didn’t seem to have anything to do with the reason we’d packed the auditorium to hear him read---his talent as a writer and the excellence of his stories.

Pompous, self-congratulatory, fatuous, full of it, but his self-admiration wasn’t connected to his talent.

It wasn't as a writer he expected us to think as highly of him as he thought of himself. It was as a man of the world. He was "smart," knew how all the games were played.

Writing, literature--games he'd mastered.  Proof of that wasn't his good reviews. It was his big advances.  Six figures for next book.

Plus, he was "funny." All his jokes cynical or insults. Actually made fun of handicapped. Serious jerk.

Takes a lot of guts to stand in front of a crowd of young aspiring writers who've come to hear you read your fiction and spend the time bragging how you’re so much smarter, savvier, and successful than they are or can ever hope to be.

Was never able to read his fiction after that without annoyance.  Finally gave up on him.

Probably unfair of me.  Lots of great writers have been serious jerks.  Doesn't affect my appreciation for their work.  But I never met them.

Their serious jerkiness is an abstraction. Almost another fiction. The biographical Dostoevsky as much a character as Prince Myshkin.

Maybe you’re wondering why I haven’t mentioned the writer’s name.

It’s like this.  He was young and flush with success.  He might have matured, learned some humility.  I have reason to think he hasn’t, that he’s grown more pompous, more self-congratulatory, more fatuous.  But I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting him again.   And whatever he is or was, I don’t want my impression of him to ruin his writing for anybody, particularly that blogger.

But really his name doesn’t matter because who he is doesn’t matter as much as what he was, a famous author who turned out to be a disappointing asshole.  The history of literature is full of those.  A similar story could be told about any number of writers.

The details change but the moral remains the same:  Avoid meeting writers whose work you admire.

In fact, I have a similar story from that very same year, about a famous poet who came to speak to a class I was in.  Might not have been as big a jerk as he came across as.

He might’ve just been drunk.

_________________

Reminds me.  I’ve been looking for an opportunity to link to this post by Kit Stolz, written last May around the time Blake Bailey's biography of John Cheever came out and inspired a lot of people, including me, to hold forth on what a colossal asshole Cheever could be.  Kit felt we were giving Cheever a bum deal, considering all the even more colossal literary assholes whose colossal assholery seems to get easily excused, forgiven, overlooked, or explained away.

Read Kit’s post, Misreading (and Misunderstanding) Cheever.

Matt Taibbi: The Journalist as Impressionist

Updated Monday afternoon:

Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi has a genius for putting into fun and funny prose the angers, frustrations, suspicions, and fears of a lot of folks on the Left.

He’s an effective polemicist.  I once called him a talented insult-artist.  Which is not an insult.  I’ve said the same thing about Hamlet.

He’s a good journalist.  What he isn’t is a particularly diligent reporter.

He’s not much of a deep thinker either.

And without being a diligent reporter or a deep thinker, he can’t be a serious analyst.  Analysis without sufficient facts and understanding of what those facts mean and what they hinge on and what hinges on them is simply opinion…or bullshit.

Hold on, there, Lance, I hear some of you saying.   How can you call Taibbi a good journalist when you don’t think he’s a diligent reporter?

Fairly put.

Technically, a journalist is anyone who writes for a journal, a definition that makes the re-write men and women at People, the restaurant reviewer at your local newspaper, and Matt Taibbi all journalists together doing the same job as the war correspondents for the New York Times.

These days, we usually use the words journalist and reporter as though they’re synonyms.  But, actually, a reporter is a type of journalist.  Journalists are writers who see their jobs as going out into the world, taking a look around, and coming back to the keyboard to write about what they saw.  Note I said they write about what they saw.  Not exactly the same thing as writing what they saw.  Reporters are journalists who see it as their job to limit what they write about what they saw to no more than what they saw.

And what they heard.

Journalists, as a group, are permitted to “report” their impressions and opinions and feelings along with what they saw and heard.  Reporters refuse themselves that permission.

Reporters deal in verifiable fact and keep their impressions and opinions to a minimum if not totally to themselves.

Unfortunately, down in Washington there are too many reporters who are so scrupulous about keeping their impressions and opinions to themselves that they “report” only what someone else tells them, to the point that if that someone tells them a lie those reporters won’t report it as a lie because that might be just their opinion or impression.

The best journalism is the work of writers who see it as their job to base their opinions on verifiable facts and deliver impressions that are the result of taking a long, hard look at the facts and thinking deeply and seriously about them in order to understand what they hinge on and what hinges on them.

That’s what Bill Moyers does.  That’s what Joan Didion does, that’s what John McPhee does, and, when they were in their prime, used to do as well as anyone has ever done.  This is very hard to do without a staff like Moyers’ or the time and space that editors and publishers gave to Didion and McPhee.

Journalists who don’t have these resources and luxuries aren’t necessarily better for sticking only to reporting.  The bare facts aren’t inherently more truthful than an impression or else a snapshot in the family album is more truthful than a Van Gogh portrait.

For one thing, it’s nearly impossible to report only the bare facts, because there’s only so much space on a page, and deciding what needs to be fit and then putting that into some sort of order (not the same thing as giving them context) requires editorial decisions, which is to say, somebody’s opinion is in every news story regardless of how “objectively” it’s presented.

This is why many people prefer journalism that is openly opinionated, even when they don’t agree with those opinions.  It’s more honest and it makes it easier to make decisions about why certain facts have been included, what might have been left out and why, and therefore how many grains of salt to take the story or article or book with.

It’s what makes Taibbi’s journalism interesting.

It’s also what makes his reporting less than reliable.

Taibbi sees it as his job to go out in the world, usually in a rush, and in a bigger rush to get back and start writing, and write about what he thinks about what he saw and heard.

He’s not working in the tradition of Moyers or Didion.  He’s the heir apparent to Hunter S. Thompson, and Thompson wrote about almost nothing but his opinions and impressions, and those impressions were so Techincolored by his extra-journalistic hobbies and fucked up by his personal gremlins that you couldn’t trust him to tell you the color of the sky on a given day.  If he wrote that Hubert Humphrey was bald or that Las Vegas was in Nevada, you were tempted to go find a photograph or a map and check.

Taibbi is not drug-addled and he doesn’t seem to be anywheres near as demon-haunted as Thompson was, but he does do his job as if that job was defined by Thompson.  He “reports” his impressions and opinions in as wild and angry and personal a fashion as he can while remaining coherent.

That last part is something Thompson didn’t always worry about.  Taibbi takes care to make sense---in the sense of being understandable not in the sense of being sensible or persuasive.  Taibbi tends to be most sensible and persuasive to readers who already agree with what he’s about to tell them.

Did you really need Matt Taibbi to tell you the guys who run Goldman Sachs are assholes and pirates?

Like I’ve said, there’s nothing wrong with journalism that is a “report” of the journalist’s opinions and impressions.  Taibbi’s work---which I want to repeat I enjoy---bothers me because I get the impression (ha ha) that Taibbi doesn’t go out into the world to gather those opinions and impressions, but that he goes out to have opinions and impressions he already owns up to confirmed.

And what bothers me more is that, in my opinion (ha ha again.  I’m on a roll), he’ too easily contented that he’s had those opinions and impressions confirmed.

One interview, some chance observations, half an overheard conversation and that will often do for him.

It does it for him because his first and best source is himself.  He trusts himself to take everything in at a glance.

Read his book, The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion---that’s a recommendation, not a dare---and you can see this at work.  Everything Taibbi thinks you need to know about the psychology of the people who make up the Christian Right he’s collected from a few out of church meetings he attended, undercover, and conversations with the three or four people he casually befriended in the course of collecting his impressions.  Everything he thinks you need to know about how screwed up things are in Congress he’s gleaned from the not very much time he spent attending the meetings of one House subcommittee back when the Republicans were running the show.

Taibbi affects to have kept an open-mind, but the fact that he came away from his meetings with the Christians with some sympathy for the more pathetic of the people attending along with him doesn’t mean that the experience changed his mind.  And his writing about what he sees in the committee meetings has a rote and tired quality and a feeling of forced anger, as if he’s written the same things before, several times, and he’s annoyed at having to write them again.  Not surprising, as the story he’s telling is not new, and it’s not likely to have been new to Tiabbi either.

That doesn’t make what he writes in either case not true.  But it makes it not very remarkable as reporting or persuasive.  You’re free to think he got it right.  He may have gotten it right.   I happen to think that he got it right about those Christians he hung out with, but I don’t think he’s right that they’re representative of the movement.  And I think he didn’t get it right about Congress because he failed to see what was going on in partisan terms.  He didn’t see what was going on as an example of how the Republicans were running Congress at the time.  He saw it as the way it is, always, no matter who’s in charge and what they’re trying to accomplish, and that opinion has carried over into his reporting about the current Congress and the Obama administration.

Which I’m about to get to, but first I want to point out, this is what I meant about Taibbi not being a diligent reporter.  He seems satisfied with just as many facts as he needs to support his opinion, either the one he went into the story with or the one he formed shortly after starting it.

I didn’t mean that he was lazy or sloppy or careless or irresponsible.

But it appears that in his latest in Rolling Stone, Obama’s Big Sell-out, it appears that he has been at least one of the above and possibly all four.

At TAPPED, Tim Fernholz lays out The Errors of Matt Taibbi and follows up here.

Kevin Drum comes to Taibbi’s defense, dismissing complaints about Taibbi’s errors, which Kevin acknowledges, as “nitpicky bullshit.”  And I suppose it might be, if we were talking about one or two mistakes.   But that many?  That’s rotten reporting and it calls into question everything else in the article, including Taibbi’s conclusions and his motives.

Kevin excuses those errors, however, on the grounds that Taibbi’s overall point is correct.

Taibbi's piece is basically about how the finance industry owns Congress and the Obama administration, and that's basically true.  In fact, I have a piece coming out in a week or so in the print magazine that makes pretty much the same point.  My approach is different, and my language is all PG-rated, but my conclusions are pretty much the same.  The finance industry, through both standard lobbying and what Simon Johnson calls "intellectual capture," has, over the decades since Reagan was elected, convinced nearly everyone that what's good for Wall Street is good for America, and that what's bad for Wall Street would be catastrophic for America.  Everything else follows from that.

But that isn’t Taibbi’s point. Taibbi’s point is that the fact that this corruption is continuing is all Barack Obama’s fault because he’s sold out to the forces of corruption.

Taibbi’s made this argument a number of times over the past year and he’s made it basing his opinion on his impression that the President has secret powers that he’s refusing to use and the only reason he doesn’t use those powers is he wants the bad guys to prevail.

As Matt Yglesias points out, to reach this conclusion Taibbi has to ignore the way Congress, particularly the Senate, works.

For example, the name “Ben Nelson” doens’t appear in the article. Nor will you read about Olympia Snowe. Nor Blanche Lincoln. Nor any of the other pivotal actors in the senate, whose decision to vote “yes” or “no” defines the limits of what’s possible.

Since it’s hard to believe Taibbi doesn’t know how things work, how power is wielded, how egos come into play, how proud and vain and corrupt men and women work their will, it’s hard not to believe that he ignores these things in his story because they’re inconvenient.

They get in the way of what he wants to do, which is to give his opinion that Barack Obama and his band of thieves are selling us out to the banksters.

I suppose he could be right.  You might think he is right.  But if you use his article to make your case, you’re using someone else’s opinion to support your opinion, someone else’s impressions to reinforce your impressions.  Which is fine, but don’t expect the rest of us to accept this as gospel or as fact.

And be prepared to answer how if Taibbi can’t get the  backgrounds, resumes, and job descriptions of the players involved sorted out, how can he be trusted to know what their motivations are?

_______________

Updated after it’s all over but the shouting:  I don’t think a lot of Taibbi’s defenders get (or want to get) that Taibbi’s point isn’t that the finance and banking industries wield far too much power in Washington and the system is corrupt, corrupting, and dysfunctional.  We all know that.  His point is that President Obama is corrupt.  But Taibbi’s proof that the President is in the pocket of the banksters rests on guilt by association and Taibbi’s erroneous claims that Obama is going back on promises he made during the campaign, along with Taibbi’s belief that Presidents can do whatever Taibbi thinks they should do, if only they had the will and the guts---the only reason Obama hasn’t done this, Taibbi argues circularly, must be because he has sold out, which is to say, he’s been bought, otherwise it would have gotten done by now.

This isn’t proof.  It’s opinion.  Which is fine.  You’re free to have the same opinion.  But like I said, don’t expect everybody else to agree with your opinion just because Matt Taibbi shares it.

Anywho, Taibbi does a somewhat better job of defending his article than he did writing it, but basically his defense is “I didn’t make the mistakes you say I made but if I did they’re minor mistakes and don’t really matter and besides you’re a fool for believing anything favorable about the Obama Administration.”

Felix Salmon defends Taibbi’s reporting on the grounds that Taibbi isn’t a reporter he’s a rabble-rouser so we should know better than to take things he says literally…,which would be fine if so many people, including most of his fans, didn’t.  Also Rolling Stone doesn’t publish Taibbi’s articles as “opinion” pieces.

And I think Digby’s defense of Taibbi is pretty weak.  The fact that we need voices like Taibbi’s on the Left doesn’t and shouldn’t give Taibbi a Get Out of the Facts free card.  And that he’s good at working a crowd while he lectures it doesn’t say anything about his writing or his reporting, it just suggests that he may have missed his true calling as a college professor.

Meanwhile, Brad Long and Andrew Leonard point out that Taibbi’s mistakes go beyond simple misreadings of resumes.  Brad is particularly tough in his post, Ten Things on which Matt Taibbi Really Does Not Know What He’s Talking About: 

When an author is apparently as clueless as to what was going on a year ago as Matt Taibbi is, one has to wonder just how seriously one is supposed to take anything he writes.

(h/t Linkmeister and MikeF)

“Looking out the window, that’s writing.”

In one of the four episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show I stayed up way too late watching the other night, Rob decides he wants to be a writer.

Laura points out that he’s already a writer.  Rob rejects the idea.  Writing for television doesn’t count.  “I’m not a writer that you read.  I’m a writer that other people say what I wrote.”

A writer, a real writer, as far as Rob’s concerned, is someone who writes and publishes novels.  In 1964, Rob would have been thinking of the likes of James Jones and Norman Mailer, of the recently dead giants, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, of the up and comers John Updike and Philip Roth.  In the show he’s specifically thinking of his old friend Harvey Bellman who’s just sent him a copy of his first novel.

Think of this.  Rob’s the head writer for the wildly popular Alan Brady Show and he’s jealous of a first-time novelist who apparently struggled for years in obscurity and penury to finish his book.

Well, not jealous, he assures Laura.

Envious? she suggests.

“Green with it,” he admits.

The world of Rob and Laura’s a long time ago now.  Can you imagine it, a television writer today envying a novelist?  Someone like David Simon or Matthew Weiner feeling a sense of failure or loss because what they’ve written for The Wire or Mad Men makes them not writers people read but writers that other people say what they wrote?

Two graduates of a prestigious writers’ workshop meet at a bar, and one congratulates the other, “Sue, I just heard you sold another script for Nurse Jackie.”

“Big deal.”

“What’s wrong?”

“The New Yorker rejected my short story.”

“Ouch!”

TV writers envying fiction writers.  That’s like saying what they really want is to be bloggers.

Isn’t it?

There’s still something about having published a novel, isn’t there?  To being able to go look yourself up in the library, to find your book on the shelf at Barnes and Noble and turn it face out or find a clerk and ask if the store would like an autographed copy?

Who reads the credits on a TV show anyway?  Who remembers the names of the writers of even their favorite episodes?   Lots of shows get praised for their writing these days, but when you get down to it the credit for how good these shows are go to the producers and the actors.  David Simon didn’t write every episode of The Wire, David Milch didn’t write every episode of Deadwood.  Thomas Pynchon, though, he wrote every word of Inherent Vice.  Jonathan Lethem wrote every word of Chronic City.

Maud Newton’s writing every word of her novel, the one that just won her Narrative’s annual award for best emerging writer.

When Maud’s novel hits the bookstores, she’s going to be my Harvey Bellman.

Kurt Vonnegut once said he’d rather have written Cheers than everything he’d written himself.  But I’d think that every writer who ever worked on Cheers, every writer who’s ever written for television, would be tempted to trade in their residuals to be able to say they’d written one novel like Slaughterhouse-Five .

Maybe.  Would depend on how old they are, I guess.  Born after 1980?  Can you name your own generation’s Harvey Bellmans?

Laura reminds Rob that he’s been writing a novel.  Rob scoffs at his own efforts.  To him, his unfinished novel is an abandoned hobby, like his friend and neighbor Jerry Helper’s attempt to teach himself Spanish guitar.  “I’ll finish my novel the way Jerry’s going to learn to play Malaguena.”

I have a small but satisfying reputation as a writer thanks to this blog.  I’m proud of some to the work I do here and grateful for the attention of my readers, of whom I would bet I have more in a year than many novelists have in a lifetime, which is a way of saying that many novels go almost entirely unread.   But I was born well before 1980.  I went to grad school with five or six Harvey Bellmans.  I’m not saying today’s one of those days, but there are days when I’d rather be able to go into a Barnes and Noble and find my own book on a shelf than have written a single post.

There are days, more days, however, and again I’m not saying today’s one of them, when I wish that instead of heading east to Fort Wayne out of grad school I’d headed west to LA with instead of the manuscript for a novel in my suitcase the floppy disc with a script for St Elsewhere to sell on spec in my jacket pocket.

A book is a fine thing, but for how much longer?  When books are all electronic and we’re all reading Harvey Bellman’s latest on our Kindles or whatevers, will having published a book feel the same when there’s no book in hand to feel?  Will having written a book feel any different than having written a TV script…or a blog?

If Harvey Bellman emails me his new novel instead of sending it via snail mail wrapped in brown paper and string and he types a note at the top instead of inscribing the actual paper title page with a pen will I be green with envy?

Will I be inspired to write a novel of my own?

Laura encourages Rob to use his long summer vacation to get back to work on his novel.  And he does.

Well, he tries.

He holes up in the den---back then, houses had dens instead of home offices---and for three days doesn’t get anything done.  Laura thinks he’s procrastinating but Rob insists he’s writing.  Writing, he says, isn’t only done with a pen or a typewriter while you’re sitting at a desk.  Writing is done in your head and no matter what else you appear to be doing you’re working at your writing as long as you’re thinking.

“Standing, that’s working.  Sitting is working.  Pacing is writing.  I do my best thinking then.  Looking out the window, that’s writing.  Brushing your teeth is writing.  Anything’s writing,” Rob says.  “The hardest writing is showering.”

Laura will have none of it.

“Darling,” she says, “You know the one thing that’s not writing?”

“What?” says Rob.

“Explaining to your wife what writing is.”

Rob takes her point.  But he says there are too many distractions at home.  He goes off to a cabin in the woods for peace and quiet.  He gets no work done.

It’'s not the book you will have in your hand someday that makes you write.  It’s the book that’s already in your head pushing to get itself down on paper…or onto the screen of your laptop.

Rob is a writer.  But he has other things that are more important to him to write at the moment.

You know what else isn’t writing?  Writing about a television character not writing.

Time I should get to work.  Excuse me while I go look out the window.

________________________

Speaking of Malaguena.

An examination of misogyny, gynophobia, and the redemptive power of tigers in a movie too slight to bear such a discussion

Scroll down to the bottom of this post---and it's a long way down.  A long way down.---and you'll see that one categories I've filed it under is Everybody has a hungry heart.  That's a clue that this isn't meant to be just another post about The Hangover.  Like a lot of my posts about movies, it's as much or more about things in real life the movie got me thinking about than about the movie itself.  In this case it's love, marriage, men, women, adultery, guilt, self-repression, Cheers, Shakespeare, and Cary Grant.

Commenter Dan was disappointed that I liked The Hangover.

Actually, he was disappointed that I was "so positive about this misogynistic dreck."

Dan has other objections to The Hangover, but the misogyny complaint is the one I was already prepared to deal with before Dan left his comment.

That's because one of the things I liked about The Hangover was that it wasn't misogynistic.

I've read reviews that call it misogynistic, like this one in the Daily Mail and this one in the Telegrah, but in both cases the reviewers have used the word lazily in a way that makes it almost meaningless.  For both of them, the filmmakers' misogyny is proved by the fact that one of the main female characters is unlikable and the other, while likable, is something of a cliche.

If the absence of admirable and memorable female leads is misogynistic in and of itself, almost all war movies are misogynistic.  If the presence of unlikable female leads is misogynistic, then Macbeth is the most misogynistic play ever written, after King Lear.

Neither review acknowledges that there is a third female lead and that, although undeveloped as a character to the point of being not much more than a stick to beat the plot along, is a strong, intelligent, adult, and likable presence.

  

In fact, the bride-to-be Tracy's likeableness is the key to liking the movie, which depends on our having a rooting interest in Stu and Phil's finding her lost groom Doug and getting him home in time for the wedding and thereby saving their relationship.  We have to like Tracy, and Doug, and care that they get married in order to care about Stu and Phil.  Otherwise they are just a couple of jerks making bigger jerks of themselves.

It's hard for me to see how a movie that is to a great degree about the happiness of a strong, intelligent, decent woman and her love for a strong, intelligent, decent man is misogynistic.

Unless you think that the character of Melissa, Stu's live-in girlfriend, is supposed to define our attitude towards all women.

Or you think that together, Melissa and Jade, the stripper and prostitute played by Heather Graham, are supposed to define it, that they represent our only two options in how to think about women, either as castrating bitches or whores.

Obviously, I don't think this is the case in The Hangover.

Melissa is a bad person.  She's nasty, selfish, grasping, stifling, and an all-around pain in the neck.  That's what I liked about her.

If you met a Melissa in real life, you'd call her a bitch, even if you are opposed to using that word in principle.   But she's not a real person.  She's a character.  More to the point, she's a type.  She's a shrew.

Shrew's another word there are principled objections to using to describe real people.  But that doesn't mean there aren't real shrews, just as the fact that the word bitch is used to put women in general down doesn't mean there aren't in fact real bitches, some of whom aren't women.  A shrew, though, is not a bitch.  Bitches aren't types because they aren't characters, just attitudes.  Bitches don't do anything but act bitchy.  Shrews are active.  They have a cause , which is the general improvement of all around them, particularly the men in their lives, and their preferred method for improving people is scolding, which they can do just as well quietly as by yelling.   P.G. Wodehouse described the (relatively) quieter sort of shrew when he described Lady Florence Cray as not being able to look at a man's soul without being overcome with the desire to get behind it and push.  Melissa is a shrew, not a bitch, and she doesn't represent all women as shrews, she represents only herself as a type.

In fiction, and in psychology, types are characters who are trapped inside a vicious circle of self-limiting behaviors.  Another word for them in real life is neurotic.

Besides having a goal, another way a shrew is different from a bitch is that a shrew, like Katherine, can be "tamed."  That is, she can break free from her neuroses, with or without help from a Petruchio.  A bitch is just a mean person not worth the effort of taming.  A shrew is someone who could be a nicer, better person, if she could only see her way to changing her act.

And in The Hangover the possibility is that Melissa is a nicer and better human being than we see her being on screen or at least at one point in time she was nicer and better.

Part of that possibility comes from the casting of Rachael Harris as Melissa.

 

Harris is playing a shrew, but she doesn't look like one.  She doesn't look like anything or anybody in particular.  She could be cast as a lawyer, a soccer mom, a school teacher, the loan officer at a small town bank, a nurse, a clerk in a department store---almost any thing.  She is attractive, but she is not a knock-out.  She is not ice queen beautiful, or movie star beautiful, or repressed schoolmarm beautiful, like Lilith on Cheers, who was not a shrew but was often put into the position of one by Fraiser and the gang's childishness and so in her own controlling, quietly bossy, treats-her-husband-like-a-dimwitted-child was a precursor to the type Harris is playing here---a smart, strong woman who to her own surprise and dismay has found herself attached to a weak and foolish and not as bright about life as he ought to be schlub of a man and rather than dumping him has decided it's her job to make the schlub shape-up.  Harris is a normally pretty, as opposed to starlet pretty, pleasant-featured woman, so normal and pleasant looking that whenever she starts in on Stu it's more disconcerting than infuriating, or funny.  It's hard to believe that this woman could be this cold and this mean.  We start wondering if we are seeing the true Melissa.  Her shrewishness might be a symptom of something, if it has cause other than her own ill-temper, and very quickly it's clear that it does have a cause and that cause is Stu.

What makes shrews shrews is the way they try to make their schlubs shape-up and what sort of person they want their schlubs to shape up into.  They don't emasculate their man, they take advantage of their man's self-emasculation.  They are reflections of a male character's weakness not its cause.

Stu is a cringing, fawning, needy, indecisive schlub whose one act of self-assertion is to spin an elaborate lie about where he and his buddies are about to spend their weekend.  He desperately needs shaping up.

And that's a major part of what The Hangover is about, Stu's needing to shape up and how he's made to.

At first glance it might appear that all Stu needs is to escape from the shrew. 

Now, if you've decided your story is the schulb's escape from the shrew into the land of happily ever aftering, a question you might want to answer is does he escape through his own efforts or is he saved by the love of another, nicer woman?  If he's to be saved, how?  And if your answer is that another woman saves him and she saves by loving him for what he is, you might be writing the script for a classic like Bringing Up Baby, but you are not writing the script for The Hangover.

Stu is not saved by Jade.  He meets and hooks up with Jade because he is in the process of saving himself.  They do not get together in the end, although the possibility that they will get together in the future is there.  But it's there because Stu is a changed man.

The Hangover is more concerned with Stu's escape from his shrew than with Melissa's escape from her schlub.  But there is a story to be told about a shrew being saved from a schlub by the love of a man worthier of her spirit and intelligence and strength.  These aren't necessarily taming of the shrew stories.  The Philadelphia Story is one of those.  Gone With the Wind is, although the taming doesn't take.  His Girl Friday isn't.

My point isn't that The Hangover is in the same class as those movies, only that it's easy to imagine Stu and Melissa's story told from her point of view and see that she needs to get rid of him just as urgently as he needs to escape from her.

Most comedies and all farces derive their humor mainly from the ways their characters are reduced or reduce themselves to types.  The "drama" is in how the characters we are meant to care about break free of their type.  I don't like farces in which the characters break so far free of their types at the end that they become realistic human beings.  But I do like to be able to see the real human beings that are behind the types, and I think I can see that in The Hangover's subplot about Melissa and Stu.

We are told very little about them or their history together.  We know they've been a couple for several years, but we don't know how they met or what attracted them to each other.  We can guess that neither one was the person we see on screen when they got together because its unlikely that Stu would have fallen for anyone this nasty and bossy or that Melissa would have gone for anyone this craven and unctuous and, well, repulsively needy.

We are told one significant fact about their past.  She has cheated on him.

As far as we know, it was just once, and we don't know the precise circumstances exactly, although it's implied that she was drunk at the time and it was on a cruise ship and with a stranger and Stu saw it happen.  We don't know if it was just a mistake or something more.  We can guess, though, that it changed their relationship for the worse, because it changed them.

Clearly, it terrified Stu to the point that he doesn't dare assert himself with her because that would risk her either breaking it off with him or, worse, telling him why she cheated, that why being that he is not sexually or otherwise enough of a man for her, an irony, since what's he's doing is making himself less and less of a man and she plainly despises that in him even as she takes advantage of it.

How it changed her is less clear, but it likely made her afraid too.  Afraid of losing Stu and afraid of herself.

What does it say about her, a strong-willed, decent, well-behaved adult, that while on vacation with the man she supposedly loves she could get drunk and rip one off with a stranger in public?

What it appears to have said to her is that if she could goof up like that then the odds were good that Stu would eventually goof up too.  She's projecting all over the place, of course.  But she's determined that Stu won't get the chance to do to her what she did to him.  She bullies him and spies on him and takes control of every aspect of his life she can get her hands on.

The trouble for Melissa is that she's decided that in order to keep Stu in line she has to keep right on top of him, which leaves her with no breathing room of her own. The cage she's built around him, she's also built around herself.  In trying to deny that the side of herself that allowed her to go wild on that cruise isn't there, she's repressed every urge to have fun, any sort of fun, including sex.

None of this is there explicitly on the screen, but none of it is precluded by anything on the screen.

And if The Hangover's treatment of Melissa was misogynistic it would have been precluded.  We wouldn't have been allowed to see past not the type but the stereotype to a real human being worth our understanding if not our admiration.

Nasty as she is to Stu, she is also being nasty to herself, and that makes her a sad and pathetic character---or it would make a real life version of her sad and pathetic.  It also makes her a particular character.  Melissa isn't representative of all women, or most women, or many women.  She is representative of herself or at least the self she would have if she was an actual person.

A lot of the stupid attitudes towards women and sex in movies is due less to hatred for women than to fear of them and not even to fear of women themselves but to men's fear of not being worthy of them.  Oh, ok, to men's fear of not being able to get it up.  Men's fear of sexual inadequacy is an ancient theme of farce.  As Yoda says, fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, and so gynophobia can turn into misogyny when men blame their own flaccidity on the women in their lives.  But while Stu is afraid of upsetting Melissa and thereby losing her, the movie's attitude towards women in general is neither fear nor anger.  Love, marriage, commitment, and intimacy between a man and a woman are portrayed as good things.

None of those qualities are present in the relationship between Melissa and Stu.  In fact, their relationship is based on anger and fear---in her case the anger is overt and the fear is repressed, and with him it's the other way around.

To repeat myself:  Most comedies and all farces derive their humor mainly from the ways their characters are reduced or reduce themselves to types.  The "drama" is in how the characters we are meant to care about break free of their type.  A lot of comedies fail when instead of their characters breaking free of type they simply turn into another type or into cliches and then demand we love them for it.

I think that both Stu and Phil break free and become, if not more like real people, at least much less their original type and more like rounded characters.  That we don't see Melissa breaking free of her type and are not meant to care one way or the other is just a fact of the movie being about Stu and Phil and not about her.  That she's a woman has nothing to do with that or with the fact that our dislike or her is left unchallenged at the end.  It's just not her movie.

Something else.  Melissa is not the movie's villain.  The movie's bad guy, to the extent that it has a bad guy, is Phil.

Phil is a selfish and careless jerk.  He doesn't like being married, but that isn't because he doesn't like his wife.  The cause and effect work the other way.  It's not that he dislikes his wife so he dislikes being married to her.  He dislikes being married so he dislikes her, as his excuse.  And he doesn't like being married for the same reason he doesn't like being a teacher.  Both things require him to be responsible to and for other people.

And if a shrew is a strong woman stuck with a man who is not a worthy match for her, and if the filmmakers meant us to see all women, or most women, as shrews, then Phil's wife ought to be a shrew too.  But she's not.  She is warm, good humored, affectionate, and quite happily surprised by the change in him which she recognizes instantly and apparently not because he's come back from Vegas a different person but because he's come back as his old self.  Her single line, which Gretchen Egolf delivers with a charming mix of surprise, relief, and love, "Is this my husband?" is rhetorical.  It's her way of saying she is glad to have him back, not just from Vegas, but from whatever dark place inside himself he's been hanging out in lately.  In short, Phil's problem is not women, or this woman.  This woman is a positive good in his life.  Phil's problem is a man.  Phil.

So, the reason I didn't think The Hangover harshes on women is that I didn't think it was about women's bad behavior at all.  This is a movie that begins with Phil tearfully confessing to Tracy on the phone, "We fucked up!"  It's about the bad behavior of two men.  It's about Stu's weakness and Phil's selfishness, and to the extent that women have anything to do with their bad behavior it's mainly that they suffer because of it.  Even Melissa.  Stu makes a fool of her with his complicated lies throughout the movie.   We're not expected to think she deserves to be lied to.  We're expected to think Stu's a creep and a coward for lying to her.  What she deserves is to be stood up to.

Seems to me that for a movie to be misogynistic women as women have to be presented as the problem. 

Now...please don't ask me to explain Mr Chow.

___________________

Courtesy of Turner Classic Movies, funny clips from His Girl Friday and Bringing Up Baby.