Thursday Music Review: Great music and then musings on greatness.

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I went to see a band tonight down at a local pub, The Dark Horse, known more for soccer clubs and televised soccer games than for music. But some friends of mine are in this band and I had to see them.

The Dark Horse Pub, Philadelphia, PA

I have played with two of the members before in an Irish band, but this new band, The Flashbacks, is just that …a flashback to several decades earlier.  The band started out as a Beatles cover band, but then expanded with a lot of Steely Dan, Yardbirds, Stones, Kinks, before settling into CSNY, Beach Boys, the Dead, Eagles, etc. (They tout themselves as the second British Invasion, but they cover a fair amount of  American bands as well.)

And the reason they can cover this music is that they are DAMN GOOD!  The harmonies are precise–three-part most of the time–and the musicianship is impeccable.  They are seasoned players who have, for the most part, known each other for a very long time and they play to each others’ strengths and build on it. The youngest member–Joe Manning–is just a pup compared to the others, (he wasn’t born when these guys first started playing together) but he is one of those wunderkinder who can play anything and play it with perfect beauty, wit and definition. If he had been alive forty-five years ago, they would have called him a god.

And so this got me to thinking….

There are an awful lot of very talented people out there. I could go see scores of really talented bands or individuals every night of the week in my city alone.  Multiply that by every other city, burg, town. How many great musicians are there in Dublin? Edinburgh? Berlin? London? Madrid? Cairo?  Innumerable.

I know very talented artists, amazing writers, magical poets, extraordinary designers who day in and day out work at their craft (or because of the ways of the world, work at their “day-job” and then work at their craft) and create wonderful pieces. I am sure you know similar people in your parts of the world. What separates these artists from those who’ve become household names?

Luck, certainly plays a role, but a very minimum one.  Being at the right place at the right time, meeting someone who can truly help, etc. are all fortunate but are not the thing that separates the very good from the great.  And mere technique is not sufficient–there are thousands of technically gifted people.

I believe it is focus, focus on one’s calling at the expense of all else.

Picasso and Bardot. How great is that?
re-posted from http://weekendspast.com

I remember having a discussion with my father once. He was bemoaning the way that Picasso treated women, discarding them indiscriminately whenever it suited him. I argued that it was a symptom of his genius. (He challenged my assumption that Picasso was a genius.)  Genius, I said, uses everything it comes across. There is nothing else that matters but his or her art, his or her genius–other people and other people’s emotions included.

The conversation came up again this week, when someone remarked on seeing the television movie Hemingway and Gellhorn on what an unlikeable cad Hemingway actually was.  Again, it is all ego wrapped around his art…or maybe the opposite, all his art is wrapped around his ego.

The attitude can be summed up in the clichéd saying “It’s his (her) world, we’re just living in it.”

Hemingway and Gellhorn in Sun Valley, Idaho.

Who else has stepped on everyone to further their art–or in the furtherance of their art?  We could cite both Shelley and Byron, who stepped on and used everyone in their belief in their own genius and the entitlements it should deserve.

But this is not only in the arts.  Steve Jobs may have been a genius but he was hardly a likeable person. And Bobby Fischer, arguably the greatest chess player ever, became more than simply an egocentric genius. He became a misanthropic, hate monger.

Mozart–a man who could create entire operas in his head without touching an instrument–was certainly egocentric, almost to an infantile degree.

So what about all your acquaintances who are truly talented, gifted people? Is it that they are decent human beings whose company you enjoy, whose interest in you and others around them is obvious, that keeps them from reaching the pantheon of genius.

And would you have it any other way?  I know I wouldn’t!  I too much enjoy the people who are creating wonderful, beautiful things–like the middle-aged Flashbacks at The Dark Horse pub–and who are still wonderful human beings, interested in the world and the people around them.

The etymology of the word “amateur” comes from the word Latin word “amat” –to love. Whether one is paid or nor, celebrated or not, it is the love of doing, making, performing something that is good and beautiful that makes for a better world.

I’ll go see the Flashbacks, the next time they play!

Tuesday Book Review: Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon

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I read Wonder Boys last week.  I had read it previously, at least twenty years ago, and, boy, had I misremembered it.  As a younger man, I found inspiration in the “wunderkind” writing student and was fascinated by the famous writing teacher who is famously blocked with his novel (also called Wonderboys) that is going on past 2600 pages long.  This time around I did not have the same reactions.

Part of the problem is also that I could not get the film adaptation out of my head– a film I had seen in the long interim between readings.  In the film, the famous writing teacher is played by Michael Douglas, his cynical, jaded literary agent by Robert Downey, Jr., and the fabulous writing student by Tobey Maguire.  And while I remember enjoying the movie greatly–and understand why marquee actors are used–I think  it was terribly miscast.

Grady Tripp is the dissolute writing teacher.  He smokes way too much dope, he is cavalier in his relationships, and he is always looking out to score. In the novel, he is over-large, a big hulking bear of a man.  In one scene, when he is spiraling into what might be a catastrophic relationship with a young student who rents a room in his basement, he notices his reflection in the mirror. He sees a middle-aged, bearish man slumped down over this young college girl as they slow dance together. It is a moment of self-awareness–aided by a large quantity of pills, dope, and alcohol enhanced by pounding adrenelain after a slapstick night of antics. The man he sees in the mirror no way is the stylish professor played by Michael Douglas.

The young writing student is a-social and painfully awkward which Tobey Maguire captures but he is not nearly dark enough. In the novel, James Leer is very dark, in a long overcoat of indeterminate material and age.  And Robert Downey Jr. did not match my vision either. I know that most people quibble with the casting of books they’ve read when they are made into movies.  And this is my quibble: the cast is too handsome.

But enough about the movie…

The novel starts out on a rollicking tear. On the night that the novel begins Grady Tripp finds a note from his wife saying she has left him, he picks up his agent and the transvestite he met on the plane, his mistress–Chancellor of the school and wife of his Department Chairman–tells him she is pregnant, he gets bit in the leg by a dog, and he is traveling around with a tuba, a dead dog, the coat Marilyn Monroe wore at her wedding to Joe DiMaggio and a student who may or may not be suicidal…or truthful.  It reminded me of John Irving at his best.

An academic farce, there are set scenes of college gatherings and festival lectures. There are Tripp’s musings on the requirements of good writing, his praise for James Leer’s young but promising work, and insights into a truly blocked artist–one who comes to no longer believe in the work he is doing.

The female characters, his wife, his mistress, the student living in his house, however, are very shallow–cardboard figures created for Tripp to act or react against.

Michael Chabon

That the novel famously echoes Chabon’s early writing life makes reading it this much later in his career offer its own rewards.  Like James Lear, the young student, Chabon received a book contract for The Mysteries of Pittsburgh when his writing professor–unknown to Chabon–passed the manuscript on to his own literary agent.  And like Grady Tripp, Chabon worked years on a follow-up novel–a novel that grew enormously large before he himself destroyed it.

Since The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonderboys, Chabon has continued to win great praise and loyal readership.  His novel, The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay won the Pulitizer Prize for fiction in 2000 and his 2007 novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union won the Hugo, Nebula, Sidewise and Ignotus awards. (An aside–I was in Quebec city one week and needed something to read. There was primarily only French book stores. In one that I stepped into there was a small rack with about a dozen books written in English. It was there that I bought the Yiddish Policemen’s Union.)

And while his first novel–The Mysteries of Pittsburgh–and the novels following Wonderboys deal directly with Jewishness and Judaism, it is a very minor theme in Wonderboys.  There are touches of it when Tripp and James go visit his Korean ex-wife for Passover Seder and bumps against it when James’ own history is revealed, but it is not forefront in the novel.

Instead this is very much a novel about writing–or not writing as is Tripp’s case.  It is academic because it takes place on a university campus and deals with chancellors and professors and students and chairmen, but there is no scenes within a classroom. It tries to be a novel about love and contentment–but Tripp’s long road there, it is his third wife that leaves him and his tentative gestures towards his pregnant mistress are filled with doubt and fear.

All in all, though, Wonderboys is a wonderful read.  The beginning is peerless–quick moving, deft character sketches, and hilarious plotting. If the second-half seems to suffer from a bit of a hangover, it is because nothing could keep up with the original momentum. The novel must switch rhythms to mirror Grady Tripp’s more thoughtful musings, fears, and discoveries.

Do read Wonderboys or, if you want, rent the film.  Both are very enjoyable.  Just don’t do both too close together. And when you finish with those give Chabon’s other titles a try. Any of them are well worth the time spent.

Sunday Movie Review: Headhunters

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It used to be when I thought of Scandinavia, I thought of crystal-blue fjords, aromatic forests, statuesque blondes, and a palatable wholesomeness.

That’s before Stieg Larson gave us his girl with the dragon tattoo, and Jo Nesbø, his various riffs on Scandinavian violence.  Now when I think of Scandinavian, it seems a place of outrageous torture, imaginative violence, and not a little repressed fascism.

Headhunters (Hodejegerne) is Mortin Tyldum’s adaptation of Jo Nesbø’s slick, stylish novel of a professional headhunter who is also a major art-thief.

Roger Brown (played by Aksel Hennie who has a striking resemblance to a young Christopher Walken) is a very successful headhunter–he brings talent to very powerful and influential corporations.  In interviewing potential clients, he discovers their routine, the artworks they own, and whether they have a dog.  In this way, he is able to case his next heist in the luxury of his offices. Roger tells us that he is only 1.6 meters tall (about 5’3″) and that he has to “compensate.”  He does this by buying his stunningly beautiful wife (Synnøve Macody Lund ) everything he thinks she desires: A house right out of the glossiest of architectural magazines, expensive and rare jewelry, an art gallery to run.  He can afford none of this–which is why he must steal art, and even that income is proving to be too little.

We begin by seeing him steal a lithograph by Munch.  (Is it just me or is Munch the most stolen artist of our time?  I don’t know how many versions of The Scream have been stolen in the past thirty years.)  Anyway, the print that he steals is called “The Broach” but it looked very much like one of Munch’s Madonna paintings.

Munch’s lithograph “Madonna”

But even the Munch is not enough to silence Roger’s creditors, so he has to go after a really big score–a long lost Rubens that is in the apartment of a man who he is recruiting for a major position.  In the interview, we learn that the man, Clas Greve, (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) is a former mercenary, a world expert at tracking people and deposing of them–aha, the plot is setting itself up. He is also ruthlessly ambitious.  We also soon learn that he is sleeping with Roger’s wife.

I will not spoil how it all plays out except to say that there is an enormous amount of bloodletting and creative violence. We move from Roger’s sleek house to Appalachian-like cabins, where the patina of civilization has been long ripped off.

Headhunters is very taut, fast moving, and exciting.  It works very well as a slick thriller, a clever heist movie, with surprising twists and tense, rapid moments.  It also aspires, it seems, to be a good-old-fashion “slasher movie.”  This is where it fails.  The blood is overdone.

And along with trying to be a heist movie, a thriller, a slasher-movie, it also makes periodic stabs at being comedic.  There are very fat twin cops protecting Roger’s hospital room who bungle everything–although their very large size might be what saves Roger’s life.  There is a nonsensical bit with a Russian prostitute and Roger’s partner in crime (which has to be introduced for a technical reason, but it is mostly nonsensical and more irrelevant than essential.)  Heist, thriller, slasher, comedy–perhaps Tyldum is trying to juggle too many balls at once.

In truth, however, Headhunters is a very good way to spend an hour and forty minutes.  Fast-paced, handsome, and clever, if it does nothing else, it is sure to drive more people to reading Jo Nesbø.  And that’s a good thing.

Check out the trailer below:

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I thought this was an interesting post. She seems an intelligent and thoughtful writer, and I am going to try to track down her book.

phdincreativewriting's avatarph.d. in creative writing

As writers, we live double lives: lived once in the world of others, and again, in the quiet of our own minds. It takes a certain amount of will and courage to leave with regularity the circle of humanity in order to enact a kind of theft, which is one aspect of what the writing life seems to be.

Anne Germanacos is the author of the short story collection In the Time of Girls (BOA Editions). Born in San Francisco, she has lived in Greece for over thirty years. Together with her husband, Nick Germanacos, she ran the Ithaka Cultural Studies Program on the islands of Kalymnos and Crete, and taught writing, literature, and Modern Greek. She holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her work has appeared in over eighty literary reviews and anthologies, including Dzanc’s Best of the Web 2009. She and her husband have four…

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Dark Sisters: Polygamy, Broken Women and Song

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I am going to try to write this without disparaging any religion. (Although I maintain my right to think that certain things are more than ridiculous. This is America, though, and one can usually worship however one pleases.) I am tolerant of most things as long as no one is hurt  And that is the litmus test that this particular sect fails. A sect that still believes in polygamy, in “perfect obedience” from wives, in children brought to marriage as they reach puberty–this is wrong-minded, de-humanizing and abusive.

I went to an opera Friday night–a friend’s niece was in a starring role. The opera was entitled Dark Sisters and dealt with a fictional raid on a polygamist ranch by government officials.  The raid closely paralleled similar raids that took place in the late 20th-century in southwest United States.

Written by Nico Muhly and Steven Karam, Dark Sisters opens with five wives mourning their children who have been taken from the ranch by the government. (Four hundred plus children have been removed.) The Father–the husband of these women and a supposed Prophet of God–tells them they must not mourn. They must “keep sweet.”  One of the wives, Eliza, bristles under her husband’s commands, worries for her children, and begins to doubt the rightness of their religion.

Another wife, Ruth,  is teetering on the edge of sanity. Her two young boys have died and Father has forbidden her to mourn. It is God’s will he explains. He also refused to allow her to seek medical care for the second son. (There is a hint that male children are unwanted and often put out of the compound. Sons are not breeders like the girl children and often can grow into rivals for the patriarchs.)

When Father goes out into the desert to pray, Eliza tries to make the other women realize what has happened. They refuse to believe her–although they almost come to her side–and see her as an apostate, a tool of the devil. For them the abuse, the sadness, the pain is the price they must pay in order to gain their heavenly reward where–significantly enough–they speak of joining their mothers and grandmothers, women who for generations have been part of this structure.

Eliza’s determination is hardened completely when she discovers that Father has arranged for the marriage of her fifteen year old daughter, Lucinda. She vows to speak the truth.

The second act begins with a news-magazine show covering the government’s raid on the ranch and interviewing the five wives.  The wives all parrot the beliefs of Father and their religion, proclaiming they are more free than the women in the real world, which they have never seen but only heard about from Father.  Only Eliza and Ruth dissent.  Eliza tries to speak her truth while Ruth’s testimony shows how dangerously fragile her psyche is becoming.

When the Supreme Court decides that the children must be returned to the ranch, life goes back to “normal” except for Eliza who has left.

Ruth decides-if that’s the right word in her distraught state–that she has had enough.  She climbs the mountain and throws herself off the cliff. (Eliza had hidden herself on the very same mountain as a girl on her wedding day before being found)

The last scene is Ruth’s funeral. Father and his five wives–he has replaced Eliza with a new favorite, her fifteen year old daughter–surround the grave. As they mouth their pieties, Eliza appears in modern but modest dress. She tries to convince them all of the truth of their imprisonment, but her arguments fall flat.

At last even her daughter,  whom she has tried so hard to liberate, turns against her. Taking Father’s hand, the young girl leaves her mother alone at the grave of the dead Ruth.

I know little about opera, and nothing about opera in English.  The story was riveting.  The set designs, the video pieces, the special effects were mesmerizing. And the music was beautiful and provocative.  I was not impressed with the lyrics, however. Maybe hearing an opera in English–instead of in French or in Italian or in German–takes something away from the magic and romance for a native-English speaker.  But many of the lyrics–while advancing the story–seemed artless. Commonplace. Perhaps it is simply the language.

Nevertheless, Darkest Sisters is an important piece.  For some reason, recent years have seen a surge of interest in polygamy.  There is the HBO series Big Love on television about a man and his wives and a reality-show Sister Wives that deals with a man and his four wives and combined children. Both shows deal with the difficulties of living in such large extended families, but neither really touches on the underside.

Dark Sisters does.  This is not a work debating the rightness or wrongness of government intrusion into private lives. That is not the focus of this piece.  Perhaps that is the subject for another piece. Dark Sisters focuses on a religious system where women are completely subservient, completely powerless, and –to my mind–completely brainwashed.

I don’t think anyone’s god should condone that.

Sarah Bones: Photographing the Other Side

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I have a friend, Sarah Bones, who is an award-winning photographer.

Sarah takes photographs for NGOs in some of the most devastated parts of the world–the other side of what we know. She has photographed the wreckage of the great tsunami in India from a few years back, a refugee camp in Tanzania, the horrors of Sierra Leone and Rwanda.

Here’s the biography from her web site:

Sarah S. Bones saved for her first 35mm camera at age 13, in 1969. She immediately hitchhiked into Philadelphia so that she could photograph the lives and circumstances of people living on the street. As a professional photographer, her passion and courage in documenting people in need continued and has carried her to Africa, across Asia, Guatemala, Cuba and locally, into prisons, homeless shelters and the intensity of political campaigns. She uses her camera and vision to tell the stories of men, women, and children around the world who are voiceless and too often ignored by the popular media.

Sarah is a self-taught, award winning photographer based outside of Philadelphia who works in both digital and film. Her photographs have been exhibited both nationally and internationally. When not on an assignment she has a successful freelance business in the Philadelphia area.

Recently she mounted an exhibit in Malvern, PA.  It is a small show with maybe thirty or forty prints detailing life in the slums of Dhaka, Bangladesh.

In this particular show, the photographs focus on the birthing center in the busy Karail slum in Dhaka, Bangladesh. In her notes to the photographs, she mentions that “Bangladesh is on track to meet the 2015 deadline for U.N. Millennium Development Goal 5 (50 percent reduction in maternal deaths).” It is an extraordinary program that tries to save mothers who give birth in some of the most primitive conditions.

Those photographs which are not focused on the birthing center looks at Dhaka itself. Dhaka has a small industry of dismantling great ships, and the photos show young boys of 7 and 8 years old, barefoot and wide-eyed, working in the scrap yards where metal is being smelted, parts disassembled, everything salvaged. Like the birthing center, this is by no means a tech-savvy industry, but simply subsistence salvaging taking place in the most dire environment.

The photographs are stunning.  Not only for the subjects–which are more than provocative and more than memorable–but for their beauty.  Colors scream out in brilliance against the drab background of the Karail slum and the dramatic black-and-whites are beautifully lit, lending a wisdom and dignity to her subjects. One photo of a building streaked with rust and grime from which bright Bangladesh clothes hung to dry was my favorite.  It reminded me of an abstract painting–with so much more invested within.

The photographs are all copyrighted and cannot be posted.  But they are visible on her web site.  Do try to check it out. There are photographs there that you may never forget. Click here for Sarah’s web-site

Movie Review: The Fairy (Le Fée)

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I went to the movies this afternoon.  There is something decadent about going to a 1:00 movie on a Wednesday afternoon.  The sky was blue, the sun was shining, the temperature was perfect.  And I wanted to sit in a dark theater.

There is something even more decadent about being the only person in the theater. It was like a private showing just for me!

Anyway, I went to see the movie The Fairy.  I really hadn’t known anything about it until Monday when I looked it up on-line. The on-line plot summary referenced Tati and Keaton (see yesterday’s post) and it looked solid enough, despite the twee title. Written and directed by the Belgium based trio of Dominique Abel, Fiona Grant, and Bruno Romy, it is very broad in its humor. It is both light and sweet, but it feels very amateurish, which it isn’t.  Abel, Grant and Romy are veteran comics, and are the acclaimed forces behind two other well-received films, Iceberg (2005) and Rumba (2008)

But The Fairy was slight.  The story is thin and much of the physical comedy has been done before.

Very early in the movie, Dom (Dominique Abel), a sad-sack concierge in a hotel in Le Harve is trying to eat a sandwich. He sits, turns on the TV, and goes for his first bite when the front bell rings. He clicks off the television, puts down his sandwich, and takes care of business.  This sequence repeats itself  four more times, with Dom’s frustration rising each time.

The last two interruptions were by Fiona (Fiona Gordon), a disheveled woman who takes a room in the hotel but only after announcing that she is a fairy and that Dom has three wishes.

Later, when Dom finally gets to his sandwich, he swallows the cap to his ketchup–which we knew was in the sandwich and which adds some comic tension to every interruption of Dom’s meal…will  he bite it now or not? It is Fiona who saves him.  She performs an unusual heimlich manuever by sitting him on the front desk and running across the room before head-butting him in the chest. The lid to the ketchup bottle comes flying out.

And the caliber of the physical comedy has been set.

It is as Dom lies recovering on the lobby floor that Fiona once again announces that Dom has three wishes.  He can only think of two: a motor scooter and a life time of free gas for it.

By the next morning, Fiona has delivered both.

Many of the gags have been done before: The valise that is holding a lap dog and which shuttles across the lobby floor…the falling down of several flights of steps…the turning a corner on a scooter and then reappearing with the driver chasing the riderless vehicle…the nearsighted waiter (Bruno Romy) who walks into things and repeatedly misses the table or the glass with his service…bumbling police.  For me, much of it felt old. I had seen much of the same in films from the ’20s and ’30s.

And while Dominique Abel’s mugging and pratfalls are amusing, it is Fiona Grant’s physicality that carries the movie.  She is a lithe as a ballerina (her bare feet seem as disfigured as a dancer’s) and as angular as a young Jerry Lewis (of whom she reminded me.) She runs awkwardly (there are several chase scenes reminiscent of the Keystone Kops) and dances more than oddly.  There is an underwater dance scene (where Dom impregnates her inside a giant clam shell) and a Marx Brothers’ style phone session.  And in it all, she is spectacular.

Perhaps the most amazing stunt is a late kiss. Dom and Fiona are being pulled away by two different groups of police. As they kiss, the police pull each of them away, but their lips remained locked. Finally, they are completely parallel to the ground, their bodies stretching in the air across a sizable space, holding each other up (I can only guess) with the force of their kiss while the police hold them by their lower legs.  If it the scene isn’t computer generated, it is truly a great physical stunt–incredibly strenuous while seeming so casual and perfect.

Throughout the film, Dom and Fiona repeat a conversation:

Fiona: Dom, have you thought of what your third wish will be?
Dom:   No.
Fiona:  Well take your time.”

This snippet occurs three or four times, but at the end, when Dom, Fiona and their baby walk into the sunset (having once more eluded everyone who is chasing them) and Fiona asks her question, we feel that Dom has already received his third wish–his very unusual family.

Overall, it wasn’t a wasted day. But The Fairy wasn’t the movie I was looking for.  Cute, inventive, and smile inducing.   It just seemed very old-hat.

Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton and the weekly coincidences

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I have been going through a noticeable streak of coincidences lately. In a particular ten days to two weeks, I will repeatedly see, hear, read about something that I hadn’t noticed or thought of in a long time. It might be a friend who has moved away…a movie I hadn’t seen in decades…a book that I had forgotten that suddenly is being cited everywhere.

Anyway, this week it has been Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton.  I knew who Keaton was, had always preferred Chaplin, but respected his enormous role in the history of movies. I knew little about Lloyd except for his famous clock scene.

And now Keaton seems to be everywhere. I wonder if, like so many things in modern culture, it is simply Keaton’s turn to be the object contemporary interest. (Contemporary interest has a very short life and while it might be Keaton in 2012, the focus could as easily turn to Jacques Tati for 2013, or Mack Sennett by July.) Who knows when it will be Lloyd’s turn?

Film connoisseurs have long praised Keaton.  Orson Welles called his The General “the greatest comedy ever made…and perhaps the greatest film every made.” And Roger Ebert called Keaton “arguably the greatest actor-director in the history of movies.”  Lloyd’s reputation is not as high-flying.  Part of this came from Lloyd’s demanding such a prohibitive price for television broadcast of his films–and so his work is generally less known than either Chaplin or Keaton.

One of his most famous scenes is this:

Indeed this  scene is very obviously alluded to in the 2011 film  Hugo, based on the Brian Selznik book The Invention of Hugo Cabret.

In the story, the young boy Hugo lives in the clock tower of a Parisian train station in the 1930s. During the course of the film, he sneaks his new friend Isabelle into a movie house. She has never seen a motion picture before and the film they watch is Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last! with its famous “hanging from the clock” scene.

Later on, young Hugo himself must escape some danger by hanging from the clock hands and moving along to safety.  In a story that is basically about the birth of cinema, the nod to Lloyd’s  iconic clock scene is both appropriate and deserved.

A photo of Lloyd hanging from the clock is in the book. And the film clip is shown in the movie.

And this is where the coincidences really start!

On Friday,  I am in a coffee shop, minding my business and reading the novel The Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon.  Two guys in the table next to me are having a friendly argument and the argument is about Harold Lloyd’s hanging from the sprung clock. The one guy is insisting that the actor is Buster Keaton; the other insists it is Harold Lloyd.  I am especially proud of myself for not inserting myself  into the discussion–as is often my wont.

Yet it goes further. About an hour later, I am still reading and I come to a passage in the novel where the narrator introduces one of his writing students to his wife who has left him the day before and who he–and the student–have followed to her parents’ house, in a slap-stick sort of way that would have made these early film directors proud.

“This is James Leer. From workshop.”…
“The movie man,” she said. “I’ve heard about you.”
“I’ve heard about you, too,” said James.
I thought for a moment that she might ask him about Buster Keaton, one of her idols. but she didn’t.

Did I just read that right? “I thought…she might ask him about Buster Keaton“? Okay, simple coincidence. An hour after overhearing the Lloyd/Keaton conversation, but a simple coincidence.

So it is Tuesday, and exams are over, and I am getting out of work around 11:15. I check to see what is playing, because I particularly love going to the movies when rest of the world is at work.  There is a film called The Fairy (le fee) with an enchanting poster that I know nothing about. I go online to read what it is about.  Here’s what they say to begin with:

The Belgian-based trio of Dominque Abel, Fiona Gordon and Bruno Romy (The Iceberg) write, direct and perform absurdist comedies in the tradition of Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati. The Fairy is a candy-colored romp set in Le Havre—a non-stop string of hilarious sight gags and madcap chases. 

More Keaton.  It’s as if he’s following me…or I unconsciously am following him. Even the movie poster alludes to its Keatonesque qualities.

So I am off to see The Fairy this afternoon. Off to see slapstick and physical humor from this Belgian trio, but I hope that it rises above that.  The slapstick of Keaton and Lloyd and Chaplin, as well, was always more than pratfalls. It always said something true about the human heart. Something important about all of us.

Quibble with electronic publishing, part 2:

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♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Who would have thought it?

Well, I guess quite a few people.  Yesterday, I posted a piece worrying about the future of writings “published” on the Internet and used as an example the disappearance of two particular stories of mine.

I said that I knew that nothing ever really disappears from cyberspace, but asked, “Would the common man have the tools necessary to recover those materials that are missing?”

Apparently he does.

Sure enough, someone a lot cleverer than I am went and found one of the stories I had cited. Three cheers for Gerry Bracken. He said the tool he used was the “Wayback Machine” (see picture above) and I know I definitely don’t have one of those.  Anyway, he found the “Dublin work-shopped” version of the story “Nadja and the Dream of Teeth.”  I don’t remember the difference between this and the final version, but it’s been a long while since I read it, so that was fun it itself.

Anyway,  I posted the first few paragraphs below.  If you’re interested, the rest of the story is at

http://web.archive.org/web/20040102060543/http://www.dublinwriters.org/eacorn/EA13/bohannonstory.htm

Again, thank you Gerry Bracken. It’s been a good day all around.

from “Nadja and the Dream of Teeth”

At the time there are three distinct women. Two orbit around his person like meteors that arrive and disappear, pendulous and pending, with the rigidity and regularity of the calendar. They are dark and light, one and the other. The fair one is more than fair. Her skin is pellucid. Thin webs of capillaries and veins map her arms, her breasts, the small of her back. The other, the dark one, is Mediterranean, raven-haired, Homeric. She smells of cigarette smoke and has hands older than her age. There is a husband somewhere. Cruel. Oafish. He keeps her meanly and she stays. The third is Nadja, herself. She is his earth, past which the others streak.

“I have made you an appointment,” she tells him. “At half-nine tomorrow.”

He presses his fingers to his face, toward the eye socket. The pain is there, where he touches. Not in the tooth itself, but on his face. Always he has avoided dentistry. But now, she has made the appointment and, when the time comes, she will drive him there.

The two others, the dark and light ones, we shall call Mim and Mam.

Mim keeps exotic animals. Large brilliant birds, ataractic reptiles, silky-haired dogs. She walks a wolfhound, Erté-like, on a tartan leash, its dusky coat shimmering in the sunlight. She wears black always and walks with catlike grace, taut muscles rippling effortlessly and surely. On certain evenings she will stride into McLoughlin’s and the big dog will stay at her feet through two and sometimes three gin-and-tonics. The dog is said to be gentle.

The other one, the dark one, he calls “Calypso,” and when she kept him, the moment seemed infinite and timeless. She fusses about him yet, fusses about what he eats and drinks and thinks, pleasuring him with a maternal concern that he had long forgotten. To his soul, dusty and cretaceous by nature, she brings the mist of the sea, the juices and oils of the fields, the energy of the sun. She gives him hope and calls him her “Father Confessor,” for she too has her secrets, her venom, her lusts. He never touches her but for her hand and her crone-like fingers.

It is to Nadja however that he has decided to remain grounded, connected. For her, too, he has given up the drink, the three-o’clock whiskeys, the bottle of Beaujolais at dinner, the Armagnac before bed. Of course, he has lied. He is always aware of his duplicity, for he said, in a moment of self-incriminating fury, that she would never again see him with a drink in his hand. And he keeps that promise, to be sure. But he continues when she is not there, when he is alone, when she is away. …

A quibble with electronic publishing

/ jpbohannon / 11 Comments

I’m a little worried.

Just a little worried.

The majority of things I’ve had published are in print. They  haven’t earned me a fortune–five dollars here, twenty dollars there–but a least I have a copy of them. Actually, two copies of them, because most of the ” legitimate” small journals pay in copies. They publish your story, poem, essay and pay you with two copies of the issue in which you appear. Two copies placed with the others in a chest at the foot of my bed.

And then along comes the Internet. Instant gratification. Electronic submissions. Electronic responses. Usually much quicker than traditional ways.

The best story I think I’ve ever wrote was published on line. “Nadja and the Dream of Teeth” first appeared through the Dublin Writer’s Workshop in the journal The Electric Acorn.

Then it was published electronically by The Richmond Review (UK). The editor at The Richmond Review was wonderful. She asked questions, made good suggestions, and, overall, made me tighten things up.  All through e-mails. From across the pond. This was the internet at its best.

And then it appeared electronically. It was beautiful. Nice layout. Clean font. Well done. I was proud of the story and proud of its being out there.

Now several years later, the site is down. Just a blank white page. Try it. Google “Richmond review uk” and you’ll find the link.  And then a pure white page. Where is my story? Not there. Not archived. Nowhere. And it was a legitimate journal!

Sort of the same thing with another story– “Pierced.” Except the journal it appeared in didn’t disappear; it sold its domain name to a Japanese company. Try to find my story and you’ll be staring at a beautiful chrysanthemum surrounded by Japanese writing. I am pretty sure that it is not my story translated into Japanese.

So. No big deal. Two short stories that meant something to me but certainly not to anyone else. Vanished. Pouf! But what if this was important material? Is there a fear that important things might simply disappear after a given time?

I know the saying that nothing ever disappears in cyberspace, but will future researchers, historians, students all have the tools necessary to recover those things that have?

Granted there is much that is superfluous, so much that is ephemeral on the Web. Much of it–my own scribblings included– really doesn’t deserve a long shelf life. But, by caching materials away so easily are we also tossing away things of lasting value.  I don’t mean the works of a future Shakespeare or a document of “Declaration of Independence” import.  I mean things like the novelist Rick Moody’s music reviews on Rumpus or Margaret Atwood’s book reviews for The Guardian or the Scottish poet Robin Robertson’s powerful reading of “At Roane Head.”  My fear is that this stuff–which is important stuff, important aspects of our culture, glimpses into who we are–will someday disappear.  Without a trace.  Without record.

Is it the nature of blogging or on-line writing in general to be ephemeral? Is that what is the draw? Do we read it not expecting ever to go back to it.  I don’t know.

But it does worry me at times.