Haunts: Reliquaries of the Dead

This 2011 anthology of ghost tales, edited by Stephen Jones, was another of my new acquisitions from City Lights and one of the few anthologies (other than the ones I edit) in which I actually read every single piece included. Not in order, though; I never read in order. I jump around in anthologies reading the short ones first, then the ones with the interesting titles, the familiar authors, and then the remainder: the loooong ones with the dull titles.

This is likely not the way an anthologist wants a reader to read, since it destroys any sense of build-up or connectivity the editor is striving for. I do try to pay attention to the editor’s role in all other ways, however. And in this regard, Jones does a couple of things very right and one thing very wrong. On the plus side, Jones has a short intro piece that nicely sets the tone: nervous black humor. He also has asked each of the authors to include in their bios a note about the inspiration for their story; this results in some very interesting insights.

On the negative side, the actual editing is atrocious. There apparently was no proofreader, and there are not only misspelled words and bad grammar throughout, but also missing words. Very annoying and very disappointing, because this is a rather “high-end” product, filled with familiar names: Ramsey Campbell, Neil Gaiman, and Tanith Lee, among others.

Overall, it wasn’t a bad assortment of stories, and several were extremely well written and intriguing, notably:

• M.R. James’s “A Warning to the Curious,” which reminded me a bit of The Man Who Would Be King, not only with its central motif but also in that old-fashioned clubby English way
• R. Chetwynd-Hayes’s “The Door,” was shiveringly satisfying
• Reggie Oliver’s highly unnerving “Hand to Mouth,” about one of the coldest, dankest, scariest old castles ever — and its long-dead occupant
• Richard Matheson’s compassionate and quite lovely “Two O’Clock Session,” which evokes the iconic Ray Bradbury, just as Matheson had hoped, according to his bio explanation
• “The Mystery” by Peter Atkins had a neatly breezy coolness to it that was most appealing in juxtaposition to the storyline
• John Gordon’s “The Place” was an admirably taut, cool exercise that put me in mind of this gem by I.A. Ireland, reprinted in the incomparable Alberto Manguel’s Black Water: The Book of Fantastic Literature (which is, in my judgment, the best anthology ever by the best anthologist ever):

Climax For A Ghost Story – I.A. Ireland

      “How eerie!” said the girl, advancing cautiously. “–And what a heavy door!” She touched it as she spoke and it suddenly swung to with a click.
“Good Lord!” said the man. “I don’t believe there’s a handle inside. Why, you’ve locked us both in!”
“Not both of us. Only one of us,” said the girl, and before his eyes she passed straight through the door, and vanished.

• R.B. Russell’s “The Bridegroom” was clean and wistful; Conrad Williams’s “Wait” shared a similar doleful tone
• Kim Newman’s “Is There Anybody There?” might be my favorite in the volume with its deliciously unexpected Internet/ouija board haunting and the equally unexpected victor in the uneven match-up of crossed times
• John Gaskin’s “Party Talk” was another top pick; this brought to mind the old hitchhiker urban legend as it slowly, delicately unfolded
• Grandmaster Robert Silverberg’s “The Church at Monte Saturno” was elegant, brittle, and sophisticated; very satisfying and another top pick

Several others, while not badly written per se, just didn’t grab or move me. And a few were just poor; the worst of these was “Poison Pen” by Christopher Fowler. This story was a complete mess, not just in terms of an overblown kicker to what had begun as an interesting premise, but literally: it had extremely poor continuity and was littered with errors and contradictions. It read as if a preliminary version of the story had been included rather than the final; again, a strike against the editor. Also badly in need of an editor was Tanith Lee, with an overly long entry, “A House on Fire,” which contained at least one jarring anachronism. Richard Christian Matheson’s unintentionally preening “City of Dreams” was a story as pretentious and bloated as his father’s was simple and sweet. I also am never fond of stories where unmotivated, unlooked-for bad ends are summoned against hapless characters: that happened in both the Ramsey Campbell and Lisa Tuttle pieces.

All told though, many hours of goosebumpy fun and several new authors to look out for in the future.

The Descendants

Ok. Maybe it’s just me.

I thoroughly disliked this movie. I deplored every one of the main characters and could not, would not, did not want to follow them through their trials and tribulations.

For one thing, and let’s get this out of the way first and fast, it is yet another movie/play/book sniffling “poor me, I’m rich and white and beautiful.” Yes, yes, I know his wife is dying after having cheated on him and yes I know his children are termagants and yes, yes, he is the thoroughly winsome and engaging George Clooney. And yes, even rich white people have troubles and even rich white people are entitled to sympathy.

Or are they?

Because you see here is my real problem with the movie. These people aren’t entitled to sympathy because they have none of their own.

Almost no one in this movie was able for a moment to look past their own issues, problems, and circumstances to discern or detect or even acknowledge those of anyone around them.

And that goes for parents with regard to their children, even their adult children; and for lovers and spouses; and for siblings; and for friends.

There is a myopic me-first bone selfishness to, particularly, the central character. He does have a lot on his plate, and a certain amount of numb, dumb self-absorption is understandable. But buck up, you know? You have children you have to be responsible for and to—regardless of whether you were the “backup” parent or not. Others’ needs and feelings come first. Yes, I know he swallowed an obvious retort rather than taking the bait proffered by his obnoxious and even more monstrously selfish and unempathetic father-in-law (vividly portrayed by the terrific Robert Forster) and allowed the hateful old man to believe in the devotion and fidelity of his daughter, but the glaring point thus underscored to me was how these horrible people all took their grief as an excuse to be meaner and more ornery and nasty than usual to their kinfolk. Instead of mourning taking them to an elevated place, it elevated their pettiest emotions. We are supposed to feel differently because we then spy Forster kissing his comatose daughter. I felt that an obvious manipulation.

We spend an awful lot of the movie chasing after the wife’s lover for an eventual confrontation. It gave an excuse for a road trip for the family and everyone in general seemed in pretty good shape on the holiday. With Mom out of sight and everyone on the path of this windmill at which to tilt, the day-to-day mundanity of coping could be fast-tracked. And Dad and the older daughter could conspire and bond as he—totally inappropriately—made this seventeen-year-old privy to adultery and vengeance: problems that were HIS issues with the mother, while not examining or even perceiving the nuances of her own, which were far more complex and, given her youth, far-reaching. Meanwhile, when it comes time to tell the younger daughter of the imminent demise of her mother, Dad heroically has a specialist stranger on the hospital staff explain the situation to the kid.

And those surrounding Matt (our hero) are no better. You really can’t expect much from the kids; they are, after all, just kids and don’t (and probably won’t) know any better. But Matt’s friends, associates, and relatives barely do more than provide the briefest nod to his situation. Certainly there is no one who seems to care or understand.

Really, too, does he have no peer, no confidante, no work associate?

I kept thinking someone wiser, older, more seasoned, more mature, would step up to the plate and demonstrate or explain about how we sometimes have to put someone else first. And no, forgiving his wife or holding onto the pristine ancestral estate in some sort of misguided effort to join the circle of life doesn’t cut it. He has nothing to say, nothing to offer, when his daughter’s goofy friend Sid reveals that his dad just died a few months ago. He hastily shuts down the emotional outpouring of the lover’s betrayed wife, making her more than a little ridiculous. He isn’t there for either daughter on any meaningful level except to draw them into his drama. Because for his generation (mine, I guess), it’s always all about ME.

I have read a few reviews of the movie and critical opinion seems to favor it. And I’ve read some “real people” over at imdb, and while they quibble over a variety of items and premises, no one ever seems to remark or even notice what killed the movie for me: its eternal, infernal self-centeredness.

I think, unfortunately, that that is because no one DOES notice this. As a society, we are so damned wrapped up in ourselves and our emotions and our needs and our problems to the exclusion of ever extending a gracious hand or performing an unselfish gesture.

Many years ago, we saw Titanic, the musical, and an early scene in it has always stayed with me—because it was so of the historical period it portrayed (gone, gone, gone, all vestige of gracious living). The owner of the Titanic wanted to toast the maiden voyage while standing on the ship’s bridge with the captain. The captain sternly noted that he did not allow alcohol on “his” bridge. The owner testily responded that, technically it was his bridge. At which point, the valet, who had been standing silently till then, demurred, saying “Sir, I cannot allow you to drink this champagne. It has gone flat.” I marveled at that, at that valet’s tact and discretion, at his ability—and his willingness—to save everyone’s face while risking their potential ire.

People don’t do that anymore.

And that’s why I so disliked this movie.

Oh, I should note before closing that I found one performance to be particularly brilliant. Beau Bridges in a tiny role (he has maybe three little scenes) is unforgettable. His way of fumfering around a line in a vague, totally naturalistic manner, conveying nothing in that annoying way people can when we are trying to get something useful, or coherent, out of them—it wasn’t that he was stupid or slow, just that’s the way his character talked. It was very real and very funny.

But still not enough reason to see this picture, I fear.

Freak Show – Robert Bogdan

Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit is the first of my City Lights books that I read and finished—and fairly quickly too, thanks to a tightly and clearly presented argument, and an engaging tone of frank interest, all of which bespeak an organized, liberal, and open mind.

A titillating topic, to be sure, and filled with many familiar images of Colonel Tom Thumb, Chang and Eng, the Hilton Sisters, and many other human oddities. But the book is not intended to be—nor is it—titillating. Nor is it self-righteous, like Frederick Drimmer’s Very Special People, nor lofty, like Leslie Fiedler’s Freaks. Instead, it is an intelligent, unusual, and highly measured look at the freak show that flourished for a century beginning in the 1840s.

Bogdan, a professor specializing in the cultural foundations of education and sociology at Syracuse University, got the idea for the book (which was first published in 1988) when he overheard his then ten-year-old son explain, in answer to a friend’s question about how you could tell in a certain movie who the good guys were, that “if they looked bad, they were bad.” Bogdan then envisioned a book illustrating the preconceptions and prejudices associated with disability. But his book quickly moved beyond this view as he learned more, and contextualized more, the world of the freak show.

What he has created is a fascinating look at the history and world of the freak show, a place where people who looked (or were made to look) different from the norm were exhibited. He explains the showmanship behind it all, and looks at the complicity of those who were exhibited in this showmanship. This was a livelihood, and in many cases, a means of independence—and in a few rare cases, a means to fortune and fame.

Doubtless, many were exploited for all or part of their careers. But he presents a rather matter-of-fact business world of hype and showmanship, wherein the freaks were largely less oppressed than liberated. Mostly, though, Bogdan shows the evolving perception of “freak” in a time of growing sophistication, education, and information. So where an exhibitor could once get away with putting feathers and masks on Harlem residents and calling them Ubangis or Wild Men of Borneo, or where the recipients of specific genetic deficiencies or birth defects could be displayed as a source of wonderment or fear, as scientific understanding—and human empathy—increased, such exhibits of necessity disappeared. This context explains why respectable doctors and scientists of the 1860s would visit a sideshow to see an Elephant Man or a Siamese twin—and why they would not a few decades later.

So essentially, knowledge killed the old standby sideshow acts.

Bogdan spends much of the book categorizing the means and methods of exhibiting the oddities presented as either “exotic” or “aggrandized”: simplistically put, as either the Other or like us, only smaller/taller/limbless, etc. And he explains how the promoters and the promoted conspired together to evoke that wonder or fear—and why pity has no place in the sideshow, and how as soon as a condition became understood as deserving of sympathy (mental retardation, e.g.), the exhibited moved from the sideshow to the asylum.

The unspoken question, of course, is which environment is more exploitative.

Overall, a highly thought-provoking and accessible book, which enriched my understanding not only of the freak show per se but also of the history of showbiz in America. The dime museum, the sideshow, the carnival, the circus, the county and world’s fairs—these were where Americans came to be entertained before vaudeville, movies, museums, and theme parks. They fulfilled a need, and gave rise to new forms of mass entertainment that use the self-same tools of promise and promotion that they had perfected.

Thought-provoking indeed.

In googling just now, I came across some intriguing related publications, sort of a “for further reading” on this topic:  http://www.anathemabooks.com/freaks.shtml.

Our Honeymoon in San Francisco

Steve and I are just back from a full six days in San Francisco. And I mean FULL. We crisscrossed the city from our North Beach base to Land’s End and the Golden Gate Park; we took in a whale sighting tour of the Farallons, a documentary, and a poetry reading; spent about six hours at City Lights bookstore; ate Italian (three times), Vietnamese, tapas, dim sum, steak, and dungeness crab (three times)—and mini donuts. We saw pelicans and cormorants and even a glorious shimmering hummingbird, which was flitting in a bush at our last stop on the Fisherman’s Wharf, waving us farewell. We saw sea lions, a whale (well, parts of one), and hundreds of seals.

And TREES.

And the Bay, the ocean, surfers, sun, sun, sun.

And we read and read, and sat and sat, and walked and walked.

And walked.

Here is how we spent each day:

• Monday: Fisherman’s Wharf and North Beach. Dungeness crab for lunch. Sea lions. Pier 39. Art: browsing and buying original wood carvings from local artists; gawking at Ertés, Picassos, Dalis, and all manner of other utterly out-of-our-reach original artwork at the fancy galleries. Dinner in North Beach (Michelangelo’s); watching the kids trick or treat at the restaurants and shops; City Lights.
• Tuesday: Golden Gate Park. The Japanese Tea Garden. The Botanical Garden. A too-long walk to what turned out to be an extremely good dim sum restaurant (Ton Kiang). A bus ride back to the park. A frustrating, but ultimately successful, pursuit of Lake Stow: California isn’t much better than New Jersey regarding signage; walked past the damned lake twice. Dinner in North Beach (Trattoria Pinocchio). Very tired feet.
• Wednesday: Lincoln Park. Legion of Honor. Land’s End Trail. Louie’s. Cliff House. Ocean Beach. Sutro ruins. Breathtaking and haunting and beautiful and thrilling. Long bus ride home; rest, reading. Tapas in Mission district. More rest, more reading. (We don’t lack for books.)
• Thursday: The Farallons. Rain, mist, cold, mild seasickness (very unexpected, that). SEALS! Hundreds upon hundreds of seals, which I was able to see thanks to my brand-new binoculars, which I love. And one gray whale, evidenced by blow holes and glimpses of its back. And hundreds too of weird little birds called Murres, which are related to penguins. Dungeness crab lunch at Pier 39 (after the nausea passed). Home. Nice nap. Reading and relaxing. North Beach dinner (our favorite, Sodini’s Green Valley Restaurant: delicious, and a vivacious and engaged waitress who made the meal still more wonderful). Full and exhausted.
• Friday: Miscellaneous culture. First real breakfast of the week (Caffe Greco: yum). Brisk walk and shop through Chinatown. Balboa Theater to see documentary about the Sutro ruins. Vietnamese lunch. Bus to Market. Walk to Powell and Bush to check out availability of tix for Ferlinghetti poetry reading at 7 p.m. Bus to home; change. Back at 6 to stand on line. Reading at 7. Dinner at 9 at John’s Grill (where Sam Spade ate).
• Saturday: Hitting and revisiting the highlights. Another delicious breakfast (Café Divine: a frittata-type creation on foccacio). Bus and streetcar to farmer’s market at the Ferry Building for walnuts and asian pears. Streetcar to Ghirardelli Square and Fisherman’s Wharf. Yet another crab, this at Fisherman’s Grotto. Molineri’s for a sandwich to eat at the airport for dinner. City Lights. Final glass of evening sherry at Hotel Bohème. To airport. Home.

And here are the highlights—what we liked best, what will stick longest, what we brought back with us:

• Our room. As we did three years ago, we stayed at Hotel Bohème in North Beach, which is cozy, friendly, and utterly seeped in Beat history. Last time, our room was in the hotel’s rear, just above the next-door bakery’s ovens. Every morning, the smell of the baking bread woke us. This time, though, we had a room of honor—Number 204, Allan Ginsberg’s preferred room when he would stay at the hotel (upper left in the photo). Such fun! Mother said to check the floorboards in case he left anything unpublished behind.
• City Lights. We went twice: once downstairs for nonfiction; then upstairs for fiction, art, and poetry (and a bonus: watching the Occupy Wall Street March through the window on Saturday in the rain, all those people, cars honking in solidarity, and a fervent belief in change emanating from that place and the people browsing in that place—oh to believe). What a terrifically eclectic selection of books—meandering through the book titles, as the topics shift subtly from linguistics to psychology to dysfunction to paranoia. This is what bookstore browsing is meant to be: discovering unlooked-for, unheard-of treasures no Amazon search could capture. I was so impressed by the taste and intelligence and shrewdness underlying and guiding the collection; it bespeaks an egalitarian open-mindedness, a humor, a wisdom.
• Lincoln Park and Land’s End and Sutro ruins. This was a part of San Francisco we had overlooked last time: this intriguing corner edge above the park and to the coast. The Impressionist collection at the Legion of Honor and its special exhibit on Camille Pissaro’s people were so interesting. A huge collection of Rodins; my favorite this time was The Mighty Hand, which looks like a strong, surging body implicit in the taut fingers and tensed wrist. And the view around the museum! The Golden Gate to the northeast; the Bay, the rocks, the water to the west. We followed the mile and a half Land’s End trail, all shady trees and dazzling, dizzying views. And at the end of the trail, at the base of the cliffs, the ruins of what had been the Sutro amusement complex. Spooky as anything called a “ruin” is, even in brilliant sunlight. We were so intrigued! And when we ate lunch at Louie’s, above Cliff House, we found a postcard advertising a documentary on Sutro’s, set to open on Friday. Which brings me to…
• Serendipitous excursions. So there we are at Sutro’s, intrigued by Sutro’s, and there is actually a brand-new documentary about Sutro’s. What luck, what serendipity. So there we went with all the old-timers, who remembered swimming there, going to the museums there (and more serendipity: dime store museums are one of the topics covered by the book I’m currently reading which I bought this week at City Lights). We love to leave ourselves open to chance, to spontaneity, to circumstance and happenstance like that. And then, after that, to go to the poetry reading featuring Lawrence Ferlinghetti, founder and owner of City Lights, ninety-two years old, and by chance, reading a new poem on Friday. And we, seeing a little blurb in a little local paper, took the chance and were able to see a legend up close. Amazing. And each of these serendipitous excursions took us to unexpected places. The Sutro documentary led us to a most lovely Vietnamese restaurant, where the owner patiently and kindly showed us how to make rice paper rolls—kind of Vietnamese burritos. And the poetry reading, instead of being an aesthetic, detached evening of art and culture was instead a fulcrum of political passion, as both poets—Ferlinghetti and Jack Hirschman—along with moderator Peter Selz, who is also ninety-two and an extremely distinguished German expressionist art historian, launched into a lively discussion of the Occupy Wall Street movement. We were so impressed; these men were so alive and vibrant and engaged and committed and obviously on top of the issues of the day. Quite unexpected; quite stimulating.
• Happy to come home to Asbury. When we last went to San Francisco, we fell in love with its neighborhoods, its quirky and outgoing residents, its vistas and views, its markets filled with glorious local foods, its nonchain restaurants filled with character and individualism. How sad we were to return home to staid, stolid, boring suburbia. And now— and now, we don’t mind leaving so much. In fact, our new hometown meets and matches San Francisco on almost all fronts. Okay, we don’t have the dazzling hillsides and bustling ports and phenomenal hills. But we got the food, we got the attitude, we got the hometown vibe, the idiosyncratic neighborhoods, the nonconformist spirit. We’ve got the rough and rocky Atlantic, every bit as mysterious and picturesque (when it chooses to be) as the Pacific. We’ve got fog and mist and chill and damp. We’ve got arty committed young people—and old ones, too. And we’ve got, I must say, even better Italian food.

W. Somerset Maugham and His World (Frederic Raphael)

Final Demands put me on a real Raphael kick. We watched Darling; we queued up Eyes Wide Shut in Netflix (haven’t yet watched); and I ordered and promptly read this obscure monograph on Somerset Maugham written in 1977.

I don’t think they produce books like this anymore. It put me in mind of the wonderful (and gloriously full-color) Life & Times books—Curtis International Portraits of Greatness—my parents subscribed to in the mid-sixties which my brother and I voraciously devoured, learning much about Elizabeth I, Beethoven, Washington, and others that has stuck with us to this day, imprinted along with beautiful full- and half-page images illustrating the subject and his or her times.

Raphael’s treatment is more text heavy, but still features 110 photos and images—some quirky, some seemingly wryly chosen, some quite illuminating, and all so nicely visible and crisp and clear; refreshing to see in these days of uncoated stock with niggardly little pictures crammed into corners of pages too small to see or jammed willy-nilly into coated sections, obscure and divorced from their context.

There was a leisureliness, an elegance to these photo-based bio books entirely missing from today’s typical biographical tomes. I don’t think I’d realized how much that bothered me until I wrote all that.

Anyway, to the book. It took me a while to work through it, but that was less Raphael’s problem than mine: nonfiction seems particularly dense and difficult these days. But here was lively prose and wicked observation and wise insights. It’s a monograph, not an exhaustive biography—and, interestingly, Raphael sheds light on the notion of a definitive biography for Maugham, pointing out that Maugham destroyed and distorted so much that such will be an impossibility. Which reminds me of Orson Welles, and Simon Callow’s similar explication of the inability of accurately capturing that man’s life.

Biography is a tremendously difficult undertaking I have always felt. I have read a handful of extraordinary ones: Richard Ellmann on Oscar Wilde, Scott Meredith on George S. Kaufman, David Starkey on Elizabeth I, a few others. Callow’s is a noble effort, but there’s too much Callow sometimes. And some evocative ones I’ve read in recent times: Stephen Youngkin on Peter Lorre and Sue Prideaux on Edvard Munch. And the ones that I read over and over in childhood: Cornelia Meigs on Louisa May Alcott, Cornelia Otis Skinner on Sarah Bernhardt, and the Scholastic biography of Annie Sullivan. So I like biographies. The ones that work for me are those that give me the person and the personality, the flavor and the essence. The mere facts of a person’s life, I increasingly believe, have so little to do with the reality of the person.

Raphael gets that, I think. Because it’s a short book, he doesn’t linger long on childhood or so-called formative events. Rather, he traces the life and analyzes and pokes and prods and conjectures along the way. And that’s fine by me. He makes some interesting points about Maugham, gives a straightforward account of his life, and discusses, in a refreshingly frank and daring manner (I couldn’t see the Curtis Greatness authors taking a similar tone!) anything that strikes him as interesting, relevant, or irrelevant. It is a decidedly idiosyncratic monograph, and that makes for its appeal. Raphael is very smart, and his literary critiques valuable. One interesting observation, for example, is that Maugham is not an “English” writer, but in fact thinks in French, which was his first language. That’s a fascinating concept, because it jars so: Maugham seems quintessentially English. But that also sheds light on the distant tone, the arm’s-length narrator who watches but doesn’t judge. Maugham is an outsider. Too, it strikes me that he really is sorry Maugham is not considered, or indeed is not, a first-rate literary talent. But he likes his work anyway, and explains how and why.

But to me this passage is worth everything; it comes a few pages before the book’s—and Maugham’s—end. He begins by noting of Maugham “Yet he was still capable of kindness and of generosity. A young and unpublished writer visited him in the autumn of 1954″; he then goes on to quote that young writer:

…I can see him now, coming through the doors from the hall where hung the great grey Picasso, a small man, surprisingly brisk, in dark flannels, tweed sports jacket and, I believe, a Paisley scarf at his throat. ‘Here’s Mr. Maugham,” Alan Searle said, and he was holding out his hand. I was reminded—no doubt because I knew of his medical past—of an eminent physician who has come to see how we are today. He cannot give you much time but while you are there, you can be sure of his undivided attention. “Now we’ll see about getting you some tea”…I took my tea with lemon, for some uneasy reason, and was flattered to discover that Maugham did the same…

After tea, just as he was telling me that I should get a job, he started to light a cigarette. The match jumped from his fingers and fell into the crevice between the cushions of the sofa on which we were sitting. He was suddenly an old man, flapping at the buried ember, in a little panic of elderly nervousness. I felt a great pity and affection for him. Later he asked me how old I was. When I told him, he said, “You’ve got plenty of time, plenty of time.”

Raphael then continues: “It is to be hoped that the length of this excerpt will be excused. The young writer was the author of the present book.”

And that touched me greatly. And offered insight into both authors through time and across the generations and then through the decades since the original incident in the fifties before my birth to its recounting in the seventies to a half century later when I read it. And it says something about youth and old age, and it says something about nobility and kindness and compassion. And I liked that. And I liked Maugham for sparking that and Raphael for being sparked.

Something Rather Amazing: Sunrise

Got up early — really early, 4:30 a.m. early — because Steve left for business trip to Manassas.

And so I did some emails and tidying up and getting started with new project and then

I looked up.

And I have to say that no matter how many sunrises I see, and I grant you, I don’t see ALL that many, but they always take me so by surprise in their slow-approaching, majestic, dramatic beauty.

And on the ocean. Oh man.

This morning, there is this low-lying dense bank of clouds meeting the water. So as the sun came up, there was black black black from the ocean and from the cloud bank, shot behind with this lovely yellow that became orange and then red and then, now, a pale peach. And the clouds are now blue against it.

That’s the view from the north window. To the west, the buildings of the city of Asbury are suddenly all bright and crisp and oddly hopeful in the fall morning sun.

And it does this EVERY day. Isn’t that something?

Catch-up: Books I’ve Read So Far This Year (with a Little Overlap from Last Year and Not Counting the Ones That Are Reviewed Elsewhere in This Blog)

These are the books I have been too lazy to write proper reviews of; I’ll list them for now, and if I get ambitious I’ll add some comments later.

• Moon Palace, Paul Auster
• Dead End Gene Pool, Wendy Burden (technically, I did NOT really read this; I found it revolting and stopped, which is something I very rarely do and is thus worth noting)
• This Time Together, Carol Burnett
• My Lucky Life in and Out of Show Business, Dick Van Dyke
• Bridge of Sighs, Richard Russo
• The Sterile Cuckoo, John Nichols
• Haunted Legends, edited by Ellen Datlow and Nick Mamatas (I really don’t know why I keep buying anthologies Datlow edits; our tastes really aren’t similar at all)
• The Berlin Stories, Christopher Isherwood
• Invisible, Paul Auster
• Await Your Reply, Dan Chaon
• Orson Welles, Volume 1: The Road to Xanadu, Simon Callow
• J. M. Barrie and the Lost Boys: The Real Story Behind Peter Pan, Andrew Birkin
• The Peter Pan Chronicles, Bruce K. Hanson
• The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey, Spencer Wells
• Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert

Roger McGuinn at Woodbridge, NJ

Since moving to New Jersey, we have been pleased, surprised, and delighted by the astonishing range of opportunities to hear live music — from the buskers on the boardwalk to the jam-packed concert halls.

But our favorite is the most unusual (to us at least):  small-town churches and middle schools hosting truly remarkable artists and legends. We have attended three such performances (as well as the Bordentown record store featuring Chris Smither, which I talked about earlier this year): Jesse Colin Young in a church at Chatham, John Sebastian in a church at Woodbridge, and last night Roger McGuinn at the Woodbridge middle school.

What has been most striking at these performances is the respect and warmth and appreciation that exudes from the audience and seemingly brings out the best in the performers. There is an palpable affection and connection in the room that makes these evenings pure magic. The musicians we’ve seen are playful, friendly, and down to earth. And in all three cases, their level of artistry and mastery was unquestionable.

Roger McGuinn exemplified all of this last night (note: it was last night May 5 when I started writing this; it is now almost three months later). The ninety-minute set took the form of a history of music and how it coincided and underscored (pun intended) the work of the Byrds. So we were treated to a bit of Bach, sea shanties, cowboy songs, Woody Guthrie, and beyond in a dazzling panorama of musical culture. The overview history coincided with his personal history once we reached the 1950s. The connection was made crystal clear with his explanation of Lead Belly’s twelve-string guitar influencing Pete Seeger and Pete Seeger introducing it to him, Roger McGuinn. It was a nifty and rather awesome bit of history: this modest man in black in front of us two degrees removed from a legend, and one from a living legend.

Final Demands (Frederic Raphael)

If Final Demands could be suspended pinata-like above me, and I given the sharpest tools of literary criticism with which to tackle it, I still don’t think I would yield more than a few handfuls of treasure.

This book, the third in the Glittering Prizes trilogy (the second of which, Fame and Fortune, I wrote about earlier) is very rich and very deep and very hard. Much of the politics, topical references, Latin puns, and elaborate wordplay with which the book is chock full I found bewildering or, I confess, boring.

But there are many treasures I was able to wrest out of this book.

First off, the book is blithely, deceptively, easy to read. The sentences are relatively short, as are the paragraphs. The phrasing is natural, like this:

“You were here,” Adam said. “You did what you did and now it’s…done. I didn’t do anything and so it’s still ahead of me, I suppose.”

or this, when protagonist and famous writer Adam Morris is asked how he made a particular book work:

“I stumbled. You stumble and then you have to run to keep your balance. And that boosts you on your way.”

“You’re married, aren’t you?”

“Very.”

“But she’s not with you.”

“And it shows. I’m not myself without her; not that you can tell, I hope.”

There’s an uncomplicated cadence established. But if you just settle into—settle for—that rhythm, you miss a lot of what’s going on. And, plotwise, not that much IS going on. There are a few big events, but mostly, this book—like the other two—is a series of almost random meetings and long conversations. So what’s happening in the book is what’s happening in the sentences. And Raphael has packed those sentences as dense as any poetry, and you really have to slow yourself down to decode the words, track back to the references, and dig to the emotions and memories underlying the sentences.

The author lays this all out on page 26, when we attend a seminar Adam is presenting to a class of college writing students. A student asks, “So what can we say about people’s…characters, what they’re really like?” And Adam replies:

“Draw him or her right and that is their character. Say precisely what happens to people and what they say; not forgetting to imply what they don’t. ‘Why’ isn’t too interesting; stick to when, what, and how. Their motives come with the right words; the punctuation even. Whenever you’re tempted to a comma, pull out a full stop. And here’s as near an absolute rule as I can hope to offer you: ‘He said’ and ‘she said’ never want an adverb attached to them. Let the reader’s imagination supply the adverbs. That way, he or she becomes your accomplice, not your critic; and you pretty well have him, or her, where you want.”

So those are the ground rules.

Then there’s a neat trick Raphael applies, which I don’t think I’ve seen anyone else use. Where most writers would indicate the passage of time with at least a paragraph break or an extra line space or a dingbat—or by resorting to the past perfect or some other tense to indicate chronology—Raphael doesn’t even pause. Literally. Like here, where  Adam has been conversing with old friend Denis Porson, who has made some rather startling observations about the changes in the gay world over the past decades:

But I do so miss the good old bad old days. My friends, the ones who’ve survived, they all have
“relationships,” dear, and “civil partners,” and I do know what all else, because they will keep telling me about them. I only ever wanted uncivil ones…The love that dared not speak its name has become the most garrulous sweetheart in town. You know what it’s killed, of course, don’t you, all this outing and abouting? The sweet sin of it all, dear: Sodom’s now turned into a garden suburb full of people in sleeveless vests doing press-ups and cleaning the motor. Talk about cities of the plain!

A half page later, Denis kisses Adam goodbye:

“On we go, dear. And never, never ask what happens to the hindmost.”

Adam turned right into Red Lion Square as the lights came on. A fox was crossing, unhurriedly, from the short pavement and went through the railings into the greenery. When he got home, he told Barbara about it.

See what he did? In three sentences, Adam left Denis and came home to Barbara, encountering a fox on the way. It’s that leap from the greenery to “When” that impresses me.

And I thought about why he would do that—glide and elide like that. It’s like you’re on the calm surface of a lake, and suddenly you have to paddle so hard because you’re going down rapids: how the hell did I get here? When did the characters change location? When did the characters change—all at once, you’re in a new scene and there were no light cues or costume changes to signal the shift.

So it keeps you alert.

But it does something else too, I think. And here’s the essence of what I got out of the book, and, in retrospect, the trilogy.

The treatment of time matches the age of the characters.

Here’s what I think is going on. The human brain is set for novelty; the senses are poised to note and process the unusual. That’s why the day is so long for a toddler: everything is new, everything must be taken in. As we age, we don’t remark on the routine. That’s why the days, the weeks, the years, fly by and we can’t think how they were filled; they’ve just somehow flown.

Final Demands takes place a full fifty years after The Glittering Prizes. Adam is seventy-one at its end, and there are large patches in the book—increasingly as it progresses—during which there are few indications of what year it is, how much time has passed, and so on. Time just passes, new babies are born, people scatter. Very in keeping with an older person’s perception of time, and very unlike the barrage of discrete, detailed moments that make up The Glittering Prizes.

And also very different from the glib, gabby egoism of Fame and Fortune, where Adam is front and center, and all is fodder for his art. In Fame and Fortune, Adam pays no attention to time, passing or otherwise. Which also makes sense, because he is in middle age, at the height of his creative powers, at his pinnacle, totally absorbed in his work, in his moment. And a right shit he is consequently.

In Final Demands, Adam is at his end. Raphael emphasizes, particularly in the closing chapters, plants and flowers. Barbara and Adam, past their peak, tend their garden. And Adam, instead of beginning a new novel, is working on an encyclopedia—coming full circle to his ABCs.

Adam’s callousness, so evident in Fame and Fortune, is reserved for a deserving crew rather than all of humanity, as it was there. And our old acquaintances from the previous volumes are all more or less present and accounted for; in general, they have followed arcs that could be tracked back reliably to their earliest incarnations. I won’t spoil the revisitings, beyond noting that one surprise is rather tender and unlooked-for. And that the relationship between Adam and his daughter is very nice. There are some appalling moments of what I found to be utterly inappropriate reactions to situations—how could Adam walk away from the specter/spectacle of Anna Cunningham, even temporarily, to pursue a banal interaction with his agent? And shouldn’t he rather have insisted on helping fat Bruno? These were the quibbles I had with Fame and Fortune; they are much reduced here.

No one could possibly be as clever, as quick, as sardonic as Adam and his cohort. And I am sure that there are many readers who derive much more pleasure and comprehension than do I from the bitchy, erudite exchanges among them. For me, I like Adam, with Barbara, in the twilight of his day. Because he remains Adam, as this passage after a health alarm has been sounded, reminds me:

He walked, like a rehearsing ghost, through a world that had no notion of his fear. The indifference of other people passed for a reprieve from a sentence that had yet to be handed down.

Adam’s vulnerability, present from the beginning of the trilogy, has endured and continues to endear. I leave him with great fondness and more than a little sadness.

Horns (Joe Hill)

It’s been a while since I’ve written about a book I’ve read. And I have been reading quite a bit, actually — mostly, the Orson Welles bio referenced below, which I read for so long I actually missed it when we parted company after 600 pages and one dunking in the bathtub — just not reporting out. But I will write (briefly) about this book, Horns, because I think if I don’t get it down quickly (I finished it the night before last), I probably won’t retain it. Which is not to say that this is not a well-written or interesting book, just that it’s slight and — with one exception — doesn’t really connect to particularly larger fields of inquiry that would fix its preoccupations more firmly in my mind.

That one exception isn’t even part of the book, really. It’s what Hill writes after the book and before the “bonus” short story included at the end. But first, a little context.

Horns is a horror/supernatural/popular fiction work about a nice guy to whom some horrific things occur, the most recent of which is that he has turned into a demon. The book then moves backward and forward to explain what has brought Iggy to this state (his full name is Ignatius Martin Perrish — IMP; he drives a Gremlin, btw). The funniest parts are in the beginning, where he slowly discovers that people tell him their inner-most wicked desires, asking his leave to pursue them. Their casual lack of any semblance of conscience in his presence as they matter-of-factly turn their censors off and admit to jarringly horrendous impulses is the book’s best conceit, I think. Overall, too, it’s a good read, not quite — for me at least — an over-heated page turner (sigh: what pleasure those are! I have recorded a couple such here; I should also mention one of my most favorite of these, Christopher Priest’s The Prestige. What is better than that wonderful/awful feeling of closing in on the end of a quintessential Page Turner, deliciously anticipating the ending, dolefully dreading the end), but a respectable novel that kept my interest and did not distract me with poor writing, poor plotting, or — thank you, editorial team at HarperCollins — poor proofreading. I would imagine that Joe Hill deserves much of the praise on all those counts, including the last, since I don’t think anybody proofreads anymore. He strikes me as a pro, a craftsman who works honestly and hard, sweats a bit, to put together a good story. I don’t think it comes easily for him. But he tied up pretty much all his loose ends, conscientiously kept his pact with the reader to explain what needed explaining, and moved on.

I don’t mean to damn with faint praise. Far from it. I respect what Hill has done, particularly because he could, as Stephen King’s son, have taken a lot of lazy ways out. And he didn’t and he doesn’t.

So, about Horns, it’s got humor and devils and a moral core. The plot may be a bit tortured around the edges, or more precisely, muddled in the middle, and there might be a couple-three too many long-drawn-out gross-out battle scenes between variants of good and evil with some truly sick-making stuff laboriously detailed. (And snakes.) But it’s a good read, and the characters are suitably endearing — the ones intended to be so — and a few of the twists are genuinely surprising.

But now for the exceptional part, and this is why I think Hill’s a pro. He gives perhaps one of the best explanations I’ve ever read of the writing process, of where the writer stands with regard to his subject matter. He begins by noting that most writers

…don’t have anything like a single clear vision… Instead, the writer is a dude with a battered Star Wars lunchbox full of precious junk. He carries it with him everywhere he goes, and he can’t resist opening and occasionally taking his things out to look them over…

In story after story, the writer opens his lunchbox and takes out the mementos and sets them in a row and admires them in the light. He smells them (they smell like himself). He touches them. He studies them. He moves them around to observe them in different order. He puts some things away, takes other things out. Each variation is a new story. The writer, it turns out, is not peddling his grand philosophical insights after all. He is instead selling tickets to a private exhibition of personal fascinations and oddities.

I think that’s an extremely insightful, carefully thought-through articulation of what it is to be a writer.

And the story that followed, a variant on the Horns themes, wasn’t bad either.