Category: books

Gelbfisz/ Goldfish/ Goldwyn: the face of a spink

Ivan KreilkampLeave a comment
[Samuel Goldwyn on the left]

I am 3/4 or so through (to 1942) A. Scott Berg’s 1989 biography of Samuel Goldwyn and loving it.  Really juicy, filled with great/hilarious/unbelievable tales about movie stars, directors, and producers of the 1910s-1950s (with an emphasis on the earlier decades), and offering a well-informed, panoptic history of early Hollywood– I’m learning a lot.

  • This is one of the best Americanized-name stories I’ve heard.  Born Schmuel Gelbfisz, Goldwyn became Samuel Goldfish in the ghetto of Birmingham, England in the 1890s. (If you’re going to Americanize your name, do you really want to choose “Goldfish”?)  In 1916, Goldfish and Edgar Selwyn formed a film distribution company they named “Goldwyn” (a portmanteau name combining Selwyn and Goldfish).  A few years later, audaciously, Goldfish changed his own name to Goldwyn.  What a power move.  His partner sued him, but a judge ruled that the name change was legal.  The now Samuel Goldwyn was subsequently forced out of Goldwyn Pictures, the company that now bore what was his name, and he was never (bizarrely) part of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.  Very weird.
  • Gelbfisz/Goldfish/Goldwyn’s emigration story from Poland to the U.S. (he arrived Jan 1, 1899) is pretty wild.  At age 16, “in 1895, Schmuel Gelbfisz walked alone, almost three hundred miles due West to the Oder River.”  After paying off border police guarding the German/Russian border, “he walked another two hundred miles to Hamburg.”  There he stayed with some family acquaintances who put him to work learning glovemaking, and then raised money from neighbors to pay for his ship fare to London.  “The next leg of his odyssey was the 120-mile walk from London to the Midlands.  He lived for two days on a single loaf of bread.”  He found his mother’s sister in Birmingham and became an apprentice to a blacksmith and then worked as a sponge salesman.  “By the fall of 1898, Sam Goldfish felt the urge to move on.  He journeyed another hundred miles, northwest to Liverpool and eventually got a boat that left him in New Brunswick.  “Once he had his legs back, Goldfish took to the road again…. Over the next month, he trudged through more snow than New England had seen in ten years.  Sometime in late January 1899, he arrived in Manhattan.”  Wow!  That’s a tough dude.
  • It’s just amazing how many of Hollywood’s biggest moguls were Jews from modest (or impoverished) backgrounds in Eastern Europe.  “In the 1880s alone, the  family of Louis B. Mayer left Demre, near Vilna, in Lithuania; Lewis Zeleznick (later Selznick) ran away from Kiev;  William Fox (formerly Fuchs) imigrated from Tulcheva, Hungary; the Warner family uprooted itself from Krasnashiltz, Poland, near the Russian border; Adolph Zukor abandoned Ricse, Hungary; and Carl Laemmle left Wurttemberg, Germany — gamblers with nothing to lose, all from within a five-hundred-mile radius of Warsaw.”
  • The first part of the book, about Hollywood prior to the advent of sound in 1927, is full of amazing stories about silent-movie stars I’d never heard of or knew almost nothing about.  E.g. Banky Vilma & Rod La Roque.  Or Mabel Normand:  “One interview for a family magazine [in 1917] went well until the reporter asked her hobbies.  ‘I don’t know,’ Mabel replied.  ‘Say anything you like but don’t say I liked to work.  That sounds like Mary Pickford, that prissy bitch.  Just say I like to pinch babies and twist their legs.  And get drunk.”
  • One of my favorite strands in the book has to do with Goldwyn’s famous malapropisms and vexed relationship to the English language.  During the editing of the 1929 Bulldog Drummond, Goldwyn noticed a line in which a colonel declares, “the eternal din around this club is an outrage.”  “Goldwyn asked his staff, ‘what is that word “din”?’  He was told it meant noise.  ‘Then why didn’t the writer say noise?'”  He insisted that the actors be called back into the studio and the set rebuilt in order to re-shoot the entire scene, until someone finally convinced him that “din” was a real word.   More Goldwynisms: of his Russian discovery Anna Sten, whom he thought would be the next Garbo (she flopped– that whole story is great, albeit slightly tragic): “She has the face of a spink.”  Or the time the Gershwins, Lillian Hellman, and George Balanchine were waiting for Goldwyn in his living room.  “Goldwyn appeared at the staircase in his bathrobe.  ‘Hold on, fellas,’ he yelled down.  ‘I’ll be right there.  And then we’ll get into a cuddle.”  “Include me out” was his most famous coinage.  “Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist needs his head examined” another famous line.  William Wyler called him “a titan with an empty skull, not confused by anything he read, which he didn’t.”  Wyler still liked him, however.

Someone comments at some point that all of the studio heads, without exception, in this period were “monsters,”  but that Goldwyn at least could laugh at himself.  He was a terrible person in many ways (treated his children really badly, was always chasing starlets), but possessing a certain charm all the same… You have to admire him, to some degree, for his bald bull-headed energy & determination & hook or crook determination to get movies made (often by lying, cheating & stealing). He bet incredible amounts on cards (in 1940 he calls in a gambling debt from fellow mogul Jack Warner for $425,000 — imagine what that would be in today’s currency) and for much of his career was continually leveraging his own company such that a major flop at the wrong moment would have bankrupted him.  (“The only way he could tolerate a baseball game was by betting on every pitch”).  The whole enterprise was high-end, high-risk gambling based on bluff and bluster, and producing strings of masterpieces and great movies.

Ruth Rendell’s *A Judgment in Stone*- murderous illiteracy

Ivan Kreilkamp4 Comments

I was at the public library and decided I’d find a Ruth Rendell novel or two to read — did a quick scan of Amazon reviews and grabbed two that had strong reviews and looked interesting.  The first one I read was her 1977 A Judgment in Stone which, I just learned, was adapted by the French director Claude Chabrol as La Ceremonie — a movie I remember liking very much and which I’d vaguely thought of as I read, but had not realized was an actual adaptation of the book.  (There was also an American adaptation of the novel, The Housekeeper.)

Here is the book’s arresting first sentence: “Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write.”  The book is pretty daring for several reasons, one that it gives everything away immediately.  Early on I did feel, “gee, can I really wade through all this, waiting for the final bloody end that has already been described to me” (although we have to wait for the end to learn most of the details of what went down).  But it works very well and you get caught up in the psychology of the murderer and your curiosity about how exactly things will go terribly wrong.

The premise is also daring because so apparently prejudicial.  Here we have an ignorant, illiterate working-class woman who, we are told, commits motiveless mass murder because of her ignorance and illiteracy.  On the one hand, the novel is so well-done that one can defend it by pointing out simply that this is a very particular story about particular circumstances — a knot of events and actions that can’t be reduced to sociology or generalizations about types of people.  On the other, this is a nasty piece of work, in some ways, and I wouldn’t be prepared to defend it absolutely against class bias in its depiction of a psychologically stunted, uneducated woman whose unreasoned hatred and resentment of her, yes, slightly smugly rich and liberal (but far from cruel or unkind) employers leads her to a senseless act of violence.  (They are educated, cultured people and Eunice’s phobia about writing, and her defensiveness about her concealed illiteracy, plays a strong role in the events.)

Rendell reminds me a little bit of Patricia Highsmith, partly in her willingness to ignore liberal or right-thinking pieties in her cool, sometimes slightly amused from-the-inside depiction of murderers and other criminals.

The novel also made me think of the brutal and random 2007 Connecticut home invasion murders committed by Joshua Komisarjevsky and Steven Hayes.

Here’s a transcript of a BBC interview with Rendell about the novel in which Rendell defends herself against a charge of cruelty or prejudice in her depiction of Eunice by saying,

I’ve had quite a lot of protest from people saying that this is cruel, including various societies who are proponents of illiterate people and who champion them, but I don’t think it’s cruel because I particularly feel that it’s unjust to say that I am stating that every illiterate person is likely to commit murder, which was alleged against me. It’s no more really than saying that every woman in my books where there is a female murderer is capable of murder, or every man is in that case. I don’t think it’s cruel but I do think, and I hope this isn’t harsh, that any illiterate person who feels burdened by his or her illiteracy can go to classes to learn to read. There are ample opportunities, even more these days than whenever I wrote that book, which I think was 1975.

Not too sympathetic…

The illiteracy angle is important enough to the book that it crossed my mind that perhaps this could be a text in our Introduction to Criticism and Theory course in a cluster on literacy — including Levi-Strauss’s famous passage from Tristes Tropiques in which he describes literacy and writing as a malign invading force in the lives of the Amazonian tribespeople he studies, bringing with it new priestly hierarchies, deceptions, and forms of oppression.  (This Levi-Strauss passage is one of many Jacques Derrida analyzes and criticizes in Of Grammatology).

The book made me think about the novelistic history of depictions of the illiterate.  Dickens’ Jo from Bleak House is one that comes to mind:

It must be a strange state to be like Jo! To shuffle through the streets, unfamiliar with the shapes, and in utter darkness as to the meaning, of those mysterious symbols, so abundant over the shops, and at the corners of streets, and on the doors, and in the windows! To see people read, and to see people write, and to see the postmen deliver letters, and not to have the least idea of all that language—to be, to every scrap of it, stone blind and dumb!

Hmm, that line “stone blind and dumb” makes me think that Rendell may have thought of Jo too.  Although whereas for Dickens, Jo is “stone blind and dumb” to the meaning of writing but is otherwise deeply feeling, Eunice is herself stone-like.

Eugenides’ *The Marriage Plot* as Neuronovel

Ivan Kreilkamp4 Comments

Just finished Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot which I enjoyed very much.  [The following contains no big spoilers but I do discuss the book as a whole, which requires some hinting at the way the plot unfolds.] Of course, as someone who went to school at Brown/ in Providence (a decade after the book’s 1980s setting and graduate rather than B.A., though), there was some strong nostalgia operating for me or, perhaps not nostalgia, but personally interested recollection & testing of details (e.g., the diner where two character go to eat seems to be located right by my old apartment, although there was no diner there — could it have folded before my time?).

The book seems practically to be begging to be adopted as a final text in a course on “Anglo-American Fiction and the Marriage Plot.”  Consider this early riff about a class one of the three protagonists, Madeleine, is taking:

In [Professor] Saunders’s opinion, the novel had reached its apogee with the marriage plot and had never recovered from its disappearance.  In the days when success in life had depended on marriage, and marriage had depended on money, novelists had had a subject to write about.  The great epics sang of war, the novel of marriage.  Sexual equality, good for women, had been bad for the novel.  And divorce had undone it completely.  What would it matter whom Emma married if she could file for separation later?  How would Isabel Archer’s marriage to Gilbert Osmond have been affected by the existence of a prenup?  As far as Saunders was concerned, marriage didn’t mean much anymore, and neither did the novel.  Where could you find the marriage plot nowadays?  You couldn’t.  You had to read historical fiction.  You had to read non-Western novels involving traditional societies.  Afghani novels, Indian novels.

Eugenides does cash out this key early riff in various ways, as the eventual winding of the plot involves marriage, a choice between two suitors, a prenup, travel to India, and, for the sake of avoiding spoilers, I’ll just say consideration of various post-marriage options.

I am not sure I feel that these themes and ideas are played out in deep enough ways, though, to make this book that perfect choice for the contemporary final text in the marriage course that I’d been imagining (e.g. a course including books by Austen, Eliot, Wharton, Henry James, then finally Eugenides).  The problem is that the book seems to suggest in the end that Professor Saunders is correct.  The characters do still struggle over marriage and the question of whom to marry, but not very much is at stake in the literal or legal fact of marriage.  For a young couple today or in the 1980s who have not yet had kids, it is not too difficult to sever all ties, whether or not a marriage has occurred.  A divorce or annulment requires a lawyer, and individuals may (probably will) invest extra meaning in a marriage (as opposed to a “relationship” or what they used to call concubinage in the old days!), but Professor Saunders’s basic point (about society, anyway) seems true, and this novel bears it out.

So, I guess I was slightly disappointed by this aspect of the novel; if I had hoped that the novel would ultimately prove that Saunders was wrong — that “the marriage plot” still endures as a powerful structure for the contemporary novel — I was not really satisfied on this score.  Madeleine comments at one point on her honeymoon that

She felt as if she’d aged twenty years in two weeks.  She was no longer a bride or even a young person.

This reminded me of Dorothea after her honeymoon with Casaubon (an intentional reference I’m sure), but what has given Madeleine this feeling is her husband’s mental illness (which renders him Casaubon-like in certain respects, including in the bedroom), not marriage as such.  If Madeleine exits the marriage, will she be irrevocably changed, altered and damaged in the eyes of the world?  Not in the least, so The Marriage Plot can not really be a modern/domestic “epic” in the way Professor Saunders (and George Eliot) assert that nineteenth-century novels were.

One could make the case that The Marriage Plot jibes with the claim some have been making recently that the really crucial topics for the contemporary novel are not marriage & love but consciousness and neurology– in that we have a protagonist who is mentally ill and whose drama, as it unfolds throughout the book, necessitates intensive consideration of drug intake and the management of his faulty/erratic interior wiring.  (On Fresh Air, Eugenides flatly refuted the suggestion that the brilliant, manic, and bandana-wearing Leonard is modeled on David Foster Wallace; it’s indeed tempting to read him this way, as it gives the novel as whole additional layer of self-conscious reflection on recent literary history.  However, in support of Eugenides, it has to be said that Leonard can’t play tennis and finds the game off-puttingly elitist (D.F. Wallace of course was a teenage tennis champion); this almost seems suspiciously planted as a red herring, though…)

In fact, Madeleine’s error, as a nascent scholar of Victorian fiction, may be that she misreads literary history and her own lover: she believes she is living in a Marriage Plot but she is actually a protagonist of a Neuronovel: “What has been variously referred to as the novel of consciousness or the psychological or confessional novel—the novel, at any rate, about the workings of a mind—has transformed itself into the neurological novel, wherein the mind becomes the brain” (Marco Roth).

No Future in Miranda July’s *The Future*

Ivan KreilkampLeave a comment
[image nicked from http://www.studio360.org/2011/jul/29/miranda-july-sees-future/%5D

This feels, for a while, like a typical mumblecore kind of movie: an arty, hipster L.A. couple, affectionate but not passionate, unfulfilled by work, hanging around their apartment, moving towards the big step of adopting a cat… But then things splinter into various forms of fantastical, sci-fi, & dreamlike modes that reminded me of The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (M. July is very Michel Gondryesque as a filmmaker).  I liked it a lot.

The following does not really contain any spoilers.

The most audacious and potentially off-putting (but IMO brilliant) element of the movie is its narration by the above-mentioned cat, Paw-Paw (a nod to the best-known track from the Shaggs’ Philosophy of the World, “My Pal Foot-Foot”?).  Paw-Paw is an injured shelter cat (he burned his paw) whom Sophie and Jason (above-mentioned hanging-around-the-apartment hipsters) plan to adopt.  Turns out Paw-Paw needs a month’s recuperation time before coming home with them.  They decide that their carefree youth will in effect be concluded once they take on this responsibility (they are 35), so the movie plays out in this final month before “the future” arrives — whatever that will bring.

I realize I’m echoing similar points I made about the Mike Leigh movie (idee fixe?)… but I read the movie as being about care-taking and responsibility and the fear that one is unable to care for another — ideas that get extended in somewhat dizzying ways to environmentalist thoughts & feelings about care for the earth.  These underemployed slackers can barely hold down a job, and so the thought of adopting an injured and possibly traumatized cat frightens them (to be fair, I remember having thoughts like this when we got Figgy circa 1999 — ah, callow, childless youth!  How little we knew of what we could or could not, but must, take care of).  Also, the shelter will apparently give them no more than a one-day grace period, once this month is up, before euthanizing Paw-Paw (seems like a pretty harsh policy, but this is L.A.), so this month, the movie’s chronotope, becomes potentially either a period of healing and movement towards life or one towards abrupt termination of life.

The movie posits several different what we could call “objects of care” or of responsibility.  First, there’s Paw-Paw, our narrator who occasionally breaks in from his cage at the pound to explain his excitement and difficulty in waiting for his adoptive parents to take him home.  (Paw-Paw is narrated by Miranda July herself in baby-voice with the help of some crude prosthetic paws).  Then, there are the baby trees that Jason ends up “selling” in his job as a door-to-door solicitor for an environmentalist group called “Tree to Tree” that aims to re-forest L.A.  (A few of these are delivered to their apartment at one point, their roots wrapped in burlap; they seem like babies dropped off at the entrance to an orphanage.) There is also a child, someone’s nine year old girl, who ends up (in one of the movie’s various increasingly surreal/fantastical moments) in effect planting herself like a baby tree in the back yard.  (Is this akin to self-burial or suicide?  Or an attempt at self-care?)

Finally, at a more cosmic level, there’s the earth itself (as “object of care”).  In his depression, Jason at one point remarks to an uninterested customer something like, “you’re right.  It’s too late anyway.  You know that moment when the wrecking ball has hit the building, and for one moment, the building is perfectly still before it collapses?  That’s us, we’re like that building.”  When the guy asks why, if this is true, Jason is even bothering, Jason says (this is very approximate) “I don’t know.  I just liked it, you know?  Not just the trees and the birds and stuff, but the houses, cars, t.v., coffee shops… I liked the whole thing.”

[If we’re looking for keynotes of the art and culture of our moment, surely one major one will turn out to be moments like this, when a character articulates a frighteningly apocalyptic vision of environmental collapse.  E.g. the character in Franzen’s Freedom who loses it and screams at a news conference: “WE ARE A CANCER ON THE PLANET!  WE ARE A CANCER ON THE PLANET!”]

So the movie ends up drawing a parallel between Jason and Sophie’s desire to adopt an injured cat, and their perhaps well-founded fear that they will not be able to care for it properly, to our more general desire to care for our injured & traumatized planet.  (And along the way a few other objects of care: the baby trees, the self-planting little girl.)

The movie’s big question is, at various levels, is it too late?  Is there “a future” at all?– for this relationship, for Paw-Paw, for the girl who plants herself in the ground as if to try to care for or raise herself on her own, for the planet?

So I don’t agree with those who dismiss July as a twee, self-regarding slacker… She uses the materials & aesthetics of that kind of lifestyle/ attitude (Etsy crafts, self-documenting or curating, underemployment, found objects & texts, lost pets, obsession with youth and old age/ evasion of adulthood) but turns them into something pretty deep.

Piggy Swine: Maurice Sendak’s terrifying new book

Ivan Kreilkamp3 Comments
[image nicked from http://mixingreality.com/2011/04/bumble-ardy-maurice-sendaks-first-book-in-30-years/%5D

The great Maurice Sendak has just published his first new picture book in thirty years, Bumble-Ardy.

It’s very disturbing.  Bumble-Ardy is a young pig who has never celebrated a birthday.  Initially because his parents “frowned on fun,” then because they just forgot, then because they were all fattened up and eaten: “forged and gained weight/ and got ate.”  That pigs are raised to be eaten is a major subtext of the book– Sendak does not let you forget this.

After the slaughter of his parents, Bumble-Ardy goes to live with his nice aunt Adeline, who is planning a 9th birthday celebration for the two of them.  While she’s at work, however, Bumble-Ardy puts the word out to all his buddies, who show up for a big party; in Sorcerer’s Apprentice-esque scenes that take up much of the book, these “piggy swine” “broke down the door and guzzled brine / And hogged sweet cakes and oinked loud grunts / And pulled all kinds of dirty stunts.”  These scenes recall Where The Wild Things Are, but it feels less like a wild rumpus, more like a scary and out-of-control house party — you see one pig sucking the “brine” directly from a hose — that’s threatening to devolve into an orgy (what are these “dirty stunts” precisely?).  Note, in the image above, the pig holding the vaguely apocalyptic sign, “Where Do We Go From Here?”

The WSJ reviewer describes the scene well: “As soon as Aunt Adeline leaves for work, a masked and costumed mob descends on her house. We see a pig in clown clothes carrying a ventriloquist’s dummy, a pig carrying the mask of a stubble-chinned man, a pig disguised as a yellow-eyed squaw, and a pig wearing a piratical skull and walking on chicken’s legs.”  Many of the figures look like gangsters with their molls.

There’s something distinctly malevolent and decadent about the images of masked pigs bent on mayhem — their dull, glazed eyes staring blankly — which put me to mind of Eyes Wide Shut.

It gets worse, though, when Aunt Adeline gets home.  Given how downright creepy Bumble-Ardy’s party has become, we assume that she will shoo everyone away and restore order.  She does, but in doing so, she becomes the most disturbing figure in the tale.  In a frightening series of images, her face darkens, twists, and metamorphoses into what is in effect another horrible carnival mask, as she pulls out a large cleaver and tells the guests that if they don’t leave immediately “I’LL SLICE YOU TO HAM!”  Her comment makes you realize that when these “piggy swine” have been “swilling brine,” they may simply have been pickling themselves in preparation for slaughter.

Bumble-Ardy now, terrified, blubbers to his aunt that he promises he will never turn ten– a comment that feels over-determined considering that his entire immediate family was recently killed.  There’s a more cheerful final scene of reconciliation, but as far as I was concerned, it was too little, too late for this fable to seem anything other than sheer vindictive nightmare.  We all know that the ovens in In the Night Kitchen hinted at concentration camps, but there the child’s fear of being devoured was buried a bit deeper, and transformed by a spirit of play and joy; here the fear that those one loves will be eaten, or will eat you, is right there on the surface (like the mother-figure’s rage).

The book is pitched to kids ages 4-7.  Holy moly, if my kids read this when they were 4 they would’ve had nightmares for months.

All respect to Sendak, a genius, and for the most part I’m with him that children’s lit could use a lot more Grimm, but I’d consider this one an envelope-pushing experiment in the genre more than something you’d actually want to read to your little tots before bed.

*A Wrinkle in Time* as Cold War fiction

Ivan Kreilkamp6 Comments
[The cover art of the original Farrar, Straus & Giroux edition]

We recently got through Madeleine L’Engle’s  A Wrinkle in Time, her weird & great 1962 children’s book about 12 year-old Meg Murry, her precocious/genius 5-y.o. brother Charles Murry, and their travel through a time-space continuum to rescue their missing scientist father, who has been taken prisoner by a malign intelligence known only as IT upon the planet Camazotz.  (When I read this, Celie and Iris kept correcting my pronunciation of “Camazotz,” which I assume means they decided they way Sarah said it was correct.)*

[*By the way: we’d gone through a period of several months of not doing much reading out loud.  C&I are always in the middle of a book and so they often seemed happiest just to go to bed and do their own reading.  But I’ve been making an effort to bring back the family reading-out-loud as part of the mix.]

It turned out that I did not remember this novel very well.  I remembered Meg and her little brother Charles Murry, and I kind of remembered the three strange benevolent female Abbott and Costello-named seer/witch/ angel/beings who visit to help them — Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Which, and Mrs. Who — but not much beyond that.

I was struck by how much of a Cold War novel this is.  Camozotz is Stalinist or Stasi, beyond the Iron Curtain, overseen by the “CENTRAL Central Intelligence Agency” and its literally all-knowing central intelligence, IT.  A friend commented to me that one of her strongest memories from the novel is of the town in Camazotz in which in front of every front door stands a boy bouncing a rubber ball at exactly the same time & in the same rhythm:

In front of all the houses children were playing.  Some were skipping rope, some were bouncing balls.  Meg felt vaguely that something was wrong with their play….

“Look!” Charles Wallace said suddenly.  “They’re skipping and bouncing in rhythm!  Everyone’s doing it at exactly the same moment.”

This was so.  As the skipping rope hit the pavement, so did the ball.  As the rope curved over the head of the jumping child, the child with the ball caught the ball.  Down came the ropes.  Down came the balls.  Over and over again.  Up.  Down.  All in rhythm.  All identical.  Like the houses.  Like the paths.  Like the flowers.

They see a boy who is bouncing a ball irregularly, out of rhythm — his terrified mother runs out and pulls him inside.  Everyone lives in terror of the oversight of CENTRAL Central Intelligence and IT, which goes beyond Stasi methods in being able to read the thoughts and consciousness of all citizens of Camazotz, who possess “no lives of [their] own, with everything all planned and done” for them.  Meg’s brainwashed brother explains to her: “Why do you think we have these wars at home?  Why do you think people get confused and unhappy?  Because they all live their own, separate, individual lives.  I’ve been trying to explain to you in the simplest possibly way that on Camazotz individuals have been done away with… that’s why everybody’s so happy and efficient.”

In Meg’s final showdown with IT over the mind of her mentally enslaved brother, who now mouths Camozotzian platitudes, she engages in an ideological showdown with this cruel “living brain” on a dais, “a brain that pulsed and quivered, that seized and commanded.”  At one point the nationalistic Cold War allegory seems especially clear when Meg, as a method to resist IT’s mind-control, recites from the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to self-evident!  That all men are created equal,” etc.  But in the end L’Engle emphasizes American virtues or principles less than Christian ones (L’Engle was a serious Episcopalian), as the power of love (more than freedom, say) is what allows Meg to defeat IT and wrest her brother away from ITS power.

The novel is strongly feminist in a way that I think made an impression of me as a kid.  Meg’s mother is as talented and dedicated a scientist as the missing father, and the kids often have to get their own snacks together in the afternoon because the mother is in the middle of an experiment in her home laboratory.  And when Meg finally reaches her father and frees him, she is cruelly disappointed that he can’t make everything OK.  One of the takeaways of the novel’s conclusion is that Meg must learn to solve her own problems; as she says to her father, “I wanted you to do it all for me…. I was scared, and didn’t want to have to do anything myself.” When they land back home on earth he’s lost his glasses and is kind of stumbling around, far from the heroic father Meg had fantasized.

Now onto A Wind at the Door…

*Cedar Rapids,* Eliot Coleman, and the Midwestern greenhouse dream

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[image: http://www.urbanfarmonline.com/urban-gardening/backyard-gardening/small-scale-greenhouse.aspx%5D

We watched the El Helms movie Cedar Rapids: Ed Helms is Tim Lippe, a modest, upstanding, nerdy small-town Iowa insurance salesman who is sent to a conference in the glittering fleshpots of Cedar Rapids, IA, which functions (often wittily) in the movie as a very tame/toned-down version of Las Vegas in The Hangover.  “Sometimes a girl just needs to go somewhere where she can be someone else,” a character comments; what happens in Cedar Rapids stays in Cedar Rapids.  It’s not bad… Helms and his roommate, similarly modest/upstanding/pious salesman Isiah Whitlock Jr., are both very amusing in their shocked disapproval of the wild goings-on (swearing, drinking shots, swimming in the hotel pool after hours) at the conference, embodied in their other crass roommate played by a good John C. Reilly.  There’s a funny running meta-joke about Isiah Whitlock’s nerdy (African-American) character, who is “a fan of the HBO series The Wire” and at one point puts on his best ghetto Omar imitation for purposes of intimidation; Whitlock played corrupt State Senator Clay Davis in The Wire.

Ultimately I’d categorize this as one of those movies that if you stumbled upon, you’d be pleasantly surprised; not exactly a must-see, though.  Sadly these days that probably makes it one of only a small handful of decent recent Hollywood comedies?  Sarah made a good point that the movie would make more sense if the characters were teenagers, and that it’s probably (a la Hot Tub Time Machine) intended for 40-somethings with fond memories of 1980s teen movies; I immediately could see the whole thing taking place at a senior class trip or some such.

Anyway… we were both amused when the Anne Heche character asks Helms to tell her about his dreams and fantasies, and he starts explaining his desire to build a small backyard season-extending greenhouse.  “A greenhouse?  Come on…” she says, meaning, “I want to hear about major life fantasies, not little DIY backyard projects,” but Helms says, “no, really, it can be quite affordable if you build it yourself.”

This was funny to us and hit a bit close to home because Sarah has been obsessed with this very possibility even since our friend Judith offered us her quite-awesome built-in greenhouse which she does not use.  Of course, the question is whether it would be remotely practical to move the fragile, glass-filled thing the 7 blocks to our yard, but Sarah has been scheming about it and dreaming of December fresh lettuce and greens.

I’m reading & enjoying that Melissa Coleman memoir about her upbringing on her father Eliot Coleman’s famous Maine organic Four Seasons Farm (which we visited last month; Sarah even managed to schmooze with Coleman himself a bit), THIS LIFE IS IN YOUR HANDS: One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone… Elliot Coleman was an innovator in popularizing organic farming techniques that allow for vegetables throughout the winter– greenhouses and root cellars playing a key role.  Sarah would also like a root cellar of course.

In a way, that a character in this kind of Hollywood comedy would be dreaming about a backyard greenhouse can be understood as a sign of how far the influence of Eliot Coleman and his ilk has spread in the U.S., far beyond the counterculture.  Next all Tim Lippe needs are some chickens.

Dana Spiotta’s *Stone Arabia*: a musical tree falling in the woods

Ivan Kreilkamp3 Comments

The one other novel I read in the midst of my Classic Doorstops was Dana Spiotta’s new Stone Arabia (link to Amazon where it’s for sale for less than $14).  This was also my first Kindle book purchase of over $1.99 or so.  I have to say that the whole Kindle (on iPad) experience was pretty great.  There I was up in Maine — the libraries did not even have the novel in yet, and in one minute I had it downloaded for $12.99.  Sarah keeps telling people that I “clutched the iPad to my breast like an infant” the entire time in Maine which I think is a gross overstatement, but it’s true that I do love my enchanted/ing tablet.  Reading in bed can be mesmerizing… no book light… the words hang in space, luminous and abstract.  Flip, flip, flip with your finger like Merlin or the Wicked Witch navigating a magic crystal.

I enjoyed this novel but don’t think it’s as strong as her great previous one, Eat the Document, which was based loosely on the life of Cathy Wilkerson, I believe, the former Weather Underground radical who changed her identity and lived ‘underground’ for a decade after playing a role in the accidental explosion of her father’s Manhattan townhouse.  Eat the Document is one of my favorite novels of recent years… Stone Arabia is well worth reading, especially if you’re a pop music fan, but felt to me slightly schematic or high-concept (movie-ready) by comparison.  The narrator is a woman, Nicole, whose older brother Nik almost made it as a rock and roll star, but (kind of along the lines of the Ben Stiller character in Greenberg?) missed out on success due to some combination of intransigence, eccentricity, and refusal to compromise.   Nicole narrates the novel, but big chunks of it constitute Nik’s “self-curation,” in the form of an obsessive project of semi-fantastic memoir, telling in great detail the counterfactual story of his major success and decline as an internationally famous pop star, including elaborately fabulated documents such as record reviews, fan mail, etc.  He also records cd after cd of his increasingly strange music, which he distributes in tiny, fully-packaged editions to a small circle of family members.  [btw, Great Jones Street (1973) by Spiotta’s mentor Don DiLillo, about reclusive, Dylan-esque rock legend Bucky Wunderlick and the theft of his unreleased recordings, hangs over this one.  The title of Spiotta’s last, Eat the Document, is appropriated from a Dylan tour documentary, fwiw.]

In this sense Stone Arabia reminded me a little bit of Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude, with the similar structure of a narrator describing a close family member’s eccentric, non-circulating project of self-memorialization or curation.  Or I suppose it’s a bit different in that in Lethem’s novel the father is simply working on a never-ending private artwork (an avant-garde film)… but there’s a similar feel in the relationship and the way the novel contains and represents a displaced self-memorialization.  Towards the end the self-curation takes a final turn of the screw when Denise’s daughter, Nik’s niece, begins a documentary film about Nik and his projects.  The novel is thinking through very of-the-moment questions about the meanings of our self-documentation, the degree to which celebrity has become normalized as a life path for ordinary people (Youtube stars, etc), and the psychological/social effects of viewing one’s own life as a “project” or a mediated story.  When self-documentation ends, can life or identity continue?  The threat of suicide-via-data-erasure (or cessation) hangs over the narrative (with almost P.K. Dick overtones at times).

Spiotta obviously knows and understands pop music, underground celebrity, the contemporary mythologies of semi-popular culture, from the inside, and so the portrayal of Nik is really compelling.  He’s a fictional cousin to real-life “lost” figures of underground music along the lines of, I don’t know, R. Stevie Moore, Skip Spence, Scott Walker?  Especially since the 1980s, we’ve been drawn to the narrative of unknown post-punk/rock legends who emerge and reveal a fully-realized body of work that was recorded but kept secret or totally ignored. It took a few decades of rock and roll history to allow sufficient sedimentation of the historical record such that giants could be “discovered,” preserved in amber from some previous strata.  Rehabilitation projects, reclaiming the marginalized, almost a World-Music-ization of Western pop, finding the primitive genius out in in the wilds.  With bands like Pavement and Guided by Voices, this became an increasingly conventional means, even, of launching oneself as a band or musician “out of nowhere” — generating the effect of “who are these guys?  Who made these strange artifacts?  Who plucked then from obscurity?”  Nik intentionally withdraws and chooses to perform as a pop music star in a private world of non-circulation, yet with a fully-articulated story of public significance, turning himself into a musical tree falling in the woods.

Stone Arabia has received rapturous reviews — “Evocative, mysterious, incongruously poetic…gritty, intelligent, mordant, and deeply sad,” NYTBR — and I think they’re are at least partly deserved… But in the end I agree more with the review in New York Magazine that praises the novel highly but complains that Denise can feel somewhat “generic…  a packhorse for all the familiar baggage of modern life;” we’re always looking through her to get to her mysterious brother’s more interesting, and only partly accessible, consciousness.

Still, if you like rock and roll/pop music fiction, this is a good one; not as great as A Visit from the Goon Squad, IMO, but in some ways a worthy pair to Egan’s novel from last year.

Excruciating & Tragic Dentistry of Buddenbrooks

Ivan Kreilkamp4 Comments

I had two wisdom teeth removed on June 3.  Dentists had been telling me to do so for at least 15 years, maybe longer.  I’m not sure how my current dentist convinced me; I think in part because he was pretty lowkey about it, and didn’t seem to be pressuring me.  Anyway, I made the appointment and had it done.  The few days immediately afterwards were not as bad as I feared.  The pain, managed with Vicodin for a few days and then a lot of ibuprophren, was very bearable.  I went to my office to do some work on the Monday after the Friday appointment and felt ok.  However — the (bearable & manageable) pain did not go away.  It turned out that I had the disturbingly-named Dry Socket.  I ended up going back 4 times or so for Dry Socket treatment, which consists very simply in sticking some intense clove oil, and clove oil-soaked gauze, in the back of your mouth.  It tastes absolutely terrible, like you’ve just swallowed some kind of potpourri spice ball, and numbs everything for a while.

So I kept going back… finally the dentist himself met with me… They were worried about infection, but the wounds were healing fine.  In they end they told me that at my age, early 40s, it’s not so unusual to have a long reaction time as the teeth readjust themselves.  I kept taking 9-12 ibuprophren a day, which is what I needed to go about my business (it still hurt, too), and it was seeming like quite a long time to be keeping up that rate of the medication, I was getting a little worried about the ol’ liver — and then finally in late July it just stopped hurting, all of a sudden.  I’ve had occasional twinges since then, but only enough to make me feel relieved that the real pain is over with.

Kids, get your wisdom teeth out before you’re 30!!

Anyway, as I was enduring this in July, I was reading Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks.  I kind of have a tradition of trying to read at least one door-stopper classic work of fiction, preferably one not directly related to ‘work,’ when we’re in Maine.  I absolutely loved Buddenbrooks; I’d read The Magic Mountain a few summers ago, and I think that’s more original, weirder and probably greater, but BB (published 1900) would be a good candidate for the Last Great Nineteenth-Century Novel, one of those (like Conrad’s, James’, a few others) that seem to have one foot in the realist novel, one just starting to move towards new approaches (although BB is pretty heavily realist).  It’s mindblowing to me that Mann published in at age 26 — amazing.

Anyway, in some ways Buddenbrooks turned out to be exactly the wrong choice for me this summer because it contains so many hair-raising descriptions of painful dentistry.  It’s practically a Big Book of German Smiles.  And without giving anything away, this is a novel that demonstrates very vividly how dangerous 19th-c dentistry could be for a patient.

The young boy Hanno, whom I presume is based on Mann himself, has teeth which

had been a source of trouble and the cause of many painful episodes… His teeth, which were as beautiful and white as his mother’s, were unusually soft and brittle; they came in all wrong, crowding each other.   And because these complications had to be corrected, little Johann was forced early on to make the acquaintance of a terrible man: Herr Brecht, the dentist…

The man’s very name reminded Hanno of the horrible sound his jaw made when, after all the pulling, twisting, and prying, the roots of a tooth were wrenched out.  The mere mention of that name would jolt his heart with the same fear he felt whenever he had to sit cowering in an armchair in Herr Brecht’s waiting room…

Hanno would sit there in a limp cold sweat, unable to protest, unable to run away — in a state no different from that of a felon facing execution — and with enormous eyes he would watch Herr Brecht approach, his forceps held against his sleeve, and he could see the little beads of sweat on the dentist’s brow and that his mouth, too, was twisted in pain.  And when the ghastly procedure was over — and Hanno would spit blood in the blue bowl on his side and then sit up pale and trembling, with tears in his eyes and his face contorted with pain — Herr Brecht would have to sit down somewhere to dry his brow and drink a little water.

(Part of what’s amazing and excruciating here is the way Herr Brecht suffers along with Honno…)

Here’s another scene in which Hanno’s father Thomas Buddenbrook sits in Herr Brecht’s chair:

Thomas Buddenbrook grasped the velvet armrests firmly with both hands.  He barely felt the forceps take hold of the tooth, but then he heard a crunching sound in his mouth and felt a growing pressure in his head…. It took three or four seconds.  Herr Brecht quivered with the exertion, and Thomas Buddenbrook could feel the tremor pass through his whole body;  he was pulled up out of his chair a little and heard a soft squeak coming from somewhere deep in his dentist’s throat.  Suddenly there was a violent jerk, a jolt — it felt as if his neck had been broken — and one short loud crack… [H]ot pain raged in his inflamed and maltreated jaw; and he felt quite clearly that this was not what had been intended, that this was not the solution to his problem, but simply a premature catastrophe that had only made matters worse.

Ow!  I can read it a bit more dispassionately now, but I was really squirming and clutching my jaw when I first read it a few weeks ago.  Of course modern life is crap in many ways, but I feet deep gratitude to live in the post-anesthesia era.  They knocked me out for the wisdom teeth, I did not feel a thing.

Then, I finished Buddenbrooks earlier than I thought I would, and decided to move on to Classic Bookstop #2, Anna Karenina, which I read in high school, I think, but not the Pevear/ Volokhonsky translation I’ve been curious about.

There’s certainly not as much dentistry in this, but there is this interesting passage when Anna Karenina’s husband finally learns definitively that Anna has been unfaithful to him:

He felt like a man who has had a long-aching tooth pulled out.  After the terrible pain and the sensation of something huge, bigger than his head, being drawn from his jaw, the patient, still not believing his good fortune, suddenly feels that what has poisoned his life and absorbed all his attention for so long exists no more, and that he can again live, think and be interested in something other than his tooth… The pain had been strange and terrible, but now it was gone; he felt that he could again live and think about something other than his wife.

Perhaps Tolstoy had had better luck with dental care than Mann.

It’s a somewhat chilling image.  You can sympathize with him to whatever degree the tooth in the metaphor is the affair, but the tooth also seems to be Anna herself, whom Alexei proves very ready to discard as something poisonous and tainted.

There are probably some (likely boring) dissertations out there on such topics…

*Another Year*: Care-giving and the Depressed Person

Ivan Kreilkamp4 Comments

Remember that David Foster Wallace story “the Depressed Person” — controversial (it elicited many angry letters in Harper’s when first published) because it seemed so unsympathetic to the “depressed person” of the title, a woman whose evenings were organized around phone calls to those dwindling numbers of old friends who were still willing to listen to her endless self-pitying monologues?  (Of course the irony is that we now realize that this may have been a self-portrait on DFW’s part — at the least, the portrayal came from “inside” depression).

Mike’s Leigh’s Another Year made me think of the story, simply in that it is in part a portrait of depression.  The movie focuses on the lives of Jerry and Tom, a 60-something social worker/counselor and geological engineer couple who share a comfortable, happy life revolving around their fulfilling jobs, home, their gardening in the nearby “allotment” (public garden), and time with their 30-y.o. son and old friends.  It’s structured around a year, the “another year” of the title, divided into four seasonal breaks, each with somewhat different cinematography and mood — this organization indebted to Ozu’s seasonal movies, perhaps?  Also reminded me of Rohmer.

Limits of Care-Giving

As the movie develops, however, it becomes increasingly dominated by the tour de force performance of Leslie Manville as Mary, Jerry’s longtime coworker and their Depressed Friend.  Mary initially seems like a charming, effervescent mess who is clearly not altogether happy but still bubbles over with energy and emotion.  A few drinks in, though, and she starts to fall apart into self-pity about how badly she feels her life has gone, how stuck she feels, how unrewarded.  The movie actually begins with Jerry talking with a deeply depressed patient who has no will to try to improve her life — we never see the patient again, but Mary reenacts that scene in various ways, such that it becomes clear that Jerry’s friendship with Mary is difficult to separate from her profession as a care-giver and counselor.  The movie is all about care-giving — its meaning, limits, dilemmas. How much care can Jerry be expected to offer her depressed friend?

Psychological Wealth and Poverty

I also thought of it as being about different concepts of “wealth.”  Tom and Jerry are so “rich” — they are financially comfortable and own their lovely home, but more than this, the movie emphasizes their possession of an extravagance of different kinds of emotional & psychological capital.  They have so much happiness and comfort that they can afford to be generous with it.  Mary seems poverty-stricken next to them in her loneliness, desperation, self-involvement, inability to control her own emotions and moods.  The movie could be criticized for being very “bourgeois” in the link it implies between financial and emotional assets — when you consider, for example, Mary’s pathetically mis-firing dream of owning her own car, which turns out to be a used lemon that she can’t manage to maintain and eventually loses — by contrast, we see Tom and Jerry loading gardening supplies and vegetables in and out of their solid Subaru (I think?)– just one example of the way Mary’s unhappiness and T&J’s happiness are manifest in material possessions.  Mary is always dying to spend time in her friends’ home (this becomes a problem later when she starts showing up uninvited), and you can see why — Tom and Jerry’s own happiness and comfort are palpable in their home, and it’s easy to visualize Mary’s cheap, small rental apartment about which she complains bitterly.  It’s not simply a matter of ownership or money, however: part of the reason Jerry and Tom can have a nice house and nice car is presumably that they are on an even keel emotionally, are able to follow through on their plans, and don’t fall into bad financial decisions due to personal freakout or crisis.  That is to say, their emotional and financial “good health” are reinforcing and create a virtuous feedback loop (and precisely the opposite with Mary).

I can imagine some viewers feeling frustrated by a whiff of smugness in Tom and Jerry’s lives — and maybe on Leigh’s part, too; he seems completely to identify with these people who, in their late middle age, have been very lucky and can look back with pleasure on a life that has led them to a happy place.  And he seems to relate strongly to their difficulties in “managing” their various difficult, depressed friends and relatives (Mary’s male counterpart is their old buddy Ken who comes to visit for a weekend and reveals that the thought of getting on the train back to Hull makes him sick because there’s nothing left for him there other than work.)

Gathering of the Toxic Depressed

Here are Mary and Ken.  The depressed are all big drinker and smokers here.

Another potentially off-putting detail: the depressed people seem cut off from child-rearing and from any fully adult relationship to children and childhood.  Neither Ken nor Mary have kids.  Mary lights up a cigarette right next to a new mother holding her infant, who moves across the garden; Ken joins Mary for this little bitter gathering of the toxic.  And Mary comes on in a creepy way to Jerry and Tom’s adult son, whom she at once wants to see (in her nostalgia) as still a child but also as a love object.

The Narratability of Unhappiness

I watched the DVD track of Leigh’s own commentary.  He mentioned that the film is partly about the link between happiness and simple luck — Jerry and Tom’s good fortune at having things work out so well.  (Although as a friend commented to me, that luck is also linked to character; it’s difficult to imagine either Tom or Jerry having turned into Ken or Mary even if their life had taken wrong turns.)  Like Leigh’s last film Happy Go Lucky, this one is an exploration of happiness — a difficult quality to capture on film; it can seem “unnarratable” as per the famous Tolstoy line about happy families all being alike whereas every unhappy family is unhappy “in its own way.”  This view suggests that narrative itself or an interesting story requires unhappiness to break up the sameness of happiness.  Whereas Leigh seems to be suggesting that it’s in fact unhappiness and depression that approach unnarratability in their routine, redundancy, circular unprogressive movements.

Leigh emphatically rejects as flat-out wrong those who interpret the movie’s final scenes as implying a critique of Jerry and Tom.  At this point in the movie Mary shows up uninvited at just the wrong moment, and Jerry especially is, initially, quite cold and critical of Mary: the seemingly never-ending flow of care-giving gets abruptly turned off.   Leigh seemed a bit defensive — he spent some time explaining why Jerry’s reaction was absolutely reasonable and that to see the film as criticizing her or portraying her as smug or hypocritical is off base.

I actually agree with Leigh… Well, obviously he can’t be wrong about his intentions, but beyond that, I agree that given the circumstances and how narcissistic Mary’s behavior is, it seems wrong to demand of Jerry that she suppress any displeasure at having her small family gathering gate-crashed by her impossible friend.  It is interesting, however, to realize how fully Leigh seems to identify with the bourgeois worldview of his protagonists — I do think that the Leigh of 20-25 years ago (of his early films like Abigail’s Party, Bleak Moments, etc) would likely have identified more with the depressed outsiders and been quicker to look for complacency and hypocrisy among his more privileged & comfortable characters.

Just to be clear, I loved the movie (Leigh is my favorite current director; here as it usually the case, his unusual film-making methods lead to incredible performances from the actors) & don’t intend this as a criticism.  And I think the film is very humane and sympathetic to Mary.   But, I think this is a film that might look very different from different audience perspectives — e.g. for someone who identifies more with the life path of Mary (or Ken) than with the happy protagonists’.