The Mumpsimus

Spring Classes

2012-01-29T21:50:00.002-05:00

Zero for Conduct

Tomorrow morning marks the start of our spring semester, and so I thought tonight I'd do my regular pre-term post about what I've got planned.

I'm teaching three classes, one of which I've never taught before. They are Currents in Global Literature, Introduction to Film, and Outlaws, Delinquents, and Other "Deviants" in Film & Society. Let's look at them one by one...

Currents in Global Literature
I taught this course last term, and it's the one that has changed the least. (Here's the syllabus.) It's also probably the last time I will get to teach it, because we're in the midst of hiring a full-time, Ph.D'ed person to do so. Thus, I didn't want to put too much energy and effort into redesigning a course I have no future with. Luckily, last term went really well.

The one big change in the syllabus is that I'm replacing Petals of Blood with The River Between. There was really no choice; A Sentimental Education and Burger's Daughter are both pretty long and complex, so following them with the long complexities of Petals of Blood was just too much for the students, though they gave it a good shot. I should probably just do a whole course of those three books, but I like having a couple shorter books in there, too. So Petals of Blood had to go. River Between is fine, but it's simpler and not as perfect for our theme of "revolution", so I'm definitely disappointed. If the term were even just one week longer, we'd still be able to fit Petals of Blood in, but I just couldn't make it work with the current schedule. We may not even get to do River Between — just last week, the campus bookstore let me know they can't get copies from their distributor because the book is effectively out of print. It's still perfectly available via Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc., so I'm going to see if the students are willing to order copies themselves (if they haven't done so already). If not, we'll have to drop it.

Introduction to Film
I taught this course a few semesters ago, and it went okay, but I'm thrilled to get to teach it again because I learned so much the first time about what works and doesn't work in a lower-level undergraduate film class. I'd never taken such a course as a student, having instead had much more specific sorts of film classes ("International Comedy 1940-now", etc.), so even wrapping my brain around the idea of introducing all the various ways of approaching film was pretty difficult. I don't think I've come up with a brilliant new approach or anything now, but I've certainly changed the class a lot. (Here's the syllabus.)

What precipitated the biggest changes was our wonderful library being willing to order a lot of new DVDs to build up our collection. It's certainly nowhere near comprehensive now, but we've at least got enough films to cover most genres and eras of Hollywood film, plus some good examples of international and experimental films. This has changed my pedagogy, because I'm now able to make group activities based around different movies a substantial element of the class. Instead of us all watching the same movies, there are now a few different mechanisms to allow student choice. Each student has to do a presentation with a partner about a film everybody else has not watched, and often these are not specific films (e.g., the first pair presents on "A silent feature (60+ minutes)", etc.).

Similarly, I'm not assigning any specific pages in our textbooks (about which more in a moment). Instead, students will mine the books for information they use in their class activities. I've created a class website with Google Sites and will add the students as editors of it so that they can create pages for the various sorts of information they find. This will all be organized not only by the specific activities, but by the fact that I'll be giving them all the questions from the final exam early on (probably on our second day). I've used this method in the feminism course I used to teach (before I started doing Communications classes), and found it really helpful as a way to give the students a guide through the huge amount of ideas and information they were exposed to. The course website will, if all goes well, becomes a really great study tool for the final exam, and hopefully that will add to their sense of investment in it. We'll see.

The textbooks I settled on were the new edition of the one I used last time, The Film Experience edited by Timothy Corrigan and Patricia White, supplemented with The Oxford History of World Cinema. The new edition of Corrigan & White mostly improves the text's clarity and adds some references to movies that have come out since the previous edition was released. I had hoped for some more substantial changes, particularly the book's design — there's a lot more that could be done with the images, as Bordwell & Thompson's Film Art has beautifully shown — but it's still the most intelligently comprehensive introductory film text I've seen, as well as the one closest to my own approach to cinema. The Oxford History is overkill for this course, admittedly, but I love film history so much that I couldn't resist assigning it. And while The Film Experience, especially in the new edition, is terribly expensive (c. $80), used copies of The Oxford History are plentiful and cheap, given that the book has been unchanged since 1996. (And given Oxford UP's move to work-for-hire contracts for all contributors, I'm perfectly happy for students to buy used copies that won't send money to that publisher.)

What films are we watching? Here's the list of ones we'll see in full, both in and out of class:

Sherlock, Jr (Keaton, 45 mins) & Duck Soup (McCarey/Marx Bros., 68 mins)
Fitzcarraldo (Herzog, 158 mins)
Casablanca (Curtiz, 102 mins)
Breathless (Godard, 90 mins)
La Jetee (Marker, 28 mins)
Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov, 68 mins)
Edge of Heaven (Akin, 116 mins)
Plastic Bag (Bahrani, 18 mins)
Miami Vice (theatrical version) (Mann, 134 mins)
Broken Blossoms (Griffith, 90 mins)
Vampyr (Dreyer, 73 mins)
Written on the Wind (Sirk, 99 mins)
Touch of Evil (restored version) (Welles, 95 mins)
Psycho (Hitchcock, 109 mins)
Peeping Tom (Powell, 101 mins)
Black Girl (Sembene, 65 mins)
Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo, 121 mins)
Children of Men (Cuaron, 109 mins)

Though I lost a bunch of favorites that I included last time, I think this is a more coherent group of films aesthetically, historically, and thematically. It allows us a lot more deliberate time talking about methods of storytelling, effects of genre, etc. I also decided I wanted to challenge the students' knowledge and assumptions about what cinema was, is, and can be. I fear they'll find a lot of it boring, but hopefully I'll be able to show them what to look for to find at least some engagement in each movie.

Outlaws, Delinquents, and Other "Deviants" in Film & Society
I've never taught this course before. It's a general education class based in the Communications & Media Studies department, for whom I've begun teaching one class each term (unfortunately preventing me from teaching any Women's Studies courses during the regular year, since there's now no room in my schedule, and I'm not allowed to teach more than 3 classes per term). The catalogue description is pretty general, basically saying it's a course about people who deviate from social norms. I decided to take that into some particular directions. (The syllabus is here.)

Here are the required films:

The Public Enemy
Border Incident
Pickup on South Street
Clockers
The Outlaw Josey Wales
Hail the Conquering Hero
First Blood
Zero for Conduct
Rebel without a Cause
The Doom Generation
My Own Private Idaho
Women in Cages (selections)
Thelma & Louise
Volver
Carrie
Easy A

So, as you can see from that list, we start with crime, move on to war and its heroes (or "heroes"), spend some time with juvenile delinquents, and end up with a variety of deviant women.

The pedagogy for this course is a bit more traditional than in my Intro to Film course because the subject matter is more specific. I'm still using our textbooks primarily as resource books for the students, though, with only a few specifically assigned readings. The books are The Cinema Book edited by Pam Cook and A Short Guide to Writing About Film by Timothy Corrigan, both of which I've written about before.

Once the term is finished, I'll post a reflection on how it all went. At the moment, I'm as excited as I've ever been for a new term, because I put an awful lot of work into preparing these courses and each one is about a subject I'm really passionate about. With luck, that passion won't reduce me to standing in front of the class each day and saying, "Isn't that just, like, so coool!"

We shall see...

Metaphor Systems, Fictive Moments, and False Arrests

2012-01-27T09:36:00.000-05:00

Bradford Morrow, editor of Conjunctions and writer of The Diviner's Tale and The Uninnocent, in an interview conducted by Edie Meidav at The Millions:

I may be overly optimistic or utterly blind, but my view of contemporary American fiction is that it is as rich as ever. Some of the best work is being written in what until recently was considered, at least among the conventional literati, genre fiction. Horror, gothic, mystery, fantasy, fabulism. There are so many stunningly original and serious writers working these fields. I have to think that anybody reading this interview would agree. Just one example, though there are many, would be Elizabeth Hand. She composes sentences of ravishing beauty. She is capable of creating metaphor systems that are so dynamic and provocative. She can turn a fictive moment that seems deeply rooted in the everyday into something that, in fact, touches upon the sublime, the miraculous. Just read her novella Cleopatra Brimstone and tell me that American fiction isn’t pulsing with life. Like I say, I could list dozens of authors here whose work I admire and follow with care and excitement. That said, I do think that much contemporary criticism is stuck in the past and that too many reviewers want those who are exploring ways to revolutionize genre to stick to the rules. I think of them as genre police. They make too many false arrests and lead potential readers astray, keep them caged away from renegades whose work they might well dig reading.

Report Realism

2012-01-25T11:54:00.001-05:00

At Gukira, Keguro has posted some provocative thoughts on "report realism" in Kenyan fiction:

Over the past 15 years and more specifically the past ten years or so, Kenyan writing has been shaped by NGO demands: the “report” has become the dominant aesthetic foundation. Whether personal and confessional or empirical and factual or creative and imaginative, report-based writing privileges donors’ desires: to help, but not too much; to save, but not too fast; to uplift, but never to foster equality. One can imagine how these aims meld with traditional modes of realism and naturalism and also speak to modernist truncations and postmodern undecidability. However, report realism names a more historically accurate way to name a genre indebted (very literally) to NGOS in Kenya.

The report aesthetic goes beyond citing NGO facts and figures. It is concerned, above all, with a search for truth and accuracy and is threatened by imaginative labor.

I cannot comment on the specific accuracy of Keguro's observations, because I'm not in Kenya reading aspiring writers' work. But I was interested in the observations because when I was in Kenya (over five years ago, now) and talked with some young writers there, the sorts of contemporary writers they cited as inspiring them were people like Stephen King and J.K. Rowling. Indeed, that's mostly what was available for fiction in the bookstores, with most stores putting Kenyan and African fiction, if they stocked it at all, in dusty corners. Yet the writers who cited these inspirations to me were, with one exception that I can think of (someone who'd spent quite a bit of time in the U.S., in fact), writing in a very realistic, documentary manner. That can happen anywhere, though, if you only talk to a limited sample of people; I hoped (and assumed) that there were other writers out there aspiring to different sorts of writing, whether fantastical in its content or experimental in its form, because aesthetic diversity makes for healthy reading-writing ecosystems. And there is some such work being written (heck, Ngugi's Wizard of the Crow is a good example); it just seems hard for it to get attention or to be celebrated in the way documentary realism is.

I'm a dedicated (if undisciplined) reader of African fiction, and particularly Kenyan fiction, but I'm very much an amateur and obviously an outsider, so I'm wary of saying anything other than, "Go read Keguro's post," because anything I say could easily be taken as a white American guy telling African writers what to write. My desire is not to tell anybody anywhere what they should write; instead, I would hope to encourage us all to do what we can to create the space for people to write what most compells them. Great writing of all types happens when writers find the forms and styles that allow them to express their own unique experiences and imaginings.

The danger of report realism is its normative power — if writers think this is what they should write, or this is the only type of writing that will get them an audience beyond their closest friends, then it is not just limiting, it is insidious and harmful.

Those of us outside of Africa who want to encourage more attention to African writing and more opportunities for African writers sometimes reinforce such harmful assumptions. The Caine Prize is a perfect example. In my Rain Taxi review of Ten Years of the Caine Prize for African Writing, I said that the Caine Prize judges' narrow tastes are helping to limit the possibilities for writing from the continent. That was born out again during this year's Caine Prize. I don't blame the writers for that.

J.M. Coetzee was criticized (rightfully, I think) for lending his name and fame to an African fiction prize/anthology that ended up including, it seems, only white writers. It looks like Coetzee only read the 21 finalists and then was tasked with choosing winners from that group, and that the reading was anonymous, so his opportunities for knowing much about the background of the writers was limited, but still, he's a hugely famous Nobel winner and could, at the end, have pulled his name or said something publicly. He didn't, but he did write the most reluctant introduction to such a book that I've ever read. The very first paragraph reads:

The 21 stories that made it to the final round this year are of a generally higher standard than the finalists for the last award, which suggests that the standard of entries as a whole may be higher. If so, this is a promising development. On the other hand, the kind of short-story writer we are all hoping that an award of this magnitude will attract, recognize, reward, foster, and perhaps even launch into the wider world — the newcomer with naked talent, a feel for language, and a fresh vision of the world —stubbornly fails to arive.

Ouch.

I don't know about "naked talent" (what does that look like in a text?), but the feel for language and fresh vision of the world are certainly things that have been, with some exceptions, lacking from the Caine Prize, too. The workshop stories presented in the annual Caine Prize anthologies, though, show that this isn't necessarily the fault of the writers, but of the type of writing that gets rewarded and encouraged.

And that, ultimately, is why I think Keguro's post is important, and why I hope it will not only be read and debated, but that it will help lead to an environment where report realism isn't the only option. Keguro says it better than I ever could:

I want to advocate for wild imaginations—wild forms of writing, non-linear narratives, an obsessive attention to detail, writing that strains at the edges, reaches beyond itself. I’m interested in writing that lives in secret folders on computers, scurries under beds and into drawers when friends visit, worries that it will be deemed obscene, crazy, impossible. I’m interested in writing that dares truth-the truth of feeling, the truth of form, the truth of seeking, the truth of language seeking byways and creating paths. I’m interested in writing beyond report realism.

Alternate History

2012-01-24T09:48:00.000-05:00

Ta-Nehisi Coates on Ron Paul's insistence that "compensated emancipation" would have prevented the Civil War:

We are united in our hatred of war and our abhorrence of violence. But a hatred of war is not enough, and when employed to conjure away history, it is a cynical vanity which posits that one is, somehow, in possession of a prophetic insight and supernatural morality which evaded our forefathers. It is all fine to speak of how history "should have been." It takes something more to ask why it wasn't, and then to confront what it actually was.

For more, see his first post in this series.

"Peter Torrelli, Falling Apart" by Rebecca Makkai

2012-01-23T14:44:00.001-05:00

I've been reading through this year's Best American Short Stories, edited by Geraldine Brooks, little by little, almost randomly, not quickly, and mostly as a reward to myself when I get other work done. I got it as an ebook, because that's a nicely convenient way to read it. What ultimately attracted me to it was that this year's table of contents is more interesting to me than any in the last few years. (Finally, a BASS that isn't a Best American Rich White People!) My favorite story so far is Rebecca Makkai's "Peter Torrelli, Falling Apart", originally published in Tin House. For me this story alone is easily worth what I paid for the book.

Before saying a few things about "Peter Torrelli...", though, I want to recommend Geraldine Brooks's introduction to you. BASS is in many ways the old guard of the old guard when it comes to self-consciously literary fiction, and the regime seems to be enforced by the publishers and series editors, as the more adventurous guest editors of the past (whether John Gardner, Michael Chabon, or Stephen King) have politely hinted in their introductions, and as the tables of contents have amply demonstrated. BASS is rarely a book you go to to find out what's new and interesting in the realm of short fiction; it's a book you read because there is a generally consistent level of accomplishment and pleasure. (True, also, of the annual Pushcart Prize volumes.) It's a rare BASS story that makes me feel like reading it was a waste of time; it's also a rare BASS story that overwhelmingly awes, thrills, inspires, or challenges me. (In that sense, "Peter Torrelli, Falling Apart" is a rare BASS story; I'd happily employ all four words to describe it. Also, and perhaps most importantly: enchants.)

What's interesting about Brooks's introduction, though, is that while she seems to be a fairly traditional reader, she is also clearly more open-minded in her approach than quite a few past guest editors. Her introduction's first pages are similar to the openings of past introductions, and then she offers specific observations about many of the stories included in the book; the really interesting bit comes at the end, beginning when she writes about George Saunders's "Escape from Spiderhead" (originally in The New Yorker), calling it "that rare example of full-bore speculative fiction to make it through the literary magazines’ anti-sci-fi force field," and says that "Coming across this story elicited the same joyful surprise I once felt when offered a glass of wine after a dry week in Riyadh." This leads her to say, "I would like to raise a small, vigorously waving hand in favor of releasing more such stories out of the genre ghetto and into the literary mainstream."

(Please, fankids, don't jump on that sentence and start accusing Brooks of somehow wanting to steal your beloved genre and suggesting that she should read at least 50 years of back issues of Analog or F&SF. No. Just: no.)

This leads Brooks to offer six, as she calls them, "carps of the day". They are:

1. Enuf adultery eds. Too many stories about the wrong cock in the wrong cunt/anus/armpit/Airedale.
2. Eros ≠ thanatos necessarily. Not all love stories have to have bleak outcomes.
3. Foreign countries exist.
4. There’s a war on. The war in Afghanistan, in the year it became America’s longest, appeared as a brief aside in only two of one hundred and twenty stories.
5. Consider the following: Caravaggio’s Conversion of Saint Paul, Handel’s Messiah, Martin Luther King. Female genital mutilation, military-funeral picketers, abortion-doctor assassins. So why, if religion turns up in a story, is it generally only there as a foil for humor?
6. Not that I want to discourage humor. There’s so little. Why, writers, so haggard and so woebegone...

This is a marvelous list, and though of course I'm sure for Brooks or anyone it could be longer or differently ordered on a different day, I was thrilled to see it in the introduction to BASS.

Now, to Rebecca Makkai.

(First, I should note that one of the reasons this story was among the first I've read from the book is that we reprinted Rebecca's story "Couple of Lovers on a Red Background" in Best American Fantasy 3 and I wanted to catch up with her work. [By the way, she has just published her first novel: The Borrower. I haven't seen it yet, but I have no reason to believe it is anything other than excellent.])

"Peter Torrelli, Falling Apart", begins with a first paragraph that could be a model for how to create an effective and intriguing first paragraph that is not gimmicky:

When Carlos asked why I would risk my whole career for Peter Torrelli, I told him he had to understand that in those last three years of high school, Peter and I were the only two gay boys in Chicago. Because I really believed it, back then, and twenty-five years of experience proving otherwise was nothing in the face of that original muscle memory: me and Peter side by side on the hard pew during chapel, not listening, washed blind by the sun from the high windows, breathing in sync. It didn’t matter that we weren’t close anymore, I told Carlos. The point was, he’d been my first love. I’d never actually loved him, but still, listen, believe me, there’s another kind of first love.

Let's look at exactly what's going on in those words and sentences. The first clause establishes three characters: Carlos, a narrator, and Peter Torrelli. In that first clause, we also know that the narrator wil risk a whole career for Peter Torrelli, and that Carlos wonders why this is.

This may not seem like a big deal to you. But remember that we are in the first clause of the first sentence of the story. The first thirteen words. In the first thirteen words of this story, we already know something about three characters. That's efficient and impressive, but more importantly, it's a darn good way to catch the reader's attention without resorting to the sort of desperate tricks you find in the first paragraphs of so many mediocre stories that clamor for attention, sentences like, "That was the day my dead sister had sex with the alien."

The first sentence works so well because though it doesn't feel like it's grasping for our attention, it nonetheless is full of information, energy, and, in the end, a bit of oddity: not "Peter and I were the only two gay boys in our tiny small town in the middle of nowhere," but "Peter and I were the only two gay boys in Chicago." Obviously, this is a statement that we suspect the narrator does not actually believe, but it nonetheless offers a light surprise and also leads to the rest of the paragraph. The next sentence builds off it while also expanding the time-frame of the story even more. The first sentence gave us "those last three years of high school" as a past event, and the next sentence broadens our sense of the narrative's time with "twenty-five years of experience proving otherwise". By the end of the second sentence, the story is both specific in its details and expansive in its chronology, using time and memory as tools to bring depth to the details.

Now imagine that the paragraph had ended with the penultimate sentence. It would have worked, but it wouldn't have been very interesting and might have felt clichéd, empty, and sentimental (which, in fact, wouldn't be terrible if the writer wanted to show that the narrator's emotional life was basically clichéd, empty, and sentimental). It's the last sentence that makes it all work: "I’d never actually loved him, but still, listen, believe me, there’s another kind of first love." It works not just because it complexifies the previous sentence, but also because it's distinct from the other sentences in the paragraph in being much more speakerly than writerly. Three words create that effect: "listen, believe me". Cut them out, and it's a much more ordinary, writerly sentence. With them in, it creates a tone of testimony, a sense of improvisation and contingency. It also reveals a bit about the narrator, because there's a certain pleading in those words. Without those three words, the sentence is an assertion: "I’d never actually loved him, but still ... there’s another kind of first love." Add those three words, and the sentence becomes an assertion that is trying to convince itself of what it says. And that makes it a far more interesting sentence to read than the alternative. It gives us, the readers, something to think about, and it helps develop the character.

What we get in this first paragraph is a lot: characters, relationships, memory, and voice. None of it is forced, though. Compare the way Makkai deftly and subtly creates a narrative voice and a sense of intimacy between that voice and the reader with, for instance, some stories in any random anthology aimed at the Young Adult market. Even in the best such anthologies, I find, there are at least one or two writers struggling hard, hard, hard to sound like teenagers, and the results are, to my ear, jarring. (Of course, there are countless non-YA examples of writers working too hard to establish a narrative voice, but YA short fiction especially seems to bring it out even in writers who are otherwise quite skilled.) A little goes a long way, and a three-word divergence from the established tone can create a powerful effect.

"Peter Torrelli, Falling Apart" is not just about its words and sentences, however. Stuff happens. We get a view of the friendship between Peter and the narrator over the course of many years, encapsulated by a particular event. After high school, Peter became a relatively successful actor in the Chicago theatre scene, while by the time of the story, the narrator, Drew, works as an events manager for National Public Radio. (Carlos, by the way, is Drew's boyfriend; the relationship isn't working out.) In the past of the story, Peter had a failure of confidence on stage, and basically lost the ability to act. Eventually, he did some regional theatre work, but his old confidence was gone. The narrator hires him for a reading at the Chicago Art Institute, which is the event for which he is risking his whole career, because he knows as well as anyone that Peter could completely fall apart during the reading and ruin an important fundraising event.

Thus we have a specific moment around which an entire friendship and history can be elaborated, which is a great structure for a short story: the single event gives the story focus, but it also allows a great breadth of remembered experience to come into play.

But that's not all. Little details create resonances, and by the last paragraphs, the story is not just about this difficult, complicated friendship, but also about its setting. This is a story about Chicago, and more broadly, about change and cities. Peter quite literally embodies the changes in the city over the narrator's lifetime. The last two paragraphs of the story make it explicit, and so we have an ending that isn't merely epiphanic, but that adds new depth to what we've already read.

The story would have still been wonderful even if it were only about Drew and Peter, because their relationship is interesting and compelling. (I was probably especially interested because Peter reminded me of some actors I have known, and there is, overall, a melancholy tone to the friendships and relationships in the story that I find truthful. It's not eros = thanatos so much as eros = huh, well, that wasn't quite how I hoped things would turn out.) The relationships between the characters gain depth and power because Drew is confused about a lot of what he feels and understands. His desires are in conflict with his experiences, and that's a particularly fertile path for exploring characters.

The story is, obviously, straightforwardly realistic in its approach, but it is not merely realistic, and that is why I love it. I don't respond to a story because its content is realistic or fantasic, mundane or bizarre, familiar or exotic. (Sometimes, yes, I'm in the mood for one or the other, the way sometimes I'm in the mood for a Jean-Claude van Damme movie and sometimes I'm in the mood for something that's not a Jean-Claude van Damme movie.) I respond to a story because there is a complexity to it, a complexity that makes it more than just what it is: aspects that create resonance or provoke thought, images and structures that linger in memory. In that respect, Chekhov's "Gusev" and Raymond Carver's "Why Don't You Dance?" are, for me, as magical as any fantasy story. In "Peter Torrelli, Falling Apart", it is the richness of the memory-narrative, the uncertainty of the immediate events, the efficiency and specificity of the sentences and paragraphs, and the power of the ending to broaden and recontextualize the story that enchants me.

Enchant, it seems to me, is the best word to describe the best stories.

Amigo

2012-01-21T13:47:00.003-05:00

When I was younger, I thought John Sayles was one of the greatest living filmmakers. I unhesitatingly said Matewan was among my favorite five movies (yes, I had a favorite five movies, something that seemed immensely important to me at the time). I made a special trip to see Men with Guns when it was first released — I saw it during a matinee in West Newton, Massachusetts, and I was the only person in the theatre. It was a glorious experience.

But somewhere along the line, I began to re-evaluate Sayles's work. I saw all of his pre-Matewan movies, and they didn't really do much for me — I admired their intentions more than their results. I didn't quite know what to make of 1999's Limbo; I felt myself trying very hard to like it, because it was Sayles, but it took a lot of work to summon much enthusiasm for it. Then Sunshine State I thought was just terrible: flat, schematic, obvious, dreadful. Silver City was worse. Casa de los Babys I sort of liked, and certainly admired elements of, but it also felt generally minor and heavyhanded. I never got around to seeing Honeydripper.

I haven't watched Matewan for a few years now (partly because the DVD transfer is terrible and makes a mess of Haskell Wexler's cinematography). Nor have I revisited the other late-'80s/early-'90s Sayles films that I so enjoyed in my teens and early twenties (City of Hope, Passion Fish, Secret of Roan Inish, Lone Star, Men with Guns) because though most of them are still strong in my memory, I know that I would enjoy them less now than I did then, and I don't see any reason to lessen what were powerful cinematic experiences for me when I was more naive about both cinema and life.

Thus, I approached Sayles's most recent film, Amigo, with some hesitancy, because while I very much wanted to like it, I knew there was plenty of chance that I would not, and if I didn't, I would tempted to give up on Sayles forever.

But I ended up enjoying Amigo more than any Sayles film since Men with Guns. It's not a movie I'd put on any sort of top-ten list, but a number of scenes held at least a bit of the old magic for me.

Amigo is set in the Philippines during the Philippine-American War at the turn of the 20th century. (This is also one of the settings for Sayles's recent novel A Moment in the Sun, which I've got a copy of, but haven't yet had time to read.) It tells the story of a group of American soldiers who have to secure and maintain a remote village that is surrounded by rebels, a village where the citizens who have not themselves gone off to join the rebels are not necessarily thrilled to see the Americans arrive. As is typical of Sayles, we get to know a lot of members of the community and see the story through many different points of view.

It's a powerful setting for a writer/director/editor of Sayles's inclinations, because the war was a significant event in the history of U.S. imperialism, though one generally forgotten in the U.S. these days. It was not a war that was universally popular among U.S. citizens or soldiers, nor did it have particularly clear goals, and so there are lots of opportunities for Sayles to write his favorite sorts of scenes: basically decent people of different experiences and points of view colliding with each other. This is Sayles's best and worst tendency, the tendency that can lead to the clunky schematic obviousness of his narratives, but also the tendency that creates the most humane and touching moments in his work.

The worst obviousness of this sort happens in various juxtapositions between groups in Amigo where one group is doing something (playing cards, reading a declaration, etc.) and we then cut to another group doing the same thing. "Look!" the movie screams at us. "They're so alike! And yet they think they're so far apart!" Moments like that make sitcoms look like models of subtlety.

Similarly, Sayles sometimes likes to indulge in ridiculous coincidences and hamfisted irony. Amigo's ending is a model of this. It's one of the things that really holds Sayles's work back from attaining the compellingly unrealistic realism of, for instance, Robert Altman's best work. The coincidences and irony are forced, obvious, and not at all playful. Sayles is unerringly earnest, and the coincidences and ironies of his movies exist within such an environment of seriousness that their artificiality, instead of being admitted and celebrated, becomes a liability, like the mark of a smile on a stern pedagogue.

For his earnestness to work, Sayles would need to develop a different style, maybe something along the lines of Meek's Cutoff. His storytelling in Amigo, though, is more like that of solid, run-of-the-mill Hollywood movies in the 1940s, and so it doesn't convey the sort of effect he seems to strive for. I don't think he should change his style so much as his desired effect — personally, I much prefer the style of classical Hollywood to the oh-god-it's-so-real-feel-how-real-so-so-real-this-is-real-reality-real-serious-realness of films like Meek's Cutoff or Keane or, to a greater extreme, Gerry.

Despite all this, if you can put up with the clunkiness of the narrative, Amigo offers some real pleasures. When the story stops grinding its gears, there are some lovely moments captured by director of photography Lee Meily (using the Red digital camera). Sayles has also cast the film well, particularly in some of the smaller roles, and the actors are very good at quiet, genuine moments. They're not so good at bigger, emotional scenes, with one exception: a woman holding her dead daughter's corpse is, in terms of the narrative, calculated and clumsy, but the filming and acting are beautiful, because the actor is shot without a close-up, and she doesn't play it as a cliché of a shrieking, bereaved mother, but rather as someone suddenly traumatized and holding an amount of grief that is infinitely vast, and then it overwhelms her.

Bigness of emotion tends to lead Sayles toward flat caricature. Most of his movies include a couple of characters who are Really, Really Bad. Chris Cooper's character of Colonel Hardacre is one such figure. Cooper's gotten good at chewing scenery, but he doesn't really know what to do with this character other than bluster about. Who can blame him, though? There's not much else available to him in the script. Slightly better is the character of Padre Hidalgo, played by Yul Vazquez, but he just ends up being annoying and mysterious because, again, he isn't given room to be anything else. This is a much greater loss than the Colonel's flatness, because Hidalgo has enough of a role in the village to be a really interesting additional point of view, but mostly he just has to stand around looking peeved.

It's the minor characters who end up being most interesting. Their faces tell entire stories. The young people are especially interesting: the inexperienced soldiers, the adolescents who have joined the rebels, the children and young women who have remained in the village. (I repeatedly felt the film would be vastly better if all of the older characters were moved into the background and the younger characters were given more screen time.)

Which is not to say that the lead characters, played by Joel Torre and Garret Dillahunt are weakly conceived; they're not, and they carry the film well. Both actors are required to suggest quite a bit of their thoughts and emotions while also hiding those thoughts and emotions from the other characters — one of the concerns of the film is what leadership means in a time when everything is in conflict. How much do you reveal to the people around you? When is truth useful, and when can it get you and everyone you care about killed? How do you lead when any decision you make will be wrong? They're powerful questions, and they lead to some powerful moments in the film, ones that Dillahunt and Torre, especially, are well matched to.

For me, though, it was Dane DeHaan who really stood out, providing a subtle performance as a soldier who is young, naive, good-natured, and awkward. He uses his eyes brilliantly, conveying all sorts of thoughts through them, and Sayles is smart enough to let him tell a lot of the story through his gestures and subtle expressions. He has perhaps the most genuinely powerful moment in the film, when, lying on a cot, he turns away from a young Filipino woman he has had a crush on. His reasons for turning away are never stated, but we know of his conflicts, we've felt his shame and regret. In that moment of turning his head away, he has achieved an unfortunate maturity, a burden of living.

Perhaps what we should value in filmmakers like Sayles are such moments, rather than demanding an entire masterpiece. Plenty of other writer-directors don't take the time to craft such small, subtle, and richly human minutes, and so maybe it is enough to excuse him for all the narrative clumsiness. With Amigo, at least, it's enough for me.

The Worst Years of the Book as an Object

2012-01-21T09:24:00.000-05:00

A fascinating interview at Boston Review with the always-already-fascinating Richard Nash:

...I’m tremendously optimistic about the future of the book as an object. I think the worst years of the book as an object have been the last 50 years. [...]

Basically, when you’ve got an industry that is pushing out $25 billion worth of physical products into a supply chain, the vast majority of businesses are going to try to cut costs and increase revenues. And the simplest way to cut costs is going to be on the production side. So if the core of the business is no longer a supply chain, but rather the orchestration of writing and reading communities, the book is freed of its obligation to be the sole means for the broad mass dissemination of the word, and instead become a thing where the intrinsic qualities of the book itself can be explored.

And much more about publishing, reading, Cursor, communities, etc.

"Why We Oppose Pockets for Women"

2012-01-20T09:08:00.000-05:00

Here's a fabulous article by Lili Loofbourow from The Hairpin that presents excerpts from a book she discovered on Project Gutenberg, Are Women People? It's full of awesomeness, but the Delany-ologist in me particularly liked this bit about pockets:

Why We Oppose Pockets for Women
by Alice Duer Miller

1. Because pockets are not a natural right.

2. Because the great majority of women do not want pockets. If they did they would have them.

3. Because whenever women have had pockets they have not used them.

4. Because women are required to carry enough things as it is, without the additional burden of pockets.

5. Because it would make dissension between husband and wife as to whose pockets were to be filled.

6. Because it would destroy man's chivalry toward woman, if he did not have to carry all her things in his pockets.

7. Because men are men, and women are women. We must not fly in the face of nature.

8. Because pockets have been used by men to carry tobacco, pipes, whiskey flasks, chewing gum and compromising letters. We see no reason to suppose that women would use them more wisely.

blackout

2012-01-18T10:28:00.001-05:00

I think the SOPA/PIPA internet blackout protest is a useful way to increase the public's awareness of legislation that has a potential to really affect the way the internet is structured. It's a "publicity stunt", indeed, because one of the goals of most protest actions is to increase public awareness of the protestors' point of view. Inconveniencing folks is a good way to do that.

Pure inconvenience is counterproductive, though. The inconvenience has to be mixed with informing the inconvenienced people about your point of view. That's why the various sites blacking themselves out are also providing links to information and ways for folks in the U.S. to contact their legislators.

I find the arguments against SOPA/PIPA convincing, and though some good and powerful people have come out against these specific bills, that doesn't mean the bills are dead, and even if it did, a show of solidarity against such bills can't be a bad thing. There are strong and powerful forces that want to curtail and censor internet communication, but those aren't the only threat — well-intentioned but shoddy legislation of highly technical systems could just as easily wreak havoc.

It's weird to think of being in solidarity with a giant corporate megalord like Google, but hey, this site is made possible by Google, which owns Blogger, and I'm grateful to them for providing it.

Here's a nice summary of some of the issues at hand, written by Sherwin Sly of Public Knowledge back in May:

Often, whenever we point out flaws in the DMCA's safe harbor provisions, we hear a reluctance among those who rely upon it to "open it up" for amendment and improvement. The fear, apparently, is that engaging in that discussion will give the record labels and movie studios an opportunity to lobby for themselves and move the goalposts further. The problem with that caution is that those goalposts are being moved today. Even if section 512 of Title 17 doesn't feel Congress's red pen anytime soon, the actual conditions under which Internet companies and users will have to operate are being changed right now. The structure of the Internet itself, and the premises upon which it is based are being negotiated in Congress, and not by those bodies concerned with its structure as a whole, but by those that see the Internet as merely a means of serving up product, or stealing it.

But the Internet is more than just another TV channel or some sort of digital magazine. Not only in what it does—connecting individuals and communities across the world—but how it does it. It relies upon technological consensus among a wide variety of actors to remain a global, unified system, but we're seeing that consensus eroding rapidly as more and more political factions come to understand its power and where the levers are. And no matter how good the intentions of the United States government may be, they will be taken as a model for governments everywhere that seek to cut off from their citizens content and speech they'd rather not have available. This bill accelerates the Internet down that path.

Some more sources of information:

Oneiric Realism

2012-01-17T19:47:00.000-05:00

From a recently-unearthed interview with Pier Paolo Pasolini, conducted three days before he was murdered:

Have you bid farewell to the realism of your first features for good?

I don't agree with this. After 15 years in Italy, they finally showed Accattone on TV. We realized it is not a realist film at all. It's a dream, it's an oneiric movie.

Didn't they consider it a realistic film in Italy?

Yes, but it was a misunderstanding. When I made it, I knew I was doing a very lyrical film, not oneiric as it now seems, but deeply lyrical. I used that soundtrack and shot it in a certain way for a reason. Then what happened was that the realistic world I drew inspiration from for Accattone disappeared; it is no longer there, so the film is a dream of that world.

Mamma Roma is realist…

Mamma Roma is more realistic than Accattone, maybe. I should watch it again. It is less accomplished, less beautiful and that's because it is less dream-like.

"Walk in the Light..." Part 2

2012-01-17T12:13:00.003-05:00

The second half of my story "Walk in the Light While There Is Light" is now up at Failbetter.com, so the story is complete. It's probably best to read it from beginning to end, but if you want to go straight to the second part, here's the link.

Exercises in Procrastinatory Videography

2012-01-15T10:05:00.000-05:00

Having plenty of other things to do always tempts me to take on Projects That Are Not The Things I Should Be Doing.

Thus, I've been making strange videos.

One didn't take long at all because it was just a mash-up for Press Play's Vertigo contest, a contest designed to find all the varieties of movies that Bernard Herrmann's "Scene d'Amour" music can fit into, now that Kim Novak has expressed her horror that it was used in The Artist. (For more on that, see Press Play.) I decided to go with a relatively obscure film, 1931's lesbian classic Mädchen in Uniform, mostly because I happened to have it on my computer, so it was easy to manipulate.

That's good fun, but it didn't really achieve my procrastinatory goals, because it took longer to upload it to Vimeo than it did to create it.It also didn't let me achieve my lifelong goal of making a science fiction movie.

For that, I had a meatier project. A bit meatier than I expected, actually. I thought it would be easy to grab a few clips from old newsreels, public service announcements, and informational films and then create a soundtrack from old radio shows to create a new story about alien invasion, colonialism, and apocalypse. Why I thought this would be easy, I don't know, but I ascribe it to the same psychology that makes procrastination's temptations irresistible. I happily collected all sorts of clips -- everything from the San Francisco fire to travel movies to atom bomb test footage -- and then found a wealth of great old radio shows and ... well, creating an actual story from it all proved more than I really had time for, so I settled for apocalyptic dreaminess...

I like a lot of what's in that, but I still had a little bit of time left over, as well as some clips I hadn't used, and I thought it might be fun to deliberately create a piece without any story, something that was more of a collage along the lines of Stan Brakhage's work or Derek Jarman's short films. Because I had Brakhage and Jarman in mind while creating it, "Remnants" ends up being a bit more reminiscent of them than I would have liked, but I'm fond of it nonetheless.

I have now fully achieved my procrastinatory desires, and must return to my regularly scheduled duties...

Double Feature: Beginners & Weekend

2012-01-13T11:11:00.001-05:00

Without any conscious decision to do so, I ended up watching two movies this week that make an excellent pair: Beginners and Weekend. Both have a lot to say about repression, shame, sex, and families, but they do so with a generally light touch. Beginners is the more comic of the two films, though its real triumph is its balance of humor and heartbreak, while Weekend is more subdued — a little bit verité, a little bit mumblecore — and far less likely than Beginners to attract Oscar votes or general viewers, which is a shame, because it's better than almost everything that will be nominated for all the awards.

Beginners is writer-director Mike Mills's semi-autobiographical story of a father's last few years of life and a son's attempt to find a romantic relationship that will last more than just a little while. The father, played by Christopher Plummer, announces that, now that his wife of 40+ years has died, he feels able to admit openly that he is gay, and he is on the search for a boyfriend. It's not long, though, before he is diagnosed with terminal cancer, and the film moves back and forth in time between these last years and the life of his son, Ewan McGregor, in the aftermath of his father's death, when he inherits his telepathic dog (complete with subtitles) and starts a romance with a mysterious woman, Mélanie Laurent.

Weekend is much more focused in its timeline: it depicts a few days in the life of two British men who meet in a bar, drink a lot, spend the night together, and then have to figure out what next. The viewpoint character, Russell (Tom Cullen), lives a life surrounded by straight people, and though he is out to his best friends, his greatest desire is to have a "normal" life. The guy he brings home, Glen (Chris New), is much more radically queer, and one broken heart has bitterly soured him on the whole idea of romance. One of the primary narrative questions that creates suspense, character development, and catharsis is: Will Glen be able to get Russell to kiss him in public before Glen heads off to study in the U.S. for a few years? That the film makes this question essential, suspenseful, and emotionally powerful is just one tribute to its many virtues.

≈

GLEN: The problem is no-one's gonna come and see it because ... it's about gay sex. So the gays'll only come 'cause they want a glimpse of a cock. And they'll be... And the straights won't come because, well, it's got nothing to do with their world. They'll go and see pictures of refugees or murder or rape, but gay sex? Fuck off.

RUSSELL: Fuck it. Doesn't matter, does it? I'd come.

GLEN: No you wouldn't.

RUSSELL: Yeah I would. [pause] Okay, maybe I wouldn't come.

≈

I watched both films after having just read three essays at The Chronicle of Higher Education about queer theory in the wake of Duke University Press ending its Series Q books: "The Q Factor" by William Germano, "Queer 2.0" by Jeffrey J. Williams, and "Queer and Then" by Michael Warner. Also, I live in New Hampshire, where this week's presidential primary caused us to be deluged with robocalls from various Republican candidates' affiliates, and so while I was watching Weekend, I got a call from an anti-marriage-equality group that wanted me to know how shocking, horrible, and disgusting it was that Ron Paul was the only candidate who hadn't signed their pledge to repeal any gay marriage anywhere at any time always. (If the call hadn't been a recording, I would have turned the movie's volume up loud and held the phone to the speaker.)

The considerations of Series Q and queer theory heightened my interest in the ways the movies constructed their characters' identities, while the robocall reminded me of how violently determined some people are to regulate all of our identities.

Michael Warner cites "many of the basic impulses from which queer theory took its point of departure:"

a broadening of minority politics to question the framework of the sayable; attention to the hierarchies of respectability that saturate the world; movement across overlapping but widely disparate structures of violence and power in order to conjure a series of margins that have no identity core; an oddly melancholy utopianism; a speculative and prophetic stance outside politics—not to mention an ability to do much of that—through the play of its own style.

These seem to me to be some of the impulses that energize these two films — and yet what is striking is how unmelodramatic it feels (even when the characters themselves are being melodramatic; we all have those moments). The styles at play in these films are many, but they are vehemently not campy or confrontational, not parodistic or anarchic or deconstructive. Beginners is certainly playful (cf. telepathic dog w/ subtitles) but its playfulness is standard (though entertaining) indie quirk -- it's one part Annie Hall, more than one part (500) Days of Summer, and no trace of The Living End.

And yet even though Beginners is perfectly at home as a low-budget Hollywood dramedy, it's also refreshingly queer in being sex-positive and shame-negative. The tortured, difficult relationship here is not the homosexual one, but the heterosexual one. McGregor's character of Oliver is certainly startled by his father's coming out, and struggles to be really comfortable around his father's boyfriend, Andy, but as he says later to Andy, his struggle is not with the homosexuality or even with the thought of his father as a sexual being, but with the sight of actual love when, in his own life, that is something he yearns for and lacks. Now, of course, we don't have to believe him -- maybe he says this because he doesn't want to be perceived as a homophobe -- but I do believe him. It makes sense to who Oliver is as McGregor portrays him.

Oliver's father's relationship with Andy is clearly contrasted with Oliver's own relationship with Anna. They very much enjoy each other's company, but they don't know what to do with that enjoyment, and Oliver's grief after his father's death continues to hold him back from any emotion beyond sadness. He fetishizes sadness. He gets into the cycle that every depressed person knows well, where the misery itself is strengthened by a feedback loop created by obsession with that misery.

Oliver's father could have wallowed in self-hatred for staying in a marriage for 44 years, but he doesn't, and he refuses to blame his wife for anything or to denigrate their relationship. It was what it was, and it provided him with comfort and a family and a stability that he probably could not have had otherwise. (Mills is smart enough to show us that Hal's perception of his marriage may be overly generous and even self-aggrandizing. If Oliver's mother had been the one to survive, she might have told the story quite differently.) He very matter-of-factly comes out, goes cruising, buys a personal ad, and gets a pretty good boyfriend. He's utterly pragmatic, too, and his relationship with Andy is an open one, which doesn't exactly thrill him, but Andy seems very good at giving Hal the sort of love he needs and desires. (I love how readily Andy dispenses with psychotherapizing: he fully admits he's seeking a replacement father-figure, and so what? We all have our fetishes.) The message to Oliver seems to be: Stop moping. You've got one life, so (as Tim Gunn would say) make it work.

The message Glen tries to give Russell in Weekend is similar — not make it work so much as fuck shame. (Oh, that would be a good bumpersticker!)

≈

GLEN: You think talking about sex is dirty?

RUSSELL: You know what I mean. It's just I'm not sure if people wanna hear about the random sex life of strangers.

GLEN: You just don't want people hearing about your sex life.

RUSSELL: That's true.

GLEN: Imagine if everybody was just open about what they did, and then everything was normal.

RUSSELL: Yeah, but people are open.

GLEN: Are they?

RUSSELL: There's this guy in work today, I just sat there having my lunch, and he starts talking about how many fingers he can put up a girl's fanny.

GLEN: But was he gay?

RUSSELL: No.

GLEN: Well, there you go. [...] Gay people never talk about it in public, unless it's just cheap innuendo. I think it's 'cause they're ashamed.

RUSSELL: Maybe it's just they're a little bit embarrassed.

GLEN: Isn't that the same thing?

≈
The conversations in Weekend are often philosophical and political, but they also feel tremendously ordinary, and that's what so marvelous about them. They are interspersed with everyday observations — for instance, the ellipsis in the dialogue above cuts out a discussion of condiments. Thus, my quote above actually misrepresents the film, because this is a movie in which thoughtful, necessary conversations about society and personality and politics and utopia are interspersed with tossed-off banalities, and nothing is ever really resolved. Much like life. It brings us far from the (necessary! important!) didacticism of, say, The Normal Heart, and into the realm of something like Medicine for Melancholy. Back in good ol' 1992, The The sang a choice: "If you can't change the world, change yourself. / If you can't change yourself, then change the world," and while Hal in Beginners is all set to change the world now that he's changed himself, the younger folks of Weekend (and Medicine for Melancholy) are too deep in the stuff of their lives to think much about changing the world. A single public kiss becomes a powerful, personally revolutionary act, one that can bind the different worldviews of Russell and Glen.
The structure and style of the films is also compelling and meaningful. Beginners moves back and forth in time, following the logic of memory. Now and then it stops for a series of montages narrated by Oliver. The writing for the montages is beautiful, with each new image introduced with, "This is..." For instance, from the script (PDF):

STILL BLACK AND WHITE AND COLOR PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE SUN, THE 
STARS, YOSEMITE, GEORGE W. BUSH FLASH BY:

      OLIVER (V.O.)
This is 2003. This is what the sun 
looks like, and the stars, nature. 
This is the President.

NOW PHOTOS OF THE SUN, STARS, NATURE, ETC. FROM 1955 FLASH 
BY:

      OLIVER V.O.
And this is the sun in 1955, and 
the stars, and nature, and cars, 
and phones, and movies, and the 
President. These are what pets 
looked like. These are fireworks. 
This was smoking.

PHOTOGRAPHS, CROPPED IN ON FACES FROM 1955, VERY FAST 
SEQUENCE OF PEOPLE KISSING:

      OLIVER (V.O.) (CONT'D)
This is what it looked like when 
people kissed...

FAST SEQUENCE OF FACES FORM 1955 LAUGHING:

      OLIVER (V.O.) (CONT'D)
...When they were happy...

SEQUENCE OF FACES CRYING:

      OLIVER (V.O.) (CONT'D)
...When they were sad. 

FAST SEQUENCE OF MARRIAGE PHOTOS FROM 1955: 

      OLIVER (V.O.) (CONT'D)
My parents got married in 1955.

There's a lovely rhythm to it all that mixes both humor and sadness, as does the whole movie. This is. This was. Mills uses such sequences not only to give context and meaning to both Hal and Oliver's lives, but also to provide some quick histories of prejudice: what his mother had to struggle with as a Jew, and what his father struggled with as a homosexual.

≈

NOW A PHOTO OF A PUBLIC RESTROOM.

      OLIVER (V.O.)
This is the only place my father 
could hide and have sex in the 
Fifties. 

NOW HISTORICAL FILM FOOTAGE OF GAY MEN BEING BUSTED BY THE 
VICE SQUAD IN THE 1950’S AND BEING LOADED INTO PATTY-WAGONS.

      OLIVER (V.O.)
My father said if you got caught my 
the Vice Squad you could lose 
everything...

This is everything.

A RAPID-FIRE SEQUENCE OF FACES AND PEOPLE FROM 1950’S 
ADVERTISEMENTS - EVERYONE HAPPY AND ENJOYING THEIR CARS, 
FAMILIES, MEALS AND HAIR PRODUCTS.

NOW A STILL PHOTOGRAPH OF A PSYCHIATRIST'S COUCH. 

      OLIVER (V.O.)
My father laid down on a couch like 
this and told the psychiatrist all 
his problems in 1955.  The doctor 
told him that homosexuality was a 
mental illness, but it could be 
cured.  

AND THEN A MEDICAL MODEL OF A HUMAN BRAIN. 

      OLIVER (V.O.)
Not everyone got cured.

≈
Both films mix handheld shots with more static shots, but the contrast is especially strong in Weekend, where close, somewhat jerky handheld shots are offset by shots like this:

It's a powerful effect, with the handheld shots creating a sense of intimacy and improvisation (though Andrew Haigh has said there wasn't much improvising) and the more distant, static, and very clearly composed shots highlighting Russell's sense of isolation and loneliness.
Sometimes the effect is more complex, too. Here's a (handheld, even voyeuristic) shot of Russell and Glen making up after their worst argument:

Which then cuts to this extraordinary shot:

There's the sense distance and isolation, yes, but now it has the added sense of these two men as the only two people in the world. Instead of being isolated and distant on their own individually, now they are isolated and distant together. The question the film raises and (smartly) never answer is: Is this enough? (It's enough for now.)

≈
...and then everything was normal...
≈
I was particularly interested in Michael Warner's essay about the Q Series and queer studies because his book The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of a Queer Life is one that really struck a chord with me when I read it in grad school five or six years ago. Warner wrote (at least partly) in response to gay rights activists' pushes for military inclusion and marriage equality, which came to be the issues that attracted the most energy and resources among mainstream gay groups. It was a push toward normality, toward achieving an uncontroversial, even invisible, identity. It was an aspiration to be just like "everybody else".
Some of the problems with such an aspiration are delineated in Warner's book and his Chronicle essay, but I wanted to bring up the topic because it is at least a shadow in Beginners and an explicit topic of conversation in Weekend. As Glen and Russell argue about the radicalism or not of marriage, Russell says, "A man standing up with another man, in front of everyone, saying that, 'I love you and I want to get married,' I think that's a pretty fucking radical statement. I mean, standing up and saying, 'I want to spend the rest of my life with you,' when everybody's looking at them, saying that it's wrong, it's disgusting, it's sick." Neither Russell nor Glen offers a particularly nuanced argument, but who gives nuanced arguments in the midst of a passionate conversation that is fueled as much by personality and emotion as intellect? (This is another example of excellent writing, too, because what Russell and Glen say to each other is fueled by the fears and anxieties each holds, and so they are, without perhaps even realizing what they're doing, justifying their own status quos. Russell is a mushy romantic at heart, but painfully concerned with how other people perceive him, and his argument for the radicalism of marriage is shaped at least as much by those personality traits as it is by anything else.)
Glen's position is somewhat closer to Michael Warner's and to the ideas of queer theory, though, again, without the nuance. The utopia he proposes to Russell when they talk about sex, though, is one that is very queer at its core: "Imagine if everybody was just open about what they did, and then everything was normal." The connection between the first and second clauses may be logically tenuous (one doesn't necessarily lead to the other), but the desire is radical: To expand the idea of normality so much that it effectively ceases to have meaning, and in ceasing to have meaning, it ceases to have the power to create abjection and shame for anyone outside its realm of acceptance. In some ways, studies such as the Kinsey Report moved the world in a step toward such a direction by showing how, in fact, the statistical norm for behavior was generally different from the social norm.
One final note about these two films: class. Beginners would be quite a different story if it were not about rich (and conventionally beautiful) people. Weekend has a bit more diversity of class — Glen seems to come from at least a little bit of privilege, since he's able to head off to the U.S. to study art and he seems perfectly able to afford as much alcohol and drugs as he wants. Russell is a different case, having grown up as an orphan and foster child, and now working as a lifeguard at a pool. There's a moment where he seems a bit embarrassed when telling Glen his job, and it plays out much like the early scene in Fear Eats the Soul when Emmi hesitates before telling Ali that she is a cleaner. Russell's envy of heterosexual families is complicated, resulting not from any one element of his life (his sexual identity, his class identity, his childhood) but from many of them. The normality he aspires to isn't merely a sexual normality, but the normality generally associated with the term "middle class life". For someone like Russell, achieving a boring bourgeois existence would, in fact, really be an achievement (whereas for Glen it would just be boring).
Russell and Glen's relationship may be doomed by more than distance. Their utopian dreams are at odds. Russell may nod along with the idea of a utopia where everything is normal, but he's too repressed for such a world — too beholden to notions of respectability, too enamored of shame and shaming.
In its final scene, Weekend returns to where its story began, but Russell is not the same. He has overcome at least a little bit of his shame. He is, quite literally, in possession of himself. Perhaps Weekend is ultimately a prelude to the real story: the story of who he will become. The filmmakers wisely leave that story to our imaginations.

Walk in the Light While There Is Light

2012-01-10T10:57:00.000-05:00

Frankenstein by Lynd Ward

A new story of mine, "Walk in the Light While There Is Light", is being serialized in two parts at Failbetter.com, with the first part now posted. Here's the first paragraph, to tempt you:

Baskerville decided to become a monster because he had chewed his way far into the Earth, and he lived now in the space he had chewed for himself, a musty cavern beneath a knoll in an unnamed wilderness in northern Maine. He had been on vacation, alone, hiking and camping, trying to forget his latest failed encounter with something resembling love, when he was seized with the desire to devour some soil. His friend Cal the Freudian would have said this desire was fueled by a need to consume and obliterate his mother—the Earth, of course, being the biggest mother of them all—but Baskerville thought this was bullshit, because Freud was bullshit, and if Cal had been there with him, Baskerville would have accused him of being a coprophiliac for all the bullshit he ate, and that would have set Cal a-thinking for so long that he might have shut up for a while.

The story was inspired by a few things -- some random passages from Frankenstein, The Hound of the Baskervilles, some stray bits of Kafka, original newspaper reports of Kaspar Hauser, and Tolstoy's essay "What is Art?" (Also, I stole the title from Tolstoy.) Some of those things I used directly, some I stuck into Microsoft Word and pureéd with the summarize feature, reducing, for instance, the entire text of The Hound of the Baskervilles to something like 250 words. The challenge then was to take all this random matter and try to weave a story between it.

What ultimately gave me the story, though, was the reissue of Frankenstein illustrated by Lynd Ward. The illustrations captivated me, and somehow sparked the story of Baskerville and his plight, and that led my brain to see links between the various bits of prose I'd been collecting.

Having it published by Failbetter is especially nice right now, because a little over ten years ago, Failbetter published my story "Getting a Date for Amelia", the first of what I generally consider my professional fiction. I didn't publish another story for a few years after that one, so with luck I'll have a little less of a gap this time, though I'm not exactly the world's most prolific fiction writer.

Desert Island DVDs

2012-01-07T11:16:00.000-05:00

It's a new year and a Saturday morning (as I type this), I have lots of stuff I should be doing, and this here thingamabob is a blog, which means -- time for a useless, ephemeral, and yet powerfully enticing internet meme (aka, tool of procrastination)!

At Salon, one of my favorite movie critics, Matt Zoller Seitz, created a slideshow of his picks for DVDs he'd want if stranded on a desert island (with, presumably, endless food and water and a great home/island video system). There are rules (1 short, 1 season of a TV show, etc.). Many people have left their own lists in the comments section of the slideshow, and critic Jim Emerson has also offered his own list, with further lists made by commenters at his site.

So, to keep the internet going, here is my contribution...

Short Film: "The Goat" (1921). Buster Keaton: The Short Films Collection is easily on my list of top 10 DVDs of all time. Under the rules of this meme, there's no way to include the whole thing, so I have to make the impossible choice between various Keaton shorts. I cherish "The Goat" because it has just about everything there is to love about Keaton in it, especially his extraordinary visual cleverness. While there are plenty of other shorts I love, both old (Griffith's "Musketeers of Pig Alley" was a close second, but I decided I'd prefer to have a comedy on a desert island than a melodrama) and new ("Plastic Bag"), there's nothing quite like Keaton.

-------------------

TV Season: The Wire, Season 3 (2004). Another impossible choice, since it means splitting up the complete set of Wire DVDs I have. I'd go with the third season because it ties up the Barksdale story arc and lets us remember a lot of what has happened in the previous two seasons. Also, plenty of Omar. I don't watch many TV shows, but this is one I think I could watch again and again for quite a long time. It was a close call between The Wire, the first season of Twin Peaks, and one of the Granada Sherlock Holmes seasons, but The Wire's depth and complexity won out in my heart.

-------------------

Feature Films:

Spies (1928): This may be Fritz Lang's most entertaining movie, filled with all sorts of wonder, and made at the height of his power.

-------------------

Vampyr (1932): Ideally, every desert island would come equipped with all of Carl Th. Dreyer's major films, but if I had to choose one, it would be Vampyr. I think The Passion of Joan of Arc and his three features after Vampyr are in many ways better movies, but Vampyr is the one that appeals to my aesthetic the most -- it's endlessly strange, surreal, haunting, bizarre. (Note to self: when packing for the island, be sure to grab the restored version and not some cheap other version, because we know from experience that watching this movie in a bad version completely ruins it.)

-------------------

Duck Soup (1933): I can't count how many times I've watched this movie, my favorite of the Marx Brothers' rather mixed oeuvre. No matter how many times I've seen it, I still laugh.

-------------------

Only Angels Have Wings (1939): Choosing one Howard Hawks movie is impossible — on another day, I'd go with Scarface or His Girl Friday or The Big Sleep or To Have and Have Not or Rio Bravo — but I nearly agree with Jim Emerson, who put it on his desert island, too, and called it, "The most entertaining movie ever made." Certainly among the most entertaining ever made.

-------------------

The Rules of the Game (1939): Cinema doesn't get better than this.

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The Lady Eve (1941): Again the impossibility —how to choose one Preston Sturges film?! (In reality, were I suddenly whisked to a desert island, I'd bring the whole Preston Sturges Collection.) This isn't Sturges's funniest movie, I don't think, but it beautifully mixes humor and pathos in a perfectly constructed plot with perfectly cast actors.

-------------------

The 400 Blows (1959): Whenever I'm asked what my favorite movie is, I say The 400 Blows. It's not true, because I don't have one favorite movie, but it's certainly a film I've watched many times and am always happy to watch again.

-------------------

Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980): Not necessarily my favorite Fassbinder, but Fassbinder is one of my favorites. Berlin Alexanderplatz contains much of what is great about his work, and it's 15+ hours long, so perfect for a desert island. (MZS mentions it specifically in his rules for this meme, too. I had thought it might count as a TV series, but, as he says, "You can put all 15 hours of “Berlin Alexanderplatz” on the list because it’s considered one long film [or if you saw it in Germany, a TV miniseries]...")

-------------------

The New World [Extended Cut] (2005): My favorite Terrence Malick movie, and one of the most beautiful films I know. The perfect film to live in whilst stranded on a desert island.

-------------------

Across the Universe (2007): Because we need at least a little bit of music on the island. As I was thinking about how to whittle down among various favorite films that have music as a central element —Cabaret, Stop Making Sense, Big Time, Topsy-Turvy, I'm Not There —I came back to this because it always makes me smile at the end, and if you're stuck on a desert island, you need some cause to smile.

-------------------

Egads, how quickly we get to ten! So much is missing —Man with a Movie Camera, Public Enemy, Stagecoach, Citizen Kane, I Walked with a Zombie, The Man from Laramie, Seven Samurai, Vertigo, Barry Lyndon, Miami Vice — that's another ten right off the top of my head (and it's still missing Unfinished Piece for Player Piano, Mulholland Drive, The White Diamond — okay, I'll stop)! I'm really glad I don't have to go to a desert island any time soon...

The Good Extra: A Movie Memoir

2012-01-06T10:50:00.000-05:00

In the winter of 1993, I had the chance to be an extra in the movie The Good Son, starring Macauley Culkin and Elijah Wood. This is a video essay looking back on that experience.

On Kipple and 2011

2012-01-03T08:53:00.001-05:00

I have a couple of things at Strange Horizons this week: a new Lexias column, "Kipple", and a contribution to the annual year-in-review article.

I hadn't thought I'd read much that was first published in 2011, but looking over other people's contributions, I see I've read more than I thought; I just forgot when it was published. (For instance, I would have mentioned Gwyneth Jones's The Universe of Things, but for some reason I had it in my mind as having been published in 2010. I'm terrible with dates.)

How to Respond to a Critic

2011-12-27T11:35:00.000-05:00

Posting will be light-to-nonexistent here until after the new year, but I want to put this up before I forget it.

I've been bingeing on Tim Minchin over the holidays, mostly because I've been very busy with grading, writing, wrapping, cleaning, etc. and needed something amusing and profane in the background of these activities. Minchin's "Song for Phil Daoust" is a heartfelt, soul-searching, and genuinely touching example of something artists should really never, ever do, despite the temptation: respond to a negative review. (Note: despite being heartfelt, soul-searching, and genuinely touching, this is not a song you will want to play anywhere where colorful words might singe sensitive sensibilities.)

A Promise Kept

2011-12-15T16:13:00.000-05:00

In my latest Sandman Meditations piece, I discussed the unconscious shame of reading comics in certain settings, and at the end I promised I would read some old G.I. Joe comics while my students worked on their final exam activities.

I have kept my promise -- and gone beyond it. Since today's class was called Media as Popular Culture, I thought we should all enjoy some popular culture for a moment, so I loaned everyone in the class a G.I. Joe comic....

click to enlarge

Site Note

2011-12-14T21:15:00.002-05:00

I was bored with the old look of this site, so decided to change things around a bit. (If you're reading this via RSS or a mobile device or something, check out the actual website to see.) There may be some adjustments as I try it out on other computers and browsers, but for now this will do.

Until I decide to go all neon green.

Because clearly the internet needs more neon green.

Canonical Nationalism

2011-12-13T13:20:00.001-05:00

Questions of literary canonicity have been stalking me for the past few months, mostly in relation to teaching. Some I began thinking about because I was designing a course called Currents in Global Literature, and when faced with giving English majors perhaps their only taste of writings from beyond the U.S. and U.K., I had to figure out my priorities.

One of the things I decided to do was try to provoke the students to think about why they have read what they have in school, why they have the assumptions they do about books and writers, and how they can learn more. So I had them watch TED Talks by Chris Abani and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, listen to Stephen Snyder on "The Business of International Literature", and read Dan Edelstein on "Gerrymandering the Canon", Binyavanga Wainaina on "How to Write About Africa", and Manijeh Nasrabadi on her experiences trying to write and publish a memoir. Additionally, our poetry textbook challenged the templates of Romanticism they had previously encountered in other courses and complexified their understanding of literary history -- not just the history itself, but how it got to be that way.

Global literature in our class, then, was presented not as some ethereal essence floating through the ether, but as a system of literary production, distribution, and reception. It's too easy to gain a feeling from our curriculum that U.S. and U.K. fiction, poetry, and (to a lesser extent) drama are Literature and everything else is some exotic offshoot. The department has done a lot to try to mitigate that, but there are huge disciplinary systems in place that make it difficult.

Last week, I was part of a panel discussion for English majors about canonicity. Various questions had been raised by majors this term about what they were learning -- particularly for the English Education majors. Hearing these questions, one of my colleagues decided to put together the informal discussion, and so a group of us created 5-minute statements about canonicity and education, then we had a free and wide-ranging discussion of all sorts of things related to it all.

In my opening statement, I tried to differentiate between the practical and the theoretical/ideal. After saying that canons are forms of discourse and not just lists, and that they are, at heart, expressions and codifications of power, I said that there is a canon of books taught in high school English classes in the U.S., and lists do a good job of showing us its borders and imperatives. For instance, the 1989 study reported by Arthur Applebee in "Book Length Works Taught in High School English Classes" (PDF) updates a 1964 study of the same thing and discovers that very little has changed. In my experience, those books remain common in high schools, though there has in many places been a strong push to sprinkle in more texts by writers who are not white men.

But for about fifty years now, the core books taught in most high schools in the U.S. have generally remained the same. The high school canon achieved its canonicity mostly through inertia: these books were taught because they were considered important, and they were considered important because they were taught. Teachers, administrators, and parents could recognize a “good” curriculum because it was a familiar curriculum. All sorts of ancillary materials were prepared around these books, and the books have benefitted from an industry of publishers, editors, administrators, and teachers enforcing their canonicity.

A list of most common books, of course, is not a list of what is taught at any specific school, and few schools limit themselves only to these books, but as a window into what is most valued by high school curricula, it's useful information.

At our discussion, I said it's worth trying to figure out what the high school canon is trying to teach, and I suggested that its goals would seem to be to get students to be capable with complex language and with the analysis of literary themes and symbols. If those are the primary goals of high school English classes then the same could be accomplished with all sorts of different books -- and to be particularly provocative, I offered a list of African books that would do it: Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, The Famished Road by Ben Okri, Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga, A Grain of Wheat by Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Death and the King’s Horseman by Wole Soyinka, etc. Indeed, a broader canon would create better learning, because if you read Sophocles and Shakespeare alongside Death and the King’s Horseman and maybe Akira Kurosawa’s movie Throne of Blood, students would get not only a more global view of literature, but a deeper understanding of tragedy as a form.

What I realized as the discussion continued in all sorts of different directions was that my fundamental dissatisfaction is not with any particular list of books, but with the idea of national literatures.

I like what Edelstein says in "Gerrymandering the Canon":

To begin with, literature professors could make a greater effort to incorporate works from other national literatures in their courses. Where the funds are available, professors from neighboring literature departments could team-teach such hybrid reading lists. Second, language and literature majors could also require that a number of courses be taken in two or three other literature departments. A model for this arrangement already exists at Stanford, where the English department recently launched an “English Literature and Foreign Language Literature” major, which includes “a coherent program of four courses in the foreign literature, read in the original.” To fulfill this last condition, of course, colleges would have to become more serious about their foreign-language requirements. Finally, literature students would be better served if colleges and universities offered a literature major, as is notably the case at Yale, UC San Diego, and UC Santa Cruz. Within this field of study, students could specialize in a particular period, genre, author, or even language, all the while taking into account the larger international or even global context.

The nationalistic imperatives of survey courses in U.S. and British literature don't make a lot of sense to my experience as a reader and writer. Once, when I was starting a job at another school, a colleague asked me, "So, are you an Americanist?" I repressed an exclamation of, "Good god no!" He was a proud reader of nothing but books written by people born in the U.S.A., so I just caught my breath, shrugged, and said, "No, I'm more of a generalist, really," and moved on to talking about the weather.

Why in studying imaginative writing do we limit ourselves to imaginary communities? Especially when the texts themselves were created by writers of more eclectic reading habits than our classes encourage?

Perhaps my antipathy to uninational approaches to literature is a result of my own education. The last classes I took in American and British literature (and both were called that) were during my high school years. In college, I avoided classes focused on only one geographic area's texts, and instead took marvelous courses on specific literary/artistic movements (Avant-Garde Literature & Art 1900-1940), individual writers (a life-changing class on Virginia Woolf), and particular literary forms (I was a Dramatic Writing major for three years, so lots of classes on drama). The only nationalistic class I took was a magnificent course on 18th century British and French literature: Samuel Johnson and Rousseau, Voltaire and Swift, Diderot and William Godwin, Vathek, The Castle of Otranto, Frankenstein. (And I took the class because I'd just read the American writer Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon and had found its language and references baffling, so I figured this class would help. It did.) Grad school was different, because my degree wasn't in English specifically, so there weren't as many lit classes, but this was also during the time when the prefix "trans-" was applied to everything in academia, so even if there had been nationalistic courses offered, they would have been things like Trans-American Transness of the (Trans)Cultural Mode.

We have arranged at least some of our teaching and scholarship around nationalist ideas that are convenient and useful for limiting the scope of what we have to aspire toward expertise with, but I wonder if the limitations are worth the benefit. At the very least, it seems to me, what we could look at is what sort of literatures were available in particular nations during particular eras -- to look at the lack of translation, publication, and distribution of some things and the prevalence of others. (To study the New England Transcendentalists still, but to do so alongside some Hindu texts.) Nations have borders, but once you get beyond the most isolated areas and eras, the textual environments within those nations are not monocultural, so literary history should not be, either.

Ultimately, this comes down to teachers' habits as readers. We can't teach what we don't know, and if we mostly read books written by people born in the U.S. and the U.K., that's what we'll teach. At the very least, though, we should aspire to be as eclectic in our influences as the writers we study have been.

This all still feels inchoate to me, despite what I've written here. It's hard to think outside the system that created you...

Notes on Petals of Blood by Ngugi wa Thiong'o

2011-12-11T11:17:00.001-05:00

In the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Petals of Blood, Moses Isegawa calls the novel "the definitive African book of the twentieth century". I would only disagree because I do not think there is any one definitive African book, nor should there be -- one of the problems African literatures face when sampled here and there is the tendency for one or two books to be seen as giving some sort of definitive portrait of a continent of over 50 countries, a billion people, and thousands of languages. Petals of Blood is capacious and brilliant, but it's not definitive.

A lot has been written about Petals of Blood since its publication, and it continues to incite interest both in its portrait of Kenya in the early years of independence and its (and its author's) politics. This was especially true at the time of its release, because it was difficult then to see beyond the novel's critique of Kenya's ruling class to its subtler aspects, and the fact that Ngugi was soon imprisoned without trial added to the political reading of the book. It is, of course, an overtly political novel, a novel that very clearly wants readers to see the government of Kenya as betraying the ideals of the liberation struggle in favor of capitalistic greed. But one does not need to be a Marxist to find great value in Petals of Blood, any more than one needs to be a visionary Christian to find value in Dostoyevsky's novels or a vegetarian to appreciate Tolstoy's.

One of the purposes Petals of Blood serves is to recuperate in writing an unwritten past. We might identify the central narrative of the book as the story of the murder of three prominent men, but amidst that story are many others, and the movement is hardly linear. Were we to create a graphic representation of the novel's many pieces, it would surely require a spiral or two, because the overall sense the various strands of plot and event give is one of moving deeper and deeper through the history of the village of Ilmorog, which is also, at least partially, the history of Kenya. The structure is so carefully constructed, though, that this history does not feel tangential -- indeed, it becomes impossible to see the solution of the murder mystery (the primary concern of the basic narrative) as separate from the history of Ilmorog and of Kenya generally: specifically, the history of its systems of power. This is perhaps one of the reasons why I constantly think of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy when I think of this novel. The murders in Petals of Blood serve similar narrative purpose(s) to the murders in Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, or the battles in War and Peace. While certainly this purpose/structure/effect can be interpreted as a result of Ngugi's Marxism (perhaps with reference to Lukács), it's not something we find only in Marxist narrative. It could come from any worldview that is not fanatically individualist.

One of the fundamental questions of the novel is: What are meaningful commonalities? In other words: What unites people? Characters suffer because they misperceive, for instance, allegiances of race and nationality. Ultimately, the main characters all discover that meaningful commonalities are ones of power: who has it and who doesn't. The failures of liberation came, it seems in the text, from a misplaced faith in a unified African, Kenyan, or black consciousness. Such consciousness might be meaningful and valuable elsewhere, but in the context of the novel it is shallow and misleading, a disappointment with fatal consequences.

Entire essays could easily be written about any one of the four main characters, Munira, Abdulla, Wanja, and Karega. The latter two have attracted particular interest from critics, mostly because they fit ideological analysis most comfortably: Karega is a revolutionary, and Wanja's Horatio Algeresque ascension from having nothing to being the wealthy madame of Ilmorog's brothel is rich with possibilities for feminist analysis. Munira and Abdulla are equally interesting, though. Abdulla at first seems like the only successful capitalist in Ilmorog -- he owns some property and runs the only shop in the village. We later learn that he was a dedicated follower of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, yet for various reasons after the Emergency years he became, as he says, "busy looking for money". His life represents in pathetic miniature the more exalted lives of the leaders who betrayed the liberation struggle in search of power and wealth. But we come to feel for and understand Abdulla in a more profound way than we do the minor characters in the novel, and by the end he finds forgiveness, redemption, and purpose.

Munira is fascinating because he chooses to deal with the complications and calamities of life by becoming a less complex person. He surrenders himself to a narrowly religious ideology -- one that, in some ways, parallels Karega's generally doctrinaire Marxism and thus argues against seeing the whole novel as a Marxist tract. Too many critics have been willing to see Karega as a mouthpiece for Ngugi. Certainly, plenty of Karega's statements are ones that Ngugi was and probably is still in sympathy with, but the character is not a simple role model. Whether Ngugi intended him to be so or not, Karega comes off as often too idealistic for the circumstances, and his faith in popular revolution seems only slightly more justified by the text than Munira's faith in anti-political religiosity.

We see a lot of the events through Munira's perception, especially from the beginning of the book, when it seems like he will be our primary viewpoint character. His position is one that would be sympathetic for many readers: a man who believes in a contemporary ideology of progress and education, who is first frustrated by his time trying to establish a school in what he considers the remote and backward village of Ilmorog, but who then decides that Ilmorog is a more honest place than the environment of bureaucracy inhabited by his bosses. He is, for at least a time, a friend and companion to the other three main characters, and so serves as our bridge into their stories. If we as the reader are positioned to be in sympathy with any one character, it is Munira -- and yet he is the character who by the end becomes the least sympathetic, the most pathetic.

The characters who change the most through the book, and who also harbor the greatest secrets, are Abdulla and Wanja. Both represent ideological analyses in that their stories serve as critiques of the power of capitalism to commodify and destroy everything, but we are encouraged, I think, to admire and sympathize with them because their reactions to their world are pragmatic. Flawed, certainly, and destructive at times, but it doesn't seem to me that we are led to sneer at Wanja's prostitution in the way we sneer at, for instance, Munira's conversion to blandly apolitical Christianity. Repeatedly, Petals of Blood states that Kenyan capitalism valorizes prostitutional relationships -- and so Wanja becomes the ultimate capitalist by becoming a prostitute. She isn't blind to what she is doing, though. Hers is a fate bounded not only by economics, but by gender expectations. In a world where everything is commodified, poor women can only commodify their bodies. She has no other path toward success and, more importantly, power. Her desire for revenge against the men who have wronged her leads her to exploit the only power available to her, and to help other women do the same. She sees the ethos of Kenya as one of bare social darwinism: "eat or be eaten". She achieves power and she achieves revenge, but that power and revenge do not exist in a world of their own, and the other systems of her world cause her to lose everything in the very moment she achieves all she desired.

Munira and Karega end the novel in prison, with Munira destined for execution. But all the characters end with a certain amount of hope and even happiness. Munira has finally found a purpose in life: he will die and go to God, feeling himself utterly righteous in his martyrdom. Karega has renewed hope for the enlightenment of the masses and the progress of revolution. Abdulla has great faith in his adopted son, Joseph, and a renewed sense of the possibilities for Kenya's future. Wanja has seemingly achieved the pregnancy she so desired, and identifies the child with both the old liberationist faith and "the possibilities of a new kind of power" -- one born of a one-legged father full of pain, suffering, and laughter.

Petals of Blood is a tremendous mix of narrative modes. It switches from third person to first person, from realism to fantasy, from prose to poetry. It melds the imperatives of the bourgeois realistic novel with those of satire, fable, and oral narrative. Throughout, we have the sense of people telling their stories, offering their points of view, and interpreting each other. This was a powerful development in Ngugi's art, and one he would continue to develop, particularly with Devil on the Cross and Wizard of the Crow. It was the last novel he would write originally in English; after Petals, it became obvious to him that he must write in Gikuyu first. He continued to develop as a writer, and his later novels are masterpieces, but had he stopped writing with Petals of Blood, his place in literary history would still be assured.

Back in the Saddle

2011-12-11T09:57:00.001-05:00

Things have been mostly quiet here for a few months because of general busy-ness on my part since September. Not just with teaching, though that has eaten up more time than usual, but also with my membership on the jury of the Shirley Jackson Awards and the board of our local domestic violence shelter and resource center, Voices Against Violence. (Operating a domestic violence shelter and resource center that offers entirely free services in these economic times in a state where the legislature is full of anti-government, anti-spending fanatics is not the easiest job on Earth.) Free time and sleep have not been things I've experienced much for the past few months, and that took a toll as well, since I'm now recovering from a rather nasty virus. But we soldier on!

And there should be a bit more time for blogging in the coming months, so I've begun to make some plans. First, the usual reflection on the term's classes, which even if it ends up being terribly boring for most readers is very useful to me, and it's also helpful to be able occasionally to point people toward some of my writings on what I do in the classroom. One thing I want to do is write about a few of the books I used in the Currents in Global Literature course I taught, and which I'll be teaching again in the spring, because a few of them are books I haven't taken the time to write about before. So expect posts soon on Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Petals of Blood, Alejo Carpentier's Kingdom of This World, and Hisham Matar's In the Country of Men. (I've written previously about Nadine Gordimer's Burger's Daughter and a little bit about Flaubert's A Sentimental Education.)

I also need to write about a few books some folks have sent me over the past six months; I've mostly discouraged anybody from sending me books (well, before I joined the jury of the Jackson Awards) because I knew I'd have limited time for reading and, especially, reviewing, but there's lots of really interesting stuff out there, and I need to take a moment to note some of it.

Also, I had fun creating the video essay on Derek Jarman, and would like to hone my skills at that with a few more. I'm thinking about something about Jean Renoir, maybe something on one of his most-neglected films, La Nuit du Carrefour, or perhaps a look at how Fritz Lang remade two of Renoir's films (La Bete Humaine became [or drew from the same source: Zola's novel] Human Desire and La Chienne became Scarlet Street). Or maybe/also something about 1980s movies like Red Dawn and Invasion U.S.A. We shall see...

Profane Love: Derek Jarman and Caravaggio

2011-11-30T08:27:00.001-05:00

I created the above video after failing at writing about Caravaggio for The House Next Door and the Summer of '86 series. I had a pile of fragments, quotes, scenes I wanted to somehow refer to, but couldn't make any of it cohere. A month or two ago, I thought about trying again by creating a sort of collage, and figured if it was too weird or unfinished for The House, I could at least post it here and be done with it. But as I looked over the collage, it felt more like some sort of script to me. "Wouldn't it be nice," I thought, "to make a film about Caravaggio?" In all my copious spare time. But the idea nagged at me, and finally I sat down to see what such a thing might look like. I transformed the essay-collage into a script-blueprint, recorded the narration, and then tried to fit images to it. I thought it would take an afternoon. It took substantially longer, and involved various software failures, lots of thinking and rethinking, a willingness to put up with some frustrating compromises after headache-inducing hours of work, and some serendipity.

In the end, I like what came out. Given endless time, there's plenty I'd change, and it's still very much a text essay that became a video essay rather than something that was conceived from the beginning as a video essay, but that's okay. Maybe I'll conceive some video essays now.

Below the cut, I'll post the script as originally written. It went through some edits as I put the video together, so this is essentially a shooting script rather than a transcript. But one of the problems I faced in putting the video together was how to signal quotations, and I never really solved that problem, so the script will at least help make it clear what is and isn't a quote.

PROFANE LOVE: DEREK JARMAN AND CARAVAGGIO
preliminary script-like object for narration

by Matthew Cheney

Death and nature made a cruel plot against you, Michele;
Nature was afraid
Your hand would surpass it in every image
You created, not painted.
Death burned with indignation,
Because however many more
His scythe would cut down in life,
Your brush recreated even more.
—Cavalier Marino

quoted in
Derek Jarman's Caravaggio:
The Complete Script and Commentaries

TITLE: NATURE WAS AFRAID

White letters on black, the obligatory credits.

The black background is different now -- still black, but more textured, with some white light reflected off the gloss at the lower left corner.

[CARAVAGGIO.

A film by Derek JARMAN.]

The paintbrush in the hand covers the diagonal texture with horizontal texture.

The paint is all black, but the single reflected light allows us to continue to see the texture.

The paintbrush in the hand is always painting quickly, always with black. What had been a flat screen shows depth: the force of the brush makes the canvas stretch. The sound of the brush on the canvas mixes with distant sounds of singing and chanting. The pale arm is vivid against the black.

[CARAVAGGIO POSTER]

Derek Jarman's Caravaggio was released in the summer of 1986, and though not exactly a blockbuster, it has endured as Jarman's most popular and accessible film, a fact that has not helped its reputation among many Jarman afficionados.

[PEAKE COVER]

In his 1999 biography, for instance, Tony Peake said that, "for all its many fine and subtle qualities, Caravaggio exudes a whiff of staleness, even flatness." Peake makes a point of noting that a year after it was released, Jarman himself watched the film again and said he thought it was "too assured".

What may disappoint some of the more doctrinaire Jarman fans about Caravaggio is its complex and sometimes contradictory presentation of sex and politics. Especially in his post-Caravaggio work, Jarman was a determinedly didactic filmmaker, but his intuitions were more artful than his public statements, and his films were always more layered than he said they were.

[BFI COVER]

In one of the best studies of Caravaggio, a monograph for the BFI in 1999, Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit discuss "Jarman's willingness to sell himself short for the sake of being immediately recognized and applauded by a particular audience"--

[PHOTO OF JARMAN AND ACTIVISTS]

the audience being militant gay men and AIDS activists. "That willingness undoubtedly helped make him famous," they say, "but it also had the unfortunate result of bringing him a fame that was a tribute to his limitations rather than to his very real talent."

[MORE PHOTOS]

"Limitations" seems to me the wrong word, though, because the films themselves easily overcome their original didactic intent, and Jarman's fame (or infamy) was a useful weapon against prejudice and injustice in England in the 1980s and early 1990s. The rhetoric was neither subtle nor nuanced, but it was fighting against lifetimes of repression, a legal system that was explicitly discriminatory, a public that seemed convinced plagues only kill perverts, a media environment that thrived on sensationalism, and a disease that was daily killing scores of people in midst of life.

[AT YOUR OWN RISK COVER]

In his 1992 memoir/journal/manifesto At Your Own Risk: A Saint's Testament, Jarman wrote, "I wouldn't wish the eighties on anyone, it was the time when all that was rotten bubbled to the surface."

[LAST OF ENGLAND APOCALYPTIC SHOTS]

At the end of 1986, Jarman learned for certain what he had suspected for a while: he was HIV positive. This fact would shape the rest of his work profoundly, adding a new urgency to it, a new anger, and, at last, an elegiacal lyricism both heartbreaking and inspiring.

[FADE LAST OF ENGLAND TO BLUE]

[FADE BLUE TO FIRST SHOTS OF CARAVAGGIO]

Thus, Caravaggio stands on a cusp: it was Jarman's fourth and most commercial feature film, and it was the last feature he made before he knew for certain that he was HIV positive.

[DANCING LEDGE COVER]

Jarman's first book, Dancing Ledge, discusses his ideas for the film of Caravaggio -- a film that he had been working toward since the late 1970s. The book was published in 1984, a year before he would be able to start filming the movie.

FROM DANCING LEDGE: “I’ve started the third Caravaggio script… Looking back over the first scripts, the narrative seems strong enough but the dialogue is dry and rather pretentious. … There is nothing more excruciating than English Historical Drama, the stuff that is so successful in America and is usually introduced by Alistair Cook as Masterpiece Theatre; in which British stage actors are given free reign to display their artificial style in period settings.”

[IMAGE FROM BRIDESHEAD REVISITED]

TITLE: ART LOVER, ART OBJECT

[MONTAGE OF WHAT IS DESCRIBED]

In one of the earliest scenes, Caravaggio announces its major themes. A dying Caravaggio lies on a cot in Porto Ercole. A voiceover has told us some of his thoughts and dreams and memories. He fades into sleep as the image fades to black, then fades in on Caravaggio at twenty years old, newly arrived in Rome, without much work or money. He sits on some steps in an alley, painting. A balding, red-faced man approaches and picks up one of the finished paintings lying around. In the script and credits, he's known only as the Art Lover. They talk price. Another man, older than Caravaggio but younger than the Art Lover, watches -- manager? Pimp? Caravaggio and the Art Lover agree on a price, they go inside. Cut to a swirling scene of intoxication -- the Art Lover, his shirt unbuttoned, his trousers at his heels, stumbling around Caravaggio, who dances round and round while tossing a bottle of wine from hand to hand. Caravaggio collapses onto some bedding and pulls out a knife.

[SCENE: “Oggetto d'arte!" he says to the Art Lover. "Ed io sono molto caro." And then he translates: "In plain English, mate, I'm an art object and very very expensive -- you've had your money's worth.”]

Art and desire commodified. Desire for art is desire for the artist. The art lover as john. The artist as whore.

[FREEZE ON CARAVAGGIO’S FACE]

[MONTAGE OF WHAT’S DESCRIBED BELOW]

These ideas will be reiterated later with nearly all the characters that enter Caravaggio's life. He will use the man he seems so often to desire, Ranuccio, as a model for The Martyrdom of St. Matthew, and to achieve a particular look, he will fill Ranuccio's mouth with coins. He sticks the last coin in his teeth and makes Ranuccio take it with his own teeth, the closest the two men come to a kiss. In the next scene, Ranuccio and his lover, Lena, play with the coins, covering their bodies with them, passing them from mouth to mouth, tossing them around until finally they fall together in love. Art, work, love, sex. Everything is fungible.

[LENA’S DEAD BODY]

Ranuccio's fate becomes a tragic one when he lets love unbalance all the other elements of life. He kills Lena.

[C & R CONFRONTATION: "You murdered her!”, "For you! For us!”]

Ranuccio says he killed Lena "For love!". What we don't know is whether this really was for some sort of love -- it could have been from being spurned by Lena,

[LENA AND CARDINAL SCIPIONE]

who decided she could get farther in life with the pope's nephew than with Caravaggio or Ranuccio. It's possible Ranuccio has mistaken the desire to possess with the desire for love.

Caravaggio's feelings are clear, though.

[AUDIO: In plain English, mate, I'm an art object and very, very expensive.]

[CARAVAGGIO KILLS R]

As an art object, Caravaggio revels in his power.

[C & ART LOVER SLO MO]

It's there in the scene with the Art Lover, Caravaggio thrilled to taunt, thrilled to be desired, thrilled to control all the terms of the transactions.

[C & R’s BODY SLO MO]

By killing Ranuccio, though, he shatters the systems of prestige that gave him his power.

[C’S ENEMIES]

He hands his enemies, the powerful people who resent his influence, the perfect excuse to shift the balance.

[C IN EXILE WITH JERUSALAME]

And so he is exiled, with only the mute Jerusalame as a companion, the assistant he raised as a son, loyal beyond all others, living outside desire, in service to art and the artist, his loyalty unaffected by the passions of commerce. He is, above all else, a silent witness.

[JERUSALAME’S FACE]

TITLE: ANGELIC CONVERSATIONS

[CLIPS OF YOUNG JERUSALAME, LATER, ETC — jumps through time]

Caravaggio is deceptive. It seems like an artsy biopic. It jumps back and forth in time, but usually gives us enough signposts for the progression of events to be comprehensible. It is tempting to watch and evaluate it as we would any other narrative film.

[SLOW CLIPS, MAKE SEPIA]

Doing so produces meanings, but leads to a whiff of staleness, flatness.

[FADE TO ANGELIC CONVERSATIONS]

Instead, we should remember a film Jarman made just before it and a film he made just after it. Angelic Conversations was shot in the summer of 1984 on Super-8, then transferred to videotape and blown up to 35mm for release in the fall of 1985. Jarman used the video transfer to capture a frame rate well below that of [standard] film, and to alter and degrade the image, creating a dreamy stop-motion effect. It is a lyrical rather than narrative film, with the soundtrack consisting of music and Judi Dench reading 14 of Shakespeare's sonnets.

[PAUSE TO HEAR JUDI DENCH]

Against the sounds float the images: two young men wandering around through caves and gardens and cliffs; they embrace; they kiss.

[EMBRACE & KISS]

The world beyond them is full of symbols of surveillance and violence, but the world they are able to create for themselves is less ominous, its violence usually sublimated.

[SYMBOLS OF SURVEILLANCE AND VIOLENCE]

[LESS OMINOUS IMAGES OF THE BOYS]

The film is pastoral, hypnotic, enigmatic, often beautiful and strangely touching, occasionally tedious. (More than occasionally for some critics -- the Scotsman's reviewer, William Parente, called it, "Possibly the most boring film ever made.")

[THE LAST OF ENGLAND TITLES, MONTAGE]

After Caravaggio, Jarman made another lyrical film, though one quite different in tone from The Angelic Conversation. Filmed throughout 1986, often by Jarman himself with his Super-8 camera, The Last of England is apocalyptic and overtly violent, like the screaming id The Angelic Conversation repressed. In early 1987, Jarman began wrestling with all of the footage he had shot or found, creating a rough cut that editor Peter Cartwright then helped him give further shape to. He commissioned music to mix with other collected sounds, and added some voiceover read by Nigel Terry (who had played Caravaggio).

[SOUNDS & NIGEL TERRY VOICEOVER]

"To some," biographer Tony Peake wrote, "it is a nightmare vision of Great Britain; to others, a vision of the nightmare that is Great Britain. For Jarman it was almost certainly the latter, as well as being a haunting and elegiac account of an entirely internal voyage, through despair and desecration into the welcoming arms of night."

[SPLIT SCREEN: LAST OF ENGLAND & CARAVAGGIO]

[SCREEN TAKEN OVER BY CARAVAGGIO]

[SPLIT SCREEN(S) OF CARAVAGGIO JUXTAPOSITIONS]

Caravaggio would seem to be exactly the opposite sort of film -- and in many ways, it is. But to appreciate its complexities and to enter into its emotional depths, we must remember Jarman's collage instincts and try to hold the film's many repetitions of incident and image in mind. It is a more classically balanced film than The Angelic Conversation or The Last of England, but it is still a film that conveys its meanings through juxtapositions, and it is still a film that gains energy from its mix of imagery and sound.

TITLE: A NARRATIVE OF PAINTINGS

FROM DEREK JARMAN’S CARAVAGGIO: THE COMPLETE FILM SCRIPT AND COMMENTARIES BY DEREK JARMAN (1986):

“The narrative of the film is constructed from the paintings. If it is fiction, it is the fiction of the paintings.”

[PAINTINGS AND FILM JUXTAPOSED]

“I have tried to create every aspect of the film in the ambience of the paintings. This world floats like an altarpiece supported by the sound, which we recorded ourselves in Italy… Even the rain was recorded in our hotel.”

[RAIN]

[SCENES DESCRIBED BELOW]

“The visual grammar of this film was vital: a blue globe, the only blue in the film — Caravaggio said ‘blue is poison’ — is balanced perfectly by a blue pot in Profane Love; the camera pans across our still lifes only once to reveal the studio table, the work bench; the ivy crown of Sick Bacchus is echoed by the gold crown with which the Cardinal replaces it. Small gestures; but nothing is left to chance.”

“I have followed the pattern of Michele’s life in the film. Moments of violent action, which are recorded by his biographers with all the gusto of the yellow Press, contrasted with the calm of the studio, where even the most rowdy models are reduced to silence as they pose before the brush — or the camera. With charp concentration, the smallest gestures are fixed on the canvas…”

“Michele is a strange mixture of vanity and humility, with a confidence born of extreme doubt; a much quieter man than his biographers have allowed, secretive and withdrawn. The sudden aimless outbursts in a bright undifferentiated world are balanced by the darkened studio, where a controlled light shines that tells the story. This story, as it grew, allowed me to recreate many details of my life and, bridging the gap of centuries and cultures, to exchange a camera with a brush.”

[HOLD ON C’S FACE]

[FADE TO JARMAN’S FACE]

[FADE OUT]

Buy Yourself a Holiday Gift! And Something for Everybody Else You Know, Too!

2011-11-29T15:53:00.001-05:00

Terri Windling is facing health and financial problems right now, and so a bunch of folks have banded together to create a giant auction of stuffs to raise money for her. If her name is unfamiliar to you, check out her Wikipedia page for a quick summary.

photo by Beth Gwinn

I don't know Terri Windling, but she has been a great help to many of my friends in their lives and careers, so I am distressed to hear of her distress. I've got dozens of books in the house with her name on them, and far more with her name on the acknowledgments page.

Therefore, I decided to contribute an item to the auction, something I've had for a while and have been looking for a good cause to which to donate it. This seems perfect.

Thus, if you would like to bid on a copy of Startling Mystery Stories with Stephen King's second professionally-published story in it, follow this link. This issue of Startling Mystery was the first magazine where King's name appeared on the cover.

There are all sorts of other items offered in the auction, of every size, shape, purpose, and price, with more added frequently. Keep your eyes on it -- treasures and wonders await you, and your money will go to a good cause!

World on a Wire Update, Plus Vanya

2011-11-15T19:21:00.001-05:00

Consumer-citizens of the United States, rejoice! Criterion has announced that they will be releasing Rainer Werner Fassbinder's wonderful science fiction epic World on a Wire in February. Diligent and obsessive readers of this here blog may remember that I swooned over World on a Wire both here and at Strange Horizons back in September, and I remain as swoonful toward it as before. The DVD/Blu-ray will include a 50-minute documentary about the film by Juliane Lorenz, one of Fassbinder's most frequent collaborators and the head of the Fassbinder Foundation. Lorenz has created documentaries for some of the other DVD releases of Fassbinder's films in the U.S. and elsewhere, and I've enjoyed all of the ones I've seen, so am looking forward to this one quite a bit.

And in equally magnificent — indeed, perhaps even more magnificent — news, Criterion will also be releasing Louis Malle's final film, Vanya on 42nd Street. It's one of my favorites, a movie that has been important to me since the day I first saw it at the Angelika in New York during my freshman year at NYU — accompanied by Carol Rocamora, whose Chekhov course I was taking at the time, and for whom I later did work as a production manager and a copyeditor. My VHS of the film is wearing out, and it will be a real thrill to replace it with the Criterion Blu-ray. I know of only one other film of Chekhov's work that affects me as deeply as some of the great stage productions I've seen — Nikita Mikhalkov's Unfinished Piece for Player Piano, which is a much freer adaptation of Chekhov (created from elements of his first play, Platonov, and some short stories). Vanya on 42nd Street uses David Mamet's adaptation of a translation of Uncle Vanya, and while there are vastly better versions (Carol Rocamora's, for instance!), the synergy of the actors along with director André Gregory is pure magic. I disliked Wallace Shawn as Vanya for a while, but have grown to love him in the role. And Larry Pine as Dr. Astrov gives one of the greatest performances I've ever seen. And Phoebe Brand and Jerry Mayer are charming and brilliant and sad and hilarious. And— Well, I'd better wait. In February, I'm sure I'll want to write about the details, and about watching the film again, for what will be something like the 15th time (I used to watch it at least once every 6 months, and used it with a couple of classes years ago).

If you can't wait till February, Amazon has the film available online, and the old DVD is back in stock after having been unavailable for years (it seems to be still unavailable outside the U.S., alas). I expect Criterion will do an excellent job with the remastering of the image, and though it's not a film that has the sort of striking cinematography that World on a Wire does, nonetheless the intimacy and immediacy of the staging will, I expect, benefit from the new image and higher resolution.

Epigraphs for an Imaginary Novel

2011-11-15T02:57:00.001-05:00

Going through notes for old pieces of writing, I discovered this collection of quotations I hoped to sprinkle through a piece of long fiction I was outlining ten years ago. The story itself never came to anything, but some shadowy traces of it remain in the collage...

If the New World fed dreams, what was the Old World reality that whetted the appetite for them? And how did that reality caress and grip the shaping of a new one?

—Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark

Why is it so inconceivable to our dramatists that some people do not know, or care, how they feel all the time? That some people act with a detachable motive, or from a myriad of contradictory ones? Why is life itself less interesting per se than explanations of life?

—Mac Wellman, “The Theater of Good Intentions”

There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.

—Herman Melville, Moby Dick

It is the private dominion over things that condemns millions of people to be mere nonentities, living corpses without originality or power of initiative, human machines of flesh and blood, who pile up mountains of wealth for others and pay for it with a gray, dull and wretched existence for themselves. I believe that there can be no real wealth, social wealth, so long as it rests on human lives — young lives, old lives and lives in the making.

—Emma Goldman, “What I Believe”

I have carried out, before my own eyes and against my intention, a part of the modern tragedy: I have made a lasting flaw in the face of the earth, for no lasting good.

—Wendell Berry, “Damage”

A great idea springs up in a man’s soul; it agitates his whole being, transports him from the ignorant present and makes him feel the future in a moment....Why should such a revelation be made to him...if not that he should carry it into practice?

—William Walker, president of Nicaragua, 1855-1857

If we confine the concept of weeds to species adapted to human disturbance, then man is by definition the first and primary weed under whose influence all other weeds have evolved.

—Jack R. Harlan, Crops and Man

Faith defies logic and propels us beyond hope because it is not attached to our desires. Faith is the centerpiece of a connected life. It allows us to live by the grace of invisible strands. It is a belief in a wisdom superior to our own. Faith becomes a teacher in the absence of fact.

—Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge

Of what consequence, though our planet explode, if there is no character involved in the explosion?

—Henry David Thoreau, “Life without Principle”

I actually had to develop a love of the disordered & puzzling, viewing reality as a vast riddle to be joyfully tackled, not in fear but with tireless fascination. What has been most needed is reality testing, & a willingness to face the possibility of self-negating experiences: i.e., real contradictions, with something being both true & not true.

—Philip K. Dick, Exegesis, 1979

For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught — nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!

—Herman Melville, Moby Dick

My favorite melodramatic theme: the harried anarchist, a wounded wolf, struggling toward the green hills, or the black-white alpine mountains, or the purple-golden desert range and liberty. Will he make it? Or will the FBI shoot him down on the very threshold of wilderness and freedom?

—Edward Abbey, journal, December 1951

To argue from analogy, every thing around us is in a progressive state; and when an unwelcome knowledge of life produces almost a satiety of life, and we discover by the natural course of things that all that is done under the sun is vanity, we are drawing near the awful close of the drama.

—Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

When I reflect to what a cause this man devoted himself, and how religiously, and then reflect to what cause his judges and all who condemn him so angrily and fluently devote themselves, I see that they are as far apart as the heavens and earth are asunder.

—Henry David Thoreau, “A Plea for Captain John Brown”

You tell me of degrees of perfection to which Humane Nature is capable of arriving, and I believe it, but at the same time lament that our admiration should arise from the scarcity of the instances.

—Abigail Adams, November 27, 1775

Fresh Links

2011-11-06T09:12:00.002-05:00

Just an addendum to my previous post, in which I lamented the breaking of Google Reader's share function, which enabled the "Fresh Links" widget over on the sidebar—

I have created a near fix, as you'll see if you look over on the side. I'm using the RSS feed from my Delicious account for this, since it was sitting dormant. (Thus some of those links are very much not fresh right now!)

There are some limitations to this system. What made Google Reader's share function so useful for this was that it required one quick at the bottom of whatever post you wanted to read. That was it. It took one second and poof!, a link automatically appeared. The new system is not so fast, because whether I do it from Reader or from NetNewsWire, it requires at least an extra click and, since I use Delicious's tagging system, the categorization of the shared link.

What this means is that the items in the Fresh Links section are things I really want to share — enough to take the time to plug them into Delicious — not just things I found momentarily interesting. That removes some of the improvisatory feeling of the Fresh Links section, but it also means the general quality of the links will be, in my eyes at least, higher.

I've kept the Diigo links widget there on the sidebar, even though it and Delicious have similar purposes. If I were starting from scratch, in fact, I'd use Diigo because it has more options for display and functionality. But I use Diigo for research and for my classes, so the links you'll find there have a different purpose and tend to be much more exclusively related to the things I teach and research. I certainly could create Diigo tags that would separate things differently, but for whatever weird psychological reason, I find it helpful to compartmentalize.

That's all probably more information than anybody needs...

Stuffs

2011-11-02T11:27:00.000-04:00

Google has done gone and broke Google Reader, removing the sharing function to encourage people to use Google Plus instead. This means the "Fresh Links" section over on the sidebar is no longer able to be refreshed, and I'll probably go back to occasionally doing linkdump posts. Here, for instance, are some links:

My latest Strange Horizons column, "Reading Systems", has been posted, as has my latest Sandman Meditations piece. (The Sandman pieces are going to be biweekly for the rest of the year rather than the regular weekly schedule because I'm just too busy to keep up with a weekly schedule right now, and I was getting really frazzled.)
Team VanderMeer has launched The Weird Fiction Review, an online journal about kumquats. Famed kumquat collected Neil Gaiman is interviewed, and there's an interesting selection of nonfiction, art, and fiction about kumquats. Don't believe me? Well, go over there and see for yourself!
In publishing news, it turns out that libraries are actually good for the publishing industry.
Fandor has a great set of tributes to the great Derek Jarman. I'm working on something about Jarman's Caravaggio (25 years old this year!) and also a piece about Jarman for Rain Taxi, but I'm finding Jarman much harder to write about than I expected, and both pieces are vastly late. But I shall persevere!
And here are 92 open-access film e-books. Never again will you complain about lacking something to read!

Kael Days

2011-11-02T11:06:00.001-04:00

Seventeen years after her last book and ten years after her death, Pauline Kael's name is hard to avoid right now if you read culture magazines or blogs. That's because of three books that came out in October: The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael, edited by Sanford Schwartz and published by The Library of America; Brian Kellow's biography Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark; and James Wolcott's memoir Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York, which includes, apparently, lots of material about his friendship with Kael (before they had a falling-out after he published a sharply critical, even vicious, essay on Kael's acolytes in Vanity Fair in 1997).

I haven't read Wolcott's memoir, but I've been reading around in Kellow's biography and I'm familiar with almost everything in The Age of Movies. It was Kael's 1,291-page retrospective collection For Keeps from 1994 that made me into a fan of her writing when I was an idealistic, ignorant kid studying playwrighting and screenwriting at NYU, and though my opinions about her have changed a bit over the years, she's part of my psyche, her presence inextinguishable, like a crazy aunt.

I hadn't gone back to For Keeps for a while, probably not since I wrote about Kael, Susan Sontag, and Craig Seligman's book about them in the fall of 2005. I know a lot more about film history and theory now than I did then, and then I knew more than I did when I first picked up For Keeps from a library and began to make my way through it. (I also read bookstore copies. I vividly remember sitting on the floor of Shakespeare & Co. in New York one night and reading through it until the store closed at, I think, midnight. Eventually I got a remaindered copy at St. Marks Books, the copy I have here beside me now.)

I was a fan of Kael before I knew her name. Until high school, the only movie reviews I'd ever encountered were ones on Siskel & Ebert. But when I was a freshman in high school, a friend told me about The New Yorker, which his family read religiously. I started making weekly trips to the library to read it, and it was there that I read these words:

There's nothing affected about Costner's acting or directing. You hear his laid-back, surfer accent; you see his deliberate goofy faints and falls, and all the closeups of his handsomeness. This epic was made by a bland megalomaniac. (The Indians should have named him Plays with Camera.)

That was from one of Kael's last reviews, her December 17, 1990 take on Dances with Wolves. I almost memorized that review -- enough so that I remember reciting that part of it to my U.S. History class in the fall of 1992 in one of those moments of self-righteous, childish nerditude that defined my adolescence. I did not remember who had written the review, because by the time I noticed the bylines in the New Yorker, Kael had retired. But the words were unforgettable, and had definitively shaped my perception of that movie and Kevin Costner.

When I came upon those words again at the end of For Keeps, I nearly burst into tears of joy and recognition. This was who had said that! Here was the author of the text that had so deeply affected not only my perception of the film, but of so much else, because from the moment I read that review, I had become a devoted reader of The New Yorker's critics. I lived in rural America before the internet; thoughtful film criticism was not easy to find if you didn't know where to look for it, and those weekly trips to the little town library across the street from my high school opened a world to me.

For Keeps was the first whole book of movie reviews I read beyond the annual video guides that my father bought each year, and it was a revelation. An entire world of cinema and opinion opened up to me. Thankfully, I was in New York by that time, so I could better find the films Kael wrote about than I ever would have been able to back home -- I lived only a few blocks from Kim's Video, and my membership there was an essential tool of education and survival.

Eventually, my taste developed in a different direction from Kael's passions, and so I found myself dipping into For Keeps less and less over the years. A lot of the various tributes to Kael that have been published in the last few weeks are written by writers who discovered her when, like me, they were young. She wrote some marvelous stuff, but there's an adolescent quality to her positions, and that's a key to both their effectiveness and their limitations.

I read Kael mostly before I knew she was reviled by certain people, and read her long before I had any context to understand her legendary differences with Andrew Sarris about auteurism. The only negative word I heard about her before I delved into For Keeps had come in a letter from the novelist and screenwriter Calder Willingham, with whom I corresponded for a while in the early '90s (his wife taught at my high school; we were both more comfortable with letters than in person). I don't remember the context, and the letter is buried in a box somewhere, but I remember some scornful description of her, something to the effect of "the noxious Pauline Kael". This was before I knew who she was, and it wasn't until years later, when I was going through some old stuff at the house, that I discovered it again. Willingham didn't have a whole lot of good words to say about anybody involved with any aspect of the movie business, so it was just one name among others (I was far more upset that he called Orson Welles "meretricious" [though I liked learning a new word] and his former friend Stanley Kubrick "psychotic").

But Kael was controversial, and she still is. Partly, that comes from prominence -- if you find her perspective particularly limited, it must be galling to see her taken so seriously, even when the serious takes are ones that don't try to pretend she was flawless. Her centrality to American film criticism is assured, whether anyone likes it or not. Partly, that's a matter of her having been in the right place at the right time (had she come around 20 years earlier or later, she wouldn't have had the influence she had). Partly, it's a matter of her taste for films that were accessibly hip. Partly, it's a matter of her sheer talent as a writer and entertainer, and a particular type of writer and entertainer: one who enjoyed a fight. It didn't surprise me at all to discover from Kellow's biography that she was a fan of boxing.

It did surprise me to discover how unethical and selfish she could be. Plenty of writers are terrible people, or do terrible things, and she was no exception to that. (She also sounds like she could sometimes be an awful lot of fun, too.) She makes a good subject for a biography because she had a big personality, and she seemed to yearn to be the center of attention.

Because I find Orson Welles fascinating, I've studied a lot about him and Citizen Kane, and so even in my more Kael-inclined years, I was wary of her long essay "Raising Kane", which attempted to refute Sarris's conception of the auteur theory by claiming most of the distinguished elements of Kane for screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz. Aside from just making up stuff in her own head, Kael also, Kellow shows, extensively and primarily used the research of a young scholar named Howard Suber, paying him $300 and then never giving him any further credit or acknowledgment. I always knew "Raising Kane" was wrong about a lot, but until now I didn't know how deeply Kael's determination to come up with a death-blow to her enemies' ideas led her to cook The Citizen Kane Book. Her knowledge of film production was weak, and part of me thinks she liked it that way, because even after various opportunities to visits sets and then briefly work in Hollywood, she still clung to the writerly idea that screenwriters are important. (Too bad she never got to sit down and chat with Preston Sturges.)

Nonetheless, I have a lot to thank the ghost of Pauline Kael for, so I'm not jumping on the bandwagon of detractors. She influenced my taste and helped me take pop culture seriously. More than that, I am fascinated by the effect she has on people, and by her life and times. There's a lot of nostalgia for the days "when critics mattered", but I don't yearn to go back to the good ol' days of cultural gatekeepers. Writers such as Frank Rich who marinate in that nostalgia (almost always with the requisite sentence decrying bloggers, a habitual move of the nostalgia-drenched decryers) are really just indulging in a power fantasy -- "Oh, wouldn't it be nice to go back in time and have the power to make or break a reputation!" (Rich had that power for a while as the lead theatre reviewer for the Times.) The golden age of cinephilia in the '60s was not my golden age. I'm too sensitive to the sounds and whims of audiences to usually find movie theatres pleasant places, so I am vastly happier being able to watch DVDs or streaming movies at home. Anybody with an internet connection and a bit of disposable income has access to more films than even the most dedicated cinephile in the '60s. Sure, a certain aura of the hunt is gone now that so many films are easily available (though plenty remain difficult or expensive to find), but I'll happily trade the aura for access. I remember well the frustration of being in rural New Hampshire, reading about wonderful films, and having no hope of seeing them. I do not have any desire to return to that frustration. I have enough others.

We have more access, too, to writings on film than ever before. There are more good cinema blogs and websites out there than I have time to read. The best stuff I've read about Kael has been online -- the conversation about her by Andrew O'Hehir & Matt Zoller Seitz at Salon and, especially, a long reflection on Kael at the Self-Styled Siren blog, which also includes a great set of comments from a fine group of readers.

Pauline Kael could not happen now, because authority is more dispersed than it was when she was writing. I'm glad for that. Maybe I wouldn't have discovered her in a world where I had had more access to various critics when I was young, but had I had access to the internet before I was 18, and had I had access to Netflix before I was in my late 20s, I would have discovered plenty of other wonders, and gotten, I expect, a more balanced self-education.

Kael was born when she was, and I was born when I was, and we are, or were, what we are and were. No use wishing it otherwise. Nostalgia is for suckers and resenters; I may be the former, but I try hard not to be the latter.

In any case, there are too few critics with a real sense of voice and style for us to toss out the ones with both. And Kael was one. She may have been a dangerous person to love either in life or in print, but so many of her words and sentences still sing that it has been, in fact, a joy for me to flip through For Keeps again. For me the title, if nothing else, still remains true.

About (Experimental) Writing

2011-10-26T10:13:00.000-04:00

...having the entire intellectual armamentarium of rhetorical devices at your beck and call is far preferable to having to limit yourself to tradititional narrative tropes, when writing about truly important matters. To me, that's just simple logic.

—Samuel R. Delany

(see also, here)

Film Textbooks, Take 2

2011-10-22T18:28:00.000-04:00

On the last day of 2009, I wrote a post about choosing a textbook for the Introduction to Film class that I was then designing. I'll be teaching that course again next term, along with another film class: Outlaws, Delinquents, and "Deviants" in Film and Society. Book orders were due at the beginning of this week, so I've been looking through film textbooks a lot over the last couple of months, and especially the last two weeks.

For the intro class, I decided to stick with The Film Experience by Timothy Corrigan & Patricia White, a book that fits my own approach and perspective very well. It's coming out in a third edition in December, and though I haven't seen that edition yet, I decided to go with it nonetheless. I like this textbook because the level of writing is such that the book doesn't feel patronizing and it provides just enough challenge that students really have to stretch their minds. While some of the simpler books available are certainly less demanding on students' reading skills, I don't think it's our job in college to be less demanding on students' reading skills. Most undergrads come to us, at least at the school I teach at, unprepared for the textual demands of college, but they won't get any better if we give them dumbed-down books, and there are a lot of dumbed-down film textbooks out there. I'm still an English teacher at heart; I like working through hard texts with students. Occasionally, I have students who like it, too. (Which is not to say that The Film Experience is particularly daunting. It's no more difficult than the dominant text in the field, Bordwell & Thompson's Film Art, and it's certainly less difficult than a book like Introduction to Film Studies edited by Jill Nelmes.)

I'm looking forward to the new edition of Corrigan & White very much, because the changes outlined by the publisher for the new edition are ones that address some of my biggest concerns with the book. In some ways, too, the changes show the dominance of the Bordwell/Thompson approach -- every film textbook now has to repeatedly emphasize how much it covers "formal elements", and the design of different books through new editions often closely follows innovations made in Film Art. I'm all for the design changes, because Film Art is one of the most beautiful textbooks I've ever seen, but Bordwell & Thompson do formalism better than anybody, so the key to making another textbook viable is not to ape their approach, but to offer a different one. (I had a competing publisher's rep once argue that the problem with Film Art is that its vocabulary is too idiosyncratic. I don't think so. The popularity of the book and of Bordwell & Thompson's blog means their terminology is used by a lot of people, even when those people disagree with it. Terms like network narratives and intensified continuity are now part of the lingua franca of film and media studies. I'm not a Bordwell/Thompsonian [Bordsonian?], but I've learned a lot from their work, even as I take seriously the criticisms of their approach by such folks as Andrew Britton and Robert B. Ray.)

Last time, I supplemented The Film Experience with The Village Voice Film Guide, an inexpensive book that would provide good examples of short reviews for the students to use as models for their own writing. This idea ended up being less important to the course than I thought it would be, and the worst parts of the class, from my perspective at least, were the ones where I tried to get the students to express their own personal taste in movies. That approach would work well for a second class, but not for a first, because the students simply didn't know enough about the history and range of cinema to be able to offer even the most basic explanations of their taste. Appropriately for an intro class, their taste was shallow and uninformed. Any film older than them was an alien artifact and highly suspect, any movie that deviated from the most mainstream film grammar was incomprehensible, and any film not in American English was likely a terrorist object.

So I'm not using the Voice guide as a supplement this time, and I'm ditching all the writing assignments designed to help them explore their personal aesthetic. We'll keep evaluation at a distance and instead look at various types of films, histories, and ways of viewing.

This time, then, I'm supplementing The Film Experience with The Oxford History of World Cinema, an extraordinary book that I didn't even consider last time around because I saw its copyright of 1998 and assumed it was too old to be useful. Silly me! Editor Geoffrey Nowell-Smith got a bunch of prominent film scholars (including A.L. Rees, Thomas Elsaesser, Martin Marks, Thomas Schatz, Edward Buscombe, Vivian Sobchack, Linda Williams, Kim Newman, and Anton Kaes) to write succinct articles about their areas of specialty, and the range is exceptional.

I'm waiting to receive the new edition of The Film Experience before I begin to lay out exactly what we'll do in the class each day and exactly which films we'll watch, but these two books together cover all the basics and then some, so I'm excited to see what can be done with them.

One of the things I like about the Oxford History is that it is an anthology, and that means no one writer's weaknesses mar the entire book. Conversely, of course, it means no one writer's strengths propel the entire book, either, but that's where the editor's selection of contributors is so important, and Nowell-Smith did an excellent job of finding people who know their fields well. There are errors and mistakes, of course, but what 800-page book by more than a dozen writers doesn't have errors and mistakes?

For the Deviance class, I also decided to use an anthology rather than a book by one or two writers. This time, it's The Cinema Book edited by Pam Cook. I did not know about the existence of this text until I read about David Foster Wallace's copy of it. Though I respond to a lot of Wallace's writing in a similar way to Geoff Dyer (my favorite Wallace book is one he edited, Best American Essays 2007), I find Wallace fascinating as a person and thinker, so when I read about his copy of this film text I'd never encountered before, I dug up a $1 copy online and ordered it. After reading through it, I thought, "Boy, I wish I had a class I could use this book in!"

I considered The Cinema Book (or the Cook Book, as I occasionally think of it, har har har) for the intro to film class. It would work well there, but I decided against it because it seems to me to work better as a source book than an intro book. For the Deviance class I needed more of a source book than an intro book, because for that class film itself, in all its manifestations, is not our primary subject. Rather, we're looking at particular types of films and how they represent society. That's a more narrow charge than an intro class has, even though the Deviance class is also a 2000-level (sophomore) general education course.

Like the Oxford History of World Cinema, The Cinema Book is very well edited. It includes among its contributors Annette Kuhn, Thomas Schatz, Yvonne Tasker, Bill Nichols, James Naremore, Richard Dyer, Barry Keith Grant, Christine Gledhill, and Edward Buscombe. Important writers, all. Its range of topics is as diverse as The Film Experience, and it has material to help contextualize all of the films I'm planning to use in the class (about which more later).

I'll supplement The Cinema Book with A Short Guide to Writing About Film by Timothy Corrigan. This is a good, basic book, though I had only ever looked at a fairly early edition of it, and never considered it as a required text, because recent editions are ridiculously expensive for what the book is -- $45 for a book that would sell for no more than $15 were it a trade book and not a textbook is, I think, obnoxious. The Cinema Book is 600 big, color-illustrated pages for the same retail price as this book of 188 small, black-and-white pages (including index). That's a rip-off, but Pearson (the publisher) gets away with it because as far as I can tell it's the only book of it's kind on the market. And, of course, given my love of The Film Experience, I'm a fan of Timothy Corrigan as a textbook writer. I'm justifying my collusion in Pearson's rip-off by the fact that the two books together retail for about $90, and with each class I try not to exceed $100 in books without a very good reason. So it's still $10 below my rule of thumb for a maximum, and it's a well-written and efficient book. But it's still a rip-off.

Since 2009, I've seen a few other textbooks I hadn't known about before. The eighth edition of The Art of Watching Films by Dennis Petrie and Joseph Boggs arrived in my mailbox recently, but one glance at it showed me it wasn't appropriate for any of my classes, as its approach to cinema seems to me rather dull. It covers all the basics, but the writers are primarily interested in "film as narrative art", and so the book contains such doubtful assertions as "The ultimate goal of any actor should be to make us believe completely in the reality of the character." Such statements are banal and wrong, and this book is full of them. A film textbook should expand students' conceptions, not constrict them.

Better are two books I seriously considered as supplements for both my courses: How to Read a Film by James Monaco (4th edition) and Engaging Cinema by Bill Nichols. Both are comprehensive, relatively inexpensive texts that would be useful for anybody, whether a student or not, who wanted to understand a bit more about how films are perceived by scholars. I didn't end up adopting either because The Film Experience and The Cinema Book cover more of what I need and these two books don't fill in the remaining gaps as fully as The Oxford History of World Cinema and the Corrigan Short Guide. But they're darn good books, and both are ones I keep on the short shelf of texts that are just waiting for the right course.

Also on that shelf is Critical Visions in Film Theory edited by Timothy Corrigan, Patricia White, and Meta Mezaj, a book that really provides a good alternative to its major competitor, Film Theory and Criticism by Braudy & Cohen. Unsurprisingly, given my reverence for The Film Experience, I find Corrigan, White, and Mezaj's selections include more of my own touchstones than Braudy & Cohen's, and their focus is not as limited to writings specifically from the world of film studies. I thought about using the book for the course I'm currently teaching, Media as Popular Culture, but its cost would have meant I couldn't use many other books, so I went with the ones I did, though if I teach the class again, I might reconsider replacing Gender, Race, and Class in Media with it. It's the sort of book I yearn to build a class around.

A Contribution to Schaller-VanderMeer Studies

2011-10-21T09:32:00.000-04:00

After my own previous contribution to the burgeoning academic field of VanderMeer Studies, I am happy to christen yet another field: Schaller-VanderMeer Studies, a discipline inaugurated in ivy-covered halls with the Illustrating VanderMeer exhibit. True (Schaller-)VanderMeer Studies scholars do not limit themselves to the study of half a VanderMeer, however, and so I am happy to present here a monograph by Eric Schaller about the woman who was described by Xaver Daffed as "the better half of VanderMeer" (325).

This monograph was originally published in the Fogcon program book, March 2011.

ANN VANDERMEER

by Eric Schaller

Something was happening back there at the tail end of the last millennium. And I’m not talking about The Gulf War, McDonald’s opening a franchise in Moscow, the cloning of Dolly the sheep, the Spice Girls, or even Bill Clinton demonstrating new uses for a cigar. Although all these probably figure in there somewhere. What I am talking about are THE SILVER WEB (1990-2002), CRANK! (1993-1998), CENTURY (1995-2000), and LADY CHURCHILL’S ROSEBUD WRISTLET (1996-date), four magazines that helped define a new course in speculative fiction. Whereas before, most notably in Damon Knight’s ORBIT series, there had been attempts to define science fiction more broadly, so much so that the old guard hesitated to call it science fiction, here the editors of these new magazines basically said, “Definitions be damned, we’ll publish whatever gives us that certain feeling we got when we first encountered genre fiction, when it seemed to open a new vista on the world, blew our collective consciousness, so to speak. Oh yeah, and we do care about language, so don’t destroy the waking dream by confusing an adjective with a unicorn.”

I notice that I didn’t mention the name of Ann VanderMeer in the previous paragraph, although her presence suffuses it. Ann was, of course, the editor for THE SILVER WEB, the first of these magazines to see print and the one that cast the broadest net in terms of what you might discover between its covers. Completists please note, the first couple of issues were published under the name of THE STERLING WEB. This quickly morphed into THE SILVER WEB but, reports by CNN pundits to the contrary, this change of name had nothing to do with any confusion brought on by the strange coincidence of Bruce Sterling having coined the term ‘slipstream’ and THE STERLING WEB, being an early proponent of strangeness and the surreal in fiction, having no connection to Bruce Sterling himself. But, back to the matter at hand, in THE SILVER WEB you never quite knew what to expect and this was all to the good. There were the short stories of course, but there were also poems, interviews, and essays. There was rock’n’roll (Ask Ann about her years playing bass with Grandma’s House). And there was the art! Great stuff, printed large, that complemented but did not repeat what was in the stories. I know of no other editor who has cared more about the relationship between art and text. Everything played off of each other to create a unique experience greater than the sum of its parts.

What’s more, it wasn’t just through her magazine that Ann was making the world a little stranger, a little weirder, a little bit better. She was also the founder of Buzzcity Press, the publisher of two remarkable books—Dradin, in Love by Jeff VanderMeer in 1996, and The Divinity Student by Michael Cisco in 1999—that restored my faith in what genre literature could accomplish. Both books are career-defining works, the points of departure for two writers who use language as if it were a scalpel for flensing the skin from your torso, so that you spin bloodied and in pain, but luxuriating in the sensation of a new world being born. If you have not read them already, I urge you to seek them out. Without Ann, you might never have had the chance.

Since then there has been much more. But you already know that. Ann joined forces (i.e. married) Jeff in 2002, at a celebration noted for a finger-puppet show, cephalopod-embossed matchbooks, and a Ketubah created by artist Scott Eagle (featured artist in the final issue of THE SILVER WEB and cover artist for Jeff’s CITY OF SAINTS AND MADMEN). Together, Ann and Jeff have edited any number of anthologies, most recently Steampunk Reloaded (out now), The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals (also out now), The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities (out soon), and The Weird (also out soon). Together, Ann and Jeff have taught at numerous writing workshops, including Clarion, Odyssey, and Shared Worlds. Although the SILVER WEB is no more, Ann now edits WEIRD TALES, somehow making this four-score and eight years old magazine seem both classic and ground-breaking at the same time (maybe that’s why the magazine received a Hugo award in 2009).

Back in 1996, Ann wrote in an editorial for the Silver Web that she would “continue to bring together work from diverse backgrounds and present it in a unique way.” You don’t have to look very far to see that she still lives and edits according to that credo.

That about wraps it up.

But wait, there’s more, you say.

What about the Northfield Bank Robbery? Aren’t you going to clear that mystery up? We’ve heard so many stories about how Ann and Jeff met that we’re no longer sure of what is what, and which is which. Well, I’m sorry to disappoint, but there’s really no mystery there at all, just a coincidence, a similarity of names, but ultimately nothing of significance. Sure there’s an Anne Kennedy listed in the county records as bank teller at the Northfield Bank of Minnesota in 1876. And sure, some members of the James-Younger gang insist that an itinerant embezzler named Geoff Vandermere joined up with them and was wounded by her during the robbery and then later, after being captured, incarcerated in Stillwater Prison. But really, that was over a century ago. There are no documents to confirm that Anne ever visited Geoff in prison, nor that they married. And even if they did, I repeat, that was over a century ago. What possible connection could that have to Ann and Jeff now?

Really?

Just because Jeff has a limp that he attributes to an old soccer injury.

Just because Ann seems a little too knowledgeable about Civil-War era firearms…

Work Cited
Daffed, Xaver. "Heteromeric interactions among VanderMeer receptors mediate signaling in arabesques". Journal of Antinormative Philology 77.4. (2003): 258-343.

A Contribution to VanderMeer Studies

2011-10-19T10:41:00.000-04:00

My previous post about The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction noted that it is in beta-text mode and so quite obviously incomplete. Among the lacks are entries on either Jeff or Ann VanderMeer. I am not a contributor to the encyclopedia nor am I in any way affiliated with it, but I do have a great interest in all things VanderMeer.

Earlier this year, I wrote a biography of Jeff for Fogcon, where he and Ann were honored guests. (Eric Schaller wrote the biography of Ann, which I hope he will allow me to reprint here, but he's not returning my calls or email at the moment, probably because I suggested that for Halloween he should dress his dog as a character from Twilight.)

I hope the information provided below will prove useful to the encyclopedists and any future scholars. My only goal in life is to be helpful. Jeff VanderMeer will, I expect, deny the accuracy of some of it, but I believe such denials only confirm the truths I am here able to provide to the world...

THE HOEGBOTTON GUIDE TO THE (MOSTLY EARLY) HISTORY OF JEFF VANDERMEER

compiled from notes found in the files of Orem Hoegbotton, including scrawls attributed to Duncan Shriek

edited and embellished by Matthew Cheney

At the tail end of America's revolutionary years, Jeff VanderMeer was born in Bellfonte, Pennsylvania, the county seat of Centre County and part of the State College, Pennsylvania Metropolitan Statistical Area. His birth seems to have caused some consternation at high levels of the U.S. government, but all the files have been classified until 2068; we do know, though, that his parents soon joined the Peace Corps and brought the child with them to the Fiji Islands. After their work there was completed, they returned to the U.S. via a circuitous route that allowed the impressionable young man to encounter Asia, Africa, Europe, Antarctica, and Long Island — experiences that would deeply influence his later fiction.

By late adolescence, VanderMeer was living in Florida, primarily on a houseboat off the coast of St. Petersburg, the fourth-largest city in the state and the second largest city in the Tampa Bay area. VanderMeer's actual activities during this time are unknown, though he has variously claimed that he was working as a merchant of dried squid, an icthyologist, and a decoy for the Witness Protection Program. Whatever he was doing, we know that he was writing, because it wasn't long before his first book, a monograph on herpetology titled The Book of Frog, was published by The Ministry of Whimsy Press, an organization believed to have originated as either a CIA front or the last wish of an asthmatic Czech architect exiled in Miami.

Despite a small print run, The Book of Frog found a devoted cult audience in Florida, though a regional economic downturn forced VanderMeer to abandon his previous employment, sell his houseboat, and move to Gainesville, home to the University of Florida and county seat of Alachua County. Here, VanderMeer posed as a student of transcendental meditation and Latin American political policy while preparing to found a magazine, Jabberwocky. The century was ticking into its last decade, Ronald Reagan was no longer President, and VanderMeer knew the morning in America was about to fade into afternoon — thus, he decided to get serious and put his talents to work in the field of small-press publishing.

Though Jabberwocky lasted only two issues, it published the work of a diverse range of writers, including Kathe Koja, Wayne Allen Sallee, Somtow Sucharitkul, and the award-winning poet Pattiann Rogers. It was a publication well ahead of its time, offering a mix of genres and styles that would later become the hallmark of such heralded publications as Century, Crank!, and Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet. (Speculation that the FBI was involved in Jabberwocky's demise has never been disproven.)

Meanwhile, VanderMeer continued writing, though he was forced to take multiple day-jobs, including work at a discount bookstore in a mall, an experience that would influence his later fiction at least as much as his childhood globetrotting had.

VanderMeer's literary endeavors at this time were various and eclectic — a historical novella about Senator Joseph McCarthy's last hour of life (Red Flags at Dusk), two children's books he illustrated himself (The Charming Adventures of Torture Squid and The Further Adventures of Torture Squid), three memoirs (The Refraction of Light in a Prison, Fragments from a Drowned City, and A Sudden Dislocation of the Spirit), a contribution to the fields of literary theory and malacology (The Importance of Bibliographies to Squidfiction), an experiment in hagiography (The Drunk But Repentent Life of Cadimon Signal), and a self-help travel guide for anxious masochists (Do You Know Where You Are Now?).

Most of these works were received well by VanderMeer's growing audience, but his profile was, ironically, most improved when Red Flags at Dusk suffered a dismissive review by the Southern cult writer Maximillian Sharp in The Gainesville Sun. Sharp complained of the novel's right-wing prejudice, of its violent anti-communism, and of VanderMeer's attributing to Joseph McCarthy an obsession with minor religious cults such as the Order of Defecation. Sharp's reputation as a critic ensured that Red Flags at Dusk would be the first of VanderMeer's books to ascend local bestseller lists, because everyone along the Gulf Coast knew that any book Maximilian Sharp disliked was a book worth reading not only with care, but with joy.

It was at this time that VanderMeer suffered a brief, though mysterious and paralyzing, onset of delusional paranoia, believing himself to be a member of the Jesse James / Younger Brothers gang on the way to rob a bank in Northfield, Minnesota in 1876.

A young editor and punk musician, Ann Kennedy, happened to run into VanderMeer in the midst of his fiercest delusion, and managed to avoid being trampled as he rode an imaginary horse through the sidewalks of Tallahassee. Kennedy had lived in Tallahassee for some time, enjoying its status as the county seat and only incorporated municipality in Leon County (it is also the 133rd largest city in the United States). She took pity on VanderMeer, who denounced her as a Yankee and an abolitionist, and she brought him to Dr. William Simpkin, a psychiatrist and occasional fiction writer (two fields frequently confused with each other). After three weeks of rest and recuperation, as well as strong medication and fine cigars, VanderMeer regained his wits, and soon wrote works that Kennedy would publish in her magazines The Sterling Web and The Silver Web: "Requiem for the Machine", "Henry Dreams of Angkor Wat", "So the Dead Walk Slowly", and "The Ministry of Butterflies". Kennedy also became enamored of The Book of Frog, which she picked up for $5 from VanderMeer himself after friends of hers in the punk music scene insisted its cover was coated with a mild hallucinogen.

VanderMeer's stories in The Sterling Web and The Silver Web were successful enough that Kennedy forgave VanderMeer for not actually coating the covers of The Book of Frog with hallucinogens (she had, by this point, licked seven copies before deciding her friends were playing a trick on her), and in 1996 she offered to use the resources of her Buzzcity Press to publish VanderMeer's latest novella, Dradin, in Love.

Dradin, in Love was the first of what would be four novellas to form the core of VanderMeer's breakout book, City of Saints and Madmen. It was followed in 1999 by The Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of Ambergris, The Strange Case of X, and The Transformation of Martin Lake, the latter of which would go on to win the World Fantasy Award in 2000.

These works introduced the city of Ambergris, a place of intrigue, revolution, and sentient fungus (c.f. the influence of VanderMeer's childhood exposure to Long Island). It was not the only city to sprout from VanderMeer's fetid and fecund mind, however, for 2003 saw publication of Veniss Underground, a novel set in a horrifying, surreal, possibly far-future city — a setting that was the culmination of at least a decade of scattered writings about Veniss. Veniss Underground was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award, and it came in second in the Locus Poll in the category of Best First Novel.

VanderMeer had not confined his work at this time only to fiction writing. He had also continued his efforts as an editor and publisher, launching the World Fantasy Award-winning Leviathan anthology series and running the Ministry of Whimsy Press, which published books by Mark McLaughlin, Jeffrey Thomas, Steve Thomasula, Zoran Zivkovic, Rhys Hughes, Michael Cisco, and Stepan Chapman — including Chapman's Philip K. Dick Award-winning novel The Troika.

2002 and 2003 proved to be extraordinary years for VanderMeer, seeing not only the publication of career-defining works such as City of Saints and Madmen and Veniss Underground, but also the immensely successful anthology The Thackery T. Lambshead Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases (edited with Mark Roberts, nominated for both the Hugo and World Fantasy awards). At the start of this publishing maelstrom, VanderMeer and Kennedy decided that Dradin was not the only one in love, and in 2002 they were married.

After 2003, VanderMeer continued to issue a tremendous amount of stories, essays, reviews, anthologies, and novels. He continued to explore the city of Ambergris in Shriek: An Afterword (2006) and Finch (2009; nominated for the Nebula and World Fantasy awards); to publish collections of his short fiction (Secret Life [2004], The Third Bear [2010]); to write a media tie-in novel (Predator: South China Sea [2008]), to publish nonfiction books such as Why Should I Cut Your Throat (2004), Booklife (2009), and Monstrous Creatures (2011); and to edit numerous anthologies, often in collaboration with Ann (The New Weird, Steampunk, Best American Fantasy, etc.).

We have not had space here to detail Jeff VanderMeer's work as a teacher at various workshops (Clarion, Shared Worlds, Odyssey), to elaborate on his career as a reviewer for venues ranging from Science Fiction Eye to Realms of Fantasy to The New York Times, to discuss his popular blog, to gaze in wonder at his collaborations with various artists and musicians, or to tell stories of his missions to such picturesque and exotic locales as Romania, Finland, and New Hampshire.

Jeff VanderMeer's oeuvre is like a city, one rich with large and impressive edifices, strange and alluring alleys, all manner of characters, vast (and not always reliable) histories, small treasures hidden in the outskirts, a few bodies buried beneath the concrete floors of abandoned warehouses, a couple of questionable intersections, and a tourist bureau run by saints and madmen. It is the county seat of a place sometimes called October (part of the Fantastika Metropolitan Statistical Area), a city of indeterminate size and ever-metamorphosing population from which no visitor leaves unrewarded, and many seek permanent resident status.

The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction

2011-10-19T10:15:00.000-04:00

The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (3rd edition) is now in beta-text mode online for free, and even in this obviously incomplete form it's remarkable and fascinating. At Readercon this summer, in answer to the question of what works of SF criticism have been as influential as some of the seminal works of the 1970s and early '80s, I proposed the second edition of The Encyclopedia, a book that was not merely a collection of facts, but an argument about how to categorize the world and our imaginings of it. As such, it reduced even someone as taxonomy-averse as I to awe, and the influence of a lot of its idiosyncratic terms and templates on how people write about SF is undeniable.

I haven't had a chance to read a lot of the new material in the online 3rd edition, and have really only spent time with the Delany entry and the entry on Feminism. The Delany entry is basically the old entry plus some apparently quick updating -- its coverage of material by and about Delany after the early 1990s is vastly incomplete, but there's no reason to assume it will remain so. And it's nice to encounter again my favorite phrase from the older version of the entry: "frank and priapic to the verge of the scabrous" (I think "To the Verge of the Scabrous" would be a marvelous title for something...).

The Feminism entry, originally written by Lisa Tuttle, has been updated by Helen Merrick, a great choice for that task. (The entry on "Women in SF" does not seem to have been updated yet.)

(Tangentially, it seems to me it would be helpful to have the contributors page more prominently available. All the abbreviated names of contributors are annoying enough without hiding the page that tells us what the abbreviations mean. It would be nice in the future if the contributors' initials could provide the full name when hovered over. The people who've done all this work deserve credit.)

Just moving the original encyclopedia, with all its references and cross references, onto the internet is a gigantic task. That the team has worked and continues to work on updating it is even more impressive, since it's not like history and the publishing world are going to stop and wait for them to catch up. Even in its current state, it is easily among the most useful reference sites available anyone with an interest in science fiction. I'm very excited to see where it will go from here...

Silly (Awards) Season

2011-10-13T13:14:00.000-04:00

I'm a juror for the Shirley Jackson Awards this year, so perhaps I'm more sensitive than normal to pundits carping about award results, but something about awards brings out people's desire to complain, and they don't usually come out looking very good by doing so.

The ones people always complain about get complaints again this year -- the Nobel and the National Book Awards. The two articles I've seen linked to most frequently are Tim Parks on the Nobel and Laura Miller on the National Book Awards.

The Parks piece isn't terrible, but I'd agree with M.A. Orthofer at The Literary Saloon that it's "somewhat careless". (Parks has written a bit more thoughtfully about the Nobel in his essay "The Nobel Individual".) I certainly agree that the Nobel is inevitably in a tough position because it's supposed to be so international and definitive, and people give it almost mystical reverence, but its track record really isn't that bad. Sure, I wish they'd give it to Chinua Achebe already, and then Ngugi wa Thiong'o (so I could say I once interviewed a Nobel winner), and not be so generally Eurocentric, but it's an award based in Europe, so, you know, whatever. And I've got no problem with it being anti-American. Michael Bourne can whine all he wants about Philip Roth not getting it, and maybe Roth will get it one of these days, but I hope not. When Bourne writes, "If Philip Roth doesn’t deserve the Nobel Prize, no one does," he just flaunts his ignorance of world literature. There are plenty of other writers out there who would benefit from it more and who are equally interesting and even influential artists.

Tomas Transtörmer, this year's winner, is a safe and relatively obvious choice. Some people have complained that he's an "obscure poet", but anybody who refers to him as such doesn't know what they're talking about. He's been translated into somewhere around 50 languages, has multiple translators in English, has books in print in the U.S. For a poet, that's rockstar status. Just because you haven't heard of somebody doesn't mean they're obscure.

Laura Miller's slam of the NBA is some of the worst writing I've ever seen from her. People have a habit of complaining about the obscurity of NBA finalists, and it always makes them sound stupid. Laura Miller accuses the NBA judges in the fiction category of deliberately seeking out books that are no fun to read and are published by small presses. She accuses them of seeking out books that deserve more attention and ignoring books that are popular. "If you categorically rule out books that a lot of people like," she says, "you shouldn’t be surprised when a lot of people don’t like the books you end up with."

That's not really an argument, though. It's more like a non sequitur. At the very least, it's irrelevant.

The judges for the fiction award this year are Deirdre McNamer (Panel Chair), Jerome Charyn, John Crowley, Victor LaValle, Yiyun Li. That's an interesting panel. My interest in a book would rise if I knew those folks had thought the book was worthwhile and even impressive.

Laura Miller, though, thinks they seem like out-of-touch snobs who want to boost the sales of books that aren't entertaining. The NBA for fiction, she says,

more than any other American literary prize, illustrates the ever-broadening cultural gap between the literary community and the reading public. The former believes that everyone reads as much as they do and that they still have the authority to shape readers’ tastes, while the latter increasingly suspects that it’s being served the literary equivalent of spinach.

In Laura Miller's mind, "the reading public" (whatever that is) is a bunch of unadventurous louts, and the "literary community" is a bunch of resentful old cultural guardians. Or something. Nobody who writes about books, nobody who sits on an awards jury, and certainly nobody who teaches literature in any school in America is likely to believe that a.) people read much, or b.) "the literary community" has much power to shape people's tastes. It's an old, outdated, disingenuous argument built from an army of straw men.

The simple fact is, if Laura Miller hasn't read all of the NBA nominees for fiction, she's opinionating without evidence. She complains that "widely praised" novels by Jeffrey Eugenides and Chad Harbach aren't finalists. So what?

The NBA jurors read lots of books and found some they thought were really interesting. It's no crime that they found these books to be more interesting than books that have gotten more attention.

I have not read much fiction this year, and have not read any of the nominees, so I can't say whether I think they're spinach or not.* I have no need to parade my ignorance as indignation.

I can say this, though -- I've discovered some wonderful books I wouldn't have otherwise known about thanks to the NBA jurors in past years. I've discovered some writers I very much appreciate thanks to the Nobel, too. It's what I like about juried awards -- a group of people sits down and reads through more books than I would ever have the opportunity to in my everyday life, and they offer their view of the best of what is in that bunch. I don't see anything particularly nefarious in that. Elitist, yes, by definition -- the jurors are an elite in that they have read more of this stuff than almost anyone who is not a juror. That seems to me to be a virtue of a juried award.

So thank you, National Book Award judges. Thank you for reading as much as you do, and thank you for sifting through so many books to offer us your opinion that these five are really special. Thank you for not trying to compete with Oprah, thank you for not coddling us, thank you for not just going with easy choices. Unlike the Laura Millers of the world, I want awards to broaden my knowledge, not humor my ignorance.

*I like raw spinach and hate cooked spinach, so for me it would really be a question of how the spinach is prepared and presented.

Telluride at Dartmouth: Le Havre

2011-10-08T15:41:00.001-04:00

This post is the last in my chronicle of attending the Telluride at Dartmouth program at the Hopkins Center for the Arts. Days 1 & 2 (A Dangerous Method and Albert Nobbs) can be found here, Day 3 (We Need to Talk About Kevin) can be found here, and Day 4 (In Darkness) can be found here.

The final film of the six shown in the Telluride at Dartmouth program was Le Havre, written and directed by Aki Kaurismäki. (As I expected, I wasn't able to get over to Hanover for The Kid with the Bike, alas.) It was a good choice for a concluding film because the program had been, overall, rather bleak -- enjoyable, powerful, illuminating, but seldom uplifting. Le Havre is a fairy tale and a feel-good movie, one that tackles terrifying and complex subjects whimsically and is so determined to finish on a good note that everybody's ending is a happy one. It's naive to the point of being Panglossian, but so darn nice about it that it seems churlish to complain. It's a tremendously enjoyable movie to sit through -- weird, funny, and full of scenes that will make you feel good about human generosity. It's the cinematic equivalent of "Kumbaya", but with more wit.

[Note that from here on, I'm going to talk about the whole film, including its ending(s). I don't think knowing how it all turns out will impede most people's enjoyment of the movie, because its tone from early on telegraphs that this is not a tragedy, but if you're the sort of person who hates to know anything about a movie's story no matter what, you should stop reading right now.]

Actually, what Le Havre really felt like to me was one of Hal Hartley's good movies, the kind he hasn't made since Henry Fool: odd, unpredictable, at least a bit silly, the sort of movie that revels in its own irony and artificiality, yet by the end somehow transforms all its irony into shameless sincerity, even sentimentality. Le Havre is the product of an utterly sentimental view of humanity, yet it isn't itself a particularly sentimental film, to my eyes, because it doesn't work very hard to wrench emotions out of us, or even insist on them. It just depicts an awful lot of nice, ordinary people being nice and ordinary to each other and to one particular stranger. Even cancer gets cured by the niceness.

The story is a simple one: An aging shoeshiner in Le Havre, France, Marcel Marx (played by André Wilms), happens upon an illegal immigrant, a boy from (if my memory is correct) Gabon named Idrissa (Blondin Miguel). Since Marcel's wife is in the hospital, he takes the boy in and shelters him from the security forces that are the primary antagonist of this story. The security forces are sent into motion by the insistence of Marx's busy-body neighbor, played by the great Jean-Pierre Léaud, and known, at least according to IMDB, as "The Denouncer". He is pretty much the only individual character who is never generous. He looks like Gargamel, in fact, and serves the same purpose in this community as Gargamel does in the world of The Smurfs: he's mean to nice people. Even the supposed-to-be-mean-because-it's-his-job police officer is actually a softie at heart.

All of this makes for a very genial movie, one where we can sympathize with the quirky individuals who make up the community of nice people in Le Havre and can feel superior to and horrified by the well-armed security forces in riot gear. The David & Goliath story is always appealing; indeed, I expect it can be traced back well before David and Goliath. There's also a racial component -- our kindly liberal hearts sing at the sight of all the good, mostly-white people who shelter the lost black boy.

The question that keep bouncing around in my head after seeing Le Havre is: should we be encouraged to feel so good about all this?

Migration is on the minds of Europe's filmmakers this year. Consider the excellent roundup of new films from or about Africans that Sean Jacobs put together at Africa is a Country -- the first group of films are all about migration. Whatever their various virtues or limitations, none of these movies seem to take as light an approach to the topic as Kaurismäki does with Le Havre.

Maybe the light approach is okay, even welcome. Maybe it helps us see the human questions at the heart of polarizing political and social problems. Maybe the thing we need right now is a fairy tale about community and generosity instead of ever more painfully realistic stories about the human costs. Maybe we need to dream about our potential to help each other. Maybe we need to believe that willpower will create miracles.

I'm not convinced, myself, but I'm a cynical old creature, and I have trouble seeing a film like Le Havre as anything other than a big lie that lets audiences feel good about something they should be horrified by. But that could just be the pessimist in me having a knee-jerk reaction to an endlessly optimistic story.

The craftsmanship of the film is undeniably strong -- the performances are affecting without ever seeming forced, the dialogue is witty and inventive, the pacing gentle but never dull. It's a film full of sly references to other films, and so in some way it's not even about the "real world" so much as it is about its own received/constructed reality, the reality of cinema. Yet Kaurismäki clearly wants us to think about the reality beyond the screen -- his characters are located in a specific place, time, and class; and there is a definite materiality to even the most absurd shots. Kaurismäki and cinematographer Timo Salminen tend often to shoot people straight on, especially when characters are first introduced. These shots are held long enough for us to really see each face, and in some way to imagine ourselves as seen by the eyes looking out through the screen. When the immigrants are first revealed, we are given a series of shots that really show them to us -- These, the film seems to be saying, are human beings. The only undifferentiated characters are the soldiers of the security forces. Formally, the film aligns the immigrants with the main characters, insisting on their equal humanity, and positions the humans against the nameless, generally faceless, and always threatening power of the State.

It's notable that the one individual antagonist, the Denouncer, is the one character who is a label instead of a name. Even Laika the dog is a clearer personality than the Denouncer or the soldiers.

Perhaps Le Havre is not, then, so much a fairy tale as an allegory -- an allegory of individual goodness against bureaucratic, state evil. It's the sort of movie Ron Paul could endorse. Little people against the government, solving problems the way they did way back in the good ol' days before paper money, back when everybody took care of everybody else. Who needs health insurance, after all, when the cure for terminal diseases is to wish them away? (Ron Paul wouldn't like Le Havre's overall message of tolerance for immigrants, though, as his own views are mostly toward the other side.)

Many of the scenes in Le Havre are amusing. One is sublime. It's a brief scene, but immensely rich. Idrissa discovers Marcel's record player, and puts on Blind Willie McTell's "Stateboro Blues". Marcel arrives home just then and watches him. Idrissa seems entranced. It's difficult to know quite what he thinks, but there he is -- a Gabonian boy in France listening to a long-dead African-American blues singer, overseen by an old French shoeshiner who has, himself, been described as like a child. Age and time, geography and history all disappear in that moment of common humanity.

Whatever my reservations about Le Havre's worldview, it and I and Bob Dylan can, it seems, all agree on one thing: No one can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell.

Strange Horizons Fund Drive

2011-10-05T17:12:00.000-04:00

It's the final week of the Strange Horizons Fund Drive, and there are lots of fun prizes that have been donated by the various folks who support SH. But you shouldn't donate just to get a prize. You should donate because that's what keeps SH going, and has kept it going for 10 years now, long enough to make it venerable. Their staff is all volunteer, but they pay their writers good rates (think of it as the opposite of the Huffington Post that way).

Here's some useful info:

Where does my money go?

Strange Horizons is staffed entirely by volunteers, so everything you donate goes towards the running of the magazine. At the moment, our costs break down something like this:

Your $5 donation will cover our administrative overhead costs for one week
Your $20 donation pays for one poem or one review
Your $50 donation pays for one article
Your $100 donation allows us to sponsor a convention event
Your $250 donation is the average amount we pay for a new story
Your $400 donation pays for an entire week's worth of material at Strange Horizons

And now, so I can follow the progress you help SH make, here's their progress rocket:

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An Autobiography in Books

2011-10-05T08:59:00.000-04:00

Ray Russell of Tartarus Press has just put a lovely short film up on YouTube, a sort of autobiography via his book collection. Anyone who has ever felt the passions of bibliomania will find the film irresistible, and the shots of some of the rare books, especially by Arthur Machen and Sylvia Townsend Warner, are sensuous and gloriously bibliopornographic.

Telluride at Dartmouth: In Darkness

2011-10-01T13:07:00.000-04:00

This post continues to chronicle my attendance at the Telluride at Dartmouth program at the Hopkins Center for the Arts. Days 1 & 2 (A Dangerous Method and Albert Nobbs) can be found here, Day 3 (We Need to Talk About Kevin) can be found here.

I resisted In Darkness because it is a Holocaust film, and that is just about my least favorite movie genre. Nonetheless, it is a genre I'm deeply familiar with, and was the subject of the first serious film book I ever read, the original edition of Annette Insdorf's Indelible Shadows, which I discovered on my father's bookshelves when I was in high school. Soon after, I saw Schindler's List and found it deeply moving in a very adolescent way (on my part, at least, and maybe on Spielberg's). Later, I realized that Schindler's List had created a sort of emotional smugness in me -- it had made me feel good about feeling all the appropriate emotions. Spielberg is one of the greatest manipulators of emotion that the cinema has ever seen, and part of the pleasure of his action films, especially, lies in surrendering to them, allowing our emotions to be played by a virtuoso. I resist this in his films about something more serious than excitement; my loathing of The Color Purple and Munich is boundless and perhaps even a bit irrational -- indeed, I may resent the manipulation so much that I tend to perceive it as worse (cinematically and morally) than it is. At the same time, I desire great art to help us understand the Nazi era and its aftermath -- Paul Celan is my favorite 20th century poet, perhaps because so much of the power I perceive in his words derives from a struggle with (and against) the representation of atrocity. The problem is that for me it has to be great art. Plenty of subjects can withstand mediocre, ordinary, awkward, or bad art. Art that takes the Nazi years as its subject and ends up, in my estimation, to be less than great feels like a trivialization, and it infuriates me.

In any case, this is the background I brought to In Darkness, and explains why I spent the first half hour or so with my arms folded and jaw clenched -- I had pretty well decided that whatever magic spells this film tried to cast, I would resist them.

In Darkness tells the story of the final liquidation of the ghetto in Lvov, Poland, in June 1943 and of a group of Jews who hid in the city's sewers to survive. They were aided by Leopold Socha, a sewer worker, whose original goals were mercenary -- in the film, he is represented as a scavenger and thief, and tension is built early on because we fully expect him to take the Jews' money and then turn them over to the Germans for a reward. This is not what happens, though, and one path of the narrative is the story of Socha's redemption.

Had that been the primary path of the narrative, I would have hated In Darkness, because using the Holocaust as a plot device for tales of redemption seems despicable to me. (Millions of people died, and thus Our Protagonist found the goodness in his heart!) Thankfully, director Agnieszka Holland had much more on her mind in making this film than the redemption of Socha, and so the redemption of Socha becomes a powerful element of the story instead of its reason for being.

Once I saw that In Darkness was not relying on the cliché emotional moves of the Holocaust film genre, I let down my guard. The characters were complex, and few of the heroic actions unambiguously heroic. Everyone is desperate, exhausted, hungry, uncomfortable, and terrified -- these are not conditions that always bring out the best in them. We may find ourselves sharing Socha's frustrations with the refugees, sympathizing with his conflicts, his desire to be free of the people he has taken responsibility for and his desire to help them. This is a brave space for the film to open up, but it is an important one for any savior story. Inevitably, viewers want to identify with the savior; we want to think we are the sorts of people who would also be good people and risk everything to save our fellow humans. Many savior stories highlight the dangers and show how fatal missteps can be, but it is much less common for such stories to show the tensions that build between people being saved and the savior. Also, the tensions between the individuals within the group -- when they are first running through the sewers, and one woman is overcome by fright and wants to return to the ghetto, we feel her sister's rage and panic, we are pushed toward terrible thoughts: Slap her! Leave her! Save yourself! Thoughts we, if we are self-consciously decent people, push from our minds -- but they were there, and their shadows remain. We learn from In Darkness how difficult it is to be a decent person in an indecent world.

Such moments let the film earn its emotional rewards. Experience is different from manipulation. If 100 viewers of the film were to chart their emotional responses to it, there would be some overlaps at climactic moments, but there would be significant deviations as well.

I discovered I had fully surrendered to the film when a relatively small moment brought on uncontrollable tears. It was a simple moment of ordinary humanity: Socha allows one of the children, who has become catatonic from fear and exhaustion, to look up at the sunlight and taste the air. That's all. But up to that moment, we, too, as viewers have not had much chance to breathe -- we have spent a lot of time with the refugees in the sewers, our eyes have grown accustomed to the dark, we have experienced our own fears for their safety: our fears that Socha would give in to his worst impulses, our fears that the group would destroy itself from carelessness or weariness or frustration. We have spent enough time looking at the darkness that the sudden bright light is blinding, but it is also welcome.

It is not a simple emotional moment. Of course, the kindness of Socha is touching. But it's a small act compared to many of his others, ones that aren't as deeply affecting. We, too, have yearned for sunlight and fresh air. We have felt a sliver of what the refugees have felt -- and if we think about it, we know it is a sliver, a grain-of-sand-sized feeling compared to all the pain and fear of the refugees, and that opens up whatever capacity we have to empathize, but though we empathize, we know our empathy is not equal to their experience.

This, it seems to me, is exactly what films about atrocity should do. They should make us empathize and at the same time they should confront us with the inadequacy of our empathy. Like Celan's poems, they should strive for language while knowing that such experiences defeat language. The work should bear the scars of its impossibility. The work should not encourage us to feel good about ourselves; rather, it should show us all the terrors we contain.

In Darkness earns our joy in its characters' heroic acts because it is honest about what all those acts must overcome. The Nazis are a clear enemy, the metonym for evil. We are good at hating them and at rooting for their opposition. The Nazis are other than us, something we would never be, because we are good and decent. They're the most convenient, least controversial bad guys wherever they appear. Hating Nazis and feeling pity or even sympathy for their victims is a worthwhile feeling, but it is not a difficult or complex one, and it trivializes the agony when art encourages us to use the Nazi era for easy feelings proudly felt.

There are few easy feelings in In Darkness, and some you will not be proud to feel. We are rewarded with a mostly happy ending, an ending that is very much a relief, even perhaps a purgation in the Aristotelian sense. (There is even one moment that is an unexplained miracle.) The ending, at least in general terms, is true to history. Many other stories of escape from the Nazis did not end happily, despite even the most selfless heroism, and In Darkness includes that fact in a way that is more powerful than most other Holocaust savior films I've seen. Much of this comes from how well Holland shows us that the group is, at the end, a small one. We move from the relative largeness of the ghetto to an overfilled living room to the crowded sewers to, finally, one tiny section of the no-longer-crowded sewers. We saw how this small group was created, and we remember the faces of the people who were not able to be part of it.

Our knowledge of the refugees as individuals grows throughout the film, but we also know why it grows: the group becomes smaller and smaller and smaller. Our joy at their survival, then, is attached to, even dependent on, our knowledge of how few survived, and what it cost to survive.

For me, then, In Darkness joins a small group of films that represent the suffering of the Nazi era in a way that is complex in what it asks us to know and feel. The only film I've seen this year that even approaches it in such complexity is The Tree of Life, a work so different from In Darkness that I find them impossible to compare except in their effect on me as a viewer: leaving the theatre, I felt more aware of the potentials and limits of my own humanity. Stating it in such a way -- trying to capture rich emotions in ordinary words -- sounds like hyperbolic praise, but I am only pointing to one of the reasons we seek out art beyond entertainment or beyond aesthetic pleasure. We spend our lives trying to understand what it means to live, what it means to know history, what it means to feel. It's an impossible quest, but great art lets us know, at least for a moment, that the quest is worthwhile.

Such words are grandiose, so I will end instead with Celan:

THREADSUNS
above the grayblack wastes.
A tree-
high thought
grasps the light-tone: there are
still songs to sing beyond
mankind.

--trans. by Pierre Joris

In Praise of the Thesaurus

2011-09-30T18:53:00.000-04:00

Hearing the news that the latest issue of the Writer's Chronicle contains a statement from poet Mark Doty that, "If you write a poem with the aid of a thesaurus, you will almost inevitably look like a person wearing clothing chosen by someone else. I am not sure that a poet should even own one of the damn things," I was aghast.

Aghast, I say! Astounded! Appalled!

I have said before that my favorite reference book is a 1946 edition of Roget's International Thesaurus, and that remains true. I covet the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary and continue to dream at night of figuring out a way to convince the good people at Oxford University Press to send me a copy (other than to pay them $500). (I do have The Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus, which is a delight. It includes a fun foreword by Rick Moody in which he notes that Donald Barthelme used a thesaurus, which should be enough to cause you to make sure you are never without one yourself.) (And, by the way, Mark Doty, what's so wrong about wearing clothes somebody else picked out?)

Doty's statement is idiotic. Irrational, witless, obtuse, hebetudinous, dull-pated, chuckleheaded, purblind, and dim. Writers! Decline to dote on Doty! He wants you to be dumb, in all senses of the word!

Few reference books are as fun to roam around in as thesauri. They demonstrate the marvelous connections possible with language. Dotyish dolts are fools who simultaneously think they have a superior command of language over everybody else while being afraid of the marvelous vast richness of language -- they want to tame us and they want to tame it. Don't give in!

Some of these crustaceous curmudgeons will say things like, "Well, if you must use one of those terrible tomes, make sure you only do so to jog your memory of words you already know."

That's terribly churlish advice. Why limit ourselves to words we already know? I want to know more words! I am greedy and lexically lustful!

There's some sort of strange Romanticism going on in the idea that one must only use the words one has immediately at hand. It's like people who say one should always go with the first draft of a piece of writing because that's what's most pure. Eschew the puritans! Cast off your ideas of Romantic genius! Get to work -- and use a thesaurus!

So some people will misuse words, particularly if they are young and untrained, impressionable and ignorant. Oh no, the unruly kids might not fully understand the context and connotations of a word they discover! Horrors! Next thing you know, they might start playing with their words! Nooooo! Stop them before it's too late!

Poets -- be not a Doty! Take instead Wallace Stevens for your model, a writer of vast vocabulary, a man who reveled in language. Do not let the great structure of words become a minor house! Fall into the thesaurus and let yourself feel the obscurity of an order, a whole, a knowledge. Dream of baboons and periwinkles! Let your thesaurus take dominion everywhere! Call the roller of big cigars, the muscular one, and bid him whip from thesaurus pages concupiscent words!

Die, American Literature! Die! Die!

2011-09-27T09:36:00.000-04:00

Last month I wrote about Joseph Epstein's hilariously grumbly screed against The Cambridge History of the American Novel, and now at Slate the editor of that volume writes a temperate, rational, and utterly ungrumbly response. I particularly liked this paragraph:

Simply recording our appreciation for the "high truth quotient" (the measure Epstein wants) of a stream of canonical novels won't do. It's not clear what that "quotient" is for Epstein, but anything that smacks of pop culture is by definition excluded. Yet novels were and remain a vital part of popular culture, and their emergence in the 18th and 19th centuries was greeted as an affront to the "centurions of high culture" who appointed themselves to guard the gates before Epstein nominated himself for the job. Only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands of American novels published ever achieved—or even aspired to—the exalted status of high art.

Telluride at Dartmouth: We Need to Talk About Kevin

2011-09-26T00:35:00.000-04:00

This post continues to chronicle my attendance at the Telluride at Dartmouth program at the Hopkins Center for the Arts. Days 1 & 2 can be found here.

Lynne Ramsay is a director of exceptional visual and aural skill, as anyone who has seen her films Ratcatcher and Morvern Callar can attest. I adored Ratcatcher and found Morvern Caller rather a bore, which seems to be a somewhat idiosyncratic view, as lots of people who saw both loved the second film even more than they did the first. What we can all agree on, though, is that a new Lynne Ramsay movie is a cause for celebration. And when that new movie stars just about my favorite living film actor, Tilda Swinton, it becomes for me a great event.

I have not read the acclaimed novel by Lionel Shriver that We Need to Talk About Kevin is based on, and I was just about to read it when I heard about the film, so I decided to wait. I have seldom wished I had read a book before seeing a movie based on it, and so whenever possible, I don't read the book first. That turned out to be, it seems, an especially good decision here, because I had dinner after the film with friends, some of whom had read the book, and it was clear that that would have changed my viewing somewhat by adding more context to Swinton's character of Eva.

Ramsay is brave and nearly alone among narrative filmmakers in her willingness to subsume almost all exposition within image and sound -- to suggest, hint, and gesture toward exposition rather than state it. (It is no surprise that Tarkovsky and Malick are to her taste, and in Ratcatcher she even used some of the Carl Orff music from Malick's Badlands.) What we get in We Need to Talk About Kevin, then, is not so much a story as a portrait of a psyche. Things happen, certainly, and there's a major climax that the film works its way toward, but the movement of the film is associational, imagistic, musical. Meaning is created not through dramatic scenes, but through colors and sounds, camera angles, montage, repetitions. The story is not presented so much as unearthed -- this is filmmaking as psychic archaeology.

The film's slow revelation of the events at its heart is its most traditional feature, and one that creates tension and suspense. However, I don't know if it's a feature I much like. On one hand, it's good to have tension and suspense. On the other hand, it feels a bit like a cheat, because it puts the audience and the characters on very different levels -- in the present-time scenes, the characters all know what has happened, and so their behaviors are explicable, but the audience stays ignorant, though we certainly intuit early on that Something Bad Has Happened. Had the movie been solely concerned with Eva's mind and perceptions, it wouldn't have hidden so much information; obviously, then, the movie is not solely concerned with Eva. Or, to look at it differently, Ramsay and co-screenwriter Rory Kinnear thought we would be better able to experience and evaluate Eva's perceptions if we did not share her knowledge. (Or they may have just decided to stick with the book's structure; I'm told it is as slow to reveal the major events as the movie is, if not slower.)

In a traditional narrative, keeping the viewer (or reader) from knowing the climax of events is a standard method for creating suspense and tension. It's not a technique that much interests me (I generally read the last chapters of thrillers first to get rid of the annoyance of suspense so I can pay attention to more interesting elements), but it's certainly the most popular sort of structure, one that provides for many people a primary pleasure.

We Need to Talk About Kevin is not a traditional narrative, however; it's nonlinear, moving back and forth through time, with its main logic associational rather than causal. I need to see the film again, now that I know how it all turns out, to settle my feelings about its determination to keep the audience in the dark.

While the last fifteen minutes of the movie answer most of our questions, at least one is left hanging and, in fact, only exacerbated by the revelations at the end: Why did everyone seem to hate Eva so much? One of my friends at dinner said this is explained much more clearly in the novel, where there is a trial sequence that is not in the film. My friend feels that Eva is, in the novel, an unreliable narrator who has a persecution complex, and so her guilt about her failures as a mother gets externalized as a feeling that everyone is against her. This may be something the film was trying for, too, but it didn't work for me, because at the end Eva is shown to have lost much more than just her son. (In fact, she hasn't entirely lost him.) There's no reason that I saw in the film for her to be such a pariah. However, the narrative is entirely within her subjectivity, and if she feels like she is a pariah, someone hated by everyone she encounters, then we inevitably see things through her eyes with little ability to judge otherwise.

There's a difference in point of view between the first-person, epistolary novel and the very-much-within-Eva's-perceptions film. The difference is one of authoricity. The novel is presented as Eva's own writing -- she tells her story. It's extremely difficult to pull off such a point of view in a film without making it a film-about-a-film, and We Need to Talk About Kevin makes no attempt at that. This change in point of view also relates to the question (problem?) of the delayed revelations -- it makes plenty of sense that Eva wouldn't explain or even discuss the climactic events were she writing about it all herself, but it makes less sense in a movie that she is not authoring.

Despite my reservations about the script, I admire much about We Need to Talk About Kevin, and I am thrilled to see a narrative, almost mainstream film using something other than the most traditional, conventional cinematic grammar. The acting in the movie is exceptional, the cinematography (by Seamus McGarvey) elegant and affecting, the editing (by Joe Bini) lyrical and smart. Special mention must be made of the music and sound design by Jonny Greenwood and Paul Davies -- I can't think of another recent film that so fully benefits from its soundtrack from beginning to end. Perhaps a few too many of the songs have on-the-nose lyrics (much as I love Washington Phillips, his "Mother's Last Word to Her Son" seemed a bit heavy-handed), but that's a minor sin in a soundscape of such richness and complexity.

While Ramsay certainly has some traits in common with Tarkovsky and Malick, the comparison seems superficial to me because she's less enigmatic. (I could easily see those directors leaving at least part of the climax completely out of the film altogether, letting the meaning come from lack, forcing us to confront how we fill in the blanks.) A closer comparison might be made to a director she is more different from on the surface: Hitchcock. He was similarly sensitive to sounds and sights, and, like Ramsay, little interested in being subtle and ambiguous about it all. Vertigo remains a fascinating movie because (among other things) it is so ostentatiously about its colors. We Need to Talk About Kevin is also very much about color, and also ostentatious -- for instance, no sentient viewer could miss the symbolism of all the red in the visually striking first few minutes. That doesn't make the images any less striking -- their color, shape, and movement is far more evocative than the symbolism we inevitably attach to it. Like Vertigo, putting words to it all weakens it. This is a movie that needs to be a movie, a movie where the force of the effect, if not the meaning, comes from its cinematic qualities. It is, in its own way, the "pure cinema" Hitchcock advocated.

(For more on the film, see Jonathan McCalmont's excellent consideration of it, one which differs a little bit from my own.)

Telluride at Dartmouth, Days 1 & 2

2011-09-24T22:35:00.000-04:00

A Dangerous Method

Dartmouth College has a long-standing relationship with the Telluride Film Festival, and every year a group of films that premiered at Telluride are shown as part of the Telluride at Dartmouth program, a highlight of any northern New England cinephile's year. (It was at Telluride at Dartmouth last year that I saw Never Let Me Go.)

This year, I've decided to try to see as many of the films as I can, and unless exhaustion wears me down, I expect to see five of the six. (Unfortunately, The Kid with the Bike, the new movie from the Dardenne brothers, is playing on a day when I have a prior commitment.) I won't do in depth reports on the films here, I don't think, because of a lack of time, but I do want to record initial impressions.

The first film shown was A Dangerous Method, David Cronenberg's best comedy since Crash. Most people probably wouldn't classify A Dangerous Method as a comedy, and it's certainly not being sold as such, but I find it a helpful way to view it. Cronenberg has the most developed and complex kitsch aesthetic this side of Abel Ferrara, and much like Ferrara, he allows actors to indulge their most histrionic tendencies with utter sincerity. Such acting can create a variety of effects, and the style's strength is the complexity of feelings it can evoke in an audience -- a complexity especially apparent when one cannot suppress laughter at the unbridled mugging on screen while also wondering whether this is something you should be taking more seriously (one of the funniest scenes I've ever watched is the one in Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant where Harvey Keitel talks to Jesus). Yet the filming and acting make no concessions to comedy in such moments -- and many viewers do not see them as funny; indeed, some see them as "great acting" and powerful, authentic expressions of emotion. Which they may be. Most of James Dean's reputation is based on such scenes, and one of the legacies of American Method acting, particularly as proselytized by Lee Strasberg, is a whole canon of "Look at me, Ma, I'm emoting!" moments. The filmmaking process can tone down, fragment, and distort such performances, and the brilliance of a Cronenberg or a Ferrara is to go in exactly the opposite direction -- to indulge the actors and allow them to reach their full melodramatic heights. More traditional directors and editors try to manage the emotions represented and the emotions evoked in the audience, and their greatest nightmare would be an audience laughing at a scene intended to be dramatic, but the filmmakers who love the melodrama inherent in their material cast that fear aside.

A Dangerous Method is a perfect example. The last thing the world needs is another historical drama about the repressed emotions of people who wear tight clothing. Yet we're still attracted to such stories, and Cronenberg delightfully plays with that desire. In the first half hour of the film, he gives us many scenes of Keira Knightley, portraying Sabina Spielrein, aiming with all her might for the My Left Foot Oscar. One shouldn't, of course, laugh at the emotionally distressed, but film is a fundamentally voyeuristic form, and one of its joys is that it allows us to do what we know in real life we shouldn't. I must admit, though, that surrounded by hundreds of people who were not laughing at the scenes of Knightley jutting out her jaw, popping her eyes, moaning and screaming and wrenching herself in every possible way, I repressed my laughter. Had I been alone at home, I would have laughed and clapped, hooted and hollered. But no. I felt pummelled by the propriety of the people around me.

Which is the perfect effect for this film, a film all about what we repress, and why -- and where.

Cronenberg and editor Ronald Sanders did what more "tasteful" people would not: they let the shots of Knightley acting her heart out go on and on, heightening the spectacle of her performance. A mediocre film would have been too embarrassed to let it go on; A Dangerous Method is fascinating and discomforting because it encourages Knightley to keep going and us to keep looking.

And I haven't even mentioned the great delight of watching Michael Fassbender portraying Carl Jung as a proficient spanker.

The beauty of a movie like A Dangerous Method, a movie that delights in wrapping trashiness in a "respectable" veneer, is that it allows a wider range of emotions and responses than does a more self-conscious and better-behaved film. The progress of the film's style and content mirror its themes -- the final moments give us characters who have achieved a stolid maturity, have reconciled their urges with the repressions of everyday society, and have been, for better or worse, cured of each other. These scenes are beautifully acted, quiet, unspectacular. And they are utterly heartbreaking in a way they could not have been had the scenes leading up to them been less excessive.

Albert Nobbs

The second Telluride at Dartmouth film was Albert Nobbs, another sort of historical drama, this one much more traditional and respectable. It's one of the most rewarding tearjerkers I've encountered in a while; if you can watch the last scenes without at least a bit of weep in your eyes, you're probably a cold and dastardly human being.

Albert Nobbs is far more restrained than A Dangerous Method, and this is appropriate to the tale it has to tell. Glenn Close's performance as the title character, a woman who has spent most of her life as a man in 19th century London, is impressive in its control and reserve. The virtue of the restraint lies in the ability of a glance to convey meaning and emotion -- this was most obvious in a moment where a single change of Close's countenance caused the audience I was in to erupt in laughter and applause (a moment where Nobbs discovers someone else is living as he is, something I expect just about everyone in the audience had figured out by that point, and so we were waiting for this moment, and were delighted when it was delivered with such panache).

From the moment we see him, we know Albert Nobbs is Glenn Close, because Glenn Close is famous and we have not been living under a rock. I don't know if the very good make-up and costuming would have fooled me had I had no knowledge of Close and no knowledge of the film's premise, but the point is moot, because I knew going into it that that was a movie in which Glenn Close played a woman who lived as a man. I was wary of this knowledge at first, thinking the effect might lesson the impact of the movie for me, but then I was grateful for it -- the knowledge dispenses with the "shock" of a revelation and puts us immediately into a potentially more sympathetic position with the character: we are in on the secret. Similarly, few viewers will mistake Janet McTeer for a man the way the characters in the film do -- when I first saw her, I thought, "I don't remember seeing k.d. lang's name in the credits..." (Then I spent a while thinking, "Is that Edie Falco?") This is all to the best, because not only does it put us in positions of sympathy, but it highlights the constructedness of gender signs -- someone clothed as a man is, to the characters in the film, a man. (Except to a little boy who stops and stares at the beginning and end of the film, as if showing that the cultural cues have not yet fully taken hold in his young mind.) Their society was one of much more restricted fashion codes than our own. As opposed to London over 100 years ago, in the general society of the U.S. in 2011 fashion is less bound by gender, transgressions of gender codes are more common, and we are attuned to more subtle cues for gender identity.

What's fascinating about the film, however, is how much it normalizes the assumed male roles even for us. A marvelous moment comes when Close and McTeer put on women's dresses for an outing to the beach -- they look ridiculous! And yet at the same time we can feel the sense of freedom that Albert feels, the freedom not to hide anymore. The dress and shoes are obviously not comfortable for him, they are not his desired outfit, but they relieve him of a secret that he has held for fear of humiliation and perhaps even death (death, certainly, of his male identity) -- his panic when McTeer first discovers his secret is the most emotional he ever gets in the film.

I've referred to Alfred here as "him" because after the first five minutes or so, that's how I always perceived him. And clearly, it's how he perceived himself -- he yearned for a wife, but he didn't seem to yearn for a wife so that he could also be a woman. He yearned for a wife because he yearned for love. When McTeer asks him his "real name", he insists it is Albert. And she's okay with that -- she seems to understand that her own desire to hold onto some of her female identity is not the same as Albert's sense of himself. For McTeer's character, the male identity is at least partly a disguise, one that allows her to be employed and to live as a lesbian without harassment. For Albert, it began as a useful disguise, but now has become very much who he is.

It's a wonderful movie -- beautifully acted by even the actors of even the most minor characters, intelligently conceived, and strengthened by the utter conventionality of its form and narrative, because this allows the unconventional elements of the characters' lives to shine. The pacing is slow and careful, which is a virtue as well: it becomes a film we live with, its incidents only occasionally feeling like plot devices. It is, in many ways, the sort of film Remains of the Day aspired (and failed) to be.

The Revelator is Now Revealed!

2011-09-22T09:40:00.001-04:00

Eric Schaller and I have been working on creating an online version of a magazine some of our ancestors were involved with in 1876, and after a long period of work, with the brilliant and invaluable help of Luís Rodrigues, THE REVELATOR can now be revealed.

In it you will find two new short stories, "Gaslight" by Jeffrey Ford and "Nick Kaufmann, Last of the Red-Hot Superwhores" by Nick Mamatas; an essay about the relationship between Salem, Massachusetts and witches by Robin DeRosa, poetry by Lillian Aujo and Beverly Nambozo, an interview with and comix by Edward Bolman, an account of The Spleen Brothers by Brian Francis Slattery, paintings by Michaela D'Angelo, and an eyewitness account of the James/Younger gang's raid on the bank in Northfield, Minnesota -- an account unlike any others, and till now lost in the archives of The Revelator!

A theme of twins, doubles, and doppelgangers runs lightly through this issue of the magazine. It's present in the fiction, there's the idea of historical doubling in Robin's essay on Salem, etc. We got creative with the doubling in the poetry department -- I knew Beverly had a lot of poet friends, and so we asked her to be the commissioning editor for the second poem, and she brought Lillian to us. Never having met Lillian in real life, I don't know if she's Beverly's doppelganger, but I do know we're thrilled to be able to publish the work of both. And of everybody else who was brave enough to want to join the old, weird tradition of The Revelator.

There will probably be future or past issues. Please note though that because of limited resources, we are not open to unsolicited submissions. We would love to get to that point eventually, but right now we just don't have the ability to read through a lot of unsolicited work.

Politics and Aesthetics, Part MCCCLV

2011-09-21T11:31:00.000-04:00

My writing at this here blog has fallen off significantly since classes started, because I'm teaching six days a week (university classes during the week, a high school class in epistemology on Saturdays), and so my current schedule consists of prepping for classes, teaching classes, and then whatever errands, etc. I can fit into the occasional free minutes.

But still the internet provides interesting stuff, regardless of how much I am paying attention to it! Imagine that!

For instance, here's an advertisement from a 1968 issue of Galaxy that reveals which science fiction writers were in favor of the Vietnam War and which ones were not. I've seen the ad before (I have some Galaxy issues from 1968) but never paid much attention to it, really, until just now I noticed something odd.

On the list of writers who declared themselves in favor of remaining in Vietnam in 1968, there are very few whose writing I have much interest in -- R.A. Lafferty and Jack Vance are the only ones whose work I find especially compelling, though I like some of the writing of Leigh Brackett, Fredric Brown, Edmond Hamilton, and Robert Heinlein, and isolated stories by a couple of others.

On the list of writers who declared themselves opposing the continued presence of the U.S. military in Vietnam, I find names I would include on any list of favorite science fiction writers, certainly, and in many cases favorite writers of any sort -- Samuel Delany, Philip K. Dick, Thomas M. Disch, Carol Emshwiller, Ursula K. Le Guin, Fritz Leiber, Joanna Russ -- as well as others who I have at least as much interest in as in nearly anyone on the other list. And among the names I recognize, at least, there are fewer I think of as just flat-out bad writers than among the names I recognize on the list of Vietnam war supporters.

Of course, aesthetics and politics have a complex relationship, and support for/opposition to the Vietnam war could include people of varying ideologies, but I'm still struck by the general aesthetic differences between the two lists. Since I am a bourgeois liberal with occasional pretensions of radicalism, my own ideological position may explain some of my preferences. (I'd be curious to see a similar list for other genres or non-genres -- didn't the New York Review of Books or the New York Times run something similar during the '60s?) But even someone who didn't find the differences between the two lists as striking as I do would have to admit that overall, and with a handful of exceptions, the two sides represent two different styles of writing. We could take the political labels off the advertisement and present the two lists to folks who have read stories and novels by many of those writers, and the groupings would still make sense overall. That could mean all sorts of things -- I would be wary of essentialist claims about how ideology affects writing, but it would be interesting to think about the ways various affinity groupings overlap. You could create Venn diagrams from those lists in which politics, friendships, publishers, etc. are categories, and the results would be interesting.

This Term's Courses

2011-09-10T13:58:00.000-04:00

I haven't done my usual blogging about teaching yet this term, mostly because I spent so much time trying to put a couple of new classes together that the idea of writing about it all wasn't very appealing. But now the classes are up and running, and so I can at least share some syllabi and thoughts with those of you who are curious.

The classes, with links to their syllabi, are:

Writing and the Creative Process (a general education, "intro to creative writing" sort of class)
Currents in Global Literature (a required course for English majors)
Media and Popular Culture (an upper-level Communications & Media Studies class)

The only one I've taught before is Writing & the Creative Process, a course I keep fiddling with in the hopes of one day getting it right. The progression and goals have basically been the same every time, but I've changed a lot of the content, and have used a number of different books in an attempt to find stuff that gives the students a wide view of how writers write -- I actually disagree with the title of the class, because I don't think there is "the creative process", just "lots of different creative processes". (At least it's not "the writing process", a label that makes me gag). One term, I used Lynda Barry's marvelous What It Is, but found two problems with it: 1.) I don't know how to teach from it, because really I just wanted the students to read and enjoy it; 2.) all copies of the book seemed to evaporate when I assigned it, so it was impossible for the bookstore to get more than 5 copies (even Amazon had none in stock), and I had to rearrange the entire schedule of the course until more copies could be found when there were only a few weeks left in the term. That was a disaster, and though I expect it wouldn't be repeated, I'm not taking the chance of it happening again, so the book is no longer required.

I've also reduced the amount of formal workshopping we do in the course, because I'm not the world's biggest workshopping fan anyway, and it's especially not my thing with students who are just starting to think about writing as something other than research papers for school. If they like the taste of workshopping that they get at the end of my class, they can take full workshops in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and scriptwriting with other teachers, since we offer them all. I prefer to use the majority of class time to think about ideas, play around with different types of writing, look at a wide array of examples, and generally improvise our way toward something resembling enlightenment. (On a good day.)

Currents in Global Literature was not a class I was expecting to teach, but some sudden personnel changes in the English department dropped it in my lap, and I was excited to take it on, because I don't usually get the opportunity to teach major-specific courses.We don't have a Comparative Literature department at Plymouth, so the majority of our literature courses are focused on American and British lit, which is what the English faculty are mostly trained in. I have at least amateur knowledge of other literatures, so, well, here I am.

Of course, "global literature" is an impossible topic for a single term. Even the course description notes that there will be a particular theme of the instructor's choice. My choice was to use a basic theme of "revolutions". I also knew I wanted to include texts I was pretty certain there was no chance the students would encounter in any of our other classes, no matter what. I was certainly tempted to go for Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Kafka, Borges, Marquez, etc. -- some of my absolute favorites -- but there's at least a chance the students will hear those names in other courses. (And this was confirmed on the first day of class, when I asked students about their experiences with non-American, non-British books; while certainly some had no experience at all with such things, at least half talked about the Russians, Kafka, magical realism, etc.)

I knew I wanted some historical sweep, and wanted to avoid making the class another iteration of our Postcolonial Literature course (taught by a friend of mine, so I got her syllabus the second I knew I was teaching Global Lit, just to make sure I differentiated enough, since all my instincts for global lit are those of a postcolonialist). Tempted as I was to cover 500 years or so of material, I decided it was probably best to stick to about 200.

Thus we have A Sentimental Education as a big, juicy 19th century novel, one that, among other things, stands as a revolution in fictional technique and a representation of people living during the revolutions of 1848.

Additionally, I decided to use Rothenberg & Robinson's Poems for the Millennium 3, which offers a global view of the idea of 19th century Romanticism(s) and post-Romanticism. We'll mostly be looking at this material in class, using it to get a general overview of the century of poetic production, with students following their own interests and curiosities into specific areas.

Alejo Carpentier's The Kingdom of this World, though written in the 1940s, is set in Haiti in the 19th century, and so allows us not only to continue thinking about themes of political and aesthetic revolution, but also to look at how the past beyond the author's own lifetime is represented and used. It's a short, rich, stunning book, and I'm very curious to see how the students react to it.

I ended up including more African novels than I planned to, but after making one list after another, this set just wouldn't leave my consciousness: Burger's Daughter by Nadine Gordimer, Petals of Blood by Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar. Really, those three books should be a course of their own, but I am somewhat insanely going to try to take the class through them all along with the other books. From our first few days, I think the students are up to the challenge, but I've been asked to teach the course again next term, and I expect I'll probably have to drop something, because the schedule is so tightly packed. But we'll see.

If you look at the syllabus, you'll see I'm also including some discussion of the nature of translation and distribution of books from outside the U.S. and U.K. That could be a course unto itself, but I think it's important for the students to think, even briefly, about the forces, assumptions, concessions, and desires that make some books prominent and some not.

Media as Popular Culture is another course that didn't have a whole lot of definition when it was given to me. It used to be "Film as Popular Culture", but the department thought it would be more useful to open it up to other sorts of media as well, which only makes it more difficult to define. But I like a challenge.

I'm not sure my approach to the course is entirely coherent, but it will, I hope, at least be fun and provocative.

We begin with explorations of ways of defining the words in the title -- "media", "popular", "culture", and "popular culture". Though the students are mostly in the last year or two of being Communications & Media Studies majors, they don't seem to have a solid grasp of some of the basic terminology of their field (or they just don't want to share that knowledge with me), and so my instinct to start with definitions turned out to be a good one. They didn't particularly enjoy having to read Dwight Macdonald and Raymond Williams, but it at least gave them some sense of the traditional points of conflict within this area of study, and I think we had a good discussion of the applicability of, especially, some of Williams's concepts to our own era. (I hadn't read Culture & Society for about six years, and until I reread it this summer, I had forgotten how many of the book's insights I had just absorbed and taken for granted.)

On Monday, we'll be discussing the first half of Let's Talk About Love, which should be fun. That will extend our discussions of how we decide things are worthwhile, and especially how we decide what is worth studying, and how we study it. From there, we'll be looking at a variety of items from online and from our big textbook, Gender, Race, and Class in Media, to try to get a sense of some of the various forces and ideologies that create and regulate cultural production.

Then on to Henry Jenkins's Convergence Culture, supplemented with the movie Gamer, which will then lead in to a discussion of media franchises, looking particularly at the Predator franchise via the original movie, Jeff VanderMeer's Predator: South China Sea, and examples from some of the comics. I knew I wanted to include something on franchises, and I settled on Predator because it's somewhat less vast than, for instance, the Star Wars or Star Trek universes, so we could potentially do it in a couple weeks. Also, Jeff might be willing to answer occasional questions about the novel if I ask him nicely and bribe him with chocolate weapons.

But we're not done yet! We'll finish up the course with a different look at franchises, influence, remixes, and popular culture by talking about melodrama -- specifically the films All That Heaven Allows, Fear Eats the Soul, and Far from Heaven. I'm going to resist my urge to gush about these films when it comes time to watch them, and try to tell the students as little as possible, because I'm very curious what their initial reactions will be.

So that's the term. My tendency to cram to much into classes is entirely on display, but I always find it preferable to have a too-full syllabus than one that feels empty, since we can always adjust a little bit as we go along.

Next term, in addition to reprising Intro to Film and Global Lit, I've got a general education Communications & Media class called "Outlaws, Delinquents, and Other 'Deviants' in Film". The possibilities for that one are nearly endless...

Just Be Glad You're Not Trying to Sell a Poetry Book

2011-09-07T09:59:00.000-04:00

I was working on a post about the BlazeVOX asking-writers-to-help-subsidize-poetry-publishing brouhaha, and its connections to the criminal idiocies of so much academic publishing, and what the idea of "legitimacy" in publishing does for us as writers and readers, but the post got long and banal and so boring that I started falling asleep while I wrote it, which is a bad sign, so I abandoned it, but I've still been keeping one eye on the discussion.

Today's post of note is from the blog of No Tell Books, a small, respected indie press:

No Tell Books' best selling title broke even after three years and is now earning a very modest profit. This is by an author whose work has appeared in places like Poetry and Best American Poetry. This title has been taught at universities. How many copies does one have to sell to be the best selling title at No Tell Books after four years? 228. That is not a typo. This number doesn't include what the author has sold herself, probably around 200 copies on her own. But the press doesn't earn money on those sales.

So if that's a best seller, what's a flop? 74 sales after five years (again, this number doesn't include what the author sold on his own, which was maybe 50 or so). (UPDATE: Gatza states, "In general, books by new authors sell around 25 - 30 copies." Shocking? Only if you don't know the first thing about poetry publishing.)

This is the reality of poetry publishing. There are certainly presses that sell more copies. A poetry title reviewed in The New York Times can sell 2-4k copies, it is true. But small, independent presses, those small shops, usually run by one or a few people, rarely see those kinds of sales. University presses, for the most part, don't see those kinds of numbers for poetry. I attended a panel by the publisher of Grove/Atlantic and he said his press' poetry sales was around 800 per title. They publish "big-name" poets, their books are often shelved by chain bookstores, they have good distribution, a strong reputation . . . and that's what they sell. Publishing poetry is their charity--their poetry titles are subsidized by their fiction and non-fiction sales.

I know of prose books where the publicity machine exploded spectacularly (or didn't exist), the publisher seemed to do everything possible to bury the book, and it only ever appeared at tiny bookstores in uninhabited regions of the world -- and still managed to sell over 300 copies!

I was going to say that obviously America hates poetry, but that's not true. To hate it, we'd have to pay attention to it.

World on a Wire

2011-09-05T11:28:00.000-04:00

My latest column is up at Strange Horizons, and this time it's about Rainer Werner Fassbinder's epic science fiction film World on a Wire (Welt am Draht).

If you want to see World on a Wire (and you should!), it's available on home video in the U.K. and Europe, and in the U.S. can be seen via Hulu if you subscribe to Hulu Plus (you can get a free trial subscription for a week, or if you have .edu email address, for a month). Rumor has it that Criterion will be releasing the film on DVD and Blu-ray in the U.S. at the end of this year or the beginning of next. It's also still touring various U.S. cities -- at the end of this week, it will be at the Harvard Film Archive in Cambridge, MA.

I'm a Fassbinder nut, so will passionately defend even his films that only lunatics defend, but you don't have to be as obsessed with Fassbinder as I to see get pleasure from World on a Wire. (Although if "efficient" plotting, suspenseful storytelling, and "round" characterizations are your primary requirements for pleasure, you should probably stay away.) While World on a Wire isn't of the power and depth of, say, Berlin Alexanderplatz or a handful of Fassbinder's other absolute masterpieces, it's still a powerful, unsettling, beautiful movie, and the restoration that the Fassbinder Foundation did is remarkable -- to take an old 16mm master made for TV and turn it into something that can be admired on a giant cinema screen is no easy feat.

I could go on and on. I won't. Instead, if you want a taste of the film, check out the trailer, which I'll embed after the jump here:

An Obstacle

2011-09-02T09:19:00.001-04:00

The preconception, on the part of critics and actors alike, regarding cinematic theatricality as a marker of feeling—a prejudice in favor of one particular school and method of acting—remains as much an obstacle to creation as to appreciation.

—Richard Brody

Elsewhere

2011-08-31T08:40:00.000-04:00

I've got a couple of pieces of writing floating around out in the internets this week—

A new Sandman Meditations piece has been posted at Gestalt Mash. This week, the penultimate chapter of Brief Lives. If my counting is correct, this is the 50th Sandman Meditation. (The 50th issue of Sandman was "Ramadan", but because I'm reading the stories in the order of the trade collections rather than the original publication, I wrote about that issue back in June when I read it in Fables and Reflections.)

Over at Strange Horizons, it's Pat Cadigan week, and I've contributed an essay about some of the 1980s short stories that helped make Cadigan famous. It's a somewhat odd essay. I expect the nice young men in their clean white coats to show up at my door any moment...

Also, it's Strange Horizons Fund Drive time! The site exists through contributions. The staff are not paid, but the writers are (the reverse of many publisher's policies). Except for a brief hiatus during the end-of-the-year holidays, SH brings you new fiction, nonfiction, and poetry every week at no cost to the, uh, consumer. Donating is easy. Try it, kids, it's fun!

The Reign of Good Queen Anne Was Culture's Palmiest Day

2011-08-27T10:22:00.001-04:00

I hadn't read an ill-tempered screed against all things contemporary and academic for at least a couple of days, so it was with delight that I happened upon Joseph Epstein's Wall Street Journal review of The Cambridge History of the American Novel. What a hoot!

Some sadistic editor at the WSJ assigned Epstein to read and review a book that was never intended for people to just sit down to read. It's a reference book, something for library shelves, a book to be cited, and, for its contributors, a credit for touting. That's not to say it's not useful -- were you doing some research on a particular phase of American lit, it might give good guidance, and I would find it especially useful with undergraduates to show them the wide range of topics that can be thought about, analyzed, studied. Like a 1,200 page collection of academic essays about American history. Useful for various purposes, but not really something to take to the beach or the bed.

Properly categorizing and assessing this book isn't Epstein's priority, because he's not actually interested in the book itself. He wants to rant about the decline and fall of university English departments and the general decline of American culture. He's an inveterate conservative, and that's what they do. We can go to the WSJ to watch them as we might go to the Right-Wing Zoo and knock on the glass at the Crusty Curmudgeon exhibit.

"The Cambridge History of the American Novel," Epstein writes, "is perhaps best read as a sign of what has happened to English studies in recent decades. Along with American Studies programs, which are often their subsidiaries, English departments have tended to become intellectual nursing homes where old ideas go to die." (He then cites Marxism for his only evidence of an old, dead idea that nobody who knows anything about economics thinks is worthwhile, and because Marxism is nothing but economics, and can't tell us how to better diversify our stock portfolios, is deserves to be forgotten.) He ponders how horrible it must be to be a student of any of the contributors to The Cambridge History, and then gives the data-loving readers of the WSJ a bite of red meat:

Some indication of what it must be like is indicated by the steep decline of American undergraduates who choose to concentrate in English. English majors once comprised 7.6% of undergraduates, but today the number has been nearly halved, down to 3.9%. Part of this decline is doubtless owing to the worry inspired in the young by a fragile economy. (The greatest rise is in business and economics majors.) Yet that is far from the whole story.

If you want a more nuanced view of the rise, fall, rise, etc. of English majors, I'd recommend a data-filled 2003 report (PDF) by the Association of the Departments of English, which demonstrates that, indeed, Epstein's random and uncontextualized percentages (87.3% of which are horse effluent) are so far from the whole story that they aren't even on the same shelf in the library. To blame the relatively low percentage of English bachelor's degrees on the lack of Lionel Trillings in the classroom is like blaming the rise of business majors on the pedagogical popularity of close readings of Adam Smith.

Epstein's sure that it must, though, be horribly depressing to be a student of these people, and that's why so many people prefer Business to English:

Two or three times a week one would sit in a room and be told that nothing that one has read is as it appears but is instead informed by authors hiding their true motives even from themselves or, in the best "context-centered" manner, that the books under study are the product of a country built on fundamental dishonesty about the sacred subjects of race, gender and class.

Throughout the review, Epstein complains about discussions of race, class, gender, and disability. These, you see, are not Literary, and therefore have no place in discussions of anything Literary, including Literary History. Such discussions depress people. They make them feel that their country is not the shining beacon of universal utopia that Ronald Reagan insisted it was. (His complaint about "authors hiding their true motives even from themselves" is disingenuous, because the era Epstein pines for is the same one that produced the idea of the "intentional fallacy" -- and a valuable idea it was, too.) It's not that Epstein objects to students learning to analyze texts for the complexities of their meanings and resonances -- I have trouble imagining him yelling at, say, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren for finding too much meaning in poetry -- but that he doesn't like what is found there. Epstein yearns for the days of innocent texts that talked only to themselves.

Sorry, dude. Those days are dead and gone, and, like all innocence, impossible to regain. And they weren't really innocent days, anyway, because, much as Epstein would be nauseated by my saying it, they were only days of innocence for straight white guys. (And I don't say that from prejudice. Some of my best friends are straight white guys.) Even when the writers being studied weren't exactly straight white guys themselves, they were still being studied as if they were.

But you don't have to agree with that statement to see that Epstein's whine is little more than nostalgic senility. His argument is actually for less knowledge, fewer ways of considering any cultural object, narrower perspectives on art.

For somebody like me, whose ancestors are white folks who first came to New England in the late 17th century, maybe learning some of the uglier sides of American history is depressing. Maybe discussing the ways that my skin color and gender identity (among other physical attributes) have given me advantages I never asked for or could give away is disconcerting. Maybe looking at how the culture has been shaped by some of these forces and this history will inspire self-hatred. But that's not been my experience. In fact, I don't think I began to feel at all comfortable with myself until I began to think about those forces, to think about how I got to be where and who I am. Because such thinking is not, if done well, depressing. Instead, it's best described by a word I'm sure Epstein loathes: empowering. (Also, interesting. It makes the world look more complex, variegated, and impossible to pin down than it looked to me before.)

Such ways of reading can also be highly literary, maybe even Literary. One of the reasons those of us who are inclined toward such ways of thinking are also inclined toward literature is because it's one of the best ways humans have developed to represent, share, and analyze subjectivity. That's not the only thing art and literature do, nor the only thing that should be studied, but it's a big component.

At heart, Epstein is a monarchist, as his rant about the unfortunate loss of a distinction between high and low culture shows: "With the gates once carefully guarded by the centurions of high culture now flung open, the barbarians flooded in, and it is they who are running the joint today." In the paragraphs in which he laments the study of anything other than the highest of High (that which has been granted the divine right of his admiration), Epstein shows that his anger and resentment are at the loss of the cultural power wielded by a few well-read men in tweeds. He seems to be angry that he wasn't born a few decades before he was, back in a time when he might have had a better shot at being the American Minister of Culture.

Epstein believes the study of English should help us become "intoxicated by literature—its beauty, its force, above all its high truth quotient," and that universities should encourage and culture "a love of stories". That's very nice, and I'm sure that anybody who has spent a lifetime devoted to books and stories and plays and art of all sorts agrees that a certain level of intoxication is one attraction of such work -- but I don't look to intoxicated people for truth (despite their penchant for saying things they might not with more sober mind). Epstein, who in those sentences is nothing if not a blubbering Romantic, seems to think "beauty" and "truth" are uncomplicated things, universal, obvious, immutable, eternal. Talking about the ways stories represent, reflect, subvert, absorb, and perpetuate various beauties and truths, various ways of knowing and being, is not an activity that destroys all pleasure in a text. I certainly wish more English professors would talk about their pleasures, but just because they don't fill their histories and analyses with evaluations and gushing pronouncements doesn't mean they are people incapable of feeling. That idea's just stupid, and usually employed for a political purpose, as Epstein does, effectively saying, "I don't like you people talking about stuff that makes me uncomfortable, and so I'm going to proclaim that you are a killjoy!" He's no better than the anti-intellectual fan who says talking about the textual complexities of a beloved book/movie/comic "ruins" it. Both think pleasure is tainted and destroyed by reflection and analysis. (Of course, Epstein, unlike the rabid fan, would say he's all for reflection and analysis, that Great Literature in fact encourages it, but his idea of reflection and analysis is too narrow to be called anything but prejudice.)

I could go on and on about the history of literary study in U.S. universities and the forces (good and bad) that have shaped it into what it is (any such discussion should certainly include the ever-growing push for the humanities to be more "useful", the constant need for professors to publish, the corporate-minded movement away from tenure-track positions and toward the exploitation of contingent faculty such as myself, etc. -- of course, all of that is outside the text), and I could lampoon the utterly exhausted and ignorant complaints about English professors' prose (as always, Sturgeon's Law applies), and I could hoot and holler about how inaccurate his citing of Famous Professors Past as some barometer of the value of English departments is, and--

But what's the point? Epstein's arguments are at best ill-informed, his perspective warped, his desires fanatical. He doesn't need our attention; he needs a pasture in which he can be put out to chew on his cud. Apparently, that's what The Wall Street Journal is for.