Furthermore...

Last night at 1 a.m. (yes, 1 a.m. - that is the sort of mad schedule we adhere to around here, thanks to D's rather, let's say, temporally expansive job), as D was just closing his eyes to go to sleep and I was attempting to finish One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, our apartment suddenly moved about an inch to the right. Then it hopped ever so slightly up and down for about 3 seconds. Since I had been reading about delusion-laced asylum life, and at the best of times have only a tenuous hold on reality, I looked over at D, just to make sure that someone else had actually witnessed this little building-dance.

And that was how we experienced our first honest-to-goodness earthquake - a 4.6.

D ran around yelling about how the earth shouldn't move, it just wasn't right, hurricanes he could handle, he was used to hurricanes, and we needed to go to the Army Surplus Store as soon as possible to get an earthquake preparedness kit (I couldn't really get him to expand on what this would entail beyond our normal emergency preparedness kit, which - among other things - has gotten him through a snowstorm in the desert coming back from Vegas). I got online and found this very useful site, which updates every hour in seismically calm periods and five minutes after every quake.

Then, after standing dutifully in two adjacent doorways for a few minutes saying things like "Are aftershocks ever, you know, bigger than the original quake?," we went back to bed, but D still jerked awake every few minutes (whenever I shifted my position, adjusted the covers, or took a particularly deep breath) to declare with alarm that he had just felt an aftershock.

~~~~

I think we all know that the harder we try not to talk about something (sex!), the more everything we say and do becomes a commentary on the forbidden topic. So, although the Victorians have a reputation for rigid prudery, their literature is in fact quite consistently sex-obsessed. The Little Professor provides a handy guide to the code that obscures and communicates Victorian sex, complete with highly amusing examples.

~~~~

At the Wilson Center's website, and in the Wilson Quarterly, Richard Schickel reconsiders the sociology of film noir's cynical obsession with the past and the city in a post-war era that was, in many other ways, increasingly optimistic and suburban. In the article, "Rerunning Film Noir," Schickel makes one of my favorite connections (one which I have taught to theatre history students in the past), drawing out the links between expressionism, medieval dramaturgy, and film noir:

More colorfully, in a more ­self-­consciously “artistic” way, the noir city was sometimes seen as something like the hellmouth in medieval mystery plays, yawning, fiery, ever ready to swallow sinner or innocent.

I do love a good hellmouth. And not just because it gives me a chance to bring up Buffy the Vampire Slayer in classes devoted to religious drama.

~~~~

Today's poem is "An Old-Fashioned Song" by John Hollander, who I have met ever-so-briefly through department functions, and whose lovely work I should attend to more keenly. In fact, I don't believe I have read any work of his (this is true of so many poets) since my introductory literature course in college. I am especially filled with shame (shame this daily verse project is meant to dispel) about the lack of poetry in my reading rotation for the last half decade because my blogging user name is in fact a reference to poetry (whereas my blog title, which I often also go by, is a dramatic allusion. Extra credit will be granted to those who can figure out the connection between the two.). Shame!

Ok, back to "An Old Fashioned Song," which you can find in its entirety at poets.org, one of my new favorite resources for this project (There are so many aspects of the site to explore. What, I wonder, do they mean by offering you the option to "Adopt a Poet?" Will s/he come live on my couch?).

The heart of the poem, which expands between two ballad-like choruses:

This is the aftermath
Of afternoons in the clover
Fields where we once made love
Then wandered home together
Where the trees arched above,
Where we made our own weather
When branches were the sky.
Now they are gone for good,
And you, for ill, and I
Am only a passer-by.

The perfect insular amorousness of "we made our own weather"! And then, the lilting complexity of "Now they are gone for good, / And you, for ill, and I / Am only a passer-by," which takes advantage of these very short lines to sandwich that crucial "for ill," between the now defunct pair - "you" and "I." I got a wonderful sense of confusion as I read the lines, unsure how to allign the terms with one another - "for good"/"and you" and "for ill/and I" was my first, meaningful, but not best instinct.

The word "passer-by" is as perfect an ending for this section as the elegant pairing of "aftermath" and "afternoons" was a beginning, both because it evokes such a perfect sense of separation from a scene that was once defined by your presence in it, and because it is one of those fascinating words than maintains its verbal duality in unity (think of its plural - passersby).

~~~~

I am quite behind in my reviewing, in part because I am speeding through books and movies, and in part because my other work is so pressing that any dutiful blogging feels like a betrayal of other academic duties. Last night and this morning I finished off not one, but TWO books from the "1001 Books you must read before you die" list: Robinson Crusoe and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. And, in the throes of a Netflix crisis (how, oh how, was I going to receive the film I wanted to watch with D this weekend if I didn't send off a DVD in today's mail?) I watched the excellent Nights of Cabiria this afternoon. How refreshing, after the thankless drudgery of The Ten Commandments.

In culinary news, I spent a surprisingly large part of the afternoon making a lovely orzo salad (with organic red and yellow cherry tomatoes, chickpeas and fresh herbs) and a Shredded beet salad which, thanks to my inferior beet-grating skills, looks more like a particularly vivid pudding. It is quite tasty though, and I congratulate myself on having completed my first encounter with fresh-beet-cooking while leaving the kitchen looking like only a very small violent murder had been committed there. In fact, the only thing to get really beety and red were my hands (I am restraining myself vigorously from making a joke right now about being "caught red-handed" at something).

But, oh! The biggest news of the day was the long awaited arrival of my ARC of Ana Castillo's The Guardians, which I received from Random House as part of LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program. Since it finally made its way to my hands just as I finished two other books, I hopped right into the opening chapter. I will let you know how it goes.

And, as if that wasn't enough of an ARC bounty, I heard from HarperCollins today that I will be receiving my first ever book from their (apologies for this repetitive rhyme) First Look program: Empire Rising by Sam Barrone, which promises to be a fortifying change from some of the more earnest reading I am doing this month. Hurrah for ARCs and other book gifts! They couldn't possibly give me more delight.

In other news...

There is something I find dually terrifying and thrilling about my LibraryThing collection. I have been going through, trying to tag all the books in my childhood home and my apartment either "already read," "to be read," or "currently reading." What is disturbing is not simply the sheer number of books involved (bear in mind that this is the result of not only my lifetime of book hoarding, but also my parents'), but the ratio of unread to read books: I have (at this moment in time) over 1500 books labeled "to be read" and only about 750 marked "already read."

In other words, I have only read a third of the books in my library. And let's say that I read 100 books a year, without acquiring any more books or getting any books out of the library - which we know is an absolute impossibility. It would take me more than 15 YEARS to finish the unread books sitting on my shelves right now.

It's like I said: both terrifying and thrilling.

~~~~

This is International Blog Against Racism week, and an excellent time for both the blogging community and the general citizenry to which we belong to reflect on the pervasiveness of racism, its insidiousness, and its multivalence (it is often not a simple unidirectional flow of either power or prejudice, but rather a complex web which partakes in many other prejudices about class, religion, gender, sexuality, etc.).

No one is immune from its workings, no one is purely subject or purely object, and self-awareness (even self-scrutiny) is a huge step towards minimizing the poison of prejudice in our culture and our world.

Ask yourself, when you talk about race and racism, "what do I have at stake in this argument that may shape my views?". This is the perfect opportunity to examine the roots of your opinions, and what their consequences and corollaries might be.

In honor of this very worthy and provocative project, I give you a link to a fascinating and disturbing article about America's prison system, and how our penal philosophy is in horrifying dialogue with the country's history of racial prejudice: "Why are so many Americans in prison?" by Glenn C. Loury.

Loury reveals some chilling statistics in this article. A few of them, including quotations from the article (I highly recommend the piece in its entirety!):

• About my home town:

  "Between 1960 and 1990, the annual number of murders in New Haven rose from six to 31, the number of rapes from four to 168, the number of robberies from 16 to 1,784—all this while the city’s population declined by 14 percent."

• Our country is home to a QUARTER of the world's prison inmates, and the "corrections industry" employs more people than "the combined work forces of General Motors, Ford, and Wal-Mart, the three largest corporate employers in the country." In other words, we have a corporate and industrial (and thus political) stake in continuing to imprison a huge portion of the population.
  
• Consider the responsibility of drug users for social problems, as well as drug distributors:

  Significantly, throughout the period 1979–2000, white high-school seniors reported using drugs at a significantly higher rate than black high-school seniors. High drug-usage rates in white, middle-class American communities in the early 1980s accounts for the urgency many citizens felt to mount a national attack on the problem. But how successful has the effort been, and at what cost?

  Think of the cost this way: to save middle-class kids from the threat of a drug epidemic that might not have even existed by the time that drug incarceration began its rapid increase in the 1980s, we criminalized underclass kids. Arrests went up, but drug prices have fallen sharply over the past 20 years—suggesting that the ratcheting up of enforcement has not made drugs harder to get on the street. The strategy clearly wasn’t keeping drugs away from those who sought them. Not only are prices down, but the data show that drug-related visits to emergency rooms also rose steadily throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

• And here, in one of a very persuasive article's most persuasive passages, Loury asks us to consider the long term consequences of incarceration for criminals who have made very bad (although not always violent) choices, but are nonetheless human beings who need to return to families, jobs, communities, and psychological/emotional functioning:

  So consider the nearly 60 percent of black male high-school dropouts born in the late 1960s who are imprisoned before their 40th year. While locked up, these felons are stigmatized—they are regarded as fit subjects for shaming. Their links to family are disrupted; their opportunities for work are diminished; their voting rights may be permanently revoked. They suffer civic excommunication. Our zeal for social discipline consigns these men to a permanent nether caste. And yet, since these men—whatever their shortcomings—have emotional and sexual and family needs, including the need to be fathers and lovers and husbands, we are creating a situation where the children of this nether caste are likely to join a new generation of untouchables. This cycle will continue so long as incarceration is viewed as the primary path to social hygiene.

~~~~

On a lighter, more literary note, Robert Peake had some interesting thoughts on the nature of a poem's title and its relationship to the poem itself, which he expressed as part of his post on the new Poet Laureate Charles Simic:

Titles are a kind of meta-line - a line that hovers from the very beginning over every other line of the poem, coloring it. It can be a key to understanding what's going on in the poem, a one-stroke scene setup, or even perform double-duty as the first line of the poem.

Ah, my meta addiction strikes again.

~~~~

Today's poem was Adrienne Rich's "Diving into the Wreck" from poets.org. It has been many years since I have read Rich's work, so I am glad to return to her with this poem about (well, putatively about) deep sea diving and narrative making. An excerpt (the whole poem can be found at the link above):

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and away into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.
~~~~

As you have probably heard by now, the Booker Prize's long list has been released. 
It is, as The Guardian notes, both shorter than it has been in recent years, and
filled to the brim with less established authors:
 Darkmans by Nicola Barker (Fourth Estate)
Self Help by Edward Docx (Picador)
The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng (Myrmidon)
The Gathering by Anne Enright (Jonathan Cape)
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (Hamish Hamilton)
The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies (Sceptre)
Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones (John Murray)
Gifted by Nikita Lalwani (Viking)
On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape)
What Was Lost by Catherine O'Flynn (Tindal Street)
Consolation by Michael Redhill (William Heinemann)
Animal's People by Indra Sinha (Simon & Schuster)
Winnie & Wolf by A N Wilson (Hutchinson)

I have yet to read any of the long listed books, but it is definitely worth noting
that Gifted was one of the books that LibraryThing offered in the last round of
its Early Reviewers program. Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach is the bookies'
favorite right now, since he has by far the vastest reputation, but consider that
Lloyd Jones's Mister Pip was the first book in nearly 1300 reviews to receive 
an A+ from The Complete Review.  I am putting my (as of yet) totally ignorant
hopes behind a less well known author than McEwan taking the prize this year.

~~~~

I have fallen prey to some sort of lurking summer bug (or perhaps it is just
very aggressive allergies), so I have been moping about the apartment for the
last few days (well, moping more mopily than usual, I should say).  Last night
I finished Noisy Outlaws, Unfriendly Blobs..., and I hope to be done with 
Robinson Crusoe AND One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest later today. What
a perfect time this would be for my two elusive ARCs to arrive in the mail....

But there was an even bigger accomplishment yesterday -- I finally finished
the unbearably bad and immense The Ten Commandments!  Huzzah! Rejoicing
in the streets!  I would like to think that this means that I will have time to
address the increasingly dire TiVo overcrowding issue, but Nights of Cabiria
is supposed to come in today's mail.... [There is an awful lot of trailing off
meaningfully in this post, I notice, mostly because I am filled to overflowing
with poorly veiled hints for the postal service.]

"The Illusionist" (2006)

We begin with a face - the face of Eisenheim the Illusionist (Ed Norton), micro-contorted by the effort of making something (we aren't quite sure what yet) appear. He is on a stage, a bare stage, set in the midst of an indeterminately 19th century world (in which there appear to be quite good electric lights in Eastern European castles, and where color film projection was available to the police in small towns) and surrounded by people with tortured accents and the desperate need to believe that his powers aren't illusions.

As soon as a image begins to appear out of the mist beside Eisenheim and a hubbub burbles out of the audience, a police inspector (Paul Giamatti) steps onto the stage and arrests the illusionist, nearly instigating a riot in the process. He returns to his boss, the "progressive" but despotic prince (Rufus Sewell, who I adore from his work in Stoppard's plays, despite rumors that he is not a terribly nice human being), and proceeds to unfold the clunky back story of Eisenheim's humble beginnings and doomed love for the "progressive" but domestically abusive prince's fiancée.

At this point, we are five minutes into the film, and D has already lost patience. Why would they give us these melodramatic flashbacks before we have any reason to care about these characters, he asks me. I don't have a response - I too am quite irritated, but I hold out hope that the film will improve. It doesn't. It is hamfistedly edited and shot, plot-holey, lacking in character development and overly proud of its sole plot gimmick. Although it was only an hour and forty minutes long, and filled with actors we admire (not including the rather uninspiring Jessica Biel, who, poor thing, might be perfectly good in other things for all I know) we found ourselves constantly checking our watches and attempting to will time into greater fleet-footedness.

The Prestige, I assured D, who hadn't seen it, was infinitely better, although it too relied too strongly on the loopiness of its plot to ever be called brilliant. It had a greater sense, I think, of how to navigate our dual desires when seeing magic - the wish for it to be true (and thus affirm another layer of existence that will lend meaning to the material world) and the need to underscore the legitimacy of logic by believing it to be an elaborate, clever trick (thus asserting our ability to control and contain the world we perceive through our senses).

There was one aspect of The Illusionist which lent it greater depth, and which, although it was largely unsuccessful, is still worth highlighting: the way in which the film asks us to contemplate the connections between magic, illusion and film. Even if the hero's name weren't so insistently like cinematic innovator Sergei Eisenstein's that I mistype it every single time, this strategy would quickly become obvious through the film's playful use of the dwindling-circle transitions known as iris wipes and other editing strategies that self-consciously evoke early film (although certainly not films of this historical period, no matter how nebulously defined it is). In case we hadn't caught on to the subtlety of this strategy (which is known for drawing attention to the way film directs the spectator's gaze and controls it, thus preventing the audience from immersing themselves in the naturalism of a narrative, and is thus rather a bludgeoning tactic if mishandled), the film's plot draws the connection for you. While the inspector is attempting to discover how Eisenheim makes his apparitions appear, he questions some film projectionists, who show him a jerky, feeble approximation of how it could be done. He rolls his eyes.

If the intention of The Illusionist is - as the title would imply - to make us ponder the nature of cinematic magic, and consider how we are tricked into sincerity or belief by a medium that its both verisimilar and supernatural in its abilities to make things appear which are not there (to fold and layer time and place), then its downfall comes in the frequent use of contemporary cinematic magic to "realize" Eisenheim's illusions (every time I use that word, I mutter an echo of Arrested Development's failed magician Gob - "Not tricks, Dad - ilLUsions! Tricks are something a whore does for money!"). The CGI and other filmic trickery that is obviously at work makes the magic less interesting, because we as an audience are so far from the (possibly apocryphal) early cinema spectators who screamed when they saw a train coming straight towards them on the screen. Today, if something looks too real, too without flaws and obvious mechanisms, we don't assume that it is supernatural or even real, but rather that it is run-of-the-mill fakery, utterly lacking in mystery or mystique. The Illusionist would have done better to pick a style for its magic (and thus for its narrative as a whole) - glitzy contemporary trickery, or scratchily archaic mechanics - and to examine what that style's relationship is to a contemporary audience's process of belief.

The Illusionist (2006)
dir. Neil Burger
**1/2

• You can find The Illusionist at Amazon, Netflix, and most stores that rent or sell DVDs. But, really, why not get The Prestige instead?
  
• Wikipedia has a page on the film, with a complete plot summary.
• This would be, coincidentally, a very easy film to do a "connect the dots" or rather "connect the phallic symbols" type reading with: the heroine is always about to be dragged back to some sinister looming tower to be locked up, and a sword plays a crucial role in the central mystery, a role which has parallels in the amorous plotline. I'm just sayin'.