Sunday Salon: On Water- and Bookbending

This is my last  week in Hawai'i, more or less.  A week from Tuesday I head back to Nova Scotia via Los Angeles to prepare for the start of the Fall term.   D has been asked to stay on indefinitely, which has him feeling a bit morose. ("Don't say this is your last week in Hawai'i," he just moaned, reading over my shoulder, "You should stay for, um, nineteen weeks.")

This has been a week of blog absence, since I have been hard at work on a set of article revisions that were due on Friday.  For perhaps the first time in my life as an academic, I actually got the revisions in several hours ahead of the deadline, an achievement which is undercut somewhat by the fact that Hawai'i is several hours behind the rest of the U.S.

My favorite tidbit, culled from the research I did for this article?  John Huston collaborated with Jean-Paul Sartre on an early version of the script for his 1962 biopic Freud, which starred the great (always a bit ambivalent and haunted) Monty Clift as the father of psychoanalysis.  Later Sartre would renounce all connection to the film, but in these early stages he and Huston were filled with enthusiasm for casting Marilyn Monroe as a patient of Freud's.  She refused the role - because her own analyst had qualms about the potential heterodoxy of the work, which hadn't been approved by Anna Freud (herself a major figure in psychiatry). I've got to get my hands on this film.

OK: I need to seek your advice on a problem that arose while I was working.  Since I am traveling, for the first time I bought a bunch of relevant academic texts in ebook format (either for the Kindle or the Barnes and Noble reader), and I was delighted by how affordable they were - $9.99 for academic tomes. Giddy, I tell you.

But there was trouble in e-Paradise. First of all, since I read Kindle books on my Mac, I can't highlight, annotate or search those works.  Why, Amazon, would you release a reader without these features?  Boo.  But more worrisome still is the problem of citation: page numbers on ebooks don't match the print edition, and Kindle books don't use page numbering at all.  Instead they have Kindle locations, which are stable (they don't change when you alter the size of the font or page), but require your reader to own the Kindle edition if they are to follow your citation.  Hmm.  Not exactly a research practice that is broadly transparent. Normally, I would prefer to cite hard copies of books, because this still carry the greatest "authority" in profession publications (and will until the citation problem has been fixed - this is the only thing that I can think of, besides Luddite snobbery, that is standing in the way), but there is one book that the University of Hawai'i doesn't own in hard copy that I need to use.  I even tried the old stand-by of using Google Books to sync the location of my ebook quotation with its page in the paper edition, but this volume can't be previewed in Google Books.  (Seriously, checking the accuracy of your citations is so much less time-consuming in the age of Google Books. Oh, the glories of being an internet-age scholar.)  So here's my question: have any of you used ebooks (and specifically Kindle books) for academic purposes?  How do you going about citing them? (I am talking here about footnotes or parenthetical citations, rather than bibliographic entries, which are fairly simple.)

So, I sent the article off on Friday, and we headed off to Oahu's North Shore to celebrate.  We visited the Byodo-In Temple on the way (more on this in a future post, I hope) - the perfect place to decompress after a stressful week - and then ate ahi poke and butterfish at the Turtle Bay resort, which is just at the point where the windward coast turns into the North Shore.  We watched the sun set from Sunset Beach, where I kicked back in the sand with my rotation of three books and D wandered in the surf.  And then we came back later that night to lie on the beach and watch the Perseid meteor shower.  The previous night we tried to watch from Waikiki beach, and saw a few "shooting stars," but the light pollution is much worse on the south side of the island, and you can only see the very brightest points in the sky.  I have to admit that I may have been unconscious for a good part of Friday evening - there is something about sleeping in sand amidst almost total darkness, with the surf rushing in the background and meteors tracing their way through the sky, that is very, very refreshing.

Yesterday we went on a snorkling expedition with some of the people D works with on the show, and actually managed to avoid terrible sunburns, although we also managed to avoid any trace of dolphins, which are less active in the afternoons.  Today is more relaxing - getting some long-missed blogging, cleaning up, perhaps going for a hike up Diamond Head later this afternoon, when it is cooler.


Reading

I finished Feeling Sorry for Celia this week, an Australian YA novel in epistolary (love it) form.  It features a teenaged heroine who is a long-distance runner, which I confess made me think of my marvelous friend RP, who is both a YA-reader (/librarian) and a marathoner, both of which, I think we can agree, are awesome accomplishments.

In the novel, Elizabeth Clarry has an eccentric best friend who keeps disappearing, an alienated father who is making awkward attempts to reacquaint himself with her, a mother who communicates largely through epic post-it notes (HEY! ELIZABETH!! OVER HERE! IN FRONT OF THIS HOUSE PLANT!! IT'S A NOTE FROM YOUR MOTHER!!!! WEAR EXTRA LAYERS TODAY! IT'S GOING TO BE COLD.), an anonymous admirer who shares her daily bus, a school-mandated pen-pal, and a half-marathon to train for. She is also the target of an endless slew of communications from organizations like "the Best Friends Club," "the Cold Hard Truth Association," and "the Young Romance Society," all of whom seem to think she is making a terrible, deflating mess of the life she has been given.  This was a fun read - once I became engrossed in it about a hundred pages in, I didn't put it down or sleep till I had finished it.  I appreciated how it presented teenaged sexuality - both having sex and never having been kissed are presented as legitimate, realistic, and problematic experiences for a fifteen-year-old, and they neither make you more or less cool, admirable, or sympathetic.  There were problems however, both with the epistolary format and with the relationship Elizabeth has with her best friend, that will keep this book out of my permanent library.  I'm hoping to have time for a longer review before I give it away via Bookmooch at the start of this week.

I am in the midst of two books now, Liz Berry's (paranormal?  I feel it is heading in that direction) YA romance The China Garden and Carrie Tiffany's Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living.  In Berry's book, which I have just begun, Clare accompanies her mother to a nursing job on a remote English country estate in the weeks before she heads off to university.  As soon as they arrive, it becomes clear that there is a lot that has been hidden from her, not the least of which is that her mother was born on the estate, and has long and tortured relationship with the people who never left. My friend CM, who always has great recommendations for thrilling YA, put me on to this one.

Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living starts in the 1930s in Australia (what can I say? I'm on an Aussie kick.), where the Better-Farming Train is making its way through the arid farmlands of the country staging lectures and demonstrations on modern agricultural and domestic science.  Jean Finnegan has been hired as the needlework lecturer, and in her year of service she meets Robert Pettigree, a soil expert, who persuades her to embark on the experiment of a scientific marriage.  It is totally engrossing - my only wish so far (and I am halfway through the novel at this point) is that we had spent more time on the train, which contains a cast of characters so vibrant and is a space so interesting that it could have filled a much longer novel. (Also: it appears to be on extreme sale at Amazon right now.  It always irks me to see this after I have already bought a book.  Hrumph.)

Watching 

Last night we swatched It Happened One Night, which I have been thinking about since last summer when we traveled through northern Maine, with its abundance of old-school housekeeping cottages.  Clark Gable (who is brilliant here, unsurprisingly) and Claudette Colbert finds their unmarried selves in a series of these cottages in the course of the movie, as they flee her worried millionaire father by Greyhound bus, and they deal with the impropriety by erecting the "walls of Jericho" (a blanket hung from a clothesline) down the middle of the room.  This is a surprisingly, delightfully saucy movie, featuring (I have to note) a slow, defiant striptease on Gable's part, but as a romance it has some troubling gender politics.

Besides this, we are totally enmeshed in a revolving array of TV shows that are available on Netflix's digital streaming (which announced this week that it is opening a Canadian service this Fall - hurrah!).  We are making our slow way through the new version of Doctor Who and its companion series Torchwood.  We jumped in to the newest series while we were in London this summer, bringing the greatest possible naivete to the episodes we saw there. ("Wait," D said, "So he travels in a phone booth that is bigger on the inside than on the outside?")  Since then we have gone back to watch all of the Christopher Eccleston episodes, and we are now well into David Tennant's brilliant tenure.  In last night's really sort of dreadful episode, from the third season, I finally learned why I get so many Google hits from people looking for information about the Sycorax.  It's because the Doctor went back to 1599 and casually mentioned his old nemeses - the mind-controlling Sycorax race of alien beings - to the Bard of Avon.  Apparently, good old Will Shagspere held onto that tidbit for many a year until he had need of an unnerving magical back story for The Tempest. It now occurs to me that I have seriously deepened the Google confusion with this post.  Ah well.  Hello, Tardis travelers! Welcome to Sycorax Pine, where we have no intention of controlling your minds via your type-A+ blood.  I promise. (But can you trust me?)

More importantly, we have become hopelessly enthralled to Avatar: The Last Airbender.  Rest assured that this is neither the Shyamalan-helmed movie (let us never speak of that again) nor an epic tale of the colonial oppression of blue, sensitive-tailed creatures.  You will not have to wear special 3D glasses.  Rather it is a visually inventive, richly characterized, well-written animated series with some of the most stunning martial arts sequences I have seen in many years.  It is a highly intelligent work, built out of deceptively simple premises (like many of the best works for children): the episode we just watched had scenes that were obviously influenced by Kurosawa's Yojimbo and its Western inheritors.

The world of Avatar is a war torn one: there used to be four nations that existed in perfect balance (Earth, Air, Fire, and Water), each with its own particular form of magic, which comes in the form of the ability to "bend," or manipulate, the nation's element.  The balance was always maintained by an "avatar," a warrior-lama who has mastery of all the different forms of bending.  But a century ago the new avatar, just a child, disappeared, and shortly after that - for reasons we don't completely understand yet - the Fire nation began a rampaging conquest of its neighbors' territories.  Now, after a hundred years of bloodshed, two Water nation children from the south pole find the young avatar (Aang) and his six-legged flying bison of a spirit-guide (Appa, who is a brilliantly drawn character in his own right) glacially preserved in unnatural youth.  The three children embark on a quest to train Aang, who is the last surviving member of the Air nation, in the bending of the three other elements so that he can turn the tide of war against the hyperaggressive Fire nation.

These three are really well-rendered - each given their own strengths,  weaknesses, areas of expertise, and feelings of responsibility that affect the adventures they have - but their plots tend toward the "very special episode" realm of lesson-learning.  Even better is the emerging story of the ruling family of Fire nation: the crown prince, Zuku, is my favorite character of the series (D tends to favor his uncle, an epicure of philosophical bent).  He has been attacked and banished by his father, and left with a vicious scar on his face from the violent confrontation.  He is a continual disappointment when compared to his gifted and heartless firebending sister, who tries (among other things) to convince him when they are still small children that their father plans to murder him.  His father has told him that the only way to restore his honor and earn a repeal of his banishment is to bring in the avatar as a prisoner, so he singlemindedly hunts Aang from one end of the world to the other.  We see him do callous, cruel things, but the more we learn of him, the more this seems a product of environment, of upbringing.  And the longer he wanders the world, the more his environment continues to work upon him, revealing how much he has in common with the heroic Aang.  His very pursuit of Aang often pits him against his own nation (which has sent other agents to destroy the Avatar), and the lines between capturing and rescuing begin to blur.

I don't even have time to get into the visual ingenuity of the film-making here, but if you can accustom yourself to some clanging moments of manga-style silliness you will also see some strikingly graceful images and movements drawn from (and built off of) that genre as well.

The fights (each nation has a fighting style based on a different discipline of Asian martial arts) are consistently my favorite part of each episode: in a recent episode that dealt with a blind girl who becomes the champion of Earth nation's WWE-style fighting league, her perception of the world around her is rendered so brilliantly that I exclaimed, "I have never seen anything like this."  Really: seek it out, and be patient through the simplicity of the early episodes.  It is one of my favorite discoveries of this year.

The Quick and the Deadwood: True Colors (3.3)

Langrishe, gazing out at Hearst's building: 

Strange affectations your devil friend has.  Shabby appearance, derelict hotel.

Al Swearengen: 

Put the hole through that wall just before he worked on my hand.

Langrishe: 

Americans! It never occurs to them to try the window.

Race and nation come to the fore again in the third episode Deadwood's last season, with the return of Wu (Westernized in dress and having quadrupled his supply of English words during a long trip to San Francisco to recruit Chinese workers for Hearst),  the arrival of Hearst's "tyrannous" black cook Aunt Lou Marchbanks, and the appearance of Al's friend (if this is really the right word), the British theatre impresario Langrishe.  Add to that the fact that this might be the first time that Cornish has ever been spoken on American television (by a weeping union agitator, who mourns the friends Hearst had murdered for their industrial politics) and we find ourselves stewing in a heady brew of ethnic difference.

The profanely even-keel relationship between Wu and Swearengen (who between them ruled the two halves of the camp before Hearst's arrival) has always been one of the series' most delightful, and Al seems genuinely heartened by his ally's return this week.  Remember back in the good old days, before Hearst rode into town, when Wu and Al could while away the hours plotting, never uttering anything but a series of increasingly expressive variations on the single word "cocksucker"? Those were good times.  Good times.

These are darker days, however, and stranger ones.  Bullock is now allied with Swearengen, a relationship that Wu (and who can blame him) is slow to comprehend.  Mayor Farnum is in ecstasies of anxiety that he and his staff will be ousted from the Hearst-owned hotel in favor of Aunt Lou, which he interprets to mean that he either hasn't smarmed sufficiently or has abased himself too egregiously.  The irony is that Aunt Lou barely bothers to smarm at all, treating Hearst with a wary ebulliance, bullying him with minor threats and wooing him with home cooking (no cobbler until you give your boots to me for a good cleaning!) in what seems at first to be an evocation of every sassy servant stereotype known to Hollywood.  Farnum takes particular glee in doomsaying, telling his wizened and filthy cook that he is going to be replaced by Aunt Lou :

Your error, surprisingly enough, is not to be a grotesque of inconceivable stupidity, but that you are white, male, and not repulsively obese. 

Ironically enough, Lou and the grotesque take to each other immediately, and soon he is following her around devotedly, clinging to her hand.

All this may make us wonder why it is that Aunt Lou seems to be the only person Hearst treats with affection and respect, waxing nostalgic about the perfection of their home in Georgia to Lou's faint affirmations.  Is this just that old trope of the grim Southern racist who nonetheless finds room in his heart for the black woman who raised him?  Not quite - it is more explicitly taken up with power than that.  As the episode progresses, Hearst brings the scaly, surely-not-sincerely born-again Cy Tolliver firmly under his thumb.  Or, shall I say, "to heel," since Hearst informs Tolliver that he will be serving him in future in a purely canine capacity.  Once that is agreed, Hearst reveals a bit more of himself, giving voice to his discomfort with a rage that is always barely contained:

But I should say too that in these rooms this afternoon such displeasure brought me near to murdering the sheriff and raping Mrs. Ellsworth. I have learned through time, Mr. Tolliver, and as repeatedly seem to forget, that whatever temporary comfort relieving my displeasure brings me, my long term interests suffer.  My proper traffic is with the earth.  In my dealings with [considering pause]... people, I ought solely have to do with n****rs and whites who obey me like dogs.

Is the implication that he has more or less respect for his black servants than for "whites who obey me like dogs"?  Or that he can only confer with those over whom he has absolute power? The scene cuts immediately and pointedly to Aunt Lou, playing (sharking, really) mah jong in Deadwood's Chinatown, and lampooning George Hearst at the top of her lungs.  Not for her canine obedience - she is not so easy a character.

But let's go back to that near-rape that Hearst mentioned.  Early in the episode, Ellsworth is climbing the walls with anxiety during his wife's meeting with Hearst, volcanically spewing expletives and accusations of murderousness until Mrs. Ellworth is forced to withdraw as tactfully as possible, both she and Hearst pretending that he is inaudible. The confrontation between the Ellsworths in the street afterward is a piece of brilliance. He categorically forbids her to make an offer to Hearst for her mine, uncharacteristically asserting his legal privilege as husband.  She gives him her back momentarily before turning to him with a chilled smile: "Well, that's settles it."  The ambiguity of this should keep him up at night.

When Mrs. Ellsworth returns later that day, filled with confidence and a script she reads from throughout the meeting, she presents an offer to Hearst for a minority stake in her mine, only to be rebuffed in the most sexually threatening terms possible.  He refuses to let her leave the room, which she has come to alone.  She can scream, he says, but the thoroughfare is so unreliable at this time of day.  He leans close, forcing her head back and her face away from him. "You are reckless, madam," he tells her, with an ominous, constrained pause, "You indulge yourself."

The gender politics of this strain of plot intrigue me.  Is her confidence in fact overweaning?  Does she not have a right to play the violent game of Deadwood with all the men?  Indeed, she is in no more or less danger (and no more or less outflanked) than Swearengen or Bullock was in the game.  And there is, truthfully, nothing that either the tormented Ellsworth or Bullock (who watches with increasing anxiety and keen understanding from across the street as the drama unfolds) can do to protect her, since her immense land-wealth has brought Hearst's attention crashing down upon her.  Is she just to give up her mine to him in its entirety, without complaint or counter-measure?

Ellsworth: "Well, I guess I know what that means.  That you're a goddamned fool who almost got what she deserved."

Mrs. Ellsworth: "And what would that have been, and why would I have deserved it?"

Ellsworth: "I only wanted to protect you."

Mrs. Ellsworth: "You can't."

Indeed her defeat is not on account of her gender, but her refinement.  She (unlike Swearengen or Bullock) cannot conceive of a conversation that unfolds like the one in Hearst's rooms.  She is from a different culture, and speaks a different language.  This puts her at a considerable disadvantage that has nothing to do with her gender.  It is a disadvantage of information and expectation, not of strength or sexual vulnerability or wiliness or legal power.  Those who have had all of those features have lost to Hearst in recent episodes.  And I feel that Alma Ellsworth, like them, will not take her defeat lying down.



Assorted notes on the episode:

• For the first time (perhaps since the very beginning of the series) we get a tour through the space that is Deadwood, as Al shows Langrishe around town, only to be fobbed off by him at the end of the venture: "It's not the first impression I'd make."
• Sol Star is the sweetest character in town by far, as evidenced by the delicacy, the endless slow affection, with which he responds to Trixie's wild lashings of mood.
• Note that Hearst feminizes the earth, even as he asserts that his conversation with it is the only one he is interested in having.  What are we to make of this gendering in light of the sexual overtones of his conversation with Alma and the symbolism of the act of mining?
• Oh, Major Dad is so good as Hearst.  Will he ever be this good in anything again?  Perhaps the new J.J. Abrams series?
• I think the Hearst family has to go down in history as the single bloodline most reviled by Hollywood. Because Rosebud wasn't enough, now we have a finger-breaking, Cornish-murdering, union-busting rapist.  But he does love his cobbler, and he doesn't care who knows it.

Read Sycorax on Episode 3.1 and Episode 3.2 of Deadwood.

The Quick and the Deadwood: "I am not the fine man you take me for"

Swearengen's minion:     "I'm older and much less friendly to change."
Swearengen:      "Change ain't looking for friends.  Change calls the tune we dance to."

The second episode of Deadwood's last season opens with a man climbing drunkenly up on the campaign platform and making confessional summary of his life to date.  Our favorite motive-hunter-of-motiveless-evil, Al Swearengen, listens with insomniac exasperation to the man's ramblings, and then (with an alarm that belies his murderous nature) to a sudden, squelching silence.  The drunk has fallen, headfirst, from the political pedestal, and snapped his neck in the Deadwood muck.

And there we have a thirty-second allegorical precis for the show as a whole, like the dumb show Hamlet's Players show to Claudius before getting down to the real, spoken Mousetrap.

Everyone is making reckonings this week. Some because they are running for election (as almost everyone of note seems to be).  Some because they are confronting the spectre of death, like pregnant Alma Ellsworth or Joanie, with a gun to her temple. Or there is Jane, who is looking a more terrifying spectre square in the eye - a room of giggling schoolchildren, eager to hear about her time under Custer.

So, naturally, Swearengen's confrontation with the political mogul Hearst comes to a head in this time of reckonings.  Hearst invites his rival over (sans bodyguard) to watch the political speeches from his "balcony" - an imitation of Swearengen's and the one at the Bella Union that the millionaire has created through sheer, speedy force of will.  He had his underlings break down an outer wall so that he can step out on the roof to survey the battlefield of town activity.  Hearst and Swearengen view the political activity below with some satisfaction, although we already see ominous signs that Al refuses to play the game, while Hearst will not drop its pretenses:

Hearst: Your bosom must swell with pride, Mr. Swearengen.
Swearengen: Swellings and saggings to the tit I lay at the exactions of time.

The mogul attempts to win Swearengen over to the virtues of consolidating their interests under the Hearst name.  "Purposes," Al replies, "butt up against each other and the strong call 'consolidating' bending the weak to their will."  He isn't wrong: in the face of this refusal, Hearst breaks the bones in Swearengen's hands with a hammer.  Al makes his way back across the crowded streets of Deadwood, grinning from ear to ear, hand in his waistcoat like a frontier Napoleon. Seth Bullock sizes the situation up in an instant, like the cowboy icon he is, and offers to arrest Hearst.  This sudden solicitousness speaks to their changed attitudes toward each other.  It sounds a chord with viewers who have traveled the whole relationship with them, and understand that strident enemies will always have a natural bond when faced with the invasions of change.  Much is tied up in the epic homosocial romance of this pair.  I can go get him right now, Bullock tells Al.  No, says Swearengen, "I'm having mine served cold."

Of course, Seth has his own dramas of repression a-brewing.  It's most evident in a brilliantly painful transition toward the start of the episode.  Bullock is attempting to forge a bond of affection with his wife (who was, you remember, his brother's widow, not a love of his), teasing her about the weakness of her tea, raising a defensive response from her,  drawing a careful hand down her spine.  There is a close-up of his hand and its heavy wedding ring, traveling over the dull fabric of her dress.  Then the scene cuts to his former lover, prostrate in bed, worried about losing their unborn child.  He knows nothing of this drama, until he is called to her side by her new husband, who is himself shattered by the knowledge that his wife is leaving care of their adopted child to Bullock.  She has good reasons for this, but she doesn't communicate them to him.  She is contemplating her mortality, and is putting her affairs in order before the necessary abortive surgery.  But there is also a sense, available to both her husband and her former lover, that as she loses Bullock's child, she gives him care of another.

These are my favorite two strands of plot underway at the moment.  Sol Star and his mistress Trixie have been moved to the back burner, although Sol's run for mayor does result in some of the most ludicrously ham-fisted anti-Semitic campaign rhetoric ever to grace the West.  We do hear a bit about the strained, despairing bond between brothel-owner Cy Tolliver and the suicidal madam Joanie, but both the writing and the acting of this plot strikes me as a trifle overblown.  It is a bad sign that I can't even recall how they came to this point of despondency in previous seasons.

One great surprise comes from watching this season so long after its original airing: I had forgotten that New Haven actor Titus Welliver - LOST's "man in black" - has a small role on Deadwood that he plays with his normal cynical panache.  Here he is the most disgruntled of Al's minions - at one point, as they all wander dutifully, one by one, behind Swearengen, he grunts, "If we was trailing water, we might get took for ducklings."

A last word about silences in Deadwood.  I am struck with admiration for how much of this show - one of the most gleefully verbal, linguistically experimental series on television - occurs in moments of quiet.  This is true of every week, but it becomes mightily apparent in this episode, which features a substantial silent exchange through a glass window, in which Sol tells Trixie he has bought a house for them to live in together.  Or not.  Whatever.  The difficulty of communicating the message to his beloved, who is playing nurse and standing guard over Alma's sickbed and abortion*, is matched only by his difficulty in gauging her response.  But the glory of the show's normal silences - charged or repressed - is that they speak to the richness of the world's subtext.  This is a subtext, a layering up of irony and possibility, so thick and viscous that the show could never be understood in a single viewing.



Read Sycorax on Deadwood, Season 3, Episode 1

*The abortion, by contrast, takes place amidst a screamed exchange between Trixie and the doctor (one of my favorite characters) - they seem to be taking all their anxieties out on each other, and are steadied by the continuous, raging argument.