A Widow for One Year

When I pick up a John Irving novel, I expect a certain level of wittiness, maybe a small dose of silliness, some odd characters and maybe a dancing bear or two. I get none of that in A Widow for One Year, his ninth novel. My expectations aside, I should be able to enjoy one of his books that doesn't rely on these hooks. I understand a writer wanting to something new. If I had to characterize this book in his canon of work, I'd put in the category of experiment that failed, like his A Son of the Circus, which was published a novel before this one. 

One of the themes of the book is grief and how different people deal with it. Two of the main characters, Ted and Marion are the parents of two teenage boys whom they see die in a brutal car accident. Ted reacts to the grief by womanizing. Marion does so by bottling it up and eventually running away. She also seduces Ted's teenage writing assistant, Eddie. Ted and Marion also have another child Ruth who is four when Marion leaves the family in 1958. The rest of the book, takes place in the 1990's with middle-aged Ruth and Eddie still dealing with how Ted and Marion's destructive behavior affected their life. Ted and Marion's grief had infected another generation. Marion explains that "grief is contagious." 

Another theme of the book is whether a writer needs to experience what they write about or is their imagination all they need to rely upon. Every major character in this book is a writer (Ted, Marion, Eddie and Ruth) which gets tiresome. In one of Ruth's books she refers to one of her characters as "a widow for one year" and an angry reader complains that one is a widow for the rest of your life implying that Ruth is an imposter and doesn't know what she is writing about. 

I find this part of the book interesting because there is always a lot of Irving's life in his books. He wrestled at Phillips-Exeter as a kid and this appears in his novels a lot. They often are based in New England (he was born in New Hampshire and is now a Vermonter) or in Canada, partially, in which he also lives. The only Irving book I can recall that did not have a lot of his life in it, was A Son of the Circus, which was a crime novel set in Dubai and it was a disaster of a book. Perhaps A Widow for One Year was written in response to the criticism of that book. 

My attraction to Irving novels is usually the characters. I love Garp, Owen Meaney, Homer Wells and the kids growing up at The Hotel New Hampshire. This is a 500+ page book that mostly documents the sex life of a small group of self-obsessed individuals. When you have the ability to create a character like Garp and his mom, why create these tiresome people? Two thirds of the way into the book, the character Ruth takes a trip to Europe. I don't know why these 100 pages are even in this book. The end could have been rewritten without these pages entirely. When I got to this point, I wanted the book to end. If I didn't have a commitment to finish a book after I started one, I wouldn't have gotten through this one.  

Notes on Reading For Whom the Bell Tolls

I am at the point in my life that I have a bathroom book. Since I have committed myself to reading one classic of literature every year for the rest of my llife, these are perfect bathroom books. It means that I may take months to read some of these tomes, two or three pages at each "sitting." Think of me as a contemporary Leopold Bloom with a blog. 

Andy Warhol has a short experimental film called Haircut that I can't help think of when I read Hemmingway. The film is just of a haircut, other than the haircut nothing really happens, and it is quite boring. At some point towards the end of the film, someone sneezes. That simple sneeze seems momentous only because your sense of time and action has been altered by the film. It slows your brain down. This is what it is like reading Hemmingway. 

If you ask someone what For Whom The Bell Tolls is about, they generally say it is about a mission to blow up a bridge during the Spanish Civil War. I take issue with this description. It is really more of a book about a bunch of characters talking about a mission to blow up a bridge. They mention blowing it up on the first page, one hundred pages into the six hundred page novel they are still talking about blowing up the bridge ... page 350 they are still talking about the dam bridge. Nothing much happens, a lot of dialogue, but when the action happens, it just seems momentous, like Warhol's sneeze. The last chapter, the bridge is blown. 

I knew this going in. Slowing your brain down is particularly difficult in the internet age, my brain seems to be hardwired to expect stimulus every few seconds. When I was younger I read The Old Man and the Sea, an entire short novel about a guy trying to catch a fish. I also read the very short story, "A Clean Well Lighted Place," about an old guy in a bar being talked about by waiters. Reading something with so little plot may not have been a problem decades ago, before the rewiring, but it is now. Maintaining my attention span is a task which I have to put work into. I can only read it in spurts, a few pages at a time hence the bathroom reading. My mind wanders too easily for Hemingway. I started reading For Whom The Bell Tolls in late November 2020, I started blogging about it, this post, in December. I expected that I would not be finished until March. I write this sentence today and it is April 2021, I am on page 350. I finally finished the book in early June. 

I don't want to give the impression that I am not enjoying it. I am. Partially. I am saved by the beauty of the writing, here is the opening paragraph of Chapter 9:

They stood in the mouth of the cave and watched them. The bombers were high now in fast, ugly arrow-heads beating the sky apart with the noise of their motors. They are shaped like sharks, Robert Jordan thought, the wide-finned, sharp-nosed sharks of the Gulf Stream. But these, wide-finned in silver, roaring, the light mist of  their propellers in the sun, these do not move like sharks. They move like no thing there has ever been. They move like mechanized doom. 

Regardless of how well it is written, it is as boring as hell. It is a chore reading it, not an enjoyment. I have a completion complex. Once I start a book, particularly a classic, I have a thing about finishing it, so finish it I did. When I read a classic like this I always wonder what a modern editor would do to it. I've always thought that the middle third of Moby Dick would be removed completely if it were published now. If I were editing For Whom the Bell Tolls, much of the flashbacks seem unnecessary. The bullfighting would be yanked from this book. Some love the bravado of it all, but I am bored stiff with it. I'd move the last chapter to the beginning, parts of it, and make a flashback of the time in the cave. 

This is a book about death, not about a mission to bomb a bridge. The mission plot is mere background. It chronicles the four days before the mission, the characters are stuck in a cave about half the time. They know their death is near. Death lingers among them almost as if it were a character in their midst. 

This is a book with a lot of sex and a lot of violence, but it is written conservatively, not salacious or gory. Here is an example of how sexuality is handled, the opening paragraph of Chapter 33:

It was two o'clock in the morning when Pilar waked him. As her hand touched him he thought, at first, it was Maria and he rolled toward her and said, "Rabbit." Then the woman's big hand shook his shoulder and he was suddenly, completely and absolutely awake and his hand was around the butt of the pistol that lay alongside of his bare right leg and all of him was cocked as the pistol with its safety catch, slipped off. 

Sometimes artists can used the limitations imposed upon them and make great beauty with it, as if the limitation are just another color in their pallet. Hemmingway does this with self-censorship. 

Because there is not a lot of action, the dialogue drives the plot forward and it is a challenge. It was written in English but the characters are supposed to be speaking peasant Spanish. This presents a challenge to a writer because Spanish, like French, has a polite form while English has no such thing.  Hemmingway resolves this by using "thou" and "thee" in dialogue. Here is an example of this from Chapter 25:

       "He should learn to control them," Pilar said. "Thou will die soon enough with us. There is no need to seek that with strangers. As for thy imagination. The gypsy has enough for all. What a novel he told me."

        "If thou hadst seen it thou wouldst not call it a novel," Primitivo said. 

All the dialogue reads like this. It makes for odd reading until you realize why it is written this way. 

Also, the characters are very foul mouthed, but not explicitly. Hemmingway censored himself, because he knew the book would not have been read or published otherwise. Instead of swearing he used words like "expletive" or "unprintable," or used words that rhymed with the real word, like "muck" instead of "fuck." 

Here is a line from Chapter 35, this is the protagonist Robert Jordan talking to himself: 

You're mucked, he told himself. You're mucked for good and higher than a kite.

It is odd at first but you get used to it.  

Robert Jordan, our protagonist, is a stoic, tough and honorable character fighting Franco's fascists on the side of an underdog. He is constantly in a state of self-questioning and doubt. In chapter 39, he refers to another character, Pablo, as being "on the road to Tarsus."  I am familiar with the "road to Damascus" but I really had to think about and research "the road to Tarsus." The "road to Damascus" is a reference to Paul conversion while he walked to Damascus. He changed his name from Saul to Paul and became a disciple of Jesus. Paul's hometown was Tarsus. The "road to Tarsus," is returning to where you came from, a pulling back from your conversion. Jordan may be referring to Pablo, but he is also referring to himself. He wonders what he got himself into. He is in love with Maria, a woman he just met and knows they will not have a life together because their mission is doomed. His challenge is one we all have, do we go with our convictions or do we play it safe? In those four days, they live in the moment and things get tense between the characters. 

Jordan is full of shame. He is ashamed of his father for killing himself. He believes he is "flying above" his father when he joins the cause of the war, which America has no stake in. He is an American Spanish language professor and a munitions expert. Somehow he is pulled into this conflict. It is a losing cause and ultimately, him being there is a suicidal act but his cause is just, unlike his father's.  

I would not recommend this book to everyone, but it is hard to see what American literature would be without it, or American film as well. I see Robert Jordan in Casablanca's Rick and even in Rocky. The film version just arrived in the mail, from my Netflix queue, and I am looking forward to seeing it. With Gary Cooper as Jordan and Ingrid Bergman as Maria, I am expecting to hate it. 

Album Dissection: The Royal Scam

A few weeks ago I went to see a jam band called Kung Fu. I didn't know much about this band, the only reason I went is because they were playing an entire set of Steely Dan music. Their original music was pretty good but I really enjoyed myself when they came out for the second set of the Dan. Check them out:



Steely Dan has been credited (or blamed or chastised) for creating the fusion jazz sound. This is not entirely accurate. They only have one album heavily infused by jazz, Aja, their sixth and most popular. Most of their work is pure rock and roll. Like many bands, Steely Dan met in college. The two main guys, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen met at Bard College in New York State in 1968 in a cafe called The Red Balloon. They formed many bands together. Believe it or not, one of the bands feature the comedian Chevy Chase on drums. After graduating they moved to Brooklyn and started working in the music industry writing songs and music for low budget films and even some big stars like Barbra Streisand. ABC records didn't know what to do with them because they kept coming up with music that was too complex for anything they had, so they urged them to form a band. They got the name Steely Dan from William S. Burroughs novel The Naked Lunch. In the novel, a Steely Dan III from Yokohama is a strap-on dildo. They have had many musicians matriculating in and out of the band but mostly it has been these two guys.

The Royal Scam, their fourth album, is my favorite of theirs and when I ranked my favorite 100 albums (see list below), it came up as #47. It is the most guitar heavy of their albums and a concept album. You don't hear the term concept album very much anymore because people buy individual songs now and it is usually only older people like me that are buying entire albums. The Royal Scam could easily be called "the American dream and other really big lies." It is scattered with songs about immigrants, oddballs and people down on their luck getting screwed-over and turning to the underworld for survival. The album cover features a man in a suit sleeping uncomfortably on what appears to be a radiator or a bench possibly in a bus station; he is dreaming about skyscrapers turning into beasts. If I remember correctly the album back cover had a close-up on the hole in his shoe. No doubt, the album cover is allusion to the theme of the album.

Side One: 

"Kid Charlemagne" is the opening track and it is loosely based on the rise and fall of San Francisco chemist Owlsey Stanley who was the LSD supplier to Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters. The first stanza is about Stanley on top of the world due to his skill of making pure acid:

       "Just by chance you crossed
              the diamond with the pearl
        You turned it on the world
        That's when you turned the world around
        Did you feel like Jesus?"

The second stanza is about his fame and his link to the Merry Pranksters: "Everyone stopped to stare at your technicolor motor home / Every A-Frame had your number on the wall." By stanza three, the party is over: "Son you were mistaken. You are obsolete" and by the fourth stanza they are running from the law worrying if there is enough gas in the car.  All of this is surrounded by one of the best guitar jams in rock history with guest fusion jazz guitarist Larry Carlton getting props from Rolling Stone magazine. The song makes their 100 best guitar rock songs list coming in at #80.

"The Caves of Altimira" is the only positive song on the album about a boy discovering the famous Caves of Altimira in northern Spain. He sees the cave painting by candlelight and their simplicity and beauty open the world up for him.
      "Before the fall when they wrote it on the wall
       When there wasn't even any Hollywood
       They heard the call
       And they wrote it on the wall
       For you and me, we understood"
He is in the dark being save by the prehistoric picture of a sun. Quite poetic.

"Don't Take Me Alive" is a sharp contrast to the previous song. It is about a guy name Mad Dog who is held up, surrounded by cops and he has a case of dynamite. We don't know how he got there but we know that he crossed his father, a bookkeeper, back in Oregon.
                "Where no sun is shining
                  No red light are flashing
                  Here in this darkness
                  I know what I've done
                  I know all at once who I am"
Unlike the boy in the cave, it is darkness that allows him to discover himself, all too late I am afraid.

"Sign in Stranger" is a science fiction rock and roll song; no wait, it is a song about a gangster ...um, okay, maybe it's both. As a kid, Donald Fagen wrote sci-fi so the first stanza is a throw back to those days. It about a planet named Mizar Five where people have to "shout to stay alive."  This is a planet of gangsters and they have the ability to give you a new identity. Admittedly, I have no idea what is going in this song, but I love the piano jam. 

"The Fez" is a short sweet song about a guy and his condom. "Ain't never going to do it without the fez on .... Please understand/I want to be your holy man." That is most of the lyrics right there. It is just a fun song. The fez in this case is not a Moroccan hat, but a condom. 

Side 2:
"Green Earrings," like "The Fez" is a vague song without a lot of lyrics. The narrator recalls a woman and her green earrings. He likes the earrings more than her, so he steals them. All he remembers about her is "the look in her eyes" but he doesn't mind. He's an egomaniac. In the Kung Fu youtube clip above, they perform both of these songs segued into each other. On a CD they actually play back to back, but on an album, the medium I grew up with, you'd have to get up and flip sides in between songs.  These songs sound great together. They are the lightness of a fairly dark album.

"The Haitian Divorce" is about a couple named Babs and Clean Willy. "Babs and Clean Willy were in love they say/So in love the preacher's face turned red." They get married then they fight and end up in Haiti for a quick divorce. After the divorce Babs drowns her sorrows at a bar and ends up having a one night stand with a Haitian. She gets back together with Clean Willy in the states and have a baby. Surprise! The baby isn't his ... "Who's this kinky so-and-so?"

"Everything You Did" is about an argument between a couple. The narrator's partner has hidden something from him and now he wants to know. He caught her with a lover. "Where did the bastard run" is the first line in the song, but he wants to know everything. He wants to know in detail really, he is a voyeur not a jealous lover. That is what he's angry about, she is hiding the sordid detrails from him.

"The Royal Scam" is the magnum opus of the album and the title track. This is very common in rock albums of this era, like Bruce's "Jungle Land" on Born to Run, The Eagles' "Last Resort" on Hotel California or Billy Joel's "Captain Jack" on Piano Man. They are the last song on the album; they are longer songs, usually one of the best songs on the album and quite serious ... and definitely not a hit song. Scam is about some Puerto Rican immigrants coming to New York City with starry eyes only to be greeted with a harsh reality and getting swallowed up by organized crime. The middle verse might be one of the most poignant and beautiful verse written in rock and roll:

     "They are hounded down
       To the bottom of a bad town
       Amidst the ruins.
       Where they learn to fear
       An angry race of fallen kings
       Their dark companions
       While their memory of
        Their southern sky was clouded by
        A savage winter
        Every patron saint
        Hung on the wall, shared the room
        With twenty sinners"

However awful his experience in America, the third stanza tells how the narrator of the song tells a different story in his letters home. The first and the last sentence of the song are the same forming a circle "They wandered in from the city of Saint John without a dime."  The cycle continues. The myth of America is a lie but it is a hopeful lie that we need. Immigrants continue to come with hope and are eaten up by the city.

All the songs on this album stand alone as great songs, but like most of the great rock albums of the 1970's, you really should listen to them in order. It is like a great movie, you could probably watch the scenes out of order if you knew it well enough, but why would you do that? These songs were put in this order for a reason. Collectively, it is not a story but a tone. It is full of darkness, but it gives you great release via guitar and piano by master musicians.

Here is the list of my top 100 albums:

My 100 Favorite Albums:
#1 Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd
#2 Blood on the Tracks by Bob Dylan
#3 The Wall by Pink Floyd
#4 Captain Fantastic and Brown Dirt Cowboy by Elton John
#5 Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart Club Band by The Beatles
#6 Ziggy Stardust and the Spider's from Mars by David Bowie
#7 The Poet Game by Greg Brown
#8 Summer's Teeth by Wilco
#9 The Native Americans by Robbie Robertson
#10 Home by Spearhead
#11 Highway 61 Revisited by Bob Dylan
#12 Yoshimi and the Pink Robots by The Flaming Lips
#13 Harvest Moon by Neil Young
#14 Odelay by Beck
#15 Hunky Dory by David Bowie
#16 Desire by Bob Dylan
#17 Zepplin II by Led Zepplin
#18 LA Woman by the Doors
#19 Mermaid Avenue by Billy Bragg and Wilco
#20 Rust Never Sleeps by Neil Young
#21 The Final Cut by Pink Floyd
#22 I'm Your Man by Leonard Cohen
#23 Who's Next by The Who
#24 New York by Lou Reed
#25 Days of Future Past by Moody Blues
#26 Rain Dogs by Tom Waits
#27 The Low Spark of High Heels Boys by Traffic
#28 The Soft Parade by the Doors
#29 Aqualung by Jethro Tull
#30 Moving Pictures by Rush
#31 Terrapin Station by The Grateful Dead
#32 The Night Fly by Donald Fagen
#33 Nebraska by Bruce Springsteen
#34 Station to Station by David Bowie
#35 Beggar's Banquet by The Rolling Stones
#36 Breakfast in America by Supertramp
#37 Oh Mercy by Bob Dylan
#38 Born To Run by Bruce Springsteen
#39 Everybody Knows This is Nowhere by Neil Young
#40 Yankee Hotel Foxtrot by Wilco
#41 Cure for Pain by Morphine
#42 I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got by Sinead O'Connor
#43 Rift by Phish
#44 déjà vu by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young
#45 Prolonging the Magic by Cake
#46 Become You by The Indigo Grils
#47 The Royal Scam by Steely Dan
#48 Animals by Pink Floyd
#49 Abbey Road by The Beatles
#50 Aja by Steely Dan
#51 I'm the Man by Joe Jackson
#52 Blonde on Blonde by Bob Dylan
#53 Comfort Eagle by Cake
#54 Diamond Dogs by David Bowie
#55 Greetings from Asbury Park by Bruce Springsteen
#56 Stop Making Sense by The Talking Heads
#57 Gimme Fiction by Spoon
#58 Bachelor #2 by Aimee Mann
#59 Titanic by Jim's Big Ego
#60 Pale Sun Crescent Moon by Cowboy Junkies
#61 Document by REM
#62 US3 by US3
#63 Making Movies by Dire Straits
#64 Goodbye Yellow Brick Road by Elton John
#65 Red Dirt Girl by Emmy Lou Harris
#66 Tea for the Tillerman by Cat Stevens
#67 American Idiot by Green Day
#68 August and Everything After by the Counting Crows
#69 52nd Street by Billy Joel
#70 Court and Spark by Joni Mitchell
#71 Meddle by Pink Floyd
#72 War by U2
#73 Darkness on the Edge of Town by Bruce Springsteen
#74 Tumbleweed Connection by Elton John
#75 Train Home by Chris Smither
#76 Secret Samadhi by Live
#77 Graceland by Paul Simon
#78 Drag Queens and Limousines by Mary Gauthier
#79 Drum Hat Buddha by Dave Carter and Tracey Grammar
#80 Turnstyles by Billy Joel
#81 Not for Kids Only by Jerry Garcia
#82 Work by Dan Bern
#83 Modern Times by Bob Dylan
#84 Songs from the Wood by Jethro Tull
#85 Play by Moby
#86 Obscured by Clouds by Pink Floyd
#87 Naturally by JJ Cale
#88 John Barley Corn Must Die by Traffic
#89 Shakedown Street the Grateful Dead
#90 Tenacious D by Tenacious D
#91 Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd
#92 Elton John by Elton John
#93 At Folsom Prison by Johnny Cash
#94 The Innocent, The Wild and the E Street Shuffle by Bruce Springsteen
#95 Night and Day by Joe Jackson
#96 The Crane Wife by The Decemberists
#97 Fragile by YES
#98 Hotel California by The Eagles
#99 Ten by Pearl Jam
#100 After the Gold Rush by Neil Young

Song Interpretation: Life On Mars?

If Roy Orbison and Bruce Springsteen sing for the lonely, then surely David Bowie sings for the alienated. The alienated are not only lonely, but feel uncomfortable wherever they are. Their quiet discomfort is not universal, obviously, but everyone knows at least one person that just doesn't feel like they fit in, even when everyone else thinks they do. Even in a crowd of friends having a party, I feel alienated and sometimes just have to leave to feel better. If you have never felt this way, then there is not much I can say to explain it to you, but it is obvious to me that Bowie has felt this way. He speaks to us, not just to the closeted gays, transvestites and otherwise tormented souls, but the seemingly average Joe like myself. I am sure you have a Bowie fan in your life. Chances are, there was a time in their life that they were dying inside. A few years ago, I was in a room where a Unitarian Universalist minister asked us all to think of someone who inspired us in their childhood. Of the eight people or so in the room, I was the only person that could not come up someone that he knew. While other people mentioned favorite aunts, neighborhood mentors or teachers, all I could come up with is writers and musicians. It may sound trite, but if not for the likes of Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Walt Whitman and Kurt Vonnegut ... I don't think I would have survived my childhood. Bowie, a true Renaissance Man, reached across the ocean, across the cosmos, and touched me in a way that those closest to me could not even comprehend. This is the power of art, is it not?

Alienation is nothing new in art. I don't know if Bowie is the first person to actually use an alien to personify it. His most famous album from 1972, The Rise and Fall  of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, tells a vague story of a bi-sexual alien rock star coming to Earth to inform us that we have five years left before we destroy ourselves. The song "Life on Mars?" from the previous album from 1971, Hunk Dory, could be seen as a setup to Ziggy. It tells a story of a "girl with mousy hair" who just got into an argument with her parents and wanders into a movie theater. She is completely disconnected to what she sees on the screen, "sailors fighting in a dance," "cavemen," and "lawmen beating up the wrong guy" ...she could spit on them. It is the early 1970's and quasi-revolutionary pretensions are sweeping through Western Europe, "from Ibiza to Norfolks Broads." Capitalism and empty patriotism has gone awry. "Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow" and "Lennon's on a sale again" (or is it Lenin?). Is she disappointed in the film or in reality? She asks "Is there life on Mars?" because surely, life sucks here. Like most of his early work, the imagery suggests that life is futile. How can be anything but futile when we are so small and insignificant?

Also, the Rick Wakeman piano is so haunting.  What a perfect song!

Like many people, I awoke on Monday with the news of Bowie's death crying out of my radio. I spent most of the day listening to him. I did my share of whimpering and singing that day. My wife bought me some maple cookies to cheer me up. My Facebook feed is still bleeding Bowie so I know I am not alone in this. I usually don't consider myself a lucky man, but I do in this case consider myself lucky that I lived at the same time Bowie did. If not for him, I'd feel much more lonely.

LIFE ON MARS?

by David Bowie

It's a God-awful small affair
To the girl with the mousy hair
But her mummy is yelling no
And her daddy has told her to go
But her friend is nowhere to be seen
Now she walks through her sunken dream
To the seat with the clearest view
And she's hooked to the silver screen
But the film is a saddening bore
For she's lived it ten times or more
She could spit in the eyes of fools
As they ask her to focus on
Sailors fighting in the dance hall
Oh man look at those cavemen go
It's the freakiest show
Take a look at the lawman
Beating up the wrong guy
Oh man wonder if he'll ever know
He's in the best selling show
Is there life on Mars?
It's on America's tortured brow
That Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow
Now the workers have struck for fame
'Cause Lennon's on sale again
See the mice in their million hordes
From Ibiza to the Norfolk Broads
Rule Britannia is out of bounds
To my mother, my dog, and clowns
But the film is a saddening bore
'Cause I wrote it ten times or more
It's about to be writ again
As I ask you to focus on
Sailors fighting in the dance hall
Oh man look at those cavemen go
It's the freakiest show
Take a look at the lawman
Beating up the wrong guy
Oh man wonder if he'll ever know
He's in the best selling show
Is there life on Mars?

Song Dissection: Skateaway

I was a fairly depressed person in the 1980's. One of my biggest causes of my angst is that something I loved was being destroyed before my eyes ... and ears. I thought rock and roll was dying.  Everything coming out seemed so over produced. Each time a new album came out of one of my favorite musicians, it was a great disappointment. The rawness, the intimacy was gone. All I could think of was some corporate douche sitting at the sound board with a pile of cocaine in front of him yelling at a band, like Heart or Genesis, that they need to add more synthesizer or insert sax solo here... or "you need more hair spray, your hair is not tall enough." Rock and roll made a lot of money in the 1970's so that meant that a lot of people got involved in it for reasons other than making great music like making money. Dumbing down the music is great for sales.

MTV (Music Television) also happened.  Having a network dedicated to pop music was good for the industry for a lot of reasons. Bands had a place to communicate almost directly with their fans for the first time. Before MTV, performers would have to hope for a rare spot on the Ed Sullivan Show, American Bandstand or Top of the Pops.  MTV had tour dates and interviews and fans could see their favorite performers readily and, of course, there was the music video. The video was a new creative medium that attracted film people to music in new creative ways. This is a good thing, but it also had a bad effect on music. The music wasn't just audio now, it was visual. The big money labels wanted to manage the image of musicians as well as their audio output. This is virtual death to creative types.

Here is what the awesome Wilson sisters from the band Heart looked like before the MTV era. 

Here is after:

Of course, they had their biggest hit "These Dreams" in the MTV era which is a pretty dreadful song co-written by one of my favorite song writers Bernie Taupin. Since this is a blog post about Dire Straits, I won't pan it any further. The era was in need of a new kick ass rock band.

I was only 12 when "Sultans of Swing" hit my FM station in 1977 and I had already started my Dylan obsession. I just had bought my first Dylan album in cassette, Infidels. My first exposure to Dylan was from MTV, the Sweetheart Like You video. Imagine that!  The first time I ever heard Dire Straits, I thought "Wow, Bob Dylan can sing!" Of course, I was mistaken it was Mark Knoffler not Dylan. If Dylan had a better voice, he'd sound like Knopfler. This band had everything. They had one of the best guitarists in rock history (27th on Rolling Stones top 100) , a killer rhythm section, a good singer and decent lyricist. How could MTV ruin this band?

Dire Straits was just so talented they could do whatever they wanted in regards to their image. They could be themselves. Mark Knopfler was a white balding Brit in his late 20's who went on stage wearing head bands and wrist bands. Talent trumps trendiness. How does a band like this survive in the era of MTV? They confront it head on. The song and video of Skateaway is about the movies we make in our head when we hear music, that which the music video robs us of. It is on their third album "Making Movies", arguably their best, which gets its title from the lyrics of the song (see below).

The lyrics are straight forward and the video is sparse and to the point. It is about a girl, a "roller girl," skating through traffic. She has headphones on and she is in her own world. While the world is at a standstill she weaves in and out of traffic freely. The "city's been so rude to her" but this is her revenge, she "tortures taxi drivers just for fun." It is escapism, but it is the "rock n roll dream" that makes her want want more, "the music make her wanna be the story."

Ironically, it is hard not to see this video in my head when I hear this song. I prefer to make own movies when I hear a great tune, but is one of the better videos I have seen. I like how the band comes in at the end and just sways back and forth. No glitter here, just rock and roll.  Rock and roll survived and is better than ever thanks to bands like Dire Straits who kept it burning through the dark ages of the 1980s.

Skateaway

lyrics Mark Knopfler

I seen a girl on a one way corridor
Stealing down a wrong way street
For all the world like an urban toreador
She had wheels on, on her feet

Well, the cars do the usual dances
Same old cruise and the curbside crawl
But the rollergirl, she's taking chances
They just love to see her, take them all

No fear, alone at night
She's sailing through the crowd
In her ears the phones are tight
And the music's playing loud

Hallelujah, here she comes, Queen Rollerball
In an Enchante, what can I say, care at all

You know she used to have to wait around
She used to be the lonely one
But now that she can skate around town
She's the only, only one

No fear, alone at night
She's sailing through the crowd
In her ears the phones are tight
And the music's playing loud

She gets rock 'n' roll and rock 'n' roll station
And a rock 'n' roll dream
She's making movies on location
She don't know what it means

And the music make her wanna be the story
And the story was whatever was the song, what it was
Rollergirl don't worry
DJ play the movies all night long

She tortures taxi drivers just for fun
She like to read their lips
Says, "Toro, toro taxi see ya tomorrow, my son"
I swear, she let a big truck graze her hip

Ah, she got her own world in the city, yeah
You can't intrude on her, no, no, no
She got her own world in the city
The city's been so rude to her

No fears, alone at night
Sailing through the crowd
In her ears the phones so tight
And the music's playing loud

She gets rock 'n' roll and rock 'n' roll station
And a rock 'n' roll dream
She's making movies on location
She don't know what it means

But the music make her wanna be the story
And the story was whatever was the song, what it was
Rollergirl don't worry
DJ play the movies all night long, all night long

Slippin' and a-slidin'
Yeah, life's a rollerball
Slippin' and a-slidin'
Skateaway, that's all
Skateaway

Shala, shalay, hey, hey, skateaway
Now shala, shalay, hey, hey
She's singing shala, shalay, hey, hey, skateaway

Shala, shalay, hey, hey

Song Interpretation: She's A Jar

A modern novel has perspective. The first person narrator doesn't necessarily represent the writer. So when Twain uses the pronoun "I" in Huckleberry Finn, he isn't presenting his tale or opinion, but Huck's. Because the narrative is in first person, he/she isn't omniscient, has perspective and is biased. This makes for a more complex reading experience. This is why I find the reading experience of a modern novel so much more enjoyable. The world you delve into is more broader and full of possibilities. What isn't Huck telling me? Is he lying? Your narrator could be deeply flawed, delusional or insane like the narrators of Poe's Tell-tale Heart, Nabokov's Lolita or A M Home's The End of Alice. This makes for a wild ride.

 Pop songs are no different. When Bruce Springsteen sings a song from the perspective of a "Highway Patrolman" or when Ice T does so from the perspective of a "Cop Killer," they are using this same literary device. The "I" is not the singer of the song but a personae that is narrating the story. A lesser known and more abstract example of this is the song "She's a Jar" by Wilco.

The band Wilco is often called Dad Rock because most of their fans are men about my age, old enough to be dads, who grew up listening to rock songs with great lyrics like Bob Dylan, Neil Young or even Bob Seger. They are a newish Chicago-based band that was formed in 1994 from the ashes of the alt-country band Uncle Tupelo. "She's a Jar" is from their third album and my personal favorite, Summersteeth. Much of the album is about how the strains of being on the road affects your marriage.
 
We have two people in this song: the male narrator and the woman who is the "she" in the title. The last line, "You know she begs me not to hit her," really threw me for a loop the first time I heard it. You don't know a lot about the man, narrator, in this song, other than he is an abuser and he is on the road a lot. We know a lot about her because the song is about her. First thing we know is that she is a jar. The image that comes to mind is that she is made of glass and containing something nourishing, but then we find out that her lid is "heavy."

Much of the rest of the song is abstract full of imagery. None of it sticks and only some of it, becomes more clear when you hear the word "hit." The lines "the bruised road," "a pretty war," "my eyes red," "my face gets sick" or "dry your eyes" all do an interpretive bend when you hit that last line.

The abstract nature of the song begs for multiple interpretations. It is his thoughts and it is obvious, it is a struggle. He is fighting against as much as rationalizing his behavior. You could also consider the "hit" in the song isn't violence at all.  For if she is indeed a jar ... when you "hit" a jar, you are drinking from it, are you not?  But then, why would she be begging him not to if that were the case?

lyrics of Wilco's She's A Jar by Jay Bennett and Jeff Tweedy

 "She's A Jar"

She's a jar
With a heavy lid
My pop quiz kid
A sleepy kisser
A pretty war
With feelings hid
She begs me not to miss her

She says forever
To light a fuse
We could use
A hand full of wheel
And a day off
And a bruised road
However you might feel
Tonight is real

When I forget how to talk, I sing
Wont you please
Bring that flash to shine
And turn my eyes red
Unless they close
When you click
And my face gets sick
Stuck
Like a question unposed

Just climb aboard
The tracks of a trains arm
In my fragile family tree
And watch me floating inches above
The people under me

Please beware the quiet front yard
I warned you
Before there were water skies
I warned you not to drive
Dry your eyes, you poor devil

Are there really ones like these?
The ones I dream
Float like leaves
And freeze to spread skeleton wings
I passed through before I knew you

I believe it's just because
Daddy's payday is not enough
Oh, I believe it's all because
Daddy's payday is not enough

Just climb aboard
The tracks of a trains arm
In my fragile family tree
And watch me floating inches above
The people under me

She's a jar
With a heavy lid
My pop quiz kid
A sleepy kisser
A pretty war
With feelings hid
You know she begs me not to hit her

I Am Charlie, We Are All Charlie #jesuischarlie

In the age of social media, freedom of expression couldn't be more important. We are not only consumers of media anymore but we are the media. In a world where you get shot or put on a hit list, if your cartoon offends a certain group or your novel offense that same group, no one is safe. If you say something in your Facebook status or Twitter that gets the wrong group of people angry, it could be the end for you. Many people respond by being quiet for fear of offending. I think this is the wrong approach. My immediate response makes me want to Photoshop pictures of their prophet doing perverted things with squirrels. I am grateful that I restrain myself mostly.

I know that most of Islamic people are not insane murderers but are just like everyone else ... just trying to figure things out. I am sure if I had Internet access when I was a teenager, lacking self control, I'd be posting whatever came to my mind.  Now I am a bit more reserved. I got somewhat depressed on Monday night after watching this week's PBS show Frontline on the National Rifle Association. It kept me awake. I then got up for work, read my news feed over coffee and heard about shootings in France. My frustration and fatigue turned to anger. Someone on Facebook shared an image that really captured what I was feeling:

I don't know who created it and I assume they don't mind me sharing it here because I think it is genius. It is a bullet going through a pencil plus a pencil sharpener equals two pencils. This is how I react to senseless violence.  Cartoonists being killed due to their biting satire just makes me want to write ... scream first but then write. I don't want to just write but to be provocative, to offend, to write something that will metaphorically slap them in the face. I want to stand by Charlie Hebdo. I had never heard of Charlie Hebdo until the shooting but now I am enthralled. The shooters want to intimidate us, sure, that worked to a certain extent. They certainly stopped these particular cartoonists from producing any more. But we are hydra-like. You cut off one head, two will grow in its place. Their aversion to satire is only going to produce more. We'll have more security and we'll be a little bit more freaked out, but we won't stop satirizing. Not even close.

The founders of America knew something that is lost on the violent sects of the Muslim faith. Criticism makes you stronger. Freedom of speech is something we take for granted in modern America. The basic idea is that we want all the ideas out there, even ideas that are diametrically opposed to our own. In each criticism, even the unfair ones, there is a kernel of truth. In this maelstrom of competing ideas somewhere is truth.  When an organization dogmatically follows an ancient book and follow it literally, growth isn't exactly their forte.

My feelings about religion have been well documented in this blog. I am not going to rehash it only to say it seems that the world would be a better place without it. People have different ideas about the nature of humanity and origins of the universe. This is a wonderful thing, yet something seems to get lost when we institutionalize it. An idea that begins as a thing of beauty is set in immovable stone in the halls of an institution and then it dies from lack of growth. It is from that point the ideas of   us and them are formed.  The Us is those who embrace the idea and Them is those that don't. When the us is threatened by the them, you often have violence.

Religion has done some good for humanity. Even a staunch atheist like me acknowledges this. In the Dark Ages, before we had any institutions, religion provided structure and a moral code. Now that we have many other institutions that provide what religion used to, do we still need religion? Spiritual beliefs are so personal that most people have their own regardless of what their church what their church has to say about it. Most church goers cite social connection as their biggest reason to be in a church. I get that. I joined a Unitarian Universalist church a few years ago. I loved the community but all that religion was just too much for me. Even with all the loose rules of a liberal theology, the group think was too much for me, but I really miss the fellowship over coffee sometimes.  I can't imagine those folks wanting to behead anyone. They'd have to discuss it for a decade and then form some committees, nothing would ever happen.

Perhaps the Muslim religion is too young of a religion. I have been told that Christianity was around the same age that Islam is now when Christianity performed all their violent deeds. So the religion just needs to mature. In an era of nuclear and chemical weapons, I just hope humanity survives their ascent into adulthood. Until then, I intend to support anyone's right to express themselves regardless of how wrong or offensive they are. It is wrong and offensive not to.

Manic Pixie Dream Girls and the Magical Negroes

If you ever get the impression that American society is not white-male-centric, you don't have to go very far to change your mind back. Just watch a movie.  When I look at Wikipedia's list of top grossing films of all time very few of them have a female lead and I can't find one with a non-white lead.  I guess you can't blame Hollywood if they are marketing their films to their audience ... but do white guys watch more movies than other demographics?  I don't know, really.

It is not just who the lead of the film is but the tone of the films. The story arcs of most American films revolve around white people. An all too common trope is the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.  This term was created by the film critic Nathan Rabin back in 2005 after seeing Kirsten Dunst in Elizabethtown, but the term can apply to films much earlier. It refers to a stock female character in a film that influences the main character (a white male) and is usually his romantic interests. She is quirky, attractive and girlish. A majority of the mainstream films made in America have a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Why create something new if an old trope will suffice? Most people won't notice that they are watching the same old thing. We have Barbara Streisand in What's Up Doc?, Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot, Carrie Fisher and Natalie Portman in the Star Wars flicks, Natalie Portman in Garden State and to a lesser extent Beautiful Girls, Emily Watson in Punch Drunk Love, Kate Hudson and Meg Ryan in pretty much everything they have ever been.  They have no growth, very little depth and merely revolve around the protagonist like a satellite, not doing much but influencing the tides.

Things are changing I hear. Of the 40 movies released this summer by major studios, 17 of them had women leads. This is less than half but higher than most years. But is this really an improvement?  The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media did a study of 122 recent family films, of 5,554 speaking roles only 29.2% were female. This is the same ratio as 1946. Of these 40, there was only one female director. Perhaps that is where the studio needs to start to fix this problem. This is a problem!

A lesser used trope is the Magical Negro or as Spike Lee called it the Super Duper Magical Negro. The Magical Negro doesn't always have magical powers but when they do, they help out white people. Will Smith in The Legend of Bagger Vance appears on golf courses and helps white men with their golf game or Michael Clarke Duncan's character in The Green Mile is a magical prisoner on death row that uses his magic to help the white guards. I am not making this shit up. I don't think there is a single black person in any Stephen King book that doesn't exist to help white people. Mother Abagail in The Stand (the magical old black lady), Dick Hallorann (Scatman Crothers' character) in The Shining and Ellis Boyd "Red" Redding (Morgan Freeman's character) in The Shawshank Redemption are example of this.

I want to say that this trend can't continue, but since woman are a majority perhaps this is just naive. According to the Hollywood reporter, 54% of film goers this years were Caucasian while making up 60% of the population. White movie-goers decreased while Hispanic and black movie-goers increased. Will we get more Forrest Whitaker and Steve McQueen (the director) in the years to come? I hope so because I love those guys. This year's Best Movie Oscar winner 12 Years a Slave was a great film. But please note, it is not on the list of the top grossing films. Most Americans want an escape at the movie theater, not introspection. We'll save that for our Netflix queue. I watched it on the plane. No one wants a downer when you drop $8.00 at the box office.

The Cop Show Formula

I can't imagine a television show based on my workday. It would be very boring, no drama, just typing and an occasional shot of me yelling at my screen. Every episode would be the same. No Emmy's expected here. I am often envious of people whose jobs are out and about in the world driving around and interacting with the world. It seems stimulating. Yet when I say this to people who have these type of jobs, they are envious of my boring existence. Grass is always greener? Perhaps.

Being a cop must be filled with drama. Even a traffic cop must see more drama than me in any given day. I have no idea really. The best I can do is watch a cop show. Cop shows are so ridden with cliche is it hard to imagine that they are at all realistic. Cliches are usually a clue to poor writing. When a writer uses cliches, they are relying on preconceived notions of archetypes established already by society, literary or otherwise, through over usage or stereotypes. Yet sometimes they work. Perhaps it is because I grew up when television was quite bad, especially the cop show: McCloud, McMillan and Wife, Baretta and Kojak. I have low expectations. Some of the better shows rely heavily on cliches. Perhaps this is an example of form dictating content. The writers are under a lot of pressure, have a short amount of time to produce and have many obstacles. On commercial television they only have 42 minutes in an hour to produce content. They not only have to satisfy the public, in an increasingly competitive saturated market, but they have to satisfy network execs who are often clueless. It is impressive that anything good gets produced at all.

Like all genre drama, cop shows have a built in structure. A crime is committed, a cop or two are assigned, the crime solved either by the end of the show or with the newer shows, using a longer story arc, by the end of the season. Perhaps it is the formula that begs for formulaic characters. Regardless of why, the American cop show is better than it has ever been.

The most common cliche is the cop on the edge, lets call him/her Dirty Harry. Dirty Harries operate by their own rules. They can't follow the constraints their commander puts on them. On "True Detective" this is Detective Rusty Cohl,  this is Detective Tim Bayliss on "Homicide: Life On the Street",  Jimmy McNulty on "The Wire," Detective Catherine Jensen on "Those Who Kill," Vic Mackey on "The Shield" or US Marshall Raylan Givens on "Justified."   These are good centerpiece characters. They are often protagonists stirring up trouble. This trouble gets McNulty demoted, Givens and Cohl investigated, Bayliss arrested and Mackey eventually, presumably, killed. The Vic Mackey character was particular compelling because the show would have been nothing without him. He is a dirty cop that feels justified in his corruption. Every character is either trying to catch him, trying to be like him, trying to sleep with him and eventually, trying to get away from him. He is a fulcrum for all the action in the show.

At least one cop per show has difficulty with their relationships, usually caused by the job. They put their jobs over their children, wife and/or girl friends. This is Joey Quinn on "Dexter,"  Detective Marty Hart on "True Detective," Detective Kima Greggs on "The Wire," Detective Sarah Linden on "The Killing," Detective Lydia Adams or Officer Sammy Bryant on "Southland" along with Mackey and McNulty again. Cops have a very high divorce rate so I would imagine that this is more than a cliche. They work long odd hours and are exposed to much darkness. We often see these characters lose control over their personal lives sublimating their professional lives, the squad room replaces the family, the partner becomes the surrogate lover. Chaos at home is unmanageable while the chaos at work is understandable ... it has a rule book called the law. This is a typical plot device that works.   

The young naive and idealistic cops that start a series usually end up corrupted by the end of the series. This is Officer Ben Sherman on "Southland" and Julien Lowe on "The Shield." It is difficult to watch them fall. Women cops, more often than not, end up pregnant. Adams on "Southland" and Danny Sofer on "The Shield." Both of these are usually sub-plots.

The cliche that always sucks me in, the one that make me think, maybe I should have been a cop, is the smart cop. Let's call them Sherlocks. Our Sherlocks are Det. Frank Pembleton on "Homicide: Life on the Street," Det. Lester Freamon on "The Wire," Det. Sonya Cross on "The Bridge," Dutch Wagenbach on "The Shield" and again the existential Rusty Cohl from "True Detective." They are what are called "natural police" for they seemed to have been born to solve mysteries. The Dutch character on "The Shield" is a little different than these others because he is a buffoon studying the psychological makeup of killers and he is almost always wrong and goes by the book. This works well in contrasting him against the corrupt protagonist Mackey who is street-wise and much more effective. The American version of "The Bridge" uses this contrast as well. The two main detectives the American Sonya Cross and the Mexican Detective Marco Ruiz are foil characters. She is passionless and by-the-book completely lacking in social skills. While Marco is street-wise and cunning. He works his network of friends while Sonya hits the computer. He buys flowers for the receptionist while Sonya doesn't even know her name. "The Bridge" that separates El Paso, Texas and Chihuahua works as a good metaphor for the relationship between these two characters that are forced to work together.  I have a lot of pent up paranoia about cops.As a working class kid from Southern New England, I have been pulled over more than once as a young man for driving a car that looked like it couldn't afford the neighborhood I was in. Not DWB (driving while black) but DWP (driving while poor).  The exposure to the smart cop has done me some good.

Are these characters anything like real cops? Perhaps. Do I watch too much television? Definitely. I used to laugh at television as a medium, but since it has become good, it has become a new obsession. It is one of my new excuses for why I don't read as much as I used to. It is too easy to turn on the tube and see something good.  Not a bad problem to have.

Perfection is the Enemy of Progress

Joseph Grand is a character in Albert Camus's great novel, The Plague. He is a minor character but is perhaps the most profound. Grand is a city clerk but in his spare time, he claims to be a writer. He is writing a novel but is stuck on the first sentence because he wants it be perfect. So much so that he spends a week deciding which conjunction to use. Finally, midway through The Plague, he reveals his sentence and it doesn't even have a conjunction:

"One fine morning in the month of May an elegant young horsewoman might have been riding a handsome sorrel mare along the flowery avenues of the Bois de Boulogne."

By the end of the novel he is nowhere closer to finishing the novel. His only achievement is 50 pages comprised of variations of this "horsewoman" sentence.

Completion is a difficult thing for an artist. When I was younger, I lingered on poems and pieces of fiction leaning on the trope "nothing is ever complete." They hung around on my hard drive for years being "perfected." When I read this Camus book, perhaps twenty years ago, I recognized this for what it was. I believe it helped me get over this. Perfection indeed is the enemy of progress. We need to move on. Perfection will never happened. I have heard interviews with creative people like Woody Allen and musician Joe Jackson where they say, they can't even look at or listen to their old work. All they see it the imperfections. I am grateful that neither one of them had Grand's problem for the world would be lacking.

Larry Heinemann, one of my writing teachers, used to say "edit is where the money is." His approach is to overwrite to get your manuscript done and then fix it while editing ... then edit .... then edit.  When he wrote his most famous novel, Paco's Story, he was stuck on a plot point where Paco was reading a female character's diary and didn't know where to go with it. To solve this he wrote the entire diary as a separate project just to get into the head of the character. He was then able to get over the hump of the novel. He only included a few lines from the diary in the novel ... hence overwrite and edit.

It seems that the axiom of "Perfection is the Enemy of Progress" works not only in writing but with the rest of life as well. As a software engineer I understand that I should be aiming for perfection, I turn projects over to testers and hope they catch any mistakes I made in coding. It is a humbling process. But I also understand, that there is no such thing as bug free software. If I were to wait for perfection, nothing would ever get completed and turned over to the users of the software. It seems that this could be applied to anything like social movements, government, household planning, etc. A few years ago, the US government rolled out a huge healthcare bill that was by no means perfect. The web site didn't even work and it wasn't even funded. I am not talking about The Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) but of Medicare Part D which was rolled out in January 2006 under President George W. Bush. Its roll out was just as bad, full of imperfections that was eventually fixed and people seem happy with it now. The difference of course is that Bush didn't budget for it and it only affected senior citizens. Not sure why the talking heads on Fox News didn't freak about it and call it Socialism ... oh wait. ... I do know why... it was rolled out by a Republican white guy. I realize that neither of these programs was even close to perfection when they rolled them out but at a certain point, especially in government, you got to say "this is done" and "I will fix it on the back end" which is what I am going to do now with this blog post.

Mud and the River

The plot in the film, Mud, unfolds like the storyline you will discover in fine literature. It is multi-layered and feeds the intellect. It is a coming of age story about two boys, Ellis and Neckbone, in rural Arkansas after a flood, that find a boat in a tree on an island in the river. Living in the tree they find the aptly named Mud, a homeless fugitive surprisingly well acted by Matthew McConaughey. Ellis, aged fourteen, becomes interested in Mud's view of the world, a mysterious combination of love and revenge. Ellis' parents have recently announced their separation rocking his understand of the world. His sense of love and place is being challenged for the first time in his short life. It also means that his home, an old river houseboat, will be lost to him, dismantle by the river authority. He will have to move into town and leave the river life behind.

I have blogged more than once about rivers. I do not hide my love of rivers. Rivers are the perfect poetic image. Whether it is Twain, Langston Hughes or Bruce Springsteen, the image of the river elicits the movement of time, of destiny and of growth. Life rolls by like a river flowing from the mountains to the sea with many rises and lows. The river eddies through the countryside, unpredictable and sometimes harsh, leaving in its wake beauty and destruction.  Mud portrays this beautifully with some stunning filming and story telling. The river is shown as an economic engine bringing livelihood to fishermen and boats men to the small Southern community of DeWitt. It is a spiritual and natural conduit to life and their connection to the outside world (at least in the film). "This river brings a lot of trash down. You gotta know what's worth keeping and what's worth letting go," says Galen, Neckbone's uncle who is raising him. Mud, the character, is the metaphorical trash he is talking about and like his namesake isn't easily nailed down. It is a universal story of the outside world invading on an insular existence. Mud is half in between these worlds, rejected by both, the river and the land.

You can barely tell what era the film is based in. This contributes to its universality. When I lived in Boston I attended a writer's workshop taught by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. One of the things he said that stuck with me was that a writer becomes "universal by being provincial" (I am paraphrasing here). This is what you have with Mud. This is a small film with a small story that is really just about a boy's perception of love being formed by the actions of the adults around him. The smallness of its theme makes it huge in concept. It is universal in many ways. No matter what town you grew up in, you know of a character like Mud who was very much apart of the town, but outside of it as well. The large big budget films, that will fill the Oscar nomination list, don't begin to illicit the emotions that a small one like Mud does. Every year when the nominations for Oscars comes out, I usually just shake my head and think, "What a joke!" but occasionally they get it right.  Three years ago, Winter's Bone made it on the list of nominations along with this star, the wonderful Jennifer Lawrence. It didn't win anything but at least it got the recognition that it deserved.  It too was better than most of the other films on the list of nominees. Mud deserves some accolades, the big budget films that rake in millions do not. They have already gotten their recognition.

East of Eden

I have blogged about Tolkien a lot in the past, more than other writers. This is mostly because of the Peter Jackson films. I do enjoy Tolkien's writing but if I were list my favorite writers he wouldn't be high on the list, but he'd be on it.  My problem with his work is the well defined line between good and evil. Characters are either good or evil. This doesn't bode well with my world view. Reality is more nuanced than that. It is not black and white, people teeter back and forward through many shades of gray. Evil and good are not entities. People, everyone, has capacity for both. I am not too critical of Tolkien, I still love his books. Perhaps I'd I have a different take on good and evil if I were writing a novel while living in England during World War II.  He wrote it in the malaise of one of the few conflicts in the history of the world where there certainly were well defined lines of good and evil.

Higher on that list (and I promise I will put it together someday) is John Steinbeck. I just finished reading East of Eden, a book that I have wanted to read for years, and I have the same problem with it that I have with Tolkien, at least, the beginning of the book. He has good characters and evil characters with very little gray. This is the fourth book of his that I have read and I might have to put it as my least favorite, certainly below Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath. 

Perhaps it is hubris, but since I have been reading novels for close to four decades now, I am confident enough in my reading that I feel that I could edit some canonized works of literature to make them better.  For example, I love Moby Dick, but I think it would be a better book if those 80 pages about the history of whaling were removed in the middle of the book.  East of Eden is about two families, I think it would have been a better book if it were only about one.  One of the families in the book is Steinbeck's, the Hamilton family. He is the narrator of the book and he even makes an appearance now and then mostly as an infant.  While reading the book, you find yourself wanting to skip over the chapters about his family to get to the chapters about the more compelling Trask family.

Steinbeck began writing East of Eden merely because he saw his beloved Salinas Valley in California changing dramatically. He started writing about the valley for his children so that they would know what it was like when he was a child, but the story evolved into a religious allegory.  The story of the Trask family is the story of Eden, Cain and Abel told in an American backdrop. The Eve character, Catherine (later called Kate) is pure evil. She uses her beauty and sexuality to get what she wants destroying people in her path. She has killed, blackmailed and has abandoned her children. The Trask storyline is of the good people who get hurt in her path. Adam who married her and her children, the twins, Aron (Abel) and Caleb (Cain).  As Sam Hamilton (Steinbeck's wise grandfather character) explains, something is missing in her. The goodness that Adam possesses, is nowhere to be found in Catherine. I'd love to read what Feminist critics thinks of this book.

The Trask story is a collection of antithetical pairs, opposing evil and good, all starting with C and A like Cain and Abel.  The story starts with Cyrus and Alice who are the parents of Charles and Adam. Adam's children, that may be Charles', are Caleb and Aron. The two main female characters are also a C and A match-up Catherine and Alba, girl friend of the twins, although they never actually meet in the story. The most interesting character, the youngest of the C characters, Caleb (or Cal) acknowledges the evil that he inherited from his mother (the sin he inherited from Eve) and struggles with it. The angst ridden Cal is famously portrayed by James Dean in the Elia Kazan film which whittles the story down even more than I would. The film concentrates on the twins Cal and Aron which is basically the last third of the book. Kazan might have it right, for evil that Cal struggles with is a far better story than the comic book like Catherine who doesn't struggle with it at all. She thrives on it. Magneto and Doctor Doom from Marvel Comics have more depth than her.

Most books that I love have a complex narrative structure. Three of my favorites, The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, have first person narrators that are unreliable and biased minor characters.  Their imperfections as narrators make for complex interpretations and are fodder for many conversations of what is really going on in the novels. East of Eden is different in that the narrator (Steinbeck) is a very minor character but who obviously wasn't present during the time of the story.  So interpretation of his narration is problematic because everything he narrates was obviously told to the narrator, not a first hand account.  The narrator tells us that Adam Trask is a good man, but his actions are, sometimes, otherwise. He frequents prostitutes and he neglects his twins during their formative years. Evil no, but hardly is he as purely good as his wife is evil.

Like a Tolkien hobbit, Cal Trask struggles with an evil that possesses him. No magic here, though, nor is there an embodiment of evil, the evil is humanity itself. It makes for a more mature book when you have a main character who is full of flaws but you love him anyway.  This is why we love Gatsby and Heathcliff (from Wuthering Heights).  We see wrong in them and we want them to make good because the wrong we see in them, we see in ourselves.  It seems my problems with the book is that I don't believe in sin, original or otherwise.  So perhaps I would cut East of Eden down even further, like Kazan, to a short story or a short novel about Cal, a teenage boy trying to be good but failing, but I guess if I did that we'd just have another Catcher In the Rye.

The Universal They and the Non-inclusive We

Considering the poor communication skills I see exhibited each day, I am amazed that actual communication ever happens. Yet it does. In reading on-line message boards and social media, it seems people are very interested in expressing themselves and connecting with others, but don't want to spend the time to be clear, to spell correctly (not only pass spell check but actually use the correct words as well) and proofread. I still get correspondence from people who confuse "since" and "sense" and who think "alot" is a word. But the miscommunication goes beyond this, the use of cliché and vague tropes are ubiquitous. I am talking about the Universal They and the Non-inclusive We.

The Universal They is the use of the pronoun "they" when you want to blame someone, but you are too lazy to research the specifics. This particular trope is handy for the paranoid among us. Certainly, just because you are paranoid, doesn't mean no one is out is to get you, but at least you could specify whom you are talking about when you share this with the world.  The paranoid use the Universal They to describe the government "They are tapping our phones," to describe corporations "they are poisoning us," or the world in general "they want to steal my poetry." The last one is from a friend who once asked me to help him setup a firewall for his computer to protect his poetry. "You setup a firewall to protect your computer from viruses, not protect your poetry. No one wants your poetry," I said. I am not very tactful, but subtlety rarely works with the paranoid.

Whenever anyone invokes the Universal They, for clarity's sake (and sanity's), always follow up with "Who are they?" When you push for deeper specifics, you usually find kinks in the armor of their paranoia. Who is tapping your phone?  The government. Who specifically? The FBI. Why would they be doing that? Are you a member of a cartel or a mafia family? Why would the federal government exert any money or energy on you? Political discussions on social media can be fun but also scary at times. People believe this stuff.

The Non-inclusive We is less innocuous. Those who use it are not paranoid, just self-righteous. Those who use the Non-inclusive We want to say something about society at large, but want to exclude themselves. They say things like this "We are a selfish society" then go on and talk about how unselfish they are.  They say "We are obsessed with material goods" and then continue to tell you about their low-budget DIY holiday season. They are a less scary crowd than the Universal They folks but more annoying. They are usually more educated, so should know better. You can see this in a lot of editorial writing. I see it sometime with writers I actually like. Here it is from Barbara Kingsolver in her essay "Jabberwocky" which is full of the Non-inclusive We:

    "But we bought the goods, or we kept our mouths shut.
    If we felt disturbed by the idea of pulverizing civilizations
    as the best way to settle our differences --- or had trouble
    explaining it to our kids as adult behavior --- we weren't
    talking about it. "

This is from page 222 from her fabulous collection of essays High Tide in Tucson from HarperPerrenial. I agree with everything she has to say in this essay. I just wish it was a better essay and less self-righteous.

While in casual conversation, how do you respond to the Non-inclusive We? We assume it is inclusive. "We" is a collective pronoun after all with the assumption that the speaker is included in the "we."  So next Christmas, when one of your self-righteous friends says to you: "We are a selfish, materialistic culture," respond by asking them, "Why are you so selfish?" That should get the conversation going!