feeling pastoral

Driving for work this week I found myself at a stop light in a small town, headed west on county road M-57 with a Standard Federal Bank sign on the corner reading 4:57 and indicating a temperature of 57 degrees. There was probably even something about the final numbers for the day’s Dow Jones closing. Twenty-first century created certainties become all the more insistent as they deny us the passing of simple time and flow of change, and I quick checked to make sure my credit card was handed back to me at the last gas station.

But for the past half hour prior the sun dripped down my windshield as a molten sphere in a cool haze, a sight usually only found in the thick lining of mid summer rather than the brittle end of November; a faint jade still lingered in the occasional field and glowed even stronger as early evening dilated a darkening and nothing hue; the farmhouses delicately repainted and I could imagine each bedroom with a lay of floor boards warped after a window left open during a heavy rain, from lovers either asleep or from one, or both, gone through its wooden frame; the barns outback as new forests for ancient hawks and generations of rabbits, and the gaps in the timber making primitive sundials as sunlight revolves through the molted dust. An endless creek at the edge of sight becomes revealed in the thinning Fall brush.

The concept of paranoid specularity referred to in my post concerning Auster and Hopper couldn’t be more appropriate when thinking about Dostoevsky’s novella The Double. There is the self that is the ‘doer’, the ‘actor’, and then there is also that part of the self that is the perceiver, and to place it into a Calvinist understanding, there is the conscience which evaluates the actions observed. In Auster and Hopper this becomes an outward manifestation with the reader or viewer wanting to place narrative upon that which is incomplete or not fully understood. In Dostoevsky’s story, about a clerk suffering from a belief that a doppelganger is interfering with his daily life, choosing to engage in behaviors which run contrary to his own, the concept remains inward and a representation of Dostoevsky’s ontological understanding of mankind becomes the obvious interpretation. Especially in light of his later writing Crime & Punishment, another work where the interior state of the character begins blurring subjective and objective understandings.

Although the writing as a perspective on urban modernity is equally as strong. The clerk represents the fragmentation of the personality as lives become dependent upon their placement and roles within society, which establishes an individual’s worth and sense of self through their social contracts with others. The split being the distinction between our private self and our public self, how our attempt to find value in our lives is now, more often than not, accomplished through the eyes of others, which in turn compromises our capacity for self-love and self-possession.

An interesting conceit but I was actually disappointed in the work. The beginning 50 or so pages are pure Dostoevsky. Our protagonist goes through a series of social blunders, which climax with his literally being thrown out from a dinner party and social ball. He then faces a fierce storm of snow and rain at midnight, which Dostoevsky uses to represent the dissolution of the core personality and into an extreme of self-consciousness/hatred and complete reliance upon social acceptance. Afterward, his double is then there to greet him in his living quarters and the novella continues with generally more of he same-- the double creating havoc and the protagonist’s strained reactions and psychological imprisonment keeping him from doing anything to help himself. The disintegration of a person’s mental state will always make for great writing, and no one can do it as well as Dostoevsky, but once that it occurs, there’s not much left to hold the reader’s attention! Reading about the interiority of an addled mind can become boring, it being too difficult to connect with a character who is beyond repair. But I would still highly recommend reading those first 50 pages to anyone who enjoys Dostoevsky

I also read The Gambler, which I enjoyed much more than The Double, but actually don’t have much to say about it. With a social group made up of flawed family relationships, greedy suitors, calamitous love affairs and distressed futures, all revolving around addictions to gambling and social gamesmanship (one of the same), you can imagine where Dostoevsky goes with this one. The momentum of personalities moving to extremes always makes for a great read.

2

Autumn River's white gibbons seem countless,
a dancing flurry of leaps, snowflakes flying:

coaxing kids out of the branches, they descend,
and in a frolic, drink at the moon in water.

--from Autumn River Songs (A.D. 742-755), Li Po

The Schwinn Stingray Still Rules!

An academic publication has recently been released that discusses similarities between the writings of Paul Auster and the paintings of Edward Hopper (via wood s lot). To make a meager attempt at paraphrasing: Hawthorne’s seminal story, Blithedale Romance, involves a male protagonist in one building looking through a window, across the street, and into another window of a room inhabited by a female protagonist, and through this story we can see the puritan conceptions of paranoid specularity (resulting from the man having to place his own, possible narratives upon the scene due to a lack of defining symbols or authoritative, cultural understandings, whereby he becomes that sole center of understanding) and transcendence (which is not defined as well in the article, but I think it involves the idea that this narrative is placed onto the scene in order to replace the divine presence once essential to puritan myths, in other words, because thought no longer exists within puritan social structures, but its psychological constructions are still inherent, the narrative is placed onto the scene to replace what would once have been understood through a divine meaning).

In Hopper’s paintings, these ideas are found in his frequent placement of subjects within a room where the viewer can only see them through a window or at a measured distance, and with the infusion of a ‘divine’ light or wind into the scene, these both being elements which move into the scene in ways that might be similar to the viewer’s gaze, echoing the idea of the viewer’s placement of an explanatory narrative. The relation to Auster’s writing focuses upon his use of fragmented and incomplete narrative and red herrings, where we can’t help but to place our own story onto what is provided in order to develop a meaning, or the layered placements of stories within stories which further fragments a shared and understood language. Both then demonstrating that while a complete unity of understanding is not possible in the modern world, the American subconscious still wants to place “signs into an incomplete and frustratingly oblique picture or narrative in order to create an illusion of wholeness”.

These are concepts which, to some extent, I understood when looking at Hopper’s paintings, but hadn’t ever placed into my thoughts concerning Auster’s writings. I understood his idea of the movement of perception to language as being a reductive act, but it never occurred to me to place this within a puritan framework. Which is interesting and will help me out in my reading. And his more cerebral works, mainly the New York trilogy, have become much more comprehensible, and allowing me to understand why it is considered his best work by most Auster readers. But I''ll still always I prefer his books with a stonger narrative, such as Timbuktu, Mr. Vertigo and The Brooklyn Follies. These tend to fall at the bottom of most readers’ lists, but the placement of these theories into story format is still much more enjoyable for me. Otherwise I find it too formulated.

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With the holiday this week I’m not sure how much I’ll post until next Sunday. To tide you over, I’ll put in my last Previte plug by encouraging you to watch this video made for the track 'Airstrip One' by Ben Franzen. Remember that blissful joy and freedom you felt as a kid out on your bike in those early May afternoons? If not, you will as soon as the video loads up. I’ll admit that during those youngin’ days I might have placed a sort of Star Wars or Indiana Jones narrative onto my ride from time to time, but more often than not, I think I was just in the present, at play in those sensations of wind in the hair, tongue off to the side, feet going like mad, and enjoying myself out cruuuuuuisssssinggggg, man. Not a bad place to be:

News from TLRHB. A sad day.

Dashiell Hammett

Neither pulp nor crime fiction holds too much interest for me, but because Dashiell Hammett has been hugely influential on American fiction I thought I should read some of his work, especially considering my enjoyment of noir in film, as well as with my favorite writers being Auster and Murakami. I picked up a collection of short stories (Nightmare Town) and found some very lean prose to reflect the hard-boiled attitude, and which at times became so descriptive, the language took on a life of its own: Sighing puffs of breath spaced his words, cushioned them, gave them the semblance of gems nested separately in raw cotton. Its this creative vividness that can pull the reader into the stories and the actual 'who dunnit' becomes secondary, at least to this reader. Although, while I haven’t read much of Chandler, I might enjoy his bombastic style a bit more, but I still need to read more of both to make a final conclusion.

For the content of the stories, some were surprisingly violent, such as the title story, Nightmare Town, which involves a small desert town entirely run by gangsters, and seemed like something right out of Sin City (a movie I detest; an abomination). But the majority were what you expect from Hammett, a solitary gumshoe trying to peel through the deceitful layers of urban crime, and in a period of American history when the public began to question public leaders and were realizing that the American dream isn't always so 'dreamy'. According to Hammett, anyone can be corrupted through vice or power, which explains the vigilant and standoffish attitude found in the majority of his protagonists.

I found that the stories all started to run together when it was the only book I would read, so they became much more enjoyable if I just read one or two at a time in between other readings. Of those in the collection, The Man Who Killed Dan Odams really took me by surprise the most. A convict is on the lam and heads off to the country for hiding. It provides one of the few stories outside an urban landscape and the language is markedly different to reflect the change, with the sentences and paragraphs being clipped, the dialogue brief, and the action more direct, without the hidden suspicion dark alleys or tight stairways in the city can engender. When reading, it immediately reminded me of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men. I'm assuming that McCarthy is familiar with the story, his writing being steeped in American literature, and I’d have to think he found it influential in how he was going to craft his novel, both with the content (both being versions of the classic 'man on the run' stories) and the style of language:

The man wolfed the meal down without even looking at it-- his eyes busy upon door, window, woman, and boy, his revolver beside his plate. Blood still dripped from his left hand, staining table and floor. Bits of earth were dislodged from his hair and face and hands and fell into his plate, but he did not notice them.

weekly film log

Travelers & Magicians, Khyentse Norbu, 2005; The contemporary arts museum was having a Tibetan film festival and this was the final of the series. Norbu had previously written and directed the fairly well known The Cup (1999), a film about the love of soccer in children living within a monastery, and this is a worthy follow-up. Its made up of two stories, one being about a young and untraditional man wanting to escape to the capitalist pleasures of the United States, where flipping burgers is more attractive to him than his low level government position in a small Tibetan village. He begins a road trip to journey to a meeting point that will give him his transcontinental ticket to the new world, but along the way a young monk becomes his traveling companion. The second story is told by this monk and about another man who lost his way on a wild horse into a thickly forested mountainside and meets an older hermit living in isolation with a beautiful and much younger wife. What follows is a tale of forbidden passion and the extremes in behavior which can follow. The characters in the two stories reflect each other nicely, dramatic but then also funny at moments, and the whole film is visually appealing with the immensity of the Tibetan landscape in the backdrop. Recommended to anyone who thinks this might be of interest.

The Designated Mourner, David Hare, 1997; This is a film adaptation of a Wallace Shawn play (who also wrote My Dinner with Andre). Three people sit at empty tables with a soothing background and each speaks to the camera in a style that might be a cross between a confessional and a Spalding Gray piece (but without the humor). They consist of a divorced couple and the woman’s father, the woman and the father representing highbrow intellectualism and the husband as a literati fallout that chooses to set aside John Donne for philistine bric-a-brac and selfish insensitivity. The play/film reviews more often than not described the work as a lament towards the fall of fine culture to the crude ways of modern capitalism, but when I read such reviews I wondered if they saw the same film I did. While that is partly true, it seemed to me to be more about the dangers of intellectual elitism in the arts being removed from real world issues and acceptance towards human behaviors. In other words, getting their upturned noses out of the air and instead take critical observations of themselves and attempt to understand rather than forming elitist separations. Stephen Holden of the New York Times agrees.

Crimes and Misdemeanors, Wood Allen, 1989; This is a dramatic suspense film with occasional comedy that forces viewers to think about what is means to make or not make moral decisions while living within an amoral world. Not what one usually expects from Allen, but done so well it makes you wish that he would break from his mold more often. Both an entertaining story but also one with a host of ideas and thoughts to keep you busy afterwards. One of Allen’s best and will make you think twice about pigeonholing his movies.

Heart of Glass, Werner Herzog, 1974; The concept behind the film straightforwardly conveys Herzog’s characteristic theme of the stresses between individual vision and the established behaviors and demands of social groups, as shown through an isolated Bavarian village which falls into despair and madness after the ruby colored glass maker dies and fails to pass on his secret for making his highly beloved, even worshiped, works. At the same time, a prophet who lives in isolation outside of the village is consulted, but he is only able to speak cryptic thoughts which prevent advice or suggestions of any substance to the fuddled inhabitants. As with the Enigma of Kaspar Houser, a view of civilization as the blind leading the blind is suggested. The extended amount of time spent on the downfall of the village without much additional narrative slows the momentum, but it does give Herzog a chance to display some truly bizarre scenes. Should also point out that the ten minute abstract opening of primal elements and natural processes, while dubbed over with electronic music and apocalyptic poetry, places the time and setting of the story beyond history and into the crepuscular haunts and truths of the human mind.

My angels are dark
They are slaves in the market
But I see how beautiful they are

-Samuel Menashe, The Shrine Whose Shape I Am

*painting by Caravaggio, Rest on Flight to Egypt, 1596/1597

The Body Artist; Don DeLillo, 2001

Rather than the usual sweeping cultural themes that are expected in his novels, DeLillo has instead authored a minimalist 124 page read of a woman performance artist, Lauren, mourning the suicide of her husband, a formerly successful movie director who suffered from depression. In the first paragraph, DeLillo collapses the focus of his book into the psychology of the personal and provides a dictum which his work attempts to make understood through the internal experience of his character: “you know more surely who you are on a strong bright day after a storm when the smallest falling leaf is stabbed with self-awareness”.

The first twenty or so pages portrays the quotidian ritual of morning breakfast and underhanded bickering, this as the last time Lauren sees her husband alive. DeLillo then travels into subjective perception through Lauren’s grief. She is alone in a rented cottage where she discovers in the upstairs room an obscure man who speaks through bizarre and cryptic phrases, but with a ghostlike knowledge of the most intimate details concerning her husband and their marriage. From here DeLillo spins the reader out in elliptical tangents of memory, experience, language, time, relationships, sex, love and death. There’s not much plot development, and only a few revealing clues about the character of Lauren, and instead, the text requires the reader to embrace the poetic dizziness of Delillo’s cerebrations.

When I began reading, it was in a nearly empty coffee shop on a Saturday night with a string symphony playing in the background. I got a little more than half way through, but for the rest of the evening I was under its magic, like a haiku meant to bring awareness towards the more subtle perceptions of life. The following day I finished the book, but it felt dead, the spell broken. Nor did I think about it afterwards, and not again until I sat down to write this post. Perhaps if DeLillo fleshed out his character for a more tangible story it could have resonated beyond the initial sitting. On the other hand, as it was written, there's no denying my being afloat in the immediacy of its ideas that Saturday night.