Originally placed on display, Thursday, November 5, 2020. Copied from the original, Thursday morning, April 15, 2021.
A life drawing class full of female art students or, as Henry James might have seen it, ruthless young businesswomen in the making: Detail from “In the Studio” by Marie Bashkirtseff, 1881. Dnipro State Art Museum, Dnipro, Ukraine. Via Wikipedia.
Today is the novelist Henry James’ birthday. He’d have been 178 years old. There are some who would say that’s how long it takes to read one of his novels. There are some, as, indeed, James himself might rejoin, who should, as it were, restrain their opinions, or, to be precise, keep their yaps shut. At any rate, as it is, to say plainly, I don’t have much to say about James off the top of my head this morning. Today is also the 156th anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination, and I have much to say about Lincoln, and am at work saying it. Meanwhile, I’m reposting this one from back in November when I was reading James’ third novel “The American”, which, as it happens, reads like a breeze. James didn’t develop his more discursive later style until late in his long career. In the end he got windy. But in his youth and middle age he was generally breezy. Like here:
November 5, 2020:
This scene from Henry James’ early novel, “The American”, can serve as a reminder that James, at least in the first half of his career, was a comic novelist in the same way Dickens was. He could be as heavy-handed in naming his characters as Dickens, as well. The hero of the novel, the American of the title, a young but precociously successful businessman, is named Christopher Newman. At any rate, here’s Newman, on his first trip to Paris, determined to educate himself on matters of art, and ending up being educated on the subject of women artists as businesswomen. My favorite line is the one in which Newman remembers what he’s been informed about not “confounding the merit of the artist with that of [her] work”, which he then immediately proceeds to do. The artist's name is Claire Noemie, and, as you can guess, she turns out to be the romantic heroine and to have a terrible secret. James could be as melodramatic as Dickens too:
We [the narrator narrates] have approached him, perhaps, at a not especially favorable moment; he is by no means sitting for his portrait. But listless as he lounges there, rather baffled on the æsthetic question, and guilty of the damning fault (as we have lately discovered it to be) of confounding the merit of the artist with that of his work (for he admires the squinting Madonna of the young lady with the boyish coiffure, because he thinks the young lady herself uncommonly taking), he is a sufficiently promising acquaintance. Decision, salubrity, jocosity, prosperity, seem to hover within his call; he is evidently a practical man, but the idea in his case, has undefined and mysterious boundaries, which invite the imagination to bestir itself on his behalf.
As the little copyist proceeded with her work, she sent every now and then a responsive glance toward her admirer. The cultivation of the fine arts appeared to necessitate, to her mind, a great deal of by-play, a great standing off with folded arms and head drooping from side to side, stroking of a dimpled chin with a dimpled hand, sighing and frowning and patting of the foot, fumbling in disordered tresses for wandering hair-pins. These performances were accompanied by a restless glance, which lingered longer than elsewhere upon the gentleman we have described. At last he rose abruptly, put on his hat, and approached the young lady. He placed himself before her picture and looked at it for some moments, during which she pretended to be quite unconscious of his inspection. Then, addressing her with the single word which constituted the strength of his French vocabulary, and holding up one finger in a manner which appeared to him to illuminate his meaning, “Combien?” he abruptly demanded.
The artist stared a moment, gave a little pout, shrugged her shoulders, put down her palette and brushes, and stood rubbing her hands.
“How much?” said our friend, in English. “Combien?”
“Monsieur wishes to buy it?” asked the young lady in French.
“Very pretty, splendide. Combien?” repeated the American.
“It pleases monsieur, my little picture? It’s a very beautiful subject,” said the young lady.
“The Madonna, yes; I am not a Catholic, but I want to buy it. Combien? Write it here.” And he took a pencil from his pocket and showed her the fly-leaf of his guide-book. She stood looking at him and scratching her chin with the pencil. “Is it not for sale?” he asked. And as she still stood reflecting, and looking at him with an eye which, in spite of her desire to treat this avidity of patronage as a very old story, betrayed an almost touching incredulity, he was afraid he had offended her. She was simply trying to look indifferent, and wondering how far she might go. “I haven’t made a mistake—pas insulté, no?” her interlocutor continued. “Don’t you understand a little English?”
The young lady’s aptitude for playing a part at short notice was remarkable. She fixed him with her conscious, perceptive eye and asked him if he spoke no French. Then, “Donnez!” she said briefly, and took the open guide-book. In the upper corner of the fly-leaf she traced a number, in a minute and extremely neat hand. Then she handed back the book and took up her palette again.
Our friend read the number: “2,000 francs.” He said nothing for a time, but stood looking at the picture, while the copyist began actively to dabble with her paint. “For a copy, isn’t that a good deal?” he asked at last. “Pas beaucoup?”
The young lady raised her eyes from her palette, scanned him from head to foot, and alighted with admirable sagacity upon exactly the right answer. “Yes, it’s a good deal. But my copy has remarkable qualities, it is worth nothing less.”
From the Department of In Search of Lost Time. Easter Sunday, April 21, 2019:
Happy Easter. Shh. We’re at mass. Father Bob’s leading us through a rousing recitation of the renewal of our baptismal vows.
“Do you reject Satan?” he asks at the top of his voice while smiling broadly, knowing we will.
“We do!” we shout back with great good cheer.
“And all his works?”
“We do!”
“And all his empty promises?”
“You betcha!”
Ok, that was me. And I said it under my breath. The rest of the congregation cried out lustily that they do.
Yes, I’m taking notes in church. It’s my form of meditation. You might be surprised that I’m in church and at mass. We’re here with Mom Mannion. We’re visiting the old Mannion Homestead to celebrate Easter with her and my brothers Larry and Lyle and my sister Liz and their families. After mass we’re all going out to brunch. Right now there’s nothing for me to do but pretend I’m still a good Catholic or at least a dependable CAPE one. I have to say Father Bob gives good a good mass. He’s a big barrel-shaped, moon-faced, gray-haired cleric of about fifty-five. Mom Mannion thinks the world of him. Pop Mannion did too. I don’t trust him. But I don’t trust any priests these days. I enjoy his sermons though. I’ve sat through three in the last two months. That makes three masses more than I attended in the year before, and one of those was a funeral mass. Pop’s funeral. Father Bob said the mass and delivered the eulogy. He did Pop proud. He also did the benediction at the dedication naming the town hall after Pop. Last time we were up here Father Bob’s took for his text for his sermon the parable of the Prodigal Son. I got a real kick out of it. I should write a post on that. I took notes. Naturally.
Now he’s moved on to expanding on the baptismal vows.
“Do you mind if I ask you a few more questions?”
Of course we don’t.
He fires off the questions---too fast for me to keep up. I’m writing them down as I catch them, so I’m not putting them in order. I got the first two in order.
“Do you BELIEVE?”
“Do you believe in BELIEVING?”
Here are the ones I caught after that:
“Do you believe in Fairness?”
“Do you believe in Justice?”
“Do you believe in Mercy?”
“Do you believe in Peace?”
“Do you believe that this year our family is going to make a difference?”
Our family is the parish. The difference is that together we’re going the world a fairer, more just, merciful, and peaceful place for everybody.
Father Bob’s turned this part of the mass into a pep rally for Social Justice. This isn’t perfunctory or rote. Father Bob, without being preachy about it, preaches regularly that the point is social justice. Everybody means everybody. As in we’re all in this together. As in nobody gets left behind. It’s implicit in the parish’s mission statement, which is printed on the front page of the weekly bulletin:
We are an Evangelizing Roman Catholic Community of Christ’s Disciples that Welcomes All Prays Joyfully Grows in Faith Proclaims God’s Kingdom Acts Justly: This is our Mission
The parish has a dedicated Social Justice Ministry. Its members are busy organizing the parish’s participation in next weekend’s CROP Walk. Father Bob will be leading the parish contingent on the walk.
Today’s gospel was from John, Chapter 20, Verses 1-9. The painting up top, by Annabile Carracci, depicts a scene from Luke’s Easter story. I couldn’t find a painting I liked based on John’s. There’s a great painting by Alexander Ivanov based on John’s story of Mary Magdalene encountering Jesus outside the tomb while Peter and John are taking a look around inside, but it’s not as colorful or joyful as Carracci’s. I like John’s story better than Luke’s. I like what John has Jesus saying to Mary--- “Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?” ---but I imagine him smiling when he says it and then nearly laughing when she still doesn’t realize it’s him---she thinks he’s the gardener---and he snaps her into focus with an amused and affectionate “Mary!” But he isn’t smiling in Ivanov’s painting and doesn’t look even mildly amused. He looks still mostly dead and as if he spent all day yesterday harrowing hell and it took more out of him than being crucified.
Father Bob gave his usual lively reading. It’s more accurate to say he performs the gospels rather than reads them. Today’s sermon started with the Easter story but he moved on to touch on other things. He told us about a couple of minor frustrations he’d experienced in the past week, Both his chalices broke. One was chipped on the lip, which he discovered when he went to drink from in during the Eucharist. The other sprang a leak. “A chalice is made to do one thing!” he said in mock dismay and irritation, as if he was saying “You had one job!” But he was leading into reminding us what a hard year we’ve been through, in which his frustrations were trivial in the grand scheme of things. Here’s something he said that made me sit up and take notice, which I think made a lot of people around me take notice too:
The Church, he said, had another hard year “mostly brought on by its own doing.”
We all knew what he was referring too. Even the Pope has trouble bringing himself to be that self-accusatory.
But Father Bob left that to sink in. He worked his way to his main subject.
Symbol. That’s the key word. Symbol. Not totem. Not icon. And of all of us. The Church first, but only as the starting point. All of us.
Then he conjured up for us the image---the altar with its gold cross still standing, looking almost untouched by the fire amid the burnt wreckage and scorched ruins. Another symbol. Not a miracle. A piece of luck giving us something to focus on and think about: that no matter the trouble and the suffering and the difficulty we go through, some good can still be left standing inside us and from that and around that we can rebuild.
Correction: My brother Luke pointed out that Father Bob didn't deliver Pop's eulogy. He did. And he did a beautiful job of it too. Technically, what Father Bob did was give the sermon----in the church missal it's called the homily---devoted to Pop.
Adapted from the Twitter and Facebook feeds, Monday, December 14, 2020, and lifted from the archives, January 7, 2016. Posted Thursday night, December 17.
Jonathan Pine (Tom Hiddleston), the night manager of a famous European hotel and a tough but sentimental man about to be drawn into intrigue and adventure by the arrival of the femme fatale mistress of an illegal arms dealer (Elizabeth Debiki) in the upcoming BBC adaptation of John le Carré's (comic?) novel“The Night Manager”.
Nuts! Thank you, Simon Schama. You too, Brad De Long. Now I want to stay up all night reading “The Honorable Schoolboy”. Which is nuts of me, because I don’t own a copy and can’t rush out to the library or Barnes and Noble at this hour to pick one up, and because I do own a copy of le Carre’s last---last as in final---novel, “Agent Running in the Field” and I’m currently reading it and enjoying it and can stay up all night finishing it.
You probably heard. John le Carre is gone. Since I can’t write about “The Honorable Schoolboy” or “Agent Running in the Field” (yet), by way of a tribute, here's a post I wrote just shy of five years ago, when an adaption of "The Night Manager" was about to make its way to TV and I was reading the novel to gear up. By the way, the answer to the question in the title of the post, is, he could be…
January 7, 2016:
When did John le Carré become a comic writer? Or has he always been and I'm just finally getting attuned to the joke?
The wig, the immortal wig: Herr Kaspar’s one-hundred-and-forty-thousand-franc crown, the pride of every classic concierge in Switzerland. Herr Kaspar’s William Tell of a wig, Frau Loring called it: the wig that dared to raise itself in revolt against the millionaire despot Madame Archetti…
Madame Archetti had inherited the Archetti supermarket fortune [and] lived off the interest on the interest. And what she liked at age fifty-something was tour the great hotels of Europe in her open English sports car, followed by her staff and wardrobe in a van. She knew the names of every concierge and headwaiter from the Four Seasons in Hamburg to Cipriani in Venice to the Villa d’Este on Lake Como. She prescribed them diets and herbal remedies and acquainted them with their horoscopes. And she tipped them on a scale scarcely to be imagined, provided they found favor.
And favor was what Herr Kaspar found in bucketloads...He found it to the tune of twenty thousand Swiss francs each annual visit, not to mention quack hair remedies, magic stones to put beneath his pillow to cure his sciatica, and half kilos of Beluga caviar on Christmas and saints’ days, which Herr Kaspar discreetly converted to cash by means of an understanding with a famous food hall in the the town. All this for obtaining a few theater tickets and booking a few dinner tables, on which of course he exacted his customary commission. And for bestowing those pious signals of devotion that Madame Archetti required for her role as chatelaine of the servant kingdom.
Until the day Herr Kaspar bought his wig.
He did not buy it rashly...He bought land in Texas first, thanks to a [client of the hotel] in the oil business. The investment flourished, and he took his profit. Only then did he decide that like his patroness he had reached a stage in life where he was entitled to shed a few of his advancing years. After months of measuring and debate, the thing was ready---a wonder wig, a miracle of artful simulation. To try it out he availed himself of his annual holiday on Mykonos, and one Monday morning in September he reappeared behind his desk, bronzed and fifteen years younger as long as you didn’t look at him from the top.
And no one did...Or if they did they didn’t mention the wig at all...The whole hotel had tacitly decided to share in the glow of Herr Kaspar’s rejuvenation…And things continued happily in this way until the evening Madame Archetti arrived for her customary month’s stay, and as usual her hotel family lined up to greet her in the lobby…
And [there] at his desk [was] Herr Kaspar in his wig.
“What are we wearing on our head, Kaspar?”
“Hair, Madame.”
“Whose hair, Kaspar?”
“It is mine,” Herr Kaspar replied with bearing.
“Take it off,” Madame Archetti ordered. “Or you will never have another penny from me.”
“I cannot take it off, Madame. My hair is part of my personality. It is integrated.”
“Then dis-integrate it, Kaspar. Not now---it is too complicated---but for tomorrow morning. Otherwise nothing. What have you got at the theatre for me?”
“Othello, Madame.”
“I shall look at you again in the morning. Who’s playing him?”
“Leiser, Madame. The greatest Moor we have.”
“We shall see.”
Next morning at eight o’clock to the minute Herr Kaspar reappeared for duty, his crossed keys of office glinting like campaign medals from his lapels. And on his head, triumphantly, the emblem of his insurrection. All morning a precarious hush prevailed in the lobby. The hotel guests...were aware of the imminent explosion, even if they did not know its cause. At midday, which was her hour, Madame Archetti emerged from the Tower Suite and descended the staircase on the arm of her prevailing swain, a promising young barber from Graz.
“But where is Herr Kaspar this morning,” she asked in Herr Kaspar’s vague direction.
“He is behind his desk and at your service as ever, Madame,” he replied in a voice that, to those who heard it, echoed for all time in the halls of freedom. “He has tickets for the Moor.”
“I see no Herr Kaspar,” Madame Archetti informed her escort. “I see hair. Tell him, please, we shall miss him in his obscurity.”
I especially like that promising young barber from Graz.
Ok, it’s not P.G. Wodehouse. But there are distinct echoes of Austen and Wilde---Madame Archetti is directly descended from the Ladies de Bourgh and Bracknell---and a touch of Waugh. Might be better, rather than calling le Carré a comic writer. to call him an ironist, a quality I’ve always noticed in his work. But in "The Night Manager" he’s verging into satire.
Come to think of it, though, "The Tailor of Panama" is a satire of Graham Greene’s and le Carré's own spy novels. And, come to think of that, Greene was a self-satirist himself. So why am I surprised to find myself laughing at a le Carré novel.
Well, smiling.
Ironically.
I started reading "The Night Manager" this evening because I’d just learned that there’s a television mini-series in the offing, starring Tom Hiddleston as the protagonist, Jonathan Pine, the night manager of the hotel where Herr Kaspar is the concierge, and---dark shades of P.G. Wodehouse!---Hugh Laurie as the villain, an illegal arms dealer named Richard Onslow Roper.
But I decided to put it aside for now and stick with "The Night Manager" because of Herr Kaspar, his wig, Madame Archetti, and that promising young barber.
Now I’m second-guessing my choice.
The hero of "The Night Manager" has just met a femme fatale.
I expect no good will come of it.
I’m not a fan of femme fatales in novels and movies and TV shows. They require too much suspension of disbelief.
I didn't live a monk-like existence before I got married, but I can't say I dated all sorts and conditions.
Most of my girlfriends were one type or another of artist, intellectual, or bohemian.
That's another way of saying neurotic.
But not one of them was a femme fatale.
I dated a few who were trouble. There were a couple who could have drawn me into real-life Elmore Leonard novels. One had a boyfriend in the army she neglected to tell me about until he came home on leave. Another had a husband in prison. She swore he wasn’t up for parole for several years. There was another who seemed to enjoy pitting her would-be boyfriends against each other but I think with her it was more the case that she was like people who can’t help ordering another dessert before they’re finished their first. In matters of love and romance she was an innocent and cheerful glutton. But I wouldn’t call any of them or any other girl I dated a femme fatale.
At least, none of them had a history of enticing tough but sentimental men who should have known better into intrigues and adventures.
Are there any real femme fatales?
If there are, I never fell into one's clutches.
I don't know if I should count myself lucky.
My life could have used a little intrigue and adventure.
Still, it always presents a problem for me as a reader when a plot depends on the hero falling into the clutches of a femme fatale.
Besides the suspension of disbelief required to accept her existence, I always suspect an element of wish-fulfillment on the author’s part and---ironically---a trace of gynophobia. It’s as if the writer is scaring himself with his own fantasy, fearing what he desires and desiring what he fears. I’m not accusing le Carré of this. But too many other writers have fallen into this trap of their own devising and I’ve grown wary.
But she’s arrived, in the company of the villain, off-limits to the hero for that reason and for that reason almost certain to entice him into intrigue and adventure even though he knows better.
The trailer for "The Night Manager" doesn’t make it look the least bit comic. And the cast list at imdb.com doesn’t include Herr Kaspar or Madame Archetti. But there does appear to be some definite femme fatale-ism at work.
Originally keyboarded, not typed, sad to report, August 8, 2013. Keyboarded again and posted Tuesday morning, October 20, 2020.
Tom Hanks showing off his collection of typewriters in a scene from the 2016 documentary “California Typewriter”.
Was doing a search of recent twitter posts, trying to find something I’d written in August about Tom Hanks’ movie “Greyhound” and I found instead something I’d written about Hanks in August of 2013! It led me to an old blog post in which I attempted to answer the question “If we ever met, would Tom Hanks and I have become friends?” The answer was we surely would if all we talked about was our mutual love of typewriters.
Thursday, August 8, 2013.
More than the romantic adventures and misadventures, more than any late night conversations about books and writing, more than anything read or said in the workshops, more than the arguments friendly and not so friendly at the bars after class, more than that day in class when, armed with a gift from Uncle Merlin just arrived in the mail, I jumped on the seminar table and, after declaring him a fugitive from intergalactic justice, zapped Ron Hansen with my brand-new toy ray gun which lit up red and yellow and made satisfyingly loud buzzing and humming noises, and then ran from the room shouting that the Federation had been avenged, and more even than any actual writing I did, my time at the Iowa Writers Workshop is defined in my memory by the image of my typewriter sitting in a circle of light on my makeshift desk in my bedroom in the house I shared with six other grad students on the street where Flannery O'Connor lived when she was at the Workshop forty years before. It’s eight or nine o’clock on a Friday night. I’ve just come upstairs with a cup of coffee or can of Pepsi, ready to spend the next three hours pounding away to earn the reward of catching up with friends at whatever watering hole they’d be watering at around midnight.
I loved that time. I loved that typewriter. It had been with me forever, my eighth grade graduation gift from Mom and Pop Mannion. The world was still very young then. PC’s were appearing on desktops all over the country and a few of my friends and classmates had them. Some of my friends made use of the University’s computer labs. But for the most part all the writing done in Iowa City was done on typewriters. We typed out our stories and our poems and our letters home and it’s a wonder all the windows in town didn’t rattle day and night from the vibration and noise.
I’m not nostalgic for typewriters. I was a slow and inexpert typist and I never had enough Liquid Paper on hand. Desktop computers and then laptops were godsends. But I still wish I had a working typewriter, just for the fun of it. Because they are fun to write on. They make noise. They encourage violence in art, like action painting. Using them made writing feel like real work. Mark Twain used a typewriter. Hemingway used a typewriter. Clark Kent used a typewriter.
As long as we talked of nothing else but typewriters.
Remingtons from the 1930s go THICK THICK. Midcentury Royals sound like a voice repeating the word CHALK. CHALK. CHALK CHALK. Even the typewriters made for the dawning jet age (small enough to fit on the fold-down trays of the first 707s), like the Smith Corona Skyriter and the design masterpieces by Olivetti, go FITT FITT FITT like bullets from James Bond’s silenced Walther PPK. Composing on a Groma, exported to the West from a Communist country that no longer exists, is the sound of work, hard work. Close your eyes as you touch-type and you are a blacksmith shaping sentences hot out of the forge of your mind.
Try this experiment: on your laptop, type out the opening line of “Moby Dick” and it sounds like callmeishmael. Now do the same on a 1950s Olympia (need one? I’ve got a couple) and behold: CALL! ME! ISHMAEL! Use your iPad to make a to-do list and no one would even notice, not that anyone should. But type it on an old Triumph, Voss or Cole Steel and the world will know you have an agenda: LUGGAGE TAGS! EXTENSION CORDS! CALL EMMA!
You will need to make space for a typewriter and surrender the easy luxury of the DELETE key, but what you sacrifice in accuracy will be made up in panache. Don’t bother with correcting tape, white-out or erasable onionskin paper. There is no shame in type-overs or XXXXXXiing out a word so mistyped that spell-check could not decipher it. Such blemishes will become the personality of your typing equal to the legibility, or lack thereof, of your penmanship.
The late, great Tom Seaver circa 1969. Via USA Today.
Now Seaver’s gone. I have a lot to say about him. I’ve said much of it over the past 16 years here on the blog, it’s just come out in bits and pieces. I don’t know how well or how quick I can put it together. I’ll try to work up something worthy of the man and my favorite Met of all-time, the greatest Met of all time, one of the greatest pitchers of all time, but this is all I have on hand at the moment. It’s from last October during the AL playoffs. It’s not much, but I love this story…
Astros pitching coach Brent Strom’s seventy-one years old. Strom wasn't the oldest pitching coach working in the major leagues this season. The Mets’ Phil Regan is eighty-two. Still, Strom’s no kid. He made his major league debut in 1972. Two years before Astros manager A.J. Hinch was born. Strom had a brief, intermittent, and undistinguished major league career. His first season was with the Mets. Went 0 and 3. Next year he was with the Indians. Year after that he sat out. Then he pitched three years for the Padres, and then he was done. Neither here nor there. Lots of great coaches and managers weren’t near being Hall of Famers. More than a few weren’t even major leaguers. Cardinals manager Mike Shildt didn’t even make it to the minors. Point is, in 1972 Strom was a rookie with the Mets, and one day, wrth the Mets set to play the Pirates, Roberto Clemente’s team at the time, Willie Stargell’s team at the time, Strom’s in the bullpen before the game, watching the Mets starting pitcher warm up. That happened to be Tom Seaver.
So this rookie Strom, duly impressed, bright eyed, full of hero worship and a little full of himself because Tom Seaver's his teammate and he gets to talk to him almost as an equal, gushes to Seaver, “Wow, Tom, you’ve got great stuff tonight!”
And Seaver looks at him with, I imagine, his usual air of mischief and amusement and says in his calm, understated way, “Kid, Stargell and Clemente will let you know what kind of stuff I’ve got tonight.”
Recalled from the archives, Friday, October 14, 2005.. Reposted in memory of Carl Reiner, Tuesday night, June 30, 2020.
To me he’ll always be Big Bad Brady. Carl Reiner (left) with Dick Van Dyke in one of my favorite episodes of “The Dick Van Dyke Show”--- "The Gunslinger”.
[I’m sure you heard. Carl Reiner’s gone. I don’t know which to watch in tribute: my favorite movie he directed, “Oh, God!”’; my favorite movie he acted in, “The Russians Are Coming! The Russians are Coming!”; or every episode of “The Dick Van Dyke Show”, which he created, produced, wrote for, directed, and occasionally acted in, and which is in of itself his ticket to immortality. If I had my copy here, I’d re-read his memoir, “My Anecdotal Life”. While I decide, here’s a post I wrote in 2005 (God, I’ve been at this a long time…) when I read “My Anecdotal Life” the first time. It’s as much about Bill Clinton as about Reiner, but at heart it’s more about Reiner’s brother Charlie than either. It’s Reiner’s anecdote and it’s full of affection and pride for Charlie, so in honor of Charlie in honor of Carl…]
I've been watching a lot of old Dick Van Dyke shows, as you might have guessed, and thinking, Darnit, I wish I was living Rob Petrie's life.
That, by the way, includes wishing that it was 1961, I'm 32 years old, commuting into New York City every day to write for a television show, and wearing a white shirt with a skinny black tie everywhere, even when I'm home at night watching television with my beautiful well-coiffed ex-dancer wife or playing bridge with the kooky but loveable neighbors from next door.
It also means I wish that we had parties like the Petries, with lots of our attractive friends, all of whom can sing or dance or tell jokes or hypnotize the host's wife at the drop of a hat and make her deliver the Gettysburg Address.
Up until the other day I thought I was fantasizing about living a fantasy. You know it's a fantasy of suburban life circa 1960, because none of those attractive guests at the Petries' parties is holding a highball glass.
But maybe it's not. It dawned on me recently that it's not Rob Petrie's fantasy life I'm envying. It's Carl Reiner's real life. Reiner, the creator, producer, and chief writer of the Dick Van Dyke Show, based the premise and many of the stories on his own experience as a second banana for Sid Caesar. He didn't write for Your Show of Shows and its successors---whenever he tried to contribute a joke or an idea for a sketch, the show's head writer, who was nothing like Rob Petrie, would remind him, kindly, "What the fuck do you know? You're just a fucking actor." But Reiner wrote in his spare time at home and his best friend on the show's staff was a young writer named Mel somebody or other. Mel Streams. Mel Rivers. Mel something to do with running water. Did an act with Reiner at parties, like the parties at Rob and Laura's, in which he pretended to be a man 2000 years old and Reiner interviewed him about famous events from history like the time Murray discovered "ladies."
Mel Creeks?
What ever became of that guy?
At any rate, I'm reading one of Reiner's books of memoirs, My Anecdotal Life, and it turns out that he's led something of a charmed life. A very talented guy who's been very lucky, who also worked very hard and earned his luck, and through it all managed to remain a decent guy.
You got to hate him.
One of Reiner's writer heroes is Mark Twain, so one of the proudest moments in his life was when President Clinton presented him with the Mark Twain Prize.
There was a big awards ceremony for television, but Clinton asked Reiner to come to the White House the next day so he could pin the medal on him personally.
The whole Reiner family was invited and showed up. Reiner's wife, children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, grandnieces and grandnephews, and Reiner's brother Charlie, who was losing a long battle with cancer but was going down swinging. Charlie insisted on showing up even though he had to come in a wheelchair.
Some friends of Reiner's were there too. Dick Van Dyke, Mary Tyler Moore, Jerry Seinfeld, Steve Martin, all of them gathered around a table in a meeting room off the Oval Office.
Clinton comes in, presents Reiner with his medal, and then shakes hands with everybody there.
Clinton never just shakes hands. Shaking hands with Bill Clinton means you talk with Bill Clinton. Secret Service hates this, of course. So do his advance people. He's late for everything because of it. Clinton once came to Syracuse. Took him two hours to get out of the airport. So Clinton has little chats with all of Reiner's family and friends. Last person he comes to is Reiner's brother Charlie.
Reiner makes the introductions, and then, because Clinton had recently been to Normandy for the 50th Anniversary of D-Day, Reiner tells the President that Charlie had been in 11 major battles in World War II, including the invasion of Normandy.
"D-Day, Omaha Beach?" Clinton asks.
"No," says Charlie, "Utah Beach, D-Day plus four." And tells the President he was with the 27th Infantry, Ninth Division, First Army.
Clinton says, "Your outfit took Ste Marie l'Eglise and St Malo?"
Charlie's amazed. "How did you know that?"
Clinton grins. "I read a lot."
For the next 15 minutes the two of them talk. Charlie's in his wheelchair, of course, so Clinton sits down on the edge of the table to get closer to his level. They talk about the war and about the ceremony at Normandy and some of the things Clinton heard from the veterans that day. Fifteen minutes. At one point an aide comes in to tell the President his helicopter's waiting to take him somewhere. Clinton waves him off. "Tell 'em I'll be there in a minute." And he and Charlie talk some more.
Keep in mind who else is in that room. Besides Carl Reiner, there's Rob Reiner, Jerry Seinfeld, Steve Martin, Dick Van Dyke, and Mary Tyler Moore. Mary Tyler Moore's right there. Sure, she's older, but you've seen her, she looks great, and, come on, it's Bill Clinton. But he's not talking to her. He's not talking to the celebrities.
All of his attention is focused on a dying old man in a wheelchair.
Where it ought to be.
I don't want anybody putting in the comments any comparisons between Bill and George Bush, because it just wouldn't be fair. It would be like putting Abraham Lincoln next to John Adams and complimenting Lincoln on being a foot taller. In fact, it would be like standing all the Presidents in a line and deciding Lincoln's the greatest because he's the tallest. (Or does Lyndon Johnson have him by a fraction of an inch?) We're talking about a gift here. This is Clinton's gift, the way he was favored by the gods. No President was as good at this as he is.
Lincoln could come close. LBJ, but there was always an element of bullying in Johnson's good old boy friendliness. Theodore Roosevelt, when he could make himself stop talking.
Other Presidents who are supposed to have had a special rapport with people, Reagan, FDR, JFK, George Washington---really, everybody who met him fell in love with Washington---were really more the beneficiaries of people's projected emotions. They accepted adulation with a special grace that looked like understanding.
But Bill's out there all alone, far ahead of them. His special grace is that he does understand. He's an empath, which makes him practically a Martian. Like I said, it's a gift. But gifts aren't admirable unless they are put to use in the right ways.
I hate the book Primary Colors and I only don't hate the movie version because of John Travolta's remarkable Clinton impersonation. Both the book and the movie are cartoons. But there's one scene that strikes me as true, so true that I think it must have been taken from life. In fact, I know that there have been plenty of moments like it in Clinton's life.
It's the scene in which the aide who is the protagonist of the story comes looking for his candidate, Governor Jack Stanton, in his hotel room late at night and discovers Stanton's snuck out. The aide's baffled and a bit anxious, worried Stanton's out tomcatting around, but he happens to look out the hotel room window and he sees a diner across the parking lot. The diner's lit up but there are only two nighthawks in it. The counterman and the candidate.
The counterman is talking, yakking away, a long, long story that probably has no point, no punchline, and no importance to anybody but him. But Stanton's attention is riveted on him. He's hanging on every word. And he's smiling. A great big smile of pure joy. He's where he wants to be, doing what he wants to do, putting his gift to work.
I know that if that didn't happen exactly like that it happened in a hundred variations.
It happened that day in the White House, when Charlie met Bill and they talked.
There’s still a lot of the primary season to get through, with some key states favorable to Bernie ahead---Michigan, Missouri, Washington, Arizona, Florida, Illinois, Ohio, Wisconsin, and New York---so it’s nowhere close to over. But I’m still thinking it’ll probably be Joe. And the prospect still doesn’t excite me and still has me worried, not just about the election, but about him. I can’t help doubting he’s up to it. What I wish is that we could have run this guy in 2016. There were reasons he didn’t run, couldn’t run, but I think he woulda won. From a post I wrote back in March of last year…
I don’t believe Biden’s our only hope for beating Trump. I don’t even think he’s our best hope. But an awful lot of people think he’s both. And I can see how they see him as such.
He’s Trump’s mirror image, his inverted double. He's his William Wilson (Mayor Pete can cite Joyce. I can cite Poe.), the good man Trump knows he isn’t and can’t be: A skilled and talented politician with a record of achievement, who appeals to working and middle class voters of all colors and both genders without appealing to their hatreds, resentments, and fears. An old school shake every hand-kiss every baby campaigner who knows how to talk to people and, more important, listen to them. A regular guy with a real sense of humor, a bit of a goof but in a lovable way, who happens to be smarter than most everybody else in the room but doesn’t make a show of it. Someone who is capable of enjoying life without his enjoyment coming at other people’s expense. A tall, strong, loving man whose whole adult life has been devoted to public service. A good husband (and this would come up. Where’s Biden’s first wife? Not collecting on her pre-nup and dropping bits of gossip when the mood takes her) and good father. Which brings me to one more thing.
Lifted from the archives, January 5, 2018. Re-posted Monday night, December 23, 2019.
Rey (Daisy Ridley) on her quest as the Romantic but not epic hero of the less than great but still fun second installment of the Star Wars sequels, The Last Jedi.
[My Star Wars Sequels reblogging marathon continues with my second post on “The Last Jedi”.]
That The Last Jedi was not a great movie or even all that good a Star Wars movie was not the first thought I had when the final credits started to roll. My first thought was, Wow! That was fun! My second thought was, But not as much fun as I expected…
I had a great time at The Last Jedi but, like I said, it’s not a great movie. There are plot holes you can fly the Millennium Falcon through and as many of them as Yavin has moons. It’s long. Over-long. Reportedly writer-director Rian Johnson wanted to make it longer and has lot of leftover footage for when his director’s cut comes to Blu-ray, but based on what he left in, it’s hard to imagine what of interest he might have left out. There are long stretches of nothing happening, filmed and acted as if this nothing that’s happening is as critical as Luke turning off his computer or as chilling and tension-filled as Han’s being frozen in carbonite and the gang escaping from Cloud City or as packed with swashbuckling action and adventure as the fight aboard Jabba’s sail barge. There are other scenes in which nothing happens that are filmed and acted as if nothing’s happening. When things are happening, to get them happening or keep them happening, smart characters have multiple attacks of the stupids. And, most disappointing, The Last Jedi does nothing to move the story of the sequels along, because, adding to the disappointment, it reveals that the sequels don’t actually have a story.
Not one worth it taking three movies to tell.
Check that.
It’s worth a trilogy but after two movies the sequels haven’t gotten down to the business of even beginning to tell it. The Last Jedi alludes to it, as if it’s being told in another set of movies that’s being released in alteration with the sequels, and we’ve already seen Episode VIIB and Episode VIIIC, with the two series intersecting and wrapping up together in Episode VIX. Would that it were so. That other series is telling the same story as The Lord of the Rings.
The age of magic and miracles is passing.
The prequels told the story of Anakin Skywalker’s fall from grace and with it the corruption of the entire galaxy. They didn’t tell it well. But that didn’t change the fact that the story itself is profound, epic, and tragic.
The original trilogy told the story of the return to grace in the person of Luke. It’s profound, epic, and comedic in the classical sense---order is restored, harmony reigns, and the good people live happily ever after.
In both trilogies, the fate of the world is tied up in the fate of the hero.
The sequels are not looking tragic or comedic. So far they’ve been routinely Romantic. And not epic. And not profound.
The fate of the world is not tied up in the fate of a hero.
Rey, whom I adore the way I adore d’Artagnan, Robin Hood, Jim Hawkins, Bilbo Baggins, and all the Knights of the Round Table, is, as I’ve written before, Percival, the natural innocent who becomes Arthur’s second greatest knight, but she’s to the Star Wars saga what Percival is to the Arthurian legends---not Lancelot. That is, she may be the one of the greatest knights but she’s not the greatest hero. A true epic hero needs an opponent or a challenge worthy of her.
Snoke is no Palpatine, Kylo Ren is definitely, emphatically no Anakin, and without a Palpatine or a Vader, Rey can be no Luke nor is she really in danger of becoming another Anakin. The Force Awakens is Rey’s origin story. She’s tested but not challenged in the way we would expect her to be challenged as the next step in her hero’s journey. This parallels what Luke goes through in A New Hope. He’s tested but his challenge isn’t given to him until The Empire Strikes Back and the moment when during his training he confronts “Darth Vader” and in lifting the mask confronts himself. In A New Hope, Vader is formidable but as far as we know he’s just the Black Knight. Now it’s revealed he’s somebody far more dangerous. He’s not simply a powerful villain who could kill Luke in a lightsaber duel or a dogfight. He’s a threat to Luke’s very soul. Luke doesn’t know it yet---neither are we supposed to---but he’s being told that Vader is his father and his challenge is to redeem the world by redeeming Anakin while resisting temptation and not falling from grace himself. The temptation, though, will come from Palpatine, working through Vader, and so Palpatine---Darth Sidious---is Luke’s real opponent, far more powerful, sinister, evil, and persuasive than Vader.
At the end of The Force Awakens, Rey, having passed her test, is given not a challenge but a quest.
It’s relatively straight-forward. She’s to find Luke, heal his psychic wound, and convince him to come home with her to save the galaxy. Along the way, she’s to receive the training from him she needs to master her skills so she can defeat Kylo Ren the next time they meet. If the parallels to Luke’s quest to find Yoda were to continue, she would be given the challenge that would make or break her as an epic hero. Things don’t quite work out as she hopes or we might expect.
Luke, unlike Yoda, hasn’t been waiting for the New Hope to come find him. He left the map, in case the day came when he was needed, but he’s been growing increasingly afraid that that day would come. And he’s convinced himself that if that day comes he’s the last person anyone should come to for help. He’s adamant that he won’t go home with Rey---which is to say, he refuses to let her heal him---and the little training he begrudges her is actually training in why she shouldn’t want to be a Jedi.
The challenge she’s given she gives to herself. Sensing that the Resistance isn’t up to the job of resisting let alone defeating the First Order and that she’s going to need help if she’s going to do the job herself, she decides to redeem Kylo Ren and convince him to help save the galaxy. Kylo Ren isn’t in the same league as Vader as a villain, but it may be that’s because he’s meant to be a hero. After all, look at his mother, father, and uncle. Look at what his grandfather was before his fall from grace. This doesn’t quite work out as she hoped either.
Ironically, in trying to make him a hero, she seems to be turning him into a stronger villain. Also a more compelling character.
This is interesting and potentially exciting---it depends on how it plays out in Episode IX---but it takes up about 40 minutes of The Last Jedi. The other two hours of The Last Jedi is mainly an extended chase scene---with a side trip to a truly fascinating and fun corner of the galaxy where it appears James Bondian adventures in space take place but which we don’t see taking place in The Last Jedi. It turns out that this is another stretch of nothing happening to move the story along except for introducing a fascinating and fun character who, it turns out, is instrumental in creating another stretch of nothing happening---the chase ending at the Battle of Helm’s Deep, with AT-AT Walkers instead of orcs and no Rohirrim on the horizon.
The lightsaber duel between Gandalf and the Necromancer’s Apprentice is pretty intense, though.
But here’s the thing.
Rey plays almost no role in the last half hour of the movie. She’s just the cavalry.
Now, consider this.
Although she provides much needed help, at the end of The Force Awakens she isn’t responsible for blowing up that movie’s version of the Death Star. She’s busy with her own personal problems. And in The Last Jedi, it’s her personal problems that have kept her away from the main action for almost the entire movie. Frankly, I’m more interested in her personal problems because I’m more interested in her and her story. I don’t care about a reiteration of the war story that provides the background to Luke’s story in the original trilogy. And if Episode IX doesn’t do what no third episode of a movie trilogy has ever done, be the best movie in the trilogy while at the same time tying up all the loose ends and closing the major plot holes and bringing the main characters’ stories to satisfying conclusions, that’s all the sequels will turn out to have been, which, as I’ve said, isn’t much of a story.
It should be all Rey’s story. That’s what The Force Awakens seemed to promise they’d be. But Rey’s story is like Percival’s, a Romance not an epic. And it’s a side story. Percival’s story is a Grail quest that takes him away from Camelot so he’s not there for the breaking of the Round Table. (Although the best King Arthur movie, John Boorman’s Excalibur, changes that, Percival is still only the sixth lead if not a supporting character.) And it would have been fine with me if the makers of the sequels---J.J. Abrams and Rian Johnson at the fore---had contented themselves with telling that story. But then it wouldn’t have been what most fans expected.
What I really would have liked to see, was Rey’s story being part of that other, imaginary trilogy, in which she and Kylo Ren would both have been irrelevant to the saving of the galaxy at the end. The two of them would have been the last Jedi because the galaxy would have no need or place epic heroes and villains with magic powers anymore. The age of miracles would have passed, and the fate of the galaxy was in the hands of mere mortals who did good or evil on their own, without the influence of devils and the intercession of angels.
Like I said, that’s what The Lord of the Rings is about.
This is a theme that’s raised in The Last Jedi but it’s not the story or, to put it another way, The Last Jedi isn’t integral to that story.
Ok, that’s what didn’t like. The forthcoming posts are going to be about what I did like, which adds up to a lot.
Hoisted from the cargo bay, Sunday morning, January 14, 2018. Reposted Sunday night, December 22, 2019.
“Chewie, we’re home.” My favorite line and one my favorite moments from Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens. Han Solo (Harrison Ford, right) and Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew) arrive to “steal back” the Millennium Falcon. Han dies in the end, but his role as the most important person in the galaxy continues to expand in Episode VIII: The Last Jedi.
[Opening crawl from the editors: Our Star Wars sequels reblogging marathon continues as we move onto “Episode VII: The Last Jedi”.]
By this point it’s probably unnecessary, but it’s a rule of the road, so: Spoiler alert…
In Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi we find out Kylo Ren didn’t murder his father because Han made one too many dad jokes when he was growing up. In fact, Kylo Ren, the once and I’m hoping not future Ben Solo because it will be far more interesting and tragic if he’s not redeemed like his grandfather---another way he fails to be as great a villain as Darth Vader is he fails to be as great a hero as Anakin Skywalker---apparently liked Han’s dad jokes. He liked Han. He loved Han. Or so he tells Rey who in the very short time she knew him adopted Han as a surrogate father which meant putting up with at least a couple of his dad jokes, which made her smile, and his irascibility, which made her smile even more. She took his grumpiness as a sign of the parental affection she craved. But to get back to Kylo Ren: whether or not he liked the dad jokes, he did love his father, and his murdering him was a perverse expression of that love.
What he was murdering, or hoped he was murdering, was the last bit of good in himself.
Whatever normal teenager’s complaints he’d had about Han as a father, Kylo Ren sees Han as a good man. His residual love for Han and Leia are hateful to him because it’s pulling him, against what he thinks is his will, away from the Dark Side to the Light. Killing Han is a form of spiritual suicide. It’s an act of self-loathing. It’s also an admission that Han stands between him and his becoming the great and terrible villain he wants to be. In short, it’s an argument in favor of Han’s critical importance to the fate of the galaxy.
If in dying Han had brought about Kylo Ren’s death---if only Chewie’s aim had been a little bit better---maybe the First Order wouldn’t have been successful so quickly. Snoke might have had to take time and attention away from galactic conquest to find a new apprentice. (Should be noted there’s evidence the First Order didn’t need Snoke, just as there was evidence the Empire didn’t need Palpatine.) Alternatively, if Han had lived, I’m not sure he’d have brought Ben Solo back to himself---as if the future of the Star Wars universe is real and subject to chance and not in the hands of J.J. Abrams and his screenwriters---but The Last Jedi does suggest that if Ben had been allowed to stay at home and to get through adolescence with Han’s guidance instead of Luke’s, he might very well have not turned to the Dark Side. He might very well have never developed his Jedi powers or felt the need to. At the very least, he’d have learned the kind of self-discipline and habits of self-denial and delayed gratification Uncle Owen instilled in Luke back on Tatooine, so that when the time came when his destiny could no longer be denied, he’d be a good and responsible young man, with greater strength of heart, and not a mixed-up teenager. And, as we learn from Luke, if Han had had his way, that might have happened.
Han’s importance was well-established in the original trilogy.
Without Han, Luke and Obi-wan wouldn’t have gotten away from Tatooine. Without Han, they wouldn’t have been able to rescue Leia. Without Han, Luke wouldn’t gotten off the shot that blew up the Death Star. Without Han, he’d have frozen to death on Hoth. Without Han, the strike team wouldn’t have knocked out the Death Star’s shields and without the Han-modified and maintained Millennium Falcon, Lando wouldn’t have been able to blow up the second Death Star.
Now, as we see at the beginning of The Last Jedi, with Han dead, the First Order was able to destroy the Republic and nearly wipe out the Resistance in it appears a matter of weeks, even without their version of a Death Star, which, by the way, Han pretty much took out on his own or at any rate he cleared the way for Poe and the fighters to take it out.
But in addition to that, we’re given reason to think that Han could have saved Ben and with him the Resistance, which might have already defeated the First Order if there’d been no Kylo Ren leading the efforts to slaughter everybody in sight but a Ben Solo to oppose Snoke and Hux from the start.
When Rey asks Luke what happened to cause Ben to succumb to the Dark Side, Luke is somewhat cryptic in his answer. But he says that Ben’s growing powers convinced both Leia and Luke that he needed serious training as a Jedi. Han, however, was “Han about it.” The implication was that Han wasn’t keen on the notion. At some level he still thought as he did back just after that first flight out of Tatooine:
Han: Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid.
Luke: You don’t believe in the Force, do you?
Han: Kid, I’ve flown from one side of this galaxy to the other. I’ve seen a lot of strange stuff, but I’ve never seen anything to make me believe there’s one all-powerful Force controlling everything. There’s no mystical energy field controls my destiny! It’s all a lot of simple tricks and nonsense.
He came to see things differently---from a new “certain point of view”---but he may have come to it too late. When Rey asks him if the Jedi were real, he says:
I used to wonder about that myself. Thought it was a bunch of mumbo-jumbo. A magical power holding together good and evil, the dark side and the light. Crazy thing is... it's true. The Force. The Jedi... All of it... It's all true.
But he says this somberly, with a tinge of sorrow and regret that make me wonder if he’s mourning both the loss of his son and his friend to the workings of the Force or if he’s wishing he’d believed in it when he and Leia sent Ben off to be trained by Luke, if he’s thinking that if he’d known what he was letting Ben get himself into he’d have put a stop to it. Maybe he’d believed in it he wouldn’t have let Leia and Luke---and probably Ben himself---talk him into it or allowed himself to be outvoted by them. Maybe if Ben had stayed home and he and Han had spent their time together working under the hood of the Millennium Falcon, going hunting and fishing on Kashyyyk with Chewbacca, hanging out and watching sports and swapping stories with some of Han’s old friends from his smuggling days, making extended visits to Maz Kanata’s, maybe if when Ben had grown up a bit more, Han would have started trusting Ben's judgment and deferring to him the way we see him doing with Rey...Maybe...maybe..maybe…
In The Force Awakens, Han tells Leia he ran out on her because he couldn’t take the looks of reproach he saw in her eyes, as if she blamed him for what happened. But he might have been projecting. What he saw when he looked at her was his own guilt reflected, and he blames himself for not having put his foot down.
This is more psychological complexity than there is in the original trilogy or the prequels, in which characters pretty much behave according to type and archetype. But that’s one of the new factors J.J. Abrams has introduced into the Star Wars movie universe, realistically human psychology. I’ll get more into that in my next thought but for now, I’ll leave it at that and just say that Han’s importance has continued after his death not just in his having in their short time together taught Rey more than she learns from Luke in the much longer time she spends with him but in his having taught a thing or two or three to Finn, who, I’m going to argue, is on his way to succeeding Han as the most important person in the galaxy.
Hoisted from the archives, Saturday, December 26, 2015, on the Feast of Stephen. Reposted Friday morning, December 20, 2019.
Two Musketeers: Finn (John Boyega) and Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) are a likable pair of supporting players in search of an adventure to call their own in Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
[Star Wars sequels blogging continues.]
Stories within stories. That’s what I enjoy most about the Star Wars movies. The old stories. The kind Sam Gamgee likes.
…the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why.
And there’s another story that if it didn’t influence Lucas directly is still in Star Wars because it was influenced by the same old stories and those stories are in there.
In creating Star Wars, George Lucas was inspired by countless old swashbucklers, tales of chivalry and legends of derring-do, and boys’ (and girls’) own adventure stories. The ones that mean the most to me and so the ones I’m most on the watch for and am most thrilled by and moved by when they show up in the movies---the original trilogy, the prequels, and now The Force Awakens---are the tales of King Arthur and his knights. Obviously. But this time out I picked up on another favorite influence as well.
The Three Musketeers.
The connections aren’t thematic or directly plot related. They aren't matters of characterization,either, although they have to do with the characters. But it’s not that this or that character is Athos, Aramis, Porthos, or d’Artagnan. I could make the case that Han is a bit like Porthos, a showoff and braggart, but that would be beside the point, my point and the point of Han as a character. And, as far as it goes, when we first meet him, he’s like all three of the original musketeers rolled into one, a rogue and a scoundrel, in it for the fun and the money and the easy living, redeemed by the example of the noble and idealistic country bumpkin turned hero. The connection is in Poe’s and Finn’s relationship to Rey and their place in her story. And as things stand, in that story, they're secondary characters and their roles are similar to Aramis’ and Porthos’ in d’Artagnan’s story. They’re there to help out. Han takes Athos’ place as the older (much older; Athos, the Comte de le Fère, is around 30), wiser, because heartbroken and bitter, guide and steadying influence on our young and impulsive hero. Athos is interesting because of his backstory but he’s important to the main story because of his relationship with d’Artagnan’s chief adversary, Milady de Winter. Aramis and Porthos are likable and fun and they have lots to do, but nothing important of their own to do. They're supporting players and in their own different ways comic relief. In The Force Awakens, Poe and Finn are likable and fun and have lots to do---Finn a lot more than Poe---but they're still supporting players and in their different ways comic relief.
The Force Awakens sets up the new trilogy as Rey’s story the way the original trilogy was Luke’s story. The whole saga, however, is still Luke’s story. That’s one of the things I liked about The Force Awakens, that J.J. Abrams didn’t try to change that. And it looks as though Luke’s story will end the way the stories of so many legendary heroes’---Arthur, Robin Hood, d’Artagnan among them---stories end, with the hero’s final failure and death. (This suggests that over in the Marvel Cinematic Universe things do not bode well for Captain America.) Things will probably change, but the way they seem headed, Poe’s and Finn’s stories aren’t necessarily integral to Rey and Luke’s story. They don’t have to be and I think shouldn’t be. In fact, I’ll be disappointed if they’re made to be.
I'll be more than fine with it if their stories are nearly entirely separate and are used to expand the new expanded universe. What I’d really like would be if Poe’s and Finn’s stories become Poe and Finn’s storyand the plot of that story is inspired by (that is, is swiped from) the plot of the first book of The Three Musketeers.
It wouldn’t need to be that Finn and Poe fit the roles of any of the Musketeers. As they are, Finn could be d’Artangan in that he’s young, naive, unschooled, and undisciplined but talented and a natural leader, but then Poe is the idealistic one. Finn wants out. Poe can't imagine being anything but in. And he's a natural leader too. Doesn’t matter. It’s the plot of "The Queen's Diamonds"I want to see them caught up in.
The problem with that, though, is sex.
There’s no place for a Milady de Winter in the Star Wars universe as Lucas created it. No place for any Constances either, and there’s no sign in The Force Awakens that Abrams intends to change that. In fact, Abrams seems to have more of a problem with grown-up women characters than Lucas had. Captain Phasma is likely going to turn out to be Rochefort to Finn’s d’Artagnan, to whatever degree Finn is d’Artagnan. A true femme fatale or a lusty love interest seem out of the question. But who knows. The next installment’s being written and directed by Rian Johnson, who has shown---in Looper and The Brothers Bloom, at any rate---that he’s not afraid of grown up persons of the female persuasion.
Other than that, though, Poe and Finn needing to join together to go on a rogue mission to steal something while both good guys and bad guys pursue them, with some intrigue, maybe some romance if not sex---that could make for a story interesting and thrilling in its own right, apart from any place it might have within the larger adventure.
As long as what they’re stealing aren’t plans for yet another Death Star.
Hoisted from the archives. Christmas eve, Thursday, December 24, 2015. Reposted Thursday, December 19, 2019.
A Knight of the Round Table, not a Mary Sue: Rey (Daisy Ridley) begins what I hope will turn out to be her quest to heal the Fisher King in “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.”
[A note from the editors of the Mannionville Daily Gazette: Our Star Wars prequels blogging marathon begins with Mannion's posts from 2015 on "Star Wars: The Force Awakens".]
Saw it tonight and my first thought was that the sequels are going to need prequels.
My second thought was how fun it was to get one more good Harrison Ford action-adventure movie. J.J. Abrams understands the story of Han Solo better than Lucas and Spielberg understand the story of Indiana Jones.
But that's another post. Back to “The Force Awakens”.
Episode VII is all fallout from a plotline that’s going to have to be explained in Episode VIII in order for the story to move on to Episode IX and the original saga’s proper conclusion. Most of what happens is a matter of raising questions that can only be answered by looking backwards. Where are we and how did we get here? Who are these people and why should we care about them? And I expect Abrams knows he can’t just exposition them away in a couple of speeches. It will have to be dealt with in an extended flashback. That is, I hope so. I hope that Abrams has set up the new trilogy as its own Machete version.
Not that I really care.
I’ve never really cared.
I’m too old.
And I don’t mean that like Obi-wan I’m getting too old for this sort of thing. I mean that when the original Star Wars came out in 1977 I wasn’t a little kid so it couldn’t become a constellating myth of my childhood. I enjoyed it immensely. I didn’t think of it as a kids’ movie. But it wasn’t new or revelatory to me. I’d heard that story---those stories. Lucas borrowed from multiple myths, legends, and adventure yarns---before, many times, in different versions, and those were the stories around which my imagination had cohered. Star Wars mattered to me because it reminded me of those stories and called up the feelings and dreams they had always inspired. What I loved about it was how it made me love those stories again---stories that included “Treasure Island”, “The Adventures of Robin Hood”, “The Three Musketeers”, and especially “The Knights of the Round Table”---stories I knew and loved from books, by the way, before I ever saw them adapted into movies, and books have always been more important to me than movies. And that’s all Star Wars was to me, a movie that captured some of the fun and excitement of those books.
In no way is this meant as a dismissal of Star Wars. Like I said, I enjoyed it and I enjoyed “The Empire Strikes Back” and “The Return of the Jedi”. I was impressed with them as moviemaking achievements. I was impressed and (moderately) thrilled that Lucas had managed to pull off setting a traditional swashbuckling adventure yarn in outer space, although I was aware that the old Flash Gordon serials he was paying homage to had already done that. The point is, though, that “The Force Awakens” was only going to matter to me to the degree it was able to do what the original had done, invoke those old stories in a heartfelt way. And to a degree, it succeeded.
But at more of a remove.
I think it's pretty well generally agreed that as a villain Kylo Ren is no Darth Vader. That even seems to be the point of the character. But as a villain in his own right he’s not particularly formidable. That also seems to be the point. He’s not the villain. He’s a representative. He’s not what caused the problem Rey has to solve. He is, like her, what’s left over. They are both effects.
Presumably, over the next two movies, they will both grow. But as things stand, neither is as important as whoever brought about their current situations, and none of whoever they were plays a significant part in “The Force Awakens”.
What I’m hoping is that some of them aren’t even mentioned in “The Force Awakens”.
What I’m hoping is that they’ll be introduced in flashbacks in Episode VIII and we’ll get the story of their downfalls. And I’m further hoping that that story isn’t simply a retelling of Anakin Skywalker’s downfall. I’m hoping it’s a retelling of the story of the breaking of the Round Table.
And I’m really hoping the Force doesn’t have much to do with it.
In the story I’m hoping to see told, Kylo Ren is not a leading character. He’s not Mordred. He’s Agravaine, Gawaine’s other anti-heroic brother, the one who sides with Mordred out of jealousy of Gawain and of Lancelot because of their place in Arthur’s affections. (Luke, of course, is Arthur.) This would mean that in the story I want to see told, there are at least three more important characters to be introduced---possibly, four: a Launcelot, a Gawaine, a Mordred, and a Guinevere. (Probably too much to expect a fifth and the movie gets truly adult by including a Morgause.) And in the story I’m hoping to see told, the breaking of the Round Table---the dissolution of the new Jedi order Luke tried to establish---would be brought about by a falling out between Luke’s two favorites, his Gawaine and Lancelot, manipulated and exploited by his Mordred (not necessarily his son but that would be interesting) but caused by ordinary human needs and desires that aren’t in themselves wrong or result in either hero going over to the Dark Side. What I’m hoping for, basically, is a real tragedy arising from the conflict between two heroic characters who both have right on their side but who handle it badly, that is, humanly.
It would be up to Luke, then, to settle things but that would require him to take sides against one or the other of his best friends. Which would break his heart.
That’s a wound that won’t heal on its own and that would send him into self-imposed exile.
And in that story, Rey would be Percival.
Percival, you probably recall, is Arthur’s greatest knight. Well, technically, he’s the second greatest. Galahad is the greatest, but he barely counts because he only shows up for the Grail quest and almost immediately becomes one with the Force---he dies and goes right to heaven---when he finds it. So for all intents and purposes, Percival is number one. (Lancelot is third and Gawain is fourth.) But he comes late to the Round Table, when Arthur and the others are nearing old age. He is a knight’s son---in some versions a king’s son---but when he was a baby his mother took him into the woods far from Camelot where she raised him with no knowledge of his father or of knights in general because she was afraid of what would happen to him if he joined the Round Table. He grows up a rude and ignorant bumpkin but strong, clever, resourceful, and brave. Then one day some knights on a quest ride through the woods and as soon as he sees them, Percival becomes aware of the Force flowing through him---that is, he knows himself to be a true knight and is instantly not only capable but the most capable with sword and lance.
Sounds like a bit of a male Mary Sue, doesn’t he?
Sounds like somebody else who’s being called a Mary Sue, too.
There’s something else about Percival that might sound familiar if you’ve seen “The Force Awakens”.
In some retellings, he’s the one who finds the Grail and uses it to heal the Fisher King.
Maybe J.J. Abrams understands those old stories as well as he understands Han Solo's...or maybe it’s that he understands Star Wars.
Hoisted from the archives, Monday, November 24, 2008. Posted Tuesday morning, November 12, 2019.
Bare ruined choirs of an oak in the neighborhood where late a sweet bird sang...well, drummed. Somewhere up there was a woodpecker when I took this picture while starting out on a November walk eleven years ago this week.
November doesn’t get enough praise. It’s one of my favorite months, for various sentimental reasons, but also for itself. Here in the Hudson Valley it presents its own peculiar beauties. This morning it looks more like December---we have snow. No significant accumulation, but more than a dusting---but one of the charms of November is its routinely looking like December. Other days it looks like October. Usually, though, it looks like itself---no longer fall but not yet winter. Here’s a post---copyedited and slighlty revised---I wrote eleven years back about a walk I took on a day it looked exactly like November…
November 24, 2008: Notes from a walk I took when I was still young, vital, and healthy---a week ago today.
Bird count: Blue Jays 25; Woodpeckers 1; all other species 0.
That was just between the house and the opening of the bike trail. The woodpecker wasn't one of the usual suspects. Flickers, downies, and hairy woodpeckers don't have that much blushing red on the backs of their heads. They wear their blazes like kerchiefs not hoods. A red-bellied woodpecker probably. Couldn't get a look. It was very high up in the bare-ruined choirs of the oak tree a block from our house in the photo up top and kept itself in silhouette as I angled around trying for a better view.
No mistaking the blue jays though. None of them cared whether or not I was watching them. In fact, many of them seemed determined that I get a good look and they took up perches at close range. Low branches, fence posts, leaf litter not more than a half dozen yards ahead of me, I swear some would have landed on my shoulder if they happened to get tired while I was in convenient roosting reach. According to the guide books, this is their social time of year. Family groups mix with family groups to form loosely-knit but gregarious flocks sharing territories and food supplies. Many of the jays carried acorns in their beaks, which is also in line with the guide books.
I reported back in June that the town had cleared the section of the bike trail running south from here. That part of the trail has since been paved. A section running north has been cleared as well. Today I went north.
I hear there's snow in parts of Ohio and Michigan and things are hellacious in Los Angeles, but when I started out on my walk the weather here was awfully pleasant for mid-November in Upstate New York. This part of the trail is still unpaved and it hadn't dried out from the rain over the weekend. But it wasn't wet. Freezing temperatures overnight took care of that. The gravel crunched underfoot with the pleasant sound of breaking ice, the puddles in the ruts in the trail had rough skins of brown ice over them.
A week ago, our blogging pal J, alerted by her painter's eye, noted the sudden switch in nature's moods that marks the change from October to November out in her part of Illinois. October, in spirit and in light and color, hung around past its stated end on the calendar and then, in the blink of an eye...
The majority of our trees stayed green forever this fall. There were a few that changed on scheduled, but so many were full and green and showed no signs of giving up the ghost. Same for the flowers and the warmth. Yes, the days were noticeably shorter and the angle of the sun was drastically different, but somehow it seemed like October would go on forever even as we flipped the calendar over to November.
And then it happened. The rest of the leaves all got on board, the flowers yielded to the frost and November grabbed hold of the earth and my soul. I looked out the other day and the sky was an unmistakable periwinkle that only November can bring. I looked at it and thought, it's just a blustery, moody sky. What is it that makes it look so purple in November?? Ah yes, it's the contrast to all of the blazing gold leaves that haven't fallen yet. The loud leaves are amping up the purple that might otherwise be mistaken for gray. It's pretty in its own somber way and while it's nice to look at, something about it reminds me it's time to turn back in... time to gather up my attention to a life that will be lived mostly inside for the next number of months. Even though we are moving into one of the more social seasons, this time of year also seems like the most introverted. Nature is pulling back in and so do I. The action will go on behind the scenes and we'll be showered with artificial light as opposed to the bright light of day.
Sky here isn't periwinkle, but then there's very little gold left in the trees to make the contrast and amp up the purple. Below the blue sky the landscape I walked through was all gray and black and brown and tan and faded blond, except for the bright red of the berries remaining on the sumacs…
...and the sapphire blue blacks and clean cotton sheet white bellies of the jays.
Plenty of them in here too, verifying the guide books, doing their social and gregarious thing, visiting relatives, making plans for Thanksgiving, catching up. Saw one of them do something I don't remember ever observing any other bird, except a hawk, do on the wing before, consciously make decisions about which way he wanted to fly. He was loafing his way towards me, doing the aerial equivalent of a leisurely stroll, flapping his wings lazily and only as often as he needed in order to keep himself aloft and moving forward, and he turned his head this way and that as he flew, making slight alterations in his course quite clearly based on something he'd spotted up ahead, as if on the lookout for familiar landmarks to navigate by, as if thinking, "What did Aunt Martha say again? Bear left at the third stump past the chokecherry, bank right again fifteen degrees when the pond shaped like an acorn comes into view..."
Probably all birds do this, but they're flying too high and too fast for me to see it for what it is. Hawks, being large, dramatic, bold, and not at all shy about what they're up to, are obvious about it. And you know exactly what they're thinking.
"There's lunch!"
"Second course!"
"Dessert!!!!"
Speaking of hawks, although the blue jays outnumbered other species along the trail by about 5 to 1, those other species included more of a variety than was represented by the lone red-bellied woodpecker back in town. The path is edged in on both sides by trees and shrubs, thickly enough that at some points it feels as though you're walking through dense woods. But what's really on either side of you are acres of abandoned farmland that has not been reclaimed by trees yet. It's all wide-open meadows and fields, ideal hunting ground for hawks, and towards the end of this part of the trail I came to a stretch bare of cover on one side and on that one side were several acres of tall, dry, blond grass over which five red-tailed hawks looped and sailed, screaming loudly to one another.
Stirred up a prayer meeting of mourning doves meditating in the leaf litter, had to stop to let a gang of red-breasted nuthatches cross the path at nose level---they landed on the bare branches of a small hawthorn and eyed me truculently. their rust-colored, not actually red, chests puffed out, pointing their long, hard-looking black beaks at me, as if to let me know that small and pretty were not synonyms for meek and harmless---and startled a little flock of juncos into auditioning for the part of the small paranoid bird with the white feather in Robert Frost's poem “The Woodpile”:
A small bird flew before me. He was careful To put a tree between us when he lighted, And say no word to tell me who he was Who was so foolish as to think what he thought. He thought that I was after him for a feather— The white one in his tail; like one who takes Everything said as personal to himself. One flight out sideways would have undeceived him.
If it was a group audition, they would all be perfectly cast in the part.
Last month I wrote about how the sight of juncos---snowbirds---on my front lawn in the middle of October when not only wasn't there any snow but there were still green leaves on the trees unnerved me. Coming upon a flock of them in the woods in November, though, isn't nearly as disturbing. Winter is in the air and in the light, even if the temperature is still pleasantly in the autumnal range, and that snow in the midwest isn't going to stay put. The juncos reminded me of a comment on that post I meant to highlight at the time. Comment came from strudel guy of Strudel and Shotguns:
The dark-eyed juncos are my friends. We've already had numerous hard freezes here in the Piedmont of Virginia and they have favorably sharpened my memory of my native upstate New York at this time of year. I first met the dark-eyed juncos in the spring of 2005 while carrying a pack along the spine of the Blue Ridge on the Appalachian Trail in Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee. Their gentle chirps and white-blazed tail feathers became familiar and welcome companions, especially on days when I was very nearly a beaten man. It was when I was the most hurting and drained, weakened and dimmed, that my spirit was at its lowest ebb, that I was open enough and my mind quiet enough to appreciate those birds. In turn, at times like those, the birds seemed to sense my beat down condition and were less likely to skitter away at my approach, but instead would hop along the trail just feet ahead of me. Over time, as I learned to walk in the woods, I also learned to see more than just the juncos, which was exactly why I had come to the woods in the first place. In the winter, at least down here, the dark-eyed juncos come down from the high country some miles to the west and mob the thistle seed in the feeders. I'm glad to see them, these friends of mine. In summer we feed hummingbirds; in the winter, it's the dark-eyed juncos, down from the mountains for a snack.
For a while I was followed by a pair of downy woodpeckers, a male and a female. The male was less stand-offish than the female and a bit of a show-off. His best trick was to go after a bug on the end of a thin woody vine dangling from a locust tree. He lit on the tip of the vine and hung there, the vine swinging under his weight and the force of his pecking, like a kid playing Tarzan.
Mammals were represented along the trail by only two of their classification, me and a squirrel.
This stretch of the trail runs about two miles along what was once the bed of a railroad to New York City. Came across only this sign that trains ever passed this way. Looks like a gravestone, doesn't it? Tomb of the unknown signalman.
It's made of wood with rusty iron truss work behind to hold it up. Don't know what the 25 means. It looks as if it was added long-after the marker itself went into the ground. Trains stopped running in the late 1940s.
It's an illusion allowed by distance and accidents of development and neglect that I could make this walk imagining that I was looking at a landscape not all that different from one John Burroughs might have seen a hundred years ago had he wandered this way, and he might have, for all I know: he lived not too far from here and liked to wander. But the trail dumped me out smack dab in the 21st Century, on a road at the edge of the grounds of a state prison where I got beeped at by a passing SUV whose driver I presumed recognized me, the beep being a quick friendly beep and not a Get out to the road, you moron honk.
The sky had clouded up since I'd started out and a strong, decidedly Novemberish wind had begun to blow. The wind bit right through me as soon as I was out of the shelter of the trees along the path. I'd set out in the fall and walked through the season into the onset of winter. Long way to walk in one morning.
Thought about turning around and heading back along the way I'd just come, but I was suddenly feeling lonely. The wind was blowing from the west, but I turned into it and followed the road a quarter of mile or so until it forked. There I turned sharply to the south and followed the river back into town, sheltered again from the wind by trees and comforted by the smell of woodsmoke from the chimneys of the houses along the way.
Hoisted from the archives, Monday, September 6, 2010. Posted Saturday night, August 24, 2019.
[Editor's note: I came across this one when I was searching for the quote from "The Inn of the Two Witches" I used in yesterday's post "Backward With Biden!"]
Joseph Conrad is one of my favorite writers, but from my very first reading of "Lord Jim" back in college I’ve always felt his stories have one glaring weakness.
They don’t include any characters who could have been played by Dorothy Lamour in a movie version made in the 1940s.
Sure, there are dark-eyed, dark-haired, fiery-tempered exotic young women who might plausibly have worn sarongs and looked good in them or, more to the purpose, half out of them---Jewel in Lord Jim being the most critically important. But her name tells you all you need to know about her, which is that she’s a symbol more than she’s a fully fleshed-out character, and that’s not just a double-entendre, it’s the point.
Jewell has as much personality and sexuality as a jewel. She is not there to be played as a part, she is there as a signifier.
“Jewell” isn’t even her name. Throughout the Patusan sections of the novel, Conrad’s narrator, Marlow, refers to her as “the girl.” Jewell is Jim’s name for her and although he means to flatter her, in naming her he’s actually identifying his own tragic situation. He’s turned her into a walking literary allusion.
Good name in man and woman, dear my lord, Is the immediate jewel of their souls. Who steals my purse steals trash; 'tis something, nothing; 'Twas mine,'tis his, and has been slave to thousands. But he that filches from me my good name Robs me of that which not enriches him And makes me poor indeed.
Jim is trying to recover his good name, the immediate jewel of his soul. His problem is that the he who filched it from him was himself. Jim has to get back his good name from himself and he won’t give it back. What Jim needs to do is forgive himself for his terrible, reflexive mistake and he can’t. He’s forever haunted by his belief that the next time he has to face a similar crisis he will fail again. Jewell, then, becomes the symbol of what he most wants and what he will not let himself have. Which doesn’t give her much to do in the novel and any movie adaptation but stand there signifying. She’s there to be there, close by but somehow always out of reach. Adoring, longing, but finally unobtainable.
Dorothy Lamour was good on the adoring and the longing, especially when she had to sit by while Bing sang. But she was never, ever unobtainable.
Lamour was more than obtainable, although she was never there just for the obtaining. She wanted obtaining. She desired it. She was desirable because she desired---that is she had needs and dreams and wishes of her own and she made the effort to get them on her own or at least to have them given to her on her terms.
She never just stood there signifying.
Beyond that, however, she held her own.
Her job in the Road movies was to keep the story grounded and the plot moving along in spite of Crosby and Hope’s runaway egos. While they were busy hamming it up, she was working hard to keep the audience interested in the two of them.
It would have been very easy for a young actress to have let herself be pushed into the background, to have disappeared in the chaos Hope and Crosby created, to have just stood there and been “the girl.”
This has been the fate of actresses playing the girl in buddy movies from the silents through whatever buddy movie opened last week.
Lamour was never just the girl.
Which is why Conrad never wrote a part for her.
It wasn’t that Conrad couldn’t write interesting female characters. But he wrote mainly about a world of, by, and for men in which women had no active roles to play, so that when one appears she appears an intrusion from another world and usually brings with her aspects of that other world which may be welcomed by the men but which are by their nature destructive of the men's world. Usually, what the women are bringing is civilization, either in the form of an idealism that the men can’t match or in the form of a domesticity that is cheering and consoling but fragile and a cause of anxiety because of that fragility.
That means that even Conrad’s strongest female characters are representative. They signify something other than and more than themselves and so their selves as selves are diminished. Several of these characters actually take pride in being representative; the two main female characters in "Nostromo", for example, set themselves up as the embodiment of ideals the men in the story are expected to live up to.
Essentially, they turn themselves into goddesses, but goddesses in the sense that prudish late Victorians would have known goddesses, as statues in museums, aloof, unobtainable, desexualized, or at least with a sexuality hypocritically unacknowledged, and monumental.
Their job is to stand there and be admired.
Pretty much the same as Jewel’s job in "Lord Jim", they just have more to say about their chosen roles.
An exception is Winnie Verloc in "The Secret Agent", one of the very few of Conrad’s stories with an actual and active female lead who is as important to the plot for who she is, as opposed to what she is, as the male characters are for who they are.
By now you’ve probably figured out that we watched one of the Road movies Friday night for family movie night and even guessed which one, "The Road to Singapore," and at this point, then, you’re asking yourself:
Is he really using "The Road to Singapore" to inform his criticism of the works of Joseph Conrad?
Nope.
I’m using the works of Joseph Conrad to inform my criticism of "The Road to Singapore".
Actually, I’m having it both ways, using one to give me something to riff on about the other, and both to give me reason to post a picture of Dorothy Lamour in a sarong. But while we were watching "Road to Singapore" I was struck by how much the movie looked like something out a story or a novel by Joseph Conrad. The seaside village on the island of Kaigoon where Hope and Crosby wash up could have been the setting for any of the seaside villages Jim lands in as he tries to run from his past and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that somebody who worked on the movie---the director, the writers, one of the designers---had read "Lord Jim" and had it mind.
More likely, though, the look of the movie was determined by cliches piling up from a hundred years worth of first theater and then movies with South Sea Island settings and the reason it looks like something out of Conrad is that my idea of what something out Conrad looks like is based on movies and TV shows that filled my imagination with those cliches when I was a kid long before I’d read a word of "Lord Jim".
It’s like with the reason many people have refused to believe that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare’s plays. Look at how well the playwright knew the ways of the aristocracy, they say. Only someone who was an aristocrat himself could have portrayed kings and queens so realistically, forgetting to ask themselves how they know how kings and queens behave. The answer is that they know it from movies and books and TV shows that have been have been heavily influenced by….Shakespeare.
And probably I was still overly-impressed with a point in my post Franzenfreude, that every tragedy contains its comedic mirror image.
I wasn’t seeing "The Road to Singapore" as the comedic reflection of any particular Conrad story. But I kept getting glimpses of scenes and characters that could have been lifted straight from Conrad even in all their comedic glory.
The nervous and prematurely young clerk who runs the local office of Crosby’s father’s shipping company and is reduced to quivering terror by the news that his boss’s son has turned up in his district and is now his responsibility has any number of brothers in Conrad’s fiction.
Hope and Crosby’s barren and joyless looking shack by the beach before Dorothy Lamour arrives to brighten it and them up and the two of them moping around in it while assuring themselves that they’re leading the life could have been Kayerts and Carlier’s trading post in "An Outpost of Progress".
And the portrait of Crosby’s great-grandfather looked exactly like my image of Captain Brierly, the heroic but arrogant young sea captain who as he sits in contemptuous judgment of Jim is secretly trying himself for crimes and failures no one else has ever seen him commit or thought him capable of and rendering up a guilty verdict that will cause him to commit suicide by throwing himself off the rail of his ship. The double-take Crosby does when he looks at the portrait allowed me to see the comedy behind Brierly’s death because I could see Brierly as his family might have seen him, stern, demanding, humorless, pompous, and vain. Heroes can be ridiculous, depending on your point of view---that of great-grandsons who desperately don’t want to follow in their noble but self-destructive footsteps, for instance.
Yes, this is exactly what it was like to be in one of my intro to lit classes back when I was teaching.
Anyway.
As I said, I was watching "The Road to Singapore" while still full of my own brilliance, so take all this for what it’s worth. But here’s the thing.
The reason I was able to see through the movie to Conrad’s stories is that The Road to Singapore has a story of its own.
It’d probably been a hundred years since I last saw "The Road to Singapore" and over that time I must have gotten it mixed up in my head with the other Road movies that followed it. Those don’t have stories. They have plots designed to move Hope and Crosby and Lamour from joke to joke and song and dance number to song and dance number along a slightly different route than the previous Road movie.
The other Road movies are about themselves as Road movies. "The Road to Singapore" is about a couple of sailors who finding themselves being rushed into marriage with girls they, for different reasons, don’t want to get married to at the moment, escape to an out of the way South Sea Island paradise to live a carefree bachelor life. There, though, they rescue a young woman from her cruel lover and hide her out in their shack by the beach where she takes immediate charge of their lives and, to their surprise and pleasure, domesticates them and shows them that they might actually enjoy married life…with her. A nearly friendship-destroying rivalry ensues.
Not much of a story but it’s a story all the same and the movie tells it in a straight-forward way that for the most part doesn’t depend on having Hope and Crosby as the leads. In fact, it’s almost possible to forget that it is Hope and Crosby or at least forget that they’re the Hope and Crosby of the other Road movies and watch them as actors playing actual characters.
Stick with me. Class is almost over.
Crosby plays Josh Mallon, the restless heir to a shipping company fortune who is resisting taking his desk-bound place at his father’s side running the family business. The portrait of the sea captain grandsire I mentioned above appears on the wall of Josh’s father’s office in a sequence in which Josh’s horrified gaze bounces quickly from ancestor’s portrait to ancestor’s portrait to his father as a portrait to himself as one of their line as he traces the devolution of his family tree from bold and independent hero to gray-faced, dyspeptic businessman (Josh’s father is played by Charles Coburn) with the next step down being whatever he allows his father and his fiancee make of him. He decides he’s not going to allow them to make anything of him and makes for the high seas with his pal, Ace Lannigan.
Ace is played by Hope, of course, and that’s one of the pleasant surprises of "The Road to Singapore". Hope plays Ace and not the caricature of Hope’s movie persona he plays in the other Road movies: the blustering coward, would-be ladies man, and Crosby’s too easily manipulated stooge. Ace is the guy those other Hopes pretend to be. Ace is brave (within limits), good in a fight (the pat-a-cake running gag makes it’s first appearances here as a method the boys use to start fights), and a real ladies man. Ace is the love ‘em and leave ‘em kind and it turns out that the last girl he loved and left he loved a little too long and didn’t leave fast enough and now her father and uncles are after Ace to make an honest woman of her. And what I liked about Hope as Ace is that he fit the part.
At the time the movie was made, 1940, both Hope and Crosby were 37. Crosby had already begun to solidify into a portly middle-age, but Hope was still youthful and in excellent shape. I don’t think I ever realized before how much bigger he was than Crosby. It’s through Hope as Ace that you can see how Josh and Ace come out of their frequent barroom brawls alive and frequently the victors. You can also see why this time around the Hope character stands more than half a chance with Dorothy Lamour.
"The Road to Singapore" isn’t going to replace "The Road to Utopia" or "The Road to Morocco" as my favorite Road movie, but it’s good to be reminded that both Crosby and Hope could act, that they weren’t movie stars just because they were the world’s favorite crooner and the wiseacrest wiseacre on the radio.
And did I mention that Dorothy Lamour’s in it?
Now we’re getting there.
Sometimes I feel sorry for those of you who are patient enough and forgiving enough to stick with me to the end of posts like this.
Your road to Singapore might not run through the novels of Joseph Conrad, but you might be surprised at what books and movies it does run through. The characters in "The Road to Singapore" are borderline cliches, the story is slight, but the point here is that it is a story. And the thing about stories is that there are only about five of them. How many did your sixth grade English teacher list? How many does Joseph Campbell say there are? However few there are, that means that the particular story you happen to be reading or watching unfold on stage or on screen is a retelling of all the other versions of that story that have told and retold since human beings began telling each other stories.
Whenever we pick up a book or sit down to watch a movie, we are asking to be told every story we’ve ever been told again.
“Read it again, Daddy!”
“How many times can you listen to the same the story?”
"The Road to Singapore" is available to watch instantly at Amazon. Here's a taste, and yes the dark and sullen character with the whip with the whip is the very young Anthony Quinn...
Mined from the archives, Tuesday, March 27, 2018. Posted Monday morning, July 22, 2019.
[Editor's note: Still at work on organizing my big blogging project. Came across this one last night from March of 2018. Apparently, I felt the need to subtweet all of Twitter and political blog world. Obviously, I feel the same way this morning.]
Tuesday. March 27, 2018:
Unless you’re a Vulcan, everybody’s most well-thought out, deeply reasoned, and informed opinions are really just high-minded words masking a tangle of feelings arising from self-interest, vanity, biases, and prejudices. Everybody’s!
Note to political journalists: Attempts to correct for this usually result in contrarianism for contrarianism’s sake or a view from nowhere...again, unless you’re a Vulcan.
In an interview on Fox News Tuesday night, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders dismissed Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s urgent calls to action on climate change: “Look, I don’t think we’re going to listen to her on much of anything, particularly not on matters we’re gonna leave in the hands of a much, much higher authority, and certainly not listen to the freshman congresswoman on when the world may end.”
“Higher authority.” That would be the Right Wing Christian version of God, a capricious demon with an allegedly benevolent plan for humankind which requires millions of innocent people to suffer and die every year but which ends with Christians being rewarded in the next life while rich Republicans get richer in this one. This notion that God is in charge, he knows what’s best for us, and we should leave things up to him isn’t really an article of faith. It’s an excuse not to care about other people’s unhappiness and misfortune.
“I’d like to help you friend, but God know what he’s doing, and who am I to question God?”
At any rate, coming across the article this morning reminded me I wrote a post on the subject back in November. I think it’s worth reposting, so here it is…
Remarking on the changeability of the weather in his adopted home state of Connecticut, Mark Twain said, “If you don't like the weather in New England now, just wait a few minutes.
Ernst missed her chance.
“If you don’t like the climate change now” she could have said, riffing on Twain, “ just wait a few millennia, it’ll ebb back. Or flow. Or whatever.” Of course, Ernst wouldn’t have said it to be funny. To tell a good joke you have to know what you’re talking about.
(You might have noticed that Ernst seemed to be pulling the usual climate change denialist’s trick of mixing up weather with climate.
“Climate is what we expect,” said Twain. “Weather is what we get.”)
I suspect that what Ernst would have liked to say was “God’s in his heaven and all's right with the world.”
This past Sunday morning’s bobblehead shows featured the typical line-ups of well-groomed and well-tailored conservative doubletalkers whose job is to reassure nervous establishmentarian journalists like Chuck Todd that the Republican Party is made up of serious-minded and responsible grown-ups with nothing but the best interests of the country at heart.
“Never mind the reactionary radicals in the Freedom Caucus,” the doubletalkers are there to say. “Pay no attention to the racists and yahoos in the state houses. Ignore the stated wishes of our voters. Don’t worry about the antics and ravings of the ignorant boob and boor in the White House. And whatever you do, don’t bring up our own actual voting records. We’ve got this. Relax and let us handle it.”
One of the things they’ve got handled is climate change.
The report on the dire progress of climate change came out on Friday---it was dumped into what the Administration would be the post-holiday news sink hole to disappear without comment or notice. Didn’t happen.---The doubletalkers on the panels were asked about it, and they did their job of trying to explain it away.
They don’t outright deny the scientific fact of climate change anymore. They know better than to do that if they’re going to keep wearing their disguises as serious and reasonable men and women. What they do is shrug it off. They’re not climate change denialists. They’re climate change shrugger-offers.
It’s happening. Maybe. The jury’s still out The science is still inconclusive. Intelligent people disagree. There’s reason to be skeptical. Didn’t they just have snow in parts of the country where they often have snow in November? And remember how when we were kids forty years ago scientists were predicting a new ice age? At any rate, it’s probably not as bad as they say, and it’s not happening as fast. We have time. It’ll all work out. The Market will take care of it. Innovation and incentivization are the key. Smart folks in the private sector will find ways to fix it or deal with it. And it may even be for the good. Nature is self-correcting. We can adapt. God has a plan.
The Right Wing position on climate change is ultimately a religious one, and it’s the same one behind their position on everything.
This is the way God wants it!
Of course, it’s actually and always the way the rich greedy bastards who own and run the Republican Party want it. The Republican position on climate change and global warming is dictated by Right Wing corporatists who believe government’s only purpose is to help them wring every last dime out of everything there is that dimes can be wrung out of, which is pretty much everything. Doing anything about climate change might cost them a dime or two, so they’ve ordered their Republican stooges in Congress to make sure nothing is done about climate change except to hurry it up.
Ernst played her part. She would. After all, she is from an oil state.
Iowa? An oil state, Lance?
Yep. Who do you think buys all that ethanol?
Ernst said any sort of federal response to climate change needed to consider the impact on the economy and jobs. The Iowa senator, who was recently elevated to a Senate GOP leadership position, talked up her state’s reliance on wind and solar energy, as well as biofuels like ethanol.
“There is a balance that can be struck there,” she said. “Again, in Iowa, as a state, we have set that standard, and it hasn’t been by mandating, it has been by incentivizing.”
Ernst calls ethanol a biofuel. Ethanol isn’t a fuel bio- or otherwise prefixed. It’s a fuel additive. A heavily subsidized one. Ernst's assignment is to keep Iowa agribusinesses that call themselves “farms” rolling in federal dough. The incentive here is easy money picked from U.S. taxpayers’ pockets.
The industry Republicans like Ernst are out to save is the fossil fuel industry. The jobs they want to protect are in the executive offices of oil company headquarters. The part of the economy they’re worried might be devastated is that part of it that’s dedicated to the care and feeding of corporate millionaires.
Excessive regulation is any regulation at all. The only incentive they support is the incentive to make the most money as fast as it can be made, and there’s more and faster money to made with an oil rig than with a solar panel.
The problem the rich greedy bastards have is there aren’t enough rich greedy bastards for them to win elections on their votes alone.
Generally, though, they can count on the votes of rank and file Republicans who, if they aren’t rich greedy bastards themselves, see their interests as aligned with those of the rich greedy bastards and their corporate overlords on the old What’s good for General Motors etc. principle. Beyond that they vote Republican because they are Republican which means they vote to keep their taxes low and to keep THEM in their place. Still, they aren’t always as selfish and narrowly self-interested as the rich greedy bastards need them to be.
To make up for any shortfall, the rich greedy bastards---the owners and bosses---have enlisted the “economically anxious” Right Wing white lower middle and working class in voting with their bosses against their own economic interests by inflaming and exploiting their angers, fears, bigotries, hatreds, resentments, and self-pity. This is an old story, but they’ve gotten really good at it the last few years because Donald Trump is really good at it. The rich greedy bastards and their political henchmen and women don’t just put up with Trump. They like him! He’s better at the inflaming and exploiting than Nixon and Reagan were.
Even so, Republicans couldn’t win elections in places where they routinely do without the votes of the most reliable Right Wingers---the Right Wing Christians who travel
under the name Evangelicals.
(All Evangelicals aren’t Right Wingers. All Right Wing Christians aren’t Evangelicals. But try telling that to the political media.)
These Evangelicals are easy marks---I mean natural allies of the corporatists on the issue of climate change because for them it’s inherently religious. It’s God versus Science, and Science puts man above God. They’re generally anti-intellectual. Education leads to thinking for oneself instead of listening unquestioningly and obediently to the preachers and elders. But science describes a universe that doesn’t need a god to have created it or to keep it running; and whatever its origins and mechanics, it doesn’t have humankind at its center.
Climate change must be either a hoax or it’s part of God’s plan. And if it is God’s plan then it’s for the best and there’s nothing to worry about. Nothing needs to be done about it by us because God’s handling it. Nothing can be done about it anyway because it’s what he wants for us.
Faith that God is with us, loving us, sustaining us and protecting us, that he’ll make sure that, no matter our troubles and sorrows of the moment, all will come out right in the end, can be a comfort and a basis for hope. It can inspire courage, instill strength, firm up resolve, and renew a sense of purpose. It can also lead to fatalism and induce passivity. Why bother to resist what can and ought to be resisted or at least not suffered without protest when it’s God’s will you’d be resisting and protesting.
In fact, resistance and protest might even be sins.
Life isn’t meant to be enjoyed. If it was enjoyable, we might get too attached to it. There’s no heaven on earth. Any attempts to build one are usurpations of God’s power and privilege.
Leave it to God. Trust God. He’s in charge. He has a plan, and we’re at the center of that plan. Even if things are awful it’s all for the best because God only wants the best for us.
The best for us is eternal life in heaven, of course.
Life here on earth is just a trial to test if we're worthy of heaven. What happens in the here and now doesn't matter except in our accepting it as God's will. So we can mine and frack and drill till the end. We can wring every dime out of the ground that we can. We can let the earth drown, burn, dry up, and blow away while Exxon rakes in the dough because it's God's plan.
And amen to that, say the rich greedy bastards in the choir.
Ocasio-Cortez responded the way you’d think would shut a Christian like Sanders up. She quoted the bible at her. Trouble is AOC’s Catholic. Catholics think the bible means what the words in it mean. Right Wing Christians think it means whatever they need it to mean to serve their self-interest at the moment. Right Wing Christians are convinced they’re the only ones who know what God wants, which always turns out to be what they want. Convenient, huh?
Photo up top is by yours truly. I took it back in the fall. October 24, 2018, to be precise. It's the marquee in front of one of the loneliest looking chruches I've ever seen. Seems like there's never more than five or six cars in the parking lot even on Sundays.
As folks like to say on Twitter, “This held up well.” Except those folks are usually being ironic. Willett’s tweet and my post from December---December 2016!---have actually held up pretty well, it’s just that things are worse than was generally known at the time. Back then it looked liked Putin meddled in the election on Trump’s behalf because he knew Trump would be a whole lot easier to deal with than Clinton. Now we know he did it because Trump was already on the string and the next step was to start pulling…
Remember when George W. Bush looked into Putin's eyes and got a sense of his soul, as if he had one? Putin's looked Donald Trump in the eye and has seen that Donald Trump doesn't have a soul either. It's all one giant, fragile, immature ego in there.
Trump is greedy, careless, irresponsible, needy, vain, insecure, and dumb in the way only people who think they're smarter than everybody else can be dumb.
And he has no interest but self-interest which he clearly has mixed up with the interests of the country. If he thinks it's good for Donald Trump, then that's all the good it needs to be.
Trump has been this way his whole life, caring only about making money and aggrandizing himself.
All of which makes him easy to manipulate and easy to outfox.
Updated to account for it being worse than I thought: Like I said up top, the post has held up pretty well, but not as well as I was congratulating myself for. At the time, I thought Trump was just a stooge and a tool and that Putin was manipulating him without his being aware of it. I still think he’s dumb enough not to know when he’s being conned and even arrogant and vain enough to think he’s the one pulling the wool over Putin’s eyes. But it’s beginning to look as though Trump has had his eyes wide-open. I don’t know if he’s been bought, bribed, blackmailed, or has simply been seduced, or if he's delusional enough to think this is a good thing. Whatever's at the bottom of it, and it may be all of the above, he’s Putin’s inside man by choice and a knowing participant in his own treason. At any rate, that’s the way my thinking’s trending after reading these columns by Tom Nichols and Max Boot:
Updated again to take into account, Columbo like, one more thing: This doesn't mean Trump is a Russian agent or a conscious participant in a conspiracy. The Kremlin's saying "it's 'stupid' to think that Trump could be a Russian agent" (Follow the link to Politico), but the implication may be the Russians think he's too stupid for them to trust with the job and stupid enough that don't need to have turned him. They just need to let him be him and sit back and enjoy the show. From "The Apprentice":
It’s hard to imagine that even a master manipulator like Putin would have anticipated the full success of his operation. Not only had he sabotaged HIllary Clinton, but he had also helped install in the Oval Office someone who---by virtue of his fragile ego, disdain for democratic norms, and volatile leadership---compounded the impact of the Russian campaign. In the months that followed Trump’s visit to CIA headquarters, his administration would be tarred by scandals political and personal, a rate of White House dismissals unparalleled in history, and investigations into possibly illegal actions by the President, his family, and his team. Trump’s decisions sometimes seemed as if they were designed to erode American effectiveness or standing, be it in government or on the world stage. Again and again he would belittle America’s closest allies---Britain, Canada, France, Germany, and Australia, all the while praising Russia’s strongman.
As folks like to say on Twitter, “This held up well.” Except those folks are usually being ironic. Willett’s tweet and my post from December---December 2016!---have actually held up pretty well, it’s just that things are worse than was generally known at the time. Back then it looked liked Putin meddled in the election on Trump’s behalf because he knew Trump would be a whole lot easier to deal with than Clinton. Now we know he did it because Trump was already on the string and the next step was to start pulling…
Remember when George W. Bush looked into Putin's eyes and got a sense of his soul, as if he had one? Putin's looked Donald Trump in the eye and has seen that Donald Trump doesn't have a soul either. It's all one giant, fragile, immature ego in there.
Trump is greedy, careless, irresponsible, needy, vain, insecure, and dumb in the way only people who think they're smarter than everybody else can be dumb.
And he has no interest but self-interest which he clearly has mixed up with the interests of the country. If he thinks it's good for Donald Trump, then that's all the good it needs to be.
Trump has been this way his whole life, caring only about making money and aggrandizing himself.
All of which makes him easy to manipulate and easy to outfox.
Updated to account for it being worse than I thought: Like I said up top, the post has held up pretty well, but not as well as I was congratulating myself for. At the time, I thought Trump was just a stooge and a tool and that Putin was manipulating him without his being aware of it. I still think he’s dumb enough not to know when he’s being conned and even arrogant and vain enough to think he’s the one pulling the wool over Putin’s eyes. But it’s beginning to look as though Trump has had his eyes wide-open. I don’t know if he’s been bought, bribed, blackmailed, or has simply been seduced, or if he's delusional enough to think this is a good thing. Whatever's at the bottom of it, and it may be all of the above, he’s Putin’s inside man by choice and a knowing participant in his own treason. At any rate, that’s the way my thinking’s trending after reading these columns by Tom Nichols and Max Boot:
Members of the Wedding: Pop Mannion, his new beloved daughter-in-law, the brand-new Mrs M, some guy in a rented tux, and Mom Mannion. May 28, 1988.
Once again, longtime blogging stalwart and friend, that vagabond scholar, Batocchio has taken on the task of assembling the Jon Swift Memorial Blogger Roundup (Company Motto: Best Posts of the Year, Chosen by the Bloggers Themselves). The Roundup was started by our late lamented comrade Al Weisel, known far and wide as the “reasonable conservative” Jon Swift---it always amazed me how many actual conservatives never got the joke, even though it was part of what made the joke work so well. Al had a generosity of spirit that was already diminishing among other A-listers of the time who were busy forgetting where they came from and whose generosity they owed their burgeoning reputations and opportunities and he was determined to use his very popular platform to help promote the work of other, lesser known bloggers. Since Al’s death, Batocchio has showed the same generosity by continuing the tradition of the Roundup. This year’s list includes some old favorites and many soon to become new favorites. I’m on it. The post I submitted is titled “Pop Mannion, Mrs M, spinach pasta, and the persistence of memory”. Some of you may remember it. I wrote it back in August, ten days after Pop died. I billed it as “A story from a very hard year with a sad part, a funny part, and a happy part.” The happy part really is happy. Rather then send you over to the Roundup only to have the link bring you back to here, I’ve reposted it below. After you’re done, please make the jump over to Batocchio’s place and dig in…
Mrs M has been home from the hospital three weeks now, and in those three weeks she’s made excellent progress in her recovery. Physically. She’s been regaining her strength. Walking more and farther and standing longer. Her coordination’s improving. She’s still wobbly on her pins. Her balance isn’t what it needs to be. Her left arm and left leg are still showing signs of neglect and are much weaker than her right. She has to be reminded to use her left hand and her left foot doesn’t always want to hold her up, so she’s in constant danger of falling and one of us needs to be nearby to spot her when she’s up and about. But with Ken acting as her personal trainer, she’s been diligent about doing her exercises. She surprises her physical and occupational therapists with her progress with each visit. And her doctors are thrilled. The trouble now is she’s getting cocky and thinks she can do more than she can. One of the things she thinks she can do is drive. This is a point she returns to again and again.
“You can’t drive,” I tell her, refusing gently but firmly to give her the keys.
“Who says?”
“Me, for one.”
“What do you know?”
“The doctors.”
“Oh, them.”
“Your therapists. New York State. Pretty much the whole world. Nobody wants you driving yet. You’d be a menace to traffic.”
“I would not.”
“You still have trouble navigating around the house. You turn right when you want to go left trying to get from the kitchen to the living room. I let you take the car to the grocery store and the next thing I know I'm getting a call from the Oregon state police telling me to come get you.”
“You worry too much. Where are the keys?”
Mrs M’s determination to get in the car and go is somewhat unnerving, mainly because she’s sneaky and quick. One day Oliver caught her on her way out the door and had to haul her back in the house. But as scary as it can be, it’s also heartening. I take it as a sign her old independence of spirit and need to keep herself busy are reasserting themselves. It shows she’s getting better, although, as is characteristic, she’s impatient and in too much of a hurry. What’s truly disconcerting is where she wants to drive to and when.
One example: Evenings after dinner she announces she has to go into the office for a bit to finish up some work.
The office she’s referring to is the newspaper office where she hasn’t worked in five years.
Physically her progress has been steady. Cognitively she’s been improving in fits and starts as her brain works to knit itself back together, a slow, complex, and unpredictable process. Mainly she’s been experiencing what are called confabulations, a mixing up of real memories with false memories with what’s actually taking place with what she’s imagining taking place. To listen to her confabulate is like listening to someone describe a dream while dreaming, with the dream being very real to the dreamer. Sometimes it’s as if Mrs M is living in two and even three realities at once, this one, an alternative and largely imagined one, and a remembered one. For instance, routinely in the mornings since she’s been home she’s waked up in her parents’ house and had her coffee in their kitchen while recognizing our bedroom and our kitchen and wondering how we managed to bring all our kitchenware down with us when we came to visit.
Her thoughts have to take detours and they don’t always get on the same train and travel along the same tracks. And some of those trains are hauling cars loaded with false memories and jumbled memories, and the passengers are looking out the windows at imagined landscapes and towns, and the trains are stopping at imagined stations to take on more confabulations.
The trains can be redirected and all the cars coupled on the same track, and her thoughts arrive at their scheduled destinations. It just makes for an interesting journey. And there’s a psychological aspect as well as a neurological one, although the two are part and parcel. Her confabulations usually seem to have roots in what is really going on or represent wishful thinking. Mrs M is itching to get back to work as a newswoman so her mixed up brain is telling her she already is.
Mrs M is aware this is part of her condition and sometimes it amuses her and even makes her laugh at herself. She calls her confabulations and memory confusions “brain hiccups” and tells people “my brain is loose.” I’m not sure she isn’t making a pun there, describing how some screws still need tightening and how her thinking occasionally escapes her control and goes wandering on its own. Her surgeons and her neurologist assure us that this will clear up, it’s just going to take several months.
Her other major cognitive issue is with her short-term memory. It’s not that she’s experiencing short-term memory loss. It’s more like short-term memory misplacement. New information takes a while to get stored where she can get at it easily when she needs to recall it. It’s as if on her way to put them on their proper shelves in her mental attic she gets tired of climbing the stairs and puts the memories in a side closet to be carried up later, then when she needs them she forgets to look in that closet. Usually a gentle reminder is all it takes for her to go look. Sometimes she has to be told. When she finds them, she seems to recognize them. She actually remembers. But sometimes a memory comes back to her as news and she’s surprised by it as if this is the first she’s heard of it.
Which brings me to the other morning, Wednesday, two days after Pop Mannion’s funeral.
When I went to help her get up and get dressed, Mrs M noticed I wasn’t my usual ebullient I’ve-been-up-since-four-a.m.-and-I’m-still-full-of-vim-and vigor-and-rarin’-to-go self.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
“It’s a sad morning,” I said.
“What are you sad about?”
“My dad.”
She reached out and stroked my cheek. “He’ll get better,” she said soothingly. Back in the beginning of May, when she went into the hospital, we thought that he would. I almost didn’t have the heart to tell her.
“Kid,” I began. We really do call each other kid. “Kid, we went to the funeral, Monday.”
She looked stricken. Her lips and chin quivered and her eyes filled with tears. It all came back to her in a rush.
A moment like this has happened just about every day since Pop died. Mrs M and Pop were very close. I’ve only had to lose my father once. She’s lost her beloved father-in-law five or six times and will likely lose him a few more until the memories finally make it to their proper place in the attic.
I debated with myself over what order to tell this, whether I should put the sad part or the funny part first. Yep. There’s a funny part. Obviously, that was the sad part. So here’s the funny part.
Pop loved all four of his daughters-in-law and both his sons-in-law, but he and Mrs M had a special affinity. They could talk to each other about politics and current events, the news business, books, and sports with an enthusiasm and directness and sense of fun that was a delight to listen in on. There was a time, when I was in my late teens and early twenties, when Pop and Mom Mannion nearly despaired of me. The thing that convinced them I wasn’t the complete screw-up and ne’er-do-well I appeared to be was my bringing this ebullient, gregarious, big-hearted, smart, talented, and ambitious curly-headed blonde home and then getting her somehow to agree to marry me. Not only did Pop enjoy talking with her, he enjoyed that she fed him well. On one of her early visits to the Old Mannion Homestead, Mrs M---the Blonde as was---made dinner for the whole clan. She was just learning to be the great cook she is, but she already had a delicious specialty, a spinach and cheese pasta dish that Uncle Merlin can attest is addictive. Pop devoured it. But it wasn’t until his third or fourth helping that he asked.
“What is this?”
“Spinach pasta,” he was told.
Pop looked taken aback.
“It can’t be,” he said.
“Why not?” Mrs M wondered.
“I don’t like spinach,” Pop said matter of factly.
So that’s the funny part. And whenever Mrs M gets sad about Pop, I just have to say “spinach” and she brightens right up. She remembers. Truly remembers. Not just that he’s gone but how happy we all were when he was here and how happy the two of them were whenever they got together, although...
She’s taught herself many more recipes over the years and I’m not sure she ever served him spinach again.
[Editor’s note: One thing leads to another on the internet. Came across this post of mine from almost exactly a year ago. Boy, I was mad at Republicans then. All Republicans. The politicians and the people who voted for them. Almost as mad as I am now.]
November 30, 2017. It’s not Trump. It’s not Applebee Nazis. It’s Republicans. All Republicans. Up and down the line. The ones in Congress. The ones in the governor’s mansions and state legislatures. The ones who vote to put and keep them there.
Our Mr President Trump’s core base of true believers is made up of yahoos, white supremacists, Nazis---neo-, crypto-, and unabashed, unapologetic, and outright---religious nuts, lifetime members of the club of life’s losers looking for someone to blame for their troubles other than themselves, the paranoid and delusional, and wannabes---the millionaires in their dreams who see in Trump the idealization of the rich person they know they would be if only. These last are the truly “economically anxious”, their anxiety stemming from their unacknowledged suspicion that they will never be rich and that “failure” earns them membership in the club of life’s losers. After all, money is the only measure of a person’s worth as a person. Just ask the President.
But the majority of Trump’s support---what little he has left in the polls, although it still amounts to tens of millions of votes---comes from garden variety Republicans who are sticking with him for the same Republican reasons they’d be sticking with any Republican president, the same Republican reasons President Pence will become their newfound hero the second he’s sworn in: he’s keeping their taxes down and Those People in their place.
I’ve ridden this hobby horse fast and furiously before: The majority of Republicans are small town suburban, middle class bigots, smug, complacent, self-righteous, self-congratulating, self-satisfied, self-important haters of everybody who is not exactly like them, everybody who by the very fact of existing they perceive as a criticism of themselves and the choices and compromises they’ve made to live conventional, unexceptional, uninteresting, unoriginal lives of conformity, hypocrisy, and unearned self-regard.
They think they’re the only ones who work and pay taxes. They think they’re the only true patriots, the only good Christians, the only real Americans. They think of themselves as the salt of the earth, lights of the world, but the only good work they have to do to continue to shine, the only way they have to be to maintain their savor is stand at the front of the temple and boast, and their reward for this is ownership.
They think this is their country and they don’t have to share it.
Liberals keep expressing disbelief that they seem to vote against their own interests. But that’s their interest. Not having to share. Keeping it all to themselves.
All their Vote for Whatever Republican is Running for Whatever Office lawn signs, the flags flying from their doorposts, their parading of virtue, all their praying in public, their God-bothering and bible waving, all their mouthing of platitudes about self-reliance and paying your own way and getting to keep what you earn, down to the last penny, is signaling. One way or another they put up a sign.
“Private Property! Keep Out! Trespassers Deserve To Be Shot!”
On the planet Ekos, which, under the (mis)guidance of a deranged Earth historian, has modeled itself on Nazi Germany, a disguised Mr Spock is interrogated by the Deputy Fuhrer Malakon in an episode of the original Star Trek TV series called “Patterns of Force,” the only “What If the Nazis Had Won?” story I’ve ever enjoyed. But then I just started Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America.”
Roth’s gone. Somewhere in the archives I’m sure I have more on him and his work, but this post from January is within easiest reach at the moment…
I wonder if “What if the Nazis Had Won?” stories are popular in Europe. Not that I would know, but I’d guess not. They’re unnecessary. The Europeans already know the answer because the Nazis did win.
I’m thinking of Western Europe. I imagine they’re intrigued by a different question in Eastern Europe: “Would it have been better if the Nazis had won?”
Two things: I’m not a fan of dystopian fiction or movies and stories that have the Nazis winning are about as dystopian as dystopian gets. And I have to make myself read Philip Roth. You’re probably already ahead of me and know why those two things aren’t non-sequiturs.
I’ve never liked stories that are premised on imagining the world gone mad because even as a little kid I knew that the world was mad. Why waste time and thought making up ways the world might be mad when all you had to do was put your finger on any spot on the map and you’d locate a place where some form of madness reigns. I figured that people went to movies and read novels about imaginary mad, mad worlds because they were too frightened to face this world’s all too real madness directly. I sound like I was an awfully hard-headed realist for my young age, but I actually I was a romantic and drawn to stories about worlds where good people conquered the madness. My favorite such stories were the tales of King Arthur and his Knights, which is ironic, considering Camelot ends with the world going mad. The attraction of What if the Nazis Had Won stories was lost on me, because I thought that if you wanted to know what would have happened all you had to do was take a hard-headed, realistic look at what did happen and because wanting such stories didn’t fit with my theory that people liked dystopias because they couldn’t face the world’s all to real madness directly---if that was the case, then why would you enjoy imagining a world gone even madder? Did people like giving themselves nightmares? It was a long time before I learned that the answer to that was yes. Thing is, I never did and still don’t. Which is why I have no interest in watching The Man in the High Castle.
Don’t try changing mind by telling me how good it is. Good and bad have nothing to do with it.
As for Philip Roth, good and bad have nothing to do with why I have to force myself to read his stuff. Neither does the man himself, except as he sneaks into his own fiction. (By the way, don’t make the mistake that his various “alter-egos,” including Nathan Zuckerman and “Philip Roth,” are him in disguise. He’s one cagey bastard. Those alter-egos are alter-egos of the alter-ego who’s supposedly writing the story, the fictional character behind the fictional “I”, who may be an alter-ego of Roth or may be the alter-ego of another alter-ego.) No, it’s not him---or “him”---it’s us.
The reason I have to force myself to read his stuff---and I’ve forced myself to read almost all his stuff, including Sabbath’s Theater, which I had to force myself to read all the way through, not the case with many of his other books. Once I got started, I didn’t have to force myself to keep going---is that Roth writes dystopian fiction in that he paints a dystopian picture of human nature. It’s not that the world isn’t mad, it’s that the people in the world as he sees it are mad. They’re mad because of it, or apart from it, or simply along with it. They cause the world’s madness and they cause their own. They make themselves mad and they make the people around them mad. They’re perverse that way. I don’t enjoy looking at human beings that way. I don’t usually see people that way. I see them---us---as weak, flawed, vicious, wicked, evil, and sinful, and I don’t mind and in fact enjoy stories that show us at our worst. But I like to see strength, decency, and virtue win out in the end. To put it simply, as much as I pride myself on my hard-headed realism, I’m a Romantic at heart, and Roth isn’t. He has almost no Romance in him. He’s a hard-headed realist, through and through.
And a cruel to the point of sadistic one at that.
Usually.
What I’ve been leading up to is this: one of the few novels of his I hadn’t yet forced myself to read was The Plot Against America.
And why would I have? A What if the Nazis Had Won story by the writer whose writing on the best of days sinks me into a pit of misanthropic despair?
So why are you reading it now, Lance? I hear you asking, once again a step ahead of me.
Because I read this interview with Roth in which I learned that David Simon is making it into a mini-series. Since I know I’ll watch it despite myself, because of Simon---and because I’m curious to see who’ll play Charles Lindbergh---I figure I might as well get a jump on it and maybe inoculate my soul against the despair I expect the series to cause.
Expected.
I’m not very far into the novel but I already know I was wrong about the plot of The Plot Against America.
It’s not a What if the Nazis Had Won story. It’s a What If A Fascist Won the 1940 Presidential Election story. I’m not giving much away that Roth himself doesn’t give away right at the start.: the answer is, he’d have a hard time of it, trying to turn the United States fascist, and ultimately he’d fail.
Here’s Roth’s giveaway.
The story centers around Jewish family named Roth living in Newark, New Jersey in 1940, the year, the novel has it, American Firster, Nazi sympathizer, and anti-semite Charles Lindbergh defeats Franklin Roosevelt in FDR’s try for a third term as president. This isn’t at all far-fetched. Lindbergh, despite having disgraced himself with a nationally virulent speech in Madison Square Garden in which he blamed all the country’s troubles on the Jews was still a popular hero; meanwhile, a lot of people didn’t think Roosevelt should even have considered running for a third term and they weren’t happy with his attempts to maneuver the country into an alliance with England in its war with Nazi Germany. Lindbergh was not a candidate. The GOP nominated lawyer and businessman Wendell Wilkie, who had no political experience and not much of a national reputation, and yet Wilke still managed to give Roosevelt a scare on election night. In The Plot Against America, Lindbergh shows up at the deadlocked Republican convention and is nominated by acclamation. Meanwhile, the Roth’s two sons, Sandy, who’s twelve, and Philip, seven, go about the business of being somewhat above average American kids. Sandy is a budding artist. Philip collects stamps. And it’s through Roth’s descriptions of Philip’s stamp collecting that we learn that Lindbergh ultimately fails:
On the green one-cent stamp in the educators group, just above the picture of the Lamp of Knowledge, was Horace Mann; on the red two-cent, Mark Hopkins; on the purple three-cent, Charles W. Eliot; on the blue four-cent, Frances E. Willard; on the brown ten-cent was Booker T. Washington, the first Negro to appear on an American Stamp. I remember that after placing the Booker T. Washington in my album and showing my mother how it completed the set of five, I had asked her, “Do you think there’ll ever be a Jew on a stamp?” and she replied, “Probably---someday, yes. I hope so anyway.” In fact, twenty-six years had to pass, and it took Einstein to do it.
Albert Einstein was already living in the United States in 1940, but if there’d been a President Lindbergh and he’d had his way, he probably wouldn’t have been living there much longer, if he was even left alone to live anywhere else. Certainly, he wouldn’t have become a beloved American icon worthy of recognition by the U.S. Postal Service in 1966.
The real Philip Roth grew up in Newark, like the Philip in the novel; was the son of an insurance agent and a housewife and community activist, just like the Philip in the novel; had a brother named Sandy, who was an artist; and was seven years old in 1940. I don’t know if he collected stamps. He writes about stamp collecting as if he did, so I’m assuming he did. I’m not assuming that “Philip Roth” is Philip Roth, but this is one case where he may be intended to be.
This is the other reason I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the book so far and, although I had to force myself to start reading it, I haven’t had force myself to keep reading.
The Plot Against America seems on track to be hopeful, optimistic, and patriotic novel. Roth doesn't mitigate the attraction fascism holds for many Americans and he’s always taken it as a kind of duty for himself as a writer to explore the ways anti-semitism is woven into the fabric of American life. But in The Plot Against America he seems out to show that a resistance to fascism is a quality of the American character. He takes the opportunity to show that character revealing itself in the day to day routines of the Newark neighborhood he grew up in. People are capable of acting as madly as they do in Roth’s other books, and madness and perversity still prosper, but his main characters and their neighbors are shown to be decent, virtuous, and sane. At least, that’s the way they appear in the what I’ve read so far.
Roth appears to be using a dark and disturbing alternative history as cover for writing idyllically about his own actual history. He writes about the days of his boyhood with affection and even borders on sentimentality. He’s still writing as a hard-headed realist, but he’s not as cynical or cruel. The Plot Against America is hardly a Romantic book, but so far it is a nostalgic one.
On the sidewalk during the long vacation months we played a new game called “I Declare War,” using a cheap rubber ball and a piece of chalk. With the chalk you drew a circle some five or six feet in diameter, partitioned it into as many pielike segments as there were players, and chalked into each the name of one of various foreign countries that had been in the news throughout the year. Next each player picked “his” country and stood straddling the edge of the circle, one foot inside and one foot out, so that when the time came he could flee in a hurry. Meanwhile a designated player, holding the ball aloft in his hand, announced slowly, in an ominous cadence, “I---Declare---War---On---” There was a suspenseful pause, and then the kid declaring war would slam the ball down, in the same instant shouting “America!”---and everybody would take off except the one on whom the surprise attack had been launched. His job was to catch the ball on the bounce as quickly as he could and call “Stop!” Everybody now allied against him would have to freeze in place, and the victim would begin the counterattack, trying to eliminate one aggressor country at a time by walloping each as hard as he could with the ball, beginning by throwing at those closest to him and advancing his position with each murderous thwack.
We played this game incessantly, until it rained and temporarily the names of the countries were washed away. People had to either step on them or over them when they made their way down the street. In our neighborhood there was no other graffiti to speak of in those days, just this. the remnants of the hieroglyphics of our simple street games. Harmless enough, and yet it drove some of the mothers crazy who had to hear us at it for hours on end through their open windows. “Can’t you kids do something else? Can’t you find another game to play?” But we couldn’t---declaring war was all we thought about too.
This passage, with all its quotidian detail, could appear exactly as written in a straight up historical or autobiographical novel or in a memoir. But maybe that’s the point.
Even as the world goes mad, life goes on pretty much as it always has for people who aren’t immediately touched by the madness. That’s what happened here in the time leading up to our entry into the war and in fact continued to happen even while we sent our young men and women off to fight and die by the tens and tens of thousands. They were missed and mourned of course, but their empty places at the dinner table grew to be taken for granted to the point that they became if not invisible unremarked upon, and their younger brothers and sisters still went out to play until it got dark and they had to come in and get ready for bed, just as if there was no war on and the world was as sane and orderly and safe as it used to be.
And the same thing went on in occupied France and even in Germany. Whole days, whole weeks could pass for most people in the ways they had passed before the first shots were fired. This “normalcy” may have contributed to the spread of fascism or at least to its acceptance. Most Frenchmen and women weren’t collaborators but neither were they members of the Resistance. The swastikas and the jackboots and the raised right arms blended in with the sights and sounds of everyday life. Fascism took hold because people stopped seeing it taking hold. They just saw it the way they saw all the other things they were used to and took for granted in their daily comings and goings. They even got used to it within themselves as feature of their own feeling and thinking. And now I’ve got myself worried.
Maybe that’s what Roth is setting me up for. Like I said, he’s a cagey bastard. Maybe The Plot Against America isn’t about how we’re immune to fascism but how we’re as susceptible as any place else. This is Roth’s way of sneaking up on that theme.
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