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The Man in the Wooden Hat

Inglourious Basterds

I'm no enormous Tarantino fan -- the train started and stopped at Pulp Fiction for me -- but I thought this was a tremendous movie, mostly for the extraordinary performance of Christopher Waltz, who managed to in three languages to be the most menacing, attractive, complex antagonist I think I've seen in film in years. If he hadn't been a Nazi, I would think he would have been nominated for Best Actor.

The three languages thing, for me, was a big deal. Sure, Brad Pitt's a cutie, and I understand he studied for months with a serious Ozark Mountains dialogue coach so he could sound so convincingly Carolina as he did -- but come on! Waltz sounded menancing and competent and human and believable in THREE ROMANCE LANGUAGES -- I'm quite sure he didn't need an "accent" coach in any of them.

The Tin Drum - new translation by Breon Mitchell

This will not comment on the new translation, too much: having read in the early 1980s, the original acclaimed Ralph Manheim translation originally published in 1959, I can't pretend to remember that version clearly enough to compare the two, although my copious excited undergraduate notes in the margin bear witness to how struck I was with the language of whatever the original might be. All I can do is compare my original underlinings with the same passages in the new one.

Mitchell, to his credit and to my slight discomfort, adds an intriguing afterword about the differences between the two translations. He wants to make clear that there were things in the original manuscript that just couldn't be printed in 1959 (although not that many, as one of Grass's multitude of prodigious literary gifts is his ability to lyrically and cryptically euphemize without quite having to hand you the keys to the car -- Martin Amis comes to mind, among others, although I'm sure both Amis and Grass would point to Nabokov as the more unitary model in dressing up one's salaciousness). Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman also comes to mind, since we hear the narrator's voice incessantly on every detail of existence preceding his birth, although he is not born until the end of chapter 3 ("Besides, the nurse had already cut my umbilical cord. There was nothing more to be done" in the original, substitute a semi-colon for the period after "cord" in the new translation. Can you hear me now? Mitchell seems to be saying.)

Or, for instance, in the original, "As always where the future of Poland is at stake, the Virgin Mary was in on the proceedings" has become "As always when the future of Poland was at stake, the Virgin Mary appeared in the crowds at these conflagrations," leading me easily to pick the former over the latter, going with easy colloquialism of Manheim over the anti-slanging of Mitchell. "Impersonating a meat-colored baby" is now "Impersonating a reddish blue baby." Little stuff like that. To Mitchell's credit, he does claim to have restored Grass's original long sentences in many places that Manheim had turned to a series of short sentences, softening some of Grass's rhapsodical, poetic stretches as a way of introducing him to a large American audienc. The long sentences as paragraphs are great stuff, and seem totally authentic to Grass's intent.

My notes of old go some distance in proving that, in 1981, I was struck by the forest, not the trees: I liked quotes, back then, stuff that could be plucked out and read aloud, as aphorisms. And there are certainl lots of them. But reading it now, relatively quickly, utterly sober, it is the sweep of the narrative that amazes me, and the intricate realistic sculpture of the landscape of Danzig, what Grass refers to as the "provincialism" of his novel, in his preface, where he also recalls wondering as a 29 year old why any self-respecting publisher would be interested in such a story steeped in a small-town locale like Danzig.

Faith Fox by Jane Gardham

Homeless Photographs by Tom Stone

http://tomstonegallery.com/

The Restraint of Beasts

This is a very funny, very dark and very powerful book. Kafka isn't the exact forbear, but he's up there in the tree someplace. For me the more immediate touchstone is Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman, one of my very favorite novels. It concerns a fencing business in Scotland. The narrator has just been named foreman of a three-man team, by his efficient and stern boss, who is interested only in the improvement of the art of putting up cattle fences. The foreman tried to control his team of sullen, silent, lazy and disturbed workers, but to no avail. The plot revolves around (spoiler) the manslaughters they commit each of the three times they are sent on a job to either construct or create a farmer's cattle fence. It's hard to describe, obviously. And doesn's parse well into quotable moments, as the whole narrative

The Rivalry at Ford's Theatre

AMERICA Magazine's Outstanding Catholic Chief Executive of 2009

Michael Sean Winter's named Governor Martin O'Malley of Maryland as 2009's Catholic Executive of the Year (now that's a weird-looking trophy, one would guess), and blogged about it in AMERICA magazine here.

I added a comment in defense at the bottom of a chain of pro-lifer's complaints about Governor O'Malley's perceived "inaction" on abortion.

The Fallen Idol, directed by Carol Reed

Pure pleasure. From the director of The Third Man. Monumental score, creepy little touches everywhere, exquisite casting, and a happy ending.

Ralph Richardson is heartbreaking as the butler, earnest, witty, caring, and love-lost. The boy, played by Bobby Henrey, is wondrous. The tightly-plotted mystery can't help but bring to mind Hitchcock.

The Final Solution by Michael Chabon

The Given Day by Dennis Lehane

"As he often did when he left a place and his body was leaden with booze, he felt fat and orphaned."

"Two engineers walked behind him, talking about a busted flange, how it was going to take two hours, maybe three, to fix, and Ruth though, Two hours in this shithole? and then he heard it again -- a dry distant crack, and he knew that on the other side of those trees someone was playing baseball."

The Gathering by Anne Enright

It took me three different false starts, but I finally read The Gathering by Anne Enright (no relation, goddamnit) and found it, finally, very powerful, very moving.

That said, the first person narrator is one of the most singularly unpleasant voices I've ever head. Negative is her only tune.

This Side of Brightness by Colum McCann

War Bird by David Gewanter

War Bird, David Gewanter (Phoenix Poets: the University of Chicago Press, 2009) (review originally published in Tikkun Magazine) (Buy it)

As a wounded Afghanistan veteran has it in an email home in David Gewanter’s poem, “American Incognito,” “As a state…/Afghanistan is next to Mars.” Where does the imagination live, and what are its politics? In “Hamlet of Merano: The Lotus Eaters,” Gewanter plays with the roles of tour guide and literary historian, knotting together a poem from strands of history and literature, but makes something new of the aggrandizing narcotic of the place itself. The reader can live in a verbal space greater than physical perception or emotional recognition, in the fires sparked by juxtaposition. A town in the Alps between Italy and Germany, Merano is not only a geographic border, but also a cultural and historical one. Gewanter’s poem is an extraordinary guide to a Merano not in any record, one that hides in imagination’s untouchable shadow, ideal and replete. Pound wrote part of The Cantos in Merano; Kafka went there as a cure for tuberculosis (“even Kafka, scowling like Bogart/came to Merano once, for the waters…”, a wondrous quoting of the film Casablanca, which captures the film’s droll irony, as Rick says to Captain Renault, “I came to Casablanca for the waters,” and Renault replies, “The waters? What waters? We're in the desert,” to which Rick replies, “I was misinformed.”)

In the poem’s present tense, undergrad tourists (“… the ox-eyed/girls of Appalachia College (study abroad)/stretch for the castle’s champagne grapes, /or play hacky sack in short-shorts…/O to be a grape underfoot–”) are subordinated to the history of the place. Gewanter summons the Lotus Easters of Homer, Herodotus, and Tennyson, and the mystical plant that Homer’s sailors eat, that kills their desire to return to the ship, and keeps them locked in their dreams: “The eye sees what it remembers,/the imagination dreams its rut/is fresh, not tragical-comical-historical…/Who, pocketing the chilly grapes, would not/name himself king here,/and forget who is king?

We’re used to reading political philosophy, history, and cultural objects as themselves first--that is, as definite “non-fiction” texts that revel in linearity and objectivity. Journalism lassoes a topic at best with a fine sprinkling of detail. Gewanter uses politics, history, and culture, but not objectively: he proclaims his poems; character or setting lead, and develop in tone from the set of a character’s mouth, the suggestive atmosphere or shape of a landscape. His diction and associations trip you up and force you back to chaotic juxtapositions built within, or by, sentences; his syntax creates a history of his imagination, which we read as an imagining of our history.

In “1972: The Battery,” the weather, adolescent political feelings and sexual maturation (“the battery hums along the leg”), conspire with the first hints of adult ennui in the American summer of the Cambodian incursion. Two high school boys, the “Billboard Bandits,” are electrocuted during one of their pranks, and their school becomes a battleground. When the bombing in Cambodia begins, the radical students want to leave the flag at half-mast, their private grief for the Billboard Bandits mutating into a public outcry over the political decision. At end, the hippies and the football players face off in an American political contest in miniature, over keeping the flag down in shame, or up high in pride.

“American Incognito,” a startling longer poem, unites wounded Iraq war veterans at Walter Reed hospital, the discovery of the spine of a prehistoric beast found in Washington, DC in 1898, and a primer on breeding hawks. It’s an anguished political howling. A wounded vet who once burned poppies in Afghanistan now finds comfort and forgetfulness only in his morphine treatment (“gorked on pain relief cocktails”). And in the momentous year 2001 when the poem is set, the future that did happen wasn’t “monkeys talking” as in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Rather, history stepped ahead all over our dreams for it, ridiculously (in the honoring of a Capitolosaurus dinosaur which never really was), politically (in the confused, negating tenure of George W. Bush), and tragically (in a chilling 9-11 reference to the moment “when Mohammed Atta decides he cannot date a waitress”). Soldiers patrol in a dust storm in Iraq, a scene crosscut with George W. Bush’s DUI and Laura Bush’s “vehicular manslaughter” conviction in high school (“the car found guilty”).

Gewanter shows great range to superb effect: from “Baudelaire’s Day Book (September, 1993: The Cauliflower)”--an imagistic prose-poem of a death-bed vigil--to “War Bird: A Journal,” a mad riffing on the 2003 poets’ anti-war rally at the White House, in response to Laura Bush’s politically-minded cancellation of a poetry “salon”. There there’s “Desaparecidos: The Unspeakable,” a playful poem about modern critical poetical thinking that is also a moving elegy for the silence real grief imposes, when language fails us.

The poems are funny, vicious and swirling, many politically motivated, their ironic language lobbying for connections between strata of meanings. How do politics and history and culture sound in the subjective, as something spoken by the poet who cares about the texture of language, the privileged placement of sound and sense, above a layer of “meaning?” Gewanter’s history feels personal, a history he creates consciously in the present, as a preparation for the future. We want some of our poems, at least, to be beyond knowing, larger than plot-driven, not necessarily lessons in how to feel or what to see, but voices we catch and chase, like a drowsy consciousness drifting toward sleep, suddenly sharply awake, enlightened or puzzled by possibility.

All Aunt Hagar's Children by Edward P. Jones

I'm reading All Aunt Hagar's Children, Edward P. Jones' second short story collection. It's good, depressing, dense, etc. The DC stuff amazes me, this whole rich novelistic life of the streets. He's got a particularly crushing line in the story "Root Worker" about my high school:

"Long before they reached 1st, N.E., Glynnis found that so much had changed, disappeared, but everything that was important to white people remained. Gonzaga High School. The railroad. After 1st Street, she saw that many of the places she had known as a girl were still standing, and that gave her heart some relief."

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest

The final installment, not out in America until May. I broke down and bought it from Amazon UK. Fully worthy part three, inconceivable to me that he could sustain it over three length novels. This one concerns a shadowy government organization, sort of intelligence-ish, that runs foreign spies who've sought asylum in Sweden. More soon. Let's hope Hollywood doesn't t fuck up the movies.

Winter's Bone

Daniel Woodrell sure can write a sentence. He manages, in Winter's Bone, not only to come up with a convincing, emotionally-taut plot, but his lean, beautiful prose makes the entire journey through the Ozark white-trash countryside a wonder. His protagonist, 16 year old Rees Dolly, searches for her missing father, who has defaulted on a jail bond, unwittingly putting the house at risk for repossession where Rees lives in with her demented mother and two younger brothers. Rees is a supergirl, taking care of her charges tenderly and completely, teaching her younger brothers to shoot a gun in the fear that they will need the skill much sooner than later. Her relatives, a sprawling, vicious, secretive and ancient Ozarks clan, threaten her, succor her, and ultimately confound her in her search.

August: Osage County by Tracy Letts

The Zero by Jess Walter

Best book about September 11 that I've seen so far.

I could not put it down, but still felt peckish and discerning as if
something in the narrative tension lessened along the way. The first half was very classic modern noir, sort of Jonathan Lethem, GUN WITH OCCASIONAL MUSIC and the film MEMENTO, but the second half dissolved into Delillo-ish trumped-up profundities. I missed his partner's presence (he jumps back in at the very end, but I liked him a lot), and I just sort of auto- read after I realized that the plot was also, ultimately, going to be beyond the protagonist's grasp too.