Dog's Dinner

Moviedom Roundup

2006-11-26T14:17:00.000-08:00

Been reading a book by Peter Bogdanovich called Who the Hell's In It? About his meetings with and musings on various movie stars. Great book. Unlike Bogdanovich, my kid brother Small Man or my wonderful brother-in-law Brian Ellis, I haven't been too scrupulous about keeping a movie-notation book even though my mom gave me a looseleaf for that purpose in 1986 or 87. But I did write down the names of all the movies I watched this summer, when I wasn't working as much as a teacher or film critic as I would have liked to, and I here (self-)publish the notations on the first several movies I watched in July and some of the recent November ones too (the ones in between have yet to be annotated, except some which were already mentioned here in the blog):

Movie Roundup

Nixon—Still just as powerful, funny and exciting, still significantly less annoying in its shorthand, keyword history (although the repetition of “the Hiss case” without any attempt to show what N. did that was so underhanded or unfair does begin to grate after a while) than almost any other biopic I can think of. Hopkins colossal and the rest of the cast all delightful as well (though Joan Allen is not prim enough).

Suspicion— Did he or didn’t he? I think you can argue either way. I actually like the ambiguous ending because I like ambiguity and ambivalence, and Cary Grant could never be a bad guy, though it’s a sign of Hitchcock’s greatness that he wanted to make him one. Great performances, always good to see Nigel Bruce, great nervous neurotic fun all around, brilliant paranoid-fantasy mindscreen.

Lifeboat—Some great moments, when Hodiak and the millionaire talk about food, for example, and the songs.

East of Eden—Tremendous, not just Dean but the whole film. One of the all-time greats.

Sunday—Regrettably grubby, unysmpathetic characters. Concept sounded promising, but alas, muddled and depressing in execution.

The Warriors—A modern classic, gripping and poignant.

Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde 1932— Surprisingly frank in its sexual themes (Pre-Code), embarrassingly bad in some parts, mostly the Hyde parts, the apelike makeup is laughable. But somehow feels alive, despite silliness.

Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde 1941—Initially intriguing but finally too stuffy, weighed down by Selznick-esque faux-Victorian respectability. Ingrid Bergman’s strong performance underrated. Tracy wonderful as Jekyll, weak as Hyde.

Czeski Sen-- One of the best documentaries ever, absolutely delightful, also heartbreakingly sad.

The Wicker Man—Stupidly-cut shorter version, missing important exposition such as Woodward with his colleagues, not fitting in, at the very beginning, and Lee’s first appearance playing the pimp, this bad edit highlighting the goofiness of the failed-seduction and other kitschy songs. Woodward and Lee still very engaging and impressive.

The Aviator-- Blanchett’s Hepburn, the main reason I wanted to see the film, was impressive but too reptilian, caricaturish and British—Lisa Kudrow or even possibly Martin Short (dare I say Anthony Hopkins?) would have done a better job. DiCaprio not bad, repeating the Clintonian shtik from Catch Me If You Can, but that’s what he does best. His spirited defense of mammaries is a great scene, and in its way very cutting and timely. Other than that the most effective scene is probably the fatal plane crash, an f/x triumph (though it seems sad to find oneself praising a Scorsese film for its f/x), quite moving in the end. Jude Law wasted in a tantalizing cameo as Flynn. Doesn’t hold a candle to The Rat Pack as movie-people biopics go.

The Omen (new 2006 version). Nice remake but not as good as the original. Can’t remember how exactly the mother died in the 76 version but the way they changed it is definitely crap, shlock, stupid, bad judgment. I also don’t quite understand the role of the writer who in the DVD documentary talks of how he and other writers spend over 6 months of a year in complete seclusion, typing away; according to my calculation there are about 5 lines that have been revised from the 76 script, making his solitary typing somewhat redundant; Liev Schreiber however is amazing. He really channels Peck, capturing the cadences of the much older actor (already in 76) beautifully. He must be a movie fan and know that that’s what movie fans want when they go see a remake: an elegant, fastidious recreation of the original by other people. (I know most people are bitter when they hear of a “shot-by-shot remake” because to them it sounds boring; I get bitter because I know it isn’t literally shot-by-shot, isn’t that faithful.) And he’s right to say in the documentary that although he at first reacted to the idea of the remake as “just another remake,” the director sold him on how the original is “a great story.” It is actually, no matter how much we scoff and snicker at the obviousness and literalness of its biblical tropes and so on, it moves me still, because of Peck (one of his best performances, truly truly underrated again) and Schreiber. Julia Stiles, whom I’ve always liked, is pretty much wasted, she doesn’t get any great moments like Lee Remick’s signature stare and feels like another star wasted in a badly-written bit part. We once were in the same class at Columbia—a class on Dante, appropriately enough—and she dropped her pen and I reached down to get it for her but she got it first. So we never got to know each other. But I admire her for studying in the midst of a wildly active career.

Carrie—William Wyler, not Brian de Palma although that is also a wonderful film. This is one of the best films I’ve ever seen—great Olivier, great Jennifer Jones, Eddie Albert is also great, a couple flat or overacted moments by Olivier and Jones but overall brilliant. There is a misogynistic strain in Wyler, as seen in his The Best Years of Our Lives (another all-time favorite) and in Hitchcock’s Rebecca (another great, at first, but then towards the end somewhat pedestrian performance by Olivier), but always balanced out by an incredible sympathy and love for women; as Robin Wood said, From Reverence to Rape (great book by Molly Haskell) should be understood as not that far of a journey, as far as Classic Hollywood goes that is, not in real life.

Happy Families Are All Alike

2006-11-26T14:08:00.000-08:00

Riding the tram back from work the other day (it's always a question: bike, train or tram? but always some sort of commute to the Hindenburg, now called Zabrze) I noticed a wedding-dress shop called Medea. Almost laughed. I must say I've seen more wedding-dress shops here than anywhere else in the world.

Unending Search for the Non-Fascist Ramen

2006-10-12T21:35:00.000-07:00

We all know that the typical ramen package is misleading, because it shows a picture with instructions for boiling the noodles with the flavoring and eating it as a kind of soup, when in fact many of us since childhood have enjoyed draining the noodles and then adding the "spice" or MSG. In fact some versions now offer a more "pluralistic" juxtaposition of the two possibilities. But once here in Poland I saw a package with a third picture, of just the package being opened, with the caption, "If you like, you can also just eat the noodles dry," or words to that effect. Ever since then, I've been looking for that package, with no success.

Innocents and not so innocents abroad

2006-09-03T18:37:00.000-07:00

I recently finished two books that I'd been reading sporadically over a period of months-- one a work of nonfiction, Heat by Bill Buford, whose Among the Thugs I enjoyed tremendously, the other, fiction, The Boy Who Followed Ripley by Patricia Highsmith, not one of her best (obviously, as her best work is frightfully compelling, almost unputdownable) but Highsmith is like pizza, etc. even when it's bad, it's good. As I was finishing up the Buford (which was a little too cute for me in its New York / New Yorker earthiness at first, but paradoxically became electrifying in its Tuscan finale, which is of course even cutesier, but not in a vulgar and pretentious way), I started thinking about the similarities and differences between the two protagonists, Ripley and Buford-- both are Americans (although I had been convinced Buford was a Brit, dunno why) fascinated with Europe, who go to Europe (Ripley is already long-settled in Europe by the opening of The Boy, but I refer to the series as a whole) to find some kind of authentic experience that's not available back home. Might as well get the inevitable irony out of the way now: Buford becomes an apprentice to an Italian butcher, while Ripley, starting in Italy and moving on through France and Germany, becomes a butcher of men; but his butchery is not an end in itself, rather a means toward the acquisition and then maintenance of something like what Buford finds—an existence more in harmony with Nature, with the soil, the changing of the seasons, making wine in tune with the phase of the moon, working with one’s hands (again, in Ripley’s case sometimes that means strangling, garroting, or bludgeoning people, but more often it means gardening on his estate in France). My point here is not to taint sweet, likeable Buford with the odiousness of Ripley’s crimes, but rather to ask, why? Why do people like Buford and Ripley-- in fact, let’s just say Highsmith, since she herself was an expatriate gardening fiend and more than once admitted that Ripley was a sort of surrogate self—and though she may have been disagreeable in the extreme , no-one accuses her of murder— why do such people have to go to Europe to “become more human” as Buford puts it? (In fact his stay in Italy was only temporary, but he plans to go back every year “until I have no one to return to.”) In Buford’s case the answer seems fairly obvious—Italy is, as an Italian friend declared, “everything connected with the verb ‘to eat,’” and Buford wanted to become a real cook. But reading the book, in particular the Italian section, one senses a kind of metonymy in this desire. It has more to do, perhaps, with a sense of community. As I wrote in this space about two years ago, I feel drawn to stay here (in, admittedly, a part of Europe not much praised for its beauty) partly for similar reasons—the way you know that it’s Easter time when you see everyone carrying pussy willows around, for example. But that sounds as fuzzy-headed as a pussy willow itself.

In other food-related matters, Bush’s monomaniacal obsession with the roast pig to come at his recent joint press conference with Merkel was truly remarkable, in the sense of cringe-makingly idiotic, but at the same time I could sort of identify with his excitement, as I made a point of getting in on some roast piglet action at a local restaurant a couple weeks ago and was quite excited about it—- imagining a jolly mob gathering round the pig, the animal turning on its spit, each carnivore practically ready to fight for his succulent portion. Succulent it was, and served with an excellent couscous-like blend of black and white grains, but served from a tray, with the outline of the body and face visible but barely distinguishable, and the demand was not nearly as frantic as I had imagined. I was particularly eager to check it out after having 1) read Buford’s description of picking up a pig (special-ordered) from his local organic market in the West Village, transporting it home with his scooter, then up the elevator to his apartment (a nearly Hitchcockian sequence) , where he had his way with it over a period of some days; and 2) visited a farm co-op here in Silesia, sort of a re-integration project for recovering and homeless people, where they happen to raise pigs, and where the pigs had struck me with their physical hugeness and psychic acuteness, their anguished eyes and panicked squeals. I wanted to try to practice the wisdom of Alan W. Watts, who in his book Does It Matter? recommended that we meat meat, but always with the mentality that “I love you so much I could eat you!” I wonder how often Bush got to eat roast pig back in Texas, or how often he savors it now at the White House. My guess would be, not that often. I'd wager more synthetic hog fare like rinds and dogs would grace his table much more frequently. But I could be wrong. What about blood sausage? Bush recently read Camus’s The Stranger and there was concern, misplaced in my view, about this sending an anti-Arab message. (The arguments against the term “Islamo-fascism” I consider somewhat more serious and worthwhile.) “The novel that inspired the song ‘Killing An Arab’” (I love that, reminds me, obliquely, of the kind of DVD-box blather that e.g. identifies Ray Milland’s noteworthiness as issuing chiefly from his having appeared in “Battlestar Galactica,” or Noel Coward’s as resting on his participation in "The Italian Job, 1969”)—why couldn’t they have just done a song cribbed from Man’s Fate? Reading the hemming and hawing over Bush’s ninth-period study hall, I couldn’t help remembering the first time I read The Stranger, when I lived with a French family in Rennes and studied at an American school with some French teachers. One Sunday, when I was halfway through the book, my host mother served, instead of the usual bland, starchy fare (often fresh from the freezer), blood sausage. I was squeamish but managed to swallow some, without pleasure. Meursault eats some blood sausage, quite casually, in the book, and I remember tacking on an embarrassing aside about this in a letter to my parents: “I can see how you would want to kill somebody after having to eat something like that!” In June of this year I ate it again at a barbecue here in Poland and, after an initial recurrence of Puritan squeamishness, had to admit that it tasted damned good, in fact better than most other kinds of Polish sausage I’ve had. And now, having cooked it at home a few times, I’m held back from eating it on a daily basis only by health considerations. As Buford notes in his book, we meat-eaters tend not to think about how what we’re eating was once a living creature. But if we must eat meat, I think seeing a little blood can only make us more human.

Couldn't agree more

2006-09-03T11:28:00.000-07:00

"It's intimidating, especially at a time like this, to think of how many books you should read and never will. Because of this, I try to avoid any systematic approach to reading, pursuing instead a random method, one which depends as much on luck and accident as on design. I find this is also the only way to deal with the newspapers and magazines which proliferate in great piles around the house-- some of the most interesting articles turn up on the reverse side of pages I've torn out for something else."
-- Stanley Kubrick

Mass destruction, with a pedigree

2006-08-08T19:37:00.000-07:00

I wanted to post a comment in response to this but they don't allow comments so I post it here:

Podhoretz's pussyfooting-with-mass-slaughter comes with a fine pedigree, as cf. this December 20, 1969 column from William F. Buckley, Jr. re Vietnam:

"...More bad news. Although the enemy, as we shall see, is reeling from successive disasters, he retains the technical capacity to regenerate himself at about the rate at which we have been killing him. An estimated 100,000 healthy males not designated for specialized training turn 18 every year. That is about how many soldiers, on an average, have been killed per year over the course of the war. The bright side of it, in the macabre figuring of the military statisticians, is that something like an entire generation of North Vietnamese males has been killed in the past seven or eight years. The sobering side is that they grow 'em as fast as we can kill 'em..."

Hmmm. Sobering perhaps, macabre definitely...

The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Sigmund Freud

2006-08-08T18:38:00.000-07:00

Just finished Civilization and its Discontents, the probably deservedly maligned (by Bruno Bettelheim) translation of Freud’s Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (according to Bettelheim a better translation of the title would be “The Uneasiness Inherent in Culture;” but in fact the problems in translation, given Bettelheim’s claims for Dr. Freud’s easygoing prose style, seem to extend far beyond the title; unfortunately my tattered paperback is one of those classic editions which ignore entirely the question of translatorhood), but nonetheless revelatory. Years ago Telly Savalas was supposed to star in a biopic of Freud (mercifully this came to nought, though I highly recommend John Huston’s Freud [Freud! The Movie!] starring the post-accident Montgomery Clift, a beautiful monument to the miraculous genesis of the not-unproblematic project of psychoanalysis) and told an interviewer that he was preparing to portray “a man worse than Hitler or Stalin.” Hmmm. An argument can be made for certain unintended malign effects in the culture, something I would like to explore in later posts, but in any case, as we approach the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, I was struck by the following:

Thus we recognize that a country has attained a high level of civilization when we find that everything in it that can be helpful in exploiting the earth for man’s benefit and in protecting him against nature—everything, in short, that is useful to him—is cultivated and effectively protected. In such a country the course of rivers which threaten to overflow their banks is regulated, their waters guided through canals to places where they are needed...

Silly Rabbit

2006-07-27T23:52:00.000-07:00

A few days ago I rented Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, and tonight I finally got around to watching it. I had heard from generally reputable sources (the great Small Man himself, and Alec Guinness in his diary-memoir My Name Escapes Me, among others) that W&G were wonderful, but after about ten minutes of The Curse I was about ready to turn it off, unable to stomach the repulsive faces (of the humans; the animals are all right, and the vegetables highly attractive), the insistently perky mock-heroic music, and the fact that the dog doesn’t talk— where’s the fun in that? But something made me change my mind and decide to stick it out—perhaps the philosophical conceit of the mind manipulation machine (was unaware that it would figure as the locus of another riff on the beloved Theme of The Double—it’s introduced more as a Clockwork Orange Ludovico Treatment / Chinese Stop Smoking Tea type thing). It turned out to be watchable, if not so lovable, though I came to savour the wise dog’s sad silence—a sort of tragic Jeeves, and anyway the least ugly of the bunch.
It was good to watch a week after watching the Fredric March / Rouben Mamoulian (1932, Pre-Code porno-comic bizarro) and Spencer Tracy / Victor Fleming (1941, respectably disappointing) Jekyll & Hyde films, and especially the wonderful Bugs Bunny short "Hyde and Hare" (included on the same DVD), for me funnier and better-made than the Were-Rabbit.

Broad beans and blueberries

2006-07-25T17:16:00.000-07:00

Blueberries are just about the only food, or thing in general, I can think of that I still love just as much and in the same way as I did when I was a small child. Maybe spaghetti, or Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, but I’ve acquired more sophisticated (though not snobbish, at least compared to Continental friends’) ideas about how spaghetti sauce should be made, and even about preparing the noodles themselves; and though I’m capable of enjoying NxNW perhaps even more than in boyhood, because more richly, provided I take my time and space the screenings out properly, it will never again make me tremble or laugh like the first time. So blueberries, as the enduring popularity of the bland anti-dramatic children’s book Blueberries for Sal testifies, are the only pleasure that maintain the same intensity and purity, whether eaten by themselves or with milk in a bowl of corn flakes.

Broad beans, on the other hand, constitute a new pleasure for me. I tasted them for the first time about a week ago. Broad beans look a bit like lima beans and for a while last year, when I first began to hear and learn about broad beans (called bob in Polish, with a slash over the o, which means you pronounce it “boob,” in the nominative case that is, fortunately in the other six cases the slash disappears and the o becomes a long o as in rodeo), I thought they were lima beans, but broad beans, or boobs, are in fact thicker and rounder, and have a little protrusion at one end, almost comparable to a nipple in fact, that I don’t think lima beans do. (Here any parallel with mammary glands ends and would best be swiftly forgotten in order to avoid a Peebee Shelley type nightmare.) They also have a skin that loosens when boiled; you bite the skin to open it and then suck the inner bean out and eat it, tossing the skin in the bin-- unless you want to eat it, but many people derive an addictive satisfaction from the ritual just described. Either way broad beans are delicious, though unfortunately the flavor is not as rich as the aroma from the boiling pot.

Two great gifts of Mother Nature, one tart, dark and explosive, the other light, tantalizing and tightly packed, both in season just now in Poland—when you’re surrounded by little Mom&Pop vegetable stands as I am, you can’t help following the seasons in a way I never did before. I guess technically my enjoyment of blueberries has changed since the great big bulbous blueberries I grew up with, lighter in color on the outside, are hard to find in Poland—they call them “American blueberries,” and their size is of course popularly attributed to laboratory skullduggery … I’ve actually come to prefer the smaller, darker ones myself. But that’s a mere detail. As Shakey said, the ripeness is all.

It Ain't Necessarily So

2006-07-19T15:55:00.000-07:00

I'm deeply annoyed with whoever it is at Slate magazine who keeps changing the presentation mode back and forth, but more troubling still is the relative paucity in recent months of interesting political articles (particularly depressing is Hitchens's tight-leash attack-dog triviality). On the cultural front, however, I was charmed by this review of a new book on the prescriptive vs. descriptive debate in language. As I mellow with age and continue teaching English in Poland I tend increasingly toward a more descriptive stance, and I found this article embracing my old bete noir(linked to at the bottom of the other) quite persuasive in its way. There is something about this kind of unblinking confrontation with contradiction (explored in a different context in Slate's ongoing series of non-cynical, open-minded interrogations of scripture) that I find very refreshing-- it reminds me in a way of the psychoanalytic notion, which I first encountered in this book, that in Freudian/Kohutian terms, a statement such as "I don't like" means the same thing as "I like," a notion easily scoffed at, to be sure, as nihilistic egghead tomfoolery, but one which I nonetheless consider to be often true. The elasticity of language is not to be underestimated. For example, a friend and former co-worker of mine, an internationally renowned guest speaker in the world of recovery fellowships, made a speech wherein he asked, with his inimitable delivery, why his audience found him in good health and spirits, looking twenty years his junior, and not paralyzed/dead/bed-ridden/decrepit after decades of abusing alcohol and intravenous drugs? "Because," he pauses, "if justice was just, then that should be so." When I first listened to the tape I heard this as a mistake and thought... "Well, with his charisma he can get away with it, after all, his point is understandable." The point being that God tempers justice with mercy. But when I thought about it some more, I realized that it not only makes perfect sense but belongs to a venerable tradition in English literature, from Shakespeare to Swinburne, in which writers (and speakers) problematize the tension between nouns and adjectives. More importantly, as the government was forced to acknowledge a few years back after having rashly christened the Afghan campaign Operation Infinite Justice, divine justice, which monotheist believers describe as infinite, is not something that humanity can fathom, let alone enforce, hence If divine justice was, or were, just, i.e. comprehensible in the narrow human sense, then perhaps my friend would have been laid low years ago by the arithmetic of self-destruction. But as God's justice is tempered (sometimes) with mercy and grace, he lives on to spread his message of temperance.

In any case, it is good to part with absolutism, in whatever sphere, and always healing, as we can hear in Dylan's "My Back Pages" and see in the later writings of Calvino.
P.S. In the article on "literally," when he used "scan" to mean "skim" as an example of multivalence, I was reminded of those old Two-Minute Mysteries (by Don Sobol of Encylopedia Brown fame), in one of which Dr. Haledjian based a charge of murder on his absolutist prescriptivist interpretation of "scan." Sobol was never one for ambiguity.

Notes on a Polish Henry IV

2006-07-17T16:40:00.000-07:00

Two months ago I finally achieved my oft-thwarted ambition of over a decade: to see a Shakespeare play done in a Slavic language, to wit, Henry IV, Part 1, in Polish, here in Gliwice (part of the Gliwice Theatre Festival which has taken place every May for the past 17 years-- this production was performed by a group of travelling players from Warsaw, all professional actors, some familiar to most of the audience, but not me, from TV). The dream was not exactly realized as conceived: I had to re-read the play in English before going to see it as it's not one I know well-- I read and enjoyed it once in school, in 10th or 12th grade, and saw it before that when I was 13 and my older brother Geoff had a small part in the Colorado Shakespeare Festival production, at which time I was too young to appreciate its many charms. Whereas the original plan was to see one of the 4 big tragedies, or Romeo, Caesar, Twelfth Night or Midsummer, all of which I've seen numerous English-speaking productions of and most of which I've even acted in at some point. And in its genesis the plan involved seeing Shakespeare in Russian. In November or December 1994 I actually had (very cheap) tickets in hand for Romeo & Juliet or possibly Othello in St. Petersburg, but Geoff, visiting from Moscow, resisted the Shakespearean temptation and we went instead to a dinner with his colleagues from Dixon & Co. I've since seen the magnificent Russian films of Hamlet and Lear by Kosintsev and a few moments of Bondarchuk's Othello and bits of an old Russian film of Twelfth Night on TV, not to mention Kurosawa's Ran and Throne of Blood (though I barely remember the latter, which Peter Brook called "perhaps the only true masterpiece inspired by Shakespeare, but it cannot properly be considered Shakespeare because it doesn't use the text"). But that's just not the same as seeing a piece of live theatre; on screen, the language of cinema takes over. I wanted to see a foreign audience electrified by Shakespeare's poetry but in their native tongue. So last spring I tried to get other family members and friends to join me for Hamlet in Krakow, but that didn't work out either. So my first (I hope of many) Slavic Shakespeare turned out to be Polish Henry IV, which is I think one of the most prosaic (in the literal sense that much of the text, i.e. all of Falstaff, is in prose). And in fact the verse of e.g. King Henry seemed to be translated for the most part as prose, and gems like "Faith, I ran when I saw others run" and the pithy, creepy "I do, I will" (Hal as Henry IV/V on banishing Falstaff) became the banal "I ran because everybody was running" and "You're to be banished, and that's that." But such losses were not felt too deeply given the tremendous vitality of the production, here is what I remember two months later: a "rehearsal" production with the actors sitting in chairs in a circle with scripts in hand while not engaged in a scene, in modern and casual dress except for the crown on the King's head and a sinister black trenchcoat and homburg hat for the scheming Worcester, with the characters of Westmoreland, Blunt and other courtiers, as well as various servitors and peripheral characters at the Boar's Head, represented by sock puppets mainly operated by two different actresses, the better to emphasize their vapid sycophancy, a device which at first, owing largely to the cynical sing-song caricaturing of the voices (something like the dreadful Mr. Rogers puppet segments as directed by Oliver Stone, if you can imagine that), I found too clever by half, but which bothered me less as I got used to it and its use became less frequent, the play dominated increasingly by in this case an electrifying, if purely comic, Hotspur, a bearded, slightly too old but charming Prince Hal, and a Falstaff also not quite rough enough around the edges but excellent and moving-- I shed a tear at his "Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world," and almost shed another at "The inside of a church!" The climactic duel between Hotspur and Hal was done as an elegant screwball dance, veering from waltz to tango, the ultimate laying-bare of the device, including Hotspur asking for a prompt at one point. The King was well done as the dyspeptic, gangsterly figure he is. The two actresses also won my heart with definitive portrayals of Ladies Percy and Mortimer, both aggressively physical, one preening and bitchy, the other shamanic. Overall, the combination of athleticism, work-in-progress playfulness and experiment, and a true ensemble spirit (I think the actor playing Sir John, that is Fat Jack, or Jasiu (YA-shoo) as they call him, was the only one who played just a single role) were inspiring and delightful, the whole thing bristling with integrity and sharpness, but I'm still waiting to consummate my desire for the Kierkegaardian repetition that will be Shakespearean tragedy, on stage, in Polish.

Arts & Culture

2006-01-14T07:45:00.000-08:00

School lunch menus

Saturday, January 14, 2006

MILFORD

High, Middle schools

Monday: No school, Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Tuesday: Chicken fingers, white fluffy rice, vegetable, fruit.

Alternate: Tuna roll.

Wednesday: High: Pot pie or chili in bread bowl.

Middle: Chicken quesadilla, salsa, sour cream, oven baked fries, fruit.

Thursday: Grilled cheese, chicken noodle soup, assorted chips, veggie sticks, fruit.

Friday: No school, professional day.

Elementary

Monday: No school, Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Tuesday: Pasta with meat sauce, garden salad, bread and butter, dessert.

Alternate: Tuna roll.

Wednesday: BYO taco, seasoned taco meat, served with soft tortilla shells, w/lettuce, salsa, cheese, and sour cream, corn niblets, rice, fruit.

Thursday: Chicken deluxe, potato puffs, vegetable, fruit.

Friday: No school, professional day.

Scarlet Express

Monday: No school, Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Tuesday: Cheeseburger or Gardenburger, fries, juice, fruit, salad bar lunch.

Wednesday: Chicken quesadilla or Gardenburger, fries, juice, fruit, salad bar lunch.

Thursday: Chef’s choice or Gardenburger, fries, juice, fruit, salad bar lunch.

Friday: No school, professional day.

HOPEDALE

Jr.-Sr. High School

Monday: No school, Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Tuesday: Chicken fajita, rice pilaf, golden corn; chicken caesar wraps, cinnamon rolls, fruit.

Wednesday: Barbecue pork sandwich, baked beans, tossed salad; pepperoni sandwich, jell-o w/topping.

Thursday: Hamburger/cheese, oven fries; Tuscanny veggies; tuna roll, baked chips, brownies.

Friday: Foccia pizza, garden salad, Sun chips; turkey on pita, baby carrots, cookies.

Memorial School

Monday: No school, Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Tuesday: Grill chicken patty, spicy potato wedges; Calif. mixed veggies, apple pie, fruit.

Wednesday: Meatball grinder, oven potatoes, tossed salad, mixed fruit cups.

Thursday: Mini corn dogs, baked beans, smiley potatoes, sliced carrots, cookies.

Friday: Papa Gino’s pizza, garden salad, baked Cheetos, cookies, fruit cup.

FRANKLIN

Middle, High, elementary schools

Monday: No school, Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Tuesday: Chicken patty on a bun, lettuce and tomato, macaroni salad, assorted fruit.

Wednesday: Chicken nuggets, mashed potatoes, sweet green peas, wheat bread, assorted fruit.

Thursday: Elementary -- brunch for lunch;

Secondary -- deli bar, assorted fruit.

Friday: Plain or pepperoni pizza, tossed garden salad, assorted fruit.

UXBRIDGE

Uxbridge High, Whitin Middle schools

Monday: No school, Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Tuesday: Choice of nachos with cheese; chicken patty sandwich; salad bar; cheese pizza; deli ham; veggie pasta blend, sunflower seeds, mixed fruit.

Wednesday: Choice of chicken fajita (w/lettuce and cheese); cheeseburger on a bun; salad bar; cheese pizza; deli: genoa salami; garden salad, Near East rice pilaf, chilled pears.

Thursday: Choice of pizza sticks and marinara; cheese quesadilla; salad bar; cheese pizza; deli pepperoni; crunchy baby carrots, kiwi fruit, fresh baked cornbread.

Friday: Choice of oven fried chicken; buffalo chicken wrap (w/lettuce, ranch dressing); salad bar; Domino’s pizza; deli: tuna; veggie of the day, pasta salad, fresh apple.

Taft, Good Shepherd Elementary

Monday: No school, Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Tuesday: Choice of nachos with cheese; chicken patty sandwich; chef salad with turkey; cheese pizza; peanut butter/jelly sandwich; veggie pasta blend, sunflower seeds, mixed fruit.

Wednesday: Chicken fajita; (w/lettuce and cheese); cheeseburger on a bun; fresh fruit and yogurt; cheese pizza; peanut butter/jelly sandwich; garden salad, Near East rice pilaf, chilled pears.

Thursday: Choice of pizza sticks and marinara; cheese quesadilla; tuna salad; cheese pizza; peanut butter/jelly sandwich; crunchy baby carrots, kiwi fruit, fresh baked cornbread.

Friday: Choice of oven fried chicken; sandwich of the day; lunch muncher (cheese, wheat crackers; veggies and dip); cheese pizza; peanut butter/jelly sandwich; veggie of the day, pasta salad, fresh apple.

Our Lady of the Valley

Monday: No school, Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Tuesday: Choice of nachos with cheese; chicken patty sandwich; veggie pasta blend, sunflower seeds, mixed fruit.

Wednesday: Chicken fajita (with lettuce and cheese); cheeseburger on a bun; garden salad, Near East rice pilaf, chilled pears.

Thursday: Pizza sticks and marinara; cheese quesadilla; crunchy baby carrots, kiwi fruit, fresh baked cornbread.

Friday: Oven fried chicken; cheese pizza, veggie of the day, pasta salad, apple.

Poem: The Fur Needs Air

2006-01-11T13:52:00.000-08:00

The fur needs air,
he said. Don't leave it in the casing.
It needs to breathe. I'll see what I can do.
It will be quite expensive. But I am
the only dry cleaner in Silesia
who gets the job done.
I use the old-time method,
extremely toxic, dangerous to myself
and other humans
and a scourge of the environment.
Film stars and crooners, divas and other folk
come here from Warsaw
to have me clean their furs.

You must be mindful,
have a care, but then, who knows.
My old lady
when she started to put on the pounds,
couldn't wear the fur,
put it away for our daughter.
Wouldn't you know,
she turned out twice as fat as her mother,
twice as fat as her mother,
that's how it is.
I'm telling you.

That Fatal Kiss

2006-01-03T23:57:00.000-08:00

A short essay by one of my students:

Fatal Kiss
Recently tragic message arrived to us from USA. Young girl died after her boyfriend's kiss.
Initially nobody knew what was reason of death of young, healthful girl. Toxicological research that carried after her death showed shocking truth. Reason of death was allergy on nut butter. As it happens, that boy was perpetrator of danger had eaten sandwich with nut butter before kiss. There is tragic and incredible history but real.
The main conclusion which comes to mind after this history is it that we don't know day neither hour. This tragedy has touched not only girl's family but also her boyfriend who has contributed to this tragic case.
Although, time cures wounds, this boy doesn't take the nut butter for mouths to end of life.

Some Christmas Cheer

2005-12-09T08:34:00.000-08:00

I thought some might enjoy this, a bit of Bible talk from yesteryear, just in time for the holidays:

POINTS OF REFERENCE IN THE WILDERNESS: TRANSLATING SCRIPTURAL ECHOES IN DOSTOEVSKY’S BESY

From the mid 1860s one can observe in Dostoevsky an increasingly strong urge to see human beings and their actions in the divine perspective. Every single “natural” thing seems to have its special spiritual and divine counterpart. It is a silhouette of a spiritual thing, and this again a portrayal of the original divine picture.
-- Geir Kjetsaa, Dostoevsky and His New Testament

Ибо быть писателем неизбежео обазначает быть протестантом. -- Joseph Brodsky
(Trans. A. Sumerkina)

Dostoevsky’s Besy, variously translated over the years of its English existence as The Possessed, Devils, and, most recently, Demons, affords the translator a wealth of challenges. The “polyphonic” quality in Dostoevsky’s fiction, famously championed by Bakhtin, is present in the novel on several different levels, notably the most obvious one, i.e., the great variety and multiplicity of different narrative and conversational voices belonging to different characters, e.g., the simultaneously naïve and ironic, slightly Gogolian narration of Anton Lavrentevich G---v; the effusive Francophone largesse and pomposity of Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky; the sometimes hyperventilating, often logorrhoeic ferocity of his son Pyotr; the mute, inchoate, lackadaisical stabs at articulation of the nihilist philosopher Kirillov; the fluidly emotionless laconicisms of Stavrogin; the often sentimental, slightly hysterical speech of the irascible and didactic Shatov; the dialect spoken by Fedka the Convict (apparently based on what Dostoevsky heard from certain fellow prisoners in his years of penal servitude); the dialect spoken by the peasants who escort Stepan Trofimovich to their village toward the end of the novel; the rambunctious, rough language and cleverly irreverent pastiche poetry of Captain Lebyadkin; the hallucinatory free-association of his sister Maria Timofeevna, and so on. The present paper will naturally fail to address the fate of all of these diverse riches of linguistic material in the English translations at hand, not only for lack of space and time, but because its purpose is to confront specific problems of intertextual, more specifically, Biblical, motifs in the Russian text that do not always come through in translation, as well as related intra-textual issues.
Even more than the other three (four, if one includes Podrostok) canonical “Great Novels” of Dostoevsky, Besy is fraught with apocalyptic imagery, arranged in a rich allusive pattern that serves to heighten the tension of the narrative. Heightening of tension occurs not simply because the apocalyptic chords repeatedly struck by Dostoevsky add a deeper, “cosmic” level to the novel’s menacing atmosphere, its murder and mayhem, but for other reasons as well: mainly, a kind of claustrophobia-inducing textual crowding. What Graham Greene wrote about the novels of Patricia Highsmith (like Greene himself, a 20th century English-language writer whose works share striking thematic, structural and tonal affinities with those of Dostoevsky), is true in equal measure of the Russian writer’s oeuvre: “ [Highsmith is] a writer who has created a world of her own, a world claustrophobic and irrational, which we enter each time with a sense of personal danger... [she is] the poet of apprehension”. In some rather complex ways, however, the sense of personal danger we feel upon opening one of the “Great Novels” is linked with Bakhtin’s concept of “polyphony”: we do not simply “identify with” Dostoevsky’s characters, but like them, we fear that someone (a character, or the author himself) may usurp our autonomy of thought and feeling; on one level, we may become unconsciously absorbed in the author’s ideological religious and political polemic, on another we may feel our critical, lucid objectivity threatened by the inextricably overlapping, yet contradictory voices of different characters. The presence of intertextuality, particularly in its subtler forms, the near-seamless weaving of other texts into the fabric of the narrative, becomes in Dostoevsky another layer of the cognitive-symbolic instability shared by characters and reader alike.
Geir Kjetsaa and others have written of the novel’s many references to the Book of Revelation, and articles by Suzanne Fusso and Russell S. Valentino in Slavic Review put these in a broader context of intertextual symbolism and irony. More explicitly and consistently than Dostoevsky’s other works, Besy is concerned with a clash of visions of the concepts of “earthly paradise” and “New Jerusalem,” both of which figure in the Book of Revelation:

And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.
And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. Revelation 21:1-2
And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain; for the former things are passed away. Revelation 21:4

This passage is subtly evoked in the conversation between the “crazed and pathetic” (Terras, p. 21) Holy Fool Maria Lebiadkina, the “Cripple” (“Khromonozhka”; Pevear and Volokhonsky render it the “Lame Girl”1), and the “rabid Slavophile” Shatov (Cravens, p. 792) in which Lebyadkina relates a conversation she had with an old woman at a monastery where she was staying about the Mother of God. Here is the Russian and four translations, by Constance Garnett, Andrew MacAndrew, Michael Katz and Pevear and Volokhonsky:

у нас жила за пророчество: «Богородица что есть, как мнишь?» -- «Великая Мать, отвечаю, упование рода человеческого». – «Так, говорит, Богородица – великая мать-сыра земля есть, и великая в том для человека заключается радость. И всякая тоска земная и всякая слеза земная—радость нам есть; а как напоишь слезами своими под собой землю на пол-аршина в глубину, то тотчас же о всем и возрадуешься. И никакой, никакой, говорит, горести твоей больше не будет, таково, говорит, есть пророчество.»

Dostoevskii, p. 152

“ […] And at that time an old woman who was living in the convent doing penance for prophesying the future, whispered to me as she was coming out of church, ‘What is the mother of God? What do you think?’ ‘The great mother,’ I answer, ‘the hope of the human race.’ ‘Yes,’ she answered, ‘the mother of God is the great mother—the damp earth, and therein lies great joy for men. And every earthly woe and every earthly tear is a joy for us; and when you water the earth with your tears a foot deep, you will rejoice at everything at once, and your sorrow will be no more, such is the prophecy.’ […]”

(Garnett, p. 144)

“But then, one day, as we were leaving the church, a lay sister who was staying at the convent to atone for making prophecies said to me:
“’Mother of God--- what do you think that means?’
“’She’s the great Mother, the hope of the human race,’ I said.
“’You’re right there,’ she said to me. ‘The Mother of God is our great mother earth, and there’s great happiness for man in that. And in every earthly sorrow and in every earthly tear there’s happiness for us. And once you’ve soaked the earth foot deep with your tears, you’ll rejoice in everything right away. And,’ she said, ‘you’ll not have a single sorrow—not a single one. There is such a prophecy,’ she told me.

(MacAndrew, p. 139-40)

“ […] Meanwhile one of the lay sisters, who was doing penance for having uttered prophecies, whispered as we were coming out of the church, “What is the Mother of God, do you think?” “The great mother,” I replied, “the hope of the human race.” “Yes,” she said, “the Mother of God is the great mother—the damp earth, and in that there’s much rejoicing for men. Every earthly sorrow, each earthly tear is a joy for us; and when you’ve watered the earth with your tears a foot deep, you’ll rejoice at everything all at once. And,” she said, “You’ll have no more sorrow. Such,” she said, “is the prophecy.” […]”

(Katz, p. 153”)

“ […] And meanwhile one of our old women who was under penance for prophesying, whispered to me on the way out of church: ‘What is the Mother of God, in your view?’ ‘The great mother,’ I answered. ‘The hope of the human race.’ ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘the Mother of God is the moist earth, and therein lies a great joy for man. And every earthly sorrow and every earthly tear is a joy for us; and when you have watered the earth under you a foot deep with your tears, then you will at once rejoice over everything. And there will be no more, no more of your grief from then on,’ she said, ‘and such,’ she said, ‘is the prophecy.’ […] ”

(Pevear and Volokhonsky, p. 145)

The four translations may seem almost identical at first, but in fact there are several important differences between all four. MacAndrew’s is clearly the weakest in at least one respect, having broken Dostoevsky’s paragraph (which in fact runs several pages in its entirety) into more manageable dialogue form, which loses the breathless, oracular stream-of-consciousness quality essential to this very strange character’s discourse. He also changes Lebyadkina’s introduction of the old woman (clearly, “staritsa” is more specialized than “old woman,” but we will leave that, for simplicity’s sake) into something very sudden and sequential: “But then one day,” thus losing more of the flowing, expanding, non-linear quality of Lebyadkina’s monologue. The old woman answering “You’re right there” is an interpolation which rings false; this is somewhat typical of MacAndrew’s modus operandi which seems based on trying to make the work as “accessible” as possible, producing such laughable failures as “Shatsie” for “Shatushka” (Lebyadkina’s term of endearment for Shatov). Katz fares better, but he leaves out the repetition of “And” in the old woman’s repeated discourse, thus losing the anaphora which greatly enhances the Biblical quality of her speech. He does, however, leave in the repetition of “she said” at the end, as do Pevear and Volokhonsky, preserving the child-like insistence and jerky change of rhythm as neither Garnett nor MacAndrew does. Katz’s “great rejoicing” for velikaia radost’ is a step up from “great happiness” in MacAndrew. “Happiness” is a generic and inadequate word, lacking the Biblical stature that radost’, “rejoicing” or “joy” have, and for an important reason2, its relatively secular quality diminishes the resonance of the philosophical “dialogue” in the work as a whole. “Rejoicing” echoes several relevant passages in the King James Bible, including “Rejoicing in heaviness” 1 Peter 1:6; “Rejoice evermore” 1 Thessalonians 5:16; “Rejoice always; and again I say, Rejoice” Philippians 4:4; “Rejoicing in hope; patient in tribulation” Romans 12:12, as radost’ echoes the forms of the verb radovat’sia in the Russian Bible. Garnett’s “great joy” is perhaps even more appropriate, however, resonating with “glad tidings of great joy” (the birth of Christ) Luke 2:10 just as the Russian does. This is relevant not only because of the evangelical character of the passage, but because Lebyadkina is one—the purest one, spiritually-- of several women in the novel who may or may not have had sexual relations with the enigmatic, possibly impotent antihero Stavrogin and may actually have borne (and then drowned) his child; a nightmare inversion of the Christmas story (George Steiner writes, in describing her reverie about the child, of “a secret flowering of consciousness… an ‘annunciation’” p. 310). Stavrogin himself, who wears, as noted below, many of the attributes of Antichrist (“rog” in “Stavrogin” means “horn”), claims that she is a virgin, and the matter is never clearly resolved. What is clear is that she is not only a Holy Fool, or simply an “allegorical representation of Mother Russia” (Terras, p. 21), but an embodiment of a proto-Solovyovian concept of the Eternal Feminine superimposed on Eastern Orthodox theology (Sofia, or the “World Soul”) with much of its pagan geneaology intact. Mat’-syraia zemlia is an expression toute faite which is very difficult to translate into English, evoking a pagan feminine personification of earth here synthesized with the Christian Mother of God, but neither Katz nor Pevear and Volokhonsky, who are generally ready to provide copious footnotes at the drop of a hat, so to speak, gives any supplementary explanation here. Failing that, “damp earth” and “moist earth” seem about equally inexpressive, but “damp earth,” while less clearly fertile and positive, has slightly more of the rugged, near-cliché quality which is necessary here. MacAndrew’s “mother earth” makes the connection which the others leave slightly less clear; in this case MacAndrew’s clumsiness and bluntness are virtues, even though the physicality of the adjective gets lost, since the Russian reader does not need to have the gap bridged, but the English reader does. In any case, Pevear and Volokhonsky’s legendary ear is not at its finest here: “rejoice over everything” sounds nonsensical compared with “rejoice at” or “in everything,” and “What is the Mother of God, in your view?” has a hard bookish edge, as if Lebyadkina were taking an exam, compared with “Kak mnish’?” which has an archaic ring, but not an academic one. Garnett’s “What do you think?”, in its simplicity, is closer to the mark.
The most interesting aspect of the passage, for the purposes of this paper, is perhaps the final reassurance of the staritsa, which resonates, if only for an instant, with the vision of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth which closes the Book of Revelation. “Nikakoi, nikakoi, govorit, goresti tvoei bol’she ne budet” clearly puts less emphasis on the personal pronoun and more on the abstract idea than “you’ll not have a single sorrow” in MacAndrew or “you’ll have no more sorrow” in Katz (at least MacAndrew, to his credit, keeps the repetition: “--not a single one”). Garnett also meddles with the syntax and omits the almost incantatory repetition, but her “your sorrow will be no more” has a majestic, Elizabethan flavor, a truly soothing Biblical sonority, which Pevear and Volokhonsky do not achieve in “there will be no more, no more of your grief from then on”—the final “from then on” is clearly unneeded here, as the sense of bol’she ne budet is inherent in “no more”.
Pevear and Volokhonsky can be remarkably adept at catching intra-textual threads which other translators miss or drop, however, as the next example will demonstrate. The passage occurs in the same scene as cited above, where Shatov, accompanied by the narrator, visits the “Cripple.” After she dreamily describes her baby, then her mysterious lover, and then darkly hints that she drowned the baby in a pond, Shatov tries to prod more specific information out of her. She resists vehemently:

А тем временем и шепни мне, из церкви выходя, одна наша старица, на покаянии

-- Не скажу, не скажу, хоть зарежь меня, не скажу, -- быстро подхватила она,-- жги меня, не скажу. И сколько бы ни терпела, ничего не скажу, не узнают люди!

(Dostoevskii, p. 153)

“I won’t tell, I won’t tell,” she answered quickly. “you may kill me, I won’t tell. You may burn me, I won’t tell. And whatever I had to bear I’d never tell, people won’t find out!”

(Garnett, p. 146)

“Right, I won’t tell you, I won’t tell you. You can kill me, but I won’t tell you,” she said, quickly catching up his words. “You can burn me, and I won’t tell you; and they can do anything they like to me—I still won’t tell them. They’ll never know!”

(MacAndrew, p. 141-2)

‘I won’t tell, I won’t tell, even if you kill me, I won’t tell,’ she said quickly. ‘Burn me, I won’t tell. However much I suffer, I won’t say a thing; people will never know!’

(Katz, p. 155)

“I won’t tell, I won’t tell, put a knife into me, but I won’t tell,” she chimed in quickly, “burn me, but I won’t tell. And however much I suffer, I won’t say anything, people will never find out!”

(Pevear & Volokhonsky, p. 147)

Clearly, Pevear and Volokhonsky's is the only acceptable rendering of the first line, whose very specific verb zarezat' («to kill, slaughter», but also «to knife», literally «to cut/slit up») the other translators have blurred and muted to simply «to kill.» Lebiadkina's choice of this verb is important not merely as an indicator of her vivid imagination or intense emotion at this moment, but because along with the following verb zhech' it directly foreshadows what will happen to her, along with her brother and another inhabitant of their house, toward the end of the novel, when Fedka the Convict slits their throats at Pyotr Verkhovensky's behest and then the house is burned down in the fire which ravages a large part of the town. Like the murder of Nastasya Filippovna in Idiot, the murder of Lebyadkina is anticipated throughout the novel. The irony is that the murder was originally expected by its instigator, Verkhovensky; its perpetrator, Fedka, and Captain Lebyadkin himself, to be sanctioned by Stavrogin as a means of keeping his marriage to the Cripple a secret; but by the time she is killed he has long since publicly broken his silence and ended his deception about the affair. She here reveals the extent of her devotion to him, although she later becomes disillusioned and compares him with an owl (bird comparisons are a favorite for Dostoevsky in such situations, cf. Grushenka in Brat'ia Karamazovy) and with Grishka Otrep'ev, the usurper. Garnett's «whatever I had to bear» is the closest to her «skol'ko by ia ni terpela», which does carry the meaning «however much I suffer» as in Katz and Pevear-Volokhonsky, but in the context of the inspirational, devotional passage cited and analyzed can be read with slightly less self-dramatization and more generosity than the latter version suggests.
The marriage of Stavrogin and the Cripple is hardly functional, but it is, curiously enough, the only de jure marriage in the book in which the wife is entirely and unconditionally faithful to her husband (most of the other wives are seduced by Stavrogin, flirt with him or style themselves as «liberated» women of the 60's). With Lebyadkina understood as a vision of Sofia, an incarnation of the divine aspect of the Eternal Feminine who in her simplicity and purity has already reached the moment in Revelation where time stops and sorrow is converted into joy, the marriage may be seen as an apocalyptic recasting of the «holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.” Lebyadkina embodies the true vision of the New Jerusalem, earthly paradise, Golden Age and all other concepts of a timeless, sinless, and deathless world, Stavrogin sinful humanity that spurns this truth. On another level, however, Stavrogin is unmistakably identified with the age-old enemy of humanity, the arch-fiend, Satan, who also appears in the Book of Revelation alongside the Ewig-Weiblich:

And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars;
And she being with child cried, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered.
And there appeared another wonder in heaven; and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads.
And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth: and the dragon stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born.
Revelation 12:1-4

The title of the chapter which follows «Khromonozhka,» «Premudrii zmii,», has most often been translated as «The Wise Serpent.» It takes this title because Stavrogin makes his first, long-awaited appearance there and Captain Lebyadkin describes him with that epithet. Of the four translators, the only one who deviates from the «wise» reading is Garnett, who offers «The Subtle Serpent.» At first glance, it may seem like a typical embellishment on her part. In fact, however, Ozhegov's Russian dictionary provides some support for this translation:

1.Deep wisdom (obs.).
2.Something odd/tricky/difficult/abstruse, not easily understood (colloq. iron.) as in «Nikakoi premudrosti tut net.» (p. 504; translation by the author)

The Soviet lexicographer wittily provides a purely negative example that in fact does nothing to resolve the ambiguity, but obviously «subtle» is an acutely ingenious translation if the second meaning is intended. Proverbs 9, in Russian a meditation on «premudrost',» is also instructive even in English, though it does give «Wisdom»:

Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars:
She hath killed her beasts, she hath mingled her wine; she hath also furnished her table. Widom 9:1-2

In line 2, the verb zakolot' in Russian is, again, more specific than the English «to kill». Like zarezat', its primary meaning is «to stab». As one reads further on in this chapter, one finds numerous other parallels to the portrait of Stavrogin, to his contradictory nature, his humility and pride, his open-ended capacity for ultimate evil and infinite good. Like Satan, he is God's creation and has a wisdom and integrity reflecting his Creator's, even in his rebellion he fulfill's the Creator's will, much as Dostoevsky believed the Nihilist «plague» was Russia's God-chosen destiny, for a time. This all suggests that the word «premudrii» in the original is part of an intricate chain of reference which is difficult if not impossible to convey in English, where the King James Bible unfortunately fails to come up with a more rarefied, poetic word than the common, overused «Wisdom»3. Therefore, «subtle» is probably a more suggestive and faithful translation than «wise» here, especially if one agrees with Steiner and Bakhtin that the novel has its own logic and structure independent of all previous human history and culture.
If «premudrii» presents difficulties to the thoughtful translator, «zmii», while not difficult in itself, introduces a leitmotif which can be difficult for translators to sustain: a series of descriptions of Stavrogin in comparison with or suggestive of reptiles, all pointing to the great Red Dragon in Revelation. N. M. Chirkov elucidates this pattern (duly noting the Biblical reverberation in the chapter title) in juxtaposition with another parallel pattern of references to Stavrogin as a noble, heroic, princely character (p. 38-9); our examination will limit itself to the reptile theme. When Stavrogin has finally appeared in this chapter, in the great «carnivalistic» confrontation scene in the drawing-room of his mother, after Liza (one of his possible conquests) has asked him to confess or deny his rumored marriage to Lebyadkina before the entire assembled company and he has unconvincingly denied it, he escorts his secret bride out of the room. Liza reacts with visceral displeasure:

Потом молча села опять, но в лице ее было какое-то судорожное движение, как будто она дотронулась до какого-то гада.

(Dostoevskii, p. 189)

«Gad» is translated by Garnett (p. 184) and Pevear-Volokhonsky, (p. 184) in the vanguard as usual, as «viper,» perhaps with a mind to Matthew 23:33 «Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?» (in Russian, «ekhidininy,» lit. Eng. echidnae) MacAndrew and Katz both opt for different degrees of vagueness, using, respectively, «some slimy creature,» (p. 175) which at least retains some residue of the Biblical echo, and «something disgusting» (p. 194), which is perhaps an attempt to tread the line between the literal («a reptile») and figurative («a loathsome, disgusting person,» cf. gadina, gadost') meanings, to little purpose and with little success. The more interesting question is the slight elevation of tone chosen by Garnett and Pevear-Volokhonsky. In this case they have used a loftier, more meaning-laden, and indeed more Biblical term than was probably called for; the simple, prosaic word «reptile» would have sufficed. 4 That solution is more impressive than certain translators' inexplicable oversimplification of the next installment of the «reptile/snake» motif, however, which does credit to Garnett, Katz and MacAndrew: as the drawing-rooom confrontation winds down, Captain Lebyadkin here bumps into Stavrogin on his way out:

Но в дверях как раз столкнулся с Николаем Всеволодовичем, тот посторонился; капитан как-то весь вдруг съежился пред ним и так и замер на месте, не отрывая от него глаз, как кролик от удава.

(Dostoevskii, p. 199)

The word “udav” here is quite specific; it means “boa (constrictor)”. MacAndrew and Katz, not to mention Garnett, distinguish themselves here by translating directly: “boa constrictor.” Pevear-Volokhonsky apparently decided that was too specific, and their choice is the most general, simple and vague: “snake.” Perhaps “like a rabbit in front of a snake” (p. 194) seemed like a smoother locution, but it is no more of an expression toute faite in English than “like a rabbit before a boa-constrictor” (Garnett, p. 195). Where, as Chirkov notes, the progression in Dostoevsky goes in descending order of grandeur from the Biblical-mythological “serpent”, to the broad “reptile”, to the vividly deadly “boa”, Pevear-Volokhonsky have made it a strange crescendo—first ascending from “serpent” to “viper” and then flattening out into the sprawling, loose generality of “snake”.
Gradually it becomes apparent in comparing these translations that what the translators have accomplished when their work is seen in its collective totality is, perhaps, much akin to the great fable of the blind sages touching different parts of an elephant and coming to various partially accurate, but incomplete conclusions: where one translator grasps and conveys the Biblical grandeur of the passage, he or she loses certain stylistic idiosyncrasies peculiar to Dostoevsky; another maintains the rhythms of the original, but gets a little more folksy or colloquial than is required at times. A composite of the best of each would still need much revising, and would never achieve perfection, for “As it is written: there is none righteous… no, not one.” (Romans 3:10)

И отрет Бог всякую слезу с очей их, и смерти не будет уже; ни плача, ни вопля, ни болезни уже не будет, ибо прежнее уже прошло.

Откровение Святого Иоанна Богослова

Works Consulted

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1984

Brodsky, Joseph. “O Dostoevskom.”

Chirkov, N. M. O stile Dostoevskogo. Akademii Nauk SSSR, Moscow, 1963

Cravens, Craig. “The Strange Relationship of Stavrogin and Stepan Trofimovich as Told by Anton Lavrent’evich G-v.” Slavic Review, Vol. 59, Issue 4 (Winter 2000)

Dostoevskii, Fedor. Besy. Azbuka, St. Petersburg, 2000

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Possessed. Trans. Andrew R. MacAndrew. The New American Library of World Literature, Inc., New York, 1962

________________. Devils. Trans. Michael R. Katz. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1992

________________. Demons. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Vintage Books, New York, 1994

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. The Possessed. Trans. Constance Garnett. The Modern Library, New York, 1936

Fusso, Suzanne. “Maidens in Childbirth: The Sistine Madonna in Dostoevskii’s Devils.” Slavic Review, Vol. 54, Issue 2 (Summer 1995)

Highsmith, Patricia. The Two Faces of January. Atlantic Monthly Press, New York, 1988

Kjetsaa, Geir. Dostoevsky and His New Testament. Solum Forlag A.S., Oslo, 1984

Macdonald, Dwight. “Updating the Bible.” In Against the American Grain. Da Capo Press, New York, 1983

May, Rachel. The Translator in the Text. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 1994

Ozhegov, S. I. Slovar’ Russkogo Iazyka. Russkii Iazyk, Moscow, 1987

Steiner, George. Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism. Vintage Books, New York, 1959

Terras, Victor. F.M. Dostoevsky: Life, Work and Criticism. York Press, Fredericton, 1984

Valentino, Russell S. “The Word Made Flesh in Dostoevskii’s Possessed.” Slavic Review, Vol. 56, Issue 1 (Spring 1997)

Got Those Contested-Election Blues Again

2005-10-11T14:23:00.000-07:00

Don't know if anybody out there follows Polish politics-- I certainly try to avoid doing so, to the extent possible-- but they just had a presidential election on Sunday, and now they have to have another one as the results between the two main candidates were too close.

But what I find more interesting than any quirks or other features of this particular election is the simple fact that the Poles always hold elections on Sunday, so it becomes a family outing, in between church and whatever leisure or work the rest of the day holds in store. A markedly different approach from holding them on Tuesday and making it a frenzied scramble to get there before or after work, or during the lunch hour. Of course most Poles are more cynical about politics than many Americans, and if I'm not mistaken, the turnout for this election was even lower than for most of the past several presidential elections back home. Of those Poles with whom I talked about the election, most were planning to vote for Tusk (apparently some sort of economic quasi-libertarian, social quasi-liberal, or that's what he says), several planned not to vote at all and a number of others still hadn't made up their mind just days or hours before the election. So, to paraphrase Pauline Kael, for Kaczyński (no, not that one ) to win at this point would be a mathematical and statistical impossibility.

Whoever "wins" in the end, however, I, for one, will miss the cultivated, erudite, charming and handsome (though overweight) outgoing President Aleksander Kwaśniewski, perhaps one of the noblest failures of the post-Communist world.

THE SLEEP OF REASON

2005-09-26T17:58:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite scenes in film-- the scene in Triple Cross (Terence Young, 1967) where a wizened, bearded Trevor Howard tells a cynical, flippant Christopher Plummer that "The private war of Eddie Chapman has come to an end" and persuades him (sort of) to commit himself to helping British intelligence-- takes place in a museum-- the British Museum, I suppose it probably is-- among prehistoric mollusks. (I think it may well have been inspired by the foreign spies meeting in the aquarium in Hitchcock's SABOTAGE.) Is that why I like museums? Anyway, except for zoos I think I love museums best of all, more even than movies. Here, minimally revised, an e-mail I wrote yesterday to my good friend Jon about one of our local museums:

There's actually a quite good museum in Katowice (35 min. train
> from
> Gliwice, big transpo hub and not known for any kind of beauty)
> which is
> showing, until the end of this week, an exhibition of Dali's
> illustrations,
> as well as a group of Polish replicas of Western European cave
> paintings
> flanked by actual detritus from central European caveman
> culture-- little
> "Venus" fetishes with big breasts, earrings made from bones and shells, etc. and real mammoth bones. The Dali
> was what
> drew me 2 weeks ago and I was quite favorably impressed-- the
> illustrations for
> Alice in Wonderland, Carmen, Don Quixote, and Chretien de Troyes'
> Quest for
> the Holy Grail have the occasional melting clock, skull crawling
> with ants
> etc. but without the teutonic pedanticism or academic rigor of his paintings-- some of
> them actually
> looked like Miros. Came back today and found it a little less
> revelatory
> however. Actually I think the most interesting part was "Dali's
> Goya," where
> D. defaces prints/lithographs/gouaches/whatever of Goya with phalluses
> including
> huge noses and tongues bending over Goya's squat, stocky figures, or with pastels (reminding me of Welles's
> supposed
> near-last words: "Keep Ted Turner and his goddam crayolas off
> 'Kane'!")
> and/or weird titles such as "Heisenberg's Law" or "Dali and
> Cezanne get in a
> fight with Francois Millet" or something. Interesting palimpsest
> after being
> shocked and convulsed by the real Goya in Berlin last July.

********************** ADDENDUM ***********************

Actually, the most likable parts of the exhibit, which I typically forgot about, were some multimedia photocollages of the type made famous by Joseph Cornell. Darkness.

No Boundary

2005-09-03T14:42:00.000-07:00

That was the title of a tao-of-physics type book by Ken Wilber (or did he write the Tao of Physics?) that I believe I once saw the shaman warrior prince Joern Kiewning reading in my parents' house in the spring or summer of 1989. (For those who know him, my mother just got in touch with Joern: he's doing great, living in Germany's oldest city, Trier, with a beautiful wife and child, doing a job that he likes.) The gist being that we're all one I guess. I try to believe that sometimes, but other times ruptures seem inevitable and even good.

For example the other night sitting in a park here in Gliwice with two friends, another German, a mathematician, bicyclist and quasi-vegetarian named Philip, and a fellow American and non-vegetarian, an English teacher called Richard Lee Jackson, both of whom play guitar. We had agreed to meet and have a "jam session," the two of them teaching each other some blues licks and Dylan songs on the guitar, me singing occasionally. We had met before in the same park (Mickiewicz Park, which almost sounds like "Macarthur Park" dunnit) to the tune of cataclysmic artistic and popular success (two Greek girls sitting on a bench said we sounded good), without the faintest hint of the horror to come.

So the second time around, before our even having fully settled ourselves on the green, a sallow thirtysomething chappie mildly in his cups saunters over, indicates his blonde wife (on the same bench where late the Greek girls sat) and child in pram and asks if we could "play something." Yes, I tell him, we came here to play. (Philip and Richard, despite valiant efforts, are still a little dodgy in the realm of Polish language.) We tool around with a couple songs-- Philip does a bluesy reworking of the Beatles' "Ballad of John & Yoko." Another intrusion by the sallow one, this time to ask if we know any Polish songs. Sorry, we don't. A third time, still politish, to ask if we (actually they, the guitarists) can find the chords to some crappy pop song that his wife will sing. We agree, with some tremors of hesitation. Philip and Richard try (a bit half-heartedly, the realization dawning belatedly on Philip and me that this may not be a good idea, Richard's inborn cynicism having guided him from the start) to find some chords for the Polish pop song she sings in a squeaky but not terrible voice. She proposes an Abba song, nobody knows it. "My Heart Will Go On"? Sorry, not in our repertoire. Finally a compromise is met-- Richard works out the chords for "Sto Lat," the Polish birthday song, to which one and a half of us (the half being me, the one being Richard) know the words.

So from there everything just deteriorates and we sit there trying to fend them off as they try to invite us to their home for coffee, then when that doesn't work she wants us to figure out some songs by a group called "Kelly Family" (it's a Swedish group, and of course Sweden is in near Germany, and they speak a Germanic language, which English is too, right? so we must know their music-- actually she didn't say that, but perhaps that was her reasoning) or play "My heart will go on." And by the way, her father was a singer, so she can help us if we want to make it big on the music scene. Gradually, as the husband's language gets fouler and he periodically "threatens" to leave and make his wife leave, the wife begs for our attention with the dead-eyed hysteria of the junkie or the religious fanatic. "We have no-one to hang out with! Not even a drunken bum who hasn't a sou will hang out with us." Finally, we leave, and find a better park across the way.

The ugly other face of the famous Slavic warmth and hospitality. No boundary. It's been said, and I agree, that in the West we have too much boundary. But then, some kind or degree of boundary is needed.

HELLO HELLO HELLO

2005-08-26T16:43:00.000-07:00

I'm back. I've been away from Poland for much of the past two months, visiting friends and family in Prague, Berlin, Washington, Virginia, New York, New Jersey, Vermont, and Baltimore. Which is no excuse. But it's sort of a transitional time-- but then, some will rightly say, isn't it always?

So I just wanted to share a short poem I wrote last night. Really it wrote itself. I was watching this report on the Idiot Box about some people in a village in Poland who discovered six years ago that there is an undetonated bomb underneath the house they bought sometime after the war, of which the bomb is a relic. The house where they live.
They've been trying for six years to get someone to help get rid of the bomb without destroying the house which they love and which contains all their stuff, memories etc. But they haven't yet succeeded. I just thought the situation said so much. So the poem is not really a poem. It could be a rock song, or notes toward a novel.

They built their house on a bomb.
They didn't know it was there.
Now they must move, perhaps.
Because the bomb might go off.
Or it might not.
They can't sell the house-- no-one will buy it.
And they can't live there.
But there's no way to move on.
Their whole life is there.

Someday, A King Will Come

2005-06-30T20:21:00.000-07:00

It's a little distressing that before even having opened, the new sushi place in my town has been defaced with a graffito, albeit a timid, innocuous, even elegant one, small, abstract, and amber in color. But I suppose the management asked for it by placing a huge black & red banner over the street several months ago proclaiming "Here Will One Day Rise a SUSHI-BAR." In fact the graffito and the banner together will probably be the only interesting aspects of the restaurant's life, if the sushi is going to be comparable with what I've eaten in Krakow and Katowice. I know many (most?) people would just say, "Polish sushi? A non-starter!" and have done with it, but as you know, I like strange and sometimes unsuccessful syntheses, hybrid homunculi, awkward juxtapositions, et al. And someday, mark my word, there will be great sushi in Silesia.

Smiling Friends

2005-06-22T13:50:00.000-07:00

Just finished David Lodge's Souls and Bodies (actually called How Far Can You Go? but the US publisher changed it for whatever reason) and wanted to share with you one of my favorite parts. Throughout the book, the narrator periodically steps outside of the action and becomes "the author," David Lodge, with some factual banter. In this part he shares an excerpt from a fan letter written to him by a Czech reader:

"Dear Sir, I beg your costly pardon for my extraordinary beg and readings-request, with them I turn at you. I am namely a great reader and books-lover. Among my best friends- books- I have also in my library the Czech copy of your lovely book 'Den zkazy v Britskem museu'. I have read it several times and ever I have found it an extraordinary smiling book. I thank you very much for the best readings experiences and nice whiles, that has given your lovely work..."

Hall of Mirrors

2005-06-21T16:22:00.000-07:00

I recently watched two films about two couples coming apart and/or together, the colossal Le mepris (Contempt) by Godard and the recent Closer by Mike Nichols. I won't go into any kind of comparison since the similarity basically ends there. Closer, like Nichols' excellent Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, is concerned primarily with the difficulties caused in relationships by neurosis; Contempt is part of a grand tradition of films that superimpose that theme on Schiller's theory of the Naive and the Sentimental in poetry, the Naive being epitomized by the ancient Greeks and their unselfconsciously ritualized harmony with Nature, also by such large-as-life figures as Shakespeare, Cervantes and Goethe, the Sentimental by Schiller himself with his sense of separation from the warp and woof of Creation.

The other films I have in mind are the earlier Viaggio en Italia (Rossellini, 1947/8?), itself referenced in Godard's film both directly (the two couples go to see it with the wise old resplendently monocled philospher Fritz Lang) and indirectly (they also watch some footage of Greco-Roman statues not unlike the footage of such statues in Viaggio, except in color), and Pasolini's marvelous Medea (1969), featuring a monologue by Chiron (beautifully played by the great French actor Laurent Terzieff) remarkably similar to Lang's Schillerian reverie.

It would be fun to be the manager of an old-school double-feature theater (do they still exist?) like the wonderful one my parents used to take me to in Dallas, and have to decide whether to show Contempt with its parent text or its sibling/child.

One could also, however, situate Contempt within a tropos of marital and sexual anxiety specific to the early-middle New Wave period, alongside Truffaut's La peau douce (The Soft Skin) and, more revealingly, Chabrol's Les bonnes femmes. Of course the symptoms of what Godard was later to condemn as bourgeois complacency are already evident in those two films, but the haunting image of dancing couples marks his and Chabrol's debt to Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt and its disturbing critique of marriage and romance. Truffaut's film, on the other hand, shares with Godard's a nauseated shame at the weakness to which the intellectual man is reduced in his pursuit of a "Naive" relationship.

Speaking of Hitchcock, the whole idea of a couple watching their precarious union reflected in a broken mirror comes from Rear Window.

I propose that in place of the cryptic French term "mise-en-abyme," academic literary discourse should adopt the carnivalistic term "hall of mirrors."

Incidentally, the changes proposed by Jack Palance's vulgarian producer Prokosch (why exactly MUST all vulgarians in films have Eastern European names???) and at first accepted by Michel Piccoli's poetic Paul, i.e. that Odysseus and Penelope's marriage is broken (he wants to roam and not to come home, she has been unfaithful) are nowhere near as radical, i.e. as destructive, as, say, taking the Gods out of the Iliad or the infidelity out of the Arthurian Cycle. A different time, sigh.

The malice of dead things? part 2: the dancing robot ambassador

2005-05-30T19:45:00.000-07:00

The "malice of dead things," or actually "malice of things dead," is a literal translation of a Polish expression, "złośliwość rzeczy martwych," used knowingly whenever, for example, a key randomly stops working (as happened to me recently), or a TV goes out of wack, or any number of such quotidian contretemps occurs. (A more accurate, but less poetic translation, might be "inanimate" instead of "dead," but it is in fact the same word, and an "inanimate" object can't feel malice, where a dead one, according to beliefs and lore as old as man itself, can.) Having at one time lived in a dank basement apartment in Astoria, Queens with a depressive sink faucet, a schizophrenic iMac, a manic-depressive lamp and a frequently catatonic stereo, I'm a firm believer in the basic concept, which you can find eloquently articulated and expostulated here and here.

I was pondering over this recently after I shared with some of my classes a Newsweek article on the leaps and bounds into the future of robotics currently taking place in Japan. (From the international edition of Newsweek-- in fact the notorious Pandora's Box international edition of May 9, 2005). I had meant to post a link months ago to an article on Yahoo! about a new breed of robotic Japanese dolls specially marketed to lonely elderly people as sleeping partners, programmed to hold and be held by them and whisper sweet nothings into their ears-- nothing romantic mind you, just childlike words of a deeply consolatory nature; but being a Yahoo! article it subsequently disappeared. In any case those dolls were a primitive plaything compared to the wonders described (and in part shown) in this article:

While engineers in most of the world try to make robots that perform specific and usually unpleasant tasks, from fighting wars to performing deep-sea salvage, Japanese engineers are obsessed with making the machines more human. [...]
The first members of the new humanoid generation are having a coming-out party of sorts at the World Expo in Aichi, which opened in March and runs through September [Small Man, see if you can go have a look!]. Guests are welcomed by an android female receptionist who speaks 30,000 phrases in four languages and even knows how to fend off unwelcome advances from male Homo sapiens. Sony's remarkably limber dancing robot QRIO demonstrates why he's even served as an unofficial ambassador for Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi on some of his trips abroad. Toyota's Partner robots, which play musical instruments using artificial lips and lungs, have been drawing sellout crowds at their concerts.

I have seen a picture of the inauspiciously named "Actroid," the polyglot robot receptionist, and she's adorable-- the students could hardly believe she was "inanimate," even without seeing the color original (she wears a lime-green early 60s stewardess uniform). The Partner robots, however, may suggest Lucas's Storm Troopers to some Western eyes.

After describing how robots can be programmed to interact with people at parties and with schoolchildren in "sensitive" and "helpful" ways, and what is more, with each other ("Two humanoid robots sharing notes with each other would be able to pool information about their human charges to figure out what they want") the article goes on:

[This] emphasis on the future function of robots as companions and helpers seems to be deeply Japanese. The reason may have much to do with Japanese popular culture, where robots like the cartoon cat Doraemon or the sweet 1960s, vintage Astroboy, tend to be portrayed as beneficent, friendly types. The tendency to regard lifelike machines as unthreatening may have deeper roots in Japan's animist Shinto culture, where inanimate objects-- ranging from teapots to samurai swords-- can have souls.

So while Japan spends millions of dollars on making nice, friendly robots, people in the USA spend millions on making films about (mostly) evil robots-- not to mention how much is spent on making actual robot-bombs, etc.

How fitting then that the two sweet and kindly robots in Star Wars are based on characters in Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress. But of course we do in fact have a tradition of kindly robots in the West going back at least to Asimov, who had some harsh words for the prophets of Frankensteinian apocalypse. The film I, Robot, based on a book of his, was apparently something of a distortion of his more benign vision, though it did have the one good robot (Sunny I think, or Sonny?) who won Will Smith's heart in the end by practicing "human" values of love and self-sacrifice. (Full disclosure here: I watched I, Robot on a plane from JFK to Amsterdam on New Year's Eve, and it was, in fact, the most interesting part of the evening, so it has acquired a special place in my heart.)

Like Bart Simpson "earning his soul" through suffering, however, Sunny probably didn't have much of a soul to begin with. To return to the Frankenstein trope for a moment, I think the myth of robotic dementia and mayhem is most alluring when the robot contains living tissue-- when it is half man and half machine, or at least some small part real man-- and those organic nerves twist it into a fury. That's why Darth Vader holds such a spell over us.

To take the pop-culture geek-out to its logical next step, if you remember the Doctor Who episode called Genesis of the Daleks, where The Doctor (yes, THE Doctor, Tom Baker) holds in his hands the ability to utterly annihilate the Dalek horror before it begins, what stopped him was exactly the fact that they contained some living flesh. Or have I misremembered again? I think not. In any case the evil genius who gave life to the Daleks, Davros, was himself half-man, half-machine. (Incidentally, if you notice, the name of Davros, who first appeared in glorious b&w on telly in the 60s, is a near-anagram of Vader. I can't be the first to have observed this, but fortunately I don't move in the type of circles where I'd know.)

So be kind to your inanimate friends. They can't be any more malicious than you.

ADDENDUM (26.09.05) Not to get too deconstructionist, but I've recently been thinking the dichotomy between "living tissue" and "pure robot" is a false one. When we say that a battery is "dead," is that a metaphor? Not entirely. Energy, as Blake said, is eternal delight, and electroenergy, as Lenin said not in so many words, is the key to the future. Electricity, in fact, = life. Vive le robot!

The malice of dead things, part 1: "He has become more machine than man"

2005-05-28T22:36:00.000-07:00

Late spring is here with its noisome heat, the river is in full stench, but there are other smells too, like honeysuckle, and the evening is cool and magical.

Just saw The Revenge of the Sith, and for the first half or more I wondered how such a semi-respectable critic as the New York Times' A.O. Scott could have thought that it was the best of the Lucas-directed works in the series (the original slapdash 1977 work and the three recent bouts of computerized solemnities). Putting aside the original Star Wars for the moment, the first two thirds of this new one have nothing nearly as surprising or charming as the young Jedi apprentices singing something like Christmas carols in the planetarium with Yoda in Episode II: Attack of the Clones, or the fetching female assassin, or the snapshots of a bounty hunter's merry domesticity. But for me it was redeemed in the end by a quick dose of the old Grand Guignol (flamboyantly riffing on Frankenstein [Whale]-- inevitably slightly bungled by Lucas with a misplaced dual wipe at the end [he then mars most of the aftermath with his infantile overuse of iris-outs], Ophelia [Millais]-- the only worthy use of Natalie Portman's great talent in the whole film, and, less stunning but striking, camping his and Richard Donner's camping of Wyeth and John Ford in the early bits of Star Wars and Superman-- ) plus the Kierkegaardian or Freudian (or Jungian) repetition of seeing things happen that you already knew happened, but with a greater sense of the whole story, topped off with a near-repetition at the very end of the very first shot in the orginal. I've never been a devotee of the series, but like many of my generation I do have an irrational, almost primal affection for at least the first two films of the series (OK, Jedi too-- I attended the Denver premiere after all-- but less so-- I remember being chided in my friend's parents' car on the way home for wanting to talk about how bad girls turn good in James Bond movies instead of focusing on the film we'd just seen). Haven't we all been waiting for twenty-five years to see how valiant Luke's once-dashing father became a bit of hamburger in a plastic mask? I suppose it is almost Hitchcockian, although I feel great trepidation in using that word in any relation to the Star Wars franchise, but I guess it is a bit Hitchcockian how the villain in the original is so much more interesting and charming than any of the young heroes, and even has a British accent and seductive voice, like the best Hitchcock villains (e.g. James Mason, Claude Rains, Ray Milland, Cary Grant, Leo G. Carroll, Godfrey Tearle, George Sanders, Tom Helmore, and even Paul Lukas-- not quite British but with that keen, authoritative near-Britishness of the Mysterious East). I remember playing on the playground at the daycare center when I was about five with a charming blonde about my age, acting out scenes from the first Star Wars. While I wanted to be Han or Luke, not only did she want me to play Vader, she wanted him to get the girl! It's true... everybody wants to be a gangster, I suppose. So it was good to see the birth of a legendary ladies' man. And for me the best thing you can say about the film is the best you can say about any tragedy: it left me with a sense of pity for all (i.e. in this case, my pity for the actors finally became pity for the characters). Where the original video-game "climax" of the first film always bored me near to tears-- yes, Jim, the new film and its two predecessors are video games practically from beginning to end, but that first essay in Centipede-style cinema, though no doubt an heartfelt hommage to crappy WWII dogfight films, is The Bad Seed, despite the brilliantly surprising, Blade Runner-anticipating cuts to lush verdure for relief-- and the moronic post-coital Triumph of the Will bit also, this one really wormed its way into my heart.

That said, putting aside the frissons of Vader's metamorphosis and the surrounding pathos, Lucas's return to the human after the sheer thinginess of the ghastly Phantom has been and continues to be sluggish and tepid. His fascination with the magic of computers has become pathological, his caravan of extravagant reptiles deeply uninvolving-- the freakshow jazz-bar with its amphibian musicians in Episode IV: A New Hope, so charming and off-beat at the time, now seems a clamorous harbinger of the dreariness to come. An endless battle between Ewan MacGregor and an utterly uncharismatic robot is dragged out endlessly-- cross-cut with other scenes only to come back, just like the Energizer bunny, but without the charm. A New Hope, as mentioned above, was deeply flawed, but it was still focused in large part on people and feelings (no doubt against Lucas' will, somehow-- I have a hunch American Graffiti was supposed to be all about cars but also picked up some warmth and life accidentally). Here, for the first half of the film, the robots are taking over, not the world, but Lucas's mind, and it's scarier (in the sense of "more depressing") than I, Robot.

One of the generally obnoxious but occasionally insightful clubmen at National Review's The Corner (I probably annoyed a few readers linking to that site a month ago, but I do read it and find it instructive in different ways) made a comment some months ago about War and Peace which was probably about as antithetical to my own thoughts and beliefs as anything I've ever read there or elsewhere: that while he adored the Great Battles, he never could stomach the "drawing room scenes," i.e. the scenes with women. Unfortunately many men nowadays seem to feel this way, which is why we get treated to the incredibly tedious, when-will-it-end? bump-and-grind of such Great Battles on screen as those in The Lord of the Rings, the Star Wars saga and the whole Bruckheimer arsenal which needn't be dealt with here. So look how far we've come. Tolstoy's battle scenes, overlong though some of them may have been, always zoomed in from the sound and the fury to what Wodehouse called The Psychology of the Individual. But we live in an age where people are bored with psychology and crave for "Pure Imagination." So the human element gradually dissipates.

The human element is composed of the director and his actors. What remains of the human grace of Classical Hollywood now, in, e.g. Revenge of the Sith, but the star glamour of Portman, MacGregor and Samuel L. Jackson, all brutally shortchanged by Lucas, in ascending order of shortchangement, and some old tricks like wipes and irises that Lucas uses with no discretion, taste, or judgement? The only part of the film that hit the spot from a technical perspective, besides the volcanic hell familiar from many films such as What Dreams May Come or Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, was a fragment of a car crash sequence early on that appeared to be done with back-projection(!). But it couldn't actually have been back-projection could it? That seems so contra Lucas's new aesthetic. There were also a few brief bits of what looked like back-projection at the end. If any of it was, then much can be forgiven him.
That was a big part of the charm of the first film-- the wipes and other primitive tools were toys, just like the later CGI, but they were so corny that, authorial intention or not, the device was laid bare. It was like, hey, we're making a movie here (OK, I'M making a movie here is maybe more like it), it's kind of another world, but kind of like old movies, it's just like putting on a show in grandpa's barn in summertime, this is fun. Where now it's like, hey, this is my world, and I can do whatever the hell I want. Look at my wipee. Look at my wipee. Whee! I did it again. Look at the birdies. They fly like real birdies but I can control them. Whoo!

Perhaps arguing against CGI nowadays is in some ways like saying that the acoustic guitar is more (morally?) "pure" than the electric, a guitar is more spiritual than a synthesizer, etc., i.e. balderdash. But there's a time and a place for everything. Hitchcock would surely have used CGI to make his birdies fly if he could, but something tells me he would have remained partly conscious, as he partly did, that the real story is about what happens between a man and a woman.

[Or not. Of course Hitchcock did take a lot of obvious pleasure in showing off with all sorts of technological gimmickry, and he said shooting the scenes with the actors was the boring part (very Lucasian) and actors are like or should be treated like cattle, and so on and so on. But it's possible to watch most of his films in their entirety without giving that too much thought. And very importantly he did find good, capable writers for his projects, an idea which Lucas unfortunately scorns. Hitchcock also allowed actors to rewrite certain of their lines sometimes. And most of his "stable" of actors say or said they liked working with him, which is rare, if not unimaginable, in Lucas's case.]

Which leads us back to the actors, or rather the actors +/- script. The screwball romance and snappy banter between Princess Leia and Harrison Ford may have been a bit vapid by the standards of Classical Hollywood (Hawks, Capra, Lubitsch, Hitchcock, McCarey at their best) but the chemistry between the brash/sheepish Ford and the bossy, sexy, adult Fisher was genuine, unlike the extremely wooden affair of Portman and the very talented Hayden Christensen. Maybe it was just luck. Lucas's lunatic decision to go back and deform the old film with CGI effects and politically correct deletions, however, while not as unforgivably vicious as, for example, the studio that made Gladiator actually attempting to remove copies of the much better film it was loosely derived from, shows an equal lack of respect for the past and, what is more disturbing, a lack of respect for his own past. So probably something has changed in him. No artist is the best judge of his own work, and many make terrible misjudgments-- Gogol, Botticelli and Gregory Peck (re: The Paradine Case) come to mind-- but to destroy it, or to want to, is much more human and sympathetic than to perform an operation on it comparable to liposuction or colorization.

Some final thoughts
Of course the most lovable character in the film, as in the previous one, Yoda, voiced by the great Frank Oz. His perverse grammar, sign of his goodness and wisdom, is actually quite Slavic (or German, I suppose) in some of its less ludicrous moments. And seeing him climb up on a wookie's shoulder, you just want to have him and keep him as a pet.

I have no problem with Lucas's pop-mysticism. I'm a pop-mystic myself. But it's telling that a lot of the Jedi teachings have to do with overcoming, in fact, killing, your emotions--one of the things that makes this film actually tragic is that passionate love causes the whole catastrophe. It's sorta like Romeo & Juliet that way. Like Wilde said, it's not our vices, but our virtues, through which the gods bring us to ruin.

Reactionary Trip

2005-05-20T15:51:00.000-07:00

To be perfectly honest, I was also somewhat annoyed by the Michael Moore avant la lettre "Interview with a Consumer Product" in Masculin, Feminin, in which the hero interviews a slightly vapid and not terribly attractive girl who won a beauty contest and a trip to America. (Not clear whether the episode is fiction or non, but it feels real, probably improvised.) He asks her about the war in Vietnam (the film was made in '66) and other political matters of which she knows or cares little. She does exemplify an annoying type of person-- a certain arrogance comes through, familiar to me from certain of my students who as I've mentioned have also often been to America. The type of person who has ambitions of a political career but refuses to engage in a discussion about drugs, an incredibly important political issue in most countries, because it's "not nice." And it is disheartening that someone in her late teens or early twenties doesn't know what "reactionary" means-- she thinks it just means someone who reacts quickly and decisively to situations. But the fact is that the hero's girlfriend is at least equally ignorant of and indifferent to Vietnam, Marx, Mao, etc., and is to at least an equal degree a "Consumer Product" (she's an up-and-coming pop star, a dreamier version of Mireille Mathieu) and probably couldn't say what a reactionary is either, but we're not (I hope) supposed to hate her, since the hero loves her and she's adorable and vulnerable and opaque and doesn't really know what she wants but starts liking Bach because her young man loves Bach and can't stand pop. So the issue is really aesthetic, not political. The scene is manipulative and dishonest, and just like the Brittney Spears soundbite in Fahrenheit 451, it caters to people's worst tendencies, their intellectual snobbery and delusions of superiority.

Soliloquy in Smithereens

2005-05-20T12:50:00.000-07:00

Saw Godard's Masculin, Feminin on the big screen last night, a special event at the art cinema in town and a real treat despite the fact that they had a crappy, scratchy print with several brief gaps and my mood was largely spoiled by an unannounced, longish, vapid & pretentious lecture by a woman from the local cine-club before the film.

Anyway, the film was great (this was probably my fourth time seeing it, but the last time was several years ago) and yet I left with this slightly disappointed feeling as I remembered there having been some poignant follow-up at the end to the hero recording the spoken-word testament to his lady love on vinyl in the middle, but it seemed to be absent from this print. Or was it an hallucination to begin with? Could someone who knows the film better than I (Jim or Small Man, perhaps) fill me in?

Red-Letter Day

2005-05-18T15:15:00.000-07:00

This is my kind of day. And somehow I knew it would be. A great many of the things I love just somehow stacked up in place: overcast sky with light but persistent rain; colorful street theater in spite of the rain (the Polytechnic students are having their Juvenalia which seems to involve, besides drinking, parading around downtown in a glorious array of bizarre costumes: if you've seen Antonioni's Blow-Up, think of the zany mimes at the beginning and end of the film, except that the mimes, being mimes, were raucous but not loud [the students sing and shout loudly, with contagious good cheer]; there are joker caps, a red flag, people dressed as priests, doctors, madmen, mothers, etc., extravagantly stuffed brassieres, people on stilts, the whole nine yards); unexplained but blissfully uninterrupted absence of the boss at work; my friend Bogdan worked the door and security, not the slightly sketchy young man, Tadek's replacement, who was scheduled; I had a nice round of productive and enjoyable classes, beginning at the civilized hour of 9:40 AM and all over by 2 PM; and to top it off I'm close to finishing a book by my favorite author, Patricia Highsmith, but still have enough pages to go that I don't yet have that sense of grieving and desperation that comes just before the end. So far, a nearly perfect day. Now I'm off to eat a quick lunch at Frykas (Fricassee), a modest milk bar on my favorite street, Wieczorka Street, and then tutor a nice lady in exchange for free internet.

One of those days where you just gotta savour the mystery and splendour of it all.

I got it

2005-05-18T14:50:00.000-07:00

Eureka! I finally figured it out. How they came up with such a strangely twisted meaning for "ewentualne," I mean. It's "in the event."

It's "in the event," stupid!

If Moon Was Cookie

2005-04-30T12:33:00.000-07:00

Have you heard the latest? They're taking the cookie, or is it the monster, out of Cookie Monster. This column, though problematic in predictable ways, lays out some reasonable arguments for letting Cookie be Cookie. But one point that isn't made is how nobody ever worried about the effects on children of Cookie's less than perfect diction and grammar-- perhaps not the best example for our kids either, when all is said and done. Of course in a way it's reassuring that no schoolmarm scold has gone throwing the dictionary (or a very basic manual of English grammar) at Cookie. We can all agree that Cookie's idiosyncratic use of language is part of his charm. But, as Goldberg implies, so is his addiction!
What's next? Shall we put Falstaff on apple juice (OK, that's what the actor would drink anyway, but you get my point) in any production that might have youthful spectators, in order to finally end the scourge of drunk driving (and beer bellies)? From FDR's elegant cigarette holder to Cookie's reverie about the moon (if I'm not mistaken, he was glad it wasn't a cookie, because then he would have to eat it and couldn't look at it anymore), much that was grand in American culture was not supposed to be a model for ordinary people like you and me. It just made life more interesting, colorful and watchable. But times change, so Goodbye, Cookie. Ave atque vale.

Housekeeping Inquiry

2005-04-27T13:05:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure Tim is the ideal person to ask about this, but I thought at least some readers of this blog might have suggestions: I am very happily living, for the first time time, in my own rented apartment. Although I try quite conscientiously to keep it neat, my efforts are often amateurish and ineffectual. In particular, I face the following conundrum. When hair, muck, and other detritus collect in the bathtub, I am likely to clean them up with a sponge, then rinse the sponge out in the sink. But what I am to do when they collect in the bathroom sink? I could clean it out with a sponge and then rinse out the sponge in the bathtub, but that would just create a vicious circle. Basically I end up washing everything down the drain, but I'm afraid it will get clogged up. Advice?

Linguist Trap Ahead

2005-04-18T17:52:00.000-07:00

I guess there's nothing like studying a foreign language, and having to practice every day, constantly making outrageous goofs and blunders, to drive home the point that nobody sees the world quite as you do.

Of course one could take comfort in the fact that there are native speakers of one's own language, but in fact the presumption is false, as the following story illustrates.*

So I've labored for months under the assumption that the Polish word that sounds like "eventually," i.e. "ewentualne," means something similar. In fact it's something quite different, more along the lines of "if possible" or "if necessary" and is most often used by waiters, shopkeepers and landlords to string customers along with a lot of Brooklyn bridges and paper moons, without committing to anything definite. Thank goodness I studied French years ago, otherwise a similar nonsense would have occurred with the word that sounds like "actually" and means "currently."

But even when I understand the meaning of words, I tend to project my own immediate, visceral reaction onto them, often wrongly. A cheap way to buy DVDs in Poland is when they come as a bonus extra with a magazine-- if you don't want to buy the magazine you can wait and buy them from dealers on the street later, either way it's cheap. A lot of them have an inscription in big letters: "WERSJA Z LEKTOREM," i.e. "NARRATED VERSION" with the Polish narrator who monotonously reads all the translated parts. For me this always jumped out as a WARNING, i.e. Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here. But it turns out it's actually supposed to be (gulp) an ENTICEMENT to buy the damn thing. Because these "readers," these "lecturers" (a good word for them, since they usually have a condescending, soporific tone, like your stereotypical lecturer) are an expensive and coveted luxury for Poles. Can you imagine? The only reason that foreign movies in theaters here almost always are subtitled is that nobody has the cash for a "reader." Well, all I can say is FANK GAWD FER VAT!!! Happily, it turns out more often than not you can switch the droner off and opt for subtitles instead. :) :) :)

* I'm not big on jokes, but I do also like this one: A brother and sister are sitting, facing one another, on a train. It pulls into a station, and each eagerly gazes out of the window to find out where they are. ‘Look!’ says the boy, ‘We’re at Ladies!’ ‘Idiot!’ replies his sister, ‘can’t you see we’re at Gentlemen!’

Turner's cataracts, Brando's pauses, Jean-Luc's drunken jump cuts: so what?

2005-04-18T17:18:00.000-07:00

At a dinner party in New York some years ago I listened on and off as a gentleman of some stature in the world of New York publishing and journalism told a nice lady about how Joseph Mallard William Turner suffered from terrible cataracts in his later years, when he was painting his most abstract-looking sunsets: hence the abstraction. Somehow a reminiscence of this came up in a conversation with Small Man while we were visiting Krakow recently-- I think it was on the day of his departure, when we were looking at a Turneresque landscape in the Cloth Hall Gallery of Polish 19th century art-- and we both agreed that in fact, such knowledge doesn't really add to (or detract from) one's appreciation of the pictures. Does its dissemination in fact cater to a certain know-nothing anti-artistic mindset? Possibly. Sort of reminds me of an alleged sicko I once knew in Boulder who pored over a biography of Nabokov I had (a gift from my father) in a vain search for evidence of Nabokov having been some kind of pervert, since VN was famous for writing child pornography (except not really). But more importantly, what we call "abstract" may well be, for the artist, "representative," or even "photographic realism," even without the benefit of cataracts. A brilliant Hmong guy named Lin with whom I took several French lit. classes at the U. of Colorado once made the point that physics and biology are myths, just like the epic of Gilgamesh or the tales of the Greek gods, since a myth is the most accurate and meaningful explanation people have yet come up with for how the world works and what it's all about. By the same token, Monet or Whistler's (or Rothko or Miro's) non-cataract-induced reveries and even Warhol's purple Marilyns are no less "representative" than Poussin's Serment des Horace, or anything by Turner, or the photographs of Diane Arbus or Robert Frank, bizarre and surreal as they often are. In any case the fact that an ordinary person without cataracts can perceive what Turner apparently more or less photographically reproduced is documented in Wilde's excellent dialogue, "The Decay of Lying," where one of the characters complains how he recently watched a sunset over the Thames and realized it was just a "bad Turner."

If there be "commentary tracks of the damned" (the onion has a weekly feature so called), then the commentary track on the Superman DVD is surely in the ninth circle. About fifty percent of it consists of director Richard Donner and creative consultant Tom Mankiewicz (who wrote a lot of the script, apparently) either repeating the characters' dialogue to each other or patting each other and themselves, and others, on the back ("That was such a great cast" is heard several times). But there are some interesting technical revelations and gossip. One gem (probably already known to many, but I either didn't know or forgot) is that Brando, who as everybody knows was paid more money for his brief appearance than anybody in film history before that, hates memorizing lines so much that if he's not allowed to improvise he has his lines written on various props that are off-camera while he's speaking so he can read off them. And in fact, Mankiewicz explains, some of those poignant or otherwise powerful Brando pauses that made him famous are actually the result of him looking for the text or not quite making it out at first. This is cynical know-nothing talk on the level of "money for nothing and the chicks for free." If the pauses didn't actually mean anything, they wouldn't be famous, and Brando's farcical struggle with the props is an immaterial coincidence.

A friend once mentioned that the jazzy jump-cuts in Jean-Luc Godard's A bout de souffle (Breathless) are an accident of history: the story (which I must confess I don't really believe, while I do believe the above stories about Brando & Turner) goes that the film was much longer, perhaps almost four hours long, but "the studio" (was there a full-on studio involved?) commissioned a re-edit and Godard re-edited in a drunken, jokey rage, giving the fat cats the black&white finger. So are we supposed to wait with baited breath for the emergence of a Director's Cut DVD? Lament its impossibility? Laugh at his drunken, accidental genius? What?

Somehow it's more interesting for me to hear that, for example, Peter Lorre was largely stoned on opium during the making of The Secret Agent-- some dialogue was improvised, but that's not the point. The point is that Lorre would have been just as bizarre without the opium-- kind of like Dennis Hopper snorting truckloads of coke on the set of Apocalypse Now, it's a moot point, but it gives you some sense of the atmosphere of those artistic processes.

Nice Dream

2005-04-12T21:31:00.000-07:00

I dreamt that somebody sold me a Volvo four-seater for ten zloty-- about three dollars. And many friends and family members came by to see it.

Ourself and Each Other

2005-04-06T21:35:00.000-07:00

What was it Springer used to say? "Be good to yourself. And each other"? or was it "yourselves and each other?" Haven't watched the show for a while. But as a teacher of English in Poland I've been pretty firm about correcting the use of "self" to mean "other," as in "The Poles and Russians have had a difficult history, but now they get along with themselves." In Polish, as in Russian, the same reflexive verb form can be used for mutual (now that's another can of worms, perhaps, but not here where I'm just using it to mean "shared") and reflexive (or, if you like, "self-reflexive") actions and feelings, although in both languages one can always use a stronger form (involving the word or particle "Sam," as in "SAM. I. AM") to indicate reflexivity. In English, however, it's always been my feeling that the "themselves" (or "your/ourselves") and "each other" are two different things. I'd be curious to know, when Jesus commanded the disciples to "Love one another," did he really mean "Love yourselves"? (Small Man, get on the case.)

Or is it the same thing? The other day I bought a cheap DVD for my new computer, just something to bicycle to, "The Skulls," a total piece of crap, not good enough to be called "shlock," a film which riffs feebly on the aura of devilment surrounding Yale's Skull and Bones society... towards the end, when it became clear that there was a sort of gang war going on within the society, the twerpy protagonist explained, "It's a war between Skulls, where they kill themselves..." clearly meaning not mass suicide but mutual warfare. Have you ever heard such a thing? The question is not rhetorical. I'm beginning to slide into the descriptive camp, and if you can find another example of such usage I'd be innerested. Or is it just another example of general decline? I know we're all one, but isn't it pretty to think otherwise?

A Streetcar Named Melancholy

2005-03-31T11:02:00.000-08:00

My parents and younger brother (aka Small Man) came to visit this last week, and we had a delightful time in Krakow, briefly Wroclaw, and also Gliwice. On our last day in Krakow I insisted that we go for a ride in a tram, as my parents hadn't yet experienced that. They agreed that it was in fact better than a taxi. It was Easter Monday, so the tram wasn't crowded and we all had seats. Actually it was one of these newfangled trams that resembles a bus in width and speed; the older ones often move with a hypnotic slowness. I remember in autumn of 2000 on a plane to Moscow I met a gentle Georgian, a former Muscovite and typically melancholy and expansive emigre intelligent on a brief visit back home, who told me he missed riding trams. At the time it seemed to me a peculiar thing to miss, and I told my wife-to-be about it with a snicker, expecting her to snicker along, but to my surprise she told me that she, too, had a deep emotional attachment to riding the tram.
"It goes so slowly," she said. I've since grown to feel almost the same way. It's not exactly, or only, the slowness-- as I've said, the newer ones move quickly-- but there definitely is something wonderfully soothing and peaceful about the tram experience. (Again, provided you get a seat.) Maybe it's the sense of being on track, tethered to something. Do they still have streetcars in San Francisco? I'd like to one day ride one and see how it compares.

Career Opportunities

2005-03-16T18:41:00.000-08:00

If you read a lot of showbiz biographies and are a movie maniac and in general live a fabulous, glamorous life of international intrigue as I do, you learn that a lot of things in history could very nearly have turned out quite differently. And sometimes it's quite tantalizing to think about.

Can you imagine, for example, Marilyn Monroe as Cleopatra instead of Elizabeth Taylor? and directed by Alfred Hitchcock instead of Joseph L. Mankiewicz? Maybe then the film wouldn't have been such a disaster-- not that Mankiewicz and Taylor aren't great, but it would definitely have been a little weirder, and that's something. Still weirder, of course, if Peter Sellers had played Julius Caesar instead of Rex Harrison.

How about Richard Burton as Jesus in King of Kings? instead of Jeffrey Hunter (now famous chiefly for being the first actor to play Captain James T. Kirk on Star Trek before the much more talented-- indeed, greatly underrated, sadly even by himself-- William Shatner took over). Can you imagine the vitriol and bile that would have spilled from Burton's lips in the driving the moneychangers from the temple scene? It would have made Burton's acidly self-pitying Hamlet, foaming at the mouth with anti-Semitism (i.e. historically accurate) Wagner, furiously excommunicating Thomas a Becket and hysterically ventilating psychiatrist in Equus seem like the mildest bunch of milquetoasts you ever saw.

Speaking of Hamlet, and Hitchcock: what about Cary Grant as Hamlet in a modern-dress Hamlet helmed by the Master? Of course North by Northwest takes its title and some of its structure and themes from the play, and Terence Rafferty has pointed out that Shakespeare's Laertes was named "Leonard" (just like Martin Landau's character, James Mason's henchman) in some alternate drafts, i.e., in "the Bad Quarto" or something. But as wonderful as NxNW is, it's tantalizing to imagine Grant doing Hamlet as Hamlet... he might just have pulled it off. (He wouldn't have been as good as Mason in A Star is Born, though... most alternate casting realities, e.g. Dennis Hopper as Travis Bickle, confirm a Hegelian view of our universe as rational and elegant.)

And, much as I love him, Laurence Olivier-- Hitchcock's first choice for Mark Rutland (Sean Connery) in Marnie and the British lawyer Keane, eventually played by Gregory Peck, in The Paradine Case-- probably wouldn't have been as bizarrely engaging, or engagingly bizarre, as Connery or Peck, even though Hitchcock later regretted both choices and Peck publicly regretted his participation in Paradine (possibly the best work of his entire career). Olivier would have been ill-suited to the part of Mark (Truffaut rightly saw a feral energy in Connery, as noted in an earlier post, that keeps the film interesting), and perhaps slightly too well-suited to the part of the square, upright barrister fallen prey to an illicit inchoate passion. (He [Olivier, not Keane] writes in his biography, after describing yet another infidelity: "I swear to you, selfishness has been like a gift with me.") Olivier as Humbert Humbert in Lolita would have been fascinating-- I've just learned that he at first accepted the part with glee, and was only later persuaded against it by his agent, i.e. no moral scruples were involved. Same story with David Niven, who I think would have been totally unsuitable. (I love Niven, but when he's doing evil and sleaze, I think Bonjour Tristesse, which shows him at the top of his craft, shows how he should do it.)

Small Man is generally very skeptical about the ornery griping and sniping at snopes.com, and he has some good arguments on his side, but anyway, it's somewhat comforting, in a minor kind of way, to know that one famous casting decision that wasn't may never have even been seriously considered.

But Allen Ginsberg as Emperor of ISHKCON (International Society for Hare Krishna Consciousness), on the other hand! (He was called upon by Swami Prabhupada to be his successor once when the latter was very ill and expected soon to be dead, but, regrettably, declined.) The mind reels. By comparison Nietzsche's delirious fantasies of "Cesare Borgia as Pope!" look tame.

Bad Sushi Faces

2005-03-12T22:41:00.000-08:00

In among the big boys of publishing, power, and politics, a moment of tender loving-kindness, or at any rate, respectful banter, between "neocon" and "lefty," beautifully described by the latter. Well Did You Evah... What A Swell Party that must have been.

When No Means Yes

2005-03-11T13:43:00.000-08:00

Late in life, after a series of strokes, Joseph Kennedy Sr. apparently lost all faculty of speech except for the word "No," which he then had to use to express a wide spectrum of emotions, including, often, approval and enthusiasm (i.e. "Yes").

Similarly, in Polish, "No" means "Yes" (or, more accurately perhaps, "Yeah," "Uh huh," "Yep," since "Tak" is the formal "Yes"). In Russian, it means "But." (Russian "Nu" is closer to Polish "No.") "Ja," which in German means "Yes," in Russian and Polish means "I"... etc. etc. etc.

Hitler, the Movie: Part 2

2005-03-08T21:18:00.000-08:00

It's rare that I see eye to eye with pompous New Republic film critic Stanley Kauffmann, but I find almost nothing to quarrel with in his review of Downfall. (Other than the somewhat distorting tagline that the magazine attached to it.) Said review will therefore substitute for the promised discussion of said film. Alas, it's for subscribers only. Such is the way of the world. No subscription? Better go and see the movie.

I have a few observations of my own, but they're more concerned with tropes exemplified in the film than with the film itself.

It's strange, but my experience of this more or less nonfiction film suffered (or did it gain? maybe so, perversely) from the fact that I was constantly reminded of other, Hollywood or Hollywoodish films.

There was the secretary-audition scene where the prettiest one wins, as in Schindler's List.
There was the performance of children from the same family singing sweetly for guests of an evening and helping them forget about the menace of (coming/ending) war, as in The Sound of Music. (Here there are six Goebbels Family Singers, as opposed to the seven Von Trapps-- although here, if my admittedly imperfect ear did not deceive me, some of the [very sweet] singing was slightly off-tune (warming the cockles of Pauline Kael's ghost's heart, no doubt). Later we get to see them given a cyanide pill by their mother-- contradicting my presumably false memory of documentary stills in Tarkovsky's My Name Is Ivan showing the Goebbels family being shot by Allied liberators-- or did I dream that? Someone straighten me out.)
And there was the general decadent, champagne-and-vodka ambiance of some fairly lucid Nazis accepting the fact of the war being lost, as in another great Christopher Plummer movie, Triple Cross. While the one true True Believer screams defiant oaths, and a number of imbecilic swine are prepared to commit suicide (by firing on an overwhelming number of Soviet troops) in his memory after his death.

Which brings me to what may be The Heart of the Matter. The focus of sympathy in the film, other than the pretty secretary, is a member of the SS, who is also a doctor, Ernst-Gunther Schenck. He is a real-life historical figure. It is he who argues cogently against mass kamikaze suicide on behalf of a dead man, and in other situations also speaks as the voice of reason and humanism. Like Albert Speer (a more controversial figure, whom the film-- based on the writings of the somewhat Speer-worshipping historian Joachim Fest-- presents opaquely, arguably noble and humanitarian in disobeying Hitler's orders for several months, arguably slick and spineless, a master of the art of self-preservation), he is handsome (a cross between the much swooned-over Brit. Lit. professor at the school where I teach, and my friend from Boulder, the punk rock legend Rich Myers) and intelligent and, unlike Speer, he is visibly driven by a real desire to save lives rather than craven personal ambition.

Much like Yul Brynner in Triple Cross, or Marlon Brando in The Young Lions, or Karl Boehm (and, more movingly, Paul Lukas) in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, or the German soldier in Vercors' Silence de la Mer, he is "The Good Nazi."

And I have to say that in the controversy over Brando's distortion of Irwin Shaw's monochrome characterization of Christian Diestl, I side with Brando. It is the actor's job to find the sympathetic side of the character he plays, just as it is the novelist's job (see Small Man's recent comment) to find some sympathy with the characters he writes about, and the fact that Shaw failed to do this did not, even considering the context, authorize him to carp about Brando's necessary, compensatory, and intelligent work.

I appreciate, as any thinking person doubtless can, the beauty of the following gesture by the very talented Daniel Olbrychski:

Outcry as Polish actor slashes Nazi portraits
Exhibition of film stills of actors in Nazi uniform is closed
By Georgina Adam
WARSAW. One of Poland's best known actors and film stars is currently under police investigation and faces a possible prison sentence for slashing a portrait of himself, in an exhibition last year in Warsaw's leading contemporary art gallery. The events happened shortly after "The Nazis" opened at the publicly funded Gallery Zachenta. The show consisted of an uncaptioned series of photographs of actors in Nazi uniform, taken from film stills without the actors' agreement, by the Polish artist Piotr Uklanski. Accompanied by TV cameramen and reporters and as the cameras rolled, the actor Daniel Olbrychski, featured in one of the portraits, entered the gallery, pulled a sword from under his greatcoat and slashed some of the exhibits, then tore the two featuring himself from the wall and left. The choice of the sword was significant: it was one used in a film about a swashbuckling Polish hero and patriot Kmicic. Mr Olbrychski later declared: "I defend the right to say that there are some frontiers of decency which were clearly overstepped in this exhibition, and I reacted violently in the hope that my gesture will highlight my objections. I did it in the spotlight of the camera and flashlights because I wanted for Poland to know about my feeling about such 'artistic practices'. Furthermore I received the agreement of other actors whose portraits were in the show, including the French film star Jean-Paul Belmondo who agreed that I should protest in their name. I can understand that there are opportunistic artists but I cannot understand why the director of such a serious institution as Zachenta has accepted this. Soon Mrs Anda Rottenberg [the director] will organise an exhibition at which she will expose the faces of known actors on lavatory paper because she considers that as we are public figures she is entitled to do so. It is unthinkable." Mrs Rottenberg riposted, "In my opinion the artist Olbrisky is suffering from a lack of popularity and therefore created an event so that he should be in the news. This was vengeance against defenceless creation," and called the police, who closed the show. The controversy continued after Poland's Minister of Culture, Kazimierz Ujazdowski, weighed in and called for it to be reopened, but on condition that it was accompanied by a commentary explaining the role of Nazism and the meaning of the exhibition. He added that national cultural institutions must not be the place of exhibitions which could be interpreted as praise for Nazism. With Poland (where painful memories of the brutal German World War II occupation are still fresh) following events day by day, a leading academic, Edmund Wnuk-Lipinski, noted that, "In films Nazis are presented as impeccable. They are clean, in well-pressed uniforms; the actors associated with these roles personify the Fascist vision of superman". However, in an open letter 15 Polish artists and critics declared that, "It is in bad faith to interpret the exhibition as a glorification of Fascism; it draws attention to the undoubted fascination of cinema and mass media with Hitler's henchmen". The show has already been seen without incident in London, Berlin and Frankfurt, and some of the works have been acquired by the New York Jewish Museum. Finally, curator Adam Szymczyk, following the artist's request, decided to close the show. Uklanski had refused to make changes, explaining that, "It is a restriction of the freedom of speech when the Ministry of Culture makes decisions about the programmes in cultural institutions financed by public money, and which, in principle, are independent." (Museum Security Mailinglist Reports, December 17, 2000)

It is cheering to find, over 60 years after "Mourir pour Danzig?", the incredible Belmondo, symbol of all that is best in Frenchmen, joining forces with the inimitable Olbrychski against "The Nazis". But the fact is, as dyspeptic Brit reactionary "Paul Johnson" (the tiresomest late-vintage Albert Finney performance since "Kingsley Amis") noted in a recent, atypically lucid and cogent Spectator column inspired by the Prince Harry controversy, the Nazis' tawdry glamour, e.g. the Death's Head insignia and the sexy boots, not to mention the coveted professorship in Fascist Mysticism at Bologna, is one reason why we rate them worse than Stalin's drab functionaries. Because Arendt (and Weil)'s truth about the Banality of Evil has failed to sink in. As has the fact that many Nazi Party members were basically good people deeply committed to a destructive and genocidal and therefore, obviously, evil organization.

EPILOGUE
There was some controversy over Jack Clay's production of Richard III in the 1983 Colorado Shakespeare Festival, when I was nine years old-- fresh from my triumph as Second Non-speaking "Macduff Child" (non-speaking, but plenty of screaming) the previous year, I tried out for the part of the little Duke of York (the younger of the Little Princes in the Tower), and was rejected, to my (and my family's) bitter disappointment. That, in case you were wondering, was not the main controversy, which had to do with Clay's decision, while setting most of the action in some baroque facsimile of late medieval England, to present some of Richard's men as SS men (a Tuchmanesque "Director's Note" invoked Vietnam). When I heard that there were "Storm Troopers" in the play, I of course imagined George Lucas' sterile white plastic automatons stomping about the Mary Rippon Theater. So I was disappointed to find they were mere SS men. Which, I think, proves my point, that to a child's mind, evil is, or should be, heavy music and fantastic costumes; but to an adult, it should be about actions and consequences.

Oh, and by the way,
Happy Women's Day, everybody!

Signor Ciardi

2005-03-04T05:22:00.000-08:00

Later in the same novel:

Signor Ciardi smiled and rubbed his stubbly cheek with a forefinger. Signor Ciardi could dress almost like a tramp, go unshaven for two or three days, and still appear a man of dignity, even of importance, because he believed himself to be one.

Deluded by Jazz

2005-02-25T17:59:00.000-08:00

Still time for one more fragment-- this from Those Who Walk Away, by the amazing Patricia Highsmith:

He listened-- with more pleasure than he usually listened to jazz, which in Mallorca had nearly driven him mad-- to the free and easy expertise coming from the boy's transistor, music that the plump barber cutting his hair now, and the other two barbers and the men in the chairs, seemed not to hear at all, and Ray felt that anything in the world that he wished might be possible. It was, theoretically, possible and true. Yet he also realized that he lacked the dash to make any of it come true, and that the thought had come to him because of the jazz and because of his fever.

Danger Zone

2005-02-25T17:45:00.000-08:00

Because the word for "dangerous" in Polish is more like "not undangerous," the word for safe being something along the lines of "undangerous," I often get confused by the double negation and end up advising something because it's "more dangerous."

Another interesting Polish twist is the translation of the title of the film National Treasure as "Skarb narodów," or Treasure of Nations, one letter divorced from a more accurate translation ("Skarb narodowy"); if you've seen the film, however, there's a certain cleverness to that.

Once again, this time thanks to the fiendish incompetence of the psychotic termagant who runs this school, I've been typing against a background of loud conversation, jokes, etc. as the graduating class of the economics department were forced to take refuge here while waiting for something, heaven knows what or why not in some other room besides the library. They and I must now vacate the premises, as the library is closing.

Weird Sundays

2005-02-13T23:29:00.000-08:00

Not that the 80s weren't at least as embarrassing as the 60s, and moreso. (I resent any attempt to dismiss or to glorify either decade.) I just saw Weird Science (on TV) for the first time, and the main thing that occurred to me was the resemblance between trite, puerile, chaotic 80s celluloid pseudo-hipness (as seen in this and a dozen other teen movies of the era, including certain scenes in the great John Hughes tetralogy) and trite, puerile, chaotic 60s celluloid pseudo-hipness (i.e. Blake Edwards's The Party, certain scenes in Two for the Road, the finale of Zazie dans le Metro... and many more). On the other hand I was briefly charmed by how the Unconscious manifests itself in the boys' goofy science in different ways. Just like how another embarrassing, trite and mediocre 80s-inspired fantasy about the dangers of geeky middle schoolers playing god, The Indian in the Cupboard, which I also caught on Polish TV of a Sunday (probably on the same channel, "tvn" or "tey-fau-en"), a month or so ago, charmed me in spite of itself just by positing the idea that things have an independent and unknown life of their own.

Hating the 80s, old chap? Sorry, too busy hating the Times

2005-02-13T22:40:00.000-08:00

There's something very condescending about most of the Times' cultural coverage, perhaps, indeed, most of its writing in general, and this article is a case in point. Nothing is said about the punk rock renaissance in Washington, DC and other places that took place during the decade; I, of course, had no interest in that renaissance in the time, and have had little since, but it definitely was a significant, and I believe largely positive, force in American culture. The glam-metal group Motley Crue is carelessly lumped together with such widely disparate elements of the Anglo-Irish Renaissance as The Cure, Tears for Fears, and Duran Duran. Photographs of Deborah Harry and George Michael are shown, no doubt to draw the reader's interest, but neither Blondie nor Michael (nor "Wham!") is mentioned in the article, yet another proof of the Times' total cynicism (far worse than the New York Post's, in my view, since the NYP presents itself as trashy entertainment and not "thoughtful commentary blahblahblah"); Prince and Madonna are praised for having evolved over the years in some semblance of an organic, artistic fashion; the same could easily be said of G. Michael, of course. (The other big Michael of the 80s is left completely unmentioned, though a photo of and a reference or two to New Edition reveal that the article is not meant to be concerned exclusively with white artists; why MJ is not mentioned I have no idea, since obviously he was the most popular singer of the mid-80s and has largely continued to be active, and somewhat successful, in music since-- this is one of the only signs in the article that the Times writer is not obsessively concerned with who is making money-- although it shows that who (of big 80s acts) is making music is anything but a paramount concern.) Various glib sub-academic or sub-artistic voices are quoted denouncing "poor schooling" in the 1980s or equating Reaganism with the music of the Reagan era. If the schooling was so poor, then how come my generation, according to the article, has more "irony" than the presumably mentally deficient Baby Boomers? As for the supposedly total identity of Reagan's policies with the pop music of the era, does that mean that the Republicans really were on to something in their twisted re-interpretation of Springsteen's "Born in the USA" (a bigger hit than any work of TFF or Duran Duran, by the way)? Should we then read the girl groups of the late 1950s and early 1960s (indeed, up until, or excluding solely, Martha and the Vandellas' explicitly antiwar "I Should Be Proud") as idiotic, sycophantic cheerleaders for Ike's policies in Iran and Guatemala or JFK and LBJ's war in Vietnam?

Another side of Noel Coward

2005-02-13T15:07:00.000-08:00

Another of the few great poems of the last century:

Poem: "Nothing is Lost" by Noel Coward, from Collected
Verse, edited by Graham Payn & Martin Tickner Š
Graywolf Press. Reprinted with permission.

Nothing is Lost

Deep in our sub-conscious, we are told
Lie all our memories, lie all the notes
Of all the music we have ever heard
And all the phrases those we loved have spoken,
Sorrows and losses time has since consoled,
Family jokes, out-moded anecdotes
Each sentimental souvenir and token
Everything seen, experienced, each word
Addressed to us in infancy, before
Before we could even know or understand
The implications of our wonderland.
There they all are, the legendary lies
The birthday treats, the sights, the sounds, the tears
Forgotten debris of forgotten years
Waiting to be recalled, waiting to rise
Before our world dissolves before our eyes
Waiting for some small, intimate reminder,
A word, a tune, a known familiar scent
An echo from the past when, innocent
We looked upon the present with delight
And doubted not the future would be kinder
And never knew the loneliness of night.

Without a Book

2005-02-12T17:51:00.000-08:00

Here's another poem I found going through my e-mail, written by my favorite contemporary American poet:

Riding Metro without a book

by Faith Williams

a mistake of course, like
going naked. No
magic cape to make
me invisible, to save
me from the gray,
the noise, the shoves,
the sighs. No secret
spyglass to reveal
a subtler, deeper
world, where I glide
with distant grace.
No, I had to be there,
Easy Spirit grounded,
hip to fat hip, them
and me. To be amazed
at how well we cross
without strife, muslim,
jew, lout, boss, child,
and crone, be and let be.

I identify strongly with the opening sentiment, and also have sometimes marveled at the general paucity of bellicosity on the (in my case NYC) subway.

Perry Wesley-- Man of the World

2005-02-11T18:05:00.000-08:00

I couldn't resist posting another glorious spam cavalcade of whimsy, this one addressed from Frances Daley to Perry Wesley. Once again I've highlighted the, er, highlights. Note, as noted by Sutton, the curiously refreshing mixture of banality and actual insight:

Boredom: the desire for desires.
He who labors diligently need never despair for all things are accomplished by diligence and labor.
I love you, not for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you.
A man never discloses his own character so clearly as when he describes another's.
Hope of ill gain is the beginning of loss.
Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.
Laughter kills fear, and without fear there can be no faith. For without fear of the devil there is no need for God.
The gods sell all things at a fair price.
Who with a little cannot be content, endures an everlasting punishment.
Outer space is no place for a person of breeding.
Delicate humor is the crowning virtue of the saints.
To have a great idea, have a lot of them.
To be happy we must not be too concerned with others.
Conscience is the dog that can't bite, but never stops barking.
Ideas are the factors that lift civilization. They create revolutions. There is more dynamite in an idea than in many bombs.
In a balanced organization, working towards a common objective, there is success.

Derick Pelletier-- My Part in His Downfall

2005-02-11T16:46:00.000-08:00

I'm in the midst of several daunting tasks of revision and selection-- working on a screenplay with/for Jim, going on a mad deleting rampage through my e-mail, and annotating the list of my favorite films posted recently (I've decide to allot one sentence to each film, which of course does not preclude logorrheic deliriums a la Faulkner or Tolstoy).

So before deleting this urgent message (titled "Best offer of this year ;)") from "Brady Winslow" (accenting@dan.com) to "Derick Pelletier"(me), I want to post it for your consideration-- I always thought that spam just meant penis enlargement scams and requests for transfers of bank accounts to Nigeria, but this kind of spam (which I only started receiving about two years ago, bizarrely enough) asks for nothing in return, while providing much food for thought and/or laughter. I've highlighted my personal faves.

Your attitude determines your altitude.
The supply of government exceeds demand.
A faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.
There is no waste of time in life like that of making explanations.
Pro football is like nuclear warfare. There are no winners, only survivors.
Character is formed in the stormy billows of the world.
The main dangers in this life are the people who want to change everything or nothing.
A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him, I may
think aloud.
Art raises its head where creeds relax.
One pain is lessened by another's anguish.
A nation is not in danger of financial disaster merely because it owes itself money.
But who would rush at a benighted man, and give him two black eyes for being blind?
The 1980s are to debt what the 1960s were to sex. The 1960s left a
hangover. So will the 1980s.
Great causes and little men go ill together.
You look rather rash my dear your colors don't quite match your face.
Paris, a city of gaieties and pleasures, where four-fifths of the inhabitants die of grief. [About Paris]

For more fun with spam, see Sutton's post on the subject.

If It Were Played Upon a Stage...

2005-02-11T13:09:00.000-08:00

My friend Tadek has this great line he uses to describe minor mishaps or pratfalls such as slipping on the ice and hurting his posterior-- "If they had caught it on film, I would have won an Oscar." The remark invites multiple readings, but definitely reveals a fascinating truth: the line between art and life is always blurry.

On that note, this screwball comedy has a different ending than most, but it's nonetheless brilliant.

NAMING THE STARS

2005-02-11T09:09:00.000-08:00

I don't "dig" much poetry written in English after 1870, but I like this one, written in July 2000, and curiously appropriate to what was going on in my life at that time.

NAMING THE STARS

This present tragedy will eventually
turn into myth, and in the mist
of that later telling the bell tolling
now will be a symbol, or, at least,
a sign of something long since lost.

This will be another one of those
loose changes, the rearrangement of
hearts, just parts of old lives
patched together, gathered into
a dim constellation, small consolation.

Look, we will say, you can almost see
the outline there: her fingertips
touching his, the faint fusion
of two bodies breaking into light.

Joyce Sutphen

Signifier Strikes Again

2005-02-08T17:09:00.000-08:00

Dadburn signifier done it again! A Dog's Dinner correspondent in the Bay Area unearthed the following tale of woe at craigslist.org:

"So I was new to California

Along with a blonde hair cut & convertible, I decide to get some personalized plates.

I could not believe my luck, when I found out that my initials "NV" (ph. "envy") are available. Not that I think anyone would be envious of me in my Miata, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.

You are probably thinking that custom plates are like bug lights to The Man. Not as far as I can tell. I got pulled over just as infrequently considering how I drive, but my accent and impeccable record kept me in the good books.

So then, I start to get random parking tickets from Los Angeles. Where my car has never been. For every type of car. Except a Mazda. Which is what I drive. No problem, right? Just call them up, deal with a healthy level of skepticism when I tell them the ticket isn't mine... no really. I would ask them what make & color the ticket is for. I would ask them what make & color my car is. Even a highly skeptical city clerk can't argue with that.

Then the notices of unpaid violations slowly start to come in from all over California. Because when the license plate is Not Visible, the charming traffic wardens enter "NV" as the license plate. So I figure they will soon fix the training issue and stop bugging me with tickets.

Then the city of Oakland has some computer upgrade. The first day I get five tickets. The next day... three. And they kept on sending them. For every type of car imaginable including BMW's and Porsches, every car imaginable, except for a white two door Mazda.

Now I know what you are thinking, BMW's don�t park in Oakland. I was surprised too. But more than that, I was tired of sitting on hold for twenty minutes, waiting to talk to a skeptical city employee. So I returned the custom plates to the DMV, and someone at Oakland told me that all fifty tickets would be put under administrative review.

Problem solved? Not even. First, the DMV refused to issue me my registration, until I got a piece of paper saying I was not guilty. Then I received a notice that the Franchise Tax Board wanted to garnish my wages. Not with cilantro either. Now I have a notice stating that any tax refund I get will be going to the City of Oakland.

So now i am feeling a little irate.

And a little wiser. I tried calling my local police department, to see if there is a bench warrant out for my arrest. The friendly officer told me that I would have to come to the office... in person. And I swear, she said this with what sounded like a straight face.

As a last resort, I decided to post here. You never know. Someone might want a collection of over fifty parking violations from seven different counties for all different makes and models. $3000, and they are all yours. Call it abstract art or something.

The only thing that makes me feel a little better, is that the lovely folks at Oakland tell me someone driving a BMW now has the license plates "NV". Give him a wave if you see him. Tell him you work for the City of Oakland in the traffic violations department. See if he goes green. You know, from envy.

NV."

Sorry, Honey, It's Fat Thursday, or: "Taters or Fries?"

2005-02-03T15:52:00.000-08:00

Today is what they call "Fat Thursday" in Poland (alternate translation: "Greasy Thursday," or, if translating from Bavarian or Swiss German dialects, "Dirty Thursday"), kind of like what we call "Fat Tuesday" in the West, but without quite the same connotations of bacchanalia and bachelor-party style baroque excess-- it's just a day when you're supposed to eat several doughnuts, not your last chance to commit every sin in the book. After all, Lent doesn't start until next Wednesday-- so when we have our Fat Tuesday, they have what's called The Night of the Herring, which often involves alcohol and other devilment as well as the fish of great and deserved renown.

I'm not planning to eat any doughnuts today-- I've had enough Fat Thursdays lately to last me a while. Every time I go to the Viennese Bar to have a cutlet or a filet o' fish and a soup and salad, they ask "Taters or fries?" Not in the intonation that allows for a third possibility (i.e., nothing). The fact that the soup itself, no matter what soup it is, contains several large lumps of potato somehow doesn't change their view that one has to have a few more, fatter lumps, fried or drenched in butter of course, on the side.

Message for the Blunderer

2005-02-01T23:14:00.000-08:00

The Judge says there's something wrong with your email account. Is it full?

Son of Food of Love

2005-02-01T18:58:00.000-08:00

Nat King Cole's "Wild Is Love", written by Dorothy Wayne and Ray Rauch, is the first song on the concept album of that name, possibly the greatest concept album ever, excluding Tammi Terrell's Irresistible. I once was bitterly annoyed with R. Burdik of The Wine Cart for dismissing Sinatra (and, more understandably, Tony Bennett) as vastly inferior to Nat King Cole. I had thought of Nat and Frank as equals. Now, looking back, I'm not so sure. [February 8-- Having listened to a couple of Frank tracks the other night, I am now sure. Chairman of the Board wins hands-down. Cole's voice has more warmth, but to me it simply isn't as expressive or as versatile. Anyway, they're both great.] This is one of a dozen or so songs I sometimes sing to myself. "And I know, I will go wherever love takes me-- whatever love makes me, I will be." Tautology? Could be used to justify all sorts of irresponsible anti-social behavior? No doubt, but terrific stuff.

"Danny Boy", one of those songs whose beauty is muffled by an ambiance of cliche, but which triumphs nonetheless, for some reason seems to me particularly splendid when sung by Welsh people-- Tom Jones has a moving, typically syncopated soul version and Charlotte Church's is one of the better traditional versions. But probably-not-Welsh Judy Garland's (as with "Almost Like Being in Love" or "You Go To my Head") is the definitive.

Another song (like Joe Dassin's "Petit pain," mentioned before) which demonstrates the ability of the French to juggle sentiment, whimsy, humor and a catchy tune is Michel Legrand's "Reve secret d'un prince et une princesse" from Jacques Demy's film Peau d'Ane (The Donkey Skin), which I first heard in a 90s film about young French students: first they listen and laugh as two girls euphorically sing along to the record at a party, with just a hint of irony; then it plays over the credits with a thick undertaste of sadness and disillusionment. But both sadness and euphoria are present. There can be no condescending dismissal of this song.

"The Party's Over," particularly in Eileen Farrell's version, could be good to get rid of guests with. Or to keep them on the edge of their seats. Set phasers on "stun."

"Start" by The Jam has been called a rip-off of George Harrison's "Taxman," but it's a much more interesting song, about a life-altering moment in a relationship between two people, not just resentment (of the super-rich) toward having to pay taxes. And it's a good song to start your party.

More Food of Love

2005-02-01T14:47:00.000-08:00

An alternate five:

"Forbidden Fruit" by the Blow Monkeys, a song of tragicomic, debonair delirium, saw me through my most passionate crush, in eighth grade, on a Swedish girl named Livia Millhagen. The great line "I have never seen a girl as beautiful as you... well that's not exactly true-- only yesterday" demonstrates the truth of Grigorii Kruzhkov's observation that "The greatest Romantics are also the greatest Anti-Romantics."

"If I Were a Bell" by Frank Loesser is another delirium, sung by a Salvation Army officer to an incorrigible gambler in Guys and Dolls after he gets her drunk in Havana. Corroborates my theory that love between human beings allows us to see the true lovableness of "inanimate" objects, whether through metaphors or in themselves.

"Hey Bulldog" by the Beatles-- soundtrack to another eighth-grade crush.

"Das geht doch keinen etwas an" by Suzanne Doucet-- 1960s West German bubblegum, with a certain undertone of sadness. Don't know what the title or most of the words mean, but I gather it's a lovesong. Must have listened to it about 50 times on a Lufthansa flight back from Europe with my grandfather in 1994-- along with another song, "Auch der schonste Tag geht mal zu Ende," it was the only song on the German Oldies channel that sounded like it could be used on the soundtrack to a movie of a book by Patricia Highsmith. Haven't heard either since, but I still remember the melodies of both songs and particularly the shy, Stoic sound of Doucet's voice.

"The Death of Tybalt" by Serge Prokofiev. I've often said that Wagner and Tchaikovsky were the greatest rock composers of all time, but Prokofiev is rock and emo and grunge and jazz and pop all put together. This song begins with something out of a Gene Kelly musical and then builds to a climax with the only fight music that has the intensity of one of those long fight scenes without music in a movie-- just recently saw such a scene on TV, at the end of some old Janet Leigh movie about King Arthur. The movie's not great, but the scene was. There are other songs in the ballet that are more beautiful-- the love music, the lovers' funeral march-- but this is the most intense.

Grace Under Pressure

2005-01-30T09:16:00.000-08:00

Speaking of (good, Czecho/Slovak) beer...

Inside the Forbidden Citi, or, The Revenge of the Signifier

2005-01-30T08:35:00.000-08:00

When I switched banks over a year ago, from the godawful Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC), whose only distinction would appear to be that P.G. Wodehouse once worked there, to Citibank, I thought I was doing myself a favor, and in many ways I was, as far as my stateside existence is concerned: Citi has branches everywhere in New York and quite a few in DC, and so far they haven't made such egregious errors with my account as HSBC used to. But I also thought it would simplify and ease matters on the Continent, and in this I was apparently sorely mistaken. There is a Citibank in Gliwice, and I've been using its ATM since I became a Citibank cardholder; but I now see that ATM described on my bank statement as a "NON-CITIBANK ATM," for which offense a harsh penalty must of course be exacted.

Although the logo looks the same to me, it turns out that "Citi" is just another empty signifier, like "Budweiser" or "Tim Williams".

As a flashy poster for a seminar on Diamond Path Buddhism here in Gliwice says, "Things are not what they appear to be; nor are they something else."

When It All Comes Down To It

2005-01-27T01:57:00.000-08:00

I've never been a fan of Tom Tomorrow's smug, condescending cartoon "This Modern World"-- for example, the stupid wanna-be Opus penguin once complained about rightist "Nazi analogies" ("feminazis," "health fascists" etc.) when it was clearly people on the Left that started the regrettable trend by, for example, likening every president since Truman to Hitler. But I do read the strip when I get the chance, and this cartoon hits the mark.

The Love of Food

2005-01-26T17:58:00.000-08:00

is not the root of all evil, but ever since college, after a Jughead-like youth of nonstop pigging-out without any consequences whatsoever, it's been a source of some dramatic tension: I've had an Oprahesque tendency to blimp out and then shrink back into some semblance of shape every year and a half or so. The blimping has at times been associated with a certain complacency and comfort in relationships, while on one occasion it was not unrelated to a sense of deep unhappiness. The trimming-down (actually it was more filling-out the first time, when I gained muscle weight; another time it didn't involve any conscious attempt to lose weight, but just happened) has been spurred on by jealous rage, or has coincided with falling madly in love, or sometimes with wanting to live life to the proverbial fullest. I'm just now getting back into the routine of daily exercise again, so I'm at that point where at the end of each workout I feel this exhilarating sense of momentum, but the next day it's once again a struggle getting myself on the bike and staying there.

Whilst lying in bed recently reading about Sartre's sense of his own body in an essay on his collaboration with John Huston on the film Freud in Peter Wollen's delightful book Paris Hollywood, I sensed a certain kinship with the "little ball of fur and ink." Those of us who live most of our lives in a world of words, whether writers, teachers or unemployed schizophrenics, are often tempted to deny the reality of our physical bodies to a somewhat disturbing degree. And with Jean-Paul and I both this vertiginous narcissism reaches back to a childhood penchant for play-acting:

Endlessly reading, and taken also to the cinema, the child Sartre played out the roles of knight-errant, swashbuckler, vagabond, outlaw. Finally, aged about eight, these imaginary Poulous crystallized around the figure of Pardaillan, the adventure hero created by the popular novelist Michael Zevaco: a swashbuckler on the side of the people, fighting against tyrants, who 'made and unmade Empires, and, in the fourteenth century, predicted the French Revolution.' Soon Sartre began to write, imitating and exaggerating Zevaco.

[...] Pardaillan would never quite go away. He became one aspect of the writer, the knight who 'had never taken orders from the king'... Gradually, Sartre claims, the writer overcame the knight; he became an 'ex-Pardaillan'. Illusory victory: on the last page of [Sartre's autobiography, Les Mots], he admits 'Pardaillan still inhabits me'.

[...] Right at the end of his life, in the interviews Simone de Beauvoir published under the title Adieux, Sartre returned, unexpectedly, to the image of Pardaillan. DeBeauvoir asked him about his always being 'uncomfortable' in his own body and he replied: 'Yes, but this is more complex, and it will lead us to Pardaillan.' She pressed him further: "You spoke of Pardaillan. What did you mean?' Sartre replied that he had long ago developed 'an imaginary body'-- that of Pardaillan, the swashbuckler, which gave him the feeling of being 'a powerful warrior'.

[...] He described how, before he could even read, he saw himself climbing up into blazing houses to rescue young girls by carrying them out on his back. [...] He talked about his denial of age, his wish to be young, and finally, most revealingly of all, his work-related addiction to amphetamines, to speed: 'I perceived myself through the motion of my pen, my forming images and ideas. I was the same active being as Pardaillan, neglecting...' 'The real body,' DeBeauvoir cut in, 'which was in the act of destroying itself and against which you always had an almost aggressive attitude.'

Well said, Simone.

When I look in the mirror, I always see the dashing cavalier of my twenty-second year, despite the unimpeachable evidence of my now rather massive girth. Yet some compromise must eventually be bartered with reality.

The Food of Love, revisited

2005-01-26T17:01:00.000-08:00

I think it's the xylophone in "Once Upon a Time" that makes it. If it is a xylophone. There's also a great xylophone solo in the Beatles' cover of The Shirelles' "Baby, It's You."

And speaking of duets, I just yesterday discovered a different version of Zemfira's big 2000 hit "Khochesh'?" (difficult to translate, literally "Do you want?") featuring Rammstein. I guess not really a duet because I think Rammstein just got permission to take the Zemfira track and lay their own track over it, but definitely worth a listen.

My dream duet would be Morrissey singing the old standard "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off" with his known arch-nemesis, the Cure's Robert Smith.

Curiously enough, I heard a Polish version of "Where Have All the Flowers Gone" playing in a bookstore today, sung by a woman with a beautiful voice. Didn't catch many of the words, don't know if it was a translation or something completely different.

While browsing in the video section, however, I noticed with some pleasure that the title of the (presumably awful) film For Love of the Game, with Kevin Costner, was translated as "Gra o milość" or "[The] Game for Love."

Small Man's Food of Love

2005-01-26T03:50:00.000-08:00

1. Total amount of music files on your computer:
Not a lot. My old Compaq desktop PC, which I owned in the glory days of Napster, had plenty of music on it. I had a long playlist in Winamp that I left on shuffle all the time, and it would cycle through the Doors and Japanese and French pop music very cheerfully. My present computer just has a little legal music I bought off iTunes, including the song Portions for Foxes by Rilo Kiley. I haven't felt the need to acquire much music here in Seattle, since I can listen to our great local radio station KEXP pretty much 24 hours a day (and you can too, if you're reading this, through Internet streaming!).

2. Last CD you bought:
One of the artists KEXP plays a lot is Nick Cave. I was actually introduced to Nick Cave through a good friend of mine who happens to be Australian too, but I found out about his new double album The Lyre of Orpheus / Abbatoir Blues through KEXP, which has been playing tracks from it regularly. Anyway a while ago I bought the CD, although I haven't listened to it as much as I planned, mostly because I just leave my radio on and still hear songs from it often enough.

3. Song you last listened to before reading this message?
This is hard to pinpoint exactly, but it was probably one of the songs on this playlist that I listened to before going to sleep.

4. Write down 5 songs you often listen to or that mean a lot to you:
I'm pretty fickle with music. I was passionately attached to some of my old records, some of which I lost through various moves, and many of which I lost through the mendacity and deception of my friend Nathan. Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass Band used to cheer me up a lot, for instance, but I lost the record and it wouldn't feel quite right to get it on CD. One song I used to love was the Doors' End of the Night, which I do have on CD now, but haven't listened to for ages. I am also a big fan of the Japanese girl singer Aiko, who does melodramatic songs about love and breaking up; at the beginning of one song called Power of Love she shouts "ay ay ay," a barbaric yelp of sheer happiness that I find incredibly comforting to listen to. More recently, I was listening a lot to U2's Miracle Drug and to the aforementioned Portions for Foxes by Rilo Kiley. In my early teenage years I mainly listened to classical music, however. Another casualty of the loss of all those records has been classical music; I had gotten a ton of great early twentieth century records from a big sale at my high school library, and I haven't really made any effort even to begin to replace that collection. I don't feel like classical music is entirely out of my life, though. For one thing, I have been reading about it often lately on the excellent blog of Alex Ross, New Yorker music critic. Also, a couple months ago I was sitting in a cafe when I heard this amazing piece played over the loudspeaker. I don't think I had ever heard it before, but for a moment it seemed not only to be the expression of my own sadness, but also to relate all the sadness of the present to the past and to fit it all together in one lovely frame. It turned out to be Samuel Barber's Violin Concerto, perhaps the next CD that I will acquire.

5. Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?
For the time being I will pass on this, even if it exposes me to getting hit by a truck or whatever other hideous punishment afflicts one for defaulting on a chain letter. There aren't any family bloggers left . . .

The Food of Love

2005-01-25T21:30:00.000-08:00

In answer to a questionnaire passed on to me by my friend and inspirator in bloggery, Sutton:

1. Total amount of music files on your computer: 0.
Total amount of computers owned by me: 0.
Total amount of music files on my girlfriend's computer: 8.65 gigabytes' worth.
Total amount of songs downloaded by me onto said computer: at least 86.5.

2. Last CD you bought:
The new version of "Do They Know It's Christmas / Feed the World"-- actually a maxi-single with the new version, old version and a live version of the old one. The old (1984) version featured Bono, Phil Collins, David Bowie, Simon LeBon, George Michael, Paul Young, and other aristos of the 1980s Anglo-Irish Renaissance preaching at times notunselfrighteously to their presumed audience of spoiled European & American teenagers about how It Could Be Worse: You Could Be Living in Africa; not the most Christian message perhaps, but the way Bono sings the line "Tonight thank God it's them... instead of you" leaves it open to multiple readings, and of course the song culminates in the call to positive action, "Feed the world! Let them know it's Christmas." The new version has Bono again, singing the same line I think, Dido, the guy from Coldplay, Atomic Kitten and other youngbloods giving it a spirited go but somehow not achieving quite the same grandeur. I bought it right before Christmas to listen to with the fam, particularly my older brother Geoff and sister Sarah since we used to listen to a 45 of the original back when it came out. It was a pleasant surprise to find that Sarah too was still a big fan of the original (I guess it was she who bought that 45; I had always thought it was Geoffrey, who was the big Anglophile in the family at that time) and we had fun singing along some. Unfortunately the CD didn't have the B-side of the old record, an instrumental version with the various luminaries saying hello.

3. Song you last listened to before reading this message?
A song by the Russian singer Zemfira, called "Znak bezkonechnost'" ("The infinity sign"-- on the tape cover the title is represented by the horizontal 8, the mathematical sign of infinity), from the album 14 Weeks of Silence ("Chetyrnadtsat' nedel' tishiny"). Hadn't listened to it for at least two years but decided to use that album (one of a dozen or so I've held on to from the old stash) for my bicycle workout today and it happened to play at the end, adding a certain poignant brooding quality to my relief and exhaustion. (Language note: technically to be grammatical it should be "Znak bezkonechnosti"-- genitive-- part of the genius of the song is how the line before the title line, a line beginning with "i" ("and"), wraps around it on repetition). The enigmatic Zemfira is one of the great talents of this decade, not only in Russian rock music but in music generally, and the song, while typifying her weakness for the anthemic, not to say apocalyptic, is one of her most [Four callow youths are standing around near me watching a fifth proceed through his grim-visaged vision quest on the adjacent computer and providing running commentary and encouragement, so my already uninspired writing is probably about to collapse into a tangle of incoherent cliches, sorry] intriguing works. Do you listen to her? If not, download some! If you can't do that, you better go to Russia.

4. Write down 5 songs you often listen to or that mean a lot to you:

"Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" particularly as performed by the Kingston Trio is probably the most perfect song I can imagine, lyricswise and musicswise. The melody is heartbreaking, and the words are politically and philosophically astute, yet compassionate.

"Le petit pain au chocolat" by Joe Dassin is the most exuberant hymn to love that I know (except maybe "I'm Ready For Love" by Martha and the Vandellas, a song too beautiful for me to even contemplate writing about), a funny little story about a nearly sightless man and the sweet girl in the bakery who buys him a pair of glasses. It's the falling notes of the flute in the third verse that do it for me. There's also something bracing about the fact that it's told in the third person with Dassin playing a kind of wise, detached narrator-- like Maurice Chevalier in Gigi, the type of the boulevardier-raconteur. You might say that makes it more like a McCartney song than a Lennon song, but you'd be wrong: the emotion is untrammelled. The other great Dassin song is "L'equipe a Jojo," a bittersweet reminiscence of lost youth.

"The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game" by the Marvelettes is, except for possibly Frank Sinatra's "Swingin' on a Star," the subtlest dose of Bodhidharma ever smuggled into the West in a smooth-like-butter, cool-like-iced-champagne arrangement of a pop song. (Smokey Robinson and the Miracles' cover is also sublime, but less memorable.) It's a shame that its glory, like that of so many other mid-1960s Motown gems, has long dwelt in the shadow of the My Girl-My Guy-Heat Wave-Grapevine axis that dominates, or at any rate has historically dominated, the marketing of Motown. (I heard this song, along with several other relatively obscure classics, playing on the radio the other day while I was riding the tram. Strange to find a classic rock/pop radio station in Silesia that allows for more variety than many "Golden Oldies" stations back home.)

(And "Hunter" was one of the hits, back in the actual 60s [before the 60s became "The 60s"]. But there were other great songs that never even made it to a greatest hits album, like Tammi Terrell's miraculous cover of the Four Tops' [mediocre] "This Old Heart of Mine (Is Weak For You)," or David Ruffin's "My Whole World Ended (the Moment You Left Me)" or Gladys Knight and the Pips' "Either Way I Lose.")

I have trouble with lists that are supposed to end somewhere, and I would like to have included a number of male-female duets that are close to my heart, from the 60s, 80s and 90s, including Tammi & Marvin's "Sad Wedding" (so great because one of the only postwar non-Beatles pre-Morrissey songs that sees the beauty and the joy in sadness) and a number of others, Chuck Jackson and Maxine Brown's version of "Hold On, I'm Coming," a-ha's "You'll Never Get Over Me" (with Lauren Savoy) and Morrissey and Siouxsie's remake of Timi Yuro's "Interlude" (themesong for the film, Interlude), not to mention Bing Crosby and David Bowie's "Little Drummer Boy" or "Trespass" with Ices T and Cube. There is something about the dialogical form at its best that is well-nigh transcendent, and some (by no means all) of the best duets are male-female. (The presence of Atomic Kitten and Dido in the new "Feed the World" is, however, one improvement over the testosterone-heavy 1984 version.) The greatest duet of all time is almost certainly Mary Wells and Marvin Gaye's "Once Upon a Time," which, like U2's "Ultraviolet," evokes a sense of shimmering luminescence amid a vast darkness, in this case more tranquilly, lamps (Chinese lanterns, perhaps) reflected on the surface of a body of water late on a summer evening, the mood akin to that of the "On such a night" scene (V, i) in The Merchant of Venice.

The last song is one I just heard last night for the first time in a long time, "Three is a Magic Number," not the wonderful DeLaSoul song but the old (Schoolhouse Rock) one riffed on (& sampled?) by DeLa, written and composed by George R. Newall. Heard it while sitting in a cafe with two good friends. What I like best about the song, and it has many virtues, is that they actually recite the multiples of three, a kind of "found poetry" reminiscent of the nonfiction fragments found in Burroughs or Moby Dick (neither of which I've read, of course, but I like the idea). Also it makes me think about Rene Girard's theory of Triangular Desire, and the afternoons reading that book and similar works at the Paradise Cafe in Astoria while chain-smoking and drinking endless cups of coffee (nonstop refills there, and the Bohemian Beer Garden right round the corner should you eventually need to de-caffeinate).

5. Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?

Jim, poet, filmmaker and painter, who's made many a fine mix for me in the past, and who is constantly discovering new things in many spheres.

Small Man, aka my brother Nick, poet, scholar, chef, former Hoagy Carmichael impersonator, and man of international intrigue, who's introduced me to some wonderful music of distant shores from Seattle to Shanghai.

My mother, Faith, poet and librarian, a devotee of gospel and bluegrass.

And, since I don't know if my brother counts, being on the proverbial "masthead," or if my mother will be game, I'll also pass the challenge on to my friend Kathleen, whom I haven't seen for at least ten years, but who writes a breezy, charming blog and who once made me a lovely mix tape of what I had boorishly dismissed in several conversations as "Hippie Music."

Hommage to Barthes

2005-01-25T11:50:00.000-08:00

From the rough draft of a "senior thesis" type thing for lit. class by one of the third-year extramural English Philology students:

"An Essay on Criticism" was the first poem who wrote Alexander Pope.

Yet these students have never read anything of Barthes, let alone the phrase "The author does not write, he is written"! This proves that we all intuit his truth somehow or other, deep down.

Why is a raven like a writing-desk?

2005-01-11T08:05:00.000-08:00

Another method I've discovered of eliciting poetry out of my students, besides forcing them to write haiku, is an exercise called "Random Nouns" where you have them each write down ten random nouns (sometimes you have to explicitly tell them to vary the nouns and include abstract, proper and personal nouns so you don't just get "Table, chair, desk, pen," etc... which would take all the fun out of it), swap papers and then team up to make comparisons between pairs of nouns. Unfortunately some groups are more inspired than others, and other groups are more inspired than others on different days... and I've yet to find a group that got into the spirit of the thing like the first group I tried it with. I actually only remember one of their sentences, not even one of the best probably, but I like it a lot: "Rabbit is more intelligent than tulips."

I had the first-year English Philology majors play the game back in December, and these are my favorites:

Waistcoat has the same color as a snowdrop.
Gossip is like an orange-- full of surprises.

Some critic wrote of Gogol that he made "the horrifying discovery that everything is like something else." Yet it need not be horrifying.

Hitler: The Movie, Part 1

2005-01-10T11:09:00.000-08:00

One of the nice things about living in Europe is that, while American films often come out later (anywhere from two weeks to six months or longer) here than in America, films from neighboring regions of the Continent, naturally enough, tend to come out sooner. A few days ago I went and saw the new German film Der Untergang, about the last days of Hitler, featuring the formidable actor Bruno Ganz, the fallen angel from Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire (or Heaven Over Berlin in the original title; I mean to write something about such changes eventually) and The American Friend, and Eric Rohmer's Marquise of O, in a phenomenal performance as the demonic Fuehrer. So far as I know, the film has yet to be released in the States (as always, please correct me if I'm wrong). Though I saw it in the original German with Polish subtitles, the title, curiously enough, flashed onscreen in English: Downfall. (At this, I couldn't help thinking of the flippant title of a book by the British comedian Spike Milligan, "Adolf Hitler: My Part In His Downfall," which I never read, but saw somewhere, perhaps used to own a long time ago, or my older brother did.)

Before saying anything more about the film, I wish to briefly consider the old question whether in fact it is appropriate for there to be artistic re-creations of such horrible people as Hitler and such horrific events as took place in Nazi Germany. Usually, so far as I know, this has come up in regard to such depictions of the Holocaust as Schindler's List and The Pawnbroker, which tell the stories mostly of the victims and perhaps a few low-level Nazi thugs (and of course, in films like Schindler's List and the excellent Good Evening Mr. Wallenberg, others who had the power to save Jews; the tagline for the latter was "Schindler saved hundreds of Jews. Raoul Wallenberg saved thousands," which I thought was not a great tagline). In the film Auto Focus, it was posed by the actor protagonist's wife in regard to the TV show "Hogan's Heroes," with her sarcastic gibe about "the new genre of Holocaust comedy," a comment both anachronistic in usage [the term "the Holocaust" was not current in the mid-1960s] and erroneous in content [Nazi POW camps were not the same as death camps], but presaging [actually, post-dating, but presaging in the world of the film] the lamentable attempt at "Holocaust tragicomedy" by Roberto Benigni. A venerable ancestor of mine, who had in fact been opposed to America entering the war at least until Pearl Harbor, disapproved of Chaplin's Great Dictator, apparently because he thought it made light of the sufferings of Hitler's victims. (It is unclear whether he actually saw the film; I rather doubt it.)

Both Chaplin's and Benigni's films, as well as both versions of To Be Or Not To Be, and indeed "Hogan's Heroes," are nobly anti-Nazi in their intent, but nonetheless run the risk of trivializing the enormities of Nazi barbarism and cruelty. (I suppose technically the same objection could, somewhat Jesuitically perhaps, be raised against Orwell's Animal Farm, which does after all have its funny moments, and which was written while Stalin was still in power [not only still in power, but still very much alive-- it is impressive in its way that he managed to maintain his stranglehold on thought, expression, politics and culture for THREE YEARS after he died] and was in fact posing more of a threat to the West than he had since before the war. [I certainly don't want to get into the ridiculous debate about whether Hitler or Stalin, Nazism or Communism, was worse. I find the idea that such a debate can be resolved somewhat obscene. Though I have great respect for George Steiner, I've never understood how he could say that Solzhenitsyn's likening of the two regimes was a "moral imbecility" or words to that effect.] [Update 8/18/2006. I hold to this in the sense that one could never say to a victim of either tyranny, or a victim's relative, that "It could be worse...". However I do find persuasive some of Hitchens and Zizek's arguments for Nazism having been inherently worse-- Hitchens also quotes Robert Conquest, no loony leftist he, as saying that Nazism was worse because "It feels worse."] But Orwell's fable ends on a note of the bleakest pessimism, which perhaps redeems it from the complacency of comedy.) I remember when I was sixteen watching, with a group of hysterically laughing children, a slapstick comedy with Louis de Funes and Bourvil, two zany, brilliant, occasionally tiresome French comedians, where they spend much of the film being chased around by Nazis; I was offended in some deep way by the portrayal of all Nazis as dolts and oafs, obscuring the sad truth that many of them were clever devils; the same criticism applies to Chaplin, "Hogan" and Lubitsch/Brooks (to his credit, it applies less to Benigni, as I just realized when I remembered the Nazi riddler, who is clever, yet blind).

Indeed, there may be something inherently trivializing about comedy, including satire. My friend Jim told me once that most comedy doesn't really speak to him, I think he meant because it leaves something out (although the poet Patrick Kavanagh said that "Tragedy is underdeveloped comedy"). The wildly popular film (and musical of the film) The Producers documents both the widespread if not universal agreement that Nazi-centred entertainment is in the worst possible taste, and the strangely irresistible lure of Nazi-themed kitsch.
But what about "beautiful" films? With "phenomenal performances," as I referred to Ganz's above. Wasn't it Adorno who said there can be no poetry after Auschwitz?
Should attempts to deal with the Holocaust be limited to documentary like Shoah or The Sorrow and the Pity, or documentary realism like The Wannsee Conference (a re-enactment, using the official transcript, of the SS conference where the plans for the Final Solution were agreed upon, in Hitler's absence but with his explicit approval)? Or do even such efforts as those lend the imprimatur of art to hideous, inhuman modes of thought and being? It's sort of a mirror image of the question, answered by Muslims and Orthodox Jews in the negative, whether it is fitting to depict God and his angels and prophets in representative visual terms. And indeed, when it comes to Christianity, films like The Passion of the Christ make me feel that it is better not to make movies about Christ, although Pasolini's Gospel According to St. Matthew and, slightly less so, Stevens' The Greatest Story Ever Told (with Telly Savalas as Pilate, John Wayne as the centurion who quoth, "Truly, this man was the son of God," and Max von Sydow as Jesus) show that it's a fine and worthy enterprise.

I leave you with these slightly pompous, but, I hope, thought-provoking questions before moving on to my impressions of the actual film.

Panic on the Streets of Warsaw

2005-01-09T04:52:00.000-08:00

CATS is coming to Warsaw. Actually it turns out that it came there already last January, but it's coming again, and that's cause for panic. Of course Phantom, the movie of the musical of the movie of the play of the book, is coming soon as well, good cause for panic on the streets of Lublin, Chyzne, and Gdynia...

I'm reminded of two things. One was part of a long (in fact endless), tiresome, yet complex jeremiad by an eccentric and cantankerous megalomaniac and hypochondriac Russian aunt-in-law of mine (she teaches English in Moscow) when I was married, about the (in some ways undeniable) awfulness of life in post-Communist Russia. On the occasion I have in mind, in the midst of slagging film acting in general and Marlene Dietrich in particular while eating grapes in the kitchen of her dacha in August 2001, she threw in the observation that "in Soviet times they didn't let us watch many Western films, but as a result what we got to see was creme de la creme, Orson Welles and Fellini..." so as a result the cognoscenti didn't need to sort through all the dross, dreck and shlock that came out of Hollywood and the West. As someone who has spent at least nine hundred hours of my thirty-one years rummaging through crap books, films, and records to find the gems, first in thrift shops and then eventually in my own apartment, I suppose I can sympathize. But at the time I was too annoyed with the dismissal of Dietrich, a wonderful performer who, along with Michel Piccoli, Gerard Depardieu, Wilfrid Sheed, and Alberto Moravia, shares my birthday, to pay much attention to other parts of the lecture. In retrospect I can entertain the prospect of there having been something to that bit about creme de la creme, even for a devotee of B-movies like myself. Like most of her table talk it was of course 1) a careless oversimplification and 2) an affirmation of the Grand Inquisitor principle that people (even intelligenty like herself) need someone to sort out their salvation (if only culturally; she was and presumably is a rabid atheist) for them. (As the continuing popularity of Putin shows, the principle dies hard in Russia, indeed, may never die.) But the deluge of dreck is quite something.

The other thing I'm reminded of is a conversation with someone in studio art class in tenth grade. We always listened to music while making art and that day it happened to be Phantom. I was in the midst of the first of several phases of Oscar Wilde worship and muttered something about how Lloyd Webber was "vulgar... he's a craftsman, not an artist." The artists gathered round me, including my friend Deep, Marcus Miller, a senior who had been one of the mechanicals with me in Midsumer Night's Dream, and our instructor, the wonderful Percy Martin, were none of them particularly impressed with my withering disdain for craft. It was Marcus who wisely reposted, "This is better than being an artist. With an artist you don't have the drum machine!" to the delight and acclaim of all.

AMOR OMNIA VINCIT

2005-01-07T14:42:00.000-08:00

Love is real and amazing.

Happy Epiphany, Twelfth Night, or What You Will

2005-01-06T11:39:00.000-08:00

It's also Christmas Eve for the Russian Orthodox, don't know about other branches of Orth. I've always loved the idea of Epiphany because just when you feel like things are or should be returning to normal after the machine-gun burst of bacchanalia that includes Christmas, Boxing Day, my birthday (Dec. 27), New Year's revelry, and my sister Susan's birthday (Jan. 3), things get going again and you get to drink champagne and "tirer les rois"-- eat a piece of marchpane cake which, if you're lucky, has a tiny porcelain statuette of one of the three kinglike Zoroastrian priests who came to see the Expected One (or, if your family is more secularist, perhaps a hippopotaumus or a shepherdess) inside it-- if you live in France, that is.

The Russians, of course, are unsurpassably brilliant at keeping the party going-- after celebrating the regular ordinary New Year's Eve, a rather grand affair over there, they have Christmas now (actually a lot of the "New Russians" now celebrate "Catholic Christmas" too), and then a week later they celebrate the Old New Year (the New Year according to the old, Gregorian calendar, the Russians having adapted the Julian calendar used in the West only after the 1917 Revolution). And of course governmental and other offices basically shut down during this two-week period because of, you know, "the holidays."

"Do You Always Sweat Like That?"

2005-01-03T10:07:00.000-08:00

That's what the nice lady said to me as I stood in the Delta check-in line at Baltimore Washington International airport last Friday. When she approached me with her "professional" smile, clearly lab-tested to put me and other asocial types like me at ease, and broke the ice by asking where I was traveling to, I immediately assumed she was one of those security people who have to ask you a series of questions about the history of your luggage, but she must have just been some kind of special Delta "holiday greeter" (a well-chosen one at that, genuinely relaxed and charming, I decided after my initial reflexive hostility) since it never got to that. (Come to think of it, nobody ever asked me those questions this trip...) But after a brief rundown of my itinerary and the not-unexpected "Going home?"-"No, I just was home" interchange, she couldn't help asking about the sweat I was in. When I said yes, I do always sweat like that, perhaps muttering something about being dressed more or less appropriately for the weather outside, her smile turned to a grin as she said, "I won't say what I was going to say." We can only guess...

There is, to my mind, something slightly ridiculous, especially in "a professional environment" in which the profession in question is not topless dancing, or, to put it more broadly, in any of those institutions of modern life which does not feature a coat rack or coat check (i.e. shops, airports, post offices, train stations, supermarkets, libraries, shops, etc.) about cranking up the indoor heat to a comfortable 75 degrees when people coming in from the cold are "dressed up like Eskimos," the way PRACTICALLY EVERYONE DOES crank it this time of year, but then, not everybody has the same metabolism as me I guess.

Morte d'Arthur

2005-01-03T07:44:00.000-08:00

Who better than Alfred, Lord Tennyson
to welcome the New Year in? with fervent hopes that it will surpass the old:

Then loudly cried the bold Sir Bedivere:
"Ah! my Lord Arthur, whither shall I go?
Where shall I hide my forehead and my eyes?
For now I see the true old times are dead,
When every morning brought a noble chance,
And every chance brought out a noble knight.
Such times have been not since the light that led
The holy Elders with the gift of myrrh.
But now the whole Round Table is dissolved
Which was an image of the mighty world,
And I, the last, go forth companionless,
And the days darken round me, and the years,
Among new men, strange faces, other minds."

And slowly answer'd Arthur from the barge:
"The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfils himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
Comfort thyself: what comfort is in me?
I have lived my life, and that which I have done
May He within himself make pure! but thou,
If thou shouldst never see my face again,
Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer
Than this world dreams of. Wherefore, let thy voice
Rise like a fountain for me night and day.
For what are men better than sheep or goats
That nourish a blind life within the brain,
If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer
Both for themselves and those who call them friend?
For so the whole round earth is every way
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God.
But now farewell. I am going a long way
With these thou seëst--if indeed I go
(For all my mind is clouded with a doubt)--
To the island-valley of Avilion;
Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow,
Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies
Deep-meadow'd, happy, fair with orchard lawns
And bowery hollows crown'd with summer sea,
Where I will heal me of my grievous wound."

So said he, and the barge with oar and sail
Moved from the brink, like some full-breasted swan
That, fluting a wild carol ere her death,
Ruffles her pure cold plume, and takes the flood
With swarthy webs. Long stood Sir Bedivere
Revolving many memories, till the hull
Look'd one black dot against the verge of dawn,
And on the mere the wailing died away.

But when that moan had past for evermore,
The stillness of the dead world's winter dawn
Amazed him, and he groan'd, ``The King is gone.''
And therewithal came on him the weird rhyme,
"From the great deep to the great deep he goes."

Whereat he slowly turn'd and slowly clomb
The last hard footstep of that iron crag;
Thence mark'd the black hull moving yet, and cried,
"He passes to be King among the dead,
And after healing of his grievous wound
He comes again; but--if he come no more--
O me, be yon dark Queens in yon black boat,
Who shriek'd and wail'd, the three whereat we gazed
On that high day, when, clothed with living light,
They stood before his throne in silence, friends
Of Arthur, who should help him at his need?"

Then from the dawn it seem'd there came, but faint
As from beyond the limit of the world,
Like the last echo born of a great cry,
Sounds, as if some fair city were one voice
Around a king returning from his wars.

Thereat once more he moved about, and clomb
Ev'n to the highest he could climb, and saw,
Straining his eyes beneath an arch of hand,
Or thought he saw, the speck that bare the King,
Down that long water opening on the deep
Somewhere far off, pass on and on, and go
From less to less and vanish into light.
And the new sun rose bringing the new year.

In a Moment of Calm

2004-12-11T23:01:00.000-08:00

One of the most pleasant sensations I can think of is that of absent-mindedly, unintentionally recalling something, which you did not really expect to remember or reconsider, but pops up repeatedly whenever your mind is at ease and open to intrusion. I've been feeling that way about an essay by Elisa New, on Hawthorne, that I read in the New Republic in August, especially this line at the end:

Wherever he roamed, Hawthorne's dwelling place was New England, but his art was never so parochial a place. It occupies, instead, the liminal and highly charged zone where the psyche, cast off from its lonely foundations, risks true growth.

I don't even have anything to say about this now; no reaction I can put into words at all. It has to do also with the schoolwork I have been doing lately, especially on a set of ancient Chinese poems about lovesick shamans and retiring divinities. Unfortunately I can hardly express an ounce of what I feel altogether, and I don't know when I will be able to make something out of this feeling now.

Snap Crackle Pop AAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGGGGGGHHHHHHH

2004-12-11T01:50:00.000-08:00

As I write, highly civilised human beings sit behind me, conspiring to drive me insane.

They're extramural students of German Philology, and they've chosen the school library to do their crunching in. As far as I can tell, chips are being eaten-- whatever it is is being consumed with great gusto. The munching is accompanied by the occasional rattle of cellophane, also rather loud. It all brings me back to the days when I used to watch old films at the Boulder Public Library; some of the greatest evenings of my life, when I was a boy and, thanks largely to impresario Chuck Loomis, later in college; but some of the most irritating moments of my life as well, thanks to three proliferating species of modern moviegoer: the Cruncher, the Crinkler and the Talker (with its subspecies of the Appreciator, the Explainer, the Complainer, the Skeptic, the Class Wit, etc.). I now see that while not as morally reprehensible as doing so in a movie theater, eating and talking loudly near someone who is trying to read can be equally irritating and disturbing. Well, at least no lips are being smacked, yet.

In point of fact, eating in this library is against school rules. The chief administrator of our school (the "Principal" or "Headmistress" as some of the students say, rather quaint for a college) once admonished some students, while scolding them for eating or drinking or wearing coats or some such, to "Treat this as you would a real library," well put, since this is not, indeed, your father's library: it has about six books (OK, about sixty-six) and none of them are available to students for checkout; they can only be consulted during library hours. But it's nonetheless my favorite room in the Academy, and not only because it houses the Internet; the librarians are two very sweet ladies (they work alternate shifts) and the walls are painted a gentle shade of avocado in contrast to the hospital white of the rest of the school, so it has a certain warmth and coziness all its own.

So anyway, I could mention that this crunchfest is in violation of the regulations, but that's not my style, and anyway it would be hypocritical since I've often (quietly) enjoyed a pickle or a tangerine in here. Furthermore, it would be depriving myself of the possibility of some good improvisational theater later on should the Matron happen to appear. I just realized that's the title that fits her best, if polite language is being used (this is a family blog, after all).

The Matron is sort of like The White Witch from the Chronicles of Narnia, but without the charm. Or the beauty, not to mention brains. What I mostly mean by the comparison is that she manages to create an atmosphere here at the school where it's "Always Winter and Never Christmas."

But human nature has a way of defeating this eternal winter. For example, just thinking about the Matron for a few seconds has made my previous rage at the Crunchers and Crinklers vanish into thin air.

Enough is Enough

2004-12-07T10:17:00.000-08:00

In seventh grade, the awkward boy, a green, bewildered Boulderite newly transplanted to what then seemed the matter-of-fact megapolis of DC, a misfit unaware of who was the Redskins' star quarterback and later to be nicknamed "Dada" by an English teacher for his incoherent clowning, loved visiting suburban malls with his family on weekends, if only to briefly high-tail it from their stultifyingly practical and prosaic shopping rounds and chase his own private VisionQuest, scouting the Sam Goodys and other fluorescent-lit music chains of the counties Fairfax and Montgomery for old Depeche Mode albums, glowing, shimmering arcana, the Silmarillion of DM fandom for a pre-teen neophyte in 1986. More than that, he loved scouting the urban music shops, chain or Mom&Pop, for the twelve-inch singles with their tantalizing treasures: the extended remixes, the live versions (where, curiously enough, Dave Gahan tended to sound slightly less like a young Adonis and slightly more like a laid-off Basildon factory worker after a few pints), the bonus tracks: it was just possible, remotely, that there might be a new song, never before released, in the magic stretch of rack between Deep Purple and Devo; there might even (gasp) be a New Single.

Even more than that, he, or should I say, I, loved riding the L2 or L4 from Van Ness to Dupont of a Friday afternoon while listening to DM's masterpiece, Black Celebration, or their best-of collection, Catching Up With Depeche Mode. The highlight of the show was riding over the bridge just after Woodley Park-Zoo Station: the listener became ensconsced in green trees and blue sky and felt the ecstatic heartache of the truly tragic, whether listening to the darkly erotic dirge "Fly on the Windscreen" or the buoyant yet somber closer, "But Not Tonight."

But the elusive Grail, the perpetual motion machine that I dreamed of possessing, was the Depeche Mode video. MTV was not the eclectic and pluralistic multi-tiered operation then that it is now, no sir. Actually, I don't remember if my family even had MTV that autumn, but I rather doubt it. We had, however, had it in Boulder that summer, and after my conversion upon listening to Some Great Reward (in fact the real masterpiece, DM's Revolver if Black Celebration is their Sgt. Pepper), an unbirthday gift from my good friend Degan, I had been ever alert and on standby for some gobsmacking Gesamkunstwerk or Gotterdammerung from the Boys from Basildon; and by the Sevenfold Shield of Ajax, that accursed spawn of Satan MTV (Channel 11 on Boulder TV at the time, I remember) had well and truly failed me.

Having joined Columbia House Record Club, as I believe it was then called (you know the drill: "ten pennies, ten albums" or some such and then you sign in blood) in the spring of that fateful year, I went ahead and ordered the anthology "Depeche Mode: Some Great Videos." But what I got in the mail some three weeks later turned out to be something called "Depeche Mode: Live in Hamburg," a concert on the Some Great Reward tour, featuring a more-than-usually atonal Gahan. Gahan's shocking oafishness and smallness-in-stature notwithstanding, it was fun to see them in concert; still, the disappointment, after waiting so long for a kaleidoscope of futuristic video art juxtaposed with My Favorite Music as-heard-on-album, was bitter.

[The discrepancy, however, later became the ace up my sleeve in a tense game of cat-and-mouse with the sinister minions of the dread Columbia House. The threat of a lawsuit for false advertising kept the bastards at bay.]

And if there was one song I really wanted to see illustrated on film, despite all the bubblegum back-street/wolf's-lair poignancy of Some Great Reward and the sugar-coated apocalyptic romance and cynicism of Black Celebration, and the candycorn Socialist agitprop of Construction Time Again and the Poor Man's Ray-Ban Wordsworthiana of A Broken Frame, it was probably DM's poppiest, happiest and most radiantly joyous hit ever: "Just Can't Get Enough," from the first album, Speak & Spell, with a spruced-up, clean-shaven version on Catching Up. Although at the time I had never really been in love, the song, a euphoric Valentine, gave me a crystal-clear premonition of what the happy moments of being in love would be like. I listened to it in the rain, walking home, on the bus, in my room, on lunch break, any chance I could get, and it never seemed to get old. When I eventually did fall in love, it was there for me again, and I again embraced its truth, this time with the feeling of being in on the secret.

Alas, the prayed-for Gesamkunstwerk, the consummation of the revelation, never came. I saw them perform "A Question of Lust" on TV at some Pan-European Christmas Eve concert in Vienna (I think) that December (I remember the Eurythmics sort of blew them out of the water, even for a Mode-ahadeen, if you'll excuse the slightly tired metaphor, like me), which quenched my thirst like Coca-Cola, and in 1988 I got to see them live in concert at some outdoor arena near DC with my sister Sarah, older brother Geoff and Bavarian shaman Joern (a sort of au pair boy who stayed with us that spring when Nick [known to readers as Small Man] was still actually small). But by that time I was much more into the Beatles, after a brief Cure phase.

Imagien my surprise after all these years, then, when I finally happened to catch the video of "Just Can't Get Enough" on MTV Classics in a bar (the one where Karen X's double works) near my apartment here in Gliwice some weeks ago. The great burning unfulfilled desire of my early adolescence (besides, um, er, the obvious) had been satisfied. And it turned out to be curiously uninvigorating. The video mostly features the lads hanging out in a bar or on some street, presumably in London, lip-synching without any particular panache. The most memorable feature, to be honest, is the slightly embarrassing haircuts of most band members, very dashing at the time no doubt.

Speaking of which, the Williams Family Christmas Card Pics (taken at Thanksgiving) of that year document for the ages my seventh-grade obsession with Being Dave Gahan. As I recall, I actually brought a photo of Gahan, probably from Star Hits (US version of UK Smash Hits) magazine, to the hairdresser and asked for something similar, i.e. an inoffensively spiky crew cut. (Ironically, people have since told me that I bear some resemblance to Gahan's Secret Sharer, curly-haired Martin Gore, blond lyricist and "Maidenform Man" of the band.) (My hair changed from straight to curly during the eighth grade; my blondness has since been steadily diminishing.) Fortunately Gahan in '86 was well past his mullet phase, otherwise I might really have something to regret now.

So we see that indeed, as E.M. Forster shows in his slight, but charming story, "Mr. Andrews" (well worth reading in a time when misguided Muslims and Christians talk of Holy War), it is not the fulfillment of desire, but desire itself, which brings joy. And not just any desire, in fact, but the desire to make others truly happy. Which Gahan and Gore have done a good job at over the years, in their own way. As a very serious, very postpunk British critic (contemptuously dismissive of and hostile to Duran Duran) wrote in 1981 after a concert at Hammersmith, "They are the boys who want tomorrow, with the best will in the world."

Like, Totally Unreal, Man (Radio Dub)

2004-12-06T03:11:00.000-08:00

[This piece has been revised somewhat as of 10:31 PM Poland time, December 6, 2004. I often revise pieces after the fact but in view of the glaring errors in the first paragraph of this one I am making note of it here. For those who encountered the earlier version, I can only say in my defense that a) whether in the internet cafe or the school library, my blogs are generally composed to the caterwauling of rambunctious teens and twentysomethings, rendering total concentration of the faculties a near-impossibility; b) I haven't actually been teaching English grammar since spring semester-- I now more or less exclusively "teach" or rather, conduct Conversation, of which more later-- so the technicalities aren't as fresh in my mind as they might be.]

Teachers of English as a Second Language generally train their students to measure the conditionals by ascending degrees of unreality (or, descending degrees of probability): The "Zero" Conditional is used for unchanging Laws of Existence: "If you die in your dream, you die." The First Conditional indicates a real possibility: "If you're a good girl, I'll buy you an orange." But not always a very real one: "If Will-o'-the-Wisp wins, we can go to the Bahamas." The Second, often used for daydreaming, indicates hypothetical situations of varying degrees of possibility or im: "If he were dead, you'd weep for him." "If you were a man, you'd fix that drain yourself." And the Third indicates something that never happened and now, never will. Sometimes used to advance an argument about the past which may affect the future: "If the Great Powers had jointly invaded Germany in 1936, the Holocaust wouldn't have happened." Other times used to wallow in self-loathing: "If I had listened to the color of my dreams, things would've turned out very differently."

Here are the Third Conditional sentences in Battersby's book, as written:
If Jane hadn't stayed out in the sun so long, we'd never have met each other.
If my parents had had more money, they wouldn't have stayed together so long.
If Mike and Cathy had got married, he wouldn't have got into trouble.
If we hadn't gone to Jackie's party, you would have enjoyed yourself.
If we'd arrived just a few minutes earlier, she wouldn't have got sunburnt.
Stupid man! If he'd followed our advice, I'm sure he would have regretted it.
If I hadn't spent every night at the disco, they could have sent me to a better school.
He's happy now, but if he'd accepted the job, we might have caught the train.
If you had remembered to bring the road map, I might have done better in my exams.
It was a great party. If you'd gone, we wouldn't have got lost.

And from the Mixed Conditionals, just a few:

If we're going to catch that train, we'd better get a couple bottles of wine.
If you were thinking of applying for that job in accounts, you never will.
If it's nine o'clock in the morning here, why didn't you say?
If you must practise the trumpet in your room, don't bother-- it's gone.

I've been reading and re-reading Strunk & White's Elements of Style lately, more just for fun than for guidance-- many's the time I've sinned against its edicts and I'm sure to continue to do so in the future. But it is a tremendous delight to read, even if you disagree with some of its precepts, the writing (as you would expect of E.B. White) is unparalleled in its elegance and some of the examples are fun. I've often thought that writing a textbook would be pleasurable to the extent that it involves dreaming up examples-- not that the Elements, or "The Little Book," is a textbook, but they have that in common.

Another Perspective on Modernity

2004-12-02T14:34:00.000-08:00

Quoth Bertie Wooster:

You know, the longer I live, the more clearly I see that half the trouble in this bally world is caused by the light-hearted and thoughtless way in which chappies dash off letters of introduction and hand them to other chappies to deliver to chappies of the third part. It's one of those things that make you wish you were living in the Stone Age.

Empty Nests

2004-12-01T13:54:00.000-08:00

There's a sweet Talk of the Town piece in the New Yorker this week about a support group for empty-nest parents. I especially liked this quote:

“I think this empty-nest thing is a new phenomenon,” one weary-looking mother of two said. “I went to a Syrian wedding recently, and they all live just two blocks from each other.”

It certainly seems to me a lot of our societal customs and organizations are designed for families that are geographically united. Actually, the children discussed in the piece haven't travelled much farther than Brooklyn. In our family, though, it's typical for at least one or two children to be on different continents at any moment. Telephones and email and jet planes compensate for dislocation, indeed make it possible, but they don't compensate entirely. In dreams begins responsibility; with freedom comes loss. There's something tempting about living in a large but tight-knit family all under the same roof, even though you know in practice it would be stifling and unbearable to a modern person.

But I'd better get back to work.

Starry-Eyed and Vaguely Discontented

2004-12-01T05:19:00.000-08:00

Another fiendishly spring-like day today in Gliwice. Having slept longer than usual and then rolled over and slept some more, I didn't get around to going outside until after twelve, and when I did, I briefly savored the delusion of having slept all winter and awoken in early April.

The holiday celebrated November 30 in Poland is St. Andrew's Night, or better, The Feast of St. Andrew, not St. Andrew's Eve, and I apologize for the error. Yesterday for the first time I got to take part in some traditional Andrzejki revels. The most interesting ritual is fortune-telling with wax, water and key. You melt some hot wax, then pour it through the hole in an old-fashioned key (where the hole is quite big) into a bowl of cold water, then let it form into some shape or shapes which you remove from the water and "read."

My lump of wax was variously interpreted as a butterfly, a chick bursting forth from the egg, a snail or turtle poking its head out of its shell, a sea-horse, or: human intestines or other internal organs.

A Beautiful Not-Quite-Wrongness

2004-11-29T03:31:00.000-08:00

One of the books I sometimes use in my teaching, Instant Grammar Lessons by Alan Battersby, has some matching exercises where you match the endings and beginnings of sentences. As the students and I have discovered, however, it's more fun to match the beginnings with the endings directly opposite, and the result usually makes some kind of sense and evokes a more interesting set of circumstances, or worldview, than the thick-skulled logic of the "right" answer. Here is an exercise with First Conditional:

If you heat water to 100 degrees Celsius, the boss will definitely fire you.
If the weather's fine, take the day off work.
If she doesn't get a good night's sleep, she can try again next year.
It's easy. If you push this button, all the plants are going to die.
If you take another week off work, you're going to have an accident.
Careful! Unless you slow down, she's always tired in the mornings.
Unless it rains soon, it boils.
She's clever, and provided she works hard, we can go to the coast tomorrow.
If you still feel awful tomorrow, she'll do well.
If she doesn't pass the exam this year, the camera rewinds automatically.

And for Second Conditional:

Late again! If you didn't stay up so late, her English would really improve.
If you were really ill, we could buy the house of our dreams.
If my English was absolutely perfect, you'd be able to get up in the mornings.
If his hair wasn't so long, there wouldn't be so many accidents.
If people didn't drive so fast on this road, we could sit outside in the garden.
If I had my address book with me, I could get a job as an interpreter.
If we won the lottery, I'd be able to phone her.
If Maria stayed in Britain for a year, I'd love to do more cooking.
If the weather wasn't so awful, he'd look much smarter.
If I had the time, I'd be more sympathetic.

Dark Meat, Bag Technicians, and Other Unsung Joys

2004-11-27T11:31:00.000-08:00

Let us now thank the Small Man, and look forward to further
contributions from the noted poet, scholar, and all
around Jolly Good Fellow.

Hope everybody had a Happy Thanksgiving. It was a day of
considerable pain, worry and unpleasantness for some of my family back
home, but it looks like everything is going to be OK, so that's
something to be thankful for.

Didn't do much celebrating on Thursday except for having a pot-luck breakfast (mostly cakes, pies, and fruit; I brought the cheez&crackers) with my first class that morning.

Then Friday morning before class I brunched on a
turkey cutlet with a generous portion of steamed potatoes at my
favorite of the local "milk bars" (a milk bar in Poland means a
cafeteria that doesn't serve alcohol, a "bar" in Polish being a
cafeteria that serves wholesome, simple foodstuffs to students and
working people; "restaurant" ("restauracja") connotes something imposingly grand and
hifalutin). Actually for some of us the best part of "Turkey Day"
generally falls on Friday, or late Thursday night-- if you've had
Thanksgiving at home that is-- when you sneak to the fridge for the
leftovers while watching movies on the VCR.

One reason I like the "Viennese Bar" so much is that they have these trays you can use, if you have a large order, to carry the food to your table (they only have two, so you then must return them straightaway). The reason I like the trays so much is they have these pictures of food on a blue sky background with words in German and English floating around the pictures: "Baked Eggs," "Bier," "Kaffee und Kuchen," "Hot Dog with Sauerkraut," "Eggs and Bacon," and more. The whole thing reminds me of this pamphlet-sized 1950s Good Housekeeping cookbook I used to have called "Eggs & Cheese, Spaghetti & Rice," featuring such dishes as "Hi-Yi Sandwiches" and "Quick-Hoppin' John." Some sort of innocence that really never existed is evoked.

While eating the delicious breaded cutlet, I remembered the lament
of R. Burdik (my boss at the wine store where I worked in the late
nineties, mentioned in an earlier post), one day sometime around Thanksgiving 1999 probably: "I like dark meat. Most Americans don't like dark meat, 'cause it's got all
these interesting flavors. Everybody wants to keep it bland." If what I've heard is true, non-free-range turkeys are in fact bred in such a way as to maximize the ratio of white to dark meat, so he was on to something there. He also eschewed eating in restaurants because the chefs oversalted the food, depriving him of the meat and vegetables' inner potentialities of personality which he so passionately sought. I don't know about that-- I think if you're not the kind of culinary genius he claimed to be, and most of us aren't, a lot of New York restaurants have fun, sometimes profound experiences to offer. But I agree with him about the dark meat being the best part of the turkey. And you don't get that in a turkey cutlet at the Viennese Bar.

Early this morning I bought some mineral water and eggs at the PLUS
supermarket (a Germain chain). I would have bought a few other
items, but I only had ten zloty. I decided while walking home,
however, that this was a blessing, and resolved from now on to go
to the supermarket only when I'm a bit short on cash. The reason is
that the German chain is too hard up or too tight-fisted to employ
baggers to bag your groceries for you, so that you have to pop your
groceries into the bag at a breakneck pace, and you're still engaged
in the business of doing that as you fumble for your cash, pay the
cashier, answer any questions or comments, etc., and you're
probably still doing it while the next customer begins their
bagging frenzy, creating a crowded and farcical contretemps. I know
this must sound like the ne plus ultra in imbecilic whining and
self-indulgent foppery; some of you may jest that I probably need
to employ my own personal umbrella-holder, like P. Diddy; but in
fact the lack of baggers can be a highly irritating, uncomfortable, and humiliating experience, as I suggest you confirm for yourselves if you ever have a chance. At
first I thought I must be deficient in the art of bagging: a matter
of speed, poise and aplomb, I thought. But I've strategized in line,
I've hopped up the pace of my bagging, and nothing seems to help.
The only thing would be to plop the groceries from the counter back
into the shopping cart and then bag elsewhere, but even then you're
always in somebody's way. Perhaps if they constructed a counter
with more space at the end... I guess you can glean from reading
this that my worries in life are few at the moment, and for that I'm truly
thankful.

***

E.B. White, in his essay "On a Florida Key," describing the contents of the refrigerator in the beach cottage where he stayed while visiting in February, 1941:

This refrigerator contains the milk, the butter, and the eggs for tomorrow's breakfast. More milk will arrive in the morning, but I will save it for use on the morrow, so that every day I shall use the milk of the previous day, never taking advantage of the opportunity to enjoy perfectly fresh milk. This is a situation which could be avoided if I had the guts to throw away a whole bottle of milk, but nobody has that much courage in the world today. It is a sin to throw away milk and we know it.

Or, I thought as I read, it could be avoided if you had the guts to drink the whole bottle of milk in one go, which is what I would probably do. But more than anything I thought of how delicious the milk must have been, perfectly fresh or next day, since I feel sure as I'm alive that it came in a glass bottle.

I wish I could tell you that all milk in Poland comes in glass bottles, but if I did, that would be a lie.

I'm off to celebrate Saint Andrew's Eve (actually on Tuesday: an orgy of fortune-telling and other devilment; but many celebrate on Saturday) by drinking a well-earned beer with my friend Tadek (I worked three hours today, he worked seven).

Interruption from Ghalib

2004-11-24T08:13:00.000-08:00

This is Tim's brother joining in. I'm studying Chinese literature at the University of Washington in Seattle. Last night I happened to go to a talk by a professor, in another part of my department, who studies various Indian languages, and he talked about this couplet by Ghalib:

When nothing was, then there was God. Had nothing been, God would have been.
My being has defeated me. Had I not been, what would have been?

(translated by Ralph Russell)

There were refreshments including wine after the talk, and the combination of wine and this poem made me deliriously happy.

Hi There!

2004-11-23T04:43:00.000-08:00

I've been taking a break from the madness of the internet cafe with its wretched continuous loop of techno and house music and its legions of lisping, adenoidal teenage miscreants grunting and hooting at each other during their extended binges of virtual homicidal mania. The only other places i can blog from are friends' apartments, where it's rude, and my school, where the library is often closed. I'm using the library just now, for example, but it closes in about ten minutes. So the internet cafe is the main hub of the operation.

Plus I've been working on a rather ambitious post going into further detail about my situation here, but somehow haven't quite got my head round it yet. Look out for something of considerable bulk and breadth, and some surprising extra special treats as well, I hope, in the coming days.

What's more, I've been spending a large amount of my time retreating into the world of P.G. Wodehouse. Had never read him before this autumn, but I just finished my third book of his and can't wait to read the fourth (the quartet happened to be languishing in a used bookstore across the street from my place of work, and on the day a few weeks ago when my TV went into a coma I decided to stock up on reading materials.) (The Idiot Box is now back in action, which is the ideal state of affairs. For whatever reason, I love to read with the faint murmur of the television in the background; I guess it gives the illusion of people being around, and sometimes something watchable comes along.) (Around the same time, my Discman was stolen from the internet cafe during an unguarded moment, restoring the balance not only of Good & Evil but of Self & World, as I could no longer succumb to the temptation to walk around in a solipsistic dreamscape, oblivious to the sounds of the city, closed off from it.) (Although I do love how the movement of everything-- on TV, or on the street-- always fits with whatever music you play against it like a choreographed ballet. In that sense maybe it's not solipsistic.)

It snowed here last weekend: gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh. Usually Silesian snow quickly turns grey and black, but this time it didn't have a chance to since it continued snowing through yesterday and then had melted away entirely by this morning. Today's been a rainy one. As my good friend Khalis Ameen, ne Ernest Hill, would say: "Liquid sunshine."

His Needs Are More... So He Gives Less

2004-11-13T06:53:00.000-08:00

They showed Moonraker on TV last night. They were showing COMA, a thriller with one of Michael Douglas' earliest leading roles, on TCM (I no longer have cable, having decided it wasn't worth it, but apparently I'm now getting a free promotional month of TCM / Cartoon Network), a film I've never seen and which looked good, but I decided if I'm going to watch an Anglo/American film with a Polish "Lektor" (a man who reads a translation over the original dialogue, which is somewhat audible in the background), it might as well be something I've seen twice already and have no notion of taking at all seriously. Plus with Bond films it's always interesting to see how they translate the sexual innuendos, though I don't remember anything interesting in that line this time. (In any case Polish, compared with French or Russian, has a refreshingly large number of idioms in common with English.)

The annoying thing, of course, about the Lektor, besides the monotony of one person reading all the parts, is that when you hear the English dialogue you don't catch all of it but the attention you expend on it detracts from your appreciation of the translation. You get lost in a sort of No Man's Land. I would almost say that full-on dubbing, which has been gaining popularity in Russia (and is the default option in western Europe, and was apparently accepted by American audiences until the mid-80s), is better: at least there you have a crew (not a cast) of different voices doing their damnednest to capture the soul of the thing. But either method of dubbing tends to cut off my involvement with the film. There's something about voices. Fortunately, in Poland most foreign films on DVD or in theatres are subtitled, except cartoons (where dubbing makes sense to me). It's only on TV, or video, that you have to fear the tentacles of the Lektor.

The conventional wisdom is that Sean Connery was the best James Bond, and it is true that the "cat-like, animal" energy which Truffaut noticed in him in Hitchcock's Marnie differentiates him strongly from pretty-boy dandy and smoothie Roger Moore. I remember reading once in the libertarian magazine "Reason" how "Sean Connery is the only man who could ever play James Bond, for the simple reason that only he conveys the impression that he would readily strangle a pussycat were it necessary for the security of the British Empire." There definitely seems to be something about the young Connery that conjures up some kind of connection with things feline. But there is nothing feminine (or shall we say "feminine?") about him, while with Moore there most certainly is. The scene in Octopussy where Moore puts on clown makeup, and the scenes in several films where he is put through extreme physical torment (in Moonraker he gets whirled around in some kind of thingumabob and almost dies, and you really feel bad for him), demonstrate the point adequately I think.

My best friend in high school, a brilliant artist and musician by the name of Charlie Habanananda, once explained to me, in tenth grade, why Moore was doomed from the start: "He got crowded out by the special effects, so he had to treat the whole thing as a joke." At the time, this made sense, and for a long time since I had come to regard Moore as a tragic figure of extraordinary pathos. In fact, however, the special effects of the Moore-era films seem no more impressive, and only slightly more prominent, than in the Connery ones (I've seen something that claims that more money was spent on Moonraker than on the previous six Bond films, but watching it in 2004, or in 1992, you would find that hard to believe).

Speaking of special effects, there seems to be a convention of computer geeks taking place in the lounge of this internet cafe, where a demonstration of some new marvel of the cyber age is taking place, and the noise they are making is hindering my thought processes to the point where I must pause.

Furthermore, an excellent essay I read a few years ago in an anthology ("On the Screens of the World") of mid-1960s Russian film criticism-- supposed to be a review of "Goldfinger" but really an "Essay on Man" for the late twentieth century-- shows that even then, the dangers of the cinematic military-industrial complex that everyone associates with Star Wars were very clear from the early, "classic" Bond films. (Rest assured that the essay itself is not a piece of Soviet agitprop but bases its attack on aesthetic and cultural values; there really was a Krushchev "Thaw"-- in fact it produced some of the best films (and folk music) of the twentieth century. If you compare the essay-- (unfortunately I've been unable to find the title or author online)-- with Roland Barthes' structuralist essay on Bond from the same era, Barthes' analysis is by far the more simplistic.) The jokey cynicism, the video-game violence, the mindless gadgetry, the general sense of whoredom and nihilism were very much there to begin with. And the whole thing was, if nothing else, an orgy of money from the beginning, though nothing can compare with having to sit through an actual advertisement for Gillette razors in Dolby Stereo while waiting for Pierce Brosnan (by far the best Bond, in my opinion, since something about him reminds me of James Mason) to appear. Not to mention the horrible Smirnoff tie-ins, etc. etc. (The North Korean sequence in Die Another Day is, however, the best opening sequence in any Bond film, and the titles sequence with Bond being tortured with the traditional dancing girls juxtaposed over him is also up there. After he shaves his late-Mason-state-of-desiccation beard, nothing in the film is worthwhile except the surprising sword fight halfway through. Nothing restored my faith in post/modern cinema more than the fact that they put the fight in the middle rather than at the end.)

Personally, I find long chunks of the Connery films to be indigestible (have never yet sat or stayed awake through the entirety of Dr. No despite numerous attempts, though I will admit the opening sequence-- not an action sequence as in later Bonds-- is delightful), just as I find the endless battle at the end of the first Star Wars (A New Hope) insufferable and the space battle at the end of Moonraker as well. But when people compare Connery and Moore, I have to just say that a) it's the old apples and oranges dilemma and b) if anything, Moore's performance is truer to the spirit of bourgeois "Pure Fantasy" (usually sexist, and often racist) which the cycle inherited from Fleming, more "organic" than Connery's, you might say, though Connery is the more "organic" actor outside the cycle.

Connery is whiskey. Moore is champagne. Connery is steak. Moore is caviar paste (taramosalata I think the Greeks call it). Moore is Rossini, Connery: Respighi. Moore could not convincingly strangle a pussycat for England (or Western Civ., humanity or whatever), nor could he, convincingly or un, commit marital rape and emerge as what is taken for a "[basically] positive hero" as Connery does in Marnie. (The director being Hitchcock, the girl being "frigid", and the year being 1964. He (Connery/"Mark") then acts as therapist and finally "cures" her, somewhat, of a neurosis brought on by childhood trauma.) Moore would never have been cast in such a role (in fact Olivier was supposed to be cast as Mark, according to Hitchcock; I learned today that he also turned down the role of Humbert in Kubrick's Lolita).

He Looks at the World and Wants It All
And while both Moore's Bond and Connery's take the trappings of Bond life-- the martinis, the pate de foie gras, the Aston-Martin, Q's gadgets, and yes, lest we forget, the girls-- for granted, only Moore's, to my view, has a glint in his eye that suggests he actually enjoys them. Which makes me identify with him more. Makes me want to drink a beer with him more, to use one of the supposedly pivotal talking points of the recent presidential election. Plus if we agree that the whole enterprise is in some way inherently an exercise in infantile, often Oedipal wish-fulfillment-- constant alternation between danger and pleasure (no boredom-- no reality), with a happy ending in the arms of the beloved (often the ex of the dastardly villain, and who invariably gives James some admonishment, sounding almost like a loving, doting mother, in the final moments), then Connery's macho sturdiness is somehow incongruous. Connery, in real life of working-class background, in his Bond persona somehow touches on the essence of upper class taste as defined by Paul Fussell in the book Class: simple, unpretentious, organic (Fussell talks of hardwood floors, beat-up Chevies as symbols of the very very rich's disdain for gaudy ornament). Moore, in real life a St. Moritz chum of William F. Buckley, Jr. and the horribly tacky Taki, as Bond seems somehow more destined to appeal to middle class taste: polite, too British to be real, often slightly condescending. (Fussell is caricaturish and many find his book "cynical"; I merely use his images to make my case.) Where womanizing for Connery-Bond is just a pastime, for Moore-Bond, a weak man who happens to be lucky and clever, it is a weakness.

For these very reasons, however, Moore is the only one capable within the films' universe of undergoing moments of moral and emotional gravity. In Moonraker, when Moore's Bond is nearly killed in the thingumabob, he has a sudden flashback of Q. For a split second, I thought it was some kind of poignant memory: "Oh dear, I'll never get to see old Q again.. and we had so many cheery times together!" but then of course it turned out that he was merely remembering the thingumajig that Q had given him in case of emergency, which ended up saving his life. The point is that with Connery I wouldn't have dared to imagine such poignancy. And I like that about Moore.

To put it another way, I can see Connery-Bond getting very angry during a golf game... Moore-Bond, rather less so.

Toward the end of the film, in the final confrontation with the supervillain Hugo Drax (one of the more elegant of a number of elegant monikers among Bond villains, but the villain himself, played by the implacable Michel Lonsdale, really is outstanding; I suppose I especially like him because he greatly resembles my part-time employer at my second job in the grim neighboring town of Zabrze), Bond almost makes a speech against the blackguard's Nazi-esque eugenic scheme, but instead uses the Socratic method to subtly convince the slightly superhuman, slightly subhuman henchman Jaws to help him. Only Moore could have pulled this off convincingly, in my view. (In Octopussy he makes two high-strung speeches against mass-murder, one in clownface. He pulls it off. That's our boy.)

In any case, for me Moonraker, if only the space battle had somehow been avoided, would be probably the apex of the series. More than usually charming villain (instead of the usual embarrassing Bond film literalistic puns he makes brilliant linguistic reversals [searching the grey cells in vain for a cleverer term] such as "Look after Mr. Bond. See that some harm comes to him.") One of the five or six best songs of the whole series, good incidental music too. Smart girl (CIA agent played by Lois Chiles, the bitchy heiress in Death on the Nile) for Bond (at first resentful of his sexism, like Judi Dench's M; then concerned as she sees him half-dead after the scene I've now mentioned twice), not a sex toy or fickle kept woman of archfiend. To balance that out, a scene of Violence-Against-Woman that reveals the fundamental sadism of the whole Bond cycle in living color: a nice French girl who slept with Bond and helped him out early in the film is devoured by two vicious dogs (not graphic, but the pursuit is chilling). Since the time when Dostoevsky started publishing his writings we've all been aware that each masochist has an inner sadist with a masochist within who is a sadist at heart, and vice versa. The Bond films are hugely successful because the sadist in us identifies with the villain and his minions, the masochist with Bond in his moments of pain.

How Much Can You Wishstand?

2004-11-10T13:57:00.000-08:00

I've been meaning to tell you for ages that I bought in Gliwice a bunch of undershirts/tanktops ("vests," in British English) bearing the inscription "Durable Apparel Manufactured To Wishstand the Extreme Elements." A typo so profound and beautiful, it boggles the mind.

Tadek has a pseudo-Anglo/American shirt with a delightful Dadaist poem on it, must transcribe for you.

A River Runs Through It, or: A Few Words About Gliwice: Part III

2004-11-10T10:29:00.000-08:00

"Today," in the words of the immortal Ice Cube, "was a good day." For those of you who don't know the song or don't remember it, let me quote you the first quatrain:

Just waking up in the morning gotta thank God
I dunno, but today seems kinda odd:
No barking from the dog, no smog
And Momma cooked a breakfast with no hog!

Apart from the religious sentiment, it seems to me barely distinguishable from one of Cole Porter, Noel Coward or Lorenz Hart's light, easygoing bagatelles.

I wouldn't have said no to a spot of hog at the breakfast-table, but what I got was even better: mushroom soup. (Actually Poles, like Americans, generally prefer egg and cereal type things, with an occasional slab of tasty hog, but having been served liver for breakfast (sans bacon, let alone balsamic vinaigrette) in Russia, I'm "down for whatever.") Unlike most days (Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and most Saturdays), I didn't have to teach at 8 AM, so I had time to drink two leisurely cups of coffee and read two E.B. White essays, "Children's Books" and "Motor Cars," while drinking my coffee and eating my soup. Which put me in a relaxed mood when I arrived at school at 11:20 and allowed for an unusually congenial time with the generally withdrawn German Philology students.

Today all of Gliwice was resplendent with the old White and Red, rippling forth from window and facade-- no, not wine, you dipsomaniac ruffians, the Polish flag. Tomorrow's Independence Day in Poland, you see. And that, for our hero, means another FOUR DAY WEEKEND... o joy, o rapture unforeseen!

A word of explanation: Gliwice wasn't always Polish. Until the end of the Second World War it was called "Gleiwitz" and belonged to Germany. Whereupon the Germans were driven out on Stalin's orders to points west, and Poles in Lvov, a Polish city from time immemorial but appropriated by the USSR (specifically the Ukrainian SSR) at that point in time, were driven here-- the poet Zagajewski being a case in point. (For Zagajewski, Lvov was a kind of Shangri-La, Gliwice an incredibly dreary comedown; in point of fact, for me at age 12 Boulder was a kind of Shangri-La, and Washington, DC, my new home, a comedown; but does this say more about the respective cities or about the unpleasant human fact of adolescence, and the glorification of the past in its refracted lens? I often wonder about a similar refraction I see when I meet middle-aged Poles and Russians who wax nostalgic over Communism. Yes, things are pretty grim now, there's not the solidarity among ordinary people that there was before, but doesn't the fact that these people were then young (and single) which they aren't now also sweeten the view of the past? Maybe it's a banal observation, but remember, banality was promised from the start.)

Return we to our story. So Gliwice wasn't always Polish. But Silesia was always Silesian, as far as anyone can remember. The Silesian region has its own "dialect," although I'll be damned if isn't a bona fide language, combining elements of Polish and German, sometimes hybrid, yet sometimes remote from either. But Silesia was German territory, at least from the time when there was such a thing as "Germany" (late 19th century?), and there were a lot of Germans here. Now, there are almost none (some old couples can be spotted at restaurants on the town square in summer; they often have to use some kind of pidgin English to make themselves understood.)

Sixty-five years, two months and nine days ago, Gliwice was the tinderbox from which great evil was kindled: it was here that Hitler started the war. Some of you may have read in William Shirer's Rise and Fall of Adolf Hitler or elsewhere the passage in Hitler's diary or somewhere where he writes "I shall find a propaganda reason for the war...". Well, the "propaganda reason" was a fake "attack by Polish partisans" on the state-owned German radio tower in Gliwice, staged by SS men who brought corpses with them to leave at the scene, showing the viciousness of the Polish nationalists. The SS men "seized control" of the tower and broadcast in badly-accented Polish, "This radio station is now under Polish control!" If their accent was so fake, how could anyone fall for it? As Hitler said of his "propaganda reason," "It doesn't really matter."

So while you can't exactly compare Gliwice with Mount Doom where the one ring was forged (I guess that would be Vienna), it definitely has seen some dark deeds done in the night, though it actually suffered minimal damage during the war.

The radio tower still stands and is one of the more formidable sights in Gliwice. Zagajewski describes it as "an exact replica of the Eiffel Tower, in wood," but it's definitely much smaller, though it does remind one of the Eiffel. At night they light it up and it's quite stunning, apparently-- I confess I haven't gone to see it at night yet as it's far from my usual stomping-grounds. In the coming years there is going to be some kind of "Cosmic Object" there (a planetarium? unclear) and all kinds of pan-European scientific, scholarly and diplomatic conferences. But there is as I recall some kind of plaque right in front of the tower that says words to the effect of "We can forgive, but we won't forget."

Like all of Poland-- for that matter, like all of Europe-- Gliwice is a land of churches. The quasi-Gothic cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul, the stark All Saints' Church, the "War Veterans' Church" (just beside the black river, named for a priest-general from the war), and the small church on my way home from school, a broadly chiselled Madonna and Child protruding outward from the front, like the prow of a Viking boat, the church where my friend Tadek used to worship as a boy (he now attends Mass at a modern monstrosity in his neighborhood, Museum of Catholic Kitsch on the outside, school auditorium on the inside), are only a few examples.

But even putting the churches aside, there are some fine architectural specimens in town. Zagajewski describes most of the architecture as being "Prussian Secessionist" or something, and I guess he's right. But there is another name for some of it, and that's "Jugendstil" ("The Youth Style," a fin-de-siecle sensation you can see to spectacular effect in, for example, Riga, Latvia, or Ljubljana, Slovenia). Extravagant colors: mauve, salmon, amber and cornflower, appear as you navigate the backstreets of town, and faces begin to pop out of columns and parapets, implacable death-masks of cruel gods. The Post Office, on the other hand, is (on the outside) a gem of medieval Germanic gingerbread. On the inside.... I don't want to think or talk about it.

Ironically, many postcards of Gliwice emphasize the drab Brezhnev-era architecture of the Polytechnika, which in fact resembles some of the buildings on the CU-Boulder campus. Though sometimes those buildings can have a kind of elegiac charm, as a remnant of "what they thought the future would look like, back in 1962." One of my favorite examples of this type of thing is the building at the bottom of Columbus Circle in New York City.

In Gliwice, it's all about the river, man. If you forget about the smell (and sometimes the smell of exhaust from passing cars overpowers it), it's beautiful to look at. The first time I visited here, before I saw the Polytechnika or got to know the scene in any way, there was something deeply consoling and reassuring about the river. Its blackness makes you think of sculptures in black marble swerving and swiveling in its motion. And it's always fun to do something I learned how to do while staring at the Neva in St. Petersburg, and then honed while looking at the Boulder Creek: you stare long enough at the water, and you begin to feel that you're actually gliding forward through it on a ship.

A River Runs Through It, or: A Few Words About Gliwice: Part II

2004-11-06T06:41:00.000-08:00

The difference being that in Gliwice, the Tracksuit Guys make no pretense of going to school. There is, as far as I know, no official football team at the Politechnika, and the football fans here are what we Yanks would call soccer fans, or to be precise, hooligans, whose allegiance is claimed not by the PS (Politechnika Śląska) but by non-universitary professional teams like Visla (Wisła) and Piast (takes its name from a line of kings). In fact their allegiance is not to any team or player but to a two-pronged grand strategy: Getting Smashed and Smashing Faces. Anyone who has read Bill Buford's Among the Thugs, which for those who haven't I deliriously recommend as a barrel of terrifying laughs, will have some concept of the culture. Whether or not you accept the argument, made, if I'm not mistaken, by Buford in the book, that British hooligans are The Worst In The World.

Not that the Tracksuit Guys are all football hooligans or vice versa, but there is inevitably some overlap as the Tracksuit Guys' main occupations are drinking and fighting and the football hooligans' the same. The Tracksuit Guys are thuggish, just like the football fans, but unlike them, they are also generally well-built and accompanied by shapely blonde women who are either dizzyingly beautiful or Barbiesque to a repugnant extreme. This feature is highly reminiscent of Boulder. In Boulder, however, when one of these vulgarly appetizing (or should I say, appetizingly vulgar?) creatures had a tan, you would generally surmise she was from California; here in Gliwice, where tanning salons outnumber internet cafes something like 15 to 3, it's a pretty safe bet she has been under the lamp for a good many hours, unless perhaps her rich Tracksuit Guy has been able to spirit her away to Turkey or Egypt recently.

A week ago I was on my way to the internet cafe from work when a well-oiled T-Guy, red as a lobster, sitting in a parked car with two other well-lubricated G's and a fourth, the silent driver, a bit like the silent Fourth Droog in Clockwork Orange, whom I hope was at least middlingly sober, started hurling spiteful oaths at me, with the other two louts repeating the occasional fragment of his monologue in a kind of Call-and-Response reminiscent of the best work of The Supremes or Martha and the Vandellas. The gist of it was that I ought to be ashamed of myself for what I did the last time we had seen each other-- which in fact was never. However, I was grimly assured, we would meet again, and my hash would be properly settled. After a brief interchange wherein I nonchalantly protested my innocence, the dour quartet trundled off.

I was mildly disquieted by the incident for some time thereafter, going through a sequence of possibilities in my head: 1) Could it be possible that I had somewhere, somehow actually offended this man, by stepping on his foot accidentally and not apologizing or by appearing to flirt with or stare at his blonde? (No doubt he has one.) Could he have not shown his reaction at the time or could I have failed to notice it, and therefore not registered the slightest memory of his face? I deemed this highly improbable. 2) Could it be another instance supporting the Doppelganger theory I mentioned in the post called "Six Doubles" (just today, by the way, I saw another double, of a friend from NY; but I have to admit I've yet to see more than one double of someone, let alone six)? A Hitchcockian case of mistaken identity, a metaphysical transference of guilt? Possible, but also unlikely.

I decided, after conferring with Rafał (in the conversation where he outlined the dynamics of the conflict of cultures reported in last blog) and Janusz, the proprietor of the internet cafe, that in fact the most plausible analysis of the situation would reckon that it was

3) A stupid joke, perpetrated out of Tracksuit Guys' sheer love of stirring up a ruckus, which had fortunately not, in this case, curdled into actual bloodlust.

But I was somewhat shaken in the minutes following the exchange, which leads me to believe that, loudly though I may protest to the contrary, I have some hard-fighting vestigial belief in Original Sin left in me.

A Link for You

2004-11-06T01:14:00.000-08:00

Silly, but fun.

A River Runs Through It, or: A Few Words About Gliwice: Part I

2004-11-02T10:51:00.001-08:00

[Been taking it easy for a few days. We had a four-day weekend, a real joy for me as I usually work Friday evenings and Saturdays-- and we have another one coming up soon, yippee!!! Read a bunch, more on that later. Plus the Poles had All Saints' Day where they visit the graves of dead loved ones and remember them, and I tagged along for part of that, and then we had the election and so on, and a good friend and former student returned from England and that was exciting. I thought some people might be interested to know a little more about where exactly I am in space...]

The town where I currently (not "presently," for you half-literate hangers-on; that would mean, in English, "immediately" or "very soon") live and work is a town called Gliwice, pronouned "Glee-VEE-tse." As you can see from the top right hand corner of the page, it's in a place called Silesia, in the southwest of Poland-- Upper Silesia, to be precise. Silesia in Polish is "Shlonsk." It makes you think of an elephant's trunk, perhaps, even if you don't know that the word for elephant in Polish is "słon" (swon), in Russian "slon."

Gliwice has a population of about 200,000. A black river runs through the town, and it (the river) smells of shit, frankly. I thought this might be the result of postwar pollution until I read Adam Zagajewski's Two Cities, where he describes it as having been the same when he came here from Lvov right after the war. Students have told me that a plan is in the works to improve Ol' Man River's condition in the coming years, but I'm skeptical.

On the other hand, 70% of the town is lush green verdure, and it shows. If you talk to people in other parts of Poland, they won't believe you when you tell them that, but it's true. They'll shake their heads and say something like, "No, Upper Silesia is probably the most depressing, ugliest and poorest place in Poland." Which is flat wrong, as in fact anybody knows that the eastern regions bordering Byelorussia and Ukraine are the really grim parts of Poland. I guess part of the reason is Upper Silesia and Gliwice were always known for their coal mines, a pivotal feature of the economy here for many years. But that's now changed, as the coal mines were closed some years ago. As you would expect, many jobs were lost. But then the German car maker OPEL brought their factory here 6 years ago and there was much celebrating, as it brought new jobs. Apparently it didn't bring quite the boom that was hoped for, but most people have somehow been able to muddle through. Anyone for another statistic? Gliwice apparently is home, proportionally speaking, to the highest number of cellphones in Poland.

Gliwice's been compared to Grosse Pointe, MI, in that it's the somewhat nicer or less awful neighbor to a huge, ugly industrial city (here, Katowice; there, Detroit). But me it always somehow reminds of Boulder, where I grew up. It's like Boulder in that it's a college town, host to the Silesian Polytechnika or Polytechnic, a university with departments of everything from robotics to architecture to administration, but no humanities or arts.

And it's like Boulder in that there is a kind of sometimes not so merry war on here between different youth subcultures, as an acquaintance of mine from the internet cafe, one Rafał, was explaining to me the other day. Rafał, a Politechnika student of mixed Irish and Italian ancestry who looks Greek or Spanish, is a metalhead, and he was telling me how the metalheads and the punks can't stand each other. These two groups both tolerate the hippies, of whom there are less than I remember there being in Boulder, but when you look at them it's sometimes hard to tell the hippies and the metalheads apart. The metalheads just want to listen to their music, man; the punks are for total destruction of the established order, anarchy is freedom, man. The hippies presumably just want to smoke pot and make love, not war. But nobody likes the "Tracksuit Guys," or as we might call them, "jocks," and they don't like anybody else.

Bread with Lard

2004-10-28T10:00:00.000-07:00

Needless to say, I've had a number of lapses from the fish-salad-soup regime I laid out herein some weeks ago, but I don't regret any of them, as it was never meant to be an absolutist regime: "Moderation in all things, including moderation," is my creed. A goulash here, a stuffed cabbage there... and in due time we return to the Golden Fish. "If You Lose Your Mind, Come Back" was the slogan of Shambhala Sun Summer Camp.

I try to avoid drinking in the afternoon, but the pub on the corner of the street where I live offers free slices of bread with lard until 5 PM, and today I simply couldn't resist having a pint of beer and a few slices of larded bread as I read another few pages of King Jesus by Robert Graves, a secular, but fanciful account of Jesus' life, full of dry yet intriguing arcana: it reads like another addendum to The Lord of the Rings, written by the Oscar Wilde who wrote "Salome," on quaaludes.

Speaking (I was a minute ago) of "Food, Glorious, Food," in a fit of whimsy I looked up Mark Lester, the actor who played Oliver in the film Oliver! (though he first achieved wide acclaim as "Jiminy, who stuttered" in Our Mother's House), on IMDb. It turns out that like most child actors he dropped acting after a few years and is now an osteopath, married to another osteopath. How lovely! I then looked up Jack Wild, who played the Artful Dodger-- he stucked with acting, but it's been a rocky road. You may have seen him as "Much the Miller's Son" in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. The only film I had seen him in besides Oliver!, though I don't remember his part, was Jacques' Demy's The Pied Piper, one of my absolute top 20 or so favorite films, though I've only seen it once (don't think it's yet available on video or DVD). You definitely have to see it if you get the chance. It's the saddest, truest fairly tale you'll ever see on the big screen.

On another note: Jesus, the execrable music in this internet cafe is, quite simply, intolerably loud and intrusive. I completely forgot the brilliant segue I had planned... sorry.

Now I Do Repent Me of My Fury

2004-10-27T13:09:00.001-07:00

If there's anyone self-satisfied and self-aggrandizing, I suppose it's me, in particular in the pages of this blog so far. So while I have no worthwhile way of making amends to my students who don't know I've insulted them herein, I can offer something to Jesus, whether he reads this blog or not, to show that I see the worth in his way. It comes from Oscar Wilde (who else?), from his De Profundis... it touches on the place, the wound I should say, where all faiths meet:

... For the secret of life is suffering. It is what is hidden behind everything. When we begin to live, what is sweet is so sweet to us, and what is bitter so bitter, that we inevitably direct all our desires towards pleasures, and seek not merely for a 'month or twain to feed on honeycomb,' but for all our years to taste no other food, ignorant all the while that we may really be starving the soul.

I remember talking once on this subject to one of the most beautiful personalities I have ever known: a woman, whose sympathy and noble kindness to me, both before and since the tragedy of my imprisonment, have been beyond power and description; one who has really assisted me, though she does not know it, to bear the burden of my troubles more than any one else in the whole world has, and all through the mere fact of her existence, through her being what she is-- partly an ideal and partly an influence: a suggestion of what one might become as well as a real help towards becoming it; a soul that renders the common air sweet, and makes what is spiritual seem as simple and natural as sunlight or the sea: one for whom beauty and sorrow walk hand in hand, and have the same message. On the occasion of which I am thinking I recall distinctly how I said to her that there was enough suffering in one narrow London lane to show that God did not love man, and that wherever there was any sorrow, though but that of a child, in some little garden weeping over a fault that it had or had not committed, the whole face of creation was completely marred. I was entirely wrong. She told me so, but I could not believe her. I was not in the sphere in which such belief was to be attained to. Now it seems to me that love of some kind is the only possible explanation of the extraordinary amount of suffering that there is in the world. I cannot conceive of any other explanation.

This Was A Man

2004-10-26T09:24:00.000-07:00

Did you know that JFK gave his entire salary to charity, from the time he entered Congress in 1947 to the time he died? Just learned this from reading Ben Bradlee's Conversations With Kennedy. The charities were: the Girl Scouts, the Boy Scouts, the United Negro College Fund, Boys Club of America, National Association for Retarded Children, Girls Club of America, and Federation of Jewish Philanthropies. And Paul Johnson in his History of the American People said Kennedy was "mean," as if he'd known him. Of course Jackie wasn't too happy about it...

Anyway, makes you think.

Varian and the Bulgarian

2004-10-24T05:08:00.000-07:00

More thoughts on finding another personality through a second language, et al.

When I was working as a secretary at the United Methodist Office for the UN (UMOUN) in the Church Center for the UN, across the street from the UN itself, a job I acquired thanks to my passable French, I decided to avail myself of the Russian classes available at the world institution. I had already studied Russian on and off for about 6 years, but was deeply dissatisfied with my progress, plus I had an ulterior motive: I was thinking about applying to graduate school in either History, Area Studies, or Slavic Languages and Literatures, so I knew it would help me to brush up on my grammar and hopefully learn some new words. As usual, there were students of different levels together in one class (Level 7), so things moved slowly. But it was all worth it for the charming story that we read and listened to in class one day about a low-level Bulgarian office worker, one Vylnarov, who went to Lisbon as an interpreter for a tour group and became something of a celebrity there. The source of his fame: without knowing a word of Portuguese to begin with, he had memorized all the words in the phrasebook:

The guide greeting the newly arrived tour group addressed them in Portuguese:
"How do you feel after the long flight?"
The tourists looked at Vylnarov. He replied, without missing a beat:
"Wonderful, good, not so good, bad, tired, sick."
The guide and the others greeting them noted his clever joke with appreciation. Two beautiful brunettes presented Vylnarov with roses.
"Is this medicine to be taken internally or externally?" Vylnarov asked.
He was rewarded with another burst of laughter. The director of the tour agency was immediately informed that a famous comedian had traveled incognito with the tour group.
....... [then, in the restaurant:]
"What would you like, sir?" the waiter asked respectfully.
This question was familiar to Vylnarov. He answered, without a pause:
"I will have one (two, three, four) steak (schnitzel, roast beef, lamb, chicken, sausage with cabbage)."
The director laughed heartily and raised his glass to the health of his dear guest:
"I wish to welcome the famous Bulgarian humorist," he said.
"I am an engineer (metallurgist, miner, farmer, singer, ballerina, dental technician..."
Laughter and applause drowned out his words.

The story ends on a note of melancholy, however. When poor old Vylnarov comes back to Bulgaria, he feels like just another ordinary working slob again. Around the time that we read that in class I read something on the internet about Varian Fry, the American diplomat responsible for saving numerous European cultural luminaries from the fires of the Holocaust. Like Vylnarov, Fry had been placed in a uniquely wonderful position in his exile (with the difference that he provided the joy not of laughter, but of survival), and when he returned to some desk job in America he felt once again like quite the ordinary, unexciting fellow whom he was, a profoundly depressing experience for him.

I am fascinated by the way that another language, another country, another gender, or another identity of any kind can awaken a sleeping tiger of hidden potentialities in a person: look at Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie, Johnny Depp in Donnie Brasco and Dead Man, Michael Redgrave in The Captive Heart, Tatsyuda Nakadai in Kagemusha, Kim Novak in Vertigo, Keanu Reeves in Point Break, Gerard Depardieu in The Return of Martin Guerre, Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis in Some Like it Hot (and look at Shakespeare's As You Like It, Twelfth Night, etc.), among many others. I've talked with my brother Nick about these films as being "films about acting," and if you go back to the origins of theatre in Dionysian rite, you find that the very source of it was this blurring of identity, this rejoicing in the collapse of the barrier between Self and Other, which is at the crux of these films. The superhero myths also, that is, Batman and Spiderman, not Superman (who as Clark Kent is a tragic hero descending to farce, as discussed in Kill Bill, vol. 2), trace a similar trajectory.

But surely it's unhealthy to seek release or power in escaping from the self? Yes, as unhealthy as deluding oneself that one's "proper self" isn't susceptible to change.