Sniff the Light Fantastic

Metropolis

2011-08-03T20:32:00.021-05:00

Last year the tireless folks at Kino on Video released a new version of the Fritz Lang film Metropolis, only eight years after their much-lauded "restored authorized edition" of the same movie. I recently watched my copy again and felt inspired to write up a little something about it for those who might not be familiar with this interesting piece of film history.

Most people are probably dimly aware that Metropolis is a famous science fiction film from the silent era, but not everyone knows its tortuous and larger-than-life story. The film was made in Germany in 1927 and was directed by the great Fritz Lang, who at the time was considered one of the preeminent filmmakers of his country and perhaps the world. Lang had had an international hit with Die Nibelungen three years earlier, and his new project, a film about an impending class war in a futuristic society, was to be one of the most ambitious movies made to date. It was budgeted at 1.5 million marks but ended up costing 5.3 million, and the finished product clocked in at two hours and thirty-three minutes. It featured gargantuan sets, 36,000 extras, and state-of-the-art special effects that frankly still look pretty damn cool.

The movie was given a limited release in Berlin with much celebratory hype, but to everyone's surprise it received only mixed reviews. Panicked that they might not even recoup their production costs, the studio decided that the film might draw a larger audience upon wider release if the running time was trimmed down (the American distributor, Paramount, had already chopped it up for its own audiences), and so they excised more than half an hour from it before distributing it to the rest of Germany and the world. Almost a quarter of the film was cut out and destroyed, and some of the intertitles were also replaced to remove certain overtones that could be interpreted as Communistic (i.e., pro-labor).

In the end Metropolis was a financial disaster, and it came close to bankrupting one of the most powerful and prestigious movie studios outside of Hollywood. The film made an impression on moviegoers, however, and for the remainder of the century slowly degenerating prints of the various truncated versions continued to be screened in revival houses and film schools. I saw it myself, but despite my high regard for Fritz Lang I never thought much of it; it seemed simplistic and naive, and frankly even a little dull; it was as though there just wasn't enough for the mind to grasp onto. To me it was one of life's typical ironies that the director's most dull and pretentious film had somehow become his most famous.

All that was to change. In the late 1980s work began at the F.W. Murnau Foundation/Transit Films to compile the best possible negatives from all the various versions of the film in order to make a restored version; meanwhile, the orginial score and intertitle submission to the German censors were found, allowing the film historians to be able to rehabilitate the story and at least sketch out the missing plot elements. The result that debuted in 2001 was amazing—not only was the picture crisp and bright, but by adding improved intertitles and filling in the gaps in the plot with still photographs and summaries of missing scenes one now at least got a sense of the larger story with more thematic elements and fuller detail.

One might think that story would end there, but fate had one more card to play. It turned out that way back when the film was first released in 1927 an Argentine film distributor had seen the full-length version in Berlin and had acquired a copy of that cut for screening in South America. Afterward this print lay in a vault for forty-odd years until being sloppily transferred to poorer-quality 16 MM film stock for fear that the silver nitrate original would cause a fire. To make a long story short, this print was discovered in 2008, and suddenly now there were materials to reconstruct almost all of Lang's original film.

A remarkable journey! It almost boggles the mind to think that film enthusiasts have literally scoured the earth for pieces of this lost and ruined work, and what was taken apart in 1927 could be pieced back together into some semblance of the original a long lifetime later.

I can say now, too, how wrong I was about Metropolis. It's strange to think that adding footage to a film that I had thought was boring could make it an interesting one, but it's true. The minor characters now finally seem like real individuals, continuity is improved everywhere, and there are completely new settings and sequences that round out the imaginary world and make it whole. Most importantly, the restoration of the film's rhythm has transformed a pencil sketch into a living story that unfolds in its own time.

Now, before I let myself get carried away with praise I must admit that there yet remain core elements that are, shall we say, politically facile, and beyond that the film might be a classic example of what people love to call a "flawed masterpiece." If anything, Metropolis is too big: the crowds, spectacle and melodrama are exhausting, and and when jaw-dropping shots are piled one on top of the other you run the risk of having the jaw drop all the way down into a yawn.

Regardless, this restored Metropolis further entrenches my long-held belief that Fritz Lang was one of the most important directors in film history, perhaps second only to D.W. Griffith in terms of shaping our narrative film language. What's odd about Lang, though, is that it can be hard to put one's finger on precisely what those contributions are. We can marvel at F.W. Murnau's evocative camerawork in The Last Laugh, we can talk about Eisenstein's innvations in editing, but what is it about Fritz Lang's films from the 1920s that makes them feel so darn modern?

I think the answer is twofold, the first part being the director's understanding of kineticism and rhythm (which was all-too-often absent in a medium that had not quite yet shaken itself free of its theater roots), and the second being what you could call "efficient film storytelling." Regarding the latter, there is an old story that Sergei Eisenstein acquired a copy of Lang's Dr. Mabuse Der Spieler and as an exercise took the film apart into its consituent pieces and then put it back together, much in the way that a novice mechanic might take apart a motor and then rebuild it. Even if the story is apocryphal, it still makes a compelling point, which is that Lang's films have the tight precision of a stopwatch, and this is precisely why the editing of Metropolis damaged the story so badly in 1927.

Anyway, all this is a roundabout way of saying that I would strongly recommend that anyone with even a passing interest in the history of film language (or really just anyone who has the guts to try something different) check out Kino on Video's "Complete Metropolis" DVD, which is also available on Netflix. Far from being slow and old-fashioned, viewers might instead be shocked by the speed and strangeness of the film, with its images of rioting crowds, rooftop battles, demonic robots, chases through catacombs, wicked industrialists and the giant specter of death towering over a city cathedral. Forgive the occasional goofiness, take frequent breaks during the nine-way climax, and try to wrap your head around the idea that Metropolis doesn't look like a blockbuster action movie, blockbuster action movies look like Metropolis.

Emir Kusturica Film Festival

2010-11-19T12:27:00.007-05:00

In 1997, my then-girlfriend-now-wife and I went to see a three-hour Serbian movie called Underground. We knew almost nothing about it except that it was about Yugoslavia and that it was supposed to be good. We did that sort of thing a lot back in those days. Anyway, when the lights came up afterwards my date said, in a very matter-of-fact way, "that was the best movie I've ever seen." I was pretty close to thinking the same thing as well; the movie had had an epic feel to it that was different from anything I had ever experienced before. I actually felt as though I had lived through decades of history, and, as sappy as it might sound, I was feeling a bit tearful at having to say goodbye to the characters. The director's name was Emir Kusturica, and for a while I went out of my way to look for more of his stuff. I later got to see Black Cat, White Cat at the New York Film Festival, and I was also able to rent a copy of Arizona Dreams, the only film he ever made in America, but neither of these were quite at the same level of Underground even if there was a unique sensibility there that I enjoyed.

Flash forward to a few months ago, when I stumbled across the VHS tape of the movie that I had bought all those years ago. I had only watched it once, maybe twice (as much as I loved it, it’s long and somewhat exhausting) so I figured I probably ought to give it another go before my VCR conked out and all my VHS tapes turned into garbage. Meanwhile it occurred to me that I also ought to take advantage of my Netflix subscription to dig up whatever other films by the director that were available.

So, anyway, I had a modest Emir Kusturica film festival, which was made up of three movies: Do You Remember Dolly Bell? (1981), When Father Was Away on Business (1985) and Underground (1987).

Do You Remember Dolly Bell? is the coming-of-age story of a teenager living in a small village outside of Sarajevo in the 1970s. A local thug asks the boy to hide a young prostitute in the second story of his family's chicken coop, and, as one might expect, the young man falls in love with the girl and must later face the harsh realities associated with her situation. The youth also comes into contact with the political realities of the time; his father is a passionate communist who is yet disaffected with the political regime in Yugoslavia, and so is nursing a wounded idealism perhaps not unlike a young man who has fallen in love with a whore.

Though the film has warmth and charm, it also has an aimless, wandering feel to it. I got the sense watching it that the director was still a bit green at that time and still finding his way as a storyteller. While the movie certainly wasn't bad, I wouldn't recommend it to a casual viewer who didn't have a particular interest in Kusturica or Yugoslavia.

The second film I watched was made four years later, and the improvement in the director's ability to carry the audience along with his story was remarkable. This time the main character was a young boy growing up in the late 1940s or early 1950s. His father makes a casual disparaging remark about a Soviet political cartoon and is sent to a work camp by the local party leader; complicating matters is the fact that the local party leader is the boy’s uncle on his mothers’ side. An even further entanglement is that the uncle had taken an interest in the father’s mistress just before he sent him away. Was it really a idealogical ostracizing, or was it something else? It is a difficult time for all involved, but eventually the political tide turns; Yugoslavia distances itself from Moscow, and the father’s black mark vanishes in a puff of nothing. However, the bitterness of lost time remains.

That may all sound like rather grim fare, but the film is much richer than that, as it is a human story with a political backdrop rather than a political polemic disguised as a human story. There’s warmth and humor, and I felt myself becoming absorbed into the lives of the people as they celebrated their happy moments and found their way through the difficult ones. There were times when I had to concentrate to follow what was going on, and times when I had the suspicion that I was lacking some piece of cultural context that would shed more light on what I was seeing, but regardless I thought it was a fantastic movie. I would recommend it enthusiastically to everyone, although there were a couple of scenes that people with “aggressively modest” sensibilities might find objectionable.

I finished up my mini-festival with a re-viewing of Underground. The story follows a love triangle through more than fifty years of history, from the German invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941 to the terrible Bosnian War of the 1990s. The three main characters are the larger-than-life “Blackie,” his charismatic and conniving best friend Marko, and the beautiful but cowardly actress Natalija. In the first hour of the film we see Marko and Blackie channel their everyday criminal activities into supporting the resistance movement, while at the same time Blackie tries to wrest his mistress Natalija away from an admiring Nazi officer. The adventures are wild and hilarious, with bombs and brawls and prison escapes, and as the film moves on into darker territory these early scenes take on a kind of mythic quality as of some distant golden days of the past. The long middle of the film depicts the cold war in a kind of surreal, symbolic way; the hero Blackie is in hiding in an enormous underground complex while Marko convinces him and his followers that the war is still going on; meanwhile Marko has become a powerful politico under Tito, and he has taken Natalija for himself. The lies and deceit collide when Marko and Natalija must go underground to celebrate the wedding of Blackie’s son, who was an infant when the film started and is now a grown man. When Blackie realizes that he has lost Nataljia, he and his son escape to put an end to World War II once and for all, though twenty years too late. The results are bizarre, hilarious and sad. The end of the film brings us to the present, where the Bosnian war rages. Blackie is a cold-blooded militant who fights for the sake of fighting, while Marko and Nataljia have become profiteering arms dealers who are wanted by the UN as war criminals. It is as though time and sorrow has caused them to become the worst possible versions of themselves. However, this tragic ending is softened by a sweet coda which is one of the most touching scenes I have ever seen on a movie screen.

According to Wikipedia, the movie was originally a miniseries on Serbian television that aired in 1995, and that the directors’ cut of the theatrical version was a whopping 320 minutes. The film was chopped down to almost half that length, and as a result it is at times disjointed; strange ideas will suddenly appear and then be quickly left behind, and the viewer becomes unsure as to how much importance should be attributed to what he is seeing. It is also unquestionably an exhausting film to watch; at times it is almost too frenetic, with too much information being thrown at the viewer too fast, but then on the other hand it also lingers on the crazy set-piece of the rollicking underground wedding for what seems like a small eternity.

That said, I think it is an incredible film. The images and ideas are wild and wonderful, and they tell the story in a way that seems mythical but at the same time very real and human. There are tigers and monkeys and tanks and brass bands and flying brides and watermelons and birth and death and murder and suicide and war and politics and singing and pretty much every other thing that one could think of. It also helps that the three leads are incredibly charismatic in their roles; the sly huckster Malko is impossible to forget, and Mirjana Jokovic’s performance is hysterically funny; she could easily hold her own against Charlie Chaplin in a mugging contest. I wish I there were a handy youtube video of the scene where she is dancing around in a black slip to Yugoslavian pop music and whacking Marko on the head with the heel of her shoe.

Anyway, it's becoming a very hard-to-find film now, so if you ever get a chance to see it, I recommend you grab the opportunity. It's long, it's demanding, but it's also sorta kinda wonderful.

Here's a taste; the trailer is Spanish, but that's okay because there isn't any dialogue in the clips:

NYFF '95–'99

2010-04-08T14:45:00.009-05:00

From 1995 to 1999 I was lucky enough to be able to go to the New York Film Festival and see some cool & different movies. This past week I was cleaning out my closet and discovered that I still had the Playbills; I kinda want to chuck 'em, but I also feel like I want some record of what I saw, if only for my own entertainment. Well, anyway, here it is:

1995

Georgia. Probably my wife picked this one. I remember thinking that the main character was just too unlikeable, and I've pretty much forgotten it all except for the cringe-inducing concert towards the end.

The Neon Bible. I wanted to see this one because it was based on an early novel by John Kennedy Toole, author of Confederacy of Dunces. It was surprisingly dull.

Guimba. I figured the film festival was an opportunity to see really far-out stuff that I wouldn't be able to find anywhere else, so I was really excited about this bizarre-sounding African movie. Afterwards I had to admit that I just didn't get it.

Cyclo. I think? I have no memory of this film, though I do remember wanting to go.

Open City. An old Rossellini film that was screened. Afterwards they announced that Isabella Rossellini was in attendance. I turned around and thought "well, I don't see Isabella Rossellini, but who is that gorgeous woman up there?" No, actually that was her. I understand why they call some women "radiant" now...it was like she was a source of light. Later when I was leaving the theater I happened to glance around and she was walking behind me; she was so gorgeous it was actually kind of unnerving.

1996

Secrets & Lies. We took my mother to see this one, as she is a big Mike Leigh fan. It was one of the better Mike Leigh movies that I've seen; I seem to recall that he kept the cello music down to the bare minimum.

Sling Blade. An amazing performance by Billy Bob Thornton, back when no one knew who Billy Bob Thorton was. If anything it's almost too show-offy. It was a pretty good movie, as I recall.

Breaking the Waves. I was completely knocked out by this one; it was almost like an ordeal, painful but also very beautiful and moving. My reaction afterwards was "that was fantastic, and I hope I never see it again."

Underground. Afterwards my wife said "that was the best movie I've ever seen," and I was debating with myself as to whether I agreed with her; certainly it was the best movie I saw in my five years of going to the festival. It was epic in a way like I'd never experienced before; I felt like I had lived another lifetime's worth of living watching it. Years later I got the movie on VHS and tried to watch it again, but sadly it didn't quite capture that same feeling; maybe long movies work better in the theater, since there's nothing around to distract you. It's two hours and forty-nine minutes, and I've since learned that it was put together from a five-h0ur TV miniseries. Anyway, I keep reminding myself that I ought to hunt down more Kusturica movies.

Movies that I didn't see at the festival but saw afterwards in the theater: Le Voleurs, The People vs. Larry Flynt.

1997

The Kingdom Part 2. "Danish scum!!!" Over four and a half hours long, and I loved every minute of it. Since then I've come to feel like von Trier was too hostile to the audience with this one, going too far with the grotesquery and absurdity, but at the time I was just happy to see all the zany characters doing their thing. For weeks afterwards I kept hearing "hepatosarcoma" in my head.

The Saragossa Manuscript. A Polish movie from 1965 which is completely off the wall. Unfortunately, the experience was practically ruined by the woman behind me, who kept coughing into my hair. I've gotten it on DVD since then and re-watched it a couple of times; I even read the novel, which is from 1815 and which is also completely off the wall. I wish I knew someone I could show this to, just so I could have the pleasure of watching them turn to me and say "what the hell is going on with this crazy-ass movie?"

Hana-bi. A lot of people like this movie; I hated it. It bounced back and forth between dull, drippy sentimentality and "cool" violence. I wanted to stand up and yell at the guy's wife, "come on, just die already!"

The Apostle. This was not what you would call a happy-fun-time movie, but I remember that it was well made and engrossing. I heard that they re-edited it before the official theater release, so we got to see a version that no other movie-goers saw. Too bad it was thirteen years ago and I don't remember anything about it.

Some movies that I didn't see at the festival but on saw in the theater or on video afterwards: Year of the Horse, Taste of Cherry (awful), Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, The Sweet Hereafter, Boogie Nights (fantastic).

1998

Strike. Sergei Eisenstein's first film. Had I seen it before? I don't think so. There was an accompanying score played by two percussionists and a keyboardist. It was incredibly good for a movie from 1924.

Gods and Monsters. Forgettable, apparently.

Black Cat, White Cat. More Kusturica. I had high hopes for this one after the amazing Underground, but it was just a goofy bit of fluff in comparison. Still, it was funny and charming in its own way. I should track it down and watch it again.

Movies I saw afterwards in the theater or on video: The Celebration (really good), Happiness (ouch), Rushmore (my least favorite Wes Anderson movie, but still pretty great).

1999

Beau Travail. Holy cow, did I ever hate this navel-gazing movie. What the hell even happens? And how do you come up with a faulty compass? A broken compass, sure, but a faulty one? Like, one that sometimes points North and sometimes doesn't? Or one that points East? How does that work, exactly? I guess you just can't trust those cheap magnets.

There is such a thing as a crappy art film, but the problem is that a lot of people don't expect art films to make sense anyway, so they say, "well, I didn't understand it, but I guess it was pretty great!" I mean, heck, there were all these cool shots of guys doing calisthenics in the desert, that's pretty interesting, right? And when the guy suddenly starts dancing frenetically in the disco, that probably means something important, right? Yeah, or not.

We had already moved to Connecticut by this time, so I guess I only came in to see one movie.

Movies I saw later on video: Princess Mononoke, Being John Malkovich, Dogma.

So, there it is, saved for posterity. I miss those days of fanatical movie-going, to be sure, but it's also nice to be a bit more centered in myself and in-the-moment. That reminds me: time for more cleanup.

Spring Thinking

2010-02-23T08:39:00.003-05:00

I was thinking today about how much I disliked Easter as a kid. There's a whole cluster of childhood sensations that still comes back to me: uncomfortable clothes, pastel colors, soggy pale daylight, dreary extra-long church service, the blank dishwater smell of my grandmother's apartment. I see the pictures and every year was the same: kielbasa, rye bread with butter, Kosciusko mustard and kapusta. That sounds really good to me now, but back then the overload of savory-sweet flavor was strange.

It's ironic, the disconnect between the message and the messenger. Underneath everything it's all about death and rebirth, and I see so clearly that the world needs death and rebirth, it's one of the great central gears that makes everything turn and function. And yet, the Catholic church never dies; it's like a living relic. It seems to believe it ought to be immortal, and I think even God scoffs at that. It grasped too much, it's afraid to let go, and it drags everyone down with its weight.

I want to celebrate in a different way this year, but how? March 20, the vernal equinox, falls on a Saturday, so that's good, but we need something to be reborn. Maybe we need to rebirth ourselves...a long hike in the rain and cold, but with food, music and games waiting at the end of it. Kielbasa, rye bread with butter, Kosciusko mustard and kapusta....

A Puzzle

2009-10-02T07:43:00.002-05:00

I created this puzzle a couple of years ago, but it didn't get published. Click on the picture to see it full-size. There's a one-word answer. It's a little tricky, but it's doable. Can you figure it out?

Nature Happens, or The Best-tasting Bug in Town

2009-09-08T09:22:00.003-05:00

Blue jays are ordinarily pretty noisy birds, but yesterday there was a racket coming from a tree behind my house that was excessive even by their high standards. It was two or more jays squawking loudly, and as I looked over to find out what the deal was I saw one of the birds flop down from one branch to another in a clumsy flutter and with a startled chirrup that I assume translated to "Ow! I mean, I meant to do that." At the same time I became aware of a loud, high-pitched buzzing, like something you might hear from a high-voltage electrical device that was getting ready to explode. The buzz got louder and started moving in my direction, and then there was a loud thunk! on the porch post right next to my shoulder. After a stunned pause, the buzzing continued on away from me, and I just glimpsed an oversized bug droning off into the lower branches of a spruce twelve or fifteen yards away.

The blue jays had the bug's number, though. Two of them flew to the top of the spruce and started squawking again while another flew down to where the bug was. There was some more rough-and-tumble bonking of branches and then the buzz got quieter and stopped.

I don't know if the birds disliked that particular kind of bug or if they just really really wanted to eat it, but the whole thing was like a sloppy mob hit; it was like when a stool pigeon escapes from a basement and runs down the middle of the street shrieking while a bunch of freaked-out gangsters chase after him with whatever blunt objects happened to be nearby, like hammers or a tennis racket.

Maybe I've just been watching a little too much film noir lately.

Battleship Potemkin

2009-09-01T13:22:00.003-05:00

My brother-in-law and his wife gave me a copy of the Kino DVD of Battleship Potemkin for my birthday, and I watched it earlier this week. It's a restoration that was done a few years ago in Germany, based on the Soviet reconstruction of the film that came out in the 1970s. The DVD features improved picture quality and a new soundtrack, the latter being an adaptation of the original film score from the Berlin premiere.

I have a VHS copy of the '70s Soviet reconstruction, which up to that point was arguably the best version of the film available and the closest approximation to what the "director's cut" might have looked like.* However, as the documentary in the supplementary materials explains, the Soviets did not feel that it was fitting to have the score to their national treasure be written by a foreigner, so they substituted Edmund Meisel's score with music by Shostakovich. The problem is that rather than tailoring the music to the film, they tailored the film to the music, specifically by slowing the film down down in certain places, sometimes dramatically.

The Kino version shows the film at the correct speed, and the difference is amazing. Suddenly the film is a lot more kinetic; the screen is constantly in motion, and there is a sense of rhythm that moves everything along. By comparison the old Soviet version is dull and lugubrious, since parts of the film are literally in slow motion; this is particularly the case in Act III, in which the people of Odessa come to see the dead sailor lying on the waterfront. In the film we see throngs of people moving towards the water and passing by the dead man, and in the Soviet version this forceful, wave-like movement is slowed to a crawl and the film all but grinds to a halt. It's just plain boring.

The new version, however, crackles with constant, clashing movement across the screen, and now we can better see Battleship Potemkin for what it is, not a boring old artifact from back when people didn't know how to have fun, but something which was experimental, avant garde and really kind of far out there. Since the 1800s the cinema had slowly been extricating itself from the swampy legacy of the theater and trying to find its own language and storytelling tools, but Eisenstein's movies were like a rocket sled barreling off into the new era. We are no longer a fly on a fourth wall, watching a scene play out from a distance and only occasionally buzzing in to get a closer look, instead we are everywhere, seeing the action from every angle, flashing up and down and back and forth. Instead of being built in massive clunky clods, Battleship Potemkin is an intricate mosaic of fragments which, when viewed from the right distance, tell an intense and detailed story. One of the most famous examples is the critical moment of a sailor reaching his breaking point and smashing an officer's dinner plate; instead of having this act be all one camera shot, it is broken up into seven or eight smaller shots that are cut together quickly. It was completely unnecessary, and yet incredibly effective; the cutting up of the motion creates a a sense of frenzy and violence that would be hard to create otherwise. It transforms a hissy fit into a revolution.

So with this new DVD release one of the most important films in the history of the medium is suddenly much, much more watchable for the average viewer. You might even say it's entertaining. It's still a tricky movie, though; beyond the uncomfortable ickiness of the propaganda, there is also sometimes a kind of intellectual coldness to the film. The movie is not really about characters, but rather about "the people," whoever they are; individuals tend not to fare very well in Battleship Potemkin, and that can be jarring to those of us who have grown up with the opposite propaganda, that the individual is everything. Also, there are times when the action on screen borders on abstract dance, like Man Ray, but with sailors instead of nails.

Still, the Odessa steps sequence is a jaw-dropper, even for modern audiences, and those who have only seen censored versions will really be in for a shock. It's violent, man.

*The film had been recut and censored many times over the years, with no copy of the original cut surviving; the soviets made a reconstruction by following a listing of the individual shots.

Seven Movies

2009-08-24T09:18:00.007-05:00

I've been on a movie-watching binge lately (partly because I've been suffering from a really nasty cold), and I've seen some interesting and unusual stuff.

Red Dust (1932)
Clark Gable plays Dennis Carson, the rugged owner of a rubber plantation somewhere in Indochina who has a torrid affair with the well-bred, fish-out-of-water, good-girl wife of one of his employees. He vows to her that he will tell her husband all so that they can be together forever...will he trigger a violent crisis, or will he pull himself away from the brink?

The movie is a straight-up fantasy, and as such it was pretty entertaining, but it was also fascinating to watch because of what it says about the people of the time period (or any time period, maybe). Obviously, there is a lot here for the ladies, and the film is careful to allow the young wife to succumb to forbidden passion while at the same time making sure she doesn't come off as a tramp; after all, she firmly rejects Carson's advances—ever so many times!—but her heart is touched by his hidden good nature when he nurses her husband back to health, and then she is literally swept off her feet when he rescues her from a rampaging hurricane; breathless, soaking wet, held tight in his manly arms, how could she resist? Interestingly, though, the film is as much a fantasy for the men: out there in the wild, Carson is the boss; there is only him and his job, with none of society's rules holding him back. His temper flares, he throws things, he bellows at the inferior people around him, and it is a pure struggle of man versus nature. He also has a relationship with a spitfire prostie (with the requisite cardioaureate medical condition) played by the sexily sexful Jean Harlow, and there is a certain amount of pleasurable hair-pulling and ass-slapping involved.

What's also interesting is the contrast between Carson's life and the life of the wife before she traveled with her husband to Asia; Carson is entirely outside of society and is a man without peers, whereas the wife is deeply enmeshed within society, to a degree that perhaps does not even exist anymore here in the fragmented twenty-first century. Basically what the movie is saying is that back in those days you had to travel to the other side of the earth to get laid without the whole town finding out about it.

I See a Dark Stranger, a.k.a. The Adventuress (1946)
Deborah Kerr is Bridie Quilty, an idealistic young Irishwoman who hates the English so vehemently that she volunteers as a spy for the Nazis. Now, that might sound rather heavy, but there is a charming and humorous touch to the film, and Bridie's naiveté and her dangerous predicament are played for laughs as well as for gasps; think The Trouble with Harry, North by Northwest, or one of the screenwriters' other films, The Lady Vanishes.

Anyway, the movie was extremely well-made and incredibly entertaining, and I was amazed that I'd never heard of it before. I would recommend it highly to anyone...except maybe Irish nationalists who might disagree with the film's chripy assumption that if everyone will just stop fighting and make friends things will work out for the best. Incidentally, Captain Goodhusband is one of my new favorite characters in cinema.

In a Lonely Place (1950)
Humphrey Bogart plays a loner Hollywood screenwriter who unexpectedly finds himself accused of murder. His beautiful next-door neighbor, played by Gloria Grahame, provides him with an alibi, and after a couple of subsequent dates the pair fall in love and get all frisky with each other. The suspicion of murder won't quite go away, however, and suddenly Laurel and the audience find themselves asking, wait—did he kill that girl?

Overall I'd say that this was an average thriller, nothing you'd have to run out and see, but it did have one really neat thing about it, which was that the movie starts out with Humphrey Bogart's character as the apparent hero, but then gradually switches alliances, alienating us from him and making us more concerned for the young woman's safety. Bogart's performance is perfectly done, and, in case you didn't get the hint from The Caine Mutiny, when Bogart wants to be creepy, he's really creepy. Like, "keep that guy away from the pets."

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)
I'd seen this one many times before, of course, but a recent online discussion about its awesomeness made me want to watch it again. What needs to be said? If you've never seen this movie, you should watch it the first chance you get, even if you don't like Westerns. Man is it great! My wife always rolls her eyes at Eli Wallach and insists that he's chewing the scenery. She's crazy. "There are two kinds of people in this world, my friend...."

I think back in the day people used to just look on this as a guilty pleasure, a popcorn movie that you wouldn't necessarily tell anyone you were watching for the tenth time, but it seems like nowadays everyone just agrees that it's a classic. That makes me really happy.

Le Samouraï (1967)
If I called this a "stylish existential gangster movie," I would probably be the 500th person to say exactly that, but really that kind of nails it. I liked it because, despite the title, it doesn't glorify the main character, and really the cop is just as interesting as the killer. Also, a lot of it is just plain cool-looking; the atmosphere is everything here.

Women in Love (1969)
There is some very strenuous acting in this movie, and a lot of important-sounding speeches. "I want to know love completely, a new kind of love, a love that transcends all barriers. I want to breathe love, I want to drown in it, I want to be born into a shining light of loving love in loveliness!" Oof. The characters are all listless, self-absorbed and unlikable, and while stuff happens, there's a falseness to everything and it's hard to say why anyone is doing the stuff we're watching them doing. There are some weird and interesting images, and everything has a veneer of importance, but it's all disconnected and empty; compare Polanski's Knife in the Water, which is also about relationships between people, except that at any given moment we know exactly how those relationships are evolving and why the characters are doing what they are doing. Anyway, I thought it was terrible. It's the kind of movie that gives art films a bad name.

Fur (2006)
It's only natural to be curious about the lives of the great artists. What were they like? What of their world? Did they trod the earth like us mere mortals, or was their existence as if on some ether plane, with naught to eat but heavenly ambrosia, every day a kaleidoscope of color and delight?

More specifically, one might wonder what it would be like if photographer Diane Arbus had had a romantic affair with a genetically challenged man who was covered in hair like some kind of afghan hound. The movie "Fur" sets out to tell this story. And it tells the hell out of it.

The movie begins with poor fictionalized Diane (portrayed by Nicole Kidman) having not yet found her muse; she spends her days assisting her average-looking husband in his photography studio, raising her two daughters with good-natured indifference and conveying her artistic and sexual repression to the world by keeping her collars tightly buttoned and sighing in bathrooms. Her life is thrown into turmoil, however, when a mysterious masked man moves into the apartment upstairs. Her curiosity is aroused, and after some minor stalking she discovers the stranger to be a colossal mop of hair piloted from within by an invisible Robert Downey Jr. What woman would not be intrigued by such a creature? The stranger lives in a magical world of whimsy and knickknacks, his apartment full to bursting with beaded curtains, tame animals, incunabula, portraits of famous circus freaks, antique personal irrigation equipment, and quill pens. His friends are giants, dwarves, siamese twins and a woman with no arms who plays the cello with one foot and a chin. Thankfully we only see this armless musician playing pieces which are not very demanding, otherwise she would be obliged to bob her head up and down the strings like some kind of out-of-control chicken. One might well wonder why she didn't just take up the drums instead.

Soon Diane's hubby is getting neglected and the children are wearing potato sacks to school. He tries to entice her back into domesticity by growing a beard, but it's too little too late. Finally in a moment of rapture the dog-man neighbor instructs Diane to shave off his pelt so that the two can be intimate without lapsing into coughing fits or choking on hairballs. She tackles this Herculean task with aplomb, and the viewer is treated to the unforgettable and magnificently unerotic sight of Nicole Kidman shaving a man's hairy ass. Thanks, movie!

Unfortunately, Cousin It's strange genetical condition is also turning his lungs to swiss cheese, and his days are numbered. As a parting gift to Diane, he blows up an air mattress with the last of his strength and presents it to her (no, seriously). Later, after he swims off into the sunset, we see her taking little fugitive whiffs of her hairy boyfriend's diseased final breaths from the air mattress. And they say romance is dead.

In the end the movie is all about a Creative Person Finding Their Muse, and while you'd think that this would be really really interesting, it's really really not; muses are like dreams, in that they are extraordinarily fascinating to the person that they belong to and utterly boring for everyone else. Also, am I the only one bugged that this movie is getting a free ride off of Diane Arbus?

Anyway, here's the scorecard: I See a Dark Stranger and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, great. Le Samouraï and Red Dust, pretty good, glad I saw them. In a Lonely Place, just okay, but kind of interesting. Women in Love and Fur, please, please, make it stop. Next up: the reconstructed Battleship Potemkin. Anchors aweigh!

So, Ulysses

2009-06-07T20:14:00.002-05:00

I first started reading Ulysses as a senior in college, though I didn't make it all the way through; I restarted and finished in 1993, then read it again in the winter of '94–'95. In the years following I picked it up and re-read certain episodes on their own, in addition to reading Ellmann's biography of Joyce. It was something that fascinated me and it was something I admired; it felt good to revisit it and reconnect with where I had been before.

This time through I felt like I saw so much more in the book, and yet at the same time I felt like I saw its weaknesses too; that Joyce was a genius and one of the greatest writers of his time is beyond question, and yet with great genius can come great excesses. There is a feeling of a novel being crushed under its own weight; Joyce continued adding to it practically up until the moment of printing, and we are left with a book which is so thick with tropes and cross-references that a first-time reader will often have no hope of knowing what is going on. There is also an overwhelming feeling of self-absorption and solipsism, not only in the author's alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, but in the author himself; "I suspect, Stephen interrupted, that Ireland must be important because it belongs to me." In addition, the artifice at times becomes artificiality, and the stylistic ideas that Joyce imposes distract and derail us and seem to only serve to draw attention to themselves.

Most of all, Ulysses is often a cruel book; the secondary characters are pushed onto the stage and then undercut like effigies, the pompous, the pathetic, the drunken, the deranged, the self-deceiving, the hopeless, the corrupt, the empty, the falling and lost. Bloom himself is ridiculed and abased in the eyes of others, despite all his good qualities, sometimes ridiculed and abased by the book itself. Is the novel a positive thing, taking the minutiae of the everyman and elevating it to something timeless and universal, or is it negative, taking the timeless and universal and dragging it down into the jakes? The answer, I suppose, is both.

This book, so inward drawn, so obsessive of one place and moment, so obsessive of itself, there is something sad about it—not pathetic, for it is also a grand construction, something huge, a work of magnificence, but in a lot of ways it is the opposite of the Odyssey, for the Odyssey has been carried forward through time, it still has meaning and life, we can still read it and feel all of humanity through it, whereas Ulysses is always turning away, looking backwards, inwards, receding, becoming more and more distant with every moment that we move farther away from June 16, 1904.

Penelope

2009-06-07T18:32:00.003-05:00

Odysseus's reunion with his wife Penelope takes up a good portion of the end of the Odyssey; she is satisfied that the man before her is indeed her husband when he reveals his knowledge of the unusual history of their marriage bed—one of the posts was a living tree that is still rooted in the ground. In Ulysses we have Molly Bloom's internal monologue from her bed; the parallel to the Odyssey is an ironic one, for, unlike Penelope, Molly's bed is secondhand and has had another man in it.

Molly Bloom is a well-drawn, complex and memorable character, and what is remarkable is that Joyce is able to present an unapologetic adulteress who is not simply a villain or the cliché of a woman swept away by her emotions. She recognizes her husband's good points, but she wants another man, and what is interesting is that she has no illusions about Boylan either; though he excites her, he is just a man, and so just as thickheaded and selfish as any other of his gender.

What was interesting reading the episode this time through is that I realized that in the past I had seen things that weren't really there; I had assumed that at heart Molly loved Bloom and that Boylan was a passing fling, but now I don't think that this is really the case. There is no remorse or impending reconciliation; Bloom exasperates her, Boylan is her lover, and there is nothing to suggest that that situation will change. There seems to be a hint of a reconciliation at the very end when she is carried away by the memory of Bloom's proposal of marriage, lying beneath the rhododendrons on the Hill of Howth, overcome by his words and by nature, until we learn that at the deciding moment she thought "as well him as another." It is a bit shocking that the book ends on such a cutting note, and yet it is their moment of union regardless, a sacred moment, "and yes I said yes I will yes."

Incidentally, the ambiguous passage from Ithaca that I mentioned previously is more or less explained in Penelope; the list of men that Bloom reels off were not infatuations of Molly's but rather her "suitors," men who were attracted to her.

Ithaca

2009-06-04T21:29:00.000-05:00

One thing that surprised me when I read the Odyssey is that the famous fantastical exploits at sea actually only take up a small portion of the epic; much more of the story is devoted to the homecoming itself—that is, what Odysseus does when he reaches his native land and how he gets rid of the villainous suitors. The ending can be summarized quickly, though: the hero enters his own house in his beggar disguise, gets a weapon in his hands, and then kills all the suitors with the help of his son and two faithful servants—no easy feat, as there are over a hundred of them.

Did contemporary readers of Ulysses think that Bloom might go home and murder Blazes Boylan, if not with bow and arrow then perhaps with handy shillelagh? Well, he doesn't, if for no other reason than that Boylan has already quit the scene. Instead Bloom brings Stephen home to 7 Eccles Street, and the first part of the episode is taken up with Bloom's apparent rapport with the young man. The two talk about a large number of things, in particular—and most important in terms of the book's themes—the similarities between the Irish and the Jews, in terms of both language (Hebrew and Gaelic) and history (the Irish oppressed at the hands of the English, the Jews oppressed in Egypt and elsewhere). Stephen sings Bloom a folk song about a boy who breaks a Jew's window with a ball, after which the Jew's daughter lures the boy inside and kills him. True to character, Stephen interprets the song in an abstract and reflective way, perhaps drawing a parallel to his adventures earlier that night, whereas of course Bloom is put off by the song. Regardless, Bloom fantasizes of a close friendship with Stephen—his thoughts even touch on the possibility of Stephen marrying his daughter—but at heart I think he knows that it will not be. Stephen, always aloof, declines to stay the night. On his leaving the pair micturate together and gaze up at the stars; as they shake hands they hear the tolling of a bell: 4 o'clock. By coincidence, the bell makes both men think of death: still brooding over his mother, Stephen hears a traditional prayer associated with the last rites, while Bloom hears "heigho, heigho, heigho, heigho," the same words he heard at the ringing of the bells in the episode Hades.

Bloom returns alone. He finds evidence of Blazes Boylan's presence in the house and a mysterious stain on an armchair. Ultimately, however, he accepts the situation. His attitude towards Molly at this moment is interesting: separate, equivocal—he idly considers leaving her or confronting her—but also confident, appreciative, pragmatic, and still attracted. Strangely, there is an ambiguous passage which might suggest that Molly has had many lovers, suitors and/or infatuations in the past. Bloom chuckles to think that each man no doubt thought himself of great importance at that moment, when in fact they were just one term in a series.

There is another subtle parallel to Homer when Bloom opens a drawer filled with mementos of his deceased father, as this echoes Odysseus visiting his own father after the killing of the suitors. We also learn a fair amount of new information about Bloom's history at this point: his father converted from Judaism to Protestantism, and Bloom himself converted to Catholicism when he married Molly. Bloom then thinks back on the day, has idle fantasies about the future, suddenly figures out the answer to a riddle that he had heard thirty years ago ("Where was Moses when the lights when out?"), goes to bed, gives his wife an affectionate kiss on the bum, recounts his day for her when she wakes (with some omissions and fabrications), and falls asleep.

The episode's style is a parody of scientific question and answer, with overblown vocabulary and matter-of-fact tone throughout. It is sometimes hilarious, sometimes aggravating, and sometimes poetic, but the overall effect is that it sets us at a remove from what's going on, as if the hero is fading off into the distance. There is even something melancholy or death-like about the end of the episode; Bloom thinks about his past and about his child; we find out that he has a life insurance policy and that he has already paid for a plot in a cemetery; in the course of becoming drowsy he pictures a heavenly idyllic house in the country, imagines himself wandering among the stars, rises above daily cares, and, in the final moments, becomes like a child again himself.

What universal binomial denominations would be his as entity and nonentity?

Assumed by any or known to none. Everyman or Noman.

Of course there is one last political tidbit here too; as a child Bloom, "in support of his political convictions, had climbed up into a secure position amid the ramifications of a tree on Northumberland road to see the entrance (2 February 1888) into the capital of a demonstrative torchlight procession of 20,000, divided into 120 trade corporations, bearing 2,000 torches in escort of the marquess of Ripon and John Morley." February 2 is also the birthday of one James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, author of Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Exiles, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.

Eumaneus

2009-05-31T22:14:00.001-05:00

Reading the Odyssey greatly improved my understanding of the Eumaneus episode in Ulysses. In Homer, Odysseus finally returns to his native land, but he feels that it might be prudent to conceal his identity at first and take in the situation incognito. In disguise he goes to the hut of his faithful swineherd Eumaneus; there he meets his son, but does not initially reveal his identity.

The ideas of return and hidden identity are recurring themes throughout Eumaneus. Bloom and Stephen stop to collect themselves at a cabman's shelter, which is sort of like an all-night greasy spoon for cab drivers. Therein they meet a sailor who could be Odysseus himself; he has been on the seas for many years and is finally returning to his wife and son. He is also a teller of tall tales, just as Odysseus is, and it is possible that he has given a false name to his assembled listeners. Another possible incognito is the owner of the shelter, who is rumored to once have been an infamous Irish revolutionary of the 1880s. Politics comes to the fore again when the sailor suggests that the hero Parnell is not dead at all, but rather that a weighted coffin was buried and the man has assumed another identity and is waiting for the right moment to reappear in triumph. Bloom has his doubts. As an aside we learn that Bloom happened to be present at a pivotal moment in Parnell's life.

Strangely, though, neither Bloom nor Stephen is strongly partisan. Stephen objects to the British rule, but he is more concerned with his own artistic freedom; in fact, the young man is so vehemently solipsistic that he declares that he is not there to help Ireland, but rather "Ireland must be important because it belongs to me." Bloom, meanwhile, deplores conflict, and to the shelter owner's insistence that Ireland will one day rise up and destroy England, he instead imagines a future in which both countries are equals.

Meanwhile Bloom finds himself drawn to the younger man, a parallel to Odysseus's one-sided reunion with his son Telemachus.

The style of the episode is supposedly a parody of men's literature, a kind of counterpart to the style seen in the first half of Nausicaa, and it is filled with cliches, dry humor, manly understatement and matter-of-fact meanderings. As usual, Joyce takes the joke a bit too far; sentences wind on and on with no end in sight, digression digressing from digression.

One other thing I found interesting is Bloom's discovery of the evening edition of the paper, which includes the obituary of Patrick Dignam. The dead man is mentioned quite often in the book, something I never really noticed before; he is practically a full-fledged character, though we do not know much about him besides the fact that he is dead. The effect is that we see death as a part of the life within the book, though not a negative type of death, existence replaced by nothingness, but rather a change to a different state. This is even the case in the Hades episode, as Bloom does not brood on ceasing to be but instead thinks about the dead man as if he is still part of the world, in a way.

Circe

2009-05-31T19:58:00.000-05:00

The story of Circe is an interesting one; Odysseus as usual is trying to get home and not making much headway; he stops off at an unknown island, sees smoke rising from the trees and sends out an advance party to see what sort of people are about. They encounter the goddess Circe, and she waves her magic wand and turns the men to pigs. One sailor escapes, however, and he informs Odysseus of what has happened. Soon after, the god Hermes tells Odysseus how to defeat Circe's magic and get her under his power; he does so and has his men restored to human form.

At this point you would think that Odysseus would beat feet and get the hell away from the sorceress with the wand, but somehow they all forgive and forget and Odysseus becomes Circe's lover for a year. Wait, a year? Really? Yep. What are we to make of this? At every other moment in the book the wanderer is eating his heart out for his lost hearth and home, but after getting another goddess in the sack he figures that that whole problem can be put on hold for a month or twelve. We are never told straight out that he has been enchanted, but one might make a guess; interestingly, Circe is known for her skill at weaving, just like a spider.

Joyce's Circe is far and away the most bizarre section of Ulysses; Bloom has gone chasing after Stephen in the red light district, as he is concerned for the young man's welfare, and the carnival-sideshow, animal-like nature of the people he finds there echoes the transformation in Homer. A series of loopy hallucinations are depicted, some comical, some horrible, some quite shocking; there are nine main ones:

1. Bloom sees or imagines Mrs. Denis Breen, née Josie Powell, first seen in The Lotus Eaters and a friend of Molly's in their youth. They flirt and reminisce about the old days.

2. Bloom is questioned by the watchmen after he feeds a stray dog, and this becomes an absurd dream of persecution which ends in an imaginary court trial for malfeasance and perversion.

3. The dream of persecution changes to one of vindication and adoration. Bloom is handed the keys to the city and many ladies of high standing faint in his presence.

4. Bloom eventually finds the bordello that Stephen has gone into; once inside, he encounters his grandfather Virag, whose pragmatic character is somewhat similar to Bloom's, but who also is a strange chimeric monster who walks on stilts and changes into various animals. It is bizarre, to say the least.

5. When the madame, Bella, enters, there is a gender reversal in which Bella/Bello and Bloom/Ruby enter into a twisted sadomasochistic relationship, with Bloom becoming the woman and having his manhood questioned and derided.

6. Bloom is then visited by the nymph from the picture that hangs over his bed; she upbraids him for his many crimes against goodness and nature, but he eventually breaks free and shows her to be a hypocrite.

7. Stephen then has a hallucination of his dead mother, resulting in a climax in which he swings his walking stick at the phantom and knocks the lights out.

8. Out in the street again, there is an altercation with two British soldiers during which Stephen is punched in the face and knocked to the ground. Interestingly, this final crisis is partly a political one, since Stephen mentions the king in the course of talking about his non serviam philosophy and this incenses the officers. During the row we see imaginary partisans cheering on the champions for England or Ireland.

9. Bloom sees the image of his dead son, Rudy.

In addition to this we see many or most of the incidental characters from the book popping in to echo their words of earlier in the day, even if the two primary characters were not there to hear them at that time; it is almost as if the book itself is dreaming.

It is a crisis for both men, Stephen in his self-destructiveness and Bloom in his broken self-image following his wife's infidelity. In the end, however, Bloom takes charge and saves Stephen with the help of Corny Kelleher, the undertaker from the Hades episode.

The overall effect is a dizzying one; it is outrageous and all-encompassing, with everything collapsing in on itself; the various conflicts with night watches, bordello owners and rowdy soldiers take on a colossal scale. It is a bit overlong, though, and is a test of the reader as well as its two characters.

Oxen of the Sun

2009-05-29T17:00:00.004-05:00

Going back home to the Oxen of the Sun
Out in back of Palmdale where the turkey farmers run

While on his way home, the wind dies and Odysseus is stranded on Thrinacia Island, where live the immortal cattle of the sun god Helios. Odysseus was warned by Circe that he must not harm the kine or bad things will happen, but his crew is starving, and when the hero falls asleep they cook a feast. On awaking Odysseus smells cooked meat and knows that a delicious outrage has been committed:

As soon as I reached our ship at the water's edge
I took the men to task, upbraiding each in turn,
but how to set things right? We couldn't find a way.
The cattle were dead already...
and the gods soon showed us all some fateful signs—
the hides began to crawl, the meat, both raw and roasted,
bellowed out on the spits, and we heard a noise
like the moan of lowing oxen.

When the ship finally leaves the island the ship and all hands are lost in a storm, with Odysseus left clinging to the broken keel.

In Ulysses the sacrilegious sailors of Homer become a bunch of drunken young Irishmen. Bloom goes to a maternity hospital to see if there is any change in the condition of Mina Purefoy, a lady acquaintance who has been in labor for three entire days; once there he discovers an impromptu party taking place among the medical students and their friends, and despite the gravity of Mrs. Purefoy's situation there is rough and disrespectful talk about the women and blasphemous jesting in general. Among the boozing boasters is the son of one of Bloom's friends–Stephen Dedalus, of course—and Bloom is saddened by the fact that a young man of such good qualities has fallen in with a questionable crowd.

Ulysses is a difficult book, and Oxen of the Sun may well be the most difficult chapter therein. The style is meant to convey the idea of the gestation of the English language, and so a good deal of the text is written using archaic vocabulary and grammatical forms. Various writers are imitated, not only in terms of language but also in terms of the writers' perspectives, so we see the action through a series of warped lenses, ranging from medieval romance to religious moralizing to allegory to bizarre mysticism. At the end of the episode the language becomes an incomprehensible babbling transcript of slang, jokes and puns as the students rush from the hospital to hit the bars.

In the past I would have said that the episode was my least favorite in the book, as the length and difficulty made it a painful slog, but for some reason it I enjoyed myself this time around and breezed right through it. I can't say I understood every word, but I definitely felt like it was easier to decipher what was going on in the "real" world behind the style. Perhaps this was so because I had taken notes on previous readings and these smoothed over some of the snags and speed bumps, or perhaps it was because I was remembering the stuff I had figured out previously without consciously realizing it.

It's interesting that we have an episode about birth directly following one with themes of youth, attraction and coupling and in which there is a sexual act of sorts. The hidden Mina Purefoy struggling through her outrageous labors becomes symbolic of all motherhood, and it is as if the spirit-child that Bloom conceived in Nausicaa is now being born. This is also the chapter in which Bloom first speaks to Stephen Dedalus, and so we see the beginnings of the father-son relationship that will develop at the end of the novel.

For me, the "birth of language" idea doesn't work but it does. I don't get a strong sense of linguistic evolution; it seems just to bounce around from style to style without any direction. On the other hand, the curious remove of the text from what is happening beneath it, so to speak, somehow suits what is going on and gets across the sense of metempsychosis, the cosmic that lies behind the particulars. We see the action through a cracked glass, looking at it through many different angles, and it almost has a cubist quality to it.

Of course, I'm sure that there's all manner of stuff that's going over my head, but one can't dwell on that too much. For example, what does all this birth stuff have to do with cattle? Beats me.

(translation of the Odyssey by Robert Fagles)

Nausicaa

2009-05-22T23:50:00.001-05:00

In the Odyssey Odysseus finds himself stranded and naked on a beach in a strange country; with winning words he appeals to a young princess who happens to be doing her laundry, and she brings him to her parents' house. Bloom too is walking on the beach, and he has an encounter of sorts as well.

There is something a bit cruel about this episode; we meet the beautiful Gerty MacDowell, but there is a deep disconnect between tone and actuality. The writing style in the first half—the half seen through Gerty's eyes—is romantic and syrupy-sweet, with Gerty as the plucky young heroine of refined taste, good character and sincere heart. However, if we read between the lines, we see someone who is somewhat peevish and petty, strangely superstitious, and painfully self-deluded. We also see Bloom in a very undignified moment, to say the least, though it is a sort of magical moment as well.

One interesting thing that I noticed—though again I don't quite know what to make of it—is that during all the carryings-on there are interpolations of a mass being held in a nearby church for a temperance retreat. Why? Is this more cutting irony, the sad reality in place of Gerty's dreams of a wedding? Or is it another echo of the general theme of young women, these pleas for the intercession of the virgin? Perhaps the latter, for that kind of mixing of the human and the divine is typical of the novel.

The Cyclops

2009-05-22T23:14:00.001-05:00

The working day is over now, and the Dubliners are hitting the bars.

The Cyclops is an entertaining episode, but it is also a puzzling one. We have a new narrator, and his vision is indeed limited, because everything he looks at he sees in the worst light possible. His recollections of the characters show them all at their most unflattering moments, and his interpretations of others' actions are always unkind. Here we see Bloom's unusually sympathetic mind as a weakness of character, the sign of one who is neither "fish nor flesh." The problem is that it's all a bit too convincing—Bloom really does come off as a bit of a fool. Was this what Joyce intended, or did the author just have a little too much fun sketching out the anti-Bloom?

We also meet the Citizen, a fierce nationalist. He too only sees issues from one side, so is he meant to be a mockery of partisan politics? At one time I assumed so, but now, after having noticed the large amount of political subtext in the book, I'm not so sure. Likely there are subtle clues to Joyce's attitude towards the Citizen that I am missing due to my unfamiliarity with the politics being discussed. Regardless, he is not a sympathetic character by any means; he is an anti-Semite, and we see that what really sparks him to action and physical protest is when he thinks that Bloom has won money at the racetrack and is refusing to buy a round of drinks.

The Cyclops also contains one of my favorite passages in the book:

—How's Willy Murray those times, Alf?

—I don't know, says Alf. I saw him just now in Capel Street with Paddy Dignam. Only I was running after that...

—You what? says Joe, throwing down the letters. With who?

—With Dignam, says Alf.

—Is it Paddy? says Joe.

—Yes, says Alf. Why?

—Don't you know he's dead? says Joe.

—Paddy Dignam dead? says Alf.

—Ay, says Joe.

—Sure I'm after seeing him not five minutes ago, says Alf, as plain as a pikestaff.

—Who's dead? says Bob Doran.

—You saw his ghost, then, says Joe, God between us and harm.

—What? says Alf. Good Christ, only five...What?...and Willie Murray with him, the two of them there near whatdoyoucallhim's...What? Dignam dead?

—What about Dignam? says Bob Doran. Who's talking about...?

—Dead! says Alf. He is no more dead than you are.

—Maybe so, says Joe. They took the liberty of burying him this morning anyhow.

Sirens

2009-05-22T17:00:00.000-05:00

I've been reading faster than I've been able to blog, so I have to do some quick catch-up.

Sirens finds us at the Ormond Hotel, where Bloom goes to eat his dinner. There are two fetching barmaids, but the siren songs actually come from men, namely Father Cowley, Simon Dedalus and Ben Dollard, who play and sing at the bar's piano. In the Odyssey the songs of the sirens are so beautiful that sailors are lured to their deaths; in Ulysses the danger would seem to be sentimentality. Bloom hears and succumbs to feelings of sadness, particularly because he knows that Blazes Boylan is on his way to a liaison with his wife, Molly. In the end he is able to shake himself free, or at least partly, and he moves on as best he can.

What is interesting is that just at the moment that Boylan is approaching Bloom's house—we are given glimpses of his jingling carriage, though not the assignation itself—the song that is being sung is a song not about love but one with a political subtext. In "The Croppy Boy" a young Irish rebel goes to confess his sins and asks for the priest, but he is tricked and unknowingly confesses to a disguised British soldier. This is arranged by a "false priest's servant"—another betrayal.

It's also interesting that the episode returns to Bloom's correspondence with Martha Clifford (first mentioned in The Lotus Eaters), which is a kind of infidelity as well; it is as if Leopold and Molly are traveling on parallel paths. It's all a bit mysterious and I'm not quite sure what to make of it. Bloom seems a bit equivocal about it as well; he mentions feeling bored by it, and yet he writes a reply anyway.

More than anything else the focus of the episode is on the style, which mimics musical composition with repetitions, rhythms, overtures and transpositions. Though difficult to follow at times, it is one of the most striking and memorable sections of the novel.

Must Be a Bethel Thing

2009-05-22T11:08:00.003-05:00

I was over at the Sycamore getting a cheeseburger with everything and the woman whose name I forget decided to make some conversation.

"So, you gonna get towed up this weekend?"

I wasn't sure if I had heard her right. "Sorry?"

"Towed up."

"'Towed up?'"

"You know...cocktails? Beer?"

"Ohhhhh...."

I had to confess that I did not know if I was going to get towed up this weekend. I am, however, very excited about having this new phrase at my disposal, and I am going to bandy it around as much as possible and see what kind of reaction I get.

The Wandering Rocks

2009-05-14T19:00:00.003-05:00

The themes of unity, metempsychosis and "all in all in all" in Scylla and Charybdis explode into multiplicity in The Wandering Rocks. We are presented with nineteen fragments in which we see a multitude of people going about their day in Dublin. The primary characters within those fragments are:

1. Reverend John Conmee, S.J., first seen in The Lotus Eaters
2. Corny Kelleher, the undertaker from Hades
3. a onelegged mendicant sailor
4. Katey, Boody and Maggy Dedalus, sisters of Stephen
5. Blazes Boylan
6. Almidano Artifoni and Stephen Dedalus
7. Miss Dunne, Blazes Boylan's secretary
8. Ned Lambert, J.J. O'Molloy and the Reverend Hugh C. Love
9. Tom Rochford, Nosey Flynn, M'Coy and Lenehan
10. Bloom
11. Dilly and Simon Dedalus
12. Tom Kernan
13. Stephen and Dilly Dedalus
14. Simon Dedalus, Father Cowley and Ben Dollard, a trio who will also appear in the following episode
15. Martin Cunningham, John Power, first seen in Hades, John Wyse Nolan, Jimmy Henry and Long John Fanning
16. Buck Mulligan and Haines, first seen in Telemachus
17. Cashel Boyle O'Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell, previously seen in The Lotus Eaters
18. Patrick Aloysius Dignam, the son of Paddy Dignam, buried in Hades.
19. William Humble Ward, Earl of Dudley, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, with entourage

In addition there are a number of other individuals and objects that appear and reappear, for example the blind stripling that Bloom helped across the street, an old woman who entertains herself at the courts of law, and the crumpled-up piece of paper that Bloom threw off a bridge in The Lestrygonians.

The fragments are bookended by the travels of the Jesuit Conmee and the British governor of Ireland; both of these fragments stand out from the others in that they have a more formal, blow-by-blow reportage-type style to them. These two are also the most formal of the wanderers; the Lord Lieutenant parades through the city in his viceregal carriage, and Conmee carries himself with good-natured dignity and "cheerful decorum." By contrast the other Dubliners seem small, flawed, and preoccupied with worries and conceits.

The formality of both Conmee and the carriage are juxtaposed with that of another wanderer, a certain Denis J. Maginni, dancing instructor of grave deportment and gay apparrel. There is something in this, I think, some sly comment about their characters. Father Conmee also seems to be concerned with appearances; we are shown his silk hat and kid gloves, and we are informed that he has cleaned his teeth. Meanwhile his imagination betrays a perhaps excessively romantic view of the past:

Don John Conmee walked and moved in times of yore. He was humane and honoured there. He bore in mind secrets confessed and he smiled at smiling noble faces in a beeswaxed drawingroom, ceiled with full fruit clusters. And the hands of a bride and of a bridegroom, noble to noble, were impalmed by don John Conmee.

The carriage of the Lord Lieutenant is also noted for its old-fashioned grandeur, with its frock-coated outriders and cream sunshades. It's hard not to imagine that there is not some kind of meaning in all this.

Maginni is also seen in Bloom's fragment—not surprisingly, the central fragment, 10 of 19—but this time in a stark contrast, for Bloom is still in grave apparel from the funeral.

James Joyce famously plotted out these various peregrinations and connections with exacting care and precise timing; they intersect like the gears of a giant clock, and a reader inclined to puzzle-solving could plot out all the routes and minute-by-minute whereabouts of the multitude of Dubliners. In fact, the episode begins with the setting of a watch.

What does it all mean, though? Scylla and Charybdis and The Wandering Rocks are episodes nine and ten of eighteen, and so the two central chapters of the novel. If we view them as a pair, we see a contrast: the idea of the spiritual unity of all men is replaced by division and multiplicity, the holy trinity is replaced by the "ten thousand things" of the Tao Te Ching, symbolic of the material world. One could also consider the two episodes to correspond to the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, specifically the idea of the Platonic forms versus Aristotle's examination of real-world examples.

We also get to see many of the incidental characters in a bit more detail, in particular Simon Dedalus, Stephen's father. Throughout the novel he is shown as an intelligent and witty man, if a somewhat acerbic one, but in The Wandering Rocks we also see him as a man in decline, sending his children out to the pawnbrokers and borrowing money from friends. We also get our first direct view of Blazes Boylan; previously in the novel he is only glimpsed from afar.

The political tone is not absent here, either. One fragment takes place at the site of St. Mary's Abbey and makes reference to the rebellion of Thomas Fitzgerald against the English crown in 1534.

Scylla and Charybdis

2009-05-12T22:05:00.000-05:00

Scylla and Charybdis is one of the two central episodes of Ulysses in terms of chapter count, and it is also one of the most heady and difficult parts of the novel. It is a "Stephen episode," and so instead of Bloom's wandering but down-to-earth stream of consciousness we are chasing Stephen's cryptic trains of thought. In the past this seemed to me an unwelcome digression from our travels with Bloom, but now I come to it with a new understanding. As I said earlier, Ulysses is not solely about Bloom; in fact, one could make the case that it is more a continuation of the semiautobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but a kind of prismatic split-image autobiography, because Joyce 's life was passing faster than he could record it, and so we have young and old together in the same fictional moment, Stephen and Bloom.

It is exactly this world of multiple identities and comingling of fact and fiction that is the theme of Scylla and Charybdis. It is like a dazzling nexus where different strands come together and different layers are superimposed upon each other. Stephen is in the National Library discussing Shakespeare with A. E. and John Eglinton, two contemporary Irish literary figures; he argues that Shakespeare wrote himself into Hamlet as the ghost of the king, and that he identified himself with that role because Ann Hathaway had been an adulterous wife. This father-son-unfaithful wife triad in Hamlet echoes the triads of Bloom-Molly-Stephen and Odysseus-Telemachus-Penelope (though Penelope was not unfaithful, even if she was besieged), and also perhaps God-Christ-Holy Ghost. Other father-son relationships are touched on in the course of the literary discussion: Plato and Aristotle, and author and creation.

Far from being a digression, this episode focuses on one of the central concepts of the entire work, which is that each individual is all things at once. In his fatherhood Bloom shares a kind of spiritual unity with all fathers throughout the ages, from Odysseus to God himself.

When Rutlandbaconsouthamptonshakespeare or another poet of the same name in the comedy of errors wrote Hamlet he was not the father of his own son merely but, being no more a son, he was and felt himself the father of all his race, father of his own grandfather, the father of his unborn grandson, who by the same token, never was born, for nature, as Mr Magee understands her, abhors perfection.

Later:

Maeterlinck says: If Socrates leave his house today he will find the sage seated on his doorstep. If Judas go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps will tend. Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves. The playwright who wrote the folio of this world and wrote it badly (He gave us light first and the sun two days later), the lord of things as they are [...] is doubtless all in all in all of us, ostler and butcher, and would be bawd and cuckold too but that in the economy of heaven, foretold by Hamlet, there are no more marriages, glorified man, an androgynous angel, being a wife unto himself.

Note that there is a nascent postmodern tone here as well, for of course Joyce is thinking of his own paternity in authorship, and so all at once he is Stephen, Bloom, and the father of Stephen and Bloom...and so in this way he is father to himself, even while Stephen is father to Joyce in the way that the child is father to the man.

Over and over we see the motif of father, son, and unfaithful wife. They are like a musical triad that ring through a symphony, slightly altered and in different keys, but always recognizable.

Unfortunately for the reader, the episode is a very difficult one. It is full of puns, euphemisms, innuendos, ellipses, hintings, references and every way of saying something without coming straight out and saying it.

The Lestrygonians

2009-04-26T21:29:00.000-05:00

In the Odyssey the man of twists and turns lands his fleet at the island of the Laestrygonians, a race of giants. He sends three messengers to the palace to see if the king is hospitable, but the king promptly rips one of the men to shreds and eats him. The fleet is attacked and only Odysseus's ship escapes. Though it takes up just a couple of pages of Homer's text, this misadventure is the inspiration for an entire episode in Ulysses.

It is lunchtime in Dublin, and food is very much on Leopold Bloom's mind. Despite the tempting opening—"Pineapple rock, lemon platt, butter scotch, a sugarsticky girl shoveling scoopfuls of creams for a christian brother"—the theme of food is not a happy, comforting one; Bloom is feeling negative and out of sorts from hunger, and throughout the episode food is associated with gorging, surfeit and indigestion. We see—either in reality or in Bloom's imagination—policemen red-faced and sweating after their meal, force-fed geese, vomiting dogs, and rats drowning in porter. We see a cheap restaurant whose gobbling, swilling patrons turn Bloom's stomach. There are even hints of the cannibalism in Homer; children eat their parents out of house and home, a woman with many children is described as "a good layer" as though she were a hen, and Bloom thinks of the tasting of flesh in lovemaking. There is also a parallel drawn to industry and the necessity of earning one's daily bread, with each person feeding off of another. Perhaps the most telling passage is in the dead center of the episode; Bloom has been thinking about the funeral and also of a female acquaintance who has been in labor for three days, and the circle of life suddenly seems to him a horrible, mechanical, meaningless march:

Cityful passing away, other cityful coming, passing away too: other coming on, passing on. Houses, lines of houses, streets, miles of pavements, piledup bricks, stones. Changing hands. This owner, that. Landlord never dies they say. Other steps into his shoes when he gets the notice to quit. They buy the place up with gold and still they have all the gold. Swindle in it somewhere. Piled up in cities, worn away age after age. Pyramids in sand. Built on bread and onions. Slaves. Chinese wall. Babylon. Big stones left. Round towers. Rest rubble, sprawling suburbs, jerrybuilt. Kerwan's mushroom houses, built of breeze. Shelter for the night.

No one is anything.

This is the very worst hour of the day. Vitality. Dull, gloomy: hate this hour. Feel as if I had been eaten and spewed.

Like the dangers that meet Odysseus on his travels, the Lestrygonians is a trial for Bloom. On the outside it is a banal problem we all face every day—what to do for lunch?—but Joyce adds thoughts and associations until it stands for something larger. The danger Bloom faces is a losing of heart, a feeling that the necessity of eating—that life devours itself—is something mindless and awful, with permanence only found in the dead wreckage of sand and stone. "No one is anything."

After a cheese sandwich and a glass of wine Bloom feels more himself and charity returns: he helps a blind boy across the street.

Meanwhile, we are once again reminded of the tension between the English and the Irish. Bloom recalls an incident in which he happened to be at the scene of a political demonstration and only narrowly escaped a charging mounted policeman.

Aeolus

2009-04-10T22:26:00.000-05:00

Odysseus visits Aeolus and is given a remarkable gift to speed him homeward: a bag in which all the unfavorable winds are trapped. There are a few windbags in the corresponding episode in Ulysses as well.

Wind is everywhere in Joyce's Aeolus: doors blow open, newspaper floats in the air, the characters smoke cigarette after cigarette, and there is even a kite and a modest belch. Wind as a metaphor for communication is ubiquitous, and discussed in the episode are newspapermen, lawyers, oratory and diplomacy.

This is also the episode that delineates one of the key metaphors within the book, the parallel drawn between Greece–Rome and Ireland–England. In each case—from Joyce's point of view—a smaller and more beautiful culture was swallowed up by a larger, vulgar one. Of the Romans:

—What was their civilisation? Vast, I allow, but vile. Cloacae: sewers. The Jews in the wilderness and on the mountaintop said: It is meet to be here. Let us build an altar to Jehova. The Roman, like the Englishman who follows in his footsteps, brought to every new shore on which he set his foot (on our shore he never set it) only his cloacal obsession. He gazed about him in his toga and he said: It is meet to be here. Let us construct a watercloset.

Of the British:

I speak the tongue of a race the acme of whose mentality is the maxim: time is money. Material domination. Dominus! Lord! Where is the spirituality?

Note, by the way, that the title of the book is not Odysseus but Ulysses, for Joyce speaks the tongue of the conqueror, the English, and the Roman conqueror's name for the Greek hero was "Ulysses."

Later on the character who voiced those thoughts, Professor MacHugh, declares himself to be loyal to "the catholic chivalry of Europe that foundered at Trafalgar." In other words, he regrets the fact that Napoleon lost. I had never fully taken in the force of that sentiment before, nor did I really absorb the fact that the monument that is mentioned later in the episode is that of the admiral who won that battle. It was in the heart of Dublin, a statue of a British war hero, and the characters must pass beneath it at the end of the episode. As they walk in its shadow, Stephen relates a cryptic parable in which two elderly and virtuous Irish women save up their pennies and bring a picnic of head cheese, fancy bread and plums to the top of the pillar. Exhausted by the climb, however, they have no strength to look up at Nelson or down at Dublin, and so they just eat their plums and spit the pits over the railing.

In my previous readings I had never quite realized just how bitter and pervasive the anti-British sentiment is in Ulysses.

The monument was blown up by the IRA in 1966.

Hades

2009-04-10T21:11:00.001-05:00

It's interesting to think that perhaps in some earlier version of the Odyssey, as it was passed down from generation to generation in its oral tradition, the story told to the Phaeacians by Odysseus was intended to be understood as a tall tale, a fabulous lie invented by a gifted liar to charm his host and hostess. After all, aside from his various contacts with goddesses, all of Odysseus's most fantastic adventures take place within this story-within-a-story. Not the least fantastic is his voyage to the land of the dead and his communion with the shades who live there.

Bloom too visits the land of the dead; after his bath he attends the funeral and interment of Patrick Dignam at Glasnevin Cemetery. As we walk with the mourners to the grave site we follow in Bloom's mind a long meditation on the many aspects of death. His perspective is interesting, in that it is largely a practical one; Bloom does not brood about his own dissolution or agonize over what lies beyond the barrier, but rather his thoughts are of a detached and practical nature. Why not a special funeral tram instead of a parade of horse-drawn carriages? Does the caretaker ever think about his own grave? One passage in particular made me chuckle: "We are now praying for the repose of his soul. Hoping you're well and not in hell."

This episode exemplifies my idea of what Ulysses is when it's at its best, which is a poem of the everyman.* Now there's something tricky about that statement (besides the fact that it makes me sound like a freshman in English Lit 101), because one has to ask: is Leopold Bloom really an everyman? After all, he's far too specific a man to be an everyman; he's a half-Jewish Irishman, with a wife from Gibraltar, a suicide father and dead son. In some ways he's an unusual man, an outsider who is on occasion the subject of mockery, and he is also a man of a peculiar intellect; like Odysseus, he is a man of many twists and turns, in that he has an uncanny ability to see any given subject from all possible angles. Because of this, he is a man of remarkable sympathy and forbearance; if one were to go to extremes, he could be called a kind of Christ, though not so much a Christ of infinite love but rather a Christ of infinite understanding.

So, it is not so much that we see all of mankind in Leopold Bloom, but rather through him. He is a prism through which humanity is refracted in all its many colors. Or perhaps his is just the shoulder on which the angel James Joyce is perched. I think when reading we must keep a similar angelic detachment; despite the exhaustive details, Ulysses is not just about Leopold Bloom.

*The ghost of James Joyce is whispering to me. "The everyman Irishman, if you please, sir."

The Lotus-eaters

2009-04-10T17:00:00.001-05:00

In the story he tells to the Phaeacians, Odysseus recounts his visit to the land of the Lotus-eaters. As translated by Robert Fagles:

Any crewman who ate the lotus, the honey-sweet fruit,
lost all desire to send a message back, much less return,
their only wish to linger there with the Lotus-eaters,
grazing on lotus, all memory of the journey home
dissolved forever.

As Bloom wanders about Dublin his thoughts make the rounds of the idle pleasures that fill up our lives, that palliate and distract us: the opposite sex, the theater, alcohol, religion, medicine, sport. There is an idle, dreamlike quality to the prose, and at one point Bloom imagines scenes of the far East:

Lovely spot it must be: the garden of the world, big lazy leaves to float about on, cactuses, flower meads, snaky lianas they call them. Wonder is it like that. Those Cinghalese lobbing around in the sun, in dolce far neinte. Not doing a hand's turn all day. Sleep six months out of twelve. Too hot to quarrel. Influence of the climate. Lethargy. Flowers of idleness. The air feels most. Azotes. Hothouse in Botanic gardens. Sensitive plants. Waterlilies. Petals too tired to. Sleeping sickness in the air. Walk on roseleaves. Imagine trying to eat tripe and cowheel. Where was the chap I saw in that picture somewhere? Ah, in the dead sea, floating on his back, reading a book with a parasol open. Couldn't sink if you tried: so thick with salt.

But we see the dangers of idle pleasures in the form of two horses with their feed bags on:

He came nearer and heard a crunching of gilded oats, the gently champing teeth. Their full buck eyes regarded him as he went by, amid the sweet oaten reek of horsepiss. Their Eldorado. Poor jugginses! Damn all they know or care about anything with their long noses stuck in nosebags. To full for words. Still they get their feed all right and their doss. Gelded too: a stump of black guttapercha wagging limp between their haunches. Might be happy all the same that way. Good poor brutes they look. Still the neigh can be very irritating.

It cracks me up that a paragraph that starts out with poetry like "a crunching of gilded oats" and "the sweet oaten reek" ends with "Still the neigh can be very irritating." The episode finishes with some more high-and-low poetry, again on the theme of idleness, ease and the sensual. Bloom imagines himself in the bath he's about to take:

He foresaw his pale body reclined in it at full, naked, in a womb of warmth, oiled by scented melting soap, softly laved. He saw his trunk and limbs riprippled over and sustained, buoyed lightly upward, lemonyellow: his navel, bud of flesh: and saw the dark tangled curls of his bush floating, floating hair of the stream around the limp father of thousands, a languid floating flower.

Also in the episode we see hints and glimpses of Bloom's past and present, many of which we won't fully understand until later. When writing about the book there's a temptation to reel off all the little thoughts, occurrences, clues and allusions; one almost feels obligated to, since so much of it is encoded in the text and must be teased out and explicated. These little puzzles are not what makes Joyce worth reading, though, and I think it's a mistake to get too caught up in trying to figure out which shop is on which street and who was M'Intosh.

Calypso

2009-04-06T19:40:00.003-05:00

The first episode of part II is a short, almostkindasorta straightforward one. Stephen is gone for the moment, we have rewound the clock a few hours, and we now see a Mr. Leopold Bloom about his morning routine: feeding the cat, cooking breakfast for the wife, nipping round to the butcher's for a nice tasty mutton kidney for himself. As in the early Stephen episodes, we see flashes of inner monologue, and, like Stephen, Bloom's thoughts spring from one subject to the next, each association giving birth to another and so on. The picture is confusing and kaledoscopic at times, as we see thin slices of thoughts juxtaposed, the important cheek-by-jowl with the banal. Some of what we read is enigmatic, only becoming clear later on; other items that are seemingly trifling will echo throughout the day, accumulating meaning with each iteration.

When we are first introduced to Odysseus in Homer, the man of many twists and turns is the captive of the goddess Calypso; an unwilling lover and mate, he longs to be home with his real wife, Penelope. In Ulysses we are introduced to Leopold Bloom, and we see him within the context of his domestic life. He serves his wife food, picks her clothes up off the bed, explains the meaning of a word from a book she's reading, et cetera. We only get a very sketchy picture of Molly at this point; at times she is almost like a disembodied voice emanating from the bedclothes. Bloom also reads a letter from his fifteen-year-old daughter, Milly. Molly receives a letter too, which she quickly hides from Leopold.

In this episode Mr. Bloom seems surrounded by women, under their power, almost beset by them. He even worries that the lady next door will see him ducking into the outhouse. A long day's wandering lies before him, however.

Proteus

2009-04-02T19:00:00.001-05:00

Whereas in the episodes Telemachus and Nestor we only saw intermittent flashes of Stephen's internal monologue—the famous "stream of consciousness"—in Proteus almost the entire episode is seen through the filter of Stephen's mind, the text a chaotic jumble of thoughts, memories and sensory perception. Though short, it is one of the more difficult episodes in the book, dense and abstruse, with many intra- and extra-textual references.

Stephen is wandering aimlessly on a beach, his thoughts circling around the idea of change and transformation in the physical world around him—birth, death, tides and metamorphosis. He thinks of Aristotle and Aquinas, and imagines his shadow being cast backwards through the endless reaches of space. He also thinks back on his own recent history, specifically his time spent in Paris; the ending of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man saw him leaving Ireland to study abroad, and now we learn that he returned early because of his mother's imminent death. He thinks back with bitter distaste on his own pretentiousness at that time, and thinks also of his acquaintance in Paris with an Irish revolutionary named Kevin Egan.

What does the episode mean to the book as a whole, aside from the repetition and expansion of motifs? At the simplest level, it is an addition of more brush strokes to the picture of Stephen as one who is unhappy, aimless, and artistically alienated. Though a genius, he is also a young man who needs direction.

There is also the underlying theme of Stephen's—and therefore Joyce's—own artistic development. Here on the beach Stephen is able to embrace his long-sought freedom, but after stripping away the conventions of society he is left on a shifting, rootless landscape with only the riot of his own swarming thoughts to guide him. Perhaps this is not an entirely bad thing, however, for out of the freedom/chaos comes creation; towards the end of the episode Stephen has a flash of inspiration and is able to jot down a piece of writing.

One question that struck me this time through was why Joyce chose to include the reminisces about the older expatriate, Kevin Egan. It is difficult to read into this passage to figure out how Stephen views this would-be father figure who haunts cafés and plays with fuses, but there is in the characterization a sense of oldness and tragic obsolescence. There is also an echo of the political theme of the betrayal of Ireland in the depiction of this aged freedom fighter left idle and alone.

This episode is not patterned after anything that happens in the main action of the Odyssey, but rather its themes are inspired by one element of a story within the story. When visiting Menelaus as Nestor suggested, Menelaus tells the young man the story of his return from Troy. In part of that story, the king finds himself stranded on an deserted island, where he is visited by the goddess Eidothea. Willing to help, she tells him how to subdue her father Proteus, the Old Man of the Sea, who on release will give him instructions on how to return home. She tells Menelaus that he must take hold of the god while he is sleeping and not let go, even if he changes from form to form when he tries to escape. On capture Proteus does exactly this, transforming from a lion to a serpent to a panther to a boar to a torrent of water to a tree.

In creating, has Stephen also conquered? Has he conquered the chaos of the physical world, the "ineluctable modality of the visible"?

One could also draw a parallel between the meeting between Telemachus and Menelaus and the meeting between Stephen and Kevin Egan. Again, this may be an ironic parallel, since Stephen seems no less lost and unhappy after meeting the revolutionary than he was before.

The final thing I'll say is that I discovered something neat this time around, which is Joyce's transformation of an ordinary dog into a protean, shape-shifting monster:

The dog yelped running to them, reared up and pawed them, dropping on all fours, again reared up at them with mute bearish fawning. Unheeded he kept by them as they came towards the drier sand, a rag of wolf's tongue redpanting from his jaws. His speckled body ambled ahead of them and then loped off at a calf's gallop. The carcass lay on his path. He stopped, sniffed, stalked round it, brother, nosing closer, went round it, sniffing rapidly like a dog all over the dead dog's bedraggled fell. Dogskull, dogsniff, eyes on the ground, moves to one great goal.

It's funny that in the end this fantastical creature is sniffing "like a dog."

Incidentally, if you noticed that "one great goal" echoes the passage about history that I quoted in the previous post, multiply that by tens of thousands of words and you'll get an idea of how densely interwoven the text of Ulysses is.

Nestor

2009-04-01T19:07:00.005-05:00

In the Odyssey, Telemachus travels to Pylos, the kingdom of Nestor, to see if Nestor has any news of his lost father. Nestor shows the young man great hospitality, but he has no information for him. Nestor tells Telemachus of the death of his father's comrade-at-arms Agamemnon at the hands of his disloyal wife's lover, and he suggests that Telemachus go to see king Menelaus.

In Ulysses we find Stephen teaching history to schoolchildren, after which he goes to the office of the schoolmaster, Mr. Deasy, to get paid. Though not unkind, Mr. Deasy is not likely to be seen as a role model or wise adviser by Stephen, as he is a Protestant loyal to the British. He is also an anti-Semite, which Stephen is not.

The main concern of the episode is history. Stephen mulls over the subject in the abstract as he teaches, and on later hearing the children playing field hockey outside, their sounds become those of a raging battle in his imagination:

Shouts rang shrill from the boy's playfield and a whirring whistle.

Again: a goal. I am among them, among their battling bodies in a medley, the joust of life. [...] Time shocked rebounds, shock by shock. Jousts, slush and uproar of battles, the frozen deathspew of the slain, a shout of spear spikes baited with men's bloodied guts.

Stephen also has an interesting interchange on the subject of history with Mr. Deasy. Stephen calls history "a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." This remark is very much in keeping with Stephen's character; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is not a tender childhood memoir of a young Irish laddie, as some insist on seeing it, but rather the story of Stephen's systematic ripping away of all that he sees as external artificialities—family, religion, social convention—so that he can free the artist within. He views Deasy's antisemitism as one more suffocating prejudice to be shaken off like a bad dream.

The conversation continues on:

From the playfield the boys raised a shout. A whirring whistle: goal. What if that nightmare gave you a back kick?

—The ways of the Creator are not our ways, Mr Deasy said. All history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God.

Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying:

—That is God.

Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee!

—What? Mr Deasy asked.

—A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders.

This last remark is open to interpretation, but to me it has two probable meanings, and perhaps is intended to encompass both. Stephen could be saying that history does not move toward "one great goal, the manifestation of God," because each ephemeral moment, each shout of a child, is already God's manifestation. Alternatively, if the cry of schoolchildren is meant to be taken as a symbol for strife and battle, then Stephen could be saying that history is not a progression to a goal but is instead the human conception of the necessary natural law of struggle, victory, and eternal change, and that with God's apparent sanction.

Other motifs within the chapter include coins as a symbol of history and power, the betrayal of leaders and of Ireland herself by those who should have been loyal, and that of a drowned man, a motif which continues from the first episode and which will be seen again several more times.

The episode ends with a beautiful if ironic image of the Protestant Mr. Deasy wearing history's mantle for the victor:

On his wise shoulders through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung spangles, dancing coins.

Telemachus

2009-03-31T19:58:00.004-05:00

In the first episode of Ulysses we are re-introduced to Stephen Dedalus, Joyce's alter ego and the hero of his earlier work, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It is early morning, June 16, 1904—fourteen years in the past from when the episode was first published in 1918, and almost eighteen years in the past from when the completed novel was published in February of 1922. The writer Stephen is found renting a Martello tower on the outskirts of Dublin with a roommate, the boisterous and irreverent Malachi "Buck" Mulligan. They also have a house guest, an Englishman by the name of Haines.

Within the episode Stephen and Buck Mulligan converse on the roof of the tower while Mulligan shaves; afterward they eat breakfast with Haines, and then Stephen follows them out as they go to bathe in Dublin Bay. Stephen then heads off to his day job as a schoolteacher. He is a fiercely intense young man, aptly described by Buck Mulligan as "brooding." He is preoccupied with a dream he had the night before about his recently deceased mother, and what we might imagine to be guilt about the fact that he did not accede to her deathbed wish that he kneel down and pray. He is also preoccupied with the Englishman Haines, whom he so dislikes that he resolves not to return to the tower that night.

Rereading the episode this time around I figured out something important about Stephen and Haines that I had never understood before. I had previously assumed that Stephen's dislike of Haines was merely because he represented for Stephen the English rule of Ireland; the distaste seemed a bit extreme, however, considering how self-centered Stephen is, and then why does Stephen think at the very end of the episode "usurper"? Now I get it: Stephen does not dislike Haines merely because he is an Englishman, but because he is an Englishman writing a book about Irish culture. Stephen feels that if anyone should be writing about Irish culture, it should be an Irishman. This resentment is only exacerbated when Haines speaks Gaelic to the elderly woman who delivers the milk and she doesn't understand the language.

The final thought, the indignation at Irish culture being explained by an outsider, is perhaps a declaration of intent by Joyce for Ulysses as a whole; it is to be a book of Ireland by an Irishman.

In terms of correspondence to Homer, Stephen is Telemachus, and perhaps Ireland or Irish culture is the mother Penelope that is besieged (and thus also perhaps Stephen's own kingship). Buck Mulligan can be seen as corresponding to the disloyal servants in Odysseus's household, since he flatters Haines and feeds him tidbits of Irish culture in the hopes of sponging money off him.

Within the episode there is also an elaborate parody of liturgical rite by Buck Mulligan, as well as a sacrilegious poem about Christ. Though these serve to paint a vivid picture of one of Stephen's contemporaries and afford Stephen a jumping-off point for his own thoughts about religion and his mother, I'm not sure what purpose they serve for the novel as a whole.

Ulysses

2009-03-30T20:17:00.004-05:00

When I was in my twenties, one of my favorite books was James Joyce's Ulysses. I loved the the language and the challenge of it, as well as the flashes of humor and humanity. I can't remember how many times I read the book; I would guess three times all the way through, though some episodes I've probably read five times or more. However, I often felt that I was missing out on a lot of what the novel had to offer because I was unfamiliar with the book's touchstone, the Odyssey. For those who don't know, in Ulysses, Joyce takes the action of Homer's Odyssey and translates it to Dublin in 1904; the reincarnation is a bit ironic, however, because Odysseus's double, Leopold Bloom, is not a hero but an ordinary man, and his perils and adventures are mostly of the everyday sort. Regardless, I'd long had the ambition of reading the poem and then immediately going back to Ulysses to see what that opened up for me. Around 1997 or 1998 I bought a copy of the Robert Fagles translation of the Odyssey for this purpose, as well as his translation of the Iliad, since as long as I was doing the one I might as well do the other, but they looked awfully long, and I kept putting off reading them.

Eight or nine years later I suddenly discovered that I wasn't getting any younger, and so in the interest of having as few deathbed regrets as possible, I hunkered down and made my way through the Iliad; it was worthwhile, but a bit of a slog at times, and I wanted to take a break before tackling the Odyssey. The short break became a long one, but this month I finally accomplished my goal: the Odyssey is finished. It's funny, though—what struck me on reading the epic was how vague the connections between the two works were; I had imagined that there would be elaborate correspondences between the two stories, but instead it's more as if Odysseus's adventures are merely frames or inspirations or jumping-off points for Joyce. Regardless, I think that knowing what parts belong to who will help me in understanding Ulysses.

So anyway, this is all a roundabout way of saying that I'm reading Ulysses again. It will be an interesting journey, I think; in a way it's as if I'm revisiting a younger version of myself, just as Joyce revisited his own younger self in the creation of Stephen Dedalus. What's particularly interesting (to me) is that when I first read the novel I was close to the age of the Stephen Dedalus; now I am almost the same age as the older man, Leopold Bloom. Already I feel as though I understand the character better.

I think it would be a worthwhile exercise for me to write up a little something about the episodes as I read them; it will help ensure that I am thinking about what is going on in the novel and getting the most out of it. I will post the thoughts here on the off chance that they'll be useful to someone.

Beautiful God of War!

2008-09-19T08:14:00.003-05:00

The following is a capsule review of Buñuel's El Bruto which I posted on Netflix. Just in case anyone is interested, I thought I would throw it up here as well.

"A relatively conventional drama centered around a strong but slow-witted man who is hired by a landlord to bully a group of tenants who are resisting their eviction. There's enough going on plot-wise to keep things moving along for 83 minutes, but what's interesting about the film is that every character is shown in both a positive and negative way; even the kind, gentle Meche can be seen handing out rocks for the children to throw when the landlord arrives. Almost all the characters lie to each other without blinking—with conviction, even—and without judgment by the film itself.

"Unfortunately, the drama is undercut by the miscasting of the pivotal role of Pedro/Bruto. The character is supposed to be a person of very low mental faculty, but the actor who portrays him is too quick and too intelligent-looking; in fact, the other characters in the film have to keep reminding the audience that he is supposed to be stupid. His character is obviously meant to be tragic, a puppet who is constantly being manipulated by those around him, but the actor's performance makes the character seem much more self-aware and culpable, and thus much less sympathetic.

"Though the film is not terrible by any stretch, there is not a lot here to interest Buñuel fans. Certainly there is a great deal about the equivocal, two-faced nature of human beings—which is not merely to say that they are liars, but rather they are cut from cloth that is both light and dark—but the more pointed irony and perverse black humor of Buñuel's best films are but an undercurrent in The Brute. As far as surrealism goes, there is really only one scene at the end which would suggest that the filmmaker is the same man who co-created Un Chien Andalou.

"It's odd that only the more conventional of Buñuel's Mexican films are available on DVD—Susana, A Woman Without Love, and The Brute—while more interesting films like Los Olvidados, El and The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz have all but disappeared."

In the past months I've watched or rewatched all the Buñuel movies on Netflix that I don't already have a copy of, and at some point I would like to write up a little guide for those who want to explore his work. Netflix has quite a few of his films, but a good chunk of them are unremarkable commercial efforts made to please his Mexican producer. I wouldn't say that films like A Woman Without Love and Susana are bad, they're just not particularly noteworthy. Moreover, it's worth pointing out that the sexy and so fairly well-known Diary of a Chambermaid, Belle de Jour and That Obscure Object of Desire are not necessarily the cream of the crop.

If I never get around to writing the piece, I suppose it will suffice to say that the best Buñuel that Netflix has to offer is the classic Viridiana. Sadly, the other great films of that period—Nazarin, The Exterminating Angel, and Simon of the Desert—are unavailable on DVD. Of course, the next one to check out after Viridiana would be the Oscar-winning Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. For those who are allergic to subtitles, I would suggest The Young One. I also find Robinson Crusoe to be quite entertaining; it has the look of something you might have been forced to watch at school on a rainy day, and of course that makes the Buñuellian touches all the more devilishly delightful. "Aiyah! Friday beautiful god of war! Aiyah!"

Spin-off!

2008-05-08T13:56:00.003-05:00

For the two or three people who still occasionally check into this blog, I'll just mention that there is a new spin-off blog about my nerdy hobby: Skunked Again. Enjoy!

Somnambulist

2008-04-11T09:28:00.010-05:00

In the early twentieth century, perhaps a bit before—no one is precisely sure when it all happened—two young men of the garret-dwelling variety decide to visit the traveling fair that has come to their sleepy German town of Holstenwall. In the midway with its tents and sideshows, a clangor is heard: a seedy barker rings his hand bell and holds forth a mysterious painting of a ghastly youth. Though dressed like a professor, he is unkempt and menacing: his chin is unshaven, and stringy white hair falls away from his temples onto his shoulders. Piercing eyes twitch behind round spectacles as a sneer flickers on his lips.

One of the youths, thirsting for sensation as all young men do, finds himself drawn to the attraction, and he pulls his comrade inside the tent.

In the darkness within, the rabble huddles on benches beneath a high stage, on which stands a tall, skinny box. The professor comes to stand beside the cabinet and proclaims that within lies the somnambulist Cesare, dead asleep for all twenty-three of his years of life, and yet under the professor's command. With a perverse grin the professor teases the doors aside to reveal the sleeper: corpselike, emaciated, with hollowed eyes and a face the color of ashes.

The professor bids Cesare to awaken, and, with a grotesque, labored twitching, the young man's eyes open to reveal a gaze of horror. With faltering steps the creature gasps for air and walks forth from its box, its hands tensed into claws before it.

The professor boasts to the crowd that within his ages of sleep Cesare has seen all things, past and future, and he dares the audience to ask the somnambulist any question of their choosing.

Entranced, insensible to the doom that hangs in the air before him, the rash young man shouts out to the monster:

"How long will I live?"

Cesare's face contorts, and in a ragged breath he replies:

"Until the sun rises."

And the nightmare begins.

As it is with so many our our shared, cultural memories, I do not recall when I first heard of Dr. Caligari and what lies within his cabinet; it seems like I have always known of their existence, as if that coffin-like box was a presupposition of the very condition of being alive. I do remember when I first felt its influence upon me, however: it was back in the last century, the year 1990 to be exact. Frageau and I—two young men of the garret-dwelling variety—would stay awake until late into the night poring over film textbooks as if they were manuals for the conjuration of angels or demons. My friend was particularly enchanted by the bizarre stills from the iconic Expressionist film: the cockeyed, angular houses teetering over town squares, the freakish family tableau of a top-hatted gentleman spoon-feeding a catatonic sitting upright in a box, and a shadowy, liquid figure hauling an unconscious girl across knife-like rooftops. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was not merely a film but a seventy-year-old mystery; what kind of minds would create such a bizarre contraption, such chaotic, horrible mojo?

The following year it happened that a course on the golden age of German film was offered at the college we attended. Of course this included The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and it was here that my nerdy but sincere love for the German silent cinema was born; I have both Caligari and my friend to thank for that.

What has brought all this to mind for me was that I recently bought a copy of the DVD of the film as restored by the Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv of Germany, released by the film-lover's friend, Kino on Video, and as I sat down to watch it I found myself wondering if the movie would still have the power to affect the average viewer, if you can call a viewer willing to sit through a silent film "average." Caligari has of course survived and thrived in movie-buff folklore, though I think this is for a number of reasons that have nothing to do with its qualities as a motion picture. First, of course, would be those striking still photographs that continue to look so snappy in textbooks. Second is that the film was singled out in Siegfried Kracauer's famous, intriguing, and, in my opinion, not remotely plausible hypothesis on German film's anticipation of the Nazis, From Caligari to Hitler. Third, and probably not least, Caligari has become the favored example of an -ism, namely Expressionism, and, as everyone knows, -isms tend to lead rich lives even after all the participants therein have long since died and gone to heaven.

It would be nice to be able to chirpily assert that, yes, of course Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is as gripping today as it was eighty-nine years ago, but if I force myself to see what's really there instead of what I want to see, I can't be quite so categorical about how well the octogenarian has held up over time.

What's ironic here is that restorations are supposed to return films to their youth and vigor, to liven the colors, sharpen the edges, and erase all the myriad insults of time and apathy that the film has suffered over the years. This rejuvenating of Caligari is striking, incredible even, but to some extent it is a bit like turning on the lights in a spook house; in what were once dark, grainy recesses that held shadows and ghosts one can suddenly see the facade, and a bit too clearly. The sets, for all their imagination, have a distinct "canvas-y" look to them, something which is forgivable on a stage but not so much in a film. Beyond that, Caligari often conveys the impression of filmed theater, an affliction that most films of the period share; after all, this was only five short years after Birth of a Nation, and film language was still in its infancy. There is some extremely imaginative camera work in the scene in which Alan is murdered, but other than that the camera setups are all static, with the one-camera-angle-per-set rule only broken for facial closeups or the occasional action sequence.

However, I do feel that there is something lasting about Dr. Caligari and Cesare, in the way that a powerful dream can remain in our memories for years or a lifetime. Like other fairy tales, it is nonsensical but compelling, as though we are looking at a strange caricature that we only just fail to recognize as something already within ourselves.

If nothing else, I know that the movie has woven its way into the fabric of my own life and is the touchstone of many thoughts and memories. One of my sharpest mental images of the world of Caligari is that of a book that my friend Frageau owned on the subject and which he always kept handy, and here fantasy and reality begin to reflect each other in odd ways, though I am only just seeing it all now, in hindsight. Just as the two young men in the film both love the same girl, my friend and I were also both smitten by a particular female, and it was she who had originally stumbled across the book and bought it as a present for Frageau. On the cover was yet another of the famous images, the chained convict in the oubliette, arrows of light or vengeance descending from above to frame or imprison him. In the wheels within wheels that seem to pervade anything that has to do with the film, this character with his mop of dark hair, long nose, and glowering, unshaven face was the very double of my friend, the similarly unfortunate Frageau.

A couple of years later, Frageau, who counted amateur photography among his numerous hobbies, was taking pictures of me for my college yearbook photo, and on a whim I picked up the Caligari book as a prop and pretended to read it. That photo ended up being the one that I eventually submitted, though I was never able to goad him into making an extra print for me to keep. No matter: some years after that his girlfriend, who was still at school, stumbled across the original in a bin in the student co-op, and she gave it to Frageau, who gave it to me. Sadly, my friend is gone now, and the book with him, lost Rosebud-like in some box or milk crate that he left behind somewhere, with someone, some someone who will probably never know what it means. I have a photograph, though, and that counts for something.

I am far away from all these people and dreams now. The lights have been turned on in the spook house. No matter—shadows still fall, and in the darkness an evil old man still keeps a young one in a box, pale, sickly, under sway, and asleep. We can thrill ourselves with the thought that some lives are short while others continue on in loss and confusion. "How long will I live?" Better to not ask questions to which you don't want to hear the answer.

High Strung

2008-03-24T20:24:00.002-05:00

A large part of what makes Matt Rae's music so enjoyable to listen to is the variety of elements that he brings to the table: fiery technical skill, a gift for catchy melodic lines, a showman's ability to slip effortlessly into different musical styles and make them his own, and, not least, a cheery, contagious sense of humor. What makes High Strung, Matt's third album of recordings, such remarkable, attention-grabbing listening is the seamless combination of all these elements into a complete whole; it stands on its own not as a showcase for this or that side of a guitarist's talents but rather as a synthesis of everything—everything that makes Matt Rae the musician he is.

There have been moments in the past when it seemed as though Matt was afraid to treat his compositions too roughly for fear that they might break; on High Strung, however, the Telecaster is not so much showcased as unleashed, playing catch-me-if-you-can with the listener and nailing every right-angle turn and dogleg. Even playful songs like "Happy Ending" and "Goose Pickin'" are salted down with blistering guitar work, and it creates something new entirely, something so very much like Matt himself, at once warmly congenial and fiercely dedicated.

As on Twang! and Tele-pathic, Matt leads off High Strung with a killer, in this case the thoroughly rambunctious "Bad Truck." If a Confederate zombie swamp monster jumped a motorcycle over twelve burning school buses, it might sound something like this. Another spectacular standout is "Small Brown Dog," a song with a Buddy Holly bounce mixed with high-speed countrified jazz. Further rockabilly is perpetrated with criminal intent on "Peanut Butter and Tele" and "Weedwhacker"; it is believed that a number of good old boys suffered acute spinal strains during its execution, and hillbilly lawsuits may be pending.

Not all of the songs are quite so easy to pigeonhole, however, "After Hours" gives us a taste of spooky blues with a hint of spandex, while "Lizzie Strut" is an amalgamation of bar band and funk, all wrapped in one of Matt's typically catchy melodies. In fact, throughout the record Matt slips into musical styles as a man might try on hats to mug in a mirror—a jazzman's beret, a bluesman's bowler, an oversized cowboy hat, a neon-yellow leopard-skin headband—and what is so refreshing is that there is not a trace of irony, just a simple joy of sound.

Fans of the soulful tracks from Matt's previous albums such as "Almost Home," and "Rolling Fog" are sure to enjoy "I Only Have Eyes for You" and "Tube Job," though the latter song is not so dreamy that Matt couldn't sneak in some hot guitar work—just in case we'd forgotten what a kick-ass musician he is.

All in all, High Strung is a great CD, and if there's any justice it will be heard by more than just hardcore guitarophiles and the devoted few who pack into the local watering holes to be blown away by Connecticut's loudest yet best-kept secret.

Night Voices

2008-02-11T14:35:00.000-05:00

A strange experience last night: I was sleeping, somewhat lightly, and dreaming of something or other, when I heard a woman's voice whisper my name, quietly but insistently. I woke up and waited, listening for more, assuming that the voice belonged to my wife, but there was nothing. Everything was quiet. My wife was asleep.

This was something that had actually happened to me before, but never before had I been so completely convinced that I had heard something instead of having just dreamed it (even when it had been a shout instead of a whisper and the voice was still ringing in my ear). Was it just a dream, and, if so, was my subconscious trying to tell me something? What? Or was it something else? I must confess that I don't rule out the possibility that a person, either living or dead, was actually trying to communicate with me, but what should I have done? Look out the window? Turn on the news? What was the follow-up? If I got up and kicked around the house, I probably never would have gotten back to sleep. I could have whispered back, but I would have died from fright if I had actually received a response.

There was only one thing that could possibly be so important that I had to be woken up at three o'clock in the morning for it, so I trudged into my son's room to make sure he was okay. As usual, he had the blanket up over his head, with his two skinny legs comically sticking out the bottom. I uncovered his face and threw another blanket on him, which he no doubt kicked off the moment I left the room.

I can still hear that voice, though: "Joe...!"

Whiter, Dammit!

2006-06-23T12:17:00.000-05:00

It's offical. I've now tried all the varieties of Wite-Out: "Extra Coverage" Wite-Out, "Quick Dry" Wite-Out and "Super Smooth" Wite-Out. The verdict: Super Smooth, all the way. Quick Dry really does dry rather quickly, I have to give it that, but the Super Smooth is just...well, smoother. I can wait a couple of seconds for more smoothness.

The Extra Coverage Wite-Out just seems excessive. It's like some kind of asbestos pudding. I could maybe see using it to hide a dead body, but for general office use it's just overkill.

To Our Friends in Asia

2006-06-04T20:05:00.000-05:00

I recently acquired a second-hand go set, and I was curious about the meaning of the writing on the box. Anyone care to translate? Maybe it just means "this is a go set," but I'm hoping there's a little more to it than that.

More Dreams

2006-03-22T09:01:00.000-05:00

My son was uncharacteristically quiet getting out of bed this morning, and when he came downstairs in a stiff, sleepy manner he immediately walked over to the drawer where we keep the art supplies. I was trying to get out the door to go to work, but, curious about his behavior, I lingered in the room to see what he had in mind.
Eventually he fished out a clean piece of paper and a magic marker and began to write. I walked past on the way to the kitchen and saw the letters a n in weird, scrawly letters. I got whatever I was looking for and he stopped me on the way back.

"That says...."

This is his way of asking us to read something he has written. The letters a n g e were written on the paper. Angry? Angel? I wasn't sure what he had in mind.

"You read."

"That says...."

"You read."

"Ange," he said.

By now my wife was in the room. "Angel? You need an ell. Good! Now draw a picture." Having written his l, he drew a round head and underneath a scribble with wings. Finished, he walked away from the table and picked up a DVD. I took his hand.

"Did you dream about an angel?"

"Yes."

"What did the angel say?"

He thought for a while. We sat and waited. Finally he murmured something short and incomprehensible, and then went on to something else.

An Unsettling Dream

2005-12-21T15:56:00.000-05:00

I have arrived in a strange, isolated town; the town is in the midst of some story, as if it were the fiction of a film; now, the apartment of a family of four; it is empty, and the children have gone missing; all that remains are the recording of the little girl's voice as she repeats a rhyme; the parents, grieved of their loss, have run an endless loop of the words through a loudspeaker hidden in a vent, but the sound is tinny and ghost-like; the father, now: he is impatient, lost in himself.

Something is happening in the town, something powerful and unknown; the people are disappearing; the national guard is called, and they launch a strange, burning chain reaction in the air over the people's heads; they explain that it is only a preventative for something airborne and mostly harmless, but that is not the truth; something else is going on, beyond air and fire, from another world; among the crowd milling through the grey streets now are the parents; they argue; the mother is sharp and angry, the father is aloof and resentful.

Now flash backwards to the girl as she speaks her rhyme into the microphone, and it is the parents that have strangely vanished, not merely missing but gone from the world; over and over she repeats the words while the little one sits and watches; over and over.

Flash backwards again, to the parents, on a huge futuristic train, in a holiday moment high above the town; they drink champagne on the balcony, and it is all a moving picture shown on magic paper, and in the picture the father takes the paper out of its envelope so that he can see the picture on the paper of him with the picture on the paper into infinity, but the paper is blank; "I guess it doesn't work that way." They laugh.

Now, I am with the detectives who try to understand what is happening and why the people are disappearing; they have taken tiny frozen bodies from the water and have put them in a small plastic tub; I pick one up, covered in ice, stiff as wood, doll-like, no longer than a pencil; it is the father; I try to rub the ice away from the features of the face. The detective says: "what would cause a man to become fozen and tiny?"

Do Tigers Ride in Boats?

2005-12-02T19:08:00.000-05:00

No.

The Scourge of Destiny, part 1

2005-05-17T13:22:00.000-05:00

I was in the break room playing a quick hand of flaschenteufel with Piker Gabble, Cole Stangle and Zbigniew Chanyeski when a sudden dread cacophony erupted from the office of Darren Truett. It sounded, to my ears, like a firecracker fight, or the flaying of an ox, and the four of us rushed to his door, where a gasp escaped us in unison.

Darren was crouched on the floor on all fours, head down between his shoulders, and over him stood Methéolina Sabrine, bare-breasted and wielding a belt. Methé was a blue-eyed starlet who by now had been auditioned so long and so thoroughly by Darren that she threatened to become something like a girlfriend, but that all seemed to have gone by the boards today. Naked to the waist, wearing only a purple skirt, wild yellow hair whirling around her in an angry halo, she towered over the producer like a bullfighter, the studded belt raised over her head; then, with a laser's snap she cracked the whip down on Darren's ears and ribs, the leather reports punctuated by the victim's shrieks and pleadings.

The four of us stared in astonishment at the beating in progress until finally the valkyrie spotted us gaping—me unfortunately in the lead—and her eyes narrowed into knives. The girl nurtured for me no particular affection, as she thought my screenplay asinine in the worst degree and so doomed to lead her producer/lover, and by extension herself, into a maelstrom of failure and stupidity. Before I could even bleat "I love you" to the apparition the belt cracked at me like a cobra and I was hit in the face by what felt like a savage velvet punch; one of my favorite teeth flew out of my head, sailed across the office in a graceful arc and was sunk into a shot glass of Irish whiskey that sat waiting on the desk. "Goaaaaal!" screamed Zbigniew as I crashed to the floor. The female terror lashed again at Darren and I, over and over; "darling! dearest! angel!" someone pleaded as we crawled beneath the desk; then the girl grabbed her shirt and shoes and started clearing a path through the doorway with the belt. We could hear the screams of our comrades and the gunshot lashes of the whip fading down the corridors.

Thunderstruck, Darren and I huddled beneath the desk, he wiping the blood from his face with his shirttails and I gingerly exploring the gap left by the missing tooth.

"Do you think we're safe?" whispered Darren. "Listen, she might come back. There's a gun on top of that bookcase, go run and get it."

"No way!" I hissed. "I'm not going back out there! You go get it!"

"Coward!" spat Darren. He fished around in his pockets. "Look, I have a half a bag of Pop Rocks. Maybe we can throw them in her face and stun her."

"Wow, they still make Pop Rocks?"

Just then a pair of threadbare khaki pants appeared, followed by deep amber sunglasses framed by two colossal sideburns. "Uh...what are you boys doing down there?"

"Good Lord, man! Are you crazy?" gulped Darren. "Get out of sight!" He reached up and hauled the hapless stranger under the desk. Between the three of us things were somewhat snug. I leaned across the newcomer to berate the producer.

"Darren, you idiot, this is Trent Tonhoe!"

"Who?"

"Trent Tonhoe."

Darren peered deep into the baffled director's face, and then, suddenly, dawn broke across his features. For once some flicker of intelligence seemed to illuminate his visage. Ardently he grasped the man by the shoulders, his eyes wide, his hair all but standing on end.

"Trent baby, quick, run over and get the gun from the top of that bookcase."

John Paul II's New Pet

2005-04-08T12:16:00.000-05:00

For those that knew him: Mookie the cat died last night. He was seventeen years old. The passing was presumably a peaceful one.

Beaten Down by the Squares

2005-03-29T19:13:00.000-05:00

To those who are searching for news items about the feature film Night of the Lobster, I apologize for the lack of activity on this page, but the sad fact is that there has been very little to report. Some weeks ago Flaming Guerilla Productions became infected with a strange kind of systemic entropy; all at once progress on various parts of the project sputtered out, and the underlying causes Darren Truett ascribed to budgetary, legal and technical difficulties, all of a somewhat abstruse nature. Permits were lacking, funding had been misplaced, and vicious gremlins had invaded every unguarded piece of equipment from the cameras to the coffeepot to the new gas chromatograph. At one point the very company itself seemed to be in danger when Darren was threatened with a statutory rape suit by a would-be actress, but this turned out to be more of an embarrassing annoyance than a crisis. One look at the offended party's head shot made it clear that the days of the budding young starlet's minority had long since passed and that any youth, corrupted or not, was merely a pleasant fiction in her own mind.

On speaking with one of the various unpaid production assistants regarding the problem, I learned that this dissipation of forward movement was not really circumstantial but was in fact a chronic illness of Flaming Guerilla; once every few months momentum would suddenly come to a screeching halt, and a fortnight would be spent in an extended argument over a soundtrack or in futile attempts at the repair of a secondhand piece of outdated sound equipment. It was all some sort of strangely exaggerated collective biorhythm, and among those working in the company there seemed to be both a frank recognition of the condition and not; it was as if everyone was intimately familiar with the state of affairs but a symptom inherent to the malady was the belief that this time it would be only a momentary hiccup, a frail bond which would be snapped by the energetic force of will that was due to arrive at any moment.

One particular member of the team was more affected than the rest, and he had moved beyond lethargic frittering to outright mania. I wandered into Art Director and Vice President of Production Cole Stangle's office hoping for a game of chess only to find him staring off into space with a look of black dread.

"Hey Cole," I said.

He glanced at me with terror. "Sixteen!" he gasped.

It was no secret around the office that Cole was obsessed with the number sixteen. It appeared in every script and on every set. Apartment numbers were invariably 16. Sixteen extras were hired for crowd scenes, and if one was a no-show he would don a floppy hat and raincoat and fill in the missing anonym himself. It almost goes without saying that he could often be heard humming "Sixteen Tons" under his breath.

"Sixteen what, Cole?"

For a moment he seemed reassured that I did not know the significance of what he was saying, as though one case of innocence might be enough to save the world from damnation. Then he shook his head, moved to the wall, and removed a framed photograph of a grey steamship. On the wall behind it was painted in red letters:

ZIGGURAT 16

It was clear that the man had inscribed these words himself; the plastic bottle of poster paint was on his desk, open and with the business end of the brush still submerged within it. Cole looked at me expectantly, saw that I did not understand, and began explaining.

"Think of a pyramid: powerful, hard to destroy. The base is wide, the top narrow, the center of gravity deep within. You cannot push it over without a supreme effort. And notice: from the top down each row of blocks is wider than the last: one, three, five, seven. Do you know what that adds up to? Sixteen. And, as if that isn't a sufficiently pure expression of power, think on this: the explosion of geometric progression: two times two times two, times two: sixteen. The square of a square. Do I even have to go on?

"And so what of the pyramid, you ask? Why significant? Well, forget the headstones of the Egyptians. That's vanity. That's the philistinism of the nouveau riche, the Romans aping the Greeks. Where did the pyramid come from? Mesopotamia. The ziggurats of Mesopotamia: understand, now, that these weren't merely the mausoleums of the oligarchy, they were thrumming dynamos. They were at once the temples of religion and the cranking generators of secular power. The gods beamed down through the tip and exploded into the land, in the form of the force of kings. Or did they? Here's the terrible part: did the god come first or the power?" Cole was standing now, and he grabbed my arm. "All around was war and struggle, but the ziggurat was inviolate, mysterious, and only the initiates knew its secrets. No windows. Who knows what happened inside? In the depths? Was it communion, or was it conspiracy?" His voice had raised in pitch and intensity, to the point of a scream, but now he whispered. "Did power come first?"

The tension in the microcosm of the room had reached a snapping point, and my arm was starting to hurt, but in the midst of dread I was struck with a translucid thought. "You've got it all wrong, Cole," I said, picking up the paint and brush. "You're coming at this all backwards." I was thinking about a book that I had read which featured a demon arguing with a fairy. "God is always an odd number. It's the devil that's even." I crossed out the sixteen, and filled in:

ZIGGURAT 16 25

I held up my hand, palm outward and fingers outstretched. "Five levels. One, three, five, seven, nine: twenty-five. Five times itself: twenty-five. The square of a prime. God is odd. God came first." It was sheer stupidity, but it seemed to be what was called for.

Cole collapsed into his chair. "Oh my god," he muttered, staring at the writing on the wall. "Ziggurat 25."

Unfortunately I was being chased by a devil of my own, and it was not so easily dispelled. I had been incautious enough to show my script to a somewhat literal-minded friend, a lanky bookkeeper with blue-veined temples, and his reaction was not so much disapproving as insulted. "Lobsters cannot live for extended periods of time out of salt water," he protested in all seriousness, angered as though I were authoring his superfluity by taking liberties with the reality in which he resided.

At first I found the objection amusing. The living quarters of actual lobsters were completely beside the point. It was as obvious as whack and blight that this was no ordinary lobster we were talking about but a super-lobster, a lobster that embodied and magnified in all actualities the evils that lie dormant in lobster hearts. My friend's reaction was nonsensical under the circumstances. Strangely, though, he persisted. "Lobsters cannot live for extended periods of time out of salt water," he would say argumentatively. "They just can't." On and on this went.

Repetition is an evil thing. If, for example, an acquaintance or coworker were to say in a accusatory fashion, "hemmershlemmer," one would hardly take offense because the word is gibberish. It is not at all clear what a hemmershlemmer is or why being one would be a bad thing. However, if this behavior persisted for days, weeks, a month even, soon one's attitude would change. The victim begins having an inner monologue in which he defends himself from the accusation, coming up with reasons why he couldn't be a hemmershlemmer, why it was a logical impossibility. Soon the threat of ruthless, empty-faced hemmershlemmers would be inspring his doubts and haunting his dreams, like gyspies at the edge of a wood. Following that as night follows day would eventually come the unavoidable raging hate of all the shadowy and ill-defined hemmershlemmers of the world and the deep conviction that the first one that presented itself would receive a roundhouse punch on the nose just on principle.

So it was with me. The insistent foolishness that I was being dunned with began to irritate, and then grate, and then infuriate. It was not enough: the moment my acquaintance saw that his objection was working its way into my nerves, the argument expanded into new and manifold areas. I was informed that lobsters did not have the necessary vocal cords with which to speak English (the notion that they scream when submerged in boiling water is a fallacy; the sound is steam escaping from the shell). I was told that the formation of their claws made it impossible for them to fire a pistol. One day I discovered that the buffoon had acquired a small library of literature about lobster anatomy and lifestyle, amassed for the sole purpose of criticizing my screenplay. I vowed not to visit him any longer, but resistance was futile: on the slimmest of pretexts my persecutor would find cause to call me on the phone, and in a matter of minutes the conversation would segue into the physics of crustacean mobility on land or the question of whether their nervous systems are capable of abstract thought.

The end of it all was the maiming of my answering machine with a flathead screwdriver and the relocation of the phone to underneath the bed. I cut myself off from all outside contact for a time, staying close to home, speaking to no one, and continuing to ignore the utility bills. It was the rare occasion that I would remove my bathrobe, to say nothing of my pajamas.

This stupefying idyll was broken one day by the insistent ringing of the submerged telephone. Nine times in one morning the thing exploded into sound. Initially I marveled at the determination of my persecutor to pass on whatever tidbit of biological information he had unearthed--that lobsters were physically incapable of steering a motorcar, or that their small size would prevent them from singing baritone--but in the end it occurred to me that even my misguided bore of a friend could not possibly be this persistent. He did have a job, after all. The only people I knew who did not really have jobs were the staff at Flaming Guerilla Studios.

With extreme difficulty I squeezed myself under the bed to answer the noxious machine, and there, in the dark, with dust weasels in my hair and a collapsible exercise machine jammed into my ribs, I picked up the receiver. "For God's sake, what is it?"

"It's Darren. Your friend Trent Tonhoe called the office yesterday. He's going to do the movie."

Krypton, Maybe?

2005-03-02T10:18:00.000-05:00

I called up Darren Truett to tell him the news. "I may have solved our director problem. Trent Tonhoe is going to look at the script."

"Who the hell is Trent Tonhoe?"

Meanwhile, set construction at the abandoned wire mill is moving along nicely, particularly the laboratory of Dr. Fong. The gaffer's girlfriend works in the physics lab at the college, so we can borrow pretty much anything we need. "How many beakers should we have?" asks Darren. "Fifty? A hundred?" Well, you know how laboratories are—they're lousy with those things. I tell him two hundred just to be on the safe side. Later the same day he found something else we might be able to use.

"What about a gas chromatograph? The college has one just sitting in storage doing nothing. They'll never miss it."

"I guess. What does it look like?"

"Well, just a metal box, really. A metal box with some buttons. I don't think it's a newer model."

"Will people know it's a gas chromatograph? I mean, will they know it's an expensive science thing and not a toaster oven?"

"We could put a sign on it."

"What, a sign that says 'gas chromatograph'?"

"Sure. Why not?"

"Why would a scientist label his own equipment? I mean, in your office do you have a big sign on the fax machine that says 'fax machine'?"

"I guess that's true...how about 'gas chromatograph #2'? It'd be like they're doing so much science they need two of them. They could have a backup gas chromatograph in case the good one is out being fixed."

That sounded reasonable. "Can we get some cool-sounding gas to go with it? Like xenon or something?"

"I'll ask Mitsy."

"Anything but oxygen. That just sounds cheap."

"We'll talk with Mitsy."

This is the kind of stuff that needs to be hammered out when you're making a movie.

Imaginary Insects

2005-02-26T12:18:00.000-05:00

On a freezing cold Presidents' Day I drove across the state to the old whaling city of New London. Several inches of snow had fallen the night before, and that plus Nixon's holiday had left the highways of Connecticut empty, a forbidden land. Everything was absence as I trespassed beneath the still, snow-covered trees in frigid silence, the evergreens standing sentinel for their sleeping young cousins and watching my car scoot below like a shiny crab. Somewhere within their splintery memories they thought back on their own founding fathers, probably, ancient pioneering arboreal species who laid down the law in seedlings and took no days off.

After a lot of fruitless searching through the ordinary channels, I had finally scored Tonhoe's address from a film geek acquaintance in Moodus; the cinephile had spotted the director in a Sports Authority last April and had stolen a peek at the information the man had provided to get his '04 fishing license. Now I was almost there, and his street turned out to be a narrow road sidling off from the city to moon along the banks of the river. I drove past frozen beaches, boatworks, slips, clam shanties and ramshackle restaurants of the sea before finally spotting the house number I was looking for. The problem was that the building was not a residence but a bait shop; I cupped my hands and pressed my face against the glass, but all I could see were rows of featureless shelves and the silhouettes of unsold fishing rods pointing into the air like the spines of a beached monster. I backed away. It was a bum lead. A dud. No Trent Tonhoe or anyone else inside. Of course. It would have been all too easy. What was I thinking?

It was then that I noticed a chain-link gate to the left, and turning the corner I saw beyond it an open wooden stairway leading up the outside of the powder-blue building. An apartment above...from the outside the accommodations looked to be modest, to put it politely, but still....

I rounded up the various scraps of courage within me, opened the gate and quietly climbed the steps. A single door faced the landing. I knocked hard on the wood.

With a pop the catch sprung and the door slowly swung open onto a small, dark kitchen littered with mismatched glassware, abundant evidence of past preparations of coffee, and unwashed cooking machinery of unfamiliar purpose. At the far end of the small space was a shuttered bar, slightly open, and beyond it I could just see the top of a man's head.

"Ah...er," I stammered, "I'm sorry, but the door just opened by itself...I didn't mean to..."

One dark eye came to view over the top of the bar.

"...intrude..."

"No matter," said a rough voice. "Come in out of the cold, kid."

I did as was suggested and cautiously entered the main room of the apartment. There was a grim but homey gloom to the place; the cold light shining in through the large picture window overlooking the bobbing masts and the river beyond seemed to be held at bay by old cigarette smoke and floating dust, and warm darkness had managed to make itself comfortable in every corner. The space was furnished haphazardly with castoff furniture and grey milk crates, and every flat surface was littered with papers and other debris. Texts and sketches were everywhere; in particular there were plies of charcoal drawings on large sheets of paper, the subjects seeming to be either fish, birds, or some mix of the two. I sat down cautiously on a nappy couch piled with European cycling magazines and trout stocking reports. On the table before me sat a small toy frog attached to a squeeze bulb. The fish and birds were in force here too, as well as pages of illegible, scrabbled writing which may have been film scripts or recipes for chowder.

The man at the table was, by my best guess, black Irish crossed with something exotic—Albanian blood, or maybe Turkish. A mop of thick black hair was becoming shot with white, as were the outrageous mutton chops that broadened an already wide face. On a sharp triangular nose sat a pair of tinted spectacles, and the man squinted through them in anxious concentration at a machine which looked something like a science fiction zap gun, except that tied to the tip like a weensy Fay Wray was a tiny pile of black fluff. String, feathers, and deer tails littered the rest of the table.

It was, unquestionably, Trent Tonhoe. I recognized him from the famous photograph from the set of Divine Wind in which he is handing a loaded rifle to Emmanuelle Clewert.

Abruptly the director bent his face down to the machine and bit off the last dangling bit of black thread with his teeth. He then sat up and turned to me. "Does that look like any bug you've ever seen?"

I squinted at the smidge on the table. It was an odd, complicated knot of red and black thread, with squibbled loops representing wings and long burrs suggesting filthy insect appendages. There was a hint of iridescence about the tiny monstrosity, with scarlet tufts and carmine swirls churning through the black furze to make a peppered illusion of depth and anatomical purpose. I shuddered. "I guess I'd have to say no."

Tonhoe did not seem displeased with this answer. "Verisimilitude is a conceit," he announced with a nod. "The funny thing about tying flies is that the right fiction will catch more fish than a good forgery. A perfect arrangement of color and shape can tweak sunken memories of extinct predators and dream-prey. Or maybe that's putting too fine a point on it? Let's just say that it hits them in just the right way, it touches the right electrical trigger point; it's not what the fish sees to be real, it's what the fish knows to be real. Two completely different things." Tonhoe touched the various half-empty mugs that were scattered about him, found one that presumably was fresher or warmer than the others, and took a long drink. Fidgeting, I gingerly touched the squeeze bulb of the frog. It hopped.

"So, what can I do for you?"

My brain had been threatening to knot itself up like Tonhoe's twine insect the moment I had climbed the first step of the stairs, and now an invisible hand pulled the end of the string tight. Whatever it was that I had planned to say had disappeared, and my blindly groping thoughts found only a strange, irregular object whose function was unclear.

"I'm making a film," I said.

Tonhoe leaned back and shook a cigarette out of a mostly empty pack. I could see now that he had an older man's frame, spare but heavy. He was wearing grey running sneakers and a fishing vest. A match sparked.

"I wrote the script, there's a production company, but I need a director. A real director. There's not a lot of money in it, but it's good, I know it's good. I...I don't know what your time, I mean your schedule is like...."

"Time!" A thunderhead of smoke rolled across the room. "Time is a nasty bitch, mostly because you never know if you're supposed to hump her or not, and she makes you feel guilty about it either way. I stay as far away from that stuff as possible. What's the title of this particular epic?"

"Uh, 'Night of the Lobster'."

"Night of the Lobster." repeated Tonhoe. He leaned back in his chair and blew curlicues of smoke at the ceiling. "Night of the Lobster?" He gave me a dubious glance. His gaze then wandered out the window, or else inward. After several minutes of silence, he spoke. "Have you ever seen the Dr. Mabuse movies?"

Well, I had. We talked about film for a couple of hours, with mostly Tonhoe doing the talking, and while only half of his comments made sense to me, everything he said had strange resonance, the deep ring of a bell that has tolled many hours. When the light outside began to fail, my host deftly maneuvered me out of his pied-a-mer. We had not discussed my project, but in between a diatribe against zoom shots and a detailed description of the creation of three-dimensional space in a Griffith short the director told me to mail the script to his post office box. We parted ways at the bottom of the steps. It was only then that the subject of Divine Wind came up.

"Yes, the scene with the centurion...everyone loves that scene. I guess I do too. It was fun to do. Italy is beautiful. They had good pasta in the valley below. Fresh tomatoes, goose liver. Clive was still in the Roman getup, shoveling in salad and wine. The people loved it. He was a celebrity...not as an actor, you understand, but as a man from the past, the glorious past, come to visit, to see if the vino was still good in that part of the world two thousand years later. They practically asked him what it was like to know Caesar. It was lovely."

Thank You for Sending Me an Angel

2005-02-16T21:21:00.000-05:00

I literally fell out of my chair when I read the name in the news item. I had been leaning back, far back—something my mother had warned me about—and when I saw the name in the paper I had drifted off into astonishment and lost touch the with mental subdepartment in charge of balance and safety. I fell.

Luckily there was another chair directly behind me. After only a second of pinwheeling arms and flailing legs I was lying upside down in a soft black leather affair that I had found abandoned outside a college dormitory. I read the sentence again:

"Another famous face at the exhibition was Hollywood director Trent Tonhoe, best known for his films Man Cooking Kidneys and Divine Wind."

To call Trent Tonhoe a famous Hollywood director was being a little optimistic; he was aggressively indie, strictly art house, and if Hollywood knew of his existence it would only be because one of the trade unions had his name on a list of people to be beaten up. Among movie buffs, however, he is legendary; Divine Wind is truly one of the masterworks of narrative film, a new Thesaurus for film language itself, and a glorious and powerful emotional experience. It is also one of the most notoriously difficult films to actually see, as very few prints are currently in circulation and it has never been transferred to videotape. The only reason that I am familiar with it is that I was lucky enough to be free on the Tuesday afternoon when the Museum of Modern Art screened the picture as part of its "Visions of the Prairie" series. Actually, the film that was supposed to be shown was the 1936 documentary The Plow that Broke the Plains, but there was some mix-up in the archival department; when the film turned out to be DW the audience of film nerds squealed with glee and ran upstairs to barricade the projection booth.

The artist whose exhibition Tonhoe had visited was one LaPacia Flemmaria, a hyperrealist who paints swirling, explosive still lifes of radial saws and fax machines. I got her telephone number from the gallery (La Bon Phott) by passing myself off as a marketing executive from Hewlett Packard who wanted to commission her to paint a portrait of a switching router. I had then prepared a very large amount of hokum in order to get into the artist's confidence so that I could tease out whatever information she knew about Tonhoe, but when I actually connected to her on the phone I lost my nerve. Her voice was simple, musical, and pleasant; she seemed to be perfectly happy to speak to a stranger about whatever was on his mind, and for some reason all the lies drained out of me.

I told her, simply, my story. I was reading about her one-woman show and had seen the name Trent Tonhoe. I was a screenwriter in desperate need of a director, a real director. From one artist to another: could she help me? Did she know Tonhoe? Was he retired? Could I meet him?

Ms. Flemmaria, with a voice of sweet concern, told me that she had never met Trent Tonhoe before that day, but that he had mentioned in passing that he was currently living in New London, Connecticut.

This was all of substance that she knew about the mysterious director, but some reason the conversation lasted a further twenty minutes. By the end I had not only promised to visit La Bon Phott gallery in Switchhaven, but that I would also drop by her private studio to look at her latest canvases. I hung up the phone feeling like I had been brainwashed by an angel.

New London...?

The Last Straw

2005-02-08T11:39:00.000-05:00

The frustrations of the past few weeks finally reached the breaking point late last night. I had gone to the offices of Flaming Guerrilla Productions to complain about Brian Eggorian's latest script suggestion (a dream sequence about horses, if you can believe that), and while I was sitting at Darren's desk and waiting for him to finish auditioning yet another female college student I happened to notice the name of one of the characters from the film on some handwritten pages. I assumed that these were production notes regarding costumes or shooting schedules or some such thing, and so I picked them up and started to read. Try to imagine my horror when I realized that what I had in my hands was, in essence, an authorial hijacking of the film by my very nemesis--in other words, a completely new scene for the film penned by the psychotic Mr. Eggorian. My beloved characters were being forced to babble nonsensically at metaphorical gunpoint, and I squirmed in agony as I read an extraordinarily lengthy dialogue between Mandy and her mother in which they discussed, among other things, the emotional trauma Mandy experienced when her mother forbade her to associate with the "rough kids" from the high school marching band, the shame she felt when her mother threw a glass of water at her after her first onset of menses, and the mother's disappointment that the girl was a failure at the art of needlepoint. These pointless histrionics continued on for about seven pages, and the truly infuriating thing about it all was that in the end the two characters did not even reach any kind of accord or understanding; they both simply stamped off to their rooms and phoned their respective therapists.

Here's a brief excerpt of the drivel in question:

Mandy: It was you, mother. You drove daddy away. You and your fancy boys and your mint juleps and everything!

Diahnne: Don't you talk about your father. Don't you dare mention that saint's name, you little tramp.

Mandy: Daren't I? Daren't I?

Diahnne: And let's not bring up the fancy boys again either.

Mandy: Fancy boys! Fancy boys! All you care about are your goddamned fancy boys! They're a sad parade of broken-down pipe dreams and nightmares, they're the clattering arrows of syphilitic cupids who can't see to aim! You shame me, mama! You shame daddy! You shame yourself!

Diahnne: For the love of god, darling, be quiet. The neighbors will hear you. Please, sweetheart, just shut up and fix me a hot toddy.

All in all, it had the rhythm and tone of a Tennessee Williams play ghost written by a mental defective...and this was the new scene earmarked for my own labor of love, Night of the Lobster.

No fucking way.

When Darren finally returned from his exercises in casting and had put on a clean shirt I let him have it. "You can film Night of the Lobster written by me or you can film A Streetcar Named Diarrhea by Brian Eggorian. Take your pick."

Darren's face was fixed into a sullen stare as he listened to my tirade, but I knew that he knew that I was right. There was a long silence as he stared out the window towards the landfill next door, but finally he sighed and looked me in the eye. "Find me a director, then, Joe. Find me a real director and I'll make Night of the Lobster, just the way you dreamed it. Find me a director and we'll make the hell out of that picture, kid."

I stamped down the concrete stairs, wondering where in the wilderness of Connecticut USA I would find a real film director, and, as I opened the door onto the howling cold of the night, I heard Darren roar out one final thought behind me:

"...but he's gotta be cheap!"

Shut Up 'n' Play Yer Guitar

2005-01-30T13:05:00.000-05:00

There's a fellow I know named Matt Rae, a regular guy living in an ordinary house on one of those quiet Connecticut streets, but he's a guy's who's worth introducing to anyone who hasn't already met him. In addition to being a pleasant fellow who likes B movies and who is kind to dogs and children, Matt is a guy who can, at any moment he pleases, wring some lightning and thunder out of a guitar neck and knock the listener out of his chair and into the street. He is, in a way, the most genuine kind of musician there is: one whose aspirations coincide with the immediacy of second-to-second communication, who plays without the cop-out of irony, and whose only goal is to bust out some notes and tear the universe a new one right when it least expects it. C'mon, let's go now, down to his basement; let him pick one of the guitars off the wall and lay down some funky shit that Homer and Cervantes would have been down with, lookout jangles for holy prophets and colliding suns. Hell, I've heard him tear the blues out of a $3.95 Toys 'R' Us kiddie ukulele, and he makes it sound good. Incredibly rare it is to find musicians who possess this kind of astounding technical ability and that elusive quality the old-timers call "soul," and Matt Rae has both, in spades.

For those of you who aren't able to catch him on one of his club dates, you could probably do a lot worse than to visit his website, mattrae.com, and preview some of the tracks from his latest CD, "Twang!" Check out the savage hillbilly assault of "Road Rage" and the down-home cockeyed grin of "Tele Savalas", get back to the oceanic with "Floatin'" or "Sonic Blue", or just wrap your mind around the million-dollar solos that pepper the whole crazy porridge, and you've got a rocket in your brain like Buzz Aldrin only dreamed of. Get on board, cosmonauts, 'cause the crummy planet we're on is old news and the cool kids are outta here.

The true joy, however, is seeing him play live, as this is an experience all to itself. With ultra sangfroid bassman Mark Bridgman and escaped mental patient and drum abuser Stuart Stahr, the Matt Rae trio has been raising insurance rates across the state by tearing the roof off of joint after joint and exposing unwary barflies to stars and rain. When the crowd is ready and jumping, when Matt sinks his teeth into a groove and his left hand goes all crazy and boneless across the frets, your soul is amazed awake and ringing, you feel the shock unto your mind and the throne upon your lungs; 100 bullets are flying every which way, and Matt has fired them all, buzzing and tickling into beer glasses and wall joists until rhythm and time are ping-ponging brainwise like a last revelation or first arrest. Then all the lonely barmaids say "hey, this cat can really swing, gimme some more of that head-over-heels, guitar man!"

Yeah, baby. Matt is only happy to oblige.

Scene From a Marriage

2005-01-25T20:50:00.000-05:00

L: Look! It's Wilford Brimley!
J: What?
L: It's Wilford Brimley! You love Wilford Brimley!
J: What are you talking about?
L: You love Wilford Brimley.
J: I love Wilford Brimley?
L: You love Wilford Brimley.
J: Since when do I love Wilford Brimley?
L: You just do.

A Disturbing Trend

2005-01-19T10:42:00.000-05:00

The situation with Mr. Eggorian is now becoming intolerable. Faxes are arriving on a daily basis, and the changes to the script that he is requesting have gone beyond the aggravating and into the bizarre. For example, why cut the birthday party scene? It's not terribly long, it contains some fairly good character development (I thought), and without it the viewer would have to wonder why Cadge and Mandy go down to the harbor at all. In addition, why the request to "tone down" the lobster's rooftop monologue? Just how mellow do you want the villain to be? Okay, maybe the cape is a little over the top, but the whole bit about the "claws of fate" is pure gold and I'm not touching a goddamn word of it.

Even more worrisome than the deletions are the new scenes the lunatic wants added. Suddenly there's supposed to be some subplot involving Mandy and an estranged mother? Why? What the hell for? Who would possibly care about that? She's a kid from the wrong side of the tracks, that's all you need to know, end of story. As if that weren't enough, he wants a big blow-up between Mrs. Rample and Dr. Fong. I don't even know what to say about that one. The two characters barely know each other. What kind of emotional baggage are they supposed to have?

I'm now starting to wonder if the man is simply insane. I'm half-tempted to sneak into a rehearsal of the Ridgebury High School production of Lend Me a Tenor to see if he foams at the mouth.

Crime & Punishment

2005-01-17T13:52:00.000-05:00

For those who are interested, I'll give a quick update on the latest ups and downs of my first and greatest film project, the horror-musical Night of the Lobster, written by me and produced by Flaming Guerrilla Studios.

Pre-production moved slowly but steadily throughout December and into January, and we all had good reason to be optimistic; casting was near completion, several letters were sent to the Connecticut Foundation for the Arts, and our production assistant and location scout Tim "Piker" Gabble found an abandoned wire mill which we could use as a makeshift studio. Regarding the last, let me just clarify that we did make an attempt to discover who owned the derelict building, but upon repeatedly dialing the phone number penciled onto the faded sign on the gate producer Darren Truett said that the only response was an answering machine recording on which could only be heard the barking of bipolar lap dogs.

The first setback was the jailing of the young man slated to play the lead role, a college student named Corky Lamour. Apparently in between his drama classes he had offered to sell pep pills to an undercover police officer, an incident which was complicated by the fact that she had been dressed as a schoolgirl at the time. Rather than contact his disciplinarian parents for the bail money, Corky preferred to remain in the pokey, spending his time making new friends and learning to play the harmonica. Darren briefly considered using part of the film's budget for the liberty of the male lead, but Herschel, the roofer who will be writing and performing the score, desperately needed a new wah-wah pedal, and so the shooting schedule was simply delayed until the rehabilitation of our star. One good thing did come of the incident, however, which is that Darren signed on the arresting officer to play one of the supporting roles. It was a nice little coup, really; she is in sufficiently good athletic condition to perform the stunts which the script demands, her duties as an undercover police person have required her to learn something of the dramatic arts—in some cases better than our college students—and on top of all that she has a certain physical charm which was a little unsettling framed in a Catholic school uniform but which will be right at home in a film about violence and totalitarian shellfish. The only complication will be, of course, that we have to make sure that our illegal occupation of the wire factory is not a topic of conversation within earshot of our winsome representative of the law.

One other difficulty presented itself when I was introduced to the director, Brian Eggorian, who is the pompous ass that runs the Ridgebury Community Theater and the Ridgebury High School Drama Club. He immediately started referring to me as "the scribbler," and by the time I had made it home from the meeting he had already faxed me several pages of notes on the script, the suggested changes accentuated by both underlines and exclamation points. For starters, he was campaigning for the eradication of all the political subtext, in particular the reference to Karl Marx. Additionally, he demanded that the dialogue of the female lead be given more "pepper," a term which I found somewhat vague. When I later pressed him for a more articulate accounting of his concept of "pepper," he hemmed and hawed for a while, muttered something incoherent (it sounded like he said "flammo," perhaps another obscure theater term) and then hung up the phone.

I have recently tried to meet Mr. Eggorian halfway and make the script a little less political and a little more peppery without destroying the feel or the underlying message. Unfortunately my attempts at "pepper" seem to come off as either abusiveness or Tourette's Syndrome; I may have to watch a few Katherine Hepburn movies to get the tone just right.

The Dream Factory

2004-12-09T15:21:00.000-05:00

Here's a quick update for all the friends and well-wishers who are following my writing career. As you might know, I've had a lot of difficulty getting my first screenplay into the right hands. Strange to say, there is a singular lack of vision in the motion picture industry these days, and very few individuals seem to be able to recognize quality material when it is presented to them. The person I met with at CAA chose to use such phrases as "profoundly amateurish" and "groundbreakingly asinine" in reference to my work, and the copy of the script that I sent to Focus Films—supposedly one of the more daring and forward-thinking studios—was returned to me with "you are an idiot" written on the cover in black magic marker. Now, what is that all about? Do people in influential positions get some kind of kick out of being hurtful? How do you expect to nurture young talent with an attitude like that? So on top of everything else I had to go to Kinko's and print out a new cover page.

Thankfully, all that is behind me now, as I have found a production company who sees the potential for greatness hidden in my words. I stumbled onto them at the Department of Motor Vehicles when I went to renew my license, and I mean 'stumbled' quite literally, as the sound guy was lying under a chair. They were busy shooting a thriller in which a dangerous new hallucinogen is being smuggled into the country in French laminate material, and naturally we got to talking about the current state of the cinema in between takes. I managed to hand the director a copy of my script just before they were thrown out, and to make a long story short Night of the Lobster has been announced as Flaming Guerilla Studio's next project.

Any worries I might have had about a rogue outfit like FGS not being equal to the task of a horror-musical special effects spectacular were quickly dispelled when Darren Truett, the producer of the project, faxed me some sketches of the lobster prop. I have to admit, I was pretty impressed; by way of some levers and squeeze bulbs the claws will be able to open and close, and the legs should move pretty convincingly as well. On top of that there will also be a large lobster head puppet for close-ups when the lobster has to speak its lines, and these sketches looked pretty cool too. Later that week Darren introduced me to some college students who were auditioning for the roles of Cadge and Mrs. Rample, and I also met the voice artist who would be performing the role of the lobster. Once again, class acts, all the way; I thought the guy who will be doing the lobster's lines was particularly good, as he was able to pull off a kind of throaty warble that was pretty close to what a lobster might sound like if it could talk. He was nice and scary, and he was able to put a lot of feeling into the big pinching speech at the end of the second act. "You weak, soft-handed humans are doomed! Dooooomed!" I swear to god it was like you were listening to a real live lobster.

Stay tuned for further developments.