I recently discovered this poet for the first time, and though I barely know his work, some of his poems have really struck me... I chose this one because it has a little "local flavor" - for me, anyway. The slave-turned-politician/orator/ambassador Frederick Douglass is one of the most inspiring and impressive stories of personal determination and triumph in this country's history. Starting with literally nothing (not even ownership of himself!), he taught himself to read from ads, scraps of paper, and anything he could find... and eventually became one of the country's most accomplished and eloquent voices for personal freedom and responsibility. His autobiography (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself) is an amazing book and well worth seeking out some time for a true-life story of succeeding against the odds (were there ever any greater odds against a man?).
Douglass was born into bondage on a farm that is only about 5 miles away from where I am sitting now - right here on Maryland's Eastern Shore. So for us around here his story is part of the local lore. I have yet to actually visit the site of his birthplace (which is embarrassing to admit!), but I plan to one day... and take my sons there as well.
Anyway, I never identified the poet I was talking about... no, it's not Frederick Douglass, but the African-American poet Robert E. Hayden. Hayden was the first black poet laureate of the United States and a pioneer poet of the African-American experience in this country. This poem is of course not just a worthy tribute to aforementioned Mr. Douglass, but also a moving rallying cry to all Americans who are still struggling to find personal freedom and make sure their voices are heard and their inherent dignity as persons is recognized. In this election season, sadly, it seems as relevant as when it was first written in the 1930's...
*******
Frederick Douglass
When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful
and terrible thing, needful to man as air,
usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,
when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,
reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more
than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:
this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro
beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world
where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,
this man, superb in love and logic, this man
shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,
not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,
but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives
fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Journal of a ‘Novel’-Entry 44
My Point Is….
You have to wonder if writers have it all together upstairs. Especially unestablished writers. I get up, I drink some coffee and read a book for a while, which I do just to get my brain into some kind of motion and because I enjoy it. But in so doing, I usually knock off an hour of time. Then I go to my basement, pull out the spiral notebook in which I am writing an utterly uknown novel that it’s hard to imagine anyone who is not related to me would care about in any way. I scribble in the notebook for about 45 minutes at the most, with nobody awake, no noise, and nothing to show for it except a lot of broken pencil leads and a few paragraphs. (This is if I am lucky and a small child doesn’t wake up way too early, which is what happened today.) Then I go upstairs to start my day, for I don’t have any more time to devote to the effort. I have one job to go to, and one some days another one after that, and by the time I get home it’s around 8 p.m. and I put my children to bed and get a little time to spend with my pregnant wife before she goes to bed out of her own utter exhaustion.
The rest of the day, while I am trying to do what I’m accountable for, I wonder about what the point is. Is there really any reason to attempt to write a novel today, when the odds against it being published are so amazingly long, the odds of anyone buying or reading it our day and age are even longer, and the tangible benefits to me and my family are at best miniscule and at worst non-existent? Yet, there I go the next day, or the day after that, and try it again. Not too long ago I spent 45 minutes in my basement and came up with three sentences. On a great day I might get a page and a half of longhand. I am working on the 5th chapter of a novel that I envision to be about 12-15 chapters. The first 4¼ took me two years, from March 2006 to March 2008, to produce in draft form. I go about the rest of my life, don’t talk about it much with anyone except with my brother, think about it an alarmingly huge amount of the time when people don’t realize I’m thinking about it, and go down there the next day to try it again. Soon, in my home, we will have a third child, a newborn, and after that the time to devote to this work will be even more sparse, the bills will be even more pressing, the importance of getting my work done even greater, and all the rest of it.
But the weird thing is, I know I will keep trying, in spite of the way it all feels and looks. It’s hard to imagine taking years out of your life to do something only to have it go nowhere, but that’s what a lot of writers do. You chalk it up to experience and start all over again. I’m not saying that’s what will happen here, because I don’t know what will happen. But the odds are very favorable that this will stay on one of my shelves somewhere. You’d think this would persuade me to give it up, but it won’t, and that’s the part even I don’t understand. I’ll keep at it, because there’s a compulsion in me to try to write stories, and this story in particular, and there’s no telling what it rose up out of or what it means. It just is. It’s there in me because God put it in me and the only way to approach doing what I am trying to do, in the end, is just to believe that God wants me to try. And I will try, I mean, I’ve proven that – I’ve been trying to write for almost 20 years. Something will send me back down there to try again in spite of all that’s working against it. I am not sure what that ‘something’ is, and I can’t think of many reasons to be glad I have the compulsion – but I am still glad I have it. Perhaps the only reason is that God did give it to me, and that makes it a gift, and gifts are something to be thankful for.
Chapter Full of Challenges
The tentative title I have going for Chapter V of the novel is A Domestic Tragedy, Obeisance to Mammon. As part of the title implies, I have at least one ‘big’ event to work into the chapter, but I haven’t really gotten there yet. My chapter titles tend to change in the course of writing them, too, so this one could definitely change. The second phrase, which would be familiar only to consistent readers of this blog, which means my brother only, has been associated with this project for a while now. (See my blog entry, August 31, 2006, in the archives if you don’t believe me.) It’s lifted from the mouth of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who in turn lifted it from the Gospel. I doubt this one will change, because that phrase is tied to an actual event from history that I want to use to round out this chapter and Part I of the novel. As for the ‘domestic tragedy’ part, readers will just have to wait to find out what that means (probably for a very long time, too).
Talk about the bull in the china shop, right now I am just barreling my way into this chapter and not paying all that much attention to what I’m upsetting. I’m still trying to find my way back into the voice and the rhythm of the story, and the only way I know of to do that is just to hack away at it, as I said at the end of my last entry. But I am also doing something I haven’t ever attempted to do, which is bring a story ahead through almost four years in the space of one chapter, which means I have to give a reader enough information to know what has happened in between. Or at least the relevant parts. So right now I am trying to explain how Walter and Greta went from having no children and no home of their own at the end of Chapter IV (although the creation of an offspring is sort of imminent in that chapter’s closing moments) in the fall of 1927 to having a house and a 9-month-old son when the next chapter opens. And believe me, I’m winging it. I’m making it up as a I go along for the most part, but I think that might be all right, depends on what I come up with to explain the leap.
What’s important is to move the story along, because we have to get into the 30s and the Great Depression. That is the historical core of the book; the formative period of Walter Brogan’s adult journey and of his son Luke Brogan’s entire life. It also was the formative core of my own father’s entire life and as such was the ultimate impetus for this entire enterprise. So it is imperative for me to get into it and start digging away at what is there. It’s essential for my novel and, in a much larger way, essential for me. This gets back to what I wrote about in the first part of this journal, but for now the literary challenges abound and I have to worry most about them. At some later point I can return and attempt to analyze what I thought I was doing when I set out to do it!
My job at present is to get the reader from Fall 1927 to March 1932. That means taking the story through 1928 and explaining how the Brogans found a house, how Walter Brogan paid for it, and how Greta’s pregnancy and the birth of Luke Brogan went. That also means cruising through 1929, which includes the opening of P.G. Heinricks’ family restaurant, The Golden Wheel, and no less than the Stock Market crash of 1929. After that, I need to sweep you along into the 1930s in even less space, for I don’t see too much happening in the first two years. It took some time for the effects of the crash and the Great Depression to infiltrate down into small town America. But by 1931 into 1932, things were getting hard everywhere. People were out of work and farmers were killing their cattle. It all led to the moment when an over-achieving former Governor of New York took the national stage in Chicago and informed the nation that it was time for a ‘new deal’, that we should all ‘admit’ that for some time we as a people had been paying ‘obeisance to Mammon’, and that things in America had to change……….
You have to wonder if writers have it all together upstairs. Especially unestablished writers. I get up, I drink some coffee and read a book for a while, which I do just to get my brain into some kind of motion and because I enjoy it. But in so doing, I usually knock off an hour of time. Then I go to my basement, pull out the spiral notebook in which I am writing an utterly uknown novel that it’s hard to imagine anyone who is not related to me would care about in any way. I scribble in the notebook for about 45 minutes at the most, with nobody awake, no noise, and nothing to show for it except a lot of broken pencil leads and a few paragraphs. (This is if I am lucky and a small child doesn’t wake up way too early, which is what happened today.) Then I go upstairs to start my day, for I don’t have any more time to devote to the effort. I have one job to go to, and one some days another one after that, and by the time I get home it’s around 8 p.m. and I put my children to bed and get a little time to spend with my pregnant wife before she goes to bed out of her own utter exhaustion.
The rest of the day, while I am trying to do what I’m accountable for, I wonder about what the point is. Is there really any reason to attempt to write a novel today, when the odds against it being published are so amazingly long, the odds of anyone buying or reading it our day and age are even longer, and the tangible benefits to me and my family are at best miniscule and at worst non-existent? Yet, there I go the next day, or the day after that, and try it again. Not too long ago I spent 45 minutes in my basement and came up with three sentences. On a great day I might get a page and a half of longhand. I am working on the 5th chapter of a novel that I envision to be about 12-15 chapters. The first 4¼ took me two years, from March 2006 to March 2008, to produce in draft form. I go about the rest of my life, don’t talk about it much with anyone except with my brother, think about it an alarmingly huge amount of the time when people don’t realize I’m thinking about it, and go down there the next day to try it again. Soon, in my home, we will have a third child, a newborn, and after that the time to devote to this work will be even more sparse, the bills will be even more pressing, the importance of getting my work done even greater, and all the rest of it.
But the weird thing is, I know I will keep trying, in spite of the way it all feels and looks. It’s hard to imagine taking years out of your life to do something only to have it go nowhere, but that’s what a lot of writers do. You chalk it up to experience and start all over again. I’m not saying that’s what will happen here, because I don’t know what will happen. But the odds are very favorable that this will stay on one of my shelves somewhere. You’d think this would persuade me to give it up, but it won’t, and that’s the part even I don’t understand. I’ll keep at it, because there’s a compulsion in me to try to write stories, and this story in particular, and there’s no telling what it rose up out of or what it means. It just is. It’s there in me because God put it in me and the only way to approach doing what I am trying to do, in the end, is just to believe that God wants me to try. And I will try, I mean, I’ve proven that – I’ve been trying to write for almost 20 years. Something will send me back down there to try again in spite of all that’s working against it. I am not sure what that ‘something’ is, and I can’t think of many reasons to be glad I have the compulsion – but I am still glad I have it. Perhaps the only reason is that God did give it to me, and that makes it a gift, and gifts are something to be thankful for.
Chapter Full of Challenges
The tentative title I have going for Chapter V of the novel is A Domestic Tragedy, Obeisance to Mammon. As part of the title implies, I have at least one ‘big’ event to work into the chapter, but I haven’t really gotten there yet. My chapter titles tend to change in the course of writing them, too, so this one could definitely change. The second phrase, which would be familiar only to consistent readers of this blog, which means my brother only, has been associated with this project for a while now. (See my blog entry, August 31, 2006, in the archives if you don’t believe me.) It’s lifted from the mouth of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who in turn lifted it from the Gospel. I doubt this one will change, because that phrase is tied to an actual event from history that I want to use to round out this chapter and Part I of the novel. As for the ‘domestic tragedy’ part, readers will just have to wait to find out what that means (probably for a very long time, too).
Talk about the bull in the china shop, right now I am just barreling my way into this chapter and not paying all that much attention to what I’m upsetting. I’m still trying to find my way back into the voice and the rhythm of the story, and the only way I know of to do that is just to hack away at it, as I said at the end of my last entry. But I am also doing something I haven’t ever attempted to do, which is bring a story ahead through almost four years in the space of one chapter, which means I have to give a reader enough information to know what has happened in between. Or at least the relevant parts. So right now I am trying to explain how Walter and Greta went from having no children and no home of their own at the end of Chapter IV (although the creation of an offspring is sort of imminent in that chapter’s closing moments) in the fall of 1927 to having a house and a 9-month-old son when the next chapter opens. And believe me, I’m winging it. I’m making it up as a I go along for the most part, but I think that might be all right, depends on what I come up with to explain the leap.
What’s important is to move the story along, because we have to get into the 30s and the Great Depression. That is the historical core of the book; the formative period of Walter Brogan’s adult journey and of his son Luke Brogan’s entire life. It also was the formative core of my own father’s entire life and as such was the ultimate impetus for this entire enterprise. So it is imperative for me to get into it and start digging away at what is there. It’s essential for my novel and, in a much larger way, essential for me. This gets back to what I wrote about in the first part of this journal, but for now the literary challenges abound and I have to worry most about them. At some later point I can return and attempt to analyze what I thought I was doing when I set out to do it!
My job at present is to get the reader from Fall 1927 to March 1932. That means taking the story through 1928 and explaining how the Brogans found a house, how Walter Brogan paid for it, and how Greta’s pregnancy and the birth of Luke Brogan went. That also means cruising through 1929, which includes the opening of P.G. Heinricks’ family restaurant, The Golden Wheel, and no less than the Stock Market crash of 1929. After that, I need to sweep you along into the 1930s in even less space, for I don’t see too much happening in the first two years. It took some time for the effects of the crash and the Great Depression to infiltrate down into small town America. But by 1931 into 1932, things were getting hard everywhere. People were out of work and farmers were killing their cattle. It all led to the moment when an over-achieving former Governor of New York took the national stage in Chicago and informed the nation that it was time for a ‘new deal’, that we should all ‘admit’ that for some time we as a people had been paying ‘obeisance to Mammon’, and that things in America had to change……….
Friday, April 04, 2008
Journal of a 'Novel'-Entry 43
Irons in the Fire
Up until now I have still been having a lot of trouble getting back into the writing of my Indiana novel. It is difficult, once you have been away from a writing project for a while, to get back into the flow of it. There’s no switch to flip that will get you back into that elusive rythmn, so important for writing a long work of fiction. For weeks now I have been wondering if I lost the touch on the project and if I was going to have to consign it to the large pile of failed novels from my past life – too numerous and unimportant to elaborate on. In my last entry I even claimed – prematurely, as it turned out – to be back at work on it, but the fact is that I wrote one scene and again put it aside in favor of another (short-term) project.
At least I can say I haven’t been idle. I don’t like to languish as a writer, and I try hard not to. On the contrary - I now have four pieces out in the world looking for a home in print. Most of which I have mentioned before, but I will group them together now and also indicate, just for kicks, where I have sent the pieces, hoping to find a generous editor who will accept them for publication. ‘Sling It’, my essay that portrays the recently retired football legend Brett Favre as a ‘literary inspiration’, is under consideration in Sport Literate magazine’s ‘Football Essay Contest’ for 2008. ‘Start Something’, a short story I wrote in 2005 concerning a single young man with a heart for poetry who has an unexpected and violent encouter on an overnight business trip, has been submitted to Relief: A Quarterly Christian Expression. ‘Auto-Response’, another short story that is under consideration at Narrative magazine (and was unfortunately rejected earlier by Glimmer Train), is about a family man in the earliest stages of grief over his father’s death (also on a business trip, I have only just noticed!) who has a curious accident in a snowstorm. And finally I have just submitted my essay (see recent post) ‘Hope on the Wing: Encounters with The Innocence Mission’ to Image magazine.
This may be a personal record for the most pieces I have had ‘out there’ at one time, but I know a few times before I have had three pieces out, and most of the time I end up going 0 for 3. Not saying 0 for 4 will happen here. But if it does, the good news is I am used to it. If it doesn’t, well, I would consider one placement out of 4 a successful effort, and anything above that would be extra. I believe in all of the pieces. I may as well go on the record and say I expect at least one of them to get accepted. But we’ll find out in a few months if that expectation was justified.
Unfinished Business
The only reason I started on some of the pieces I mentioned above in the first place is because I was having trouble getting back into the novel to work on Chapter V. But the hiatus got out of hand. In particular the essay on The Innocence Mission grabbed me full throttle and wouldn’t let go until it was written, so it made more sense to devote the necessary time and effort to getting that done than to avoid it any longer. As soon as that was done, however, I felt restless and frustrated – my novel was, and remains, unfinished business.
But I didn’t have any confidence I could easily enter that world again. If nothing else the experience of trying to get a novel off the ground gives me plenty of respect for those who write even one of them, let alone 10, 15, 20…I honestly don’t know how these writers find the stamina or the time to write their books. The problem for me has been that each chapter has taken about 3-6 months just to draft, and after that you have to revise and rewrite, revise and rewrite….the revision process never ends. Even if I had financial independence and nothing but time it would be damned near impossible. With two jobs and almost three kids, forget it!! And yet, the work calls to me as it always has. There I was with a prologue and four lengthy chapters in draft and about two years of writing invested in this novel, and my confidence was wobbling. Could I honestly throw in the towel again? It seemed possible that I had crossed a line you couldn’t come back from. As my brother put it in an email, by way of ‘encouragement’, ‘I don’t care if I have to pick up the pen myself and finish it, it’s going to get done.’
Well, we certainly can’t have that, so it’s back to the grind. (Just kidding, Duke.) Chapter V is another mountain looming before me. It may be the largest one yet. But three days ago, I went to the foot of the mountain and simply started up again. It’s funny, because it was a day – and I do have days like this – where I simply didn’t want to work on it. I didn’t feel like it, I was tempted to just read or putz around on the internet or whatever. I had to force myself to go down there and pull it out. Which is exactly what I did. Sometimes you just have to say to yourself, ‘If you do not take this out and get started today, it will never get done.’
The amazing thing is that in spite of the fact that I had gone almost 6 months without feeling at all like I knew where it was going or how to continue, as soon as I sat down to it again a few days ago, the process kicked back in and things started to happen. I worked steadily on it that day and have again for the last two mornings. A workable plan of attack for Chapter V almost immediately came together in my brain, and I jotted it down in a margin of the manuscript. From that point on, it became a matter of following the plan and making adjustments along the way. Which is exactly how I have written the other chapters. What’s the point? Only this: the plan had no possibility of coming together until I started to work on it. The process of writing creates its own momentum, that’s why many writers refer to it as ‘organic’. It propels itself, you just have to kick it off and learn how to let it flow.
Now, I have a lot in the plan for Chapter V and it is going to require more months of work – not weeks. It will not be easy. Add to that a new baby here in about 8 weeks and it will become maybe twice as hard. I don’t feel that there is any guarantee that the work will get done to my satisfaction any time soon. But I know somehow that it can happen. And I have learned the lesson once again that persistence is the most crucial quality for a fiction writer. You have to sit down and bang it out. It is, literally, the only possible way.
Up until now I have still been having a lot of trouble getting back into the writing of my Indiana novel. It is difficult, once you have been away from a writing project for a while, to get back into the flow of it. There’s no switch to flip that will get you back into that elusive rythmn, so important for writing a long work of fiction. For weeks now I have been wondering if I lost the touch on the project and if I was going to have to consign it to the large pile of failed novels from my past life – too numerous and unimportant to elaborate on. In my last entry I even claimed – prematurely, as it turned out – to be back at work on it, but the fact is that I wrote one scene and again put it aside in favor of another (short-term) project.
At least I can say I haven’t been idle. I don’t like to languish as a writer, and I try hard not to. On the contrary - I now have four pieces out in the world looking for a home in print. Most of which I have mentioned before, but I will group them together now and also indicate, just for kicks, where I have sent the pieces, hoping to find a generous editor who will accept them for publication. ‘Sling It’, my essay that portrays the recently retired football legend Brett Favre as a ‘literary inspiration’, is under consideration in Sport Literate magazine’s ‘Football Essay Contest’ for 2008. ‘Start Something’, a short story I wrote in 2005 concerning a single young man with a heart for poetry who has an unexpected and violent encouter on an overnight business trip, has been submitted to Relief: A Quarterly Christian Expression. ‘Auto-Response’, another short story that is under consideration at Narrative magazine (and was unfortunately rejected earlier by Glimmer Train), is about a family man in the earliest stages of grief over his father’s death (also on a business trip, I have only just noticed!) who has a curious accident in a snowstorm. And finally I have just submitted my essay (see recent post) ‘Hope on the Wing: Encounters with The Innocence Mission’ to Image magazine.
This may be a personal record for the most pieces I have had ‘out there’ at one time, but I know a few times before I have had three pieces out, and most of the time I end up going 0 for 3. Not saying 0 for 4 will happen here. But if it does, the good news is I am used to it. If it doesn’t, well, I would consider one placement out of 4 a successful effort, and anything above that would be extra. I believe in all of the pieces. I may as well go on the record and say I expect at least one of them to get accepted. But we’ll find out in a few months if that expectation was justified.
Unfinished Business
The only reason I started on some of the pieces I mentioned above in the first place is because I was having trouble getting back into the novel to work on Chapter V. But the hiatus got out of hand. In particular the essay on The Innocence Mission grabbed me full throttle and wouldn’t let go until it was written, so it made more sense to devote the necessary time and effort to getting that done than to avoid it any longer. As soon as that was done, however, I felt restless and frustrated – my novel was, and remains, unfinished business.
But I didn’t have any confidence I could easily enter that world again. If nothing else the experience of trying to get a novel off the ground gives me plenty of respect for those who write even one of them, let alone 10, 15, 20…I honestly don’t know how these writers find the stamina or the time to write their books. The problem for me has been that each chapter has taken about 3-6 months just to draft, and after that you have to revise and rewrite, revise and rewrite….the revision process never ends. Even if I had financial independence and nothing but time it would be damned near impossible. With two jobs and almost three kids, forget it!! And yet, the work calls to me as it always has. There I was with a prologue and four lengthy chapters in draft and about two years of writing invested in this novel, and my confidence was wobbling. Could I honestly throw in the towel again? It seemed possible that I had crossed a line you couldn’t come back from. As my brother put it in an email, by way of ‘encouragement’, ‘I don’t care if I have to pick up the pen myself and finish it, it’s going to get done.’
Well, we certainly can’t have that, so it’s back to the grind. (Just kidding, Duke.) Chapter V is another mountain looming before me. It may be the largest one yet. But three days ago, I went to the foot of the mountain and simply started up again. It’s funny, because it was a day – and I do have days like this – where I simply didn’t want to work on it. I didn’t feel like it, I was tempted to just read or putz around on the internet or whatever. I had to force myself to go down there and pull it out. Which is exactly what I did. Sometimes you just have to say to yourself, ‘If you do not take this out and get started today, it will never get done.’
The amazing thing is that in spite of the fact that I had gone almost 6 months without feeling at all like I knew where it was going or how to continue, as soon as I sat down to it again a few days ago, the process kicked back in and things started to happen. I worked steadily on it that day and have again for the last two mornings. A workable plan of attack for Chapter V almost immediately came together in my brain, and I jotted it down in a margin of the manuscript. From that point on, it became a matter of following the plan and making adjustments along the way. Which is exactly how I have written the other chapters. What’s the point? Only this: the plan had no possibility of coming together until I started to work on it. The process of writing creates its own momentum, that’s why many writers refer to it as ‘organic’. It propels itself, you just have to kick it off and learn how to let it flow.
Now, I have a lot in the plan for Chapter V and it is going to require more months of work – not weeks. It will not be easy. Add to that a new baby here in about 8 weeks and it will become maybe twice as hard. I don’t feel that there is any guarantee that the work will get done to my satisfaction any time soon. But I know somehow that it can happen. And I have learned the lesson once again that persistence is the most crucial quality for a fiction writer. You have to sit down and bang it out. It is, literally, the only possible way.
Wednesday, April 02, 2008
One Man's Epic Struggle Against the World
An appreciation of John Kennedy Toole's remarkable comic novel, A Confederacy of Dunces
Sometimes you'll read a novel and you'll think to yourself, "OK, this was a great read - a formidable contribution to the _______ genre." And then there are other occasions, much rarer of course, in which you'll finish a novel and want to climb up onto the highest platform you can find and proclaim, "I have never read a story like this before... and trust me, you haven't either! Track down a copy of this book and read it now!" I am happy to report that John Kennedy Toole's posthumous comic masterpiece, A Confederacy of Dunces, is a brilliant example of the latter category. Consider this post my yelp of praise from the rooftops.
Of course, I am way late to this Crescent City fete. This is a novel that has been repeatedly praised from the moment of its publication in 1980 - unfortunately, years after Mr. Toole committed suicide at the ridiculously early age of 32. But since that time the book has never gone out of print, and the party rages on in celebration of what is undeniably an amazing artistic achievement - a novel that is truly comic in both the classical and modern senses of the word: hilarious, ribald, madcap, rambling, poignant, profound, vulgar (again, in both senses: crass AND appealing to the masses), wise and ending on a note of joy and hope. It is a terrible shame that the ending of the author's own real life echoes with tones from the opposite end of the scale.
But if one of the criteria by which we might evaluate the impact of a life is the kind of legacy it has left for those who come after it, then at least on this level the achievement of John Kennedy Toole can be justly and gratefully celebrated. Walker Percy said it best in his hilariously self-deprecating, appreciative forward:
"It is a great pity that John Kennedy Toole is not alive and well and writing. But he is not, and there is nothing we can do about it but make sure that this gargantuan tumultuous human tragicomedy is at least made available to a world of readers."
Fortunately for us, Percy was true to his word and helped to make that happen, after being given the original manuscript by Toole's mother and cajoled into reading it. The rest, as they say, is literary history.
To attempt to summarize such a convoluted and rambling a tale as A Confederacy of Dunces would go well beyond the scope of a blog post. Instead what I want to try to do is whet appetites and provide intriguing clues as to why this is so immensely pleasurable and profound a book. That's why I have called this not a review, but an appreciation.
The tale's hero, Ignatius J. Reilly, resembles an American Don Quixote for the modern age. That description alone may capture the attention of readers who, like myself, appreciate and admire the long literary tradition of the loveable fool, the protagonist whose entire existence seems to be contra mundi, swimming against the strong currents generated by the society he (or she) lives in. Reilly certainly has his share of windmills to assault (everything from capitalism to post-Vatican II Catholicism to the sexual revolution), and he even has a Dulcinea of sorts in his feisty, "liberated" ex-girlfriend, Myrna Minkoff. Throughout the novel Reilly is engaged in a "war of letters" with Minkoff, each railing against the worldview of the other and recommending steps of action for the other to get their lives in order (Toole breaks into the narrative repeatedly with passages from these letters, as well as other passages from Reilly's copious journal entries). Myrna thinks that Ignatius needs to break the apron strings attaching him to his mother and become sexually active; Ignatius is shrewd enough to know that sex is certainly not the answer to all of his problems, but is slow in realizing how much his dependence on his mother is hurting him. Ironically, it is Minkoff who in the end provides for him the escape from her that he so desperately needs.
There are many reasons why this is a truly great novel. For one, the prose is richly evocative of the city of New Orleans - clearly written by a native, in celebration of one of America's most unique and treasured landmarks. (Of course the book to me came with an extra layer of poignancy since I am reading it post-Katrina: the clammy squalor and poverty so vividly described in many of the book's passages can only have increased since that terrible storm ravaged this proud city.) I have never been there, but there is a palable sense of humidity and grime in Toole's descriptions of the sleazier parts of the French Quarter and of the Reillys' home, especially Ignatius' room where he spends the greater part of his unemployed days lying in bed and/or writing. Yet he also captures the frenetic activity in the bustling streets, the carnival atmosphere, the elegant architecture and the rat-haunted ports in descriptions that make you feel as if you know the place. Most if not all of the characters in the book are a part of the city's working class, and as you follow them from local corner groceries to night clubs to back alleys where winos, hookers and transvestites frolic together, you really get a flavor for this crazy and unique place.
But to me the most appealing aspect of this novel is its main character and his quixotic struggle against modern civilization. Perhaps it is the idealist in me, the unabashed romantic, but I (like so many others) am always drawn to this type of protagonist - the "holy fool" engaged in a one-man (or woman, as the case may be) war against the accepted norms, the vagaries and absurdities of a culture that has rejected traditional wisdom and values. To me the ultimate poster child for this sort of free-spirited, "foolish" innocence that takes pleasure in challenging current conventions is the great English writer and thinker G. K. Chesterton, and I could not help but think of him as I followed Reilly around... he even seems to resemble Chesterton, with his great bulk, heavy moustache and penchant for dramatic costumes and chivalric statements and deeds. I don't think it's an accident here that GKC is even quoted in the book, or that Reilly's favorite book and "bible" for living is a medieval text (The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius - a book that highly influenced C. S. Lewis as well, it's worth noting). Ignatius is much more cynical and confused than Chesterton seems to have been (one of the wisest and most well-grounded writers I know of, largely due to his celebrated defense of and adherence to, Catholicism), but he retains both a physical and spiritual resemblance to the man, and is something of a "colossal genius" in his own right.
As with any true comedy in the classic sense, Ignatius Reilly's story is not all fun and games and belly laughs. There are moments of great poignancy and pain in this novel, especially towards the end after many of his repeated attempts at "revolution" have failed, most of his friends and family members have rejected him, he has lost several jobs and his own mother is trying to get him institutionalized. At one point a former colleague visits him at his home and experiences the physical squalor and emotional abuse (his mother is an alcoholic, I meant to add) he lives with on a daily basis, and takes pity on him. In this moment the reader too is distracted enough from the hilarity of Reilly's rantings and madcap adventures to see the harsh realities of his life, and it is deeply moving... and when a writer can do that, take you on a such a wild, rushing roller coaster ride and yet inspire in you deep feeling for his characters along the way - feelings you hadn't had time to notice you even picked up - then that to me shows he knows what he's doing. A Confederacy of Dunces is a wild, hilarious, but also powerful and profound journey that has you pulling for the philosopher-hot dog vendor-culture warrior buffoon, Ignatius J. Reilly, to the extent that when you wave to his car speeding away on the last page, as he makes one last mad hopeful dash towards freedom and possibility, you find yourself surprised at how hard it is to say goodbye.
Sometimes you'll read a novel and you'll think to yourself, "OK, this was a great read - a formidable contribution to the _______ genre." And then there are other occasions, much rarer of course, in which you'll finish a novel and want to climb up onto the highest platform you can find and proclaim, "I have never read a story like this before... and trust me, you haven't either! Track down a copy of this book and read it now!" I am happy to report that John Kennedy Toole's posthumous comic masterpiece, A Confederacy of Dunces, is a brilliant example of the latter category. Consider this post my yelp of praise from the rooftops.
Of course, I am way late to this Crescent City fete. This is a novel that has been repeatedly praised from the moment of its publication in 1980 - unfortunately, years after Mr. Toole committed suicide at the ridiculously early age of 32. But since that time the book has never gone out of print, and the party rages on in celebration of what is undeniably an amazing artistic achievement - a novel that is truly comic in both the classical and modern senses of the word: hilarious, ribald, madcap, rambling, poignant, profound, vulgar (again, in both senses: crass AND appealing to the masses), wise and ending on a note of joy and hope. It is a terrible shame that the ending of the author's own real life echoes with tones from the opposite end of the scale.
But if one of the criteria by which we might evaluate the impact of a life is the kind of legacy it has left for those who come after it, then at least on this level the achievement of John Kennedy Toole can be justly and gratefully celebrated. Walker Percy said it best in his hilariously self-deprecating, appreciative forward:
"It is a great pity that John Kennedy Toole is not alive and well and writing. But he is not, and there is nothing we can do about it but make sure that this gargantuan tumultuous human tragicomedy is at least made available to a world of readers."
Fortunately for us, Percy was true to his word and helped to make that happen, after being given the original manuscript by Toole's mother and cajoled into reading it. The rest, as they say, is literary history.
To attempt to summarize such a convoluted and rambling a tale as A Confederacy of Dunces would go well beyond the scope of a blog post. Instead what I want to try to do is whet appetites and provide intriguing clues as to why this is so immensely pleasurable and profound a book. That's why I have called this not a review, but an appreciation.
The tale's hero, Ignatius J. Reilly, resembles an American Don Quixote for the modern age. That description alone may capture the attention of readers who, like myself, appreciate and admire the long literary tradition of the loveable fool, the protagonist whose entire existence seems to be contra mundi, swimming against the strong currents generated by the society he (or she) lives in. Reilly certainly has his share of windmills to assault (everything from capitalism to post-Vatican II Catholicism to the sexual revolution), and he even has a Dulcinea of sorts in his feisty, "liberated" ex-girlfriend, Myrna Minkoff. Throughout the novel Reilly is engaged in a "war of letters" with Minkoff, each railing against the worldview of the other and recommending steps of action for the other to get their lives in order (Toole breaks into the narrative repeatedly with passages from these letters, as well as other passages from Reilly's copious journal entries). Myrna thinks that Ignatius needs to break the apron strings attaching him to his mother and become sexually active; Ignatius is shrewd enough to know that sex is certainly not the answer to all of his problems, but is slow in realizing how much his dependence on his mother is hurting him. Ironically, it is Minkoff who in the end provides for him the escape from her that he so desperately needs.
There are many reasons why this is a truly great novel. For one, the prose is richly evocative of the city of New Orleans - clearly written by a native, in celebration of one of America's most unique and treasured landmarks. (Of course the book to me came with an extra layer of poignancy since I am reading it post-Katrina: the clammy squalor and poverty so vividly described in many of the book's passages can only have increased since that terrible storm ravaged this proud city.) I have never been there, but there is a palable sense of humidity and grime in Toole's descriptions of the sleazier parts of the French Quarter and of the Reillys' home, especially Ignatius' room where he spends the greater part of his unemployed days lying in bed and/or writing. Yet he also captures the frenetic activity in the bustling streets, the carnival atmosphere, the elegant architecture and the rat-haunted ports in descriptions that make you feel as if you know the place. Most if not all of the characters in the book are a part of the city's working class, and as you follow them from local corner groceries to night clubs to back alleys where winos, hookers and transvestites frolic together, you really get a flavor for this crazy and unique place.
But to me the most appealing aspect of this novel is its main character and his quixotic struggle against modern civilization. Perhaps it is the idealist in me, the unabashed romantic, but I (like so many others) am always drawn to this type of protagonist - the "holy fool" engaged in a one-man (or woman, as the case may be) war against the accepted norms, the vagaries and absurdities of a culture that has rejected traditional wisdom and values. To me the ultimate poster child for this sort of free-spirited, "foolish" innocence that takes pleasure in challenging current conventions is the great English writer and thinker G. K. Chesterton, and I could not help but think of him as I followed Reilly around... he even seems to resemble Chesterton, with his great bulk, heavy moustache and penchant for dramatic costumes and chivalric statements and deeds. I don't think it's an accident here that GKC is even quoted in the book, or that Reilly's favorite book and "bible" for living is a medieval text (The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius - a book that highly influenced C. S. Lewis as well, it's worth noting). Ignatius is much more cynical and confused than Chesterton seems to have been (one of the wisest and most well-grounded writers I know of, largely due to his celebrated defense of and adherence to, Catholicism), but he retains both a physical and spiritual resemblance to the man, and is something of a "colossal genius" in his own right.
As with any true comedy in the classic sense, Ignatius Reilly's story is not all fun and games and belly laughs. There are moments of great poignancy and pain in this novel, especially towards the end after many of his repeated attempts at "revolution" have failed, most of his friends and family members have rejected him, he has lost several jobs and his own mother is trying to get him institutionalized. At one point a former colleague visits him at his home and experiences the physical squalor and emotional abuse (his mother is an alcoholic, I meant to add) he lives with on a daily basis, and takes pity on him. In this moment the reader too is distracted enough from the hilarity of Reilly's rantings and madcap adventures to see the harsh realities of his life, and it is deeply moving... and when a writer can do that, take you on a such a wild, rushing roller coaster ride and yet inspire in you deep feeling for his characters along the way - feelings you hadn't had time to notice you even picked up - then that to me shows he knows what he's doing. A Confederacy of Dunces is a wild, hilarious, but also powerful and profound journey that has you pulling for the philosopher-hot dog vendor-culture warrior buffoon, Ignatius J. Reilly, to the extent that when you wave to his car speeding away on the last page, as he makes one last mad hopeful dash towards freedom and possibility, you find yourself surprised at how hard it is to say goodbye.
Saturday, March 22, 2008
Innocence, on a Mission
I’ve just finished most of the work on a new essay I am going to try to find a home for in print called ‘Hope on the Wing: Encounters with The Innocence Mission’. An excerpt from the essay appears below, which provides an idea of what I am trying to do - discuss The Innocence Mission’s music via a number of ‘encounters’ I’ve had with it in my life.
I queried some magazines about whether they would publish it, and have some received some level of interest from two journals. We’ll see what happens. I think the essay is among my best work in nonfiction so far, and I’ve certainly had a positive experience writing about this musical trio from Lancaster, PA. I’ve been working on the piece for about 5 weeks or so now. It is almost entirely done, but for one important missing ingredient, and that ingredient is a literary first for me.
I mentioned that the group is from Lancaster. If you know me, you know this is where my mother and father live, only about an hour and change away from my own home. Now, The Innocence Mission’s work has been important to me for many years, as my essay indicates – long before I knew they were local. But it happens that several years ago, the nucleus of the group, husband and wife Don and Karen Peris (guitarist and singer/writer, respectively), began to attend the same church my parents go to. Over time, since my mother and father are very involved in the parish, they got to know the Perises, who also have two young children.
I had mentioned off and on to my mother over the years that I truly admired their music. For those who don’t know them, they are one of the best-named bands in the world; their music is highly counter-cultural and, I think, very important. Anyway, I never had the idea of actually writing about them until the encounter described in the excerpt below. After this occurred, I spoke to my mom, who sent an email to Karen Peris, asking her if I could talk to them.
Since then I have been exchanging emails with Peris, who is in the process of answering my questions. I hope to use some of her words in the final essay. It is a big thrill for me, since it is the first time I have ever been able to actually engage in direct correspondence with an artist I wanted to write about. I will also mention here that Karen Peris has been extremely friendly and generous in this exchange. ‘I am really touched by what you say and by your interest in writing about the songs,’ she wrote to me. This has only made the experience even more gratifying.
My thanks go to Karen and Don Peris for their inspiring music and for their kindness and grace. My own ‘mission’ now is to write the best piece I possibly can and get it out there for readers to see.
And now, on to the excerpt.
It was a crisp but cold Saturday morning, following a difficult overnight in my household. By this time, I had become the father of two little girls, and my wife was again pregnant with our first son. Ours is a loving family, but on this occasion my wife and I were both under a great deal of stress for a variety of reasons. There had been frank discussion, a quantity of tears, and some spilling over of tension into dealings with our daughters. That morning, I headed off to the second of my two jobs hanging on the precipice of despair, even while I understood that it was imperative for me not to languish there, or fall over.
When I started the car, the CD player, which I had left on, kicked back in. In my distracted state, it took me a few minutes to realize what was playing. It was We Walked In Song, The Innocence Mission’s most recent release – specifically the opening track, “The Brotherhood of Man”. My mother, who had met Karen and Don Peris though St. Mary’s Parish, had purchased some copies of the CD from them, and gave two of them to my twin brother and I as Father’s Day presents months before. The CD turned out to be a most fortuitous gift; it would seem that some mothers never lose their ability to supply their own with what is needed.
While I struggled with the unhappy sensation of being overwhelmed by the trials of adult life, the first two verses of the song, which describe rather placid encounters between Karen Peris and genial strangers, filtered slowly into my brain. Without my realizing it, the simple beauty of Peris’ observations, married to her husband’s silken electric guitar performance, began to work on me.
Then came a breakthrough moment, perhaps arriving in an interval between black thoughts. I heard Peris sing the following words near the song’s conclusion, as though I had never heard them before:
I never can say what I mean
but you will understand,
coming through clouds on the way.
It finally occurred to me what was happening here, that in turning this song into a kind of dialogue with Jesus, Peris had evoked an image of what the early Greek Christians called the Parousia, the second coming. But more importantly, she had, in the space of just seventeen words, thrown all the challenges of this world and this life into relief. She had reminded me of just Who God is, as opposed to who I am with all of my problems.
Peris, who has elsewhere written about her concerns with being properly understood, couldn’t be clearer here. The confidence of these lines reminded me that the same God who has numbered the hairs on our head (Luke 12:7) holds us forever in His hands and knows our hearts. It didn’t bring me completely out of my mood, and it certainly did nothing to move me towards overcoming the stark realities I was facing. But on that cold day, this experience of the power of song offered me comfort, and helped to lift, at least to some degree, the dark veil that was covering my head.
I queried some magazines about whether they would publish it, and have some received some level of interest from two journals. We’ll see what happens. I think the essay is among my best work in nonfiction so far, and I’ve certainly had a positive experience writing about this musical trio from Lancaster, PA. I’ve been working on the piece for about 5 weeks or so now. It is almost entirely done, but for one important missing ingredient, and that ingredient is a literary first for me.
I mentioned that the group is from Lancaster. If you know me, you know this is where my mother and father live, only about an hour and change away from my own home. Now, The Innocence Mission’s work has been important to me for many years, as my essay indicates – long before I knew they were local. But it happens that several years ago, the nucleus of the group, husband and wife Don and Karen Peris (guitarist and singer/writer, respectively), began to attend the same church my parents go to. Over time, since my mother and father are very involved in the parish, they got to know the Perises, who also have two young children.
I had mentioned off and on to my mother over the years that I truly admired their music. For those who don’t know them, they are one of the best-named bands in the world; their music is highly counter-cultural and, I think, very important. Anyway, I never had the idea of actually writing about them until the encounter described in the excerpt below. After this occurred, I spoke to my mom, who sent an email to Karen Peris, asking her if I could talk to them.
Since then I have been exchanging emails with Peris, who is in the process of answering my questions. I hope to use some of her words in the final essay. It is a big thrill for me, since it is the first time I have ever been able to actually engage in direct correspondence with an artist I wanted to write about. I will also mention here that Karen Peris has been extremely friendly and generous in this exchange. ‘I am really touched by what you say and by your interest in writing about the songs,’ she wrote to me. This has only made the experience even more gratifying.
My thanks go to Karen and Don Peris for their inspiring music and for their kindness and grace. My own ‘mission’ now is to write the best piece I possibly can and get it out there for readers to see.
And now, on to the excerpt.
It was a crisp but cold Saturday morning, following a difficult overnight in my household. By this time, I had become the father of two little girls, and my wife was again pregnant with our first son. Ours is a loving family, but on this occasion my wife and I were both under a great deal of stress for a variety of reasons. There had been frank discussion, a quantity of tears, and some spilling over of tension into dealings with our daughters. That morning, I headed off to the second of my two jobs hanging on the precipice of despair, even while I understood that it was imperative for me not to languish there, or fall over.
When I started the car, the CD player, which I had left on, kicked back in. In my distracted state, it took me a few minutes to realize what was playing. It was We Walked In Song, The Innocence Mission’s most recent release – specifically the opening track, “The Brotherhood of Man”. My mother, who had met Karen and Don Peris though St. Mary’s Parish, had purchased some copies of the CD from them, and gave two of them to my twin brother and I as Father’s Day presents months before. The CD turned out to be a most fortuitous gift; it would seem that some mothers never lose their ability to supply their own with what is needed.
While I struggled with the unhappy sensation of being overwhelmed by the trials of adult life, the first two verses of the song, which describe rather placid encounters between Karen Peris and genial strangers, filtered slowly into my brain. Without my realizing it, the simple beauty of Peris’ observations, married to her husband’s silken electric guitar performance, began to work on me.
Then came a breakthrough moment, perhaps arriving in an interval between black thoughts. I heard Peris sing the following words near the song’s conclusion, as though I had never heard them before:
I never can say what I mean
but you will understand,
coming through clouds on the way.
It finally occurred to me what was happening here, that in turning this song into a kind of dialogue with Jesus, Peris had evoked an image of what the early Greek Christians called the Parousia, the second coming. But more importantly, she had, in the space of just seventeen words, thrown all the challenges of this world and this life into relief. She had reminded me of just Who God is, as opposed to who I am with all of my problems.
Peris, who has elsewhere written about her concerns with being properly understood, couldn’t be clearer here. The confidence of these lines reminded me that the same God who has numbered the hairs on our head (Luke 12:7) holds us forever in His hands and knows our hearts. It didn’t bring me completely out of my mood, and it certainly did nothing to move me towards overcoming the stark realities I was facing. But on that cold day, this experience of the power of song offered me comfort, and helped to lift, at least to some degree, the dark veil that was covering my head.
Friday, March 14, 2008
Duke Altum's POTM #61
If anyone were to ask me why it is I read, and continually attempt to comprehend, poetry, I might well refer them to these passages from a longer poem by Galway Kinnell. Kinnell is one of America's greatest living poets by any standard, and is still writing strong in his 70's (his last collection was released just this past year, with its title lifted ingeniously from Whitman: Strong is Your Hold).
There are moments when I sitting at night, reading a few poems because shorter pieces seem about all my tired brain can handle, when all the crap and clutter of the day is sliced through cleanly by mere words arranged on a page.. . words, however, that seem to function almost sacramentally, that draw forth from the heart's hard and crusty ground a sprout of insight, a small flower of truth. It might take the form of a memory, or a recognition from my own experience... or it could be something totally new to me, a revelation with a small "r." But these brief lightning-flashes of transcendence the great poets are mysteriously able to offer is what keeps me coming back to the well, thirsting for more...
These three numbered stanzas from a longer poem called "Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight" are a perfect example of what I'm talking about. This long and beautiful meditation on parenthood and memory penetrated my still-maturing father's heart repeatedly with shafts of light. Do I know exactly what each line means? Of course not. But something within me, at a level deeper than mere knowledge, glows dully in faint recognition of an earned wisdom.
*******
1
You scream, waking from a nightmare.
When I sleepwalk
into your room, and pick you up,
and hold you up in the moonlight, you cling to me
hard,
as if clinging could save us. I think
you think
I will never die, I think I exude
to you the permanence of smoke or stars,
even as
my broken arms heal themselves around you.
6
In the light the moon
sends back, I can see in your eyes
the hand that waved once
in my father's eyes, a tiny kite
wobbling far up in the twilight of his last look:
and the angel
of all mortal things lets go the string.
7
Back you go, into your crib.
The last blackbird lights up his gold wings: farewell.
Your eyes close inside your head,
in sleep. Already
in your dreams the hours begin to sing.
Little sleep's-head sprouting hair in the moonlight,
when I come back
we will go out together,
we will walk out together among
the ten thousand things,
each scratched too late with such knowledge, the wages
of dying is love.
There are moments when I sitting at night, reading a few poems because shorter pieces seem about all my tired brain can handle, when all the crap and clutter of the day is sliced through cleanly by mere words arranged on a page.. . words, however, that seem to function almost sacramentally, that draw forth from the heart's hard and crusty ground a sprout of insight, a small flower of truth. It might take the form of a memory, or a recognition from my own experience... or it could be something totally new to me, a revelation with a small "r." But these brief lightning-flashes of transcendence the great poets are mysteriously able to offer is what keeps me coming back to the well, thirsting for more...
These three numbered stanzas from a longer poem called "Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight" are a perfect example of what I'm talking about. This long and beautiful meditation on parenthood and memory penetrated my still-maturing father's heart repeatedly with shafts of light. Do I know exactly what each line means? Of course not. But something within me, at a level deeper than mere knowledge, glows dully in faint recognition of an earned wisdom.
*******
1
You scream, waking from a nightmare.
When I sleepwalk
into your room, and pick you up,
and hold you up in the moonlight, you cling to me
hard,
as if clinging could save us. I think
you think
I will never die, I think I exude
to you the permanence of smoke or stars,
even as
my broken arms heal themselves around you.
6
In the light the moon
sends back, I can see in your eyes
the hand that waved once
in my father's eyes, a tiny kite
wobbling far up in the twilight of his last look:
and the angel
of all mortal things lets go the string.
7
Back you go, into your crib.
The last blackbird lights up his gold wings: farewell.
Your eyes close inside your head,
in sleep. Already
in your dreams the hours begin to sing.
Little sleep's-head sprouting hair in the moonlight,
when I come back
we will go out together,
we will walk out together among
the ten thousand things,
each scratched too late with such knowledge, the wages
of dying is love.
Friday, March 07, 2008
Tribute to #4
To commemorate the great Packer quarterback Brett Favre's retirement this week from pro football, I am posting below a recent essay I wrote, inspired by him. This essay was submitted to a magazine running a "Football Essay Contest", and while it's not likely it will win, it was fun to put this together and pay tribute to a player I've always been a huge fan of.
Sling It
Brett Favre as Literary Inspiration
I have tried – and failed - to write about Green Bay Packers quarterback Brett Favre for years. Honesty forces me to disclose from the outset that I am a Pittsburgh Steelers fan, but I have a lifelong love of American football, and if I were forced to identify a single athlete as my all-time favorite from any professional sport, I would choose Favre. Something about his style of play, unchanged throughout a legendary career, has always inspired me, as it probably has others. And since I am a literary sort, and feel compelled to write about the things that interest me in order to understand them more fully, it seemed inevitable that I would eventually write about Favre. If I could never play football well, maybe I could write well about someone who does.
Yet I could never find an angle on the subject that satisfied me. Although I share some things with him – we’re roughly the same age; we both have two daughters – I don’t know Brett Favre. I’ve never met the man, let alone played with him or coached him; I’ve never even seen him play in person. So I cannot tell stories about him that you wouldn’t already know if you’ve ever turned on a TV on a Sunday for the last, say, seventeen years. I’m not a football expert, sports columnist, or even a journalist, so what does my opinion matter? I’m just another fan who happens to appreciate the way Favre plays.
Yet somewhere along the line, in the midst of all those false starts, I realized that that’s not all I am. I’m a fan, it’s true, but I’m also a writer. And that’s where I finally saw the connection. It’s not that I want to play football the way Brett Favre plays football. I gave up on that a long time ago. It’s that I want to write the way Brett Favre plays football.
This idea didn’t occur to me yesterday. It wasn’t even recently. In fact, I can pinpoint the exact date – January 26, 1997. The only problem was that I didn’t realize it. I couldn’t see the connection eleven years ago. I didn’t discover the link until this year, because I simply wasn’t a good enough writer in 1997. I needed a lot more practice in seeing where things connect. While athleticism may have a lot to do with natural gifts, writing well requires a slow maturation; one must develop an aptitude for certain mental processes through the crucible of experience, which can take many years of time and effort.
Nonetheless, I still remember the moment: it was the second play from scrimmage in Super Bowl XXXI in the Louisiana Superdome. Favre took the snap, dropped back, and fired a 54-yard cannonblast to Andre Rison for the first score of the game. It was a phenomenal pass, but it was Favre’s reaction to the end result of the play that, for me, elevated it into something else. He tore off his helmet, lifted it high over his head, and charged off the field, howling with triumph. Hundreds of millions of people were watching, and Favre didn’t care one bit. At that moment, the game was already over. Favre was victorious, and he knew it. Everything he had been through to that point seemed as though it had been worth the cost.
That one moment from Favre’s career – even though there have been other triumphant moments since then; the man has thrown for more touchdowns than any other quarterback in the history of the National Football League – stayed firmly rooted in my brain for more than a decade. And while I always wondered why it carried so much weight for me, I never was able to successfully connect it to my own world – what I was, and what I wanted to be. Meanwhile, all along the way, I worked tirelessly at my craft, literally whenever I could, sending my writings out into the open (like passes), and watching most of them come back the other way (like interceptions). It wasn’t until last season, in the midst of Favre’s resurgence at the age of 38, that I realized what there is in common between what he does on the football field and what I have been doing in my own corner of the world for years (with less success).
It’s not about who Favre is off the field, though he seems like a good man that has overcome numerous difficult challenges that have nothing to do with football. It’s not about the boyish enthusiasm on display during the games, though I can relate to it. It’s about how he plays – the way he executes his game. In the end, it’s about slinging it.
Into every pass he throws, you can see in his body language and on his face, even on TV, he puts everything he has to give. He throws the football hard and he throws it with confidence. When he releases the ball downfield, no matter what happens on the other end, you can sense that, in his own mind, it is going to be caught. He is sure that every throw he makes is going to connect.
This is exactly what a young writer needs to do. Sling it. If he wants to be heard, he has to chuck his writing out there, and chuck it hard. If he’s not sure that it’s going to hit the mark, then he shouldn’t fire the pass (maybe he shouldn’t even be on the field). When it does hit, he should revel in that moment, for he alone is responsible for bringing it into existence.
It’s not possible for a true champion to fake their performance. They must pour their heart and soul into their work – and then pay the price. When Favre plays football, even a casual observer can see that he exposes himself, in every way possible. He will stay in the pocket and take the hit before he will fail to make the throw. He takes the field for game after game after game, even when fighting against painful injuries. But he also reveals himself emotionally, in a way that many ‘tough’ men will not.
I recall Favre talking to reporters after a regular season football game in 2001, a game the Packers had pulled out by a nose. There he sat, answering questions, when he suddenly became choked with emotion, stopping the press conference. He apologized to the reporters, declined to even attempt an explanation, and left the room. Of course there may have been any number of unrelated events happening in his life that may have accounted for this behavior. Nonetheless, I cannot believe that none of the emotions he was dealing with that Sunday had to do with what had just occurred on the field.
A more famous example of Favre’s dedication to his work is the monumental performance he turned in on December 22, 2003, one day after his father, Irvin Favre, was found dead in his car. It is well known that against the Oakland Raiders on that Monday night, before a national audience, Favre passed for 399 yards and four touchdowns, leading the Packers to victory, 41-7. Favre channeled his emotions – his grief – into the execution of his game on the field. Every time he passed the ball on that night, he was slinging it. He threw his passes as if he was hurling his own will – the hard fist of his heart – into the teeth of a heartless world’s brutal sneer.
Over decades of watching pro football, I have of course been roundly impressed with other players, especially other quarterbacks. Ben Roethlisberger of the Steelers clearly wants to win more than most, and uses his impressive physicality and aggressiveness to find ways to do so – but he can also be foolhardy and brash, for he is still a young man. The Indianapolis Colts’ Peyton Manning, a great quarterback, is a true student of the game with flawless mechanics, but he often strikes me as jumpy and over-cerebral on the field – and how often does Manning look like he is actually enjoying himself? Tom Brady of the New England Patriots, for all of his unbelievable success, often looks more like a machine than a human being, although a spiffy one. All the more impressive in some respects, but this quality sometimes seems to spill off the field, as if he’s unable to switch the machine off. One wonders how much success is enough for a man like that.
For me Brett Favre stands out from the others, for one simple reason: he’s the only champion athlete that inspires me to be a champion.
Over seventeen years of writing, I have noticed something about myself, and it is simply this: those rare occasions when I am writing well, and feel as though I am turning my words into something meaningful and relevant, are the only times in my day-to-day existence when I feel absolutely fearless. No external concern can cast a shadow over my mind, or my heart, when I am doing what I do to the best of my ability. At any other time – which means most of my existence on earth – I can never fully free myself from some form of fear or anxiety. This doesn’t mean I am not happy; it just means I normally have concerns. But not when I am writing, at my desk, in pre-dawn darkness, when everyone else is asleep. No one can touch me then. I know it because I can feel it I my soul, and the soul always recognizes the truth.
This, I believe, is what happens to Brett Favre on the football field. I know it because I can see it on his face, even through a television. I know it in spite of the other chasm that exists between Favre and me – that distance between the uniquely gifted celebrity and the average Joe who works in a cube and whose toughness is never on display. I know it because he slings it. He slings it fearlessly, regardless of what is happening to him off the field. It doesn’t always lead to success, of course, as the conclusion of the 2007 season made painfully clear. But it requires a singular kind of courage to harness one’s varying emotions into their life’s work, and Favre lives by this quality – sometimes he dies by it.
Here’s something else I know. I am writing these words in response to a literary contest. I have never won a contest before, but I expect to win this one, because I’ve learned the lesson. When I do, I am going to push back from this desk, grab the nearest pencil, move through my house and out the back door, where I will thrust the pencil in the air and run across my yard howling. I will not take note of the hour. I will not care how many people are (or are not) watching. For it will have been a very long time coming, and worth every part of what it cost.
Sling It
Brett Favre as Literary Inspiration
I have tried – and failed - to write about Green Bay Packers quarterback Brett Favre for years. Honesty forces me to disclose from the outset that I am a Pittsburgh Steelers fan, but I have a lifelong love of American football, and if I were forced to identify a single athlete as my all-time favorite from any professional sport, I would choose Favre. Something about his style of play, unchanged throughout a legendary career, has always inspired me, as it probably has others. And since I am a literary sort, and feel compelled to write about the things that interest me in order to understand them more fully, it seemed inevitable that I would eventually write about Favre. If I could never play football well, maybe I could write well about someone who does.
Yet I could never find an angle on the subject that satisfied me. Although I share some things with him – we’re roughly the same age; we both have two daughters – I don’t know Brett Favre. I’ve never met the man, let alone played with him or coached him; I’ve never even seen him play in person. So I cannot tell stories about him that you wouldn’t already know if you’ve ever turned on a TV on a Sunday for the last, say, seventeen years. I’m not a football expert, sports columnist, or even a journalist, so what does my opinion matter? I’m just another fan who happens to appreciate the way Favre plays.
Yet somewhere along the line, in the midst of all those false starts, I realized that that’s not all I am. I’m a fan, it’s true, but I’m also a writer. And that’s where I finally saw the connection. It’s not that I want to play football the way Brett Favre plays football. I gave up on that a long time ago. It’s that I want to write the way Brett Favre plays football.
This idea didn’t occur to me yesterday. It wasn’t even recently. In fact, I can pinpoint the exact date – January 26, 1997. The only problem was that I didn’t realize it. I couldn’t see the connection eleven years ago. I didn’t discover the link until this year, because I simply wasn’t a good enough writer in 1997. I needed a lot more practice in seeing where things connect. While athleticism may have a lot to do with natural gifts, writing well requires a slow maturation; one must develop an aptitude for certain mental processes through the crucible of experience, which can take many years of time and effort.
Nonetheless, I still remember the moment: it was the second play from scrimmage in Super Bowl XXXI in the Louisiana Superdome. Favre took the snap, dropped back, and fired a 54-yard cannonblast to Andre Rison for the first score of the game. It was a phenomenal pass, but it was Favre’s reaction to the end result of the play that, for me, elevated it into something else. He tore off his helmet, lifted it high over his head, and charged off the field, howling with triumph. Hundreds of millions of people were watching, and Favre didn’t care one bit. At that moment, the game was already over. Favre was victorious, and he knew it. Everything he had been through to that point seemed as though it had been worth the cost.
That one moment from Favre’s career – even though there have been other triumphant moments since then; the man has thrown for more touchdowns than any other quarterback in the history of the National Football League – stayed firmly rooted in my brain for more than a decade. And while I always wondered why it carried so much weight for me, I never was able to successfully connect it to my own world – what I was, and what I wanted to be. Meanwhile, all along the way, I worked tirelessly at my craft, literally whenever I could, sending my writings out into the open (like passes), and watching most of them come back the other way (like interceptions). It wasn’t until last season, in the midst of Favre’s resurgence at the age of 38, that I realized what there is in common between what he does on the football field and what I have been doing in my own corner of the world for years (with less success).
It’s not about who Favre is off the field, though he seems like a good man that has overcome numerous difficult challenges that have nothing to do with football. It’s not about the boyish enthusiasm on display during the games, though I can relate to it. It’s about how he plays – the way he executes his game. In the end, it’s about slinging it.
Into every pass he throws, you can see in his body language and on his face, even on TV, he puts everything he has to give. He throws the football hard and he throws it with confidence. When he releases the ball downfield, no matter what happens on the other end, you can sense that, in his own mind, it is going to be caught. He is sure that every throw he makes is going to connect.
This is exactly what a young writer needs to do. Sling it. If he wants to be heard, he has to chuck his writing out there, and chuck it hard. If he’s not sure that it’s going to hit the mark, then he shouldn’t fire the pass (maybe he shouldn’t even be on the field). When it does hit, he should revel in that moment, for he alone is responsible for bringing it into existence.
It’s not possible for a true champion to fake their performance. They must pour their heart and soul into their work – and then pay the price. When Favre plays football, even a casual observer can see that he exposes himself, in every way possible. He will stay in the pocket and take the hit before he will fail to make the throw. He takes the field for game after game after game, even when fighting against painful injuries. But he also reveals himself emotionally, in a way that many ‘tough’ men will not.
I recall Favre talking to reporters after a regular season football game in 2001, a game the Packers had pulled out by a nose. There he sat, answering questions, when he suddenly became choked with emotion, stopping the press conference. He apologized to the reporters, declined to even attempt an explanation, and left the room. Of course there may have been any number of unrelated events happening in his life that may have accounted for this behavior. Nonetheless, I cannot believe that none of the emotions he was dealing with that Sunday had to do with what had just occurred on the field.
A more famous example of Favre’s dedication to his work is the monumental performance he turned in on December 22, 2003, one day after his father, Irvin Favre, was found dead in his car. It is well known that against the Oakland Raiders on that Monday night, before a national audience, Favre passed for 399 yards and four touchdowns, leading the Packers to victory, 41-7. Favre channeled his emotions – his grief – into the execution of his game on the field. Every time he passed the ball on that night, he was slinging it. He threw his passes as if he was hurling his own will – the hard fist of his heart – into the teeth of a heartless world’s brutal sneer.
Over decades of watching pro football, I have of course been roundly impressed with other players, especially other quarterbacks. Ben Roethlisberger of the Steelers clearly wants to win more than most, and uses his impressive physicality and aggressiveness to find ways to do so – but he can also be foolhardy and brash, for he is still a young man. The Indianapolis Colts’ Peyton Manning, a great quarterback, is a true student of the game with flawless mechanics, but he often strikes me as jumpy and over-cerebral on the field – and how often does Manning look like he is actually enjoying himself? Tom Brady of the New England Patriots, for all of his unbelievable success, often looks more like a machine than a human being, although a spiffy one. All the more impressive in some respects, but this quality sometimes seems to spill off the field, as if he’s unable to switch the machine off. One wonders how much success is enough for a man like that.
For me Brett Favre stands out from the others, for one simple reason: he’s the only champion athlete that inspires me to be a champion.
Over seventeen years of writing, I have noticed something about myself, and it is simply this: those rare occasions when I am writing well, and feel as though I am turning my words into something meaningful and relevant, are the only times in my day-to-day existence when I feel absolutely fearless. No external concern can cast a shadow over my mind, or my heart, when I am doing what I do to the best of my ability. At any other time – which means most of my existence on earth – I can never fully free myself from some form of fear or anxiety. This doesn’t mean I am not happy; it just means I normally have concerns. But not when I am writing, at my desk, in pre-dawn darkness, when everyone else is asleep. No one can touch me then. I know it because I can feel it I my soul, and the soul always recognizes the truth.
This, I believe, is what happens to Brett Favre on the football field. I know it because I can see it on his face, even through a television. I know it in spite of the other chasm that exists between Favre and me – that distance between the uniquely gifted celebrity and the average Joe who works in a cube and whose toughness is never on display. I know it because he slings it. He slings it fearlessly, regardless of what is happening to him off the field. It doesn’t always lead to success, of course, as the conclusion of the 2007 season made painfully clear. But it requires a singular kind of courage to harness one’s varying emotions into their life’s work, and Favre lives by this quality – sometimes he dies by it.
Here’s something else I know. I am writing these words in response to a literary contest. I have never won a contest before, but I expect to win this one, because I’ve learned the lesson. When I do, I am going to push back from this desk, grab the nearest pencil, move through my house and out the back door, where I will thrust the pencil in the air and run across my yard howling. I will not take note of the hour. I will not care how many people are (or are not) watching. For it will have been a very long time coming, and worth every part of what it cost.
Wednesday, March 05, 2008
NEWSFLASH: 'Citizen Kane' is a Pretty Good Movie
For someone who has enjoyed movies for a long time and claims to be something of a movie buff (though nowhere near an expert, as this post will make abundantly clear!), it is embarrassing for me to note that I recently watched Orson Welles’ 1941 classic Citizen Kane for the first time a few weeks ago. Of course I had heard all of the hype about it, and was aware that it is always listed at the very top of most lists of the greatest films of all time – including, most notably perhaps, the American Film Institute’s Top 100 list. That list was completely revised recently, but Welles’ film did not lose its secure hold on the top slot. I had a pretty good idea that whenever I got around to it I would find something to enjoy and be interested in… but truth be told, I did not expect it to engage me and stir up my fascination nearly as much as it did. By any standard, Citizen Kane is a truly exceptional work of art that is a profound commentary not only on American culture, but also on our common human condition.
Before going any further here, however, I want to publicly acknowledge and thank a good friend of mine, who is the one who pushed hard for me to watch it when I sheepishly admitted to him that I never had… to protect his identity I will use a pseudonym, but he certainly knows who he is. So to Mr. Braxton, I can only say: you were right to insist upon it, pal. You have more than earned your standing as a “go to” critic of movies (not to mention movies/books!) in my opinion…
Anyway, I came to Citizen Kane almost completely cold. All I knew about it was that it was widely considered one of the best, if not THE best, movies ever made, and that it made Orson Welles a Hollywood legend at the ripe old age of 26. Beyond that, I didn’t know a darn thing. Literally the only other thing I could have conjured up if asked about it was an image: a HUGE placard bearing the likeness of a moustachioed Orson Welles behind a podium, and the real Orson Welles (with moustache) thundering from said podium in the foreground. From this image I assumed the movie had something to do with politics. And that is the sum total of everything I ever knew about the film up until a few weeks ago.
The story, for the three people left on earth besides me who didn’t or don’t know, presents to us the life of the titular character, who is based on the real-life newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. Hearst built up an empire based on his ownership of scores of newspapers across the United States, and amassed a personal fortune that rivaled those of Morgan and Rockefeller. But more intriguing to the public (and richer fodder for a Hollywood film!) were the details of Hearst’s personal life: he weathered several broken marriages and seamy scandals, and died alone in a spectacular mansion he had built for himself, which he filled with archeological treasures he had plundered from all over the world. These were not treasures he went out and found himself, mind you: they were priceless items that, well, turned out not to be.
On the surface, then, Kane is essentially a rags-to-riches story about a lonely child abandoned by his parents who rises to the upper echelons of both business and social circles, but can’t ever seem to find the true happiness and peace that eludes him all along. What’s the big deal, then? Isn’t that the plot for countless stories and films that have been made? Well, yes, it is… but in this case it’s all about execution. The true genius of Citizen Kane, in my opinion, is not so much in the story itself, but in the way it is told: the technique of Welles’ filmmaking, the unusual narrative structure, and perhaps most of all, the use of images and visual cues to “pull back the curtain” and reveal the profound moral layers and depths hidden within a seemingly conventional narrative. I’ll briefly touch on the three of these.
1. The Technique – Now I know next to nothing about actual filmmaking technique, so maybe I better clarify here. When I say “technique” I am just talking about the way it is shot, the thought and craft that went into presenting each scene to the viewer. Admittedly, I listened to much of the commentary track (in this case it happened to be from Roger Ebert) on the DVD, so I did actually learn something about the technical aspects… such as Welles’ experimenting with a shooting technique called “deep focus” in order to make sure that items in the background of a shot remained as clear and distinct to the viewer as items/actors in the foreground. But I can’t get into the technical side of the film too much here simply because I don’t know what the heck I’m talking about. No, what I mean is the visual and emotional impact the film has upon you from the moment you start watching it. The opening of the film is a perfect example. First, you get these ominous and brooding shots of a haunted-looking castle high upon a hill behind a “No Trespassing” sign, and you witness the dying gasps of an unknown man secluded in a high bedroom, desperately clinging to a child’s toy and whispering a final, enigmatic word: “Rosebud.” (The mystery of what the word really means to the dying man runs throughout the film, and I gather, is still widely debated and discussed to this very day!) It’s an unforgettable opening that remains as puzzling and haunting in 2008 as it must have been to its first viewers in the theater. Next, you get a spot-on parody of an old-time newsreel which announces the death of one Charles Foster Kane, and reviews his life in true sensational, gossip-tinged American media style. You don’t realize it at the time of course, but what you’re getting is a preview of the whole story that’s about to unfold in front of you in the next hour and a half. These two contrasting and equally fascinating opening sequences set you up for a film experience that, at the time, utterly re-defined what American cinema could be… Welles blew the doors off creatively, pulling out all the stops in a virtuoso visual storytelling clinic. Throughout the film, striking images and powerful scenes abound. Citizen Kane is justly famous for its low camera angles, making characters appear larger than life and giving us an extraordinarily full view of the interior sets. It’s as if Welles said to himself, “Let me go through every established technique in Hollywood so that I can defy them all.” Stunning close-ups of objects and faces contrast with wide-angle panoramas of newsrooms and warehouses. The film is quite obviously the work of an ambitious young artist who’s not afraid to experiment and aim high.
2. The unusual narrative structure – Much of the genius of Welles’ film lies in the decision to wrap the story of Kane’s life around the mysterious utterance of that one word on his deathbed, “Rosebud.” Rather than tell the story in conventional, linear “biopic” style, we are presented with his death scene first (as described above) and the announcement of his demise in the media. From there, we are introduced to an investigative reporter who is given the task to uncover why Kane may have uttered this final word, and what it meant to him. In order to do so, the reporter needs to go and find those people who were closest to Kane – former colleagues, benefactors, ex-spouses – and interview them to try and piece the puzzle together. So the story of Kane’s life is told in a series of memories and flashbacks, delivered from multiple perspectives and points of view. I thought this was a fascinating device and a particularly ingenious way to tell the story of a man surrounded by mystery and speculation, a man who appears larger than life itself and yet died alone in “quiet desperation,” surrounded by his riches that ultimately meant very little to him. Another advantage of the story-telling method is that you can see first-hand the effect Kane’s egotism and ambition had on those closest to him, how he alienated and let down those few people who he allowed to get past his persona. The story of Kane’s life has so many layers of meaning, but one of the most powerful I think is the way that his sense of abandonment as a young child left a hole in him he could never fill, and permanently crippled his ability to be vulnerable to anyone around him. Like so many others, his desire for power and control thinly masked a strong sense of inadequacy and personal insecurity – and this combination makes it nearly impossible for a man to maintain a close and intimate relationship with anyone, be they a friend, confidant or spouse. Finally, the “investigative” approach enables Welles to jump around chronologically in the narrative, which meant that actors had to play their characters at multiple ages – Welles starts the film as a lean, handsome businessman full of charisma and vigor, and ends it as a fat, balding man with a moustache and a permanent scowl. These days it is commonplace to see actors take on different ages and don make-up to appear older than they are, but at the time I think it was very rare to see an actor take on so many different looks for one role. Welles is utterly different from one scene to the next in this film, and it is a performance of astounding range and depth.
3. The use of images and visuals – To me, this is the best part of Citizen Kane, where the genius and artistic vision really pay off. What stays with you after all is said and done are certain haunting key scenes and images that linger long in the mind and seem to capture the essence of the storyline more than any single line of dialog. Take, for example, the famous swirling "snow" inside the child's snow globe that Kane is holding as he breathes his last breath, and the slow fall of the same globe from his hand to the floor at the moment of death. Or the scene where Kane, in a rage after his second wife leaves him, trashes a room in his house and then slowly walks down a hallway in his lonely castle, mirrors on either side of the hallway reflecting him infinitely to the left and right, as if to say his sadness is without end. Or the scene described earlier when Kane is campaigning for public office, standing at a podium dwarfed by an enormous image of himself, emphasizing his hubris and his larger-than-life persona. Or, perhaps most strikingly, the final scenes of the film, which pan widely over a vast warehouse of his "stuff," his archeological treasures and furniture - the shots not only ingeniously include props from most of the other scenes in the movie as sort of a visual re-cap of all that has come before in the film, but also poignantly reveal the ultimate emptiness of Kane's life, as he has built up this museum-like fantasy land around himself but has no one left to share it with. I won't say what the final image of the film is, but like everything before it is an ingenious shot, and neatly wraps up the mystery running through the entire length of the film with a profundity no words could capture. There are so many indelible images in this film it would be impossible to recount them all.
All of this is only to scratch the surface of this complex morality tale which has so much to say about American culture and human nature. I don't pretend for a moment to have encapsulated all that is good and notable about Citizen Kane here, but I do hope I have provided enough of a taste of it to intrigue those who haven't yet seen it, and maybe even inspire them to give it a watch. On every level imaginable, it is a film that inspires and fascinates. Anyone with even the slightest interest in film will come away rewarded from Welles' ingenious and innovative character study.
Before going any further here, however, I want to publicly acknowledge and thank a good friend of mine, who is the one who pushed hard for me to watch it when I sheepishly admitted to him that I never had… to protect his identity I will use a pseudonym, but he certainly knows who he is. So to Mr. Braxton, I can only say: you were right to insist upon it, pal. You have more than earned your standing as a “go to” critic of movies (not to mention movies/books!) in my opinion…
Anyway, I came to Citizen Kane almost completely cold. All I knew about it was that it was widely considered one of the best, if not THE best, movies ever made, and that it made Orson Welles a Hollywood legend at the ripe old age of 26. Beyond that, I didn’t know a darn thing. Literally the only other thing I could have conjured up if asked about it was an image: a HUGE placard bearing the likeness of a moustachioed Orson Welles behind a podium, and the real Orson Welles (with moustache) thundering from said podium in the foreground. From this image I assumed the movie had something to do with politics. And that is the sum total of everything I ever knew about the film up until a few weeks ago.
The story, for the three people left on earth besides me who didn’t or don’t know, presents to us the life of the titular character, who is based on the real-life newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. Hearst built up an empire based on his ownership of scores of newspapers across the United States, and amassed a personal fortune that rivaled those of Morgan and Rockefeller. But more intriguing to the public (and richer fodder for a Hollywood film!) were the details of Hearst’s personal life: he weathered several broken marriages and seamy scandals, and died alone in a spectacular mansion he had built for himself, which he filled with archeological treasures he had plundered from all over the world. These were not treasures he went out and found himself, mind you: they were priceless items that, well, turned out not to be.
On the surface, then, Kane is essentially a rags-to-riches story about a lonely child abandoned by his parents who rises to the upper echelons of both business and social circles, but can’t ever seem to find the true happiness and peace that eludes him all along. What’s the big deal, then? Isn’t that the plot for countless stories and films that have been made? Well, yes, it is… but in this case it’s all about execution. The true genius of Citizen Kane, in my opinion, is not so much in the story itself, but in the way it is told: the technique of Welles’ filmmaking, the unusual narrative structure, and perhaps most of all, the use of images and visual cues to “pull back the curtain” and reveal the profound moral layers and depths hidden within a seemingly conventional narrative. I’ll briefly touch on the three of these.
1. The Technique – Now I know next to nothing about actual filmmaking technique, so maybe I better clarify here. When I say “technique” I am just talking about the way it is shot, the thought and craft that went into presenting each scene to the viewer. Admittedly, I listened to much of the commentary track (in this case it happened to be from Roger Ebert) on the DVD, so I did actually learn something about the technical aspects… such as Welles’ experimenting with a shooting technique called “deep focus” in order to make sure that items in the background of a shot remained as clear and distinct to the viewer as items/actors in the foreground. But I can’t get into the technical side of the film too much here simply because I don’t know what the heck I’m talking about. No, what I mean is the visual and emotional impact the film has upon you from the moment you start watching it. The opening of the film is a perfect example. First, you get these ominous and brooding shots of a haunted-looking castle high upon a hill behind a “No Trespassing” sign, and you witness the dying gasps of an unknown man secluded in a high bedroom, desperately clinging to a child’s toy and whispering a final, enigmatic word: “Rosebud.” (The mystery of what the word really means to the dying man runs throughout the film, and I gather, is still widely debated and discussed to this very day!) It’s an unforgettable opening that remains as puzzling and haunting in 2008 as it must have been to its first viewers in the theater. Next, you get a spot-on parody of an old-time newsreel which announces the death of one Charles Foster Kane, and reviews his life in true sensational, gossip-tinged American media style. You don’t realize it at the time of course, but what you’re getting is a preview of the whole story that’s about to unfold in front of you in the next hour and a half. These two contrasting and equally fascinating opening sequences set you up for a film experience that, at the time, utterly re-defined what American cinema could be… Welles blew the doors off creatively, pulling out all the stops in a virtuoso visual storytelling clinic. Throughout the film, striking images and powerful scenes abound. Citizen Kane is justly famous for its low camera angles, making characters appear larger than life and giving us an extraordinarily full view of the interior sets. It’s as if Welles said to himself, “Let me go through every established technique in Hollywood so that I can defy them all.” Stunning close-ups of objects and faces contrast with wide-angle panoramas of newsrooms and warehouses. The film is quite obviously the work of an ambitious young artist who’s not afraid to experiment and aim high.
2. The unusual narrative structure – Much of the genius of Welles’ film lies in the decision to wrap the story of Kane’s life around the mysterious utterance of that one word on his deathbed, “Rosebud.” Rather than tell the story in conventional, linear “biopic” style, we are presented with his death scene first (as described above) and the announcement of his demise in the media. From there, we are introduced to an investigative reporter who is given the task to uncover why Kane may have uttered this final word, and what it meant to him. In order to do so, the reporter needs to go and find those people who were closest to Kane – former colleagues, benefactors, ex-spouses – and interview them to try and piece the puzzle together. So the story of Kane’s life is told in a series of memories and flashbacks, delivered from multiple perspectives and points of view. I thought this was a fascinating device and a particularly ingenious way to tell the story of a man surrounded by mystery and speculation, a man who appears larger than life itself and yet died alone in “quiet desperation,” surrounded by his riches that ultimately meant very little to him. Another advantage of the story-telling method is that you can see first-hand the effect Kane’s egotism and ambition had on those closest to him, how he alienated and let down those few people who he allowed to get past his persona. The story of Kane’s life has so many layers of meaning, but one of the most powerful I think is the way that his sense of abandonment as a young child left a hole in him he could never fill, and permanently crippled his ability to be vulnerable to anyone around him. Like so many others, his desire for power and control thinly masked a strong sense of inadequacy and personal insecurity – and this combination makes it nearly impossible for a man to maintain a close and intimate relationship with anyone, be they a friend, confidant or spouse. Finally, the “investigative” approach enables Welles to jump around chronologically in the narrative, which meant that actors had to play their characters at multiple ages – Welles starts the film as a lean, handsome businessman full of charisma and vigor, and ends it as a fat, balding man with a moustache and a permanent scowl. These days it is commonplace to see actors take on different ages and don make-up to appear older than they are, but at the time I think it was very rare to see an actor take on so many different looks for one role. Welles is utterly different from one scene to the next in this film, and it is a performance of astounding range and depth.
3. The use of images and visuals – To me, this is the best part of Citizen Kane, where the genius and artistic vision really pay off. What stays with you after all is said and done are certain haunting key scenes and images that linger long in the mind and seem to capture the essence of the storyline more than any single line of dialog. Take, for example, the famous swirling "snow" inside the child's snow globe that Kane is holding as he breathes his last breath, and the slow fall of the same globe from his hand to the floor at the moment of death. Or the scene where Kane, in a rage after his second wife leaves him, trashes a room in his house and then slowly walks down a hallway in his lonely castle, mirrors on either side of the hallway reflecting him infinitely to the left and right, as if to say his sadness is without end. Or the scene described earlier when Kane is campaigning for public office, standing at a podium dwarfed by an enormous image of himself, emphasizing his hubris and his larger-than-life persona. Or, perhaps most strikingly, the final scenes of the film, which pan widely over a vast warehouse of his "stuff," his archeological treasures and furniture - the shots not only ingeniously include props from most of the other scenes in the movie as sort of a visual re-cap of all that has come before in the film, but also poignantly reveal the ultimate emptiness of Kane's life, as he has built up this museum-like fantasy land around himself but has no one left to share it with. I won't say what the final image of the film is, but like everything before it is an ingenious shot, and neatly wraps up the mystery running through the entire length of the film with a profundity no words could capture. There are so many indelible images in this film it would be impossible to recount them all.
All of this is only to scratch the surface of this complex morality tale which has so much to say about American culture and human nature. I don't pretend for a moment to have encapsulated all that is good and notable about Citizen Kane here, but I do hope I have provided enough of a taste of it to intrigue those who haven't yet seen it, and maybe even inspire them to give it a watch. On every level imaginable, it is a film that inspires and fascinates. Anyone with even the slightest interest in film will come away rewarded from Welles' ingenious and innovative character study.
Saturday, February 23, 2008
Journal of a "Novel"-Entry 42
Writing in Lent
At least the good news is that after many months' delay, and having written a new short story and an essay in the interim as reported in my last journal, I am back at work on the Indiana novel. I am working on Chapter V now, but still in the first 'scene' of the chapter; I have a long road to hoe in this chapter alone, before I can even think of what comes after that. But at least I have gotten a start on it once again, considering the fact that it was November 6 when I finished the preceding chapter. Although I gave myself until age 40 to complete the draft of the novel, my recent pace has put even such a generous goal in jeopardy!
This chapter takes on a lot of meaning for me, for a few reasons. On a practical level, although the previous four have been loaded pretty heavily with a lot of characters and plotlines, so many that it seems questionable whether I will be able to keep all of the balls in the air, this fifth chapter is attempting to take on even more. It has to accomplish a lot of things, and do so if at all possible in a similar amount of space as the other chapters. This is the first chapter, for example, of the whole novel so far that will attempt to make several jumps in time instead of being set in one year. The first three chapters of the story were set at different months in the year 1924; Chapter IV was the first to move ahead, but it was all set in 1927; this new chapter will span from 1929, when it opens, to 1932, where it will end. This makes my challenge more difficult than it has been already, since in some way you need to account for the space in between those jumps; you have to let the reader know at least the most essential information about what has happened in between, and you have to do it in a way that doesn't bog the chapter down OR make the reader feel cheated for what he or she has missed.
I am facing that challenge now as the chapter opens, because I went from the conception of Walter & Greta Brogan's son, Luke, at the end of Chapter IV (I assure you, I spared the reader any description of the mechanics of what took place, since you KNOW I would bungle any attempt to make that sort of thing read well!) to the early summer of 1929 at the beginning of Chapter V when Luke is already a chubby 9-month-old. Thus the reader got none of Greta's pregnancy and was not a witness to the birth of their son. I felt it was not necessary to attempt to write a whole 'labor and delivery' segment of the book, and I didn't think I'd do such a good job at it anyway. My vision for this book extends all the way to 1942, so I have to leave some stuff out somewhere along the line! For me the most important thing is to establish that they were able to start a family after all, and that for the rest of the novel Walter Brogan will be embroiled in his efforts to provide for them all during the difficult circumstances of the Depression and the World War II era.
And speaking of labor, although not the child-bearing kind, the entire book to me feels like a massive labor at this stage. It has been coming hard and slow when it comes at all, and I have been feeling the difficulty of what I am trying to do in the most acute way in the last few months. Working two jobs, under very tight and often stressful financial circumstances, awaiting a third child in addition to the two very active little girls I have now: all of these things make the attempt to write a real novel absurd if not outright irresponsible: should I not be spending whatever time I can put into this work doing other things? Even when I try to stay true to my original vision and set these distracting questions aside, I find when I sit down that the work has felt strained and unfocused, and I feel the burden of my own creative vision, since I feel like I have so much more ground to cover and make so little headway in covering it. The idea of finishing by the time I turn 40 now seems ridiculous where it once seemed crazy to give myself so much time.
So why do it? I ask myself this all the time. Especially now in the season of Lent, one feels the need to strip away things that don't matter and focus on things that do. Does my writing belong in the former group? I honestly find this a hard question to answer right now. I do know that it doesn't feel like it doesn't matter to me; writing for me is very serious, it always has been; I don't do it for silly reasons. I do it because it feels necessary for me to live. But lately I haven't been doing the best job of making it easier for the people I provide for to live, or at least live at the level of comfort that I want for them. Is there more I can do - especially since the writing I am doing now doesn't seem to be of the best quality? Should I be focusing on other things?
During Lent I have a personal tradition of trying to spend time engaged in what they used to call Lectio Divina, or spiritual reading. I know how grandiose this sounds but the truth is that if I don't set time aside to do it in Lent I find I don't do too much of it at all the rest of the year, something I'd like to rectify at least to some degree. Right now I am reading a book by Thomas Merton, one of my favorite spiritual writers, called No Man is an Island, and in the book I found the following quotes which I must say have hit me where I am living now as I have struggled with these questions: 'All vocations are intended by God to manifest His love in the world. For each special calling gives a man some particular place in the mystery of Christ, gives him something to do for the salvation of all mankind.' Merton also writes, 'Each vocation has for its aim the propagation of divine life in the world.' I have often said that to me writing this novel, if I can really do it, feels to me like my 'life's work'. The question is whether I really have been called to do this sort of thing by God, and if so, can I make sure that my work actually contributes in the way that Merton describes above. If I can complete the work in such a way that it does, it has not been a waste of time. But if I give up or cannot do it, it has been a waste. And if I think that is where it's going it would be better to give up now. But on the other hand, if I really believe I have been called to write by God, then I need to do it as well as I am able. Merton also writes, 'By doing things badly we make ourselves less real.' If I'm going to do it I want to give it my best and that means working at it and not giving up.
I have been working on my novel for two years next month; if I make it to the end of Chapter V I am done with one part of three. If I follow my original plan I have at least 2 1/2 more years of work ahead of me on the book and I don't have any reason to think my life will become easier financially, spiritually, or materially in the meantime. But I am not prepared to give up and I still believe I can achieve something with it that will be glorifying in some way, ultimately, to God. Rainier Maria Rilke in his Letters to a Young Poet suggested to his youthful protege that he ask himself very honestly if he believes he can live without writing poetry. If the answer is yes, Rilke suggested, his course of action was simple: stop writing it now and get on with his life doing other things. But if the answer was No, however, Rilke's advice to him was to stop worrying about it and get down to the work. It helps me to remind myself of this during times of struggle, and this is one of those times. I don't expect the struggle to end for a long time, but that is all right. I don't want success to be handed to me on a platter, and I can't expect to earn God's reward either by cruising into Heaven on auto-pilot. I must put in the work.
At least the good news is that after many months' delay, and having written a new short story and an essay in the interim as reported in my last journal, I am back at work on the Indiana novel. I am working on Chapter V now, but still in the first 'scene' of the chapter; I have a long road to hoe in this chapter alone, before I can even think of what comes after that. But at least I have gotten a start on it once again, considering the fact that it was November 6 when I finished the preceding chapter. Although I gave myself until age 40 to complete the draft of the novel, my recent pace has put even such a generous goal in jeopardy!
This chapter takes on a lot of meaning for me, for a few reasons. On a practical level, although the previous four have been loaded pretty heavily with a lot of characters and plotlines, so many that it seems questionable whether I will be able to keep all of the balls in the air, this fifth chapter is attempting to take on even more. It has to accomplish a lot of things, and do so if at all possible in a similar amount of space as the other chapters. This is the first chapter, for example, of the whole novel so far that will attempt to make several jumps in time instead of being set in one year. The first three chapters of the story were set at different months in the year 1924; Chapter IV was the first to move ahead, but it was all set in 1927; this new chapter will span from 1929, when it opens, to 1932, where it will end. This makes my challenge more difficult than it has been already, since in some way you need to account for the space in between those jumps; you have to let the reader know at least the most essential information about what has happened in between, and you have to do it in a way that doesn't bog the chapter down OR make the reader feel cheated for what he or she has missed.
I am facing that challenge now as the chapter opens, because I went from the conception of Walter & Greta Brogan's son, Luke, at the end of Chapter IV (I assure you, I spared the reader any description of the mechanics of what took place, since you KNOW I would bungle any attempt to make that sort of thing read well!) to the early summer of 1929 at the beginning of Chapter V when Luke is already a chubby 9-month-old. Thus the reader got none of Greta's pregnancy and was not a witness to the birth of their son. I felt it was not necessary to attempt to write a whole 'labor and delivery' segment of the book, and I didn't think I'd do such a good job at it anyway. My vision for this book extends all the way to 1942, so I have to leave some stuff out somewhere along the line! For me the most important thing is to establish that they were able to start a family after all, and that for the rest of the novel Walter Brogan will be embroiled in his efforts to provide for them all during the difficult circumstances of the Depression and the World War II era.
And speaking of labor, although not the child-bearing kind, the entire book to me feels like a massive labor at this stage. It has been coming hard and slow when it comes at all, and I have been feeling the difficulty of what I am trying to do in the most acute way in the last few months. Working two jobs, under very tight and often stressful financial circumstances, awaiting a third child in addition to the two very active little girls I have now: all of these things make the attempt to write a real novel absurd if not outright irresponsible: should I not be spending whatever time I can put into this work doing other things? Even when I try to stay true to my original vision and set these distracting questions aside, I find when I sit down that the work has felt strained and unfocused, and I feel the burden of my own creative vision, since I feel like I have so much more ground to cover and make so little headway in covering it. The idea of finishing by the time I turn 40 now seems ridiculous where it once seemed crazy to give myself so much time.
So why do it? I ask myself this all the time. Especially now in the season of Lent, one feels the need to strip away things that don't matter and focus on things that do. Does my writing belong in the former group? I honestly find this a hard question to answer right now. I do know that it doesn't feel like it doesn't matter to me; writing for me is very serious, it always has been; I don't do it for silly reasons. I do it because it feels necessary for me to live. But lately I haven't been doing the best job of making it easier for the people I provide for to live, or at least live at the level of comfort that I want for them. Is there more I can do - especially since the writing I am doing now doesn't seem to be of the best quality? Should I be focusing on other things?
During Lent I have a personal tradition of trying to spend time engaged in what they used to call Lectio Divina, or spiritual reading. I know how grandiose this sounds but the truth is that if I don't set time aside to do it in Lent I find I don't do too much of it at all the rest of the year, something I'd like to rectify at least to some degree. Right now I am reading a book by Thomas Merton, one of my favorite spiritual writers, called No Man is an Island, and in the book I found the following quotes which I must say have hit me where I am living now as I have struggled with these questions: 'All vocations are intended by God to manifest His love in the world. For each special calling gives a man some particular place in the mystery of Christ, gives him something to do for the salvation of all mankind.' Merton also writes, 'Each vocation has for its aim the propagation of divine life in the world.' I have often said that to me writing this novel, if I can really do it, feels to me like my 'life's work'. The question is whether I really have been called to do this sort of thing by God, and if so, can I make sure that my work actually contributes in the way that Merton describes above. If I can complete the work in such a way that it does, it has not been a waste of time. But if I give up or cannot do it, it has been a waste. And if I think that is where it's going it would be better to give up now. But on the other hand, if I really believe I have been called to write by God, then I need to do it as well as I am able. Merton also writes, 'By doing things badly we make ourselves less real.' If I'm going to do it I want to give it my best and that means working at it and not giving up.
I have been working on my novel for two years next month; if I make it to the end of Chapter V I am done with one part of three. If I follow my original plan I have at least 2 1/2 more years of work ahead of me on the book and I don't have any reason to think my life will become easier financially, spiritually, or materially in the meantime. But I am not prepared to give up and I still believe I can achieve something with it that will be glorifying in some way, ultimately, to God. Rainier Maria Rilke in his Letters to a Young Poet suggested to his youthful protege that he ask himself very honestly if he believes he can live without writing poetry. If the answer is yes, Rilke suggested, his course of action was simple: stop writing it now and get on with his life doing other things. But if the answer was No, however, Rilke's advice to him was to stop worrying about it and get down to the work. It helps me to remind myself of this during times of struggle, and this is one of those times. I don't expect the struggle to end for a long time, but that is all right. I don't want success to be handed to me on a platter, and I can't expect to earn God's reward either by cruising into Heaven on auto-pilot. I must put in the work.
Monday, February 18, 2008
Duke Altum's POTM #60
Ha - did anyone notice the subtle change in the title of this series there?? Since I don't seem to be able to keep up with this blog as regularly as I'd like to, calling this series of occasional great poems the "Poem of the Week" series seems just a trifle, well, optimistic. So, just like that, is has now been officially re-named the Poem of the Month series! See how easy that was! But the same great, albeit sporatic, content will continue... so keep on tuning in!
This month is a beautiful poem - well, honestly, more of a prayer than poem - from Franz Wright... a Lenten poet if there ever was one! (Wright's poetry often deals with repentence, salvation, grace unearned, delivery from or contention with spiritual and emotional suffering, etc.) The last eight lines alone are well worth the price of admission (i.e. reading this blather first!), and I appreciate them a lot personally as they articulate a prayer I have sometimes uttered in my own heart, but of course lacked the words to articulate as well. Amazing stuff.
*******
Cloudless Snowfall
Great big flakes like white ashes
at nightfall descending
abruptly everywhere
and vanishing
in this hand like the host
on somebody's put-out tongue, she
turns the crucifix over
to me, still warm
from her touch two years later
and thank you,
I say all alone—
vast whisp-whisp of wingbeats
awakens me and I look up
at a minute-long string of black geese
following low past the moon the white
course of the snow-covered river and
by the way thank You for
keeping Your face hidden, I
can hardly bear the beauty of this world.
This month is a beautiful poem - well, honestly, more of a prayer than poem - from Franz Wright... a Lenten poet if there ever was one! (Wright's poetry often deals with repentence, salvation, grace unearned, delivery from or contention with spiritual and emotional suffering, etc.) The last eight lines alone are well worth the price of admission (i.e. reading this blather first!), and I appreciate them a lot personally as they articulate a prayer I have sometimes uttered in my own heart, but of course lacked the words to articulate as well. Amazing stuff.
*******
Cloudless Snowfall
Great big flakes like white ashes
at nightfall descending
abruptly everywhere
and vanishing
in this hand like the host
on somebody's put-out tongue, she
turns the crucifix over
to me, still warm
from her touch two years later
and thank you,
I say all alone—
vast whisp-whisp of wingbeats
awakens me and I look up
at a minute-long string of black geese
following low past the moon the white
course of the snow-covered river and
by the way thank You for
keeping Your face hidden, I
can hardly bear the beauty of this world.
Monday, February 11, 2008
Swinging to the Music
A review of U23D
directed by Catherine Owens and Mark Pellington
Concert films are almost always boring. No matter how much one may love the band or the artist, anyone who has been to a rock concert knows that viewing a film of a group performing live is nowhere near the experience of being there in person. After the first few numbers, it amounts to listening to the same songs you’ve heard over and over in a slightly different format and tempo. What you don’t get is all of the sights and smells, the pulse of the music in your bones, the strange but pleasing communion you experience with a large gathering of like-minded people for a temporary period of time that is somehow all the more transporting for that.
The challenges to producing a successful concert film would seem all the more formidable for a group as huge in every way possible (except perhaps the physical stature of the members) as U2, the Irish megaband that has been an international phenomenon for decades now. One of the reasons their popularity has become so pervasive across the globe is that their concerts are more than just a live performance. A U2 concert is an event, a spectacle in almost every sense, anchored firmly by the members’ unique talents to entertain with passion and vigor. These men are gifted artists all, blessed with the good fortune to have discovered not so much fame and wealth, but a clear vocation. U2 knows why they’re here. They are doing what they were born to do, and if you’ve seen their shows you know this is true.
The challenge for filmmakers Catherine Owens, a designer of U2’s stage presentations, and Mark Pellington, a film and television director (The Mothman Prophecies, “Cold Case”), was to provide an experience that, while necessarily falling just short of “you are there” verisimilitude, is nonetheless as grandiose and thrilling as this truly great band’s audience expects. In U23D, with the help of recent (and quite remarkable) film technology, they unquestionably succeed. The first concert film ever to be shot entirely by digital, three-dimensional cameras, U23D can rightfully be considered a landmark motion picture, and also one of the most satisfying marriages of form and subject to be seen on the big, big screen in many years.
The three-dimensional aspect of the film is a gimmick. Some may find it over the top at best, and off-putting or even irritating at worst. Entering the theater, the viewer is handed 3-D glasses, and for the first several minutes of the show I found it slightly difficult to get used to the sometimes-blurred or replicated images on the screen. I found, however, that the eyes adjust to it, and to me the handful of moments in the film when the 3-D imagery really works best are worth the temporary disorientation. Besides, it’s a fun gimmick; when was the last time you saw a 3-D movie? (I realized I hadn’t seen one at all.) At one particular moment in the film, the neck of Adam Clayton’s bass appears to be reaching out over one of your shoulders; in another fascinating touch, during the band’s classic anti-violence anthem “Sunday Bloody Sunday”, all of the crowd noise is consigned to the background, and while Bono sings the line, ‘Wipe your tears away’ directly into the camera, he reaches out and seems to actually wipe your own cheeks.
By deploying a dizzying array of camera angles, close-ups, and breathtaking wide-scale shots that fully encapsulate the sheer magnitude of the frenzied South-Central American crowds (the film was shot in Mexico and Argentina primarily) and the astounding stage and lighting designs, the filmmakers have done an extraordinary job of approximating to the fullest extent possible the sensual and visual barrage of a U2 concert. They deserve credit for their expansive vision and execution of this hugely entertaining film, which is best experienced on the IMAX screens it opened on initially.
Still, the ultimate credit goes to the band itself, who have turned themselves into worldwide icons by force of their own extraordinary talent and creative bravado. Some people seem put-upon by U2’s tremendous popularity and seemingly infinite success. For others, this is made even worse by their relatively clean reputation and by Bono’s global stature as an activist against hunger and poverty who seems at times to have more gravitas than presidents and heads of state. But the essential fact remains that for U2 to be as massively popular as they are, and for their shows to deliver the huge payoff one comes to expect, the songs themselves have to be great. It may be stating the obvious that a song like “Oops, I Did It Again” performed in the same venue with the same stage and lighting would not come off nearly the same way, but sometimes it’s easy to take fine songwriting for granted. The music viewers will see and feel in this concert film consists of some of the most spirited, unique and satisfying songs in rock music history – “Where The Streets Have No Name”, “New Year's Day”, “Bullet the Blue Sky”, “With Or Without You”, and so forth. There’s a good reason classics are classics; they’re built to last.
Lest anyone still believes that U2’s best work is behind them, however, nowhere is the aforementioned greatness so evident as in the performance of “Vertigo” from the band’s last album, which provides U23D’s most electrifying moment. The opening salvo of the film, this bombastic rock gem explodes every asset of U2 as a live act in one spectacular burst.
As an entertainer and vocalist, Bono is a force of nature, defying his age and whatever shelf-life a set human of vocal chords might have. He almost literally leaps off the screen. The Edge, U2’s extraordinary guitarist, is a technical genius, and performs with such cool professionalism and ease that one wonders if he is programmed. And the rhythm section of the band, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen, Jr. on drums, play so well together after 30 years that you expect their flawless execution as a matter of course. I can’t think of a better compliment to pay to these fine musicians.
By the time you reach the first chorus of “Vertigo” and hear Edge’s call to the Spanish-speaking audience of ¿Donde esta? you’re ready with your answer: Right here, in the beauty of the moment, along with everyone else, no matter where in this world we’re from. And for at least 80 minutes out of your busy life, there’s no place you’d rather be.
directed by Catherine Owens and Mark Pellington
Concert films are almost always boring. No matter how much one may love the band or the artist, anyone who has been to a rock concert knows that viewing a film of a group performing live is nowhere near the experience of being there in person. After the first few numbers, it amounts to listening to the same songs you’ve heard over and over in a slightly different format and tempo. What you don’t get is all of the sights and smells, the pulse of the music in your bones, the strange but pleasing communion you experience with a large gathering of like-minded people for a temporary period of time that is somehow all the more transporting for that.
The challenges to producing a successful concert film would seem all the more formidable for a group as huge in every way possible (except perhaps the physical stature of the members) as U2, the Irish megaband that has been an international phenomenon for decades now. One of the reasons their popularity has become so pervasive across the globe is that their concerts are more than just a live performance. A U2 concert is an event, a spectacle in almost every sense, anchored firmly by the members’ unique talents to entertain with passion and vigor. These men are gifted artists all, blessed with the good fortune to have discovered not so much fame and wealth, but a clear vocation. U2 knows why they’re here. They are doing what they were born to do, and if you’ve seen their shows you know this is true.
The challenge for filmmakers Catherine Owens, a designer of U2’s stage presentations, and Mark Pellington, a film and television director (The Mothman Prophecies, “Cold Case”), was to provide an experience that, while necessarily falling just short of “you are there” verisimilitude, is nonetheless as grandiose and thrilling as this truly great band’s audience expects. In U23D, with the help of recent (and quite remarkable) film technology, they unquestionably succeed. The first concert film ever to be shot entirely by digital, three-dimensional cameras, U23D can rightfully be considered a landmark motion picture, and also one of the most satisfying marriages of form and subject to be seen on the big, big screen in many years.
The three-dimensional aspect of the film is a gimmick. Some may find it over the top at best, and off-putting or even irritating at worst. Entering the theater, the viewer is handed 3-D glasses, and for the first several minutes of the show I found it slightly difficult to get used to the sometimes-blurred or replicated images on the screen. I found, however, that the eyes adjust to it, and to me the handful of moments in the film when the 3-D imagery really works best are worth the temporary disorientation. Besides, it’s a fun gimmick; when was the last time you saw a 3-D movie? (I realized I hadn’t seen one at all.) At one particular moment in the film, the neck of Adam Clayton’s bass appears to be reaching out over one of your shoulders; in another fascinating touch, during the band’s classic anti-violence anthem “Sunday Bloody Sunday”, all of the crowd noise is consigned to the background, and while Bono sings the line, ‘Wipe your tears away’ directly into the camera, he reaches out and seems to actually wipe your own cheeks.
By deploying a dizzying array of camera angles, close-ups, and breathtaking wide-scale shots that fully encapsulate the sheer magnitude of the frenzied South-Central American crowds (the film was shot in Mexico and Argentina primarily) and the astounding stage and lighting designs, the filmmakers have done an extraordinary job of approximating to the fullest extent possible the sensual and visual barrage of a U2 concert. They deserve credit for their expansive vision and execution of this hugely entertaining film, which is best experienced on the IMAX screens it opened on initially.
Still, the ultimate credit goes to the band itself, who have turned themselves into worldwide icons by force of their own extraordinary talent and creative bravado. Some people seem put-upon by U2’s tremendous popularity and seemingly infinite success. For others, this is made even worse by their relatively clean reputation and by Bono’s global stature as an activist against hunger and poverty who seems at times to have more gravitas than presidents and heads of state. But the essential fact remains that for U2 to be as massively popular as they are, and for their shows to deliver the huge payoff one comes to expect, the songs themselves have to be great. It may be stating the obvious that a song like “Oops, I Did It Again” performed in the same venue with the same stage and lighting would not come off nearly the same way, but sometimes it’s easy to take fine songwriting for granted. The music viewers will see and feel in this concert film consists of some of the most spirited, unique and satisfying songs in rock music history – “Where The Streets Have No Name”, “New Year's Day”, “Bullet the Blue Sky”, “With Or Without You”, and so forth. There’s a good reason classics are classics; they’re built to last.
Lest anyone still believes that U2’s best work is behind them, however, nowhere is the aforementioned greatness so evident as in the performance of “Vertigo” from the band’s last album, which provides U23D’s most electrifying moment. The opening salvo of the film, this bombastic rock gem explodes every asset of U2 as a live act in one spectacular burst.
As an entertainer and vocalist, Bono is a force of nature, defying his age and whatever shelf-life a set human of vocal chords might have. He almost literally leaps off the screen. The Edge, U2’s extraordinary guitarist, is a technical genius, and performs with such cool professionalism and ease that one wonders if he is programmed. And the rhythm section of the band, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen, Jr. on drums, play so well together after 30 years that you expect their flawless execution as a matter of course. I can’t think of a better compliment to pay to these fine musicians.
By the time you reach the first chorus of “Vertigo” and hear Edge’s call to the Spanish-speaking audience of ¿Donde esta? you’re ready with your answer: Right here, in the beauty of the moment, along with everyone else, no matter where in this world we’re from. And for at least 80 minutes out of your busy life, there’s no place you’d rather be.
Saturday, February 09, 2008
TST is Back... and Nationwide!
Well, not really. That was just a lame homage to classic ZZ Top. I once had a job as a janitor cleaning schools during the summer vacations, and for some reason the "soundtrack" of those days for me is loaded with vintage, before-my-time ZZ Top, from the period when their albums were still being released with Spanish titles: stuff like "Cheap Sunglasses," "I'm Bad (I'm Nationwide)," "I Thank You" and of course, who could forget, "Jesus Just Left Chicago." I'm talking way before the "Sharp Dressed Man," "Gimme All Your Lovin'," "Legs" days.
Whatever. The point is, we ARE back, after at least a months' worth of technical issues, delays, and the usual craziness of life as working, young-children-raising family men.
As you can see, The Secret Thread has received a bit of an upgrade: at least, we hope it's an upgrade. We're still working out the kinks of the new template here, but in general it should be a bit easier to read and more pleasant to the eye.
But the same great content (if you're going to laugh, laugh here!) will continue... coming up soon, Mutt will provide and extended review and offer up some reflections on the spectacle that is U23D (U2's 3D concert film that is currently playing in IMAX theaters across the U.S.). And I'm planning on ringing in with another list, just for the fun of it: my Top 10 Road Novels of all time. So, please keep on stopping by... and enjoy the ride!
Whatever. The point is, we ARE back, after at least a months' worth of technical issues, delays, and the usual craziness of life as working, young-children-raising family men.
As you can see, The Secret Thread has received a bit of an upgrade: at least, we hope it's an upgrade. We're still working out the kinks of the new template here, but in general it should be a bit easier to read and more pleasant to the eye.
But the same great content (if you're going to laugh, laugh here!) will continue... coming up soon, Mutt will provide and extended review and offer up some reflections on the spectacle that is U23D (U2's 3D concert film that is currently playing in IMAX theaters across the U.S.). And I'm planning on ringing in with another list, just for the fun of it: my Top 10 Road Novels of all time. So, please keep on stopping by... and enjoy the ride!
Sunday, January 06, 2008
A (Post-)Christmas Meditation from Hans Urs von Balthasar
Christmas has already whizzed by us and we are all well on our way into the new year, 2008. However, on this Epiphany Sunday, before the season completely vanishes into our individual archives of memory, I wanted to share a very interesting and profound scriptural meditation from the great 20th century Swiss priest and theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar.
Lately I have been richly rewarded by starting off each day reading from his posthumously-collected series of scriptural reflections, You Have Words of Eternal Life. Each short reflection takes a brief phrase directly from scripture -- such as the title phrase -- and goes off from it in fascinating, and very often quite unexpected, directions. These were among the last writings he was working on just before he died, and the sense you get as you read them is of a wise old theologian/priest sharing with you the various and valuable fruits of a lifetime of thinking, praying and studying the scriptures. This experience, I am convinced, is the reason that each meditation seems to provide me with an angle on a familiar passage of scripture I had never considered before. The collection is a wonderful blessing from one of the most important and gifted theologians of our time.
I read this one only a few days ago, but then realized it would work very well as a meditation before/during the Christmas season (which, according to the Church, we are still very much in the midst of, even though the stores and homes have all packed away their decorations and lights for another year!). I thought it would be worth sharing on this blog, and as I do so, I wish everyone a blessed New Year -- one that brings with it new and exciting encounters with Jesus, our Emmanuel ("God with us").
*******
"Are You the One Who is to Come?"
The question that a captive John the Baptist sends to Jesus by way of two of his disciples (Matt. 11:3) is the all-encompassing question of the Old Covenant directed at the New. Drawing together all of Israel's longing, John had expected the eschatological Judge who would also be Israel's Savior. He spent only a short time in Jesus' company (John 4:1-2) -- his arrest caused Jesus to return to Galilee (Mark 1:14) and made it impossible for John to keep track of Jesus' activity. But what he learned of Jesus' doings from his prison did not correspond to Israel's end-times expectations. The arrival of the messianic Kingdom seemed to require a fundamental rearrangement of this world's structures and relationships. Whether the last days could begin in the middle of history itself, without a total upheaval of that history, was the question that all of Israel asked Jesus: "Where is the promise of His coming?... Everything has remained as it was since the beginning of creation." (2 Pet 3:4)
Jesus' reply employed words borrowed from the Old Covenant itself: "the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the good news is proclaimed to the poor." (Is. 35:5; 26:19; 61:1). What Isaiah perhaps had intended as a series of joyous images for the dawn of salvation now become literal reality in Jesus' work. He not only had healed the deaf, blind, lame and lepers but also, just before John's question had arrived, had raised the boy from Naim from the dead (Luke 7:11-17). The metaphorical and eschatological had come to pass in history, including the eschatological resurrection of the dead, which was now occurring within time. All this seemed so modest, so powerless to overturn the world's structures. Yet the phrase "the good news is proclaimed to the poor" was also an Old Testament phrase (Is. 61:1), and it precisely the poor whom Jesus lists first among those who are blessed -- yet they are blessed precisely as the poor, not, as the Old Covenant normally assumed, as having been snatched out of their poverty ("he raises the weak from the dust, and the poor from the ash heap" [Ps. 113:7]). The great transformation of which the Magnificat also sings does not take place sociologically -- the "lowly maid" is not changed into a reigning queen.
The Old Covenant simply must bring its expectation into line with the decree of God that was revealed clearly enough in Isaiah 61:1-2: the Spirit of the Lord has sent the messiah to "proclaim good tidings to the poor, to heal the brokenhearted... to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." And if "liberty" is promised "to the captives" and "redemption to those in shackles," this apparently means something beyond the sort of political development hoped for by the Baptist suffering in his prison. Social and political developments may well follow from the true eschatological event that Jesus constituted, but the order he established dare not be reversed. Had not Yahweh throughout the course of history repeatedly disappointed, indeed, deliberately crushed, his people's earthly expectations and longings?
When Jesus concludes with the warning "happy is he who takes no offense at me" (Matt. 11:6), he addresses the entire Old Covenant in his direct answer to the imprisoned John the Baptist, who needs to tear down some of his "ideological superstructures" in order to uncover the simple meaning of the divine promises. What a withdrawal process Israel has already begun: the Ark of the Covenant taken captive only to be destroyed by fire later along with the entire temple; not even one stone of the rebuilt temple is left standing upon another; the entire holy city lying in rubble. Should not Christians reflect on this object lesson and ask themselves whether the Crusades, the forcible conversion of the Saxons under Charlemagne, the cathedrals, and the Basilica of St. Peter, can be a basis for, even a mere symbol of, "proclaiming the good news to the captives"?
Lately I have been richly rewarded by starting off each day reading from his posthumously-collected series of scriptural reflections, You Have Words of Eternal Life. Each short reflection takes a brief phrase directly from scripture -- such as the title phrase -- and goes off from it in fascinating, and very often quite unexpected, directions. These were among the last writings he was working on just before he died, and the sense you get as you read them is of a wise old theologian/priest sharing with you the various and valuable fruits of a lifetime of thinking, praying and studying the scriptures. This experience, I am convinced, is the reason that each meditation seems to provide me with an angle on a familiar passage of scripture I had never considered before. The collection is a wonderful blessing from one of the most important and gifted theologians of our time.
I read this one only a few days ago, but then realized it would work very well as a meditation before/during the Christmas season (which, according to the Church, we are still very much in the midst of, even though the stores and homes have all packed away their decorations and lights for another year!). I thought it would be worth sharing on this blog, and as I do so, I wish everyone a blessed New Year -- one that brings with it new and exciting encounters with Jesus, our Emmanuel ("God with us").
*******
"Are You the One Who is to Come?"
The question that a captive John the Baptist sends to Jesus by way of two of his disciples (Matt. 11:3) is the all-encompassing question of the Old Covenant directed at the New. Drawing together all of Israel's longing, John had expected the eschatological Judge who would also be Israel's Savior. He spent only a short time in Jesus' company (John 4:1-2) -- his arrest caused Jesus to return to Galilee (Mark 1:14) and made it impossible for John to keep track of Jesus' activity. But what he learned of Jesus' doings from his prison did not correspond to Israel's end-times expectations. The arrival of the messianic Kingdom seemed to require a fundamental rearrangement of this world's structures and relationships. Whether the last days could begin in the middle of history itself, without a total upheaval of that history, was the question that all of Israel asked Jesus: "Where is the promise of His coming?... Everything has remained as it was since the beginning of creation." (2 Pet 3:4)
Jesus' reply employed words borrowed from the Old Covenant itself: "the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the good news is proclaimed to the poor." (Is. 35:5; 26:19; 61:1). What Isaiah perhaps had intended as a series of joyous images for the dawn of salvation now become literal reality in Jesus' work. He not only had healed the deaf, blind, lame and lepers but also, just before John's question had arrived, had raised the boy from Naim from the dead (Luke 7:11-17). The metaphorical and eschatological had come to pass in history, including the eschatological resurrection of the dead, which was now occurring within time. All this seemed so modest, so powerless to overturn the world's structures. Yet the phrase "the good news is proclaimed to the poor" was also an Old Testament phrase (Is. 61:1), and it precisely the poor whom Jesus lists first among those who are blessed -- yet they are blessed precisely as the poor, not, as the Old Covenant normally assumed, as having been snatched out of their poverty ("he raises the weak from the dust, and the poor from the ash heap" [Ps. 113:7]). The great transformation of which the Magnificat also sings does not take place sociologically -- the "lowly maid" is not changed into a reigning queen.
The Old Covenant simply must bring its expectation into line with the decree of God that was revealed clearly enough in Isaiah 61:1-2: the Spirit of the Lord has sent the messiah to "proclaim good tidings to the poor, to heal the brokenhearted... to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." And if "liberty" is promised "to the captives" and "redemption to those in shackles," this apparently means something beyond the sort of political development hoped for by the Baptist suffering in his prison. Social and political developments may well follow from the true eschatological event that Jesus constituted, but the order he established dare not be reversed. Had not Yahweh throughout the course of history repeatedly disappointed, indeed, deliberately crushed, his people's earthly expectations and longings?
When Jesus concludes with the warning "happy is he who takes no offense at me" (Matt. 11:6), he addresses the entire Old Covenant in his direct answer to the imprisoned John the Baptist, who needs to tear down some of his "ideological superstructures" in order to uncover the simple meaning of the divine promises. What a withdrawal process Israel has already begun: the Ark of the Covenant taken captive only to be destroyed by fire later along with the entire temple; not even one stone of the rebuilt temple is left standing upon another; the entire holy city lying in rubble. Should not Christians reflect on this object lesson and ask themselves whether the Crusades, the forcible conversion of the Saxons under Charlemagne, the cathedrals, and the Basilica of St. Peter, can be a basis for, even a mere symbol of, "proclaiming the good news to the captives"?
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
On Writing Short Stories: A Kind of Meditation
Not too long ago (July ’07) I posted on this blog a rant, more or less, decrying the current ‘state’ of the short story in America in a very limited and non-scholarly way. Shortly after that a piece ran in the New York Times Book section by Stephen King in which he provided his own assessment of the form, following on the heels of his stint as the editor of the Best American Short Stories series for 2007. (Read King’s take here if you’re interested: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/books/review/King2-t.html )
I based much (but not all) of my opinion on stories I read in the New Yorker throughout the year, and while I realize that this is only a very small portion of the short fiction published in literary magazines, that magazine is still more or less universally regarded as the gold standard for short fiction. At the time I couldn’t believe that what was showing up in the magazine represented the very best of the short story form. What I’ve read since July in the magazine certainly hasn’t changed my view. In fact, right now I am reading the ‘Winter Fiction Issue’ which features five original short stories, as opposed to the regular output of one per week. I’ve read four of the five stories selected in the issue so far, and even though they’re big names (Juanot Diaz, Anne Enright), the only one of them I liked at all so far was written by Raymond Carver in the early 1980s, reprinted in a different format than the published original. (The story is called ‘Beginners’ in this issue but was originally published in a much smaller version as ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love’.) The three new stories I have read all seemed boring and pointless to me, although written well. Which is my general complaint with the contemporary short story: they’re well written and almost all of them leave me saying, ‘Who the hell cares??’ I have one story left to read in the issue, by Jhumpa Lahiri, but since she won the Pulitzer Prize for a story collection not too long ago, I am cautiously optimistic. We’ll see.
The reason why I bring this up is that whenever I consider my dissatisfaction with the current ‘state’ of the short story, my next thought is something to the effect of, while the form may be ill at the moment, I personally don’t appear to be the cure. In other words, I don’t seem to be much better. I’ve tried to write them for years, but they never seem to be very good. None of my stories have ever been published, and it’s not for lack of trying. Recently I was saying to a friend that I was 0-for-?? in terms of publishing short fiction, and that got me wondering how many stories I had ever attempted to send out for publication, which in turn made me wonder how many short stories I’ve actually written in my writing life. So I conducted a short experiment in my basement, sifting through all my old and new writing notebooks and files, attempting to determine how many stories I have authored. At first I thought “It must be close to 100.’ Not even close. As my list grew slowly, I could tell I was running out of material! Then I thought, ‘Maybe I’ve written 50 though.’ Nope. As it turns out, as best I can tell, I’ve written a total of 33 short stories. (I am only counting finished stories, meaning stories I wrote until they ended, as opposed to the large number I’ve tried and eventually abandoned.) This number includes a certain infamous tale I was once assigned to write for a high school English class concerning an angel that I, for some reason, still own a copy of, and that only Duke would recognize. It is one hell of a bad story, but I still managed to bring it to an end.
In fact, most of my short stories are rather unsatisfying to me, so I guess in my previous ‘rants’ I am proving the adage that those who can’t do become critics. I’ve written a few that I’m reasonably proud of, maybe two or three, but most of my 33 stories fall way short of the original ambition behind them. That seems true all the way up through the most recent story I finished called ‘In The Throes’, which I sent hopefully to three magazines that all promptly rejected it. Although in fairness I thought ‘Throes’ contained some of my best writing to date. Still, no one bought it, literally. So it turns out that I can recognize very well, I think, what I think ails other stories but can’t do a very good job of writing a good one myself. I guess this is nothing new. Yet I feel like I’m slowly improving all the time, even though each new story still seems to fall short. I often wonder when the one story I am writing will finally be ‘the one’ that busts through, but in seventeen years, that moment has still not come.
Now I find myself writing my 34th short story while my novel is on hiatus, owing to a lack of time and resources for the necessary research to continue (which I’d better fix here right quick!). And this one is coming along particularly painfully, especially since I don’t know much about what I am writing about, which is grief – or, it may be more correct to say, that shell-shocked state of mind a person enters into before they are able to grieve. This time around the writing is coming very slowly, almost a paragraph at a sitting, which probably has a lot to do with how little time I get to actually work on it, but it also says something to me about the arduousness of the job. Particularly with short stories I find the writing to be very difficult. To me the only way to write short stories is on an instinctive basis – meaning you start the story just based on your hunch of where the thing should begin, you end it much the same way, you break off certain segments based on your gut, and you write different sequences of it on the basis of what feels right for the story. More than with a longer fiction work (which of course I am no expert at either), to me writing stories feels like a blind operation – I can rarely see exactly where I’m going and I don’t know what obstacles I’m going to hit, even if I know how I want the story to end.
In my new story, for example, I know how I want the story to end ahead of time, but I don’t really know what it ‘means’ or why I think it needs to end there. I just feel like it should. Don’t ask for interpretations. I also included an early dream sequence that has nothing to do with the actual events of the story and seems awfully cryptic and strange, and yet the images in the dream I invented to me are powerful ones and need to stay even though I can’t explain why or what ‘purpose’ the sequence serves. Also, as I alluded to before, I am writing about someone going through something I haven’t personally had much experience with so I don’t really know how the hell the guy in the story would feel or what he would do in the situation. So what gives me the thought that this is a story I can write? I can’t answer that, but I have been writing stories at least for long enough to know that when an idea grips me and I feel like I have something to say about it, I need to try it, and it doesn’t matter whether I am doing so with the authority of experience or not. My job is to tell the story and to do that you have to just put yourself in the mind of someone else, which is inherently impossible, so in that sense there’s no less reason for me to try it than any of the great story writers who have done so with so much more success before me.
Thus, these days I get up and I grind out what I can of the new story and I don’t worry too much about whether or not it will get there. I just try to write the next sentence. When the narrative arc is curving around to the finish, I will know – that much I do have experience with. The process is so nebulous, so organic that it is hard to know what drives one to do it or what purpose it serves. Yet the instinct is there and it is powerful, and with me it only grows with each new completed story or book review or essay, no matter how few people read it and hear whatever it was I was trying to say, no matter how little success it meets in terms of publication or readership or admiration from someone other than its author. There’s something I must want to say on the subject, and I will stick at it until I’ve said it. If nobody hears it it doesn’t seem to matter. It’s a bizarre thing, but to me it also feels like a pure thing, a natural thing. God created natural things one and all, so if each story is a flame and my work is one big fire, God is the Source of the fire. So you might say that just as each individual story has its own author, the Source of the stories has its own Authority, and I am merely acting upon His edict.
I based much (but not all) of my opinion on stories I read in the New Yorker throughout the year, and while I realize that this is only a very small portion of the short fiction published in literary magazines, that magazine is still more or less universally regarded as the gold standard for short fiction. At the time I couldn’t believe that what was showing up in the magazine represented the very best of the short story form. What I’ve read since July in the magazine certainly hasn’t changed my view. In fact, right now I am reading the ‘Winter Fiction Issue’ which features five original short stories, as opposed to the regular output of one per week. I’ve read four of the five stories selected in the issue so far, and even though they’re big names (Juanot Diaz, Anne Enright), the only one of them I liked at all so far was written by Raymond Carver in the early 1980s, reprinted in a different format than the published original. (The story is called ‘Beginners’ in this issue but was originally published in a much smaller version as ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love’.) The three new stories I have read all seemed boring and pointless to me, although written well. Which is my general complaint with the contemporary short story: they’re well written and almost all of them leave me saying, ‘Who the hell cares??’ I have one story left to read in the issue, by Jhumpa Lahiri, but since she won the Pulitzer Prize for a story collection not too long ago, I am cautiously optimistic. We’ll see.
The reason why I bring this up is that whenever I consider my dissatisfaction with the current ‘state’ of the short story, my next thought is something to the effect of, while the form may be ill at the moment, I personally don’t appear to be the cure. In other words, I don’t seem to be much better. I’ve tried to write them for years, but they never seem to be very good. None of my stories have ever been published, and it’s not for lack of trying. Recently I was saying to a friend that I was 0-for-?? in terms of publishing short fiction, and that got me wondering how many stories I had ever attempted to send out for publication, which in turn made me wonder how many short stories I’ve actually written in my writing life. So I conducted a short experiment in my basement, sifting through all my old and new writing notebooks and files, attempting to determine how many stories I have authored. At first I thought “It must be close to 100.’ Not even close. As my list grew slowly, I could tell I was running out of material! Then I thought, ‘Maybe I’ve written 50 though.’ Nope. As it turns out, as best I can tell, I’ve written a total of 33 short stories. (I am only counting finished stories, meaning stories I wrote until they ended, as opposed to the large number I’ve tried and eventually abandoned.) This number includes a certain infamous tale I was once assigned to write for a high school English class concerning an angel that I, for some reason, still own a copy of, and that only Duke would recognize. It is one hell of a bad story, but I still managed to bring it to an end.
In fact, most of my short stories are rather unsatisfying to me, so I guess in my previous ‘rants’ I am proving the adage that those who can’t do become critics. I’ve written a few that I’m reasonably proud of, maybe two or three, but most of my 33 stories fall way short of the original ambition behind them. That seems true all the way up through the most recent story I finished called ‘In The Throes’, which I sent hopefully to three magazines that all promptly rejected it. Although in fairness I thought ‘Throes’ contained some of my best writing to date. Still, no one bought it, literally. So it turns out that I can recognize very well, I think, what I think ails other stories but can’t do a very good job of writing a good one myself. I guess this is nothing new. Yet I feel like I’m slowly improving all the time, even though each new story still seems to fall short. I often wonder when the one story I am writing will finally be ‘the one’ that busts through, but in seventeen years, that moment has still not come.
Now I find myself writing my 34th short story while my novel is on hiatus, owing to a lack of time and resources for the necessary research to continue (which I’d better fix here right quick!). And this one is coming along particularly painfully, especially since I don’t know much about what I am writing about, which is grief – or, it may be more correct to say, that shell-shocked state of mind a person enters into before they are able to grieve. This time around the writing is coming very slowly, almost a paragraph at a sitting, which probably has a lot to do with how little time I get to actually work on it, but it also says something to me about the arduousness of the job. Particularly with short stories I find the writing to be very difficult. To me the only way to write short stories is on an instinctive basis – meaning you start the story just based on your hunch of where the thing should begin, you end it much the same way, you break off certain segments based on your gut, and you write different sequences of it on the basis of what feels right for the story. More than with a longer fiction work (which of course I am no expert at either), to me writing stories feels like a blind operation – I can rarely see exactly where I’m going and I don’t know what obstacles I’m going to hit, even if I know how I want the story to end.
In my new story, for example, I know how I want the story to end ahead of time, but I don’t really know what it ‘means’ or why I think it needs to end there. I just feel like it should. Don’t ask for interpretations. I also included an early dream sequence that has nothing to do with the actual events of the story and seems awfully cryptic and strange, and yet the images in the dream I invented to me are powerful ones and need to stay even though I can’t explain why or what ‘purpose’ the sequence serves. Also, as I alluded to before, I am writing about someone going through something I haven’t personally had much experience with so I don’t really know how the hell the guy in the story would feel or what he would do in the situation. So what gives me the thought that this is a story I can write? I can’t answer that, but I have been writing stories at least for long enough to know that when an idea grips me and I feel like I have something to say about it, I need to try it, and it doesn’t matter whether I am doing so with the authority of experience or not. My job is to tell the story and to do that you have to just put yourself in the mind of someone else, which is inherently impossible, so in that sense there’s no less reason for me to try it than any of the great story writers who have done so with so much more success before me.
Thus, these days I get up and I grind out what I can of the new story and I don’t worry too much about whether or not it will get there. I just try to write the next sentence. When the narrative arc is curving around to the finish, I will know – that much I do have experience with. The process is so nebulous, so organic that it is hard to know what drives one to do it or what purpose it serves. Yet the instinct is there and it is powerful, and with me it only grows with each new completed story or book review or essay, no matter how few people read it and hear whatever it was I was trying to say, no matter how little success it meets in terms of publication or readership or admiration from someone other than its author. There’s something I must want to say on the subject, and I will stick at it until I’ve said it. If nobody hears it it doesn’t seem to matter. It’s a bizarre thing, but to me it also feels like a pure thing, a natural thing. God created natural things one and all, so if each story is a flame and my work is one big fire, God is the Source of the fire. So you might say that just as each individual story has its own author, the Source of the stories has its own Authority, and I am merely acting upon His edict.
Saturday, December 29, 2007
Journal of a "Novel"-Entry 41
The List is Life
The above has nothing to do with the novel I am writing, but that's kind of on hiatus at the moment (see below). Since I know Duke's the only one who's gonna read this anyway, I thought I would make a few quick overdue observations about his Top Ten Books list this year. Notice how drastically different it is from mine, which I always find very interesting about these lists when we post them annually. They really reflect the differences in our reading, while at the same time many of the books on his list could have been books I would have enjoyed as much or nearly as much, and vice versa. I lean heavily on fiction titles, always have; but Duke reads more widely than I do, in poetry, general nonfiction, and religion, so his list frequently reflects those interests. I am interested to some extent in all of those things, and probably should read more of them, but I don't always seem to prioritize them over the fiction I am (at times) irrepressibly interested in checking out. There's one exception for me, which is my annual Spiritual Reading challenge during the 40-day period of Lent, when I generally try to read exclusively religious titles. It's my way of taking time to focus on those concepts and realities, which I think is helpful in some ways. But anyway, I just wanted to comment on how much I can appreciate the diversity of Duke's list, with a poetry collection, two short-story volumes, a 19th century classic, a spiritual classic, a pair of memoirs, a play, and three contemporary novels. Now THAT'S a diverse best-of list. Furthermore, I defy anyone who sees this to find a single other person who, if they would even make a best books of the year list, include a Papal encyclical on that list. Only a Duke Altum list would contain that, which is why they're so enjoyable to check out every year.
Holiday Hiatus
Unfortunately, I haven't been able to make any progress on starting into Chapter V of my novel. After finishing the draft of Chapter IV back on November 6, I thought for sure I would be able to start Chapter V before the end of 2007, but it hasn't happened. I guess you can chalk that up to a lot of things, not the least of which is the holiday madness around Christmas and visiting relatives, which makes getting anything done difficult. But the real problem is that I have a concept of how I want to open up the chapter but don't have a sufficient amount of research information to start writing, and I have not had time to go to a library and try to track down what I need. Unfortunately what I do need is not going to be easy to find so it may take some time. Time to spend at a library doing research is not something I can usually attain unless I do a certain amount of prior planning and make arrangements. Not so easy during this time of year. Not to mention the fact that I'm not really sure how to go about getting what I need in the first place. So I guess it's natural that I might fall behind this time of year but I don't much like it, it gives me concerns about whether I will be able to sustain overall momentum on the project. It occurs to me that I have had concerns of a similar nature before during the writing of this novel, and have been able to overcome them. Overcoming past obstacles doesn't guarantee you will be able to overcome future ones, but it does give you some confidence that you might not have had before. At least I do have a general idea of what I want to do in the chapter, with plenty of open spaces to fill in as well, but filling in those spaces is the least of my concerns, because I know that happens when you get into the actual writing. What I need to worry about for now is finding time to gather information and actually get started on the chapter. But I think it will still be a little while before I can get to it; we're still in the holiday season. In the meantime, I get really antsy if i am not writing at all, so I have taken a couple steps to try to stay active in the middle of this break in the novel action. Hope it doesn't derail me permanently......
Two New Writings
As I mentioned, even when I am having problems in the novel, I don't like to be completely inert when it comes to writing. I like to keep working. This was borne out last year when I was having so much trouble writing Chapter III in the middle of my family's house hunting and move to Pennsylvania. I was really stuck in the middle of the chapter, but I wanted to keep working, so I took some time to write a short story (the only one I wrote last year) called "In the Throes". Now, during this hiatus, I wanted to do the same thing, so the first thing I took on was a short essay on a topic I've been meaning to write on for about 4-5 years, and it's a departure for me. The subject is the Green Bay Packers quarterback Brett Favre, and the essay is called "Sling It: Brett Favre as Literary Inspiration". As I said, I wanted to write a piece on Favre for some time, but I could never find the angle on it that I wanted. I even started several different Favre-related essays but they all fizzled out. This time I ran into a contest run by a magazine called Sport Literate that asked for "Football Essays" and hopes to run a winning piece by the start of the '08 football season. Since the magazine seemed to aspire to bridge the gap between literature and sports (who knew that gap needed to be bridged?), I thought I would take a literary sort of angle on my being a fan of Favre, and the essay is what I came up with. I think it turned out pretty well and that I said most of what I have been wanting to say in writing about this great player, and I plan to ship it in for the contest after this football season is over (how far Favre goes in the post-season may have some bearing on the essay!). Stay tuned here to see what happens with the piece. The odds are long but that never stopped a champion like Favre so I don't see why it should stop me.
The second piece during this break is the one I am working on now - a new short story tentatively titled "I Will Be Out of the Office". I just started working on it and I am not sure if it's going to fly, but we'll see. I have never had any publishing success with stories so I always go into a new story hoping that 'this will be the one'. At the same time I enter into a new story with some trepidation because I don't feel very adept at the form, never seem to be able to keep my stories as short as they probably need to be (I need a kind of Gordon Lish, not that I'm any Ray Carver), and usually feel that they don't quite reach my original ambition. These are the same qualities that keep me trying on stories, though; I feel like I want to stick at it until I get one right. I don't want to say too much now about the one I am working on, because I don't know if it will make it past the sputtering stage, but I can reveal that it is about grief, something that I don't have a lot of first hand experience with. This, in an odd way, is why I wanted to write the story now, since it relates to losing a direct family member. I haven't lost one myself, aside from a grandparent, and in a strange way I kind of feel like for me to write a story on the subject after this inevitably occurs would just be a way for me to channel my own grief, and would end up being a kind of memoir-disguised-as-a-story. It would be therapy, and I don't want to write this particular story that way. Doing it now for me is an exercise in trying to enter into the emotions of someone else, which I think is a valuable enterprise. I can't rely on my own experience because I haven't had it yet. So the literary challenge for me is to make it a believable story in spite of the fact that I haven't experienced it myself yet. That to me is what a fiction writer has to be able to do and I may very well bungle it, but the challenge itself is a motivator to me. We'll see if I get this one done.
The above has nothing to do with the novel I am writing, but that's kind of on hiatus at the moment (see below). Since I know Duke's the only one who's gonna read this anyway, I thought I would make a few quick overdue observations about his Top Ten Books list this year. Notice how drastically different it is from mine, which I always find very interesting about these lists when we post them annually. They really reflect the differences in our reading, while at the same time many of the books on his list could have been books I would have enjoyed as much or nearly as much, and vice versa. I lean heavily on fiction titles, always have; but Duke reads more widely than I do, in poetry, general nonfiction, and religion, so his list frequently reflects those interests. I am interested to some extent in all of those things, and probably should read more of them, but I don't always seem to prioritize them over the fiction I am (at times) irrepressibly interested in checking out. There's one exception for me, which is my annual Spiritual Reading challenge during the 40-day period of Lent, when I generally try to read exclusively religious titles. It's my way of taking time to focus on those concepts and realities, which I think is helpful in some ways. But anyway, I just wanted to comment on how much I can appreciate the diversity of Duke's list, with a poetry collection, two short-story volumes, a 19th century classic, a spiritual classic, a pair of memoirs, a play, and three contemporary novels. Now THAT'S a diverse best-of list. Furthermore, I defy anyone who sees this to find a single other person who, if they would even make a best books of the year list, include a Papal encyclical on that list. Only a Duke Altum list would contain that, which is why they're so enjoyable to check out every year.
Holiday Hiatus
Unfortunately, I haven't been able to make any progress on starting into Chapter V of my novel. After finishing the draft of Chapter IV back on November 6, I thought for sure I would be able to start Chapter V before the end of 2007, but it hasn't happened. I guess you can chalk that up to a lot of things, not the least of which is the holiday madness around Christmas and visiting relatives, which makes getting anything done difficult. But the real problem is that I have a concept of how I want to open up the chapter but don't have a sufficient amount of research information to start writing, and I have not had time to go to a library and try to track down what I need. Unfortunately what I do need is not going to be easy to find so it may take some time. Time to spend at a library doing research is not something I can usually attain unless I do a certain amount of prior planning and make arrangements. Not so easy during this time of year. Not to mention the fact that I'm not really sure how to go about getting what I need in the first place. So I guess it's natural that I might fall behind this time of year but I don't much like it, it gives me concerns about whether I will be able to sustain overall momentum on the project. It occurs to me that I have had concerns of a similar nature before during the writing of this novel, and have been able to overcome them. Overcoming past obstacles doesn't guarantee you will be able to overcome future ones, but it does give you some confidence that you might not have had before. At least I do have a general idea of what I want to do in the chapter, with plenty of open spaces to fill in as well, but filling in those spaces is the least of my concerns, because I know that happens when you get into the actual writing. What I need to worry about for now is finding time to gather information and actually get started on the chapter. But I think it will still be a little while before I can get to it; we're still in the holiday season. In the meantime, I get really antsy if i am not writing at all, so I have taken a couple steps to try to stay active in the middle of this break in the novel action. Hope it doesn't derail me permanently......
Two New Writings
As I mentioned, even when I am having problems in the novel, I don't like to be completely inert when it comes to writing. I like to keep working. This was borne out last year when I was having so much trouble writing Chapter III in the middle of my family's house hunting and move to Pennsylvania. I was really stuck in the middle of the chapter, but I wanted to keep working, so I took some time to write a short story (the only one I wrote last year) called "In the Throes". Now, during this hiatus, I wanted to do the same thing, so the first thing I took on was a short essay on a topic I've been meaning to write on for about 4-5 years, and it's a departure for me. The subject is the Green Bay Packers quarterback Brett Favre, and the essay is called "Sling It: Brett Favre as Literary Inspiration". As I said, I wanted to write a piece on Favre for some time, but I could never find the angle on it that I wanted. I even started several different Favre-related essays but they all fizzled out. This time I ran into a contest run by a magazine called Sport Literate that asked for "Football Essays" and hopes to run a winning piece by the start of the '08 football season. Since the magazine seemed to aspire to bridge the gap between literature and sports (who knew that gap needed to be bridged?), I thought I would take a literary sort of angle on my being a fan of Favre, and the essay is what I came up with. I think it turned out pretty well and that I said most of what I have been wanting to say in writing about this great player, and I plan to ship it in for the contest after this football season is over (how far Favre goes in the post-season may have some bearing on the essay!). Stay tuned here to see what happens with the piece. The odds are long but that never stopped a champion like Favre so I don't see why it should stop me.
The second piece during this break is the one I am working on now - a new short story tentatively titled "I Will Be Out of the Office". I just started working on it and I am not sure if it's going to fly, but we'll see. I have never had any publishing success with stories so I always go into a new story hoping that 'this will be the one'. At the same time I enter into a new story with some trepidation because I don't feel very adept at the form, never seem to be able to keep my stories as short as they probably need to be (I need a kind of Gordon Lish, not that I'm any Ray Carver), and usually feel that they don't quite reach my original ambition. These are the same qualities that keep me trying on stories, though; I feel like I want to stick at it until I get one right. I don't want to say too much now about the one I am working on, because I don't know if it will make it past the sputtering stage, but I can reveal that it is about grief, something that I don't have a lot of first hand experience with. This, in an odd way, is why I wanted to write the story now, since it relates to losing a direct family member. I haven't lost one myself, aside from a grandparent, and in a strange way I kind of feel like for me to write a story on the subject after this inevitably occurs would just be a way for me to channel my own grief, and would end up being a kind of memoir-disguised-as-a-story. It would be therapy, and I don't want to write this particular story that way. Doing it now for me is an exercise in trying to enter into the emotions of someone else, which I think is a valuable enterprise. I can't rely on my own experience because I haven't had it yet. So the literary challenge for me is to make it a believable story in spite of the fact that I haven't experienced it myself yet. That to me is what a fiction writer has to be able to do and I may very well bungle it, but the challenge itself is a motivator to me. We'll see if I get this one done.
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
DUKE ALTUM'S NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2007
Well, here we go again friends... another year has gone by (almost), and I have had the opportunity to read many great and interesting books. And some not so great. But here are the ten that have made the most lasting impact on me this year, in no particular order... and some honorable mentions thrown in as well. Enjoy!
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A Christmas Memory/One Christmas/The Thanksgiving Visitor, Truman Capote - The book in this list that was read the earliest (January 2007) has stuck with me ever since. Each of these exquisitely written memoir pieces is embued with enough innocence, poignancy and sheer beauty to break your heart.
The Road, Cormac McCarthy - So much has already been said about this one that it seems absurd to try and capture it in a smattering of cheap words... an absolutely riveting and deeply haunting tale of good and evil, the end of the world, and the love between a father and son. It's strange that a book so cold and seemingly devoid of hope can feel, by the time you get to end, so uplifting.
In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, Tobias Wolff - This debut collection of stories set mostly in the American Northwest examine the foibles, pitfalls and consequences of human infidelities, both marital and otherwise. But they are written with enough originality, attention to detail, human insight and razor-sharp wit to remind of writers as good as O'Connor and Carver.
Middlemarch, George Eliot - As argued in an earlier post on this blog (see Archives -> November 2007), Eliot's masterpiece of English provincial life is really a book about vocation, and the profound significance and impact seemingly inconsequential lives can have on other lives around them, and on the world as a whole.
The Problem of Pain, C. S. Lewis - The only re-read on this year's list, Lewis' brilliant attempt to answer one of the world's oldest questions -- "Why do we have to suffer?" -- is one of the most lucid, insightful, and ultimately helpful theodicies I've ever read. More than just a philosophical treatise, this book is a manual to help us to live in a profoundly fallen world, even while hoping and and preparing for a greater one. Somehow, it manages to challenge the intellect and rejuvenate the spirit at the same time.
Gould's Book of Fish, Richard Flanagan - By far the most original of all books I read this year (and quite possibly, ever), Flanagan's book-within-a-book conveys the horrors and wonders of a 19th-century Tasmanian penal colony through the strangest of devices: a catalogue of local fish, painted by a lonely prisoner with a colorful and violent past. In the end, this surreal and haunting tale is a powerful treatise about the nature, and the limits, of art -- and the evils men are capable of inflicting upon one another.
A Long Day's Journey Into Night, Eugene O'Neill - There's always one I'm fairly confident I read late in the previous year, but nevertheless want to single out for this year's list because I am unable to forget it. Long Day's Journey is definitely that one this year for me. This soul-shaking drama from the American Nobel Laureate has got to be one of the most devastating portraits of family failure ever written, in any age. Even the stage direction notes gave me goosebumps! Heartbreaking, but brilliant.
The Art of Living, John Gardner - A fascinating, eclectic collection of stories from one of America's most underappreciated writers who profoundly understood the human condition and used his art to wisely plumb its mysterious depths.
The Voice at 3:00 AM, Charles Simic - Has to be at least one poetry collection on the list. This extraordinary collection from 2007's U.S. Poet Laureate not only contains some of the most vivid and interesting poetry I've read in a long time, it also bears my favorite book title of the year. That voice is relaying some pretty strange, but fascinating, things to Simic when he can't sleep, apparently!
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Ron Hansen - Well, I missed the movie version (of course) this year, but I was very glad to have read the book! Hansen's meticulously crafted historical novel is a fascinating character study and morality tale that strips away all sentimentality and explores the reasons for, and the consequences of, the titular murder. Very few novels explore the aftermath of violence as effectively as this one.
BONUS ROUND: Titles that deserve mention and would have made the list if it were longer:
The Greatest American Short Stories (anthology)
Deus Caritas Est, the encyclical on Love by Pope Benedict XVI
A New Selected Poems, Galway Kinnell
The Short Stories of Jack London, Jack London
Billy Budd, Herman Melville
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