Let's Go Crazy: Supergirl

 I finished a draft for a story - after five hurs - ate breakfast around 2:30 pm and instead of cleaning up and doing some housework, I looked at Google News. More press for Supergirl. I have already made my point that it is an ok movie. But what as bothered me is the reaction to it. The reviews I find more interesting, maybe more than the movie which was more entertaining than mind-blowing.

'Supergirl' review: Let Milly Alcock party harder next time - Los Angeles Times

As usual, there’s a tyke in trouble: 13-year-old Ruthye (Eve Ridley), a fellow orphan with a ramrod disposition and a tidy brunet braid that gives away that her character is modeled on Hailee Steinfeld’s vengeful teenager in “True Grit.” Ruthye wants to hunt and kill the creep who murdered her family. Unlike Supergirl, the child thinks it’s healthier to exorcise — not imbibe — one’s heartache. The duo visit an Epstein-island-like planet of kidnapped breeding women where, in one of the script’s subtler sick horrors, the locals imply that pubescent Ruthye is more valuable than aged 23-year-old Supergirl. (Although some of the caged extras appear to be as ancient as 30.) It’s yet another swiped idea, this one from “Mad Max: Fury Road,” for a minor story beat that’s unnecessary. Still, Alcock reacts with exactly the right note of disdain: “Cool,” she croaks. ‘Nuff said.

The True Grit copy ends quick and conclusively, unless you've never read the book or watched both movies. Supergirl is not Rooster Cogburn, nor is Ruthye Mattie Ross from Yell County. Mattie Ross has more to do with Lobo. Only when Supergirl rises to the occasion of being Supergirl is there anything like the arc Charles Portis gave to Rooster Cogburn. It might also be noted what happened to Rooster after the main events of the novel - he reverted to his low-born, anti-social ways. Supergirl gives the hope that Kara has found her way back to people. Not that script makes this clear. Still, it is different from any other superhero movie I can think of right now.

Still, the production design has imaginatively askew takes on the mundane: gridded jail cells, plodding space buses, clumsy oxygen suits that shimmy on with a satisfying squeak. When Supergirl makes a pit stop at a celestial convenience store, she samples a snack that I’m forced to call poop-corn. If “Supergirl” sells enough of it, hopefully Alcock can rampage again in a more confident sequel that truly cuts loose.

That might be the most fun scene. What the movie bodes for the DC's cosmic stories may be most interesting. More about that below.

'Supergirl' Review: Super-Horrendous

James Gunn, along with Peter Safran, knew that he was launching DC Studios right into the teeth of superhero fatigue. Gunn got asked a lot about how he was going to avoid that, and the key thing he said was: We’re not going into production on any movie until the script we have is rock-solid. For that was the overriding problem with the superhero overkill era: The films had lousy scripts, which were used as grids on which to layer the visual effects. Gunn was right to want to take the comic-book genre back to well-structured screenwriting basics. So what has he done in his second DC outing? He’s given us a comic-book movie with the worst script I can remember. (It’s by Ana Nogueira.)

What about all those Sony Spider-verse movies that bombed? No, the script is not Citizen Kane; it is not Iron an; but neither is Superman v. Batman. 

I’ve never bought the idea that movies were ruined by “Jaws” and “Star Wars,” but watching “Supergirl” you might well think that they were ruined by the Mos Eisley Cantina scene of “Star Wars.” Because that seems to be the movie’s dominant influence. One set piece after another features rubbery creatures with heads like melting anvils and tentacles coming out of strange places, as if this, after 50 years, was still charming and awesome. (Industrial Light & Magic is one of the film’s visual-effects houses.) Actually, the cantina scene was corny even back then, and creatures like these now make you feel trapped in a Muppet movie.

Alien came to mind along with Star Wars. Maybe even more in the atmosphere. Before Alien, the science fiction aesthetic was sterile cleanliness; after, it had a lived-in messiness of use and decay. That DC has a multi-species universe the creature designs had to follow the cantina scene's multitude of designs. Frankly, this felt like the greatest stretch of imagination in the movie.

'Supergirl' Review -  Milly Alcock Rises Above Poor DCU Growing Pains

Pulling from Woman of Tomorrow was a striking choice for a film adaptation, showing audiences a different interpretation of Supergirl than they might be familiar with and providing a unique foil to Corenswet’s boy-scout Superman. It’s genuinely refreshing to see this version of Kara on screen, as Supergirl is bravely uninterested in toning down her flaws and eccentricities. Yet, Kara is still a lovable character, and Milly Alcock slips so comfortably into the role. Alcock gives Kara pathos and a razor-sharp edge that carries the entire movie, sometimes even doing the heavy emotional lifting that the writing and directing fail to deliver. I hope to see Alcock shine in a film more worthy of her talents in the future.

This might be the best criticism I have seen; it runs through several reviews. Is it because our society has gotten so misogynistic? Did the men start crying and booing when Ripley killed the alien in Aliens?

Is this a cool neo-space western? Is this a grounded character study? Is it a flashy space opera? Supergirl never seems to commit to anything. Ana Nogueira‘s script prefers to sheepishly flirt with all these tones rather than balancing them. The main conflict of Supergirl also feels strangely disconnected from Kara herself. Notably, Captain Marvel (2019) had a similar problem, where all the most compelling character development occurred in flashbacks. It’s not that these heroines are hollow; it’s just that we rarely see them make choices that shape who they are in the present storylines of their films. Honestly, it’s maddening how little the creatives learned from the past mistakes of other female-driven comic book movies.

***

It’s far from the genre’s worst, especially within the standards of what the DC franchise has delivered in the past, but Supergirl deeply suffers from not knowing how to build a film around its iconic heroine.

★ ★ ½

I Wanted to Like ‘Supergirl’ (And I Kind of Did, Sort Of) 

Alcock successfully sells a character who doesn’t know what home is and identifies with nowhere, using copious amounts of alcohol to dull the pain of her past. However, the film fluctuates wildly on whether it wants to be an origin story, making an emotional connection with Kara difficult. The narrative expects the audience to understand her trauma without elaborating on it early on, meaning she initially just comes across as a drunk trying to be funny.

***

That disconnect is exactly why the viewing experience is so frustrating. There are so many noteworthy moments buried inside a disjointed narrative that it creates a constant push-and-pull; I didn’t know whether to lean in or pull away. The relationship between Supergirl and Ruthye lacks chemistry – it feels quite tame – but the dynamic of Kara stepping into a “big sister” role to warn Ruthye that revenge yields no rewards works beautifully in the film’s key moments. Kara’s evolution into the hero we expect is genuinely impressive when it finally arrives, especially since she spends most of the film out of costume. And the brief cameos from Superman himself are wholesome enough to conjure a smile – a sweet reminder of a cousin looking out for family.

The foundation of a great story was there, and the character development was exactly what the audience needed; it just required tighter direction. To prove the point, Jason Momoa pops up as the chaotic-neutral Lobo. The cameo is designed to provide comedic chaos, but it feels incredibly tame. Instead of landing jokes, it just feels like Momoa throwing his weight around and shouting his lines, with little consideration for comedic timing or whether the character fits the scene.

I never had any interest in the character or great expectation of the movie, but Alcok's performance is what stitches the script together. 

Supergirl Review: Unnecessary Tie-Ins & Incomprehensible Action

Much like the Levity Test for awards hopefuls, there’s a similar test I have for action movies and sci-fi blockbusters — not a test, per se, but more like a common marker of baseline competence. I call it the “who is doing what and where” test.

That’s not a demand for more exposition, or that filmmakers pre-fill every “plot hole” and explain away all the movie magic. It’s simply a plea for coherent visual design. I tend to be invested in the action of an action-based movie when I can tell who is doing what and where. Without that, it turns into a montage of blurs and reaction shots that kills all suspense. Rather than being on the ride, I’m simply biding time between outcomes. Remember when filmmakers could convey a basic sense of spatial awareness? We used to be a proper country.

Take the Harrier Jet sequence in True Lies. The whole thing is pretty ridiculous on the face of it. It’s goofy, to the point that you wonder how much is even meant to be taken “seriously,” and some of the effects even look kind of chintzy to modern eyes. But there isn’t a single second of it that leaves you wondering who is doing what and where. Whatever you think of the ride, you’re on it. James Cameron builds suspense and wonder through carefully constructed frames, allowing this big, sort of idiotic cat-and-mouse game played with hovering fighter jet to work as both drama and slapstick. “Believable?” Maybe. But really who cares, it’s gorgeous.

Interesting test. I like it. I also like how he nails a few more references, potentially even more pertinent than True Grit.

The only way to save the dog from a protracted, painful death is to find Krem and retrieve the antidote. Kara has three days to do so (the relativity of time on different planets is never addressed, perhaps mercifully so). And so, even if Kara is ambivalent about helping Ruthye, she has to find Krem in order to help her dog. Popeye, John Wick, Princess Bride… what was I saying about obvious influences?

On the one hand, it’s rather refreshing that the James Gunn-era of DC has, on some level, solved the stakes-inflation problem that bedeviled the MCU. Where every plot was about a big bad planning to destroy the Earth, all life in the universe, the very fabric of reality, etc (exhausting!). They solved it largely by ripping references from other movies, sure, but still: an improvement. That being said, if you’re going to make a movie that rests on a mission to save a cute dog, maybe just use a real dog? There’s a limit to how much I can care about a “dog” rendered in mediocre CG. I suppose I can understand the need for CG when the dog is doing super stuff, but not when he spends most of the movie lying sick on a table or doing regular dog things. Could we not find a real dog? It’s not like there’s a shortage of real dogs in the world.

Good point about the dog, too. Probably a problem of finding the right-looking dog. Even more in making the point about raising stakes. I see it as a coming of age story for Kara, not the usual beat up on the villain superhero story. Still the script muddles that point, but I am willing to give them points for making the try. 

'Supergirl' is a grim, violent, and depressing superhero movie

When we first meet the titular Supergirl, Kara Zor-El, she's a sad, lonely, drunk who spends her days hungover and her nights drinking heavily with her dog. She's taken off to a planet with a red sun, which removes her powers and makes her vulnerable like an ordinary human, so that she can feel the effects of booze. She abuses it to avoid her real feelings of anger and abandonment stemming from deep childhood trauma and a sense of parental abandonment that the film slowly reveals. 

If that isn't bright and cheery enough, she quickly gets caught up in a young girl's quest to find the Brigands—leather-and-spikes-wearing space raiders who murdered the girl's mother, father, and brother in front of her, in one of the movie's two (!) separate on-screen family massacres. It turns out that the Brigands are essentially an intergalactic rape and sex trafficking gang who make a practice of abducting, imprisoning, and sexually assaulting young women, whom they call brides, to perpetuate their all-male society. 

Directed by Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya and Cruella), the movie is tinged with the sort of Heavy Metal-esque trippy pulp weirdness that Gunn is known for, but it comes across as forced and tonally at odds with its hero. The whole thing plays like a fourth-rate Mad Max ripoff, but without the pedal-to-the-metal action sequences or the single-minded vengeful fury. It's not fun. It's barely even righteous. It's just miserable. At one point, Supergirl flat-out murders a guy by pushing a giant sword through his neck. Somehow, I suspect even Zack Snyder would be appalled. 

Which makes me think it did not fit the reviewer's expectations rather than finding any good in what was on the screen. 

Review: “Supergirl” is Perfectly Fine, Which is a Little Disappointing - Blog - The Film Experience

It's not like the film does anything wrong, it's just slight. I love not having a plot hinge on universe-changing implications, but this film just establishes the Supergirl character enough to lead to other stories. Table-setting is always a part of the deal with these connected universe stories, but it's surrounded by such low stakes and forgettable characters, it's hard to care...

None of this is the fault of Milly Alcock, who gives her all to the character of Kara Zor-El/Supergirl. Any characterization of hers is lush, full, charismatic, and welcome. At the same time, despite making a Supergirl film, the filmmakers go out of their way to act like you should care about the Brigands, Kryptonian backstory, and the logistics of red, yellow, and green suns. It's a very busy film for essentially a plot that contains two simple story elements.

***

More than anything, Supergirl is ultimately forgettable. There isn't much to hang your hat on, though I was mildly entertained. It's a terrible middle ground to be when you put this much money and effort into a large-scale universe. It's an underwhelming start for the character, despite Milly Alcock's best efforts.

Grade: B-/C+

Supergirl Should Be Ashamed of Itself - Reactor for an all out demolishing of the movie.

I find myself agreeing with the grades given more than some of the written commentary. But I come back to my main question of late: by what standards are we judging and can those standards survive judgment?

sch 6/28 

I finished my forays into Supergirl with this video that does a better job than most of the above review of distinguishing between the movie-in-and-of-itself and the novel-as-part-of-a-series. I will admit, grudgingly, there is an aesthetic to the series, but I remain convinced it is it the financial that overtops the aesthetic. YMMV.

 sch 6/30

   

  

 

 

  

 

 

  

  

 

  

Writers: Advice; Thomas Mann & Colm Tóibín; Charles Portis; Chester Himes +

 Another collection of things I have read, watched, listened to recently about writing, or writers. I hope they help you with your writing, that they encourage you to write, or any combination of the two.

My Favorite Book About Writing is Not a Book About Writing 

Back in the late 1980s when I was younger and more impressionable, I was riveted by the PBS series The Power of Myth. For those who remember, it was simply journalist Bill Moyers and academic Joseph Campbell sitting in the Skywalker Ranch’s study-like setting, talking about ancient cultures and their beliefs. The graphics, what few there were, were amateurish by today’s standards. Campbell, who had only a year or so left to live, was prone to long, storytelling tangents. Moyers was a curious questioner, sometimes knowledgeable about the subject at hand, sometimes a neophyte, and always in awe of his interviewee. Not the kind of stuff one is likely to find these days.

The series was recently rebroadcast by my local PBS station (which may not survive much longer due to NEA budget cuts). It was based largely on Campbell’s book from 1949, The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Nearly 40 years later, and hopefully more mature in my ability to understand, I found it even more fascinating. The breadth of Campbell’s knowledge about myth—particularly cultural origin stories—was even more inspiring than I remembered. He knew and could recite stories from dozens of cultures.

***

Later on in the book Campbell discusses the concept of the annihilation of the ego, so important to The Hero’s Journey. That’s an aspect of the journey that is rarely followed these days. So much of our literature, and particularly motion picture making, is devoted to the exaltation of the ego rather than its sublimation. But that was a characteristic necessary for the survival of the culture, because its underlying message was that a hero is not an egotist—far from it. A hero was devoted to the welfare of the people. And the hero was one of the people. Contrast that to much of today’s “strongman” politics, or mainstream entertainment, in which heroes are not just heroes, they are superheroes, an entity none of us can become.2

***

1 Although most writers are familiar with the twelve-step Hero’s Journey, according to Wikipedia, Campbell’s original version contained seventeen steps, and was trimmed to twelve for screenwriting purposes by Christoper Vogler, a Hollywood executive. The Joseph Campbell Foundation website doesn’t list the journey as individual, chronological steps, but expresses it as a circular path of interrelated actions. This representation is more closely related to what is in the book.

 While cleaning out, organizing my Watch Later list on YouTube, I found the following videos related to Thomas Mann.

There is this rather short documentary, which touches more on his personal life than delving into his writing:

 Colm Tóibín | The Magician is an hour-long discussion of Mann and Tóibín's novel about Mann:

 The Blog Of The South (Defector) discusses Portis's novel, Dog of The South. If you have not read Portis, you should. If you want to know why you should read Portis, then click on that link. No American writer is like Portis.

 Write Conscious brings together David Foster Wallace and David Pynchon, both writers who have left me bewildered.

 The Nation highlights the work of Chester Himes and his life in Chester Himes’s Harlem Noirs; which sounds like it only touches on his Harlem police stories. Like the man, it is more than that. I read his Harlem novels when I was young; If He Hollers, Let Him Go, when I was in prison. No, he has not the grace of Ralph Ellison or James Baldwin, but he has his own bag - an imagination, an honesty, a certain sort of fine madness. Ignored for too long, America needs to face up to him. 

Lost Literature: On “Picket Line,” Elmore Leonard’s Remarkable, Long-Unpublished Novella (Crime Reads) - anybody who has not read Leonard should; I see him as one of those guys who straddle the genre/literary line. He writes great dialog.

sch 10/21 

 Not sure what I expected from a site calling itself The Art of Manliness hosting a podcast on Hemingway, but The Writing Life of Ernest Hemingway does a very good job, steady on the writing, intelligent questions by the host.

Fiction as an Exercise in Sabotage by Xiaolu Guo (Words Without Borders)

I conceived this film after reading Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Since my film school years, I have deeply felt that the collaborative nature of filmmaking changes the notion of originality, as John Berger has stated in his Ways of Seeing. So when I read “The Death of the Author” by Barthes, I understand what he means when he says that in writing it is language that speaks, not the author. And it is important to realize that to write is to reach, through a preexisting impersonality. This is a perfect explanation behind both Borges’s and Kathy Acker’s retellings of Don Quixote. To write is to reach out, through a preexisting work.

Language is a superstructure, as Noam Chomsky said. It has a universal grammar that is beyond linguistic difference. Language is a system through which we writers move back and forth, travel within and beneath. But never truly beyond. Language is an infinitely vast code that cannot be destroyed, it can only be played with. A semiotic sabotage suggests that a certain narrative can be challenged, rewritten, and reconstructed, but it may not be replaced entirely. And the role of fiction, as radical it may be, is also inherently traditional and sentimental, therefore it is deeply humanistic.

Fiction is the art of narrative, it comprises the ever-changing human stories. It is the Dharma wheel that a Buddhist monk has to constantly turn, or a herd of deer in the wood that a Daoist would follow, wherever that path might take. Human life is spontaneous and risky; fictions have proved that. In that sense, all of us are warriors. We are at once saboteurs and builders, we destroy and we create anew.

Think about that. Read the entire essay. Think about these paragraphs some more. I am.

sch 10/23 

Something more practical, Free Talk: How Write a Satisfying Final Act for Your Novel (With Ley Taylor Johnson) from Authors Publish.

This video addresses one thing that has bothered me since getting out of prison - sensitivity warnings. The word anodyne is used in the video, and that seems to me to be a valid worry about our current literary output. It seems impossible to know what might set off an unknown person's sensitivity. Well, other than the obvious - sadism, brutality for the sake of brutality, racism and its related isms - which do not seem to be literary subjects in and of themselves. That they might be tools for a literary purpose is possible, but also damned tricky. See Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, and its history, for how the unpleasant can be handled in a literary way, while showing the problems for such works.

David Foster Wallace on the uses of irony may seem like an unlikely video for me. I may have my doubts about his Infinite Jest, I have no doubts about his skill and respect for his ideas.

Writers on Writing (60 Minutes)

Well, this post is more than long enough. I hope these were of help and/or inspiration for you.

sch 10/25

 

 

Grab Bag: Writers and Books

Since the Nobel Prize for Literature has just been awarded, the cold water splashed in the face of Jeffrey Meyer's Damned to fame: the Nobel Prize for Literature (The Article) should be read. There are problems with any award system, but I found the Nobel Prize winners a better education than the Pulitzer winners. A Dylan fan, I would have preferred Philip Roth to have gotten the Nobel. I read a long time ago that Dreiser should have gotten the Nobel instead of Sinclair Lewis - it would have improved Dreiser's writing by giving him confidence, while winning ruined Lewis. There may be more than a little truth that the Nobel embalms the living, but I think there are exceptions to that: Toni Morrison, Eugene O'Neill, and J.M. Coetzee. Where I find real quality is the National Book Awards (for Americans) and the Booker (for the rest of the world).

Is English literature dying - I know this should not even matter when we are destroying the planet, but if we are to survive as a species, we need our arts:

The third issue of The Indianapolis Review is out! 

 While in prison, I read Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, and I heard him interviewed on an NPR show. I liked the novel and I liked how he talked. What I did not know until after he died that he wrote one of my favorite movies, Smoke. He died last year.

Regarding Auster, I ran across RIP: an author, an artist on failbetter, and took this away:

...We recall with a certain degree of excitement and trepidation a time more than two decades ago detailing the impact of the internet on storytelling and story tellers, and are forever grateful to him for being one of our first author interviews.  So, to our readers today, we implore you to read his books… and remember his words. 

He is worth reading, and he is worth listening to about writing. On YouTube, I found the following videos.

This video examines Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye by way of Anthony Burgess. While The Long Goodbye is not my least favorite Chandler novel (that will always be The High Window), it has always been a hard read for me. It is not much of a detective novel. After listening to the podcast, I see it now as a novel about Los Angeles, and about friendship. That makes it more sensible to me. (BTW, my favorite Chandler novels are Farewell, My Lovely, The Big Sleep, and The Lady in the Lake.)

 

(Some views on The Long Goodbye, that I could not resist adding here

 The Long Goodbye at 70 (Sam Wiebe)

Published in 1953, The Long Goodbye is a bloated, meandering and sentimental book containing the world’s worst gimlet recipe. It’s also arguably the finest crime novel by an American.

Unsurprisingly, The Long Goodbye is also the last great Marlowe novel. Chandler broke something with that one.

I don’t really think Marlowe cares all that much about the Sternwood family, Bogart and Bacall’s chemistry aside. He’s not personally involved in Moose Malloy’s search for Velma, or the Quest family, or the Brasher Doubloon. But poor pitiful Terry Lennox gets to him, and that betrayal signals the end.

 The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler, book of a lifetime (The Independent) by Benjamin Black (who is John Banville)

Chandler never wrote with such passionate conviction as he does in this long and darkly tormented work. In the figure of the best-selling but self-hating author Roger Wade, we glimpse an exaggerated version of Chandler himself, who throughout his writing life chafed under the label of "mere" thriller-writer.

He complained repeatedly and with bitterness against highbrow critics, such as Edmund Wilson, who failed to see, Chandler believed, the artistry and stylistic polish of his work. In fact, Chandler was valued and praised, far more than he acknowledged: as a serious drunk, he preferred martyrdom to stardom.

The Argentinean novelist Rodrigo Fresán suggests that throughout the seven novels in which he figures, Marlowe truly falls in love with only one person, the ambiguous and gentlemanly Terry Lennox, a subtle variation on F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby. That Lennox turns out to be a scoundrel is not the point; the point is Marlowe's confused and melancholy love for him. 

 A Wannabe-Hardboiled-Jew Reads Raymond Chandler’s ‘The Long Goodbye’ by Alexander Aciman:

It’s a long drag back from Brooklyn and one of the dullest in the city. Sometimes I’ll catch myself narrating life to myself this way, like I’ve just flicked away my cigarette, pulled up my collar, like I can still feel the day-old hangover crawling around silent and sluggish in the back of my head like a bad dream, and oh my God I’m doing it again, aren’t I? But that’s just the price we pay for reading The Long Goodbye.

I’ve read it almost half a dozen times. Certain chapters much more than that. And I’ve nearly memorized the last page, which, after all this time I still think is one of the best last pages ever written. And still, I don’t entirely know what to make of this book.

If Raymond Chandler’s earlier novels were detective stories that just so happened to be good, The Long Goodbye is a full reversal; it is a great novel that just so happens to be a detective story. It should be no different than saying Moby-Dick is a great novel that happens to be about whalers, or that Ulysses is a great novel that happens to take place in Dublin. But by describing it as detective fiction, we can obscure the fact for more than 60 years that it was one of the greatest novels ever written in America. There is hardly a novel more human, more heartbreaking, strung together with prose as boozily and as meticulously exacting as The Long Goodbye’s.

***

The real story, however, to very sloppily paraphrase Raymond Chandler, is about the greatest mystery of all, the mystery that is the human heart, set against what is perhaps the greatest topographical enigma of all: The City at night. What could possibly be more uniquely American than rolling highway, dry wind up in the canyon, dim headlights refracting across the streets of Los Angeles?

***

I have a theory that the great American Tough Guy is a myth—that he never existed and was dreamed up only to address some massive vulnerability in the national construction of self, almost like a superhero. Marlowe exposed him as a total sham. The brokenness that Marlowe carries, which is suggested but never addressed—a device that is the equivalent of gymnastics almost to the point of magic on Chandler’s part—is infinitely more American. The French can say bof all they want, and Italians have their mercurial shrugs and ironic, fatalistic hand gestures, but carrying brokenness to the point of near toxicity, for better although almost certainly for worse, is what we do in America, as Americans. That’s our thing. And Marlowe laid it bare for all the world to see.

The Edgar Awards Revisited: The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler (Best Novel; 1955) (Criminal Element)

Raymond Chandler. The name carries so much weight in the mystery genre, it’s hard to believe anyone who says they’ve never read any of his works. But I hadn’t. Like much of popular culture, after a certain time, the details are everywhere—reviewed, rebooted, interpreted, and imitated. I knew Philip Marlowe through and through without having read a single word. (Similarly, I hadn’t seen any of the Star Wars films until my 20s but could hold my own in any conversation about the films.)

It’s a shame that things get put on a pedestal like that because the expectations always overreach and cause an expectation for more. And that’s exactly what happened when I read Chandler’s The Long Goodbye (and watched the Star Wars films, for that matter). 

Oh, yes, I have misread the novel, for however much I agree as a detective novel it is bloated and meanders. It is that meandering that takes into the territory of the plain novel.)

The Master and Mikhail Bulgakov (History Today) - 

Bulgakov’s novel has so many layers that it defies easy interpretation. But underlying its many twists and turns there is nevertheless a simple, if chilling message: that in times of upheaval, when the past fragments and even memory fails, it is the historian’s curse to write fictions which are true, but which no one believes except madmen and the devil.

Reading Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita broke down my resistance to the Russian novel. It is also an example for me of how to approach the madness of reality in a novel by using a madness of its own - the imagination.

Let us not forget the theater: Reviving a forgotten playwright for a new era (Sheffield Hallam University). The playwright in question is John Ford, a Jacobean playwright. Jacobean is the era that came after the Elizabethan. I have been interested in Jacobean revenge tragedies, but have only managed to read The Duchess of Malfi. More reading, still not done.

 For some fun: The Duchess [of Malfi] review – Jodie Whittaker trapped in Tarantinoesque revenge tragedy 

John Webster’s revenge tragedy contains a terrible timelessness. To modernise this story of a woman who refuses to be submissive and is killed by her brothers for it is to highlight the eternal relevance of male domestic violence, even against a figure as powerful as Webster’s wealthy duchess.

Zinnie Harris’s updated version from 2019, taking place in an indistinct present with swearing and sex alongside some 17th-century formalities, makes hard-hitting points on the sociopathic reasoning for murderous misogyny. But it is too much of a melange of tone and ideas. Jodie Whittaker, returning to the stage after more than a decade’s absence, gives a spirited leading performance but is hamstrung by the strangeness of Harris’s own production. 

 A Slaughterhouse-Five lecture that I think escapes the tedious, life-draining exercises of most academics. This fellow seems to have actually liked reading Vonnegut's novel, and just as much liked teaching it. 

 Sherwood Anderson is one of those American writers I think is more talked about than read. Having read a little of his biography in prison, it seems to me that bad luck and stubbornness may led him into obscurity. Winesburg, Ohio is his most-cited work; I knew much of it without having read it. When I did read it during my stay in prison, it was both much of what I expected (on the macro level) and a surprise (at the micro level of the stories themselves). There is some of him in my stories about Jackson, Indiana - and several differences that are also rooted in his book.

A documentary on the man:

Having written the paragraph above, I was struck by a mixture of curiosity and procrastination. What was it that I read about him that underlies my opinion? The results from a cursory Google search follows:

Sherwood Anderson: a room of his own by James Tuttleton (New Criterion, 1987) is behind a paywall, so I went to onto the book being reviewed there, Sherwood Anderson by Kim Townsend. And kept hitting paywalls. What I could discern was that Townsend had written the most recent biography - in 1987.

 SHERWOOD ANDERSON: SHORT-STORY LEGEND (Arizona Daily Sun) was the first without a paywall, and might catch some of what I read years and years ago.

Between World War I and World War II, Anderson helped to shatter formulaic approaches to writing, influencing a subsequent generation of writers, most notably Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. 

Anderson, who lived in New Orleans for a brief time, befriended Faulkner there in 1924 and encouraged him to write about his home county in Mississippi.

***

Anderson’s first novel, “Windy McPherson’s Son,” published in 1916 through the efforts of Theodore Dreiser and Floyd Dell, is an autobiographical work about a young man’s success in the business world that he later rejects. Anderson’s 1919 collection of short stories, Winesburg, Ohio,  is considered his finest work.

In 1921, Anderson met writer Gertrude Stein, whose innovative writing influenced his development as a young writer. 

Anderson later wrote in the autobiographical “A Story Teller’s Story” that the occasion of his reading Stein’s “Tender Buttons” perhaps was the first time he “really fell in love with words, wanted to give each word I used every chance to show itself at its best.”

A brief survey of the short story part 51: Sherwood Anderson (The Guardian)

Even as Anderson's once-great reputation plummeted, the book, published in 1919, continued to exert a pronounced effect on the American short story throughout the 20th century. His prose carries flavours of Whitman and Twain, and the distinctive, comma-rejecting rhythm of Gertrude Stein. Above them you detect those he influenced: the Hemingway of In Our Time, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty and Raymond Carver among many others. Sometimes he writes very badly, but when he writes well his discursive style envelops you completely, without fanfare.

***

Anderson wrote the vast majority of his good work between 1916 and 1926, and most of his readers had abandoned him years before his unfortunate death in 1941 (he developed peritonitis after swallowing a cocktail stick). But regardless of his inconsistencies and his long decline, stories such as I Want to Know Why (1919), I'm a Fool (1922) and the problematic but brilliant Death in the Woods (1933) demand to be read by any lover of the form. There's plenty to explore beyond Winesburg's city limits.

Sherwood Anderson: An appreciation by William Faulkner (The Atlantic), but here I have a subscription:

At this time in his life, he had to believe this. His mother had been a bound girl, his father a day laborer; this background had taught him that the amount of security and material success which he had attained was, must be, the answer and end to life. Yet he gave this up, repudiated and discarded it at a later age, when older in years than most men and women who make that decision, to dedicate himself to art, writing. Yet, when he made the decision, he found himself to be only a oneor two-book man. He had to believe that, if only he kept that style pure, then what the style contained would be pure too, the best. That, was why he had to defend the style. That was the reason for his hurt and anger at Hemingway about Hemingway’s The Torrents of Spring, and at me in a lesser degree since my fault was not full booklength but instead was merely a privately-printed and -subscribed volume which few people outside our small New Orleans group would ever see or hear about, because of the book of Sprat ling’s caricatures which we titled Sherwood Anderson and Other Famous Creoles and to which I wrote an introduction in Anderson’s primer-like style. Neither of us — Hemingway or I —could have touched, ridiculed, his work itself. But we had made his style look ridiculous; and by that time, after Dark Laughter, when he had reached the point where he should have stopped writing, he had to defend that style at all costs because he too must have known by then in his heart that there was nothing else left.

***

I learned more than that from him, whether or not I always practised the rest of it any more than I have that. I learned that, to be a writer, one has first got to be what he is, what he was born; that to be an American and a writer, one does not necessarily have to pay lip-service to any conventional American image such as his and Dreiser’s own aching Indiana or Ohio or Iowa corn or Sandburg’s stockyards or Mark Twain’s frog. You had only to remember what you were. “You have to have somewhere to start from: then you begin to learn,”he told me. “it dont matter where it was, just so you remember it and aint ashamed of it. Because one place to start from is just as important as any other. You’re a country boy; all you know is that little patch up there in Mississippi where you started from. But that’s all right too. It’s America too; pull it out, as little and unknown as it is, and the whole thing will collapse, like when you prize a brick out of a wall.”

“Not a cemented, plastered wall,” I said.

“Yes, but America aint cemented and plastered yet. They’re still building it. That’s why a man with ink in his veins not only still can but sometimes has still got to keep on moving around in it, keeping moving around and listening and looking and learning. That’s why ignorant unschooled fellows like you and me not only have a chance to write, they must write. All America asks is to look at it and listen to it and understand it if you can. Only the understanding aint important either: the important thing is to believe in it even if you dont understand it, and then try to tell it, put it down. It wont ever be quite right, but there is always next time; there’s always more ink and paper, and something else to try to understand and tell. And that one probably wont be exactly right either, but there is a next time to that one, too. Because tomorrow America is going to be something different, something more and new to watch and listen to and try to understand; and, even if you cant understand, believe.”

To believe, to believe in the value of purity, and to believe more. To believe not in just the value, but the necessity for fidelity and integrity; lucky is that man whom the vocation of art elected and chose to be faithful to it, because the reward for art does not wait on the postman. He carried this to extremes. That of course is impossible on the face of it. I mean that, in the later years when he finally probably admitted to himself that only the style was left, he worked so hard and so laboriously and so self-sacrifieingiy at this, that at times he stood a little bigger, a little taller than it was. He was warm, generous, merry and fond of laughing, without pettiness and jealous only of the integrity which he believed to be absolutely necessary in anyone who approached his craft; he was ready to be generous to anyone, once he was convinced that that one approached his craft with his own humility and respect for it. During those New Orleans days and weeks, I gradually became aware that here was a man who would be in seclusion all forenoon — working. Then in the afternoon he would appear and we would walk about the city, talking. Then in the evening we would meet again, with a bottle now, and now he would really talk; the world in minuscule would be there in whatever shadowy courtyard where glass and bottle clinked and the palms hissed like dry sand in whatever moving air. Then tomorrow forenoon and he would be secluded again — working; whereupon I said to myself, “If this is what it takes to be a novelist, then that’s the life for me.”  

On My Obsession with Sherwood Anderson by Bruce Falconer 

Their betrayals, hurtful though they were to Anderson, speak to something not uncommon in how people relate to him and his work. Literary critic Irving Howe, in his 1951 biography of Anderson, writes: “When I read Winesburg, Ohio in my adolescence, I felt that a new world had been opened to me, new possibilities of experience, new dimensions of emotion. Not many years later I found myself rejecting Anderson’s work: I was impatient with his vagueness, superior to his uncertainty. Yet he still meant more to me than other writers of unquestionably greater achievement.” I might easily have written those words myself. For years, I have idolized Anderson for the austere rhythm of his prose, his desperate quest for self-knowledge, his empathy and kindheartedness. But he was also vain, immature, sentimental, even pathetic, and despite his best efforts, a stranger to himself. Even so, my affection for him remains. As Anderson wrote in a letter to Van Wyck Brooks, a prominent literary critic who had recently savaged the work of his childhood hero, Mark Twain, “Surely the thing has to be undertaken as a labor of love and love should stomach imperfections.”

Anderson himself possessed an unusually sharp critical eye and plainly realized when his own work, all too often, fell short. Still, he pressed on, driven by an almost religious fervor with regard to the redemptive power of creativity. “The object of art is not to make salable pictures,” he wrote in a 1927 letter to one of his sons, a novice painter. “It is to save yourself.” Depressive by nature, he suffered two nervous breakdowns, both of which sent him reeling aimlessly about the countryside in a kind of fugue state. More than once he seriously contemplated suicide. Known primarily for his short stories, he also produced a number of second-rate novels, both early and late in his career, which most critics judged to be as much a labor to read as they had been for him to write. Still, at least Anderson was laboring on Anderson’s own terms; he no longer felt the pangs of self-loathing that had assaulted his conscience during his time as an advertising copywriter in Chicago. There he had earned a meager living while honing his abilities as a wordsmith. For a man of limited education, the experience could only have improved his prospects. But as the years elapsed without his being able to separate himself from what he sneeringly called the “universal whoredom” of advertising, Anderson grew despondent over the soullessness of the job. (Even after publishing Winesburg, he remained, for a time, unable to earn an independent living.) He came to view himself as a sellout, a slave to the same voracious capitalism that he believed was devouring the best aspects of American life.

 The open-hearted Sherwood Anderson (Richard Goodman's Newsletter)

Beyond that, though, Anderson’s book is true. You can experience this dramatically in one of the stories, “Adventure.” The story is about a lonely woman in this small town whose hopes are dashed. A woman whose story, save for Anderson, would be swallowed by much bigger stories that vie, always, for our attention.  These are the intimate, intense tragedies in life that everyone knows about and many of us have experienced. Anderson casts his eye on them knowingly and with concern. 

I do not see exactly what sparked my interest in Anderson, but I see plenty enough similar to justify these quotes - to myself, anyway. Faulkner would have always been enough for me. For me, he is the great modern American writer, so his saying Sherwood Anderson was a giant is a striking comment.

Considering the influence of Sherwood Anderson on Ernest Hemingway, it seems time to go back to Anthony Burgess' Ninety-Nine Novels: Two Novels by Ernest Hemingway. The two novels are For Whom The Bells Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea. When I read the first in 1978, I was as impressed by the novel as I was by the movie (although, I seemed to have been confused then by the word cojones); re-reading the novel while in prison, I was was shocked by its ramshackle shape and being so un-Hemingwayesque in its style. The Old Man and the Sea, I read around 1973 (thank you Scholastic Books!). I think it holds up the better of the two. Its length is far shorter than For Whom The Bells Tolls, shorter than any of the other novels, and far longer than any short short of his. I would call it a novella. What seems to me, it is this short novel that sticks in our cultural mind as the Hemingway novel. I think the podcast does a good job of positioning these novels; it may work against my own dire opinion of For Whom The Bells Tolls.

 

 I came to love Charles Portis, there are other posts on him contained on this blog (please search them out), and I am not sure if I have not already noted The American Anthropology of Charles Portis (Slate). Considering what is in the Sherwood Anderson quotations, I am going ahead and quote from the essay - and hope you have the sense to find and read Portis.

The entertainment value of his work can trick the unwary into thinking it’s not about much. Unfortunately, Norwood, True Grit, The Dog of the South, Masters of Atlantis, and Gringos actually are, in a phrase that would have probably pissed him off, “novels of ideas.” Or one idea, anyway: In these five novels, Portis wrote America.

His plots—a fourteen-year-old girl avenging her father’s death, an obscure power struggle between sectarian cultists, an aspiring teacher driving to Honduras to recapture his wayward wife after she fled his math lessons and “weekly embraces”—are all about America’s obsessions, weaknesses, and incurable fixations. His grifters and drifters show us who we are: gullible, suspicious, and highly susceptible to advertising. And his cast of charlatans have mastered the American art of self-invention, which the American reader almost reflexively admires. The books are screwball, but not trivial. It’s the interest in the carnies who make the world go round that makes his work ring true.

***

His stories, all of them picaresque, had the appearance of plainness of craft—well-crafted things tend to appear plain because they don’t need ornamentation. He got more mileage out of “throw these two guys in a car” than Jonathan Franzen got out of the entire known world. There’s a deceptively simple sturdiness to them that conjures the “are you sure Hank done it this way?” posture of outlaw country, until you realize Portis was more of a Roger Miller fan and Roger Miller had a song called “My Uncle Used To Love Me But She Died.” Portis’ novels, like Miller’s songs, start with three chords and the truth and unfurl into chaos. The plainness makes you not expect the madness.

All of Portis’ people and places are specific. He had his beat, his areas of interest, and he stayed there, never courting fame or breakout success. He stayed in Arkansas, a place he believed you couldn’t ever quite get out of, and lived his life. But it’s in specificity where we can find and express the universal. Portis’ novels about losers from Arkansas have aged so well because he understood something about America: We’re a profoundly individualistic country, and that makes us a country of con artists, cultists, scammers, and hustlers sitting around thinking hard about cartoons. Once you learn that, you’ll never get fooled

One more from the Anthony Burgess list: Ian Fleming and Goldfinger. Hey, you might as well have some fun with your reading. I read all the Bond books, but one, when I was a teenager. Re-reading Moonraker 50 years later, I was struck by how stodgy was the prose and how much a bureaucrat meeting freakish villains was James. Bond.

 

Why read Edgar Allan Poe? Watch this one:

 I leave you with Salman Rushdie's favorite books:

 

The books are: 

Sterne: Tristram Shandy 
The Thousand and One Nights
Joyce: Ulysses
Swift: Gulliver's Travels
Dickens: Great Expectations
Borges: Ficciones
Marquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude
Grass: The Tin Drum
Calvino: Our Ancestors
Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita

 sch 10/10

 

 

Hodgepodge of The Literary - Videos. A True Grit Essay, Zora Neale Hurston, and More!

 I really like pulp fiction - Hammett, Robert E. Howard - even the pulpiest heroes - Doc Savage, The Shadow - can be fun.

J.M. Coetzee is one writer who I have read less of (two novels, a couple of short stories) than who I found videos on YouTube:

Daphne du Maurier interested me because I have never understood Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds". She wrote the story on which it is based.

I managed to read two Iain M. Banks's Culture novels while in prison. If you think you like science fiction, that you have read great science fiction, without reading Banks, then you are missing out. Seriously missing out.

Speaking of Iain Banks:

Michael Connelly is one who I found in prison, and I am still wondering  where to place him. He is not a prose stylist, but it is hard not to get attached to his characters.

I have not read much of J.G. Ballard - did I get a novel of his read in prison? I have read much about him. Here is a documentary on him, hopeflly it will inspire you find his books:

Alasdair Gray on writing and painting:

Ross MacDonald:

Groucho, Capote, Ring Lardner:

Indiana represented:

Philip Roth at 70: Interview with David Remnick is not what what I heard on The New Yorker Radio Hour. It is more than that. Roth was one of my great discoveries while in prison. Yes, I knew about him when I was a teenager, but did not read him. I wish I had read him instead of Saul Bellow; Roth's world is far mre accessible to me than Bellows'.

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While in prison, I read an anthology of Russian fantasy and science fiction. I used the interlibrary loan program to get more current Russian writers; one was Victor Pelevin's A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia.  What I picked up was the idea of using fantasy where social realism is insufficient to tell us about life. Why I am adding to this already too long post is that The Guardian published a long read on Pelevin: The mysterious novelist who foresaw Putin’s Russia – and then came to symbolise its moral decay.

sch 1/10

In He Got Away With Everything: Reading True Grit After the Reelection of Donald Trump (LitHub) Piers Gelly offers a reading of True Grit which is beyond anything I have read about Charles Portis' novel. 

On its face, this decision to write fiction rather than journalism might seem like a turn away from reality—a reality in which, by the time he started writing True Grit, Kennedy and X and King had all been murdered. But in Portis’s writing, and in True Grit especially, I see an Oklahoma of the mind in which these convulsions are powerfully resonant. True Grit is a story about how, in times of upheaval, the mind clings to systems for safety. And in staging this psychological fact, Portis’s novel echoes a contemporary novel not typically mentioned in the same breath: The Crying of Lot 49, which was published three years earlier. What’s implicit in Portis is explicit in Pynchon: both novels, I think, are attempts to represent a mind metabolizing the upheavals and anxieties of the era.

***

Similarly, the quest at the heart of True Grit isn’t just about revenge; it’s also a quest for meaning in a world grown increasingly slippery and strange. As Mattie travels further and further into the Choctaw Nation in search of Tom Chaney, her father’s killer, the reality of True Grit begins to warp. Psychological and moral ambiguity come with the territory: beyond the borders of the United States lies a lawless land of rumor, deception, and plain old oddity. Out here, names drift. Tom Chaney’s name, we learn, might actually be Chelmsford. The villainous Permalee brothers are named Darryl, Carroll, Farrell, and Harold, which has a rather Pynchonian mouthfeel. In this context, Mattie’s theological gloss seems more and more like a desperate insistence—not an attempt to describe order but to create it.

 ***

The quietly anarchic possibility of this gesture, in the context of the whole, made me feel certain that Portis’s subject matter wasn’t predestination itself, but rather the tendency of the human mind to seek refuge in rigid systems, in doctrines, but to do so imperfectly, incompletely, for the mind contains doubts and contradictions that doctrines simply do not. Mattie’s hopefulness is, for me, a final act of courage—grit, even—and although we can never know that LaBoeuf did, in fact, read those pages, we can hope. 

Mr. Gelly may be onto something here that applies to Portis' other novels. This conflict between systems and the contradictions that reality imposes on those systems. That I agree with him on how Trump mangles reality with his lies does not affect my opinion on this reading of True Grit.

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Where to start with: Zora Neale Hurston - it doe not mention any of her plays, but it does place her memoir high on the list. That is where I started with Hurston. Start, you will not mind going on.

How Zora Neale Hurston's posthumous novel was rescued from a fire and published. It may be that her biographers may need to change their views on the last decade or so of her life. This makes it sound like she never quit writing (unlike myself).

Until today, outside of a handful of scholars, the world had not seen Zora Neale Hurston's final novel, The Life of Herod The Great.

Hurston, the accomplished Black writer, folklorist and anthropologist in the Harlem Renaissance era, worked for many years on the pages to The Life of Herod the Great until she died in Fort Pierce, Fla., in 1960 at the age of 69.

In this novel, Hurston looked to redefine the legacy of Herod, who reigned as king of Judaea from 37 BCE to 4 BCE. In a 1953 letter to her editor Hurston wrote, "You have no idea the great amount of research that I have done on this man. No matter who talks about him, friend or foe, Herod is a magnificent character."

And today's reading of the Gospel touched on Herod's slaughter of the innocents. I keep saying this, Hurston is very much worth reading. That she was forgotten for so long is a blot on America's literary conscience.

Gallardo: I wanted to talk about Jan. 7 when the novel debuts, which would have been Hurston's 134th birthday. What should the world remember about Hurston?

Plant: She loved life. And she loved humanity. And everything she did, her anthropological work, her work as a novelist, dramatist, her political activism, everything was about having us see one another as different variations of divine expression … We want to remember her as a humanitarian who was courageous in her effort to have us see ourselves, whole and complete. Undiminished.

sch 1/12

5 Reasons Writing Is Important to the World

Here are five reasons writing a story is possibly the most powerful act for good you will ever accomplish in your life.

And they are good reasons. They buoyed my feelings this morning of excruciating pain and disgust.

I came to Leonard Cohen late in life. Of Federico Garcia Lorca, I read his plays in prison. I offer “In love for life”: The poet who changed Leonard Cohen’s life by Callum MacHattie to point out the strange ways inspiration pollinates creativity.

However, decades before, Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca was forging the path upon which Cohen’s lyrics would follow. Lorca was a member of the ‘Generation of ‘27’, a collection of Spanish poets in the 1920s who spearheaded a movement that showcased romance and tragedy through surrealist imagery. While Cohen’s work has carved him an individual lane in contemporary music, he has often cited Lorca’s work as deeply formative in terms of his influence: “I was fifteen when I began to read Federico Garcia Lorca. His poems perhaps have had the greatest influence on my texts. He summoned up a world where I felt at home. His images were sensual and mysterious: ‘throw a fist full of ants to the sun.’ I wanted to be able to write something like that as well”.

Until today, I never heard of Kate Braverman. That I is due to The Paris Review posting her short story Histories of the Undead. I am thinking hard about my prose for "Chasing Ashes". I like Braverman's style - it has an energy that I think mine lacks.

She remembers now, in the long mornings when Flora and Bob are gone, that she always detested fragments. Or more accurately, the need to order them, to invent a spine, a progression, a curve that resolves.

The Paris Review also posted a link to Kate Braverman Is Dead by Leah Mensch. I like Ms. Mensch's prose, too.

In the photo, she stands in front of a shop window, naturally disinterested. “Beverly Hills,” the sign reads. It’s one of the only shots I’ve ever seen where she looks relaxed, her hands in her pockets. She wears a skirt long over her knees, pulled up to her waist, fastened with a belt. She’s thin, but her cheeks are full. She’s just published her first book of poetry, Milk Run, and her debut was a success: her friends at Momentum Press had underestimated the print demand. Open, all open the places. Never mind that she’s going to walk home through a dark and filthy LA alleyway. Never mind that afterward, she’ll heat speed over an open flame, because the world, for the first time, has made space for her. Los Angeles’s streets overflow with art and literature, and her mind, full of sex and rage and sprawling sentences, is not only tolerated, but, at last, celebrated. “She has,” a critic wrote, “come to a place on the narrow landscape of American poetry where her art and talents cannot be denied.”

For the next forty years, she’ll struggle to fit more than an arm and the backside of her torso into this space. She’ll try everything: Prozac, Lithium, hiding her breasts, pulling her shirt over her head on the Venice boardwalk. Her future efforts will be deemed too desperate, too ambitious, her fiction’s protagonists — double-fisting a syringe and a pen, leaving men behind, gasping for air — too intense and severe. Her rage and her obstinacy, which will drive her work, will trap her, too. “Girl child of the already decomposing streets of Los Angeles,” she’ll later call this 1977 self, with all her bursting naiveté.

From what I read about Braverman, another American writer ignored by America.

So much of her work was born from this: her desire to make a man sit down. Across four decades, she would publish twelve books — poems and short stories, novels and a memoir — all of which are populated with unorthodox women. A revulsion toward conventional womanhood drives the rage in her writing. Womanhood should, she believed, confer outlaw status; it should encompass everything from single motherhood to murder, creation to destruction, the full alphabet of human possibility. Central to her narratives are characters with addictions or criminal records, or who court instability — people who, like herself, have a penchant for danger, a penchant for pain. Sex, pain intermingling with pleasure, were regular subjects. Intimacy and sentimentality were not: “you never understood this man / or why you need him,” she wrote. “Surely another could have tied your wrists / and made your hidden parts open, glistening.” Elsewhere, she wrote about rejecting men’s company altogether: “by choice I sleep alone.” 

And people wonder why women got angry at us men:

Like Palm Latitudes, Squandering the Blue failed to satisfy the publishing world. Though some of Braverman’s female contemporaries, like Kathy Acker and Mary Gaitskill, were gaining momentum, the ‘80s were still largely dedicated to literary men. “If I were male,” Braverman said, “[the writing] would be normal. But good girls don’t write about drugs, single motherhood, and rage.” That she had deliberately rejected fluency in the publishing industry’s language, choosing instead to stand on her own power and intellect, was a point of pride. She’d expected some reward for it, but instead — perhaps because of some convergence of her subject matter, her womanhood, and her temperament — Braverman struggled to regain a foothold. And it made her angry. Angry that she’d been left behind by the Ackers and Gaitskills, that she’d been rejected by their publishers. Angrier still that men like Bukowski, who was then publishing about a book a year, were celebrated and revered for their writing about addiction. Bukowski also, around this time, gave an on-camera interview during which he kicked his soon-to-be wife and called her a whore.

I sit here amazed by her story. 

sch 1/13

 Back in the archive, I posted about Lincoln Michel inveighing against novels slavishly imitating film. He posted a link to an earlier entry in this discussion, Your Novel Should Be More Like Moby-Dick. When I was filling the holes in my literary education during my prison stay, I began noticing the differences between Nineteenth Century novels and those of the Twentieth Century. I put this down to film coming into its own after 1915. Check out the difference between Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace and James Jones's From Here to Eternity - in terms of themes, but as to the visuals contained in the stories. Jones's novel was filmed much more easily than ever has been the case of War and Peace. Hemingway and Hammett are much easier adapted to film.

The obsession with plot movement rendered through televisual scenes at the expense of other pleasures seems a very modern and very American attitude. I have to imagine much of it comes from the domination of Hollywood in American culture, which has passed down many “rules” of storytelling to other mediums. While I don’t necessarily agree with those rules for filmmaking anyway, they’re bizarre to apply to novels. Many of the film and TV rules for storytelling have to do with the basic constraints of filmmaking. Primarily, it costs a lot of money. And film is a visual medium where story is conveyed by actors moving and talking. But novels are not bound by production costs, fitting in commercial breaks, or the need to convey story only through actors’ actions and dialogue.

A novel should lean into the pleasures and possibilities of a novel, I say. The novel is an explosive, expansive, and exuberant form. It can encompass anything. Certainly early novels like Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy knew this, as did modernists like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Such writers leaned into the varied possibilities of fiction and were always willing, even eager, to shift form and style.

sch 1/14

Reading Book Reviews and Getting Ideas For All My Troubles

 Rachel Cusk intrigues me, for all I think she is not my cup of tea. When I started working on fiction again, I realized there was more to the novel than what I had realized when I was young (yeah, I was pretty dim for all of having read The Sound and The Fury, The Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man, Raintree County and Slaughterhouse Five before I graduated high school; only Faulkner and Vonnegut had been required by a class.) Cusk seems to be the darling of the cutting edge. So, I read her reviews and think I should read her and yet I am not sure if I am too old, too set on what I want to say for her to teach me anything.

Parade by Rachel Cusk review – cold visions of chaos

In the last section, the narrative “I” multiplies to “we”, in vigil at their mother’s deathbed. This “we” could be a mad and fractured self, it could be inclusive, universal – it could be both. The narrator notes that people expect “a storyteller to demonstrate his mastery and control by resolving the confusion and ambiguity of reality, not deepening it”. This deepening of chaos is Cusk’s artistic project here, and she delivers it coldly. No doubt she’s pausing now to observe our pain.

Not that  A scream heard behind the glass: The logical terminus of Rachel Cusk’s journey in selfhood by Nat Segnit does not reinforce my doubts.

And yet the power of Parade resides less in these gestures at affectlessness than in their incomplete realization, in the tension between the efforts by the authorial voice to rid itself of affect and its inability (or reluctance) to do so. At its best, the prose has a quality of muted intensity to it, like a scream heard behind glass. Much as the recently bereaved, plural narrator of the closing chapter persists in confessing to their indifference – “at the news of her death we felt nothing, and understood that to have felt nothing was the greatest tragedy that could have befallen us, for its effect on us could only be to reveal greater depths and breadths of non-feeling” – it is a peculiarly emotive indifference. The “we” has recognized the impossibility of reconciliation now the unloving parent is dead. “What we were grieving was the fact that nothing had changed or been resolved, and that there was no longer the chance to resolve it. We were full of a dark knowledge that had briefly surfaced and over which the waters of time were closing again.” There is a sense in these pages of the novel finally confronting itself, or its real stakes: an acknowledgement of depersonalization or unfeeling rendered, despite itself, with great feeling.

Kurt Vonnegut got me to read Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and I think it was a good idea. Not that I have anything like his experiences, but he does not hide the ugliness of life with false pieties. That he was a reprehensible person is a drawback. ”The Moral Delusions of Patriotism: On Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s “War” By Charlie Taylor explains the good and the bad in a review of a new book by Céline, and maybe this paragraph will explain why Céline should be read:

In one passage, as he is being moved by train to a military hospital, the corpses of Ferdinand’s comrades materialize around him, and he finds himself speaking to them. But “their eyes were closed. They were reproaching me. In short they’d come to keep watch over me,” he speculates. “They said nothing at first, and finally it was Cambelech, who’d gone behind me, who spoke. I wasn’t expecting him: his face was all split in two, his lower jaw was hanging in disgusting shreds.” Using his hands to make his mouth work, Cambelech tells Ferdinand, “We’re not happy, no we’re not, that’s not the kind of story we need.”

I read Kevin Barry's Night Boat to Tangier and thought this was a guy to watch. He has a new book and here is a review, The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry review – fast and loose on the frontiers of America.

Tom and Polly hatch a plan involving arson, theft of a chunk of cash, and an escape out west, and the main action of the novel is under way. And as the lines quoted here suggest, this is a book where everything springs alive from the page, so you need to take it slowly. Doing so gives the short atmospheric scenes time to marinate in the mind and adds an epic feel despite the novel’s brevity; the style, peppered with run-on sentences and hardly any commas, has a dash of Cormac McCarthy and Charles Portis to it.

***

But Barry doesn’t write according to the rules. The fun of the romp recedes and the closing chapters offer a different, satisfying register in a minor key, a break from the pace but with new depth. It’s a risk, but that is what Barry’s writing is all about, after all. He has made it pay off before, and he does it again here. 

Risk. That appeals to me, even in my new reformed life. The differences between 2009 and 2024 are many, but a big one is now I do not mind taking risks that will create rather than be self-indulgent self-destructiveness.

I close with another bit of controversy, James Campbell's Best Western? A controversial novel of the American frontier. 

To begin with the assertion that Angle of Repose is a great novel of the American frontier is to go looking for trouble. Wallace Stegner’s story, set largely on the last unsettled territories of the West, was first published in 1971. It moves forwards by way of two parallel narratives, one taking place around the time of the novel’s composition, the other a century earlier – not unlike the plan John Fowles devised for The French Lieutenant’s Woman in 1969.

I read Angle of Repose while in prison, before learning of the controversy about plagiarism, and I would read it again.

sch 6/17