Sunday Salon: Leviathan and Lonely

Last night a friend from my department hosted a massive 80s party.  I may (embarrassingly) be the only person I work with who was born in the 80s (and thus may have a somewhat blurrier memory of the decade than everyone else there), but I did my best to turn it out.  Much planning went into my ensemble: A stiff silk taffeta baby doll dress, its gunmetal overskirt pinned up to render it less demure and show off the ruffled petticoat. Gartered fishnets.  Hand-knitted (over the last two days) faux angora legwarmers that made my feet look like a sooty yeti's and that made a determined run for the floor at every opportunity. Peep-toe, bow-and-brocade black heels (totteringly high, ill-conceived for dancing). Huge, curling-ironed hair, asymmetrically swept up on one side.  Sparkle-encrusted, teal-lined eyes, heavy on the mascara. Harsh blush, hot pink lipstick.  Emphatic brows.

It all started out looking satisfyingly trashy, though by the end of the evening it had settled into this. (Left.  Note that the yeti legwarmers had, at this point, given up any attempt to stay on my gams.)

At any rate, the moral of the story is that this morning (sigh, midday) I look like a raccoon that fell face-first into a child's collection of colored glitters and finger paints, I've lost my voice from shouting over Madonna and the Bangles, and I can barely walk from dancing in those heels.

Ah, well: worth it.

So what am I up to this Sunday? Well, blogging (a pleasure I have shamefully neglected since the start of classes a few weeks ago).  Gym-going.  Lesson-planning for tomorrow.  And, hopefully, some of these other things:


Reading

My copy of Monsters of Men, the third book in Patrick Ness's increasingly brilliant Chaos Walking trilogy, arrived on my doorstep this week, so I am dying to dive into the conclusion to this tale of a world in which a virus has made men's thoughts audible (the Noise, they call it, and it makes living in a community almost unbearable), and the consequences to society of this psychological shift.  I can't forget that I have work to do, or it will absorb me totally.

It's lucky that it arrived when it did, however, because I had just finished Carolyn Crane's excellent romance-tinged sci fi novel, Double Cross, and was feeling a bit bereft.  This is the second in Crane's series about an alternate-history midwestern metropolis in which the, well, excessively-abled (known by those who actually believe in their existence as highcaps) can invade your dreams, or manipulate building structures, or read your thoughts.

The heroine isn't a highcap, but she encounters a magnetic figure named Packard who tells her that her rampant health anxiety (a really crippling hypochondriacal paranoia) can be externalized - purged temporarily from her system and even used as a sort of a weapon or tool.  She can pour it into others, specifically targets who need to be "disillusioned" of their antisocial tendencies, for whom all her potent fear can act as a destructive catharsis.  But Packard, of course, has his own agendas, probably nefarious, and despite the pull he exerts, she also finds herself drawn to a heroic figure named Otto, the mayor of the city and the very emblem of the power of the law and its structures.

I won't say any more for fear of wandering into the dread land of Spoiler for those who haven't read the totally engrossing first book, Mind Games, but I can wholeheartedly recommend both of these trilogies.  Double Cross is the sort of fiction that isn't afraid to (scratch that - is eager to) grapple with big, complex moral issues.  Crane doesn't mind ripping the veneer of perfection away from her characters - the fact that they are human makes them more compelling, and no less admirable (somehow) than the plastic sheen of flawlessness would.  This itself becomes a major theme in book 2...


Watching
I had a lot of time on my hands yesterday, while I had my fingers full of half-knitted legwarmer.  My eyes wandered guiltily to the pile of Zip.ca discs that had gathered dust under my television for the entire month of September.  So, in the time it took to knit a legwarmer and a half, I watched In Bruges (a brutal, sometimes manipulatively shocking, jarringly beautiful movie about two hitmen exiled to the fairy tale limbo of Bruges, it is the filmic equivalent of one of those marvelous, monstrous moral paintings by Brueghel or Bosch, filled with wild demonic torments) and then the classic Man of the West, starring Gary Cooper (never one of my favorite western heros, although he is sort of charmingly clumsy here).  This second may demand a rewatching at some point: my knitting is not so practiced, at this point, that I can take my eyes off it for any length of time, so I missed all the shadings of familial guilt and sexual threat that occur in the silences of a good western.  Another time...




Listening (A Literary Analysis)
All week (when I wasn't bathing my sparkly self in the sounds of the 80s) I was discovering the long-owned and long-neglected (by me) newish album by Josh Ritter, So Runs the World Away.  Ritter has been a favorite of mine for a long time, not only for the richness of his sound, but also for the literary intricacy of his lyrics. Consider my current favorite from the new album, "Change of Time":

He describes a dream of nightswimming, "directionless and drifting," in a world of things that have suffered a sea change (into something rich and strange):

I had a dream last night

and rusting far below me

battered hulls and broken hardships

Leviathan and lonely....

Its the wit of the wordplay that always gets me in a good Ritter song.  A hull is (of course) a nautical term - he is floating above shipwrecks and the sirens that lured men down - but it is also an empty shell, the container for things that have slipped away.  This is a song about the batterings of life, the ellusiveness and hollowness and strange, floating suspension of memory - the pun on "broken hardships" breaks that metaphor wide open for us.

(Also, I may have to name my first novel, set in Nova Scotia, Leviathan and Lonely.  You heard it here first.)

He goes on to extend the metaphor - the past is an anchor we drag behind us, memory is a set of ripped sails that won't quite propel us, catching the wind and then letting it slip through.  We are pummeled by the whitecaps of recollection.

And like so many Ritter songs, there is a fundamentally romantic shift at the end, although one tinged with melancholy rather than sentimentality.  (This is, of course, a pivotal part of my devotion to his music - unsentimental romanticism.  Do you know how hard that is to find?  How hard a pitch it is to hit and maintain?)

I had a dream last night

And when I opened my eyes

Your shoulder blade, your spine

Were shorelines in the moonlight.

New worlds for the weary,

New lands for the living.

I could make it if I tried -

I closed my eyes, I kept on swimming.

Here is a live acoustic version of the song - stripped down, less surging, but still lovely.

Until next time, Saloners! Enjoy your October days before they get too short....

Sunday Salon: Becoming Ambilextrous

Peggy's Cove, NS, just down the road from me: Take a gander at the name of this rather downtrodden boat,  Yikes.

My mother got a Kindle.  Yesterday, as she headed off to the National Book Festival (where, lucky devil, she got to hear Suzanne Collins speak about the Hunger Games trilogy), she began to fret about whether she should take it with her: would a Mall full of bibliophiles react with horror to the sight of the device?  She worried that buying a Kindle was an abandonment of paper books. "There's only one solution," she told me, "I'll become ambilextrous."

I am filled with envy on both the Kindle and the NBF fronts.  But I can't complain, since I have spent the last week reveling in the Atlantic Film Festival.  So far I have only managed to post one review of the seven films I saw (of Howl, based on Allen Ginsberg's life and poem), so I hope to rectify that today, along with catching up on my Oahu diary and reviewing my most recent read, the brilliantly named The Ask and the Answer, which is the second installment in Patrick Ness's Chaos Walking trilogy.  We will see how far I get, however, because this term Sunday is a teaching prep day, and a giant pile of Oedipus quizzes has my name all over it.  And of course I wouldn't mind making some progress through my current books: Ann-Marie Macdonald's Fall on Your Knees (epic in scope, I've barely made a dent at 200 pages), Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Cherry (which I should have read years ago for my comprehensive exams.  Oops.), and Marc Eliot's biography of Cary Grant.  There are also some DVDs in desperate need of returning: the Martin McDonagh-penned In Bruges and the classic Man of the West, which I can't seem to remember whether I have seen before.  Hmm.

Wish me luck!

Howl (Atlantic Film Festival)

Last night I ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of the Bowery.

That is to say, I spent an hour and a half in company with the new movie (part biopic, part legal drama, part animated hallucinterpretation of the poem) based on Allen Ginsberg's Howl.

I am starting at the end of my first experience with the Atlantic Film Festival, which has been unfolding languorously around Halifax for a little over a week now.  And a giddy week it has been for me: I missed the festival entirely last year, and - determined not to let it slip by again - I found myself on a frenzy of ticket buying.  Seven films in as many days, and all of them more or less gratifying.  Two of them Cannes award-winners.  Several by directors whose work I already admired.  None of them Canadian (through no fault of the programmers, since they included a panoply of intriguing Canadian and Maritime films at times I couldn't make them, including the rather bleak national entry for this year's Academy Award).  And I still have regrets: I didn't manage to make it to the new Woody Allen film, although I wanted to.  I comfort myself with the knowledge that it is almost certainly fairly awful.

More backstory on Howl, which stars a surprisingly good James Franco.  Last week I was talking to a friend from my department about the film, and she said "You know he is getting his doctorate in English, right?".  "Ha!" I scoffed, "Where?".  "At your program," she said, surprised to be delivering this news, "At Yale."  I thought she was lying.   I knew I had arrived at Yale a decade and a half too late to overlap with David Duchovny; it just seemed like the taunting of fate that I then left a year too early to coincide with another movie star.  (Once I saw Duchovny on "Inside the Actors Studio" while I was in the throes of my dissertation.  James Lipton asked him about his Yale years, which seemed fine at first, but then he said something like, "You left... before completing your dissertation.  What was the title of that work?".  And David Duchovny, possessor of fame and wealth beyond most people's wildest imaginings, just sort of, well, crumbled away, collapsing in on himself as he travelled mentally back to the masochistic, excruciated mindset of someone in the advanced stages of pursuing their doctorate.  He curled forward and shook his head slowly, and I thought, "Yes.  Yes: you never lose that terrible anxiety of underachievement, no matter what else you accomplish in life.  David Duchovny, I know exactly how you feel.")

As it turns out, my friend was only telling me true. James Franco has just begun his Ph.D. in literature and film.  So all I could think throughout this film was how very different my seminar years of graduate school would have been if this Ginsberg-tinted Franco had been a part of them.

But, the film:

It is a sort of a quilt of a project, a stitching together of "interviews" with a youngish Ginsberg (played by Franco) at the moment when his book Howl and Other Poems has landed its publisher in court under obscenity charges.  His reflections on poetry, inspiration, and his biographical influences (most notably a series of men he loved and situated as muses and often priapic heroes in the poem) are interlarded with animated illustrations of the poem, which unfurl like whisps of highly sexualized smoke, and with scenes from the trial itself.  The casting of the film is phenomenal: in the trial scenes, for instance, the uncomprehending prosecutor is played with convincing bluster by the suddenly gray David Strathairn, while the coolly eloquent defense is portrayed by who else but Jon Hamm, who delivers a defense of literary freedom like he is pitching ad copy to a skeptical corporation.  It is all brilliantly rousing, even before you see a line of famous character actors playing professors and critics of literature, called in as "expert witnesses" on the necessity of words like "snatch" to the artistic integrity of Howl.  And, more impressively, it is rarely clear.  The court scenes don't succumb to the Hollywood conventions of juridical process any more than they have to: most of the time the witnesses and lawyers are merely muddling through some very murky ethical and aesthetic territory as they attempt to establish a concrete legal conception of literary value.

The least compelling aspect of the film is the animation, sad to say.  This isn't because it is an objectionable choice: it is in fact a compelling formal experiment, and if ever a poem were made for this sort of experiment, it is Howl.  But the aesthetics of the CGI don't match the polish or complexity of the rest of the film: they seem clumsy where everything else is elaborately casual, and the human forms seem wooden exactly at the moments when they should be as organic and sinuous as a vine.

As the credits began to roll, I turned to the colleague sitting next to me in the theatre.  "So," I said, "will you be showing your freshmen this film in 'Introduction to Literature?'".  "Well, I had high hopes for it," she replied with a laugh, "but ... no, I don't think so."  I thought back to the students sitting next to us, texting persistently through the first twenty minutes of the film, who got up and left in the middle of the umpteenth cartoon copulation to grace the screen.  As they stepped in front of me, two of several departures that didn't seem related to the film's quality, I had to wonder whether they weren't (oddly) unready to be "dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts."