Katerina heard at breakfast the next morning that Anders had left for Vilny.
“Now perhaps there will be some regularity in this household,” said the King.
And indeed Katerina picked up the routines of her life again, studying mathematics and languages and history with her tutors, reading the Bible, playing hostess to her father’s guests. But her manner was more and more remote, her smile increasingly frozen in place. She made foreign dignitaries nervous. She frightened children, and children had always adored her in the past.
For herself, these social situations seemed louder, more threatening and most of all, faster paced than ever before. Things seemed to go by her in a whirl of sound and color. She often had no idea where she was in a conversation or what was expected of her from moment to moment.
Lochinvar’s departure was a blow she couldn’t seem to recover from. She was helplessly angry with her father but had given up trying to talk to him. She spent a lot of time in her chambers crying and took long walks with Wilf. But his conversation was limited. He was a dog, after all. She had always thought that a talking animal would sound like a human being, only cuter. But Wilf’s concerns remained stubbornly canine.
“Running feels good,” he would offer. Or, “Throw stick for me.”
He missed Lochinvar, too. But it didn’t affect him in the same way. He was sort of impervious to things.
“I hope Lochinvar is happy, I hope he likes his new people,” Katerina would say.
Wilf would focus for a moment. “Me, too,” he’d say. Then, “Bird to chase!” or “There’s some dead stuff to roll in.” and he’d sprint away.
She envied the way his mind was rooted in whatever was going on at any exact moment. It was hard for him to think about the past and to say he had no worries about the future missed the point. He didn’t even understand what the future was, unless it could be summarized by some general concept like, “more of the same”. He liked that idea. More of the same was fine with him.
She couldn’t bear to go near the stables and so she didn’t find out for several days that Anders had returned. It was eight o’clock on Sunday evening when he came to her chamber door. Normally, the servants who worked outside the castle proper were not allowed even into the anterooms of the royal residence, much less the Princess’ suite. But Anders had friends among the palace staff and he was allowed to come and go as he pleased, a privilege he had maintained by not abusing it. In fact, he rarely asked a favor from anyone.
But this night was special.
He knocked on Katerina’s door just as the church bells were tolling the hour. It was only a few days until the summer solstice and the light was still strong outside. Though many in the castle were asleep behind heavy curtains by now, Anders knew Katerina would be awake. She loved the long summer days just as she loathed the cold dark afternoons of the German winter; she had told him so. And she rarely slept more than a few hours a night anymore. She had confessed that, too.
He knocked softly on her chamber door. When she opened it, he stepped back, stunned for a moment by the sheer force of her effortless physical beauty. She had just come from the bath and her personal maid, Lisa, had been brushing her long blond hair, It was usually pulled back into a severe bun or braid – Anders had never seen it loose, framing her face like a waterfall of golden light. And she was wearing some sort of nightgown with a pattern of tiny violets. It was ankle length and demure, but still so intimate that he had to look away.
He was blushing. And it made her smile. Lisa would have been pleased to see that smile – it was the first one that had crossed Katerina’s face for days.
She touched his shoulder.“Anders?,” she said. “What are you doing here? When did you get back?”
He looked up, then away again. He knew his stare was a kind of trespass, for both them. She would see too much if he let her look into his eyes.
“I have something to show you,” he told her. “Come with me to the stables, Princess. Please. It’s important.”
“Now?”
He nodded, memorizing the hallway flagstones, terrified by his own impertinence.
But she said, “Just give me a moment to get dressed.”
The door closed and when it opened again she was wearing her rough riding clothes. To Anders she always looked far more beautiful this way than when arrayed in her finery. Elaborate gowns and evening dresses made her look like anyone else, like all the other noble girls who crowded into the castle for the annual balls and celebrations with their intricately piled coiffures and their painted faces. They were invisible behind those masks; they almost clanked in their feminine armor. And from what Anders had heard about their undergarments, the wired brassieres and the metal chastity belts, the image was not so far-fetched as it might seem.
He loved to see Katerina with her face smudged with dirt and lashed with twigs and leaves after one of her wild rides – that was the best make-up of all. He knew she hadn’t been riding since his departure. But that that was about to change.
They walked to the stables in silence. After a few steps, Wilf joined them, but she scarcely seemed to notice the dog’s presence. Anders could feel her sadness, like a terrible heat. She was a girl with a fever, so warm to the touch; and inside, she was shivering with the cold. Anders knew better than to bother the princess with chitchat, or to try and “cheer her up”. Only the boldest of actions could have any effect on such distress.
So he had acted, in the only way that he was able to, in the only arena where he was free.
He opened the stable door for her and Wilf and followed them into the shadows. An unmistakable voice called out, “Princess? Is that you?”
Katerina grabbed Anders’ arm so hard he cried out in surprise.
“Anders!”
He nodded.
“But how -- ?”
“Go to him. I’ll explain later.”
Katerina ran. She stumbled once, with Wilf tangled in her feet, and cracked her shin on a feed bin. When she found the stall she fumbled with the latch. For a long moment she thought she wouldn’t be able to open it, that her hands had failed her as her mother’s hands had failed, flailing with palsy.
The big horse came to the door just as she managed to release the hasp and slide back the bolt.“I missed you,” he said, rubbing his head against hers “Why didn’t you come?”
She slipped into the stall and hugged his neck.
“I … I didn’t know – I thought – “
“I meant to tell you he was here,” said Wilf. “But I just forgot. I’d see you and get all excited and all the food smells in the castle and … It’s hard for me to remember things sometimes.” He lowered his head, and she rubbed him behind his ears.
“It’s all right, Wilf. You’re a good dog.”
Anders was beside her then. He said, “It’s still light outside. Lead him into the yard. I want you to see something. Then I’ll explain.”
He spoke as an equal and it seemed perfectly natural to all of them. Here among the horses, he was her equal.
In the evening light, Katerina could see that the white flash on Lochinvar’s forehead was gone. If you looked closely you could see that colors didn’t quite match up; his brow was mottled.
“The work I did on Samson was much better. His white flash looks perfect.”
Katerina laughed “Samson? You gave them Samson? He’s the slowest horse in the stable!”
“And the most ill-tempered. We’re well rid of him.”
Lochinvar put his muzzle to her ear. “He was dumb, too, princess. And a bully.”
“But he stood seventeen and a half hands,” said Anders. “Just like Lochinvar here. And that was all that mattered.”
Katerina reached out to touch his arm. “But what if someone finds out?,” she asked. “Won’t you get in trouble?”
“Those people don’t know horses. But even if they did somehow figure it out, what would they do? Accuse the King of cheating them? That’s the quickest route I can think of to the hangman’s noose.”
“The second quickest,” she said softly. “If you’d been caught doing this, you’d have found that out for yourself.”
Anders looked down.
A horse – it sounded like the mare Brianna – whinnied from the back of the stable. Territorial dogs barked back and forth. The wind had picked up a little out of the east. It wheezed along the eaves of the old building.
Katerina stared at Anders for a long moment in the densely peopled silence of the yard.
“Thank you,” she said, finally. And she touched his arm again. They were standing out in the open now, on the flagstones in front of the stables –- if anyone witnessed such a gesture … But fear was the least of what he felt.
He mastered himself. “There is something else,” he told her. “At the inn where I was staying I fell into conversation with an old herbalist. It turns out he had known my father briefly when they were young. We talked through the night for several nights running and eventually I wound up mentioning your … condition. I didn’t disclose your name and I spoke only in the most general terms. But he had a small quantity of a medicinal leaf, from the gryphillaria plant, which he gave me for you. He will be travelling over the next few months and he has promised to visit me here. If the gryphillaria helps you, he can find more. He says it grows copiously here.”
“If it works -- couldn’t we find more ourselves?”
“Unfortunately … no, princess. It is virtually identical to plant called pormelusia, which is deadly. Its juices kill very slowly, but once started the process cannot be reversed. There’s no cure and the pain is unendurable. It’s used as a particularly cruel method of execution in certain … Eastern countries. Or so the herbalist told me. Anyway – it takes a lifetime of study for the eye to distinguish any difference between the two plants. And one wouldn’t want to make a mistake.”
“No.”
“He gave me some gryphillaria for you to try, though. If it eases your sadness at all, there would be cause for hope.”
He pulled a folded tissue out of his pocket. When he opened it there were four small leaves, green and spotted with a darker green, inside. Wilf padded over to smell them. His nose wrinkled and his head flinched away from Anders’ palm. Katerina had never seen that reaction before. Wilf had a lively interest in the world of odor. No smell had ever troubled him like that. She glanced nervously at Anders.
“Do I eat them?,” she asked him.
“You chew them and swallow the juice. It will be bitter, the herbalist told me. He said he found that ‘charming.’ It’s one of God’s little ironies, that medicine so often tastes so terrible, as if it might actually hurt you. Whereas the things that taste best really do hurt us. Or so he says. He thinks God is a perverse sort of fellow, a prankster if you will, and the best way to secure a place in heaven is to let him know you get his jokes.”
“That sort of a God would make me nervous,” Katerina said. “I think I prefer the stern but fair old man with the white beard.”
“Maybe. But I think if you’re trying to hold a whole universe together every day, and answering all these crazy prayers and sorting out all that divine retribution, a sense of humor would come in handy. You’d lose your mind otherwise. Just deciding on the weather every day, and doling out the luck and the diseases, who gets rain and who gets rich and who gets the plague. It’s a big job.”
The princess smiled. He liked the smile so much he decided to go on. He knew it was a kind of sacrilege, but even God would be pleased to see this young woman happy for a moment.
“Sometimes I think he’s in over his head. He’s overwhelmed. How else do you explain ingrown toe-nails and tooth decay and body odor? I’m not saying it’s his fault we smell so bad when we sweat. It just slipped past him, that’s all. He’s overworked. He had more important things to deal with on that day. Commandments to write. Angels to banish. I don’t know. It wasn’t a race – maybe he should have taken an extra day or two.”
She laughed and held out her hand with a mock imperious flourish. He went down on one knee.
“Here, my Lady,” he said, and handed her gryphillaria leaves.
She tasted them gingerly. He was right. The acrid flavor constricted her tongue and dried out her mouth. Her features bunched together comically as she tried to swallow; Anders fought back an unseemly smile. His face was serene and serious when he nodded encouragement into her questioning glance. She stared back at him for a long moment. Then she tore off half of one leaf and bit down hard.
“This better work,” she croaked.
At first the herb seemed to have no effect except to make her dizzy. She held onto Anders to steady herself. She closed her eyes and focussed all her attention inside, hoping to feel the shift. But it was like listening for some impossibly faint sound, every ounce of her clenched into a self-defeating effort. Will became confusion -- the distant cry of greeting was only her own breath; the longed for rain just a rustle of wind in the trees.
She needed distraction. “Talk to me,” she said. “Tell me about your trip.”
“All right,” Anders replied. He thought a moment. Then he brightened. “We were set upon by highwaymen,” he said. “But Lochinvar outran them! And he forced Samson to keep up. Sam wasn’t happy. He tried to kick me when I put him in his stall that night. And there was a carnival. With jugglers. And beggars everywhere. Vilny is a very busy place, Princess. It was market day when I arrived and everything was for sale in the streets. Every kind of food, fruits and vegetables, sides of meat, smoked fowl, wines and liquors, clothing and toys, pots and pans, even … “
“Even what?”
“Even women, princess. Beautiful women, offering their bodies to anyone with a few ducats.”
“It sounds quite overwhelming.”
“It was, princess.”
“Did you buy anything, Anders?”
There was a tiny squint of pleasure in her eyes; the innuendo of a smile. She was teasing him. It took him a moment to realize what was happening. She had never done such a thing before.
Perhaps he was mistaken; he answered her seriously. “No, princess,” he said. “I had only enough money for food and lodging.”
“Probably just as well.”
There was that little squint again. She really was teasing him.
That was the beginning. He could hear it in the tone of her voice. For the Princess it was different. The change for her was physical. It was as if she had lost weight. Her body felt lighter; at the same time the world seemed to settle back into its old dimensions. Everything had loomed so large to her for so long, hills and buildings and trees and people; and she had seemed to be shrinking – withering into a shrill, frightened speck. Now things looked normal again. The barn wasn’t some evil citadel. It didn’t dwarf her, it didn’t drown her in its deep shadow. It was just the barn, low and thatch-roofed and tilting slightly to the southwest, with its crumbling mortar and its sweet reek of hay.
She pulled Anders back inside where they couldn’t be seen and embraced him. He was in the middle of a sentence, something about how someone at the castle in Vilny had spilled a bottle of wine and ruined a damask tablecloth. But the hug squeezed the words out of him. He couldn’t speak and he had no idea what he’d been saying. Katerina was holding him tight.
“It’s working,” she said.
He whispered into her neck: “I’m glad.”
They embraced for a few seconds longer. Then she pulled away. Lochinvar was in the first stall now. He whinnied at her and she stroked his neck. “You’re a good boy,” she said. He whinnied again. It had been a long time since she had heard that sound. But for some reason he wasn’t speaking to her this evening.
“Is he all right?,” Anders asked. “He sounds strange.”
“He’s fine.” She turned away from the horse. “I have to go back. People will start to wonder what I’m doing out here.”
He nodded and pressed the leaves into her hand. “Take these with you. But use them sparingly. We won’t be able to get any more until I see the old man again. He told me he was traveling this way, but he’s on foot so it could take a month or more. And I have no idea how long the effects last.”
“Perhaps I’m cured already,” she said.
“That would be wonderful,” Anders said.
But they both knew it wasn’t true.
Thursday, November 09, 2006
Thursday, November 02, 2006
The Animal Kingdom, Part One
Just for fun, I'm going to serialize a story on the blog ... kind of an adult fairy tale with a talking dog (who doesn't have much to say, except about getting scratched behind the ears and rolling in dead stuff). I'll put up a section every week until it's done.
Princess Katerina’s life was as perfectly arranged as her father’s gardens. In the formal plantings cut by gravel walks, each season had an array of flowers that came into bloom in stately waves of color as the seasons changed. It was a visual symphony that the King orchestrated himself, every day all year round, on his hands and knees in the dirt, meticulously pruning and weeding the shrubs and flowers. He had gardeners of course, but he didn’t let them into his private garden. He said it was because he didn’t trust them, but the truth was he didn’t want to share the fun. There wasn’t much fun in his life since his wife had died; he tended to hoard the little that was left.
He had groomed and tended his daughter in much the same way. She was educated in all the arts and sciences; she had been taught to ride and to hunt, to cook and to sew, to play chess and work the abacus. At twenty, she was a gracious hostess, an excellent cook and a deadly warrior with a bow or a sword. An impeccable marriage had been arranged with a Prince from an adjoining barony. His name was Torvald. He was handsome and charming and solicitous. The marriage was set for the first day of June.
Katerina had every reason to be happy. But she wasn’t.
In fact she had been growing more and more miserable over the last months. She had lost interest in her studies, she scarcely ate any more, and the only time she went outside was just before dawn, when she would visit the stables to curry her favorite horse, Lochinvar. Some days she would take long rides on the big roan stallion with the flash of white on his forehead, disappearing for hours at a time into the woods beyond the town at the foot of the castle. The only other creature whose company she could bear was a hunting dog named Wilf. He was a mutt who had come to the door of the servant’s quarters the previous year. Katerina’s personal maid had taken him in. She and Katerina had fed him and nursed him and saved his life.
Now the dog ran beside Lochinvar tirelessly on those long morning excursions. Dogs and horses generally didn’t get along, but these two had become fast friends instantly.
The only person who didn’t question Katerina’s darkening state of mind was Anders, the stable master. He didn’t ask how she was feeling or suggest remedies for her sorrow. He didn’t badger her to smile as her father did. He didn’t taunt her for her unwillingness to go out in society as Torvald did. He didn’t object to her preference for torn pantaloons and men’s blouses over the brocade dresses and gowns that were made especially for her by the royal seamstresses. He simply bridled her horse and called Wilf from the recesses of the barn. He would hand her Lochinvar’s reins with a shy smile and help her up into the saddle though they both knew she didn’t require the assistance. He spoke so little, many people thought he was mute. They found his open-eyed stare unnerving (some suspected he was simple; others claimed he was a warlock), but Katerina liked it. No one else except her father was willing to look directly into her eyes. Not even Torvald.
Anders had helped her once. She suffered from tightness of breath. There were some terrible hours when she felt as if she could hardly breathe at all, as if she were drowning in the sunshine. The court doctors prescribed various potions, leeches had been applied to her bosom, but none of it helped. When the attacks came she could only sit up in bed and haul the air into her lungs with all her might, as she would pull on a rope attached to a boulder, dragging it across a muddy field. It was exhausting.
One day, her lungs closed while she was riding Lochinvar. The big horse sensed there was trouble and galloped as fast as he could back to the castle. Katerina barely had to touch his flanks with her heel. She released the reins, hugged his neck and leaned forward, resting her head on him, letting the world rumble through her as she fought for breath.
She didn’t know how bad it was until she saw Anders’ face at the stable. He was wide-eyed with shock and fear. He made her sit down, held out a hand as if to say “Wait here” and vanished. When he returned five minutes later, he had some yellow berries in his hand.
“Crush these between your fingers and inhale the vapor,” he said.
She looked at them dubiously.
“Please,” he said. “They will help you,” He held out the berries again. Katerina was impressed. This was the most Anders had ever said to her. She took the berries and squeezed them between her thumb and forefinger. Blood-red juice spurted out with a sickly smell of rotting fruit and mildew. She grimaced. Anders shook his head. Lochinvar and Wilf had joined her now, the big horse gently nudging her head with his, the brown and white dog lying down with his spotted muzzle in her lap. She felt loved and safe, surrounded by friends. Best of all her lungs opened up and she could breathe again.
She stood up. She hugged Anders. Anders flinched: this was an unthinkable breach of protocol. He could be executed like a common criminal if anyone saw them. But Katerina didn’t care. They were alone in the stable. No one ever came down here, except on hunt days.
“It worked,” she said into his ear. “I can breathe again. Thank you so much.”
“I was glad to be of service, Princess,” he said.
She kissed his cheek. “How did you do it?” she asked him. “How did you know about those berries?”
“My father taught me. He was a great healer. He knew hundreds of herbs and salves. He spent his life studying them.”
“What happened to him?”
“He saved the life of the King of France. And he was guillotined for witchcraft.”
She pulled away a little. “I’m so sorry.”
“I had to run away. They wanted to kill me, too. I took his notes and formulas and I’ve kept them. But they have to stay secret. People can’t accept such things. People are afraid.”
He gave her the berries whenever she needed them after that and her difficulties with breathing ended and the court doctors called it a miracle.
“In other words,” Anders said ruefully, “They can’t take the credit but there’s no one to blame.”
And that was all he said.
As time went on and the date of the Princess’ nuptials approached, she sank deeper and deeper into the sadness that no one could explain. Little noises alarmed her, the prospect of a simple family dinner filled her with dread and loathing.
She wanted to tell her father to cancel the wedding; she wanted to tell Torvald that their engagement was broken. But she couldn’t. Instead she kept more and more to herself riding Lochinvar and tending to the horses in the stable. Anders was glad for the help and he never questioned the eccentricity of the Princess’ behavior – after all, everyone knew that her father poked around in the dirt working his garden, with thorn cuts on his wrists and blossoms in his hair. They were an odd family, and that was that. One didn’t question the idiosyncrasies of the nobility, just as you tried your best to conceal your own. The world was not so tolerant of ordinary people, as Anders’ father had discovered.
As it turned out, he was able to help the Princess again, a few weeks later. It was the middle of June and the household was like an occupied country. The servants scuttled from room to room quietly; no one wanted to be noticed. The King would pillory a maid who smiled at him, have a master at hounds whipped for not smiling, banish a chef for no reason at all. He was at war with his daughter and anyone might be a casualty at any time.
Katerina had simply not appeared at her own wedding, humiliating the groom and her father in front of hundreds of guests and townspeople. Worse than that, she refused to either apologize or explain. To Torvald she just said, “I cannot see you any more.” When her father confronted her in a rage she said nothing until he had talked himself out, then asked quietly, “May I go now?”
He let her go, but followed her to the stables and watched her gallop off on Lochinvar. That decided him: her obsession with that horse was the root of the problem. The King didn’t brood over problems, he solved them. And the obvious solution to this problem was to get rid of the horse. He had gotten rid of several unacceptable human suitors in the last few years, sending them off to distant wars being fought over various indeterminate slights by his allies to the North and East.
This equine interloper would be even easier to deal with. His stable was the envy of his vassals and any of them would be honored by the gift. It was only a question of which one of them to choose.
The King made the announcement the next night at dinner. “I’m giving the horse Lochinvar away to the Baron of Vilny,” he said. “His stable has been depleted by injury and Lochinvar is an irksome animal anyway. Very moody and difficult. Apparently he kicked one of the stable boys last month.”
“He’s not difficult if you know how to treat him,” Katerina replied. “You just have to spend time with him.”
It was the wrong thing to say.
“Well, it seems to me that you’ve been spending far too much time with that horse, young lady. It’s not healthy. You’ve been neglecting your responsibilities and the people around you. Everyone is upset. I’m worried about you. And Torvald is heartbroken.”
A torrent of answers cascaded through her mind – that Torvald’s heart was like his nose: broken many times, with little effect except to made him more attractive to certain kinds of women, one of whom he was seeing already. That Lochinvar had ten times Torvald’s character, and was much better company as well. That if anyone was worried or upset, this was the first she had heard about it. In fact, everyone had been avoiding her as if she had some contagious disease. Some physical ailment would have been an improvement. The fact that the illness was in her mind appalled and disgusted everyone. She could see it in their faces. She could hear it in the exaggerated courtesy with which they treated her, as if one wrong word might send her over the edge.
She wanted to say everything -- shout it in her father’s face. But she couldn’t. She didn’t have the strength, it wouldn’t do any good and besides, she knew the moment she started to speak she’d start crying.
Instead, she excused herself from the table.
“I know where you’re going,” her father called after her. “Say your goodbyes while you can! The horse is leaving for Vilny at first light tomorrow.”
Katerina ran to the stables. She had never been so unhappy. It was as if she had been trapped in a dark room for weeks, comforting herself that at least there was space around her; but now she had reached out her arms and touched the walls. She was in a tiny, airless room – a cell, a closet. And still no one would hear her when she screamed, no one would come to let her out.
It was a clear night, warm and calm with a bright crust of stars above her. She ran all the way to the stables and when she got there she was alone. Anders had dismissed the stable boys and gone to bed early. Well, of course, that made sense. He had a big day tomorrow. No doubt a trip to Vilny was an exciting prospect, what with the crowds, and the shops and the beautiful women. It would have to be a country boy’s dream come true.
She hated Anders at that moment. She hated her father and his cronies. She hated her mother for dying. She hated the tiptoeing servants and tutors who whispered around her as if she were insane. She hated everyone and everything.
Except Lochinvar; and Wilf.
The shaggy, sweet-tempered dog had fallen into step beside her. Normally she brought biscuits from the kitchen for him, but she had forgotten tonight.
“No Biscuits?”
She stopped running and looked around. She was out of breath and the courtyard was silent under the stars.
“Who said that?,” she called. Her own voice alarmed her. It sounded like someone else’s. No one answered. She looked around. No scuttling furtive figures, no heads disappearing around corners. She looked down at Wilf. His head was cocked inquiringly. His tail was tapping steadily on the stone work of the enclosure.
Their eyes met.
“No biscuits?,” he said again.
Katerina put her hand to her mouth and stepped back. The dog had spoken to her.
Everyone was right – she was insane. She had finally unhooked the last cables of her rational mind and floated away.
But she found herself talking to the dog, anyway. There didn’t seem to be any reason not to.
“I forgot them,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. I love you. Pet me.”
She scratched behind Wilf’s ear and they walked together to the stables.
In the sweet, hay-smelling shadows, Lochinvar spoke to her also. “I missed you,” he said.
She hugged his neck. “I missed you, too.”
If this was madness, madness might not be such a bad thing after all.
It was long after dark when they returned from their ride. Katerina was currying the big horse with Wilf at her feet. It was a favorite ritual for both of them (She knew for certain now what she had always presumed), but she was distracted tonight. She knew she would be losing him in the morning. She finished finally, and kissed the white flash between his eyes. She didn’t have the heart to say goodbye.
Lochinvar pushed at her head with his own. It something he did often.
“What does it mean when you do that?,” she asked him.
He looked down. “It means … be happy.”
“I can’t tonight,” she said.
She hugged him once more and left the stable.
Princess Katerina’s life was as perfectly arranged as her father’s gardens. In the formal plantings cut by gravel walks, each season had an array of flowers that came into bloom in stately waves of color as the seasons changed. It was a visual symphony that the King orchestrated himself, every day all year round, on his hands and knees in the dirt, meticulously pruning and weeding the shrubs and flowers. He had gardeners of course, but he didn’t let them into his private garden. He said it was because he didn’t trust them, but the truth was he didn’t want to share the fun. There wasn’t much fun in his life since his wife had died; he tended to hoard the little that was left.
He had groomed and tended his daughter in much the same way. She was educated in all the arts and sciences; she had been taught to ride and to hunt, to cook and to sew, to play chess and work the abacus. At twenty, she was a gracious hostess, an excellent cook and a deadly warrior with a bow or a sword. An impeccable marriage had been arranged with a Prince from an adjoining barony. His name was Torvald. He was handsome and charming and solicitous. The marriage was set for the first day of June.
Katerina had every reason to be happy. But she wasn’t.
In fact she had been growing more and more miserable over the last months. She had lost interest in her studies, she scarcely ate any more, and the only time she went outside was just before dawn, when she would visit the stables to curry her favorite horse, Lochinvar. Some days she would take long rides on the big roan stallion with the flash of white on his forehead, disappearing for hours at a time into the woods beyond the town at the foot of the castle. The only other creature whose company she could bear was a hunting dog named Wilf. He was a mutt who had come to the door of the servant’s quarters the previous year. Katerina’s personal maid had taken him in. She and Katerina had fed him and nursed him and saved his life.
Now the dog ran beside Lochinvar tirelessly on those long morning excursions. Dogs and horses generally didn’t get along, but these two had become fast friends instantly.
The only person who didn’t question Katerina’s darkening state of mind was Anders, the stable master. He didn’t ask how she was feeling or suggest remedies for her sorrow. He didn’t badger her to smile as her father did. He didn’t taunt her for her unwillingness to go out in society as Torvald did. He didn’t object to her preference for torn pantaloons and men’s blouses over the brocade dresses and gowns that were made especially for her by the royal seamstresses. He simply bridled her horse and called Wilf from the recesses of the barn. He would hand her Lochinvar’s reins with a shy smile and help her up into the saddle though they both knew she didn’t require the assistance. He spoke so little, many people thought he was mute. They found his open-eyed stare unnerving (some suspected he was simple; others claimed he was a warlock), but Katerina liked it. No one else except her father was willing to look directly into her eyes. Not even Torvald.
Anders had helped her once. She suffered from tightness of breath. There were some terrible hours when she felt as if she could hardly breathe at all, as if she were drowning in the sunshine. The court doctors prescribed various potions, leeches had been applied to her bosom, but none of it helped. When the attacks came she could only sit up in bed and haul the air into her lungs with all her might, as she would pull on a rope attached to a boulder, dragging it across a muddy field. It was exhausting.
One day, her lungs closed while she was riding Lochinvar. The big horse sensed there was trouble and galloped as fast as he could back to the castle. Katerina barely had to touch his flanks with her heel. She released the reins, hugged his neck and leaned forward, resting her head on him, letting the world rumble through her as she fought for breath.
She didn’t know how bad it was until she saw Anders’ face at the stable. He was wide-eyed with shock and fear. He made her sit down, held out a hand as if to say “Wait here” and vanished. When he returned five minutes later, he had some yellow berries in his hand.
“Crush these between your fingers and inhale the vapor,” he said.
She looked at them dubiously.
“Please,” he said. “They will help you,” He held out the berries again. Katerina was impressed. This was the most Anders had ever said to her. She took the berries and squeezed them between her thumb and forefinger. Blood-red juice spurted out with a sickly smell of rotting fruit and mildew. She grimaced. Anders shook his head. Lochinvar and Wilf had joined her now, the big horse gently nudging her head with his, the brown and white dog lying down with his spotted muzzle in her lap. She felt loved and safe, surrounded by friends. Best of all her lungs opened up and she could breathe again.
She stood up. She hugged Anders. Anders flinched: this was an unthinkable breach of protocol. He could be executed like a common criminal if anyone saw them. But Katerina didn’t care. They were alone in the stable. No one ever came down here, except on hunt days.
“It worked,” she said into his ear. “I can breathe again. Thank you so much.”
“I was glad to be of service, Princess,” he said.
She kissed his cheek. “How did you do it?” she asked him. “How did you know about those berries?”
“My father taught me. He was a great healer. He knew hundreds of herbs and salves. He spent his life studying them.”
“What happened to him?”
“He saved the life of the King of France. And he was guillotined for witchcraft.”
She pulled away a little. “I’m so sorry.”
“I had to run away. They wanted to kill me, too. I took his notes and formulas and I’ve kept them. But they have to stay secret. People can’t accept such things. People are afraid.”
He gave her the berries whenever she needed them after that and her difficulties with breathing ended and the court doctors called it a miracle.
“In other words,” Anders said ruefully, “They can’t take the credit but there’s no one to blame.”
And that was all he said.
As time went on and the date of the Princess’ nuptials approached, she sank deeper and deeper into the sadness that no one could explain. Little noises alarmed her, the prospect of a simple family dinner filled her with dread and loathing.
She wanted to tell her father to cancel the wedding; she wanted to tell Torvald that their engagement was broken. But she couldn’t. Instead she kept more and more to herself riding Lochinvar and tending to the horses in the stable. Anders was glad for the help and he never questioned the eccentricity of the Princess’ behavior – after all, everyone knew that her father poked around in the dirt working his garden, with thorn cuts on his wrists and blossoms in his hair. They were an odd family, and that was that. One didn’t question the idiosyncrasies of the nobility, just as you tried your best to conceal your own. The world was not so tolerant of ordinary people, as Anders’ father had discovered.
As it turned out, he was able to help the Princess again, a few weeks later. It was the middle of June and the household was like an occupied country. The servants scuttled from room to room quietly; no one wanted to be noticed. The King would pillory a maid who smiled at him, have a master at hounds whipped for not smiling, banish a chef for no reason at all. He was at war with his daughter and anyone might be a casualty at any time.
Katerina had simply not appeared at her own wedding, humiliating the groom and her father in front of hundreds of guests and townspeople. Worse than that, she refused to either apologize or explain. To Torvald she just said, “I cannot see you any more.” When her father confronted her in a rage she said nothing until he had talked himself out, then asked quietly, “May I go now?”
He let her go, but followed her to the stables and watched her gallop off on Lochinvar. That decided him: her obsession with that horse was the root of the problem. The King didn’t brood over problems, he solved them. And the obvious solution to this problem was to get rid of the horse. He had gotten rid of several unacceptable human suitors in the last few years, sending them off to distant wars being fought over various indeterminate slights by his allies to the North and East.
This equine interloper would be even easier to deal with. His stable was the envy of his vassals and any of them would be honored by the gift. It was only a question of which one of them to choose.
The King made the announcement the next night at dinner. “I’m giving the horse Lochinvar away to the Baron of Vilny,” he said. “His stable has been depleted by injury and Lochinvar is an irksome animal anyway. Very moody and difficult. Apparently he kicked one of the stable boys last month.”
“He’s not difficult if you know how to treat him,” Katerina replied. “You just have to spend time with him.”
It was the wrong thing to say.
“Well, it seems to me that you’ve been spending far too much time with that horse, young lady. It’s not healthy. You’ve been neglecting your responsibilities and the people around you. Everyone is upset. I’m worried about you. And Torvald is heartbroken.”
A torrent of answers cascaded through her mind – that Torvald’s heart was like his nose: broken many times, with little effect except to made him more attractive to certain kinds of women, one of whom he was seeing already. That Lochinvar had ten times Torvald’s character, and was much better company as well. That if anyone was worried or upset, this was the first she had heard about it. In fact, everyone had been avoiding her as if she had some contagious disease. Some physical ailment would have been an improvement. The fact that the illness was in her mind appalled and disgusted everyone. She could see it in their faces. She could hear it in the exaggerated courtesy with which they treated her, as if one wrong word might send her over the edge.
She wanted to say everything -- shout it in her father’s face. But she couldn’t. She didn’t have the strength, it wouldn’t do any good and besides, she knew the moment she started to speak she’d start crying.
Instead, she excused herself from the table.
“I know where you’re going,” her father called after her. “Say your goodbyes while you can! The horse is leaving for Vilny at first light tomorrow.”
Katerina ran to the stables. She had never been so unhappy. It was as if she had been trapped in a dark room for weeks, comforting herself that at least there was space around her; but now she had reached out her arms and touched the walls. She was in a tiny, airless room – a cell, a closet. And still no one would hear her when she screamed, no one would come to let her out.
It was a clear night, warm and calm with a bright crust of stars above her. She ran all the way to the stables and when she got there she was alone. Anders had dismissed the stable boys and gone to bed early. Well, of course, that made sense. He had a big day tomorrow. No doubt a trip to Vilny was an exciting prospect, what with the crowds, and the shops and the beautiful women. It would have to be a country boy’s dream come true.
She hated Anders at that moment. She hated her father and his cronies. She hated her mother for dying. She hated the tiptoeing servants and tutors who whispered around her as if she were insane. She hated everyone and everything.
Except Lochinvar; and Wilf.
The shaggy, sweet-tempered dog had fallen into step beside her. Normally she brought biscuits from the kitchen for him, but she had forgotten tonight.
“No Biscuits?”
She stopped running and looked around. She was out of breath and the courtyard was silent under the stars.
“Who said that?,” she called. Her own voice alarmed her. It sounded like someone else’s. No one answered. She looked around. No scuttling furtive figures, no heads disappearing around corners. She looked down at Wilf. His head was cocked inquiringly. His tail was tapping steadily on the stone work of the enclosure.
Their eyes met.
“No biscuits?,” he said again.
Katerina put her hand to her mouth and stepped back. The dog had spoken to her.
Everyone was right – she was insane. She had finally unhooked the last cables of her rational mind and floated away.
But she found herself talking to the dog, anyway. There didn’t seem to be any reason not to.
“I forgot them,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. I love you. Pet me.”
She scratched behind Wilf’s ear and they walked together to the stables.
In the sweet, hay-smelling shadows, Lochinvar spoke to her also. “I missed you,” he said.
She hugged his neck. “I missed you, too.”
If this was madness, madness might not be such a bad thing after all.
It was long after dark when they returned from their ride. Katerina was currying the big horse with Wilf at her feet. It was a favorite ritual for both of them (She knew for certain now what she had always presumed), but she was distracted tonight. She knew she would be losing him in the morning. She finished finally, and kissed the white flash between his eyes. She didn’t have the heart to say goodbye.
Lochinvar pushed at her head with his own. It something he did often.
“What does it mean when you do that?,” she asked him.
He looked down. “It means … be happy.”
“I can’t tonight,” she said.
She hugged him once more and left the stable.
Coverage
Occasionally, in weak moments, I regret leaving Hollywood and abandoning my screenwriting ambitions. Then I find an angry note like this one, sent to my manager at the time about the girl who was ‘covering’ – reading and supposedly analyzing – scripts in her office.
As far as the coverage goes, someone should write coverage of these reader's reports. They are so smug, snotty and badly thought-out. Any decent English teacher would flunk most of these people on a ninth grade research paper. I don't even know where to begin, so I probably shouldn't. But she missed the point totally. She compares me to the “dreadful” Whit Stillman. Sorry, I take that as a compliment. Sophistication and smart characters freak her out. Well, send her a copy of the Beverly Hillbillies script. It's all intellectualized? Did she notice the over-the-top shouting match on New Year's Eve, or the tooth and claw fight scene between the father and son in Act III? Her comment that there's not enough reason for Joanna to be interested in Robert in the gallery irks me -- as Ben Hecht says, when it's two hot actors, the question is how, not why.
But there’s no reason go point by insipid, tedious point. The heart of the matter is -- and you know this as well as I do, if I revised this thing WITH HER, treating her like a movie director whose opinion actually meant something, and made every change she asked for until it was ABSOLUTELY PERFECT in her estimation ... the next dimwit we showed it to would have a whole other raft of idiotic opinions and I could spend another month fixing it for them ... and on and on until I had done a draft for every lame-ass moron in Hollywood (Which I think I may have actually done by now). To me, needless to say, this is a demented waste of time. Erin Martin is not going to be directing this movie. So her comments are utterly irrelevant ... and fortunately so. If it was up to her, I would never have gotten to see Metropolitan , Barcelona or The Last Days of Disco.
There's another whole essay I could write about the seduction of critiques. Almost any comment can seem valid, just by being written down. In fact it may be that almost any comment is valid, that anything can be said about anything. And not just regarding art. It works for people, too -- we're all slimy and honest and normal and weird and lazy and energetic and lucid and irrational and passive and violent and everything in between. You could say One Man Show has too much backstory, or not enough, or just the right amount and maybe all of those comments would be true ... or none of them. That's why, when one sees a particular comment actually written out with some sense of authority, one naturally goes... Hmmmmm, "that's actually kind of true" ... forgetting that an almost limitless number of other statements could give one exactly the same feeling. They're all "kind of true" . So finally the only "truth" that matters is what you think. All the great Hollywood moguls knew this ... which is why they didn't bother with focus groups. They just made movies. And they made Sunset Boulevard, not Before the Sunset; Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, not Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Those new movies suck because they were composed by committee. And no one could possibly think that’s an improvement.
As far as the coverage goes, someone should write coverage of these reader's reports. They are so smug, snotty and badly thought-out. Any decent English teacher would flunk most of these people on a ninth grade research paper. I don't even know where to begin, so I probably shouldn't. But she missed the point totally. She compares me to the “dreadful” Whit Stillman. Sorry, I take that as a compliment. Sophistication and smart characters freak her out. Well, send her a copy of the Beverly Hillbillies script. It's all intellectualized? Did she notice the over-the-top shouting match on New Year's Eve, or the tooth and claw fight scene between the father and son in Act III? Her comment that there's not enough reason for Joanna to be interested in Robert in the gallery irks me -- as Ben Hecht says, when it's two hot actors, the question is how, not why.
But there’s no reason go point by insipid, tedious point. The heart of the matter is -- and you know this as well as I do, if I revised this thing WITH HER, treating her like a movie director whose opinion actually meant something, and made every change she asked for until it was ABSOLUTELY PERFECT in her estimation ... the next dimwit we showed it to would have a whole other raft of idiotic opinions and I could spend another month fixing it for them ... and on and on until I had done a draft for every lame-ass moron in Hollywood (Which I think I may have actually done by now). To me, needless to say, this is a demented waste of time. Erin Martin is not going to be directing this movie. So her comments are utterly irrelevant ... and fortunately so. If it was up to her, I would never have gotten to see Metropolitan , Barcelona or The Last Days of Disco.
There's another whole essay I could write about the seduction of critiques. Almost any comment can seem valid, just by being written down. In fact it may be that almost any comment is valid, that anything can be said about anything. And not just regarding art. It works for people, too -- we're all slimy and honest and normal and weird and lazy and energetic and lucid and irrational and passive and violent and everything in between. You could say One Man Show has too much backstory, or not enough, or just the right amount and maybe all of those comments would be true ... or none of them. That's why, when one sees a particular comment actually written out with some sense of authority, one naturally goes... Hmmmmm, "that's actually kind of true" ... forgetting that an almost limitless number of other statements could give one exactly the same feeling. They're all "kind of true" . So finally the only "truth" that matters is what you think. All the great Hollywood moguls knew this ... which is why they didn't bother with focus groups. They just made movies. And they made Sunset Boulevard, not Before the Sunset; Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, not Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Those new movies suck because they were composed by committee. And no one could possibly think that’s an improvement.
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
The Long Way Home
I remember visiting Nantucket in 1979, walking down Main Street. Cool, interesting-looking people greeted each other in the cross walks, or chatted by the Compass Rose sign on Washington Street. The sign is a circle with the distances from Nantucket to everywhere else inscribed around the circumference – east to Portugal, west to Hawaii, north to Quebec, south to Buenos Aires. There should have been a small marker for me at the bottom; I felt so distant from this closed convivial world.
I grew up in cities. In New York, where such chance encounters were rare; and Los Angeles, where you moved sealed in separate cars and never saw anyone, except at assigned destinations. Nantucket reminded me of a big college dormitory and made me nostalgic for the ease and adventure of those casual friendships and romances. There was even a phrase current on the island at that time: “See you around the campus.”
It was a remote idyll for me. Adult life as I knew it seemed designed to keep people apart or at least put formal barriers between them. There were protocols and routines and strategies. Phone calls and dates. Activities had to be planned. Appointments had to be made. On Nantucket, it seemed as though you just stopped your car to chat with someone going the opposite way, while two amused and lengthening lines of cars settled in patiently behind you. No one honked. No one was in that much of a hurry.
When I moved here four years later it was more or less against my will and I felt no remnant of that collegiate bonhomie. Just the opposite, in fact. I worked with a bunch of troglodyte carpenters all day, and came home to a crying baby and an angry wife. We had no friends and no chance of making any. Workmen called Nantucket “The Rock”, a reference to Alacatraz that I heartily endorsed. For years I told people I was just visiting; I was sure my writing career would take off and I’d be gone. There’s a passage from my Nantucket mystery novel Owners that captures this feeling perfectly. My character, Cindy Henderson, is being tempted to leave the island (and her husband) by an old high school flame who has become a movie director. He has appeared at her door with a bunch of flowers and two plane tickets.
He held out his hand and all the constraints of her life seemed to rise up and choke her. She was trapped in this petty panopticon town, in her puny, unaccomplished life, stumbling towards middle age. Mark Toland was the natural adversary of this gray world. He could wreck it so easily.
And what did he offer in its place? Glamour, excitement, celebrity, warm winters and ripe oranges. A sunlit David Hockney world of pale blue swimming pools and cool Mexican tile. An Architectural Digest world of dinners on the patio with views of the city lights, brilliant nights of conversation with the people she glimpsed in People magazine, cashmere against the desert chill; palm trees and Bougainvillea among the faint smells of cut grass and eucalyptus.
Nantucket would shrink to a crumb of land on the far end of the map, a second rate film festival, a cage with an unlocked door that she had stepped away from so easily one winter afternoon.
No movie directors were courting me, but that world certainly was. Of course it’s pretty much impossible to succeed in Hollywood while painting houses 60 hours a week three thousand miles away; it might have been impossible under any circumstances. And so I stayed on Nantucket. We had another kid, I went off on my own as a contractor. Writing became my hobby. I told myself I’d try L.A. when the kids were out of high school. But by then I was almost fifty. The odds seemed daunting, the benefits of success, increasingly ephemeral. I had come to enjoy my little scribblings. I had a lot of books I wanted to write, and not much time left to get them all done. Pitching movies I didn’t want to write anyway to a bunch twenty-year old studio executives began to seem like an idiotic waste of time.
So, once again, I stayed on Nantucket.
I had my first inkling that things were changing when I worked a paint job off-island. I walked into a Boston hardware store and was quietly startled by the experience. I didn’t know where to find anything I needed, but that was the least of it. I wasn’t welcome behind the counter. No one who worked in the store knew me; all of the customers were strangers. That hadn’t happened in years. Normally when I go into Marine Home Center, I greet everyone who works there, grab some stir sticks from under the counter, hit on a carpenter I know for a job, discuss a recalcitrant customer with a painter friend, help an acquaintance choose the right gloss for their trim. There are occasional unexpected reunions, complete with hugs and reminiscences. I see old customers, old friends, old crew members. I’ve signed on for local plays by the rosin paper shed and pitched screenplays to local b-list movie actors over the caulk bins. It’s more of a social club than a store, but it took a trip to an Ace hardware outlet in Brookline to make me realize it.
And it’s not just the Marine paint department. When I paddle out to go surfing I see my friend who’s supposed to replace a gutter for me but only wants to talk about when our writers’ group is meeting next. I see his old girlfriend (she’s tiling the new house next door) and all my son’s friends and the guy who shaped my surfboard and the old school longboarder with the earring who it turns out was married to the girl who ran our local literary magazine back in the day. It’s a dense weave of social interactions, so unlike the chilly, territorial world of surfing in Los Angeles.
When I went into the hospital for a minor operation last year, the doctor had operated on me on several occasions and saved one of my fingers after a bad job site accident; the receiving nurse was the mother of my son’s girlfriend; the floor nurse had been our baby sitter fifteen years before. It couldn’t have been more intimate or comforting. I didn’t need three hours in a Boston hospital emergency room for comparison.
It all came home to me last week when I stopped my car on Broad Street to chat with a friend. Cars lined up amiably behind us (All the impatient New Yorkers were gone for the year), and I realized as I gunned the engine again, that I had become one of the people I envied so much on my first visit. This was my town now. It’s claustrophobic sometimes but it’s good and healthy and nourishing, too -- like the Atlantic sea air and the first taste of the scallops in November. I live here and so do my friends and acquaintances and my ex-wife and my ex-girlfriends; my old bosses and employees. We stop and talk on the street and if some tourist pauses to listen and wonder how he might find his way into this closed circle, I could tell him: it’s easy. Just move here, planning to leave, take a job you expect to walk away from for something more glamorous as soon as your ship comes in, while you ride the real ships, “the big ships of the Steamship Authority”, the Nobska and then the Nantucket and the Uncateena and finally the Eagle, in and out back and forth in every season; raise some kids go to the band concerts and the high school plays and finally the graduations and let the dense briny truth of human community rise around you like the tide.
It takes twenty years. But they go by fast.
I grew up in cities. In New York, where such chance encounters were rare; and Los Angeles, where you moved sealed in separate cars and never saw anyone, except at assigned destinations. Nantucket reminded me of a big college dormitory and made me nostalgic for the ease and adventure of those casual friendships and romances. There was even a phrase current on the island at that time: “See you around the campus.”
It was a remote idyll for me. Adult life as I knew it seemed designed to keep people apart or at least put formal barriers between them. There were protocols and routines and strategies. Phone calls and dates. Activities had to be planned. Appointments had to be made. On Nantucket, it seemed as though you just stopped your car to chat with someone going the opposite way, while two amused and lengthening lines of cars settled in patiently behind you. No one honked. No one was in that much of a hurry.
When I moved here four years later it was more or less against my will and I felt no remnant of that collegiate bonhomie. Just the opposite, in fact. I worked with a bunch of troglodyte carpenters all day, and came home to a crying baby and an angry wife. We had no friends and no chance of making any. Workmen called Nantucket “The Rock”, a reference to Alacatraz that I heartily endorsed. For years I told people I was just visiting; I was sure my writing career would take off and I’d be gone. There’s a passage from my Nantucket mystery novel Owners that captures this feeling perfectly. My character, Cindy Henderson, is being tempted to leave the island (and her husband) by an old high school flame who has become a movie director. He has appeared at her door with a bunch of flowers and two plane tickets.
He held out his hand and all the constraints of her life seemed to rise up and choke her. She was trapped in this petty panopticon town, in her puny, unaccomplished life, stumbling towards middle age. Mark Toland was the natural adversary of this gray world. He could wreck it so easily.
And what did he offer in its place? Glamour, excitement, celebrity, warm winters and ripe oranges. A sunlit David Hockney world of pale blue swimming pools and cool Mexican tile. An Architectural Digest world of dinners on the patio with views of the city lights, brilliant nights of conversation with the people she glimpsed in People magazine, cashmere against the desert chill; palm trees and Bougainvillea among the faint smells of cut grass and eucalyptus.
Nantucket would shrink to a crumb of land on the far end of the map, a second rate film festival, a cage with an unlocked door that she had stepped away from so easily one winter afternoon.
No movie directors were courting me, but that world certainly was. Of course it’s pretty much impossible to succeed in Hollywood while painting houses 60 hours a week three thousand miles away; it might have been impossible under any circumstances. And so I stayed on Nantucket. We had another kid, I went off on my own as a contractor. Writing became my hobby. I told myself I’d try L.A. when the kids were out of high school. But by then I was almost fifty. The odds seemed daunting, the benefits of success, increasingly ephemeral. I had come to enjoy my little scribblings. I had a lot of books I wanted to write, and not much time left to get them all done. Pitching movies I didn’t want to write anyway to a bunch twenty-year old studio executives began to seem like an idiotic waste of time.
So, once again, I stayed on Nantucket.
I had my first inkling that things were changing when I worked a paint job off-island. I walked into a Boston hardware store and was quietly startled by the experience. I didn’t know where to find anything I needed, but that was the least of it. I wasn’t welcome behind the counter. No one who worked in the store knew me; all of the customers were strangers. That hadn’t happened in years. Normally when I go into Marine Home Center, I greet everyone who works there, grab some stir sticks from under the counter, hit on a carpenter I know for a job, discuss a recalcitrant customer with a painter friend, help an acquaintance choose the right gloss for their trim. There are occasional unexpected reunions, complete with hugs and reminiscences. I see old customers, old friends, old crew members. I’ve signed on for local plays by the rosin paper shed and pitched screenplays to local b-list movie actors over the caulk bins. It’s more of a social club than a store, but it took a trip to an Ace hardware outlet in Brookline to make me realize it.
And it’s not just the Marine paint department. When I paddle out to go surfing I see my friend who’s supposed to replace a gutter for me but only wants to talk about when our writers’ group is meeting next. I see his old girlfriend (she’s tiling the new house next door) and all my son’s friends and the guy who shaped my surfboard and the old school longboarder with the earring who it turns out was married to the girl who ran our local literary magazine back in the day. It’s a dense weave of social interactions, so unlike the chilly, territorial world of surfing in Los Angeles.
When I went into the hospital for a minor operation last year, the doctor had operated on me on several occasions and saved one of my fingers after a bad job site accident; the receiving nurse was the mother of my son’s girlfriend; the floor nurse had been our baby sitter fifteen years before. It couldn’t have been more intimate or comforting. I didn’t need three hours in a Boston hospital emergency room for comparison.
It all came home to me last week when I stopped my car on Broad Street to chat with a friend. Cars lined up amiably behind us (All the impatient New Yorkers were gone for the year), and I realized as I gunned the engine again, that I had become one of the people I envied so much on my first visit. This was my town now. It’s claustrophobic sometimes but it’s good and healthy and nourishing, too -- like the Atlantic sea air and the first taste of the scallops in November. I live here and so do my friends and acquaintances and my ex-wife and my ex-girlfriends; my old bosses and employees. We stop and talk on the street and if some tourist pauses to listen and wonder how he might find his way into this closed circle, I could tell him: it’s easy. Just move here, planning to leave, take a job you expect to walk away from for something more glamorous as soon as your ship comes in, while you ride the real ships, “the big ships of the Steamship Authority”, the Nobska and then the Nantucket and the Uncateena and finally the Eagle, in and out back and forth in every season; raise some kids go to the band concerts and the high school plays and finally the graduations and let the dense briny truth of human community rise around you like the tide.
It takes twenty years. But they go by fast.
Friday, September 29, 2006
Moving violations
It occurred to me the other day, as yet another Range Rover (or was it an Expedition?) breezed through yet another four way intersection, that there must be a new traffic law in force on Nantucket. The idea of this one is simple: any vehicle whose MSRP exceeds forty thousand dollars can ignore all traffic laws. It explains a lot – The BMW SUV roaring through the cross walk scattering dogs and children in its wake while bemused rent-a-cops look on; The Lexus SUV casually double parked, blocking the street for half an hour at a time; the Mercedes SUV cruising the wrong way on orange Street, ignoring the screams of pedestrians and the horns of other drivers (How could they be expected to hear anything over the twelve speaker sound system blaring out I Did It My Way into the climate controlled leather interior?)
At first I didn’t think much of the new rules; they were roughly comparable to our new legal system where the litigant with the most money wins the case. But recent developments in the larger world have given a sinister connotation to the antics of our Humvee and Suburban owners. A number of the corporate criminals responsible for the collapse of trust in the stock market, bandits who sold out their worthless stocks and escaped the economic catastrophes that followed, leaving their shareholders and workers to face ruin and bankruptcy, own houses right here on Nantucket. Many of them are driving the gas gulping behemoths that wreak terror and havoc on our narrow roads. It makes sense. The same attitude of entitlement and superiority, of oblivious greed and patrician contempt for the lower classes, inform both the corporate behavior and the driving habits of the nouveau royal. Despoil the retirement hopes of a whole generation? Force a moped off Hummock Pond Road? Who cares - as long as you exercised your stock options in time and you get to Bartlett’s before the cilantro runs out.
My private fantasy is that some disgruntled cop who has just watched his 401 k retirement fund disappear will pull over one of these trophy cars with the “I got mine - up yours” bumper sticker and do some vigilante economic re-education. Until then – put your money under a mattress and look both ways when you cross the street.
At first I didn’t think much of the new rules; they were roughly comparable to our new legal system where the litigant with the most money wins the case. But recent developments in the larger world have given a sinister connotation to the antics of our Humvee and Suburban owners. A number of the corporate criminals responsible for the collapse of trust in the stock market, bandits who sold out their worthless stocks and escaped the economic catastrophes that followed, leaving their shareholders and workers to face ruin and bankruptcy, own houses right here on Nantucket. Many of them are driving the gas gulping behemoths that wreak terror and havoc on our narrow roads. It makes sense. The same attitude of entitlement and superiority, of oblivious greed and patrician contempt for the lower classes, inform both the corporate behavior and the driving habits of the nouveau royal. Despoil the retirement hopes of a whole generation? Force a moped off Hummock Pond Road? Who cares - as long as you exercised your stock options in time and you get to Bartlett’s before the cilantro runs out.
My private fantasy is that some disgruntled cop who has just watched his 401 k retirement fund disappear will pull over one of these trophy cars with the “I got mine - up yours” bumper sticker and do some vigilante economic re-education. Until then – put your money under a mattress and look both ways when you cross the street.
9/11, Five Years Later
I wrote this as a letter to my local newspaper, on the day after the attacks. I was furious and slightly unhinged at that moment. The local red-neck bigots all loved the letter; my friends hated it. I wrote another letter in the next's week's paper addressing that anger. It was meant partly as a gesture of concilliation, but mostly to enlarge, qualify and examine what I had been feeling in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. The sentiments in the first letter are raw and harsh; those in the second are more considered and complex. I stand by them both. It was a situation where almost any response seemed valid. Unfortunately, the events of the last five years have rendered the optimism of the second letter poignantly naieve.
The first letter -- dated 9/12/01
I don't know what this makes anyone else feel, but I'll tell you what I'm feeling tonight: sheer red-eyed rage and fury. The amputation of the World Trade Center, the violation of my home town, the sheer senseless, blood and cant-soaked religion fuelled hatred of the act make me feel about the whole world of Islam what they have been feeling about us for decades. They want a religious war? I say give it to them. I say let them find out what happens when they awaken this sleeping giant. I say carpet bomb the whole middle east -- every one of those countries, with all the innocent people in them. This has to be a calamity for them, an act of God, a typhoon, a tidal wave, a rain of toads. They have to learn that they cannot let their lunatic fringe declare war on the most powerful country in the world because if they do we will reach over and crush them like the puny desert bugs they are.
What no American politician has ever understood is that you cannot fight these people in a civilized way. Jimmy Carter never grasped this. He tried to negotiate with a culturally institutionalized mass psychosis. He talked about the energy crisis as the 'moral equivalent of war' and then failed to notice when the real thing actually happened. Iran declared war on us, and we refused to fight it. That sent the terrorists a message they've never forgotten. George Bush Senior only made things worse when he refused to deal decisively with Saddam Hussein. And the same thing is happening again.
George W. is talking about 'hunting down' and 'punishing' the perpetrators. This is just bombastic noise: The ones who committed the act are dead. The ones who gave the orders are impossible to hunt down. It's like finding the one mosquito with the West Nile virus. You don't capture a million mosquitos and give them each a blood test -- you wipe out ALL MOSQUITOS .. or at least you do the best you can. You spray. That's what we have to do.
The sad fact is there's no middle ground between the pathetic nothing of the President’s rhetorical outrage and the ruthless everything of total war. To fight terrorism effectively, innocent people will have to be killed. Beautiful historical sites will have to be destroyed. A whole sick culture will have to go down in flames. It's our God against their God, and Jesus can warm the bench on this play, folks. Because we need the Old Testament God now. We need someone in the White House with the guts to enact the towering rage that is exploding in the American people tonight. If Bush and his geriatric cold warriors can't do it, I volunteer.
It wouldn't cause world war III -- Putin is ready to fight and that's one thing the Russians are good at. If there is a World War III, it will be the whole civilized world united to wipe out this insane cancerous society which has been mestastacising for a thousand years. And we can take out the Taliban while we're at it, and take over the Saudi Oil fields, too.u Those towel-heads have been robbing us blind for decades.
The thing that really broke my heart was watching those towers collapse. I know that the actual crash was the true tragedy; the explosion killed the people. But the utter destruction of the buildings just levelled me. It was like ... the terrorist killed your lover, but before that he yanked out her two front teeth. The death is horrible, but the brutalization and disfigurement is worse somehow. That's the thing that gives you the rage to kill in your turn. And I'm in a killing mood tonight. I just wish our President felt the same way.
The second letter, dated 9/19/01
Several people have told me they thought last weeks’ letter in the Inquirer and Mirror was “insane.” They couldn’t believe I was advocating unilateral military attacks against civilian targets in the middle East. Perhaps I was insane when I wrote those things. But to take a reasonable position on the most appalling attack on our country since the war of 1812 at that moment, before the dust from the ruined towers had even settled on lower Manhattan … that would have been a different kind of insanity. Obviously, I have nothing to do with making military policy in this country. That gives me the luxury to vent my feelings. We all expected Colin Powell and the President to be more measured and – gratefully – they were . But in raving at this murderous outrage I was also trying to articulate feelings that many people shared. My hope was that seeing those raw emotions clearly stated in print might allow others a moment of relief – and a sense of perspective. An aggressive “Right on!” followed by a flinch reaction of “Oh no.”, hate and horror separate but profoundly connected – the lightning flash of bloodlust; and then the slow thunder of rational thought.
I could have written a letter with the opposite viewpoint the next day, and twenty others in the days since. Like everyone else I know, I have felt every possible emotion from helplessness and fear and guilt to the indignation and anger I described last week. The situation is too large and evil and unprecedented for any single reaction, and no one would want the snap-shot of one instant’s emotion to stand as a permanent record of their grief. Even the media, with their relentless ability to hype and exploit and over-dramatize any event, have been outstripped by the reality here.
The tactics I suggested were impractical as well as draconian. We need to find the actual culprits; killing thousands of innocent people in senseless bombing raids would please the terrorists more than anything else we could do. They would love to see us reduced to their level of bloody-toothed grinning barbarism; and even more than that, they would love to see us diminished in the eyes of the world. Because the fact is that we hold the moral high ground against them, for the first time in decades. Even Yassir Arafat is on our side. We have the chance to literally unite the entire globe in a confederation unparalleled in history and unimaginable before the eleventh of September. There might even be greater benefits to be gotten from this alliance than the eradication of terrorism.
Looking up from the smoking rubble of an insane act of war, we can see – if we’re willing to squint through the smoke – the astonishing possibility of a world at peace.
The first letter -- dated 9/12/01
I don't know what this makes anyone else feel, but I'll tell you what I'm feeling tonight: sheer red-eyed rage and fury. The amputation of the World Trade Center, the violation of my home town, the sheer senseless, blood and cant-soaked religion fuelled hatred of the act make me feel about the whole world of Islam what they have been feeling about us for decades. They want a religious war? I say give it to them. I say let them find out what happens when they awaken this sleeping giant. I say carpet bomb the whole middle east -- every one of those countries, with all the innocent people in them. This has to be a calamity for them, an act of God, a typhoon, a tidal wave, a rain of toads. They have to learn that they cannot let their lunatic fringe declare war on the most powerful country in the world because if they do we will reach over and crush them like the puny desert bugs they are.
What no American politician has ever understood is that you cannot fight these people in a civilized way. Jimmy Carter never grasped this. He tried to negotiate with a culturally institutionalized mass psychosis. He talked about the energy crisis as the 'moral equivalent of war' and then failed to notice when the real thing actually happened. Iran declared war on us, and we refused to fight it. That sent the terrorists a message they've never forgotten. George Bush Senior only made things worse when he refused to deal decisively with Saddam Hussein. And the same thing is happening again.
George W. is talking about 'hunting down' and 'punishing' the perpetrators. This is just bombastic noise: The ones who committed the act are dead. The ones who gave the orders are impossible to hunt down. It's like finding the one mosquito with the West Nile virus. You don't capture a million mosquitos and give them each a blood test -- you wipe out ALL MOSQUITOS .. or at least you do the best you can. You spray. That's what we have to do.
The sad fact is there's no middle ground between the pathetic nothing of the President’s rhetorical outrage and the ruthless everything of total war. To fight terrorism effectively, innocent people will have to be killed. Beautiful historical sites will have to be destroyed. A whole sick culture will have to go down in flames. It's our God against their God, and Jesus can warm the bench on this play, folks. Because we need the Old Testament God now. We need someone in the White House with the guts to enact the towering rage that is exploding in the American people tonight. If Bush and his geriatric cold warriors can't do it, I volunteer.
It wouldn't cause world war III -- Putin is ready to fight and that's one thing the Russians are good at. If there is a World War III, it will be the whole civilized world united to wipe out this insane cancerous society which has been mestastacising for a thousand years. And we can take out the Taliban while we're at it, and take over the Saudi Oil fields, too.u Those towel-heads have been robbing us blind for decades.
The thing that really broke my heart was watching those towers collapse. I know that the actual crash was the true tragedy; the explosion killed the people. But the utter destruction of the buildings just levelled me. It was like ... the terrorist killed your lover, but before that he yanked out her two front teeth. The death is horrible, but the brutalization and disfigurement is worse somehow. That's the thing that gives you the rage to kill in your turn. And I'm in a killing mood tonight. I just wish our President felt the same way.
The second letter, dated 9/19/01
Several people have told me they thought last weeks’ letter in the Inquirer and Mirror was “insane.” They couldn’t believe I was advocating unilateral military attacks against civilian targets in the middle East. Perhaps I was insane when I wrote those things. But to take a reasonable position on the most appalling attack on our country since the war of 1812 at that moment, before the dust from the ruined towers had even settled on lower Manhattan … that would have been a different kind of insanity. Obviously, I have nothing to do with making military policy in this country. That gives me the luxury to vent my feelings. We all expected Colin Powell and the President to be more measured and – gratefully – they were . But in raving at this murderous outrage I was also trying to articulate feelings that many people shared. My hope was that seeing those raw emotions clearly stated in print might allow others a moment of relief – and a sense of perspective. An aggressive “Right on!” followed by a flinch reaction of “Oh no.”, hate and horror separate but profoundly connected – the lightning flash of bloodlust; and then the slow thunder of rational thought.
I could have written a letter with the opposite viewpoint the next day, and twenty others in the days since. Like everyone else I know, I have felt every possible emotion from helplessness and fear and guilt to the indignation and anger I described last week. The situation is too large and evil and unprecedented for any single reaction, and no one would want the snap-shot of one instant’s emotion to stand as a permanent record of their grief. Even the media, with their relentless ability to hype and exploit and over-dramatize any event, have been outstripped by the reality here.
The tactics I suggested were impractical as well as draconian. We need to find the actual culprits; killing thousands of innocent people in senseless bombing raids would please the terrorists more than anything else we could do. They would love to see us reduced to their level of bloody-toothed grinning barbarism; and even more than that, they would love to see us diminished in the eyes of the world. Because the fact is that we hold the moral high ground against them, for the first time in decades. Even Yassir Arafat is on our side. We have the chance to literally unite the entire globe in a confederation unparalleled in history and unimaginable before the eleventh of September. There might even be greater benefits to be gotten from this alliance than the eradication of terrorism.
Looking up from the smoking rubble of an insane act of war, we can see – if we’re willing to squint through the smoke – the astonishing possibility of a world at peace.
Monday, September 11, 2006
Old Friends and Ordinary Shoes
It's strange to think of Paul Simon as sixty four years old; no doubt it will be
even more 'terribly strange' to be seventy. I trail him by ten years, leading a far less accomplished life. But the two lives do seem to intersect from time to time. The most critical occasion happened fourteen years ago, as I was lurching through the first months of an ugly divorce. There's a line from Maugham's THE CONSTANT WIFE, where the heroine comments that she and her husband had a lucky marriage because they happened to fall out of love with each other at exactly the same moment.
I had no such luck. I was unceremoniously dumped and it took a while to appreciate my good fortune. At first I was miserable. I experienced authentic insomnia for the only time in my life during those cold autumn nights. Reading didn't help; talking to people didn't help (I was talked out and they were bored senseless by the same old primal whimper). TV grated on me. I tried long walks but the small island where I live seemed more than deserted on a midnight in November. It had an interrupted, concluded quality -- a town after the evacuation, but before the bombs start falling. The silence felt like a preview of annihilation; or maybe it was just my mood.
The only thing that helped was the moment when the guitars and drums kicked in on DIAMONDS ON THE SOLES OF HER SHOES. Some reviewer said that the song 'lilted to the stars' and I couldn't agree more. The charge of sheer energy and joy as that song took off never failed to quiet my jangling nerves and release my clenched spirit. By the time the time the characters in the song were 'sleeping in a doorway /by the bodegas and the lights of upper Broadway', I was fast asleep, also.
I often speculated about what the song might mean. Paul Simon said in numerous interviews that he wasn't sure himself and in any case, lyrics were less important than the 'track' -- the beat and the melody. That may be; certainly this song makes a stirring case for the primacy of rhythm and music over the word. But I couldn't help pondering it anyway, and it occurred to me one morning after a startlingly good night's sleep, that the diamonds represented a state of grace, an incalculable wealth that didn't need to be flaunted, that turned walking into a mystery and made a kind of secret society out of everyone who understood that sorrow is incidental and joy is within your grasp.
I still feel that way when I hear the song -- despite my ordinary shoes -- remembering how it floated me over a shallow patch by a rocky shore during the lowest tide of my life.
even more 'terribly strange' to be seventy. I trail him by ten years, leading a far less accomplished life. But the two lives do seem to intersect from time to time. The most critical occasion happened fourteen years ago, as I was lurching through the first months of an ugly divorce. There's a line from Maugham's THE CONSTANT WIFE, where the heroine comments that she and her husband had a lucky marriage because they happened to fall out of love with each other at exactly the same moment.
I had no such luck. I was unceremoniously dumped and it took a while to appreciate my good fortune. At first I was miserable. I experienced authentic insomnia for the only time in my life during those cold autumn nights. Reading didn't help; talking to people didn't help (I was talked out and they were bored senseless by the same old primal whimper). TV grated on me. I tried long walks but the small island where I live seemed more than deserted on a midnight in November. It had an interrupted, concluded quality -- a town after the evacuation, but before the bombs start falling. The silence felt like a preview of annihilation; or maybe it was just my mood.
The only thing that helped was the moment when the guitars and drums kicked in on DIAMONDS ON THE SOLES OF HER SHOES. Some reviewer said that the song 'lilted to the stars' and I couldn't agree more. The charge of sheer energy and joy as that song took off never failed to quiet my jangling nerves and release my clenched spirit. By the time the time the characters in the song were 'sleeping in a doorway /by the bodegas and the lights of upper Broadway', I was fast asleep, also.
I often speculated about what the song might mean. Paul Simon said in numerous interviews that he wasn't sure himself and in any case, lyrics were less important than the 'track' -- the beat and the melody. That may be; certainly this song makes a stirring case for the primacy of rhythm and music over the word. But I couldn't help pondering it anyway, and it occurred to me one morning after a startlingly good night's sleep, that the diamonds represented a state of grace, an incalculable wealth that didn't need to be flaunted, that turned walking into a mystery and made a kind of secret society out of everyone who understood that sorrow is incidental and joy is within your grasp.
I still feel that way when I hear the song -- despite my ordinary shoes -- remembering how it floated me over a shallow patch by a rocky shore during the lowest tide of my life.
Monday, September 04, 2006
Another Rite of Passage
My son went off to college yesterday. I left him at the airport feeling proud but lonely and oddly bereft. Obsolete; but as my Mother often points out, that should be any parent's ultimate goal. It made me think of something I wrote on the day he graduated from high school, which is worth posting here for the record:
My son Nick graduated from high school today, and I was stunned by the ambush of emotion. For years it seems I’ve known every possible sentiment ahead of time, shrugging as they trundled towards me: this is going to make me angry, that will be fun; whatever. But this came at me from too many directions at once. It was strange and troubling to have a feeling I couldn’t identify.
I grasped just bits and pieces of it at first. I felt a tug of genuine suspense when Nick was crossing the stage to pick up his diploma … as if something might happen to screw it up, as if the diploma itself might be blank. I know other people felt the same way: I made the joke with a few of the parents I knew, and saw the nervous smile of recognition on their faces. Then came the relief. It was over, we did it, he made it.
I called my ex-wife and we talked for a while. Later, I said to my Mom, “No one else knows what this feels like.” And she said, “What about me? I’ve been through it, too.” We hugged and I found that I was crying. She said: “For twenty years you’ve been putting yourself last; now you can finally put yourself first. You can finally do what you want. But what is that?” And I really had no idea. But I feel like some huge changes could begin now; as if I had graduated, not Nick.
But even that isn’t all. Nick’s graduation unplugs me from a whole community that I didn’t even know I cared about. I wasn’t really part of it, in any big way: I didn’t volunteer, or chaperone or substitute teach. But I knew these kids, and through them their parents and through those families the real life of the island I lived on and the town that had somehow, almost against my will, become my home. Now that living connection is gone, too. The next bunch of kids will be strangers to me; the next crazy teacher won’t be my problem. So this rite of passage isolates me. It makes me feel my age. I finished my fiftieth year, my first real novel and my children’s high school careers all in the same week. That’s a lot of endings.
At the senior ball a few days ago I looked around at the kids dancing and felt so much like one of them. My own delirious prom – on a different continent, almost a third of the way back into an earlier century, in a long-extinct world of bell-bottoms and LBJ - was so close it seemed like it was still happening. Then I looked around at the baggy, graying adults jostled by the vivid pulsing life around them, shaking their heads and taking pictures … and I realized with a thud, it was actually as if I had dropped something, that I was one of them: I was just another beloved but marginal Dad, too old to matter at that moment, on my way out, letting them have the night to themselves.
It had happened at last: they were all grown up.
It was disorienting: something huge and minutely detailed, a whole world, really, had disappeared in an instant. The secret core of my identity had become a technicality. Of course I’m still a parent and always will be. But my job is complete. This is the moment we were striving for. And I’m happy about it, just like I’m supposed to be. Still, the sadness under that triumph is all around me, pervasive as the weather. This moment feels like a picnic in the rain, and it’s raining hard on Nantucket today, in the middle of the wettest late spring on record. Despite the joy, I feel displaced, like an executive forced into early retirement, but given a seat on the Board. My status may be the same, but my daily life will be permanently diminished.
My brother Peter came to Nantucket for the graduation, and he walked into the house with a bag of groceries a few minutes ago. Mom stood up as he came in – cutting me off in the middle of a sentence. I asked her, “Why did you get up?” She said, “I thought Peter needed help.” He just looked at her with a patient baffled smile (he has no children). He said, “I’m fine Mom,” and started unpacking the food. She sat down again, and I said, “I guess that’s a look I’m going to have to start getting used to.”
She nodded a little sadly. “Yes,” she said. “But you never will.”
My son Nick graduated from high school today, and I was stunned by the ambush of emotion. For years it seems I’ve known every possible sentiment ahead of time, shrugging as they trundled towards me: this is going to make me angry, that will be fun; whatever. But this came at me from too many directions at once. It was strange and troubling to have a feeling I couldn’t identify.
I grasped just bits and pieces of it at first. I felt a tug of genuine suspense when Nick was crossing the stage to pick up his diploma … as if something might happen to screw it up, as if the diploma itself might be blank. I know other people felt the same way: I made the joke with a few of the parents I knew, and saw the nervous smile of recognition on their faces. Then came the relief. It was over, we did it, he made it.
I called my ex-wife and we talked for a while. Later, I said to my Mom, “No one else knows what this feels like.” And she said, “What about me? I’ve been through it, too.” We hugged and I found that I was crying. She said: “For twenty years you’ve been putting yourself last; now you can finally put yourself first. You can finally do what you want. But what is that?” And I really had no idea. But I feel like some huge changes could begin now; as if I had graduated, not Nick.
But even that isn’t all. Nick’s graduation unplugs me from a whole community that I didn’t even know I cared about. I wasn’t really part of it, in any big way: I didn’t volunteer, or chaperone or substitute teach. But I knew these kids, and through them their parents and through those families the real life of the island I lived on and the town that had somehow, almost against my will, become my home. Now that living connection is gone, too. The next bunch of kids will be strangers to me; the next crazy teacher won’t be my problem. So this rite of passage isolates me. It makes me feel my age. I finished my fiftieth year, my first real novel and my children’s high school careers all in the same week. That’s a lot of endings.
At the senior ball a few days ago I looked around at the kids dancing and felt so much like one of them. My own delirious prom – on a different continent, almost a third of the way back into an earlier century, in a long-extinct world of bell-bottoms and LBJ - was so close it seemed like it was still happening. Then I looked around at the baggy, graying adults jostled by the vivid pulsing life around them, shaking their heads and taking pictures … and I realized with a thud, it was actually as if I had dropped something, that I was one of them: I was just another beloved but marginal Dad, too old to matter at that moment, on my way out, letting them have the night to themselves.
It had happened at last: they were all grown up.
It was disorienting: something huge and minutely detailed, a whole world, really, had disappeared in an instant. The secret core of my identity had become a technicality. Of course I’m still a parent and always will be. But my job is complete. This is the moment we were striving for. And I’m happy about it, just like I’m supposed to be. Still, the sadness under that triumph is all around me, pervasive as the weather. This moment feels like a picnic in the rain, and it’s raining hard on Nantucket today, in the middle of the wettest late spring on record. Despite the joy, I feel displaced, like an executive forced into early retirement, but given a seat on the Board. My status may be the same, but my daily life will be permanently diminished.
My brother Peter came to Nantucket for the graduation, and he walked into the house with a bag of groceries a few minutes ago. Mom stood up as he came in – cutting me off in the middle of a sentence. I asked her, “Why did you get up?” She said, “I thought Peter needed help.” He just looked at her with a patient baffled smile (he has no children). He said, “I’m fine Mom,” and started unpacking the food. She sat down again, and I said, “I guess that’s a look I’m going to have to start getting used to.”
She nodded a little sadly. “Yes,” she said. “But you never will.”
Sunday, August 13, 2006
The Pooh Template
For most of human history people have devised elaborate ways of classifying each others’ personalities. Race prejudice is an obvious example, a simple template which lets us know without a moment of observation or rational thought that this person is lazy and that one is stingy and the other one is shrewd. Psychologists have come with various labels, each branch having its own guidebook to human habit and pathology. Hippocrates had his four humors, Rudolf Steiner divided people into the sanguine, phlegmatic, melancholic and the choleric. William Sheldon famously separated people by body type into ectomorph, mesomorph and endomorph. Then there are the superstitious systems – tarot, which gives some 78 options and astrology which offers at least twelve. These categories give you a sense of human community and way to name and share your eccentricities, whether you’re a Gemini with Taurus rising or the Prince of Cups. Some people trust the enneagram, which classifies nine types of personality.
Each of these systems has its merits, but mine renders them all obsolete.
Yes, there’s no reason for false modesty here: I have devised the one foolproof method for describing and evaluating the human character. The source material for this system contains the prototypes which alone or in combination, account for every variation of temperament and disposition. It’s foolproof and profoundly insightful – that is to say, it’s no more arbitrary and nonsensical than any of the others. And, most importantly, it’s fun.
I call it the Pooh Template. Everyone you know contains some unique combination of A.A. Milne’s characters:
Rabbit, The bossy gossip, always surrounded by friends and relations.
Owl, The pretentious faux intellectual who enjoys feeling superior to the other animals,though he can’t even spell properly.
Piglet, The energetic true friend always up for an adventure , whether it’s
looking for the north pole and hunting the elusive heffalump.
Pooh, The lazy, optimistic and simple minded sybarite with a flair for doggerel about food (Isn’t it funny how a bear likes hunny; buzz,buzz,buzz, I wonder why he does)
Tigger, The wildly passionate, overly energetic but generally misguided enthusiast(They eat anything! Except Honey. And thistles. And acorns …)
Eeyore, The gloomy pessimist who manages to lose his own tail on his birthday.
Kanga, The fiercely protective mother.
And , lastly, Christopher Robin, the natural leader.
If you apply these types, you’ll see that one friend is mostly Rabbit, with a dash of owl and a saving dollop of Piglet; while another is almost all Eeyore with a trace of Pooh. We can play the game together using celebrities. Paris Hilton? Part Rabbit, part Tigger and lot of Pooh. George Bush? A dangerous Pooh-Tigger combo. Dick Cheney? Owl-Eeyore-Christopher Robin. Meryl Streep? Kanga-Piglet and a dash of Rabbit. Tom Cruise? Another Owl-Tigger … with endearing trace elements of pooh and piglet (“I feel great! Sure I’ll do the stunt!) American Idol judges? Let’s see … Simon is mostly Owl, with good amounts of Eeyore and Christopher Robin. Paula is mostly Kanga, with some Tigger and Pooh. Randy? Mostly Pooh, but there’s a little Piglet in there, fortunately. A little Piglet in the mix always helps.
That should give you the general idea. Now you’re on your own.
Each of these systems has its merits, but mine renders them all obsolete.
Yes, there’s no reason for false modesty here: I have devised the one foolproof method for describing and evaluating the human character. The source material for this system contains the prototypes which alone or in combination, account for every variation of temperament and disposition. It’s foolproof and profoundly insightful – that is to say, it’s no more arbitrary and nonsensical than any of the others. And, most importantly, it’s fun.
I call it the Pooh Template. Everyone you know contains some unique combination of A.A. Milne’s characters:
Rabbit, The bossy gossip, always surrounded by friends and relations.
Owl, The pretentious faux intellectual who enjoys feeling superior to the other animals,though he can’t even spell properly.
Piglet, The energetic true friend always up for an adventure , whether it’s
looking for the north pole and hunting the elusive heffalump.
Pooh, The lazy, optimistic and simple minded sybarite with a flair for doggerel about food (Isn’t it funny how a bear likes hunny; buzz,buzz,buzz, I wonder why he does)
Tigger, The wildly passionate, overly energetic but generally misguided enthusiast(They eat anything! Except Honey. And thistles. And acorns …)
Eeyore, The gloomy pessimist who manages to lose his own tail on his birthday.
Kanga, The fiercely protective mother.
And , lastly, Christopher Robin, the natural leader.
If you apply these types, you’ll see that one friend is mostly Rabbit, with a dash of owl and a saving dollop of Piglet; while another is almost all Eeyore with a trace of Pooh. We can play the game together using celebrities. Paris Hilton? Part Rabbit, part Tigger and lot of Pooh. George Bush? A dangerous Pooh-Tigger combo. Dick Cheney? Owl-Eeyore-Christopher Robin. Meryl Streep? Kanga-Piglet and a dash of Rabbit. Tom Cruise? Another Owl-Tigger … with endearing trace elements of pooh and piglet (“I feel great! Sure I’ll do the stunt!) American Idol judges? Let’s see … Simon is mostly Owl, with good amounts of Eeyore and Christopher Robin. Paula is mostly Kanga, with some Tigger and Pooh. Randy? Mostly Pooh, but there’s a little Piglet in there, fortunately. A little Piglet in the mix always helps.
That should give you the general idea. Now you’re on your own.
Thursday, August 10, 2006
1984 at 22
I just finished reading 1984 again; it something everyone should do every few years. It's always relevant, unfortunately. And it's always an inspiration.
It’s easy to dismiss Orwell’s masterpiece as a quaint and dated dystopia, a banal nightmare of the future cobbled together in 1948 out of the dingy present and the recent past: the bombed out London of the novel looks like nothing so much as that city under the blitz. The scarcities and rationing, the war frenzy, the propaganda and paranoia required no imagination to describe. They were right in front of him. These critics use Orwell’s merciless reportorial skill as a brief against his imagination. His grim fantasy is all too realistic. It fails both as fantasy and prophesy. The titular date has come and gone, they point out. The world is not divided into three super powers perpetually at war; no telescreens invade our privacy. No all-powerful totalitarian state controls our lives, which are in fact more free and prosperous than anyone could have imagined at the bleak and dreary end of the Second World War. Of the computer and the internet, plausibly the most significant new developments since that time, Orwell had not an inkling.
But this superficial reading of the book, whereby we comfort ourselves with the fact that we drink Bombay Sapphire rather than Victory Gin, is tragically naive and misguided. In fact every basic concept, every philosophical and political development Orwell addressed in his book has come to pass almost exactly as described.
Compare this infamous quote from Ron Susskind’s October 17, 2004 New York Times Magazine article, “Without a Doubt”, with a particularly telling fragment of 1984.
First, Susskind:
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''
Now, Orwell, from p. 82 of the novel:
In the end, the party would announce that two and two made five and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they would make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.
The terminology he created colors our thinking every day. Paul Krugman talks about memory holes, as he derides the Bush administration for trying to rewrite the past and obliterate or classify any evidence that disputes their revisionism. More and more, as each scandal breaks in the news, it’s obvious that Big Brother, in the form of the IRS , Homeland Security, the NSA or the CIA, is indeed watching us. Even the On-Star GPS units in our SUVs are tricked out to function as surveillance tools. Doublethink abounds – from the “Peacekeeper” missile to the "Clear Skies" initiative to the “No Child Left Behind” program, which are – respectively -- a weapon of mass destruction, a blank check for polluters and a shockingly effective attack on our basic educational system, complete with drastic funding cuts.
Orwell nailed the degeneration of mass culture, as well – whether in the big novel writing machines that generate plots on giant kaleidoscopes or the ‘versificator’ which manufactures generic popular music for the proles. Reading any romance novel or watching any episode of American Idol confirms Orwell’s prescience with disheartening clarity. He was just as accurate about Mass Millions and The Reader’s Digest Sweepstakes … or “the Lottery” as he called it:
The Lottery, with its weekly pay-out of enormous prizes, was the one public event to which the proles paid serious attention. It was probable that there were some millions of proles for whom the Lottery was the principle if not the only reason for remaining alive. It was their delight, their folly, their anodyne, their intellectual stimulant. Where the Lottery was concerned, even people who could barely read and write seemed capable of intricate calculations and staggering feats of memory.
Far more importantly, Orwell analyzed the way people driven by the need for power actually think. This is the most useful insight in his book, delivered by the Grand Inquisitor O’Brien:
“The Party seeks power entirely for it’s own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury, or long life or happiness: only power, pure power … We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture … How does one man assert his power over another? … By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering how can you be sure he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”
To this bleak vision the battered and terrified Winston Smith has one reply: “Somehow you will fail. Something will defeat you. Life will defeat you.”
Of course in the novel it is Winston Smith who is defeated and obliterated, after learning to love Big Brother. The story is unrelenting, a harsh tragedy in which the human spirit is crushed and the future is too horrible to contemplate. The good guys lose. They are forced to betray their deepest beliefs and emotions, gutted of their souls and left to wander the streets like hollow eyed ghosts. Evil wins, over and over again, with a shriek of glee and blare of military music. The book ought to be profoundly depressing
And yet it isn’t. Just the opposite: it’s uplifting, thrilling. It’s a form of meta-text: the fact that you are reading he book at all, the fact that the book was written and published, confounds the darkness of its message. Winston Smith knows no one will ever read his journal … but people will be reading the novel that contains it for as long as books exist. The authors of the Newspeak dictionary exult in the destruction of language; the mandarins of the inner Party continuously dismantle all passion and morality and truth. But the novel itself, with its vivid prose and ferocious probity creates an exhilaration, a giddy hope in the reader that its characters can never share.
And it sounds a warning that any reader can act on. Many have acted on it, invoking Orwell over and over again in the fight against tyranny, from HUAC to the Patriot Act. The book remains an inspiration and a surprisingly durable bulwark against the very world it so brilliantly described. That’s about as much as you could ask from any novel, but this one has so much more: the vibrant density of authentic literature, visible on every page. Page 165, for instance:
He would have liked to continue talking about his mother. He did not suppose, from what he could remember of her, that she had been an unusual woman, still less an intelligent one; and yet she had possessed a kind of nobility, a kind of purity, simply because the standards she obeyed were private ones. Her feelings were her own, and could not be altered from outside. It would not have occurred to her that an action which is in effectual thereby becomes meaningless. If you loved someone, you loved him and when you had nothing else to give you still gave him love. When the last of the chocolate was gone, his mother had clasped the child in her arms. It was no use, it changed nothing, it did not produce more chocolate, it not avert the child’s death or her own; but it seemed natural to her to do it. The refugee woman in the boat had also covered the little boy with her arm, which was no more use against the bullets than a sheet of paper. The terrible thing that the Party had done was to persuade you that mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same time robbing you of all power over the material world. Hen once you were in the grip of the party, what you felt or did not feel, what you did or refrained from doing, made literally no difference. Whatever happened, you vanished, and neither you nor your actions were ever heard of again. You were lifted clean out of the stream of history. And yet, to the people of only two generations ago, tis would not have seemed all-important, because they were not attempting to alter history. They were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself. The proles, it suddenly occurred to him, had remained in this condition. They were not loyal to a party or a country or an idea, they were loyal to one another. For the first time in his life he did not despise the proles, or think of them merely as an inert force which would one day spring to life and regenerate the world. The proles had stayed human. They had not become hardened inside. They had held onto the primitive emotions which he himself had to relearn by conscious effort. And in thinking this he remembered, without apparent relevance, how a few weeks ago he had seen a severed hand lying on the pavement and had kicked it into the gutter as though it had been a cabbage stalk.
Maybe that’s all it is: Orwell helps us stay human, an effort every bit as delicate and critical as it was the day 1984 was published. It’s never going to get any easier. But this book will always help.
It’s easy to dismiss Orwell’s masterpiece as a quaint and dated dystopia, a banal nightmare of the future cobbled together in 1948 out of the dingy present and the recent past: the bombed out London of the novel looks like nothing so much as that city under the blitz. The scarcities and rationing, the war frenzy, the propaganda and paranoia required no imagination to describe. They were right in front of him. These critics use Orwell’s merciless reportorial skill as a brief against his imagination. His grim fantasy is all too realistic. It fails both as fantasy and prophesy. The titular date has come and gone, they point out. The world is not divided into three super powers perpetually at war; no telescreens invade our privacy. No all-powerful totalitarian state controls our lives, which are in fact more free and prosperous than anyone could have imagined at the bleak and dreary end of the Second World War. Of the computer and the internet, plausibly the most significant new developments since that time, Orwell had not an inkling.
But this superficial reading of the book, whereby we comfort ourselves with the fact that we drink Bombay Sapphire rather than Victory Gin, is tragically naive and misguided. In fact every basic concept, every philosophical and political development Orwell addressed in his book has come to pass almost exactly as described.
Compare this infamous quote from Ron Susskind’s October 17, 2004 New York Times Magazine article, “Without a Doubt”, with a particularly telling fragment of 1984.
First, Susskind:
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''
Now, Orwell, from p. 82 of the novel:
In the end, the party would announce that two and two made five and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they would make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.
The terminology he created colors our thinking every day. Paul Krugman talks about memory holes, as he derides the Bush administration for trying to rewrite the past and obliterate or classify any evidence that disputes their revisionism. More and more, as each scandal breaks in the news, it’s obvious that Big Brother, in the form of the IRS , Homeland Security, the NSA or the CIA, is indeed watching us. Even the On-Star GPS units in our SUVs are tricked out to function as surveillance tools. Doublethink abounds – from the “Peacekeeper” missile to the "Clear Skies" initiative to the “No Child Left Behind” program, which are – respectively -- a weapon of mass destruction, a blank check for polluters and a shockingly effective attack on our basic educational system, complete with drastic funding cuts.
Orwell nailed the degeneration of mass culture, as well – whether in the big novel writing machines that generate plots on giant kaleidoscopes or the ‘versificator’ which manufactures generic popular music for the proles. Reading any romance novel or watching any episode of American Idol confirms Orwell’s prescience with disheartening clarity. He was just as accurate about Mass Millions and The Reader’s Digest Sweepstakes … or “the Lottery” as he called it:
The Lottery, with its weekly pay-out of enormous prizes, was the one public event to which the proles paid serious attention. It was probable that there were some millions of proles for whom the Lottery was the principle if not the only reason for remaining alive. It was their delight, their folly, their anodyne, their intellectual stimulant. Where the Lottery was concerned, even people who could barely read and write seemed capable of intricate calculations and staggering feats of memory.
Far more importantly, Orwell analyzed the way people driven by the need for power actually think. This is the most useful insight in his book, delivered by the Grand Inquisitor O’Brien:
“The Party seeks power entirely for it’s own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury, or long life or happiness: only power, pure power … We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture … How does one man assert his power over another? … By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering how can you be sure he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”
To this bleak vision the battered and terrified Winston Smith has one reply: “Somehow you will fail. Something will defeat you. Life will defeat you.”
Of course in the novel it is Winston Smith who is defeated and obliterated, after learning to love Big Brother. The story is unrelenting, a harsh tragedy in which the human spirit is crushed and the future is too horrible to contemplate. The good guys lose. They are forced to betray their deepest beliefs and emotions, gutted of their souls and left to wander the streets like hollow eyed ghosts. Evil wins, over and over again, with a shriek of glee and blare of military music. The book ought to be profoundly depressing
And yet it isn’t. Just the opposite: it’s uplifting, thrilling. It’s a form of meta-text: the fact that you are reading he book at all, the fact that the book was written and published, confounds the darkness of its message. Winston Smith knows no one will ever read his journal … but people will be reading the novel that contains it for as long as books exist. The authors of the Newspeak dictionary exult in the destruction of language; the mandarins of the inner Party continuously dismantle all passion and morality and truth. But the novel itself, with its vivid prose and ferocious probity creates an exhilaration, a giddy hope in the reader that its characters can never share.
And it sounds a warning that any reader can act on. Many have acted on it, invoking Orwell over and over again in the fight against tyranny, from HUAC to the Patriot Act. The book remains an inspiration and a surprisingly durable bulwark against the very world it so brilliantly described. That’s about as much as you could ask from any novel, but this one has so much more: the vibrant density of authentic literature, visible on every page. Page 165, for instance:
He would have liked to continue talking about his mother. He did not suppose, from what he could remember of her, that she had been an unusual woman, still less an intelligent one; and yet she had possessed a kind of nobility, a kind of purity, simply because the standards she obeyed were private ones. Her feelings were her own, and could not be altered from outside. It would not have occurred to her that an action which is in effectual thereby becomes meaningless. If you loved someone, you loved him and when you had nothing else to give you still gave him love. When the last of the chocolate was gone, his mother had clasped the child in her arms. It was no use, it changed nothing, it did not produce more chocolate, it not avert the child’s death or her own; but it seemed natural to her to do it. The refugee woman in the boat had also covered the little boy with her arm, which was no more use against the bullets than a sheet of paper. The terrible thing that the Party had done was to persuade you that mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same time robbing you of all power over the material world. Hen once you were in the grip of the party, what you felt or did not feel, what you did or refrained from doing, made literally no difference. Whatever happened, you vanished, and neither you nor your actions were ever heard of again. You were lifted clean out of the stream of history. And yet, to the people of only two generations ago, tis would not have seemed all-important, because they were not attempting to alter history. They were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself. The proles, it suddenly occurred to him, had remained in this condition. They were not loyal to a party or a country or an idea, they were loyal to one another. For the first time in his life he did not despise the proles, or think of them merely as an inert force which would one day spring to life and regenerate the world. The proles had stayed human. They had not become hardened inside. They had held onto the primitive emotions which he himself had to relearn by conscious effort. And in thinking this he remembered, without apparent relevance, how a few weeks ago he had seen a severed hand lying on the pavement and had kicked it into the gutter as though it had been a cabbage stalk.
Maybe that’s all it is: Orwell helps us stay human, an effort every bit as delicate and critical as it was the day 1984 was published. It’s never going to get any easier. But this book will always help.
Monday, March 06, 2006
After the Oscars
It was a predictable night, and a frustrating one.
I liked CRASH; BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN was tedious if undeniably significant. But the movie that was better and more important than both of them put together won nothing. Don't get me wrong. I was glad CRASH won; it was an excellent film. BROKEBACK just wasn't good enough. It wasn't scandalous or ground breaking or outrageous or powerful ... just slow and dull. I was bored. Story points were ignored: we find out YEARS LATER that wifey booby-trapped the fishing tackle to see if Ennis was really fishing or not. First of all -- would it have killed them to actually fish a little? But anyway, the trap was sprung, she knew right then, YEARS AGO, that the fishing was bullshit. But she waits decades to bring it up. Why? Because the writers and director are insanely invested in having a crushingly static story where nothing ever happens. Call me a phillisitine, but I like movies where something does actually happen from time to time. I'll say it again, since Ang Lee is a notorious wide-screen-panoramas-of-the-mountains and drops-of-water-on-the grass style film-maker: you can't tell a story with scenery. You have to tell it with scenes.
But pretty pictures are easy; confrontations and the repercussions of those confrontations are anything but. Writing characters going at each other and altering the course of their lives ... that's hard work. Work: what we fucking pay you for, Ang. Anyone with a camcorder and a flock of sheep can do what you did. You have to do a little more if you want that gold statue at the end of the night.
It's funny, so many people talked about how "homophobia" killed BROKEBACK's chances for the Oscar. But no one mentioned the hawkish pro-Israel political orthodoxy that killed MUNICH. That's a good way to get blacklisted ... or is it shitlisted now? Whatever. So no one said a word, not even Spielberg. But he knew; and to his credit, he must have known before he ever started shooting the movie. But he went ahead and shot it anyway.
I can't help wondering what his old pal George Lucas must be thinking, if any actual self-analytcal thought penetrates his Death-star fortress of narcissistic self-delusion. They started out together, kind of on the same level, making pop-corn movies ... JAWS, STAR WARS, sharing the credit (rightly or wrongly) for inventing the 'blockbuster' and destroying the golden age of film-making. But look at them now. George wheezing out the last pathetic, unwatchable loogie of derivitive phglem he's been hawking up for 30 years ... and Steve making MUNICH. If I were George I'd want to rise to the occasion and try to make a film that mattered to someone besides comic-book geeks ... or else just retire and count my money. He thinks of himself as a 'maverick' who rejects Hollywood, but that's the standard tinsel town finally judges you by, the gold standard, and he cares about it just as much as any craven studio executive. It's a trap, though. Millions of people may have seen the last STAR WARS; but for most of them it was a duty, something they had to do just to be done with it -- like an afternoon in divorce court or an apendectomy.
MUNICH may nave been a relative 'flop', but it's going to last, and the people who paid their money and let themselves be harrowed by the ravishing imagery and the ugly facts know they got what people have been going to the movies for since D.W Griffith invented the tracking shot: a dream that grabs you when you're wide awake, and hangs on until you get insomnia, that forces you to notice and doesn't let you forget.
That's what they ought to give Oscars for. But not this year. I don't think Spielberg really gives a damn, though. So I'm trying not to, either. Jon Stewart was funny and the dresses looked good.
That's enough for me.
I liked CRASH; BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN was tedious if undeniably significant. But the movie that was better and more important than both of them put together won nothing. Don't get me wrong. I was glad CRASH won; it was an excellent film. BROKEBACK just wasn't good enough. It wasn't scandalous or ground breaking or outrageous or powerful ... just slow and dull. I was bored. Story points were ignored: we find out YEARS LATER that wifey booby-trapped the fishing tackle to see if Ennis was really fishing or not. First of all -- would it have killed them to actually fish a little? But anyway, the trap was sprung, she knew right then, YEARS AGO, that the fishing was bullshit. But she waits decades to bring it up. Why? Because the writers and director are insanely invested in having a crushingly static story where nothing ever happens. Call me a phillisitine, but I like movies where something does actually happen from time to time. I'll say it again, since Ang Lee is a notorious wide-screen-panoramas-of-the-mountains and drops-of-water-on-the grass style film-maker: you can't tell a story with scenery. You have to tell it with scenes.
But pretty pictures are easy; confrontations and the repercussions of those confrontations are anything but. Writing characters going at each other and altering the course of their lives ... that's hard work. Work: what we fucking pay you for, Ang. Anyone with a camcorder and a flock of sheep can do what you did. You have to do a little more if you want that gold statue at the end of the night.
It's funny, so many people talked about how "homophobia" killed BROKEBACK's chances for the Oscar. But no one mentioned the hawkish pro-Israel political orthodoxy that killed MUNICH. That's a good way to get blacklisted ... or is it shitlisted now? Whatever. So no one said a word, not even Spielberg. But he knew; and to his credit, he must have known before he ever started shooting the movie. But he went ahead and shot it anyway.
I can't help wondering what his old pal George Lucas must be thinking, if any actual self-analytcal thought penetrates his Death-star fortress of narcissistic self-delusion. They started out together, kind of on the same level, making pop-corn movies ... JAWS, STAR WARS, sharing the credit (rightly or wrongly) for inventing the 'blockbuster' and destroying the golden age of film-making. But look at them now. George wheezing out the last pathetic, unwatchable loogie of derivitive phglem he's been hawking up for 30 years ... and Steve making MUNICH. If I were George I'd want to rise to the occasion and try to make a film that mattered to someone besides comic-book geeks ... or else just retire and count my money. He thinks of himself as a 'maverick' who rejects Hollywood, but that's the standard tinsel town finally judges you by, the gold standard, and he cares about it just as much as any craven studio executive. It's a trap, though. Millions of people may have seen the last STAR WARS; but for most of them it was a duty, something they had to do just to be done with it -- like an afternoon in divorce court or an apendectomy.
MUNICH may nave been a relative 'flop', but it's going to last, and the people who paid their money and let themselves be harrowed by the ravishing imagery and the ugly facts know they got what people have been going to the movies for since D.W Griffith invented the tracking shot: a dream that grabs you when you're wide awake, and hangs on until you get insomnia, that forces you to notice and doesn't let you forget.
That's what they ought to give Oscars for. But not this year. I don't think Spielberg really gives a damn, though. So I'm trying not to, either. Jon Stewart was funny and the dresses looked good.
That's enough for me.
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
Cut-rate Parasites
So what do Google, Joe Biden and Colin Powell have in common? Each found themselves at the juncture of history and conscience; each had an opportunity to make a stand and change things for the better. Each of them failed. Each of them had a counterpart who was somehow less despicable, though far more vile. There’s no disappointment when you expect the worst of a villain and you get it. Each new lie and betrayal provokes little more than a fatalistic shrug. It’s when you expect a crucial gesture of decency that your heart breaks. Why waste a moment’s regret or sadness on Yahoo, who agreed to help the Chinese government track down and punish dissidents; or Clarence Thomas, or the Bush Administration? But the people who could have stood up to them and didn’t continue to infuriate me.
Google is compromising with the Chinese, running censored web-searches, with a note attached, explaining that some results have been deleted by the government. Do they really believe that the Chinese are unaware of Government censorship? Do they really believe their little footnote makes any difference to anyone? No, what they believe, with overwhelming corroborative evidence, is that there is an incalculably immense amount of money to be made in China, if they’re willing to collaborate with one of the most repressive and vicious regimes on the face of the earth. They could have made stand, but grand gestures are expensive, rationales are plentiful, and nothing really matters but the bottom line. Yahoo’s all-out collaboration seems almost clean by comparison. I think of that line from Casablanca, when Rick says to Ugarte, “I don’t mind a parasite. I object to a cut-rate one.”
As for Joe Biden, he’ll never live down the way he caved to the sleazy accusations of racism during the Clarence Thomas hearings. Thomas said the questions were the equivalent of a lynching. That wasn’t the moment to duck your head and apologize (and refuse to call the three women who could back up Anita Hill’s charges with stories of their own). No, sorry. That was the moment to stand and say, “How dare you accuse this body of such a crime? More to the point, how dare you conflate honest discourse with a heinous race murder? Do you really not understand the difference? Your reckless words have shown us the crudity, sophistry and corruption of your thinking. Your relentless manipulations, your desperate mendacity, your self-serving, self-righteous slanders prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that you have no place on the highest court in the land. You have no place on a night court in Newark. Shame on you. And thank you – for showing us all who you really are before it was too late.”
That’s what he should have said, but he didn’t. And if he chooses to run for President in ’08, all the people who might have votes for him will remember. He had a chance to stand up, and he backed down. That’s not a accident of circumstance, that’s a character trait. That’s who you are. All the tailored suits and tough talk in the world can’t change it.
Which brings us to Colin Powell, the worst and saddest of them all. He knew there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He knew that Saddam wasn’t trying to buy uranium from Niger. He knew there were no chemical warfare laboratories or atomic warheads in the ruined kingdom of Saddam Hussein. He had said as much in public, on television, before 9/11. Our policies were working, he said. Iraq was disarmed and helpless. He knew that Bush had cooked the intelligence on the Middle East, he knew the neocons had been slavering to take out Saddam since Desert Storm. And yet he went to the U.N. and lied. He could have stood up at the U.N. or just at a press conference, and told the truth and stopped the whole insane delusional Iraq war before it started. He could have saved thousands of American lives and tens of thousands of Iraqi lives and hundreds of billions of dollars that could have been spent on improving life for the majority of Americans who don’t happen to have a controlling interest in the Bush White House. But he didn’t. Cheney and Wolfowitz and Pearle had the courage to be evil; there’s nothing tragic or even surprising about that. But Colin Powell couldn’t muster the courage to be good. That’s the real calamity. And every mother with a son killed or maimed in action must feel a special fierce loathing for him. He wasn’t evil. He was just weak. But that one weak man was our only bastion against the years of bloodshed national disgrace that were rushing towards us, so his weakness excuses nothing. It just makes everything worse.
He says he’s ashamed of himself. Well, that’s nice, but it’s not good enough. It’s not even close. He retired in disgrace? He deserved to. Bush says his critics are traitors. But Powell, in his debased capitulation to bad men who frightened him, was the real traitor, and we’ll be living with the results of that treason for a long time to come.
Google, Biden, Powell: the best our side has to offer.
No wonder the other side is winning.
Google is compromising with the Chinese, running censored web-searches, with a note attached, explaining that some results have been deleted by the government. Do they really believe that the Chinese are unaware of Government censorship? Do they really believe their little footnote makes any difference to anyone? No, what they believe, with overwhelming corroborative evidence, is that there is an incalculably immense amount of money to be made in China, if they’re willing to collaborate with one of the most repressive and vicious regimes on the face of the earth. They could have made stand, but grand gestures are expensive, rationales are plentiful, and nothing really matters but the bottom line. Yahoo’s all-out collaboration seems almost clean by comparison. I think of that line from Casablanca, when Rick says to Ugarte, “I don’t mind a parasite. I object to a cut-rate one.”
As for Joe Biden, he’ll never live down the way he caved to the sleazy accusations of racism during the Clarence Thomas hearings. Thomas said the questions were the equivalent of a lynching. That wasn’t the moment to duck your head and apologize (and refuse to call the three women who could back up Anita Hill’s charges with stories of their own). No, sorry. That was the moment to stand and say, “How dare you accuse this body of such a crime? More to the point, how dare you conflate honest discourse with a heinous race murder? Do you really not understand the difference? Your reckless words have shown us the crudity, sophistry and corruption of your thinking. Your relentless manipulations, your desperate mendacity, your self-serving, self-righteous slanders prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that you have no place on the highest court in the land. You have no place on a night court in Newark. Shame on you. And thank you – for showing us all who you really are before it was too late.”
That’s what he should have said, but he didn’t. And if he chooses to run for President in ’08, all the people who might have votes for him will remember. He had a chance to stand up, and he backed down. That’s not a accident of circumstance, that’s a character trait. That’s who you are. All the tailored suits and tough talk in the world can’t change it.
Which brings us to Colin Powell, the worst and saddest of them all. He knew there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He knew that Saddam wasn’t trying to buy uranium from Niger. He knew there were no chemical warfare laboratories or atomic warheads in the ruined kingdom of Saddam Hussein. He had said as much in public, on television, before 9/11. Our policies were working, he said. Iraq was disarmed and helpless. He knew that Bush had cooked the intelligence on the Middle East, he knew the neocons had been slavering to take out Saddam since Desert Storm. And yet he went to the U.N. and lied. He could have stood up at the U.N. or just at a press conference, and told the truth and stopped the whole insane delusional Iraq war before it started. He could have saved thousands of American lives and tens of thousands of Iraqi lives and hundreds of billions of dollars that could have been spent on improving life for the majority of Americans who don’t happen to have a controlling interest in the Bush White House. But he didn’t. Cheney and Wolfowitz and Pearle had the courage to be evil; there’s nothing tragic or even surprising about that. But Colin Powell couldn’t muster the courage to be good. That’s the real calamity. And every mother with a son killed or maimed in action must feel a special fierce loathing for him. He wasn’t evil. He was just weak. But that one weak man was our only bastion against the years of bloodshed national disgrace that were rushing towards us, so his weakness excuses nothing. It just makes everything worse.
He says he’s ashamed of himself. Well, that’s nice, but it’s not good enough. It’s not even close. He retired in disgrace? He deserved to. Bush says his critics are traitors. But Powell, in his debased capitulation to bad men who frightened him, was the real traitor, and we’ll be living with the results of that treason for a long time to come.
Google, Biden, Powell: the best our side has to offer.
No wonder the other side is winning.
Sunday, February 12, 2006
The Velocity of Intuition
The writers I know often argue about the value of outlines. Some books require them – a murder mystery, which has to be composed back to front, can’t really be done without some clear idea of who done it and who you want the reader to think done it; all the clues and red herrings. But I wrote the first two hundred pages of my first mystery with only the vaguest idea of what was actually going to happen. The eventual hero and several other major characters didn’t even exist in that draft. Admittedly, when I decided to actually finish the project, I had to sit down and organize who did what and to whom. There was a murder; someone had to solve it. That implied a detective character. Probably he was should be the hero. I had another unfinished book with a housepainter/poet protagonist. The book wasn’t working, but I loved the character. So – how about police chief/poet? That might work. The transplant was surprisingly painless. I was sick of housepainters anyway. Twenty years of painting houses will do that to you. I also needed some villains and some apparent villains. It came to head with a big party scene. Most of the characters attending that soiree in draft one have been written out; at least half the characters in the finished version didn’t exist when I started writing. It seems a chaotic and dysfunctional way to compose a book, but I was pleased to read today that the writers of 24 only have about one third of the season figured out when they start. In a way, the less you know, the better. Fowles said, “In art as in life, follow the accident, fear the fixed plan.” It’s a little scarier. But the results are generally worth the anxiety.
The truth is that writing occurs as you do it: the act of putting words on paper generates more words, not to mention ideas and characters. Much as your nit-picking, list-making, problem-mongering front brain hates to admit it, the big work is done in the sweat shop cellars of the unconscious. All your petty, anxiety ridden conscious mind can profitably do is get out of the way. This is why the best writing is always the quickest and the easiest. Studio executives and editors like the image of the writer pulling each perfect word out of his head like wisdom teeth with a pair of pliers and no Novocain (straight whiskey is our preferred anesthetic). It troubles them that good writing should come easily. But when the work is slow and painful, something is wrong. Nabokov understood this. He called the natural ease and lack of hesitation he felt the ‘velocity of intuition.’ Escape velocity: you can feel yourself pulling away from all the normal gravity, all the insecurity and confusion. You’re in orbit and three hours go by in the turn of a dependent clause.
It’s true that an outline can keep you on course and free you up for those big sessions. But the outline changes as you write and if you fight that anarchic process, the story dies.
I’m about to start rewriting a book I’ve been pecking away at for years. The new version of the character has a daughter. I almost dropped the whole idea of the revision, It would mean a year of my life and a massive amount of work. But I couldn’t bear to part with that little girl. Here’s the fragment that did me in:
But living on the ocean was a privilege, even Sally understood that. She’d stay in the water until her lips were blue and her fingertips were pale prunes with the cold, and still beg for more. She loved walking on the beach with him, on the cool, packed sand near the low-tide line, letting the icy brine foam around her ankles. He’d take her to lunch at Alice’s restaurant on the pier, just the way his Mom had taken him, chatting with the fishermen, checking the surf and then hurrying home before the incoming tide swept under the houses and they had to walk on the edge of the highway.
Sally loved the scent of the ocean and demanded to know why she could only smell it early in the morning and when she was just home from school. Mike tried to explain the principle of nasal fatigue, but she didn’t get it. “I want to do exercises,” she told him once. “I want a strong nose so I can smell the ocean all the time. “
He gave her a hug and kissed the top of her head when she said that. “Me, too, honey,” he told her. And he was thinking. “My girl. My little girl.”
So I decided to do a whole year’s worth of work and reconfigure a the whole novel, all because of one six year old girl’s stray comment about smelling the ocean. The point is, I hadn’t even known Sally cared about the ocean when I started writing that morning. But there she was, suddenly, alarmingly like my own daughter at that age, like the little kids in those Save The Children Foundation ads: just pennies a day will buy their village a goat or pay for ten years of penicillin shots. Or, in this far more eccentric and trivial case, a few paragraphs a day will keep this suddenly vivid and crucial figment of my imagination alive ...and sustain six hundred pages of painstaking rewrites.
Who could refuse?
Not me.
The truth is that writing occurs as you do it: the act of putting words on paper generates more words, not to mention ideas and characters. Much as your nit-picking, list-making, problem-mongering front brain hates to admit it, the big work is done in the sweat shop cellars of the unconscious. All your petty, anxiety ridden conscious mind can profitably do is get out of the way. This is why the best writing is always the quickest and the easiest. Studio executives and editors like the image of the writer pulling each perfect word out of his head like wisdom teeth with a pair of pliers and no Novocain (straight whiskey is our preferred anesthetic). It troubles them that good writing should come easily. But when the work is slow and painful, something is wrong. Nabokov understood this. He called the natural ease and lack of hesitation he felt the ‘velocity of intuition.’ Escape velocity: you can feel yourself pulling away from all the normal gravity, all the insecurity and confusion. You’re in orbit and three hours go by in the turn of a dependent clause.
It’s true that an outline can keep you on course and free you up for those big sessions. But the outline changes as you write and if you fight that anarchic process, the story dies.
I’m about to start rewriting a book I’ve been pecking away at for years. The new version of the character has a daughter. I almost dropped the whole idea of the revision, It would mean a year of my life and a massive amount of work. But I couldn’t bear to part with that little girl. Here’s the fragment that did me in:
But living on the ocean was a privilege, even Sally understood that. She’d stay in the water until her lips were blue and her fingertips were pale prunes with the cold, and still beg for more. She loved walking on the beach with him, on the cool, packed sand near the low-tide line, letting the icy brine foam around her ankles. He’d take her to lunch at Alice’s restaurant on the pier, just the way his Mom had taken him, chatting with the fishermen, checking the surf and then hurrying home before the incoming tide swept under the houses and they had to walk on the edge of the highway.
Sally loved the scent of the ocean and demanded to know why she could only smell it early in the morning and when she was just home from school. Mike tried to explain the principle of nasal fatigue, but she didn’t get it. “I want to do exercises,” she told him once. “I want a strong nose so I can smell the ocean all the time. “
He gave her a hug and kissed the top of her head when she said that. “Me, too, honey,” he told her. And he was thinking. “My girl. My little girl.”
So I decided to do a whole year’s worth of work and reconfigure a the whole novel, all because of one six year old girl’s stray comment about smelling the ocean. The point is, I hadn’t even known Sally cared about the ocean when I started writing that morning. But there she was, suddenly, alarmingly like my own daughter at that age, like the little kids in those Save The Children Foundation ads: just pennies a day will buy their village a goat or pay for ten years of penicillin shots. Or, in this far more eccentric and trivial case, a few paragraphs a day will keep this suddenly vivid and crucial figment of my imagination alive ...and sustain six hundred pages of painstaking rewrites.
Who could refuse?
Not me.
Tuesday, February 07, 2006
The Best Thing Ever
I've noticed people posting from works in progress -- mostly screenwriters. This is a chapter from my new book; I'm thinking it might stand alone as a story. The title is the logline. Does it work? Let me know.
Mike Henderson arrived in New York with the first blizzard of the season. Somehow the city had missed the early storms that blew in from the west, off the Great Lakes, and the massive cold fronts avalanching from Canada. But this one had more force, pushing down the steep longitudes, burying the city like a little town at the foot of an unstable mountain.
Mike rode behind the plow into the city from LaGuardia. The snow was blowing horizontal and the wind whined like a table saw. Mike’s flight had almost been forced back to Nantucket and the airport had closed a few minutes after they were on the ground.
Mike sat in the back of the cab, trying to work the tension out of his hands, staring out the window at the whitened industrial outskirts of the city. “Clean it up with paint,” his first boss had always said: no scrubbing or sanding, just a heavy layer of latex. “Don’t make it right – make it white.” That’s what Queens looked like this morning: filth and garbage covered over with pristine crystal. The snow itself would be filthy enough soon.
He bounced his leg on the ball of his foot, beating his thigh against the cracked vinyl of the seat. He had only one chance here and he had almost blown it. If the plane had been turned back, if he had taken a later flight, even half an hour later, if this old Buick skidded on the icy Major Deegan … and even if he made it into the city, there was no guarantee –
He was thrown against the side of the cab as the driver changed lanes abruptly.
“Hey! Slow down,” Mike called out, through the pitted plexiglas barrier between them. But beyond street names and monetary denominations, the driver seemed to speak no English. He wore a turban and spoke continuously, in Hindi, into a headset. He never paused to listen. Was it some elaborate prayer? Was he dictating a novel? Mike settled himself back in the seat again. It was irrelevant. The driver knew what he was doing. Mike needed to think about what he was going to say this morning. Everything depended on that. And his mind was a blank.
How had things gotten this bad? They had wanted a baby for years. Cindy had gotten pregnant two years before, but she had miscarried. That tragedy had revealed every weakness in their marriage. He thought often about the hotel Frank Lloyd Wright had built in Tokyo. Wright sank The Imperial’s supports into the unstable sub strata below the city, so it moved with the earth. When the great Kanto earthquake hit in 1923, it was one of the few buildings left standing in a city of rubble.
The image stuck with him. Mike had always assumed his marriage was flexible enough to ride out any calamity. But the loss of their baby had leveled it. Things that should have bent, shattered; things that should have shifted, fell. Cindy had been inconsolable and Mike had been shut out completely. It was her tragedy, it had happened inside of her. Mike had nothing to do with it. He could only intrude. When he tried to understand, he was presumptuous. When he tried to cheer her up, he was shallow. When he ignored her, as she seemed to want, he was heartless.
But it was even worse than that. Over time, she had come to blame the way they lived. She hated the seasonal panic of house painting on Nantucket, as everyone scurried around looking for interior work like woodland creatures trying to get inside for the winter, and waited for final payments and groveled to imperious general contractors. The constant stress had killed the baby, that was Cindy’s theory. It infuriated Mike. The doctors had no idea what might have happened, the best minds in modern medicine were baffled; but Cindy knew it was his fault. It was her body. That made her the final authority.
Mike didn’t know; maybe she was right. The stress never let up. Even now he could feel it, like pressure on a bruise. He might never get his final payment on the Eel Point Road job, and he didn’t know how he was going to survive the winter without it.
Things had been the same two years ago, they’d been going through some other crisis: a lawsuit, a lost job, a late check. They always pulled through, the phone call always came, and he went from no work to hiring extra people overnight. But the constant uncertainty was damaging.. Painters got hypertension and ulcers and colitis from it. They had nervous breakdowns. They became alcoholics. Why not their wives?
But it was the same old bind: if he argued he was a bully, if said nothing he was unsupportive, if he agreed he was wimp. It was like trying to sleep when he’d torn his rotator cuff, in college: there was no comfortable position.
Cindy had held her grudge, clutched it tightly, like a little kid holding her bus fare, hurrying through a bad neighborhood. It had helped for a while, but she couldn’t keep it up forever. Something like normal life resumed eventually. The wall stayed up, though. Mike couldn’t reach her. They still talked, but the talk was more and more superficial; they made love, but less and less often. Still, somehow she had gotten pregnant again. It was a small miracle, really. Maybe it was fate.
Mike had been her doctor’s office once, when Cindy had came down with stomach flu on a visit to her parents. He remembered sitting for more than an hour in the dark wood paneled waiting room. P.S. 6 got out for the day sometime during the wait. He had listened to the shouts and laughter of the newly liberated kids across the street, loving the sound, wanting kids of his own.
Well, that’s why he was here today.
The coffee shop on Madison was still there, right across from the school. He pushed inside out of the snow and found a table near a window. He was going to have to be here for a while. He should order breakfast. But he couldn’t eat. He ordered coffee and an English muffin. That was a good default strategy: he could sip and nibble for a while. He checked his watch: ten after eight. Office hours probably didn’t start until nine.
The waiter brought his order, with a visible sigh. But the place was still uncrowded, so at least he wasn’t taking up a table where real eaters and big tippers might be sitting. At least not yet. It was warm. He pulled off his coat and took a sip of coffee. It was strong and hot and it went down all right. He took a bite of muffin. Maybe he was hungrier than he’d thought.
A cab pulled up across the street: the office nurse. The rest of the staff arrived over the next half hour. Mike drank two more coffees and another English muffin. He was starting to get wired. He asked for the check. He didn’t want any delays when Cindy finally arrived. He watched the traffic, yellow taxis and buses half obscured by the gusting snow. The windows were steaming over; he’d be lucky to see her at all.
Finally, he couldn’t sit still any more. He paid the check, left an extra five dollars tip, and walked out into the blizzard, zipping up his coat.
Her cab pulled up ten minutes later, just as he was considering going back inside. The light was green but it was about to go red. He sprinted across Madison Avenue. Cindy sensed the bulky figure moving toward her and looked up blankly. He hit a patch of ice on the sidewalk and skidded into her. They grabbed each other to keep from falling, an awkward little dance that ended with him sitting in the snow.
She helped him up.
“Graceful as always,” she said, but with a smile to soften the words.
“Thanks.”
They stood holding each others’ arms lightly, snow blowing between them, traffic coursing through the slush behind them.
“What are you doing here?,” she asked finally.
“Can we go somewhere and talk?”
“I have an appointment -- ”
“With Doctor Mathias. I know. 47 East 82nd Street.”
“I don’t understand. How did you -- ?”
“I know what’s going on, Cindy. I figured it out. I’m not an idiot. And I know you.”
“Mike -- ”
“Can we go somewhere? Get out of the cold?”
“Let’s just walk.”
She stuck her hands in her coat pockets and started across Madison towards Fifth Avenue. Mike followed, looking around him at the heavy green copper-roofed old buildings, the snow gathering on their ornamental stonework. These were think tanks now, embassies, foundation headquarters. But they had been residences once. They had been built when the details of craftsmanship mattered and no expense was spared. The wealth they represented made the Nantucket trophy houses look cheap and suburban by comparison. There were co-op buildings of the same pre-war vintage, lining the avenues behind them, that would never have let Preston Lomax into their lobbies, much less their owners’ associations. It was a different world, and Mike couldn’t help feeling it was a better one. It was solid at least, rooted in generations of privilege and civic responsibility. But it made him feel like he was trespassing. He was an alien here. If he actually approached one of these places he would be sent instantly to the delivery entrance at the rear. These old buildings dwarfed him and his proletarian difficulties. But he rebelled against the feeling. The streets were public and he had as much right to be walking here as anyone else. Anyone could enjoy this beauty. The swells who had lived here a hundred years ago probably saw nothing but drafty rooms and endless maintenance costs. For the current residents it was probably the inconvenience (the nearest subway was three long blocks and four short ones away) and the heating bills (those high ceilings!). He was lucky in a way: he could enjoy the formal elegance of the neighborhood with a comfortable detachment. He let it buoy him up for a moment. It was actually the perfect location for this dispute. It embodied tradition and history. It had its own persuasions.
He took Cindy’s arm and began.
“I was thinking about the last time we were in the neighborhood. You were sick, we thought they were going to take you to Lenox Hill. But Dr. Mathias took care of you. I remember sitting in the office, waiting, thinking how much I wanted to have kids.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“No it wasn’t. It feels that way but it wasn’t.”
“Mike, I’m going to be late if I don’t -- ”
He wanted to say, forget it, you’re not seeing the doctor today, but he knew it would backfire. Besides, he was on to something now and he wanted to finish it.
“Just listen to me for a second. This is important. Sex felt different after that. It seems like we spend our whole lives dodging pregnancy, fighting against it, you know? Trying to slip a little pleasure past the reproduction police. And all of a sudden we were trying to conceive a child. Part of it was not using birth control. Just being unencumbered, I guess. But it felt pure, like there was nothing between us and the consequences of what we were doing. Like, the consequences were what we were doing. The orgasm almost didn’t matter. It was just the starter’s gun. You know? It was scary. But it was good. It was like sky diving without a parachute, except when we hit the ground we weren’t going to die. Someone else was going to be born.”
Cindy looked down. “Well, it didn’t work out that way.”
“No. I know that.”
“I wish you’d said some of this stuff then.”
“I tried to. But it was just a jumble. I needed time to think about it.”
“Things were different then, Mike. We were different.”
He stopped walking, took her hands, faced her down.
“I want this baby, Cindy.”
She looked away, watching a Great Dane pulling a slim man on a taut leash. A woman was coming around the corner with a pair of King Charles spaniels. The dogs sniffed each other, the leashes tangled.
“That’s not your decision to make,” Cindy said.
“Yes it is. Part of it is. That’s what you never understood. You still don’t get it. This is happening to both of us. Just like it happened to both of us before. I lost a baby, too, Cindy.”
“Mike -- ”
“I lost a baby, too.”
Impulsively, she hugged him. She flung herself at him and knocked him back a step, into a big car, its make and model anonymous under a great loaf of snow. They held each other tight through their heavy coats. She was crying.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“Hey, it’s okay. I love you. Cindy – it’s okay.”
She pulled away and looked up at him, tears glittering in her eyes, snow glittering in her hair.
“What a pair of ridiculous fuck-ups we are.”
He kissed her. “I know. But we’ll stop. We’ll be better. We’ll have to be better. We’re going to be setting an example now.”
“Oh God.”
“We can do it. Our parents did.”
She smiled. “Don’t set the bar too low, Mike.”
They pushed off the car and walked on, across Fifth Avenue, past the museum and along the park wall. The wind died down and the snow sifted down quietly, gentle and relentless. That was the trick, Mike thought.
“It doesn’t matter about Mark Toland,” he said after a while. ”I deserved that. And so did you.”
“Well, I needed it, anyway.”
“As long as it’s over.”
“It barely began.”
“Good. It balances things. It settles the score.”
“Not really, Mike. I didn’t sleep with a co-worker, or make you the subject of choice for every malicious gossip on the island. You never had to stand making small talk with Mark Toland at a party.”
“No. But it still hurt.”
“Did it really?”
“Thinking of you with that guy? Jesus.”
“You were jealous?”
“Come on.”
“Unbearably jealous?”
“Actually, I found the whole thing strangely erotic.”
She punched his arm. “You’re sick.”
They walked along quietly for another block. The snow was coming down more heavily now, muffling their footsteps and cutting them off from the gauzy buildings across the street and the Christmas card shadows of the park.
“There are just two things you have to do for me,” Cindy said as they crossed the transverse entrance at Seventy-ninth street.
“Tell me.”
“First, just keep talking to me.” She grabbed a handful of his hair. ”I want to know what’s going on in there. I know I’ve been shitty to you. I can be a jerk. But just tell me so from now on. Don’t just nod and go off to work another seventeen hour day. Whenever some painter’s wife tells me her husband is on the job until nine every night, all I can think is, your marriage is in trouble, honey. If it wasn’t, he’d be home. No one has to work until nine o’clock every night, unless they’re on some corporate fast track. And you’re not.”
“No.”
“So come home early and talk to me. If I take your head off, I’ll make it up with sexual favors. I promise.At least until the baby arrives.”
Mike put his arm around her. “Fair enough,” he said. “What’s the other thing?”
“It’s about Tanya Kriel.”
“What about her?”
Cindy gave him her sweetest smile.
“Fire the bitch.”
“Done,” Mike said. “As soon as we get home. But right now, since this is the first time we’ve been off-island together in six months, I’d like to take you to fabulous breakfast and a tour of the new Museum of Modern art and maybe even an early movie before we fly back.”
“Lunch at Papaya King?”
“Absolutely. Five star all the way.”
She stood on her tiptoes to kiss him. “Thanks, Mike,” she said. “I mean it. Thanks for coming. It’s the best thing anyone’s done for me since … I don’t know. Since my Dad drove all the way up to Maine to take me out of that horrible outward bound summer camp. God, I was so happy to see that old Dodge Caravan coming up the camp road. I started crying right on the spot. No, this was better than that. This may be the best thing ever.”
“Throw in some great art and a drastically maudlin chick flick with all the popcorn you can eat, and we may never top this.”
“Just wait six months,” she said.
Then she took his hand and they started east through the curtain of snow, toward breakfast and the rest of their day.
Mike Henderson arrived in New York with the first blizzard of the season. Somehow the city had missed the early storms that blew in from the west, off the Great Lakes, and the massive cold fronts avalanching from Canada. But this one had more force, pushing down the steep longitudes, burying the city like a little town at the foot of an unstable mountain.
Mike rode behind the plow into the city from LaGuardia. The snow was blowing horizontal and the wind whined like a table saw. Mike’s flight had almost been forced back to Nantucket and the airport had closed a few minutes after they were on the ground.
Mike sat in the back of the cab, trying to work the tension out of his hands, staring out the window at the whitened industrial outskirts of the city. “Clean it up with paint,” his first boss had always said: no scrubbing or sanding, just a heavy layer of latex. “Don’t make it right – make it white.” That’s what Queens looked like this morning: filth and garbage covered over with pristine crystal. The snow itself would be filthy enough soon.
He bounced his leg on the ball of his foot, beating his thigh against the cracked vinyl of the seat. He had only one chance here and he had almost blown it. If the plane had been turned back, if he had taken a later flight, even half an hour later, if this old Buick skidded on the icy Major Deegan … and even if he made it into the city, there was no guarantee –
He was thrown against the side of the cab as the driver changed lanes abruptly.
“Hey! Slow down,” Mike called out, through the pitted plexiglas barrier between them. But beyond street names and monetary denominations, the driver seemed to speak no English. He wore a turban and spoke continuously, in Hindi, into a headset. He never paused to listen. Was it some elaborate prayer? Was he dictating a novel? Mike settled himself back in the seat again. It was irrelevant. The driver knew what he was doing. Mike needed to think about what he was going to say this morning. Everything depended on that. And his mind was a blank.
How had things gotten this bad? They had wanted a baby for years. Cindy had gotten pregnant two years before, but she had miscarried. That tragedy had revealed every weakness in their marriage. He thought often about the hotel Frank Lloyd Wright had built in Tokyo. Wright sank The Imperial’s supports into the unstable sub strata below the city, so it moved with the earth. When the great Kanto earthquake hit in 1923, it was one of the few buildings left standing in a city of rubble.
The image stuck with him. Mike had always assumed his marriage was flexible enough to ride out any calamity. But the loss of their baby had leveled it. Things that should have bent, shattered; things that should have shifted, fell. Cindy had been inconsolable and Mike had been shut out completely. It was her tragedy, it had happened inside of her. Mike had nothing to do with it. He could only intrude. When he tried to understand, he was presumptuous. When he tried to cheer her up, he was shallow. When he ignored her, as she seemed to want, he was heartless.
But it was even worse than that. Over time, she had come to blame the way they lived. She hated the seasonal panic of house painting on Nantucket, as everyone scurried around looking for interior work like woodland creatures trying to get inside for the winter, and waited for final payments and groveled to imperious general contractors. The constant stress had killed the baby, that was Cindy’s theory. It infuriated Mike. The doctors had no idea what might have happened, the best minds in modern medicine were baffled; but Cindy knew it was his fault. It was her body. That made her the final authority.
Mike didn’t know; maybe she was right. The stress never let up. Even now he could feel it, like pressure on a bruise. He might never get his final payment on the Eel Point Road job, and he didn’t know how he was going to survive the winter without it.
Things had been the same two years ago, they’d been going through some other crisis: a lawsuit, a lost job, a late check. They always pulled through, the phone call always came, and he went from no work to hiring extra people overnight. But the constant uncertainty was damaging.. Painters got hypertension and ulcers and colitis from it. They had nervous breakdowns. They became alcoholics. Why not their wives?
But it was the same old bind: if he argued he was a bully, if said nothing he was unsupportive, if he agreed he was wimp. It was like trying to sleep when he’d torn his rotator cuff, in college: there was no comfortable position.
Cindy had held her grudge, clutched it tightly, like a little kid holding her bus fare, hurrying through a bad neighborhood. It had helped for a while, but she couldn’t keep it up forever. Something like normal life resumed eventually. The wall stayed up, though. Mike couldn’t reach her. They still talked, but the talk was more and more superficial; they made love, but less and less often. Still, somehow she had gotten pregnant again. It was a small miracle, really. Maybe it was fate.
Mike had been her doctor’s office once, when Cindy had came down with stomach flu on a visit to her parents. He remembered sitting for more than an hour in the dark wood paneled waiting room. P.S. 6 got out for the day sometime during the wait. He had listened to the shouts and laughter of the newly liberated kids across the street, loving the sound, wanting kids of his own.
Well, that’s why he was here today.
The coffee shop on Madison was still there, right across from the school. He pushed inside out of the snow and found a table near a window. He was going to have to be here for a while. He should order breakfast. But he couldn’t eat. He ordered coffee and an English muffin. That was a good default strategy: he could sip and nibble for a while. He checked his watch: ten after eight. Office hours probably didn’t start until nine.
The waiter brought his order, with a visible sigh. But the place was still uncrowded, so at least he wasn’t taking up a table where real eaters and big tippers might be sitting. At least not yet. It was warm. He pulled off his coat and took a sip of coffee. It was strong and hot and it went down all right. He took a bite of muffin. Maybe he was hungrier than he’d thought.
A cab pulled up across the street: the office nurse. The rest of the staff arrived over the next half hour. Mike drank two more coffees and another English muffin. He was starting to get wired. He asked for the check. He didn’t want any delays when Cindy finally arrived. He watched the traffic, yellow taxis and buses half obscured by the gusting snow. The windows were steaming over; he’d be lucky to see her at all.
Finally, he couldn’t sit still any more. He paid the check, left an extra five dollars tip, and walked out into the blizzard, zipping up his coat.
Her cab pulled up ten minutes later, just as he was considering going back inside. The light was green but it was about to go red. He sprinted across Madison Avenue. Cindy sensed the bulky figure moving toward her and looked up blankly. He hit a patch of ice on the sidewalk and skidded into her. They grabbed each other to keep from falling, an awkward little dance that ended with him sitting in the snow.
She helped him up.
“Graceful as always,” she said, but with a smile to soften the words.
“Thanks.”
They stood holding each others’ arms lightly, snow blowing between them, traffic coursing through the slush behind them.
“What are you doing here?,” she asked finally.
“Can we go somewhere and talk?”
“I have an appointment -- ”
“With Doctor Mathias. I know. 47 East 82nd Street.”
“I don’t understand. How did you -- ?”
“I know what’s going on, Cindy. I figured it out. I’m not an idiot. And I know you.”
“Mike -- ”
“Can we go somewhere? Get out of the cold?”
“Let’s just walk.”
She stuck her hands in her coat pockets and started across Madison towards Fifth Avenue. Mike followed, looking around him at the heavy green copper-roofed old buildings, the snow gathering on their ornamental stonework. These were think tanks now, embassies, foundation headquarters. But they had been residences once. They had been built when the details of craftsmanship mattered and no expense was spared. The wealth they represented made the Nantucket trophy houses look cheap and suburban by comparison. There were co-op buildings of the same pre-war vintage, lining the avenues behind them, that would never have let Preston Lomax into their lobbies, much less their owners’ associations. It was a different world, and Mike couldn’t help feeling it was a better one. It was solid at least, rooted in generations of privilege and civic responsibility. But it made him feel like he was trespassing. He was an alien here. If he actually approached one of these places he would be sent instantly to the delivery entrance at the rear. These old buildings dwarfed him and his proletarian difficulties. But he rebelled against the feeling. The streets were public and he had as much right to be walking here as anyone else. Anyone could enjoy this beauty. The swells who had lived here a hundred years ago probably saw nothing but drafty rooms and endless maintenance costs. For the current residents it was probably the inconvenience (the nearest subway was three long blocks and four short ones away) and the heating bills (those high ceilings!). He was lucky in a way: he could enjoy the formal elegance of the neighborhood with a comfortable detachment. He let it buoy him up for a moment. It was actually the perfect location for this dispute. It embodied tradition and history. It had its own persuasions.
He took Cindy’s arm and began.
“I was thinking about the last time we were in the neighborhood. You were sick, we thought they were going to take you to Lenox Hill. But Dr. Mathias took care of you. I remember sitting in the office, waiting, thinking how much I wanted to have kids.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“No it wasn’t. It feels that way but it wasn’t.”
“Mike, I’m going to be late if I don’t -- ”
He wanted to say, forget it, you’re not seeing the doctor today, but he knew it would backfire. Besides, he was on to something now and he wanted to finish it.
“Just listen to me for a second. This is important. Sex felt different after that. It seems like we spend our whole lives dodging pregnancy, fighting against it, you know? Trying to slip a little pleasure past the reproduction police. And all of a sudden we were trying to conceive a child. Part of it was not using birth control. Just being unencumbered, I guess. But it felt pure, like there was nothing between us and the consequences of what we were doing. Like, the consequences were what we were doing. The orgasm almost didn’t matter. It was just the starter’s gun. You know? It was scary. But it was good. It was like sky diving without a parachute, except when we hit the ground we weren’t going to die. Someone else was going to be born.”
Cindy looked down. “Well, it didn’t work out that way.”
“No. I know that.”
“I wish you’d said some of this stuff then.”
“I tried to. But it was just a jumble. I needed time to think about it.”
“Things were different then, Mike. We were different.”
He stopped walking, took her hands, faced her down.
“I want this baby, Cindy.”
She looked away, watching a Great Dane pulling a slim man on a taut leash. A woman was coming around the corner with a pair of King Charles spaniels. The dogs sniffed each other, the leashes tangled.
“That’s not your decision to make,” Cindy said.
“Yes it is. Part of it is. That’s what you never understood. You still don’t get it. This is happening to both of us. Just like it happened to both of us before. I lost a baby, too, Cindy.”
“Mike -- ”
“I lost a baby, too.”
Impulsively, she hugged him. She flung herself at him and knocked him back a step, into a big car, its make and model anonymous under a great loaf of snow. They held each other tight through their heavy coats. She was crying.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“Hey, it’s okay. I love you. Cindy – it’s okay.”
She pulled away and looked up at him, tears glittering in her eyes, snow glittering in her hair.
“What a pair of ridiculous fuck-ups we are.”
He kissed her. “I know. But we’ll stop. We’ll be better. We’ll have to be better. We’re going to be setting an example now.”
“Oh God.”
“We can do it. Our parents did.”
She smiled. “Don’t set the bar too low, Mike.”
They pushed off the car and walked on, across Fifth Avenue, past the museum and along the park wall. The wind died down and the snow sifted down quietly, gentle and relentless. That was the trick, Mike thought.
“It doesn’t matter about Mark Toland,” he said after a while. ”I deserved that. And so did you.”
“Well, I needed it, anyway.”
“As long as it’s over.”
“It barely began.”
“Good. It balances things. It settles the score.”
“Not really, Mike. I didn’t sleep with a co-worker, or make you the subject of choice for every malicious gossip on the island. You never had to stand making small talk with Mark Toland at a party.”
“No. But it still hurt.”
“Did it really?”
“Thinking of you with that guy? Jesus.”
“You were jealous?”
“Come on.”
“Unbearably jealous?”
“Actually, I found the whole thing strangely erotic.”
She punched his arm. “You’re sick.”
They walked along quietly for another block. The snow was coming down more heavily now, muffling their footsteps and cutting them off from the gauzy buildings across the street and the Christmas card shadows of the park.
“There are just two things you have to do for me,” Cindy said as they crossed the transverse entrance at Seventy-ninth street.
“Tell me.”
“First, just keep talking to me.” She grabbed a handful of his hair. ”I want to know what’s going on in there. I know I’ve been shitty to you. I can be a jerk. But just tell me so from now on. Don’t just nod and go off to work another seventeen hour day. Whenever some painter’s wife tells me her husband is on the job until nine every night, all I can think is, your marriage is in trouble, honey. If it wasn’t, he’d be home. No one has to work until nine o’clock every night, unless they’re on some corporate fast track. And you’re not.”
“No.”
“So come home early and talk to me. If I take your head off, I’ll make it up with sexual favors. I promise.At least until the baby arrives.”
Mike put his arm around her. “Fair enough,” he said. “What’s the other thing?”
“It’s about Tanya Kriel.”
“What about her?”
Cindy gave him her sweetest smile.
“Fire the bitch.”
“Done,” Mike said. “As soon as we get home. But right now, since this is the first time we’ve been off-island together in six months, I’d like to take you to fabulous breakfast and a tour of the new Museum of Modern art and maybe even an early movie before we fly back.”
“Lunch at Papaya King?”
“Absolutely. Five star all the way.”
She stood on her tiptoes to kiss him. “Thanks, Mike,” she said. “I mean it. Thanks for coming. It’s the best thing anyone’s done for me since … I don’t know. Since my Dad drove all the way up to Maine to take me out of that horrible outward bound summer camp. God, I was so happy to see that old Dodge Caravan coming up the camp road. I started crying right on the spot. No, this was better than that. This may be the best thing ever.”
“Throw in some great art and a drastically maudlin chick flick with all the popcorn you can eat, and we may never top this.”
“Just wait six months,” she said.
Then she took his hand and they started east through the curtain of snow, toward breakfast and the rest of their day.
Friday, February 03, 2006
Going With the Blow
I hate wind. And it hates me just as much. Mere anthropomorphism? Don't be too sure. Living on this flat island in the Atlantic Ocean has convinced me that the wind has both a malignant intelligence and a nasty sense of humor. It's good for nothing but erosion and it's a bad influence on the other elements. It turns harmless dirt into dust storms; it turns rain into typhoons. It turns snow into blizzards. It's a bully. It creates wind-burn and wind chill and wind shear. It makes frost-bite and broken boats and plane crashes and lately it's been trying to get into my house at night. It's like an angry crowd, banging on the doors, whipping the storms off their hinges, rattling the windows, screaming in the eaves and kicking over the lawn furniture. I hate its relentless attention to detail: it yanks every door out of your hand, finds every crevice in your clothing and somehow manages to be blowing in your face, no matter which way you're walking.
In Manhattan, where I grew up, the wind was mostly impotent, blocked by buildings; all those barricades of steel and cement . It was puny and trivial, able only to swirl a stray page of newspaper around your leg or toss some grit in your eye. But Nantucket has no defences. It's splayed out to the wind horizontal and helpless as it receives its seasonal scouring from the Canadian gales.
As a house painter you develop as special loathing for the wind. It sends your ladders sliding over the shiny Tyvek house-wrap, turns your drop cloths into kites and pulls the paint out of your brush. It always wins; if nothing else works, it will sand-blast your finish work with grime. It's timing is always perfect.
I was griping about this last summer when a friend invited me to see the friendlier side of my old nemesis, and go sailing with him. I grudgingly agreed and we went out on a warm day in August, full of energy and optimism, only to be becalmed. As we rowed back home, sweating and cursing, a guy in a speed-boat called down to us, "Tough luck! You can't buy a breeze out here today! Come back in February."
I could almost hear the wind laughing at us.
Well, it's February now. The wind is back and it doesn't look like it's going anywhere until May. It's just going to scream around the island, making sunny days raw and cold nights colder, bucking my car, downing trees and power lines, spewing garbage into people's yards. It's like having a motorcycle gang in residence for the winter. But I try to be positive. Maybe I'll invest in a windmill. They may be loud, ugly and inefficient, but they force the wind to be useful, which it hates more than anything else. A satisfying thought, but impractical: I can't afford a windmill, or a sailboat, for that matter. I've never even managed to fly a kite.
I guess for people like me there's nothing to do about the wind -- except spit into it.
In Manhattan, where I grew up, the wind was mostly impotent, blocked by buildings; all those barricades of steel and cement . It was puny and trivial, able only to swirl a stray page of newspaper around your leg or toss some grit in your eye. But Nantucket has no defences. It's splayed out to the wind horizontal and helpless as it receives its seasonal scouring from the Canadian gales.
As a house painter you develop as special loathing for the wind. It sends your ladders sliding over the shiny Tyvek house-wrap, turns your drop cloths into kites and pulls the paint out of your brush. It always wins; if nothing else works, it will sand-blast your finish work with grime. It's timing is always perfect.
I was griping about this last summer when a friend invited me to see the friendlier side of my old nemesis, and go sailing with him. I grudgingly agreed and we went out on a warm day in August, full of energy and optimism, only to be becalmed. As we rowed back home, sweating and cursing, a guy in a speed-boat called down to us, "Tough luck! You can't buy a breeze out here today! Come back in February."
I could almost hear the wind laughing at us.
Well, it's February now. The wind is back and it doesn't look like it's going anywhere until May. It's just going to scream around the island, making sunny days raw and cold nights colder, bucking my car, downing trees and power lines, spewing garbage into people's yards. It's like having a motorcycle gang in residence for the winter. But I try to be positive. Maybe I'll invest in a windmill. They may be loud, ugly and inefficient, but they force the wind to be useful, which it hates more than anything else. A satisfying thought, but impractical: I can't afford a windmill, or a sailboat, for that matter. I've never even managed to fly a kite.
I guess for people like me there's nothing to do about the wind -- except spit into it.
Thursday, December 01, 2005
The Emerald City
I don't know whether to refer to this as a 'wake up call' or a 'reality check' or maybe just skip the cliches altogether and present the facts.
For the last few months a thriller I wrote has been haunting the atrium of the Creative Artists Agency, ringing ever more faintly, like someone’s lost cell phone. I was just hoping someone might find it behind the potted ficus tree before the last bar ran down. But that begins to seem more and more unlikely.
Still, some people there like the script, and they’ve been trying to get clients interested in making the movie. If enough of them commit, the people who get in-house projects financed there could go out and get the money for the production. It’s an odd situation. I’m not a CAA client. I suppose I might become one eventually, if some creative ignition happens. But for the moment my script is as anonymous as a Shaker quilt.
We were given a list of possible directors and then watched as each one took a different movie. It was like reading Ten little Indians, except that nobody died. Most of them never even saw my screenplay. There’s not much incentive to read some unknown’s work when big stars and Academy Award winning writers and studio deals with big paychecks beckon. Finally the only one left was Peter Weir. When I first saw the list it never occurred to me that they might give him my project. He’s in a different class than the others. He's an auhentic artist, a giant. I couldn’t imagine he’d be interested in my paltry adventure story. The last thing remotely like a thriller he did was Witness and this was no Witness, even I could see that. But I amused myself with some wary moments of hope as the weeks wore on. Finally he passed, as I had always been pretty sure he would.
What did he choose to do instead?
Well, he’s making film out of Shantaram, a book I read last year when I was looking for something long and engrossing. The first paragraph won me over as did the aphorism spouting love interest ("Truth is the bully everyone pretends to like") and the story, based on the author's life. He went to prison for drugs and robbery in Australia, escaped, wound up in Bombay, running a free medical clinic in the slums, and became the protege of the head of the Bombay mafia. I've given the book to many people, all of whom devoured it much the way I did.
Great book. Owned, produced and set to star Johnny Depp
Script by Eric Roth. If you think he isn't the best book adapting screenwriter in Hollywood, check out the novel of Forrest Gump. Then you'll want to give him another Oscar. He didn’t just solve story problems, he created the whole feel of the story, from the feather to the bus stop bench. (In the book Forrest and Lieutenant Dan didn't even meet in Viet Nam.)
I'm supposed to compete in that league?, asked the house painter from Nantucket.
I don't think so. I don't get to be ball boy in that league.
So that's today's humbling tale of Hollywood.
As a fan I'm looking forward to Shantaram. As someone who doesn't believe in portents and signs, I'm not taking this as the big blood red sky-writing message (SURRENDER DOROTHY) that it seems to be.
I'm more used to the other OZ paradigms. For writers, Hollywood is full of them: the poppies and the flying monkeys, the friendly munchkins and the angry trees.
All the quotes feel chillingly familiar: “Off to see the Wizard” (or is it the Head of Development); “Bring me the broomstick (or the next unnecessary free revision) of the Wicked Witch of the West.” And don’t forget that old favorite, “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain”.
Of course it ends with “There's no place like home” as you flee back to Kansas and tell yourself it was all a dream.
But I did that 20 years ago. And I'm still dreaming.
For the last few months a thriller I wrote has been haunting the atrium of the Creative Artists Agency, ringing ever more faintly, like someone’s lost cell phone. I was just hoping someone might find it behind the potted ficus tree before the last bar ran down. But that begins to seem more and more unlikely.
Still, some people there like the script, and they’ve been trying to get clients interested in making the movie. If enough of them commit, the people who get in-house projects financed there could go out and get the money for the production. It’s an odd situation. I’m not a CAA client. I suppose I might become one eventually, if some creative ignition happens. But for the moment my script is as anonymous as a Shaker quilt.
We were given a list of possible directors and then watched as each one took a different movie. It was like reading Ten little Indians, except that nobody died. Most of them never even saw my screenplay. There’s not much incentive to read some unknown’s work when big stars and Academy Award winning writers and studio deals with big paychecks beckon. Finally the only one left was Peter Weir. When I first saw the list it never occurred to me that they might give him my project. He’s in a different class than the others. He's an auhentic artist, a giant. I couldn’t imagine he’d be interested in my paltry adventure story. The last thing remotely like a thriller he did was Witness and this was no Witness, even I could see that. But I amused myself with some wary moments of hope as the weeks wore on. Finally he passed, as I had always been pretty sure he would.
What did he choose to do instead?
Well, he’s making film out of Shantaram, a book I read last year when I was looking for something long and engrossing. The first paragraph won me over as did the aphorism spouting love interest ("Truth is the bully everyone pretends to like") and the story, based on the author's life. He went to prison for drugs and robbery in Australia, escaped, wound up in Bombay, running a free medical clinic in the slums, and became the protege of the head of the Bombay mafia. I've given the book to many people, all of whom devoured it much the way I did.
Great book. Owned, produced and set to star Johnny Depp
Script by Eric Roth. If you think he isn't the best book adapting screenwriter in Hollywood, check out the novel of Forrest Gump. Then you'll want to give him another Oscar. He didn’t just solve story problems, he created the whole feel of the story, from the feather to the bus stop bench. (In the book Forrest and Lieutenant Dan didn't even meet in Viet Nam.)
I'm supposed to compete in that league?, asked the house painter from Nantucket.
I don't think so. I don't get to be ball boy in that league.
So that's today's humbling tale of Hollywood.
As a fan I'm looking forward to Shantaram. As someone who doesn't believe in portents and signs, I'm not taking this as the big blood red sky-writing message (SURRENDER DOROTHY) that it seems to be.
I'm more used to the other OZ paradigms. For writers, Hollywood is full of them: the poppies and the flying monkeys, the friendly munchkins and the angry trees.
All the quotes feel chillingly familiar: “Off to see the Wizard” (or is it the Head of Development); “Bring me the broomstick (or the next unnecessary free revision) of the Wicked Witch of the West.” And don’t forget that old favorite, “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain”.
Of course it ends with “There's no place like home” as you flee back to Kansas and tell yourself it was all a dream.
But I did that 20 years ago. And I'm still dreaming.
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