Author: Ivan Kreilkamp

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*Margaret* as Gerard Manley Hopkins film adaptation

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Kenneth Lonergan’s 2011 movie Margaret, his vexed sequel to You Can Count on Me (you may have read the NYT Magazine piece on “Lonergan’s Thwarted Masterpiece”), could plausibly considered as a film adaptation of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ great poem “Spring and Fall.”  That’s pushing the boundaries of how we usually define an adaptation, but the movie can serve as an intriguing limit case for how far the concept can be stretched.

Here’s the poem:

Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

One of many details about the film that the producers probably were not crazy about is the fact that there is no character in it named Margaret.  The movie stars Anna Paquin as Lisa Cohen, a troubled Manhattan private school teenager (Paquin is 30 now with twins but was only 23 or so when the movie’s shooting wrapped in 2005), raised by an actress single mother, who witnesses and bears some responsibility for a tragic bus accident that leads to a pedestrian’s death.  The movie reminded me to a surprising degree of the excellent recent Iranian art-house hit A Separation: both movies use a similar structure to explore the legal, psychological, and ethical aftermath of a deadly accident, paying close to attention to the impact on this process of class differences and class privilege.

I thought Paquin gave a really good performance as Lisa, a pretty insufferable yet, to me, still sympathetic, spoiled and unhappy teenager trying to figure out how to be an ethical person or how to respond ethically to a tragedy.

Lisa is Hopkins’ Margaret (King Lear is another intertext, by the way).  The main thrust of the movie explores the process by which she “weeps” and “know[s] why,” coming to “sights colder” and encountering the “blight man was born for”, namely an understanding of death and loss.

The movie is very interested in pedagogy and classroom experience and how “learning” of various forms occurs.  Two of the primary supporting roles are played by Matthew Broderick (who apparently ended up bankrolling part of the film) and Matt Damon as teachers at this Dalton or St Ann’s-like NYC tony private school.  The Damon character is specified as being from Indiana, so you know he’s upstanding and a bit naive. You really start to feel for these earnest teachers (or at least I did) as they struggle to teach and expand the horizons of their very bright, privileged, rather unbearably narcissistic charges.  (Although I also felt a little envious at how quick the students are to talk and argue in class!)  The title of the movie comes from a particular scene where Broderick is teaching “Spring and Fall”, but the themes of the poem extend throughout the movie as Lisa undergoes hard lessons in self-awareness and moving beyond her self-centered worldview.

I just found this “interactive feature” that tries to match short clips from the film to particular lines in the poem— I think the connections could use some further glossing, though (I just watched the video for “And yet you will weep and know why” and am not clear why the makers of this widget chose that scene in particular for this line).

We watched the 150-minute theatrical release, but now I kind of wish we’d gone for the three-hour director’s cut.  The version we saw is a strange and somewhat awkward movie but also at times a ravishingly beautiful one that offers all kinds of food for thought — I haven’t even touched on what it does with theater and opera (the moving final scene involved a kind of catharsis as Lisa and her Broadway actress mother watch Offenbach’s The Tales Of Hoffmann at the Met) or how it works as a post- 9/11 movie exploring the consequences of that trauma in and for NYC (remember, shooting was completed back in 2005).

This is a good piece, from a blog about music in film, that presses on a line from the movie, Lisa’s protest, “My life isn’t an opera!”  As the author of the blog argues, Margaret ultimately does become not just operatic but a kind of opera in film.  And I think one could make a similar claim about the film’s relationship to Hopkins’ poem.  All in all, it’s a movie with interesting things to say about cross-media representations and influences.

Don Winslow’s *Savages*: A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of O.

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Is there a verb for going back to read the book that inspired a new movie?  Retroreading or some such?  I have not seen Oliver Stone’s adaptation of Don Winslow’s novel Savages but was inspired by the coverage of the movie (and reviews of the novel’s sequel) to check it out.

I get why it was popular/successful… it has a Quentin Tarantino/ Elmore Leonard / James Ellroy hipness, speed, sex, violence and general nastiness that makes for a quick and in some ways fun read.  I didn’t love it, though.

One problem: I found the basic premise of much of the story to be implausibly silly.  (Spoilers to follow, but I won’t give away the actual ending.) The high-end Berkeley Laguna Beach [Ben’s parents are Berkeley liberals and he went to UC Berkeley] pot dealers Chon and Ben cross a brutal Mexican drug cartel who respond by kidnapping their friend/ shared girlfriend/ girl-toy Ophelia a.k.a. “O” and threatening to behead her if Chon and Ben fail to comply with every demand.  Our Laguna stoner young men in turn start putting on masks and robbing the drug cartel… who for some inexplicable reason can’t seem to decide if this sudden string of bold robberies, performed by two tall white men in masks, might just possibly be connected to Chon and Ben.  So they leave “O” alone and allow plenty of time for the revenge/recapture of O plot to unwind.

I also think the book is ultimately racist in effect in ways that turns up the general nastiness/nihilism factor to an uncomfortable degree.  Every brown-skinned person in the book, pretty much, is a disgusting, sadistic, torturing thug. (There are some semi-exceptions like O’s relatively good-hearted guard.  Aww, he loves his girlfriend!)  The book turns into what’s hard not to read as an allegory of slacker white America shaking off its pot lethargy and rising up to kick the ass of the brutal brown invaders.

This theme is laid out explicitly towards the end:

Chon has read a lot of history.

The Romans used to send their legions out to the fringes of the empire to kill barbarians.  That’s what they did for hundreds of years, but then they stopped doing it.  Because they were too distracted, too busy fucking, drinking, gorging themselves.  So busy squabbling over power they forgot who they were, forgot their culture, forgot to defend it.

The barbarians came in.

And it was over.

Winslow to some degree protects himself against accusations of racism with occasional ironic shifts in perspective when we see that to some of the Mexican narco-terrorist types, it’s Chon and Ben and O., in their shiftless Anglo ways, who are are the “savages.”  I didn’t really buy it, though, and it’s not enough of a counter-weight against the morbid wallowing in visions of the sadistic kingpin Lado contemplating the rape and then beheading of O.  It’s a classic old-fashioned captivity narrative with the beautiful Anglo in the clutches of the dark-skinned savage, with all the suspense of the narrative depending on the question of whether she will be rescued before she is raped.

[That one of our heroes is named “Chon” is perhaps symptomatic of the tensions/ambiguities around ethnicity in the novel… it sounds like a Hispanic name, but it’s actually a nickname for John]

The nastiness is often witty but felt too xenophobic/racist in worldview in the end for my tastes.  And the premise of the revenge plot just didn’t make sense to me.  That said, it does have style to burn and can be pretty funny.

I’ve read very mixed reports on the Oliver Stone movie: some seem to see it as a return to form and his best film in years, but I’ve seen a couple reviews that call it borderline unwatchable and absurd.

“‘Good-bye, everybody!'”: Hart Crane Revival in *The Paris Review*

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I started subscribing to the Paris Review a while ago and enjoy it– find it consistently interesting/good to great.  I think what may have spurred me to start subscribing was the serial publication of the Roberto Bolano novel The Third Reich last year.  Other good recent-ish contents that come to mind: the Wallace Shawn interview in #201; a portfolio of “anonymous photographs of children from the personal collection of Terry Castle” in issue #198.  The art portfolios always tend to be interesting and the fiction is almost never boring or predictable.

Got the new issue #202 the other day.  What has leapt out at me about it, thus far, is that it contains TWO different stories that include reference to Hart Crane’s supposed last words.

David Gordon’s “Man-Boob Summer”: the 38-year old narrator seems to have recently finished a Comp Lit thesis and is depressed and living for the summer with his parents.  He starts flirting with the young lifeguard at the apartment complex’s pool who is reading Crane’s Collected Poems.

“You know what his last words were? As he jumped off the steamship?”

She was watching me very closely now.  She shook her head.

“‘Good-bye, everybody!'”

She laughed abruptly, a short burst, and covered her mouth with her hand.

“It’s true,” I said.  “I think, anyway.  I read it somewhere.”  And then while I wasn’t looking, she kissed me.  (p. 28)

And Sam Savage’s strange, long “The Meininger Nude,” narrated by a dyspeptic, dying art collector:

I was always fascinated by great-artist suicides.  By Hart Crane, for example, who called out, ‘Good-bye, everybody,” before leaping from the stern of a steamship.  He was 270 miles North of Havana, returning from a year in Mexico, where he had written nothing.  (p. 90)

Coincidence?  Something else?  Will I find any additional citations of this line as I keep reading the issue?

Dylan’s *Tempest*, *Where’d You Go, Bernadette*, *Homeland*

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Several great things I have recently read/seen/heard:

The new Bob Dylan album Tempest (I try not to buy everything on Amazon these days but I will note that it is $5 for the Mp3s on Amazon).  I’ve only listened to it 2-3 times can say that it continues his amazing late-career run.  For a long time I took for granted that nothing Dylan had done since 1975 (Blood on the Tracks) was even remotely in the same ballpark of quality or significance of much of his music before that point.  But ever since, I guess, World Gone Wrong in 1993 it’s all been great, much of it amazing.  (I don’t know about Christmas in the Heart, I gave that to my dad for Xmas but have not really checked it out myself!)   Some of the new one sounds like, I don’t know, Western Swing, Johnnie Cash, Nashville Skyline; weird, craggy, old-timey; funny, tender, & mean.

Where’d You Go, Bernadette.  This is the funniest book (novel) I have read in quite some time– totally sharp, witty, entertaining, and moving too.  The author, Maria Semple, used to write for Arrested Development so the funny part is not surprising.   One reviewer sums it up pretty accurately as “a wry slice of a life– one that’s populated by private school helicopter parents, obsessively eco-conscious neighbors, and green-juice swilling, TED-talking husbands.”  The social satire is hilarious and spot-on even for someone who doesn’t know Seattle– Seattle stands here for a certain kind of techie contemporary bourgeois bohemian that one finds everywhere.  The private school shenanigans are priceless. What’s most immediately impressive and amusing is Semple’s facility with the different voices, jargons, and styles contained in all the documents she incorporates seamlessly into the novel — which is a dossier of texts, somewhat in the style of Clarissa or Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone, I suppose, with no real central narrator but only Bernadette’s 8th-grade daughter, who (we eventually figure out) has collected the set of texts and is collating them and turning them into a narrative.  There are emails back and forth from various parties; a psychiatrist’s report; memos from the head of the not-quite-A-list Seattle private school; a cruise ship’s log; a news article or two; tributes by famous architects to the protagonist Bernadette, who designed an influential early “green”/eco house, won a MacArthur, and mysteriously retired; some IM messaging within Microsoft’s system, etc.  In this way it brings to mind A Visit From the Goon Squad a tiny bit — and there’s one riff about the pauses between songs on a CD that almost seems a homage to Egan’s novel — but the mode is more brightly comic and satirical.

Homeland, the Showtime show starring Clare Danes.  Season one is recently out on DVD and we are devouring it (waiting for the 3rd and final DVD to arrive).  Danes is fantastic and the show is addictively suspenseful– I’ve never seen 24 but I imagine it has some things in common with that?  It is, interestingly, a remake of an Israeli t.v. series.  Danes plays a somewhat unstable C.I.A. officer who has become convinced that Nicholas Brody, a war hero and former POW recently captured and brought back from Iraq, is in fact a mole or double agent who was turned by Al Quaeda.  Three episodes left and I do not know how it’s going to turn out, although I have some theories.  Season Two starts pretty soon.

Bringing Up Hush Puppy: Free-range Child-Rearing in *Beasts of the Southern Wild*

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As I watched the in-many-ways great Beasts of the Southern Wild I kept thinking about recent debates and publications I’ve read about child-rearing, specifically those that discuss the tension between “helicopter” or over-protective vs. “free-range” parenting and related issues.  I recommend therapist Madeline Levine’s new book Teach Your Children Well: Parenting for Authentic Success, [link to NYT review] which covers a lot, but perhaps offers as its biggest take-away the lesson that parents who believe they can control every facet of their children’s experiences are both kidding themselves and damaging their kids by denying them the potential to achieve autonomy/ become their own people.  I also thought about the much-discussed recent Elizabeth Kolbert New Yorker piece “Spoiled Rotten: Why Do Kids Rule the Roost?” which compared American middle/upper-middle class child-reading methods with those of the Peruvian Amazonian tribe the Matsigenka, in which six-year old children uncomplainingly clean, do household chores, and fish for, clean, boil, and serve to others crustaceans from the river.  (Whereas the typical elite American kid apparently is too busy nurturing his special, college-admissions-bait talents to do anything as mundane as household chores.)  Bringing up Bebe, which everyone seemed to be discussing his summer (even if they, like me, had just read reviews of it — although I did glance through it at one point), is also part of this conversation, in its advocacy of French-style parenting that expects children to behave in more responsible/ autonomous ways.

The New Yorker published an interesting letter in response to Kolbert’s article from an anthropologist named Nicholas Emlen who wrote,

During my recent nineteen months of anthropological fieldwork in Matsigenka communities, I, too, was impressed by the self-reliance and maturity expected of children. But Matsigenka hands-off parenting also has its disadvantages. I met several young children who had suffered serious, permanent injuries while cooking and hunting without adult supervision. Additionally, Matsigenka parents generally do not encourage their children to pursue education beyond primary school—although in recent years, many Matsigenka parents have begun to think of education as essential. To this end, these parents are trying to be more supportive of their children’s intellectual development, allowing them to spend afternoons doing homework, rather than collecting firewood, for instance. While Kolbert hopes that her sons will pitch in and “become a little more Matsigenka,” many Matsigenka parents are modifying their parenting strategies so that their children may one day become a little more like Kolbert’s sons.

So anyway, I was thinking about these sorts of questions while watching the movie.  Beasts of the Southern Wild stars a rather incredible child actress, Quvenzhané Wallis (who was in fact six during the movie’s filming!), playing the six-year-old Hush Puppy who lives with her single father Wink in “the Bathtub,” a fictitious bayou community in Louisiana.  And, like the children of the same age in the Matsigenka, she catches and cleans her own crustaceans; there’s a memorable scene in which all the adults chant for her to “beast” a crab, which means to snap it in half and suck out the meat. (We went to the movie with a vegetarian friend who found the Man vs. Beast dynamics a bit much throughout.)

The events of the movie, which reminded me a little of Zola Neal Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, occur before, during, and after a massive Katrina-like storm that floods the Bathtub and leaves Hush Puppy, Wink and their friends stranded and floating in a house turned house-boat. Hush Puppy is an almost absolutely “free-range” child– or we could use the word neglected, or even abused.  Her mother has vanished and she does not even live with her father, who has his own shack next door.  She eats canned cat foot, and (this was a pretty hilarious moment, actually) starts a semi-functional gas stove by donning a helmet-face mask and lighting the gas with a flame thrower.  (This does not turn out well.)  Wink cares for and seems to love his daughter, but often ignores her and sometimes hits her.  Before the storm, she wanders around completely unsupervised.  In many ways, not just shellfish cleaning, her experience seems more like that of a Matsigenka child than a contemporary middle-class American.

In the still used for the movie poster, above, Hush Puppy is running with her hands full of fireworks.  Having recently supervised my kids as they used sparklers, I winced at the sight of her holding what seem to be much higher-power firecrackers in a setting where all of the adults are falling-off-their-chairs drunk.  On the other hand, she is certainly having a blast.

The movie continually prompted me to spiral through a series of reactions along those lines.  First, something like “oh no!” — judging her father to be criminally neglectful —  and then a counter-reaction of recognizing that Hush Puppy gets to experience things and sensations that the film represents as intensely meaningful and valuable.  Yes, her father and his friends are always drunk and Hush Puppy appears to be in grave danger of injury throughout the movie, but we see her immersed in a vivid world in which she interacts with the natural world and animals and nature, learns quickly how to take care of herself, and develops a fierce loyalty to her community and friends.

The movie could definitely be accused of romanticizing the Bathtub’s primitive world, and there are whiffs of pretty familiar strains of nostalgic, even slightly noble-savage-type valorizing of that world as a refreshing antidote to the sterile, heartless bureaucracy that is contemporary middle-class life — represented by the professional-class administrators who try to keep Wink and Hush Puppy in a disaster-relief tent city after they’ve been forcibly evacuated.  (The review in Salon took this approach, even suggesting that is offers a “dangerous political message.”)

To my mind, though, although I can certainly see the reviewer’s point, the movie is best approached as a non-realist (and often rapturously beautiful) fairy tale that, notwithstanding inescapable Katrina parallels, is certainly not trying to offer any sociologically accurate view of rural Louisiana or anything like that.  (I thought it was telling that it’s based on a stage play.)  Sarah commented that the whole Bathtub community reminded her a bit of the Popeye comics’ world.  Or maybe the fictionalized Okefenokee Swamp of the Pogo comics?  A wildly fantastical vision of a little girl’s dangerous idyll among the cat-fish, dogs, and wild boars of her imagination-infused surroundings, and a somewhat wishful (and yes, romantic) fantasy of how a child could live in a state of continual risky wildness.

Memo to self: demand that the kids procure and prepare fresh crab dinner for us this weekend.  Beast it!

Sonic Youth/ New Order

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Playing ‘Schizophrenia’ for Paul Smith on Eldridge Street, Moore was taken aback when Smith said, ‘I can’t believe you made a record like this.’ Moore didn’t know what to make of the remark; maybe Smith was disappointed it wasn’t noisy enough. No, Smith said; he loved it because it reminded him of New Order.

Smith was spot on. Love both of these videos (we just have to get Thurston into some white shorts).

New Order, 1984:

Sonic Youth, 1987/ 2012:

Dreaming about Kim Gordon

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I picked up Goodbye Twentieth Century: A Biography of Sonic Youth (by David Browne) at my mother in law’s house (have no idea whatsoever what it was doing there).  I enjoyed it and it sent me off on an ongoing Spotify tour of Sonic Youth’s music from the past 10-15 years that I ignored or gave short shrift to at the time (e.g. I’m enjoying A Thousand Leaves).

Here are a few things I learned or found edifying:

  • Reading the book and going back to some of the music, I was struck by how very Catholic Thurston Moore’s songs are.  No wonder he loved Madonna!  There’s the great “(I Got a) Catholic Block,” of course: “I got a Catholic block/ Inside my head/… Guess I’m out of luck.”  But so many others.  “She said Jesus had a twin who knew nothing about sin/ She was laughing like crazy at the trouble I’m in.”  Have any Religious-Studies types gotten on this?
  • I guess I always realized that the band’s name was inspired by Big Youth, but I don’t think I ever thought about their serious debt to reggae & dub.  “The deep, undulating rhythms of reggae and dub had infiltrated the downtown music scene.  Moore was so invested in the genre he’d begun taking subway trips to a warehouse in Queens that specialized in reggae LPs, and he told Gordon to practice at home by playing along with the bass lines on a Black Uhuru album.”  This actually makes perfect sense as a way to think about the claustrophobic sound & rhythms of their early music: No Wave meets Lee Perry.
  • This was a favorite moment of mine:  “Phil Morrison, the up-and-coming filmmaker who’d directed the “Titanium Expose” video, starting having dreams in which [Kim] Gordon would suddenly appear, casting a judgmental eye on whatever he was doing.  Talking with friends, he discovered he wasn’t alone. “Lots of people dreamed about Kim,” he says.  “That was a real phenomenon.  And it wasn’t about sex.  She was the person you’d be most concerned about whether they think you’re cool or not.”  This most perfectly encapsulated the band’s role as taste-makers, cool-hunters and -arbiters, commanding the hipster unconscious of their era. I do think some of the music absolutely stands up as some of the greatest of the era (Sister is my personal fave), but the book kind of makes the case that their greatest importance lay in their stewardship of the underground as “the imposing older siblings of the new alternative world order.”  Thurston was the ultimate record-collector boy (someone hypothesizes that they invited Jim O’Roarke to join the band primarily so Thurston would have someone to go record shopping with on tour!) and Kim the arch-cool underground art/fashion diva.

  • They had the kind of career that creates a bit of a letdown in the last third of the book.  Their big pop push with Goo and Dirty in the mid-90s never really happened, and so there’s a little disillusionment as they soldier on making new records to diminishing expectations every year or two.  That said, they’re actually really impressive as a model of a band that figured out new models for their career as they went along (e.g. Thurston’s immersion in experimental & improvised music, the band’s own SYR Records, and so on).  There are some funny lines from Geffen execs or others expressing their mild frustration or resignation about the band’s increasingly willfully anti-pop moves.  “The cover [of 1998’s A Thousand Leaves] was given over to “Hamster Girl,” a piece by L.A. artist Marnie Weber.  In keeping with Weber’s disturbing cut-and-paste montages, “Hamster Girl” juxtaposed a small rodent with a young girl… who was sporting animal horns.  ‘It was obviously not something they put together to sell a lot of records,’ recalls Farrell…”

*In the latest SY-related news, Thurston Moore has apparently just joined “black metal supergroup” Twilight.  He does keep himself busy.

Recent reads: Ellen Ullman, Brian Moore, Chad Harbach, Sara Levine

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By Blood by Ellen Ullman.  This 2012 novel takes place in San Francisco in the 1970s, narrated by a professor who is on work leave following what, we eventually suss out, was some kind of sex scandal or impropriety (shades of Coetzee’s Disgrace?).  He is deeply depressed and, simply to keep himself sane and to force himself to leave his bedroom, he rents an office to go to every day.  In the office he soon realizes that he can hear the sessions conducted by the psychoanalyst in the room next door.  Our creepy narrator starts listening in and becomes obsessed with one particular patient, a lesbian woman struggling with issues related to her adoption and her heritage.

This is one of those novels that’s super-literary and smart but also has thriller/pulp fiction tendencies. (I noticed it was recommended recently in the NYT Magazine’s “summer reads” feature.)  Complex issues of Jewish/Israeli/ German identity come to the fore in unexpected ways, and to be honest, at times it’s all laid on a bit thick, but it kept me hooked.

Brian Moore, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (the recent NYRB reissue edition).  This 1955 novel was Brian Moore’s first success and was made into an 1987 film starring Maggie Smith and Bob Hoskins that I believe I saw at the time.  Set in 1950s Belfast.  From the NYRB site: “Judith Hearne is an unmarried woman of a certain age who has come down in society. She has few skills and is full of the prejudices and pieties of her genteel Belfast upbringing. But Judith has a secret life. And she is just one heartbreak away from revealing it to the world.”  The novel is, in part, about alcoholism, and about Catholicism at this period in Ireland.  Great novel, kind of devastating.  It’s a very lonely passion…

Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding.  This was the/a big literary breakthrough this year.  I think I did not like it quite as much as many others did, but I didn’t regret reading it either and liked/enjoyed various things about it.  I probably just came to it too late in the hype/backlash cycle.

Sara Levine’s Treasure Island!!!  This weird and very funny novel is narrated by a feckless young woman who could, maybe, fit into the world of Lena Dunham’s Girls.  She has a crappy job, mooches off her parents and her long-suffering boyfriend, sister, and friends, and longs for excitement.  A chance reading of Stevenson’s novel sets her off on a misguided quest for “adventure.”  It’s very amusing, sharp and surprising.

Rat’s/ Fresh Clams/ Mussels/ Cherry Stones

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I have been amused/ disturbed by this sign, on route 102 on Mt Desert Island (Maine) as you approach Town Hill, for years.  The sign used to be weirder before they added the quotation marks, and maybe the apostrophe too– I swear that it used to just be straight-up Rats/ Fresh Clams, but then they finally added the quotation marks to clarify.

Anyway — the punch line is that Rat’s is fantastic!!!  Great lobsters and steamers and the people are lovely.  “Rat” is the guy’s first name, I do not know what it is short for.  They have a nice chicken coop too (thus the eggs).

Highly recommended…