Lance Mannion

Did Viola, Rosalind, and Portia wax?

Looking forward to Anne Hathaway's appearance as Viola in the current Shakespeare in the Park production of Twelfth Night, Ron Rosenbaum hopes Hathaway will have sense enough to give a certain line a particular reading that will call attention to her pudendum and invite the audience to imagine her naked and speculate about her bikini lines.

The line in question comes in the third act. Hathaway, playing Viola, a young woman shipwrecked on the seacoast of Illyria who disguises herself as a young male page in the court of Orsino, is engaged in raillery with the jester Feste. The jester slyly takes note of her androgynous, beardless appearance and tells the cross-dressed page, "Jove in his next commodity of hair send thee a beard."

To which Viola replies, "By my troth I'll tell thee I'm almost sick for one, though I would not have it grow on my chin."

Viola is in love with Orsino, but he doesn't know she exists.  He knows a boy name "Cesario" exists.  And Viola can't tell him the truth because she believes...Well, she believes she has to maintain her disguise at all costs, although she never really explains why.

Now it seems to me that in this scene Viola is slyly admitting her love in that line and the actress playing her needs to come down hard on the word my.  The beard she wants sent to her is the one on Orsino's chin.  Viola is being off-handedly witty, which is her way, and taking advantage of the fact that Feste thinks she's a boy to say out loud what's in her heart.  She's hoping Feste isn't paying too close attention to her words and if he catches what she said at all will just casually assume this "boy," who is too young to grow a proper beard, is wishing he was more grown-up.  The question for the director here isn't how Viola should say the line, but how Feste should react to it. 

Feste is Shakespeare's wisest fool.  Viola might think he's not listening, but he might very well have heard her distinctly, picked up the clue, and figured her out.  That would change the dynamic between them for the rest of the play.  Viola would have what she hasn't had to that point, an ally and even a friend helping her protect her secret.

At any rate, the reading for Viola's aside is so obvious that neither my Arden edition of the play nor my Yale edition includes a note on it.

But Rosenbaum thinks it's too obvious.

He thinks Hathaway needs to put the emphasis on chin because it's a joke about Viola's muff.

Here's where an actress can turn the line into a sexual reference if she wants to. Once, at another rehearsal of another production, I overheard another Viola and her director discuss how to play it. If she emphasizes chin, then she's indirectly but unmistakably wishing for the "beard," the hair, to grow elsewhere, leaving little doubt where that elsewhere is. On the other hand, if she emphasizes the my in "my chin," then she seems to be wishing that the beard would grow on someone else's chin, not between her legs.

It's hard to figure out why she'd care whether a beard was growing on somebody else's chin. The scholarly Arden footnotes both the sexual and nonsexual readings of the line, although its explanation of the latter—that she wants somebody else's beard on her chin—seems reminiscent of the puritanical bowdlerizing of editions past. The footnote says that "... with emphasis on my Viola would like to possess Orsino's beard (and thus) him, rather than one of her own."

Frankly this is tortured nonsense; if you don't do the dirty joke, you're repressing the vitality of the sexuality Shakespeare embedded in the line, the kind of body-part joke he rarely resisted. It's a play shot through with sexual references, and this one would be missed. So much depends on the inflection.

True, that last bit.

But the inflection depends on the intent, and the intent belongs to the character.  The intent is part of what makes the character.

Why would Viola be lamenting, even humorously, her lack of pubic hair?

Did she have a full Brazilian before she set sail on her cruise and learn since her shipwreck that bare is not the fashion here in Illyria?  Has Orsino confided a fetish?  Is she telling us she hasn't reached puberty yet?  That would make the happy ending we're expecting problematic, if she's younger than Juliet.

Viola is pretending to be a boy too young to grow a beard but that doesn't mean she's the same age as that boy.  She's a young woman, not a girl, of marriageable age, and even though in Shakespeare's day that might have meant she was as young as fifteen or sixteen, she was certainly not twelve.

Maybe Rosenbaum is right that it's a sexual reference but wrong about what it refers to.

Maybe it's a joke about oral sex.

If the usual way a girl gets a man's beard "on" her chin is to be kissed by the mouth the beard surrounds and Viola wants that beard but wants it to go elsewhere on her person...

In fact it's unlikely that Viola would make any sort of joke about sex.

When trying to figure out how a line should be said, look at the character.

It's become a commonplace that Shakespeare could be bawdy, but it was actually a pun--a quibble---Dr Johnson said Shakespeare couldn't resist, the fatal Cleopatra for which he would lose the world and be content to lose it, not a dirty joke.  It's some of his characters who can't resist a good sex joke.

In Romeo and Juliet when Mercutio delivers his line about the prick of noon, there's no doubt what he means and no doubt for the actor playing him about what gesture should accompany the line.  There's also no doubt that this is Mercutio talking.

Shakespeare has established that Mercutio is a rather dirty-minded young rogue, cynical about love and sex, and inclined to find ways to ridicule and embarrass everyone he deals with, including his best friends, when he thinks they're being foolish or self-destructive or pursuing pleasures that don't include Mercutio.  He's a bit of an intellectual bully who uses words the way dumber, less subtle bullies use wedgies and noogies.  And in this scene he's bullying Juliet's nurse, for no particular reason except to amuse himself and to hear himself talk, one of his favorite hobbies.  His sex jokes here are coarse and crude and not particularly imaginative or original, a form of linguistic slumming on the part of the speaker of the Queen Mab speech.  He's talking down to what he thinks is the Nurse's level, and apparently expects her to mistake what he's doing for flirtation---You know, Mercutio is one of my favorite characters in Shakespeare, but he's really not a nice guy.  But the jokes have one thing in common with the Queen Mab speech, and with everything else he says, except for his terrible last lines.  He doesn't mean them.

For Mercutio, words are sounds that are most useful for expressing his mood at the moment, and since he is a moody young man and his moods are always changing, his words are always changing.  He can go from lyrical and rhapsodic to crude and vicious in an instant and the words he uses match the shifts in gears---are the sounds of the gears shifting.

In the scene with the nurse he is in a nasty mood to start and he just gets nastier, which is an annoyance to the Nurse, but a disaster for Mercutio himself, because Tybalt is about to enter.

I said Shakespeare has established Mercutio as the character he is.  But as far as an audience is concerned, it's Mercutio himself who establishes his own character for us, who in fact creates himself on stage right before our eyes---or rather our ears---through what he says and how he says what he says.  Mercutio's wild habits of speech and his careless use of words tell us that he is a wild and careless person.  His abrupt shifts in style and form, back and forth from the intellectually pretentious to the crass and vulgar, back and forth from poetry to prose, are the expressions of his mercurial temperament.  They make the mercurial young man Mercutio.  In Shakespeare character is words, words, words, and so words are fate.  Those nasty jokes at the Nurse's expense come out of Mercutio's carelessness and a fundamental cynicism that borders on nihlism.  They are expressions of his general quarrel with the world, and they lead him into his fatal duel with Tybalt.

The sex jokes then aren't there for the sake of the laughs.  They're they're because they are the sound of the mood that gets him killed.

And that's the way it is with all the sex jokes in all the plays, the same way it is with all the words, words, words.  They are the particular expressions of particular characters. 

Shakespeare's characters aren't just creations of words.  They are creatures of words.  They have to tell us who they are but they do it by how they us.  The words they use, their idiosyncratic imagery, their styles, are the sounds of them coming into being.  The more intelligent and loquacious of them, like Mercutio, like Hamlet, like Rosalind, Cleopatra, and Iago, seem aware of this---and half-aware of us---and attempt to control it.  They fight with their author for the command of their own speech and of course through that for command of their own souls and fates.  They make themselves up as they go.

So when they speak of what Hamlet calls country matters, they do it in character, and their jokes are like them.  Petruchio's are blunt and bluff and good-natured.  Lucio's are base and evil-minded.  Mistress Quickly's are naive and impulsive and goofily literal.  Dogberry's are stupid, accidental, and oblivious.  Hamlet's are passive-aggressive, alienating, alienated, and often downright mean.

And so, Viola.

Rosenbaum's preferred reading of that line is a legitimate one for rehearsal.  It's worth trying out because it's a way for the actress and the director to ask themselves the question, What if Viola is making a dirty joke here?  What would that tell us about her?

It would tell us that she is a very different sort of person than all her other lines tell us she is.

VIOLA
I left no ring with her: what means this lady?
Fortune forbid my outside have not charm'd her!
She made good view of me; indeed, so much,
That sure methought her eyes had lost her tongue,
For she did speak in starts distractedly.
She loves me, sure; the cunning of her passion
Invites me in this churlish messenger.
None of my lord's ring! why, he sent her none.
I am the man: if it be so, as 'tis,
Poor lady, she were better love a dream.
Disguise, I see, thou art a wickedness,
Wherein the pregnant enemy does much.
How easy is it for the proper-false
In women's waxen hearts to set their forms!
Alas, our frailty is the cause, not we!
For such as we are made of, such we be.
How will this fadge? my master loves her dearly;
And I, poor monster, fond as much on him;
And she, mistaken, seems to dote on me.
What will become of this? As I am man,
My state is desperate for my master's love;
As I am woman,--now alas the day!--
What thriftless sighs shall poor Olivia breathe!
O time! thou must untangle this, not I;
It is too hard a knot for me to untie!

Viola is a shyer and more timid young woman than Rosalind and Portia, Shakespeare's other famous gender-benders.  Those other two get a kick out of pretending to be boys.  It makes them bolder and more brazen.  It frees them.

But Viola feels trapped within her disguise.  First of all, she is not very good at being a boy.  She is often embarrassed by what she has to do to pass herself off as a guy and when being a guy gets her into guy trouble---a duel with the fop Sir Andrew Aguecheek---she nearly faints from fright and the only thing protecting her is that Sir Andrew is more frightened than she is.  (It's easy to imagine Rosalind enjoying the chance to show off her fencing skills.)  But beyond that, Viola's disguise has gotten her into trouble from two sides.  She has fallen in love with a man who thinks she's a boy and therefore has no romantic interest in her, and a woman, Olivia, has fallen in love with the boy Viola's pretending to be, and is making a serious and aggressive play for "him."

In both cases it would be in her best interest to throw off her disguise, but she can't do that.  She's stuck inside her boy's clothes.  Worse and worse, she feels she needs to remain in disguise but the greatest threat to that is her own body.

We should see Orsino casually slapping "Cesario" on the back, throwing a friendly "arm" over his shoulder, and see Viola visibly shrinking within her clothes.  The same goes when Olivia leans in close, hoping to prompt a kiss.  An accidentally misplaced hand, a too tight hug, and the game's up.  It's not just that Orsino or Olivia might touch something that shouldn't be there---a pair of somethings.  With Olivia, Viola might give herself away by clenching up too tightly, pulling away too fast, and with Or by not clenching up, by going all soft and pliant, by melting into his arms.

If Viola has any of her own body parts on her mind, it's her breasts, not her crotch.  One good heaving sigh, her nipples showing a mind of their own at the wrong moment, and the traitors will have exposed her.

Viola  then needs to be on guard and doubly modest.  Rosalind might be played as having a grand time toying with Orlando by acting seductively when he thinks he's talking to a boy.  But Viola should be played as always pulling away, with one eye on the lookout for the nearest avenue of escape---intellectually as well as physically.  Her wit then is part of her defense.  She uses words as a deflection.  Which makes it highly unlikely that she would risk giving herself away to Feste that way.

Her aside makes the most sense not as a conscious joke, but as mental relief.  For a second she, reflexively, stops pretending, and in her head does what she's afraid she's going to do with her body around Orsino, respond to his touch and melt into his arms. 

In short, wishing for a beard that is not on her chin is not a dirty joke.  It's an expression of romantic longing.  It may be erotically charged.  But if it is, it's because Viola herself is erotically charged.  She's sexy.  The joke isn't.

By the way, Rosenbaum is the author of The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups, and his essay isn't all about or even really about Viola's aside.  It's about all the asides and all the lines and all the words in all the plays and how to say them so that they make sense and make character and make poetry.  It's about how to speak the speech since Shakespeare himself isn't here to pronounce it to us.

Still.  I don't think Viola would make that joke if she did lose control and give in to even a fleeting temptation to expose herself---Rosenbaum's reading of the line suggests an imaginary striptease, but I mean that almost literally.   Viola is always on the verge of revealing herself, and when she finally does it will be a matter of undressing.  In performance, the actress playing her "proves" Viola's a girl by exiting the scene for the time it takes to change and coming back in a dress.  But in the fictional world the characters inhabit, and into which we can follow them in our imaginations, Viola will prove to Orsino that she's a woman by climbing naked into bed with him.  That's the moment she's dreaming of, longing for, and trying her darndest to put out of her mind.  Thinking about it is her problem.

But it's not likely that when she does let herself look forward to it, she worries that when the moment finally arrives Orsino will be disappointed because she doesn't have much of a beard.

____________________

The New York Times review of Twelfth Night is here.  You can get tickets through the Public Theatre's website.

Hat tip @GraceToy.

What we talk about when we talk about love...of writing

Probably you don't need to read this New Yorker article, Show or Tell, by Louis Menand unless you're thinking about applying to a creative writing program somewhere.  Or you're already attending a creative writing program.  Or you attended one.  Or you taught at one.

Probably the same goes for this post which if I was in a creative writing program and it was being workshopped would have people shouting at me, Why are you putting your readers off with your opening?  You should be drawing them in, not pushing them away!

And I'd sit back smugly in my chair and fold my arms and shake my head at how good everybody else was at missing the point and wait for one of my friends to come to my defense.  "Don't you get it?  How he's establishing a mood of alienation?   The narrator is full of such self-loathing that he can't be bothered to care about his own thoughts.  Readers are going to want to know.  How does a guy become that boring to himself?  It's a fascinating question.  And it sets up the ending perfectly where he decides to order the hash browns with his eggs and not the blueberry pancakes."

Actually, nobody ever shouted at anybody in the workshops I was in at Iowa.  We were a very polite bunch.  Teachers and staff remarked upon it.  "You don't hate each other at all.  What's wrong with you?"

And I never sat back smugly when my stories were being discussed or wrote a story with an ending that relied on readers finding deep meaning in a main character's breakfast order at a diner.  All my stories ended with hearts broken, bodies dead on the ground, and thieves making off into the night with their ill-gotten booty.  And their ill-booten gotty.  But I did have to read and comment on a lot of stories that ended with the equivalent of the symbolic import of those hash browns.

Everybody in the Workshop those two years read and loved Raymond Carver but me.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch.

Menand is reviewing a book by Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing , a literary survey of the last seventy or so years that attempts to trace the effects of creative writing programs on the shape, direction, fads, and styles of American fiction.  Menand, though, seems more interested in the questions, can people be taught how to write and if not (the answer he leans towards) what good are workshops?

Ok.  Someone taught Shakespeare the form of a sonnet.  No one taught him how to be a genius within the form.

People can be taught to write.  Have been taught to write.  It's been going on for centuries.  The Greeks started it.  Students can learn to write with craft, intelligence, and persuasive effect.  They can be taught proper grammar and usage, spelling and punctuation.  They can be taught how to organize a paragraph, how to structure an argument, how to evaluate evidence and bring it to bear in support of their points.  They can be taught how to use all the rhetorical devices.  They can be taught forms.  They can even be taught what has worked well within those forms and why it has worked, and the cleverer among them can learn how to mimic those successes for their own purposes. 

Students who aren't tone deaf can train their ears to hear the music behind the language.  They can train their eyes to see more and see more clearly.  They can increase their vocabularies, break the habit of employing cliches, develop the knack for timely quotation and allusion.  They can broaden their frames of reference.

They can't be taught to have talent or to think originally, but they can be taught skills without which, no matter how much talent or originality they possessed, they would be effectively mute.

But all that should have been taught and learned before they were halfway through high school.  And almost none of it gets brought up again in creative writing programs even though it's often the case that many students did not in fact learn those skills and lessons, at least not to the point of having mastered them.

That doesn't mean that no teaching or learning goes on in these programs.

As I said, someone taught Shakespeare how to write a sonnet.  No one taught him how to write brilliantly when he was writing sonnets.  But it's likely that someone along the way said something to him that flipped a switch in his brain and turned on his genius.

There's a scene in Shakespeare in Love in which Will sits down at a bar with a slightly drunken Christopher Marlowe to talk shop.  Up to this point in the movie, Will's been what Shakespeare was in real life at the same point in his life, a talented hack, skilled at turning out historical melodramas and slapstick comedies and with a knack for ripping off other writers and making their old stale stuff sell like new.  Marlowe is the genius.  But he gives Will an offhand piece of advice about his play, which is about pirates, and almost all at once Will knows how to rewrite the play into Romeo and Juliet.

Did it happen like that?  Sure, why not?  Shakespeare and Marlowe knew each other.   A young and smart writer like Shakespeare would have been paying close attention to whatever Kit Marlowe had to say about poetry and playwriting. 

After a certain point, good writers become their own best teachers.  They teach themselves how to be better writers and, if they are also natural teachers, they can explain how they did it to students who may or may not benefit from following their example.

Marlowe may or may not have tried to teach Shakespeare a lesson in writing.  But almost certainly he would have said something that Shakespeare could have used to teach himself.

What he needed from Marlowe, then, was his company.

And that's what creative writing programs offer.  The company of other writers.

Writers need each other's company, for moral support if for nothing else.  A while back I wrote about how Richard Yates went to France hoping to find there what Hemingway and Fitzgerald found there.  The problem was that one of the best things Hemingway and Fitzgerald found in France was each other's company.  In Paris, Yates was just as all alone as a writer as he'd been in New York.  He had no one to learn from but himself, and, since he didn't like himself very much, his classes tended to be rather tense and depressing.

Meanwhile, back in America, at around the same time Yates was moping about New York and dreaming of Paris, Wallace Stegner was setting up shop at Stanford and Flannery O'Connor was finishing up at Iowa.

I'm not saying Yates would have been happy, or productive, at Iowa or Stanford or another creative writing program.  Just that the company of other writers was more available to him closer to home.

The teaching that goes on at creative writing programs occurs haphazardly outside the classroom, in the conversations students have with each other in bars, in the aisles of bookstores, on long walks around town, on the floors of apartments, in bed.

This is the best thing about writers' workshops.  Every night for one or two years there is the possibility that you will blunder upon the opportunity Will Shakespeare had, of sitting down at a bar next to a slightly drunken fellow writer who will happen to say something that flips a switch in your brain that will turn on your genius.

Of course, just because it could happen doesn't mean it will happen.

But it's far likelier to happen in a bar in a town that's home to a creative writing program than anywhere else.

Now, here's the problem.

Students at creative writing programs are learning from each other all the time.  But what are they learning?

According to Menand, they aren't learning to write well.  They are learning to write what is fashionable well.  This is what McGurl's looks at in The Program Era, what has been fashionable and how fiction writing programs have responded to and shaped those fashions.

I went off to Iowa full up to my eyeballs with the works of Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Herman Melville, only to find that just about every other fiction writer there was only interested in what was in the New Yorker that week.  My pal Miller was the only one there who'd read a word Richard Yates had written.  My friend Ed was a fan of Peter Taylor and Scott Fitzgerald.  My friend Ann was wild about Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children.  When the four of us tried to talk about our favorites in a workshop, other students could barely stifle their yawns.

Raymond Carver and Bobbie Ann Mason were the literary heroes of the day.

Minimalism was the fashion.

You'll notice that among my literary heroes of the time there's nobody who could be by any stretch described as a minimalist.

The upshot of this was that one of the lessons I learned at Iowa was that Raymond Carver and Bobbie Ann Mason were my mortal enemies.

I set about teaching myself to write what was not fashionable which is another way of saying that I taught myself how to write what was not publishable.

Even Shakespeare had to write what was fashionable in order to make money.

We don't know why Shakespeare retired from London when he did, but I don't think it's a coincidence that he gave up playwriting at the same time the fashion had changed.  The fairy tales he was turning out at the end of his career have nothing in common with the blood and sex soaked melodramas that were the rage of the Jacobean and Caroline theater and he probably didn't have much interest in---and no financial need for--rehashing perversities he'd dealt with in Titus Andronicus twenty odd years before.

Fashions come and go.  That's practically the definition of the word.  It's not really a criticism of creative writing programs to say that they teach what is fashionable.   It's just something prospective students need to be aware of.

What I'm wondering though is if creative writing programs do teach what is fashionable anymore.

As far as I know, every reputable fiction writing program in the country operates as if there is only one kind of fiction writing, the kind that is sometimes called literary fiction, often called serious fiction, the kind that might be better called domestic realism, the kind that is not mystery writing or science fiction or romance, the kind that does not sell and that relatively few people read.

The fashion has changed, significantly.

Steve Kuusisto has a somewhat demoralizing post up called Why the Novel Isn't Dead Exactly.  In it he includes an extended quote from Gore Vidal delivering the bad news that there are no more famous novelists anymore nor are there likely to be again:

How can a novelist be famous--no matter how well known he may be personally to the press?--if the novel itself is of little consequence to the civilized, much less to the generality? The novel as teaching aid is something else, but hardly famous.

There is no such thing as a famous novelist now, any more than there is such a thing as a famous poet. I use the adjective in the strict sense. According to authority, to be famous is to be much talked about, usually in a favorable way. It is as bleak and inglorious as that. Yet thirty years ago, novels were actually read and discussed by those who did not write them or, indeed, even read them. A book could be famous then but today's public seldom mentions a book unless, like The Da Vinci Code, it is being metamorphosed into a faith-challenging film.

But this isn't quite true, is it?  J.K. Rowling and her books are famous in the way Vidal says novelists and novels used to be famous, nevermind the success of the Harry Potter movies.  Terry Pratchett---Sir Terry Pratchett---is famous.  I'd say Neil Gaiman's on the cusp.

Is Stephen King still famous?

I don't know if it's the case, but I wouldn't be surprised if it is, but if you're a young writer looking for the company of other writers and you're full up to the eyeballs with the work of Rowling or Pratchett or Gaiman or King, or of any fantasy and science fiction writers, my guess is you aren't going to get admitted to a creative writing program, no matter how well you've learned all those lessons I mentioned above.

I don't know where I thought I was going with this post.  I had a great time at Iowa, despite the fashions of the time.  I wish I could have been more open-minded.  It probably would have been good for me if I could have read Carver's short stories without resenting the hell out of them.

I might have learned something.

Hat tip to Maud Newton.

_______________

 Related:  Jaquandor takes a Book Quiz.

Everything I know about writing, I learned from Beatrix Potter

This is something Mr Buchanan said about Sonia Sotomayor recently.

"Well I, again in that Saturday piece, she went to Princeton. She graduated first in her class it said. But she herself said she read, basically classic children’s books to read and learn the language and she read basic English grammars and she got help from tutors. I think that, I mean if you’re, frankly if you’re in college and you’re working on Pinocchio or on the troll under the bridge, I don’t think that’s college work."

Mr Buchanan was sneering at something he read in the New York Times.

"Judge Sotomayor is not known to have identified herself as a beneficiary of affirmative action, but she has described her academic struggles as a new student at Princeton from a Roman Catholic school in the Bronx — one of about 20 Hispanics on a campus with more than 2,000 students.

"She spent summers reading children’s classics she had missed in a Spanish-speaking home and 're-teaching' herself to write 'proper English' by reading elementary grammar books. Only with the outside help of a professor who served as her mentor did she catch up academically, ultimately graduating at the top of her class."

I wish the New York Times reporter had written down the titles of some of those books.  When Sonia Sotomayor was in college, a required reading list of children's classics would have included, among many others, Alice in Wonderland, The Wind in the Willows, Tom Sawyer, Anne of Green Gables, The Secret Garden, and Treasure Island.

These are children's books only because they are the first grown-up books many children get to know and love.  Children can read and understand them but they are not childish books, even the ones with talking animals.

Maybe especially not the ones with talking animals.

Many adults enjoy these books.  Many more would benefit from reading them.

Mr Buchanan, for instance.

He needs to improve his reading skills.  The article does not say Sonia Sotomayor read those books, whatever books they were, for college.  It says she read them in order to improve her ability to do her work at college.

Ok, boys and girls, we all know Mr Buchanan is a hateful bigot, not to mention a double-talking hypocrite and a liar.

Nothing he says means anything other than "I loathe and despise people who aren't like me for not being like me."

If a Republican President had nominated the son of Hispanic immigrants to the Supreme Court and it came out that that nominee had spent his summers in college reading children's classics in order to improve his English, Mr Buchanan would have praised the man for his hard work and self-discipline and it still would have meant "I loathe and despise people who aren't like me."

In praising that man he'd have found a way to insult all other Hispanics.

He doesn't think Sonia Sotomayor is funny and dumb because she read children's books when she was in college.  He thinks she is funny and dumb because she is Hispanic and female and to him that makes anything she does funny and dumb.

Then, as Miss Potter said of Mr Tod , nobody could call Mr Buchanan "nice."

But I think Miss Potter described Mr Buchanan when she described Tommy Brock.

"Tommy Brock," Miss Potter wrote, "was a short bristly fat waddling person with a grin; he grinned all over his face.  He ate wasp nests and frogs and worms; and he waddled about by moonlight, digging things up."

Miss Potter knew how to turn a phrase.

Mr Graham Greene thought Miss Potter was one of the finest prose writers in the English language.

And with that thought, we can kick Mr Buchanan out the door to go snarling and worrying with Mr Tod and Tommy Brock and get to the point.

Sonia Sotomayor did a very wise thing when she decided to read those children's classics.

All those books are beautifully written.  If you wanted to learn how the English language looks and sounds at its best, you couldn't do much better than to go to the likes of Mark Twain, Kenneth Grahame, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Beatrix Potter for your lessons.

Let me back up a bit.

The New York Times doesn't actually tell us why Sonia Sotomayor read those children classics.  It only tells us that she missed reading them when she was growing up.  The implication is that she read them for the same reason she read the elementary grammar books and sought help from a tutor. 

The implication is there because the thoughts are associated in a sentence and in a paragraph.  But if the writer had wanted to say that she'd read those books for the same reason and wanted to be precise about saying it, he would have written, "To 're-teach' herself how to write 'proper English,' she spent summers reading children’s classics she had missed in a Spanish-speaking home and reading elementary grammar books."

It's easier for modifiers to reach forwards than backwards.  This is how the language works and it works this way because this is how people use it to work.

When they are thinking about it and being careful.

Children learn how the language works by hearing it at work when they are too young to read to themselves and then by seeing at work after they've learned how to read.

Those children's classics are some of our first and best examples of the English language at work.

And that work is more than a matter of rules of grammar and usage.

From well-written stories---and notice I didn't say prettily written---we learn our language's structures and its sounds, and the way words sound, alone and together, is part of their meaning.

No writers of prose are as sensitive to the way words sound as the writers of children's books.

If you wanted to help someone who did not speak or read English well improve her skills, you could hand her a copy of Strunk and White.

Or you could read to her from a children's classic and let her hear that it sounds better to describe an animal as being a bear of very little brain than to just call him a dumb bear and it's more fun to say too.

Anyway, he's not a dumb bear.  He's a silly ol' bear.

And I don't have to tell you what bear I'm talking about, do I?

Which brings me to another reason Sonia Sotomayor was wise to read those children's classics.

Mr Buchanan made the argument for her himself with his confidence that his audience would know what he was sneering at when he sneered at Pinocchio and the troll under the bridge.

A language isn't an assemblage of words.  It's a collection of shared references.

You can't speak English well unless you know what troll and what bridge and what happened to him.

We spend a lifetime gathering and storing up these references, and the ones we gather first and the ones we treasure most so that they stay with us longest and the ones that have the most currency are the ones we learned from the first stories we were told as children.

If you are missing those references from your personal storehouse, you are missing a large part of the language.

You might as well not know how to conjugate verbs.

And, yes, I'm suggesting that a great many Americans who grew up speaking what they thought of as English as their native tongue don't know how to read and write it because they are missing those references.

They could all benefit from Sonia Sotomayor's example.

Let me tell you, I truly believe I have.

I spent the better part of the 1990s re-reading children's classics.

I had an audience of two small boys, of course.  But I was part of my audience too.  And I heard some wonderful sounds I hadn't heard in a long, long time.

At any rate, to speak English you need to know what someone who has gone through an emotional upheaval is referring to when they say, "I feel like I've gone through the looking glass."

You need to know why someone anticipating winning an argument might confide out of the corner of her mouth, "Please don't throw me in that briar patch" and sound as if she wants to be thrown into that briar patch.

You need to why a friend is shouting at Mr Buchanan on the television, "I can see your nose growing, Pat!"

And maybe you don't need to, but it's fun, to look at Mr Buchanan on the television grinning all over his face and think, "Tommy Brock."

_________________________________________

Your turn: What are some children's books you'd recommend to someone trying to learn to read and write English?  What books did you love when love when you were a kid?  Which ones have you re-read as an adult and loved all over again?  If you can quote a passage, that would be great.

Empathy, reconsidered

Spurred by my post on empathy, Ian Welsh comes to the defense of the word and the virtue.

No empathy for empathy

Words do not matter to the Right.

They don't care about the meaning of a word.  They are only interested in its uses.

And those uses are tied up in their politics and like their politics are aggressive and manipulative and aimed at one end, power.

To the extent that conservatives understand the words they use, they understand them as sounds that express their feelings.  They know they've found the right word if it sounds like how they feel at the moment they say it.  As far as they're concerned, there's no difference between lightning and lightning bug if both can be made to sound like, Oh my God the black guy in the White House wants to put a Spanish chick on the Supreme Court!

Their favorite words are words that can said with a sneer, but they enjoy words that bark, growl, whine, wheedle, and spit with rage too.

Empathy is a perfect word for them because it can be said with an implied flounce and limpness of wrist.

Empathy is a wussy word.  Just listen to it.

Which is why it's being used against Sonia Sotomayor, in particular, and Barack Obama's criteria for nominating federal judges in general.

Empathy sounds like weakness, emotionalism, and an effeminate and hysterical over-concern for other people's feelings, not a good quality when the other people whose feelings are being taken into account are criminals.  Empathy sounds like the fear of making the hard choices in case you hurt someone's feelings.

Empathy sounds like...liberalism.

Which is why it doesn't matter that George Herbert Walker Bush applied the word to Clarence Thomas when he nominated him to the Supreme Court.

Of course, to conservatives, it's no endorsement that the word was used by that wimp George Herbert Walker Bush.  But even if it had been used by George W. Bush about Sam Alito it wouldn't matter to them, because to them it's not the same word.

Listen again.

"Different when we say it, isn't it?"

We can't trip them up on their own words, even when they use words that contradict each other as if they mean the same thing, even when they use words that they affect to despise when liberals use them.

Because the words have no meaning, only sounds and uses.  For them, words are defined by their sounds and uses.

Trying to throw their own words back in their face only allows them to make the same sounds all over again or use different words that they give those old sounds.

This is connected with their idea of morality---their feeling about morality.  Moral behavior is what they do.  Immoral behavior is what anybody who gets in their way does.  The correct use of a word is their use of it at the moment, however they're using it, no matter how they've used it in the past.

We can't argue with their choice of words.  We're better off competing with it with our own sounds.

And by the way, the sound of a word is part of its meaning.  Using a word as if it only has the meaning the dictionary gives it is using only a piece of the word.  Actually, it's often as big a mistake as using the wrong word.  Often, it is the wrong word.

The sound of a word and the sounds of the words around it help convey its meaning.

We're not going to convince anyone that empathy is a good quality in a judge, unless we can make empathy sound like a good quality.

I have to admit, I don't think we can do that.

I'm no fan of the word empathy.

Goes back to grade school.

I learned what it meant in conjunction with learning what apathy meant, and I learned both through comparisons with the word sympathy.

This was probably in fifth or sixth grade.  I already knew what sympathy meant and that it was a good trait to have.  A virtue even.  But the effect of that was that instead of learning what apathy and empathy meant by learning what they were, I learned what they meant by learning what they weren't---they weren't sympathy.

I doubt Sister Mary Anthony, who taught us grammar and usage, intended it, but I saw the three words on a continuum, starting with apathy and proceeding to empathy.  But not progressing towards empathy.  There was sympathy, which was a good thing, it meant you cared about what other people felt, and on the one side of it was apathy, which meant that you didn't care, and on the other side was empathy, which meant---well, which I took to mean, you cared too much.

Sympathy was a virtue.  Apathy wasn't a vice as much as it was a failure to practice the virtue.  Empathy was an indulgence.  And indulgences are hard to distinguish from vices.

In short, empathy is not a quality I want in Supreme Court justice.  Frankly, I think John Roberts is entirely too empathetic---to rich and powerful white guys.  Empathy is as empathy is directed, and that's what conservatives intend when they use empathy as a sneer word.  It doesn't matter what the dictionary says it means and that that meaning makes it a good quality.  It sounds like liberal who will let terrorists out of Gitmo and buy them houses in your neighborhood.

The more effective way to fight this is to use our own words, words that sound like what they mean, and which have the virtue of actually describing Sonia Sotomayor.  Tough, smart, hard-working, disciplined, concerned, compassionate, fair.

There's no point in trying to save her from the word empathetic by trying to make people understand that it doesn't mean what it sounds like it means.  And at any rate, she's not empathetic.

At least, I wonder if her former boss, Manhattan's longtime District Attorney Robert M. Morganthau, would describe her as empathetic.  He might just paraphrase himself on the question of her liberalism:  "I am sure that none of the defendants in her cases thought of her as a 'liberal.'"  They probably wouldn't have called her very empathetic either.

_____________________-

Dahlia Lithwick boils down the argument about "empathy" (her quotation marks, too) to this:  Conservatives want to make the case that Sotomayor feels too much, and that's code for too ethnic and too female and it gets them into a demographic battle they can't win.  Lithwick concludes:

The angry screeching from the right that Judge Sotomayor is too emotional to fairly apply the law is already starting to sound, well, hysterical. And the fun is only just beginning.

Screeching.  Hysterical.  I like the sound of those words, and they have the virtue of actually applying to the Right.

Happiness Shmappiness

Bill Scher wants to know, "Will Ross Douthat argue that Sotomayor is unhappy today?"

Bill's referring to Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the Supreme Court and the newest New York Times' op-ed columnist's brilliantly original regurgitation of an age-old conservative and patriarchal argument against allowing women to be full-fledged grown-ups.

Having a job makes women unhappy.

I'd agree, if Douthat means that it's no fun working as a cashier at Wal-mart or cleaning toilets at the local convenience mart.  But he doesn't.  Like many elitists, of the right and the left, in whose thinking about gender and work working class women often seem not to figure, Douthat means any sort of job, but is thinking really about the kinds of jobs held by smart, ambitious, competent women of his own class and educational background, because those are the women who from the point of view of men like Douthat need putting back in their proper place lest they make men like Douthat feel less smart and competent themselves.

The world needs its toilets cleaned.  It does not need doctors, lawyers, scientists, and journalists who may be smarter than Ross Douthat, make more money, and show no deference or desire to give over their lives to bearing and raising his children.

Douthat forgot to mention it, but having a career makes a woman act like a man, too.  So those of you ladies who want to be feminine and therefore attractive to men like Douthat need to march right out of that cubicle and back into the kitchen before you start sprouting mustaches and following UFC.

Ok, let's forget that these polls and surveys are usually of questionable provenance and doubtful methodology.  Let's just consider a fact about women that I think Douthat would agree is true.

Women are under a lot of pressure to be happy.

I don't mean that the feel compelled to attain some higher level of bliss on their way to self-enlightenment and fulfillment.

I mean that generally, at work, at home, around friends and family, just walking down the street or sitting on a park bench alone with their thoughts, they are expected to be happy in the same way they are expected to be busy.  It's in their job description.

"Smile, dear."

Or to put it another way.  A man in a grumpy mood is a man in a grumpy mood.  A woman in a grumpy mood is being a bitch.

Most of us know to steer clear of the man in the grumpy mood.  With the bitch, not so much.  Plenty of her friends, coworkers, and family, female as well as male, will make it a point to tell her to snap out of it.

Women are the peacemakers and the comfort-bearers.  They are the happy homemakers---it usually falls to them to make the home a happy place to be.   This is the traditional wife and mother's first duty.

Which means, of course, that for a woman, admitting to being unhappy is tantamount to admitting to being a failure.

It's worse for the traditional types Douthat wishes all women within his dating range would emulate.

In short, when asked to participate in these surveys and polls, these women have a strong incentive to lie, if only to fool or flatter themselves or, more likely, keep up their morale.

"Liberated" women of the type who apparently shatter Douthat's fragile sense of male superiority and whose senses of self-worth and success are not as strongly defined by how good a job they do at making  other people happy don't have the same incentive, and they can flat out say what is in fact true, life usually sucks and happiness is fleeting if not an illusion altogether so there's not much gain in making it the point of one's existence or the measure of one's...um...happiness.

Boy, there's a post in that one---happiness is not itself a necessary ingredient of happiness.

Of course, one of the first complaints men had against women becoming liberated was that they would feel liberated to speak their minds because they were afraid it would turn out as it has turned out that a lot of what was on women's minds was not flattering or comforting to men.

Now, let's add this.  Happiness---being happy---is an American virtue.

We're a nation of bucker-uppers.  This is one of the great things we do for each other.  We cheer each other up.  We're constantly telling each other and ourselves to buck up, cheer up, suck it up, live it up, look for the silver lining, put a shine on our shoes and a melody in our hearts, gray skies are gonna clear up, put on a happy face, pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, start all over again, and shut up, stop your whining, nobody wants to hear it, and I like this about us.

It can be overdone, and it's nice to take a vacation from it now and then, either by sinking into your own private slough of despond or by finding a bar full of kindred dour spirits and share complaints or by visiting New York City or by just kicking a mime.

But on the whole I'd rather be stuck on a stopped elevator or on a broken down train or in a long line at the supermarket with people who think it's their job to find the situation at least mildly amusing.  And I think it is everybody's job in a family to try to make things pleasant for everybody else.  I don't mean by burying feelings, by living in denial, by enabling, or by living a lie.  I mean by doing whatever little things we can do and saying what little things we can think of to make home, and home is where the heart is, so that can include work and school, bearable.

And it's important to remember that there are ways of doing that besides prancing around the house singing and telling jokes---which, in fact, can be a good way to make the place a living hell---or even without smiling all the damn time. 

There's a marvelous poem by Robert Hayden that captures this, Those Winter Sundays:

Sundays too my father got up early
And put his clothes on in the blueback cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

There's an ambiguity in the poem that's troublesome when you start to think about the many images in it that allude to pain and bruising and that line about "fearing the chronic angers of that house" tells you that the boy's indifference to his father's favors isn't just the usual case of a child taking his parents for granted.  But I love the last line, "love's austere and lonely offices," and it still makes the point---there's a lot of pain and suffering, sacrifice and hard work that goes into being happy.  And to get back to Douthat's rather childish notion that mothers and housewives are the happier women, who knows better how lonely and austere love's offices can be?  When these women respond to nosy poll takers, it's very likely that they are taking rather small comfort in being happy and what they are doing instead is keeping themselves going.

Back when I was in grad school I taught a correspondence course in creative writing.  Really.  It was offered by the university.  I was a pioneer in distance learning although it was all done through the mail and not over the internet, that's how old I am.  My students included all sorts and conditions, but I'd bet that the great majority of them were stay at home wives and mothers---this being Iowa, staying at home for a lot of them meant working at home on the farm.   I didn't get know my students well, naturally, and in fact knew very little about them, just what they chose to reveal about themselves in their stories and poems.  But since their work was usually autobiographical the main thing I learned was that people who enroll in creative writing courses by mail have a lot more sadness in their lives than the twenty-something wiseguy presuming to be their teacher would have suspected or was prepared to deal with before taking on the job of grading the expressions of that sadness.

I remember one poem in particular.  It was by a woman living on the far western side of the state, which I imagined to be all bleak and desolate prairieland.  Her poem was a litany of personal and familial disaster.  Cancer, job loss, divorce, estrangements between parents and children and brothers and sisters, financial ruin, fatigue, stress, loneliness, and not one but two tornados.  I was devastated while reading the poem but I was utterly dumbfounded by its last verse which was very close to being, "But God's in His heaven and all's right with the world."

Being young and arrogant and naturally self-centered, not to mention fashionably cynical and world-weary, I was impressed, or convinced myself I was impressed, by the poet's naivete.  And I went around for weeks afterwards telling everybody who would listen about it and spouting theories about what the poem proved about Iowans or Midwesterners or Christians in general---I used to blog before there were blogs by shooting my mouth off a lot---and otherwise proving my own spiritual and intellectual superiority.

Just in case you're worried that about how big an asshole I was capable of being, I kept these theories from the poet herself and limited my jerkiness to suggesting, tactfully, that her poem would be better if she left the last verse out.  Which from a purely critical point of view was actually true.  It wasn't a bad poem at all.  But what did I know about love's austere and lonely offices?  That last verse was her point in writing the poem, and she wrote back to tell me that, tactfully, speaking as a grown-up to an arrested adolescent.

And I'll tell you, I'll bet if you'd asked that woman if she was happy, she'd have said yes.

Because what else did she have left to be?

No talent for happiness

Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet as Frank and April Wheeler in the movie adaptation of Richard Yates' novel Revolutionary Road.  In this picture, DiCaprio looks a lot like the man Frank was based on, Richard Yates himself as a young man.  April's real-life model, Yates' first wife, Sheila, was a redhead.

I'm having a hard time slogging my way through A Tragic Honesty, Blake Bailey's biography of Richard Yates.  Good book, sad subject.  Sad man, Yates.  I wonder if the guy enjoyed a single happy day in his life.  Children growing up in war zones and under conditions of horrific poverty still manage to find and sustain moments and even whole days full of joy.  At the point I've reached in the book, Yates is a young man in his early twenties and except for his last couple years of high school, he seems not to have found many moments that kept him smiling for a minute let alone made him laugh out loud at the sheer fun of being alive.

Of course it was difficult, growing up with a neurotic, self-absorbed, careless and foolish mother who mentally abused Yates and his sister in one of the most insidious ways possible, by loving them but loving them as extensions of herself.  Dookie Yates believed that what made her happy made her children happy and what made her sad, angry, frustrated, bitter, or desperate made them, well, not exactly feel the same, but sympathetic to the point of wanting to hear all about her disappointments and to console her.  Since she was sad, angry, frustrated, bitter, and desperate far more often than she was happy, her children spent much of their childhoods playing psychiatric nurse and child confessor to their mother.  And the rare times when she was happy might have been even worse, because then she more or less forgot all about them, assuming that since she was doing well they must be too and so simply by indulging her own inclinations and desires and compulsions she was in fact taking excellent care of them.

It didn't help that Dookie was constantly pulling the kids out of school and moving them to another town as she pursued what she thought of as a properly middle class life, a life that was totally incompatible with her ambitions---she wanted to be an artist, but she wanted to live like a doctor's wife.  (She was the ex-wife of a not very prosperous salesman who supported her and the children as best he could but who kept himself distant from them.)  But young Dickie Yates didn't have a knack for making friends even if he'd had more of a chance.  The friends he did have, as a boy and as a man, are friends who went out of their way to befriend him, an effort they often came to regret.  On top of all this, Yates was naturally prone to depression and acute anxiety and he was almost pathologically shy and introverted.  A kid growing up the way he did might learn to withdraw as his only recourse and solace, but I suspect there was more to it.   The anxiety, the compulsiveness that when he was a grown-up kept him chainsmoking even after he'd been diagnosed with tuberculosis and then with emphysema, the inwardness, the not just social but physical maladroitness---Yates could hardly wash a glass without dropping it---of course, I'm on the lookout for  it but I'm convinced Yates had Asperger's Syndrome, which by itself is not a punched ticket for a life of unhappiness and loneliness, not by any stretch.  Asperger's kids, and adults, share a number of social and physical disfunctions, but they all have their own temperaments and develop their own idiosyncratic ways of coping, and all I'm saying is that along with all his other problems, Yates appears to have had no talent for happiness.

As I said, at this point in Bailey's book, Yates is in his early twenties.  He and his wife and baby girl have just moved to France where he's hoping to jump start his stalled (actually non-starting) career as a writer by following in the footsteps of his literary heroes Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.  But the opening clause of the previous sentence gives a clue that things aren't going to go well for him.  Yates and his wife Sheila shared vaguely bohemian ambitions, but both had no idea how to be bohemians and neither seemed to understand what being an artist demanded of them and when it at last dawned on them what they were getting themselves into, Sheila decided that on the whole she would rather be conventionally middle-class and bourgeois, and Yates decided that he would rather be...something. 

If you'd asked him what that something was, he'd have said "a writer," preferably a rich and famous one. 

But Yates didn't know how to go about being a writer.  He thought it was just a matter of writing.  Makes sense.  A writer is someone who writes.  Yates wrote like the dickens (but not like Dickens, and I'll get to that) but it doesn't seem to have occurred to him that sitting down to write is the next step.  The first step is going out into the world and gathering material to write about.  It's a fairly common misperception that writing is a solitary profession, after all writers spend an awful lot of time alone at their desks and many of them tend to be the kind of people who have been very comfortable being alone with their thoughts from an early age.  But writing is a social act.  Writers write to be read.  That means there is always at least one other person involved, a reader.  Writers are writing to and writing for other people.  Writers always have to keep in mind that they aren't alone.  They have an audience or at least are trying to get the attention of one.

Beyond that, however, other people are their material.  Even the most autobiographically-inclined writer---and given his temperament and his neuroses, it's not surprising that that's the kind of writer Yates turned out to be---can't get by writing only about what's going on inside his own head.  Writers need to get out and about to see and hear and feel what other people are up to.  It's the only  way to develop sympathy.  A critic whose name I can't remember once wrote that Shakespeare put only one real writer in all of his plays, Hamlet.  Just about every other character who puts quill to paper in all his other plays is a poseur.  But I think that Shakespeare wrote what was an excellent motto for all writers and put it in the mouth of one of his least literary creations, one of the young lovers in the farce A Comedy of Errors.  Upon his arrival in Ephesus, Antipholus of Syracuse declares his intention to "lose myself, and wander up and down to view the city."

The losing of oneself there is necessary to the viewing of the city.  You can't see and take note of what's in front of you, if you're wrapped up in your own thoughts.

There are notable cases of writers who did not do much wandering up and down in their lives, writers who were recluses and hermits.  But they are rare.  But most of the very best ones have been extremely social animals, even if they had to force themselves to be that way.  One way or another they manage to lose themselves, to spend a lot of time wandering up and down, viewing the city, which is to say, spending time with and getting to know the thoughts and habits and feelings of other people.

I'm not saying that great writers have to be journalists in the way Tom Wolfe has argued they need to be (which is only his way of arguing that he's a great writer) but many of them have been---Dickens, Hemingway, Zola, for example---and almost all the rest you can name have been journalists in the sense that they took notes about what they saw when they wandered out to view the city.  Their letters, diaries, and notebooks, put together can be read as one-person magazines.  They were proto-bloggers.

Unfortunately, Yates was temperamentally almost incapable of losing himself, although he was highly proficient at getting lost within himself, and when he was in France he was too sick and debilitated to do much wandering up and down anyway.

At any rate, although it should have been clear to him that moving to France was a mistake from the get-go, things that should have been clear to him rarely if ever were, and he appears to have been convinced that simply by living and writing in the place where is literary idols lived and wrote he would become a writer like them.  It didn't occur to him that to be writers like them he first had to be men like them.  Yates identified with Fitzgerald and counted up all the ways they were like, including sharing a facial resemblance, but he missed the fact that they were temperamentally different in that Fitzgerald could overcome his natural shyness and social insecurities enough to enjoy the company of other people, and that like Hemingway he also had a knack for enjoying himself.  I wouldn't say that either Fitzgerald or Hemingway had a talent for happiness, but both of them, especially Hemingway, knew how to take pleasure in being alive.

Even if he had been well, Yates would have been as miserable in France as he'd been in New York, as he'd be everywhere else he lived afterwards.

So this part of A Tragic Honesty is heartbreaking to wade through.  It's wrenching to follow the way too young for what he's let himself in for writer realize part of what he thought of as his dream only to have it turn to ashes on him, to watch him write away furiously to no success or satisfaction, to feel him feel his growing unhappiness with his marriage and feel him feeling his wife having the same thoughts and pulling away from him.  I'm sad for him and mad at him at the same time, and I'm thinking, This is the stuff of a tragic novel.

And of course it is.  It's the germ of Yates' own Revolutionary Road.

Which is another reason I'm having such a tough time with A Tragic Honesty.

The more I read of it, the less I want to read of Yates' fiction.

Richard Yates was an obsessively auto-biographical writer.  The thing is, I didn't know until now that he was an obsessively auto-biographical writer.  I'd thought he was a brilliant journalist who put his imagination to work on turning his brilliant journalism into brilliant fiction.

I'm learning that Yates put his imagination to work on turning his own life into brilliant fiction, which is fine, if you like autobiographical fiction.  I don't.

I have a longstanding prejudice against obviously auto-biographical fiction in which you can see through the real life that inspired it, and I'll tell you why---in another post.

_______________________

This post actually about Charles Dickens as much as it's about Richard Yates.  It part of my ongoing effort to make something out of the time I spent watching the recently concluded adaptation of Little Dorrit on PBS.  Please bear with me.  Meanwhile, previous related posts include:

Old Heart Crying, The murderer Rigaud captures another imagination for Charles Dickens, and Nobody's Weakness.

My student, Abraham Lincoln. Part Two.

Part One is here.

"What we do get in life and miss so often in literature is the sentence sounds  that underlie the words.  Words in themselves do not convey meaning, and to [prove] this, which may seem entirely unreasonable to any one who does not understand the psychology of sound, let us take the example of two people who are talking on the other side of a closed door, whose voices can be heard but whose words cannot be distinguished.  Even though the words do not carry, the sound of them does, and the listener can catch the meaning of the conversation.  This is because meaning has a particular sound-posture; or, to put it another way, the sense of every meaning has a particular sound which each individual is instinctively familiar with and without at all being conscious of the exact words that are being used is able to understand the thought, idea, or emotion that is being conveyed."

When Robert Frost talked about "the sound of sense," he meant that reading and writing, using language to transmit a thought, was a physical act.  We understand words by their sounds.  The sense of a poem is conveyed sensually.  We have to hear it to make sense of it.  If something doesn't sound right, it doesn't mean right---or mean anything.  You can't be a good poet or writer if you have a tin ear.

(The deaf have a different experience, but I would guess that they still feel words.  Maybe there's not  a sound of sense but a sensing of sense.  And Steve Kuusisto has an interesting post up at newcritics about how as a blind lover of literature he hears things in a poem sighted readers are, well, deaf to.  Walt Whitman, Steve says, had a lousy ear.)

We learn to use our language at the same time we are learning to sort out and make sense of the physical world we got dumped into without a manual or set of instructions.  Our first words are tied to the immediately physical, to things and actions, and are tools for helping us manipulate those things.  Talking is our first physical labor.  Naming things, saying them, is our way of taking hold of them.  The word and the object are physically connected by the sound.

Words that have no sound have no sense.  Make no sense.  My students who could not hear what they wrote and read were at a loss.  Words on a page did not connect to the real world or to themselves.

For most of my students, the ones who had been lucky enough to have had some one who read out loud to them when they were young and so helped connect spoken words to written words, the connection was severed just at the point when it should have been even more strongly reinforced.  Adults stopped reading out loud to them before they'd learned to really read and write.  Just about the time when they were ready to graduate from picture books to chapter books the grown-ups shut up their own copies and said, Now you are old enough to read it for yourself.  And when their teachers began to teach them to write sentences more complex than See Spot run, dealing with the written word became a more or less silent and private activity.  These children went off by themselves to read by themselves to themselves.   They sat at their desks and struggled, in silence, to turn out compositions that their teachers would read silently, later, and neither they nor the teacher would ever hear the sound of their words.  By the time they reached my class, words on a page barely whispered to them, if they made any noise in their heads at all.  All writing was something done instead of and apart from speaking.

If I'd been a true scholar I'd have studied this.  I'd have conducted surveys and researched current pedagogic theories and practices.  Maybe I'd have published a few papers, gotten a book out of it.  But I was a young teacher in a hurry and I saw this as a problem that needed to be dealt with right then and there and not as an opportunity to build an academic career on.  I was impatient and short-sighted is what I was.  I decided to try to fix things and set out to reconnect the sight of their written words with the sounds and I did this the only way I could think of because it is the only way to do it.  I had them reading out loud.

Whatever we studied or discussed, poems, passages from essay, their own work, we read it first.  I didn't ask for volunteers.  I just pointed.  If I asked a question and you answered it, you had to be ready to read to the class the paragraph or the verse you were talking about.  When they'd written their second drafts, I broke them up into small groups that I called editorial boards (each one organized around one of the better writers in the class, although I never pointed that out) and they helped each other with the next revision by reading over, out loud, what worked and what didn't.  My classrooms were pleasantly noisy places.  Colleagues who passed by the door would ask me later what was going on.  "It sounds like you're having a party in there."

I don't know how much good this approach did.  There were problems with it.  Not every student can read well out loud or wants to.  Telling students to write like they talked was all well and good, provided they thought first about what they were talking about, and just because they could talk about something better than they could write about it, that didn't mean they were all born orators and storytellers.  Without careful questioning and tactful prompting they could be just as vague and dull and grammatically- and lexiconally-challenged when they talked as when they wrote.  But it did some good.  It brought the language back to life for them.  It made them interested in the sound of their own voices.  It forced them to focus on specific examples when they set out to make a point.  It made class a lot more fun than it would have been if the only sound they heard was my voice droning on about grammar and usage.  And most of them left the class with at least one poem in their head and heart that had moved them in some way.

Whatever good it did them, it suited me and made teaching more enjoyable, and that fact has often made me wonder how much it really was the case that I was on to something useful and how much it was just the case that I was rationalizing my own fun and games.  Then the other day I was reading Fred Kaplan's Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer and I came across something that made me hopeful that I hadn't been just fooling around.

Young Abe Lincoln, as we all know, loved learning and he loved books.  But out on the frontiers of Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois, where he grew up, books were scarce, and formal schooling a rare luxury.  Lincoln was in and out of schools, never completing a whole year at any one, and it's hard to say that when he was done he'd had even the equivalent of a fifth grade education.  Most of what Lincoln knew he taught himself, and that included how, beyond the basics, to read and write, and he taught himself how to do that by reciting.

And he often recited from memory.  One of the ways he made up for the lack of books he owned was to memorize the ones he could borrow.  He'd commit favorite passages, chapters, poems, speeches, entire essays to memory and when he needed to he'd recite, sometimes to himself, often to anyone he could make stand around an listen.  It was not an unusual sight, wherever his family happened to be living, to see the tall, gangly, squeaky-voiced boy, normally a shy and quiet and solitary type, standing on a stump or sitting on a fence and delivering a speech by his political idol Henry Clay or a soliloquy from Shakespeare to a crowd of playmates or curious and amused adults.

Around he time he turned fourteen, Lincoln immersed himself in a couple of anthologies he found among his step-mother's small but prized collection of books, Lindley Murray's The English Reader and William Scott's Lessons in Elocution, Or, a a Selection of Pieces, in Prose and Verse.  Kaplan writes:

Both equate, as William Scott does on his title page, "READING and SPEAKING."  Scott placed emphasis on reading aloud, a practice Lincoln had already adopted.  From the start, reading seemed to him an aspect of oral performance, the words enunciated in the theater of his own head or aloud to himself or to family and schoolmates.  Public recitation as a teaching device emphasized the connection.  The repetition that Lincoln believed facilitated comprehension also promoted memorization.  "Abe could Easily learn & long remember and when he did learn anything he learned it well and thoroughly," his stepmother recalled.  "What he learned he stowed away in his memory...repeated over & over & over again till it was...fixed firmly & permanently..."  He developed an anthology of the mind, independent of whether he had the actual book in hand.  "My mind is like a piece of steel," he later remarked, "very hard to scratch anything on it and almost impossible once you get it there to rub it out."

The man who wrote, and said:

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

Was the boy who amused himself as he did his chores by reciting:

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow'r,
  And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Awaits alike th' inevitable hour:
  The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

Lincoln was Lincoln, and what worked for a self-taught genius may not have any application for us ordinary mortals, but one of Kaplan's points is that Lincoln made himself Lincoln through his reading and writing, through his love for and careful use of the English language, and for Lincoln words were physical things, they had a sound, and through their sounds they made sense, they were meant to be heard.

I don't know if there was a Lincoln among my students.  If there turns out to have been, I'm not going to take credit for her success.  All I'm hoping is that somewhere out there are some people who love the sounds of words and appreciate the connection between the sounds they make and sense they convey and, if they are teachers, they're passing that along to their students, and if they're not teaching they're making use of it in courtrooms and newsrooms and town meetings or in the theaters of their own minds, and that all of them are reading out loud to their kids.

__________________________

The other President from Illinois:  I suppose I should write "one of the other Presidents from Illinois" since, technically, Ronald Reagan counts.  In fact, he was born there and Lincoln and Obama weren't.  But you know what I mean.

President Obama clearly relishes the connection between the spoken word and the written one.  So I hope there'll be a lot of reading out loud in this new course at Ohio State, Barack Obama and/as Literature.  The reading list is made up of some of the President's favorite books and includes, naturally, a collection of the writings and speeches of Abraham Lincoln.

Hat-tip to Gabrielle David at Rabble Rouser's Forum.

My student, Abraham Lincoln. Part One.

"There is, thank God, no Teacher Meter," wrote the poet and essayist and sometime teacher Wendell Berry, "And there never is going to be one.  A teacher's major contribution may pop out anonymously in the life of some ex-student's grandchild."

My former students aren't old enough to have grandchildren yet.  I don't know what good I did any of them and never will know.  I like to think that all over Indiana there are these thirty-something parents reciting their favorite poem from college to their kids at bedtime in the bad music hall cockney accent used by that professor, what was his name again?---

Now in Injia's sunny clime
Where I used to spend my time
A-serving of her Majesty the Queen,
Of all them blackfaced crew
The finest man I knew
Was our regimental bhisti, Gunga Din...

Don't scoff.  I had them in tears by the end of it, every time.

What I hope, though, is that, since so many of my students were education majors, that I managed to impress upon them the one truly useful insight I had into the teaching of composition, which was this:

Written English and Spoken English are not two different languages.

Very shortly after I started teaching I discovered that a great many of my students couldn't write.

But they sure could talk.

They could tell me anything.  They could describe a process, analyze a poem, compare this to that and contrast that to this, and narrate an adventure, not always eloquently, but thoughtfully, coherently, interestingly.  They were a pleasure to listen to.

But when they tried to write out a description or an analysis, when they compared and contrasted, when they narrated an event on paper the result would be something close to gibberish.

They wrote in a different language than they spoke, following different rules of grammar and usage that they understood imperfectly and using vocabularies that were not their own or which contained a mere fraction of the words that flowed out of them when they spoke. 

I had them writing three drafts of every paper and I met with them individually to go over their first drafts with them---some weeks I would have sixty to seventy half hour editorial conferences to go over essays sentence by sentence.  I don't know how I managed this.  I was young.  I thought I was superteacher,  I guess.  Usually there'd come a point in a meeting when, hiding my exasperation, I'd point to a particularly tangled or empty paragraph and ask the student what he or she had been trying to say in it.

They'd look at it, their own words, often less than a hour from their printer, and they wouldn't know.  They wouldn't even recognize it as their own writing.  It was gibberish to them too.

I'd pull the paper back and say, "Tell me what you wanted to say."

And they would.

Sometimes it took some prompting.  But they would do it.  They would tell me a paragraph that was thoughtful, coherent, interesting.

And while they were telling me, I'd write down what they were saying.

When they were done I'd read back to them what they'd said.

This would lead to an exchange that went something like this:

Me:  Sounds a lot better, doesn't it?

Student:  Sure does.

Me:  Try writing like that.

Student:  How is that?

Me: Write like you're talking to me.

Student:  I can do that?

Me:  Well, leave out the ums and ers and like you knows.

Student (very doubtfully):  Um...ok...

They tried, but it was difficult for them.  They thought speaking and writing were very different skills, like painting and sculpting or carpentry and plumbing.  Basically, they didn't believe they talked smart enough.  Writing looked smarter than they felt, it looked more difficult to decode than anything anyone told them.   Then I realized what was happening.  To them good writing looked like something.  It didn't sound like anything, let alone an ordinary person talking.  When they wrote they weren't transcribing what they heard inside their own heads, they were copying something they had seen, something they had been taught was good writing.  Being normal American teenagers, most of them weren't readers, and this meant that what most of them were trying to make their writing look like was what they thought teachers thought was good writing, textbooks and encyclopedias.

It meant that for the most part they were trying to make their own writing look like boring writing.

I keep saying look like because to them it didn't sound like something.  Writing had no sound.  Words on a page probably weren't completely silent to them but they didn't speak with a normal human voice.  The words they read had no feeling, and I mean that they conveyed no emotions, but I also mean that my students didn't feel the words.  Their bodies didn't react to them.  The written word was actually alien to them. 

I had never thought deeply about this before and I'd had no experience teaching small children and, since this was years before my own kids came along and went through it, I had no idea what was going on in grade schools these days.  I had only my own vague memories of learning to read and write.  But what I mainly remembered was that when I was a kid grown-ups were always reading to me.

My favorite books had been books that Captain Kangaroo read to me and when I was old enough to read them myself I read them like the Captain did, out loud.  You should hear me read Caps For Sale .  I still read it just as I remember the Captain reading it, drawing out the peddlers call almost mournfully, "Caaaaaaps!  Caps for sale!  Fifty cents a cap!"

At some point before I reached fourth or fifth grade this must have stopped.  I don't think I ever read the Hardy Boys out loud or that any of my teachers read The Gift of the Magi or The Ransom of Red Chief out loud.  But it was around this time in my life that I found a paperback copy of Macbeth among my father's books.  By the time I got to eighth grade, I'd read all of Shakespeare's plays except Henry VIII (because I knew he hadn't written all of it.  I still haven't read it, and I refuse to bother with The Two Noble Kinsmen either.).  And reading Shakespeare inspired me to write my own plays.  Writing my own plays made me want to read other people's plays to find out how it was done in contemporary English prose---I never got the hang of writing in Elizabethan blank verse.   For the end of my grade school years and on into high school, then, my personal reading mostly included plays, which is to say, writing that was meant to be spoken out loud, and since I joined the Drama Club, that's what happened to a lot of what I read.  It got said.

Had I but world enough and time....end of Part One.  Follow the link to Part Two.

Updike at Rest

John Updike's death isn't affecting me like Donald Westlake's or John Mortimer's or Studs Terkel's or Tony Hillerman's.  Westlake and Mortimer were my literary models at a key moment of my life.  Their styles and senses of humor got into my head and my writing.  Their characters became my friends.  Their books and stories are comforts as well as inspirations.  Terkel was a hero.  Hillerman just wrote books that I had a lot of fun reading.

Updike was...

Updike.

From the beginning.  He was a last name.  It was how I was introduced to him.

"Your assignment, class, is to read Updike's A&P."

"What are you reading, Dad?"

"Updike's new novel, Lance."

I read "A&P" in high school.  I read Rabbit, Run my freshman year in college.  It wasn't assigned.  One day I decided I needed to read more Updike---"Who's the best American writer?  Mailer?  Roth? Updike?"---and I walked down to the local bookstore and bought it.  I didn't feel particularly grown-up or sophisticated.  I felt furtive and anxious and guilty.  I was skipping a class I hadn't done the homework for and spending money I should have put towards paying my phone bill.  Buying the book made me feel like I was running away from something only to run right smack into it.  I read it in one sitting and realized that before I even knew his story I was feeling like Rabbit Angstrom.

I never got over that feeling and I think it kept me at a distance from Updike's fiction.

But it was a distance I've always had to close.

I think Updike never wrote a bad sentence but he wrote a lot of bad novels.  He wrote many great short stories, a ton of wonderful essays, more bad poetry than good, and the Rabbit series, Roger's Version, and Month of Sundays, novels that spooked me and continue to haunt me.

As I said, I don't feel about Updike's death the same way I felt about those other writers'.  I don't feel as personal a loss.  I feel a loss to the community I live in.  It's as if I was walking past a beautiful old Congregationalist church at the center of town that I attended irregularly and learned from the sexton weeping on the steps that the pastor had died and the bishop had decided to shutter the church forever.

Or...it's as if that church was a landmark in a very small self-circumscribed world and that I've walked over there expecting to attend the service and found the church and the piece of ground it occupied torn away, like a section from a map, and all is chaos and void where the church used to stand and the world now feels smaller and shakier, less solid and less real.

________________________________

More from James Wolcott.

Turns out TBogg and I had similar feelings about Updike and about Rabbit Angrstrom.

Can a bold-talking one-eyed fat man be a hero-king?

"I mean to kill you in one minute, Ned, or see you hanged in Fort Smith at Judge Parker's convenience.  Which'll it be?"

"I call that bold talk for a one-eyed fat man."

"Fill your hands you son of a bitch!"

The best take on the shoot-out at high noon from a fun movie adapted from a great book .

But what this scene from True Grit really is is an acknowledgement that westerns are our continuation of the stories begun with the sword being pulled from the stone.  Westerns are chivalrous tales of knights-errant on quests or hero-kings arising to save the people from oppression and restore order and peace and justice.

In this scene, Rooster Cogburn is literally a knight on horseback.  In the long shots he might as well be Beaumains confronting the Black Knight and his minions or Launcelot tilting against all comers beneath the castle of Shallot.  In close up, of course, he doesn't look anything like a knight in shining armor---until he twirls his rifle, which he does with the panache of a knight of the Round Table drawing his sword.  But that's the joke that drives the story.  Mattie Ross has come looking for a Launcelot to go after her father's killer and instead she gets Rooster Cogburn.

On the face of things this is a reiteration of the classic theme, Don't judge a book by its cover.  Heroes are as heroes do.  And this is the lesson Mattie herself thinks she learns.

"No grit?  Rooster Cogburn?  Not much!"

But Mattie doesn't know she's living out the shadow of a myth.

Rooster isn't a hero.  Not until she makes him into one.  His drinking and swearing and bad manners and less than noble ideas about how he ought to go about doing his job as a deputy marshal are the least of his unheroic qualities.  He has an unsavory past and his commitment to the law is purely mercenary and opportunistic.   He has some of the qualities of a knight, grit, mainly, and there may have been times in his life when he's been a knight.  But while knights are heroic by nature, they aren't necessarily heroes.  The Black Knight is a knight.   A knight doesn't become a hero until he has a heroic cause to serve.

Although she doesn't know it, Mattie herself is that cause.

The key scene in both the novel and the movie isn't Rooster's joust with Lucky Ned Pepper and his gang.  It's the ride Rooster makes to get Mattie to the doctor afterwards.

That's when he completes the task she's set him for him and which by sheer force of will, her own grit, she's kept him at, becoming her worthy lieutenant.

In case you haven't figured it out, this is a follow-up to Friday's post, Lieutenants, sergeants, squires, free-lances, and the hero-king.

Don't mind me.  I'm just trying to decompress from the election.

At any rate, to answer my own question, Can a bold-talking one-eyed fat man be a hero king:  No.  At least, not in this story.  But he can become a hero, if he's lucky enough to meet a Mattie Ross.

That answer would seem to put Mattie in the role of hero-queen, wouldn't it?

She isn't, though.  Not quite.

In a comment on Friday's post, Dave MB asked, "Hmm... in _True Grit_ Glen Campbell is a free-lance, but how do you classify John Wayne and Kim Darby?"

I'm glad you asked, Dave MB.  And funny that you should, because I was thinking about True Grit when I wrote that post.

You're right about Campbell's character, the Texas Ranger, being the free-lance.

And I've pretty much said what I think Rooster is.

Maddie, however, is an somewhat ambiguous position.

First off, there is no hero-king in True Grit.  Mattie's hero-king, her father, is dead.  Which would make her the princess.   But what is a princess or a prince but a ruler in training? 

Maddie, at the start, is a version of the squire.  She's the apprentice.

She's also at the start in the same boat as Rooster.  She has no hero-king to serve.

This is where a lot of epics and westerns and action-adventures begin.  There is no king.  Chaos reigns.  The story is about how a hero or band of heroes defeat Chaos and bring about the return of the king.

The king, by the way, doesn't have to be literally a king or even literally a character.  In a more democratic age, the "king" is an ideal.  "He" is the ordered and peaceful and just society that the heroes preserve and protect.

The hero, then, doesn't have to be a king or a queen.  The hero can be, and often is, a lieutenant who is waiting for the king's return or who has gone on ahead to act in the king's stead or he can be a free-lance who has been prevailed upon to do the job.  In this story, the hero is a surrogate for the king or queen and he neither wants or expects to continue to be in charge once his job is done.  Robin Hood is a surrogate for King Richard.  All the knights of the Round Table---except Launcelot, Galahad, and Percival---are surrogate Arthurs.  Arthur himself is a surrogate for the real once and future king, You Know Who.  And I'm still convinced that was the path the new Batman movies were headed on, with Batman, the free-lance on his way to becoming a lieutenant, unaware of it but acting as a surrogate for Superman.

Most westerns are stories about lieutenants (any movie with a lawman as the hero) or free-lances ("Come back, Shane!  Shane!  Come back!") who are called by duty or forced by circumstances to take on the job of the hero-king, but who ride off into the sunset, usually more figuratively than literally, once that job is done.

Just talking through my hat here, but I'll bet that if you did a comprehensive survey of movies and literature you'll find far more stories about lieutenants and free-lances than about hero-kings and queens.

And for the record, I'm not trying to make the case that every story is a tale of a hero-king or a hero-king's surrogate or that every main character falls neatly into one of these archetypal roles.

But I'll also bet that if you did that survey you also find that there are lots and lots and lots of stories about apprentices who in the course of learning whatever they need to learn bring about the conditions necessary for the return of the hero-king.

This is the first tale of King Arthur.  It's the story of Luke Skywalker.  It's the story Anakin Skywalker failed to live out.

The apprentice is always young, usually a young teen and very often a child.  She---and now it's just as accurate to use feminine pronouns, because the apprentice is quite regularly a girl, because she:---doesn't have to be a knight in training or the heir of a hero-king or queen.  Her apprenticeship can be in a vocation that doesn't require her to wield a sword or a gun.  She's learning something far more important and powerful than warcraft and statecraft.  She's acquiring knowledge.

In many of these stories, the apprentice is a sorcerer's apprentice.

The most popular hero in contemporary literature is a sorcerer's apprentice who just finished up his training and his hero's journey.

In the end Harry Potter doesn't become the hero-king he seemed on the road to becoming in the first books.  He finishes as lieutenant in service to a system instead of to a an actual hero-king or queen.  (Actually, he finishes as a minor government functionary, but I'd rather not dwell on the banalities in the last chapter of Deathly Hallows.)  That's because Harry is the product of a democratic age and an egalitarian-minded author and he has helped bring about a world in which a hero-king isn't needed.   But considering the direction J.K. Rowling took him, even if Harry had been set down into a world more like Middle Earth than like late 20th Century Great Britain, he'd have refused a crown in the end.  He identifies too much with Dumbledore and Tom Riddle and having seen how they were tempted he's become his own greatest doubter.  He's also seen his own father, a more natural hero-king than Harry himself, abuse his own power over lesser wizards like Snape and that's caused Harry to wonder if perhaps if he hadn't met and married Lily, if he hadn't been surprised and murdered by Voldemort, James Potter might have met with some temptations he wouldn't have been able to resist.

Harry really doesn't have to worry about himself because he had an advantage that James didn't.  It's the same advantage Arthur had.  The same that Luke had over his father.  Harry was raised by adults who taught him humility.

On the other hand, I wouldn't trust the almost slavishly worshipful Ginny to have the same effect on Harry as Lily had on James.  Maybe Harry spends a lot of his time at Ron and Hermione's.

At any rate, to get back to True Grit.  Mattie is an apprentice.  I'm not sure what she learns how to be or that it matters all that much.  True Grit isn't a myth, after all.  It's a comic novel.  At the end of the book we're given a glimpse of Mattie in late middle-age.  She has become something of a queen of all she surveys.  She's the richest woman in town, an empire-builder.  But this seems to be a result of her grit and her common sense and her lawyer's investment advice rather than a symbol of her learned wisdom or her nobility.  Mattie is the the teller of her own tale and she's not the kind who brags.  But she's also not inclined to leave out the facts, even ones that are flattering to herself, and she doesn't give any hint that she thinks she's particularly noble or even wise and benevolent.  She's just who she is.   A banker.

Rooster, by the way, isn't able to continue his knightly ways after he and Mattie part company.

In the end maybe the point of the myth is that there are no heroes or heroines.  There are only people who sometimes get lucky enough to attach themselves to a cause that makes them heroic for a time.

Mattie's and Rooster's causes were each other.

Lieutenants, sergeants, squires, free-lances, and the hero-king

President-elect Obama's selection of Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff the other day got me thinking about The Magnificent Seven.

Not about the plot.  No cheap comparisons there, please.  Cool, quiet, dangerous man in black leads a band of heroes into town to save the peasants from the bandits who have been terrorizing them, that has no relation to...

Um...

Ok.  Nevermind.

I really wasn't thinking about the plot.  I was thinking about the characters, and not about them as specific individuals in a particular story so much as archetypes in an epic.

Try this.

Barack Obama is to Yul Brynner as Rahm Emanuel is to...?

Time's up.

James Coburn.

If you answered Steve McQueen you need to go back and watch the movie again.

In mythological terms, Brynner's character, Chris Adams---and you can spend all day unpacking the allegorical luggage loaded into that name---is the hero-king, the noble warrior who appears on the scene to defeat the forces of chaos and bring order and justice, and with luck peace, to the people.  The hero-king usually appears out of nowhere, at least from the point of view of the people he's come to rescue.  He's from somewhere far, far away, like the planet Krypton or Tattooine, or he arises from a background that's humble or otherwise unlikely for a king---Arthur is practically a servant in his foster father's house; Chris is a gunslinger, a hired killer---or he's just been away on another quest or adventure---Robin of Locksley returns from the Crusades to become Robin Hood; Aragorn has been off living among the elves, wandering with wizards, and hunting orcs with the Rangers.  Sometimes the hero-king works alone, usually when it's not a whole village or kingdom that needs saving but one damsel in distress who needs rescuing, although rescuing her almost always rescues everybody else in the process.  But more often than not, the hero-king arrives with or soon recruits a sidekick...or two...or three.    And these sidekicks come in a variety of types.

Before I get going, let me apologize in advance for the preponderance of male pronouns coming up.  Epics and their contemporary shadows, action-adventure tales, are very much phallocentric genres in which women, when they appear at all, are relegated to the roles of damsels in distress, mother-figures, sex objects, or witches, either good or bad.   Since even when I'll be writing about sidekick types in general terms I'll actually be alluding to specific characters who are male, it would be inaccurate to go the he/she route or even to use the gender neutral plural.

The most common sidekick for the hero-king is the squire.  His job is to serve the hero-king and back him up in a fight.  He can be literally a servant or he can be an apprentice.  In the first case his role is usually comic.  Think of Sancho Panza as the prototype.  In the second case, his role can be comic or serious, depending, and his role can change.  Servants don't become masters, but students do become teachers.  Students also reject their teachers.  Obi-wan takes over the role of hero from the fallen Qui-gon.  Anakin rebels against Obi-wan.

But in addition to a squire the hero-king will often have a lieutenant.  The lieutenant is the hero-king's right-hand man.  He doesn't take orders from the king as much as he simply anticipates them and carries them out.  In a way, the lieutenant is an extension of the king's self.  He is that part of the king that commands the army and does the actual fighting.   He's there to let us know that even while in the foreground of the story the hero is busy wooing the princess, arguing with the local, lesser kings, mingling with the people to show he has the common touch and their love, dueling the chief villain, or wrestling with his private demons, he's also still in command.  The king might look distracted, but we can rest assured that he still has the situation in hand because we know his lieutenant is somewhere there in the background making sure the king's orders and plans are carried out.

For this reason a lieutenant is often more a presence than he is a personality in his own right.  Captain Kirk had a lieutenant in the earlier episodes of Star Trek and it wasn't Spock.  It was Mr DeSalle.  He was essentially a second Kirk and saved the Enterprise on a couple of occasions while Kirk was busy down on some planet wooing an alien maiden or fighting it out with this week's space villains.  Eventually, DeSalle disappeared and the role of lieutenant would fall to Spock or Scotty, but the main character who was implicitly the lieutenant was Sulu and that's why it's no surprise in The Undiscovered Country when he turns out to be the one who gets his own command.

Scotty, by the way, was another kind of sidekick.  The sergeant.  These roles have nothing to do with actual military ranks.  Generals and privates can be lieutenants and sergeants.  The sergeant is a lieutenant with a personality, usually an irascible one.   Sergeants are usually older because their job is to give the hero the benefit of experience the hero is too young or too much of high-born noble to have acquired on his own.  Sergeants give advice; lieutenants take orders.  When lieutenants argue with the hero, they are providing us with insight as to why the hero is doing what he's doing.  The lieutenant gives a good reason why the hero should pursue another course of action and the king refutes it, either demonstrating his superior wisdom or his folly, depending on whether or not the story's a tragedy.  The lieutenant's arguments are almost always rejected.  The sergeant's advice is almost always followed.  Lieutenants may know the whys, but sergeants always know the how.  When the king rejects the sergeant's practical advice it's because the sergeant has inadvertently given him a better idea and then it's the sergeant's job to make that better idea work.  Kirk routinely dismisses Scotty's doubts, but he is always dependent on Scotty's know-how.

Sergeants have another job as well.  They're the voice of the people.  Lieutenants are other nobles.  They rank below the king in the chain of command, but they are on the same social standing as the king.  Sergeants are made of more common stuff.  Sergeants are the democratic principle in action.  They get to talk back to the king and so remind him who he really works for.  Squire-servants sometimes get to do this too.

In the Lord of the Rings movies, Legolas is Aragorn's first lieutenant, Gimli is his second, although he often talks and acts like a sergeant.  Sam, of course, is Frodo's squire-servant.  In the books, too.  In the books, though, Aragorn is a more solitary figure and Legolas and Gimli often seem to be off in a story all their own.

In the Robin Hood tales, Little John's role can change, depending on the teller's inclinations or narrative needs.  Sometimes Little John is Robin's chief lieutenant, sometimes he's the sergeant, and sometimes, as in the movie Robin and Marian, he's the squire-servant.  In the Errol Flynn movie, Little John is the sergeant.  Will Scarlet is Robin's lieutenant.  And Much is the squire-servant.  In the TV series currently running on BBC, Little John is the lieutenant but he has a sergeant's irascibility and habit of arguing.  Much, again, is the squire-servant.  Will is the sergeant in that he is chief engineer for the Merry Men and has the practical knowledge Robin lacks and he's the representative of the common men and women of Nottingham, but he has a lieutenant's innate nobility and reticence and he usually follows orders without question; he's also the youngest in the band and sergeants aren't usually younger than the hero-king.  Sergeants aren't usually romantic leads either and Will gets the girl in the end.   These roles aren't immutable.

Alan A-dale is something else again.

In many of tales of hero-kings and their adventures, the king is accompanied on his quest by another hero.  This second hero's presence, if not accidental, is whimsical.  The second hero has joined the king's cause but not necessarily because he agrees with the king or even sympathizes with him.  The second hero comes along for reasons of his own, which may parallel the king's or may in fact be in opposition to them.  He may like the king.  He may hate him and actually want to see him fail.  He may be there just for kicks.  He may be a rival to the hero-king, like Boromir in Lord of the Rings, and, again, like Boromir, whose real mission is to save Gondor not protect Frodo and destroy the ring, it might be that this hero has more intensely personal reasons for signing on.  A family member or a lady love who has been imprisoned by the villains.  An estate or an inheritance that's been stolen from him.  A reputation that needs to be restored.  He may be motivated by idealism or by the need for revenge.  " Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya.  You killed my father.  Prepare to die."  He might be motivated by the most basic self-interest.  There's money to be made.

"Look, I ain't in this for your revolution, and I'm not in it for you, Princess.  I expect to be well-paid.  I'm in it for the money."

Han Solo is basically a hired gun.  So is Chris Adams, at the start, as are five of the other six of the Magnificent Seven.  All of them, Han, Chris, and the other five are ennobled by their cause and discover other, better reasons for fighting.  Come to think of it, so does the last of the Seven.  Chico starts out wanting to be a hero to feel like a big man and ends up fighting for love and for the people.  But the second hero in many of these adventures is a hired gun or a hired sword in his relationship to the hero-king.  The king has to enlist his help with a promise of a reward.  That reward might be crassly material or it might be transcendentally spiritual, but without the promise of it the second hero would not be there.  He'd go his own way, which is where he was going to begin with and where he will probably continue to go when this adventure is over.  He is an independent actor.  A free spirit.

He's what I call a free-lance.

And it's not unusual for the free-lance to be more the actual hero of the tale than the hero king.

Agamemnon is far from the hero or even the main character in the Iliad.  Achilles, the free-lance, has both those roles.  Odysseus, by the way, is a mere lieutenant.

Jack Sparrow is the free-lance, Will is the hero-king in the making, but if the next two sequels were going to star Orlando Bloom instead of Johnny Depp, would anybody go see them?

Launcelot is the free-lance but it's a toss-up as to whether he or Arthur is the main hero of the tales of the Knights of the Round Table.

As a side note: the hero-king can himself be a free-lance, if not by trade or temperament, then by coincidence.  It depends on whether or not the kingdom he's saving is own.  He may have been called in or wandered in to another country and been prevailed upon to take on the local troubles as though they were his own.  When he's done, he will leave, either to continue on the quest that was interrupted by this adventure or to go home to his own kingdom.  Chris Adams does not stick around to become mayor of the village.  That will be Chico's job when he's older.  The hero-king may be free at the end to take his lance elsewhere, while it's the free-lance who winds up staying put to get married and take on the responsibilities of running the place.

This is the trick George Lucas plays on Han Solo.

By the end of Return of the Jedi, it's Han who has taken on the role of hero-king.  He's a general in the Rebel Army with all the responsibilities and ties that come with that.  All the sidekicks in the saga have gravitated to him.  Luke, who had appeared to be the hero-king in the making, has detached himself from the cause of the Rebellion and is on a quest of his own.  That in completing it he saves the Rebellion is a happy coincidence.  When we last see him, Luke is all alone except for his ghosts.  Restoring the Republic, bringing order and peace to the people, the hero-king's supposed task, is a job left to Han and Leia and their children.

Meanwhile, in the Star Trek universe.  Kirk has the role of the hero-king, although he's only a king if you count the Enterprise as his kingdom.  Within the Federation, he's very much a free-lance.  But in his role as hero-king he is assisted by his sergeant, Scotty, a lieutenant who's invisible after the first few episodes and another, Sulu, who unfortunately wasn't given much of lieutenanting to do by the writers of the original series, and by Uhura, who is more or less a squire, sometimes a servant and sometimes something of an apprenctice.

Then there are the two free-lances.

Spock and McCoy.

Spock's commitment to Star Fleet is idiosyncratic and incomplete.  McCoy doesn't consider himself a military man at all.  Both are more loyal to Kirk than they are to "the cause," assuming that cause is the advancement of the interests of the Federation.  But both are there for reasons of their own that don't necessarily coincide with Kirk's. 

So, to get back to The Magnificent Seven, Steve McQueen's character, Vin, is the free-lance.  Of course, as I mentioned, Chris and all the others except Chico are free-lances by profession too.  But once the cause is joined, Chris is committed, and it's Coburn's character, Britt, who best and in the most useful ways subordinates himself to Chris, while Vin remains the most independent.  If you look at the way the men are grouped in many of the shots, McQueen is often off by himself, occupying his own dominant spot of the screen, while Coburn is placed closer to Brynner but a few steps behind him, exactly where a good lieutenant belongs.  Although Charles Bronson's character, Bernardo O'Reilly, finally surrenders himself heart and soul to the villagers' cause, we're given very good reasons to doubt that he and two of the other seven will stick it out to the end, and Vin's hanging around is always an open question.  We're pretty sure he'll come through, and not just because he's played by Steve McQueen.  The free-lance is a hero, after all.  But we can always see that Vin's leaving his options open.  Britt, though, never wavers, never openly questions Chris.

That's why it's: Barack Obama is to Chris Adams as I hope Rahm Emanuel will be to Britt.

I also hope that, metaphorically speaking, Emanuel's just as deadly with a knife.

_______________________

Again, I'm sorry about all the male pronouns.  Times are changing though.  Eventually there will be more stories where the hero-king is a woman, where grizzled old sergeants can be either male or female (or both or neither or whatever they want to be.  See Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett), and where all these terms are gender-neutral.  For example, on Stargate: SG-1.  O'Neill and then Mitchell are the hero-kings.  Teal'c is the lieutenant.  Daniel is the free-lance.  And Carter is the sergeant.  She's the one with the practical experience, and the one with the freedom to actually question O'Neill's and Mitchell's judgments to the point that they have to doubt themselves.  Teal'c will respectfully disagree, and occasionally disobey.  Daniel is always arguing.  But when Carter says something won't work, it won't work, and when she tells her commanding officers they're wrong, they usually are.

Sex and politics in the City of Churches

The one, the only Nancy Nall uses a story about an adulterous politician---no, not John Edwards; the mayor of Detroit, and getting caught cheating is the least of his problems--- to teach a lesson in good newspaper writing.

Nance's excellent advice boils down to this.  Avoid embellishing.  There are some stories in which the plain facts provide all the color and drama and comedy you need.  And don't indulge in mind-reading, because A. you probably aren't any good at it and B. again, there are some stories in which the plain facts provide all the color and drama and comedy you need.

Nance starts with an example that doesn't avoid either embellishment or mind reading and then compares that to some good writing that does, and I wasn't surprised when the good writing turned out to be by a reporter for the Detroit News by the name of Ron French.

Ron is an old friend of ours from our salad days in Fort Wayne.  He and Nance and the blonde were part of a group of young reporters who were the core of what was then a very fine local news desk, surprisingly fine for a paper that size.  The group also included  Ron's future wife, Valerie, and another friend of ours I'll call Missy, just because it will annoy her if she happens to read this.  All of them were good reporters and all of them wrote very well, but even back then Ron was probably just a bit better than the rest.  As Nance reminds me, he had a good eye for the odd but telling detail and a knack for knowing just where in a sentence or graph to stick it that would electrify the whole story.

Ron was also a Mets fan, despite having been born and raised in the wilds of Indiana, which is probably not incidental to his being a smart reporter and talented writer.

Nance's post also reminded me of another post of hers, a real nice one, concerning another old colleague of theirs from those days.  Unfortunately the post was relaying news of the man's death.

I didn't know Bill all that well.  He was a good deal older than Nance and the blonde and Ron and their group and didn't hang out with them.  I remember a cheerful, energetic, fast-talking man with jet black hair always perfectly combed and parted and a very red face.  He was a Vietnam vet who'd left the New York Daily News to come cover the arts scene in Fort Wayne, Indiana but who never seemed to regard that as a comedown.   He reported on the local theater, museums, music, dance, and all the other arts plastic and performing, without snobbery or condescension, that last bit always getting him in trouble with community theater types who tended to forget all the praise he gave them whenever he happened to hold them to the standards that pretended to aspire to.  That seems to be a quirk of community theater types everywhere.  They always want an A for effort even when the effort went into putting on a stinker of a show.  But Bill enjoyed the theater.  He enjoyed all the work and the artists he covered.  He was in his way a force for good, a critic who added to the art he wrote about just by writing about it intelligently and constructively.

So it seems a shame to eulogize the man with the additional biographical fact that he was also an enthusiastic and unabashed patron of the local whorehouses.  But it can't be helped.  Bill's cheerful adventures with prostitutes and his stories about them defined him to us as much as his arts reporting and made him something of a legend in our minds.  You had to admire a guy who could recommend a massage parlor with the same objectivity and expectation that you'll thank him for it later as he'd recommend a play or a concert or a restaurant.  As I recall, he preferred places where the employees were of Asian background or descent, but that might have been our embellishing, based on his war record, allowing us to allow ourselves to work the half-sung phrase "Still in Saigon," into a conversation about him. 

The other reason that part of his sex life has to be mentioned is one that Bill himself, a die-hard tabloid newspaper man, would appreciate---it leads naturally into a story that mixes sex, politics, and crime.

I don't know if Fort Wayne, which liked to bill itself as The City of Churches because of all the steeples that dominated the otherwise unimposing skyline, had a higher proportion of whorehouses than other cities its size.  I doubt it.  But the ones it did have operated more out in the open than the ones in any other places I've lived.  Most of them were massage parlors with obvious names like The Doll House and they were located in just about every neighborhood business district.  When the local DA decided to crack down, the ones he shut down re-opened not too much later as "modeling studios."   Local "artists" could come with their sketch pads and charcoal pencils to draw the "models" who would pose for "tasteful" nudes.

The story begins with this, it came to the police's attention that several of these massage parlors were owned by a local bail bondsman whose business partner and chief bookkeeper was his sometime girlfriend, a woman who had run for city council several times.  The police wanted her and the bail bondsman, but at first they were only able to bring him in.  Somehow she eluded them.

Here's what I wrote in my notebook at the time:

R., a former Republican candidate for city council is wanted by the police for her connection with a prostitution ring run by her boyfriend, a bail bondsman.  There's a warrant out for her arrest but so far she hasn't been caught.  I don't think she's actually on the run.  The cops just don't know where to look for her.  She must be out of town.

The blonde's old boss predicted something like this in an editorial meeting the last time R. ran for the council.  They were discussing which candidates to endorse and Stuart said that R. was trouble because of her involvement with the bondsman who was a known sleaze even before the news about his massage parlors broke.  "Something's going to blow," Stuart said.  [Editor's note: Obvious oral sex jokes go here.]

Allegedly, R. and her boyfriend operated The Fort Wayne School of Massage and Reflexology.  [Editor's note:  No, he's not making that up.]  Presumably the masseuses had Ph.D.'s and were called Professor.  What did the profs wear under their caps and gowns was wanted the police wanted to know, and how much did it cost to find out?

Before the professors began their careers in tutelage, the Fort Wayne School of Massage and Reflexology was known as Tender Touch Massage, a name that had the virtues of hominess, comfort, and truth in advertising.  Snobbery brought them down.

[Editor's note:  Actually, the name was changed during a crack-down on massage parlors.  Guess it was hoped it would fool the vice cops.  "No need for us to investigate that place, chief.  It's a school of reflexology not a whorehouse."]

R. sometimes worked at the school, but she didn't give massages.  She did the books and the laundry and she ran the credit cards.  Yep.  A lot of customers---students---paid with their credit cards.  They received receipts from R.'s legitimate business, a downtown boutique specializing in women's vintage clothing and jewelry.  Wives who looked at the credit card bills probably got their hopes up for some very nice Christmas and birthday presents they never received.

Desperately trying to explain husband to irate wife:  I swear, honey, I didn't give anything to any secret girlfriend!  I'm not having an affair!  All I did was go to a massage parlor a few times!

R. looks like the woman Dustin Hoffman's character was trying to look like in Tootsie, shapely and pleasant looking but plain as can be, with the same bouffed out blond hair and big round glasses.  In one of the photos in the paper she has her glasses off and looks slightly cross-eyed.  She's younger than Tootsie though, and although plain still prettier than Dustin Hoffman, so I can imagine that on a good day she might feel attractive and on a bad day feel ugly and this whipsawing of her vanity probably makes her insecure enough about her looks that she'd be willing to accept any proof that she's attractive, including the attentions of a man of dubious reputation twenty years her senior whose regular female company she'd find out was his prostitute employees.  I don't know if love or fear of rejection made her willing to go into the business with him.  Maybe she just saw a good opportunity.  Maybe the prostitution scheme had an erotic thrill for her.  Maybe she was a vicarious member of her own faculty, imagining herself the most popular professor on the staff, her classes always full.

I wrote that nearly twenty years ago and you probably noticed that I hadn't yet learned Nance's lessons about avoiding embellishment and mind-reading.  [Editor's note: He still hasn't.] Of course, I thought of myself as a fiction writer in those days too, so I felt free to to embellish and read minds, and my notebooks were full of what would turn into, or what I hoped would turn into, short stories.  And you can see I was already at work on one there.  In fact, I did write half of one, but it kept trying to turn itself into a novel by Joseph Conrad.  In those days I didn't know any better because I hadn't read enough Elmore Leonard and I thought all good fiction had to be convoluted and psychologically "complex."

Maybe I'd have had better luck with it, too, if I'd let it become a novella.

Somewhere I've got all the newspaper articles that would tell me what happened to R.  Her bail bondsman/pimp boyfriend was tried and convicted.  His trial was a comedy that would have made a good short story in itself.  I remember that the first thing the prosecutors felt they had to do was establish that the Fort Wayne School of Massage and Reflexology was just a massage parlor and that a massage was really sex for pay and the professors were prostitutes, and in order to prove this they called some of the regular students who'd been arrested in a raid to testify.  One of these students was an old man who used to ride his bike to the school for his weekly classes from the Lutheran home for senior citizens where he lived.  Nance is right, sometimes the facts just speak for themselves.  On the stand, he was asked by the DA if he saw any of his professors in the courtroom that day.

The old man, who took testifying very seriously and didn't want to make any mistakes, put on his glasses and took a long look around the room and then took another long look back before his gaze settled steadily and very deliberatively on a pretty young woman sitting in the front row of the gallery.

It was our friend Missy who there covering the trial for the newspaper.

Missy, thanks to a scolding, judgmental, and sexually repressive mother and a loving but fanatically religious and sexually repressive father who used to light votive candles before the statue of the Virgin Mary in the hallway whenever she went out on a date, had a hyper-active conscience and some self-esteem issues particularly when it came to her status as an unmarried woman nearing thirty with what should have been regarded as a normal and healthy sex life.  Of course all eyes in the courtroom turned to her, which was embarrassing enough, but Missy herself became convinced that the old man was about to identify her as one of the professors and that everybody would believe him.  She suddenly imagined that her near future would be filled with conversations in which she had to explain again and again that she was not moonlighting as a prostitute.

It was not helpful at the moment that she could hear her mother's voice in her memory calling her a whore and see her father sadly shaking his head and lighting another candle.

Which is probably why, she said, she had to fight the urge to stand up and confess right then and there.

This little incident has always reminded me of a line from William Maxwell's short story, My Father's Friends:

Once when I was sitting in the jury box the judge said, "Will the defendant rise," and I caught myself just in time.

I think we're all like that, possessed by a vague, undefined guilt for crimes and sins we can't name or even remember having committed, and immediately ready to confess when the lights on the cop car appear in our rearview mirrors or the priest pauses dramatically during a sermon or someone just tells a story about someone else's transgressions.

Missy caught herself just in time.

I don't remember what happened when the cops caught up with R.  and I sure don't know how her conscience acted upon her if and when the judge said, Will the defendant rise?

Guess I'll have to finish writing that novella to find out.

Odysseus and the enduring myth of the trickster-hero as not played out in the life of Pete Rose

Not a bad thing, necessarily, to start reading a new book already in an argument with the author.  The book is No Man's Lands, the author’s Scott Huler, my argument with him is this: Ted Williams was not a real-life version of the Greek hero Achilles.

That’s part of my argument, at any rate.

No Man's Lands is subtitled “One Man’s Odyssey Through the Odyssey.”  It’s a travel book, Huler’s account of his attempt to follow the course of Odysseus’s wanderings in the ten years after he helped sack Troy and set out for home on the island of Ithaca where he was king and where his wife Penelope was waiting for him, passing the time by thwarting the advances of a houseful of drunken suitors who thought she was a rich widow and thought she ought to admit she was a rich widow and thought once she admitted it she’d want to get over her grief in a hurry by marrying one of them.   I’m reading it because some minor god of vacation reading threw it off the shelf at the library just as I was passing by.

It’s called No Man's Lands because No Man (or no one) is Odysseus’ own translation of his name.

Huler’s trip around the Mediterranean is only an attempt to retrace Odysseus’ because no one really knows where Odysseus was supposed to be as he was bobbing about, surviving shipwrecks and sea monsters, fighting cyclopses, messing around with goddesses, and generally developing his opinion of himself as a man of sorrow and woe.  Homer was something of a proto-journalist and he liked to fill his stories with the kind of realistic descriptive details and historical facts that sound as though they could only have come from first-hand observation and research.  Some of the places Odysseus visits are real and identifiable.  Troy, Ithaca, the north coast of Africa.  Other places sound real.  But The Odyssey is a myth, after all, and Homer was a poet and a storyteller.  He was free to just make things up.  The islands and coasts where Odysseus washes up might as well be Narnia or Middle Earth, Discworld or Earthsea. 

These days, fantasy writers feel they have to make their magic kingdoms geographically plausible and consistent.  Homer probably didn’t worry about it.  Trying to find your way around the Mediterranean using The Odyssey as a guide book is probably a lot less helpful than trying to find your way around North America using a map of Shannara.

But over the centuries some very intelligent and temperamentally skeptical but still curious travel writers have tried to chart Odysseus’s adventures and they've made some plausible guesses as to where he did what and met up with whom have been made—the land of lotus-eaters in Tunisia, the home of the Cyclops in Sicily, Calypso’s island as Malta—and Huler took what he regarded as the best guesses and put together his itinerary based on them.

Huler has a sharp and discerning eye, a talent for thumbnail descriptions of places and people, and the good travel writer's virtue of modesty in several senses of the word---he knows that though his readers accept that in a first person narrative the writer will inevitably write about himself but that they aren't reading his book to find out what the writer thinks about himself and he has no illusions about what he's up to.  He's not trying to deliver the last word on the places he visits or on the Odyssey.  He found an original excuse to send himself on a fun trip around the Mediterranean and get his publisher to pay for it and here's his fairly straight-forward account of what he saw along the way.

Plus, he has a knack for lively summarization.  Each of his stops requires him to re-tell the passages from the Odyssey that brought him there and he does a fine job of it, which makes No Man's Lands a useful and entertaining annotated prose abridgement of Homer's epic, which is why the fifteen year old Mannion keeps stealing the book off my desk to read it himself.

Huler writes well.  But he has a bad habit, at least in the early chapters, of trying to show that the myths still have contemporary relevance, which is going about it backwards, I think.  If a myth is still relevant it doesn't need proving.  The point is to show how contemporary events, ideas, people, whatever, are relevant to the myths.  Instead of saying, "Odysseus is like so and so" or "the lotus-eaters are like such and such," you say that "So and so and such and such" are like what's going on in the Odyssey.  The reason for this is the first way diminishes the myths by bringing them down to the level of the ordinary and ignoble, the second way enlarges and ennobles the contemporary.  Plus, a comparison has to, you know, work.  The things compared have to be alike in non-trivial ways.

Huler proves my point by repeatedly reaching for sports metaphors to make his comparisons, and comparing Odysseus and his men leaving Troy to a victorious high school football team returning home on their bus not only trivializes the Greeks it forces qualifications into mind like "if victorious high school football teams raped the cheerleaders, carried off the homecoming queen to sell her into slavery, and slaughtered the opposing team and left their bloody corpses for the crows on the fifty yard line."

But my least favorite of Huler's sports analogies, the one that started the argument between me and his book, is the one he uses to try to illustrate how the archetypal characters of the Greek heroes have carried over into our times.

Baseball fans might compare Achilles, the vain, arrogant hero of The Illiad, with someone like Ted Williams: undeniably great, but not necessarily good for the team or pleasant to be around; Agamemnon might be like Ty Cobb, vicious and dangerous but hard to beat; and Meneleaus something like Mickey Mantle: great and useful but something of a blowhard.  Odysseus would be Pete Rose: the sneaky little bastard who pulls off some kind of trick that you think is beneath contempt, but carries the day.  The guy you call a liar and a cheat---unless he's on your team  Then he's just a guy who doews what it takes to win.

Oh boy, there's so much wrong in that paragraph, just starting with the idea of comparing ball players to heroes.  Heroes fight for something that matters.  Athletes play games.  Whenever you can describe a professional athlete as heroic, you are most likely doing it for what he or she does off the field or the court.  But baseball players are probably the most ordinary and workmanlike people of the whole crowd and their jobs rarely require them to do quasi-heroic things like lead or take chances that risk life and limb.  If I was forced into it, I'd look for contemporary epic heroes on the football field among quarterbacks and wide receivers.

But even taking Huler's comparisons for what they're worth, Ted Williams was not like Achilles.  For one thing, he was missing a quality that for want of a better word I'd call feminine.  Achilles was emotional, passionate, he'd have worn his heart on his sleeve if he'd worn sleeves.  He was also vain, not just arrogant, and he craved love and approval.  Williams, remember, was famous for never taking a curtain call after a home run.  He had his own approval and that was enough for him.  Williams was also something of a loner.  Achilles wasn't.  He went everywhere with his friend (and, possibly, lover) Patroclus and his Myrmidons.  They were his team.  If he wasn't necessarily good for Agamemnon's team, that was because Agamemnon didn't deserve Achilles' loyalty, not because Achilles was only out for himself.

And regardless of what you might think of Agamemnon, who sacrificed his own daughter just to get a favorable wind so he could go wage a war nobody but his stupid brother wanted to fight, he wasn't a petty villain like Ty Cobb.

I wouldn't call Mickey Mantle a blowhard either.

But it's the comparison of Pete Rose and Odysseus that really steams me, mainly because it gets Odysseus all wrong, but because it gets Rose wrong too.  Rose was an aggressive player, and he was reckless, and he could be personally and professionally obnoxious, but as far as I know he wasn't a cheater.   If he did cheat, it was after his gambling overwhelmed him and then he was cheating in order to lose.

Beyond this, though, is that Odysseus isn't a liar or a cheater either.  He does lie, sometimes, and he does resort to tricks, but always to defeat an enemy who deserves to be lied to or tricked.  It takes him ten years to come up with the idea for the Trojan Horse because it takes that long for the gods to abandon the Trojan cause.  And the cyclops is going to kill him and all his men and eat them.  I think he's pretty well justified in lying to get himself and his men out of that cave.  The point, too, of his tricks and lies is that they are signs of his intelligence.  Odysseus is the smartest of the heroes.  He's not the biggest or the strongest.  That's Ajax.  He's not the most able warrior.  That's Achilles.   But he is the one who survives not just one but two epics, because he is the one who thinks.

I don't know that anyone ever accused Pete Rose of being a great thinker.

To top it all off, Odysseus is a king.  All the heroes who go to Troy are kings and princes, a fact that is intrinsic to their characters.  They are nobles.  They are noble.  Pete Rose is hardly a prince among men.  But Odysseus is the prince among princes, a fact that is obvious at a glance to everyone who meets him.  One of his princely qualities is his honesty.  To people who deserve the truth of him, which is anyone who isn't trying to kill him or get him and his friends killed, he tells the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, something that distinguishes him among the heroes, apparently---his stories are never colored or edited by vanity.  It's his innate truthfulness that makes his lies effective.  And it's this combination of honesty and deviousness that makes Odysseus a relevant mythopoetical type.

The honest liar, the trickster-hero, the good guy who can outwit the bad guys by thinking like them, the rogue king---this is a type that is not just a regular character in contemporary storytelling, he or she is our favorite type of hero.

Oh, we still have plenty of versions of Achilles, the vain and petulant superhero willing, even eager, to go his own way---Batman, Dirty Harry, Grace Hanadarko, Shark.  This is the kind of hero George Lucas was warning us about with Anakin Skywalker.

And we have far too many Ajaxes, self-important blowhards who win through the exercise of brute strength and a willingness to slaughter whoever gets in their way.  Rambo, every Arnold Schwartzenegger character, Lara Croft.

But it's the trickster-hero whose exploits we most enjoy.  Ok, that I most enjoy.  But he or she is a popular type.  Han Solo and Obi-wan Kenobi are liars and con men when they need to be.  Hawkeye Pierce.  Captain Kirk.  Spider-man.  Robin Hood.  Dolly Gallagher Levi.

Indiana Jones.

Odysseus is always making it up as he goes too and like Jones he's something of a thief in the interests of a good cause.  Of course you have to know when and what and from whom it's ok to steal, and something of the cattle of the sun episode works its way into every one of Indy's adventures with someone else paying the price of going a theft too far and Indiana escaping because he knows when to shut his eyes, put the thing back, or turn his back on it and run like hell away from it.

Kingdom of the Crystal Skull even echoes the Odyssey in that Indiana is reunited with his less than patient Penelope, Marion, and his son after the same amount a time as Odysseus spent away from Ithaca.

And when you get right down to it, smart and thoughtful as he is, Odysseus is a heartless killer when he needs to be and perfectly willing to do the less than noble and heroic thing and just shoot the guy with the sword and get on with the chase.

_________________________________________

The other very popular recurring mythopeotic hero isn't as popular as he used to be.  And he has no counterpart in the Greek myths that I can think of.  The hero who wins by virtue of being virtuous, the one whose strength, like Galahad's, is as the strength of ten because his heart is pure.  King Arthur.  Luke Skywalker.  Superman.

But there's a little bit of Odysseus in all of them too.  Even Superman can be pretty tricky when he needs to be.

Just ask Mr Mxyzlptlk.

That voyeur thing

Updated Thursday afternoon.

Got mad at myself this morning when I was out walking around and as I sometimes do when I’m mad at myself and alone I started to tell myself off in no uncertain terms.  Out loud. 

I was giving myself a pretty stern talking to and I had worked my way about halfway through my list of reasons why I’m an idiot before I realized this conversation wasn’t taking place inside my head.  What shut me up was the realization that along with my own voice I’d also been listening to the sound of typing and suddenly I wasn’t listening to it anymore.  I looked around and saw that I was passing by one of the quainter and handsomer of the old inns in town.  Sitting out on the front porch was a young woman with a cup of coffee and her laptop.

Who knows what she’d been working on?  Email.  A novel.  Her MySpace page.  Her blog.  Whatever it was, she wasn’t working on it anymore.  She was too busy staring at me.  She was wearing the obvious look of someone trying to decide if she was dealing with a drunk or a lunatic and, whichever, whether or not he was dangerous.  Our eyes met.  There was an awful second of mutual embarrassment, probably augmented by stark terror on her part—“Oh no!  He’s going to talk to me!”—and then she quickly went back to her typing and I hurried on down the road, my head down and my jaw clamped shut. 

Foolish as I felt, though, I couldn’t help laughing—silently—at the possibility that she was a blogger too and she was doing to me what I’m now doing to her, turning me into a character in her vacation notebook.

“Some crazy old coot just staggered by ranting to himself about—“

You’ll have to read her blog to find out what crazy thing I was ranting about.

Google Chatham Surf Side Inn coot.

Serve me right if you find her post.

I wouldn’t complain though.  Or care.  Much.  Whatever she wrote about me, I wouldn’t take it personally.  I wouldn’t see it as me.  I would see it as part of her attempt to put her world into words in order for her to make sense of it.  I would see it as writing. 

Turning people into characters is a regular feature of my blog.  Turning people into words, I could say.  If this blog is about any one thing, it is about the writing.  It is about turning the world into words.  My words.  A less than generous way to describe what I, like most other bloggers and writers, am up to is trying to colonize your head.  I’m trying to force you to use my words to think about what I’ve been thinking about.  I prefer to call what I’m doing sharing.

“Here,” I’m saying, oh so generously, “is something I thought you’d find interesting.  Pardon me, if the only way I can share it with you is by turning it into words of my choosing.”

It doesn’t matter what you look at, Thoreau said, what matters is what you see.

This was a boast, his way of saying that his readers shouldn’t judge his writing on his chosen subject but on the words he's used to describe his subject.  Some supposedly fine writers wrote badly on great themes.  Thoreau wrote very well about seeds.  Better to see a lot in a single seed waiting to be planted on a plain desk in a homemade cabin on an obscure pond in a small village in the homely state of Massachusetts than to go to Europe, visit all the capitals, tour the cathedrals and the ruins, and notice nothing.

But what you choose to look at is just going to have an effect on what you see.   Thoreau could spend hours looking at seeds.  I spend hours looking at people.  He did too, but he was happier with seeds.  I look at people.  I turn them into words, then I share the words.  I don’t worry much about the ethics of this.  Before I started blogging, I never would have thought there were any ethics to consider.  Writers turn people into words the way painters turn them into splotches of paint on a canvass.  The words belong to the writer, the splotches belong to the painter, neither the words nor the splotches are the people they are meant to describe or represent, and there’s no reason for anyone to complain or to care.  Most of the time nobody does care or complain because the words and the splotches don’t get identified.  In the four years I’ve been blogging I’ve only unpublished two posts and both times I did it was because the person I’d turned into words in the post recognized themselves and wrote to complain.  I have to admit that I wouldn’t have taken down either post if I hadn’t decided on my own that the words I’d used were unfair or contained too many clues to the originals’ identity.

Usually, I don’t worry when I write about a person I saw any more than I worry about it when I write about a bird, a movie star, a politician, or something else non-human.

Still, I’m a spy and, objectively, I’m violating people’s privacy twice—once when I do the spying and again when I give you the words that let you spy on them second-hand.

As I said, though, I don’t worry about this.

So what’s different about posting photographs?

Last Wednesday evening we went up to Nauset Beach.  To the young men Mannion’s delight, the waves were high.  Old man Mannion was pretty delighted about it too.  There were surfers in the water.  Real surfers on real surf boards really not watching what they were doing.  They were surfing too close in.  One rode a wave right at me and would have taken my head off if I hadn’t warned him off.  He bailed just in time.

There was a girl at the water’s edge when we hit the beach and set up our chairs and stuff.  Fifteen or sixteen.  Tall, lithe, beautiful, like a ballerina.  Coffee with cream colored skin with a touch of cinnamon.  She wasn’t in a bathing suit.  She was wearing white shorts and a tank top and had a pink sweater hugged around her shoulders like a shawl.  She was all alone, standing perfectly still and staring straight out to sea.  Nothing extraordinary about this, except that she hadn’t moved, at all, by the time we’d arranged everything and were ready to head into the water and she was still there, no sign of having moved, when we came out to dry off the first time, and she was still there, in the same spot, in the same pose, when we came back in again this time to pack up and go eat at the snack stand back up in the dunes, and she was still there when we’d gathered our stuff and started off the beach.  That puts her there for close to an hour.

At that age you think a lot of deep thoughts.  But still that’s a long time to stand so still.

Now here’s the thing.

I took her picture.

And I felt bad about that.

But I took pictures of the surfers too.

And I did not feel bad about that.

There’s more.

Obviously I do not feel bad about writing about her or about the surfers.  But I would nor feel right about posting the picture I took of her.  It’s in long shot.  You can’t see her face.  You’d have to know her well to be able to identify her.  It’s extremely unlikely she would ever find it on the web herself.  But I still won’t post it.

I don’t have any problem posting a picture of one of the surfers though.

I have another picture of another one of the surfers.  He’s carrying his board across the beach.  Big, beefy guy with a long ponytail.  And she’s in it.  She’s there in the background, off to the left, at the waterline, staring out to sea.  And if I hadn’t written about her I’d have posted that picture.

There are a lot of other people in that picture.  I wouldn’t have been at all concerned about their feelings either.

I’m not sure I understand this, so I can’t explain it, why I think writing about her here is ok, but posting her picture would be wrong, why I think writing about the surfers and posting a picture is ok.

I don’t know if I’m making distinctions without differences, if I’m kidding myself, or what.

I just know that there’s something bothering me now that hadn’t bothered me much before.

Foggy this morning when I was out walking around, talking to myself.  After I gave that young woman on the inn porch fodder for her blog, if she wants to use it, I wandered down to the small beach that’s up around the riprap from Lighthouse Beach.  The sand was heavy and wet from the rain that had fallen overnight.  I had the beach to myself, except for two seagulls and a plover down at the waterline and a cormorant cruising by in the shallows.  The plover flew off as soon as it became aware of me.  The gulls glared at me over their shoulders and hung around for a bit, just to let me know they weren’t scared of me, they just didn’t care for my company, before they flapped away.  The cormorant disappeared into the fog, keeping its thoughts about my presence a complete mystery.  A skimmer flashed past, equally inscrutable.

The gulls came back soon enough, though.  Or some gulls did.  Could have been the same pair.  Who can tell.  But one of them had just deposited a blue crab on the beach. The crab lay on its back, legs and claws flailing in the air, while the gull studied it, with the cool eye of a practiced killer trying to decide just which spot on the crab’s belly to drive its beak into.  Then the bird saw me.

I wasn’t about to come near, but he clearly thought I was out to steal his breakfast.  He lifted his wings, thrust his head and neck out, opened his beak horribly, and made a run at me.  I stood my ground and he veered off and flew away.  But he circled back and landed on the beach again, a dozen yards away from me and the crab.  He paced back and forth on the sand, giving me the evil eye, thinking, I’m pretty sure, The nerve of some humans.

I waited where I was, giving him time to realize I had no intention of rescuing the crab.   Probably could have given him all day.  He was too busy giving me time to realize he wanted to be left alone with his snack.  After a while, he gave up and flapped off.  I saw no point in leaving the crab to suffer now.  I went over to him, and remembering what I’d just read about blue crabs in Wyman Richardson’s The House on Nauset  Marsh, that they are mean little buggers who unlike other crabs can reach over their shoulders with their claws to snap at you if you try to pick them up from behind, I used my coffee cup to flip him right side up.  He showed me that Richardson knew his blue crabs by trying to pinch holes in the cup before he scuttled away.

He started off in good crab-fashion, sideways, but then he began turning around and around in circles, as if tied to a stake.  That’s where and how I left him.  When I reached the top of the beach I turned around and saw three seagulls swooping in towards him.

The fog was heavy enough that I couldn’t see more than twenty or thirty yards out.  Across the water from where I was standing is a long spit of sand that reaches all the way here from Orleans.   Up there it’s called Nauset Beach.  Down here it’s known as North Beach.  The water on this side of it is called Pleasant Bay the whole length of itself..  Somewhere out on North Beach something was making a melancholy sound like wind blowing steadily through a chink in a drafty house.  There happen to be a bunch of drafty houses over on North Beach, cabins really, large shacks in some cases, but enough of them that I suppose the wind whistling through them together could be heard where I was.  But it might not have been the wind.  It might have been a colony of seagulls bemoaning their sad lots in life together.  There was a roughness in the sound too, a sound that might have been barking along with it, so there might have been a herd of seals out there.  The sound could have been a combination of a wind, gullsong, sealcall, and my imagination.  I don’t know.

Whatever it was, it, they, the wind, the shacks, the birds, the seals, the by-now pecked apart and devoured crab, the gull I robbed of his breakfast with my intrusive humanness, none of them are going to mind that I’ve turned them into words.

Updated to paint a portrait of the blogger as knight with a woeful countenance:  Over at Blog Meridian, John B. detects the subconscious literary influences behind this post.

Baseball is like writing, you can never tell with either how it will go...

(Suggested by post-game broadcasts)

Fanaticism?  No.  Writing is exciting

and baseball is like writing.

   You can never tell with either

      how it will go

      or what you will do;

   generating excitement--

   a fever in the victim--

   pitcher, catcher, fielder, batter.

Victim in what category?

Owlman watching from the press box?

To whom does it apply?

Who is excited?  Might it be I?

It's a pitcher's battle all the way--a duel--

a catcher's, as, with cruel

   puma paw, Elston Howard lumbers lightly

      back to plate.  (His spring

      de-winged a bat swing.)

   They have that killer instinct;

   yet Elston--whose catching

   arm has hurt them all with the bat--

when questioned, says, unenviously,

   "I'm very satisfied.  We won."

Shorn of the batting crown, says, "We";

robbed by a technicality.

When three players on a side play three positions

and modify conditions,

   the massive run need not be everything.

      "Going, going . . . "  Is

      it?  Roger Maris

   has it, running fast.  You will

   never see a finer catch.  Well . . .

   "Mickey, leaping like the devil"--why

gild it, although deer sounds better--

snares what was speeding towards its treetop nest,

one-handing the souvenir-to-be

meant to be caught by you or me.

Assign Yogi Berra to Cape Canaveral;

he could handle any missile.

   He is no feather.  "Strike! . . . Strike two!"

      Fouled back.  A blur.

      It's gone.  You would infer

   that the bat had eyes.

   He put the wood to that one.

Praised, Skowron says, "Thanks, Mel.

   I think I helped a little bit."

All business, each, and modesty.

        Blanchard, Richardson, Kubek, Boyer.

In that galaxy of nine, say which

won the pennant?  Each.  It was he.

Those two magnificent saves from the knee-throws

by Boyer, finesses in twos--

   like Whitey's three kinds of pitch and pre-

      diagnosis

      with pick-off psychosis.

   Pitching is a large subject.

   Your arm, too true at first, can learn to

   catch your corners--even trouble

Mickey Mantle.  ("Grazed a Yankee!

My baby pitcher, Montejo!"

With some pedagogy,

you'll be tough, premature prodigy.)

They crowd him and curve him and aim for the knees.  Trying

indeed!  The secret implying:

   "I can stand here, bat held steady."

      One may suit him;

       none has hit him.

   Imponderables smite him.

   Muscle kinks, infections, spike wounds

   require food, rest, respite from ruffians.  (Drat it!

Celebrity costs privacy!)

Cow's milk, "tiger's milk," soy milk, carrot juice,

brewer's yeast (high-potency--

concentrates presage victory

sped by Luis Arroyo, Hector Lopez--

deadly in a pinch.  And "Yes,

   it's work; I want you to bear down,

      but enjoy it

      while you're doing it."

   Mr. Houk and Mr. Sain,

   if you have a rummage sale,

   don't sell Roland Sheldon or Tom Tresh.

Studded with stars in belt and crown,

the Stadium is an adastrium.

O flashing Orion,

your stars are muscled like the lion.

---"Baseball and Writing" by Marianne Moore

Saying yes to the negative

The always affirmative Jennifer, a painter by training and trade, has a question about writing.

She wants to know if writers make use of "negative space" in a way comparable to the way painters make use of it in their work:

...negative space can be some of the most exciting space in a painting. The space between objects can has its own weight, its own atmosphere, its own tension and excitement. Even if you're painting an object, what's not there and how it's placed can have as much impact on the painting as what is. I was wondering what the negative space in writing would be...

Would it be the pauses in between sentences? The economy of words? Would we even see the negative space in the finished copy or would the negative space have occurred when the writer was taking a break? Would the reader only know the negative space was there somewhat like a contrail informs a person that a plane had gone by? Where is the negative space in the written word and is it as important for the written word as it is for a painting or drawing?

Intriguing question that I'd never thought about before.

I know of poets who say that what a poem looks like on a page is part of the poem's effect, which means that all the white space around the words is as much a part of the poem as the words themselves and you can get a quick hint at what they mean by that by laying a poem by William Carlos Williams next to one by Wallace Stevens and then setting them both next to a poem by Marianne Moore.

And back in the day when avante-garde writers oversaw the printing of their books they put as much thought into the type of paper, the size and style of font, and the layout of the words on the page as they may have put into composing a chapter.  Those extra-literal aesthetic choices are not exactly silent though, the way I'd expect negative space to be.

Laurence Sterne may have invented and perfected negative space for writers in the blank pages and black squares and hourglass arrangements of words on the paper in Tristram Shandy.

And you've probably noticed there's a lot of empty space in my blog posts.  Some of that is just to make my writing look less dense and to try to trick your eye into thinking, "This will be a quick read."  Some of it...

...is...

...for...

effect.

Off the top of my head, I'd say that the negative space in writing is invisible but there in what's not said, in what's left out, and in the word that could have been said instead.

But I'm not sure.

At any rate, there's a good discussion up and going at Jennifer's place.  See what you think.

Three months, one day, seven hours, and thirty-seven minutes since the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and...

...JK Rowling has decided Dumbledore is gay.

Ok.

I can see it.  I guess.  I didn't see it while we were reading the books.  Probably didn't see it because Rowling forgot to put it in.

But she forgot to put a lot of stuff into the books that's supposed to be there and she put a lot of stuff in them that she promptly forgot about later just to cover holes in her plots made by the stuff she forgot to put in in the first place.

But if Ray Bradbury can decide fifty-odd years later that his most famous book isn't about censorship, Rowling can decide within a few months of publishing her last Harry Potter novel that one of her main characters had an intense homosexual love affair when he was in prep school.

Oh, you didn't realize the whole young Dumbledore and Grindelwald subplot was a retelling of A Separate Peace?  Me neither.

I thought it was the story of Dumbledore's temptation to go over to the dark side.  I didn't pay much attention to Grindelwald himself because he's not much of a character.  He's an attitude, and it's the attitude that Dumbledore is shown to be rejecting, not the young man.

I also thought---think---it's the story that explains why Harry is the greater hero than Dumbledore.  Like Aragorn and Luke Skywalker, Harry is never seriously tempted by power.  That's because he has something the young Dumbledore did not, the example of Dumbedore himself.  Dumbledore faced and overcame that temptation for both of them.

Again, this reduces Grindelwald to an abstraction and a plot device, neither of which things in a story are ever very interesting in and of themselves.

But Rowling now says Grindelwald was the great love of Dumbledore's life.

That would be a romantic and tragic story, but it's not one that Rowling wrote.

Maybe she plans to.  Maybe she's going to do what Tolkien did with Middle Earth and write her own  Silmarillion that will give us the entire mythology behind the Potter books.

As it stands though, the only way you would "know" Dumbledore is gay, based on what Rowling actually wrote, is if you "know" that the default setting on all intense friendships between adolescent boys is homosexual.

Which raises some questions about Ron and Harry and, possibly, about Harry and Draco Malfoy.

I know I've often treated the Potter books as if they bore as much analysis as the works of Charles Dickens, but really this is too much subtext for what are essentially adventure tales for children.

Still, I kind of like it that Dumbledore is gay.  Mainly because having an out and out gay character (sorry about the pun) as one of the heroes may put an end to all the Lupin is gay because he's a werewolf nonsense.

Now it may be that as a werewolf Lupin is in the same position that gay people have often found themselves in, forced to hide their true natures from their employers and colleagues.  But the fact is that in the world of Harry Potter there are werewolves and they are dangerous and Lupin is a werewolf.  There is a very good reason why if they found out even the most tolerant and understanding parents wouldn't want him teaching their children.

If you want to read Lupin's lycanthropy as a metaphor for homosexuality, that's your business, but it's not a metaphor that goes very far in a direction gay people should like---homosexuality as a deadly and contagious disease, homosexuals as predators barely in control of their urges?---and that's all it is, a metaphor, and it's your metaphor, not the books'.  In the books, being a werewolf is not a metaphorical condition.  In this particular case, it is Lupin's tragic flaw, just as carelessness is Sirius Black's, and arrogance was James Potter's---or might have been had he not fallen in love with Lily.

There is a reason the wizarding world needs Harry Potter to come along and save it from Tom Riddle and it's that the heroes of the previous generation weren't up to the job.

The story of the first war against Voldemort hasn't been written yet either, so there's no way of knowing, but it does seem that if James, Sirius, Lupin, and Lily were all as gifted and brave as they're portrayed, that the four of them working alongside Dumbledore and aurors of the likes of Mad-eye Moody should have been a match for Riddle and his Death Eaters.

That the weren't suggests that they had flaws that weakened them.   Lupin's was, and continues to be in the present war, the debilitating effects of his being a werewolf.

Maybe they were up to the job.  I'm still not clear on it, my impression is that the forces of darkness were in retreat by the time Voldemort found the Potters and it was only thanks to the perfidy of Peter Pettigrew that Voldemort came as close to winning as he did. 

What is clear in The Prisoner of Azkaban is that Lupin's lycanthropy came close to destroying him.  It was something terrible about himself he needed to be saved from by the intervention of his friends, which again is not exactly a flattering metaphor for being gay.

And if being a werewolf is not meant to be taken "literally" but "figuratively" (this is, as if within an imaginary work it's not to be seen as what it appears to be but as standing for something real outside the work) then it is the only allegorical aspect of the whole series, unless you think it's all an allegory.

I don't think so, but that's my interpretation.  I think Rowling herself has dismissed allegorical readings of her world.  She means the magic to be magic.  But it now appears she's given herself permission to write and re-write her books outside their covers.

Which brings me to the real question here, which isn't whether or not Dumbledore is gay, but whether or not he is just because his author says he is.

If an artist paints a picture that everybody sees as a bowl of green apples but then after the painting is hung in a museum she comes along to tell us that it's actually a bowl of pears does that make it a bowl of pears or does that make it a bad painting?

What if the artist says, Yes, it's a bowl of apples, but one of those apples is rotten, it's just that the rotten part is hidden behind one of the other apples, does that make it a painting of a rotten apple?

What if she says there's also a peach in the bowl, but it's underneath the apples?

If something isn't there on the canvas, then it's not there, is it?

But what if it isn't on the canvas in itself, but is there in effect?

The painting of the apples may include a bad apple. although not one in the bowl, if there's also a boy holding his stomach and grimacing, but how do we know that it was a bad apple that gave the boy a stomach ache?

What if the painter writes a letter, twenty years after painting the picture, claiming that the boy had actually been punched in the stomach by another boy who stole his apple?

If a thing isn't on the canvas, how can it be there?

If something isn't in the book an author wrote, can she put it in afterwards without actually going back and rewriting the book?

And if she does that, isn't it a whole new book?

Same question goes for movies now that studios are in the habit of releasing "the director's cut" on DVD.  Which is the real Apocalypse Now?  The movie that was released thirty years ago or Apocalypse Redux?

If Shakespeare's spirit were doomed to walk the earth and could a tale unfold that for the last few centuries we've been completely missing the point of Hamlet, the melancholy Dane's dying of a brain tumor and the ghost and all his suspicions about his uncle and mother are symptoms of his disease, would that mean that in all future Hamlets the Prince should be made-up to look as though he's undergoing chemo?

Or, since we are scholars like Horatio, might we be within our rights to question it and demand to know, "Just where in the text did you bother to tell us that fact, Bill?"

What if Shakespeare's ghost told us that Hamlet was gay?

That might give actors playing Hamlet and Ophelia, Gertrude and Claudius something new and interesting to work with (although I'm sure there have already been productions that made Hamlet's homosexuality a subtext), but I'm not sure what it would actually add to what we see on stage since like Hamlet's presumed heterosexuality his being gay would seem to beside the point at the moment, unless like Olivier you believe he really does want to sleep with his mother and that's his main motivation.  It's always seemed to me though that Prince has more important things on his mind than whether or not and how and by whom he's going to get laid.

Where in the books is Dumbledore shown to be gay?

Rowling may have intended Dumbledore to be a gay character, but his gayness does not seem to have mattered to her when she has him onstage.  The one scene in which he's shown with Grindelwald (shown as in "show don't tell"), is not a love scene; it's the scene in which one of them kills Dumbledore's sister.  Their great duel is summarized and if there was any left-over sexual tension between them when they faced off, Rowling didn't put it in the summary.

So here's the second part of my question:

What does Dumbledore's being gay add to the books as books?

Not what does it do for your appreciation of the books?  Not what good might it do for gay adolescents struggling to come to terms with their sexuality?

What does it mean artistically?

That sounds like an exam question.  Part One:  Using only evidence from the texts, show that Dumbledore is queer.  Part Two:  Show how Dumbledore's sexuality is important to the themes/narrative.

And that brings me to my last question, another two-parter.

Do the Harry Potter books support this much critical attention and if they do why are they worth it?

Related:  Dumbledore may or may not be gay, but Jon Swift is certain of one thing.  Harry Potter is a brat!

That's not writing, or typing, it's driving---and in circles

I have my own dreams of the open road.  But although I dream them all with a literary finish----not necesarily with a Fitzgeraldian passage of interior monologue summing up America and my place in it, but definitely with a writing down of my adventures---my dreams are inspired by driving not by reading about other people's driving.

Travels With Charley captured my heart because I already wanted to do what Steinbeck had done, pack light, call my dog, jump into the car and drive.

As for Kerouac...

Well, Kerouac.

I read On the Road when I was exactly the right age and in the right mood to take it to heart.  I was twenty-two and I was spending a lot of time alone with my typewriter, making what I've come to regard as the biggest mistake of my life, trying to turn myself from a guy who wrote plays sometimes into a novelist and short story writer.  I should have been trying to turn myself into a lawyer or an accountant, but nevermind.  As long as I was trying to turn myself into a species of professional writer, I probably would have been better off getting a head start on the way things worked out and tried to turn myself into a journalist, especially since in what I was doing to turn myself into a writer, writing a lot, I was mostly practicing a kind of journalism.

Since I was already pretty adept at dialog, I'd decided that what I needed the most practice in was turning what I'd seen into prose.  I needed to learn to be descriptive, I thought, so I spent a lot of time typing out descriptions.  I wanted an audience though, so I put all my descriptions into letters.  My friends became resigned to receiving 15 and 20 page letters from me.  Typed.  Single-spaced.  I didn't keep copies of my letters but I'm pretty sure that taken together they amounted to a proto-blog, a disorganized, unedited, rambling mix of politics, book reports, romanticized reminiscences, anecdotes that didn't adhere strictly to the facts, self-conscious snippets of prose poems I couldn't bring myself to think of as prose poems and so never shaped into anything, and logs of that part of my day that wasn't spent typing up my letters, which, since I didn't sleep much, included a lot of time watching old movies late into the night, which I dutifully reviewed for my friends who I was sure were dying to know what I thought of My Darling Clementine and Mr Smith Goes to Washington.

All this typing, it wasn't writing, had an underlying message.

"I'm dying of loneliness here.  Come save me."

Every now and then one of my friends, usually Nora, sometimes Meg, and, when she was in the country, Cathy, would try to save me.  And of course I would type up their attempts to save me and send them off in letters to other friends.

I didn't always stick to the facts.

I don't stick to the facts even now.  I just changed all their names.

Sharon, the friend I most wanted to come save me, knew better and kept her distance.

I wrote about her anyway.

Although I didn't recognize it, what I was doing in my self-referential, self-pitying, self-aggrandizing letters was writing---typing---the first draft of my own On the Road and so you might think that when I read the book I slapped my forehead and said, This is what I should be doing!

I didn't.  I don't think it even occurred to me that there was anything in what I was typing remotely like what Kerouac had written in On the Road.

It wasn't the case, though, that I was fixating on the most obvious differences, that I was nowheres near close to Mexico City, jail, the merchant marine, or San Francisco.  I spent a lot of time in New York City, but not Kerouac's New York City, which I'm sure I was convinced was as dead as Peter Stuyvesant's.  But I was a long way from Joyce's Dublin, Conrad's Malaysia, and Graham Greene's Africa, and that didn't stop me from thinking I could learn a few tricks from Dubliners, Lord Jim, and A Burnt-Out Case, which I read at about the same time.

I just didn't like the book.

Dean Moriarty---Neal Cassady---was a bore and Sal Paradise was a drip.

I was disappointed...in myself.  I "knew" On the Road was an "important" book.  I "knew" I "needed" to read it if I was going to be a great American writer.   So I thought I had failed somehow, either as a writer or as a reader, in not liking the book.  I had assigned myself the job of reading On the Road, as homework for my self-taught course on becoming a writer, and I finished it with a sense of relief, as if it was homework and I was glad to have the task over and done with it.

I was a savvy enough reader to understand that I was being unfair to the book.  I was judging it against my expectations and not on its own terms.  But I was expecting, and I needed to read, a book that was a dream of the open road, which is to say a book about escape, and On the Road is a book about being trapped.

The point keeps getting made again and again throughout the novel:  No matter where you go, there you are.  There being stuck inside your own self.

On the Road isn't about being on the road, it's about being in the car and not looking out but looking up, into the rear view mirror, and seeing the same damn face looking back every time.

Since I was already spending far too much time looking in a symbolic mirror in hopes of finding somebody else more interesting looking back and not enjoying it at all, it's no wonder On the Road didn't strike me as a useful literary model.

Ten or so years later, when I was teaching and looking around for books and authors to put on my reading lists, I decided to give Kerouac another chance and I picked up On the Road again, and The Subterraneans, and Big Sur, and Desolation Angels, and Dharma Bums.

And they all had as one of their themes the same unattractive (to me) theme as I saw in my first reading of On the Road, Kerouac's self-disgust and his wishing that he was another, more interesting, happier, or at least more well-adjusted, man.

The trouble is that what makes the men Kerouac wishes he were interesting at all is the work they produced on their own, and so it's more profitable and enjoyable to read their books and their poems, listen to their music and look at their paintings, than it is to read Kerouac's extensive chronicling of his man-crushes on them.

In an essay on On The Road in the New Yorker, Drive, He Wrote, Louis Menand looks at this theme as it appears in On the Road in a more sympathetic light:

Satire and polemic are, on some level, defensive. It’s possible that something about the Beats simply made people uncomfortable. For the nineteen-fifties images of the Beat—Partisan Review’s bohemian nihilist and Hollywood’s hip hedonist—are almost complete inversions of the character types represented in “On the Road.” The book is not about hipsters looking for kicks, or about subversives and nonconformists, rebels without a cause who point the way for the radicals of the nineteen-sixties. And the book is not an anti-intellectual celebration of spontaneity or an artifact of literary primitivism. It’s a sad and somewhat self-consciously lyrical story about loneliness, insecurity, and failure. It’s also a story about guys who want to be with other guys...

The car is also a male space. The women who end up being driven in (never driving) the car are either shared by the guys (Marylou, for example, whom Dean hands off to Sal, as Cassady handed off LuAnne to Kerouac) or abandoned (as happens to the character Galatea Dunkel, and as happened to her real-life counterpart, Helen Hinkle). But the car is not an erotic space. Driving is a way for men to be together without the need to answer questions about why they want to be together. (Drinking is another way for men to be together, and there is a lot of drinking in “On the Road.” There is a lot of drinking, period.) In this sense, “On the Road” is a little like another sensational road novel of the time: Humbert and Lolita drive obsessively back and forth across the continent because that is the only public way for them to be together. As long as they’re driving, they’re not doing anything they shouldn’t be doing.

But maybe we should not understand the sexual themes in “On the Road” too quickly. Maybe the best thing to say about those themes is that they are murky and underrealized, not entirely within the author’s control. Sal has a crush on Dean, in the way that attractive but insecure men can form attachments to gregarious and self-confident men. Sal gets close to women vicariously by being closer to Dean than Dean’s women are (until he, too, gets dumped, in Mexico City). This is perfectly consistent with the “Ocean’s Eleven” genre of buddy stories: there is always a dame, but the real bond is between Brad and George. They have something with each other that neither could have, or would care to have, with a woman.

Menand also sees that On the Road is not about being on the road.  The road isn't taking Sal and Neal and the various women they pick up and drop off anywhere.  They all want to go somewhere, but they can't get there because the road they want to take to get there doesn't exist anymore, it's lost in the past, recoverable only through memories and regrets, and the point becomes simply being in the car and being on the way to somewhere:

Nostalgia is part of the appeal of “On the Road” today, but it was also part of its appeal in 1957. For it is not a book about the nineteen-fifties. It’s a book about the nineteen-forties. In 1947, when Kerouac began his travels, there were three million miles of intercity roads in the United States and thirty-eight million registered vehicles. When “On the Road” came out, there was roughly the same amount of highway, but there were thirty million more cars and trucks. And the construction of the federal highway system, which had been planned since 1944, was under way. The interstates changed the phenomenology of driving. Kerouac’s original plan, in 1947, was to hitchhike across the country on Route 6, which begins at the tip of Cape Cod. Today, although there is a sign in Provincetown that reads “Bishop, CA., 3205 miles,” few people would dream of taking that road even as far as Rhode Island. They would get on the inter-state. And they wouldn’t think of getting there fast, either. For although there are about a million more miles of road in the United States today than there were in 1947 (there are also two more states), two hundred million more vehicles are registered to drive on them. There is little romance left in long car rides.

In fact, the characters in “On the Road” spend as short a time on the road as they can. They’re not interested in exploring rural or small-town America. Speed is essential. The men rarely even have time to chase after the women they run into, because they’re always in a hurry to get to a city. A lot of the book takes place in cities, particularly New York, Denver, and San Francisco, but also Los Angeles, New Orleans, and Mexico City. Even there, the characters are always rushing around.

The bits and pieces of America that the book captures, therefore, are snapshots taken on the run, glimpses from the window of a speeding car. And they are carefully selected to represent a way of life that is coming to an end in the postwar boom, a way of life before televisions and washing machines and fast food, when millions of people lived patched-together existences and men wandered the country—“ramblin’ round,” in the Guthrie song—following the seasons in search of work. Robert Frank’s photographs in “The Americans,” taken between 1955 and 1956 and published in Paris in 1958 and in the United States a year later, with an introduction by Kerouac, held the same interest: they are pictures of a world not yet made plump and uniform by postwar affluence and consumerism.

The sadness that soaks through Kerouac’s story comes from the certainty that this world of hoboes and migrant workers and cowboys and crazy joyriders—the world of Neal Cassady and his derelict father—is dying. But the sadness is not sentimentality, because many of the people in the book who inhabit that world would be happy to see it go or else are too drunk or forlorn to care. They do not share the literary man’s nostalgie de la boue; they are restless, lonely, lost—beat. “There ain’t no flowers there,” says a girl whom Sal Paradise, the Kerouac figure, tries to pick up in Cheyenne by suggesting a walk on the prairie among the flowers. “I want to go to New York. I’m sick and tired of this. Ain’t no place to go to but Cheyenne and ain’t nothin in Cheyenne.” “Ain’t nothin in New York,” Sal says. “Hell there ain’t,” she says. She wants to get in the car, too.

Nothing worth staying at home for.  Nothing in their destinations that make them worth the drive or worth sticking around in once they get there.  Nothing to see out the windows or stopping along the way to explore because all that's worth seeing and exploring has vanished.  Nothing to do then but drive.

On the Road is one of the most claustrophobic and static novels not written by a French existentialist.

Menand clearly admires On the Road much more than I do, but he sees the book's importance as being primarily biographical and historical not literary.  He doesn't try to argue that On the Road is a great American novel.  He does point out that it's a better written book than is sometimes thought.   It's the stuff of literary legend how Kerouac typed the first draft of On the Road on one long roll of paper in a frenzied and caffeine-(not drug)-fueled three weeks.  That's not why Truman Capote dismissed On the Road as typing not writing though.  Kerouac may have banged out the first draft in a blur, but he took his time with the following drafts, polishing and revising the book over the course of ten years.  Kerouac, says Menand, made a deliberate aesthetic choice in shaping On the Road that his one hundred and twenty-five foot page of paper helped him achieve:

He saw that this-happened-and-then-that-happened had literary possibilities, and the scroll was a way of forcing himself to stick to this vision. (A little later, Frank O’Hara made poems using the same theory. “I do this, I do that” is how he described them.) The scroll was therefore a restriction: it was a way of defining form, not a way of avoiding form. In religious terms (and Kerouac was always, deep down, a Catholic and a sufferer), it was a collar, a self-mortification. He did, after he finished the scroll, go back and make changes. But first he had to submit to his discipline.

Capote was probably refering to Kerouac's "this-happened-and-then-that-happened" approach to his subject.  But he might just as well have been referring to something else.  On the Road is a written book.  But it is not an imagined one.

I mentioned Joyce and Conrad and Greene earlier as writers I was reading for the first time around the same time as I read On the Road.  Coincidentally, all three of them, like Kerouac, drew heavily on their experiences and personal biographies in their fiction.

But unlike Kerouac, the other three managed to see and re-create their experiences as having shape and meaning apart from their original sources.  Kerouac worked hard at not letting that happen to his stories.  I don't think Capote was right, On the Road isn't just typing, it is writing, but in the end it's a particular kind of writing.  It's journalism with a get out of the facts free card attached.

Conrad, Greene, and Joyce aren't American writers, of course, and I think it's best when comparing Kerouac to other writers to see him as part of the American grain.  Menand mentions Hemingway, Pynchon, Updike, and, not as oddly as it might at first seem, Nabokov---after all, Lolita is the other notorious American road novel from the period.  And there's no getting away from or around the other Beats and their sons and heirs, particularly Ginsberg and Burroughs, but also Gary Snyder and Ken Kesey, Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson.

Gee, no women.  What a shocker.

But the American writer who always springs to mind whenever I think about Kerouac preceded him on the road, although he didn't go very far down it, by a century, his fellow Massachusettsan, Henry David Thoreau.

Thoreau is another one who took himself as his main subject.  But unlike Kerouac he was never tempted to write up his adventures as fiction and, as cranky as he could be, and as unforgiving, he was basically a cheerful man who got a kick out of other people, even if he didn't always like them very much.  He was egocentric, but not self-absorbed, and so he was a more active and more objective observer.  Makes him more entertaining and more informative company.  Thoreau famously traveled extensively in Concord.  He got up to Maine too, and over to Cape Cod, but mainly he stayed at home.  Kerouac went back and forth across the continent several times.  But of the two of them Thoreau did travel.  He got away.  On his short hikes and lazy canoe trips, in his bean patch, and during one night in jail, he managed to escape.  From himself and from his demons.

Kerouac went a long way to get nowhere.

Cross-posted at newcritics.

This year marks the 50th Anniversary of the publication of On the Road and Tom Watson salutes it by taking a more Thoreauvian position and celebrating the pleasures of Staying Put.

Your turn:  What reputedly great book have you read that disappointed you?

Anton Chekhov's Posthumous Oscar for Best Screenplay

Think I'm guilty of expecting that all writers and directors of movies and TV shows can be, ought to be, and want to be as insightful, subtle, sophisticated, and clinically objective in their portrayals of human behavior as Chekhov was in his stories and plays.

So I wind up reviewing a fun and silly movie like Mrs Doubtfire as if it was meant to be a contemporary exploration of love, marriage, vanity, and ego along the lines of Chekhov's short novel, The Duel.

Fairest way to critique works of art, I keep reminding myself, is to ask, What job did the artists involved give themselves to do?  In what ways were they limited by time, by budget, by resources (in the case of the performing arts, this means casting), and by the conventions of the genre or medium they've chosen to work in?  And, finally, given those limitations, how well did the artists do their assigned job?

It's not fair to judge a work of art based soley on how well it stacks up against another work of art you happen to prefer.

Or hate.

It's fine to mention other works, as long as they're examples of other artists' attempts to do the same job, and you keep in mind the ways both sets of artists were limited.  So it's ok to bring up Tootsie in a discussion of Mrs Doubtfire, but you shouldn't compare either to Uncle Vanya or The Cherry Orchard.

Which I didn't do in my post on Mrs Doubtfire yesterday.

But I did sort of imply I wished it had been a different sort of movie than it was, not a gender-bending comedy like Tootsie but a more realistic meditation on love and marriage, like, say, um...well...a movie version of Chekhov's The Duel.

Of which there isn't one.

I don't think there's been a successful big screen adaptation of any of Chekhov's works.

This is not surprising when it comes to his plays, which were very stagy.

But many of his stories could make good movies.

Chekhov died in 1904, at the age of 44.  He might have seen a few silent movies but he probably never bothered to think how his stories and plays might be translated to the screen.

Of course, if he was alive today, that's all he would be thinking about, how to tell the stories he wanted to tell in pictures.  Dickens would be writing for movies and television too.  Shakespeare, as well.

Shakespeare and Dickens thought in visuals anyway.  They invented movies before there were movies.  Shakespeare complained through the narrators of a couple of his histories that movies hadn't been invented yet and he was forced to make the audience rely on their imaginations to "see" the battle scenes he would have portrayed for them if he'd had the medium.

But although their very pictographic imaginations would have made them natural screenwriters, that's not why I think they'd be working in Hollywood or for HBO today.  I think it because they wrote for money, and movies and TV are where the money is.  At the beginnings of their careers, both young men were ambitious hacks.  That they each turned out to be great artists might have come as shocks to both of them.

Chekhov started writing for money too.  He was a young doctor, and doctors back then didn't get rich.  He needed extra cash to support his brothers' families and the quickest way he found to get it was to write short comic fillers for newspapers and magazines.

So if Chekhov was around today and still a doctor...well, maybe he wouldn't be writing at all, not having the time---young doctors in his day didn't work as many hours---and he still needing to pick up some extra cash might still be writing for newspapers and magazines.

But if that took him where it really did take him, into the company of other, more serious writers and then into the company of actors and theater people, a play or two might come of it, but a screenplay or three might too.

And I'm thinking that if Chekhov wrote a screenplay, given his penchant for stories with many characters and multiple plot lines, his talent for having his characters talk over each other and past each other, when they are not simply mumbling their thoughts out loud, and his clinical bordering on cynical view of human nature, there'd be only one director he should sell the rights to.

Of course, that director is dead, recently so, but if I can bring Chekhov alive and kicking into the 21st Century, I can resurrect him.

Robert Altman.

The past is another country

One of the arguments routinely made by the crackpots who insist that Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare’s plays is that the middle-class nobody from Stratford couldn’t have known as much about the lives of kings and queens as the author of the plays knows.

The flaw in this argument is that most of what we "know" about the lives of kings and queens we know because Shakespeare told us about it.

And the odds are he made it all up.

This is a general problem in trying to figure out what people were like in the past.  Most of what we "know" about what they were like we learned from plays and movies and novels and TV shows before we were even aware that there was such a place as the past.

The past isn’t dead; it's not even past, said Faulkner.  (Quote corrected, thanks to Mike Schilling.)  I love that quote, but the past isn’t exactly here and now, either.  It’s a foreign country we can only visit virtually and for which there is no reliable Michelin Guide.  Historians do what they can, but most people leave no record of what they’ve felt and thought and how they’ve managed to get through a day, and the people who do leave records tend to be...not exactly representative.

There have been periods throughout history when it was not unusual for an average person to keep a diary and write long, thoughtful letters, but those periods have been rare and the practice has been geographically and culturally limited.  Since the invention of writing, most people who have been moved to take up a pen or a quill or a hammer and chisel or to sit down at a keyboard have been oddballs and weirdos, introspective misfits who had time to themselves to write because they didn’t like the company of other people as much as they liked their own or because other people didn’t much care for their company.

Socially gregarious and popular types like Henry James and Marcel Proust are the strangest of ducks in a crowd of strange ducks.

Your average poets and novelists and creative non-fictionalists want to have as much to do with the world outside their own heads as most people want to have to do with cleaning septic tanks.

They are the last people to go to to find out how the world works.

They are often very good on the kinds of truths they can discover through explorations of their own hearts and minds, moral and psychological truths.  But when it comes to politics and sociology they get fuzzy.

And it’s not just the case that when writing about how the world outside their heads works they aren’t particularly knowledgeable or insightful.  It’s that in novels and plays and short stories and movies and TV shows everything—everything—is in service to the plot.

Their job is to get their main characters from here to there and if the historical or sociological facts of life are in the way, they will have their characters just go around them.

And if the facts aren’t getting in the way, but they aren’t helping either, writers will invent their own facts that will do the job.

So you don’t sit through a production of Hamlet to find out about life in the royal court of Denmark in the late middle ages, or even about life in the court of Queen Elizabeth in the late Renaissance.  You do it to find about what’s going on in the heads and hearts of Hamlet and Claudius and Gertrude and Ophelia.

Does Hamlet’s treatment of Ophelia tell us anything about the roles of men and women in Shakespeare’s day?  Not unless you think that all men in Elizabethan England were mad but north by northwest and all women were emotionally fragile flowers with serious daddy issues.

Last night’s live-blogging of Mad Men over at newcritics, ably and insightfully led by Tom Watson, with assists from some of newcritics’ best and brightest (I can say this with all modesty, because I wasn’t home last night and couldn’t take part) and some outside guests including Mr James Wolcott, produced a savvy and sometimes savage group analysis of the show.

But if there was a theme running through the commentary it was this: How many of the attitudes being dramatized on Mad Men, particularly the attitudes towards women, are historically true to life?

(Dramatized may not be the best word.  One point that Wolcott kept bringing up is that last night’s episode was not inherently dramatic.  There was no real story.)

Mad Men’s production values force the question.

As Nancy Nall lays out over at her place, the show’s producers and designers have done excellent work in re-creating the look of the world of the organization men in late 1950s New York.

But did they put the same effort into recreating the mindset of the people who lived and worked in the living rooms and offices so faithfully reproduced on the sets of the studio?

Dan Leo decided that at least some of what was coming across was true to life because of the similarities he saw between attitudes in the show and attitudes dramatized in literature from that specific time, particularly the short stories of John Cheever and the novel Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates.

Now, Cheever was one of the best American writers of the last 60 years, and Yates was a fine writer whose collection of short stories, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, is, I think, the American Dubliners.

But Cheever was a closeted gay man who pretended to be straight and additionally pretended to his family not to be a writer at all.  He used to put on a suit and tie every morning, say goodbye to his wife and kids, and go out the door as if he was leaving to catch the train to his office, then go down into the basement of their apartment building where he had set up a table and typewriter to write all day, "returning" home at the time other 9 to 5 dads were returning from their real office jobs.

And Yates was a terrifically angry and self-loathing drunk who had a habit of self-destructing wherever he went.  I wish I’d known who he was when I was in college in Boston because he was still alive then, not writing a lick, but available to meet, every night at a bar near campus, where I could have gone to watch him fall off his barstool, an acrobatic feat he was said to perform nightly.

This is to say that while both Cheever and Yates wrote about the suburban and office worker worlds of the late 1950s and early 1960s they were not either of them truly of those worlds.

They were outsiders who had no real desire to become insiders, even imaginatively.

When I was teaching it was an article of faith among the deconstructionist types that I worked with that outsiders were the most insightful critics of a society or culture, outsiders being usually defined not as foreigners but as people from groups marginalized or ostracized within that society, so that the best critics of straight society are gay people, the best critics of male only worlds are women, the best critics of white society are the black and brown people who serve it.  This idea, self-serving and self-flattering because who is marginalized and ostracized if not neurotic academic types, doesn’t take into account the emotional damage being caused by being marginalized and ostracized, as if anger, frustration, hatred, and self-loathing are the necessary ingredients to objectivity.

John Cheever and Richard Yates were two of the most unrepresentative middle-class white men alive in 1960 and they produced fiction that expressed their own situations as misfits.

Cheever’s short stories are prose poem dreams of a self he couldn’t be, and Revolutionary Road is a nightmare vision of a life Yates was trying desperately not to have.

You don’t read their stories to find out about life in their time.  You read them to find out what their characters are up to.

If the writing on Mad Men seems to be historically accurate because of how well it reflects the work of John Cheever and Richard Yates, it’s probably because what the writers know of life back then they know from reading the likes of John Cheever and Richard Yates.

My feeling is that it doesn’t much matter if the attitudes of the characters in Mad Men are historically correct, any more than it really matters if Tolstoy’s Napoleon matches up with the historians’ Napoleon.

One advertising agency doesn’t represent the whole advertising world, the advertising world isn’t the whole of the business world, the whole of the business world isn’t the whole of the working world, and the whole of the working world isn’t the whole of life.

In other words, there’s a lot of room for the creators of Mad Men to play around in.  They are free to say, maybe the stories we’re telling aren’t representative of life in general in the business world of 1960; they are, though, stories about the way things were at this particular agency.

So the question isn’t whether or not anything on the show is historically accurate, but whether or not they are dramatically plausible.

We can’t really know what people in general were thinking and feeling in 1960.  But we can know what these characters are thinking and feeling, and knowing that, we can judge whether or not those thoughts and feelings are true to life.

We don’t need to know if these characters are behaving like people did back then.  We only need to know whether or not they are behaving like people.

When all’s said and done, a story isn’t compelling because of what it tells us about life back then.

It’s compelling because of what it tells us about life.

Then and now.

The past may be another country, but I need to get around in this one, the present.  So my question for the gang at newcritics is this:  How well does Mad Men help us navigate through the here and now?

Poetry as fiction, poetry as lies

Post-script added 7 PM Saturday night.

I've always believed Shakespeare was making it up.

In his sonnets.

About the Dark Lady, about WH, about the bisexual love triangle, about riding a horse, about even having a horse to ride.

Made it all up.

There's more of his autobiography in A Midsummer Night's Dream than in My mistress's eyes.

And because I think he was inventing on every couplet, his sonnets strike me as essentially true.

When the questions How much of this really happened? and How close is what the poet says happened to what really happened? don't have to be asked, then naturally their possible answers don't pop up to complicate your enjoyment of a poem.  Poets are born liars and aren't known for worrying about getting their facts straight when a rhyme or a metaphor is at stake.  The answers to those questions are almost certainly Not much and Not very and once the lies are on the table it's hard to care about the poetry.

Back in Shakespeare's day it was assumed poets were making it up.  Even when the circumstances of a poem seemed to match the circumstances of the poet's life the poem's audience wasn't expected to think that the speaker of the poem and the poet were the same person.

Poets depended on readers making this distinction, particularly aristocratic readers with legal authority and whimsical ideas about freedom of the press, to keep themselves out of prison and away from the block.

In our time, poets are reflexively autobiographical.  If a poet writes a poem that sounds like a suicide note, the odds are good it is a suicide note, which is why Ted Hughes was racked with guilt over his wife's sticking her head in the oven until the day he died himself.

But in defense of Hughes and everybody else who read Sylvia Plath's last poems and missed the obvious clues, like I said, even when they're not supposed to be making it up poets tend to make it up anyway.  They can't help themselves.

I don't trust autobiographies of any kind.  They demand that we accept a preposterous premise---that the author remembers everything just the way they happened.

Nobody remembers anything.

They remember the last time they remembered something.

Try to remember what you were like when you were five.

You're making it up.

You're remembering what you are like now only picturing yourself shorter.

Louise Gluck is a good poet.  I like this poem, Snow.

Late December: my father and I
are going to New York, to the circus.
He holds me
on his shoulders in the bitter wind:
scraps of white paper
blow over the railroad ties.

My father liked
to stand like this, to hold me
so he couldn't see me.
I remember
staring straight ahead
into the world my father saw;
I was learning
to absorb its emptiness,
the heavy snow
not falling, whirling around us.

But I only like it when I convince myself that she made it all up, that she made up this preternaturally insightful and resentful small child and the father the child thought didn't like to look at her or was too obtuse to know she needed to be looked at.

Naturally, I'm on the father's side here.  It's hard for me to imagine a non-acrophobic child who felt that riding on her father's shoulders was a form of punishment or a sign of neglect.  When my boys were small enough to ride on my shoulders they did a great deal of their traveling up there.  I'm pretty sure they liked it.  They used to ask to be lifted up.  I hope I wouldn't have put them up there if they hadn't enjoyed it, if it scared them or made them feel anxious or taken into custody in some way.  I liked to do it because they liked it.  But I also liked to do it because it made me feel strong and protective and in charge---made me feel like their father.  And I liked to do it because often it was the quickest way to get from one place to another.  It meant that I did not have to slow my pace to match theirs so they could keep up when I was in a hurry.   They might have guessed that.  I might have told them outright sometimes.  Maybe there were times when they weren't in a hurry that they resented being lifted up and plopped on my shoulders, trapped up there and unable to touch or smell or chase the things three and four year olds need to touch, smell, and chase in order to get to know the world.

Maybe they will write accusatory poems about it when they get old enough.

I just don't believe Gluck thought what she portrays herself as thinking when she was riding on her father's shoulders.

Those feelings aren't a child's.

They're the feelings of a bitter and depressive adolescent who thinks she can lay the blame for her own temperament on her father's aloofness, on his unwillingness to let her see him, on his forcing her to face an emotional emptiness when she was barely more than a baby.  She has made a metaphor out of a memory.

Nothing wrong with that, poetically, artistically.  If this was a scene from a short story or a movie it would be a wonderfully symbolic moment.   But is it a scene from a fiction or a scene from Gluck's real life?

If it's meant to be real, why should we trust that Gluck is remembering it correctly?  Why should we trust that there was an actual moment like that for her to remember?  People routinely fill their mental attics with false memories.  They unconsciously doctor the real memories that they do posses.

And how good a self-analyst is she anyway?  Why should be believe that her current gloom has a cause that reaches back to when she was a child and why should we just accept that she has correctly identified that cause?

I like the poem better when I think that it's made up.  When I suspect it's the truth---Gluck's version of the truth---it feels like a lie.

I think that Gluck has a streak of perversity in her that allows her to "remember" the past in ways that appeal to her vanity.  I think she is vain about being gloomy and withdrawn, vain about being a person who responds to affection and emotional claims upon her by going cold and turning mean.

I think she is nursing a grudge that has no cause but her own self-loathing.

I think she is a female, poetic Dr House.

You know why I think this?

Because I have read other poems by her in which she presents herself as just this kind of person.

She has a poem called Brown Circle that begins,

My mother
wants to know
why, if I hate
family so much,
I went ahead and
had one. I don't
answer my mother.
What I hated
was being a child,
having no choice about
what people I loved.

Once again Gluck is claiming that when she was a child she had feelings and insights into herself and the people around her that would have been remarkably precocious in a teenager and she is portraying herself vain about what a precociously bitter and perverse little girl she was and vain about her cold, stubborn, self-defensive self-centeredness now.

But I don't really know if Gluck is writing about herself or about a person like herself.

If she's expecting us to believe that this is the way she is, that this is what really happens, then her poems are a pack of lies.  But if she's making it up, if her poems are fiction, then I believe she is telling us the truth about life.

The poet and the juggler, a post-script brought on by some serendipitous afternoon reading.

This is critic and essayist Clive James writing about W.C. Fields:

Though he exaggerated his early deprivations when he told tales of his upbringing, Fields was certainly the man out of place, one of those people who are born exiles even if they never leave home.

I read that and thought, That's Louise Gluck! Or that's how she presents herself as the speaker of her poems.  A person out of place.  A born exile.

W.C. Fields and Louise Gluck?  Kindred spirits?  Not so far-fetched.  In his essay, James makes the case the case that Fields was in his way a verbal and visual poet.  He says of Fields, but could be talking about Gluck, just as well:

For some reason such misfits seem to favour the notion of verbal economy, as if turning ordinary language into the kind of compressed code that unfolds into a wealth of meaning when you have the key.

Could have come from an essay analyzing Gluck's poetry.  This is the last poem in one of her books.  It's called, as a sly joke, First Memory:

Long ago I was wounded, I lived
to revenge myself
against my father, not
for what he was---
for what I was: from the beginning of time,
in childhood, I thought
that pain meant
I was not loved.
It meant I loved.

A person out of place, a born exile, a poet, like W.C. Fields.

Snow, Brown Circle, and First Memory are from Gluck's book of poems, Ararat.

The essay on Fields is from James' new collection of essays and reviews, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories From History and the Arts.

The threat of the ink-stained wretch

Forgoing live-blogging the Tony Awards in order to settle down to watch the last episode of The Sopranos and the latest installment of The Tudors, Wolcott found himself instead drawn back to the world of theater to review a new short one-act play by a right wing blogger who calls herself with all the vanity of the self-righteously humble the Anchoress.

The Anchoress calls her play "A Snapshot of America" and tries to pass it off as a slice of life, a verbatim account of some time she spent eavesdropping in the check-out line at her local bookstore.  But Wolcott buys none of it.

I want to be encouraging, truly I do. Loath as I am to call anyone a fibber, I'm afraid I don't believe a single line of the dialogue the Anchoress has crafted, and the characterizations are cartoonishly sketchy, lacking in texture and plausibility. It'd be far more believable for the cashier to blame the low a/c on the store manager and seek solidarity with the customers by acknowledging that she's sweating too than to be chirping, "Doing our part to save the planet!" Similarly, the angry man's interjection of Al Gore's "liberal nonsense" into the discussion seems like an authorial thumb on the scales, as does the indignant reference to Gore's reputed "rock star friends." Perhaps the weakest characterization is the role of the Other Warm Woman, whose dropped "g's"--"I'll tell you somethin' else"--are lazy gingerbread crumbs of vernacular expression. Her mini-testimonial to George Bush keeping us safe mars the unvarnished surface of the work's artistic integrity. And I regret to observe that the Anchoress commits a common rookie playwright's mistake when she spells out the message of her piece and caps it off with a wink--"Gonna be a long, hot summer, and global warming may indeed have something to do with it…but not as you might think"--instead of allowing a whiff of ambiguity to linger.

After my first reading of Snapshot in America, I was inclined to agree with Jim that it's all fiction.  It's a little too convenient that the line at any store, even a bookstore, would be made up of that many people with obstreperous political opinions who are willing to voice them at the drop of a hat and that those people would fall out in such a war movie platoon ideal of diversity---the "sensible" free market conservative, the plain talkin' security mom, the know-nothing xenophobe, and the chirpy, green, ostensibly polite but really just another mean-spirited liberal clerk eaten up with rage at our dear Leader.

But thinking it over, there's enough of a note of realism to make me think the Anchoress wasn't making it all up.

For one thing, there's everyone's irritability at the clerk's stupidly cheerful but completely unhelpful response to their reasonable complaint.  Nothing grates on your nerves like walking into an over-heated, unventilated store on any day, let alone a nice one, and having the clerk tell you that the reason you're uncomfortable is for your own good and the good of the environment is enough to make anybody's cork pop.  Well, it would mine, anyway, and if I'd been there I'd have had a hard time keeping my mouth shut and not joining in with the guy who pointed out how stupid it is to run the air conditioner to no real effect.   Then I'd have had a hard time not pointing out to him that Al Gore suggests no such thing as the bookstore management's stinginess as a way of cutting your carbon footprint and we'd have been off to the races.

Unless I got on my high horse about how if the corporate owners of my local bookstore tried this stunt I'd be hopping mad.  If they want to fight global warming the suits could trade in their Hummers and SUVs for Priuses and leave the rest of us to browse their aisles in the relative cool.

So the situation is plausible, if you grant that the shoppers at the Anchoress' bookstore are more opinionated and outspoken than they seem to be at any I've been in lately.

Wolcott's right about the dialog, though.  It rings as phony as the banter between the anchors and the sports guy on you local evening news.

But I wouldn't be surprised if the Anchoress wrote exactly what she thinks she heard.

And this is what separates most of us from great journalists and other real writers---having a trained ear that hears what is really being said instead of what you expect people to say or what you remember other people to have said in similar situations, having a trained eye that sees everything and not what memory and expectation tell it it should be seeing, and then having the kind of trained memory that remembers and retains what the ear heard and the eye saw and does not overlay these fresh memories with old ones and with old prejudices and with wishful fantasies and opinions about what should have been said and what should have been seen and what should have happened.

And having a notebook handy.

Maybe not in your pocket at the moment but near enough that you can get to it soon and fill it up before the memories start to fade or blend with other memories.

This is tough work, and even the best and most disciplined fail at perfect recall and at re-creation.  For one thing, you have to edit.  You can't put everything that was said into a story, post, or book.  Besides being boring and interminable, it would make the people talking sound like imbeciles.  Most of what's said in any conversation is nonsense and gibberish, comforting noises people make to show they are thinking and involved that happen to imitate actual words and sentences but which mean nothing more than, Hold on, I'm thinking or I'm just being polite here while I look for a way out of this conversation or I'm sorry, I lost track of what you were saying because I saw a dog running by or I suddenly remembered where I left my keys.

What's left that isn't gibberish and nonsense is mostly just sound...um...ah...er...huh...sigh...ugh...yawn...ahem...cough...

So even the most accurately re-created dialogs wind up being the result of some heavy and judicious editing.

Then the writer has to resist the urge to embellish.  People don't often put things exactly as they wish they had, the way they would have if they'd been able to think of the right word on the spot, remember the perfect example, call up the telling detail, think up the apt analogy, and it's tempting when you're writing down their words later, which is a way of speaking for them, to help them out.

One of the reasons I like to say that fiction is more truthful than journalism is that when a good fiction writer makes up dialog---by editing, by embellishing, by polishing---it's something that a real person could have said, but when a journalist makes it up---by embellishing, editing, and polishing---it's something that a real person most certainly didn't say and the likeliest real person who might have said something like that is the journalist.

This is why I never trust journalism that is heavy on dialog, even when it's the work of a great and scrupulous writer-reporter.

There's a scene in the other Capote movie, Infamous, in which Truman and Harper Lee are in their hotel room working on writing down the conversations they'd had that day with the people Capote interviewed for what would become the book, In Cold Blood.  Capote didn't take notes when he did interviews.  He relied on his memory, which was phenomenal, and he relied on Lee's to back his up and fill in the blanks and correct what he'd gotten wrong or couldn't recall as exactly as he demanded of himself.

It's a throwaway scene but impressive as a snapshot of two great writers at work.  What I took away from it though was the thought that In Cold Blood, Capote's non-fiction novel, may have a little more novel relative to its non-fiction than I previously supposed.

Here was not just one writerly mind trying to resist the professional urge to embellish but two, and while I'm sure Capote and Lee did their best to keep each other focused on the purely factual, I'm not so sure they wouldn't have naturally fallen into their more usaul habits of writers and begun collaborating on a fiction.

There's relatively little dialog in In Cold Blood, and very few conversations recounted second-hand or at a distance by someone involved trying to remember what was said a long time ago.  Mostly Capote gives the sense of what people told him and I guess I trust him to have gotten that pretty close to exact, although I don't trust the memories of the people he spoke to.

Now here's the thing.

How many of the people Capote interviewed read his book and then how many of them from then on remembered what they read they told him rather than what they told him?

There's one more thing that gets in the way of most of us remembering an incident or conversation well.  Besides lacking a good ear and a sharp eye and a disciplined memory and a handy notebook, most of us don't have our own vocabularies for describing what we've seen, heard, and thought.  We borrow our words, usually from the people around us, who are in turn borrowing their words, but often from movies and TV shows we've watched and newspapers and magazines and books we've read.

Don't want to get into here the ways television has polluted most people's conversations, it's too big a subject, but just ask any reporter who's been sent out to cover a fire or a car crash or a crime scene and wound up interviewing bystanders who as soon as the notebook came out or the microphone was shoved in their face stopped talking like normal human beings and spoke in nothing but cop-speak and official-ese and the language of therapists and shrinks.

The books and newspapers and magazines we read layer our memories; the words the writers of those books and articles used become our words.  We see things through prisms those writers have put before our mind's eye.

This is what makes writers dangerous.

They can control what we think.  They change how we look and how we hear.  They can decide what we remember.

I'm not sure that I believe that this means that writers therefore have a duty to be responsible and considerate of the truth, that they have to be careful with their words and stern and earnest about disciplining themselves and their imaginations.  I think most good writers already are and do those things, and I wish more would be.  I'm using "writer" here to include both fiction writers and journalists.  It also includes bloggers.

I don't know how much of that scene in the bookstore was accurate, but it's clear that a lot of the dialog was made up and that suggests that the dynamic of the scene didn't play out exactly as the Anchoress rendered it.  I wouldn't be surprised if that's how she remembers it now, but what she's remembering is what she was writing in her head as it happened or immediately after.  She's doing what we all tend to do when we wish a conversation had gone more our way; she's remembering what she wants to have happened.

So she's fooled herself with her own story.  But she's also fooled her readers---her regular readers who are also her fans and friends---she's given them an idea of how the world is that isn't true, taught them now to hear people speaking in a way they don't really so that now they won't hear real conversations, they'll hear versions of those conversations retold on the spot in the Anchoress' words.

This is not a Right vs. Left thing.  It's about good writing versus less good versus bad and there's lots of bad writing over here on the west end of the bandwidth too.  I think it's a sorry thing, but not because of its political effect---although of course I'm not happy about that, even though it's not much more than the reinforcing of prejudices that hardly need reinforcing they're so solidly cemented in the concrete brains and hearts that support them---I think it's a sorry thing when writers instead of helping their readers see and hear the world more clearly, see and hear it as what it truly is, gives them another layer of fog and cork to put between themselves and their lives.
______________________________________

For the record, I had to get past my own prejudices in order to take the Anchoress's post seriously.  My first thought on hearing that a right wing blogger had been in a bookstore was that all it takes for an establishment to qualify in their minds as a bookstore is a revolving rack of paperback bestsellers and a few magazines.

There's absolutely no good reason for me to think that Right Wing bloggers don't go to good bookstores, particularly in this case, because the Anchoress seems to be very well read.  I like the quote from Thomas Merton she has on her masthead---I suspect there's more of a shot at the MSM in her use of it than Merton intended, but it's still a good quote.  And I know plenty of literate and literary Conservatives and not a few Liberal philistines.  So this was a pure and reflexive bit of bigotry on my part and I don't know where it came from.

But, you know what?  I'm not sure it didn't come from me.  And I'm not sure it's an actual prejudice as much as it is a bit of vanity.  Not Liberal vanity.  Writerly vanity.  I think that revolving rack of paperback novels has been revolving in my brain for a long time and something about Wolcott's post opened up whatever workshop it's been stored in and pulled it out and once it was out there in my conscious mind I fell in love with it and wanted to use it, no matter whether or not it was true.  I would make it true by believing it was true.

Of course, I managed to work it in anyhow, didn't I?  Ain't I clever?

Literary notes from my basement in Terre Haute

Novelist Richard Ford has never met a literary blog he's liked.

Then again, he's never read a literary blog.  Not Maud Newton's, not Mark Sarvas', not Beatrice, not a one.

But he knows he wouldn't like one if he read one.  He's like Clarence Darrow who didn't like peas and was glad he didn't like them, "because if I liked them, I'd eat 'em, and I just hate 'em."

Ford prefers newspapers.  He'd rather read book reviews---and I presume have his own books reviewed---in the papers.

Newspaper book reviews are edited, you see.  Ford "wants the judgment and fliter a newspaper book editor could provide," says the New York Times.

Now, I've reviewed books for newspapers---really.  People have paid me actual cash money to blather on in print the way I do here for free.---and I can tell you the way the filter and judgment of my editors would come into play if I wanted to review a novel by Richard Ford.

Me:  I'd like to review The Lay of the Land.

Editor:  When did you get interested in geography?

Me:  It's a novel by Richard Ford.

Editor:  Who's Richard Ford?

Me:  He's a famous novelist.  He won the Pulitzer Prize for Independence Day.

Editor:  I thought that was a movie.

Me:  It is.  But it's also a novel.

Editor:  Aliens attack earth and blow up the White House?

Me:  In the movie.  The book's different.

Editor:  That movie came out years ago, why are they just putting out a novelization?

Me:  They're not.  It's not.

Editor:  What's not what?

Me:  Independence Day the novel by Richard Ford isn't a novelization of the movie about aliens attacking.

Editor:  Then why do you want to review it?

Me:  I don't.

Editor:  But you said---

Me:  I said I wanted to review The Lay of the Land.

Editor:  Which isn't about geography, right?

Me:  Right.  It's a novel.  By Richard Ford.

Editor:  Who also wrote Independence Day.

Me:  Yes.

Editor:  So he's a screenwriter too.

Me:  No.

Editor:  But---

Me:  Forget Independence Day.

Editor:  It was a good movie.

Me:  I'm talking about Ford's new novel, The Lay of the Land.  I want to review it.

Editor:  And who's Ford again?

Me:  Famous novelist.  Pulitizer Prize winner.  His most famous book's The Sportswriter.

Editor:  So he writes about sports?

Me:  He used to.  He was a sportswriter once.

Editor:  So this new one, The Lay of the Land, it's about sports?

Me:  No.

Editor:  I thought it might be about golf.  You know, "Play it as it lays," Lay of the Land?

Me:  Play it as it lies.

Editor:  What?

Me:  Nevermind.

Editor:  So this book isn't about golf?

Me:  Nope.

Editor:  Do you like golf?

Me:  Um---

Editor:  I love golf.  You ever read The Greatest Game Ever Played?  That's about golf.  Good novel.

Me:  It's not a novel.

Editor:  Did you see the movie?

Me:  Yes.

Editor:  Is Lay of the Land going to be made into a movie?

Me:  Not that I know of.

Editor:  Hard to make a good movie about golf.

Me:  It's not about golf.

Editor:  What isn't?

Me:  Ford's novel.

Editor:  Oh.

Me: It's about the sportswriter from his first book---

Editor:  I thought you said it isn't about sports.

Me:  It's not.  It's about the sportswriter's family.

Editor:  And the sportswriter's Ford, right?

Me:  Not in the novel.

Editor:  What's he in the novel?

Me:  Ford?

Editor:  Yeah.

Me:  He's not in the novel.

Editor:  I thought he was the sportswriter.

Me:  He used to be a sportswriter.  Then he wrote a novel about a sportswriter called The Sportswriter.  But the sportswriter wasn't him.  Just somebody a lot like him.

Editor:  And this new novel's about another sportswriter?

Me:  The same sportswriter.

Editor:  It's a sequel?

Me:  Kind of.  It's part of a series.  Independence Day was about the same guy too.

Editor:  I thought it was about ali---

Me:  The book!

Editor:  Oh, right.  So he's written three books about this sportswriter?  It's a trilogy?  Like Lord of the Rings?

Me (sighing):  Sure.  Like Lord of the Rings.

Editor:  But it's not a fantasy?

Me:  No.  It's a realistic novel.

Editor:  So what's the local angle?

Me:  Local angle?

Editor:  Ford.  He a local author?

Me:  No.

Editor:  He grow up around here?

Me: He grew up in Mississippi.

Editor:  He live in our circulation area?

Me:  Maine, I think.

Editor:  The book, is it set around here?  The land we're getting the lay of, it's this area?

Me:  New Jersey.

Editor:  The writer coming to read at Barnes and Noble?

Me: No.

Editor:  So there's no local connection?

Me:  Not really.

Editor:  Forget it.

Me:  But---

Editor:  If there's no local angle, why would we review it?

Me:  Well, Ford's considered an important writer and I thought our readers who like to read novels would---

Editor:  Which readers?

Me:  The ones interested in books.

Editor (smirking):  Oh, right.  All five of them.

Me:  Whatever.

Editor:  Listen.  This guy Ford's a famous novelist, right?

Me:  Yeah.

Editor:  So he's been reviewed by the New York Times?

Me:  Definitely.

Editor:  Good.  When the Times reviews this golf book, we'll run their wire copy.  If we have room.  Meantime, you want a book to review?  Here's a memoir by a guy who lives in a town just south of here, spent his whole life growing award-winning orchids.  Give me, what?  Two, three hundred words?

For the record, the editors I wrote for weren't stupid.  They were just clueless about contemporary literature.  Novels weren't their thing.  They weren't book editors.  They were features editors or arts and entertainment editors or "Style" editors.  The papers my reviews ran in didn't have book editors.  They didn't have book sections.  At most they had two pages in the Sunday arts and leisure section.  Very few newspapers have book editors or book sections.  And many of the papers that do are cutting back---on editors, on pages devoted to books, on reviews written by local reviewers.  When and where they have space, they're running more wire copy.

Ford knows this and he regrets it.  But he doesn't see literary blogs as an alternative.

He has no respect for bloggers.  To him a literary blogger is just "some guy sitting in his basement in Terre Haute".

Meanwhile, Richard Schickel, long-(long, long, long)-time film critic for TIME has expressed his disgust for bloggers who presume to review movies.

Let me put this bluntly, in language even a busy blogger can understand: Criticism — and its humble cousin, reviewing — is not a democratic activity....French critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, a name not much bruited in the blogosphere, I'll warrant....We have to find in the work of reviewers something more than idle opinion-mongering....They need to prove, not merely assert, their right to an opinion. ....At the recent Los Angeles Times Festival of Books [] blogging was presented as an attractive alternative — it doesn't take much time, and it is a method of publicly expressing oneself (like finger-painting, I thought to myself, but never mind).

Ok.  This fondness for credentialism that's become a hallmark of members of the traditional media when sneering at bloggers is very strange coming from people who work in jobs that up until just a few generations ago were done and done well by people who hadn't finished high school.  There was a time when having a college degree in journalism was an obstacle to getting hired by a daily newspaper.

But as for credentials, a random sampling of my blog roll would turn up doctors, lawyers, investment bankers, scientists, lawyers, college professors, best-selling novelists, poets, and working journalists, actors, filmmakers, television writers, and film and drama critics.

It flatters their own vanity to think that the bloggers challenging them are pajama-wearing agoraphobes who'd spend their days muttering to themselves if they didn't have computers, but these blogophobes only prove their own ignorance by missing the fact that a whole lot of highly accomplished people blog, people who have credentials and resumes that make holders of simple BAs in journalism look like a pitiful pack of underachieving goof-offs.

And they doubly prove their ignorance by proving it to the very people they need to think them smart and savvy---bloggers and blog readers are their audience.  We're the readers of their newspapers and magazines and the buyers of their books.

On top of which, Schickel's proudly admitted undemocratic views are very strange coming from a citizen of the country that produced Abe Lincoln, Tom Edison, Booker T. Washington, and the Wright Brothers.  We are a nation of autodidacts and self-made men and women and it's ludicrous to think that of all the many jobs there are to be done film criticism is one of the ones that require special and esoteric training.

A college degree is a good thing and nothing except genius beats years of experience on the job, but the fact is that neither the degree nor the experience is a guarantee that the person doing the job knows how to do it.

Ford's some guy sitting in his basement in Terre Haute and his cousin, Brian Williams' Vinny who hasn't left his apartment in two years, very easily could have taught themselves more about literature or politics than most Workshop trained MFA's or Ivy League poli sci professors know, nevermind what their own courses of study and personal experience and native intelligence could give them on your average journalistic hack of a film critic toiling away on the back pages of a decidedly middle-brow news magazine notorious for rewriting its own reporters' and critics' copy to dumb it down.

But besides being creepily un-American---in fact, almost a parody of a French academician's---Schickel's attitude towards criticism is hilariously packed with unintended, self-caricaturing irony.

A commenter at Kevin Drum's place---and thanks to Kevin for this stuff on Ford and Schickel---left this quote from playwright Brendan Behan about critics:

Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves.

The definition of critic might as well be "somebody who has no business telling other people how to do their jobs."

In the traditional media, every day, movies are reviewed by people who've never held a camera, novels are reviewed by people who have never written a chapter of a book, rock bands are reviewed by people who've never played an instrument except air guitar, and plays are reviewed by people who were onstage once in their lives, in sixth grade, when they played a Pilgrim and forgot their lines and were so sick with stage fright they threw up on Myles Standish.

Most reviewers of classical music are trained musicians, and most art critics have some training as painters.  But the rest of us---and I get to include myself because, like I said, there are newspapers who've paid for my blather---got the job despite our credentials, or lack of them, not because of them.  We were able to convince some editor desperate for copy that we could fill the space with words that would come together in a fairly intelligent fashion without getting the rag we're writing for sued in the process.

Critics don't have to be able to do the work they critique.  They have to be able to appreciate the best of the work and be able to explain why and how what they're writing about at the moment measures up or doesn't measure up.  In other words, they have to be a good audience and they have to be able to write well.  They have to have good eyes, good ears, some experience using them, and a clear and snappy prose style, qualities that you don't have to be taught, even if they can be taught, which is debatable.  You don't have to go to a special school, you just have to school yourself.

Critics---Americans---don't have to prove their right to an opinion, as Schickel insists they do.  They have to prove they know what they're talking about by what they say.  Their degrees and resumes don't matter if what they write is stupid and unreadable.  Critics prove themselves by being right.  I don't mean right in that their opinion is unquestionable and definitive.  I mean that readers who read their reviews and see whatever work's being reviewed say, Yep, the critic and I were looking at the same thing and I can see what he saw and I understand why he liked or didn't like what he saw but...

The but is always a part of any assessment of a critic's work.

I'll bet Schickel hates that but.

The but means that readers are free to reject the critic's judgment, even if they think it was honestly and fairly and intelligently reached.

The but means that everybody is entitled to an opinion, a notion Schickel sneeringly rejects.

Clearly, Schickel believes that artists produce and critics pronounce and the rest of us rabble fall in line.  Bloggers are just people with opinions and to make it worse they have comment sections where other people with opinions can come along to say, But!

Epilogue:  Ford's dismissive sniff towards that guy in his basement in Terre Haute puzzles me.

For one thing, why Terre Haute?  Does Ford think he has no readers in Terre Haute?   Does he think folks in Terre Haute are on the whole illiterate?  There's a big state university in Terre Haute, one that besides having a large English department, employs one of the best biographers of the last generation, Gale E. Christianson, whose lives of Isaac Newton and poet and naturalist Loren Eisley are as far as I'm concerned works of literature.  Surely there are a few people in town who read novels.

The other thing that puzzles me is what does Ford think that guy is doing in his basement in Terre Haute?

My guess is he's writing a novel.

And this is something Ford's got to know.  Most great novelists started out as some guy or gal sitting in a basement, or an attic or a cheap rented room, in some place as obscure and far away from literary glamor and greatness as Terre Haute---some of those obscure and far away places were in Paris and New York, the distance and obscurity are spiritual and metaphorical but very real to that guy or gal. 

A few years from now Richard Ford will be blurbing that guy from Terre Haute's new novel.

Or...because an awful lot of the reviewers for the Sunday Times Book Review are writers themselves who once upon a time were just some guy or gal sitting in their basements in their own spiritual Terre Hautes...a few years from now he'll be reviewing Ford's new novel in the Times.

Of course, he'll post a link to his review on his blog.

Recommended:  Of course I always think that a long explore of my blog roll is a good and profitable way to spend some time, but today I'm pushing the two subsections called Film Majors and Literary and Artistic Types.  Take a look when you get a chance.

Weirdos, neurotics, lunatics, poets, and dreamers

A note to my fellow bloggers, right and left:

When we get the urge to project our feelings about politics or politicians onto the American people, we need to remember one thing.

We're a pack of weirdos.

I don't mean that we're weird in the blogging in our pajamas while the cats play about our slippered feet way that used to be our image among people whose lives were entirely confined to the analog world, although, frankly, some of us are still a little too enamored of our cats.

Most of us are intelligent, talented, accomplished people with successful or at least marginally fullfilling lives offline.

And I don't mean that we're weirdos in the ranting, foaming at the mouth, blinded by ideological rage way that various members of the traditional media elite would like to dismiss us as, although there are more than a few of us, more on one end of the bandwidth than the other, who have to wipe the spittle off their monitors after typing every post.

I mean we are weirdos in the sense that most normal people do not have the urge to share their every passing thought with a world of strangers.

We're weirdos because we're writers.

Most normal people when they're mad about something, moved by something, provoked into thought or sunk into deep brooding by something they''ve read, heard, seen, remembered, or dreamed don't deal with it by sitting down at a keyboard to write about it.

And if they did it would never occur to them to hit the publish button because they would never assume that what they wrote about what they're mad about, moved by, provoked into thought or sunk into brooding upon would matter to anyone besides themselves.

Now I happen to think that writing is a positive, active, life-affirming way to engage with the world.  But that's not how most normal people see it.

Most normal people see writing as a withdrawl, even an escape.  Writers, just in order to write, have to detach themselves from the world.  Most normal people understand that part of the job.  But they think that writers like that detachment.  And they're right.

Too many of us, if we're honest, would have to admit that the happiest times of our lives when we were young were the times we holed up somewhere far from the madding crowd with our notebooks, sketchpads, guitars, computers, or our thoughts.

There have been periods in human history when it was more common for people to react to something that occured to them or around them by picking up a pen, or a hammer and chisel, or a brush and a pot of paint, and the rise of the internet, the ease and ubiquity of email, and the emergence of blogs has revealed that more people have the talent and the urge to write stuff down than anybody would have thought when the ability to publish depended on access to a printing press.

With this the act of writing might be seen as less eccentric than it was in the past and that might lead to more, and more normal, people taking to their keyboards.

I think this would be a good thing.

But it won't ever be a usual thing.

It will always be a little bit of weird thing to do.

I'd like to believe that being a writer is just a result of having a particular talent and the normal human urge to use a talent. 

But the whole history of writers and writing, including those periods when it was more usual for people to write down their feelings and thoughts in their diaries, in letters, or in poems and songs, shows that the people who write out of sense of vocation tend to be weirdos, neurotics, lunatics, freaks, and geeks.

We can flatter ourselves that in our crazy way we are wiser and more attuned to the world than the poor, stifled souls who can't express their thoughts and feelings in as felicitous, even poetic ways as we do.

That still makes us weirdos.

I'm not trying to insult us or put us down.  I just think it's important for our own sanity's sake to remember this.

It's also important in helping us to reach conclusions and judgments that aren't simply projections of our own feelings, fears, and wishful fantasies.

The way we think is not the way most people think.

Add to this the fact that we are way more interested in politics than is probably healthy.

So, whenever we're responding to something in the news, something a candidate for President or Congress said, something a pundit spouted on the Sunday bobblehead fests, and we get the urge to speak for regular people and tell our readers how they're feeling or thinking or likely to feel and think, we'd better have some specific facts to back it up, poll numbers for instance.

Because...

While we're writing about an issue or a candidate or an event, putting all our passion, intelligence, insight, and talent into it, most normal people are reacting to the issue or candidate or event by saying to themselves, "Damn!  I forgot to pick up the bread."