Julia Grey: Bookmovision

I'm in the middle of something...

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 21:51:52 GMT

So, even though I've only just started up again, blogging will have to be intermittent for a while now again. What am I working on? An entry for the Quilting Arts 2010 Calender Contest. I realize now that I'll have to start another category to document my creative endeavors. Later.

Walker, Texas Crapper

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 18:26:13 GMT

I recently had occasion to watch a double episode of Walker, Texas Ranger, starring one of the right's most popular culture warriors, Chuck Norris (who, because he one of those "blacklisted" conservatives in Hollywood, is undoubtedly pining away in some empty-pooled residential motel, rubbing his pennies together and paring his cheese). I don't know why we kept WTR on after it started one afternoon following something else Spouse was watching (I was only seeing it with half an eye and 1/4 of an ear, as I was on the laptop at the time), but after a while it developed into something so incredibly horrible that we couldn't look away. We had our own little Mystery Science Theater 3000 session.

I have never seen an episode of that show before, and I'm here to tell you that if this Very Special Twofer is any indication, it is a crapfest that surpasses all other crapfests in Television Land, past or present. And this is coming from someone who loved Flipper and The Flying Nun.

It wasn't just the music, nonsensically swelling to heroic proportions every few minutes (I was going, WTF? because these big orchestral hooteroos seemed to kick in almost randomly, but I gradually became aware that the Bonanza-style theme started blaring pretty much whenever Chuck Norris entered a scene). No, it wasn't just the music.

It was the AA sidekick character being made a fool of from the very first moment. Dimwit, Eyerolling Black Deputy wanted to "just talk it over" and politely beg the hostage-taking Bad Guys to surrender nicely -- and I'm asking myself, even given that this guy is supposed to be a liberal buffoon, what trained member of law enforcement would EVER be THAT lame? But clearly I was thinking too logically. DEBD was there simply so Walker could show him that only violent confrontation works).

It was the mystical presence of the Walker character's ancestor and present-day Walker's ability to sense his ghostly, haloed outline riding heroically up one ridge and down another (accompanied by loud Ponderosa music), and thus discover where said ancestor left a cache of treasure.

It was Walker reaching with his bare hand for a rattlesnake the Bad Guys threw into his truck, and thereby getting bit.*

It was the fever dream of his snakebite collapse in which he Got Some from the past life character of the insanely beautiful, flawlessly groomed, totally chilly and utterly inexpressive female law enforcement personage whom I gathered he was too honorable (or something) to do in the present day.**

It was his ancestor character having to leave the IBAFGTCAUIFLEP behind in classic Loner Cowboy style. "Please take me with you!" "I can't!"

It was... etc. etc. etc.

It was seriously, truck-pile-up disgusting. The whole exercise was expressly designed to showcase its faultless, macho, ass-kicking S*T*A*R. No surprise that it was executively produced by same. Dork.

* Hello? stop the truck, get out, and if you must, chase the snake out of the cab with something long and, you know, pole-like -- don't REACH OUT AND GRAB IT WHILE YOU'RE DRIVING. Okay, so the bad guys get away, at least you're not writhing in hilarious dramatic torment while they get away later!!!! And by the way, as long as we're on the subject, how in Pink Feather Boa Hell did the shambling villainous Bad Guys manage to so efficiently and safely handle that snake themselves? Dead-eye aim while pacing our hero's truck on a rutted dirt road, too.

**Perhaps her icy demeanor has something to do with his inability to fire her up today like he did back then. I got the idea that this episode constituted wish fulfillment for the fans. It wouldn't do to have Walker and Chill Pill actually hook up in the present day story line (removes the sexual tension, dontcha know, and it would also not be M.O.R.A.L), so they worked up this past-life narrative to give the followers of the series a thrill (I'm assuming the upstanding audience gave the previous-life Immorality a pass because Things Were Different Back Then for the rough and tumble heroes of those days).

But one does wonder what sort of person would take this shit seriously enough to watch it more than once. And whether this Very Special Toilet Flush hit any of them upside the head with the burning question: "Why the HELL am I watching this shit?"

Romance Fiction: Male and Female

Fri, 09 Jan 2009 15:05:44 GMT

Back in December, Susan of Texas (The Hunting of the Snark), in a post entitled "Let's Read Some Stupid," features (among others) a paragraph from Stephen Spruiell of National Review Online's (NRO) "The Corner." Spruiell opines:

I'm pretty sure there's never been a period in human history when certain people haven't had this particular kind of unrealistic expectation when it comes to love. We typically refer to those people as women, and they also happen to make up a majority of rom-com-watchers. If there's a connection, it's that women enjoy these films because these films show guys acting like women want guys to act, i.e. irresponsible and hopeless at first before their love for the female lead transforms them into stable, romantic (and telepathic) adults. Stephen Spruiell

Susan replied:

I had no idea The Corner let 13-year-olds write for them.

Which was a good line (as usual), but I had to say:

I dunno. I didn't read the post in question, so I don't know what thesis he was hanging on that assertion about women's narrative preferences. But I think that a lot of the appeal of romantic comedy IS very much because of the scenario he outlines. It's essentially the plot of every romance novel ever written: Bad Boy is tamed by the love of a Good Woman. If you're the right woman and you love him enough, you can always bring him to his knees. Male romances (aka "Westerns") revolve around the opposite notion: that even the love of a Good Woman CAN'T tame a Bad Boy. After he tastes of (doomed) love, he must always ride off into the sunset. Alone. Of course, in both romance narratives, the Bad Boy is never all that bad after all. In Westerns he's usually just Dramatically Haunted, by a previous love that didn't work out or an incident of violence in which he didn't acquit himself well enough. The man's flaws in classic Romance are usually excesses of a traditionally "masculine" virtues (too Honorable, Protective or Independent), or his behavior is the result of a mere misunderstanding that can be cleared up in a climactic revelation scene (after much entertaining angst). Romances can therefore be funny, whereas a true Western is always tragic. A man is what a man is, see, and a man has to do what a man has to do -- and that always means he has to Leave. Noir fiction of the hardboiled detective variety, another "male romance" genre, has essentially the same theme: It Never Works Out With Women, although in noir it's because of HER, and in Westerns it's because of HIM. I'm not saying these are realistic themes, or contribute positively to the modern American ethos, but I don't think he's wrong to say that women, even today, are more drawn to Tameable Lone Wolf kind of stories and men are more drawn to stories of Lone Wolves Who Can't Be Tamed. Personally I like both kinds of fiction, but I'd never mistake them for lessons in living.

Susan anwered:

... I believe he was talking about women wanting immature types that they can make into the type of man they want. I agree many women want to tame a bad boy, but I don't thing they want "irresponsible and hopeless" men to trnasform them into "stable, romantic (and telepathic) adults." I think Spruiell is projecting, here.

True. When are conservatives NOT projecting? For more on women, men and romance fiction, take in "Tom Terrel's" Ten Ways To Be A Lover: A Man Looks at Romance Novels, a guest story on my moribund Why Your Wife Won't Have Sex With You blog (to which this Pharisees and Philistines entry is cross-posted. P.S. Another relevant blog story at WYW is Do Women Prefer Bad Boys?

Book Review: Kristin Lavransdatter

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 18:28:20 GMT

Kristin Lavransdatter
3 volumes, The Bridal Wreath, The Mistress of Husaby and The Cross
Originally in Norwegian, first published in English 1923-1927 (New York:Knopf)
Later (recommended) translations, The Wreath, The Bride and The Cross by Tiina Nunnally 1997-2000 (New York:Penguin), 1137 pp. This was the book that prompted Sigrid Undset's 1928 Nobel Prize in Literature, "principially for her powerful descriptions of Northern life during the Middle Ages." When the prize was presented, Undset had only just written the four volumes (as they were translated into English) of The Master of Hestviken (a.k.a. Olav Audunssøn) and in my view the later multi-book novel is the better work. Don't let the slow start of these novels put you off, with their opening paragraphs of flat-footed exposition outlining lineages, marriages and property inheritances. You will discover that as often as these delineations occur, you will still occasionally be lost in these knots of relationship, complicated by the fact that actual family or lineage names are rarely mentioned and the individual characters are known in the text only by their first name and as the "datter" or "son" of their father's first name). Undset's explication of the relationships, properties and inheritances serves as an illustration of the great emphasis that the people of Norway's medieval period laid on these matters, a thread of concern that runs heavily through both novels. One of the fascinations of these novels is the way they evoke the essential ethos of the so-called "Dark Ages." Unlike the rootless individualism that Undset saw as the tragedy of modern life in her earlier novels (set in and around the Norwegian city of Christiana in the 1920s), in her medieval novels the characters are, for better and for worse, inextricably bound to their lands, their families, their religion and what our Founding Fathers called their "sacred honor." It is so sacred to Undset's characters, in fact, that sometimes it is as if this austere sense of honor is just another part of their Christian faith. And, like their faith, honor is deeply tested in both novels. A woman's virginity before marriage is a particularly important element in the behavioral code which intersects so strongly with their religious laws, but curiously, the most consequential early actions in both novels involve a young woman succumbing to her desires with an "unsuitable man," before the arranged marriage her family desires. The ideal of sexual continence, for both sexes, seems almost more honored in the breach than in conformance in both novels, as numerous characters, major and minor, demonstrate the consequences of this particular human weakness. Religious exhortation to virginity and marital fidelity didn't work in those days, either, even when reinforced, as it isn't so much today, by the prospect of overwhelming public shame. Although all scenes touching directly on the sexual act are elided and euphemized and the physical particulars are never addressed as they are in modern novels, the Nobel presentation speech noted that "[t]he erotic life, the problem common to the two sexes ... constitutes the centre of Sigrid Undset's psychological interest." I would say that Undset's focus is more upon the conflicts between the inner physical demands, the received duty ("what honor requires"), and the spiritual longings of her characters. Although the many earnest discussions of Christian doctrine and the ways in which Kristin has fallen short, both in her own mind and in the consideration of her priests, are sometimes heavy going for a modern reader, they are crucial to our understanding of the inner life of a "woman of excellent lineage" in that pious age. Even though it may seem to us that Kristin's serious commitment to Christianity imposes too many strictures and impossible demands on human nature, to Kristin it is one of the most important parts of her life. She swings passionately between accepting and rejoicing in the comforts it can bring, defying its expectations, and despairing in her bouts of disconnection from God. Ultimately it is the combination of her halting, hard-won understanding of what her faith demands -- and the sense of personal honor so inextricably tied to it -- that sets up the heroic challenge she undertakes at the end of her life. A lot of lives end in these books, and it is Undset's treatment of death which stands out for me as much as the gorgeous descriptions of the physical world of Norway's mountains, meadows, fields, and fjords (for which the Nobel presentation also rightly commended her). Death in Undset's novels often occurs just as it does in life, unforeshadowed and shocking, "out of the blue." This causes the impact on the "unprepared" reader to be similar to that of the unprepared characters. Undset depicts all too clearly the vulnerability of children in that age and works to demolish the idea that people didn't mind their children's deaths as much then, when they died more often. Even when Kristin manages to become numbly resigned to the losses she must suffer, Undset convincingly demonstrates the emotional and spiritual devastation that comes in their wake. She also shows how little could actually be done for the sick or injured in that era. People essentially got better on their own or they died. All Kristin can do, even after she develops her medical skills over the course of her lifetime, is attempt to keep her patients comfortable. What is particularly affecting is the way she must face her medical helplessness when one of her own loved ones is dying. In most cases of adult death Undset carefully follows the inner life of the doomed as much as she does the thoughts and actions of the people around the deathbed, and the effect is poignant and profound, to the extent that we are drawn into the same acceptance of death experienced by the dying. It is significant to Undset's illumination of the mindset of the era that the firm and active religious faith enjoyed by almost everyone is not only a comfort to the survivors but mercifully eases the passing of the declining characters themselves. I hadn't fully appreciated before how psychologically useful the refuge of religion could be to people who lost children so often and so commonly died in the prime of life. (At the same time, the Church's assiduous cultivation of the sense of sin -- which lays so heavily on Olav in The Master of Hestviken -- can also deeply damage a man's life.) Death is everywhere in these Middle Ages, in childbirth, from accident, from infection, disease, suicide, and most extraordinarily to our era's sensibilities, from interpersonal violence. Swordfights, axe killings, daggers, spears to the groin...Undset demonstrates all the ways that men (and occasionally women) of that era killed one another, in what seems to have been almost routine violence. The incidents often arise because of offenses to "honor," such as verbal insults or active affronts like the seduction of a man's daughter. In Undset's view, both the initial outrages and the impetuous reactions, at least among men, are usually fueled by an accepted and nearly universal habit of prodigious alcohol consumption. Many of these violent deaths are justified within the community (there are no trials, per se) by the "severe provocation" defense and the punishment for them (agreed by the aggrieved survivors or decreed by ecclesiastical judges) is often just some material loss, in money, land or expensive goods. It is the loss of lands and estates which is considered the most grave punishment, because the children of the gentry maintain their status largely by being able to live on land that they inherit from their parents. Having to "hire out" and work on another's estate or depend upon the forbearance of indirect relatives is a great humiliation -- a major loss of honor. Given the extent of out-of-wedlock sexual activity in Undset's novels, the disinherited fate of illegitimate children becomes an important worry for many characters. In fact, the parents' concern for the fate of all their children, legitimate and not, forms a crucial spine of both books. In The Master of Hestviken Olav must reconcile his tender feelings for an illegitimate child and his stormy relationship with his legitimate, but difficult and "unlovable" son. Kristin Lavransdatter's emphasis is, understandably, more upon the experiences of motherhood. Undset's portrayal of the crippling guilt Kristin feels when she discovers she will destroy her beloved father's honor by turning up pregnant before her long-delayed marriage is harrowing enough, but her depiction of Kristin's agonies in the delivery of the child "conceived in sin" is frankly horrifying. Pregnancy and childbirth, even within marriage, are fraught with grim consequences for medieval women, not least of which is the way in which the lack of contraception renders them helpless in the face of their own fecundity. Every delivery embodies a real threat of death, and pregnancies which occur at the wrong place and wrong time (even if they are only perceived as such by the neighbors), give rise to ugly rumors and even outright accusations spoken in church sanctuaries and before bishops. Kristin must endure an assault of undeserved shame in relation to one of her unavoidable pregnancies, and an attempt to defend her against the charge leads to one of the saddest incidents of her life. But not a whisper of rebellion against any of the oppressive circumstances of her life and the gossipy local community's often ugly role in it, or any breath of "feminist" thought crosses Kristin's mind. Kristin accepts her endless duties, health burdens, disappointments with her irresponsible husband, and her inescapable position in her household and community as the immutable "way things are" and "the way things must be." Undset literally never even approaches any idea of structural or institutional injustice. Such destabilizing, community-threatening ideas are not even wrongly considered or defended against by her characters in these novels; no hint of them even arises. I think she was right in this. One of the major divisions between medieval thought and the ethos of the Renaissance is in the bubbling up of ideas that challenged structural orthodoxy, whether it was questions about the positions of women in relation to men or serfs' relation to their masters. Although these dangerous ideas are more-or-less successfully controlled, suppressed or co-opted for centuries, the turning point is the very fact that they do begin to arise and be seriously considered, even among the "common folk," and therefore must be overtly dealt with by various forms of appeal to authority. Undset goes on to show how a mother's intent everyday concentration on her children and her determination to preserve their inheritance can ultimately become more important to her than her relationship with her husband. Many women will also identify with Kristin's struggle to finally "let go" of her children. A continual sense of realistic surprise is what makes the reading of this huge, sometimes challenging tome so compelling. As the Nobel presentation put it,

Her narrative is vigorous, sweeping, and at times heavy. It rolls on like a river, ceaselessly receiving new tributaries whose course the author also describes, at the risk of overtaxing the reader's memory. This stems in part from the very nature of the subject. ... However, this heaviness is also a result of the author's ardent and instant imagination, forming a scene and a dialogue of each incident in the narrative without taking the necessary backward look at the general perspective. And the vast river, whose course is difficult to embrace comprehensively, rolls its powerful waves which carry along the reader, plunged into a sort of torpor. But the roaring of its waters has the eternal freshness of nature. ... Then, when the river reaches the sea, when Kristin Lavransdatter has fought to the end the battle of her life, no one complains of the length of the course which accumulated so overwhelming a depth and profundity in her destiny. In the poetry of all times, there are few scenes of comparable excellence.

Another way to put it is that Kristin's life story has all the rich, unexpected depth and detail of a real life, lived as we all live, incident by incident, crisis by crisis, and with no discernable "story arc" or "theme" that would allow us to guess what is coming next. And yet, in the end, because this is a novel, we are finally allowed to see how all of the years and experiences, as random as they seemed in the progress of the narrative, have produced a woman whose heroism, spent as it is on something we in this age might consider unnecessary, comes as no surprise. Undset's lengthy, sometimes lyrical, sometimes matter-of-fact treatment of "life as it is lived," depicting a woman at once so ordinary and so brave, would be fascinating even if it was set in the present day, in familiar physical surroundings and within our current world view. That it also beautifully and intimately evokes the experience of Norwegian landscapes and weather, and presents a 14th-century culture so far removed from ours today, only makes the reading experience more satisfying. The ending of Kristin Lavransdatter is quintessential Undset: she somehow creates a deeply affecting lyricism from straightforward prose, a view of the Norwegian landscape, a brief discussion of the weather, and a quiet, unpretentious description of two people stepping out from under their shelter onto a new fall of snow. It's one of those conclusions you know you'll always be able to see in your mind's eye, even after you may have forgotten all that went before.

The Very Definition of a Modern Major Philistine

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 22:51:09 GMT

[Crossposted at Pharisees and Philistines ("Everything You Don't Want To Be")] Here is a comment I made on a post regarding Jonah Goldberg (of Liberal Fascism ~~fame~~ notoriety) at Susan of Texas's The Hunting of the Snark.

Goldberg is quoted as saying:

[Television s]eries such as Dexter, House, and countless others have elevated egomania, self-absorption, and narcissism to admirable character traits.

I responded:

What. a. dip.

What is it Roy Edroso calls it? Kulturkampf? Right wing philistines somehow believing that the main purpose of art is the promotion of "values."

Worse, they have such a juvenile appreciation of literature and drama that they believe the main character in any fiction must always be the "hero," and it stands to reason (in their eyes) that the writer "admires" all the hero's characteristics. It's like they never heard of the concept of the "anti-hero," where, if there's any conscious promoting going on, it's the writer's profound belief in things CONTRARY to the main character's (professed) values.

The thing about House is that he is in a constant struggle against softer, more "dangerous" emotions and beliefs. His strongest characterological drive is toward Truth at all costs, and the way this otherwise "admirable" quality plays out against his arrogant dismissal of other aspects of Being Human is what drives most of the drama. It's fucking brilliant. And dimwits like Jonah can't begin to grasp it because they think the narrative is CELEBRATING House's approach to life.

No, it's not even merely dimwitted...it's some other word, some other worse adjective that I can't even think of, maybe because what Jonah is is SO awful we don't actually have coherent words to describe it.

So maybe we'll have to resort to ART.

Susan replied by offering a quotation from J.D. Salinger:

Maybe Philistine is a good word for his type. I looked it up and wikipedia has a J.D. Salinger quote: "A person deprived, for life, of any understanding or taste for the main current of poetry that flows through things, all things."

And it also says, [The Phoenicians'] boutique culture could not withstand the Assyrian and later Babylonian expansions into Canaan, however – after which they disappeared as a cohesive cultural group."

The insulated world they hope to live in is truly a little hothouse culture. They won't be able to survive without the backing of a wealthy elite, because they certainly can't survive on their merits. Who wants propaganda, which is predictable by definition, when they could have originality and surprise, which only true art can achieve?

Who wants propaganda, which is predictable by definition, when they could have originality and surprise, which only true art can achieve?

I answered,

Who indeed? Actually, it's clear that there is an audience for predictable fiction (at least), and it seems to consist of fearful people who HATE to be surprised.

Conservatives, by definition.

National Poetry Day in the UK

Thu, 07 Oct 2004 22:45:13 GMT

I was inspired by this post at Crooked Timber, which celebrates the UK's National Poetry Day with one of Shakespeare's lesser-known but most beautiful sonnets, to post the one and only sonnet I've ever written (so far).

It was genned up in a hurry one day in response to a challenge in the auld (late 90s) Salon Table Talk "Books" section. One of the irascible regulars was complaining (soon after I posted a quite different offering in the "Post Your Poams" thread, if I remember right) that nobody even knew what the meter of a classic sonnet was, much less how to write one anymore. To him, it was (I'm paraphrasing here) all free verse and other foolishness these days. Young whippersnappers! Get offa my lawn!

So of course I had to prove him wrong. Not terribly wrong, mind you, since it isn't a good sonnet, but I proved to the old coot that I could imitate the Shakespearean FORM (which is the easiest of all the old sonnet forms, truth be told).

Chapel On the Headland

The bells above my head now ring a time
Too soon to love you, and too late to know
How to resist, how to elude the flow
Of hope rebounding in their chime,
Or this glow of you beside me, this silent crime
Of wishing you would be an undertow
To me, and pull me to the waves below
The steepled cliffs our chastened lives have climbed.
The sea beneath the stones beneath our feet
Echoes with each wave the carillon
Which slowly tolls the hour above the street,
A beat, a roar, and then the antiphon.

My life is on the rocks, and bittersweet
Will be this love that I embark upon.

There are additional poetical celebrations in the comments thread over at CT. Go look.

Magical Rivalry

Tue, 07 Sep 2004 17:47:24 GMT

Amazon Link

Hogwarts for Grown-Ups. A densely woven debut novel by Susanna Clarke chronicles the world of a magician and his young rival in early-19th-century England. A review by GREGORY MAGUIRE. [The New York Times > Books]

All About Jenna -- No, the OTHER One

Tue, 07 Sep 2004 17:17:45 GMT

From a New York Times review of Jenna Jameson's book How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale in the New York Times

By JANE and MICHAEL STERN

... Jenna Jameson's Herculean life includes not only battles with drug addiction, drinking and eating disorders, but also emotional tugs-of-war with an estranged father, a grueling succession of dysfunctional relationships with men and women, and strep throat contracted from a co-star. ''It's not easy to have sex with strangers in front of other people,'' she announces, and yet, no surprise, the book is packed with exhaustive accounts of filmed sex scenes with guys and gals who range from ''soft, pasty . . . porous, greasy'' to an actor/director/boyfriend whose on-camera work delivers such satisfaction that she deems their videotaped sex ''by porn standards . . . the sign of a healthy relationship.'' A performance she describes in detail as ''one of the most explosive scenes I had ever filmed'' is done with a male co-star so energetic that she declares, ''Trying to maintain eye contact with him was like trying to read Dostoyevsky on a roller-coaster.'' ...

''How to Make Love Like a Porn Star'' doesn't offer much useful information for those who prefer having sex in private; but for aspiring performers, it's a gold mine. Remarkably, Jameson debunks the myth of the casting couch: ''You don't have to have sex with anyone in order to get a job having sex with people.'' And she offers tips like ''Girls who scream and flop all over the place into new positions don't get many jobs.'' To men who want to be in movies, the author suggests, ''Practice your orgasm face,'' and to women, ''Pick a name that's original and not cheesy.'' Jenna (nee Massoli) chose Jameson because ''it was the name of a whiskey, and whiskey was rock 'n' roll.''

Bonus gossip quote: Jameson says actor Nicholas Cage smells like ''the distilled sweat of homeless people'." Oooh, baby.

Bookmovision Archives: High Concepts and Doomed Characters

Sun, 22 Aug 2004 22:39:16 GMT

Tuesday, March 18, 2003

Why Blockbuster Movies Suck

Heather Havrilesky looks at a new documentary on the Trio Cable network, in Salon.

Charles Fleming, the author of High Concept: Don Simpson and the Hollywood Culture of Excess, sums up the kind of movie Hollywood wants to make in much more specific terms: "The first act, you've got a clever guy who's really attractive and really interesting but he's sort of flawed, and he's kind of arrogant. In the second act, bad stuff happens to him ... He's being challenged by something that's gonna make him figure out whether he's a real man or not. In act three, it turns out he's a real man. So simple that, you know, an idiot can understand it. And so universal that all idiots can appreciate it."

Another reason why those summer blockbusters seem so thoroughly skewed toward men?

Here's another book on movies, full of enjoyable fripperies: Ten Sure Signs a Movie Character is Doomed, and Other Surprising Movie Lists, by Richard Roeper. Including "5 Reasons George Bailey Isn't Such a Wonderful Guy in A Wonderful Life," and "7 Movies in Which Ben Affleck Cries Like a Big Fat Baby."

What I'd really like to see is "Just One Movie in Which Ben Affleck GETS STUFFED."

Archives: Mel-Low

Wed, 18 Aug 2004 07:20:24 GMT

March 12, 2003

Mel Gibson: International Man of Meshugena

From Is the Pope Catholic....Enough?, a NYT Magazine article on Mel Gibson and his anti-semitic Dad.

...Gibson has shown some of his father's flair for conspiracy scenarios. In a 1995 Playboy interview, he related a sketchy theory that various presidential assassinations and assassination attempts have been acts of retribution for economic reforms that challenged the powers-that-be. ''There's something to do with the Federal Reserve that Lincoln did, Kennedy did and Reagan tried,'' he said. ''I can't remember what it was. My dad told me about it. Everyone who did this particular thing that would have fixed the economy got undone. Anyway, I'll end up dead if I keep talking.'' [sigma]

"I can't remember what it was."

"My dad told me about it."

"Whatever it was, it woulda fixed the economy."

eye roll

Mel. Baby. Even if we were inclined to listen to Your Dad for our international economic facts, we'd be a bit put off by the knowledge that the Federal Reserve wasn't created until sometime in the 19-teens, so Lincoln couldn't have had anything to do with it.

Just stand over there and look pretty, will you?

Archives: Reconsidering the Chel-scene

Wed, 18 Aug 2004 06:12:10 GMT

May 6, 2003

Reconsidering the Chel-scene

From The Morning News, The Complicated Art of Chelsea, by Choire Sicha:

I had set out to convert Jacob to the love of art, and instead his easy disdain was converting me. I began to apologize for the expedition, the art, even myself. He shrugged, unharmed by the disregard of art, something he didn't even care for. Frantically I dragged him into the next gallery, then the next. Globby paintings of sunset (but why sunsets? who cares?), repetitive time-and-date-stamped snapshots of a naked man bathing in streams (I can't imagine why I'd care about someone's vacation nudism, unless there's a hard-on involved), and empty, crappily painted flowery canvasses of a gender-indeterminate couple on what appeared to be the set of Six Feet Under. I stood in the middle of the empty Mary Boone gallery, the most pristine money mill in the world, surrounded by a sold-out show of half-a-million dollar paintings. The impeccable staff were clicking their pens and answering their phones and I wanted to scream.

Had it always been so awful?

Well, yes, actually, it had.

Sicha's effort here is just one more easily-ignored critical piece that dares to whisper that the pricey "high concept" art scene is a parade of naked Emperors. Sure, there's the occasional velvet tabard or sharp-nosed ermine scarf, but it's 99% bare asses.

There's too much at stake, though: reputation, money, money based on reputation, reputation based on money (not to mention one's personal status in the Sophistication Bureaucracy). We have to ignore those little voices piping in the background:

"But all I see is dick!"

Archives: Great Moments in Movie Religion

Wed, 18 Aug 2004 04:51:04 GMT

Friday, August 15, 2003

Great Moments In Movie Religion

In Cousins, when old crank Lloyd Bridges' character is asked at the cemetery why he didn't come to his brother's funeral in the church, he says,

"God makes me nervous when you get him indoors."

Bookmovision Archives: Sinatra, or, Life vs. Art

Wed, 18 Aug 2004 04:42:07 GMT

Tuesday September 9, 2003

Life and Art

I've been thinking a bit lately about The Story of My Life, given that I've been telling so much of it here, so I was intrigued by this post at critic Terry Teachout's artsblog, About Last Night.

George Jacobs' Mr. S: My Life with Frank Sinatra (HarperCollins), the ghostwritten autobiography of Frank Sinatra's valet, is a piece of lowbrow trash, though I will freely admit that I gulped it down in a single sitting, pausing only to perform necessary bodily functions, and not always even then. I read it partly for the dish value (which is considerable), but mostly because it sheds a strange half-light on Sinatra's artistry. He was and is one of the unsolved mysteries of American culture, a man of limitless vulgarity who made art of the utmost sensitivity, and the more I learn about his life, the more puzzled I am by the fissure in his soul that made it possible for him to record albums like Only the Lonely, then go out and do the things Jacobs describes with seemingly unselfconscious relish in Mr. S.

Because Jacobs had no understanding of Sinatra the artist, his book supplies a shockingly lucid portrait of the dark side of a double man. Perhaps not surprisingly, it barely hints at the existence of the other Sinatra, the self-conscious introvert whose record collection consisted mostly of classical music and who sang the great American popular songs as tenderly as Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau sang Schubert. I hope somebody will get around to writing a book about that Frank Sinatra, and I'll read it with equal attention, but I'd never make the mistake of supposing that the sensitive Sinatra was the "real" Sinatra. Both Sinatras were real, which is why the man they comprised was so endlessly interesting -- and, I suspect, ultimately unknowable.

Of course we're all ultimately unknowable, even to ourselves. But I have a theory about the Sinatra disconnect which might also apply to other artists whose work seems to belie their actual lives.

People like you and me have to integrate all parts of our personalities because we don't have any particular genius. We can't separate our everyday work from who we are or how we behave. Genius makes it possible for a man like Sinatra to work out all his "sensitivity" in his art. When he sings he can sink himself temporarily into the depths of human love, emotional delicacy, despair, introspection, nostalgia, suffering -- all that difficult, beautiful stuff, upending himself in a sense and pouring them out of his soul. Afterward he's cleared out, purged and untroubled.

Confronting those emotions and sensibilities becomes The Work, something that he has trained himself to turn on and off efficiently for performances, and not otherwise. He feels no need to Work when he's off-stage, and it's possible to see how difficult it would be to live a whole life in the heightened state of emotional consciousness that he creates while he's singing. Being a dickwad in ordinary life might simply be the only possible defense against allowing The Work to take over and cripple him.

CONTRAST is also an essential element in creating powerful art. Perhaps what we see as the genius of someone like Sinatra is caused by his ability (or need?) to maintain the contrast between an ordinary, even deliberately ignoble life and an extraordinary, otherwise insupportable sensitivity and expressiveness.

Archives: The Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution

Wed, 18 Aug 2004 00:34:45 GMT

Tuesday, March 18, 2003 (Archive Post)

Masturbation as Cultural Construct

From the Chronicle of Higher Education: Knowing Thyself

Historian Thomas W. LaFleur explains how the stigma of masturbation rose and fell (heh) in Solitary Sex.

What set the ball rolling was the publication in 1712 of the indulgently titled Onania; or, The Heinous Sin of Self Pollution and all its Frightful Consequences, in both SEXES Considered, with Spiritual and Physical Advice to those who have already injured themselves by this abominable practice. And seasonable Admonition to the Youth of the nation of Both SEXES.

In London's booming coffeehouse scene, its 17 printings sold like so many thousands of lattes. Its unnamed author, Mr. Laqueur determines, was John Marten, who had earlier written a popular treatise on venereal disease, and who was clapped in irons in 1708 for obscenity. Marten had then reappeared as a "surgeon," purveying remedies for ills caused by "willful self-abuse," which his book luridly detailed. ...

So a trade came to flourish, from then until World War I, in devices like erection alarms, sleeping mitts, cradles that raised bedsheets away from danger zones, and hobbles to keep girls from spreading their legs. The last of those, notes Mr. Laqueur, highlighted one startling aspect of the contagion: that it affected women as much as men. ...

But the cultural practice that most provoked anxiety about solitary pleasures, in Mr. Laqueur's view, was the reading of novels [which] put readers at risk of "the solipsism of private vice." Many paintings depicted bourgeois women in private, enrapt with love letters, or spent after their "one-handed books" tumbled aside as they swooned, variously en déshabille or fully in flagrante. ...

The frequency of this coupling of fiction and friction surprised Mr. Laqueur. "I hadn't understood that this was part of the commercial revolution in print," he says.

Bookmovision Archives: Taxing Reading

Wed, 18 Aug 2004 00:31:49 GMT

March 22, 2003

Tax Time Reading

If you don't have time for a tome, but need to know whether the lower taxes proposed by the Bush administration can solve the country's economic situation, look at the witty, height-challenged Robert Reich's I'll Be Short : Essential Ideas for Getting America to Work.

Read an Excerpt.

Bookmovision Archives: Radio Free Rocky D vs. Pinko Hollywood

Wed, 18 Aug 2004 00:27:04 GMT

Friday, March 28, 2003

Rocky D vs. The Red Mill

Radio Free RockyD, sometimes heard on my local talk radio station (although not if I can help it), writes a hilarious column for the right-wing website Sierra Times called "Politically Incorrect Movie Reviews."

His schtick is to tell his readers how liberal pinko Hollywood (he calls it "Hollyweird") shoehorns its commie values into all the big mainstream movies. He therefore rates movies not with stars but with "Capitalist Dollar Signs." He also makes note of whether the movies fulfill a standard called the 5 B's: blood, breasts, bashes, bombs and beasts (shades of Joe Bob Briggs!).

That said, the guy is very entertaining, both purposely and inadvertently. He holds what he calls "feeelm krit-eeeks" in abysmal disregard, and never misses a chance to slap up on the "liberal = snooty candyass" stereotype, as in this review of "Moulin Rouge":

Imagine if Walt Disney met Busby Berkley on the way to see Cirque du Soleil, but instead of going to the circus, they drop acid and go see the Rocky Horror Picture Show ... quite a stretch, eh? Well, so is this movie, which is an esoteric mish-mash that will no doubt be hailed by film-buffs sipping latte's in trendy La-La-Land café's as they discuss how the EVIL REPUBLICANS are ruining film art. Puh-lease ... will someone unplug this leftover anti-Christmas tree?

Although there's plenty I could criticize in Rocky's copy, the one thing I really hold against him is that Moron-American habit of forming plurals by adding 's. Still, he's got an admirable manic energy:

Here's the plot: Poet-boy (Christian) meets ho' (Satine). They fall in love, but their love is interrupted by The Evil Duke, who is warm for Satine's form. ...Naturally, The Evil Duke is played by a blonde-haired blue-eyed sissy (the gay guy from "The Kids In The Hall" TV Show). This guy looks as if he couldn't fight his way out of a wet paper condom.

You mean there was only one gay guy in "The Kids in the Hall"....? But I digress. Rocky continues (believe it or not, I'm only quoting a fraction of this lengthy review):

There is a disturbing scene where the Duke tries to rape Satine, but she is saved by Le Chocolat. Le Chocolat has to do something heroic; he's the only black guy in Paris. There is also only one midget in Paris, and she saves the day (temporarily) by dropping a sandbag on Thug-Man's head. John Leguizamo does a similar deed. So there you have the Hollyweird PC injection -- 3 heroes: the only black guy, the only Hispanic and the only midget. Let's all say this together in a rude French accent: Those normal-sized whiteys are so stupid!

And then there's this:

Maybe it's just me, but I noticed something. The lead male is named Christian. The female lead is named Satine. Get it? Christian and Satan? It's a good thing the lead male isn't named Moses, or there'd be a protest march. But like I always say, in Hollyweird, Christian-bashing (however disguised) is accepted.

Cough. You read that right. "Christian" being the hero of the movie and "Satan" coming to a bad end adds up, aboard Rocky's runaway mental locomotive, to bashing Christianity. Wow. Right off the rails. But for me that's the real charm of Rocky's jackazoid reviews: there's sure to be a smoking train wreck somewhere along the way.

Watching it burn is half the fun.

Bookmovision Archive: Somalia on $5 a Day

Wed, 18 Aug 2004 00:22:50 GMT

Saturday, March 29, 2003

Lessons from Somalia

The images of Iraqis fighting for those truckloads of humanitarian supplies the other day reminded me forcefully of a pivotal scene in Marty Stanton's Somalia on $5 a Day: A Soldier's Story. (I read the hardback last year; the mass market apparently comes out this summer.)

Stanton, whose extra "danger pay" during his deployment to Somalia was about $150 a month -- hence the "$5 a day" -- tells an instructive story of his small squad's experiences in trying to guard a warehouse of relief supplies. A huge mob of Somalis wanted those supplies, and it soon became clear that they were all too hip to the Americans' rules of engagement. Knowing that the soldiers guarding the cordon were unlikely to actually shoot into the crowd, they were undeterred when Stanton ordered his men to fire warning shots over their heads.

Realizing that he and his squad were seriously outnumbered and likely to be overwhelmed at any moment, Stanton determined that he was going to have to actually shoot one of the civilians in hope of scaring off the rest. He reasoned that he had to protect his men's lives and -- not least important given that a large part of their mission was to disarm the Somali warlords -- prevent their weapons from falling into civilian hands.

He drew his service revolver and grimly picked out the one man he was going to shoot -- a tall Somali with a green knitted cap -- but, happily for everyone involved, reinforcements arrived at just that moment.

The stated objectives of the Somali deployment (begun during the first Bush's administration) and those of our attack on Iraq are essentially similar: both were launched to depose vicious men. Both efforts are based on the idea that military action is a sovereign remedy, that superior firepower is all that is needed to subdue and re-organize a swarming, murky hive of social, political and economic complexity.

Stanton doesn't pretend to have definitive answers, or to be able to scope the big picture, but he does outline some very practical, grunt-level military lessons he learned from the essentially disastrous Somalia campaign. It begins to appear that many of those hard-won lessons were ignored when the present Bush administration began planning the attack on Iraq.

A related book, a classic in my own academic field of international relations, is Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes, by Irving Janis. Janis outlines the ways in which highly cohesive groups, like presidential administrations, will tend to filter out information they don't want to hear. A valuable book just for the history of the contrast in Kennedy's decision-making processes between the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis. It's still being used as a textbook in IR today. (Hence the hefty price-tag.)

Bookmovision Archive: Fun at the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama

Wed, 18 Aug 2004 00:20:24 GMT

Monday, March 31, 2003

Buy it with Assault of the Killer Bimbos and save!

A friend of mine was just celebrating the arrival of his most recent purchase from Amazon. I thought the title was irresistable, so I looked it up: Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama. Snort.

Amazon amateur Jon McNeill reviews it thusly:

Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama really does have it all -- if all you're looking for is the worst movie ever made ("Plan 9" watch out!). You will laugh (although don't watch this alone, you'll just feel dirty) -- it'll be one of those big, hearty, non-stop, spots-in-your-eyes, dizzying laughing fits.

The plot... unimportant. Both to the director and to the viewer.
The acting... no words can describe.
The directing... who would take credit for this?
But what you do get is lots of paddles, shaving cream, showers, more bowling alleys than The Big Lebowski, and one awfully racist caricature of an imp.
And that, to me, spells classic.

Yep, looks like it's Not To Be Missed.

Bookmovision Archives: The Art World, Framed and Reframed

Wed, 18 Aug 2004 00:17:10 GMT

Thursday, April 17, 2003

The Art World, Framed and Re-Framed

by Paula Woods, Special to the L.A. Times

Twenty-five years of the New York art world, with all of its hyperkinetic creativity, petty jealousies and dazzling degeneracy, is brought to life by Siri Hustvedt in her third novel, What I Loved. Narrated by Leo Hertzberg, 72, who begins his account as a 45-year-old art historian living in SoHo, the novel pulses with an electric current of ideas and people whom Leo remembers with a fierceness and particularity that bely his advancing age and physical infirmities. For Leo, we learn early in the book, is losing his vision to macular degeneration -- clouds in his eyes.
Central to Leo's recollections is Bill Wechsler, an artist whom Leo first encounters through one of his self-portraits, viewed at a Prince Street gallery in 1975. ... Compelled to buy the painting for the pricey sum of $2,500, Leo arranges to meet the artist at his Bowery studio and is immediately drawn to the tall, handsome but disheveled Wechsler.
That meeting is enlivened by the two men's discussion of how other artists and their work influence Bill's. Their initial conversation, ranging from 17th century Dutch painter Jan Steen's "The Morning Toilet," in which a woman is removing her sock, to R. Crumb's "Tales From the Land of Genitalia," grows into a solid friendship. Eventually included are Leo's wife, Erica, an English professor with whom he shares a passionate romance, and Bill's awkward mate, Lucille, a writer of precise and distant poetry. ...
Bill's life begins to be re-visioned when his model Violet returns from Paris in 1981, and the artist finally succumbs to the attraction that was sparked during their work together and leaves his family to move into the Bowery studio with his younger lover. ...
[Bill's son] Mark is a cipher of a child and an interloper in these early scenes, shuttled as he is between his mother, who at one point takes a job in Houston, and his father in New York. But even Mark's relative absence in the first part of the book, which is capped by a heart-wrenching tragedy, changes as his behavior becomes tangled with and propels the latter sections of Leo's narrative. In the process, "What I Loved" itself is transformed from an intellectually engaging novel to a taut and nerve-racking thriller that encompasses Mark and his friends Teddy Giles, Teenie Gold, Me and other habitues of the rave-crazed, drug-addled art scene that was characteristic of the late 1980s and 1990s. ...
"What I Loved" bears the mark of a keen intellect and meticulous researcher whose analysis of Wechsler's fictional works of art is as spot-on as her investigations into the hearts and souls of her complex characters. Hustvedt's novel is a quietly astounding work of fiction that defies categorization as surely as its central characters defy the vision-impaired Leo's clouded interpretations.

Bookmovision Archive: Inspired by TV Events

Wed, 18 Aug 2004 00:14:31 GMT

Tuesday, April 29, 2003

Inspired by TV Events

I wrote this little melodrama in response to a notorious television series suicide. It's a vision of what I thought would (should) come next in the continuing story of the series. Needless to say, the producers didn't share my vision, and as far as I'm concerned that was the day the show jumped the shark.

Points in Julia's Just For Fun Game to those who can guess which TV program it refers to. Bonus points for the name of the episode that inspired it.

COVENANT

The driven day is over,
And the sleepless night is fed
By more work in his apartment.
Obsessed and frozen, dry-eyed, numb,
She can't be led away by anyone,
Not even he who'd give his arms
And eyes to end her pain.
Papers, pictures, dishes, discs, his ties,
All are summarized by her cold hands.
His mother will be pleased with all she's done.
Toward dawn she must succumb
To weariness, falls to his rumpled bed --
And then -- the scent of him is there...
All semblance of control is gone.

We, awed watchers, must forgive
These tears, the terrifying breaking of a heart
In one we'd had a hope might be too strong.
But even she can only bear so much.
Not just the savage loss, but guilt,
Even though (we know with her)
There was no other way.
She had, last night, believed the time
Of telling him their quest had been a Lie
Would be the worst her shortened life
Would ever know.
No pain of blood or breath, she'd thought,
Could ever equal what she'd wrought
On him -- herself! -- with saying so.
He'd trusted her --
That trust had been her strength! --
And then she'd proved the instrument of death
To all his dreams, his pride and glory, hope,
To everything that made him who he was.
That was an agony.
Yet she would rather live that moment now, again,
A thousand times, or an eternity,
Than bear a single night like this,
Alive while he is gone.

Oh, God! she thinks,
Who needs a Truth
In which he becomes a pawn,
Manipulated sojourner in Lies?
Who wants a truth -- not I! --
In which the Tower of my life
Proved weak and wrong,
A merely weary, guilty man,
And not the constant Power
I demanded that he be?
Does Nothing matter to You, Lord,
But Truth?

You see?
You've finally broken me.
Lying here, I pour out my heart at last
To You.
And yet I still imagine that I speak to him...
Perhaps I do.
I address his vigor of belief,
His humor, courage, radiance -- and rage --
All that made a life like his
A Bible for a woman left behind.
By God -- and, yes, by him! --
They'll pay.
In every day that I have left, in every hour
I will redress his death;
And they will pay
For everything they did to us, to ours,
To everyone who died upon that ground of Lies!

She takes a longing breath of him again,
Closes her eyes.

The dawn creeps to his window,
Slow...
Above the sill,
Across the floor,
The pouring glow of silent light
Covers her like Love.
Then, at the edge of sleep, she feels
A thrill in that hot brightness on her skin,
And at her cheek and ear and lips
It hovers in the air....
She dreams (or does she dream?)
It is his touch,
She dreams that he is there:
The blessing of his kiss upon her throat,
His hand upon her hair...!

Bookmovision Archives: The Crimson Petal and the White

Wed, 18 Aug 2004 00:08:55 GMT

Tuesday, May 27, 2003

Sexual Paranoia and Self-Delusion in 19th Century London

Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White is a novel worthy of the term "Dickensian," but without Dickens's moral strait-jacket or his stifling sentimentality. The main character is Sugar, a steely 19-year-old prostitute who has become so renowned for her graceful compliance with any requested perversion that she is featured in a "gentleman's guide" to London bordellos. Sugar has been the star attraction in the house of the morally hideous Mrs. Castaway since she was sold to her first "nice gentleman" at the age of 13.

The only way Sugar can vent the rage that boils behind her expensive acts of submission is by writing a novel about a prostitute practicing inventive tortures upon her erstwhile customers. It's a book that will rival the shocking works of the Marquis de Sade -- if she ever finishes it.

Sugar becomes the sexual obsession of William Rackham, a supremely selfish plutocrat who can't imagine that he is being manipulated by a a mere woman. He thinks that Sugar anticipates his every need and is always willing to do anything he wants because she loves him with the perfect and sacrificial love his culture has taught him to expect from "truly feminine" women.

Sugar and Rackham are surrounded by a familiar cavalcade of Victorian characters that are nevertheless anything but "stock": Rackham's mad wife Agnes, a delicate, convent-raised dreamer whose romantic ignorance was shattered on her wedding night; a pious but somewhat sensible widow who attempts to "rescue" London's prostitutes by placing them into nightmarish physical drudgery as scullery maids or factory workers; a tormented cleric who is horrified by his own unstoppable sexual fantasies -- especially those which feature the woman he genuinely loves; venal servants, conniving socialites, cynical dilettantes, drunken slumlords...the whole breathing world of the 1870s -- but portrayed with a depth of feeling and emotional realism Dickens and Trollope could never dare.

Victorians didn't want to hear the truth that Faber so robustly reveals: that their own attitudes toward women and sex warped the human beings of their day, male and female, into even more grotesque shapes than they ordinarily take. But there is no preaching here, only an exquisite, heartbreaking sympathy, even for the confused and monstrous character of William Rackham.

If small bubbles of human hope and love rise only sluggishly to the dark surface of this novel, eventually there is some desperate -- if perhaps misguided -- heroism, a rocky sort of justice, and, in the end, even a glimmer of the half-forgotten glory of Eros.

HIGHLY recommended.

Bookmovision Archives: Seabiscuit

Wed, 18 Aug 2004 00:05:49 GMT

Saturday, July 26, 2003

Seabiscuit

The first part of this movie was so slow and so borderline hokey that I was rolling my eyes, but perhaps that is a function of having to get lots of exposition out of the way before we get to the meat of the tale. (I also wasn't all that sure about the folksy David McCullough narration/commentary along the way. It mostly worked, but there were times when my eyes started rolling again.)

But once Bill Macy's frenetic radio announcer ("Tick Tock" McGloughlin) comes on the scene, the real action gets underway, and, frankly, it would be hard to completely blow it with such engaging narrative material and such worthy actors. It really is a great, great story. And even if the story wasn't much, there would still be HORSES. And, oh, they are wonderful horses, particularly the eponymous fellow at the center of it all, the huge-hearted "Pops," as his jockey Red Pollard (Tobey McGuire) calls him, the gutsy little horse called Seabiscuit.

Even once the story's engine is in gear there are some over-earnest scenes when writer-director Gary Ross lays his thumb on the scale (although not to a Spielbergian, Ryan-in-the-graveyard extent) but the acting is excellent (everyone, particularly Chris Cooper as craggy trainer Tom Smith, adds special subtleties to their otherwise fairly predictable characters), and there are some absolutely perfect, throat-catching Moments scattered throughout.

Both Macy and Gary Stevens, who plays the handsome gentleman jockey George "Iceman" Woolf, definitively steal their brief scenes, Macy with his crazy, cocky charm and Stevens with a quiet, large-eyed authority. The racing scenes are filmed beautifully, with irresistable kinetic excitement, and...did I mention those gorgeous horses?

Not Oscar material, but all things considered I give it 3.5 out of 5.

(Also saw a trailer for "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World," a film version of one of the best stories in the great Napoleonic naval novels by Patrick O'Brian. Russell! Crowe! plays legendary ship's captain Jack Aubrey in one of the most difficult incidents of his illustrious career -- a high seas chase before the wind and in mountainous seas almost to the South Pole. Although Crowe is not the image I had in mind when I was reading the books, in the trailers he seems to work in the role and the production values appear to be absolutely PERFECT, which is crucial to these kinds of stories. It looks like it will be a must-see. In contrast, I also saw the trailer for the new Kevin Costner Western, "Open Range." Robert Duvall, Annette Benning and desperate attempts to inject trailer-cut "excitement" notwithstanding, it's obvious this one is going to be another skunky stinker.)

Bookmovision Archives: Invisible Eden

Wed, 18 Aug 2004 00:00:38 GMT

Saturday, August 30, 2003

INVISIBLE EDEN

A Story of Love and Murder on Cape Cod

By Maria Flook.
406 pp. New York: Broadway Books. $24.95

From a NYT review by Julie Salamon

Maria Flook, a novelist, had fond feelings for Cape Cod, from her childhood memories of summers there. She returned as an adult to work on her writing, settling in Truro, a small town she describes as ''a sleepy hamlet controlled by the weather.'' In this setting she would find the writer's luck that often comes from somebody else's tragedy, when Christa Worthington was murdered in January 2002, ''as the crow flies'' less than a mile from Flook's own house.

That the Worthington story had the ripe ingredients for a succulent potboiler quickly emerged: Christa Worthington, enviable Vassar alumna, had returned to her New England roots after spending years traversing the rarefied landscape of the fashion world in Paris, London and New York. (She had worked for Elle and Women's Wear Daily, and had been a freelance writer for Harper's Bazaar, The Independent of London and The New York Times.) At 42, and single, she became pregnant by Tony Jackett, a Truro shellfish warden, Provincetown fisherman and the married father of six. Worthington decided to raise the child alone, but then wanted Jackett to chip in. After the birth of her daughter, Ava, Worthington briefly had an affair with a neighbor, Tim Arnold, a children's book author; Arnold says he found the body when he stopped by to return a flashlight, and called the police. Her father, Christopher H. Worthington, known as Toppy, a former civil prosecutor for the state attorney general's office, was in his 70's and was infatuated with a heroin addict 40 years younger than he (while Christa's mother was dying of cancer). There were inheritance issues.

Move over, ''Peyton Place.'' Christa Worthington's murder and its entanglements of class, sex, fashion and money riveted the Cape Cod press and engaged the national news media, tabloid and otherwise (including this newspaper, which sent a reporter to the scene). The residue from the event that inspired coverage on programs like ''48 Hours'' and ''Dateline'' settled in Flook's writerly haven like fog; the seaside air became thick with murder suspects and speculation. How could she resist? The novelist became a journalist -- of sorts -- and began her own investigation of the case.

Bookmovision Archives: Sex, Time and Power

Tue, 17 Aug 2004 23:58:24 GMT

Monday, September 1, 2003

Hidden Ovulation + Narrow Pelvis = Why Your Wife Won't?

Here's an essay/excerpt from a new book called Sex, Time and Power. I haven't had a chance to read it yet, so I don't know if I can actually recommend it, but it does seem to have a VERY provocative thesis.

BIG BRAIN, NARROW PELVIS
By Leonard Shlain

Since our genetic makeup has changed very little in the last 150,000 years, I will make the key assumption that the main features of modern men's and women's reproductive life histories do not differ substantially from those present at the outset of our species. There can be no doubt that culture can affect sexual behaviors, but the features I will be referring to are more basic. For example, I assume that the average length of a contemporary woman's menstrual cycle and that of a current man's obsession with sex are both innate traits that ancestral humans exhibited. ...
I will hypothesize that the male's behavior evolved soon afterward in response to the female's lead. In fact, I will argue that the history of our species could be written from the perspective that males have spent the last 150,000 years trying to regain the power they so emphatically lost to females when we differentiated away from Homo erectus. By examining the habits of modern human males and females, we can infer the many changes that emerged when the new, improved Homo sapiens female debuted in Nature's garden.

The catalogue begins with the absence in Eve's daughters of some sort of signal that would inform a male that they were ovulating. Unlike the vast majority of other females, the one belonging to the human line does not advertise her ovulatory burst. With very few exceptions, other species' females have a distinct period of sexual receptivity during which they experience a powerful instinctual drive to mate. To the males of her species, a female emanates a distinctive "green light," whether olfactory, visual, auditory, gestural, or some combination thereof. These episodic heights of female sexual desire are exquisitely timed to coincide with her ovulation. Previously uninterested males are alerted by her attention-grabbing signals.

Estrus, as this upsurge is called in female primates, promotes harmony between the sexes. When both male and female are equally excited about mating, it is likely that they will have an amicable and mutually rewarding encounter. Obviously, a considerable benefit accrues to the species if mating occurs in synchrony with ovulation. Sperm meets ovum, and conception occurs. Eve's daughters, however, lack this most basic sexual semaphore, having replaced it with concealed ovulation. Human ovulation is so cryptic that most women remain unaware when, precisely, their eggs have departed from their ovaries.

Further obscuring the timing of her ovulation, the human female acquired the potential to engage in sex, if she desired, 365 days of the year, during pregnancy, lactation, menstruation, and even after menopause. ...

The innovations distinguishing the human female from other mammalian females mentioned thus far pale when compared with her most spectacular new feature. She became the first species who possessed the willpower to refuse consistently to engage in sex around the time she was ovulating. For that matter, she was the first animal of either sex , of any species, capable of deciding to remain celibate if she so desired.

This resolve is the heart of Response W. This is the gift Natural Selection bestowed upon her for having to endure Factor X, high maternal mortality and painful childbirth. It is something that had heretofore never existed in the animal kingdom. Philosophers call it Free Will. And herein lies the crux of relations between the sexes. African Eve and her daughters developed the determination to choose consciously a course of action that overrode the instinctual circuits that drive every other species' females to copulate when they ovulate. Females of some other species may be able to choose which male among multiple suitors upon which they wish to confer their favors; an occasional female of any species may decide not to mate with anyone or at any time. But the human species was the first in which all the females evolved the capacity to decide consciously to refuse to mate during any one ovulation or all the time.

* * * *

Leonard Shlain is the Chairman of Laparoscopic surgery at the California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco and is an Associate Professor of Surgery at UCSF. He is also the author of "Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light" (HarperCollins, 1991) and "The Alphabet Versus The Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image"(Viking, 1998).

Has anybody else out there read this yet? How does it vary from Geoffrey Miller's The Mating Mind?

I'm also interested in whether this guy has a political axe to grind. His statement of his thesis is a bit worrisome in that regard.

Archives: The Legacy of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Tue, 17 Aug 2004 23:55:11 GMT

Saturday, September 6, 2003

The Legacy of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

From a review in the New York Times, by Kevin Baker:

As David Von Drehle makes clear in his outstanding history, Triangle: The Fire That Changed America, the overwhelmingly young, female victims of the [1911 shirtwaist factory] fire -- at least 123 were women, and of these at least 64 were teenagers -- were betrayed by the greed of their employers, by the indifference of the city's political bosses, by an entire matrix of civic neglect and corruption.

Girls who routinely worked 84 hours a week for as little as $7 were immolated because their bosses kept stairway doors locked to prevent theft. In a city that had added nearly 800 skyscrapers over the past 10 years, the fire department had no ladders that reached above the sixth story and pumps that could spray only a ''gentle rainfall'' on the fire that raged through the eighth, ninth and tenth floors of the Asch building in Greenwich Village. The social reformer Frances Perkins remembered the mood in New York afterwards as one of guilt, ''as though we had all done something wrong.'' Over the next 25 years a determination to expiate that feeling would bring about seismic changes in American life. ...

Like many of the [factory] owners, Blanck and Harris were immigrants themselves, who had worked their way up from the bottom and now churned out thousands of shirtwaists, an early form of women's blouse that was a highly popular item in the booming new business of ready-to-wear clothes. By 1909 it was a $1.3 billion industry ($23 billion in today's dollars), but a fickle one, which turned on the smallest efficiencies and on ''sweating'' every cent out of labor costs. ...

Within six minutes, the fire had consumed some 9,000 square feet of factory floor, trapping most of the workers on the ninth floor. The 18-inch wide fire escape collapsed, spilling two dozen women down onto the glass skylight and an iron picket fence below. Dozens more were simply consumed by the fire, or leapt down the elevator shaft or from the window ledges, falling so hard they ripped right through the fire department nets.

The fire lasted only 15 minutes, but it would never be over. Blanck and Harris managed to beat a manslaughter rap with the help of a smart lawyer and a tainted judge. They made $60,000 from the fire -- more than $400 per dead worker -- and two years later were caught locking another stairwell door in yet another firetrap factory. The families of the dead had to settle for $75 each.

In recent years, some right-wing commentators have challenged the significance of the Triangle fire, attributing subsequent improvements in working conditions and wages to voluntary, market-based decisions. Von Drehle puts paid to this frivolous bit of revisionism, showing how revulsion over the fire led directly to legislation ''that was unmatched to that time in American history . . . entirely recasting the labor law of the nation's largest state.'' Perkins and Wagner would go on to play key roles in the New Deal and the founding of the American welfare state.

Always, though, Von Drehle keeps his eye on the factory workers. He is at his elegiac best in describing what these young women must have seen as they clung to life on the window ledges, looking out over Washington Square Park on a gorgeous, sunlit spring day: ''This, then, was their universe: panic and fire behind them, horror and helplessness on the faces far, far below -- and something cool, something beautiful, just out of reach beyond the heat waves and the blinding smoke.'' Almost a hundred years later, it is still enough to bring tears of rage and sorrow.

Next time you hear someone touting a "laissez-faire" market economy "freed" from government regulation, hand them this book.