Moving towards life

From a conversation between Jim Sheridan and Annette Insdorf, included at the back of In America: A Portrait of the Film:

JS: If I think of an idea, I usually try to put it up against the X-ray that is James Joyce. He was the only one with a good father, like Leopold Bloom in Ulysses.

AI: Of course.

JS: A Jewish man walking around Dublin was the only good father figure in Irish literature before 1980! And in Joyce’s stories, the women were always in love with dead people: The Dead is essentially about that estrangement from the husband. And Molly Bloom is about the estrangement from the husband through the dead child. So, there was a kind of refusal by the women to engage on a loving or sexual level because of a death, which I always thought was probably like a psychological dramatization of the famine. So, I just stole a little bit from Joyce, and added the husband in love with the dead child. The attempt was to move the stone from the mouth of the grave, you know. To kind of get out of the death culture.

(I've loved this film since it first came out in 2002, but Sheridan's audio commentary is really wonderful as well--very rich.)

The armor of a dead man

From director Jim Sheridan’s forward to In America: A Portrait of the Film:

When I was doing my own story, I thought a lot about Bloom and his dead son, and the resonance throughout Ulysses, of Shakespeare, and of Hamlet in particular. And when I wondered if it was right to do such a personal story and cannibalize my own life, I remembered that the great Shakespeare had a child called Hamnet and that three years after his son’s death, he took out an old play and rewrote it.

And not only did he rewrite it, he went in the lonely isolation of backstage, he put on the armor of a dead man, and he clunked out on stage as the ghost of Hamlet’s father. That idea has always struck me as profound. A live man in dead man’s clothes talking to his dead son, alive, in front of him, on stage and asking for revenge. Shakespeare must have been tough, I thought, to keep the deep baritone of the ghost intact.

Brief resurfacing

Today was my last in this little office, running an EFL program to support several small groups in the elementary school. On Monday, I'll cover for the resident librarian for two weeks before embarking on my postgraduate work in literary translation. Here are a few things I've been gathering in the meantime...

• The magician escapes: Levi Asher's take on Paul Auster's new novel and Ed's recent conversation with Auster. (Bat Segundo continues to amaze...and make me wish that I could listen to them go on for a couple more hours at least...)
• (I would love to ask him about the Chanel No. 5 and the cheese sandwiches in The Book of Illusions--I think they tear a small hole in the narrative and upend what the conclusion appears to be.)
• Fun discussion of "meta-murders" by Sarah Weinman
  
• A "multimedia adaptation" of The Waves! (via Maud)
• Sicheii Yazhi's interesting discussion on Amazon's recent purchase of Shelfari and Abe Books and what this means for LibraryThing (my favorite). (Tim Spalding responds in the comments.)
• Wyatt Mason on Nabokov's last
  
• Daniel Samper Pisano considers the effect of global warming on global politics.
• Inara and Martha
  
• NPR presents concerts from the Newport Folk festival, which include sets by Calexico, Gillian Welch (finally, a recording of "Throw Me a Rope"!), Jakob Dylan, She & Him (Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward), and Steve Earle, among others.
• Maud discusses ten books that would make great films.
• Robert Pinsky on John Milton

Blindess at Cannes

So apparently there were quite a lot of negative opinions about the new adaptation of José Saramago's Blindness. But Saramago is reported as saying that he wants Meirelles to adapt another of his novels as well and that he liked it very much:

El pasado 14 de mayo, la cinta del brasileño Fernando Meirelles, Blindness -basada en Ensayo sobre la ceguera, del nobel José Saramago-, que inauguró la muestra, recibió una lluvia de opiniones en contra.

Tras asistir a la proyección del largometraje, Saramago aseguró que quisiera que Meirelles volviera a adaptar otra de sus novelas y les restó importancia a las opiniones negativas que ha recibido la cinta por parte de los críticos. El autor de la novela aseguró a los medios acreditados que: "Me gustó mucho, mucho. Me emocioné algunas veces".

Blindness (Ceguera), protagonizada por Julianne Moore y Mark Ruffalo, el mexicano Gael García Bernal y la brasileña Alice Braga, es una aterradora fábula sobre cómo sobreviviría la gente cuando una plaga de ceguera los azote. "Hay distintos tipos de ceguera. Hay 2.000 millones de personas que se están muriendo de hambre en el mundo. Esto está ocurriendo. No hace falta una catástrofe. Está pasando, y debido a que no hay un evento como Katrina, no lo estamos viendo", aseguró el director Meirelles. La cinta tendrá su estreno en Estados Unidos el próximo 19 de septiembre.

I look forward to seeing it, regardless of its reputed quality.

A conceptual poem

(Eliza Triana as Sierva María de Todos los Ángeles--aka María Mandinga. Foto: Olga Paulihiac, CMO Producciones, Alicia Films)

Director Felipe Aljure visited the set of the current production of Del amor y otros demonios and was impressed by what he discovered:

Las tres productoras coinciden en que uno de los ingredientes que hace parte de su apuesta es el no haber acudido a ningún coproductor extranjero para que entrara en esta producción. Es un concepto lleno de poesía, los buenos productores no se limitan a hablar de plata, pues reconoce una unidad cultural latinoamericana y más aún caribeña, por ser Colombia, Costa Rica y México las tres nacionalidades más activas en el proyecto. Tres productoras, de tres países, pensándose como de una misma nación, es un poema conceptual sobre el cual se erigen otras fortalezas de esta adaptación, como por ejemplo usar actores de la misma nacionalidad de los personajes de la novela para evitar acentos falsos e impostados; o usar a Cartagena como escenario central del rodaje, por ser allí en donde la novela transcurre; o filmarla en español, idioma en el que la novela está escrita. Aunque la película aún no está terminada, Del amor y otros demonios tiene todos los ingredientes para ser un delicado espejo audiovisual capaz de reflejar con fuerza todas las sutilezas del libro.

Needless to say, I'm very excited about the potential of this film.

In the meantime, I was delighted to discover A.S. Byatt's 1995 review of Edith Grossman's English translation of the novel:

Mr. Garcia Marquez's pointed and resonant epigraph is from St. Thomas Aquinas's treatise "On the Integrity of Resurrected Bodies": "For the hair, it seems, is less concerned in the resurrection than other parts of the body."

What is body and what survives? What is flesh and what is spirit and what is demonic? Mr. Garcia Marquez's answer is an almost didactic, yet brilliantly moving, tour de force.

Also, I wonder if the opera will be released as an album someday. I look forward to reading reviews of the future performances.

Dillard, O'Connor, Whitman

A couple of very marvelous discoveries have dramatically increased the quality of this day. Annie Dillard's The Writing Life was translated into Spanish last year by Miguel Martínez-Lage. Here is an old favorite passage, rendered anew in Vivir, escribir:

Una de las pocas cosas que sé acerca de la escritura es ésta: gástalo todo, dispáralo a bocajarro, piérdelo sobre la marcha, una y todas las veces que sea preciso. No conserves lo que parece provechoso para más adelante, para otra fase del libro: dalo, dalo todo, dalo ahora. El impulso de reservar algo bueno para un lugar aparentemente mejor es la señal que se necesita para gastarlo ahora, sin tardanza. Ya aparecerá algo distinto, puede que mejor, más adelante. Estas cosas se llenan por detrás, por abajo, como el agua de un pozo. Del mismo modo, el impulso de guardar para uno lo que ha aprendido no sólo es vergonzoso, sino que es destructivo. Todo lo que no dé uno libre y abundantemente termina por perdérsele. Uno abre un buen día la caja fuerte y se encuentra con cenizas.

La palabra escrita es débil. Son muchas las personas que prefieren la vida. La vida mueve la sangre en tus venas. Huele de maravilla. Escribir es la mera escritura, la literatura es poca cosa. Apela únicamente a los más sutiles sentidos -la visión y el oído de la imaginación-, al sentido de la moral, al intelecto. Esta escritura a la que te entregas, y que tanto te emociona, que tanto te conmueve y te alboroza, casi como si estuvieras bailando junto a la banda de música, es apenas audible para cualquier otra persona.
El oído del lector ha de ajustarse, rebajarse, para pasar del estruendo de la vida a la sutileza de los sonidos imaginarios que se desprenden de la palabra escrita.

This reminds me that yet another important work has recently been translated into Spanish--Flannery O'Connor's Mystery and Manners as Misterio y maneras by Esther Navío Castellano. (Thanks for the news, Nora!)

And I've had Whitman's Canto a mi mismo (Song of Myself) for a while now (A. is currently reading it), but this is the perfect opportunity to mention that the entire American Experience Whitman documentary is now online. (Thanks for posting this, Jeff.) I hope to check it out later tonight.

Another look

Marcelo Ballvé explores how García Márquez subverts cliché in an essay on Love in the Time of Cholera:

García Márquez is not shy about exploiting a metaphor; but this cholera trope, unlike the quickly wilted rose metaphor, survives its multiple uses. The reason is that it points to a natural and classic symmetry, that between love and death, Eros and thanatos. So despite the fact that the metaphor is used not only frequently but for multiple purposes—to bring characters together or to highlight their emotional states—it continues to ring true. Love and death dance together in the novel, and it is a close dance.

In fact, García Márquez lets us know that nothing the novel describes, none of its loves, would have happened were it not for cholera. One of the 19th century cholera epidemics, we are told, wiped out a quarter of Cartagena’s population in only three months. And it is right after this particularly deadly cholera outbreak that Lorenzo Daza, a shady, widowed trader, arrives in Cartagena, like an opportunistic buzzard.

Keeping a low profile

El Tiempo links to an article discussing Hilda Hidalgo's adaptation of Del amor y otros demonios (Of Love and Other Demons). The "day on the set" piece describes the modest ambitions and artistic heart of the project, currently in its fourth week of filming in Cartagena.

Here's some additional (English) information:

Already Hidalgo has been treated more generously by the Nobel Prize-winning Colombian author; while Garcia Marquez sold the rights to "Cholera" to Hollywood for $3 million, he was rumored to have given away the rights to "Of Love and Other Demons" to his fellow Latin American artist. "We agreed on a symbolic figure, an amount I'm not going to reveal," said Hidalgo, who is Costa Rican.

Hidalgo met the author when she took a class he taught in Cuba two years ago on "how to tell a tale."

Personal revolution

Tore through Revolutionary Road in three days. Yates perfectly captures the delicate balance between responsibility and personal satisfaction, locating the dilemma in the decisions of a young couple in 1955. I'm still thinking about it... (Can one ever really know the difference between gut instinct and self-delusion?) Although it's your standard realist novel, the ambiguity of the causes and effects of the Wheelers' disastrous relationship make it more mirror than cautionary tale--its issues are just as vital and necessary as they were then. I hope the upcoming film maintains this ambiguity.

As Blake Bailey says in a 2007 article,

Were Yates alive to advise Mendes, I daresay he'd insist that the movie begin, as the novel does, with April's mortifyingly awful performance in an amateur production of The Petrified Forest. In other words, the Wheelers' doom should never be in doubt because they can't help being themselves. "When the curtain fell at last," Yates wrote, at the end of one of the most excruciating scenes in American literature, "it was an act of mercy."

Another disappointment?

Trailers for the film adaptation of Vargas Llosa's La fiesta del chivo are now online. (I'm sure Junot Díaz is thrilled.) The film features Isabella Rossellini, Tomás Milián, Juan Diego Botto, Stephanie Leónidas, Paul Freeman, David Zayas, Steven Bauer, Eileen Atkins, Pericles Mejía, Murphy Guyer, and Carlos Miranda.

I'm disappointed that they decided to shoot it in English and don't have very high hopes for it in general.

(via El Tiempo)

Van Gogh and the movies

People who say that all of the great books have already been written are just not paying attention. I picked up Steve Erickson's Zeroville having never read anything of his before and with very little idea of what it was about. The Josef von Sternberg line that serves as the epigraph ("I believe that cinema was here from the beginning of the world") isn't merely some cute quotation, but an encapsulation of one of the novel's (many) themes and something the reader should seriously consider after finishing the book.

I'll leave the real reviews of this engaging and complex work to the real reviewers and instead focus on one element that caught my attention. Vikar is an ex-divinity student who wound up studying architecture. The presentation of his final project doesn't go as well as hoped:

In fact the committee chairman's fury had nothing to do with the lion or axe but with the fact that the small model church had no door. "There's no way in!" the chairman thundered, and even as the years passed, by the time Vikar got to Los Angeles he couldn't be sure whether leaving out the door had been inadvertent: "I believe," Vikar had answered in all innocence, "it's more that there's no way out."

The allusion to Van Gogh and his doorless Church at Auvers (painted in the last year of his life) is striking. His letters to Theo help explain his intent (as I sheepishly quote this):

The foreground of The Church at Auvers is brightly lit by the sun, but the church itself sits in its own shadow, and "neither reflects nor emanates any light of its own." After Van Gogh had been dismissed from the evangelical career he had hoped to continue in the Borinage, he wrote to his brother Theo from Cuesmes in July 1880, and quoted Shakespeare's image from Henry IV, Part 1 ("And I have not forgotten what the inside of a church is made of, I am a peppercorn, a brewer’s horse: the inside of a church!" — Act 3, Scene iii) of the dark emptiness inside a church to symbolize "empty and unenlightened preaching": "Their God is like the God of Shakespeare's drunken Falstaff, 'the inside of a church.'"

(It's interesting that this Wikipedia entry uses Kathleen Powers Erickson's book, At Eternity's Gate: The Spiritual Vision of Vincent van Gogh as a source. She's probably no relation...but it's interesting.)

I found it especially telling that Soledad (which means "loneliness" or "solitude" in Spanish) smashes the structure by hurling it against a hotel wall, also destroying the certain object Vikar had placed inside (at the altar).

At the point where Erickson writes, "Vikar doesn't know it, but everything now has been reset to zero", we begin to go backwards. The previous section gives him "visions of smashing Soledad in the face with a Coke bottle" and his perceptions have now been inverted. He has come full circle, and his views of Solitude and the movies will no longer be the same.

By the time I reached the ending (a type of this event also occurs in Gene Wolfe's The Fifth Head of Cerberus, but with much more impact here), I could do nothing but breathlessly close the book and sit thinking...and thinking...

Dissertations could be written about this novel.

Much more (and better) information can be found in Bookslut's interview with Steve Erickson, as well as his recent appearance on The Bat Segundo Show. There are also many more links to other articles and interviews on his site.

Lost in New York

One of the (many) reasons I love living here is all I'm learning about Colombian literature and film. Ever since seeing Rosario Tijeras, Jorge Franco has been on my TBR list and I've finally been able to read both Don Quijote de la Mancha in Medellín and Paraíso Travel. Although I had been aware of this latter work, it wasn't until I read Scott's interview with translator Katherine Silver that I bought the novel (in its original Spanish). (Of course, hearing that a film adaptation was in the works helped too.)

I finished reading it on the road to Cartagena (with A. striving valiantly to not tell me too much--he considers the last spoken line to be one of the best he's ever read) and we went straight to Teatro Heredia in the old city (after checking in) for the first event we were able to attend at this year's Hay Festival.

In the novel, Marlon and Reina are a young couple that immigrate illegally from Colombia to the U.S. and get separated in New York City, lost to each other among the millions. Marlon’s narrative alternates between three different parts of the story, which dissolve into a single strand once the reader realizes where Marlon is going and to whom he’s actually speaking. (I was reminded of Laura Restrepo’s more complicated structure in Delirio.)

As I got further into the book, I remembered what Katherine Silver had to say about Marlon, “whose subtly idiosyncratic voice—part idiot savant, part idiotic innocent—gives the novel unity and depth.” She’s certainly right about the “unity and depth,” but I was a little surprised to find my perception of Marlon to be so different from her own. He is young, scared, slightly superstitious, and in love—for the first time in his life. He is also helplessly (and illegally) lost in a foreign country where he doesn’t speak the language and doesn’t realize that tossing a cigarette on a sidewalk could, say, get you unwanted attention from a couple of nearby cops. He wanders the streets for days without food or shelter; the fear and utter exhaustion cause a nervous breakdown, which will fill him with self-doubt later on (“Le eché la culpa al cansancio, hasta pensé que los días en que no fui yo me habían causado un daño cerebral, o que definitivamente era imposible entenderse en Nueva York.”).

As Junot Díaz says, there is nothing to compare it to: the immigrant experience (particularly the illegal immigrant experience) is so far removed from the typical frame of reference that the only thing that can really even come close is science fiction. But Franco isn’t writing science fiction, simply the thoughts and experiences of a bewildered young man, lost in a foreign country. (As Marlon’s friend Giovanny tells him, “Aquí lo que funciona es la observación: tenés que mirar y seguir, mirar y luego imitar, y obedecer, así creás que no te están vigilando, porque siempre están mirando.”) It isn’t even until much later in the novel that he is finally able to articulate his fear and confront himself and truth of his situation.

Yet he is innocent (in a sense), filled with idealism, blind faith, and, yes, obsession when it comes to Reina. As far as he's concerned, she's alive, lost, and waiting for him to find her. Perhaps saying he is “idiotic” is really just something he’d say of himself:

Ahora estoy seguro de todo lo que uno tiene que ver con su propia suerte. Si de algo he de lamentarme no es de mi mala estrella sino de mi estupidez: seguir a alguien por enamorado tiene más de torpeza que de honestidad o de ceguera.

But idiotic or not, he expresses the tragedy of the immigrant/exile (self-imposed or otherwise) and the misapprehensions of the homeland that can lead to a devastating confusion:

Cargaban en su expresión la desesperanza y el cansancio de haber agotado todas sus posibilidades en este país. Este país, así lo llamamos todos, con una pronunciación despectiva que acompañamos siempre de una mueca desagradable. Como si este país fuera un trapo sucio, ajeno, y no lo que todos hicimos de él. [...]

Se van mermando las esperanzas, se va uno acostumbrando a la prisa, uno comienza a ser desleal con sus sueños, se deja de llorar pero también de reír y finalmente termina uno padeciendo la maldición del emigrante: uno no se quiere quedar pero tampoco quiere volver.

His insight into his own plight extends into an awareness of wider issues:

También hubiera querido decirle que la infamia no era una exclusividad de los colombianos, que todos los seres humanos, sin excepción, somos infames y que por eso es que estamos irremediablemente perdidos.

Ultimately, he goes from glimmers of understanding (“Reina, Monterrey, Reynosa, todo tan monárquico”) to knowing what it is to “mortgage [one's] existence to another’s will.” He learns what identity and patria really mean, summing it up in a beautiful passage (whose impact I won't spoil by posting here) that will leave you wanting to pass this book on to someone else.

Another aspect of the work that I enjoyed were small, revealing details that Franco included. Marlon is hopelessly besotted with Reina, but even though there’s plenty of mention of his attraction to her and the physical aspect of their relationship, it isn’t until page 180 that a particular phrase is used...

Yo no sabía si agradecerle o reprocharle que me hiciera contarle mi historia. Me sentía cansado y liviano a la vez, como si acabara de hacer el amor.

...and he isn’t talking about Reina.

Something else I loved was his inclusion of a character whose loss of identity is mirrored in the letters lost from his name—from Rogelio Peña to Roger Pena:

—¿Usted no se llama así? —le pregunté.

—Primero perdí la eñe. Aquí esa letra no existe.

Hubiera querido preguntarle cómo se podía hablar sin una letra en el abecedario y cómo se decía coño en inglés, pero él estaba decidido a contarme sólo cinco segundos de su historia.

What Marlon doesn’t mention is that “pena” is also a word for shame, sorrow, and hardship in Spanish. Could this have something to do with Roger’s past?

Roger was also a pretty steady source of amusement:

—¿Y para dónde nos vamos? —le pregunté mientras trataba de recoger lo mío.

—I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street with my hair down, so.

—¿Qué está diciendo, Roger?

—Yo, nada. El que lo dijo fue Eliot.

Back in Cartagena, we stood in line outside the theatre, the wind off the sea chilling us (or at least me) on this festive night. Although the film had opened in theatres the week before, it felt like a premiere—especially with the perambulating newspaper boys announcing it and the aproned (theme-appropriate) women pretending to mop the floor in and around the line of people. (We joked with one of them that it was all part of the experience, and she agreed.)

In the Q&A session after the screening, Jorge Franco and Juan Rendón took questions from the audience. Franco explained how he became attracted to the immigrant story and how a “what if” idea led him to imagine certain scenarios and explore different types of people and the reasons behind their choice to leave one country for another.

Most of the questions were pretty dull or obvious (“by people who haven’t read the book,” as A. observed), but I liked the last one. Someone asked why he tends to have such strong female characters (referencing both Rosario Tijeras and Paraíso Travel) set against weaker male counterparts. He acknowledged the trend, but thought that things changed considerably with Marlon. He sees him as a more developed character who “emancipates” himself throughout the novel.

I plan on seeing the movie again, but I was a little disappointed with how sure of himself Marlon was in the film. It was a tougher read of the character than I was expecting. One of the questions asked about certain differences between how the characters were written and how they were portrayed onscreen. Franco said it was true that some actors changed certain aspects of their characters, but added that this was their art and their contribution to the form.

The film itself is an excellent production. Some of the changes were improvements (emphasis on the tragedies of the border crossing) and others diluted the experience (the absence of Marlon’s mental breakdown and extreme suffering—he doesn’t even have beard by the time he finds shelter at Mi Tierra Colombiana). The three narrative threads are pared down to two, two characters are conflated into one, and the ending doesn’t have the emotional depth and clarity of the original. But the actors did excellent jobs and (just barely) kept John Leguizamo from stealing the show (his Spanish has improved considerably as well!). I can now forgive him for Lorenza Daza (almost).

I also really liked the depth the filmmakers added to the character of “La caleña” and how they emphasized the differences between herself and Reina.

Just today I thought of the question I should’ve asked. Orlando is a character in Franco’s novel that reminded me exactly of the character of Don Fernando in María Full of Grace. Turns out that Orlando Tobón who plays Don Fernando is the associate producer of María and is also "known as 'The Mayor of Little Colombia' in Jackson Heights, Queens, New York." Although another actor portrays him in the Paraíso Travel film, I found it moving that Franco uses his actual name in the novel. It would’ve been interesting to hear if he’s met Orlando Tobón and how he came to put him into his novel.

Thus ends the account of Friday night at the Hay Festival. On Saturday morning, A. went in search of parts for his electric guitar and I spent two hours in one bookstore (hence my lovely finds). Our next event was Saturday afternoon with Anne Enright. (The Irish were definitely well represented in the audience—we were surrounded!) My notes may be slow in coming, but I am determined to post on each event throughout the coming week. And if you’ve made it this far, my sincere congratulations!

Someone should write a book

that examines Philip Pullman's retelling of Paradise Lost in His Dark Materials and that objectively, dispassionately compares his reading of Milton with those of C.S. Lewis and Stanley Fish. Blake should also be tossed in there (particularly a reading similar to Annie Dillard's in "A Field of Silence"). Also, how does Pullman read Paradise Regained? Would it clarify or confuse the issues raised in his trilogy?

Basically, with the renewed interest in Pullman due to the film release of The Golden Compass, I'd love to see exchanges that have more to do with literature than religious polemic. (Granted, polemic has its place, but it seems that it is more and more difficult to find assessments of such polarizing work that are free of agendas, pro or con.)

An epic elegy

Beowulf opened this weekend in Santa Marta and we went to see it last night. I wasn't overly impressed, but it certainly could have been worse (and there were some nice touches). One of the great things about it was how it sent me straight back to the text--and to what Tolkien had to say: "Disaster is foreboded. Defeat is the theme. Triumph over the foes of man’s precarious fortress is over, and we approach slowly and reluctantly the inevitable victory of death."

Cheery, huh? I guess that may be one of the reasons Gaiman and Avary chose to end the film in the middle of a choice. They were right in attempting to show the hollowness of "heroism" (although the hero's own demise is undeniably "heroic" and the result is more cautionary tale than lament). In the original, the battles with the three monsters only take up about one-third of the poem, making it more of an elegy than an epic.

And upon the hill-top        the warriors awoke
The mightiest of bale-fires.        Rose the wood-smoke,
Swart above the blazing.        And the roar of flame
Blended was with wailing,        as still the winds became,
Till, hot unto his heart, it broke        the Geat’s bone-frame.
Unglad of mood, in grief they mourned        their great Chief dead.
And his Wife, with hair bound,        her song of sorrow said,
Over and over:        how ‘t was hers to dread
Days of harm and hardship,        warriors’ fall and grame,
The terror of the raider,        captivity and shame.
        The sky the reek had swallowed.

The people's agony before Beowulf's pyre blends with the roar of the blaze until it becomes one keening force that quiets nature ("the winds") with its power. The grief and the fire become indistinguishable from each other, blurring the boundaries of physical fact and spiritual need to the point that it is unclear whether the disintegration of Beowulf’s body is the direct result of the flames, or the effect of his people’s agonized wailing, "hot unto his heart." It isn't just the loss of their hero that they're mourning, but the end of their way of life, the senselessness of war, and the void left by their gods. (I found it quite telling that the screenwriters decided to throw in Christ with the rest of them--he is notably absent from the original.)

I was lucky enough to hear Seamus Heaney speak while I was in college. His phrase, "Poetry is a plow that turns time up and over" brilliantly applies to the necessity of works such as Beowulf. He said that through poetry we are able to more fully comprehend the sorrow of an ancient people facing unconscionable tragedy. Contemporary news via the media slips past us much too easily to be absorbed. The agony of nations is effortlessly offered on the silver platter of the 30-second sound bite. Because worldwide suffering dwarfs modern society’s ability to assimilate it, we need art and poetry to help us keep hold of our humanity.

Haunting humanity

(cross-posted at A Curious Singularity)

After reading Guy de Maupassant's "The Horla" I was struck by the narrator's awareness of his own isolation and role it plays in his descent into "madness":

Yesterday after doing some business and paying some visits, which instilled fresh and invigorating mental air into me, I wound up my evening at the Theatre Francais. A drama by Alexander Dumas the Younger was being acted, and his brilliant and powerful play completed my cure. Certainly solitude is dangerous for active minds. We need men who can think and can talk, around us. When we are alone for a long time, we people space with phantoms.

But almost immediately after admitting this to himself, he does an about-face and makes some pretty cold remarks about people:

July 14. Fete of the Republic. I walked through the streets, and the crackers and flags amused me like a child. Still, it is very foolish to make merry on a set date, by Government decree. People are like a flock of sheep, now steadily patient, now in ferocious revolt. Say to it: "Amuse yourself," and it amuses itself. Say to it: "Go and fight with your neighbor," and it goes and fights. Say to it: "Vote for the Emperor," and it votes for the Emperor; then say to it: "Vote for the Republic," and it votes for the Republic.

Those who direct it are stupid, too; but instead of obeying men they obey principles, a course which can only be foolish, ineffective, and false, for the very reason that principles are ideas which are considered as certain and unchangeable, whereas in this world one is certain of nothing, since light is an illusion and noise is deception.

Earlier this week, I read "Ghost Calf," a short story by Marcelo Ballvé, and had a realization about how easily we rationalize ourselves right into inhumanity and how "hauntings" can function as an echo of that lost humanity--either as a reminder of what's being lost or as an act of vengeance against our calloused perceptions.

As Litlove writes,

What this story performs so well is the loss of control it posits as one of the great fundamental fears of mankind. Our narrator finds the possibility of other races so convincing because he thinks of humanity as so weak, vulnerable and flawed. It would not take very much to create a race of beings superior to us, who would not be so limited or so powerless. It’s not much more than the thought of this that transforms our narrator, over the course of thirty pages or so, from a wealthy, advantaged young man to a gibbering wreck, half out of his mind with terror. The imagination – the power to invent this story, as well as the power to envisage new possibilities for mankind – is the internal instrument of our own disintegration as well as one of the greatest features of the human race.

Unfortunately for our narrator, the realization never comes. After setting fire to his own house, he hears

[A] cry, a horrible, shrill, heart-rending cry, a woman's cry, sounded through the night, and two garret windows were opened! I had forgotten the servants! I saw the terror-struck faces, and the frantic waving of their arms!

He remembers other people only when he has destroyed them. It is too late to save anyone, and so, without any evidence whatsoever, he makes the snap judgment that the Horla has survived and so he (the narrator) must kill himself. His guilt is so great that it is obvious to the narrator that his nemesis has survived. Of course he has. By severing his own last link to humanity (causing the death of his servants), he is utterly lost to the figure of his own demise.

P.S. Interestingly, it seems that this story helped inspire H.P. Lovecraft and was later "adapted" (read: mutilated) to film in 1963, starring (who else?) Vincent Price.

Like ice cream

Neil Gaiman on the history of fairy tales and Stardust:

I was fortunate in having Charles Vess, to my mind the finest fairy artist since Arthur Rackham, as the illustrator of Stardust, and many times I found myself writing scenes - a lion fighting a unicorn, a flying pirate ship - simply because I wanted to see how Charles would paint them. I was never disappointed.

The book came out, first in illustrated and then in unillustrated form. There seemed to be a general consensus that it was the most inconsequential of my novels. Fantasy fans, for example, wanted it to be an epic, which it took enormous pleasure in not being. Shortly after it was published, I wound up defending it to a journalist who had loved my previous novel, Neverwhere, particularly its social allegories. He had turned Stardust upside down and shaken it, looking for social allegories, and found absolutely nothing of any good purpose.

"What's it for?" he had asked, which is not a question you expect to be asked when you write fiction for a living.

"It's a fairytale," I told him. "It's like an ice cream. It's to make you feel happy when you finish it."

I don't think that I convinced him, not even a little bit. There was a French edition of Stardust some years later that contained translator's notes demonstrating that the whole of the novel was a gloss on Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, which I wish I had read at the time of the interview. I could have referred it to the journalist, even if I didn't believe a word.

(via Crooked House)

["And Into Faerie" image from Charles Vess' "Stardust Print Suite"]

Hermosa Cartagena

I've had many reservations about the adaptation of Love in the Time of Cholera (none the least of which is the horrible poster), but this "behind-the-scenes" glimpse was encouraging.

(We'll see how long it takes the film to arrive here on Colombian screens--so far, it doesn't look like it'll make it down before the end of the year. There will be something a bit surreal about having to finally see it with Spanish subtitles, but I'll do my best to lock the jury out until after the credits have rolled.)

UPDATE: As of today, we're looking at a 16 November release date here in Santa Marta! (Nerve-racking excitement ensues. Also, Callie has her own worries.)

Scattered notes on ephemeral illusions, Part II

(Second page of notes on The Book of Illusions by Paul Auster)

"We might not have met until yesterday, but we've been working together for years." ~ Alma

Thanks to Brian (of the excellent Five Branch Tree) for mentioning this brief interview with Paul Auster and his new film, The Inner Life of Martin Frost. (It's a good interview, but rife with spoilers—so beware.) To be honest, I got goosebumps when I read his comment. This post has been in draft form since the beginning of the month, as I was about to discuss...The Inner Life of Martin Frost. To discover that Auster had recently made this into a film was a bit unnerving.

• Page 217: "At some point, we notice that the philosopher's name is written out in block letters across the front of the sweatshirt: BERKELEY--which also happens to be the name of her school. Is this supposed to mean something, or is it simply a kind of visual pun?" Both, of course.
• As an undergrad, I was able to visit Berkeley Castle while studying for a term in England ("Where Edward II was murdered, where the Barons of the West gathered before Magna Carta and where Queen Elizabeth I hunted and played bowls."). There are many stories connected to the place--and it's where I learned that UC Berkeley (and the town) was actually named after the philosopher, George Berkeley (although the British pronounciation is "BARK-ley" and the American is "BERK-ley"). Even though Zimmer doesn't seem to be aware of this, Auster certainly is. (Wheels within wheels within wheels...)
• Claire reads from The Principles of Human Knowledge:

  And it seems no less evident that the various sensations or ideas imprinted on the sense, however blended or combined together, cannot exist otherwise than in a mind perceiving them. And again: Secondly, it will be objected that there is a great difference betwixt real fire and the idea of fire, between dreaming or imagining oneself burnt, and actually being so.

• My first real (conscious) encounter with Berkeley's thought came from reading Through the Looking-Glass—actually, The Annotated Alice (brilliantly edited by Martin Gardner), which explains the scene of the Red King sleeping underneath the tree as Alice argues with Tweedledum and Tweedledee about the nature of existence:
  

  “I’m afraid he’ll catch cold with lying on the damp grass,” said Alice, who was a very thoughtful little girl.
  
  “He’s dreaming now,” said Tweedledee: “and what do you think he’s dreaming about?”
  
  Alice said “Nobody can guess that.”
  
  “Why, about you!” Tweedledee exclaimed, clapping his hands triumphantly. “And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you’d be?”
  
  “Where I am now, of course,” said Alice.
  
  “Not you!” Tweedledee retorted contemptuously. “You’d be nowhere. Why, you’re only a sort of thing in his dream!”
  
  “If that there King was to wake,” added Tweedledum, “you’d go out—bang!—just like a candle!”
  
  “I shouldn’t!” Alice exclaimed indignantly. “Besides, if I’m only a sort of thing in his dream, what are you, I should like to know?”
  
  “Ditto,” said Tweedledum.
  
  “Ditto, ditto!” cried Tweedledee.
  
  He shouted this so loud that Alice couldn’t help saying “Hush! You’ll be waking him, I’m afraid, if you make so much noise.”
  
  “Well, it’s no use your talking about waking him,” said Tweedledum, “when you’re only one of the things in his dream. You know very well you’re not real.”
  
  “I am real!” said Alice, and began to cry.
  
  “You wo’n’t make yourself a bit realler by crying,” Tweedledee remarked: “there’s nothing to cry about.”
  
  “If I wasn’t real,” Alice said—half-laughing through her tears, it all seemed so ridiculous—“I shouldn’t be able to cry.”
  
  “I hope you don’t suppose those are real tears?” Tweedledum interrupted in a tone of great contempt.
  
  “I know they’re talking nonsense,” Alice thought to herself: “and it’s foolish to cry about it.”

• As Gardner aptly notes,

  This well-known, much-quoted discussion of the Red King’s dream (the monarch is snoring on a square directly east of the square currently occupied by Alice) plunges poor Alice into grim metaphysical waters. The Tweedle brothers defend Bishop Berkeley’s view that all material objects, including ourselves, are only “sorts of things” in the mind of God. Alice takes the common-sense position of Samuel Johnson, who supposed that he refuted Berkeley by kicking a large stone. [...]
  
  An odd sort of infinite regress is involved here in the parallel dreams of Alice and the Red King. Alice dreams of the King, who is dreaming of Alice, who is dreaming of the King, and so on, like two mirrors facing each other [...].

• Jostein Gaarder's novel Sophie's World is another obvious example of Berkeley's philosophy at work in fiction. (There are many, many more—feel free to list them in the comments.)

Authorship as collage

The Little Professor on Becoming Jane:

After watching the film, it struck me that biopics about the life of the author inadvertently contribute to the death of the author. That is, such films frequently represent authorship as transcription or collage; the author's own unique contribution frequently gets lost in the mix. On the one hand, Becoming Jane does want to argue in favor of the imagination, in the form of Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe. Radcliffe's bestsellers derive, we are told, from an mental "landscape," a wild and eerie place pointedly not embodied in her reserved, restrained figure and rather shabby setting. And Jane's own plots, we are also eventually told, will also be unreal, if in a different sense: although Jane initially rejects the comforts of poetic justice in Fielding's Tom Jones, the novel which is also the source of her sexual awakening (this is one of the more literate seduction techniques in recent memory, I must say), her experience of romantic loss teaches her the need for stories in which everyone gets their just rewards. In that sense, the film detaches fiction from "real life." Yet, on the other hand, the film adheres to the biopic's conventions for representing inspiration, and these conventions make fiction very much a direct product of the author's biography. Jane even gets the first line of her novel from the unprepossessing Mr. Wisley (Laurence Fox, of the omnipresent Fox acting clan). Strictly speaking, there's nothing inaccurate about this convention; after all, Charlotte Bronte turned William Carus Wilson into Mr. Brocklehurst, Charles Dickens kept recycling his childhood experience of poverty, and so on. But this turn to biography eventually becomes troubling, I think, when it confuses why the author might have been drawn to put such-and-such in a text with what such-and-such actually does there.

Unavoidable

I've been avoiding news about the new Brontë film because, well... Why go there? But the BrontëBlog points to a piece in today's Telegraph & Argus that actually made me crack a smile about the whole thing:

Charlotte Bronte, played by Michelle Williams, stands and tosses her hair.

Charlotte: "God damn it, Dad! Potatoes again? This is doing nothing for my attempt to get into that 00 frock for the prom, you know."

Patrick (seething): "Don't take the Lord's name in vain, missy! That's my Goddamn job!"

Charlotte storms out. Bryce Dallas Howard is Emily Bronte, absent-mindedly pushing a potato around her plate with her fork.

Emily: "Dad, I think I'd like to go for a walk on the moors. Get some inspiration from the blasted heath for me writin', donchaknow."

Patrick (glowering): "That's the worst Goddamn British accent I ever heard. That's worse than Dick Van Goddam Dyke."