Tilda Swinton quotes:

Hollywood is built on Europeans... Go back and look. I'm just really sad I couldn't give my speech in Gaelic. Don't tell everybody. We're everywhere.

There's such an effort to try and explain people.

I always think of the word 'abandonment' when I think of the character.

I've been on the other side of the table many times, trying to get people to be sympathetic to projects, and I've been the victim of that kind of intense kindness masking extreme stupidity.

I felt clearly that the atmosphere of the film is about loneliness, and existentialist loneliness - in all the characters, including my own.

There is something insane about a lack of doubt. Doubt, to me anyway, is what makes you human, and without doubt even the righteous lose their grip not only on reality but also on their humanity.

True, there is all sorts of religious extremism all over the place, but the reason for this partly has to do with the fascist attitudes and language of absolutism coming from Washington. It's challenging for people outside of America that Bush was re-elected. It means we're all going to have to work a lot harder to understand what so many more Americans than we thought really want. It's an identity shift in our minds about America and maybe for many Americans as well.

[portrait by John Byrne]

Country Fair
--Charles Simic

If you didn't see the six-legged dog,
It doesn't matter.
We did, and he mostly lay in the corner.
As for the extra legs,

One got used to them quickly
And thought of other things.
Like, what a cold, dark night
To be out at the fair.

Then the keeper threw a stick
And the dog went after it
On four legs, the other two flapping behind,
Which made one girl shriek with laughter.

She was drunk and so was the man
Who kept kissing her neck.
The dog got the stick and looked back at us.
And that was the whole show.

[Clown Carrying Cat; John Byrne]

This vaudevillian inspired painting is by John Byrne, a Scottish artist who had at one time sent work under the disguised name of 'Patrick' to a gallery known for displaying self-taught artists. He himself was not such an artist and needed a way to increase the likelihood of their hanging his work, but also from his fondness for creating characters-- 'Patrick' after his newspaper selling father. John Byrne also happens to be the partner of Tilda Swinton, which might help explain the skillful ease at which she slips into her 'characters'. In some instances, strong creativity between partners leads to throat clutching madness, other times it becomes a ridiculously potent catalyst for imaginative play. Neither of which are unlike a cat being carried by a clown.

Apparently last night's Oscars viewing attendance was down 14% from the previously least-watched ceremony. Maybe why I enjoyed it so much? It appears as though there is a growing split in Hollywood between those productions which seek to reach a reputable level of quality and those that are obvious fodder for studio profit. As evidence of the split you could look at how all of the Best Picture nominations were excellent works but without any mass appeal. Or in that all of the actor/actress awards went to Europeans where traditionally there is a greater appreciation of the art of acting, unlike America's emphasis upon looks and celebrity gossip. Compare the schoolgirl giggle that makes Cameron Diaz so popular next to the sassy Gaelic elegancies of Tilda Swinton, or the easy-slouching Pitts and Costners beside the stalwart and restrained compositions made from the efforts of Daniel Day Lewis and Javier Bardem.

The problem could be that American blockbuster actors are largely brought on board to play their real life personalities- what the public actually wants to see when enthralled with the 'cult of the celebrity'. But in actuality this washes out their role into viewer ambivalence and the picture then has to rely upon action and special affects to garner interest. However, with an actor/actress that has to form a personality different from their own, which requires mindful craft and skill, the efforts pay off with dramatics larger than anything a person generally comes across in daily life. Everyone knows a Matt Damon but no one, hopefully, knows a Daniel Plainview. So another test could be whether or not you think you might know what the actor/actress is like in their personal life. If so, the acting or the role is limited. A good role and good performance won't leave any ideas as to what that performer might be like in their day to day lives.

To give some credit to the commercial aspect of the production, I thought John Stewart was a hilarious host. I'm not an easy person to make laugh, but he me rolling. Also, I hope that you all caught that brief shot of Cormac McCarthy and his son in the audience. I guess that would be the extent to which proper crediting towards the writers and the books from which many of the film were adapted will be provided for a while. An improved year, still a long way to go.

This excerpt from poet Mark Strand’s essay ‘Landscape and the Poetry of the Self’:

...ignorance is perhaps necessary. For it is just such relief from naming and knowing that one seeks in landscapes. It may be that landscape is not merely a way out of the confines of the city and the deplorable conditions which flourished along with progress, but a way out of the exhausted and claustrophobic limitations of the self; and not necessarily a self without mystery or purpose, but one so pampered, so examined, so named and renamed, that is must go elsewhere to reconstitute its energies. Landscape is a way of finding another self, larger, more general, and, possibly, more basic. It certainly was for Wordsworth, who leaves the city as if it were a prison, and who immediately experiences a new freedom and the potential for self-realization.

When literature and art have political/social conditions for their subject matters, the efforts tend to be most effective when understood from the personal, as a subjective reaction or individual attempt to come to an understanding. This video installation by William Kentridge, Felix in Exile, is an excellent example-- a male European who reflects upon the atrocities imbedded within the history and land of South Africa. It doesn’t offer any answers. Instead, it makes you feel; an important documentation as the passing of time inevitably dismembers the events of the past.

Duke S.
What would you have? Your gentleness shall force
More than your force move us to gentleness.

Orlando
I almost die for food; and let me have it.

Duke S.
Sit down and feed, and welcome to our table.

Orlando
Speak you so gently? Pardon me, I pray you:
I thought that all things had been savage here,
And therefore put I on the countenance
Of stern commandment. But whate’er you are
That in this desert inaccessible,
Under the shade of melancholy boughs,
Lose and neglect the creeping hours of time;
If ever you have look’d on better days,
If ever been where bells have knoll’d to church,
If ever sat at any good man’s feast,
If ever from your eyelids wip’d a tear,
And know what ’tis to pity, and be pitied,
Let gentleness my strong enforcement be:
In the which hope I blush, and hide my sword.

Duke S.
True is it that we have seen better days......

--As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII

Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year is divided into two sections. The first is 'Strong Opinions', where the character of the author (a stand in for Coetzee himself) sets himself up mighty on the soapbox. The second, 'Soft Opinions', is then for his thoughts concerning the appreciation of literature, stories and analogies, his inner life and processing. It also happens to be where the opinions he feels the need to express throughout the book are much more fully effectuated:

Another lesson from my hours in the park.

I approve of children, in the abstract. Children are our future. It is good for old people to be around children, it lifts our spirits. And so forth.

What I forget about children is the unending racket they make. Badly put, they shout. Shouting is not simply talking writ loud and large. It is not communication at all, but a way of drowning out rivals. It is a form of self-assertion, one of the purest there is, easy to practice and highly effective. A four-year old may not be as strong as a grown man, but he certainly is louder.

One of the first things we should learn along the road toward being civilized: not to shout.

Although, such an opinion seems appropriate once you know that Coatzee has been known to attend dinner parties and not utter a single word.

[The Magic Flute: Man and Bird, 2006; by South African artist, William Kentridge]

Time to put McCarthy’s world to rest for a while and move on to something else, such as J. M. Coetzee’s newest and fabulously cut and polished gem, Diary of a Bad Year. First, the conceptual structure of the novel requires comment, not only because of its ingenuity, but also because its where the reader can discovery the subtleties of Coetzee’s work. In a series of chapters running no longer than four or five pages, the top half of each page consists of an author’s views on current political and social issues and then the bottom half is divided for the ongoing thoughts of his personal assistant, a 30 year old bombshell named Anya, and Anya’s 40 something boyfriend, real estate king and champion rider of the capitalist tides.

While at first I questioned whether or not Coetzee had resorted to gimmickry (I prefer my novels with minimal post modern structure), as the story moved along and the author’s subjects further away from excessively opinionated rhetoric, towards more personal thoughts on life and literature, while at the same time becoming more involved with Anya and her scheming boyfriend, it became clear that novel acts as an ironic take on the idea of possessing rigid viewpoints on the state of the world, especially when from the mouth of a novelist, who’s nuts and bolts is founded within human drama and not specialized discourse.

The challenge to the opinions is most obvious in the direct honesty from Anya, who though vapid at times also recognizes that limitations of the individual’s influence, and Alan- brutishly self guarded but providing the necessary reminder of competitive and economic realities, which have little concern for the minutiae of one’s high minded ideals. But a more subtle, and in turn more effective, method is through the dramatic relationship the author ends up having with the other two characters. As everyone knows, when an older man begins lobbying for the attention of a much younger woman, who already has a domineering partner, there will surely be gamesmanship being played amongst all parties. And the difference of this from governments, is what? Flawed creators will only ever result in flawed systems, and governments are nothing more than extensions of our own behaviors.

The combined effect becomes a reminder of the complexities behind all world issues and the inviolability of singular ideas resolving world problems, while also relaying a touching story about relationships. Appropriately enough, the topic of the last chapter is on the books of Dostoevsky. While it specifically comments upon The Brothers Karamazov (which I have not yet read), anyone who has read the Russian master knows that his characters are never reduced to black and white motives and actions. Instead, a whole series of cause and effect relationships course through their behaviors, many of which are beyond their control or even awareness. In such unfathomable interconnectivity, even more so in the contemporary world, the life and control of the individual strays much further from the possessive we like to think exists.

The Guide
--Ted Hughes

When everything that can fall has fallen
Something rises.
And leaving here, and evading there
And that, and this, is my headway.

Where the snow glare blinded you
I start.
Where the snow mama cuddled you warm
I fly up. I lift you.

Tumbling worlds
Open my way

And you cling.

And we go

Into the wind. The flame-wind - a red wind
And a black wind. The red wind comes
To empty you. And the black wind, the longest wind
The headwind

To scour you.

Then the non-wind, a least breath,
Fills you from easy sources.

I am the needle

Magnetic
A tremor

The searcher
The finder

....................fly them....................

[Music, Sounds of Life, by Pink Floyd; video by Storm Thorgerson.]

While Suttree's story largely stays beyond the violence that can be found in McCarthy’s later books, the notion of the hunt and the hunted being bound by the muscled tendons of the world still appears throughout the novel:

Somewhere in the gray wood by the river is the huntsman and in the brooming corn and in the castellated press of cities. His work lies all wheres and his hounds tire not. I have seen them in a dream, slaverous and wild and their eyes crazed with ravening for souls in this world. Fly them. (471)

However, in Suttree, the descriptive language constantly alludes to the geologic processes of the region, the macro-frame through which to read the novel, making the implications of the hunt and the hunted less severe:

Some like spirit joined beast and captor. (355)

…now postulate the denial of the old lie that beholder and beheld are ever more than one….(281)

As far as removing life from the hunt, McCarthy reveals the holy and the transcendent through parted forms, as with his other books:

Across the river, the rainy hodden landscape, he could see traffic going along the boulevard, locked in another age of which some dread vision had afforded him this lonely cognizance.(135)

Bell loud in the silence. Harried mute and protestant over the darkening windy fields he saw go with no surprise mauve monks in cobwebbed cowls and sandals hacked from ruined boots clapping along in a rude shuffle down small cobbled ways into an old stone town.(287)

This suggests that within McCarthy's books, removal of life from the hunt, which is embedded within the world, is an impossibility. However, in the end, for Suttree, as with his other characters, the personal story is of symphonic transfiguration within the individual, an act of Western heroic progression. In this case, it begins deep in the caliginous riverbanks and moves towards the higher realms of the self. By golly, McCarthy is a Romantic.

How about a Valentine’s Day post, Cormac McCarthy style, in a manner that would make fellow river rats Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer thumb spittin’ proud. This scene occurs after Sut battles a life threatening typhoid condition, which threw him to the edges of the ectoplasmic void where awaited rebirth through “an enormous livercolored cunt with prehensile lips that pumped softly like some levantine bivalve.”:

He was given no food. A strange sour potion to drink. A nurse who came to catheterize him. He’d lain for hours with his cock hanging down the cool throat of a battered tin pitcher.

Catheterina, he said.

My name is Kathy.

We’ve got to stop meeting like this.

Hush now. Can you lift up some? Lift up some.

Try to control yourself. Damn.

You don’t even have a temperature so I know this is all put on.

I hear water running.

Hush.

I never saw a lovelier ass.

I never knew anybody to get sexy being catheterized.

Will you marry me?

Sure. (462)

A photo of the Tennessee River in modern day Knoxville, found in the Searching for Suttree photo website.

Gene Harrogate. Anyone who has read Suttree and again runs across this name will inevitably start to slowly shake their heads and begin laughing. I'm a long way from reading all the major works of American Literature, but I can’t imagine a funnier character. Suttree meets Harrogate in a work camp, where Harrogate was sent on charges of bestiality after copulating with a farmer’s watermelons (appropriate), which ends up being just the beginning of his misadventures. After being released, Harrogate goes through the trouble of again locating Suttree (he tells people that he and Sut go ‘way back’) and Suttree steers a paternal eye towards Harrogate. But outside of keeping him from accidentally killing himself or others, there’s not a lot to be done with the rustic bumpkin.

While Harrogate has a comic hilarity about him, his impenetrable state of ignorance leads to some disturbing scenes, such as when he attempts to slaughter a stolen piglet or when he finds out that the hospital, through a rabies prevention program, will pay cash for any dead bat brought in (flitter-mice he calls them). This partly leads into McCarthy’s development of violence within his later books, but in this publication Harrogate is simply too pathetic to incite moral forming disturbances in the reader. Instead, its more of mournful sorrow in the back of the black comedy.

And this stays in suit with the underpinning drama of the whole book. While funny at times, as actually with all of McCarthy’s books, there is a much more pervasive sadness running through the writing. This is found in the events of the book but, more importantly, also through the tone of the writing, both of which are exhibited in Suttree’s enigmatic past and his attempted relationships. McCarthy doesn’t specifically outline Suttree’s troubles and instead keeps it in the generalities of poetic heroism. Harrogate, on the other hand, is more of a tragic figure, as are the other Knoxville yokels Sutree hangs with, and garners a multifaceted emotional connection from the reader.

"To be able to have dreams, it's crucial that you know how to have no illusions.

In this way you'll reach the summitt of dreamy abstention, where senses blend, feelings overflow, and ideas intermingle. There colours and souls taste like each other, hatreds taste like loves, and concrete things like abstract things, absract things like concrete. The ties that joined everything but also separated everything-- because they isolated each element-- are broken. Everything melds and merges."

--No. 324 from The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa

A short clip from the famous French short film, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, which was based upon the Ambrose Bierce story. Rod Serling enjoyed it so much it became a Twilight Zone episode. The closing comments:

An occurence at Owl Creek Bridge--in two forms, as it was dreamed, and as it was lived and died. This is the stuff of fantasy, the thread of imagination...the ingredients of the Twilight Zone.

The River
--Ted Hughes

Fallen from heaven, lies across
The lap of his mother, broken by world.

But water will go on
Issuing from heaven

In dumbness uttering spirit brightness
Through its broken mouth.

Scattered in a million pieces and buried
Its dry tombs will split, at a sign in the sky,

At a rending of veils.
It will rise, in a time after times,

After swallowing death and the pit
It will return stainless

For the delivery of this world.
So the river is a god

Knee-deep among reeds, watching men,
Or hung by the heels down the door of a dam

It is a god, and inviolable.
Immortal. And will wash itself of all deaths.

Oaring his way lightly through the rain among these curiosa he felt little more than yet another artifact leached out of the earth and washed along, draining down out of the city…. In the fluted gullies where the river backed or eddied spoondrift lay in a coffee colored foam, a curd that draped the varied flotsam locked and turning there, the driftwood and bottles and floats and the white bellies of dead fish, all wheeling slowly in the river’s suck and the river spooling past unpawled with a muted seething freighting seaward her silt and her chattel and her dead.(306)

While plot is largely arbitrary, Suttree regularly returns to the Tennessee River and when the story does veer away from its shore-- into the neon night life of Knoxville, shack homes of hill people, underground caves about the city-- water remains a prominent element within the narrative. A metaphor for the continuity of life, taking and giving equally without deference for either. And it is a key component within the cosmology of McCarthy’s oeuvre, the basic processes of the material world becoming as integral to his stories as his characters. There is another non-material world, which runs in parallels in the forms of dreams, visions, myths and stories, but not without the core seating of material reality, a dualism in which the lives of his characters are at play.

A scene where Suttree views the photographs that document the concatenation of his Saxon clan :

Suttreee turned up a tinted photograph of a satin lined wickerbound casket with flower surrounds. In the casket a fat baby, garishly painted, bright fuchshia cheeks. Never ask whose. He closed the cover of this picturebook of the afflicted. A soft yellow dust bloomed. Put away these frozenjawed primates and their annals of ways beset and ultimate dark. What deity in the realms of dementia, what rabid god decocted out of the smoking lobes of hydrophobia could have deceived a keeping place for souls so poor as in this flesh. The mawky wormbent tabernacle.(130)

Post mortem photographs became an integral component of the death and grieving process in the 1800's, especially as photography became accessible to the majority of social classes. Often the dead were staged to appear as though they were only asleep, which would allow family members to carry on with an illusion that they might then wake up and rejoin the living. The inclusion of flowers, particularly with children, added to the effect.

They turned and defiled out of the glade, Suttree behind the Indian. Dragonflies kept lifting from the tops of the reeds like little Chinese kites.
What's your name? said Suttree
The Indian turned and looked back. Michael, he said.
Is that what they call you?
He turned again. No, he said. They call me Tonto or Wahoo or Chief. But my name is Michael.
My name's Suttree.
The Indian smiled. (224-5)

Before getting into the book, I needed to first figure out how to pronounce Suttree's name. When I initially saw the title, and without thinking about it, an annunciation like 'Sue', 'suit', 'sooner' or 'sewer' for the beginning syllable was what had popped into my mind, and then followed with 'tree'. But that never sat in my mouth quite right when considering the locale. Too Northern, French, un-Confederate. So I changed the first syllable to a short 'u', like in 'sullen', 'sundry', 'suck', which sounded more appropriate. But after thinking about it some more, I remembered that this was the South, which has some carryover into the mid-West, and so I turned the 'ttree' to a 'dree': Sud - dree. Closer yet, and probably correct, but if the dialect was on the heavy and guttural, it could possibly even be pronounced as Suh' ree (accent on the first). I like that one the best.

For the character of Suttree, McCarthy never gets definite with his background. At the beginning you know him simply as a man in his early 20's who resides in a dilapidated houseboat underneath a bridge in Knoxville along the Tennessee River in 1950, living hand to mouth through fishing-- catching catfish. Clues of his past are slowly leaked in and you find out that he comes from a well-off family (and with an uncle in their history that was hung, possibly for lycanthropy), is college educated, and was even briefly married at one point. Yet there is an unnamed dejected sadness that the reader can speculate on, as to why he decided to turn his back on blue blooded privilege and live amongst outcasts, imbeciles, drunkards, bone diggers, cross dressers and other roustabouting riffraff. For the Indian, Michael, his presence is all too brief, arriving mid way for a few pages, and then not again until near the end, and then for only a paragraph or two. Must be as a result of his not wanting to stray far from the maternal solace of the river.

Elsewhere McCarthy again brings in names as a point of notice within the narrative, humorously:

He gazed at the possumhunters from one to another. You all aint got the same name have ye? he said.
The possumhunters guffawed and the one with the shotgun elbowed the other one in the ribs. Naw, he said. I'm Vernon and this here is Fernon.
Reese grinned.

A reading plan of mine for the coming months consists of Cormac McCarthy’s earlier novels. Over the holiday season I reread Cities of the Plain and a large portion of The Crossing. For Cities of the Plain, about a young ranch hand that falls in love with a prostitute in Mexico, who also happens to be the fateful object of possession for her ruthless pimp, McCarthy demonstrates how often what we personally dream for our lives can be in conflict with what the realities of what the world will allow. The crux of the dilemma then being this: at what point do we sacrifice what we envision to lead us to our happiness- what we perceive as our individual destinies- in order to accommodate for the forces of the world that proceed in their own accord? What are we willing to compromise, and what are we not, despite the inevitable consequences? It’s a balancing act between romantic heroism and the rational acceptance of the quaint but true aphorism, ‘that’s life kid’.

The Crossing also has this same coming of age story, through two brothers that travel into the barren regions of northern Mexico, initially because of a wolf they wanted to return to the wild in the mountains and then again after finding themselves orphaned. But I found a stronger theme in it being a rite of passage tale that results from the brothers moving in and out of the social and cultural backgrounds that had made up the lives of their childhood. Through McCarthy’s descriptive passages of the arid desert and its inhabitants, he evokes a temporal region where the brothers are effectively in a metaphysical ‘no-man’s land’, at the fringes of two different civilizations, where awaits self realization as well as the most base processes of survival and personality. This also compounded by the disruptive effects of Mexico having gone through the Mexican Revolution and America's involvement with World War II. And its then in the last third of the novel, where the two brothers must make decisions as individuals and outside their shared context of family and past social placement, that the same themes of Cities of the Plain emerge.

Although what I will be focusing on in the next week or two is McCarthy’s 1979 publication, Suttree, which is a far different work then The Border Trilogy and the most recent No Country for Old Men and The Road. The largest difference being the setting, which is not the harsh and barren lands of the west, with their isolative pockets of village life and wayward travelers, but the spawning biological fecundity of the Tennessee River and its banks of densely wooded hills and occasional intrusive city life. Its a book with a momentum not based on a tight narrative, like McCarthy’s most recent publications, but through a much broader emotional scope, being equally sad, funny and tragic, all in a sort of macabre blend of rye whiskey and bean pole honky-tonk. A book that has become my favorite of McCarthy’s works.

If you have 10 minutes, this short film, called Hedgehog in the Fog, from the Russian animator Yuriy Norshteyn is wonderfully well done (and best viewed at night in the dark). A short story about the ghostly unknowns that exist in the outer-world of our comfortable expectations, where respect and an acceptive awe to our lives can be awakened.

From Jason Steven's Introduction to the current Signet Classics publication of Elmer Gantry:

"At the time Lewis was writing, Protestantism was possessed of a drive for 'muscular Christianity' (forerunner of today's 'Promise Keepers'): a backlash against what Ann Douglas has famously called 'the feminization of American culture' in the Victorian period. Christ was redefined as a man of vigor, ruggedness, and daring, suitable for an age in which Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders were iconic, Tarzan was a silent cinema sensation, and free enterprise was conceived as a pioneering frontier adventure. In this atmosphere, where power and faith were reconciled through an ethos of manliness..........."

And an excerpt from the novel, when Gantry was beginning to develop his addiction for rousing up crowds of hungry worshipers:

Remembering his college cheers, remembering how greatly it had encouraged him in kneeing the opposing tackle or jabbing the rival center's knees, Elmer observed to himself, "Why shouldn't we have yells in this game, too?"

That was a thing to hear, when Elmer led them; when he danced before them, swinging his big arms and bellowing, "Now again! Two yards to gain! Two yards for the Savior? Come on, boys and girls, its our team! Going to let 'em down? Not on your life! Come on then, you chipmunks, and lemme hear you knock the roof off! Hal, hal, hal!"

Sounds like the birth of a fascist leader as well.