Occasionally, it's a good idea to pick up a book for which you have no frame of reference. It can serve as an education, a corrective to bad assumptions, or just a nice diversion from your usual reading. I know very little about European football (soccer) and have virtually no knowledge of the English leagues, which was why David Peace's novel was not only an introduction but also as something much deeper. It also serves as the basis for a movie starring Michael Sheen.
Peace, more well known perhaps for his crime noir Red Riding quartet and his reputation as a British James Ellroy, takes as the novel's subject the short, turbulent career of football manager Brian Clough heading his long-time nemesis, Leeds United. The story is told from Clough's point of view, in short, clipped, often vulgar stretches of self-flaggelation and rage. It isn't necessary to know the backstory to appreciate very early on the stakes.
Clough, a footballer whose career ended prematurely due to injury, becomes the manager of Derby County and quickly gains a reputation as a brilliant manager. His nemesis, though, is Don Revie's Leeds United, a championship club he holds in the utmost scorn for what he perceives as their dirty play. He is publicly critical of them and their manager while at the same time building his own legend in Derby. When he is forced out in Derby, he becomes Leeds' unlikely hire after Revie takes the England manager's job.
From there, Clough embarks on a whirlwind 44 days as manager, trying to change the character of the team while at the same time hating what he has inherited. It is Peace's achievement in this novel to tell both stories of Clough's rise and fall simultaneously, showing the seeds of his downfall in his rise. Constantly, Peace's Clough understands it's not his team, but Revie's. There is no changing them, and even as he tries to lead them, he still hates them. Even a reader with no interest in soccer can appreciate the humanity in the observation, "They love me for what I'm not. They hate me for what I am."
Clough does not believe in God, but he does believe in sport, which makes him believe in himself. It's easy to recognize the familiar egotism that runs through virtually every athlete. The idea that particular teams can be cursed, that the game can help one overcome life, that to beat an opponent is in some ways a moral exercise. "You believe in football; in the repetition of football; the repetition within each game, within each season, within the history of each club, the history of the game - "
But again and again, life intrudes to recalibrate what Clough feels about himself and the game, and the games outside the game. The turning point comes when Clough's mother dies. She isn't really a character in the novel (indeed, characters in the novel mostly serve as foils for the portrait of Clough that emerges) but it is her death which begins the descent that eventually carries him to Leeds, "The end of anything good. The beginning of everything bad..." Clough doesn't believe in an afterlife, no heaven, no hell, no God, nothing, but after her death, "for once in your life, just this once, you wish you were wrong."
Clough, in real life, went on to once again achieve success with Nottingham Forest, becoming the sort of sports figure for whom statues are erected. Peace's novel though reminds us that even the worlds we create within our world -entertainment, sports, business - all seek to operate outside life according to rules of effort, and fairplay. Rules we devise. And yet, even there, the ball seems to bounce against us, no matter what strategies we devise, what defenses we deploy, whatever trophies we think we may capture.
Friday, June 19, 2009
Saturday, May 9, 2009
A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez by Selena Roberts
Last night, Alex Rodriguez returned to the New York Yankees' lineup after recovering from surgery. He took the first pitch he saw from the Baltimore Orioles' starter and parked it in left field for a home run, thereby demonstrating several things - his credentials as a major leaguer and why he should be the subject of a controversial biography, and the ability of a crowd to forgive a man who can hit a baseball over a fence.
"A-Rod" is not really a sports biography in a real sense, any more than Kitty Kelley's biographies were history. "A-Rod" is a celebrity biography, a beach read that gives a superficial dusting of biographical facts for anyone curious about its subject. It was in that spirit that I came to the book. It would be impossible to ignore the obvious hype around its speculations that Rodriguez may have used steroids as early as high school to gain an edge on the diamond, that he "tipped" pitches to opposing teams, that he has alienated his teammates over the years with prima donna behavior in various clubhouses.
I say speculations though - not revelations - because Roberts relies so heavily on speculation and innuendo as to undercut the case she makes. Anonymous sources carry the heavy lifting in this story, and Roberts places the greatest weight in the narrative on what they have to say. The prose is replete with loaded words and exclusionary thinking, all focused on Roberts' premise - that there is no real A-Rod, just an amalgam of shifting personalities tuned to whatever the demands of the moment are. Rodriguez can be humble when talking to a reporter and monomaniacal when dealing through his agent. He can be humble at the All-Star Game when giving up his position to Cal Ripkin Jr., or selfish in announcing new contract demands during the final game of the World Series. "The truth was that Alex's baseball career and almost every other part of his life consisted of one artifice atop another," Roberts writes.
That sentence illustrates the problem with this book - those are Roberts' conclusions. She finds others who will back them up, but not enough to successfully convict. She shouldn't be making those conclusions as the author, but quoting someone else who will. The narrative voice has "inside" information that we doubt she could know - many times we are treated to A-Rod's "thoughts" when we know she can't possibly have them (how can she, if Rodriguez is the shape-shifter she says he is?)
That's not to say the entire book is a fabrication. Obviously not. Alex Rodriguez has long been dogged by accusations that he is too selfish a player, too needy, too focused on statistics to ever gain the fan acceptance and reputation he would need to accomplish what he longs for - a world title. And in light of the Manny Ramirez suspension, the idea of A-Rod relying on performance enhancing drugs isn't at all implausible. In that, he seems the latest example of his species - the modern professional athlete, with otherworldly talents but all-too-human frailties. But that should engender a measure of disappointment, not the kind of personal distaste that Selena Roberts revels in between the pages of this book. This is a nasty book, a vicious, personal screed where the author seems to think her subject guilty of much more despicable things that one can find between its covers. Leaving its journalistic integrity aside, one wonders what might have inspired it. If there is more to this story, it should have been nailed down more precisely than it is here.
On the issue of steroids itself - it is now obvious that both the owners and players of Major League Baseball colluded, whether by design or accident, in the steroid use of the last 20 or so years. We have now entered a climate where sports journalists, using sources of varying veracity, are seeking to expose the users and thereby render judgment on whether their accomplishments are "real." This is an endless, ridiculous quest, and it won't result in any kind of satisfaction if any end is ever reached. The records, broken and set by steroid users, are there. They happened. To decide which ones we will recognize and ignore after the fact is to render a moral judgment that I think is outside the bounds of the discussion, especially since it's being rendered by journalists who are not exactly disinterested observers, as this book proves. The athletes who are the subject of sports journalism are, unfortunately, human, and while undeserving of the salaries and adulation they garner, they also don't deserve a witchhunt which won't punish fairly or totally and will only diminish both the games journalists cover and the profession they practice.
One last point - Roberts, in the act of telling this story, renders a moral judgment on Rodriguez's life. That's obvious. That's why we - and Roberts - pay attention when A-Rod courts Madonna or when he indulges in celebrity Kabbalah clinics. It's an old story. It's the nagging feeling that being the highest-paid player in the history of the game isn't enough, and will not satisfy. When A-Rod's trainer tells him he's leaving, fed up with the celebrity behavior, Rodriguez asks him what he wants. "I'll give you whatever you want," Roberts tells us A-Rod said.
We shouldn't be surprised when the trainer, who has worked for Rodriguez for 10 years, hands him a slip of paper bearing the words - Find Jesus.
"A-Rod" is not really a sports biography in a real sense, any more than Kitty Kelley's biographies were history. "A-Rod" is a celebrity biography, a beach read that gives a superficial dusting of biographical facts for anyone curious about its subject. It was in that spirit that I came to the book. It would be impossible to ignore the obvious hype around its speculations that Rodriguez may have used steroids as early as high school to gain an edge on the diamond, that he "tipped" pitches to opposing teams, that he has alienated his teammates over the years with prima donna behavior in various clubhouses.
I say speculations though - not revelations - because Roberts relies so heavily on speculation and innuendo as to undercut the case she makes. Anonymous sources carry the heavy lifting in this story, and Roberts places the greatest weight in the narrative on what they have to say. The prose is replete with loaded words and exclusionary thinking, all focused on Roberts' premise - that there is no real A-Rod, just an amalgam of shifting personalities tuned to whatever the demands of the moment are. Rodriguez can be humble when talking to a reporter and monomaniacal when dealing through his agent. He can be humble at the All-Star Game when giving up his position to Cal Ripkin Jr., or selfish in announcing new contract demands during the final game of the World Series. "The truth was that Alex's baseball career and almost every other part of his life consisted of one artifice atop another," Roberts writes.
That sentence illustrates the problem with this book - those are Roberts' conclusions. She finds others who will back them up, but not enough to successfully convict. She shouldn't be making those conclusions as the author, but quoting someone else who will. The narrative voice has "inside" information that we doubt she could know - many times we are treated to A-Rod's "thoughts" when we know she can't possibly have them (how can she, if Rodriguez is the shape-shifter she says he is?)
That's not to say the entire book is a fabrication. Obviously not. Alex Rodriguez has long been dogged by accusations that he is too selfish a player, too needy, too focused on statistics to ever gain the fan acceptance and reputation he would need to accomplish what he longs for - a world title. And in light of the Manny Ramirez suspension, the idea of A-Rod relying on performance enhancing drugs isn't at all implausible. In that, he seems the latest example of his species - the modern professional athlete, with otherworldly talents but all-too-human frailties. But that should engender a measure of disappointment, not the kind of personal distaste that Selena Roberts revels in between the pages of this book. This is a nasty book, a vicious, personal screed where the author seems to think her subject guilty of much more despicable things that one can find between its covers. Leaving its journalistic integrity aside, one wonders what might have inspired it. If there is more to this story, it should have been nailed down more precisely than it is here.
On the issue of steroids itself - it is now obvious that both the owners and players of Major League Baseball colluded, whether by design or accident, in the steroid use of the last 20 or so years. We have now entered a climate where sports journalists, using sources of varying veracity, are seeking to expose the users and thereby render judgment on whether their accomplishments are "real." This is an endless, ridiculous quest, and it won't result in any kind of satisfaction if any end is ever reached. The records, broken and set by steroid users, are there. They happened. To decide which ones we will recognize and ignore after the fact is to render a moral judgment that I think is outside the bounds of the discussion, especially since it's being rendered by journalists who are not exactly disinterested observers, as this book proves. The athletes who are the subject of sports journalism are, unfortunately, human, and while undeserving of the salaries and adulation they garner, they also don't deserve a witchhunt which won't punish fairly or totally and will only diminish both the games journalists cover and the profession they practice.
One last point - Roberts, in the act of telling this story, renders a moral judgment on Rodriguez's life. That's obvious. That's why we - and Roberts - pay attention when A-Rod courts Madonna or when he indulges in celebrity Kabbalah clinics. It's an old story. It's the nagging feeling that being the highest-paid player in the history of the game isn't enough, and will not satisfy. When A-Rod's trainer tells him he's leaving, fed up with the celebrity behavior, Rodriguez asks him what he wants. "I'll give you whatever you want," Roberts tells us A-Rod said.
We shouldn't be surprised when the trainer, who has worked for Rodriguez for 10 years, hands him a slip of paper bearing the words - Find Jesus.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Frost/Nixon vs. Frost/Nixon
What would a previous generation think of our obsession with the ghost of Richard Nixon, which now goes on in the artistic world? He was castigated in his lifetime as a plastic man, incapable of human emotion; a bloodless, small-minded crook who cheapened the nation's institutions, seemingly out of frustrated resentments going back to high school? Yet he appears in movie after movie, is a constant laughline, has even been animated in "Futurama," has remained in our consciousness in a way no one might have guessed back in 1974. Perhaps we miss him still.
The latest example is the Ron Howard movie "Frost/Nixon," starring Frank Langella as the latest screen incarnation of the thirty-seventh president of the United States. It's based on a Peter Morgan play, which also starred Langella and his opposite number, Michael Sheen, as the interviewer David Frost. Peter Morgan, who also produced the screenplay, is the screenwriter of "The Queen" and scripted "The Last King of Scotland."
A series of television interviews might not make for gripping theater, but the Nixon/Frost interviews (as they were previously known) were theater of their own, and they were gripping. What Morgan did was take the obvious story - of Nixon's first attempt at rehabilitation - and marry it to the story of Frost, as a frustrated entertainer angling for respectability, fame, and what our current age refers to as "gravitas." By putting Frost's name first, he shows us the entertainer, the one asking the question, is now more important than the one who is being questioned.
Langella does a serviceable Nixon, giving the gentle side of Nixon in ashes, though I think the definitive screen Nixon was provided by Anthony Hopkins in Oliver Stone's movie. Langella's Nixon at times lapses into a bellicosity and plainspoken rhythm that seems false when compared to the real man. The real Nixon, strangely enough, presents a dilemma for the dramatist. Viewed in retrospect, the many aspects of Nixon's legend - the sweaty upper lip, the shifty eyes, the anger - were much more subtle in real life than a motion picture is capable of showing. Hopkins wisely chose to give us an outward picture of the internal soul wrestling we could distinguish in the real Nixon. Langella's Nixon is already broken, but he remains a proud man who isn't yet ready to bow to the demands of the historical record.
The Frost character undergoes the biggest transformation from play to movie. In the play, Frost was the other boxer in the ring, a Rocky who gets his unexpected date with the prize fighter and bests him. This survives, but Frost's "lightweight" credentials, his fecklessness, come forward more and somehow make him less of an adversary. He seems more of a spectator in the film. The boxing metaphor, which survives, feels inadequate, at least until the end, when we have the inevitable montage of the previously disengaged Frost suddenly cramming the night before the final Watergate interview like Sylvester Stallone on the heavy bag.
The play, I think, is superior to the movie because of its brevity. The movie also feels the need to quickly dismiss Nixon from the stage after a final meeting between the two, giving him a dismissive ending that doesn't quite match what comes before. The film has spent two hours convincing us of a certain amount of grandeur in this frustrating man, but he receives an unsatisfactory epitaph. Frost goes off to renewed celebrity, but he need only look at Nixon to understand how long it may last. The play was tight, while the film wants to be about more than it is.
The reason we're treated to Nixon yet again, of course, has more to do with the present than the past. As several extras on the DVD make clear, "Frost/Nixon" has direct bearing on our own late political age, the age of George W. Bush. As one of the participants in the real "Frost-Nixon" interviews observes, Nixon's defense that "when the President does it, that means that it is not illegal" is just as relevant in the shadow of waterboarding, Abu Gharib, and warrantless wiretapping. There's a fundamental problem this this logic.
In the play, Reston, one of Frost's researchers and one of Nixon's harshest critics, laments his time in a California hotel room, trapped with a television constantly replaying the same skin flicks. "Is there anything more depressing as a porno the second time around?" he asks. Watergate, in effect, was porn for all those who hated Nixon. It paraded his worst character flaws and transformed them to national legends, and it cemented the worst suspicions about Nixon's party in the national consciousness.
With Bush, the skin flick seemingly gets a second national viewing. But the audience at the end of "Frost/Nixon" probably feels some sympathy for the fallen president who gropes toward an apology at the end. Morgan wisely avoids the kind of demonization all too evident in the last eight years. By replaying Watergate and reexamining its chief actor, we are reminded that our national obsessions only reveal for us that the monster in the palace often looks a lot more like us than we want to admit, and the hatred they engender is because they remind us of the fallacy of faith in heroes. We question them, but the answers don't seem to ever satisfy. It's a point worth remembering as the hysteria fades and we embrace another leader with ever more urgent needs for a savior.
The latest example is the Ron Howard movie "Frost/Nixon," starring Frank Langella as the latest screen incarnation of the thirty-seventh president of the United States. It's based on a Peter Morgan play, which also starred Langella and his opposite number, Michael Sheen, as the interviewer David Frost. Peter Morgan, who also produced the screenplay, is the screenwriter of "The Queen" and scripted "The Last King of Scotland."
A series of television interviews might not make for gripping theater, but the Nixon/Frost interviews (as they were previously known) were theater of their own, and they were gripping. What Morgan did was take the obvious story - of Nixon's first attempt at rehabilitation - and marry it to the story of Frost, as a frustrated entertainer angling for respectability, fame, and what our current age refers to as "gravitas." By putting Frost's name first, he shows us the entertainer, the one asking the question, is now more important than the one who is being questioned.
Langella does a serviceable Nixon, giving the gentle side of Nixon in ashes, though I think the definitive screen Nixon was provided by Anthony Hopkins in Oliver Stone's movie. Langella's Nixon at times lapses into a bellicosity and plainspoken rhythm that seems false when compared to the real man. The real Nixon, strangely enough, presents a dilemma for the dramatist. Viewed in retrospect, the many aspects of Nixon's legend - the sweaty upper lip, the shifty eyes, the anger - were much more subtle in real life than a motion picture is capable of showing. Hopkins wisely chose to give us an outward picture of the internal soul wrestling we could distinguish in the real Nixon. Langella's Nixon is already broken, but he remains a proud man who isn't yet ready to bow to the demands of the historical record.
The Frost character undergoes the biggest transformation from play to movie. In the play, Frost was the other boxer in the ring, a Rocky who gets his unexpected date with the prize fighter and bests him. This survives, but Frost's "lightweight" credentials, his fecklessness, come forward more and somehow make him less of an adversary. He seems more of a spectator in the film. The boxing metaphor, which survives, feels inadequate, at least until the end, when we have the inevitable montage of the previously disengaged Frost suddenly cramming the night before the final Watergate interview like Sylvester Stallone on the heavy bag.
The play, I think, is superior to the movie because of its brevity. The movie also feels the need to quickly dismiss Nixon from the stage after a final meeting between the two, giving him a dismissive ending that doesn't quite match what comes before. The film has spent two hours convincing us of a certain amount of grandeur in this frustrating man, but he receives an unsatisfactory epitaph. Frost goes off to renewed celebrity, but he need only look at Nixon to understand how long it may last. The play was tight, while the film wants to be about more than it is.
The reason we're treated to Nixon yet again, of course, has more to do with the present than the past. As several extras on the DVD make clear, "Frost/Nixon" has direct bearing on our own late political age, the age of George W. Bush. As one of the participants in the real "Frost-Nixon" interviews observes, Nixon's defense that "when the President does it, that means that it is not illegal" is just as relevant in the shadow of waterboarding, Abu Gharib, and warrantless wiretapping. There's a fundamental problem this this logic.
In the play, Reston, one of Frost's researchers and one of Nixon's harshest critics, laments his time in a California hotel room, trapped with a television constantly replaying the same skin flicks. "Is there anything more depressing as a porno the second time around?" he asks. Watergate, in effect, was porn for all those who hated Nixon. It paraded his worst character flaws and transformed them to national legends, and it cemented the worst suspicions about Nixon's party in the national consciousness.
With Bush, the skin flick seemingly gets a second national viewing. But the audience at the end of "Frost/Nixon" probably feels some sympathy for the fallen president who gropes toward an apology at the end. Morgan wisely avoids the kind of demonization all too evident in the last eight years. By replaying Watergate and reexamining its chief actor, we are reminded that our national obsessions only reveal for us that the monster in the palace often looks a lot more like us than we want to admit, and the hatred they engender is because they remind us of the fallacy of faith in heroes. We question them, but the answers don't seem to ever satisfy. It's a point worth remembering as the hysteria fades and we embrace another leader with ever more urgent needs for a savior.
Crash by J.G. Ballard
Last week's news of the death of J.G. Ballard focused inevitably on his most famous work, "Empire of the Sun," made popular by the movie version directed by Steven Spielberg. That work dealt through fiction with Ballard's experience in a Japanese prison camp during World War II, a nightmare vision he carried with him into the rest of his works. But obituaries also dealt with easily his most infamous work, the 1973 novel "Crash," which was also made into a movie by David Cronenberg.
Putting it mildly, Ballard was pessimistic about the ability of technology to improve the human species, as well as any hopes he might have harbored about the moral improvement of man. This view becomes abundantly clear with "Crash," a book in which Ballard said he "wanted to rub the human face in its own vomit, and force it to look in the mirror." I'd say he accomplished that task. The anger of that statement shines through on every page. Ballard supposedly submitted a much longer manuscript which one publisher rejected, saying the author was beyond any psychological help.
It's easy to see why. "Crash" is a hard book to read, even now, more than 30 years after its publication. The story is told by a man in an open marriage who falls under the influence of a man sexually obsessed with car accidents. One may draw his own conclusions when one learns the narrator's name is James Ballard. The collision of cars serves as a metaphor for the unexpected consequences when individuals unite sexually. In its short 200 plus pages are crammed drug use, adultery, homosexuality, and a host of unhealthy fetishistic behaviors. A cast of numb characters rehearse a number of liasons in junked cars, with Ballard's prose flitting back and forth between their limbs and glands and the instrument panels of the automobiles they occupy, without any detectable difference between the living and the inanimate. Characters do not seem to be living and breathing as much as so many orifices and body parts to satisfy urges they cannot understand or articulate. They are objects, supposedly for satisfaction, though no one seems satisfied by anything.
Every accident is unique, with its own trajectories, vectors, circumstances, outcomes. The fictional Ballard's mentor Vaughn plans in intricate detail his hoped-for fatal crash - that of Elizabeth Taylor. He drives a Lincoln Continental, the same car President Kennedy rode in when he was assassinated. When Ballard is involved in a car accident, he is shaken to discover there is a victim, a man who dies sprawled on the hood of Ballard's car. Ballard then takes up with the dead man's wife. You get the picture. Ballard, the real one, may have wanted to make a statement about human depravity and how technology facilitates it, but he seems to be enjoying himself too much in the seemingly endless cataloguing of bodily secretions, wounds and deviancies, as when the fictional Ballard reveals, after his own crash, thinking of other disaster victims, "the injuries of still-to-be-admitted patients beckoned to me, an immense encyclopedia or accessible dreams."
What struck me the most about this book was its artificiality, which I suppose is the point. Ballard, Vaughn, and the other characters are survivors of car accidents, yet their lingering on the accident scene isn't so much a longing for the accident as the idea of it. Much like society's current obsession with the virtual world the information age may create, these characters live in a fantasy world divorced from the reality of what their obsessions really are or mean. We are a society that talks a great deal about love, but the love we seek is often not love at all but a biological urge that becomes warped by our own inarticulate, misunderstood urges. When our fantasies are placed side by side with reality, or perhaps compared with the ideal of what we seek, we quickly understand the great distances the human imagination can quickly travel and how inadquate its sense of direction is. This became abundantly clear to me yesterday when I witnessed an actual car accident.
I was driving north on the Interstate when I noticed a dust cloud in the median. I looked in my rearview window and saw a rising cloud on the opposite shoulder of the southbound lane and dozens of cars slowing down. I got off at the next exit and quickly crossed over to the other lane to see if help was needed. At the foot of a steep hill, an SUV laid on its side, smashed and smoky after tumbling several times. Hand tools, CDs, clothes, and other articles lay strewn in the tall grass. Standing amidst onlookers was the driver, a thin trickle of blood coming from his forehead. He was shaken, but alive and intact. And grateful. When I asked him what had happened, he gave a vague explanation, what shock would allow of an instance that lasted perhaps 10 seconds at most.
Accidents remind us of the random nature of life, and the reality that technology can only do so much to save us from ourselves. A wrong turn at too great a speed can be deadly, or exhilirating if survived. As we've observed here before, it is the danger inherent in sin that makes it attractive, regardless of how vivid the consequences may be in our minds. Just as the characters of "Crash" know what the outcome of a car collision might be, we continue to take the curbs of our lives too fast, our foot a little too far from the brake, our eyes straying from the path ahead.
Putting it mildly, Ballard was pessimistic about the ability of technology to improve the human species, as well as any hopes he might have harbored about the moral improvement of man. This view becomes abundantly clear with "Crash," a book in which Ballard said he "wanted to rub the human face in its own vomit, and force it to look in the mirror." I'd say he accomplished that task. The anger of that statement shines through on every page. Ballard supposedly submitted a much longer manuscript which one publisher rejected, saying the author was beyond any psychological help.
It's easy to see why. "Crash" is a hard book to read, even now, more than 30 years after its publication. The story is told by a man in an open marriage who falls under the influence of a man sexually obsessed with car accidents. One may draw his own conclusions when one learns the narrator's name is James Ballard. The collision of cars serves as a metaphor for the unexpected consequences when individuals unite sexually. In its short 200 plus pages are crammed drug use, adultery, homosexuality, and a host of unhealthy fetishistic behaviors. A cast of numb characters rehearse a number of liasons in junked cars, with Ballard's prose flitting back and forth between their limbs and glands and the instrument panels of the automobiles they occupy, without any detectable difference between the living and the inanimate. Characters do not seem to be living and breathing as much as so many orifices and body parts to satisfy urges they cannot understand or articulate. They are objects, supposedly for satisfaction, though no one seems satisfied by anything.
Every accident is unique, with its own trajectories, vectors, circumstances, outcomes. The fictional Ballard's mentor Vaughn plans in intricate detail his hoped-for fatal crash - that of Elizabeth Taylor. He drives a Lincoln Continental, the same car President Kennedy rode in when he was assassinated. When Ballard is involved in a car accident, he is shaken to discover there is a victim, a man who dies sprawled on the hood of Ballard's car. Ballard then takes up with the dead man's wife. You get the picture. Ballard, the real one, may have wanted to make a statement about human depravity and how technology facilitates it, but he seems to be enjoying himself too much in the seemingly endless cataloguing of bodily secretions, wounds and deviancies, as when the fictional Ballard reveals, after his own crash, thinking of other disaster victims, "the injuries of still-to-be-admitted patients beckoned to me, an immense encyclopedia or accessible dreams."
What struck me the most about this book was its artificiality, which I suppose is the point. Ballard, Vaughn, and the other characters are survivors of car accidents, yet their lingering on the accident scene isn't so much a longing for the accident as the idea of it. Much like society's current obsession with the virtual world the information age may create, these characters live in a fantasy world divorced from the reality of what their obsessions really are or mean. We are a society that talks a great deal about love, but the love we seek is often not love at all but a biological urge that becomes warped by our own inarticulate, misunderstood urges. When our fantasies are placed side by side with reality, or perhaps compared with the ideal of what we seek, we quickly understand the great distances the human imagination can quickly travel and how inadquate its sense of direction is. This became abundantly clear to me yesterday when I witnessed an actual car accident.
I was driving north on the Interstate when I noticed a dust cloud in the median. I looked in my rearview window and saw a rising cloud on the opposite shoulder of the southbound lane and dozens of cars slowing down. I got off at the next exit and quickly crossed over to the other lane to see if help was needed. At the foot of a steep hill, an SUV laid on its side, smashed and smoky after tumbling several times. Hand tools, CDs, clothes, and other articles lay strewn in the tall grass. Standing amidst onlookers was the driver, a thin trickle of blood coming from his forehead. He was shaken, but alive and intact. And grateful. When I asked him what had happened, he gave a vague explanation, what shock would allow of an instance that lasted perhaps 10 seconds at most.
Accidents remind us of the random nature of life, and the reality that technology can only do so much to save us from ourselves. A wrong turn at too great a speed can be deadly, or exhilirating if survived. As we've observed here before, it is the danger inherent in sin that makes it attractive, regardless of how vivid the consequences may be in our minds. Just as the characters of "Crash" know what the outcome of a car collision might be, we continue to take the curbs of our lives too fast, our foot a little too far from the brake, our eyes straying from the path ahead.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Together Through Life by Bob Dylan
On a beautiful late summer day eight years ago, Bob Dylan released one of his greatest albums on the same day 19 men with boxcutters changed the New York skyline and the world. It was one of those strange incidences of synchronicity, much as this week, when Dylan again released an album at the same time Air Force One inadvertently made New Yorkers run for cover again. In the same spirit, "Together Through Life" shows all the earmarks of Dylan's late career renaissance, but only serves to remind the listener of the uncanny greatness of this latest, unexpected phase.
At the end of the sixties, when Dylan had produced six records in a row redefining both folk and rock music, he produced "Nashville Skyline," a short, spare record with carefully crafted, seemingly benign and banal love songs. While it wasn't "Blonde On Blonde," it was one of his most delightful and unexpected works. "Together Through Life" plays in much the same way, the music flitting between Tex Mex and Zydeco, not quite reaching the level of "Modern Times" or "Love and Theft" but still staying with the listener long after listening.
The album opens in a similar vein as Dylan's last three, with the haunting "Beyond Here Lies Nothing." The tone of the song is the same as most of Dylan's late work - hard-edged, bluesy, brimming with mocking pessimism. But the words reveal a desperate love song, frustrated by a seemingly finite future. From there, Dylan progresses into "Life Is Hard," and the character of the record begins to reveal itself. It is an old-fashioned crooner's ode, much like "By and By" or "Spirit On the Water," with the melody hovering high just on the cusp of Dylan's haggard husky whispering croak. Maybe he does, as he later sings, have "the blood of the land in his voice." His narrator simply wants "strength to fight the world outside."
From there, the record becomes an exercise in fun, revealed most starkly as Dylan laughs (!) toward the end of "My Wife's Home Town." Many of these songs resemble, in structure, rhythm and lyrics, those of the past 10 years in Dylan's catalogue. Lyrics seem lifted from the obscure tunes he spins on "Theme Time Radio Hour." Impressionistic thoughts fill the air. He explores familiar themes of haunted, frustrated love in "Jolene." His songs seem divorced from time, as the hero of "If You Ever Go to Houston" reveals he was nearly killed in the Mexican War. The melody of "Forgetful Heart" reminds one of the meandering menace of "Ain't Talkin'" only at a softer, lighter pitch.
The man who once sang "The Times They Are A'Changin'" now gives the world "I Feel A Change Comin' On," not a Obamaian anthem but a personal song about individual happiness. Dylan doesn't do utopian dreams anymore, if he ever did. "We've got so much in common/We strive for the same ends/And I just can't wait for us to become friends." Billy Joe Shaver and James Joyce get called out, and William Shakespeare quoted.
But Dylan wouldn't be Dylan without a tough, sarcastic jeremiad to the present age, which closes the record, "It's All Good." This song will remind listeners of similar tales of frustration, resignation, alienation, such as "Everything Is Broken" and "Things Have Changed." No one seems to care that no one seems to care anymore. But Dylan keeps smiling, it seems, as the lies and lives pile up.
If this record lacks one thing, it is the usual veiled spirituality of his earlier albums, the pseudo-Gospel that has dusted his music since his conversion in the late seventies. That is, unless you count the fact that he identifies Hell as his wife's hometown. Or perhaps the border longing of "This Dream Of You" isn't so much a love song to a woman as much as Someone else, as he speaks of his "earthly death." When Dylan speaks of crossing over, it usually isn't the Rio Grande he means, but either the River Styx, or the River Jordan. His mood is all important.
At the end of the sixties, when Dylan had produced six records in a row redefining both folk and rock music, he produced "Nashville Skyline," a short, spare record with carefully crafted, seemingly benign and banal love songs. While it wasn't "Blonde On Blonde," it was one of his most delightful and unexpected works. "Together Through Life" plays in much the same way, the music flitting between Tex Mex and Zydeco, not quite reaching the level of "Modern Times" or "Love and Theft" but still staying with the listener long after listening.
The album opens in a similar vein as Dylan's last three, with the haunting "Beyond Here Lies Nothing." The tone of the song is the same as most of Dylan's late work - hard-edged, bluesy, brimming with mocking pessimism. But the words reveal a desperate love song, frustrated by a seemingly finite future. From there, Dylan progresses into "Life Is Hard," and the character of the record begins to reveal itself. It is an old-fashioned crooner's ode, much like "By and By" or "Spirit On the Water," with the melody hovering high just on the cusp of Dylan's haggard husky whispering croak. Maybe he does, as he later sings, have "the blood of the land in his voice." His narrator simply wants "strength to fight the world outside."
From there, the record becomes an exercise in fun, revealed most starkly as Dylan laughs (!) toward the end of "My Wife's Home Town." Many of these songs resemble, in structure, rhythm and lyrics, those of the past 10 years in Dylan's catalogue. Lyrics seem lifted from the obscure tunes he spins on "Theme Time Radio Hour." Impressionistic thoughts fill the air. He explores familiar themes of haunted, frustrated love in "Jolene." His songs seem divorced from time, as the hero of "If You Ever Go to Houston" reveals he was nearly killed in the Mexican War. The melody of "Forgetful Heart" reminds one of the meandering menace of "Ain't Talkin'" only at a softer, lighter pitch.
The man who once sang "The Times They Are A'Changin'" now gives the world "I Feel A Change Comin' On," not a Obamaian anthem but a personal song about individual happiness. Dylan doesn't do utopian dreams anymore, if he ever did. "We've got so much in common/We strive for the same ends/And I just can't wait for us to become friends." Billy Joe Shaver and James Joyce get called out, and William Shakespeare quoted.
But Dylan wouldn't be Dylan without a tough, sarcastic jeremiad to the present age, which closes the record, "It's All Good." This song will remind listeners of similar tales of frustration, resignation, alienation, such as "Everything Is Broken" and "Things Have Changed." No one seems to care that no one seems to care anymore. But Dylan keeps smiling, it seems, as the lies and lives pile up.
If this record lacks one thing, it is the usual veiled spirituality of his earlier albums, the pseudo-Gospel that has dusted his music since his conversion in the late seventies. That is, unless you count the fact that he identifies Hell as his wife's hometown. Or perhaps the border longing of "This Dream Of You" isn't so much a love song to a woman as much as Someone else, as he speaks of his "earthly death." When Dylan speaks of crossing over, it usually isn't the Rio Grande he means, but either the River Styx, or the River Jordan. His mood is all important.
Friday, April 24, 2009
What Was She Thinking? (Notes On a Scandal) by Zoe Heller
About midway through the story of teacher Sheba Hart’s illicit romance with one of her teenage students, she confesses to the narrator of the story, her friend Barbara Covett, what motivated her:
“But the truth is, Barbara, doing that kind of thing is easy. You know how you sometimes have another drink even though you know you’re going to have a hangover tomorrow? Or, or, you take a bite of a doughnut, even though you know it’s going straight to your thighs? Well, it’s like that. You keep saying No, no, no until the moment when you say, Oh bugger it. Yes.”
My experience with “The Believers” sent me on to Heller’s second novel, which proved to be every bit as entertaining. Many may be more familiar with the Oscar-nominated movie starring Cate Blanchett and Judi Dench, but no movie could do justice to this book. It’s one of those tightly-written mini-masterpieces that British authors are so annoying at producing like we churn out bad talk shows. When I wasn’t reminded of Ian McEwan by the flawless style, I was reminded of the great Russian authors in the book’s moral vision.
The story is familiar to anyone who reads the news. A good looking, married teacher, a mother to several children, suddenly attaches an unhealthy fascination on a young man in her classroom. Heller adds on a few details unique to the British setting, such as how Sheba’s upbringing and class consciousness might have played a part. But she adds to this tale the figure of Barbara, one of the most unreliable narrators in literary history. It is Sheba’s misfortune to play out her role in the gaze of a lonely, thoroughly obsessed colleague.
Actually, it’s unfair to describe Barbara as unreliable. Indeed, she meticulously records her life as an unmarried woman lurching toward oblivion in harrowing detail. The key, though, is the understated, desperate detachment that resounds as she gives selected peeks into her life, as it exists apart from Sheba. What upsets us beyond the way Barbara veritably stalks Sheba is how desperate she is for someone, anyone, to take an interest in her.
But as her confession above demonstrates, Sheba learns a little bit about the nature of sin in the course of her romance, after it blows up in the tabloid press and threatens to send her to prison. One of the pleasures of this novel is to watch Sheba, through Barbara’s eyes, delude herself as her interest in a young man crosses a series of uncertain lines, until she realizes the distance she has traveled from conscientious teacher to reckless lover. There is a part of us all that doesn’t care when we cross the line, and we are painfully aware of where that line is. The justifications we use last only long enough for the line to be breached. In the end, we are proud of what we do, even when we know it is morally reprehensible.
At first blush, when confronted with this kind of story in the news, we quickly pass judgment and we want swift punishment. But the novel reminds us that within this relationship are thousands of questions - who is in control, the older woman or the young man? At what point does a wife slightly bored with the conventional nature of her marriage suddenly become a vamp preying on the young? "A woman who interferes with a minor is not a symptom of an underlying tendency. She is an aberration. People don't see themselves, or their own furtive desires, in her." At what point, simply, does evil become “evil?”
When Barbara tells the reader, toward the end, that “the time we have spent here has been terribly sad, of course. But terribly intense too and even wonderful in its way,” she might as well be talking about the lives of these characters, and the character of our lives.
“But the truth is, Barbara, doing that kind of thing is easy. You know how you sometimes have another drink even though you know you’re going to have a hangover tomorrow? Or, or, you take a bite of a doughnut, even though you know it’s going straight to your thighs? Well, it’s like that. You keep saying No, no, no until the moment when you say, Oh bugger it. Yes.”
My experience with “The Believers” sent me on to Heller’s second novel, which proved to be every bit as entertaining. Many may be more familiar with the Oscar-nominated movie starring Cate Blanchett and Judi Dench, but no movie could do justice to this book. It’s one of those tightly-written mini-masterpieces that British authors are so annoying at producing like we churn out bad talk shows. When I wasn’t reminded of Ian McEwan by the flawless style, I was reminded of the great Russian authors in the book’s moral vision.
The story is familiar to anyone who reads the news. A good looking, married teacher, a mother to several children, suddenly attaches an unhealthy fascination on a young man in her classroom. Heller adds on a few details unique to the British setting, such as how Sheba’s upbringing and class consciousness might have played a part. But she adds to this tale the figure of Barbara, one of the most unreliable narrators in literary history. It is Sheba’s misfortune to play out her role in the gaze of a lonely, thoroughly obsessed colleague.
Actually, it’s unfair to describe Barbara as unreliable. Indeed, she meticulously records her life as an unmarried woman lurching toward oblivion in harrowing detail. The key, though, is the understated, desperate detachment that resounds as she gives selected peeks into her life, as it exists apart from Sheba. What upsets us beyond the way Barbara veritably stalks Sheba is how desperate she is for someone, anyone, to take an interest in her.
But as her confession above demonstrates, Sheba learns a little bit about the nature of sin in the course of her romance, after it blows up in the tabloid press and threatens to send her to prison. One of the pleasures of this novel is to watch Sheba, through Barbara’s eyes, delude herself as her interest in a young man crosses a series of uncertain lines, until she realizes the distance she has traveled from conscientious teacher to reckless lover. There is a part of us all that doesn’t care when we cross the line, and we are painfully aware of where that line is. The justifications we use last only long enough for the line to be breached. In the end, we are proud of what we do, even when we know it is morally reprehensible.
At first blush, when confronted with this kind of story in the news, we quickly pass judgment and we want swift punishment. But the novel reminds us that within this relationship are thousands of questions - who is in control, the older woman or the young man? At what point does a wife slightly bored with the conventional nature of her marriage suddenly become a vamp preying on the young? "A woman who interferes with a minor is not a symptom of an underlying tendency. She is an aberration. People don't see themselves, or their own furtive desires, in her." At what point, simply, does evil become “evil?”
When Barbara tells the reader, toward the end, that “the time we have spent here has been terribly sad, of course. But terribly intense too and even wonderful in its way,” she might as well be talking about the lives of these characters, and the character of our lives.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Who is Mark Twain?
Today is the 99th anniversary of Mark Twain's death, and news of the late Mr. Clemens' departure is still being greatly exaggerated, as evidenced by a new collection of unpublished material released today by Harper Studio. Not that he would have cared. As he observes in these very pages, "I have long ago lost my belief in immortality - also my interest in it."
Perhaps no writer, save Ernest Hemingway, left behind the trove of unpublished and unfinished manuscripts that Mark Twain did when he rode out on the tail of Halley's Comet in 1910. Several biographers, including Justin Kaplan, have explained how, in the years after the deaths of his wife and daughters, Twain would turn out veritable bales of manuscript, asking questions on the nature of fate and faith that seemingly had no answers. In these pages, we can see by turns a man who seems bitter, boyish, cynical, hopeful, cantankerous, mysterious, probing, sentimental and funny, forever funny.
The pieces in this new collection span his literary career, and show most of Twain's gifts as both a writer and entertainer. One of the many, many endlessly fascinating aspects of Mark Twain, the literary creation of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, is his ability to hold us spellbound with his own character as well as the characters that sprang from his imagination. He was a performer, a highly unlikely profession for a writer, as well as the most introspective of men. He draws both skeptics to his work, because of his knee-slapping rationalism, and believers, because of the moral tone of his work and the rhythms of his language, steeped as they are in 19th century American Protestantism. As the editor Robert Hirst observes, he is "always capable of surprising us into smiling at some shameful trait of the damned human race."
One of these pieces is an unfinished dialogue, "Conversations with Satan," which casts the devil as an aristocrat clothed as an Anglican bishop. The narrator encounters him in Vienna, and identifies Satan as "one of my most ardent and grateful admirers." They then begin a rambling discussion of stoves and tobacco before Twain abandons the idea. In fact, Satan, after appearing, begins to disappear into a monologue of very Twainian character.
Satan is often mentioned in Mark Twain's work, from early in his lecture career to the posthumously published "The Mysterious Stranger" and "Letters From the Earth." One recalls his stage joke, of Satan saying to a newcomer in Hell: "You Chicago people act as though you own the place, whereas you are merely the most numerous." At times, he protrays Satan as deceptive, while at others, he is a wronged, slandered figure forever in the shadow of the Almighty, seemingly over some undisclosed family spat. Like Mikhail Bugakov, Twain's Satan (in this story) is a man of impeccable manners and civilization, courteous and solicitous, eager to please. He comes in the guise of a clergyman, and he is well-travelled. Yet he assures our narrator he hasn't been to America as he is "not needed there."
The dialogue on tobacco seems a ruse, since Twain begins a discussion of how ignorant some smokers are in telling the difference between good and bad cigars. When one travels the earth, one tends to adopt the native cigar as though it were the best in the world, no matter the quality, he says. But it becomes evident after awhile that, in this case at least, sometimes a cigar is more than a cigar:
"I am well satisfied that all notions, of whatever sort, concerning cigars, are superstitions - superstitions and stupidities, and nothing else. It distresses me to hear an otherwise sane man talk of 'good' cigars, and pretend to know what a good cigar is - as if by any chance his standard could be a standard for anybody else."
Is Twain talking about moral judgments, religions, personal tastes, or just tobacco? We might never know, since the few odd pages here represent only a beginning. The title implies a series of conversations, not a monologue. We presume that even Satan would be able to get a word in edgewise when combating with Twain's garrulous frontier voice.
But like Kipling, I stand in awe of the great, godlike Twain, since reading one piece in this book, the notes for an ungiven New York lecture, provided me with one of the hardest laughing fits I've had in years. That a man, almost a century in the grave could provide that, provides us a very vivid answer to the question of who Mark Twain was, and is.
Perhaps no writer, save Ernest Hemingway, left behind the trove of unpublished and unfinished manuscripts that Mark Twain did when he rode out on the tail of Halley's Comet in 1910. Several biographers, including Justin Kaplan, have explained how, in the years after the deaths of his wife and daughters, Twain would turn out veritable bales of manuscript, asking questions on the nature of fate and faith that seemingly had no answers. In these pages, we can see by turns a man who seems bitter, boyish, cynical, hopeful, cantankerous, mysterious, probing, sentimental and funny, forever funny.
The pieces in this new collection span his literary career, and show most of Twain's gifts as both a writer and entertainer. One of the many, many endlessly fascinating aspects of Mark Twain, the literary creation of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, is his ability to hold us spellbound with his own character as well as the characters that sprang from his imagination. He was a performer, a highly unlikely profession for a writer, as well as the most introspective of men. He draws both skeptics to his work, because of his knee-slapping rationalism, and believers, because of the moral tone of his work and the rhythms of his language, steeped as they are in 19th century American Protestantism. As the editor Robert Hirst observes, he is "always capable of surprising us into smiling at some shameful trait of the damned human race."
One of these pieces is an unfinished dialogue, "Conversations with Satan," which casts the devil as an aristocrat clothed as an Anglican bishop. The narrator encounters him in Vienna, and identifies Satan as "one of my most ardent and grateful admirers." They then begin a rambling discussion of stoves and tobacco before Twain abandons the idea. In fact, Satan, after appearing, begins to disappear into a monologue of very Twainian character.
Satan is often mentioned in Mark Twain's work, from early in his lecture career to the posthumously published "The Mysterious Stranger" and "Letters From the Earth." One recalls his stage joke, of Satan saying to a newcomer in Hell: "You Chicago people act as though you own the place, whereas you are merely the most numerous." At times, he protrays Satan as deceptive, while at others, he is a wronged, slandered figure forever in the shadow of the Almighty, seemingly over some undisclosed family spat. Like Mikhail Bugakov, Twain's Satan (in this story) is a man of impeccable manners and civilization, courteous and solicitous, eager to please. He comes in the guise of a clergyman, and he is well-travelled. Yet he assures our narrator he hasn't been to America as he is "not needed there."
The dialogue on tobacco seems a ruse, since Twain begins a discussion of how ignorant some smokers are in telling the difference between good and bad cigars. When one travels the earth, one tends to adopt the native cigar as though it were the best in the world, no matter the quality, he says. But it becomes evident after awhile that, in this case at least, sometimes a cigar is more than a cigar:
"I am well satisfied that all notions, of whatever sort, concerning cigars, are superstitions - superstitions and stupidities, and nothing else. It distresses me to hear an otherwise sane man talk of 'good' cigars, and pretend to know what a good cigar is - as if by any chance his standard could be a standard for anybody else."
Is Twain talking about moral judgments, religions, personal tastes, or just tobacco? We might never know, since the few odd pages here represent only a beginning. The title implies a series of conversations, not a monologue. We presume that even Satan would be able to get a word in edgewise when combating with Twain's garrulous frontier voice.
But like Kipling, I stand in awe of the great, godlike Twain, since reading one piece in this book, the notes for an ungiven New York lecture, provided me with one of the hardest laughing fits I've had in years. That a man, almost a century in the grave could provide that, provides us a very vivid answer to the question of who Mark Twain was, and is.
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