Tag Archives: criticism

The Winter House

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inA female novelist rents a house in New Hampshire for the winter. On one of the first nights, she’s interrupted from sleep by a burglar, Jesse. She doesn’t take the gun downstairs to confront the younger man. He’s in the kitchen eating. Her motherly instincts kick in (although she knows he lying about everything). He says this house belongs to his parents. He’s just dropping by. She doesn’t ask all the questions. He doesn’t want to say why’s he’s come. She doesn’t want to explain why she’s there. She lets him sleep in the upstairs bedroom, next to hers. He leaves the next morning but returns at the some hour that night. Time to call the cops.

They hike and see the panoramic view of New Hampshire’s hills. She learns he once liked to write poetry but preferred drugs. He drinks a lot. He falls asleep on the couch. She puts a blanket over him.

DAY THREE: He’s chopping wood somewhere. She’s at home and is confronted by a goon, a large bald guy looking for Jesse. She appropriately fends of the goon, but doesn’t immediately tell Jesse the goon showed up, a huge coincidence: Remember Jesse had no connection with the house except he once attended a teenage party there. So goon is a character out of no where, but one wonders will Jesse ever confront goon?  As an unrelated plot point the viewers learn Jesse and goon were partners in a recent crime, unsuccessfully pulled off.

DAY FOUR: Jesse reads one of her novels and lands on a prosaic statement which he considers the most profound. She’s pleased, as though it’s the centerpiece of the story. He reads more. She sees the goon in town talking to three thugs. She returns home but doesn’t mention that. He gives a thoroughly bullshit analysis of her novel, which any novelist should be able to brush away. She’s too understanding. They get cozy. The goon and the three thugs show up in a pickup and leave the headlights shining. There’s no explanation but that quartet walks away, out of the movie forever. [Reality: This is a low budget flick and no one had the bucks to allow for broken windows and furniture, amid the bullet holes.] There’s sheet music (mostly sheets, no notes). In the morning the goon and thugs are gone; there’s no pillow talk. 

Jesse turns himself in and the rest of the gang. He’s in the pokey. From the cell he sends a poem. I didn’t hear her read it: Leave poetry to the prose. This movie is nothing to write home about. I hope they don’t make a sequel.   

THE TROLL GARDEN

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Willa Cather

They advise that a writer should write what she knows. Willa Cather followed that advice. She began her career of words in journalism. Part of her assignments was reviewing art, music and literature. In her first published work (of short stories), The Troll Garden presents Cather’s relaying performances, artists, fans and art to the reader. She write each story with a proper amount of skepticism toward characters (artists and fans) and what they are doing. Troll has pejorative inference, and thereby, Cather has described the process and results of art. It is a trolly world of being.

For example,
FEMALE FANS: “What he had was that, in his mere personality, he quickened and in a measure gratified that something without which – to women – life is no better than sawdust, and to the desire for which most of their mistakes and tragedies and the astonishingly poor bargains are due.” The Garden Lodge.

MALE FANS: Man re-meets singer after singer is retired and dying.
“It was the silence of admiration,” protested Everett, “very crude and boyish, but very sincere and not a little painful. Perhaps you suspected something of the sort? I remember you saw fit to be very grown-up and worldly.”
“I believe I suspected a pose; then that college boys usually affect with singers – ‘an earthen vessel in love with a star,’ you know. But it rather surprised me in you, for you must have seen a good deal of your brother’s pupils. Or had you an omnivorous capacity, and elasticity that always met the occasion.” A Death in the Desert.

TRAGEDY: “He used to write only the tragedies of passion; but this is tragedy of the soul, the shadow coexistent with the soul. This is the tragedy of effort and failure, the thing Keats calls hell. This is my tragedy; as I lie here spent by the racehorse…”

“I wanted to be with you….I have never cared about other women since I met you in New York when I was a lad. You are part of my destiny, and I could not leave you if I would.

She put her hands on his shoulders and shook her head. “No, no; don’t tell me that. I have seen enough of tragedy, God knows. Don’t show me any more just as the curtain is going down. No, no, it was only a boy’s fancy, and your divine pity and my utter pitiableness have recalled it for a moment. One does not love the dying, dear friend. If some fancy of that sort had been left over from boyhood, this would rid you of it, and that were well. Now go, and you will come again tomorrow….” A Death In The Desert.

MARRYING AN ARTIST
“…She has remained in much the same condition she sank to before his death. He trampled over pretty much whatever there was in her, I fancy. Women don’t recover from wounds of that sort – at least not women of Ellen’s grain. They go on bleeding inwardly.”…

“The marriage,” Lady Mary continued with a shrug, “was made on the basis of a mutual understanding. Ellen, in the nature of the case, believed that she was doing something quite out of the ordinary in accepting him, and expected concessions which, apparently, it never occurred to him to make. After his marriage he relapsed into his old habits of incessant work, broken by violent and often brutal relaxations. He insulted her friends and foisted his own upon her – a homeless vagrant, whose conversation was impossible. I don’t say, mind you, that he had not grievances on his side. He had probably overrated the girl’s possibilities, and he let her see he was disappointed in her. Only a large and generous nature could have borne that, and Ellen’s not that. She could not at all understand that odious strain of plebeian pride which plumes itself upon having not risen above its sources.” The Marriage of Phaedra.

{Observe a similar sentiment at the end of the movie, My Brilliant Career where Sybilla declines to marry Harry. She wants to become a writer, an artist, and she tells him, I will destroy you. He does not understand.]

WANT-TO-BE PERSON CRAVING ARTIST’S LIFESTYLE

“Several of Paul’s teachers had a theory that his imagination had been perverted by garish fiction, but the truth was that he scarcely read at all. The books at home were not such as would either tempt or corrupt a youthful mind, and as for reading the novels that some of his friends urged upon him, — well, he got what he wanted much more quickly from music; any sort of music from an orchestra to a barrel organ. He needed only the spark, the indescribable thrill that made his imagination master of his senses, and he could make plots and pictures enough of his own. It was equally true that he was not stage struck – not, at any rate, in the usual acceptation of that expression. He had no desire to become an actor, any more than he had to become a musician. He felt no necessity to do any of those things; what he wanted was to see, to be in the atmosphere, float on the wave of it, to be carried out, blue league after blue league, away from everything.” Paul’s Case.

Undoubtedly, Willa Cather had witnessed and cringed about much she saw in the artistic world. She is plain, honest and open, letting the world witness what is frequently worshiped – not only the art, but also the artist. She is not judgmental except in Paul’s Case, the boy who seeks to attach himself to the material benefits of art. Obviously, what applied to women also was true for men. Have there not been a long trail of “poor bargains” arising from love, worship or fantasy?The Garden Lodge. Does any artist want to be revered, adorned and fawned over at death, or does the artist, using human common sense, understand for any person to cling to a drying artist is tragedy. A Death In The Desert.

[That point in A Death is reminiscent of William Shatner’s advice supposedly given during a Star Trek convention: “Get a life.”]

Willa Cather does not disapprove of artistic behaviors. Some artists act well, and others poorly. She cannot reform human behaviors, but she can bring light to common behaviors to give a perspective and to make situations common and understandable.

Observe in The Marriage of Phaedra Willa Cather describes where the painting has gone (Australia) as “entombed in a vague continent in the Pacific, somewhere on the other side of the world.”

H.L. Mencken

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MY LIFE AS AUTHOR AND EDITOR

Salient in the life of this journalist with a name is asking what type of American he was. Mencken came from Germany and during World War One and World War Two he was pro- German and pro-Hitler. He lost his newspaper job with the Baltimore papers in 1941. Apparent German actions again other peoples were dismissed because they were not Germans. Carrying on with that antiquated thinking (feudalism or before) into the Twentienth Century makes Mencken an unexplained throwback, and given the quality of writing in the book, a throw away.

The book presents an autobiography of part of Mencken’s life. I have no idea how much he drank, womanized, or contributed to established art and literary politics. The book describes some of this editorial activities, but does not set human beings in business except to say this happened that happened and the reasons for any disagreements – the other person was Jewish, or was a woman, or would not do what Mencken advised. Mencken dismissed film and California completely without realizing it dramatized American short stories many times better than the writer could put it on a page.

The book was Mencken’s final writing effort with time qualities reflected in the writing. It tells its story sloppily, if at all. It appears Mencken chained himself to a typewriter and merrily typed. There is no sense a wordsmith was at work, edited or believed the manuscript needed further work. The book’s editor, Jonathan Yardley did his best, but elementary flaws flow throughout the writing.

A few observations early in the book should be noted:

“…I am convinced that writing verse is the best of all preparations for writing prose.
I makes the neophyte look sharply to his words, and improves the sense of rhythm and tone-color – in brief, that she of music which is at the bottom of all sound prose…” Page 5-6)

“Under the influence of my father…I emerged into sentience with an almost instinctive distrust of all schemes of revolution and reform. They were…only signs and symptoms of a fundamental hallucinations…the hallucination that human nature could be changed by passing statutes, and preaching gospels – that natural law could be repealed by taking thought.” (page 34)

“…my interest in Roosevelt 1 was always born of delight in the mountebank, not of belief in the prophet.” (page 34)

Work at home: “We … wondered why none of our colleagues had hit on the device of staying way for their offices…we escaped the burden of listening to countless visitors who infest such places – mainly authors trying to sell their manuscripts, not on the merits

thereof but by selling talk. Virtually all our business was done by mail, and it was thus possible for us to do it at our own convenience, and with expedition. On my trips to and from New York I read more manuscripts than the average editor could get through in ten times the time in his office. It was not until long afterward that I discovered that a number of English magazine editors had practiced keeping clear of their offices before we thought of it.”(Page 50)

Paying writers: The Saturday Evening Post’s “…editor…not only paid much higher prices for manuscripts…but he also paid off once a week. As a result [he] got first whack at virtually all the better fiction of the time…” (page 51)

Personal responsibility/memory: “After [Zoe Atkin’s] removal to New York, she let it be known that [Reedy] had not only discovered her but also seduced her, and in the course of time she pushed back this catastrophe back in time until in the end he was depicted as her undoing when she was but sixteen years old. This, if true, put it in 1902, when Reedy himself was forty.”(Page 68)

1920’s Greenwich Village: “…the Village, like the Paris Left Bank, was much less literary artistic than sexual, and most of its male denizens lived on women. The typical menage consisted of a widow or spinster from some small-town in the Middle West, come east to spend her dead husband’s or father’s money and see life, and a bogus painter or pulp- magazine fictioneer who let her feed, clothe and love him.”(page 95)

Any sort of writer putting together an autobiography would have given thought to organization. Little does Mencken’s story at the typewriter evince such expansive thinking – just put together antedotes loosely. What lacks is the potential for an authoritative description of the literary artistic scene on the East Coast i.e. the market Mencken was involved with. Mencken should have stepped back to write the Big Picture. But he could not escape his profession, journalism and its need to advance facts (and Mencken’s opinions) in detail without describing the setting, or telling any reasons. Influences (other than getting drunk), the environment (Mencken did not believe important) and competition (society) – did not writers know one another? As an editor did he not know writers talked and exchanged ideas, concepts and reactions?

So this book falls short in its organization and in its writing.

THE YEARS AT OCCIDENTAL COLLEGE IN THE LATE SIXTIES CHARLES E. ROUSE

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Events in this book are about the author. The college setting is an accidental backdrop.

The book does not tell about the effect of significant, outside events on the Occidental College campus or among the students: Were there anti-War protests, demonstrations and writings on campus by teachers or students? What were the effects of rioting elsewhere? The author did not see Martin Luther King speak at Occidental College in 1967, but in less than a year Doctor King had been assassinated. Where there reactions about assassinations at Occidental? What did the administration do?

An odd fact out: I doubt if the yippies organized the 1967 Pentagon demonstration, as the author reports. This demonstration was inserted like other significant events: Tet, student riots, student politics campus to campus. Merely mentioning events does not tell what happened to anyone or to anything at Occidental College.

The author is loyal and devoted to Occidental. He identifies every class he had and every professor. But little is told about the teaching, the learning or the students action and growth of the author, or of other students. Everyone at Occidental was smart. They liked to drop names and supply authorities, venturing into German philosophy or onto someone’s newly discovered poem. The author’s favorite authorities were Thomas Wolfe – Electric Kool Air, etc – and Ayn Rand.

The author was awkward around girls, but the psychological diagnosis is incomplete. The reader does not learn if the trouble with women is the root cause of psychological disabilities, or merely one manifestation of other problems. Lots of pages are given to girlfriends (ambiguous suggestions of sex: Everyone was chaste at Occidental?), to mental issues, to eastern religions and to meaningless comments from persons or others in quotes.

For IRONY, try. On the back cover squirb, the author mentions that Barack Obama spent two years at Occidental College during the 1980s. Not mentioned is a state legislator, decades later always trying to please Obama, had a stretch of the 134 Freeway named after Obama. Those four miles, east of the 2-Freeway to Figueroa Avenue, is the route to the Scholl’s Canyon Dump.

Avoid this book.

LOSER MOVIES

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A friend said, perhaps prematurely, “Let’s go to the movies.” I agreed but refuse to patronize the Marvel stuff, the cartoon stuff, the comic book stuff or the animation stuff. I got her to agree to the new James Bond Movie. It is out! The August release was bumped to October – the producers are looking for giant box office in the early Holiday season It will have to be another movie.

Don’t say Scarlett Johansson is a fine actress. She has obvious attributes but appearing in cartoon movies will do nothing for her career. In the past younger actresses have taken that career path and gone nowhere.

A suitable movie will not be the Disney release, The Jungle Ride, starring Emily Blunt and The Rock. I know the story will bring back fond memories of my friend’s Orange County childhood with a weak story, poorly acted while emitting lousy jokes.

I further object to movie companies making mediocre theme park rides the underlying concept for a movie. Disney ought to know better with those loser Pirates of the Caribbean movies, bad stories acted poorly. Don’t you think The Rock is an improvement over Johnny? Note the rides, The Pirates and the Jungle Cruise no longer require E-Tickets. I’ve never see a movie where the only charge for the ride is a B ticket – put me on a horse drawn tram on Main Street. So The Jungle Ride is out.

WARLORD

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Carlo D’Este

This excellent history/biography uses Winston Churchill as a model to show British ways of war, the British mindset during war and British systems of making war. This biography is enlightening yet unsympathetic to Churchill and British diverting methods as World War II dragged on. The book overall tells the World War II perspective of the British.

For a long time before D-Day Churchill was against any landings in Northern Europe. He proposed and applauded Anzio in Italy which was greatly pared down (five divisions to one and reduced logistics and supply). {Politicians have long been deceived by U.S. Grant’s amphibious landing south of Vicksburg in May 1863 and eventually surrounding and obtaining the surrounding of that river town.] Churchill devised and held to the idea that taking over Greek islands in 1944 in the Aegean Sea was the masterstroke that would end the War in Europe. He insisted Rome be taken in June 1944 rather than attack and weaken the German army. Churchill opposed the American invasion of Marseilles in August 1944, opening a second supply route for American armies: Forty (40) percent of the supplies for those armies came through Marseilles.

Meanwhile, the British used Montgomery (seemingly the best general the British could produce). Churchill did not like other generals and summarily dismissed them. Between August 1944 and November 1944, Montgomery lengthened the war by losing opportunities to destroy German armies at Falaise Gap in Normandy; he did a risky, men-wasting incursion of Belgium and Holland called Market Garden – supplies had to go up one long road; he failed to open the Scheldt Estuary, depriving the allies of using the port of Antwerp for three months.

So the British fought World War II using men expensively, and Winston Churchill was a Warlord, not a cabinet position of the British government, but akin to Warlords of yore commanding armies, promoting strategies, wanting to join the fight, always in political control, urging actions leading to non-profitable military measures, sanctioning incompetence from military underlines, and craving compliance from the British people and every person in government for each of his decisions.

TOO CLOSE TO THE SUN

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Diane Dempsey

The spiel on the back cover of this book describes openly what is wrong with this novel: “…Will Henley appears on the scene. With his good looks and Ivy League pedigree, he’s on the prowl for his next business acquisition” – a winery.

Apparently Old Will is destined to come the master vintner after a season or two. Good luck with that.

I once considered a career in the NBA. I did not go to an Ivy League school and don’t have that pedigree. Hence, I never made it to the NBA. But I know people who went into the Ivys, and they didn’t play in the NBA either.

When they send astronauts to Mars, they return, and none has radiation sickness and die during the trip or upon return, Too Close To The Sun may be worth reading.

GENESIS OF QANON

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Hunter Thompson originated QAnon. He advanced the Thompson Report concept in a book or periodical proposal to his publisher in 1968, The Gonzo Papers, Vol II, p. 15-16. Thompson called it root-hog journalism:

[15] “We have to keep in mind that various outrages are in fact being planned, and that I probably wouldn’t have much trouble getting a vague battle plan…but of course that wouldn’t be enough. I’d have to mix up fact and fantasy so totally that nobody could be sure which was which. We could bill it as a fantastic piece of root-hog journalism – The Thompson Report, as it were. This courageous journalist crept into the sewers of the American underground and emerged with a stinking heap of enemy battle plans – and just in time, by god, [16] to warn the good guys what to watch for. Oh, I would have a ratlin good time with it…I could even compost a fictitious interview with Guru Bailey, the Demo chieftain, during which I try to warn him of this impending disaster and he reacts first in anger, then with tears, throwing down hooker after hooker of gin during our conversation. And a private chat with Johnson, who heard of my dread information and summoned me to the White House for a toilet-side interview with two recording secretaries – a bracing fag and a nervous old woman from New Orleans – taking notes on a voice writer(s) – echoing my words, and Lyndon’s, for the private record.

…(The Case of the Naked Colonel…did you ever see that? A fantastic story and absolutely true..a Pentagon colonel found naked in his car, passed out on the steering wheel with a pistol in each hand… no explanation.)

…Richard Nixon… calls me at my Chicago hotel, during the course of my research and offers me $20,000 for my information…then a meeting with Nixon and his advisors, they want to exploit the freak-out…but an argument erupts when one elf Nixon’s aide makes a crude remark about his daughter – undertones of drugs and nymphomania, Julie, caught in the 14th green at Palm Springs with a negro caddy at midnight, the caddy now in prison, framed on a buggy count.”

It is shameful that the Republicans can originate nothing of their own. The Reps have to reach into the 1960s and Hunter Thompson’s prowess for their journalistic ideas to produce fantasies. The Nixon fact might be raw in 1968, but today anything goes, do your own thing, I have freedom. Every Rep. believes that. They bare all and welcome any overt violence by fragile white people, exhibiting truly hippy behaviors like those manifested during the 1960s in San Francisco., and later elsewhere. Indeed, most of the participants of January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol in Washington DC looked like hippies – unshaven, unclean, sneering, uncontrollable, likely on meth…

Thompson’s media proposal is being used by the Reps today.

DAWN OF BELLE EPOQUE, TWILIGHT OF BELLE EPOQUE

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MARY MCAULIFEE

These books tell of a completely defeated France (1870), loser of the Franco-Prussian War, and for the next 44 years France’s imagination became culture and industry reinventing its thinking, culture and society, and somewhat its politics. Those achievements in the Arts, in literature, education and scientific endeavors (Pasteur, Pierre, Marie Curie) drove France into the Twentieth Century.

The innovation of this history is an original telling in its approach, beginning in 1870 and year after year going through 1918 (end of World War One). Culture enters the story and artists, including industrialists, struggle for recognition, succeeding as years pass. Politics and foreign affairs are included but not emphasized. Georges Clemenceau, a friend of all the painters and writers, gets the most attention.

The text is easy to follow. Its argument builds with humor, and terrific antidotes, while the Art, society and politics progress. One wonders how Paris was livable. Of the many histories I’ve encountered, this is a brilliant survey presentation. Its style gives the essence of France and the French in a studied, flippant, and charming manner.

THE INVENTION OF MURDER

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BY BOOKJudith Flanders

The story of murder in the Nineteenth Century promises more than this book gives. In Nineteenth Century England an active swirl surrounds death, accusation, murder, trial and execution. According to the book not many murders happened, but enough gained public attention. Some stories survived decades; one Seventeenth century death was picked up during the Nineteenth century and used. The Invention seems to tell this story. It does in the first 110 pages when I stopped reading repeat actions and stories of death, accusation, etc… Victorian England had to be a dull place for the masses and the middling peoples to be enthralled by this sort of deviancy.

What could interest me in this book’s subject was developing detection of crimes and causes into evidence presented in court. This is no indication that this knowledge or ways were of interest, but the same trip, all well-put down. However, this book is neither a cultural anthropology nor a sociology. It is one telling of death, one after another, as though the public insisted upon new deaths to become sensational to engage them. One prays for the public’s interest to be distracted – like professional sports, largely a Twentieth Century invention coming from America.

How to judge this for The Invention? From a case that lasted decades, any reader and watcher of bit plays, would expect the basic facts of death, accusations, etc to be used as procedures and processes of detection became sophisticated; those ways and means would be written into the story as the time from the events distanced. Note the criminal is not the protagonist; nor is the victim. But investigators become prominent and their methods interesting. MORALE: the bad people are caught and punished.

In the one telling of a 1840’s murder, the story, according to the book, had to be close to the real facts for a long time. What Victorians seemed to like was thoroughly retro and religious: Repetition of accepted facts and outcomes as though to reassert the foundations of the purity, the justice and righteousness of their society. No one has to read 480 pages of that. However, writers might be expected to mention and use changing methods of detection. Those writers did not exist.

By 1894 Conan Doyle changed crime and detective stories, and decades of more nonsense followed. Raymond Chandler’s writing analyzes some of that, chopping up popular, misleading detective stories for readers to observe the nonsense. Chandler used current methods changing criminal investigations and writing. And what of detective stories today, and of the last 25 years? Can anyone spell DNA?