Solar, by Ian McEwan

 

 

Solar is the type of novel I love: the extended tale of a smart fool, an egotistical clown who scrabbles to the top only to have his sins and foolishness catch up with him. The best of this genre is typified by Jane Smiley's Good Faith and Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full, two novels I would re-read at the drop of a hat.

Solar doesn't quite reach their heights. McEwan's great line writing is an unwavering delight, and the plotting is great, if not as intricate and full as those other novels. The problem is his protagonist, the physicist Michael Beard, who is meant to be a flawed and somewhat comic fool. The great hat trick of this type is the novelist's ability to make you feel a complex blend of derision and, eventually, affection for him. It's that last bit that's the sticking point.

It doesn't help that Beard describes himself as physically grotesque, a lardball who can't stem his love for food and drink (and sex and reputation and money and leisure). And yet he has a constant stream of comely women at his beck and call, usually three or four at once, a vast and rotating cast over the ten years or so of the novel. I know that we, as readers, are supposed to have long accepted that young(ish) and beautiful(ish) women are attracted to ugly old men for their money and protection, but I can't seem to buy it. It just engendered a whole lot of eye-rolling---and a feeling of disgust, not just for the character but for the novelist.

The ending of the novel is problematic too. I'm sympathetic; endings are the hardest part of fiction. I once read a take-off on a writing seminar that advised students, if they got stuck, to just end it with "And then he got hit by a bus." Novelists have limited choices: death, satisfaction (romance attained, legal case won, mountain climbed), failure. Solar ends with a modern variant, what I call the moment of grace. The world is crashing down around the protagonist, but he steps out into the sunshine, feels the warmth and light that the universe is showering upon him, and for a moment is lifted above the worldly concerns that have consumed him for the entire length of the novel. It can be a truly touching thing, but here it just feels cheap and unearned, the moment-of-grace equivalent of that bus: "And then he felt love for a moment." Okay.

There's something about McEwan's writing of gender, too, that bothers me. Some readers complained that it's the same old Maileresque middle-aged man in crisis that we've had for decades on end now, but I need to actually read a Mailer novel before I can write "Maileresque" with authority. For me the women are reminiscent of Saul Bellow's, those shimmering presences on the sidelines whom the protagonist views with affection but distance, ready to expose their sadnesses and little humiliations. It truly makes me uncomfortable, probably compounded my dislike of McEwan's Saturday, which featured a home invasion in which bad things occur, but mostly for the women in the family. There's a similar scene in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace that still causes my face to make an involuntary moue of disgust. I don't experience these things as artistically challenging or a picture of harsh reality, but as a glimpse of a sick little part of the novelist's head. It pains me to even put McEwan in the same corner as Coetzee, because he's written some truly great books. I hope that he turns a corner with his next one.

My Main Question After Seeing Iron Man 3

When did Don Cheadle get so ripped??

The Impossible

The true story behind this movie is remarkable: the tale of one family's experience of the 2004 tsunami in south Asia. Many survivors of the tsunami have said how true-to-life the movie is. 

But beyond the story is equally remarkable filmmaking. J. A. Bayona directs with great finesse. The scenes before the tsunami are some of the most suspenseful I've ever seen because you know what's coming and Bayona uses sound and blackouts to create a sense of dread, even as the family is enjoying itself and sky is clear. Sudden noises in traffic. Turbulence on the plane. A view looking out at the placid ocean that cuts to black. We sense something underneath the surface that is threatening, and who knows which of these moments represents the one in which the earthquake, deep in the sea, actually occurred, setting this enormous tragedy in motion as tourists sunbathed and locals went about their day.

I expected the movie to be more about the main character, Maria (played by Naomi Watts), clinging to a tree for hours (which she did), in other words a chronicle of a single feat of endurance like 147 Hours. But the movie covered much more than just that awful time. It's the time before, the time during, and the time after, showing how the characters' endurance and consciences were tested for not just a few hours but for days, in complex, varied ways. The filmmaker packs so much into this movie: what it means to love, how humans operate in tragedy, what family means, the difficulty of making decisions with children when no decision is good. My favorite scene was when Maria and her oldest son, Lucas, have dragged themselves near a tree they think they can climb and be safe in case another wave hits. As they near it, absolutely exhausted and seriously hurt, they hear a child's cry. Maria starts to look for the child while Lucas begs her not to, to instead get to the tree and safety. "We're going to die!" Maria bends down to him, puts her hands on his face, and says, "If it's the last thing we do." And they go to find the boy.

A Handpicked Bunch of Delightful

A friend recently asked me for a list of my favorite reads, books that were not necessarily the best literature but that were simply wonderful to read. Here's my short list:


1.  Horse Heaven, by Jane Smiley

This is the type of novel I like best: thick, juicy, filled with content. Smiley has written a lot of books like this, with big casts of characters of all types, comic, whimsical, philosophical, winners, losers, and satisfying, complex plots.


2. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson.

This is a no-brainer. Compulsively readable, beautifully plotted, great characters, suspenseful. Everything a mystery thriller should be. Possibly the best book of its genre.


3. Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett

Fun + Weighty + Inventive = Fiction Perfection.


4. Graceling, by Kristin Cashore

A YA fantasy novel that returns to its fairy tale roots and seems all the fresher for it.


5. The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold

Can a novel told from the perspective of a murdered child be "delightful"? Strangely, yes, in the sense that you love every minute spent in the company of these characters and the story is not mostly a tale of woe but a tale of resistance, pushing back, resilience, and the search for justice.

This Film Has Not Yet Been Rated

This documentary details the travails that filmmakers have to go through to get an R rating on their edgy movies. It's not the world's most captivating documentary, but it makes the case that the MPAA is outdated and just all-around awful. The membership of the ratings board is kept secret,  a bizarre injustice that filmmaker Kirby Dick goes about rectifying by hiring a private investigator to track down their identities, which she does with dogged glee. Half of the fun of the movie is seeing the PI follow these hapless raters around, snapping their license plates and going through their garbage.

Most grating is that any kind of below-the-belt frontal nudity is going to get filmmakers an NC-17 rating, which means that it won't be seen in the theaters (except for the occasional art house or film festival). The result is a whitewashed American oeuvre of film work that abounds in shots of topless young women and not much else. I'd much rather see PG and PG-13 movies that are more tightly restricted in terms of language and nudity. It's important to preserve a realm of filmmaking that is innocent and truly child-appropriate. But the PG and PG-13 ratings are the appropriate place for this kind of care and conservatism. The R rating should be the place for freedom and honesty. After all, no parent who is truly concerned about exposing their kids to inappropriate material is going to take their child to an R-rated movie.

Also grating is the mere fact that such a small group of people are allowed to control the ratings system and thus the content of American filmmaking. The raters don't seem particularly sophisticated or fair, defending their choices (when finally confronted) with sentiments like "All I know is that I wouldn't feel comfortable watching that with my daughter." Uff—then don't go to R-rated movies with your daughter. The movie makes the case that the raters are really just shills for the studios, who want to maximize the profitability of films by cutting out any disturbing bits. The raters know what is expected of them and are simply doing their jobs. The solution isn't better raters but a completely different philosophical orientation within the MPAA, which probably isn't happening any time soon.

Julie Taymor's Tempest

 

 

How pissed am I that mediocre reviews kept me from seeing this movie till now? I'm not saying it's perfect, but the parts that are good are damn, damn good. Unfortunately, critics tend to be much harsher judges of experimental films than conventional ones.

Helen Mirren is so great as Prospera that I now can't imagine the play with a male Prospero. Djimon Hounsou has a monumentally challenging job as the slave Caliban and he tackles it fearlessly. Russell Brand was born to be a Shakespeare fool, and Ben Whishaw brings depth and spookiness to Ariel. Most of all, Julie Taymor creates a uniquely loaded atmosphere to the film. It feels weird and portentous, and if not all the special effects work, most are spectacular.

As Roger used to say, thumbs way, way up.

The Boy in the Suitcase

I just finished this new mystery/crime novel, another entry in the growing list of great Scandinavian thrillers. Perhaps a key to their success is that these novels have several nodes of storytelling: a main protagonist, a second protagonist working toward a similar goal but unaware of the first, and a villain (or two) who is working toward the same goal but with a different aim in mind. We get to see the thought processes and psychologies of three or four gripping characters who are slowly converging toward each other.

In The Boy in the Suitcase, we have the mother of a kidnapped child, the woman who has found and is protecting him, the kidnapper who's been cheated of payment, and a fourth character whose relationship to the others is murky.

The book was co-written by Lene Kaaberbol and Agnete Friis, which makes it the second co-written Scandinavian thriller I've read in the last few months. Seems like a hard thing to do, co-write a novel, but these authors seem to do just fine.

Good Friday

Good Friday is such a special day. In the Christian faith, it is the triumph of love and self-sacrifice, an affirmation that the basis of the universe is a God who loves us as completely as it's possible to be loved. In addition, the crucifixion is the culminating event of God's incarnation: we are never as corporeal, never more situated in our mortal bodies, as when we are in pain. It's an answer to the question, Does God know how suffering feels? Because if he did, he couldn't possibly allow it, could he?

The question has never been stated more poignantly than in this song by the Christian singer-songwriter Rich Mullins. Rich was killed in a car accident when he was in his early forties. He had already written a handful of Christian pop classics, and after his death, a demo tape was found in his belongings. It consisted of ten songs he had recorded by himself in a church nine days before he died. His friends published the songs in a two-album set. The first CD consisted of the rough demos recorded by Rich in the church. The second CD consisted of renditions of the songs recorded by his friends.

The demo version of "Hard to Get" is one of my all-time favorite songs, and it specifically references Good Friday (in the lines about friends falling asleep, as Jesus's disciples famously did as Jesus prayed and sweat blood the night before Good Friday). The song is available on Amazon, YouTube, etc.; just be sure that you get the demo version by Rich, and not the recorded version by his friends.

HARD TO GET

You who live in heaven
Hear the prayers of those of us who live on earth
Who are afraid of being left by those we love
And who get hardened by the hurt

Do you remember when You lived down here where we all scrape
To find the faith to ask for daily bread
Did You forget about us after You had flown away
Well I memorized every word You said

Still I'm so scared I'm holding my breath
While You're up there just playing hard to get

You who live in radiance
Hear the prayers of those of us who live in skin
We have a love that's not as patient as Yours was
Still we do love now and then

Did You ever know loneliness
Did You ever know need
Do You remember just how long a night can get?
When You were barely holding on
And Your friends fall asleep
And don't see the blood that's running in Your sweat

Will those who mourn be left uncomforted
While You're up there just playing hard to get?

And I know you bore our sorrows
And I know you feel our pain
And I know it would not hurt any less
Even if it could be explained

And I know that I am only lashing out
At the One who loves me most
And after I figured this somehow
All I really need to know

Is if You who live in eternity
Hear the prayers of those of us who live in time
We can't see what's ahead
And we can not get free of what we've left behind

I'm reeling from these voices that keep screaming in my ears
All the words of shame and doubt blame and regret
I can't see how You're leading me unless You've led me here
Where I'm lost enough to let myself be led
And so You've been here all along I guess
It's just Your ways and You are just plain hard to get.

Act of the Imagination

The speculative novel is on fire: Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, World War Z by Max Brooks, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, and Reamde by Neal Stephenson are just a few of the massive literary hits of the last few years. While there is plenty of traditional narrative out there, spun by great novelists like Jonathan Franzen and Marilynne Robinson, it's among these speculative novelists that the most vibrant work is being done. We've turned some sort of corner.

For decades great literature was defined by closely observed quotidian lives, battling ennui or inner demons. Protagonists were often middle-aged, divorced or estranged, searching for meaning at a time when their work lives were stagnating, sex was failing them, or drink was consuming them. These stories ended at worst with total Willy Loman-like  failure and at best with a small moment of grace that was as modest as it was fleeting: a Saul Bellow character stepping out into the sunlight, About Schmidt's lost retiree getting a letter from the African child he supported, reflections on a moment of youthful possibility in Olive Kitteridge.

But the themes of disappointment and melancholy that permeate classic works like A Fan's Notes and Revolutionary Road are fast becoming antiquated, their characters more Sad Sack than Antihero. For me, and I suspect others, any appreciation of the fine prose and reflection on life's limitations have been completely subsumed by a massive irritation at the haplessness and passivity of their characters.

Especially when juxtaposed with their new counterparts. In new fiction, internal turmoil has been almost entirely replaced with external conflict. Characters have their back stories, their disappointments, but these are not the center of their lives, nor the motor of the plot. Rather, they are consumed with rebellion against structures of power. In Cloud Atlas, for example, protagonists from six different time periods are pitted against the institutions of oppression of their time: tribal aggression, plantation slavery, corporate corruption, and so on. In The Hunger Games, Katniss Everdeen is set against the dictatorship-cum-entertainment-colossus of the Capital. In World War Z and other zombie novels like Justin Cronin's The Passage, ordinary people defend their world from an totalitarian death horde. In The Road the father and son struggle for survival in a landscape denuded of life. And protagonists in Neal Stephenson's novels maneuver toward freedom through the twin pitfalls of oligarchy and anarchy: government bureaucracies, terrorist cells, and the all-encompassing reach of technology and surveillance.

What makes these stories great works of art is that, in all these cases, the protagonists are empowered by their capability and moral strength. They have skills. Cloud Atlas's Luisa Rey has her investigative smarts. Katniss has her bow. The zombie fighters have their jerry-rigged generators. Nearly any page of Reamde offers a tutorial on applying one's intelligence to the circumstances at hand. You can see the influence of genre fiction like thrillers here, as well as the influence of superheroes and comic books. And these works would remain in those categories but for the way their authors marry these features with great writing and a moral perspective. Their characters are saved not only by their skills but by their adherence to a moral code in difficult circumstances. Cloud Atlas's Adam Ewing saves a runaway slave at great personal risk. Katniss refuses to kill her friend. The nuclear sub commander of World War Z refuses to launch his missiles. We have moved way beyond the personal here, way beyond middle-age disappointment and the sorrow of old age. And yet these novels remain humane and important, because what's more personal than the way we act upon the world in the few years that we have here?

This new strain of literature may also be born out of our current understanding of morality. Several decades of liberal thinking has brought us an awareness of global impacts, an attention to the Other, and admonitions to Think Globally Act Locally. We understand that you can't be considered a good person if you're faithful to your wife but pollute the water source of an Indian village; if you donate to local charity but use military power recklessly; if you celebrate freedom but destroy the ozone. The stage upon which we act is so much larger than our homes and offices. That's why so many of these novels are global: the action takes place in China, or a Pacific island, or the Philippines, and the protagonists are global too. And it's not just a Western man acting on a global stage, but the global stage acting itself. When Briony, the young budding writer in Atonement first realizes that it may be "just as vivid" an experience to be her sister as it is to be herself, she's taken the first step in empathy: realizing that others' lives are just as real as one's own. This new literature takes that perspective global.

A third influence may be our realization that the world is changing, fast and in scary ways. We can see, maybe for the first time, that we are capable of really destroying our world. Not just a generation, as in World War I or II. Or a particular area, as in the Irish potato famine or the Dust Bowl disaster of the 1930s. We see glaciers literally falling apart before our eyes and hear that the beautiful city of Venice may disappear under the water within a century and begin to envision a disaster that is global and irreversible. Perhaps the apocalyptic novel is such a huge American phenomenon because we want desperately to believe we can McGyver our way out of it. These protagonists operate in hugely complex, risky worlds, but overcome through their persistence, intelligence, and creativity. It may be wishful thinking but only through these traits we can avoid the disasters in the first place. These novels feel like a challenge: get off your asses; stop moping; get to work.

E. B. White's Dilemma

E. B. White famously wrote, "I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day."

To plan a life too. And a politics. I thought about White's quote after a friend posted a link online to a short article in The Atlantic about wealth distribution. Among the people who responded to his post was a woman in a high-paying career. Here is what she wrote:

"You begin by recognizing that there has always been, and will always be, a 'wealthy' class. No matter how far we can go back in recorded history, this has been so. Why are we now preoccupied with redistribution of that wealth? It will never happen. The only thing that can happen is that the wealth is transferred, temporarily, inappropriately and/or coercively from one who does have it written in their 'Book of Life' to one who does not have it written there. To see the future, we have only to look at the past. The past has proven that the wealth always returns to the rightful heirs. May God help us all."

While you stop to deal with your rising nausea, let me home in on this part in particular: "No matter how far we can go back in recorded history, this has been so. Why are we now preoccupied with redistribution of that wealth?" I imagine this woman looking back at the stretch of recorded history, all those millennia during which the rich got up in the morning and enjoyed their wealth guilt-free. The Greek landowner who set his slaves to work each day and capped off the night with a banquet and courtesans. The Roman patrician who looted the European countryside and came home to his estate, library, and wine cellar. How lucky they were to have no troublesome wrinkles in the cloth of their consciences! To be so fully enfolded in their warm and reassuring culture of their peers!

Unfortunately for this woman, she has been cursed with living in an era in which concern for injustice is the central thrust of all serious intellectual and spiritual activity. Our titans of industry devote their billions to health care around the world. Our entertainers spend their off months walking the dusty camps of Darfur.  Our literary awards go to those who poke at the world with a stick, looking for those nooks and crannies where good is being attempted or evil can be exposed. And our daily lives, from the products we consume to the trash that we entomb, from the words we use and the assumptions we assume, are subjected to a continual ethical testing. Should we eat veal? Should we buy sweatshop clothes? Can we say "retard"? Should we say "bitch"?

It's annoying, really, the constant, hovering presence of conscience, and yet we have gotten off relatively easy thus far. Nothing in a middle-class American life compares to the moral demands of the past and those being made daily in other parts of the globe. The World War II era provides case studies. For example, the New York Times today carried a review of a new volume of the letters of P. G. Wodehouse. Reviewer Charles McGrath noted that Wodehouse was mostly interested in writing and spending time with his Pekingnese lapdogs. He writes:

"The evidence in the letters suggests that his political naïveté bordered on moral obtuseness. While the war was going on, Wodehouse made a deal with a German film company, for example, to develop his novel “Heavy Weather” into a movie. And in the letters he wrote from the Adlon Hotel—Berlin’s most luxurious—after his release from camp, he treats the war mostly as a personal inconvenience, with seemingly no awareness of Hitler’s genocide or of the thousands of lives being spent on both sides."

This review in turn made me think of the excellent documentary about Leni Riefenstahl, the German filmmaker who socialized with Adolf Hitler and directed Triumph of the Will. The documentary, called The Rise and Fall of Leni Riefenstahl, describes her rising career as an actress and filmmaker and how she brushed aside her few quibbles about socializing and even collaborating with the Nazi establishment. Riefenstahl was not a monster. She was simply a woman who loved her life and found the moral challenges of her day not to her liking.  She preferred that history not interfere with her plans for a fabulous life.

No one can live a perfectly moral life, and agonizing over every action can lead only to madness. But it's a privilege to live in a time when we are alive to the reality of others, and an honor to be even a small part of the struggle for a more just world.

Bill and Melinda Gates working on vaccinations in Africa

George Clooney in Africa, working with his foundation Not On Our Watch

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity,

winner of the National Book Award

My Booky Wook, by Russell Brand

 

I picked up this book recently because it got good reviews and who can resist the subtitle "A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up"? It ended up being one of my all-time favorite memoirs.

Its first virtue is that Brand is a great writer. This shouldn't be a surprise since he's a creative type, a comedian who writes his own material. He uses all the weapons in his arsenal: word play ("I still feel myself within the same vessel—my flesh a rocket of which I am the captain and chief cosmo-naughty"); metaphors (of a nice neighborhood man who was a possible father figure but whom he alienated as a boy: "I never spoke to that old man again. I closed down that account which could have been quite rewarding"); and brilliant imagery ("Toddlers can't move properly in winter coats; they're like little trussed-up Hannibal Lecters scanning the world with their eyes").

Best of all is his mix of high-brow and low-brow, which comes out just right. Of his gerbils, who began breeding out of control and eating their young, he writes: "The second generation stuck rigidly to the Old Testament model and ballsed Eden right up." And being a young teenager in gym class: "I hated them showers and that cold thigh-slap bonhomie, me trudging about all pudgy and unloved on some hard pitch, while other kids excelled, brilliantly occupying their newly masculine bodies."

A second virtue is that Brand is a thoughtful observer, and the care he takes with writing means that his observations are memorably rendered. I like this passage early on: "We all need something to help us unwind at the end of the day. You might have a glass of wine, or a joint, or a big delicious blob of heroin to silence your silly brainbox of its witterings, but there has to be some form of punctuation, or life just seems utterly relentless." I love every word of this passage. "Witterings" is made up but we know exactly what he means. "Punctuation" is the perfect term for those little rituals that create some sense of rhythm to our days. And he makes a really truthful and surprisingly painful observation with "life just seems utterly relentless."

It's this combination he pulls together—the lightheartedness of "silly brainbox" and the heavyheartedness of "relentless"—that is so powerful. In another passage he reminds us that the French describe orgasm as a "little death" and says that's what it is for him: "a little holiday from my head." This passage touches on his sexual appetites, which are usually a topic of sport or humor, but then throws in "holiday from my head," which most of us can relate to as the serious issue that it is. And he concludes with a funny: "I hope death is like a big French orgasm."

A third virtue is that Brand is (now, at least) a man of essentially good will. Of all the many, many people he discusses in the book, he has harsh words for very few of them. He has a generous disposition toward others. And because he's creative, he's not clichéd in his thinking any more than in his writing: "I didn't want to go to that treatment center, but all the do-gooders—and I mean that literally, as they did generally do good (I've never really understood why people employ the term pejoratively)—they all insisted, and I sort of, kind of agreed." This is his essential creative mind coming out: rehabilitating the term "do-gooder" is a much more radical act of unconformity than, say, taking heroin.

The trickiest part of a memoir is getting the tone right, especially toward your parents and your child self. He's brilliant at this: He puts you right in the mind of the inexplicable little shit that he was, making you feel how he did: that he wasn't trying to be bad or mean (who ever is?) but sometimes he couldn't help himself. He didn't even understand it himself. As adult after adult becomes disgusted with him (and later as woman after woman becomes disgusted with him), he recalls their reactions with equanimity and understanding, even while reserving some sympathy for his child self.

As for his parents, he notes his absent father's faults but also his strengths. And his mother he loves to pieces. Writing about when he was learning to talk, he writes, "My childhood can't have been that bad if someone loved me enough to document my first words."

I could go on and on, but I'll just say: Whether or not you like Russell Brand (or even know who he is), if you like language, this is the book for you.

Our Coming Chinese Overloads

Have you noticed how often comics like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert make jokes about this? It's become a thing, and people laugh every time. But even as I'm laughing, I'm thinking, "Why am I laughing??" Do we think it's so preposterous that it's funny? No, that's not it. . . . It's more like we're congratulating ourselves for knowing what's coming and being all mature about it. 

The China anxiety comes through in literature too. Neal Stephenson writes about a future in which China is at the center of the world in The Diamond Age, and there are lots of other novels that give China and its people a place in their imaginative worlds that is prominent and equally significant as the Western world (Cloud Atlas, Reamde).  These writers are taking us into the future to show us a world in which we aren't the stars, in which our culture is marginal, and a big old Other is where the action is. Even Reamde, which takes place in the kind-of present, shows us a China that is as vibrant, whose people are as individual and psychologically rich, as we are. It's a good thing, but it does strike me as a nice little lullaby: "There, there, see . . .  they're not monsters . . . they're just like us. Everything will be fine."

The apocalyptic novel has arguably been the most vibrant form of fiction for the last ten years or so. Maybe people like me feel a sense of vulnerability about our country that was completely missing from the time of my childhood. But novels like The Road, The Passage, and World War Z strike me as psychological trial runs for a scary future.

 

The Art of Description, by Mark Doty

 

Mark Doty is a poet and essayist whose Art of Description is a volume in the "The Art of" series of books curated by Charles Baxter. If you ever want to take a stroll down memory lane and experience the kind of "literary appreciation" that used to characterize literary criticism but has been out of vogue for decades, check out his parsing of Elizabeth Bishop's poem "The Fish" or George Herbert's "Prayer." I also love his proposal that what description describes is not the world but rather a particular consciousness (that of the author or narrator) at work.

9/11 Memorial in New York

Finally had a chance to visit the site of the 9/11 memorial at the World Trade Center this month. We have been blessed with a lot of really beautiful, strong memorials in recent years, from the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial in Washington, DC, to the Oklahoma City memorial with its empty chairs, to the FDR Memorial, again in DC. There have been only a few stinkers (the World War II memorial and, to a lesser degree, the MLK memorial, both on the National Mall).

The 9/11 memorial consists of two pools situated on the footprints of the twin towers. Names of the lost are inscribed on a metal counter that goes around them. They include not only the names of the 9/11 victims but also those of the earlier 1993 attack. In cases where a victim was pregnant, "and her unborn child" is included.

From under these counters, water falls in thick sheaths down to a pool the same size as the tower, gathers at the bottom, and then falls further into a small dark rectangle whose bottom is not visible. In this elegant design are intimations of tears, falling, disappearance. I so admire that dark rectangle in the middle of each pool because it is terribly sad, it's allowed to be terribly sad. The water not only reminds us of tears and falling but also creates a soundscape that isolates the memorial from the quotidian noises of the city: construction, car horns, and the like. It helps create a sacred space that is graced with the so-called Survivor Tree, the one tree at the World Trade Center that survived the attack.

Warm Bodies

Spoilers, natch.

How do I love thee, Warm Bodies? Let me count the ways.

First, I love your slyness. Like how you work in references to Romeo and Juliet (the protagonists names are Julie and "R" and there's a good balcony scene) without hitting us over the head with it. How you show the zombies meandering around the airport while R thinks about how it must have been in the old days, when people could connect with each other and interact, and then cut to a flashback of people meandering around the airports with their heads dropped down, riveted to their iPhones---a flashback so quick you could miss the joke if you weren't paying attention.

Second, I love your leads. Nicholas Hoult has it all: the perfect slouch, a great way with a comic line, and the rarified art of acting with your eyeballs (which is about all he's got to work with for the first half hour of the film). Teresa Palmer has the casual naturalness and attitude of Kristen Stewart with the dewy sex appeal of Scarlett Johansson.

Third, I love your humor because it's subtle and quiet. I like a good Melissa McCarthy scene as much as the next girl, but it's refreshing to be have jokes sent your way like a wink, quick and light.

Quick and light, too, is the moral of the story, that connection makes us human, that most (but not all) of us are salvageable if we try. There are no big speeches and no lengthy wrap-up. Just an image here, a line there, and the trust that the audience can put it all together.

Random

I like Helen Mirren's pink hair.

When You're Sick

Every time you blow your nose, you think, "THAT should do it."

The Wisdom of Helen Keller

Helen Keller famously wrote, "True happiness . . . is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose." I often apply this formula to my daily life, according to circumstances: "True happiness . . . is not attained through playing another round of Red Dead Redemption but through fidelity to another load of whites."

I've never read her autobiography, but every quote that I've read is full of that clear-sighted wisdom that sounds obvious when you're young but whose depth and meaning become clearer with every year that you age.

On religion: "It is wonderful how much time good people spend fighting the devil. If they would only expend the same amount of energy loving their fellow men, the devil would die in his own tracks of ennui."

On loss: "What we have once enjoyed, we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes part of us."

On work: "I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble." 

And with that, back to laundry.

Steampunk: An Introduction to the Genre

Wanting to find out more about this subgenre, I stumbled upon this admirable post. For the aspiring aeroplane enthusiasts among you:

Twenty Must Read Steampunk Books – An Introduction to the Genre | The Ranting Dragon

Fincher and Mara and Craig, Oh My

The world needs to get cracking on that Girl with the Dragon Tattoo sequel asap.

My New Favorite Detective

Chet is a disgraced police trainee dropout. After failing miserably his final exam, he became a PI and is now investigating crimes ("mostly missing persons") in California. He's got a great nose for criminals and an unfailing ability to size people up. He can follow a trail across the desert and back but sometimes has trouble communicating his findings. Illiterate? Autistic? No, dog.

Chet's favorite things in life include riding shotgun, catching perps, and hanging with his best buddy Bernie (who usually drives, though I'm certain Chet could step up if need be). And he's a great storyteller, from the first page of Dog on It to the last. This series by Spencer Quinn is flat-out charming, and that's something that's not too easy to do well. The writing is snappy, the plot is engaging, and the whole experience of reading makes you think, along with Chet, "Is this a great life or what?"

The Gallery of 20th-Century Martyrs at Westminster Abbey

Including Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Oscar Romero, and, of course, Martin Luther King Jr. Their examples illuminate for us still the art of living.

Our Midatlantic Stony Creeky Leafy Piedmont World

 

The Sorest Loser That Ever Lived

That's what Earl Weaver, legendary manager of the Baltimore Orioles, wanted on his tombstone, and it will be repeated a hundred times in the obituaries that are already starting to appear.

Sports is narrative. It can be a long, sprawling novel, like the epic century-long Curse of the Babe. It can be a short story, like the Orioles Magic of 2012. Or it can be a tweet, like a really intense at-bat. One of the great characters of baseball was Earl Weaver, whose fiery showdowns with umpires constituted one of the great serial stories of my childhood. Baseball cap turned backward so he could really get up in the umps' faces, his short stature only made his fury that much more explosive. He was ejected from games more than any other manager in the American League, often kicking dirt onto home plate on his way out. But Weaver brought more than fire to the game. He brought joy, enthusiasm, smarts, and one of the winningest records in all of baseball history. All hail the Duke of Earl.

C. S. Lewis and the Virtue of a Loved Book

Lewis's An Experiment in Criticism has many, many fascinating ideas brewing about how to judge the worth of a book. He has this revolutionary thought: We can never really know what a book brings to another person. Even if it seems like a waste to us, if someone else claims to love it we have to contend with this fact: "The prima facie probability that anything which has ever been truly read and obstinately loved by any reader has some virtue in it is overwhelming."

C. S. Lewis and Reading

On looking down one's nose at certain kinds of literature:

"The Puritan conscience works on without the Puritan theology—like millstones grinding nothing; like digestive juices working on an empty stomach and producing ulcers. The unhappy youth applies to literature all the scruples, the rigorism, the self-examination, the distrust of pleasure, which his forebears applied to the spiritual life; and perhaps soon all the intolerance and self-righteousness."

Elizabeth Wurtzel

Have you forgotten how amazing she is?

Here's a reminder:

Elizabeth Wurtzel for NY Mag

Lincoln, Finally

As I sat in the theater tonight, I thought, "Why didn't anyone tell me how great this movie is??" Well, it's been on every top ten list, usually first or second, so, duh . . .  people told you. But I had convinced myself that it was a much-admired movie, not a much-loved one. How wrong I was.

Spielberg, as always, can tell a story like nobody's business. Set, music, blah blah blah. All good. The acting? Wondrous. There was plenty of room for histrionics (Mary Todd Lincoln) and mugging (the comic relief of the fixers, the chief of whom is played brilliantly by James Spader). But not a single performance goes off the rails into melodrama or exaggeration. And Daniel Day-Lewis does the seemingly impossible, marrying the quiet, even awkward dignity of our public idea of Lincoln with the charisma and cleverness that we know he must have had because you don't get to the presidency without them. He's a whole, seamless psychological being. He's quiet, then he starts telling a folksy story, then he's chatting away like a gossip, then he's intense and focused, and so on and so forth. Even when he slams his palm on the table and gets all bossy, it feels like one and the same person, and it's not exploited with halo lighting and prolonged into A Moment. There's something in Spielberg's direction that's not insistent, that doesn't try to shove [Lincoln's greatness, the fixers' charm, Mary Todd's complexity, take your pick] down your throat.

Even Tommy Lee Jones stays within the bounds of believability

 in his lovable curmudgeonliness and disdain for the opinion of others.

I'm certain that Daniel Day-Lewis will win the Oscar for Best Actor, but how about Best Supporting Actor for James Spader? I'd be on board with that, if only for the scene in which he belated realizes that they guy he's been chatting up at a public house is trying to kill him. I also like the scene in which Lincoln surprises the fixers at their makeshift headquarters and it takes about three minutes for both Lincoln and Spade's character to realize they're the smartest people in the room. This is another way that both the script and Daniel Day-Lewis nail it, by making evident how very, very smart Lincoln was. It's easy for the public personas of people like him (salt-of-the-earth Lincoln, Bubba Clinton) to obscure their razor-sharp minds.

Here's a puzzle: How can a vote, a historical congressional vote whose outcome we already know with complete certainty, be so very suspenseful?

Solipsistic Pop 4

On a whim I ordered this annual collection of British comics, each year with a different theme. This year's, volume 4, was maps, and I love it so much I had to share. Here are some images from the two-color volume (plus the cover in blue).

Peter Jackson's Hobbit Problem

There are two films inside The Hobbit, battling for supremacy. This is the one I was hoping for:

And this is the one I mostly got:

Many critics have already knocked the film for being too like The Lord of the Rings, but it's a fair complaint. Part of the problem is that we've seen nearly nine hours of The Lord of the Rings already. We've seen the fellowship hiking in grand vistas:

And the spectacular deeps of Middle Earth lit with fire:

And the bulging, grotesque, fearsome opponent:

The noble warrior:

This would be a problem even if the movie was faithful to the source material, but of course it isn't. You can see that Peter Jackson has attempted to incorporate some of the charm of The Hobbit in shots like these:

In the humor of the troll scene:

And in Martin Freeman's admirable turn as Bilbo:

But it's not enough, not nearly enough. Because what he did was essentially start with the Lord of the Rings template, and then append to it moments of charm or humor. If instead the movie had been imagined from the ground up, as something fundamentally different than LOTR, it could have really been something.

All of this is essentially a fan's problem, though—I wanted the movie to capture more of the feeling of the book and it didn't happen. A bigger problem is the movie's weaknesses as a movie, not just an adaptation. An easy target is the set design, which often looks more cheap and fake than some videogames. I disliked Jackson's rendering of Rivendell even in The Fellowship of the Ring, but it's never looked worse than here:

Then there's the dismal storytelling. There are many individual shots in The Hobbit that are spectacular: the showdown in the trees, the goblin kingdom—scenes of great beauty and power in and of themselves. But you can't have a movie that is nothing but great scenes. The movie is too heavy. Every scene is packed with drama or charm or grandiosity or danger or poignancy or whatever it is that is being picked from the a la carte menu. There's no filler. As I said to my viewing companion, it's as if every minute of the movie has a soundtrack. There are five or so musical themes (drama, charm, grandiosity, danger, poignancy), and every minute of the film must be assigned one of them. 

The heaviness is a textural problem because it's boring to stay at the same level of intensity throughout. Moments of lightness (Bilbo in the Shire) and potential slowness (Bilbo in Gollum's lair) are cut away from so quickly or frequently that you never adjust, never start to feel immersed in a different, slower rhythm. 

Even worse, at some point the grandiosity and poignancy start to feel unearned. I remember distinctly feeling this for the first time in The Two Towers. Early on Aragorn is presumed lost in a battle, as his stunned friends watch him fall over a cliff. They return to the castle, but shortly Aragorn is seen waking up in stream, getting up, and making his way back to the castle. In a beautiful shot, he comes up to the massive doors of the castle and puts all his remaining strength into pushing them open, upon which his friends and allies rush to greet him in amazement. It's a great shot. Filmmakers like Peter Jackson have really learned how to film monumental moments and vistas like this. But Aragorn's journey took all of  . . . two, three minutes of screen time? We didn't experience a long, arduous journey, nor a castle's grief at his loss. These are summarized in the visual image of the doors; the monumentality of the door scene replaces the actual journey rather than serving as the capstone for its portrayal. 

Perhaps Jackson is afraid to bore us by portraying Aragorn's trudge back to life. Or perhaps he's a sucker for these great shots and can't bear to cut any of them, despite their lack of supporting structure. But this replacement of earned emotion—earned through the time spent on a journey or time spent with a character, and replaced with a visual summation—is a shortcut that Peter Jackson turns to more and more often. The visuals ask us to feel wonder, but the story hasn't taken us there.