Exclusive Excerpt
The following is an early excerpt from Chapter VII of my novel-in-progress, Only the Dying. The chapter is tentatively titled 'Desperate Measures, Obeisance to Mammon'.
Career Change
Walter Brogan was freezing. If there was anything he was sure of, early on the morning of March 3, 1931, this was it. Everything else he found himself involved in on that particular morning was unsure ground. But he was doing everything he could not to make it appear that way.
A late winter freeze had had the township of Bentonville in its grip for the better part of a week, and it was quickly getting tiresome, Brogan thought. The temperature on the new thermometer he had nailed to the front porch of his home on 2nd and Evergreen had been a teeth-chattering 15 degrees; he’d made sure that he checked it on the way out the door earlier that morning. The unpleasant reading of the mercury had bothered him for two reasons: one, that he was going to have stand around ‘working’ in it all day, although working outside on cold days was something he’d done plenty of in his previous job. Two, he was now saddled with the concern that his wife would be too cold all day, because he knew she wouldn’t turn up the heat.
Normally, Greta Brogan’s frugality and self-sacrifice was something he wouldn’t take issue with. He couldn’t budge her anyway on such matters: he’d certainly learned that. Utility prices were murderous; just the cost of heating his house alone was drawing their already-strained budget close to the limits of its flexibility. But he hoped Greta would remember – well, certainly she remembered – or take into consideration the reality of her situation. For as of the first week of March, Greta Brogan was into the ninth week of her second pregnancy.
So far it had all gone down much differently than their first experience with pregnancy. Much less fanfare, both between Walter and Greta themselves, and in terms of their announcement of the news to the rest of their families. Greta had told Brogan around the middle of January that she had a suspicion she could be pregnant again, over dinner one night; the next week she visited the doctor, and received a phone call a few days later with a confirmation. She told Walter that evening when he arrived home from work. Brogan couldn’t feign great surprise or explode with nervous enthusiasm the way he might have done the first time around. And it wasn’t exactly a private moment between them, for their son Luke was literally tugging at his trouser leg for some attention when Greta delivered the information. Brogan, exhausted from his day’s work and trying to decompress from the struggles and inanities of same, managed to give his wife an embrace and a brief smile. He held her for a moment, before they moved into the kitchen where she had a beef stew and cornbread meal waiting for them.
But this was not to say that Walter Brogan was not happy with the prospect of having a second child. On the contrary. Brogan had always liked children. One thing that he and Greta had seen eye to eye on – since the first moment in their relationship when it seemed appropriate to even broach the topic – was the prospect of having a family together, with more than one child, if God’s will allowed for it. Brogan had wanted a son, and they’d been blessed with one the first time out, but he didn’t want the boy to have no sibling. Secretly, he began to hope right from the moment he learned Greta was expecting a second child that Luke would have a brother, for the simple fact that he never had one himself. At the same time, however, part of him was also intrigued by the prospect of having a daughter, and wondered about what having a baby girl would mean to him.
Nonetheless, it was difficult to react in quite the same way he had the first time – as much as his wife seemed to expect that he would. Their situation had been quite different when they’d learned about Luke’s existence, and so were the conditions around them. Winter 1927 seemed a thousand miles away from the place they found themselves in in March 1931, despite the relatively brief span of three years and a handful of months. The entire nation had been in a very different situation before from the pickle it was embroiled in now, and the mood of the people – their concerns, their hopes, their dreams, and their nightmares – had shifted dramatically. Brogan had already been inclined to worry, to internalize his personal questions and insecurities about his ability to provide a good home and a good life for the people who bore his last name – even before the bad reports that seemed to keep streaming in hand over first since this decade of the 1930s has begun. There was also the matter of the dead father who populated his thoughts and dreams - to whom he’d expressly promised, after his death, that he would secure those things for those who came after him.
But with every passing day in 1931, this calling, this responsibility, seemed to grow more and more difficult.
For Brogan, it would all be won or lost with his performance in this new role. This arena, that of his career, was the one in which he was obligated to excel. This was where his struggles would play out – right here, on the Hoosier ground where he now stood, where at that very moment a crew of workers was hacking away at the frozen soil in order to lay a new foundation.
He’d been hired by Standard Oil Corporation of Indiana two weeks before Christmas of the previous year. It had been a remarkable turn of events, at least from the Brogans’ perspective. For seven weeks following his face-to-face ‘walkthrough’ interview back in September with Standard’s Tom Spenlow and Bill Doyle – the latter of whom was supervising construction in the grass field – Brogan had heard precisely nothing about his prospects for obtaining the position. The closest he’d had to any feedback on how well he’d jockeyed for the job was Spenlow’s observation that day that it had been ‘very good’ to hear his condensed pitch for hiring him. The two men had walked him around for a while longer, dropped him back off at the Auto-Stop, and disappeared. By the beginning of December Brogan had more or less concluded that he hadn’t made the cut for one reason or another.
But then came the letter, from one Ralph ‘Whitey’ Pickering, the General Manager of Standard of Indiana’s North Gary Refinery, just over two hours away by car between Gary proper and East Chicago. It was a brief message, inviting Brogan to tour the facility and to ‘have lunch’ with Pickering and ‘some of my associates’ on Friday, December 17, 1930. That was the moment when Brogan first began to understand in his gut that the job would be his, and his life, or at the very least his career, was about to change.
He’d said this much to his wife on the evening the letter came. He remembered that she had been standing in their kitchen at the time, wearing an apron and cutting up chicken livers for a meal. She smiled warmly and said she felt that way too, and that she was positive that he would go up there and show those oil men who was the right man for the job. Brogan felt his confidence begin to swell – until Greta made one more observation.
‘Pretty soon though, honey, you’ll have to explain all this to my father.’
Brogan felt like someone had snuffed his best set-shot on the basketball court. But Greta was right. He’d thought of the matter before, but not recently, and not at all since he’d opened up that official letter of invitation that evening.
He’d asked her: ‘What do you think is the best way to go about doing that?’
To which Greta responded, after pausing for a half-beat to think about it, a large kitchen knife extended in front of her, parallel to the wood cutting block: ‘The sooner the better.’
‘Be direct about it. No pussy-footing,’ he’d said.
‘Don’t you think so?’
He did. After their dinner on that very evening. Brogan found himself strolling down the sidewalk in the pale, chilled moonlight towards his father-in-law’s house, where he lived with Gertie only. He carried the letter with him. He felt nervous as he still sometimes did when approaching a discussion with P.G. Heinricks, who had not softened one bit over the years they’d been related when it came to matters of business. Heinricks was a hard man with a keen intellect and a foreboding sense of loyalty.
All of this came rushing into Brogan’s mind anew when the front door of the familiar house abruptly opened. P.G. Heinricks stood rigidly before him, still dressed in his signature shirtsleeves and black tie, a lit pipe exhaling smoke into the night air. He stared at his son-in-law through the doorframe.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’ the old man growled.
‘Mr. Heinricks. Sorry to bother you. There’s something I need to discuss with you. It’s important. Do you have a minute?’
P.G. Heinricks stared some more. Brogan held his ground, looking straight back into Heinricks’ eyes, from his somewhat elevated angle, the way he had once done at the tail end of a church aisle on a day many years before, with a woman dressed in white by his side. ‘Come on in, then,’ Heinricks said, and stood to one side to allow Brogan through.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Thursday, March 12, 2009
A Four-Course Meal of Faulkner
Occasionally I will embark on a self-regimented “reading series” in order to read more deeply into a certain area of literary interest. A few years back I did this with 19th-century British literature, finally getting around to works of such giants as Eliot, Hardy and Lawrence. I’ve got plans one of these years to do one focused on the African experience in America (possibly in 2009), and one exploring modern literature from India. I even have a more ambitious project in mind (and I know I’m not the first to do this!) to “read around the world,” taking on books from six continents and “raiding into dark corners” (to steal from Benedict Kiely) I have yet to explore. Whether that happens any time soon, given my hectic home and work life, is anyone’s guess needless to say… but it never hurts to aim high.
Recently I decided to take on another of these series’, this time attacking the work of William Faulkner. As someone with a fascination and taste for American literature, I felt I needed to know more of his work… and even though I had read such standards as The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, I knew there was whole huge chunks of the Faulkner corpus that would reveal far more to me about this complex and intriguing writer. I decided to take on four other works from the Southern master: Sanctuary; If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem; Absalom, Absalom! and finally his last novel The Reivers.
What it was like, plowing through four Faulkner works almost back-to-back? What did I learn from it? Well, it would be hard to sum up in a short post… but I would like to share some impressions of each book and take an amateurish stab at how they might fit into the greater Faulknerian body of work. I’ll take them in the order that I read them…
Sanctuary – This strange foray into the world of noir crime fiction (sort of) is definitely one of the stranger, and in my opinion less successful, Faulkner works. It’s interesting though because we know Faulkner worked for a time in the Hollywood system writing screenplays (most famously, I think, for his script for Chandler’s The Big Sleep), and I wonder if his time doing that sort of nudged him in this direction with his fiction, or whether it was the reverse somehow. Anyway, mixing Southern gothic and noir fictional themes together makes for a dark, murky, strange brew… which would be interesting if more happened in the story. Still, the climactic crime and courtroom scenes that revolve around it still hold some shock value even today… and in Popeye, Faulkner created one of the more menacing heavies in all of American fiction. Fans of Cormac McCarthy might pick up echoes of Faulkner’s descriptions of the Memphis underworld in Suttree’s Knoxville. This is definitely not the place to start with ol’ Billy though.
If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem – Probably one of the most experimental of Faulkner’s novels (along with perhaps A Fable), this tells the seemingly-unrelated stories, in alternating chapters, of a love affair between a man and a married woman and three convicts trying to escape prison across fields flooded by the Mississippi River. Literary types (like myself) will find interest in thinking about what possessed Faulkner to take these two disparate tales, which he was working on separately, and intertwine them together into a larger work… not to mention the utter mystery of taking that phrase from the Old Testament as his title (though this is something Faulkner liked to do, obviously, with his novels – see Absalom, Absalom!). By the way, based on imagery I noticed in this novel (the flooding river engulfing cotton fields and farms, livestock on top of henhouses, not to mention the fact that this is all set in Mississippi), I'm convinced that this book is one of the sources the Coen Brothers were drawing from - whether consciously or not, we'll never know - as they were conceiving and filming their underappreciated O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Absalom, Absalom! – Speaking of… not only was this the most powerful and accomplished of the four novels I read in this series, I think it’s also right up there with As I Lay Dying as my favorite of all Faulkner works. For years schools and literature courses have been using The Sound and The Fury as a way to introduce Faulkner to readers, but in my opinion this is the one novel that best represents his work in terms of setting, themes, characters and concerns. It chronicles the rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen and the estate he built up in the Old South – the slaves he kept, the affairs he had, the children he neglected and his dogged ambition to build up some kind of ‘legacy’ in his adopted home state of Mississippi. Rich, complex and deeply evocative of a Southern culture that was quickly fading (although not the racist attitudes that grew up out of it, unfortunately), this is considered by many to be William Faulkner’s masterpiece… and I would have a hard time arguing against that. I think I enjoyed reading Dying more, but this novel amazed me nonetheless with its poetic language and seething passion, rising from every page like Southern humidity.
The Reivers – Faulkner’s last published novel is considerably different in tone and style from all of those previously mentioned… it read to me like the work of a more mellow, older and perhaps wiser writer who’s reflecting on the life he’s led. Hence its (important?) subtitle, A Reminiscence, and its warm and elegiac tone. I’m not sure if this is based on real memories of his or not, but it was interesting to read him writing in the voice of an 11-year-old boy this late into his career, and the upbeat ending came to me as something of a surprise given the somber and menacing tones the other books had struck. It may be a classic case of an artist “mellowing with age” and perhaps losing a bit of his former bite… still, there are interesting aspects to this comic novel, especially in its depiction of the newly-emerging phenomenon of the automobile. His descriptions of driving and maintaining an early Ford and what it was like to traverse long distances through state lands without highways were both humorous and fascinating.
Recently I decided to take on another of these series’, this time attacking the work of William Faulkner. As someone with a fascination and taste for American literature, I felt I needed to know more of his work… and even though I had read such standards as The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, I knew there was whole huge chunks of the Faulkner corpus that would reveal far more to me about this complex and intriguing writer. I decided to take on four other works from the Southern master: Sanctuary; If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem; Absalom, Absalom! and finally his last novel The Reivers.
What it was like, plowing through four Faulkner works almost back-to-back? What did I learn from it? Well, it would be hard to sum up in a short post… but I would like to share some impressions of each book and take an amateurish stab at how they might fit into the greater Faulknerian body of work. I’ll take them in the order that I read them…
Sanctuary – This strange foray into the world of noir crime fiction (sort of) is definitely one of the stranger, and in my opinion less successful, Faulkner works. It’s interesting though because we know Faulkner worked for a time in the Hollywood system writing screenplays (most famously, I think, for his script for Chandler’s The Big Sleep), and I wonder if his time doing that sort of nudged him in this direction with his fiction, or whether it was the reverse somehow. Anyway, mixing Southern gothic and noir fictional themes together makes for a dark, murky, strange brew… which would be interesting if more happened in the story. Still, the climactic crime and courtroom scenes that revolve around it still hold some shock value even today… and in Popeye, Faulkner created one of the more menacing heavies in all of American fiction. Fans of Cormac McCarthy might pick up echoes of Faulkner’s descriptions of the Memphis underworld in Suttree’s Knoxville. This is definitely not the place to start with ol’ Billy though.
If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem – Probably one of the most experimental of Faulkner’s novels (along with perhaps A Fable), this tells the seemingly-unrelated stories, in alternating chapters, of a love affair between a man and a married woman and three convicts trying to escape prison across fields flooded by the Mississippi River. Literary types (like myself) will find interest in thinking about what possessed Faulkner to take these two disparate tales, which he was working on separately, and intertwine them together into a larger work… not to mention the utter mystery of taking that phrase from the Old Testament as his title (though this is something Faulkner liked to do, obviously, with his novels – see Absalom, Absalom!). By the way, based on imagery I noticed in this novel (the flooding river engulfing cotton fields and farms, livestock on top of henhouses, not to mention the fact that this is all set in Mississippi), I'm convinced that this book is one of the sources the Coen Brothers were drawing from - whether consciously or not, we'll never know - as they were conceiving and filming their underappreciated O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Absalom, Absalom! – Speaking of… not only was this the most powerful and accomplished of the four novels I read in this series, I think it’s also right up there with As I Lay Dying as my favorite of all Faulkner works. For years schools and literature courses have been using The Sound and The Fury as a way to introduce Faulkner to readers, but in my opinion this is the one novel that best represents his work in terms of setting, themes, characters and concerns. It chronicles the rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen and the estate he built up in the Old South – the slaves he kept, the affairs he had, the children he neglected and his dogged ambition to build up some kind of ‘legacy’ in his adopted home state of Mississippi. Rich, complex and deeply evocative of a Southern culture that was quickly fading (although not the racist attitudes that grew up out of it, unfortunately), this is considered by many to be William Faulkner’s masterpiece… and I would have a hard time arguing against that. I think I enjoyed reading Dying more, but this novel amazed me nonetheless with its poetic language and seething passion, rising from every page like Southern humidity.
The Reivers – Faulkner’s last published novel is considerably different in tone and style from all of those previously mentioned… it read to me like the work of a more mellow, older and perhaps wiser writer who’s reflecting on the life he’s led. Hence its (important?) subtitle, A Reminiscence, and its warm and elegiac tone. I’m not sure if this is based on real memories of his or not, but it was interesting to read him writing in the voice of an 11-year-old boy this late into his career, and the upbeat ending came to me as something of a surprise given the somber and menacing tones the other books had struck. It may be a classic case of an artist “mellowing with age” and perhaps losing a bit of his former bite… still, there are interesting aspects to this comic novel, especially in its depiction of the newly-emerging phenomenon of the automobile. His descriptions of driving and maintaining an early Ford and what it was like to traverse long distances through state lands without highways were both humorous and fascinating.
Monday, February 16, 2009
In lieu of "Valentine's Day"...
I know many readers are waiting in rapt expectation for the annual Secret Thread Valentine's Day Celebration... what's that you say? You don't remember any in the past??
All right, I'll be honest here - I think Valentine's Day as we know it today is ridiculous, a total sham. I think this guy is absolutely right on the money when he says, essentially, that not only is it a bad idea all around, but it only exists to make retailers richer and actually weakens the concept of "true love" in people's minds.
I know that makes me sound like a crank and a curmudgeon... and yes, it also makes me unpopular at home around this time of year... but something about the idea of the Hallmark Corporation telling me that I MUST express my love for my wife on THIS day, in THIS way, just rubs me the wrong way.
Fortunately, I've come across two items that serve as great reminders/instructors of what real true love is all about... i.e. self-sacrifice, giving without counting the cost, and taking great personal risks to make yourself vulnerable to someone else.
These are the kinds of ideas you're not going to find expressed in pithy statements inside of those Hallmark cards...
A phrase that dawned on me when I first became a parent and has stayed with me ever since is this (and I don't claim it to be in any way original!): the greater the love, the greater the risk. Once I had a child and started the long and wondrous journey of watching and helping him grow (and subsequent other "hims" and one "her" since :) ), I began to realize what a 'great and terrible' thing is it to wholly invest yourself in someone else. Of course I had a sense of that once I met and fell in love with my wife, but with a child somehow it is even more apparent - the instant they are born you feel yourself "fully invested." It felt to me exactly like climbing a very high ladder, putting some powder on my hands and reaching out for that swinging trapeze - even though I had never swung on one before, and there was also that terrifying realization that there is no net underneath!!
Because there isn't. When you give yourself away in love to someone else, you are fully aware of the fact that you could lose them at any moment... and that realization intensifies your love for them like nothing else. Oh, I'm not saying for one second that I always treat my loved ones as I should because of that love... far from it, unfortunately, for I am a deeply flawed man like any other. But when I stop to think about how much I love them, or how much I love their mother... really think about it, and the implications of that... well, I think there is a healthy bit of fear mixed into the warmth of the love I feel. It's scary to deeply love someone, because of how vulnerable you become. Every parent has felt this.
Here are two items that caught my eye because they are expressions of this... in very different ways.
The first is a blog entry from a writer for The New York Times who is suffering from cancer. In this piece he offers a heart-felt tribute to his wife who has hung in there with him through a very physically and (importantly) emotionally/psychologically debilitating experience. It's so devoid of sentimentality that it actually describes things you'd never want to really know about (the man has prostate cancer, so you can imagine)... but that honesty is essential, because it serves to hammer home his point all the more. Which is nicely summed up when he writes:
Yes — lust is essential. But right now, sex seems quaint, old-fashioned. Oddly enough, it can’t compete with the depth and gravity of a light touch, a sly glance. I’m in the mood for the Beatles and “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” not Grace Jones growling, “Pull up to my bumper, baby." Don’t get me wrong. I really, really like sex. But given a choice between the mere biology of lust and the deep soul of love, I’ll take love.
A wise man. Me too. Sex is important, sure, even vital - but it's not the be all end all, even though our culture tries to tell us it is. God bless Mr. Jennings in his fight to beat the cancer, and may he enjoy many more years of love - true love - with his wife.
Then there's this concise, poetic and heart-shaking from Donald Hall (especially when you realize the writer lost his beloved wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, several years back) description of the risk of love... which, if you truly mean it when you say those words "in sickness and in health," you're signing up for on the day the ship sets sail.
Love Poem
When you fall in love,
you jockey your horse
into the flaming barn.
You hire a cabin
on the shiny Titanic.
You tease the black bear.
Reading the Monitor,
you scan the obituaries
looking for your name.
May God give me, and all spouses everywhere, the strength and courage to see the journey through to its end... no matter how rough the waters become, no matter if the very ship itself goes down in the effort.
All right, I'll be honest here - I think Valentine's Day as we know it today is ridiculous, a total sham. I think this guy is absolutely right on the money when he says, essentially, that not only is it a bad idea all around, but it only exists to make retailers richer and actually weakens the concept of "true love" in people's minds.
I know that makes me sound like a crank and a curmudgeon... and yes, it also makes me unpopular at home around this time of year... but something about the idea of the Hallmark Corporation telling me that I MUST express my love for my wife on THIS day, in THIS way, just rubs me the wrong way.
Fortunately, I've come across two items that serve as great reminders/instructors of what real true love is all about... i.e. self-sacrifice, giving without counting the cost, and taking great personal risks to make yourself vulnerable to someone else.
These are the kinds of ideas you're not going to find expressed in pithy statements inside of those Hallmark cards...
A phrase that dawned on me when I first became a parent and has stayed with me ever since is this (and I don't claim it to be in any way original!): the greater the love, the greater the risk. Once I had a child and started the long and wondrous journey of watching and helping him grow (and subsequent other "hims" and one "her" since :) ), I began to realize what a 'great and terrible' thing is it to wholly invest yourself in someone else. Of course I had a sense of that once I met and fell in love with my wife, but with a child somehow it is even more apparent - the instant they are born you feel yourself "fully invested." It felt to me exactly like climbing a very high ladder, putting some powder on my hands and reaching out for that swinging trapeze - even though I had never swung on one before, and there was also that terrifying realization that there is no net underneath!!
Because there isn't. When you give yourself away in love to someone else, you are fully aware of the fact that you could lose them at any moment... and that realization intensifies your love for them like nothing else. Oh, I'm not saying for one second that I always treat my loved ones as I should because of that love... far from it, unfortunately, for I am a deeply flawed man like any other. But when I stop to think about how much I love them, or how much I love their mother... really think about it, and the implications of that... well, I think there is a healthy bit of fear mixed into the warmth of the love I feel. It's scary to deeply love someone, because of how vulnerable you become. Every parent has felt this.
Here are two items that caught my eye because they are expressions of this... in very different ways.
The first is a blog entry from a writer for The New York Times who is suffering from cancer. In this piece he offers a heart-felt tribute to his wife who has hung in there with him through a very physically and (importantly) emotionally/psychologically debilitating experience. It's so devoid of sentimentality that it actually describes things you'd never want to really know about (the man has prostate cancer, so you can imagine)... but that honesty is essential, because it serves to hammer home his point all the more. Which is nicely summed up when he writes:
Yes — lust is essential. But right now, sex seems quaint, old-fashioned. Oddly enough, it can’t compete with the depth and gravity of a light touch, a sly glance. I’m in the mood for the Beatles and “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” not Grace Jones growling, “Pull up to my bumper, baby." Don’t get me wrong. I really, really like sex. But given a choice between the mere biology of lust and the deep soul of love, I’ll take love.
A wise man. Me too. Sex is important, sure, even vital - but it's not the be all end all, even though our culture tries to tell us it is. God bless Mr. Jennings in his fight to beat the cancer, and may he enjoy many more years of love - true love - with his wife.
Then there's this concise, poetic and heart-shaking from Donald Hall (especially when you realize the writer lost his beloved wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, several years back) description of the risk of love... which, if you truly mean it when you say those words "in sickness and in health," you're signing up for on the day the ship sets sail.
Love Poem
When you fall in love,
you jockey your horse
into the flaming barn.
You hire a cabin
on the shiny Titanic.
You tease the black bear.
Reading the Monitor,
you scan the obituaries
looking for your name.
May God give me, and all spouses everywhere, the strength and courage to see the journey through to its end... no matter how rough the waters become, no matter if the very ship itself goes down in the effort.
Monday, February 09, 2009
Journal of a 'Novel'-Entry 51
It’s gratifying to report that I have completed the draft of Chapter VI of my novel, as of this morning.
‘But wait!’ interrupts the discerning reader of this blog. ‘You started writing it back in July! How is this progress?? I’ll look forward to reading the book in about twenty years, thanks.’
My answer: ‘Chill out, bro. This is in fact progress, as I am about to explain. It is true that I first laid pencil to paper on July 28, 2008 to begin drafting Chapter VI and that today is February 9, 2009. For those who don’t do math, this constituted a period of roughly 6½ months. However, back in ’08, I only got through one “scene” and part of another one before careening into a brick wall and skittering off wildly towards a few essays and some weird short story about a woman who commits suicide by jumping off a tower in a parallel universe. As you can see, I lost my head for a little while. Fortunately, I buckled down sometime around Jan. 2 of 2009, and have written all of the rest of the chapter since then, which is only about five weeks. It’s a good size chapter, close to 40 pages. When you consider the documented fact that most of the first five chapters of the novel have taken me anywhere from 3 to 6 months to write, I’d say that Chapter VI was composed relatively quickly, and it bodes well for getting this book done in the less-than-two-more-years I have allowed myself.’
Discerning Reader (DR): ‘Ok, ok, so you are working well now. Will it continue?’
Mutt Ploughman (MP): ‘I hope so. I am going to make every effort to cruise right into writing Chapter VII without so much as a tap on the brakes.’
DR: ‘But don’t you have to put in some time on editing and rewriting Chapter VI first?’
MP: ‘Next question.’
DR: [clears throat] ‘What’s Chapter VI called? Being Discerning Reader, I of course saw that already in the historic Entry #50, but maybe the legions of other readers here will want to know.’
MP: ‘Good point. It’s called “The Right Man, Tapping a Gusher”.’
DR: ‘What’s “tapping a gusher” even mean?’
MP: ‘Read the book.’
DR: ‘I’d love to, but I don’t have 20 years to wait.’
MP: ‘Ha ha ha. Well, it has to do with the discovery of oil under the ground.’
DR: ‘Where else might one discover it?’
MP: ‘Do I need to end this interview?’
DR: ‘Sorry. So what does happen in Chapter VI?’
MP: ‘I can’t really say that.’
DR: ‘Nah, I guess you can’t. Can you relate the characters the chapter is most concerned with?’
MP: ‘Sure. There’s Walter Brogan, my protagonist, of course. Cal Wittenburg, the wheat and hog farmer, at least at the outset. He’ll also have a key role in Chapter VII. Peter Heinricks, Brogan’s wayward brother-in-law, experiences some major changes, but off-camera, as it were, since he’s in Texas. And finally Myron Devreaux, the attorney who wants to run for public office, returns in this chapter from being absent in Chapter V.’
DR: ‘Where time-wise does Chapter VI lead us up to?’
MP: ‘November 1, 1930, to be precise.’
DR: ‘Interesting! So why did Chapter VI take so long to write?’
MP: ‘It’s a good question. The answer is I wish I knew. As I remember, when I completed Chapter V over last summer, I was feeling about as confident as I have at any time that I could keep going with the novel. I liked how the writing was going. My goal was, like it is now, to hop right into Chapter VI – and I did! But as I said above, I got about two scenes in and just hit the wall. It wasn’t really “writer’s block”, per se. I mean, I had an idea generally of where I want to go. When I start a chapter, I write a very loose outline, like six or seven lines. I don’t really want to plan the book very much, planning is overrated. But I do have some ideas of where I want a chapter to go when I start on it – you have to have something in mind – so I jot a few of them down in about one sentence each. So I had done this for Chapter VI, it’s still sitting there on my desk. But I got into the second scene and something just wasn’t working well. And it’s a confidence thing, I believe. You start to second-guess. That’s why momentum is important. I wasn’t feeling it, and I started to skip days, and before I knew it the thing had gone way cold and I couldn’t breathe any life into it anymore. Is that frustrating? Exceedingly. But there’s a positive thing which comes out of this kind of experience too. Whenever this happens to me, and it has happened a number of times in writing this story, I always find that my writing instincts do not give way. I can’t get the chapter moving again, but luckily – and I do consider this extremely fortunate – I am still dying to write something. Anything! So I might scribble a few entries in here, for example, or, a lot of times, I think about trying an essay or a story. So that’s what I did from August to January 1, ’09. I wrote a book review, at least two essays, and the short story I mentioned before. The story in particular I think really helped me on a confidence level. I had a weird idea and decided to try it. Just before then, I had had a different weird idea for a story that had to do with Bono [singer from U2] and Africa, and I tried it, and I failed right out of the gate. But this time I had a fantastical idea and I demanded of myself that I would write it. I felt that I was the only one who could. And so I did. It was a great exercise, and it gave me back my confidence.’
DR: ‘What happened to that story? I know you’ve always tried to get stories published, but without much success.’
MP: ‘True. I entered it into a contest. I’m still waiting for the results.’
DR: ‘Good luck.’
MP: ‘Thanks. It’s a real long shot, but I don’t mind the odds, and I’ve certainly gotten used to rejections.’
DR: ‘Any other potential publishing accomplishments in the docket?’
MP: ‘I have one other short story submitted to a literary magazine and an essay also entered into a contest. Still waiting on all three.’
DR: ‘What do you predict will happen?’
MP: ‘Next question.’
DR: ‘So what happened after you finished the story?’
MP: ‘In a word, the holidays. Then after the new year I resolved to work doubly hard on my novel. I picked up Chapter VI and after one day it was as though I never stopped.’
DR: ‘Let’s change course. How do you think the novel is coming along overall?’
MP: ‘Really, considering that I have never written one or even came close – the closest was my graduate school thesis, a modern-day military novel that logged about 300 pages but never really got anywhere – I think it’s going pretty well. I have worked on it at least half the year every year since 2006. I had been thinking about it in some capacity since at least 2000, if not earlier. I just needed to develop more skills and discipline to get started on it and perhaps a little bit of publishing experience to gain enough confidence. Unfortunately, none of my published work has been fiction, but that hasn’t been for lack of effort. I’ve written about 40 stories, so that’s something. My experience over the last three years has revealed to me a truth I suspected but didn’t really have enough information to confirm, namely, that anyone writing a first novel is going to school – they are involved in the ultimate OJT. No one really knows how to write a novel. No one can really teach you how to write one. I would even imagine, and I am going to have to find this out later, that even after you’ve written one you still don’t know “how” to do it. You have to just read a lot of them and decide you’re going to try to write one. And from there it’s a commitment. I figure if I am capable of making a marriage work, then I can write a novel too, if it really matters to me to write one.’
DR: ‘Are you fully satisfied with the speed with which you’re writing the book?’
MP: ‘Not even a little. But I can’t increase it too much more. I might be able to jam in more writing here and there in my day, but there isn’t a whole lot of room, and I probably would pay for it in other areas even more than I do now. The commitment to write a book that I spoke of a minute ago comes with a price tag. You have to be able to afford what it costs you. If I’d been able to write one from the ages of say, 22-30, that would have been the best time for me to do it, but I’ve always been a late bloomer, and I just couldn’t get one going. Now I’m 38 with a wife, a full-time job, sometimes a second job, and three young children. I don’t get much time to write. I have to do it a little bit at a time. There’s nothing for it.’
DR: ‘Do you think your novel is publishable?’
MP: ‘It’s up to me to make it so. I can try as hard as I can to make it so. The good thing about that is that at least some of that is in my own control.’
DR: ‘But do you believe it will be published?’
MP: ‘Honestly, I don’t know. Like they say in sports, I don’t have a crystal ball. I hope so.’
DR: ‘But surely you think about it?’
MP: ‘Sure I do. Often. But when I am writing, I have to make a very conscious effort not to. What matters is not what happens to the story, when you are writing a story. What matters is the story. And that’s all that matters. Take this analogy: I remember when Bruce Springsteen was doing his solo acoustic tour in support of the record The Ghost of Tom Joad, he would tell the audience at the beginning of his shows that he wanted to have silence – that he needed to have silence from them so that he could, as he put it “give my best to you”. That’s kind of how I feel about those thoughts. I can’t be thinking them if I want to give my best to the story itself. And as a consequence, one hopes, give my best effort to the reader, should the story ever find one.’
DR: ‘But I take it you have to imagine, at the very least, that the readers exist in order to write.’
MP: ‘Of course. Otherwise, why do it? You don’t write just to see your own words on a page yourself. You want to communicate what you have to say or tell to others.’
DR: ‘What’s the next chapter called?’
MP: ‘I’m not sure yet. In keeping with my idea of having each chapter title be one phrase, comma, another phrase – i.e., Sweet Music, Pretty Flowers (Chapter I) – I think I know what I want the second phrase to be: “Obeisance to Mammon”. That is from Scripture, and it was also quoted by FDR in a famous speech in 1932. Which, if you’re paying attention, gives you a clue of some of the timing of the next chapter.’
DR: ‘What’s my name?? Of course, I caught that. Have you started writing it yet?’
MP: ‘No, I am typing up Chapter VI and have to do some rewriting and editing first. I hope to start it by the end of February though.’
DR: ‘Best of luck. Hey, one last question. Isn’t it really egotistical to sit down and ask yourself a bunch of interview questions that you can answer, like you’re some kind of real writer?’
MP: ‘It’s really just pure fantasy, is what it is. But the way I see it, what’s the difference? Ego or fantasy? Both are essential for a novelist, it seems to me. In the words of Popeye, I yam what I yam.’
‘But wait!’ interrupts the discerning reader of this blog. ‘You started writing it back in July! How is this progress?? I’ll look forward to reading the book in about twenty years, thanks.’
My answer: ‘Chill out, bro. This is in fact progress, as I am about to explain. It is true that I first laid pencil to paper on July 28, 2008 to begin drafting Chapter VI and that today is February 9, 2009. For those who don’t do math, this constituted a period of roughly 6½ months. However, back in ’08, I only got through one “scene” and part of another one before careening into a brick wall and skittering off wildly towards a few essays and some weird short story about a woman who commits suicide by jumping off a tower in a parallel universe. As you can see, I lost my head for a little while. Fortunately, I buckled down sometime around Jan. 2 of 2009, and have written all of the rest of the chapter since then, which is only about five weeks. It’s a good size chapter, close to 40 pages. When you consider the documented fact that most of the first five chapters of the novel have taken me anywhere from 3 to 6 months to write, I’d say that Chapter VI was composed relatively quickly, and it bodes well for getting this book done in the less-than-two-more-years I have allowed myself.’
Discerning Reader (DR): ‘Ok, ok, so you are working well now. Will it continue?’
Mutt Ploughman (MP): ‘I hope so. I am going to make every effort to cruise right into writing Chapter VII without so much as a tap on the brakes.’
DR: ‘But don’t you have to put in some time on editing and rewriting Chapter VI first?’
MP: ‘Next question.’
DR: [clears throat] ‘What’s Chapter VI called? Being Discerning Reader, I of course saw that already in the historic Entry #50, but maybe the legions of other readers here will want to know.’
MP: ‘Good point. It’s called “The Right Man, Tapping a Gusher”.’
DR: ‘What’s “tapping a gusher” even mean?’
MP: ‘Read the book.’
DR: ‘I’d love to, but I don’t have 20 years to wait.’
MP: ‘Ha ha ha. Well, it has to do with the discovery of oil under the ground.’
DR: ‘Where else might one discover it?’
MP: ‘Do I need to end this interview?’
DR: ‘Sorry. So what does happen in Chapter VI?’
MP: ‘I can’t really say that.’
DR: ‘Nah, I guess you can’t. Can you relate the characters the chapter is most concerned with?’
MP: ‘Sure. There’s Walter Brogan, my protagonist, of course. Cal Wittenburg, the wheat and hog farmer, at least at the outset. He’ll also have a key role in Chapter VII. Peter Heinricks, Brogan’s wayward brother-in-law, experiences some major changes, but off-camera, as it were, since he’s in Texas. And finally Myron Devreaux, the attorney who wants to run for public office, returns in this chapter from being absent in Chapter V.’
DR: ‘Where time-wise does Chapter VI lead us up to?’
MP: ‘November 1, 1930, to be precise.’
DR: ‘Interesting! So why did Chapter VI take so long to write?’
MP: ‘It’s a good question. The answer is I wish I knew. As I remember, when I completed Chapter V over last summer, I was feeling about as confident as I have at any time that I could keep going with the novel. I liked how the writing was going. My goal was, like it is now, to hop right into Chapter VI – and I did! But as I said above, I got about two scenes in and just hit the wall. It wasn’t really “writer’s block”, per se. I mean, I had an idea generally of where I want to go. When I start a chapter, I write a very loose outline, like six or seven lines. I don’t really want to plan the book very much, planning is overrated. But I do have some ideas of where I want a chapter to go when I start on it – you have to have something in mind – so I jot a few of them down in about one sentence each. So I had done this for Chapter VI, it’s still sitting there on my desk. But I got into the second scene and something just wasn’t working well. And it’s a confidence thing, I believe. You start to second-guess. That’s why momentum is important. I wasn’t feeling it, and I started to skip days, and before I knew it the thing had gone way cold and I couldn’t breathe any life into it anymore. Is that frustrating? Exceedingly. But there’s a positive thing which comes out of this kind of experience too. Whenever this happens to me, and it has happened a number of times in writing this story, I always find that my writing instincts do not give way. I can’t get the chapter moving again, but luckily – and I do consider this extremely fortunate – I am still dying to write something. Anything! So I might scribble a few entries in here, for example, or, a lot of times, I think about trying an essay or a story. So that’s what I did from August to January 1, ’09. I wrote a book review, at least two essays, and the short story I mentioned before. The story in particular I think really helped me on a confidence level. I had a weird idea and decided to try it. Just before then, I had had a different weird idea for a story that had to do with Bono [singer from U2] and Africa, and I tried it, and I failed right out of the gate. But this time I had a fantastical idea and I demanded of myself that I would write it. I felt that I was the only one who could. And so I did. It was a great exercise, and it gave me back my confidence.’
DR: ‘What happened to that story? I know you’ve always tried to get stories published, but without much success.’
MP: ‘True. I entered it into a contest. I’m still waiting for the results.’
DR: ‘Good luck.’
MP: ‘Thanks. It’s a real long shot, but I don’t mind the odds, and I’ve certainly gotten used to rejections.’
DR: ‘Any other potential publishing accomplishments in the docket?’
MP: ‘I have one other short story submitted to a literary magazine and an essay also entered into a contest. Still waiting on all three.’
DR: ‘What do you predict will happen?’
MP: ‘Next question.’
DR: ‘So what happened after you finished the story?’
MP: ‘In a word, the holidays. Then after the new year I resolved to work doubly hard on my novel. I picked up Chapter VI and after one day it was as though I never stopped.’
DR: ‘Let’s change course. How do you think the novel is coming along overall?’
MP: ‘Really, considering that I have never written one or even came close – the closest was my graduate school thesis, a modern-day military novel that logged about 300 pages but never really got anywhere – I think it’s going pretty well. I have worked on it at least half the year every year since 2006. I had been thinking about it in some capacity since at least 2000, if not earlier. I just needed to develop more skills and discipline to get started on it and perhaps a little bit of publishing experience to gain enough confidence. Unfortunately, none of my published work has been fiction, but that hasn’t been for lack of effort. I’ve written about 40 stories, so that’s something. My experience over the last three years has revealed to me a truth I suspected but didn’t really have enough information to confirm, namely, that anyone writing a first novel is going to school – they are involved in the ultimate OJT. No one really knows how to write a novel. No one can really teach you how to write one. I would even imagine, and I am going to have to find this out later, that even after you’ve written one you still don’t know “how” to do it. You have to just read a lot of them and decide you’re going to try to write one. And from there it’s a commitment. I figure if I am capable of making a marriage work, then I can write a novel too, if it really matters to me to write one.’
DR: ‘Are you fully satisfied with the speed with which you’re writing the book?’
MP: ‘Not even a little. But I can’t increase it too much more. I might be able to jam in more writing here and there in my day, but there isn’t a whole lot of room, and I probably would pay for it in other areas even more than I do now. The commitment to write a book that I spoke of a minute ago comes with a price tag. You have to be able to afford what it costs you. If I’d been able to write one from the ages of say, 22-30, that would have been the best time for me to do it, but I’ve always been a late bloomer, and I just couldn’t get one going. Now I’m 38 with a wife, a full-time job, sometimes a second job, and three young children. I don’t get much time to write. I have to do it a little bit at a time. There’s nothing for it.’
DR: ‘Do you think your novel is publishable?’
MP: ‘It’s up to me to make it so. I can try as hard as I can to make it so. The good thing about that is that at least some of that is in my own control.’
DR: ‘But do you believe it will be published?’
MP: ‘Honestly, I don’t know. Like they say in sports, I don’t have a crystal ball. I hope so.’
DR: ‘But surely you think about it?’
MP: ‘Sure I do. Often. But when I am writing, I have to make a very conscious effort not to. What matters is not what happens to the story, when you are writing a story. What matters is the story. And that’s all that matters. Take this analogy: I remember when Bruce Springsteen was doing his solo acoustic tour in support of the record The Ghost of Tom Joad, he would tell the audience at the beginning of his shows that he wanted to have silence – that he needed to have silence from them so that he could, as he put it “give my best to you”. That’s kind of how I feel about those thoughts. I can’t be thinking them if I want to give my best to the story itself. And as a consequence, one hopes, give my best effort to the reader, should the story ever find one.’
DR: ‘But I take it you have to imagine, at the very least, that the readers exist in order to write.’
MP: ‘Of course. Otherwise, why do it? You don’t write just to see your own words on a page yourself. You want to communicate what you have to say or tell to others.’
DR: ‘What’s the next chapter called?’
MP: ‘I’m not sure yet. In keeping with my idea of having each chapter title be one phrase, comma, another phrase – i.e., Sweet Music, Pretty Flowers (Chapter I) – I think I know what I want the second phrase to be: “Obeisance to Mammon”. That is from Scripture, and it was also quoted by FDR in a famous speech in 1932. Which, if you’re paying attention, gives you a clue of some of the timing of the next chapter.’
DR: ‘What’s my name?? Of course, I caught that. Have you started writing it yet?’
MP: ‘No, I am typing up Chapter VI and have to do some rewriting and editing first. I hope to start it by the end of February though.’
DR: ‘Best of luck. Hey, one last question. Isn’t it really egotistical to sit down and ask yourself a bunch of interview questions that you can answer, like you’re some kind of real writer?’
MP: ‘It’s really just pure fantasy, is what it is. But the way I see it, what’s the difference? Ego or fantasy? Both are essential for a novelist, it seems to me. In the words of Popeye, I yam what I yam.’
Monday, January 26, 2009
On what ought to be a resounding wake-up call to American Catholics (and Christians of all stripes)
Despite all that lip service (read: BS) about “reducing abortions” and “women’s health,” current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made it blatantly clear yesterday in a nationally-televised interview why the pro-abortion lobby is so important to her party… it’s the economy, stupid!!
From ABC NEWS’ THIS WEEK:
STEPHANOPOULOS: Hundreds of millions of dollars to expand family planning services. How is that stimulus?
PELOSI: Well, the family planning services reduce cost. They reduce cost. The states are in terrible fiscal budget crises now and part of what we do for children's health, education and some of those elements are to help the states meet their financial needs. One of those - one of the initiatives you mentioned, the contraception, will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government.
STEPHANOPOULOS: So no apologies for that?
PELOSI: No apologies. No. We have to deal with the consequences of the downturn in our economy.
“Fix the economy by increasing the amount of pregnancies we terminate”… that’s a great idea. That’s forward-thinking. That’s “change we can believe in.” Did you know that $65-70 million of the President’s proposed “stimulus package” would go straight into Planned Parenthood’s coffers? What a surprise, huh? (Obama is, and always had been, PP’s “dream” candidate. I think nowhere near enough people have really thought about that. One wonders what PP’’s founder, a white woman and an infamous racist, would’ve made of that one…)
Don’t tell me it ain’t about convenience and money… don’t talk to me about “only in cases where the life of the mother is at risk”… after all, we've got an economy to jump-start here! It’s an industry we’re talking about here, it’s big business… might as well make money off of it!! Why not pass out coupons in public schools, Nancy?? (Actually, they probably already do that… or close to it.)
Anyone ever read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World??
Does anyone else see something troubling in this logic, or am I just a hopelessly right-wing fanatic??
Not condemning any person here… I know I’m in no position to… just the mindset.
Look, there’s no doubt this is a very complex issue. I acknowledge that. But even putting all spiritual/theological discussions aside: to actually encourage this as a money-making operation, as an industry – to me that is incredibly problematic. Where are the sweet-smelling Clintonian reassurances along the lines of “safe, legal and rare”? Doesn’t such a promise run contra to the instincts of the entrepreneur, or the businessman/woman?
Just as the government wants to help the Big Three make and sell cars, they also apparently want to help Planned Parenthood succeed as well… oh, for the greater good, of course (whose, is open to question). But you know what? - we could save a LOT of money and funnel it back into the economy by getting rid of all our elderly on life support, too… hmm… somebody call up Peter Singer at Princeton! (Don’t laugh - they actually do this stuff in the Netherlands!!)
Remember the whole “Quietus”** concept in Children of Men? This ain’t very far from that, when you think about it… encouraging the elimination of the inconvenient, so that the rest of us lucky enough to have been born already (and good thing we weren’t born during a similar economic crisis, under an administration like this one! *whew!!*) can thrive again, upgrade our house and buy a Wii for the kids! Whoo-hoo!!
Don’t get me wrong: it’s not like I don’t want some of that stuff, for my own family… I'm not putting myself on some holier-than-thou pedestal here... but at this cost?? NO THANKS.
** from the Wikipedia plot summary of P.D. James’ novel The Children of Men: “Older/infirm citizens have become a burden… they can either (a) die helpless and unassisted in their homes; (b) commit suicide or (c) take part in a so-called Quietus (government-sanctioned mass drownings).”
From ABC NEWS’ THIS WEEK:
STEPHANOPOULOS: Hundreds of millions of dollars to expand family planning services. How is that stimulus?
PELOSI: Well, the family planning services reduce cost. They reduce cost. The states are in terrible fiscal budget crises now and part of what we do for children's health, education and some of those elements are to help the states meet their financial needs. One of those - one of the initiatives you mentioned, the contraception, will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government.
STEPHANOPOULOS: So no apologies for that?
PELOSI: No apologies. No. We have to deal with the consequences of the downturn in our economy.
“Fix the economy by increasing the amount of pregnancies we terminate”… that’s a great idea. That’s forward-thinking. That’s “change we can believe in.” Did you know that $65-70 million of the President’s proposed “stimulus package” would go straight into Planned Parenthood’s coffers? What a surprise, huh? (Obama is, and always had been, PP’s “dream” candidate. I think nowhere near enough people have really thought about that. One wonders what PP’’s founder, a white woman and an infamous racist, would’ve made of that one…)
Don’t tell me it ain’t about convenience and money… don’t talk to me about “only in cases where the life of the mother is at risk”… after all, we've got an economy to jump-start here! It’s an industry we’re talking about here, it’s big business… might as well make money off of it!! Why not pass out coupons in public schools, Nancy?? (Actually, they probably already do that… or close to it.)
Anyone ever read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World??
Does anyone else see something troubling in this logic, or am I just a hopelessly right-wing fanatic??
Not condemning any person here… I know I’m in no position to… just the mindset.
Look, there’s no doubt this is a very complex issue. I acknowledge that. But even putting all spiritual/theological discussions aside: to actually encourage this as a money-making operation, as an industry – to me that is incredibly problematic. Where are the sweet-smelling Clintonian reassurances along the lines of “safe, legal and rare”? Doesn’t such a promise run contra to the instincts of the entrepreneur, or the businessman/woman?
Just as the government wants to help the Big Three make and sell cars, they also apparently want to help Planned Parenthood succeed as well… oh, for the greater good, of course (whose, is open to question). But you know what? - we could save a LOT of money and funnel it back into the economy by getting rid of all our elderly on life support, too… hmm… somebody call up Peter Singer at Princeton! (Don’t laugh - they actually do this stuff in the Netherlands!!)
Remember the whole “Quietus”** concept in Children of Men? This ain’t very far from that, when you think about it… encouraging the elimination of the inconvenient, so that the rest of us lucky enough to have been born already (and good thing we weren’t born during a similar economic crisis, under an administration like this one! *whew!!*) can thrive again, upgrade our house and buy a Wii for the kids! Whoo-hoo!!
Don’t get me wrong: it’s not like I don’t want some of that stuff, for my own family… I'm not putting myself on some holier-than-thou pedestal here... but at this cost?? NO THANKS.
** from the Wikipedia plot summary of P.D. James’ novel The Children of Men: “Older/infirm citizens have become a burden… they can either (a) die helpless and unassisted in their homes; (b) commit suicide or (c) take part in a so-called Quietus (government-sanctioned mass drownings).”
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Oil Men
Below is a brief excerpt from Chapter VI of my novel in progress, Only the Dying. In this segment, two men from the Standard Oil Company of Indiana have shown up in Bentonville, Indiana, unannounced, looking for Walter Brogan, my protagonist. When they find him, they invite him along on a walking tour of a possible building site for a new bulk plant facility for the storage of fuel oil. The site is alongside the B&O rail line on the outskirts of town where a decrepit ruin of an old factory now stands. Brogan understands that the invitation amounts to a job interview. The time is early September, 1930.
‘Al McCready is dead,’ the older man said when Brogan had stopped talking.
This was not what Brogan had been expecting to hear, of all intelligence that the men from Standard Oil of Indiana might have been there to impart. He was dumbstruck, and slowed his progress through the grass to nearly a stagger. Al McCready, dead? He had never known the man to seem robust, but passage from this world was not something that had struck him as being imminent. Although it was true that Brogan hadn’t exactly counted McCready among his close friends, he had been an associate, and for a few years running was his sole connection to the possible change in profession that the three men now seemed to be on the way to discussing. In short, the news came as a shock.
‘Had he been ill?’ Brogan asked.
Spenlow looked at his red-haired colleague, who exchanged a silent glance with him.
‘We were thinking you might be able to tell us,’ said Spenlow.
‘Me?’ asked Brogan. ‘No, I’m sorry. I didn’t know the man well enough to know that. Sure, we spoke a lot, but we never got into that kind of thing. McCready is – or, was – he was a bit rough around the edges. Smoked a lot. But if he was sick or not, I never knew.’
‘In that case, I’m sorry to have to tell you. It was a surprise to us too, as you can imagine.’
‘Any news about what happened?’ Brogan wanted to know. By the time they had reached the old building and were standing adjacent to its flaking southern end.
‘He was found in his home, in the bathroom. Looks like an accidental death. That’s all I really know, and couldn’t tell you much more than that in any case, on account of the inquest that is just underway,’ Spenlow related.
‘Sorry state of affairs,’ commented Doyle abruptly, and Brogan was about to agree, but then saw that the other man wasn’t even talking about McCready. He was peering into a shattered window close to where they stood, into the darkened interior of the old factory. ‘We’d need to come in here and level all of this right quick.’ This last comment was directed to Spenlow, almost as if the preceding conversation had never taken place.
Insensitive son of a gun, thought Brogan. McCready put in over a quarter century of service to this crackerjack’s outfit. But he said nothing.
‘You said he was found in his bathroom?’ Brogan asked. His thoughts had immediately flown to Ilse Heinricks and her tragic death two years before.
‘That’s right. Damned tragic,’ replied Spenlow. He shook his head. ‘Anyway, I didn’t want to mention that while you were eating with your whole family. But it was one of those things that got us out here now. McCready’s untimely death accelerates the process. We’ve got Fred Means in there temporarily, but he won’t be delivering to this area. We need a new facility.’
With that, he began looking over the decrepit building. He walked around the corner to the west side. The breeze tousled the grass. A wasp buzzed near Brogan’s head. He waved at it impatiently, not knowing quite what to say next. He was still a bit flummoxed by the news about McCready, but didn’t want to ask more questions on the matter. Something made him feel that Spenlow, representing Standard, knew more than what he had indicated about the death, but there was no legitimate basis for this feeling. Only the inclination of his own gut.
Spenlow had opened a small distance between himself and Brogan. He gestured to Doyle to join him, and for a few moments the two of them spoke in inaudible tones. Doyle made broad sweeping motions with his arms, and pointed in particular directions. Brogan, standing off to one side, realized the younger man was describing a potential layout of the site. Spenlow nodded here and there. It began to occur to Brogan that Spenlow was doing more of the talking because he was the officer type, a man who made decisions. Doyle was the foot soldier, as it were; the man with the trade knowledge. Although he seemed rather young to have expertise, he clearly was directing the thought process.
Brogan stood off to one side and remained quiet. He didn’t want to seem impatient. But the truth was he had left Benson on his own at the station, and, more to the point, he still didn’t know what the precise purpose was for these men to bring him out here with them. He had an idea, of course, that they were interested in recruiting him, but they had yet to make mention of this. They must have picked up something in Brogan’s demeanor, however, for Spenlow broke away from Doyle again and wandered across the grass towards him once again.
‘Sorry, Brogan. We were thinking things over.’
‘What are you thinking about?’ Brogan asked. He thought it wasn’t out of line to ask, since they had brought him out this way after all.
Spenlow pulled a white handkerchief out of the inside pocket of his suit jacket. He removed his barbershop hat with one hand and mopped his brow with the other.
‘Well, if we’re going to put a bulk facility in here, we’ll need a man to run it. You know that. The fact is, we’ve got a job to fill. McCready recommended you to us. In fact, he brought your name up some time ago. That doesn’t surprise you, I take it.’
‘No sir. We spoke about it. He told me months ago he would mention my name. I’ll be up front about that.’
‘Hopefully you’ll be up front about everything, Brogan. That’s the sort of man we’re looking for.’ Spenlow now regarded him with great scrutiny and a stone face. Doyle had his back to them, still looking back and forth over the land.
‘Of course, Mr. Spenlow. I didn’t mean otherwise,’ said Brogan, rubbing his hands together.
‘I’m sure you didn’t, sir. And while we’re talking straight, I’ll tell you this. We’re here because of McCready’s, let’s say, “enthusiasm” about you as a good candidate. But we’ve got questions, too. A couple concerns. I don’t mind telling you about them. I’d like to know what your answers would be to those concerns.’
‘Then go ahead, Mr. Spenlow.’
The older man smiled. ‘Brogan, I consider myself a reasonably good judge of a man’s character. I think that’s part of what got me to where I am right now. And you strike me as a decent fellow. You’ve got some backbone. And you seem to work pretty hard. Standard of Indiana can appreciate those qualities.’
‘I suppose I have some pretty good reasons to work hard,’ Brogan said, shrugging. ‘More reasons every day, I’d say, if you read the papers.’
‘I assure you, sir, that I do. Good jobs aren’t exactly easy to come by nowadays. Which is why we feel we need to select our man wisely. To tell you the truth, Mr. Doyle here is of the opinion that you might not have the experience required to do this job. We know you haven’t been in the business for long. What would you say that?’
Brogan eyed the redheaded man. He still didn’t turn towards the two of them, even though he was certainly within earshot. This Brogan found irritating.
‘I’d say if he has questions about what I can or can’t do, maybe he ought to ask me about them himself.’
Now the younger man did turn around. Quickly. His eyes blazed, but he did not advance towards Brogan.
‘Now listen here—’ Doyle began.
Spenlow held up one hand. His eyes remained on Brogan. He waited a moment before speaking. Brogan stood his ground and looked at Doyle straight on.
‘Look, Brogan,’ said Spenlow. ‘This isn’t personal. I appreciate that you have self-confidence. But the fact is that Doyle’s correct. You do lack experience. You’d have to hit the ground and learn the distribution aspects of this business in short order. Pumping fuel is one thing, sir; handling it on a regular basis is quite another. I need not tell you that aside from all business issues, there are also safety concerns that we would need to have assurance that you would be able to understand and address.’
Brogan took his eyes away from Doyle and paid Spenlow his direct attention. He still didn’t like, or much respect, what he could ascertain of the younger man’s character. But he knew that Spenlow’s points were valid, and he could sense that his opportunity was on the line. There would not be a whole lot of other chances to land a more suitable position, he thought.
He realized that Spenlow was giving him the chance to speak. So he decided to make his own thoughts clear.
‘Mr. Spenlow, I understand that you’re concerned about my experience. It makes sense that you would be. But if you don’t mind my pointing this out, it doesn’t seem to be too big of a problem, or your employer probably wouldn’t have sent you out here to find me. I’m sure you men, and Standard Oil, aren’t interested in wasting time.’
‘You got that right, Brogan,’ said Doyle, still looking him over.
Brogan ignored the interjection. He continued: ‘I’ll tell you this much. I think I can handle the job. I’m strong, I work hard, and I’m local. And I’m looking for a more promising situation in order to better protect my family. There’s no shame in saying that. Now, I don’t know if you folks teach your employees or if I need to go out and spend some time up in Gary or Calumet talking to other men that handle fuel or what. I do know I spent a lot of time talking about the way it works with Mr. McCready.
‘I’ll learn the job. You can bet on that. If you’re looking for a man that’s serious, who will make you feel right about your choices, Mr. Spenlow, I am that man.’
At that moment, as Brogan finished speaking, what might have been a lingering moment of silence suspended between the three men in the grass was splintered by the long, low rumble of a freight train’s whistle. The approach of a trainful of supplies seemed to Brogan to lend the whole situation a good feeling, a kind of unspoken confirmation that the location was appropriate, and the need to find the right man for the job was, for all practical purposes, the last piece of the puzzle.
‘That’s good to hear, Brogan,’ said Spenlow. ‘Very good. Now, let’s take a few more minutes before we get you back to the station to talk about what a bulk plant down here might look like. Come with me.’
He walked around the edge of the building, clapping Doyle once on the shoulder as he did so. Brogan followed after them.
‘Al McCready is dead,’ the older man said when Brogan had stopped talking.
This was not what Brogan had been expecting to hear, of all intelligence that the men from Standard Oil of Indiana might have been there to impart. He was dumbstruck, and slowed his progress through the grass to nearly a stagger. Al McCready, dead? He had never known the man to seem robust, but passage from this world was not something that had struck him as being imminent. Although it was true that Brogan hadn’t exactly counted McCready among his close friends, he had been an associate, and for a few years running was his sole connection to the possible change in profession that the three men now seemed to be on the way to discussing. In short, the news came as a shock.
‘Had he been ill?’ Brogan asked.
Spenlow looked at his red-haired colleague, who exchanged a silent glance with him.
‘We were thinking you might be able to tell us,’ said Spenlow.
‘Me?’ asked Brogan. ‘No, I’m sorry. I didn’t know the man well enough to know that. Sure, we spoke a lot, but we never got into that kind of thing. McCready is – or, was – he was a bit rough around the edges. Smoked a lot. But if he was sick or not, I never knew.’
‘In that case, I’m sorry to have to tell you. It was a surprise to us too, as you can imagine.’
‘Any news about what happened?’ Brogan wanted to know. By the time they had reached the old building and were standing adjacent to its flaking southern end.
‘He was found in his home, in the bathroom. Looks like an accidental death. That’s all I really know, and couldn’t tell you much more than that in any case, on account of the inquest that is just underway,’ Spenlow related.
‘Sorry state of affairs,’ commented Doyle abruptly, and Brogan was about to agree, but then saw that the other man wasn’t even talking about McCready. He was peering into a shattered window close to where they stood, into the darkened interior of the old factory. ‘We’d need to come in here and level all of this right quick.’ This last comment was directed to Spenlow, almost as if the preceding conversation had never taken place.
Insensitive son of a gun, thought Brogan. McCready put in over a quarter century of service to this crackerjack’s outfit. But he said nothing.
‘You said he was found in his bathroom?’ Brogan asked. His thoughts had immediately flown to Ilse Heinricks and her tragic death two years before.
‘That’s right. Damned tragic,’ replied Spenlow. He shook his head. ‘Anyway, I didn’t want to mention that while you were eating with your whole family. But it was one of those things that got us out here now. McCready’s untimely death accelerates the process. We’ve got Fred Means in there temporarily, but he won’t be delivering to this area. We need a new facility.’
With that, he began looking over the decrepit building. He walked around the corner to the west side. The breeze tousled the grass. A wasp buzzed near Brogan’s head. He waved at it impatiently, not knowing quite what to say next. He was still a bit flummoxed by the news about McCready, but didn’t want to ask more questions on the matter. Something made him feel that Spenlow, representing Standard, knew more than what he had indicated about the death, but there was no legitimate basis for this feeling. Only the inclination of his own gut.
Spenlow had opened a small distance between himself and Brogan. He gestured to Doyle to join him, and for a few moments the two of them spoke in inaudible tones. Doyle made broad sweeping motions with his arms, and pointed in particular directions. Brogan, standing off to one side, realized the younger man was describing a potential layout of the site. Spenlow nodded here and there. It began to occur to Brogan that Spenlow was doing more of the talking because he was the officer type, a man who made decisions. Doyle was the foot soldier, as it were; the man with the trade knowledge. Although he seemed rather young to have expertise, he clearly was directing the thought process.
Brogan stood off to one side and remained quiet. He didn’t want to seem impatient. But the truth was he had left Benson on his own at the station, and, more to the point, he still didn’t know what the precise purpose was for these men to bring him out here with them. He had an idea, of course, that they were interested in recruiting him, but they had yet to make mention of this. They must have picked up something in Brogan’s demeanor, however, for Spenlow broke away from Doyle again and wandered across the grass towards him once again.
‘Sorry, Brogan. We were thinking things over.’
‘What are you thinking about?’ Brogan asked. He thought it wasn’t out of line to ask, since they had brought him out this way after all.
Spenlow pulled a white handkerchief out of the inside pocket of his suit jacket. He removed his barbershop hat with one hand and mopped his brow with the other.
‘Well, if we’re going to put a bulk facility in here, we’ll need a man to run it. You know that. The fact is, we’ve got a job to fill. McCready recommended you to us. In fact, he brought your name up some time ago. That doesn’t surprise you, I take it.’
‘No sir. We spoke about it. He told me months ago he would mention my name. I’ll be up front about that.’
‘Hopefully you’ll be up front about everything, Brogan. That’s the sort of man we’re looking for.’ Spenlow now regarded him with great scrutiny and a stone face. Doyle had his back to them, still looking back and forth over the land.
‘Of course, Mr. Spenlow. I didn’t mean otherwise,’ said Brogan, rubbing his hands together.
‘I’m sure you didn’t, sir. And while we’re talking straight, I’ll tell you this. We’re here because of McCready’s, let’s say, “enthusiasm” about you as a good candidate. But we’ve got questions, too. A couple concerns. I don’t mind telling you about them. I’d like to know what your answers would be to those concerns.’
‘Then go ahead, Mr. Spenlow.’
The older man smiled. ‘Brogan, I consider myself a reasonably good judge of a man’s character. I think that’s part of what got me to where I am right now. And you strike me as a decent fellow. You’ve got some backbone. And you seem to work pretty hard. Standard of Indiana can appreciate those qualities.’
‘I suppose I have some pretty good reasons to work hard,’ Brogan said, shrugging. ‘More reasons every day, I’d say, if you read the papers.’
‘I assure you, sir, that I do. Good jobs aren’t exactly easy to come by nowadays. Which is why we feel we need to select our man wisely. To tell you the truth, Mr. Doyle here is of the opinion that you might not have the experience required to do this job. We know you haven’t been in the business for long. What would you say that?’
Brogan eyed the redheaded man. He still didn’t turn towards the two of them, even though he was certainly within earshot. This Brogan found irritating.
‘I’d say if he has questions about what I can or can’t do, maybe he ought to ask me about them himself.’
Now the younger man did turn around. Quickly. His eyes blazed, but he did not advance towards Brogan.
‘Now listen here—’ Doyle began.
Spenlow held up one hand. His eyes remained on Brogan. He waited a moment before speaking. Brogan stood his ground and looked at Doyle straight on.
‘Look, Brogan,’ said Spenlow. ‘This isn’t personal. I appreciate that you have self-confidence. But the fact is that Doyle’s correct. You do lack experience. You’d have to hit the ground and learn the distribution aspects of this business in short order. Pumping fuel is one thing, sir; handling it on a regular basis is quite another. I need not tell you that aside from all business issues, there are also safety concerns that we would need to have assurance that you would be able to understand and address.’
Brogan took his eyes away from Doyle and paid Spenlow his direct attention. He still didn’t like, or much respect, what he could ascertain of the younger man’s character. But he knew that Spenlow’s points were valid, and he could sense that his opportunity was on the line. There would not be a whole lot of other chances to land a more suitable position, he thought.
He realized that Spenlow was giving him the chance to speak. So he decided to make his own thoughts clear.
‘Mr. Spenlow, I understand that you’re concerned about my experience. It makes sense that you would be. But if you don’t mind my pointing this out, it doesn’t seem to be too big of a problem, or your employer probably wouldn’t have sent you out here to find me. I’m sure you men, and Standard Oil, aren’t interested in wasting time.’
‘You got that right, Brogan,’ said Doyle, still looking him over.
Brogan ignored the interjection. He continued: ‘I’ll tell you this much. I think I can handle the job. I’m strong, I work hard, and I’m local. And I’m looking for a more promising situation in order to better protect my family. There’s no shame in saying that. Now, I don’t know if you folks teach your employees or if I need to go out and spend some time up in Gary or Calumet talking to other men that handle fuel or what. I do know I spent a lot of time talking about the way it works with Mr. McCready.
‘I’ll learn the job. You can bet on that. If you’re looking for a man that’s serious, who will make you feel right about your choices, Mr. Spenlow, I am that man.’
At that moment, as Brogan finished speaking, what might have been a lingering moment of silence suspended between the three men in the grass was splintered by the long, low rumble of a freight train’s whistle. The approach of a trainful of supplies seemed to Brogan to lend the whole situation a good feeling, a kind of unspoken confirmation that the location was appropriate, and the need to find the right man for the job was, for all practical purposes, the last piece of the puzzle.
‘That’s good to hear, Brogan,’ said Spenlow. ‘Very good. Now, let’s take a few more minutes before we get you back to the station to talk about what a bulk plant down here might look like. Come with me.’
He walked around the edge of the building, clapping Doyle once on the shoulder as he did so. Brogan followed after them.
Friday, January 16, 2009
Mutt Ploughman’s Annual Non-Scholarly Charles Dickens Essay
*The Posting of Which Officially Concludes Dickensfest VII*
My business here is to offer some thoughts on this year’s Dickensfest selection, which happens to be the 1850 novel David Copperfield.
Even among the multitude of famous novels written by Dickens, David Copperfield stands apart for a number of reasons. First, it represents the midway point in Dickens’ career as a novelist – there were seven major novels that came before it, and seven more followed. Second, it is the first of his novels that Dickens wrote exlusively in the first person, losing himself in the voice of the young Copperfield of Blunderstone Rookery. Thirdly, it has the following distinction, which I will articulate using Dickens’ own words from his preface to the ‘Charles Dickens Edition’, published in 1867: ‘Like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child. And his name is David Copperfield.’
When you read Dickens, you’re taking on a lot, and commiting a hefty block of your own time. As well you should. There aren’t many other writers whose novels take such a commitment with every outing, which is why their legends don’t endure. Unlike most writers’ work, when you decide to read Charles Dickens, you’re not just experiencing a story – you’re entering a whole world. It’s like traveling to 19th century England for an extended stay every time you open one of his books. You’re going to get the sights, the smells, the noises, and above all else, you’ll get an entire peanut gallery of personalities – not just one or two characters. You’ll enter Victorian chambers for tea with the very rich, gossiping amongst themselves about this scandal or that; but you’ll also take to the cold streets, and experience the poverty and peril of the underworld.
One of the reasons Dickens was so adept at portraying many different aspects of British life was his own experience early on as a court stenographer, where he was exposed to a wide variety of real-life characters ensnarled in an unmitigated maelstrom of legal and moral predicaments. In fact, one aspect of the character of David Copperfield’s life that parallels Dickens’ own is revealed when, late in the novel, Copperfield also becomes a court stenographer, allowing Dickens to deliver this revealing observation: ‘Brittania, that unfortunate female, is always before me, like a trussed fowl, skewered through-and-through with office pens, and bound hand-and-foot with red tape.’
However Dickens’ talents may have come about, it is because of his astonishing range of vision – his close attention to all levels of human society, not just the elevated ones – and the author’s singular gift of imagining and giving voice to so many different characters that his works have become immortal in the annals of world literature. Almost no iteration of the modern novel can be imagined were it not for the influence of his stories.
Hallmarks of that influence can still be seen clearly in much of today’s literature and film; it is something I perceive acutely every time I take on one of these annual adventures. Just as I have been reading David Copperfield, I saw two films that bear his influence: Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone, a ghost story (itself a genre which Dickens has also greatly influenced) which depicts disadvantaged, orphaned children banding together to avenge the murder of one of their own; and Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, which features a long, complicated plot filled with coincidental collisions that are as unpredictable as they are improbable, and also pays particular attention to the sights, colors and sounds of the world of the poor. Mr. del Toro, the Mexican director who is responsible for such visionary works as Cronos and Pan’s Labyrinth, frequently acknowledges Dickens’ influence on his films and screenplays; in Pan’s Labyrinth, for example, the young female protagonist’s offering of her left hand in introducing herself to a man who will become her abusive stepfather is unabashedly lifted from Chapter II of David Copperfield, where David does the same thing to a figure who will play a similar role in his existence.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but the entire phenomenon of Harry Potter would be utterly nonexistent without the long reach of Charles Dickens. J.K. Rowling’s complex plots betray an indisputable debt to the Dickens canon, and her very memorable wizarding world includes dozens of characters of all shapes, sizes and colors (not to mention species). The bumbling elf-like character of Dobby, for example, who is introduced in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, is so comically Dickensian in his mannerisms and frequent lamentations that it feels like he was lifted right out of one of his novels, except for the fact that he is not human! Not to mention the central notion of the boy hero who rises from humble circumstances, which can be traced straight back to Dickens’ Oliver Twist, the first major novel in the English language to feature a child as its protagonist.
In David Copperfield there is little question that we encounter Dickens the novelist at the zenith of his considerable powers. But rather than to try to describe in hyper-literary terms exactly why that is the case, I think what I will do instead, for the duration of this commentary, is attempt to describe some of the things that I have most enjoyed about this particular Dickens novel, and let whatever conclusions or observations that are scattered in the process sprout where they have fallen.
Within our own family, Duke and I are somewhat reputed for our tendency towards hyperbole – and few among us, if I may be so bold, can do it like we can. But NOBODY exaggerates like Dickens does, and when he chooses to lay something on thickly, he doesn’t just cover the subject, he smothers it. His descriptions of David Copperfield falling immediately in love with the childish Dora Spenlow are so over the top, I found myself howling. Probably a lot of critics throughout the different eras since his books appeared have crushed him for this, and there’s no doubt that he can overdo it on certain subjects just like he can overdo it in general (note the size of his novels!). But that’s the nature of the beast when it comes to Dickens, and I suppose if you’re going to wax at length about any particular subject, you can do worse than extolling the virtues and sublime qualities of the person you love.
Dickens’ portrayals of the lives and struggles of the underclass and the poor are always interesting to read, and his sympathy towards their plight resonates profoundly, which can be comforting if one is reading during tough economic times themselves, and is all the more laudable given that shortly after his first novel appeared on the scene, Dickens himself had absolutely zero financial worries of his own. He was the J.K. Rowling of his own time. But his memory was long and sharp, and he never strayed too far away in his own mind from his father’s humiliation by being thrown into debtor’s prison (which is where I probably would find msyelf right now if I lived in those times) or his own personal baptism into the life of the working class via a stint in a blacking factory as a young boy. In this novel, as in most, there are a number of characters who are involved in a mighty struggle to stave off insolvency, David Copperfield himself being not the least among these; but the spirit with which he carries himself in this struggle is laudable and worthy of the reader’s appreciation. He won’t give in. He makes something of himself against all odds. I can relate to that idea.
I also find it interesting to note, which may not be much of a surprise, that David Copperfield himself becomes a writer, and begins to publish stories and such in various magazines. Later, he publishes a novel. It was with a wry turn of the lip, I admit, that I discovered that David Copperfield’s transition from aspiring writer to ‘authorship’, to use his own word, occurs over the course of exactly one brief retrospective sentence in the novel, whereas my journey towards being a published fiction writer began somewhere around 1994, and has yet to find its way to a legitimate conclusion. However, my lack of success is no fault of the fictional Copperfield. Furthermore, I can always reiterate the words that close the previous paragraph here with regard to my own situation: he won’t give in. He makes something of himself against all odds.
Lastly, it’s also interesting that although Copperfield touches on his literary success in the book, he reflects upon it with humility. Dickens doesn’t have him fixate on his own stories or novels: ‘I do not enter on the aspirations, the delights, anxieties, and triumphs of my art,’ he writes, in Copperfield’s voice. ‘That I devoted myself to it with my strongest earnestness, and bestowed upon it every energy of my soul, I have already said. If the books I have written be of any worth, they will supply the rest.’
One of the funniest characters in the book to me was a man called Wilkins Micawber, a side character with whom David works for a period early in his career. Micawber is one of those Dickens characters that is comically dramatic, waxing at length about the plight of his existence and the various challenges he faces. In this case, Micawber is constantly fighting to overcome debt, a struggle for more than one character as I alluded to earlier. He even spends some time in debtor’s prison. This character is based on Charles Dickens’ father, John. Micawber’s circumstances are difficult throughout most of the story, although he eventually finds a way to deal with his problems, thanks to the help of many generous friends. But what makes him funny to me is the numerous letters he writes in the book and the off-the-cuff speeches he gives regularly about his struggles to defeat his creditors. These are filled with flourishes of highly exaggerated language that amply demonstrate both Dickens’ unique flair for drama and his exuberant prose style.
To conclude I would remark that the key to appreciating Dickens’ work, to me, is to simply allow yourself to enter fully into his stories and become swallowed up in them. I believe that this is the way Dickens meant his fiction to be experienced. His efforts seemed to lean towards creating a panoramic reflection of human experience, an invitation to readers from all walks of life to come inside and be entertained and perhaps to learn or re-learn some of the things about ourselves that are worth remembering. For you can say what you want about how his novels are filled with melodrama or unrealistic twists and turns or just too many words, but the fact is that very few novelists across the centuries, in all the history of English literature, had compassion, generosity, and warm-hearted enthusiasm for their fellow man on the same scale as Charles Dickens.
If you, in a dark moment, seek to cut yourself off from mankind and cower in the mirthless, painful corners of our existence – and I admit, sometimes I do myself – then you might do better to curl up with some Hemingway or Nietschze. But if you pine for some instruction from literature on how to be alive and to accept and even embrace your brother, while being simultaneously and copiously entertained, Charles Dickens is still your man. David Copperfield stands forever as one of the greatest examples of what he accomplished.
Tuesday, January 06, 2009
Journal of a 'Novel'-MILESTONE 50th ENTRY!
Mark it: November 7, 2010
I know many of you have been anxiously awaiting the miletone 50th entry to my Journal of a ‘Novel’ series of posts. If you are in this large group, you have been waiting for a whopping eight weeks, but your wait is over. This one is for you!! (????)
And in the spirit of this post and of my literary work for the year ahead, let’s get to work. The date above is my 40th birthday. It also represents a new goal for me with regard to my fledgling, but slowly coming awake again, novel-in-progress, with the working title of Only the Dying. Actually, this goal is not really new. When I first started writing on this story, way back in March 2006 (the research began in 2005), I always thought, and I even told the few people that knew I was starting on this, that my loose goal was to have the novel completed by my 40th birthday. That never meant published, for who knows if this novel will ever be published. It faces monumental odds. Rather, it meant that I would have finished writing the book by the time I turned 40 years old.
At the time I was 35, and that seemed like giving myself a reasonable space to get the book finished. Five years seems like a long time, but I was trying to be realistic. It was to be an ambitious project, and I had (have) never written a novel before. I also had two children at the time I started it, and have since added a third; I am the sole bread-winner for my family, etc. There’s not much time in an existence like that to work on a novel, especially if you have financial pressures of the sort I (and many others) face every day.
But the truth is, I never really held myself mentally to that, and always thought of it as a “loose” goal. It didn’t matter to me so much if I finished it by then, as long as I got it done “someday”. With this 50th journal post (the fact that there are 50 posts and I’m not even halfway done with the novel tells you there’s a disciplinary problem here), however, I announce the change: now, my 40th birthday IS the official goal, and I pledge to do everything I can to meet it. The problem is, I am a lot closer to being 40 than I was when the goal was originally floated! It’s less than 2 years away now. But no matter: I understand now that I have lacked the discipline so far that is required to see this novel through. And setting a tighter deadline will hopefully help me develop the discplinary fortitude to get the book done.
But this is no self-flagellation. I now take the time to appreciate, hopefully without aggrandizement, what I have accomplished so far. For while I have not done a great job over three years’ time setting myself to hard work on the book, I have done a reasonable job. I have hand-written over 270 manuscript pages, and have drafts of a Prologue and five full chapters completed. I researched for three and half months about the Great Depression, the Roaring 20s, and the oil industry in late 2005 and early 2006, and learned a lot there. I have continued to research such topics as Indiana history, the oil boom in Texas in the early 1930s, early pro football teams, Prohibition, township governance and by-laws in the state of Indiana, New Deal politics, and, most recently, the smuggling of contraband or “hot” oil across state lines that led to the Connally Hot Oil Act of 1935, all while continuing to write the novel. I think these are all legitimate accomplishments, and worth being proud of, but all the same, the novel is still not making very rapid progress, and unfortunately it hit a LONG snag towards the end of 2008 for at least a couple of months. I might have had a sixth chapter completed by now had I not hit a rut, but lamenting that reality is not a very good use of time either.
And at the very least I can be happy that I used that time to write two or three nonfiction pieces and one short story, all of which I am pleased to have written, even if none of them have yet to find a home in print. But those pieces have been written about elsewhere on this blog and are not my focus here.
The simple fact is that for all I have done so far, more effort is required if the dream of writing a novel is ever to be realized. The question for me is how to work in the effort that it will obviously require. My life is no less busy with three children than it was with two, when I started the book, as one can easily imagine. My time only grows shorter as life moves ever-forward. It may seem bleak but it’s true. How long does one allow oneself to take an honest shot at one’s life dream? When is it too late? How long can one justify taking the time to write a novel when I could use the time for an infinite variety of other pressing needs and matters, and in light of the chances of success a novel might have to be published, let alone read? Why does one even attempt to labor against such odds in the first place? If I, at 38 years old, can still walk around saying that I feel like I was ‘called’ or ‘born’ to write novels, when most people who are called to do so have certainly produced something worth mentioning well before my age, at what point does that become kind of a sad joke, or worse, a form of self-delusion?
Needless to say these questions haunt me all the time and I do not have, or I do not want to have, their answers. But I know that my time is not unlimited. And I have strong suspicions that so far I have not lived up to my full potential on this earth. I don’t know if I am kidding myself or not at this stage. What I do know is that I have a very powerful urge to write, and I want to use that urge to produce writing I can be proud of. And I also know that a long time ago, many years ago, I set a goal for myself that I would someday write a novel. As early as 1999, the subject for my novel began to take shape in my mind. And to this day that novel remains unwritten. It’s in progress, but it’s still unwritten. I am the only one who can write it. So I am giving myself a deadline to finish the book. The deadline is November 7, 2010.
What does that mean? It means I have to write a lot more than I have in a smaller amount of time. If I have been writing the book for almost three years, and have produced what I believe is a bit less than half of the story, what it means is that I have to write over one half of the novel in less than two years. So it’s obvious that the output will have to be more prodigious with less time. How can I expect to achieve this? The only answer is to cut other things out. For example, I almost always devote some time in the early morning to reading. Much of that is going to have to be temporarily suspended, as much as it pains me. Reading for pleasure is going to have be fit in only when more pressing matters have already been addressed in a given day.
Furthermore, I am going to have to write more, and more often. For me to achieve this new goal, it seems reasonable to expect that I will need to write once a day at least for 5-6 days per week. And it may require even more than that. I remember when I was trying to get Chapter 1 of the novel off the ground, back in 2006, I was trying to fit in what I called at the time “two-a-days”, where I would write as much as I could fit in in the mornings, and then take the manuscript with me to work, drive to a library on my lunch hour, and try to put in some more time on it at lunch. I may have to adapt a similar strategy now. How else can I expect to make the progress I need to? It will take a lot of persistence and effort when there will be many, many days where I don’t want to do it. But it’s becoming clear that it won’t get done otherwise, and who knows, I may run out of time in one capacity or another.
Can I do it? I think I can. I can recall another time in my life when I set a milestone birthday as a goal to achieve something, and I manged to achieve it. When I was serving in the Army in my 20s, I told myself that I would obtain an advanced degree before I was 30 years old. At the time this goal involved taking the GRE test to even be qualified for graduate school, researching and applying to schools, then entering a program and completing the course work for a Master’s degree AND a thesis. It’s true that I was single then and had no family and nowhere near the same financial constraints that I have now, but that’s no excuse for not achieving other goals later in life. If I did it before, I can do the same thing now. Getting a Master’s degree required a lot of work, and I accomplished that, so I can move on to the next goal and get that done too. If I am fixated on the idea that the day will arrive when it’s too late, then I suppose I have no business trying to get something done in the first place.
Today I went down into my basement work area, where I have not written a word in several months. In some places there were literally cobwebs to be brushed away. I cleared off my writing desk, a dark wood piece of furniture that my wife gave me when we got married, because she believes in my writing abilities. Then I set to work, climbing back up the side of the mountain, scratching out only a few new paragraphs to a draft I have had going of Chapter VI of the novel, that had been laying stagnant for many months. I am working on a scene in which Walter and Greta Brogan, married characters from the novel, are in a restaurant discussing the downturn in the economy. The year in the novel is 1930, but I hardly need point out the parallels to the present day. ‘The question is,’ Walter Brogan says, ‘how bad are things going to get.’ As we all know, things from that point in history only got far worse before they got better. But they eventually did get better.
What I want the character in my novel to do is press through, and he will – he will keep working as hard as he can to provide for his family, come what may. He may not emerge victorious, but his spirit will live on, just as his real-life inspiration, my grandfather, has lived on and is living on in spirit as I write this book which is partly based on his life story.
Reader, your humble(d) scribe has no choice but to do the same thing. He has a job before him. Times are tough. He is under strain. There are many things demanding his attention. He has not achieved everything he has set out to do. He must have faith, stay strong, get serious and stay serious. His family is counting on him to become what he believes he can become. The work awaits: it must be seen as his job: it is his job. Time for him to set to it.
I know many of you have been anxiously awaiting the miletone 50th entry to my Journal of a ‘Novel’ series of posts. If you are in this large group, you have been waiting for a whopping eight weeks, but your wait is over. This one is for you!! (????)
And in the spirit of this post and of my literary work for the year ahead, let’s get to work. The date above is my 40th birthday. It also represents a new goal for me with regard to my fledgling, but slowly coming awake again, novel-in-progress, with the working title of Only the Dying. Actually, this goal is not really new. When I first started writing on this story, way back in March 2006 (the research began in 2005), I always thought, and I even told the few people that knew I was starting on this, that my loose goal was to have the novel completed by my 40th birthday. That never meant published, for who knows if this novel will ever be published. It faces monumental odds. Rather, it meant that I would have finished writing the book by the time I turned 40 years old.
At the time I was 35, and that seemed like giving myself a reasonable space to get the book finished. Five years seems like a long time, but I was trying to be realistic. It was to be an ambitious project, and I had (have) never written a novel before. I also had two children at the time I started it, and have since added a third; I am the sole bread-winner for my family, etc. There’s not much time in an existence like that to work on a novel, especially if you have financial pressures of the sort I (and many others) face every day.
But the truth is, I never really held myself mentally to that, and always thought of it as a “loose” goal. It didn’t matter to me so much if I finished it by then, as long as I got it done “someday”. With this 50th journal post (the fact that there are 50 posts and I’m not even halfway done with the novel tells you there’s a disciplinary problem here), however, I announce the change: now, my 40th birthday IS the official goal, and I pledge to do everything I can to meet it. The problem is, I am a lot closer to being 40 than I was when the goal was originally floated! It’s less than 2 years away now. But no matter: I understand now that I have lacked the discipline so far that is required to see this novel through. And setting a tighter deadline will hopefully help me develop the discplinary fortitude to get the book done.
But this is no self-flagellation. I now take the time to appreciate, hopefully without aggrandizement, what I have accomplished so far. For while I have not done a great job over three years’ time setting myself to hard work on the book, I have done a reasonable job. I have hand-written over 270 manuscript pages, and have drafts of a Prologue and five full chapters completed. I researched for three and half months about the Great Depression, the Roaring 20s, and the oil industry in late 2005 and early 2006, and learned a lot there. I have continued to research such topics as Indiana history, the oil boom in Texas in the early 1930s, early pro football teams, Prohibition, township governance and by-laws in the state of Indiana, New Deal politics, and, most recently, the smuggling of contraband or “hot” oil across state lines that led to the Connally Hot Oil Act of 1935, all while continuing to write the novel. I think these are all legitimate accomplishments, and worth being proud of, but all the same, the novel is still not making very rapid progress, and unfortunately it hit a LONG snag towards the end of 2008 for at least a couple of months. I might have had a sixth chapter completed by now had I not hit a rut, but lamenting that reality is not a very good use of time either.
And at the very least I can be happy that I used that time to write two or three nonfiction pieces and one short story, all of which I am pleased to have written, even if none of them have yet to find a home in print. But those pieces have been written about elsewhere on this blog and are not my focus here.
The simple fact is that for all I have done so far, more effort is required if the dream of writing a novel is ever to be realized. The question for me is how to work in the effort that it will obviously require. My life is no less busy with three children than it was with two, when I started the book, as one can easily imagine. My time only grows shorter as life moves ever-forward. It may seem bleak but it’s true. How long does one allow oneself to take an honest shot at one’s life dream? When is it too late? How long can one justify taking the time to write a novel when I could use the time for an infinite variety of other pressing needs and matters, and in light of the chances of success a novel might have to be published, let alone read? Why does one even attempt to labor against such odds in the first place? If I, at 38 years old, can still walk around saying that I feel like I was ‘called’ or ‘born’ to write novels, when most people who are called to do so have certainly produced something worth mentioning well before my age, at what point does that become kind of a sad joke, or worse, a form of self-delusion?
Needless to say these questions haunt me all the time and I do not have, or I do not want to have, their answers. But I know that my time is not unlimited. And I have strong suspicions that so far I have not lived up to my full potential on this earth. I don’t know if I am kidding myself or not at this stage. What I do know is that I have a very powerful urge to write, and I want to use that urge to produce writing I can be proud of. And I also know that a long time ago, many years ago, I set a goal for myself that I would someday write a novel. As early as 1999, the subject for my novel began to take shape in my mind. And to this day that novel remains unwritten. It’s in progress, but it’s still unwritten. I am the only one who can write it. So I am giving myself a deadline to finish the book. The deadline is November 7, 2010.
What does that mean? It means I have to write a lot more than I have in a smaller amount of time. If I have been writing the book for almost three years, and have produced what I believe is a bit less than half of the story, what it means is that I have to write over one half of the novel in less than two years. So it’s obvious that the output will have to be more prodigious with less time. How can I expect to achieve this? The only answer is to cut other things out. For example, I almost always devote some time in the early morning to reading. Much of that is going to have to be temporarily suspended, as much as it pains me. Reading for pleasure is going to have be fit in only when more pressing matters have already been addressed in a given day.
Furthermore, I am going to have to write more, and more often. For me to achieve this new goal, it seems reasonable to expect that I will need to write once a day at least for 5-6 days per week. And it may require even more than that. I remember when I was trying to get Chapter 1 of the novel off the ground, back in 2006, I was trying to fit in what I called at the time “two-a-days”, where I would write as much as I could fit in in the mornings, and then take the manuscript with me to work, drive to a library on my lunch hour, and try to put in some more time on it at lunch. I may have to adapt a similar strategy now. How else can I expect to make the progress I need to? It will take a lot of persistence and effort when there will be many, many days where I don’t want to do it. But it’s becoming clear that it won’t get done otherwise, and who knows, I may run out of time in one capacity or another.
Can I do it? I think I can. I can recall another time in my life when I set a milestone birthday as a goal to achieve something, and I manged to achieve it. When I was serving in the Army in my 20s, I told myself that I would obtain an advanced degree before I was 30 years old. At the time this goal involved taking the GRE test to even be qualified for graduate school, researching and applying to schools, then entering a program and completing the course work for a Master’s degree AND a thesis. It’s true that I was single then and had no family and nowhere near the same financial constraints that I have now, but that’s no excuse for not achieving other goals later in life. If I did it before, I can do the same thing now. Getting a Master’s degree required a lot of work, and I accomplished that, so I can move on to the next goal and get that done too. If I am fixated on the idea that the day will arrive when it’s too late, then I suppose I have no business trying to get something done in the first place.
Today I went down into my basement work area, where I have not written a word in several months. In some places there were literally cobwebs to be brushed away. I cleared off my writing desk, a dark wood piece of furniture that my wife gave me when we got married, because she believes in my writing abilities. Then I set to work, climbing back up the side of the mountain, scratching out only a few new paragraphs to a draft I have had going of Chapter VI of the novel, that had been laying stagnant for many months. I am working on a scene in which Walter and Greta Brogan, married characters from the novel, are in a restaurant discussing the downturn in the economy. The year in the novel is 1930, but I hardly need point out the parallels to the present day. ‘The question is,’ Walter Brogan says, ‘how bad are things going to get.’ As we all know, things from that point in history only got far worse before they got better. But they eventually did get better.
What I want the character in my novel to do is press through, and he will – he will keep working as hard as he can to provide for his family, come what may. He may not emerge victorious, but his spirit will live on, just as his real-life inspiration, my grandfather, has lived on and is living on in spirit as I write this book which is partly based on his life story.
Reader, your humble(d) scribe has no choice but to do the same thing. He has a job before him. Times are tough. He is under strain. There are many things demanding his attention. He has not achieved everything he has set out to do. He must have faith, stay strong, get serious and stay serious. His family is counting on him to become what he believes he can become. The work awaits: it must be seen as his job: it is his job. Time for him to set to it.
Monday, January 05, 2009
"Take up and read" - again
It will come to know surprise to anyone familiar with me that C. S. Lewis is one of the guiding lights – “patron saints,” if you will – of this blog. The very name of the blog itself is a direct reference to something the world famous Oxford (and Cambridge) don wrote in his essential book The Problem of Pain.
Anyway, this post also takes its inspiration from something Lewis once wrote, which is (paraphrasing a little here) that no one can say they “know” a book having only read it once. I heartily agree – the first reading of a great book is something like your first introduction to a memorable person. Or any person, for that matter… who would say they truly know a person after just one meeting? Chances are, you've only just begun to scratch the surface.
In the spirit of this wise dictum, then, I present a short list of books that I am aiming to re-read in the year 2009. I’ll say right off the bat that it’s unlikely I will get to all of these, especially since there are so many new books I want to get to… but these are some of the books I consider to be truly great and worth investing a lot more time into. There are depths to these books I have only barely begun to plumb, and I look forward to discovering what a second trip through these pages may have to teach me.
In 2008 I re-read Cormac McCarthy’s magnum opus Blood Meridian and got a lot more out of it than I did the first time (which is not to say I understand the book now!). Who’s to say the same won’t be true for some of these classics?
Everything That Rises Must Converge, Flannery O’Connor
I resolved a while ago to re-read at least one part of the short but essential O’Connor canon every year.
Silence, Shusaku Endo
The Creators, Daniel Boorstin
The Man Who Was Thursday, G. K. Chesterton
Till We Have Faces, C. S. Lewis
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Jesus’ Son, Denis Johnson
Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason) and Salvifici Doloris (On the Christian Meaning of Human Suffering), Pope John Paul II
Anyway, this post also takes its inspiration from something Lewis once wrote, which is (paraphrasing a little here) that no one can say they “know” a book having only read it once. I heartily agree – the first reading of a great book is something like your first introduction to a memorable person. Or any person, for that matter… who would say they truly know a person after just one meeting? Chances are, you've only just begun to scratch the surface.
In the spirit of this wise dictum, then, I present a short list of books that I am aiming to re-read in the year 2009. I’ll say right off the bat that it’s unlikely I will get to all of these, especially since there are so many new books I want to get to… but these are some of the books I consider to be truly great and worth investing a lot more time into. There are depths to these books I have only barely begun to plumb, and I look forward to discovering what a second trip through these pages may have to teach me.
In 2008 I re-read Cormac McCarthy’s magnum opus Blood Meridian and got a lot more out of it than I did the first time (which is not to say I understand the book now!). Who’s to say the same won’t be true for some of these classics?
Everything That Rises Must Converge, Flannery O’Connor
I resolved a while ago to re-read at least one part of the short but essential O’Connor canon every year.
Silence, Shusaku Endo
The Creators, Daniel Boorstin
The Man Who Was Thursday, G. K. Chesterton
Till We Have Faces, C. S. Lewis
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Jesus’ Son, Denis Johnson
Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason) and Salvifici Doloris (On the Christian Meaning of Human Suffering), Pope John Paul II
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Mutt's Top Ten Film Conclusions
For a bookend piece, see my June 20, 2008 post, "Mutt's Top Ten Film Openings".
In discussing films as we often do, Duke and I sometimes talk about those rare movies that have a striking conclusion, the kind that makes you shake your head in wonder, cementing the fact in your mind that you have just seen a superior film. For me, as in great books, there is nothing quite as exhilirating as an excellent ending to a film or novel, especially when the whole rest of the story preceding it has been executed just as well. One gets the feeling that the director, in the case of films, has successfully carried their vision through all the way to the end, and completed their work in the most convincing and satisfying manner. There aren’t very many films that have given me this sensation, the thrill of having seen a genuine work of art, but the ones that do have always stayed with me. And so, in this season of lists, I present the selections for my own Top Ten Film Conclusions. Feel free to join the debate or add your own choices for consideration….
Pan’s Labyrinth, director Guillermo del Toro
Guillermo del Toro, one of the most interesting and imaginative creative minds working in film today, begins the conclusion to his triumphant 2006 film with the murder of an innocent child. This dreadful event is followed soon thereafter by an absolutely gorgeous, color-infused scene unlike any other in the film, in which the young female protagonist, clad in a stunning red satin gown, appears in a cathedral-like hall in front of a trinity of huge thrones and the figure of the immortal ‘faun’ from the film walking among them – a kind of visual passage into the afterlife, and an incredible sensory flourish worthy of the rest of this great film. Then, in the final shots, a stirring voice-over informs the viewer that the story has come to a conclusion, but that one can still find traces of the young girl’s incredible journey in our world ‘if you know where to look’, spoken over a succession of lovely shots of certain backdrops from the film, and concluding finally with a small scrap of a girl’s dress caught on a branch, fluttering in the breeze, deep in a thick forest.
Dreams, director Akira Kurosawa
The legendary Japanese film director’s utterly unique Dreams is unlike almost any other film you can imagine – a kind of visual short-story collection, consisting of ten small films based on dream fragments from the director’s own subconscious. The dreams all vary in style and substance, but each one is almost more visually stunning than the previous; also, they grow more and more ominous and apocalyptic as they progress. That is, until the beautiful and moving final ‘dream’, which is totally opposite in tone and setting. Titled “Village of the Watermills”, the final sequence depicts small, quiet moments that contrast sharply with the harrowing images from the dreams before it. The dream as well as the film ends with a long, silent shot of thin, slender blades of grass billowing just under the glimmering surface of a gently rolling stream awash in blazing sunlight. All one can hear is rolling water. There are no words, no other sounds. One of my favorite things about this lovely and moving final shot is how it holds for an unusually long time before the end credits roll, deliberately lingering over the beautiful simplicity of natural life. (Incidentally, Dreams is the only film to make BOTH my Film Openings and Film Conclusions list.)
O Brother, Where Art Thou?, director Joel Coen
In my opinion the Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, are unmatched among filmmakers working today. (That is why they appear more than once on this list.) They are outstanding writers, editors, and directors, and they never do the same thing twice, nor do they pay much heed to the audience’s expectations. This brilliant and hilarious re-telling of Homer’s The Odyssey in the Depression-era South is one of their crown jewels, and I enjoyed it from beginning to end. For me, the final shot of this film is best appreciated in context, as a lovely capper to all that has come before it. In the scene, Holly Hunter and George Clooney, in character, are discussing their recently renewed plans to get married as they walk along towards a set of railroad tracks while Clooney’s co-horts in all the madcap action from the preceding story lag behind. The camera follows the group from the side as they approach the tracks, then begins to ascend slowly into the sky as they cross over the tracks. On the railroad tracks, an old black man can be seen inching forward towards the horizon on a hand-pumped rail car; the same man appears at the very beginning of the film as a kind of soothsayer. He heads off towards a brilliant gold-colored horizon as the camera lofts ever higher and the screen fades. The combination of the extraordinary photographer Roger Deakins’ beautiful, valedictory shot and the beautiful colors and various small-town sounds makes this final image a stunning conclusion to a great film.
Millions, director Danny Boyle
This excellent film about a young child in Ireland who comes upon a misplaced stash of criminal money, and his adventures with his brother to prevent people from finding out about it, is a funny, endearing and sometimes sad story that earns a genuine emotional response. The key to the movie is that it is told from a child’s point of view, and contains many imaginative scenes where we see things that children might see in their own imaginations, but that adults often miss. Nowhere is this more effective than the final sequence, in which the young boy narrating the film says that while others might end the story sooner, it’s his story, and what we assume is the end of the film is not the way he wants it to end. From there, the action transports, quite magically, to a village in Africa, where the boy and his family assist a group of poverty-stricken children in setting up a pump for clean water, which begins to spring forth. The installation of this life-giving spring represents a salvific, cleansing miracle for the villagers, and makes for a very touching and beautiful conclusion to a lovely, family-friendly, inspiring film. Note the gorgeous, celebratory African music that accompanies the scene.
8 Mile, director Curtis Hanson
This may seem like an odd choice, because the rest of the film is nowhere near the other films on this list in terms of overall quality, but for me the conclusion expresses the timeworn theme of striking out for oneself against all imaginable odds in a stirring and fresh manner. The proverbial tale about the kid from the rough part of town that rises above his origins, as depicted endlessly in other films such as Rocky, etc., is here given a beat-saturated urban spin. The film stars the famed white rapper Eminem as “B Rabbit”, in a role that has many autobiographical similarities to his own life, and although it’s not clear that Eminem will ever be a great actor, here he channels his well-known verbal energy and pent-up angst to enormous effect, pounding against any instinct the viewer may have to dislike him. The last twenty minutes of the film present B Rabbit’s triumphant victory in three successive freestyle rap contests against successive black male rappers, all of whom have been ‘dissing’ him and his friends in increasingly hostile ways throughout the narrative. Physically beaten, financially destitute, and having been betrayed by his girlfriend, B Rabbit stands up for himself in a fury of funny and stunningly inventive verbal bursts, positively bristling with angst and rage, and emerges victorious. He then walks quietly through the Detroit urban landscape to complete his overnight shift at a metal factory. No matter what you think of rap music, Eminem’s fierce performance here is inspiring. Notably, he also won an Academy Award for the song “Lose Yourself” from the film’s soundtrack.
Fargo, director Joel Coen
The Coen’s darkly hilarious film about a desperate man’s ill-considered plot to have his wife kidnapped so he can collect the ransom money is well-known and often quoted. Most people know about the climactic scene that involves Frances McDormand (in an Oscar-winning performance), a criminal, and a wood-chipper – one of the most memorable sequences in modern film history. This is followed by a wonderful monologue in a police cruiser, in which the simple, good-hearted, and very pregnant police chief, played by McDormand, lectures a hardened murderer on his seemingly random acts of violence and wonders aloud why anyone would behave this way. Both of these sequences are beautifully acted and memorable, and most filmmakers, having inserted those lines into their characters’ mouth in the police car, would end the picture there. But the Coens, as I alluded to previously, like debunking expectations, so their film ends with the police chief in bed with her husband at night, praising him for his accomplishment of having one of his watercolor paintings accepted for use on a 3-cent stamp. And in a lovely reflective moment, the woman says, “You know, we’re doing pretty good”, and they switch off the light and go to sleep, awaiting the moment when they become a family.
Blood Simple, director Joel Coen
The third Coen film to make this list has probably one of my favorite concluding lines of any film script I’ve come across. Blood Simple, the Coen brothers’ first feature, was a noir-ish tale set in rural Texas in which a honky-tonk owner named Marty, realizing his wife is having an affair, hires a hitman to kill them both. The film is filled with wonderful performances and skilfully crafted moments of tension, as well as a deep vein of black humor running throughout. All of these things come together in the highly memorable final sequence in which the wife, played again by Frances McDormand (a.k.a. Mrs. Joel Coen), defends herself against the hitman – while separated from him by walls. As the hitman draws closer, McDormand’s character, who is convinced it’s Marty stalking her, and doesn’t know there is any hitman involved, fatally shoots him through a doorway. She then says, “I’m not afraid of you, Marty” and the hitman, bleeding on the floor, manages a laugh and says, “Well, ma’am, if I see him, I’ll sure give him the message.” End of film.
The Blair Witch Project, directors Daniel Myrick & Eduardo Sanchez
Perhaps this film didn’t age entirely gracefully, but many will remember that at the time it came out in 1999, it was a phenomenon, and scared many viewers silly, including yours truly. The film was shot over 8 days for $22,000 and ended up making over $250 million worldwide. Blair Witch was an entertaining and inventive horror story about a group of college kids, two guys and a girl, who go into the woods together to hunt out the truth about a local legend about people being murdered in the Maryland forest by a “witch”. They go to the woods with hand-held cameras and a brazen attitude and are never seen again – the only thing that is recovered are their cameras with documentary-style footage, and this makes up the film itself. During the film, a legend is related about how when the “witch” takes its victims, it makes them stand in the corner with their back turned before it kills them. As the film progresses, the kids are spooked in increasingly portentuous ways by unexplained sounds, voices, and strange stick figures in the woods. When one of their group disappears without a trace overnight, the other two set out to find him. Eventually they follow his screams to an abandoned ruin of a house. Once inside, they become confused and disoriented. One of them screams and drops his camera, and when the other runs into the room with her camera, she finds him standing in the corner, and screams herself. Then her camera is knocked down, and everything goes black. When I saw this in the movie theater in 1999, knowing nothing about the story, it scared the living daylights out of me.
Casino Royale, director Martin Campbell
At the time when this film was released in 2006, I and possibly many other people could have cared less about the James Bond film franchise. These films had been around forever and had become increasingly tired, and in the age of Jason Bourne and other action movies of this millennium, they seemed outdated and trivial. But this tremendously entertaining film completely defied expectations, and is probably the best Bond film of all of them. It began with the gutsy casting of the little-known Daniel Craig in the lead role, replacing a suave but rather blasé Pierce Brosnan. Craig brought a whole new element of pathos and physicality to the role, and his fierce, explosive performance carried the film. Since the film’s conceit was to go back to the beginning and tell the story of Bond’s first mission as a “007” agent in the British Secret Service, in keeping with the fact that Casino Royale was the first Bond novel Sir Ian Fleming ever wrote, Craig was able to bring a youthful recklessness to the role, something he does in brilliant fashion. The entire film is fast-paced, well-acted, and thrilling, but the ingeniuous idea of concluding the film with Bond’s most famous line was the kicker. At the very end, Bond arranges to meet a man who represents his enemies, and when the man shows up aside a coastal hotel in Europe, he steps out of his car into brilliant sunlight – and is immediately shot in the leg. As he gropes towards cover, Bond’s foot is seen stepping up beside him. ‘Who….are…you?’ the man asks. The camera shows Bond as seen from the man’s point of view below, and Craig says, ‘Bond. James Bond.’ The movie ends.
The Grapes of Wrath, director John Ford
John Steinbeck’s classic novel is famously brought to the screen in director John Ford’s Oscar-winning 1940 film. This film is famous for many reasons, including the legendary Ford’s direction, Henry Fonda’s brilliant performance as Tom Joad, and the famous speech in which Tom Joad, leaving his family forever, tells his mother in response to her asking how she will know if he’s all right, “I'll be everywhere. Wherever you can look - wherever there's a fight, so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there.” But the singular moment from the film as opposed to the book may be the concluding speech, delivered by the actress Jane Darwell, who portrayed Ma Joad, at the very end of the film. This speech, which wasn’t even in the novel, earned Darwell a Supporting Actress Oscar. As the Joad family drives away at the end of the film, without their eldest son, to find work and simply survive, Ma Joad says, “Rich fellas come up an' they die, an' their kids ain't no good an' they die out. But we keep a'comin'. We're the people that live. They can't wipe us out; they can't lick us. We'll go on forever, Pa, 'cause we're the people.”
In discussing films as we often do, Duke and I sometimes talk about those rare movies that have a striking conclusion, the kind that makes you shake your head in wonder, cementing the fact in your mind that you have just seen a superior film. For me, as in great books, there is nothing quite as exhilirating as an excellent ending to a film or novel, especially when the whole rest of the story preceding it has been executed just as well. One gets the feeling that the director, in the case of films, has successfully carried their vision through all the way to the end, and completed their work in the most convincing and satisfying manner. There aren’t very many films that have given me this sensation, the thrill of having seen a genuine work of art, but the ones that do have always stayed with me. And so, in this season of lists, I present the selections for my own Top Ten Film Conclusions. Feel free to join the debate or add your own choices for consideration….
Pan’s Labyrinth, director Guillermo del Toro
Guillermo del Toro, one of the most interesting and imaginative creative minds working in film today, begins the conclusion to his triumphant 2006 film with the murder of an innocent child. This dreadful event is followed soon thereafter by an absolutely gorgeous, color-infused scene unlike any other in the film, in which the young female protagonist, clad in a stunning red satin gown, appears in a cathedral-like hall in front of a trinity of huge thrones and the figure of the immortal ‘faun’ from the film walking among them – a kind of visual passage into the afterlife, and an incredible sensory flourish worthy of the rest of this great film. Then, in the final shots, a stirring voice-over informs the viewer that the story has come to a conclusion, but that one can still find traces of the young girl’s incredible journey in our world ‘if you know where to look’, spoken over a succession of lovely shots of certain backdrops from the film, and concluding finally with a small scrap of a girl’s dress caught on a branch, fluttering in the breeze, deep in a thick forest.
Dreams, director Akira Kurosawa
The legendary Japanese film director’s utterly unique Dreams is unlike almost any other film you can imagine – a kind of visual short-story collection, consisting of ten small films based on dream fragments from the director’s own subconscious. The dreams all vary in style and substance, but each one is almost more visually stunning than the previous; also, they grow more and more ominous and apocalyptic as they progress. That is, until the beautiful and moving final ‘dream’, which is totally opposite in tone and setting. Titled “Village of the Watermills”, the final sequence depicts small, quiet moments that contrast sharply with the harrowing images from the dreams before it. The dream as well as the film ends with a long, silent shot of thin, slender blades of grass billowing just under the glimmering surface of a gently rolling stream awash in blazing sunlight. All one can hear is rolling water. There are no words, no other sounds. One of my favorite things about this lovely and moving final shot is how it holds for an unusually long time before the end credits roll, deliberately lingering over the beautiful simplicity of natural life. (Incidentally, Dreams is the only film to make BOTH my Film Openings and Film Conclusions list.)
O Brother, Where Art Thou?, director Joel Coen
In my opinion the Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, are unmatched among filmmakers working today. (That is why they appear more than once on this list.) They are outstanding writers, editors, and directors, and they never do the same thing twice, nor do they pay much heed to the audience’s expectations. This brilliant and hilarious re-telling of Homer’s The Odyssey in the Depression-era South is one of their crown jewels, and I enjoyed it from beginning to end. For me, the final shot of this film is best appreciated in context, as a lovely capper to all that has come before it. In the scene, Holly Hunter and George Clooney, in character, are discussing their recently renewed plans to get married as they walk along towards a set of railroad tracks while Clooney’s co-horts in all the madcap action from the preceding story lag behind. The camera follows the group from the side as they approach the tracks, then begins to ascend slowly into the sky as they cross over the tracks. On the railroad tracks, an old black man can be seen inching forward towards the horizon on a hand-pumped rail car; the same man appears at the very beginning of the film as a kind of soothsayer. He heads off towards a brilliant gold-colored horizon as the camera lofts ever higher and the screen fades. The combination of the extraordinary photographer Roger Deakins’ beautiful, valedictory shot and the beautiful colors and various small-town sounds makes this final image a stunning conclusion to a great film.
Millions, director Danny Boyle
This excellent film about a young child in Ireland who comes upon a misplaced stash of criminal money, and his adventures with his brother to prevent people from finding out about it, is a funny, endearing and sometimes sad story that earns a genuine emotional response. The key to the movie is that it is told from a child’s point of view, and contains many imaginative scenes where we see things that children might see in their own imaginations, but that adults often miss. Nowhere is this more effective than the final sequence, in which the young boy narrating the film says that while others might end the story sooner, it’s his story, and what we assume is the end of the film is not the way he wants it to end. From there, the action transports, quite magically, to a village in Africa, where the boy and his family assist a group of poverty-stricken children in setting up a pump for clean water, which begins to spring forth. The installation of this life-giving spring represents a salvific, cleansing miracle for the villagers, and makes for a very touching and beautiful conclusion to a lovely, family-friendly, inspiring film. Note the gorgeous, celebratory African music that accompanies the scene.
8 Mile, director Curtis Hanson
This may seem like an odd choice, because the rest of the film is nowhere near the other films on this list in terms of overall quality, but for me the conclusion expresses the timeworn theme of striking out for oneself against all imaginable odds in a stirring and fresh manner. The proverbial tale about the kid from the rough part of town that rises above his origins, as depicted endlessly in other films such as Rocky, etc., is here given a beat-saturated urban spin. The film stars the famed white rapper Eminem as “B Rabbit”, in a role that has many autobiographical similarities to his own life, and although it’s not clear that Eminem will ever be a great actor, here he channels his well-known verbal energy and pent-up angst to enormous effect, pounding against any instinct the viewer may have to dislike him. The last twenty minutes of the film present B Rabbit’s triumphant victory in three successive freestyle rap contests against successive black male rappers, all of whom have been ‘dissing’ him and his friends in increasingly hostile ways throughout the narrative. Physically beaten, financially destitute, and having been betrayed by his girlfriend, B Rabbit stands up for himself in a fury of funny and stunningly inventive verbal bursts, positively bristling with angst and rage, and emerges victorious. He then walks quietly through the Detroit urban landscape to complete his overnight shift at a metal factory. No matter what you think of rap music, Eminem’s fierce performance here is inspiring. Notably, he also won an Academy Award for the song “Lose Yourself” from the film’s soundtrack.
Fargo, director Joel Coen
The Coen’s darkly hilarious film about a desperate man’s ill-considered plot to have his wife kidnapped so he can collect the ransom money is well-known and often quoted. Most people know about the climactic scene that involves Frances McDormand (in an Oscar-winning performance), a criminal, and a wood-chipper – one of the most memorable sequences in modern film history. This is followed by a wonderful monologue in a police cruiser, in which the simple, good-hearted, and very pregnant police chief, played by McDormand, lectures a hardened murderer on his seemingly random acts of violence and wonders aloud why anyone would behave this way. Both of these sequences are beautifully acted and memorable, and most filmmakers, having inserted those lines into their characters’ mouth in the police car, would end the picture there. But the Coens, as I alluded to previously, like debunking expectations, so their film ends with the police chief in bed with her husband at night, praising him for his accomplishment of having one of his watercolor paintings accepted for use on a 3-cent stamp. And in a lovely reflective moment, the woman says, “You know, we’re doing pretty good”, and they switch off the light and go to sleep, awaiting the moment when they become a family.
Blood Simple, director Joel Coen
The third Coen film to make this list has probably one of my favorite concluding lines of any film script I’ve come across. Blood Simple, the Coen brothers’ first feature, was a noir-ish tale set in rural Texas in which a honky-tonk owner named Marty, realizing his wife is having an affair, hires a hitman to kill them both. The film is filled with wonderful performances and skilfully crafted moments of tension, as well as a deep vein of black humor running throughout. All of these things come together in the highly memorable final sequence in which the wife, played again by Frances McDormand (a.k.a. Mrs. Joel Coen), defends herself against the hitman – while separated from him by walls. As the hitman draws closer, McDormand’s character, who is convinced it’s Marty stalking her, and doesn’t know there is any hitman involved, fatally shoots him through a doorway. She then says, “I’m not afraid of you, Marty” and the hitman, bleeding on the floor, manages a laugh and says, “Well, ma’am, if I see him, I’ll sure give him the message.” End of film.
The Blair Witch Project, directors Daniel Myrick & Eduardo Sanchez
Perhaps this film didn’t age entirely gracefully, but many will remember that at the time it came out in 1999, it was a phenomenon, and scared many viewers silly, including yours truly. The film was shot over 8 days for $22,000 and ended up making over $250 million worldwide. Blair Witch was an entertaining and inventive horror story about a group of college kids, two guys and a girl, who go into the woods together to hunt out the truth about a local legend about people being murdered in the Maryland forest by a “witch”. They go to the woods with hand-held cameras and a brazen attitude and are never seen again – the only thing that is recovered are their cameras with documentary-style footage, and this makes up the film itself. During the film, a legend is related about how when the “witch” takes its victims, it makes them stand in the corner with their back turned before it kills them. As the film progresses, the kids are spooked in increasingly portentuous ways by unexplained sounds, voices, and strange stick figures in the woods. When one of their group disappears without a trace overnight, the other two set out to find him. Eventually they follow his screams to an abandoned ruin of a house. Once inside, they become confused and disoriented. One of them screams and drops his camera, and when the other runs into the room with her camera, she finds him standing in the corner, and screams herself. Then her camera is knocked down, and everything goes black. When I saw this in the movie theater in 1999, knowing nothing about the story, it scared the living daylights out of me.
Casino Royale, director Martin Campbell
At the time when this film was released in 2006, I and possibly many other people could have cared less about the James Bond film franchise. These films had been around forever and had become increasingly tired, and in the age of Jason Bourne and other action movies of this millennium, they seemed outdated and trivial. But this tremendously entertaining film completely defied expectations, and is probably the best Bond film of all of them. It began with the gutsy casting of the little-known Daniel Craig in the lead role, replacing a suave but rather blasé Pierce Brosnan. Craig brought a whole new element of pathos and physicality to the role, and his fierce, explosive performance carried the film. Since the film’s conceit was to go back to the beginning and tell the story of Bond’s first mission as a “007” agent in the British Secret Service, in keeping with the fact that Casino Royale was the first Bond novel Sir Ian Fleming ever wrote, Craig was able to bring a youthful recklessness to the role, something he does in brilliant fashion. The entire film is fast-paced, well-acted, and thrilling, but the ingeniuous idea of concluding the film with Bond’s most famous line was the kicker. At the very end, Bond arranges to meet a man who represents his enemies, and when the man shows up aside a coastal hotel in Europe, he steps out of his car into brilliant sunlight – and is immediately shot in the leg. As he gropes towards cover, Bond’s foot is seen stepping up beside him. ‘Who….are…you?’ the man asks. The camera shows Bond as seen from the man’s point of view below, and Craig says, ‘Bond. James Bond.’ The movie ends.
The Grapes of Wrath, director John Ford
John Steinbeck’s classic novel is famously brought to the screen in director John Ford’s Oscar-winning 1940 film. This film is famous for many reasons, including the legendary Ford’s direction, Henry Fonda’s brilliant performance as Tom Joad, and the famous speech in which Tom Joad, leaving his family forever, tells his mother in response to her asking how she will know if he’s all right, “I'll be everywhere. Wherever you can look - wherever there's a fight, so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there.” But the singular moment from the film as opposed to the book may be the concluding speech, delivered by the actress Jane Darwell, who portrayed Ma Joad, at the very end of the film. This speech, which wasn’t even in the novel, earned Darwell a Supporting Actress Oscar. As the Joad family drives away at the end of the film, without their eldest son, to find work and simply survive, Ma Joad says, “Rich fellas come up an' they die, an' their kids ain't no good an' they die out. But we keep a'comin'. We're the people that live. They can't wipe us out; they can't lick us. We'll go on forever, Pa, 'cause we're the people.”
Monday, December 22, 2008
DUKE ALTUM'S NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2008
2008 is hurtling rapidly towards the finish line, and so it's time once again to look back on the year of reading that was and select ten books that had the most impact on me over that time.
As the subtle variation in the names of our posts implies ("10 best" vs. "notable books"), my list is a little bit different than Mutt's, in that I don't attempt to put them in any kind of order... although if I did, I will say right now that there would be a tie for the top slot: between Denis Johnson's short story collection Jesus' Son, and Flann O'Brien's speculative mind-bender novel The Third Policeman. See below for more on both.
It's a strange coincidence that both Mutt and I would single out a book from the same author - a first as far as I know, in about 5 years of trading lists like this - but it certainly seems appropriate in both of our cases.
Anyway, no more preamble... here's my list for the year. And stay tuned to this channel for my bonus list, Noteworthy Films I Saw in 2008, coming soon...
*******
Jesus’ Son, Denis Johnson – This is not only the best story collection I read in 2008, it’s one of the best I’ve ever read. These interconnected stories featuring a drug-addled lost soul wandering from calamity to calamity across America’s bleak, modern landscape reminded me of the great Flannery O’Connor in the way they evoke a profound spiritual yearning within a context of violence, confusion and mystery. The great alchemy of Johnson’s prose is that he is able to create a unique, lyrical language out of material that is as painful as it is profane.
The Glass Key, Dashiell Hammett – My first exposure to this pioneer writer of so-called noir fiction was one of the most enjoyable reading experiences of the year. The tight plotting, double-crossing and mysterious women are all there, but it’s Hammett’s lightning-fast, darkly humorous, intelligent dialogue that makes him required reading. An undeniable influence on the Coen Brothers!
The Reason for God, Timothy Keller – Keller’s attempt at a modern-day Mere Christianity succeeds for the most part, and is a valuable resource in terms of presenting clear-headed, insightful arguments for the existence of God. A solid answer to the recent spate of bestselling rants against religion and an engaging read as well, The Reason for God ought to be read widely by Christians as well as skeptics who are open to considering a sensible argument for belief.
A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy O’Toole – Click here to read my thoughts on this great comic novel, posted earlier this year on The Secret Thread.
A New Selected Poems, Galway Kinnell – I like to try and include at least one poet on my list each year, and no other collection I’ve read in 2008 (excluding those I read from perennially, such as those from R. S. Thomas, Charles Simic and Walt Whitman) gave me as much pleasure and insight as Kinnell’s. His poems tend to focus on those places where the miraculous, mysterious and mundane intersect: the family, the natural world and the treasure vault of memory. For samples of the great stuff included in this collection, check out this earlier “Poem of the Week” post.
The Family of Pascual Duarte, Camilo Jose Cela – Like Camus’ The Stranger and Hugo’s novella The Last Day of a Condemned Man, this neglected classic by the Nobel Prize winning Spanish novelist features a man on death row looking back on the events of his life that brought him to the brink of execution. This novel is a gripping examination of evil, and whether a man can be saved (or not) from his own darkest impulses. It is also noteworthy (in my mind anyway) for how seriously it deals with questions of faith, God, sin and free will.
The Known World, Edward P. Jones – This novel took a long time to grow on me, but the farther along I read in it the more I appreciated its originality and imagination – and it’s lingered in my mind for a long time after I finished it. Jones’ extraordinary examination of a reality more or less obscured by history – the keeping of slaves by black landowners in 19th century Virginia – is in fact a profound and moving meditation on the promise, and problems, of African-American community life.
The Third Policeman, Flann O’Brien – Whoo boy... where to begin? This was by far the strangest, and most memorable, novel I read this year. In fact, I’ve never read anything quite like it. A brilliant hybrid of speculative science fiction and nightmarish vision of the afterlife, all set in rural Ireland (where else?!?)… Who is the mysterious “third policeman”? Why are most of the characters obsessed with bicycles? What exactly is happening within that underground chamber, and what the hell is this magical material called omnium? And why does the whole story seem to be set on an infinite loop? Naturally I can’t shed light on ANY of these questions, even after having read it – but trust me, this book is one weird and wild ride.
The Histories, Herodotus – Who says ancient history is boring?? If you’ve ever had any interest in travel narratives, Herodotus’ Histories is both the Granddaddy and the Holy Grail of the genre. I fully admit that I only read half of this weighty tome this year (which makes it a bit of a cheat, but I include it anyway because it was so unlike anything else I read), but that half was crammed with so many fascinating details about the cultures, religions, wars, politics and technologies of the ancient world that I felt it was well worth the careful attention it required.
Night Flight, Antoine de Saint Exupery – For sheer originality in subject matter, nothing (other than The Third Policeman) I read this year beat this beautifully written novella from the world-famous author of the classic children’s fable The Little Prince. This fictional chronicle of the pilots and mechanics who delivered air mail to and from South America in the early days of aviation (around 1920!) is both a gripping adventure yarn, and a fascinating philosophical/spiritual meditation on the human spirit. Saint Exupery’s descriptions of flying in the middle of snowstorms over the Andes were some of the most stunning passages I read in 2008.
Honorable mentions: The Collected Plays of Karol Wojtyla; If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, William Faulkner; My Confession: The Recollections of a Rogue, Samuel Chamberlain; Blood Meridian (re-read), Cormac McCarthy; The Braindead Megaphone, George Saunders.
As the subtle variation in the names of our posts implies ("10 best" vs. "notable books"), my list is a little bit different than Mutt's, in that I don't attempt to put them in any kind of order... although if I did, I will say right now that there would be a tie for the top slot: between Denis Johnson's short story collection Jesus' Son, and Flann O'Brien's speculative mind-bender novel The Third Policeman. See below for more on both.
It's a strange coincidence that both Mutt and I would single out a book from the same author - a first as far as I know, in about 5 years of trading lists like this - but it certainly seems appropriate in both of our cases.
Anyway, no more preamble... here's my list for the year. And stay tuned to this channel for my bonus list, Noteworthy Films I Saw in 2008, coming soon...
*******
Jesus’ Son, Denis Johnson – This is not only the best story collection I read in 2008, it’s one of the best I’ve ever read. These interconnected stories featuring a drug-addled lost soul wandering from calamity to calamity across America’s bleak, modern landscape reminded me of the great Flannery O’Connor in the way they evoke a profound spiritual yearning within a context of violence, confusion and mystery. The great alchemy of Johnson’s prose is that he is able to create a unique, lyrical language out of material that is as painful as it is profane.
The Glass Key, Dashiell Hammett – My first exposure to this pioneer writer of so-called noir fiction was one of the most enjoyable reading experiences of the year. The tight plotting, double-crossing and mysterious women are all there, but it’s Hammett’s lightning-fast, darkly humorous, intelligent dialogue that makes him required reading. An undeniable influence on the Coen Brothers!
The Reason for God, Timothy Keller – Keller’s attempt at a modern-day Mere Christianity succeeds for the most part, and is a valuable resource in terms of presenting clear-headed, insightful arguments for the existence of God. A solid answer to the recent spate of bestselling rants against religion and an engaging read as well, The Reason for God ought to be read widely by Christians as well as skeptics who are open to considering a sensible argument for belief.
A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy O’Toole – Click here to read my thoughts on this great comic novel, posted earlier this year on The Secret Thread.
A New Selected Poems, Galway Kinnell – I like to try and include at least one poet on my list each year, and no other collection I’ve read in 2008 (excluding those I read from perennially, such as those from R. S. Thomas, Charles Simic and Walt Whitman) gave me as much pleasure and insight as Kinnell’s. His poems tend to focus on those places where the miraculous, mysterious and mundane intersect: the family, the natural world and the treasure vault of memory. For samples of the great stuff included in this collection, check out this earlier “Poem of the Week” post.
The Family of Pascual Duarte, Camilo Jose Cela – Like Camus’ The Stranger and Hugo’s novella The Last Day of a Condemned Man, this neglected classic by the Nobel Prize winning Spanish novelist features a man on death row looking back on the events of his life that brought him to the brink of execution. This novel is a gripping examination of evil, and whether a man can be saved (or not) from his own darkest impulses. It is also noteworthy (in my mind anyway) for how seriously it deals with questions of faith, God, sin and free will.
The Known World, Edward P. Jones – This novel took a long time to grow on me, but the farther along I read in it the more I appreciated its originality and imagination – and it’s lingered in my mind for a long time after I finished it. Jones’ extraordinary examination of a reality more or less obscured by history – the keeping of slaves by black landowners in 19th century Virginia – is in fact a profound and moving meditation on the promise, and problems, of African-American community life.
The Third Policeman, Flann O’Brien – Whoo boy... where to begin? This was by far the strangest, and most memorable, novel I read this year. In fact, I’ve never read anything quite like it. A brilliant hybrid of speculative science fiction and nightmarish vision of the afterlife, all set in rural Ireland (where else?!?)… Who is the mysterious “third policeman”? Why are most of the characters obsessed with bicycles? What exactly is happening within that underground chamber, and what the hell is this magical material called omnium? And why does the whole story seem to be set on an infinite loop? Naturally I can’t shed light on ANY of these questions, even after having read it – but trust me, this book is one weird and wild ride.
The Histories, Herodotus – Who says ancient history is boring?? If you’ve ever had any interest in travel narratives, Herodotus’ Histories is both the Granddaddy and the Holy Grail of the genre. I fully admit that I only read half of this weighty tome this year (which makes it a bit of a cheat, but I include it anyway because it was so unlike anything else I read), but that half was crammed with so many fascinating details about the cultures, religions, wars, politics and technologies of the ancient world that I felt it was well worth the careful attention it required.
Night Flight, Antoine de Saint Exupery – For sheer originality in subject matter, nothing (other than The Third Policeman) I read this year beat this beautifully written novella from the world-famous author of the classic children’s fable The Little Prince. This fictional chronicle of the pilots and mechanics who delivered air mail to and from South America in the early days of aviation (around 1920!) is both a gripping adventure yarn, and a fascinating philosophical/spiritual meditation on the human spirit. Saint Exupery’s descriptions of flying in the middle of snowstorms over the Andes were some of the most stunning passages I read in 2008.
Honorable mentions: The Collected Plays of Karol Wojtyla; If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, William Faulkner; My Confession: The Recollections of a Rogue, Samuel Chamberlain; Blood Meridian (re-read), Cormac McCarthy; The Braindead Megaphone, George Saunders.
Friday, December 19, 2008
Mutt Ploughman's Best Books of 2008
'Tis the season for annual Top Ten lists of the best books of the year, and here at The Secret Thread this is also our tradition. (Duke's list will follow later, stay tuned.) I read a ton of great books this year, but these were the ones that impacted me the most. Without much more introduction, I present them here, in order of merit, and with a one-sentence commentary for the second year running. (Be glad, my lists before then ran much longer!!)
Note: I'd like to give a shout out to my big sister, Maria Therese Hey, who gave me not one but TWO books featured on this list as gifts. Does she know her brother or what?? These books, should anyone care, are marked with an asterisk*.
10. Night Shift, Stephen King. This collection of early Stephen King stories contains some real howlers, but it is still a rollicking entertainment and a bravura creative display that demonstrates the power of a fearless imagination.
9. Chekhov: A Spirit Set Free, V.S. Pritchett. An elegant, efficient biography of the master of the modern short story by the great Pritchett, himself a towering figure in 20th century English letters, who possessed the skills and experience to do this great subject justice.
8. The Keep, Jennifer Egan. A fresh voice for me, Egan’s absorbing and intelligently structured novel is part homage to the great Gothic tradition, part compelling commentary on the alienation of modern man by technology, and part post-modernist exhibition of stories-within-stories – an elaborate creation, skillfully executed.
7. Exiles, Ron Hansen. The spiritual struggles of the under-lauded but influential poet Gerard Manley Hopkins and the harrowing sea tragedy that inspired his masterpiece are here dramatized in a graceful, moving novel that only Ron Hansen could have written.
6. Jesus of Nazareth, Pope Benedict XVI.* This mature, illuminating study by the current Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church is filled with the insights and wisdom of a serious religious thinker’s lifelong pursuit of the meaning of the Incarnation, without a trace of condescension or scholarly bluster.
5. On Beauty, Zadie Smith.* The only novelist to make my list two years running, Smith’s fascinating and funny third novel, widely praised by critics, dares to re-imagine Forster’s Howard’s End through two modern families and their inter-connecting stories in a New England college community.
4. Man in the Dark, Paul Auster. With trademark precision and grace, this dark, stirring fable concerning a damaged old man and the youthful assassin he conjures up in his troubled imagination is a striking performance even by Paul Auster’s lofty standards, and is one of the best novels in his long and satisfying career.
3. Say You’re One of Them, Uwem Akpan, S.J. Not for the faint of heart, this collection of stories about modern Africa by Akpan, a Nigerian and a Jesuit priest, is filled with startling violence and tragedy, almost unbearably depicted with efficient prose and vivid dialogue – and made all the more harrowing by the fact that the stories’ narrators are young children.
2. An Imaginary Life, David Malouf. One of the most beautifully written novels I’ve read in years, this utterly original tale is based on the few known facts about the ancient Roman poet Ovid, exiled to a small island by the emperor, where he befriends a child raised by animals and attempts to take him on as his own.
1. Tree of Smoke, Denis Johnson. Here is a novel I am not even sure I fully understood, yet cannot forget – a massive, fascinating, heartbreaking epic set primarily in Vietnam between 1963 and 1983; a story that attempts to contain and illuminate the great tragedy of that war within the context of an unsettling portrayal of United States intelligence operatives; a brave, unbearably sad discourse on American power and the consequences of its flagrant abuse; and a moving, passionate commentary on modern man’s search for meaning and truth.
2007 List:
10. The Unknown Terrorist, Richard Flanagan.
9. Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters, Meg Meeker, M.D.
8. Hopscotch, Julio Cortazar.
7. The Bridge on the Drina, Ivo Andric.
6. White Teeth, Zadie Smith.
5. Freddy’s Book, John Gardner.
4. Forty Stories, Anton Chekhov.
3. Like You’d Understand, Anyway, Jim Shepard.
2. What is the Point of Being a Christian?, Timothy Radcliffe, O.P.
1. Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert.
Note: I'd like to give a shout out to my big sister, Maria Therese Hey, who gave me not one but TWO books featured on this list as gifts. Does she know her brother or what?? These books, should anyone care, are marked with an asterisk*.
10. Night Shift, Stephen King. This collection of early Stephen King stories contains some real howlers, but it is still a rollicking entertainment and a bravura creative display that demonstrates the power of a fearless imagination.
9. Chekhov: A Spirit Set Free, V.S. Pritchett. An elegant, efficient biography of the master of the modern short story by the great Pritchett, himself a towering figure in 20th century English letters, who possessed the skills and experience to do this great subject justice.
8. The Keep, Jennifer Egan. A fresh voice for me, Egan’s absorbing and intelligently structured novel is part homage to the great Gothic tradition, part compelling commentary on the alienation of modern man by technology, and part post-modernist exhibition of stories-within-stories – an elaborate creation, skillfully executed.
7. Exiles, Ron Hansen. The spiritual struggles of the under-lauded but influential poet Gerard Manley Hopkins and the harrowing sea tragedy that inspired his masterpiece are here dramatized in a graceful, moving novel that only Ron Hansen could have written.
6. Jesus of Nazareth, Pope Benedict XVI.* This mature, illuminating study by the current Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church is filled with the insights and wisdom of a serious religious thinker’s lifelong pursuit of the meaning of the Incarnation, without a trace of condescension or scholarly bluster.
5. On Beauty, Zadie Smith.* The only novelist to make my list two years running, Smith’s fascinating and funny third novel, widely praised by critics, dares to re-imagine Forster’s Howard’s End through two modern families and their inter-connecting stories in a New England college community.
4. Man in the Dark, Paul Auster. With trademark precision and grace, this dark, stirring fable concerning a damaged old man and the youthful assassin he conjures up in his troubled imagination is a striking performance even by Paul Auster’s lofty standards, and is one of the best novels in his long and satisfying career.
3. Say You’re One of Them, Uwem Akpan, S.J. Not for the faint of heart, this collection of stories about modern Africa by Akpan, a Nigerian and a Jesuit priest, is filled with startling violence and tragedy, almost unbearably depicted with efficient prose and vivid dialogue – and made all the more harrowing by the fact that the stories’ narrators are young children.
2. An Imaginary Life, David Malouf. One of the most beautifully written novels I’ve read in years, this utterly original tale is based on the few known facts about the ancient Roman poet Ovid, exiled to a small island by the emperor, where he befriends a child raised by animals and attempts to take him on as his own.
1. Tree of Smoke, Denis Johnson. Here is a novel I am not even sure I fully understood, yet cannot forget – a massive, fascinating, heartbreaking epic set primarily in Vietnam between 1963 and 1983; a story that attempts to contain and illuminate the great tragedy of that war within the context of an unsettling portrayal of United States intelligence operatives; a brave, unbearably sad discourse on American power and the consequences of its flagrant abuse; and a moving, passionate commentary on modern man’s search for meaning and truth.
2007 List:
10. The Unknown Terrorist, Richard Flanagan.
9. Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters, Meg Meeker, M.D.
8. Hopscotch, Julio Cortazar.
7. The Bridge on the Drina, Ivo Andric.
6. White Teeth, Zadie Smith.
5. Freddy’s Book, John Gardner.
4. Forty Stories, Anton Chekhov.
3. Like You’d Understand, Anyway, Jim Shepard.
2. What is the Point of Being a Christian?, Timothy Radcliffe, O.P.
1. Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert.
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