September 1, 2010
Twelve Angry Men
"In 12 Angry Men (1957) [Henry Fonda] was the only voice of reason when an innocent boy is being railroaded on a murder case."
--Robert Fulford, Aug 31, 2010, National Post
It's pleasant to see how somethings don't change; Bob Fulford, for example, after all these years still rigorously eschewing nuance and subtlety in his analysis of film. About the only way he could improve on this travesty of a capsule review would be by remembering Henry Fonda pulling a Perry Mason with a last minute reveal of the guilty criminal.
I don't know how you'd find any evidence of railroading on the part of the prosecution; what they do is put together a neat tidy case based partly on circumstantial evidence, partly on an eyewitness identification nobody seems to know is suspect. (If the prosecution is aware the eyewitness is nearsighted and wasn't wearing her glasses when she made the ID, they can be accused of railroading even if they believe the circumstantial evidence and think the witness ties it up with a ribbon, but isn't crucial in itself. But I don't recall there being any suggestion of that. Surely the possibility of an apparently unbeatable case being made, in good faith, out of a succession of such imperfectly linked pieces of evidence is unsettling enough without any assumption of police or prosecutorial malice.)
If it's the jury who are railroading the accused, they don't do much of a job of it, slidng over one by one to a not guilty verdict over a single afternoon of deliberations--and if Fonda's character is the sole voice of reason how does that happen? Not only are they won over by his arguments, they are won over by their own--Fonda's character only starts the ball rolling. If he were the unique voice of reason the most he could have achieved would be a hung jury, eleven for conviction v. one for acquittal.
As for 'an innocent boy'--that's the plot pivot for a much more straightforward melodrama than Twelve Angry Men. When Fonda's character says "We may never know what happened that night," he means precisely that; they don't vote acquittal because they're certain he's innocent but because what looked like a rock solid case against him has revealed cracks and fissures which crumble it to bits. On the presumption of innocence he's innocent, and the odds are that he actually is--but high odds are not a certainty, and what's most interesting about Reginald Rose's play in all its incarnations--on television, film and the legitimate stage--is its creative integration of uncertainty, normally an element vigorously excised from courtroom/trial drama.
May 31, 2010
Death House Comedy
New essay up at The Linnet's Wings (www.thelinnetswings.net) Comes with its own screening room by way of informal footnotes.
March 10, 2010
January 30, 2010
January 17, 2010
Taste Test
Taste Test
They blindfolded our entire section for the in-flight meal. This was annoying because I had a window seat and we were flying toward the sun, but apparently it was in the fine print of something we'd signed on boarding. They were kidding I'm sure when they said the pressure door's that way, we have parachutes should you require them, but you don't want to take the chance. The carrots tasted like rutabaga which is really strange since I've never eaten rutabaga so how would I know? I'm not saying it tasted like good rutabaga anymore than the spinach tasted like good mashed potatoes or the beefsteak like good chocolate pudding. Now every time I see a chocolate pudding I think about mad cow disease. I suppose that makes sense since it's a milk-based product.
Other testees reported variable but equally subjective tastings. I don't think anybody correctly identified a single serving. Orange juice tasted like tequila, I don't know why that couldn't happen to me (especially since they were charging for drinks on the flight). On the plus side I didn't get the ravioli which tasted like earthworms still covered in gritty soil, though she didn't mind. Said it took her back to when she'd been a bird in happy transient flight once upon a time. Until she was caught and snapped dead by a hooded falcon but that's another story. She later married the falcon but that was another life.
When they removed my blindfold the clouds below our wing were awrithe with serpents and agallop with stallions. I had to wonder how even a billowing cumulus cloud could hold up so vivid and solid a tusked woolly mammoth. Remember thinking maybe that's where all the prehistoric creatures went instead of becoming extinct. It seems a more sensible choice. Through a gap in the cloud I could see the ocean below which was on fire. Green, orange, lavender and bright blue flames. In a subsequent letter I was informed the probable reason for these visions and the wildly subjective taste impressions both was the substantive dose of lysergic acid dialethamate in our lemon iced vanilla cake. (It tasted like hominy grits, which is not my idea of dessert.) They said it altered our perceptions backward as well as forward in time because it was a new, unusually proactive variety. But how did the acid know in advance who was going to ingest it? I think personally the reason was the time zones we were passing through.
I have no idea the purpose of this study, but I for one will study the fine print in airline contracts a great deal more watchfully in future.
They blindfolded our entire section for the in-flight meal. This was annoying because I had a window seat and we were flying toward the sun, but apparently it was in the fine print of something we'd signed on boarding. They were kidding I'm sure when they said the pressure door's that way, we have parachutes should you require them, but you don't want to take the chance. The carrots tasted like rutabaga which is really strange since I've never eaten rutabaga so how would I know? I'm not saying it tasted like good rutabaga anymore than the spinach tasted like good mashed potatoes or the beefsteak like good chocolate pudding. Now every time I see a chocolate pudding I think about mad cow disease. I suppose that makes sense since it's a milk-based product.
Other testees reported variable but equally subjective tastings. I don't think anybody correctly identified a single serving. Orange juice tasted like tequila, I don't know why that couldn't happen to me (especially since they were charging for drinks on the flight). On the plus side I didn't get the ravioli which tasted like earthworms still covered in gritty soil, though she didn't mind. Said it took her back to when she'd been a bird in happy transient flight once upon a time. Until she was caught and snapped dead by a hooded falcon but that's another story. She later married the falcon but that was another life.
When they removed my blindfold the clouds below our wing were awrithe with serpents and agallop with stallions. I had to wonder how even a billowing cumulus cloud could hold up so vivid and solid a tusked woolly mammoth. Remember thinking maybe that's where all the prehistoric creatures went instead of becoming extinct. It seems a more sensible choice. Through a gap in the cloud I could see the ocean below which was on fire. Green, orange, lavender and bright blue flames. In a subsequent letter I was informed the probable reason for these visions and the wildly subjective taste impressions both was the substantive dose of lysergic acid dialethamate in our lemon iced vanilla cake. (It tasted like hominy grits, which is not my idea of dessert.) They said it altered our perceptions backward as well as forward in time because it was a new, unusually proactive variety. But how did the acid know in advance who was going to ingest it? I think personally the reason was the time zones we were passing through.
I have no idea the purpose of this study, but I for one will study the fine print in airline contracts a great deal more watchfully in future.
Eric Rohmer 1920-2010
Eric Rohmer 1920-2010
On Jan 11 one of the finest of the French New Wave directors (who began his career, as a number of them did, writing on film for Cahier du Cinema) died at the age of 89. His last film was completed two years before. Every film he made from 1981 (Le Beau Mariage) to 2007 (Les Amours d'Astree et de Celadon) is one more argument against Quentin Tarantino's contention that filmmakers almost never produce first rate movies after the age of 60. So are the later films of Alain Resnais and Jacques Rivette, in fact among genuinely distinguished directors who survived past 60 and remained active, there are easily as many exceptions to as confirmations of this very rough rule of thumb. (Mounting evidence suggests Tarantino's best-before year may have been his fortieth or even his thirty fifth.)
The obit I read in the Globe and Mail (taken off the wires from the Manchester Guardian) has this to say about his first film and its promise for his career:
"Le Signe du Lion, completed in 1959 after one false start and a handful of shorts, fitted comfortably into the New Wave formula of Parisian life, with its tale of a student musician, tempted nto debt by a promised inheritance, who lapses into abject destitution after the legacy turns out to be a hoax.
"In retrospect, one can clearly see in it the seeds of Rohmer's later work. Showing little interest in plot or action, Rohmer concentrates on showing how Paris itself becomes an objective correlative to the hero's state of mind, gradually metamorphosing from a welcoming city into a bleak stone desert as he realizes that the friends from whom he might hope to borrow are all away for the vacation."
I'm very grateful, given its shoddy character, that this was the only synopsis of a Rohmer film attempted. Key point in rebuttal: Pierre (Jess Hahn) doesn't discover the inheritance was a hoax; he learns his aged relative changed her will when she heard that he'd run into debt and a dissipated life and--I expect most crucially for her--began neglecting his music in anticipation of a huge legacy that would free him from any obligation to work, develop talent or follow a determinate course of any kind. Only on the quite unfounded assumption that the inheritance is a hoax can you get by with the preposterous notion that Rohmer, in this film or any of those that follow, shows little interest in plot or action. If you add inaction as action's dynamic counterpoint, with choice as the fulcrum that balances the two, you understand the importance of his seamlessly intricate plots as revelations of character. They're there in all his stories, and they aren't hard to find unless you begin with the persuasion that plot OR character must predominate in the telling of any story: but in the most satisfying ones they always collaborate as equal partners.)
Not long after seeing Le Signe du Lion I looked it up in one of those omnibus film studies under the letter 'L'. I discovered to my astonishment that the reviewer thought it a remarkable debut, marred by a too-pat happy ending. What film had the reviewer been seeing? What happens in the last scene of Le Signe du Lion is that, casually betraying the man who's kept him alive at the lowest ebb of his fortunes, Pierre rides happily and furiously off on a suddenly cresting wave toward almost certain catastrophe. These are not points made obscurely or oversubtly; they will occur spontaneously to any reviewer who simply pays attention, which I'll grant you a well firmed body of assumption and resultant theory makes it almost impossible to do.
The only other fable of despair that I know of in Rohmer is Les Nuit de la Pleine Lune (1984) (though a case could be made for La Collectioneuse, which certainly is engagingly grim). It’s perhaps characteristic of Rohmer’s work as it can be seen to develop over a long, rigorously planned-out career, that his lead this time is female. (The leads in Six Contes Moraux are all male; in Comedies et Proverbes all female with the interesting variation that Pauline a la Plage has two female leads of equal prominence, as does Quatre Aventure de Reinette et Mirabelle; I’ve seen only trois of the Quatre Saisons group, and the count is 2 females to 1 male; I’d have thought according to previously established pattern that the lead in the fourth, Conte d’Hivre, would be male, but the synopsis suggests this is another story centred on a woman. Odd shift of emphasis, but he had his reasons I suppose.)
Equally characteristic is the difference between Les Nuit. . .’s Louise (Pascale Ogier) and Pierre. Rohmer’s male leads all tend to be in a state of drift until a clear choice presents itself. (In one of the subtlest, Conte d’Ete ,Gaspard’s choice grows progressively clearer, but never quite clear to him, and so he misses it: which is bittersweet but not tragic because there’s no sense his character is firmed enough that he will always fail to recognize what life precariously offers.) His women most often have to deal with forced choices; ones they try to will into being or ones connived at for them by close female friends. (Women connive at choices for male friends also, which they go along with, insofar as they do, as part of their tendency to drift: leave choices to others.)
Beatrice Romand played Sabine in Le Beau Mariage (1981), who tries to break the cycle of drift in her life by breaking up with her married boyfriend (a wise move) and entering upon a campaign to meet and marry—not live with, never merely that again—an eligible man she can love through life, at the earliest possible opportunity. Nothing goes right with the man she fixes on because she’s driven by compulsion, not free choice. When the skein of her plans and expectations has thoroughly unravelled, a moment of warm eye contact with a stranger on a train suggests hmm. . . real possibilities if she can let feeling grow in its own natural soil.
In Conte d’Automne the same actress plays Magali, who meets a man at a party on her friend’s estate, for which she’s supplied the wine, a recent bottling she’s particularly proud of from her own vineyard. There’s a sudden, fierce mutual attraction—complicated and almost derailed when she senses her friend has connived at this chance meeting (and for devious intricacy this connivance was a beaut). She breaks off the evening with him rather than explode—likes him too much to be altogether angry, doesn’t trust herself to maintain a false calm. When they meet again—neither by contrivance nor entirely by chance—later that same evening, she’s had it out with her friend, regained composure—once again they get along famously. A forced choice for once takes on the aspect of a natural choice after all.
Delphine in Le Rayon Vert is perhaps the most perplexed of Rohmer’s heroes or heroines, simultaneously in a state of aimless drift and making forcible, abrupt choices that puzzle others and frustrate herself. The pain she experiences on this account, coupled with her ferocious sincerity, is tremendously affecting. Ultimately she decides to resolve her perplexities by a lightning test of her perceptiveness, and make her answer to a proposition that would change the course of her life depend on whether her eyes can detect a natural appearance that vanishes almost as it’s seen. (A similar test illuminates The Blue Minute, premier des quatre aventures de Reinette et Mirabelle.)
If men tend to evade serious choices by drifting, women by trying to force choices that cut across the grain, which for that reason usually fail wholly or partially, it’s perhaps not surprising that the woman who comes nearest to duplicating Pierre’s appalling fate is the one who forces a choice and has it succeed, catastrophically—Louise in Les Nuits de la Pleine Lune.
It’s obvious why no one has taken the ending of Les Nuits . . . as happy, artificially or otherwise: Louise’s world has fallen apart, she’s at the lowest ebb of fortune’s wheel and, trying to retrieve herself, makes a choice more desperate dthan the one that began her descent. I suppose I can see how, on a superficial reading, the sudden restoration of a huge fortune to a man so careless that his first act on hearing of it is to desert and betray a man who saved his life is a happy ending, if the man he betrays reads to you (as he does to the reviewer I cited) as local colour, not a human being, and if the pervious inheritor of this fortune, a psychological match for Pierre, died in an auto smashup which is why Pierre has been reinstated as heir—all that might read as an artificially happy ending on the shallow consumerist principles that dominate the box office, hence the consciousness of reviewers, if dark portents for the future are declared strictly out of bounds. (The number of betrayals that slide by as inconsequential in a typical hero(ine)’s progress to a happy ending would be a study in themselves; as would the varied strategies for muffling and obscuring the time stamp for expiry of any happily ever after. Brecht didn’t call this style of storytelling illusionist for nothing.)
There are dimensions within and beyond dimensions in Rohmer’s films. To keep this within reasonable length I’ve limited myself to a few words on the characteristic pattern of his plots, what it suggests about his ideas of human character, limiting myself to skeletal outlines without, I hope, violating too much the complexity with which these are worked out in practice by his consistent method. Beyond that I’ll happily enough write elucidations at greater length on individual movies from time to time, as the mood strikes, giving myself room to touch on the intimate tangle of his subplots and secondary characters, any of which—almost any individual scene taken in isolation—would reward study at much greater length than this, but as a writer with my own work to get on with, I prefer to leave that study to the busy workings of my subconscious, to be dredged up impromptu perhaps, where appropriate, in conversation with fellow cineastes at tony parties should I ever arrive at a position where I’m invited.
On Jan 11 one of the finest of the French New Wave directors (who began his career, as a number of them did, writing on film for Cahier du Cinema) died at the age of 89. His last film was completed two years before. Every film he made from 1981 (Le Beau Mariage) to 2007 (Les Amours d'Astree et de Celadon) is one more argument against Quentin Tarantino's contention that filmmakers almost never produce first rate movies after the age of 60. So are the later films of Alain Resnais and Jacques Rivette, in fact among genuinely distinguished directors who survived past 60 and remained active, there are easily as many exceptions to as confirmations of this very rough rule of thumb. (Mounting evidence suggests Tarantino's best-before year may have been his fortieth or even his thirty fifth.)
The obit I read in the Globe and Mail (taken off the wires from the Manchester Guardian) has this to say about his first film and its promise for his career:
"Le Signe du Lion, completed in 1959 after one false start and a handful of shorts, fitted comfortably into the New Wave formula of Parisian life, with its tale of a student musician, tempted nto debt by a promised inheritance, who lapses into abject destitution after the legacy turns out to be a hoax.
"In retrospect, one can clearly see in it the seeds of Rohmer's later work. Showing little interest in plot or action, Rohmer concentrates on showing how Paris itself becomes an objective correlative to the hero's state of mind, gradually metamorphosing from a welcoming city into a bleak stone desert as he realizes that the friends from whom he might hope to borrow are all away for the vacation."
I'm very grateful, given its shoddy character, that this was the only synopsis of a Rohmer film attempted. Key point in rebuttal: Pierre (Jess Hahn) doesn't discover the inheritance was a hoax; he learns his aged relative changed her will when she heard that he'd run into debt and a dissipated life and--I expect most crucially for her--began neglecting his music in anticipation of a huge legacy that would free him from any obligation to work, develop talent or follow a determinate course of any kind. Only on the quite unfounded assumption that the inheritance is a hoax can you get by with the preposterous notion that Rohmer, in this film or any of those that follow, shows little interest in plot or action. If you add inaction as action's dynamic counterpoint, with choice as the fulcrum that balances the two, you understand the importance of his seamlessly intricate plots as revelations of character. They're there in all his stories, and they aren't hard to find unless you begin with the persuasion that plot OR character must predominate in the telling of any story: but in the most satisfying ones they always collaborate as equal partners.)
Not long after seeing Le Signe du Lion I looked it up in one of those omnibus film studies under the letter 'L'. I discovered to my astonishment that the reviewer thought it a remarkable debut, marred by a too-pat happy ending. What film had the reviewer been seeing? What happens in the last scene of Le Signe du Lion is that, casually betraying the man who's kept him alive at the lowest ebb of his fortunes, Pierre rides happily and furiously off on a suddenly cresting wave toward almost certain catastrophe. These are not points made obscurely or oversubtly; they will occur spontaneously to any reviewer who simply pays attention, which I'll grant you a well firmed body of assumption and resultant theory makes it almost impossible to do.
The only other fable of despair that I know of in Rohmer is Les Nuit de la Pleine Lune (1984) (though a case could be made for La Collectioneuse, which certainly is engagingly grim). It’s perhaps characteristic of Rohmer’s work as it can be seen to develop over a long, rigorously planned-out career, that his lead this time is female. (The leads in Six Contes Moraux are all male; in Comedies et Proverbes all female with the interesting variation that Pauline a la Plage has two female leads of equal prominence, as does Quatre Aventure de Reinette et Mirabelle; I’ve seen only trois of the Quatre Saisons group, and the count is 2 females to 1 male; I’d have thought according to previously established pattern that the lead in the fourth, Conte d’Hivre, would be male, but the synopsis suggests this is another story centred on a woman. Odd shift of emphasis, but he had his reasons I suppose.)
Equally characteristic is the difference between Les Nuit. . .’s Louise (Pascale Ogier) and Pierre. Rohmer’s male leads all tend to be in a state of drift until a clear choice presents itself. (In one of the subtlest, Conte d’Ete ,Gaspard’s choice grows progressively clearer, but never quite clear to him, and so he misses it: which is bittersweet but not tragic because there’s no sense his character is firmed enough that he will always fail to recognize what life precariously offers.) His women most often have to deal with forced choices; ones they try to will into being or ones connived at for them by close female friends. (Women connive at choices for male friends also, which they go along with, insofar as they do, as part of their tendency to drift: leave choices to others.)
Beatrice Romand played Sabine in Le Beau Mariage (1981), who tries to break the cycle of drift in her life by breaking up with her married boyfriend (a wise move) and entering upon a campaign to meet and marry—not live with, never merely that again—an eligible man she can love through life, at the earliest possible opportunity. Nothing goes right with the man she fixes on because she’s driven by compulsion, not free choice. When the skein of her plans and expectations has thoroughly unravelled, a moment of warm eye contact with a stranger on a train suggests hmm. . . real possibilities if she can let feeling grow in its own natural soil.
In Conte d’Automne the same actress plays Magali, who meets a man at a party on her friend’s estate, for which she’s supplied the wine, a recent bottling she’s particularly proud of from her own vineyard. There’s a sudden, fierce mutual attraction—complicated and almost derailed when she senses her friend has connived at this chance meeting (and for devious intricacy this connivance was a beaut). She breaks off the evening with him rather than explode—likes him too much to be altogether angry, doesn’t trust herself to maintain a false calm. When they meet again—neither by contrivance nor entirely by chance—later that same evening, she’s had it out with her friend, regained composure—once again they get along famously. A forced choice for once takes on the aspect of a natural choice after all.
Delphine in Le Rayon Vert is perhaps the most perplexed of Rohmer’s heroes or heroines, simultaneously in a state of aimless drift and making forcible, abrupt choices that puzzle others and frustrate herself. The pain she experiences on this account, coupled with her ferocious sincerity, is tremendously affecting. Ultimately she decides to resolve her perplexities by a lightning test of her perceptiveness, and make her answer to a proposition that would change the course of her life depend on whether her eyes can detect a natural appearance that vanishes almost as it’s seen. (A similar test illuminates The Blue Minute, premier des quatre aventures de Reinette et Mirabelle.)
If men tend to evade serious choices by drifting, women by trying to force choices that cut across the grain, which for that reason usually fail wholly or partially, it’s perhaps not surprising that the woman who comes nearest to duplicating Pierre’s appalling fate is the one who forces a choice and has it succeed, catastrophically—Louise in Les Nuits de la Pleine Lune.
It’s obvious why no one has taken the ending of Les Nuits . . . as happy, artificially or otherwise: Louise’s world has fallen apart, she’s at the lowest ebb of fortune’s wheel and, trying to retrieve herself, makes a choice more desperate dthan the one that began her descent. I suppose I can see how, on a superficial reading, the sudden restoration of a huge fortune to a man so careless that his first act on hearing of it is to desert and betray a man who saved his life is a happy ending, if the man he betrays reads to you (as he does to the reviewer I cited) as local colour, not a human being, and if the pervious inheritor of this fortune, a psychological match for Pierre, died in an auto smashup which is why Pierre has been reinstated as heir—all that might read as an artificially happy ending on the shallow consumerist principles that dominate the box office, hence the consciousness of reviewers, if dark portents for the future are declared strictly out of bounds. (The number of betrayals that slide by as inconsequential in a typical hero(ine)’s progress to a happy ending would be a study in themselves; as would the varied strategies for muffling and obscuring the time stamp for expiry of any happily ever after. Brecht didn’t call this style of storytelling illusionist for nothing.)
There are dimensions within and beyond dimensions in Rohmer’s films. To keep this within reasonable length I’ve limited myself to a few words on the characteristic pattern of his plots, what it suggests about his ideas of human character, limiting myself to skeletal outlines without, I hope, violating too much the complexity with which these are worked out in practice by his consistent method. Beyond that I’ll happily enough write elucidations at greater length on individual movies from time to time, as the mood strikes, giving myself room to touch on the intimate tangle of his subplots and secondary characters, any of which—almost any individual scene taken in isolation—would reward study at much greater length than this, but as a writer with my own work to get on with, I prefer to leave that study to the busy workings of my subconscious, to be dredged up impromptu perhaps, where appropriate, in conversation with fellow cineastes at tony parties should I ever arrive at a position where I’m invited.
January 9, 2010
I Live in the Real World
Can you recall an occasion when you’ve heard this said in good faith? without a superadded tone of belligerent outrage to boot? Whenever I hear that tone of aggressive don’t-you-tell-me! moral indignation, I know I’m hearing a vocal mask of bad conscience—hear it in my own voice I know it’s time to rethink seriously whatever I’ve just said.
A few years back I wrote to a National Post columnist about what I thought was a rather bizarre contention: that the trial and execution of Saddam Hussein was a triumph of natural justice. Her reply turned on that sentence: “I live in the real world”—a world, apparently, in which natural justice can embrace the assassination of three consecutive defence attorneys—no doubt to encourage the fourth—and, in general, trial proceedings that—I kid you not, look up the news reports of the time if you don’t believe me—resembled nothing so much as those of the Red Queen’s court in Alice in Wonderland. Apparently we’ve been wrong about Lewis Carroll all this time; he was actually a naturalist in the manner of Emile Zola.
Of course Lewis Carroll was writing about the real world—aspects of it I should say, that’s all any of us can claim—telling the truth but telling it slant as Emily Dickinson put it. Thought I don’t think the word totalitarian had been coined yet, the court of the Red Queen strikes me as a far more astute vision of totalitarianism than George Orwell’s 1984. Orwell imagines a middle level bureaucrat like O’Brien could be a philosopher prince—or is forced to pretend he does, since otherwise he can’t get out the reams and reams of argument he has to fall back on, lacking the skill to show the intricate apparatus of totalitarianism—instead he has to turn a character into his mouthpiece, improbably and at whew! length, so he can tell tell tell you what he thinks. It’s what happens when you send an impatient schoolmaster to do a novelist’s job (and his fervid misrepresentation of Gulliver’s Travels shows he was equally as capable a misreader of novels).
None of the attendants at the Red Queen’s court pauses in frenzied action to give a solemn exposition of its inner workings at a hundred pages’ length—the chop logic they speak very frequently conveys sense (hidden from themselves), but their words don’t explain the social order—they reveal it. So do their actions—principally variations of running around like chickens with their heads cut off, mainly in the devout hope that they can thereby prevent their actual heads from being, you know, actually cut off. Motions of that kind—paranoid, frenetic, scrabbling—are constant in Stalin’s Russia as well—from the lowest level at its outer to the highest level at its inner circle. A middle manager like O’Brien in such a maelstrom will have little time to concentrate his thoughts , what with the huge proportion of every working day and restless sleeping night that must be given over to metaphorically, and on some occasions perhaps literally (state occasions I’d be inclined to say, but that may be editorializing) pissing his pants with fear.
The curious thing about the columnist who argued the Red Queen’s court was an admirable model of natural justice is that she’s interesting and provocative—on the euthanasia movement, feminism and men’s rights, the rising tide of anti-semitism in polite society and (perhaps most worrying) public schools—whenever she engages with the world around her. Her occasional book reviews are a delight—where the subject isn’t overtly political—because she has far more practical aesthetic sense than most professional reviewers. It’s only when alarmist tendencies send her back to the entrenched redoubt of living in the real world that she ever talks solemn nonsense, as in a recent column commending realists (rightists) and savaging dreamers (leftists) in our society for their respective views on militant Islam. Apart from the fact that it was right-wing realists whose dream of miring the Soviet Union in Afghanistan precipitated the exponential leap forward in power and militancy of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, this is a classic example of an either /or question—“Are you a realist or a dreamer?”—that can only be coherently answered “Yes”. It’s possible to criticize a particular dream on any number of counts—it’s wishy-washy; too aggressively self-centred; so unfocussed it has no centre at all; seems high sounding and noble but would lead in practice to self-replicating (self-exploding) nightmares—but it’s pointless to criticize (or praise) anyone for being a dreamer if it’s impossible to discover a single example of a human being who isn’t.
A few years back I wrote to a National Post columnist about what I thought was a rather bizarre contention: that the trial and execution of Saddam Hussein was a triumph of natural justice. Her reply turned on that sentence: “I live in the real world”—a world, apparently, in which natural justice can embrace the assassination of three consecutive defence attorneys—no doubt to encourage the fourth—and, in general, trial proceedings that—I kid you not, look up the news reports of the time if you don’t believe me—resembled nothing so much as those of the Red Queen’s court in Alice in Wonderland. Apparently we’ve been wrong about Lewis Carroll all this time; he was actually a naturalist in the manner of Emile Zola.
Of course Lewis Carroll was writing about the real world—aspects of it I should say, that’s all any of us can claim—telling the truth but telling it slant as Emily Dickinson put it. Thought I don’t think the word totalitarian had been coined yet, the court of the Red Queen strikes me as a far more astute vision of totalitarianism than George Orwell’s 1984. Orwell imagines a middle level bureaucrat like O’Brien could be a philosopher prince—or is forced to pretend he does, since otherwise he can’t get out the reams and reams of argument he has to fall back on, lacking the skill to show the intricate apparatus of totalitarianism—instead he has to turn a character into his mouthpiece, improbably and at whew! length, so he can tell tell tell you what he thinks. It’s what happens when you send an impatient schoolmaster to do a novelist’s job (and his fervid misrepresentation of Gulliver’s Travels shows he was equally as capable a misreader of novels).
None of the attendants at the Red Queen’s court pauses in frenzied action to give a solemn exposition of its inner workings at a hundred pages’ length—the chop logic they speak very frequently conveys sense (hidden from themselves), but their words don’t explain the social order—they reveal it. So do their actions—principally variations of running around like chickens with their heads cut off, mainly in the devout hope that they can thereby prevent their actual heads from being, you know, actually cut off. Motions of that kind—paranoid, frenetic, scrabbling—are constant in Stalin’s Russia as well—from the lowest level at its outer to the highest level at its inner circle. A middle manager like O’Brien in such a maelstrom will have little time to concentrate his thoughts , what with the huge proportion of every working day and restless sleeping night that must be given over to metaphorically, and on some occasions perhaps literally (state occasions I’d be inclined to say, but that may be editorializing) pissing his pants with fear.
The curious thing about the columnist who argued the Red Queen’s court was an admirable model of natural justice is that she’s interesting and provocative—on the euthanasia movement, feminism and men’s rights, the rising tide of anti-semitism in polite society and (perhaps most worrying) public schools—whenever she engages with the world around her. Her occasional book reviews are a delight—where the subject isn’t overtly political—because she has far more practical aesthetic sense than most professional reviewers. It’s only when alarmist tendencies send her back to the entrenched redoubt of living in the real world that she ever talks solemn nonsense, as in a recent column commending realists (rightists) and savaging dreamers (leftists) in our society for their respective views on militant Islam. Apart from the fact that it was right-wing realists whose dream of miring the Soviet Union in Afghanistan precipitated the exponential leap forward in power and militancy of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, this is a classic example of an either /or question—“Are you a realist or a dreamer?”—that can only be coherently answered “Yes”. It’s possible to criticize a particular dream on any number of counts—it’s wishy-washy; too aggressively self-centred; so unfocussed it has no centre at all; seems high sounding and noble but would lead in practice to self-replicating (self-exploding) nightmares—but it’s pointless to criticize (or praise) anyone for being a dreamer if it’s impossible to discover a single example of a human being who isn’t.
December 17, 2009
find the wheel
(A Fun interpretation by a fellow scribe, Gabriel Orgrease, of a piece by me called
Find the Wheel
Frequently when writers tell stories in unconventional ways--which may be defined as "ways a particular reader is uncomfortable or unfamiliar with"--they are accused of trying to reinvent the wheel. My reply to this has always been:
Telling a story is a completely different kettle of fish from reinventing the wheel. They're horses of a different stripe, and so's a zebra. Some scientists maintain an ostrich is a giraffe of a different neck but I'm not altogether persuaded this reasoning is sound. We're on safer ground I'd say, maintaining that the correct shape of a wheel, for maximum effectiveness, is round and the same might be said, in a way, of the palindrome. But is palindromic invariably the correct shape of a story? It would certainly cut down the size of the slush piles.
Very few fish, while we're on the subject, are round, and to the best of my knowledge at least, no Kentucky Derby winners. Tigers aren't especially round, nor are they horses of a different stripe, though I suppose there are some who might disagree. To convince themselves that this is wrong, I recommend they try saddling a Siamese. (There are obvious arguments against saddling a tiger.) Then again I've never been accused of trying to reinvent the tiger--why is that do you suppose?
Not that I'm looking to take on the project. I don't think I have a single idea that would be a real improvement on the current design, and anyway it's inadvisable for me--I always get too close to my work.
People are rarely round, especially in North--wait a minute, I'd better rethink that one.
Trees embody roundness as a dynamic component of their form, maybe I could reinvent the tree. What would a story look like if it looked like a tree? It's true that a printed book has leaves. . .
Maybe I could reinvent the shaggy dog. True, a certain number of readers are allergic, but who imagines it's possible to please everybody? Did you ever hear of a book with a sold out print run of six billion copies, or even close?
I'm not sure what my point is--then again if this is a wheel, why should it have a point? Actually it would have an infinite number of points (doesn't sound possible I know, but it's true--an infinite number, count 'em up yourself if you don't believe me). That sounds like a lot of points but none of them is the point, since they can't be (successively or predecessively) distinguished from each other. So, fine, I have no point--I should presume to reinvent the wheel? Make it square with clearcut corners that each come to a point, that would cut down on functionality some. But does a story have a function? Have to think about that one. Organize a multi-participant debate. Does anybody know who you'd contact to. . . ?
November 19, 2009
Grown Ups
Years ago back in Saskatoon I was part of the set up and performance of a Winter concert (poetry, music, skits)—Sundog it was called for the rainbows ‘round the sun you can see with particular vividness on a Prairie winter’s iciest days. Two of the organizers’ children were making a lot of commotion and getting in the way. A parent gave them the most ambivalent dressing down I’ve ever heard—scolding himself as much as them for insisting they stop acting like children, or go someplace where they wouldn’t interfere with things. “So if you don’t want to play that game of being boring adults, you don’t have to. But you have to play someplace else.” I watched the two children a moment after he’d walked away. The young girl broke the silence by saying to the younger boy, “Come on. We’ll be adults.” So for the next two hours that’s what they played at; as we all do.
November 11, 2009
Sounds of Silence
A blaring voice over TTC Speakers--heard it two,three times in my travels up and down--informed riders that at eleven o'clock the subway system would observe two minutes' silence in remembrance of our veterans. It occured to me since the speakers are silent mosty of the time, the only way to indicate the reason for this silence would be to announce first, that it was beginning, next, that it had just concluded. I've been on the subway at eleven on Remembrance Day and never noticed that they did that. Usually I only noticed after the time was past.
The canonical or official time, of course, is 11:11. That was the time I observed it, sectioning off the moment with a sip at 11:11, then a second at 11:13, of Creemore. Between these I tried to make the stillness in my head match the quiet around me.
The canonical or official time, of course, is 11:11. That was the time I observed it, sectioning off the moment with a sip at 11:11, then a second at 11:13, of Creemore. Between these I tried to make the stillness in my head match the quiet around me.
October 11, 2009
Novel Launch (ii) The Day Itself
I always enjoy visiting Word on the Street, but it's a very different feeling to be personally involved. I was able to show an actual book to old friends like Stuart Ross at their tables. I was able to inscribe a few copies to actual buyers--not enough to give me writer's cramp by the end of the day, but eight copies, a little under half of which were bought by people who didn't know me personally.
I'll be busy the next two weeks reading books I picked up at the fair, not only a few I bought but four other titles from Crossing Chaos that the publisher passed on to me. Today I'm looking at Yang Chu''s Poems by Duane Locke--read and enjoyed a number of them Sunday. He's in his nineties apparently, publishing snce the forties and this is his nineteenth book Definitely have to Google him.
I reread mine yesterday in the free moments of my courier rounds--the standbys, the subway rides between calls. I was pleased to see five proofreads each by my publisher, another reader and myself had actually eliminated almost all the typos. There was a rather embarrassing one in the 'teaser' I wrote for the back cover (which they didn't send me to proofread)--the dreaded misplaced apostrophe: 'song styling's of owls'. (Yes, I admit it, there's a poet/singer in my novel who is an owl; performs under the stage name Minerva.) The worst of it is I can't think how anybody but me ould have been responsible for that one. (Though looking it up just now I find no trace of an apostrophe in the original:
It's so lovely being all of you this evening
Smoke, intelligent fog, fun house mirrors, death house aesthetics, a city lit from within and a city of living houses. Riddles and enigmas. What was that language, where is its key? City webworks for instant travel by elevator or magic bus. People who are you and me only fictional. Elf clubs burrowed snug in the friendly earth and nightclubs whose floor show is literally murder. St James Infirmary as you've never heard it in your life before. Song stylings of owls. Storytellers way too invowen with the stories they tell. Red and blue water on tap. Dream or real? you or me?
happening to us or do we make it happen? Plain language that almost makes sense. Bloodsuckers alive and undead. A once-majestic hall of mirrors that now exists somewhere between memory and legend. "Alive and und--ead, alive and unde--ead. . . " Vomiting parties, economic indices, themebook competitions. Action and suspense, stories that begin. Till human voices wake us.
Have you noticed how cities are like dreams? Anything imaginable can happen in them. Cut the deck and snap! the cards. Step right up.
So who knows where the insidious misplaced apostrophe came from? Probably the same place as the misspelling of my name: "Martin Heavidsides" on the spine. These are the things that'll make that print run instantly recognizable to collectors in years to come.)
Undermind in Crossing Chaos Catalogue
I'll be busy the next two weeks reading books I picked up at the fair, not only a few I bought but four other titles from Crossing Chaos that the publisher passed on to me. Today I'm looking at Yang Chu''s Poems by Duane Locke--read and enjoyed a number of them Sunday. He's in his nineties apparently, publishing snce the forties and this is his nineteenth book Definitely have to Google him.
I reread mine yesterday in the free moments of my courier rounds--the standbys, the subway rides between calls. I was pleased to see five proofreads each by my publisher, another reader and myself had actually eliminated almost all the typos. There was a rather embarrassing one in the 'teaser' I wrote for the back cover (which they didn't send me to proofread)--the dreaded misplaced apostrophe: 'song styling's of owls'. (Yes, I admit it, there's a poet/singer in my novel who is an owl; performs under the stage name Minerva.) The worst of it is I can't think how anybody but me ould have been responsible for that one. (Though looking it up just now I find no trace of an apostrophe in the original:
It's so lovely being all of you this evening
Smoke, intelligent fog, fun house mirrors, death house aesthetics, a city lit from within and a city of living houses. Riddles and enigmas. What was that language, where is its key? City webworks for instant travel by elevator or magic bus. People who are you and me only fictional. Elf clubs burrowed snug in the friendly earth and nightclubs whose floor show is literally murder. St James Infirmary as you've never heard it in your life before. Song stylings of owls. Storytellers way too invowen with the stories they tell. Red and blue water on tap. Dream or real? you or me?
happening to us or do we make it happen? Plain language that almost makes sense. Bloodsuckers alive and undead. A once-majestic hall of mirrors that now exists somewhere between memory and legend. "Alive and und--ead, alive and unde--ead. . . " Vomiting parties, economic indices, themebook competitions. Action and suspense, stories that begin. Till human voices wake us.
Have you noticed how cities are like dreams? Anything imaginable can happen in them. Cut the deck and snap! the cards. Step right up.
So who knows where the insidious misplaced apostrophe came from? Probably the same place as the misspelling of my name: "Martin Heavidsides" on the spine. These are the things that'll make that print run instantly recognizable to collectors in years to come.)
Undermind in Crossing Chaos Catalogue
September 6, 2009
Novel Launch
I've waited to announce the publication of my novel UNDERMIND 'til I was sure when it was due, which I finally found out late last month: this month, with the launch scheduled for Word on the Street (Toronto) Sept 27.
April 17, 2009
Not Twice This Play Redux
Just a note to say The Living Theatre in New York is going to be presenting a staged reading of Empty Bowl on Monday Apr 27.
Not Twice This Play
Empty Bowl is rewritten, rethought and considerably expanded from a one act play I wrote in 1993, inch foot time gem, which for a one act play intended to run an hour had far too many irreducible flaws. Whole scenes intended to capture the enigmatic character of the Zen koan came out obscurantist and befuddling rather; those I excised. In Act III of Empty Bowl I re-used about two pages of Eshun's long speech from the earlier play, though most of Eshun's dialogue's original to this version. None of the other characters already featured--Nobunaga, Nobushige, Hakuin, Peasant in Blue Kimono (renamed Ainu in Empty Bowl)--spoke in their real voices yet, so their dialogue here is totally fresh. (I tell a lie. I did retain two lines from the earlier, much shorter version of the fairground shell game scene:
NOBUNAGA
It's better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.
AINU
I dunno. Six of one, half dozen of the other if you ask me.
Well, would you have cut that?)
The prologue, 'inch foot', and the epilogue, 'not twice this day', considerably reworked, still frame the action of Empty Bowl. Quite a few images I thought effective have been retained, such as Ainu, back from numerous campaigns, a one-eyed double amputee. Narrative threads originally independent of each other have been integrated into one continuous story line.
Wabi, Tamago, Minaki, Taka and various secondary characters are entirely new to this version. inch foot time gem was missing them.
It often takes a long time for the true form of a play to be disclosed, even to its author.
Not Twice This Play
Empty Bowl is rewritten, rethought and considerably expanded from a one act play I wrote in 1993, inch foot time gem, which for a one act play intended to run an hour had far too many irreducible flaws. Whole scenes intended to capture the enigmatic character of the Zen koan came out obscurantist and befuddling rather; those I excised. In Act III of Empty Bowl I re-used about two pages of Eshun's long speech from the earlier play, though most of Eshun's dialogue's original to this version. None of the other characters already featured--Nobunaga, Nobushige, Hakuin, Peasant in Blue Kimono (renamed Ainu in Empty Bowl)--spoke in their real voices yet, so their dialogue here is totally fresh. (I tell a lie. I did retain two lines from the earlier, much shorter version of the fairground shell game scene:
NOBUNAGA
It's better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.
AINU
I dunno. Six of one, half dozen of the other if you ask me.
Well, would you have cut that?)
The prologue, 'inch foot', and the epilogue, 'not twice this day', considerably reworked, still frame the action of Empty Bowl. Quite a few images I thought effective have been retained, such as Ainu, back from numerous campaigns, a one-eyed double amputee. Narrative threads originally independent of each other have been integrated into one continuous story line.
Wabi, Tamago, Minaki, Taka and various secondary characters are entirely new to this version. inch foot time gem was missing them.
It often takes a long time for the true form of a play to be disclosed, even to its author.
April 10, 2009
High End Murder
Impossible to understand the current economic crisis if you take it as a one-off: think of it rather as a high water mark on a crisis wave that crests and ebbs; bearing in mind that the low water mark generates more than enough ruined and outright excised lives to be gong on with. By the same token Bernie Madoff is better read less as an aberration than a very slight extrapolation from everyday commercial practice; the subprime mortgage fiasco scarcely seems less consciously fraudulent, and it appears that until almost the end, knowing his methods grew more questionable and his hopes of recovery more desperate hour upon hour, Madoff still imagined that his superior fiduciiary powers, coupled to one exceptionally luck turn of fortune's wheel would save him yet: which was the fervent prayer of the subprimers and the AIG fiasciators--now enjoying their golden handshakes--as well. (After all he had perhaps the world's largest collection of statuary bulls, nary a bear in the lot; surely that would protect and save him in a market, as everybody knows, governed by phases of the planets overhead and concentrate effusions of sympathetic magic.) And as for the Ford Pinto
--(Google this under "gas tank that explodes" if you want the full background)--
that can't be comprehended at all if regarded as an isolated incident, or even one of a firecracker string of them throughout a century and more of intense commercial history--the Dalkon Shield; Bhopal; the Three Gorges Dam; IBM's collaboration with Nazi Germany on the death camps (you ever wonder why those tattooed numbers on the victims' arms? Each was matched to a stippled card with the same number in a primitive version of computerized filing.) I'll grant you IBM's crime has features that are unique. More indecent even than the collaborations of Krupp and IG Farben (now Bayer); IBM's was as great a crime against humanity, but also an act of high treason. Still, it has features in common with relatively much less extreme commercial crimes.
Nobody writing about this or the Pinto case has ever suggested that either board of directors was composed of anything but typical businessmen. I don't know if a paper trail exists from the late thirties, early forties that would show who at IBM was down with the deal, who if anyone resigned in outraged horror, but memos that came to light in the class action suit over the Pinto make it clear the executive board of Ford Motors, fully aware that they were seeding every highway in North America with car bombs, released the Pinto unmodified because it made more sense on a cost/benefit analysis. A fifty cent piece of equipment they might easily ahve attached to the Pinto's volatile gas tank would have corrected the problem, but they would have had to put up the price about a dollar, or absorb an infinitesimal reduction in profit on each auto sold. Add it all up car by car that's a lot of bucks; two hundred thou per wrongful death suit is what accountants tell them insurance settlements are going for and hey! that works out cheaper. What kind of system so easily and reflexively performs cost/benefit analysis on the merits of murdering random strangers in cold blood? How many? Eight hundred is the lowball estimate.
How many of the most depraved serial killers on death row (in the U.S. states that still maintain it) would you need to assemble in a room until confirmed kills among the lot would total eight hundred? The bloodiest hundred fifty cover that spread? Almost certainly double that number, you'd be down from the eight-ten range to triple, double and onetime murderers long before they added up to such a sum.So why do people who are rabid for the death penalty concentrate so exclusively on such comparative small fry. A CEO and twelve or fourteen presidents and vices round a table conspire to murder eight hundred people and the only sanctions called upon are economic ones. They lost that lawsuit big time, paid out way more than $200,000/wrongful death. That'll teach 'em.
Alas, I'm pretty much an absolute opponent of the death penalty, and besides in this case its woeful inadequacy is plainly to be seen. How many times can you effectively execute any one murderer? Once remains pretty much the upward limit in spite of the dazzling technological advances we've seen in so many areas of our lives. Even if the means existed to spark life back into a corpse so you could execute again, 800 executions would ultimately be not only sickening but way monotonous. Even assigning a value of twenty-forty murders per board member, poking in that many successive lethal needles would surely prove ultimately as tedious as assembly line work. So by the law of an eye for an eye, strict retributive justice must remain a perpetually elusive goal. And I did think the money settlement, humungous as it was by the standard of its day, was rather a timid slap on the wrist. What settlement then might have seen rough justice done and, more importantly, allowed good to win out in glory at last?
What if instead of a huge but inadequate (and for a corporation the size of Ford, fairly easily assimilable) money settlement, or better yet along with it, the defendants had been stripped of their stocks in Ford Motors and the class action plaintiffs, in equal shares, invested with them? appointing a new board of directors from among their own number and taking over management of the company completely.
I'm not sure this wouldn't be a wise thing to attempt everywhere in the corporate world, certainly in every failing or failed institution where people whose corruption, incompetence or both has bred chaos, insolvency and a begging bowl mentality on a global scale. Do you seriously think people randomly plucked off any street corner wouldn't handle things better than these self-inflated, overpriced frauds and financial know-nothings? Me, I seriously wonder if children randomly plucked from a playground could possibly misperform as badly.
How many people died of Madoff's scams? Not just ruined lives, pensioners with their savings wiped out joining the line at job fairs to seek entry level positions at McD's (rain forest assassin) in their golden years, but actual deaths directly traceable to sudden catastrophic plunges in the net worth of charities invested with him whose work literally spelt the difference between life and death in many cases? I don't know if it would be possible to calculate, but in spite of the general hatred of Madoff--loud applause in the courtroom when he was sentenced--it's a question, as far as I know, no-one's thought even to ask. (Given the circumstances, I'm not sure I'd put the charge any higher than negligent homicide in his case. But that much at least, justice should insist on.) With the exception of mob hits and killings associated with large inheritances or insurance payouts, people seem remarkable little inclined even to speak the word when it comes to murder visibly linked to commercial gain. Too brutal a word for most of us perhaps, to associate with gentles of such majestically hoarded wealth. The indisputable common denominator among those on death row in all but a statistically negligible number of cases is not that they've committed a murder--dubious prosecution methods cast doubt on how fairly that issue was decided in too many cases; I'm grateful that in the numerous cases in Canada where we've discovered a wrongful conviction, we've been able to restore justice partiallly by releasing the wrongly convicted, rather than speak useless words of apology to a headstone. No, what they have in common almost universally is that they're poor. Where the rich are convicted of murder they serve out terms in prison, and no-one's ever convicted of murder if it's carried out in the interest of a corporate bottom line.
--(Google this under "gas tank that explodes" if you want the full background)--
that can't be comprehended at all if regarded as an isolated incident, or even one of a firecracker string of them throughout a century and more of intense commercial history--the Dalkon Shield; Bhopal; the Three Gorges Dam; IBM's collaboration with Nazi Germany on the death camps (you ever wonder why those tattooed numbers on the victims' arms? Each was matched to a stippled card with the same number in a primitive version of computerized filing.) I'll grant you IBM's crime has features that are unique. More indecent even than the collaborations of Krupp and IG Farben (now Bayer); IBM's was as great a crime against humanity, but also an act of high treason. Still, it has features in common with relatively much less extreme commercial crimes.
Nobody writing about this or the Pinto case has ever suggested that either board of directors was composed of anything but typical businessmen. I don't know if a paper trail exists from the late thirties, early forties that would show who at IBM was down with the deal, who if anyone resigned in outraged horror, but memos that came to light in the class action suit over the Pinto make it clear the executive board of Ford Motors, fully aware that they were seeding every highway in North America with car bombs, released the Pinto unmodified because it made more sense on a cost/benefit analysis. A fifty cent piece of equipment they might easily ahve attached to the Pinto's volatile gas tank would have corrected the problem, but they would have had to put up the price about a dollar, or absorb an infinitesimal reduction in profit on each auto sold. Add it all up car by car that's a lot of bucks; two hundred thou per wrongful death suit is what accountants tell them insurance settlements are going for and hey! that works out cheaper. What kind of system so easily and reflexively performs cost/benefit analysis on the merits of murdering random strangers in cold blood? How many? Eight hundred is the lowball estimate.
How many of the most depraved serial killers on death row (in the U.S. states that still maintain it) would you need to assemble in a room until confirmed kills among the lot would total eight hundred? The bloodiest hundred fifty cover that spread? Almost certainly double that number, you'd be down from the eight-ten range to triple, double and onetime murderers long before they added up to such a sum.So why do people who are rabid for the death penalty concentrate so exclusively on such comparative small fry. A CEO and twelve or fourteen presidents and vices round a table conspire to murder eight hundred people and the only sanctions called upon are economic ones. They lost that lawsuit big time, paid out way more than $200,000/wrongful death. That'll teach 'em.
Alas, I'm pretty much an absolute opponent of the death penalty, and besides in this case its woeful inadequacy is plainly to be seen. How many times can you effectively execute any one murderer? Once remains pretty much the upward limit in spite of the dazzling technological advances we've seen in so many areas of our lives. Even if the means existed to spark life back into a corpse so you could execute again, 800 executions would ultimately be not only sickening but way monotonous. Even assigning a value of twenty-forty murders per board member, poking in that many successive lethal needles would surely prove ultimately as tedious as assembly line work. So by the law of an eye for an eye, strict retributive justice must remain a perpetually elusive goal. And I did think the money settlement, humungous as it was by the standard of its day, was rather a timid slap on the wrist. What settlement then might have seen rough justice done and, more importantly, allowed good to win out in glory at last?
What if instead of a huge but inadequate (and for a corporation the size of Ford, fairly easily assimilable) money settlement, or better yet along with it, the defendants had been stripped of their stocks in Ford Motors and the class action plaintiffs, in equal shares, invested with them? appointing a new board of directors from among their own number and taking over management of the company completely.
I'm not sure this wouldn't be a wise thing to attempt everywhere in the corporate world, certainly in every failing or failed institution where people whose corruption, incompetence or both has bred chaos, insolvency and a begging bowl mentality on a global scale. Do you seriously think people randomly plucked off any street corner wouldn't handle things better than these self-inflated, overpriced frauds and financial know-nothings? Me, I seriously wonder if children randomly plucked from a playground could possibly misperform as badly.
How many people died of Madoff's scams? Not just ruined lives, pensioners with their savings wiped out joining the line at job fairs to seek entry level positions at McD's (rain forest assassin) in their golden years, but actual deaths directly traceable to sudden catastrophic plunges in the net worth of charities invested with him whose work literally spelt the difference between life and death in many cases? I don't know if it would be possible to calculate, but in spite of the general hatred of Madoff--loud applause in the courtroom when he was sentenced--it's a question, as far as I know, no-one's thought even to ask. (Given the circumstances, I'm not sure I'd put the charge any higher than negligent homicide in his case. But that much at least, justice should insist on.) With the exception of mob hits and killings associated with large inheritances or insurance payouts, people seem remarkable little inclined even to speak the word when it comes to murder visibly linked to commercial gain. Too brutal a word for most of us perhaps, to associate with gentles of such majestically hoarded wealth. The indisputable common denominator among those on death row in all but a statistically negligible number of cases is not that they've committed a murder--dubious prosecution methods cast doubt on how fairly that issue was decided in too many cases; I'm grateful that in the numerous cases in Canada where we've discovered a wrongful conviction, we've been able to restore justice partiallly by releasing the wrongly convicted, rather than speak useless words of apology to a headstone. No, what they have in common almost universally is that they're poor. Where the rich are convicted of murder they serve out terms in prison, and no-one's ever convicted of murder if it's carried out in the interest of a corporate bottom line.
March 3, 2009
Politics and the English Language
Orwell: All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays
In a column on the most famous essay included in this new volume, 'Politics and the English Language' (1946) Robert Fulford drops the rather original suggestion that Orwell's failure to notice Churchill's splendid wartime speeches--in an essay eplicitly devoted to rigorous analysis of double talk and obfuscation in the political rhetoric of his day--was a proof of Orwell's reverse snobbery. Que?
Truth is you could make a pretty good case for Orwell as both a snob and a reverse snob on the basis of any number of things he actually wrote. (Perhaps he was simply being narrowly self-consistent--his upbringing was shabby-genteel, either lower-upper or upper-lower class depending your pov--which afforded ample room to despise the true lower and true upper classes both.) But to argue he was expressing contempt for Churchill by not winkling him into an essay he couldn't have fit into logically--what possibly is the point? He wrote enough words actually about Churchill--admiring and critical both--if that's your litmus test for his response to the upper classes. What would he have accomplished by heaping praise on Churchill as a master political rhetorician in an essay otherwise completely taken up with negative examples? taken it down a blind alley for a paragraph or two before it to its proper course? And how could he possibly have praised Chruchill fulsomely enough to satisfy Rob, 63 years later?
'Most important, the English language had just given the greatest political performance in its history, turning away from England's shores the most formidable of all military machines, Germany's.
' In the hands [sic] of Winston Churchill, language ralllied the British, sustained them through desperate years and led them to victory. It was the supreme political accomplishment of Britain in modern times.
'How could Orwell, writing at precisely that moment, have ignored this central fact of England's existence?'
--Robert Fulford, NatPost Mar 3, 2009
If this hyperbolic gush acknowledges Churchill's role in defeating Hitler, it's hard to imagine what Orwell or anyone, writing at the time with nothing but facts to go on, could have written that wouldn't have struck Fulford as grossly inadequate recognition. Did Churchill's speeches galvanize? yes. Were they the sole force that did? no, though they were a key focal one. At the base level what galvanized the British was simple recognition that Nazism was anti-human and a danger to life and alll human liberty. Was British resistance to Hitler crucial? yes. Was it sufficient? no, anymore than Churchill's language was sufficient in itself to defeat Germany's war machine. Troops moving over air, sea and land were also required, and support troops supplying them in a thousand areas. And they were galvanized, not hypnotically and zombifically driven, by Churchill's powerful rhetoric, and obliged to make complex decisions day by day, hour by hour, that Churchill's speeches could give them no specific guidance on. Some of the credit for their actions--my mother's and father's among the rest--belongs to them as free agents; they weren't simply windup dolls driven forward by a master rhetorician's impulsion. Churchill would have been repulsed by that suggestion, and so should every free citizen.
In one of his essays or columns during the war Orwell spoke of a most-probably-apocryphal story going round about one of Churchill's most famous speeches: ". . . we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender!” It was widely rumoured that when he went off mike he added, "We'll throw bottles at the bastards, we've got nothing else." Orwell thought, rightly I'd say, that for such a story to circulate was a strong indication the depth and breadth of affection there was for Churchill, across all class lines. Even more interesting is how stark a topper it is, and what ferocity of resistance it utters. Churchill felt that impulse and fed it, but he didn't originate it: it came from a wider place than any individual, great or small, could occupy alone.
In a column on the most famous essay included in this new volume, 'Politics and the English Language' (1946) Robert Fulford drops the rather original suggestion that Orwell's failure to notice Churchill's splendid wartime speeches--in an essay eplicitly devoted to rigorous analysis of double talk and obfuscation in the political rhetoric of his day--was a proof of Orwell's reverse snobbery. Que?
Truth is you could make a pretty good case for Orwell as both a snob and a reverse snob on the basis of any number of things he actually wrote. (Perhaps he was simply being narrowly self-consistent--his upbringing was shabby-genteel, either lower-upper or upper-lower class depending your pov--which afforded ample room to despise the true lower and true upper classes both.) But to argue he was expressing contempt for Churchill by not winkling him into an essay he couldn't have fit into logically--what possibly is the point? He wrote enough words actually about Churchill--admiring and critical both--if that's your litmus test for his response to the upper classes. What would he have accomplished by heaping praise on Churchill as a master political rhetorician in an essay otherwise completely taken up with negative examples? taken it down a blind alley for a paragraph or two before it to its proper course? And how could he possibly have praised Chruchill fulsomely enough to satisfy Rob, 63 years later?
'Most important, the English language had just given the greatest political performance in its history, turning away from England's shores the most formidable of all military machines, Germany's.
' In the hands [sic] of Winston Churchill, language ralllied the British, sustained them through desperate years and led them to victory. It was the supreme political accomplishment of Britain in modern times.
'How could Orwell, writing at precisely that moment, have ignored this central fact of England's existence?'
--Robert Fulford, NatPost Mar 3, 2009
If this hyperbolic gush acknowledges Churchill's role in defeating Hitler, it's hard to imagine what Orwell or anyone, writing at the time with nothing but facts to go on, could have written that wouldn't have struck Fulford as grossly inadequate recognition. Did Churchill's speeches galvanize? yes. Were they the sole force that did? no, though they were a key focal one. At the base level what galvanized the British was simple recognition that Nazism was anti-human and a danger to life and alll human liberty. Was British resistance to Hitler crucial? yes. Was it sufficient? no, anymore than Churchill's language was sufficient in itself to defeat Germany's war machine. Troops moving over air, sea and land were also required, and support troops supplying them in a thousand areas. And they were galvanized, not hypnotically and zombifically driven, by Churchill's powerful rhetoric, and obliged to make complex decisions day by day, hour by hour, that Churchill's speeches could give them no specific guidance on. Some of the credit for their actions--my mother's and father's among the rest--belongs to them as free agents; they weren't simply windup dolls driven forward by a master rhetorician's impulsion. Churchill would have been repulsed by that suggestion, and so should every free citizen.
In one of his essays or columns during the war Orwell spoke of a most-probably-apocryphal story going round about one of Churchill's most famous speeches: ". . . we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender!” It was widely rumoured that when he went off mike he added, "We'll throw bottles at the bastards, we've got nothing else." Orwell thought, rightly I'd say, that for such a story to circulate was a strong indication the depth and breadth of affection there was for Churchill, across all class lines. Even more interesting is how stark a topper it is, and what ferocity of resistance it utters. Churchill felt that impulse and fed it, but he didn't originate it: it came from a wider place than any individual, great or small, could occupy alone.
February 27, 2009
Slumdog Millionaire
I don't often feel huge enthusiasm for the film that wins best picture at the Oscars. They seem to me mostly such timid and compromised choices. I'm rarely quite so pissed at them as I was in 1972, when I thought it scandolous that The Ruling Class didn't swep every major category. Best adapted screenplay? There certainly wasn't one that year--few any year--so brilliant and incisive as Peter Barnes' adaptation of his own stage play--just as there've been few plays in English that come close to the wit intelligence emotional-philosophical range of The Ruling Class--and five at least of those that did were written by Peter Barnes. (A couple were even written by Shakespeare.) Best lead actress? Coral Browne, hands down. Lead actor? Peter O'Toole. Supporting actress? Carolyn Seymour. Supporting actor--Alastair Sim and Arthur Lowe would have to duke that one out. Direction? Editing? Soundtrack? Cinematrography? Set design, costume design? Nothing else that year came anywhere near The Ruling Class in any of these categories and I'm sure there are others I'm forgetting. But I was angry at a larger injustice than an Academy snub: the loss to a wide popular audience of a genuinely great popular classic.
The Ruling Class had been too weak a draw at the box office to drum up much Academy buzz, and why is a puzzler. Indifferent promotion's the culprit I suspect, by movie executives who had no clue the film's merits--made it at O'Toole's insistence in exchange for his agreement to play the lead in Man of La Mancha. You tell me: was A Clockwork Orange a huge hit? Was Life of Brian? why shouldn't The Ruling Class have been, since it fuses the virtues of both?
Slumdog Millionaire didn't evade the same fate by much. It was slated to go straight to video when a People's Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival (my home town, yay!) got the money boys thinking they might have a viable property on their hands after all. Good that this time around a truly splendid popular entertainment has its chance, a film whose intelligence is not whittled away by compromises aimed at mass acceptance, but amplified by its wide-ranging appeal. Big pictures like Dark Knight or The Curious Case of Benjamin Button almost never have that kind of potency.
Then again some of the people I've been chatting with virtually think Slumdog Millionaire is a big picture masquerading as a small one. The helicopter scene is cited. Here it might come down to your definition of big and small. Through most of the history of movies, $15,000,000 would have been a very big budget indeed, and as recently as fifteen years ago I think it would still have been a mid-sized one. And of course it's still possible to make a film for much less if all involved tighten their belts, defer their salaries and bring their own lunches along. Maybe The Wrestler was made for less, but every other best picture nominee cost more, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button cost ten times as much. (Way more money for sure than ever got out through FEMA for relief of Katrina victims.) And there's this: the entire cast and crew of Slumdog Millionaire attended the Oscars. I think they took up roughly a single row of seats. What secondary hall would you have hired to seat everybody else if the entire Benjamin Button cast and crew had turned up? Slumdog aims at epic proportions, which necessitates a certain bigness of frame and scope; but it's always resolutely on a human scale.
Somebody else communicating cross-continentally said he had no interst in seeing "feel good shit" like Slumdog Millionaire. I won't presume to guess what he'll think of the film if he ever does get round to seeing it, but if he still dislikes it he'll have to modify his reasons. "Feelgood shit" has as near as it can come to no emotional range, that would be too unsettling; it doesn't take you on a propulsive roller coaster ride, and it certainly never ends with a disturbing fusion of tragedy and triumph. (The best fairy tales, on the other hand, often do, which is why I have no quarrel with people who call Slumdog Millionaire a fairy tale, unless they mean it derisively. "Just a fairy tale"--why do people say things as silly as that? They never say a story is "just a tragedy," "just an epic" or "just a magic-realist fable". And what, pray tell, is a magic-realist fable when it's at home? a fairy tale. What's the difference between a flutist and a flautist? $50,000 a year.)
I admit to being of two minds about the film's title. I like the classic purity of Q & A, the title of the novel it's based on; but would enough people have lined up to see a film called Q & A for it to win a Peoples Choice Award at TIFF? And the in-your-face quality of the title the filmmakers settled on has its appeal: we're dogs, we're scum, we're from the slum, but you who'd sell your nearest and dearest for some additional cash, we can out-think you any day of the week.
No theme's more richly explored in the movie than the global economy and its frenzies; its easy cohabitation with the gangster element; the uneasy points of comparison between gangsters and the respectably wealthy (Maman who captures stray orphans to set loose in the city as beggars, blinding the sweetest singing ones so they'll fetch more from sentimental passersby, is the psychological twin of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? host Prem Kumar, which is why Jamal with his experience of Maman knows Kumar's offer of help on the ten million rupee question can't be trusted); the empty towering shells it erects and sheathes for quicky mass housing. But the main critique of a money obsessed ethic in Slumdog Millionaire is the lead character Jamal, the film's calm intelligent centre, who apart from what's necessary for survival has zero interest in money. He's known for months if not years how to become a contestant on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, but only uses that knowledge as a last ditch measure to reach, in the battlement tower where she's imprisoned, his lost love.
I don't often feel like climbing on the bandwagon for an Oscar pick, but it's the rare rule that isn't sometimes best observed by breaking it.
The Ruling Class had been too weak a draw at the box office to drum up much Academy buzz, and why is a puzzler. Indifferent promotion's the culprit I suspect, by movie executives who had no clue the film's merits--made it at O'Toole's insistence in exchange for his agreement to play the lead in Man of La Mancha. You tell me: was A Clockwork Orange a huge hit? Was Life of Brian? why shouldn't The Ruling Class have been, since it fuses the virtues of both?
Slumdog Millionaire didn't evade the same fate by much. It was slated to go straight to video when a People's Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival (my home town, yay!) got the money boys thinking they might have a viable property on their hands after all. Good that this time around a truly splendid popular entertainment has its chance, a film whose intelligence is not whittled away by compromises aimed at mass acceptance, but amplified by its wide-ranging appeal. Big pictures like Dark Knight or The Curious Case of Benjamin Button almost never have that kind of potency.
Then again some of the people I've been chatting with virtually think Slumdog Millionaire is a big picture masquerading as a small one. The helicopter scene is cited. Here it might come down to your definition of big and small. Through most of the history of movies, $15,000,000 would have been a very big budget indeed, and as recently as fifteen years ago I think it would still have been a mid-sized one. And of course it's still possible to make a film for much less if all involved tighten their belts, defer their salaries and bring their own lunches along. Maybe The Wrestler was made for less, but every other best picture nominee cost more, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button cost ten times as much. (Way more money for sure than ever got out through FEMA for relief of Katrina victims.) And there's this: the entire cast and crew of Slumdog Millionaire attended the Oscars. I think they took up roughly a single row of seats. What secondary hall would you have hired to seat everybody else if the entire Benjamin Button cast and crew had turned up? Slumdog aims at epic proportions, which necessitates a certain bigness of frame and scope; but it's always resolutely on a human scale.
Somebody else communicating cross-continentally said he had no interst in seeing "feel good shit" like Slumdog Millionaire. I won't presume to guess what he'll think of the film if he ever does get round to seeing it, but if he still dislikes it he'll have to modify his reasons. "Feelgood shit" has as near as it can come to no emotional range, that would be too unsettling; it doesn't take you on a propulsive roller coaster ride, and it certainly never ends with a disturbing fusion of tragedy and triumph. (The best fairy tales, on the other hand, often do, which is why I have no quarrel with people who call Slumdog Millionaire a fairy tale, unless they mean it derisively. "Just a fairy tale"--why do people say things as silly as that? They never say a story is "just a tragedy," "just an epic" or "just a magic-realist fable". And what, pray tell, is a magic-realist fable when it's at home? a fairy tale. What's the difference between a flutist and a flautist? $50,000 a year.)
I admit to being of two minds about the film's title. I like the classic purity of Q & A, the title of the novel it's based on; but would enough people have lined up to see a film called Q & A for it to win a Peoples Choice Award at TIFF? And the in-your-face quality of the title the filmmakers settled on has its appeal: we're dogs, we're scum, we're from the slum, but you who'd sell your nearest and dearest for some additional cash, we can out-think you any day of the week.
No theme's more richly explored in the movie than the global economy and its frenzies; its easy cohabitation with the gangster element; the uneasy points of comparison between gangsters and the respectably wealthy (Maman who captures stray orphans to set loose in the city as beggars, blinding the sweetest singing ones so they'll fetch more from sentimental passersby, is the psychological twin of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? host Prem Kumar, which is why Jamal with his experience of Maman knows Kumar's offer of help on the ten million rupee question can't be trusted); the empty towering shells it erects and sheathes for quicky mass housing. But the main critique of a money obsessed ethic in Slumdog Millionaire is the lead character Jamal, the film's calm intelligent centre, who apart from what's necessary for survival has zero interest in money. He's known for months if not years how to become a contestant on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, but only uses that knowledge as a last ditch measure to reach, in the battlement tower where she's imprisoned, his lost love.
I don't often feel like climbing on the bandwagon for an Oscar pick, but it's the rare rule that isn't sometimes best observed by breaking it.
February 8, 2009
25 Random Things
1. I have no intention of telling you 25 random things about myself. On the other hand. . .
2. Approached as a compositional idea, it has a certain temptation. . . which is a major revelation about how I approach the creative act of writing.
3. I try not to repeat myself too much because I'm easily bored.
4. Also I find that if you repeat something for emphasis or to make a point, it often has the opposite effect: either each repetition diminishes the impact, or the point being made is obscured by the reader's attempt to look for a hidden meaning.
5. If I remember, I roll my socks in pairs when they come out of the dryer. If I don't, which is often the case, in the morning I'm trying to find two matching black socks in the dark, not wanting to wake Marysia an hour earlier than she has to get up.
6. I get up an hour earlier than I strictly need to because it's a good time to catch up with work on the computer.
7. I wake up in the middle of the night with story ideas, perhaps direct from my dreams to me. Sometimes I go back to sleep, sometimes I get up and write out at least a beginning.
8. I'm a big fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. Still can't understand, except as an index of his pretentiousness, a maven of the National Post. lamenting the triumph of trash culture, whose crescendo argument at the end was that scholars write studies of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. They write studies of The Brothers Karamazov too, what's your point?
9. I like both shaggy dogs and shaggy dog stories.
10. If I had any brains I'd be an idiot, they seem to get all the best jobs.
11. I've thought for years the fundamental unit of meaning in language is not the word but the rhythm, or more precisely the breath. Same in all the other arts really. If a research facility offered me a huge sum to study this for a year or two I'd produce some interesting results.
12. The fundamental unit of all artistic expression really.
13. Of all expression in life, even conversation.
14. I've been known to worry at the thread of an argument an inordinate length of time.
15. At least I don't have any red socks in my drawer. Two black socks, people have to examine the patterns pretty close to know they don't match, and even in the dark I can tell which of my socks are white.
16. I wonder how entropy really
17. I sometimes wish I'd been born in a different galaxy. The trick would be discovering just the right one, with a site available for live births.
18. Is a question ever a random fact?
19. I know how to count but putting the numbers right there on the side helps keep track for sure. Very few people could keep count while speaking 19 consecutive sentences, and I'm certainly not one of them.
20. I like to play slightly subversive games with formal literary exercises.
21. Even informal ones.
22. If I'd been editing Frida Kahlo's diary, I'd have put the translations of the extensive text on facing pages instead of at the back of the book. As it is you have to flip back and forth too much, unless your Spanish is tip top, and the whole point of these illustrated pages overgrown with jungle thickets of text is that you should be reacting to the images and the words simultaneously. Somebody else would have to do the translaation.
23. I have my suspicions about the Universe. I think it may be a collective noun to which no collective unity can be ascribed.
24. I'm listening to Fats Waller right now. The Dadaists could have learned a thing or two from him.
25. So could just about everybody else.
2. Approached as a compositional idea, it has a certain temptation. . . which is a major revelation about how I approach the creative act of writing.
3. I try not to repeat myself too much because I'm easily bored.
4. Also I find that if you repeat something for emphasis or to make a point, it often has the opposite effect: either each repetition diminishes the impact, or the point being made is obscured by the reader's attempt to look for a hidden meaning.
5. If I remember, I roll my socks in pairs when they come out of the dryer. If I don't, which is often the case, in the morning I'm trying to find two matching black socks in the dark, not wanting to wake Marysia an hour earlier than she has to get up.
6. I get up an hour earlier than I strictly need to because it's a good time to catch up with work on the computer.
7. I wake up in the middle of the night with story ideas, perhaps direct from my dreams to me. Sometimes I go back to sleep, sometimes I get up and write out at least a beginning.
8. I'm a big fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. Still can't understand, except as an index of his pretentiousness, a maven of the National Post. lamenting the triumph of trash culture, whose crescendo argument at the end was that scholars write studies of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. They write studies of The Brothers Karamazov too, what's your point?
9. I like both shaggy dogs and shaggy dog stories.
10. If I had any brains I'd be an idiot, they seem to get all the best jobs.
11. I've thought for years the fundamental unit of meaning in language is not the word but the rhythm, or more precisely the breath. Same in all the other arts really. If a research facility offered me a huge sum to study this for a year or two I'd produce some interesting results.
12. The fundamental unit of all artistic expression really.
13. Of all expression in life, even conversation.
14. I've been known to worry at the thread of an argument an inordinate length of time.
15. At least I don't have any red socks in my drawer. Two black socks, people have to examine the patterns pretty close to know they don't match, and even in the dark I can tell which of my socks are white.
16. I wonder how entropy really
17. I sometimes wish I'd been born in a different galaxy. The trick would be discovering just the right one, with a site available for live births.
18. Is a question ever a random fact?
19. I know how to count but putting the numbers right there on the side helps keep track for sure. Very few people could keep count while speaking 19 consecutive sentences, and I'm certainly not one of them.
20. I like to play slightly subversive games with formal literary exercises.
21. Even informal ones.
22. If I'd been editing Frida Kahlo's diary, I'd have put the translations of the extensive text on facing pages instead of at the back of the book. As it is you have to flip back and forth too much, unless your Spanish is tip top, and the whole point of these illustrated pages overgrown with jungle thickets of text is that you should be reacting to the images and the words simultaneously. Somebody else would have to do the translaation.
23. I have my suspicions about the Universe. I think it may be a collective noun to which no collective unity can be ascribed.
24. I'm listening to Fats Waller right now. The Dadaists could have learned a thing or two from him.
25. So could just about everybody else.
February 2, 2009
Tradition Busting at the House of Lords
So there's a plan afoot to reform the British House of Lords by ousting members convicted of felonies:
"A spokesperson for the Ministry of Justice said: 'In the House of Commons, if you break the criminal law or, for example, it's found that although you haven't broken the criminal law you've been doing something completely improper then the House of Commons can, in extremis, expell you. We're saying that most apply, too, to the House of Lords also."
--Julia Belluz, London Feb 2 '09
(Special to the Globe and Mail)
Dangerous, precedent-shattering idea! Pretty much violates every tradition on which the House of Lords is founded. Those Nobles who don't owe their titles and estates to appropriations from the looting and sacking of monasteries in Henry VIII's time owe it to the pillage and plunder of an entire nation by William the Waster (Alasdair Gray's more apt name for the king usually styled William the Conqueror); or to some lesser episode in the gleefully kleptomanic history of the nobly armed and wealthy. True, there are titled families that have kept their noses clean since, sometimes for as much as a century at a time, and they're to be commended for the fresh spirit of innovation they embody. The trouble is these titles are hereditary. Strip a fourteenth, seventeenth or nineteenth century Lord of title for crimes against humanity, you've pretty much stripped the current Lord of the same title. What to do with a House of Parliament suddenly bereft of Members? Make a jazzy site for a commercial mall. Dibs on the Starbucks site eh?
"A spokesperson for the Ministry of Justice said: 'In the House of Commons, if you break the criminal law or, for example, it's found that although you haven't broken the criminal law you've been doing something completely improper then the House of Commons can, in extremis, expell you. We're saying that most apply, too, to the House of Lords also."
--Julia Belluz, London Feb 2 '09
(Special to the Globe and Mail)
Dangerous, precedent-shattering idea! Pretty much violates every tradition on which the House of Lords is founded. Those Nobles who don't owe their titles and estates to appropriations from the looting and sacking of monasteries in Henry VIII's time owe it to the pillage and plunder of an entire nation by William the Waster (Alasdair Gray's more apt name for the king usually styled William the Conqueror); or to some lesser episode in the gleefully kleptomanic history of the nobly armed and wealthy. True, there are titled families that have kept their noses clean since, sometimes for as much as a century at a time, and they're to be commended for the fresh spirit of innovation they embody. The trouble is these titles are hereditary. Strip a fourteenth, seventeenth or nineteenth century Lord of title for crimes against humanity, you've pretty much stripped the current Lord of the same title. What to do with a House of Parliament suddenly bereft of Members? Make a jazzy site for a commercial mall. Dibs on the Starbucks site eh?
January 31, 2009
January 28, 2009
Baudolino
Baudolino, Umberto Eco
The story of a peasant who rises to power when he's taken under the wing of Frederick Barbarossa, adopted in all but name.
A story full of inextricable ambiguities because Baudolino's special talent is to lie persuasively, and he constructs a tapestry of complex, involuted lies, mostly concerning the dazzling kingdom of Pester John to the East, which is already part of the mythic fabric of Europe. Therefore he and four collaborators who help build up the story half believe it already, and come to believe it more the more they fill in the outline and the shape in detail--the shape of a perfect kingdom and therefore impossible for imperfect men to conceive unless it really exists. So Baudolino, inflamed with a passion to journey there, infects Barbarossa with the same desire, which--though it never brings them near Prester John's kingdom if any--radically alters Barbarossa's course in life and the destony of many his path, and sword, crosses.
Is the Crusade against Saladin he undertakes late in life decent or wise? He is far more scrupulous than some of the the thugs who've typically led crusades in the previous two centuries, but Saladin has ruled--except for these bloody crusader wars that keep interrupting him--with a tolerably even hand over a mixed population seething at its extremes with mutual hostility. He's maintained religious tolerance--even toward Christians in spite of all these outside agitations by the tribe trying his patience. Barbarossa has some of the same qualities except for a tendency to fall into indiscriminate--all right, semi-discriminate--massacre when he feels his will has been too grievously crossed. Should he conquer and depose Saladin, would the people of Jerusalem consider it a fair trade? And mark this: war upon Saladin isn't even his main intent, it's the pretext required to get his soldiers moving. The main purpose of his quest is to pass through to the Eastern kingdom of Prester John, to return to him the Grasal or Grail which some unscrupulous knave has abscounded with from that magnificent country.
And this Grasal is what when it's at home? The wine bowl Baudolino's father was drinking from on his deathbed, which a remark of his father persuaded Baudolino was much likelier to resemble the Grasal than the cliche gold cup encrusted with gems and lapis lazuli he'd previously conjured. And if this was likelier to be the sort of vessel Christ drank from, what then? Surely it was likelier the simple drinking bowl of a poor carpenter's son would pass down the centuries from peasant to peasant than from noble to noble? He already half believes the tale when he presents the vessel to his adoptive father. He is still more persuaded when his intimates at court, worldly nad sophisticated counsellors all, instantly believe the story he conjures. Such men would scarcely be so gulled by a transparent fraud! Net result? another holy war of dubious provenance. Humankind should at last outgrow them.
I'm not worried that this detailed account of one passage qualifies as a spoiler, because the book teems with incidents as lively and as parabolically rich. It's generally axiomatic that a book over five hundred pages, even a very fine one, will have passages that could be trimmed without conspicuous loss, but there are exceptions.
The story of a peasant who rises to power when he's taken under the wing of Frederick Barbarossa, adopted in all but name.
A story full of inextricable ambiguities because Baudolino's special talent is to lie persuasively, and he constructs a tapestry of complex, involuted lies, mostly concerning the dazzling kingdom of Pester John to the East, which is already part of the mythic fabric of Europe. Therefore he and four collaborators who help build up the story half believe it already, and come to believe it more the more they fill in the outline and the shape in detail--the shape of a perfect kingdom and therefore impossible for imperfect men to conceive unless it really exists. So Baudolino, inflamed with a passion to journey there, infects Barbarossa with the same desire, which--though it never brings them near Prester John's kingdom if any--radically alters Barbarossa's course in life and the destony of many his path, and sword, crosses.
Is the Crusade against Saladin he undertakes late in life decent or wise? He is far more scrupulous than some of the the thugs who've typically led crusades in the previous two centuries, but Saladin has ruled--except for these bloody crusader wars that keep interrupting him--with a tolerably even hand over a mixed population seething at its extremes with mutual hostility. He's maintained religious tolerance--even toward Christians in spite of all these outside agitations by the tribe trying his patience. Barbarossa has some of the same qualities except for a tendency to fall into indiscriminate--all right, semi-discriminate--massacre when he feels his will has been too grievously crossed. Should he conquer and depose Saladin, would the people of Jerusalem consider it a fair trade? And mark this: war upon Saladin isn't even his main intent, it's the pretext required to get his soldiers moving. The main purpose of his quest is to pass through to the Eastern kingdom of Prester John, to return to him the Grasal or Grail which some unscrupulous knave has abscounded with from that magnificent country.
And this Grasal is what when it's at home? The wine bowl Baudolino's father was drinking from on his deathbed, which a remark of his father persuaded Baudolino was much likelier to resemble the Grasal than the cliche gold cup encrusted with gems and lapis lazuli he'd previously conjured. And if this was likelier to be the sort of vessel Christ drank from, what then? Surely it was likelier the simple drinking bowl of a poor carpenter's son would pass down the centuries from peasant to peasant than from noble to noble? He already half believes the tale when he presents the vessel to his adoptive father. He is still more persuaded when his intimates at court, worldly nad sophisticated counsellors all, instantly believe the story he conjures. Such men would scarcely be so gulled by a transparent fraud! Net result? another holy war of dubious provenance. Humankind should at last outgrow them.
I'm not worried that this detailed account of one passage qualifies as a spoiler, because the book teems with incidents as lively and as parabolically rich. It's generally axiomatic that a book over five hundred pages, even a very fine one, will have passages that could be trimmed without conspicuous loss, but there are exceptions.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
