Saturday, August 15, 2015

Chapter 20: [read and unread]

There are only a few things that truly terrify me. Drowning is one. I remember as a teenager swimming off the coast of Santa Monica and getting caught in the mildest of rip tides. I’m not the strongest swimmer, though, and the current proved just determined enough to keep me from easily returning to shore. I quickly dispelled a moment’s panic and relied instead on my instinct to reduce all fear to a series of accomplishable tasks, both remembering what to do and how to do it; swimming parallel to the shore I escaped the nagging current and, once in easier waters, returned to the feel of gritted sand under my feet.

My other big fear is my eyes. I once saw an old Japanese horror movie—a genre that there is more subtle than here—possessing a single gratuitously awful scene involving an eye and a needle. (This was long before such moments had become ridiculously common). The scene, wrapped as it was in an odd little love story (I did say the Japanese were more subtle in their horror), was one I could not watch, could not even listen to. I left the room. Even when merely written the thought of damaged eyes haunts me. John Irving (an excellent author whose stories, sadly, have never really captured me) in The World According to Garp had a child lose any eye to a Volvo’s stick shift. I understood then and understand now the need for the novel’s tragic moment, but why an eye?
And there are few things that I truly love. I truly love my wife and children, and I’m not even adding an “of course” after that clause, since such love shouldn’t be assumed or taken for granted. I love music, both the listening to and the playing of, and when I’m traveling it saddens me that days go by where I can’t pick up a guitar, or lay fingers to piano keys or flute.
And I love reading. But that you know.
*****
Aging is an odd process, one that proceeds in humans much like it does in automobiles. The early years are great: everything handles perfectly, things stop and start when they should, everything accelerates smoothly.  Basic nutrition and exercise keep things running with little thought. After some years, though, maintenance requires a more attentive ear, a more concentrated eye. Small parts start to weaken. At 57, that’s about where I am—there’s no need to worry about anything, but awareness has climbed. A shoulder aches, a knee twinges. It’s a little harder to get in and out of a car. A three-hour flight in coach pins-and-needles the legs. But it’s no big deal.
Unless it’s the eyes.
I’ve worn glasses since I was a kid; at age twelve the chalkboard (that’s what they were then, slate with white marks and erasure’s shadows) seemed slightly further away than it should have been and the words on it bore fuzzed edges. Moving to the front of the class wasn’t an option; seats were assigned and decisions irrevocable. Glasses were the answer, and not a surprise—my mother had worn thickened lenses for many years and she recognized the need right away. Since then new prescriptions have followed every few years; now I own progressive trifocals which serve me well.
(In case you’re wondering, by the way, why I never considered Lasik surgery—or even contact lenses—I refer you back to paragraph two, the one that includes the reference to a particular horror movie.)
Recently it became clear (or unclear, to be specific) that the need for yet another new prescription has come round. It’s been four years plus since the last cycle—a span longer than normal, I admit, but a span sans vision coverage on my insurance plan—and street signs were starting to wander a bit in my field of vision. So I set up an appointment.
Normally such visits are boringly routine.  This one wasn’t.  It seems there’s something wrong with one of my eyes. Or maybe both.
I don’t know exactly what it is, nor exactly what it means. The term used was corneal dystrophy which (thanks to Google) I now know something about—just enough to feed my fears. I have an appointment scheduled with a specialist, and it’s entirely possible that the initial diagnosis is wrong. But the numbers (everything is measured and numbered these days, even eyes) aren’t what they should be, and they’ve been checked twice. My new prescription still leaves the left eye’s vision fuzzy, and no amount of Which is better? One or two? Two or Three? manages to clear it up.
I’m a little freaked.
*****
As a writer, I suffer from imagination, and right now the condition hangs above me like Poe’s pendulum. I’m dwelling too heavily on what it would be like to cross one of my greatest fears with one of my greatest passions: what it would be like to lose literal clarity—the ability to read?  I know there are many options (should it come to that), but I have for so long merely assumed this simple and pleasant activity.  I read for pleasure every single day of my life. I grab a book with my morning coffee; I break out an essay over a lunchtime salad; when I travel I read over dinner and in airplane terminals and in the skies. I can’t imagine reading becoming difficult, unpleasant, uncomfortable.
*****
I have just a few books left on this list; it’s been a while since I’ve written anything, but the reading has continued unceasing. There have been more and more non-Pulitzered books on my nightstand and in my suitcase (Doctor Who novels, it turns out, last about the length of a non-stop flight from New Hampshire to Florida), but the end is in sight.
What an ironic phrase, don’t you think?
The end is in sight.
It better not be.
 
 
Read since last post:
  • The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz, 2008
  • March, Geraldine Brooks, 2006
  • The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon, 2001
  • The Known World, Edward P. Jones, 2004
  • Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry, 1986
  • The Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever, 1979
  • Andersonville, MacKinlay Kantor, 1956
  • Angle of Repose, Wallace Stegner, 1972 
Currently Reading:
  • All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr, 2015
Count: 85 read; 3 to go
 

Tuesday, April 14, 2015

Chapter 19: Racism Unchanged

This morning, cup of coffee in hand and enjoying an open window’s breeze for the first time since last fall, I finished up the last few chapters of The Store, T.S. Stribling’s 1933 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. The book (the second in a trilogy) takes place in Alabama two decades after the Civil War, and centers on a middle-aged protagonist named Miltiades Vaiden. Vaiden is a man out of time; prior to the war he was a respected and wealthy plantation owner. Known as a fair man, he treated his slaves well.
 
He treated his slaves well.
 
Vaiden isn’t a particularly good man, come post-reconstruction, though not a particularly bad one, either. He has a certain insular honor and suffers from his many losses; post-conflict he finds himself relatively poor, married to a woman he doesn’t really love or admire, and generally wistful about the past. He misses the approbation he used to have, back in the days when he led the local chapter of the Klan.
 
When he led the local chapter of the Klan.
 
The plot of the novel revolves largely around Vaiden’s attempts to recover an old debt, to rekindle an old romance, and to adjust to a world changing under reconstruction—particularly with regard to the ways in which the white population suffers the reality of a negro population just beginning to comprehend its own freedom. The Alabama whites answer in their time-worn way.
 
Suffers the reality of a negro population.
 
***
Across the scores of Pulitzer winners there are many that touch upon war, and quite a few of those address the Civil War and post-Civil War eras. Andersonville, Gone with the Wind, and The Killer Angels are three of the most widely read, and all include—as they must—accurate renderings of the time’s racial attitudes. But there has always seemed a clear delineation between the depiction of racism as presented by the author in service of a story, and the sense that the author himself (or herself) was comfortably racist. Stribling strikes me as residing in the latter class, as when he casually has Vaiden remark how he intends to “jew down” the price of some goods he wishes to buy or, as in this example taken from near the novel’s end, when an octoroon (described in the book as a “white negro”) presses a legal point against Vaiden, something never before attempted:
A drunken cry floated through the open window.
“Lemme git to that black bastard, I’ll show him!” More controlled voices interposed, “Let him alone! Let him in! Time enough when he comes out again!”
There was laughter from below. It was on the whole a fairly good-natured crowd.
The crowd gets him eventually, and in the end he hangs from a tree. That fairly good-natured crowd.
***
The novel made me decidedly uncomfortable, and not only for the obvious reasons.
It’s easy to argue that such books and their authors are merely of their times. Stribling, after all, was born in 1881 and grew up in Alabama (later moving to Tennessee). His own family could have been the Vaidens, and there are certainly characters (including the young lawyer, Sandusky, who stirs up much of the plot’s conflicts) modeled on people Stribling knew. Nevertheless, reading the words results in a certain distaste.
It’s that “distaste” that bothers me today, that sense that we are somehow better, that we’ve grown beyond the world that Stribling unfortunately limns so well.
We’re not better. Racism remains essentially unchanged.
***
Just a little more than a week ago an African-American man, Walter Scott, was shot to death while running away from a North Charleston police officer named Michael Slager. Video clearly shows the salient points; Scott was in no way a threat to Slager, who shot the fleeing man in the back. Slager, justifiably, has been charged with murder.
The story had legs—as do all the numerous other stories of white officers killing African-Americans that seem today in constant eruption. Among the many stories cast across the 24-hour news cycle, one in particular caught my attention, this one just a couple of days ago on Good Morning America. The brief piece included the particulars of the incident (what we used to call the “facts”), but then went on to speculation, the modern media drug of choice.
We found out, for example, that Scott was well behind in his child support payments and may have been running to avoid arrest and jail. We also heard the news reporter’s expressed curiosity at the passenger in Scott’s vehicle, providing us with just the smallest of intonational hints that something unknown could very well mean something suspicious. No conclusions were reached, of course; like a faulty boomerang the ideas were just thrown out there, never to return.
And then the piece ended, leaving us not with final thoughts about the shooting, but final thoughts about what might have precipitated Scott’s flight, a different story altogether, and one implying that, perhaps, if he hadn’t run, he would still be alive. That it might be, just a little bit, his fault.
As if anything might justify an armed police officer shooting someone in the back.
The story should have ended with the facts. Shot in the back. No excuse. End of report.
But it didn’t.
It was at that moment when I realized there is essentially no difference between the post-Civil War racism depicted in The Store, and the post-modern racism depicted on Good Morning America. In both cases the stories go on a beat too long, a beat designed to remind us that when an African-American—or a black, or a negro, or a nigger—does something whites don’t like, then somehow he shares responsibility for his own downfall. His own assassination. His own lynching.
Racism remains, in very fundamental ways, unchanged from Stribling’s time. We just pretend more these days.
 
Read since last post:
  • Humboldt's Gift, Saul Bellow (1976)
  • One of Ours, Willa Cather (1923)
  • Arrowsmith, Sinclair Lewis (1926)
  • Early Autumn, Louis Bromfield (1927)
  • The Store, T. S. Stribling, (1933)
  • Lamb in His Bosom, Caroline Miller (1934)
  • Empire Falls, Richard Russo (2002)
  • The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters, Robert Lewis Taylor (1959)
Currently reading:
  • The Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever (1979)
  • Honey in the Horn, Harold L. Davis (1936)
Count: 77 read, 10 to go

Monday, February 16, 2015

Chapter 18: The Pulitzer Praises (Movie Edition), in Which I Generally Prefer the Book, Prove Myself Once Again Overly Pedantic, and Still Manage to Include a Reference to "Lydia the Tattooed Lady"

First time visiting? Start by finding out why I blame Gillian Flynn, then follow the Chapter order in the Archive list on the right.
 
In celebration of the upcoming Oscars I’m devoting this current chapter not to what I’ve been reading, but to what I’ve been watching 
I’m rather fond of movies both old and new (as long as they don’t have mooning vampires in them, or Nicolas Cage), and I admit to enjoying both physics-defying special effects and grainy black-and-whites; I can watch Orson Welles whisper the word “Rosebud” or Groucho Marx belting out the chorus of “Lydia, the Tattooed Lady” just as easily as I can watch Loki go head to head with The Avengers.
The older movies used to be tougher to find, but not so anymore. This is largely thanks to Turner Classic Movies and the marvelous technology that is the DVR. About once a week I check the TCM listings and grab anything that falls into one of two categories: old movies I love and want to see over and over again (with yuletide’s The Bishop’s Wife topping that list), or old movies I feel I should see because they’re acknowledged classics (like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis).
I’ve also fallen into the habit of grabbing any movie based on a book I’ve read. Just recently, for example, I came across Zazie dans le Metro, a French film based on a wonderful book by Oulipo member Raymond Queneau. I’ve been looking for it for years. Turner doesn’t disappoint, even if he does require patience.
(My wife, by the way, has come to refer to this movie as “Sassy Dancing”; that’s now the movie’s unofficial title. At least in our home.)
What does any of this have to do with my Pulitzer mission? Since Hollywood loves to coat-tail literary success, quite a few Pulitzer Prize winners have made the leap to the screen over the years, and of those quite a few, quite a few circulate semi-regularly on TCM. In recent months I’ve seen: The Magnificent Ambersons, The Age of Innocence, The Good Earth, Gone with the Wind, A Bell for Adano, The Way West, The Caine Mutiny, All the King’s Men, The Reivers, and Advise and Consent.
I have The Old Man and the Sea (with Spencer Tracy) in queue, and am still keeping an eye out for South Pacific and The Executioner’s Song.
In much the same way that I’d already read several Pulitzer winners prior to this obsession’s onset, I’ve also seen a few of the screen versions as well, including: The Grapes of Wrath, The Yearling, The Shipping News, A Thousand Acres, Breathing Lessons, Beloved, The Color Purple, The Hours, Lonesome Dove (the TV mini-series), To Kill a Mockingbird, and the very recent Olive Kitteridge, a wonderful two-part mini-series on HBO starring the always-brilliant Frances McDormand.
I’ve come to the conclusion that most adaptations—particularly those squeezed into two hours or less—can’t possibly do justice to a complex novel. In fact, it would be fair to say that nothing ruins a good book like a bad movie.
And there are some real clunkers on the list. The Way West, for example, wastes the talents of Kirk Douglas, Richard Widmark, and Robert Mitchum by turning a story that should have been about pioneers overcoming incredible odds with resolve and fortitude, into one that’s basically a testosterone contest. The only reason to watch it at all is to see a pre-Flying Nun Sally Field over-acting as a teenage tart. A Bell for Adano also falls short on film. The movie loses all of the humor and pathos of the book, replacing cunning and wit with badly directed bravado. The titular bell becomes less a symbol and more of a punch line, and nary a nodule of the book’s satire made it onto celluloid.
Perhaps it’s merely logical that nothing ruins a good book like a bad movie, but what’s surprising is to find that nothing ruins a good book like a good movie, too.
There are some truly good movies on this list. Gone with the Wind and All the King’s Men both took home best-picture Oscars, yet I found them both noticeably flat when watched within weeks of reading the novels on which they are based. Both are book-faithful in plot, but still seem disjointed and forced. Even GWTW, at well over three hours, seemed rushed, and I couldn’t help noticing the changes (subtle as they were), and the differences between actor’s interpretations and the characters as written.  
Some movies are simply ground down by time. The Good Earth, a best picture nominee, was a wonderful movie but isn’t anymore, a victim now of its time’s institutionalized racism; though beautifully filmed, acted, and directed, I simply couldn’t get past Luise Rainer and Paul Muni as the ostensibly Chinese leads (despite Rainer’s Oscar-winning turn).
Perhaps any viewing damages the text in subtle ways; the imagination, fervid when reading, disappears before the moving image. One solution would be to see the movie before reading the book; I experienced The Hours that way, and while I enjoyed both words and visuals a great deal, I couldn’t quite get the image of Nicole Kidman’s Woolfian prosthetic out of my mind. A minor distraction, but distraction nonetheless.
Another solution would be to read the book first, but then allow substantial time to pass, waiting as the author’s plot turns to grey in memory’s fog, replaced instead by a strengthened sense of the novel’s themes and emotions, thus preventing the distraction of minor differences, compressions, or character shifts.
Or perhaps (and I’m only thinking this now as I scribe), I should simply attempt less pretension, and just enjoy what there is to enjoy. 
Some knots are Gordian for a reason: we experience what we experience in whatever order, and are left to feel what we feel accordingly. What if, as a child, I had read Peter Pan before watching Mary Martin strung above a narrow stage? Or The Wizard of Oz without knowing Bert Lahr’s not-quite-fearsome bluster? I’ve enjoyed both forms since, and imagine I can do so again with any of these movie/book combinations. Perhaps what makes me so critical is neither book nor movie, but the project itself, the obsessive knot in which I’ve tied them.
At least two of these movies—and more than two of these books—I’ve finished only because of the project; the project is unto itself (especially now that it’s more than three-quarters complete) and, I think, spoiling some of what could have been joy.
On the other hand, would I have ever watched The Caine Mutiny without it? Or read A Bell for Adano? Assuredly not, and both offered time well spent. And so it’s for me to find the balance, looking for the benefit in what I might not always, technically, enjoy, but what I still feel enjoined to do. I can’t envision, certainly, stopping…..

Read since last post:
  • The Hours, Michael Cunningham (1999)
  • The Executioner’s Song, Norman Mailer (1980)
  • A Journey in the Dark, Martin Flavin (1944)
  • So Big, Edna Ferber (1925)
  • The Able McLaughlins (1924)
Currently reading: 
  • The Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever (1979)
  • Honey in the Horn, Harold L. Davis (1936)
  • Humboldt’s Gift, Saul Bellow (1976)
Count: 69 read, 18 to go