Nickelodeon Story

I wrote and produced this little tribute to the Nickelodeon Theater in Columbia for a show I work on for South Carolina Educational TV.

Books, we get books...

Today, Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice and William T. Vollman's Imperial, both scheduled for early August release dates, arrived in the mail, as did a colorful graphic novel of Fahrenheit 451.

The first one looks like a beachy crime thriller, a detective story, a, ahem, quick read ... a thought I should no doubt banish immediately. If my past experience (a little over half my life) with reading Pynchon tells me anything it's that everything is far more complex (not to mention more sinister) than it looks. I liked his mammoth last book, Against the Day, a multi-story chronicle set in the early 20th Century in which characters from around the globe are trying to wake from the nightmare of history, the history that is bearing down on them; they wage real and surreal battles with destiny. Some try to step out of time, and a few hardy characters actually try to get out of the book.

It's a work of genius and I've never found a simple way to talk about it.

I know nothing about Vollmann except that every book he writes is a cinderblock, and so is the new one. I have one of his books, Europe Central, and I checked out a pile of them from the library the other day. Why? I don't know. Maybe I figured staring at them would get me in the mood. I do kind of like big novels, they tend to be more involving than the average-sized book, and I suppose I should catch up on what Vollmann is all about, but that would take a year. Imperial is very long, so long that I don't want to let it linger.

Lumpy Epic

Stay awake! Or I'll SHOOT!

No surprise to learn that Steven Soderberg's two-part Che, which costs $61 million to make, has to date earned an embarrassing $1.7 million at the box office.

I saw it back in March and was woefully unimpressed.

Some thoughts I never got around to posting:

I'm sure if I cared enough to pursue it I could find out just what possessed Steven Soderberg to make not one film about the late revolutionary leader Ernesto "Che" Guevara, but two. A four-hour film -- normally shown in two parts, as it has been over the past week at the Nickelodeon -- is nothing if not an act of ambition, presumably from a film artist with a lot to say and the clout to say it at considerable length. Soderberg is an unquestionably talented filmmaker, and the trademark hand-held camera work we always associate with him is on considerable display, but this is a dull, plodding, torpid, oddly inert and passionless film; it feels somewhat dutiful and educational and the one movie that kept coming to mind was Richard Attenborough's Gandhi, except that was a lot better.

Soderberg seems to have had a real problem knowing just what his film is about. I got the feeling he had no particular sense of Che, that he wasn't sure whether to take the objective approach or the wide-eyed hero-worshipping adulatory one and he wound up settling for both. Benicio del Toro certainly looks the part of the title character, and I don't doubt he seized the role with passion, but the script never turns him loose.

The first part, which tells the story of Che's adult life and political awakening and activity, is bookish and undramatic. The second part, which focuses on Che's campaign in Bolivia, is unendurable, illustrating the sheer difficulty of finding the drama in a long, drawn-out guerrilla campaign. It amounts to little more than two hours of people moving from bush to bush.

Short version Cheever

From this week's Free-Times.

A Few Words About A Band I Don't Really Get

A couple of weeks ago I bought two albums by a band named Grizzly Bear, a group about which I knew absolutely nothing except that a lot of people liked them. I'm not in love with them. I don't find myself singing along. They're not what I would call melodic, generally, and despite the name they are most definitely not funky or raucous or loud or brazen. In fact, more than a few times, listening to their swirling, dizzying, arty, somewhat narcoleptic rhythms, I found myself wanting to hear James Brown talk about his licking stick or the Louvin Brothers sing about Jesus.

And yet, I do find myself listening to them repeatedly, for no other reason than somewhere in their aural haze there's something indefinably weird and interesting going on.

The earlier of the two albums is titled Yellow House, which I can only describe as an album of ghostly melancholy. The songs are all keyed to a very somber, meditative sort of mood, and while I wouldn't say the songs all sound the same, they do seem to be about the same thing, which is trying to connect with someone who is either about to leave or who is no longer there. "Can't you feel the knife?" one song asks, but there's no anguish or hurt or passion to it. It's like some disembodied observation. Other songs seem to be about searches that end up nowhere or thoughts that can't be expressed. Beyond that, I can't really say what the songs are about, because the lyrics are like broad, occasional brush strokes of words to go with the sweeping, semi-orchestral sounds, the wash of strings and high, sleepy choral harmonies, which is why I'm not bothering to quote them.

The words elliptic and lacunae keep coming to mind.

The music matches well with the beautiful pictures in the sleeve, of empty rooms in an old house. It occurs to me, looking at the Edward Hopper calendar on my wall, that they would similarly match the visual effect of Hopper's wide spaces and lonely, often reflective people.

The band's latest disc, and the one that has gotten so much enormous acclaim, is Veckatimest, "named after a small island in Dukes County, Massachusetts," according to Wikipedia. The themes tend to be the same, these very brittle love songs where couples see the future yawning before them, but the music is more song-oriented, the lyrics don't seem like an afterthought, and it rocks a little harder. Or maybe I should say it rocks a little.

When Everyone Wore a Hat

Cheever: A Life by Blake Bailey. Knopf. 770 pages. $35.00
Cheever: Collected Stories and Other Writings. The Library of America. 1,040 pages. $35.00
Cheever: Complete Novels. The Library of America. 933 pages. $35.00

In a series of short stories, most of them published in The New Yorker from the 1940s through the 1970s, John Cheever examined the the lives and hopes of American domestic life, postwar commuter class division. They were set in and around the `burbs, where husbands took the train to work, wives stayed home, everybody smoked three packs a day, and everyone got drunk at the Saturday dance at the club. The characters are, generally, residents of the upper middle class who have sacrificed everything for the good life, and then find themselves trapped in it: public successes and private failures, alcoholics, adulterers, people who feel their lives slipping away and who yearn, comically and tragically, for time that is lost for good.

Classic American fiction, but not everyone noticed. Critics made worthless comparisons to Salinger, found Cheever a "toothless Thurber," a "culture-hero to the barbecue and Volkswagen set," or "coy and cloying." New Yorker editor Harold Ross, despite the fact that he published Cheever, wished he would follow the house rules, and stick to the lighter side. ("Goddammit, Cheever, why do you write these fucking gloomy goddamn stories?")

Although the criticisms never really let up, Cheever had the last laugh, or so it seemed. When he died in 1982, he went out on top, thanks to the late career resurgence of his acclaimed novel Falconer and, particularly, the best-selling and Pulitzer Prize-winning Collected Stories. With his beaming smile and attractive blazer, the man on the book jacket looked like everyone's favorite uncle, and the books seemed a testament to the longevity of patient craft. He was an old-school tortoise who had calmly beaten out so many strutting post-modernist hares. ("All writing is `experimental,'" he once told a student, the future novelist T.C. Boyle. "Don’t get caught up in fads.")

His fall from grace was swift. No sooner was Cheever buried than his private life came crawling from the ground, in his daughter Susan’s memoirs, Home Before Dark and Treetops, Scott Donaldson’s erratic but revealing biography, and the author’s own graphic-to-the-point-of-repulsive letters and excerpted journals. Cheever went from being an elegant scribe of the torments and hypocrisies of grasping American life to a glaring symbol of it: a raging alcoholic, closeted bisexual and, like so many of his characters, a man who tried and failed to negotiate some balance between his public and private selves. In the 1990s, he even became a punch-line on "Seinfeld" leaving the world to wonder if that was his final legacy.

Does anyone read John Cheever anymore?

These two beautiful new volumes from the Library of America, published in concert with Blake Bailey's long-awaited biography, make an excellent case for this fucking gloomy goddamn writer of stories. Cheever, who yearned for success as a novelist above all, said a novel was "massive, longlived" while a short story "has the life expectancy of a mayfly." The exact opposite is true in his case. The short story was his true means of expression; a point only reinforced by such novels as the engaging but episodic The Wapshot Chronicle or the beautiful but incomprehensible Bullet Park.

The stories are miraculously old and new. They’re set, as the author himself once noted, in a "long lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat." Despite that, there’s a freshness to them; from the ones that work brilliantly to ones that don’t work at all, Cheever’s always trying to tell a story a new way, adopting an odd or sometimes deceptive perspective, or taking a startling approach.

Take for example, the first entry in Collected Stories, "Goodbye, My Brother," one of Cheever's earliest masterpieces (although not as early as it's placement suggests; Bailey points out that Cheever and editor Robert Giroux rigged the chronology to make it appear Cheever blossomed before he actually did.)

Set in a familiar Cheever environment, a semi-annual family reunion at a waterfront family home, it's a story about one man's struggle with his wet blanket younger brother, who won't participate in family activities, regards everyone with chilly contempt and may be something of a manic-depressive.

That, however, is just the surface, which Cheever thickens considerably, by giving us an unnamed narrator we're inclined to like, much as we are someone like Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, with whom he bears a resemblance. Both have the kind of mature skepticism toward privilege and family honor that suggests he's playing straight with us.

He is a Pommeroy, he says, and "while we are not a distinguished family, we enjoy the illusion, when we are together, that we are unique." They aren't unique, he continues, but they are loyal.

It's this sense of loyalty that Lawrence, his younger brother, seems to threaten, not because he's the bad guy but because the narrator simply keeps insisting he is. He's a projection of the narrator's worst fears, and a near constant reminder of what all he doesn't want to face.

Cheever's best stories compress whole lives and worlds into a few pages, such as "The Five Forty-Eight," where we get an acute picture both of an odious employer, who will be forced at gunpoint to pay for his sins, as well as the urban life which has squeezed out his humanity. Another sterling example is "The Country Husband," which is basically about a man who has sacrificed everything for the good life, and then finds himself trapped in it. It's the texture of his very routine neighborhood that Cheever is really after, though; the unusual details as well as the ordinary but funny ones, like the wandering child who never goes home or the dog who steals steaks from outdoor grills, all of which are ultimately woven into a truly magical ending.

Best of all perhaps is "The Swimmer," a real and surreal tale in which a former golden boy swims his way home by way of every pool in the neighborhood. The trip, over the course of a mere 11 pages, takes him through his past and right up to the doorstep, literally, of his disastrous present.

Blake Bailey was given full access to Cheever’s journals, which cover the whole of his writing life. His biography is balanced, judicious, smart, extremely well-written, likely definitive, and sometimes tough to sit through.

On the plus side, they reveal a very hard worker, a man who sought to live entirely by his imagination, and who slaved over his word; even a bad story, in one instance, took nine months.

The biography reveals a man both kind and terribly needy -- for fame, attention, alcohol, and sex -- who stayed soused for most of his life and hit on everyone from his teenage son’s girlfriend to students in his writing classes. There's even a predatory, sex-for-advice relationship with a pathetic, untalented young man that seems to come straight out of a Fassbinder film.

Also, he takes off his clothes at a moment’s notice. (The Index entry, "John Cheever, naked in less than private situations" lists seven references, which seems to be understating the matter.) There are times in his marriage battles when I found myself inclined to take his side against his icy, affectionless wife; then again, any husband who sits at the family dinner table and brags about who he’s screwing probably gets what he deserves.

It must be said that Bailey never aims for sensationalism, that nothing is revealed without a sense of perspective or judiciousness or a duty to the truth, and that he’s a very original reader of Cheever’s fiction. He gives Cheever his full measure, and Cheever, both as writer and exhibitionist, could not have asked for better.

But this is, also, another compelling example that it’s best not to know much about people you admire. Read the biography, but please, read the stories first.

Old age ruined John Updike

Such is the opinion of Martin Amis, at his absolute crotchetiest in this Guardian review of Updike's last book of stories.

Bob Dylan's Debut

I walked down there and ended up
In one of them coffee-houses on the block.
Got on the stage to sing and play,
Man there said, "Come back some other day,
You sound like a hillbilly;
We want folk singer here."

--Bob Dylan, "Talkin' New York"

There's something very punk about Bob Dylan's first album, punk in several senses of the word, whether you take that to mean brash upstart or fierce independent, a hillbilly trying to be a folk singer, a middle-class Jewish kid from Minnesota trying to sound black and poor, or -- what it really comes down to -- a 20-year-old hoping to win over an audience armed with nothing but a guitar, a harmonica and a very strange voice.

I suspect in 1962 it sounded like nothing else, and it still does. It's stark and alive and brazen; Dylan at a microphone, relying on nothing but his own raw vocals and his fierce guitar playing, as if he wanted on this first effort to say this is me, all me, nothing else, and to be judged strictly on that and nothing else.

The songs were well-chosen and varied, allowing his voice to shift between the easy humor of "Talkin' New York" to the raw scrapping defiance of "In My Time of Dyin'" , the low-down mournfulness of "Man of Constant Sorrow" and "House of the Risin' Sun" and the bluesy yowl of "Freight Train Blues." Also, just as this first album was make or break for Dylan, there's something very much life or death about the songs, mostly death. "In My Time of Dyin'", "Fixin' to Die", "Highway 51", "House of the Risin' Sun", "See That My Grave is Kept Clean".

This marked the first time most people had heard Dylan, and what they heard was someone with something to prove, which is that he's part of a great tradition, that he's here to pick up where Woody Guthrie -- soon to be dead from Parkinson's Disease -- left off. From the perspective of 47 years later, it's hard not to believe him.

Today's word...

is brachiate: "to progress by swinging from hold to hold by the arms." Example Sentence: "Sarah sat on the park bench and watched as her five-year-old son confidently brachiated along the monkey bars."

My guess is that's from a children's book titled "Tommy's Day Out" by John Updike.

Don't read this review!

The title of this particular blog post was one used many years ago by theater critic Robert Brustein of The New Republic. He was writing about Marsha Norman's great play `Night Mother, which is about suicide, and which is difficult to write about without giving away much of the story, the hook, the surprise.

The same goes for Ramin Bahrani's wonderful and bracingly honest new film Goodbye, Solo, which is like Norman's play in that it never condescends to the viewer by cheating on reality; so if you're one of those who gets all wound up about spoilers, consider this fair warning. It goes where others dare not; it heads down a hard road, and refuses to turn back, or even blink. If you haven't seen it, go to one of the handful of theaters across the country where it is now playing or soon will be. Or wait for the DVD on August 25.

Set in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, the story involves Solo (Souleymane Sy Savane), a cabbie from Senegal, who picks up a moody passenger, William (Red West, whose face looks like a crumpled road map of hard living). William offers him a mysterious deal: a thousand dollars to take him, at a specified later date, to the North Carolina mountain known as Blowing Rock, where he will likely end it all, or so he implies.

Implication is how William communicates; he keeps quiet, smokes, and says only what he must. Solo, by contrast, can't keep quiet for a minute. He's a good-natured, lively fellow who sings, laughs, jokes, and has a native belief in the importance of family, where people work hard to take care of their children and the children in turn take care of their elders. Surely, he says, William's family will take care of him. He is both ambitious (he is studying to become a flight attendant) and care-free; faithful that troubles will work themselves out. William's offer of easy money troubles him, as he can definitely use the money but doesn't want to be party to a man's self-destruction. Instead, he takes it upon himself to become a Good Samaritan to his new passenger. Over the weeks that follow, Solo (who is trying to hold his own family together) temporarily leaves his pregnant wife to become William's constant driver and usually unwanted companion, even moving in with him in a motel.

Yes, you think you know where it's all going. We've seen this kind of warm-hearted movie a hundred times: youth vs. age, black vs. white, joy vs. sorrow; surely, life will triumph. Weary old William will come to his senses, everything will work out, and he and Solo will become buddies. It's set in the fall; hey, maybe it will end with a Thanksgiving scene.

But Goodbye, Solo is simply not that kind of bird. The triumph of Bahareh Azimi's superbly subtle script is that, in effect, it departs from the script we're used to. It takes a different, perhaps more honest, definitely more original route that not only avoids the easy answer, but respects the mystery of the situation, and it is something of a mystery. Just what is William's problem anyway? We don't really know. We're left to guess a great deal about William, not because the part is underwritten, but because he's a man in the shadows. We suspect, from his cooking skills, that he was probably a chef. We also know there has been a rupture, somewhere, in his domestic life, although we are spared the details; all we know is that in his spare time he is fixated on a young man who is likely his grandson, but who doesn't know William is his grandfather.

We also know, by the steely determination in his eyes, without William ever having to say it, that he knows he must end his life, either as personal punishment or because it is, to him, the only remaining option. He's hard-headed, stubborn, and can be violent when pushed; maybe that also has something to with why he's here looking to end his life, and why no family has come looking for him. We don't know if he's the good guy or not. We don't know if this is a situation that can be fixed.

One of the most refreshing things about this film is that it's set in the middle of nowhere, a nowhere with which I'm somewhat familiar. I have relatives spread out all across that stretch of North Carolina from Winston-Salem to Blowing Rock and into East Tennessee, which I still visit every couple of years. The fog lifting over the Blue Ridge Parkway and the rich fall colors of the trees are sights I know well. I even lived in the area briefly and quite miserably, although it's not necessarily the kind of territory you associate with suicidal depression. Although the film captures the environment, this is a story that could happen anywhere. That's one of it's charms.

Like last year's Ballast, this is one of those tough, smart films that are inspiring much the way Italian Neo-Realist films are. It restores my faith in independent film-making, and it suggests that the best films in America are coming from flyover country.

Ever notice...

that when certain frustrated readers, either on Amazon or on certain cranky websites like The Second Pass start bashing "canonical" novels, they often wind up not only sounding kind of old, tired, and lazy, but they have the effect of making you want to do the opposite of what they so adamantly insist you not do? Much in the way that Richard Dawkins makes going to church seem like some edgy, dangerous political act, the no doubt well-intentioned folk at The Second Pass make you want to read the very books they hate. In some instances, like The Corrections, they even have more to say in its favor than not. And, on top of that, they quote the ever unreliable B.N. Myers as an authority. Am I the only one getting a distinct whiff of reverse psychology?

On the other hand, I have to admit U.S.A. is a very tough slog.

Infinite July -- and Beyond

Along with a good many others from the rest of North America, I've signed on to the craze known as "Infinite Summer," a reading program started late in June where you read ten pages a day of David Foster Wallace's 1996 monolith: a mind-bending, multi-story, extraordinarily brainy and extensively footnoted tale of tennis, drugs and God knows what all, set sometime in the not too distant future, which is more or less now.

I've always felt guilty about this book, since after reading Sven Birkerts essay on it in the Atlantic I literally called the publisher and begged for a copy. I started it with the great enthusiasm, taking notes, underlining passages, carrying it around and, somewhere around page 400, taking what turned out to be an infinite vacation from it. As the great reviews piled up, I stared at my copy in ignominius shame, especially when I looked on the opening page, where DWF's signature stared at me with a hopeful, happy face, a face I felt I was someone disappointing.

So this summer I'm hoping to pay an old debt to this book, and I've even dragged along my daughter Kate as a teammate. It's like literary whitewater rafting.

So far, I'm remembering what I liked about the book before, but I'm remembering too why it was easy to bail, because it's one of those very big, intense, demanding novels that not only requires your full and unblinking attention but also taxes your memory and, over a few hours of reading, can exhaust your patience.

So all I can say at this stage is that the key with this, as with so many bigs of similar ambition, is to pace yourself, not wear yourself out, and remember there's always tomorrow.

The Runner

John Updike points out in the introduction to Rabbit Angstrom -- the omnibus Everyman's Library edition of Updike's four Rabbit novels -- that Rabbit, Run was never meant to have a sequel, which may be why of all the books in the series it's the one most people have read.

As a whole, the series is a fascinating, absorbing picture of an average, selfish, hedonistic, waveringly moral and occasionally tormented man's trek through the last half of 20th Century America, and it becomes very much of a picture of the those times. Every book is rooted squarely in it's own era, and the characters both comment on everything going on around them, what's in the papers and what's in the news, and are affected by it. If you read these books as they came out, which I more or less did with the last couple, it felt strange and unsettling, as if what was only in the papers yesterday had suddenly taken on the weight and durability of fiction. Updike had a way of capturing the fading moment and making it immortal.

With the first novel, however -- and by the way, I decided upon Updike's death in January to read them all again -- the picture is far more micro than macro, a 1959 story of American rootlessness, the loss of youth and vitality, and the yearning for God amidst apparent absence.

Like many novels, it's about a young man searching for the meaning of life, the distinction being that this young man is not a well-read intellectual, like say, Stephen Dedalus. The life and experiences of Updike's immortal protagonist, ex-high school basketball star Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, are not extraordinary. They're so common in some ways that Harry hardly seems to have the weight, the gravity, to anchor a major work of fiction, let alone four others. Updike nonetheless makes Harry's averageness interesting, mainly because after awhile he seems -- in his confusion, his drives, his sense of alienation, and his sometimes fumbling way of dealing with the world at large -- less average than universal. A modern man, burning up with the American energy to move, but no real idea of where to go.

Harry enters adulthood realizing that life is, if not already over, then at the very least something of a mystery in which there is no clear path. The signposts all lead to dead ends. He still lives in the dreary Pennsylvania town where he grew up, he and his wife, Janice, have a small son, Nelson, and Harry's job, such as it is, means standing around in a supermarket demonstrating a gimmicky kitchen device called the MagiPeel Peeler.

When we first meet Harry, he's coming home from work, sees some kids playing at a back lot court, and invites himself to join them, as if to remind himself that there was one thing he was once very good at. Coming home reminds him where he wound up. The house is a mess. Janice, once a pretty wisp of a girl, has turned into a dumb, slack mother who parks herself in front of the TV and only gets up to freshen her drink. She has dumped Nelson off at her parents. On the TV is the Mickey Mouse Club, where the head Mouseketeer Jimmy shares some gooey conventional wisdom that lights the fuse under Rabbit, and will result in his flight from domestic hell:

Know Thyself, a wise old Greek once said. Know Thyself. Now what does this mean, boys and girls? It means, be what you are. Don't try to be Sally or Johnny or Fred next door, be yourself. God doesn't want a tree to be a waterfall, or a flower to be a stone. God gives to each of us a special talent.

And what is Rabbit's talent, what is his role? Harry, who is as conventionally Christian as he is conventionally so much else, isn't real sure where God is, either. All Harry really knows is that his life has entered a dreary routine and, when he leaves to pick up Nelson from the in-laws, impulsively decides on taking a detour.

Rabbit's night ride takes him only briefly away from his hometown, making it as far as West Virginia before heading back. Instead of going home he seeks the counsel of his old high school coach, Marty Tothero.

Rabbit is always seeking counsel throughout the novel, always looking for someone to set him straight, to give him a clear course, and Tothero is hardly the person to ask. Instead, he seems the very picture of Rabbit's own confusion; he is sympathetic to Janice, and stupidly suggests Rabbit should have helped her hold things together by drinking with her, but so sympathetic to Rabbit's despair that he basically sets him up with Ruth, a local "hooer," a kind of non-professional prostitute.

Ruth is everything Janice isn't: she's fattish, tart-tongued, fleshy, atheist, and very much the hard core realist. Harry moves in with her and tries to forge some kind of life on his own. Balancing her out is Jack Eccles, an Episcopalian pastor who wants Harry to be certain of Christ's love eventhough he himself is no longer sure of it at all. Eccles is married to the pretty and flirtatious Lucy, who gave up the faith long ago and who will serve as a temptation to Harry to stray even further.

Updike says in his introduction to the Everyman edition that Rabbit gave him "a way in -- a ticket to the America all around me," but here, in this novel, it's a ticket to the themes that would later come to dominate his career -- namely the struggle between religious faith and a real world absorbed in chaos, which would figure in A Month of Sundays and Roger's Version, among others, as well as many short stories. It also demonstrates his extraordinarily exacting prose, although it lacks the polish of his later novels. Updike had wanted in his early years to be a cartoonist and a painter, and studied to become one, and his descriptions of people are nothing if not painterly. He always sees the people in his novels, visualizes them, and renders them with unstinting accuracy.

But there is, too, in this novel, a sense of a writer who is a little too pleased with himself, as well as one who isn't yet absolutely sure of his style. Later in the novel, when Harry returns to Janice and then leaves yet again, her random thoughts run in a very stream-of-conscious way that just seems like a bad imitation of Molly Bloom's monologue in Joyce's Ulysses.

He also demonstrates here something he would show over and over in the books to come, which is that he's better than almost any one at capturing what goes on between people when they are trying to communicate: the mixed messages, the signals, the passive-aggressiveness, the sexual tension between men and women.

In fact, it's the tension, the not-knowingness, the what-do-I-do that makes the book so powerful. In a way Harry is like a character in a Bresson film; Updike wants you to meet him just as you would any human being, without being told, up front, how you're supposed to feel, whether you're supposed to like or hate him. One feels no attachment to Harry -- the responses of readers range from dislike to indifference -- but it's hard not to feel deeply involved in his life.

It's the push-and-pull of life, of what he's going through; the great inner and outer tension of how you resolve the unresolvable -- which, incidentally, Updike doesn't even bother to do. None of the book's resolve anything, really, at least nothing fundamental, yet each feels complete.

The Emperor With Lots of Clothes

Just got back from watching Matt Tyrnauer's fascinating Valentino: The Last Emperor -- one of those rare documentaries which not only put this viewer in the thick of a world he knows absolutely nothing about, but also reminds him that he still buys his pants at Kohl's.

The world is haute couture, and the man at its center is the fashion designer Valentino Garavani, who has reigned supreme for the last three decades, the go-to man for everyone from Elizabeth Taylor to Audrey Hepburn to Jackie O to Princess Diana to Sophia Loren to Fill in Famous Leading Lady Here. The film follows him in the year leading up to his retirement, at 70, when after 45 years the business he has created has become bigger than he is, which is saying a lot.

What a life: Valentino lives like a pasha, surrounded by sucker-uppers, fans, and yards and yards of extraordinary cloth. He has five pugs who accompany him everywhere and take up two seats on a private jet. It's a rich and fascinating world, as well as a sterile and abstract one. It's the glamorous jet set life that both attracted and repulsed Fellini in La Dolce Vita (which came out just as Valentino's career was getting off the ground.) It's all about beauty, about a man whose dream in life is to make beautiful clothes for beautiful women, but beauty in the purely aesthetic sense, where a gorgeous naked model is regarded as little more a breathing mannequin.

As a designer, Valentino is presented as an impassioned but also prickly and extremely demanding artist, a man for whom every detail is vital and who lets nothing stand in the way of his vision -- a fact the people around him adhere to unstintingly. It's Valentino's world; they just sew, stitch, make phone calls, make and break plans, and brush the teeth of his dogs in it.

Of no one is this more true than Giancarlo Giametti, Valentino's companion, business manager, and top assistant for the last 45 years, with whom he has forged an indelible relationship that reminded me of Mr. Burns and Smithers on "The Simpsons." If Valentino wants it, Giancarlo makes sure he gets it; he's a fulltime willing slave to Valentino, a fact he basically admits, but he is also the only person who really knows his moods, and how to deal with them. It's as if he is his other half: the left brain, business-minded, real world complement to a decidedly right-brained life. He completes him, to use a cliche. Giancarlo is the one who puts together a typically lavish (not to say gaudy) show to display Valentino's latest creations, a desert setting full of sand and pyramids. Virtually at the last minute, Valention tells him it's a bad idea; that the setting doesn't make sense, that it's stupid. Giancarlo placates the boss, and proceeds ahead anyway.

The show is fantastic and everyone is happy. One senses that there have been a lot of battles like this between these two, and that Giancarlo has served as a necessary buffer between a meticulous and easily bored genius and the world at large.

Despite all the above, I doubt anyone who sees this film will fail to like Valentino. He's often (though not always) easy-going, and he loves his life and his work: he has a genuine artistic enjoyment not only of creating something dazzlingly beautiful, but in dazzling others.

The greater world closes in on Valentino in the last third of the film, as the designer's business is taken over by first one major corporation and then another, ultimately leading to his willing retirement. Valentino says he wanted to leave while the party was still full, and Giancarlo makes sure he has the career-saluting party to end all parties, with a spectacular show at the Coliseum in Greece. There's a suggestion that it's a wise emperor who bows out before he is dethroned.

Mike Nichols' "Frustrated" Adaptation of Catch-22

Kelly Cozy has some interesting thoughts on turning an unfilmable book into a confused movie.

I read both the Heller novel (and the Monarch Notes) in high school, which from the vantage point of over 30 years later means I remember preciously little of it. Apparently I read enough of it (those notes must have helped) that I didn't find the movie hard to follow, but it did leave me rather cold.

On a related note

A 2007 interview with Frieda Hughes. She was 14 before she learned the truth of her mother's death. Can you imagine?

Nicholas Hughes, Biologist

When I heard last night that Nicholas Hughes, the son of poetic legends Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, had committed suicide, two thoughts came to mind.

One, obviously: some families seem born to grief.

In 1963, Sylvia Plath committed suicide by putting her head in a gas oven. Nicholas was just over one; his older sister Frieda was almost three. At the time of her death, Ted Hughes had been having an affair with a woman named Assia Weevil, with whom he would have a daughter, Alexandra; she would move in with the family and care for Frieda and Nicholas.

In 1969, Assia, supposedly long haunted by Sylvia, killed Alexandra and herself in a manner similar to Sylvia's death: after dragging a bed into the kitchen and sealing off the doors, she sedated the little girl, turned on the gas jets, and then got in bed with her.

Nicholas was seven. Awful lot of death to grow up with.

Second thought: is depression hereditary? Is that why he took his life? Was it predestined? Did the fact that both parents were literary giants have any impact?

On the last question, Dermot Cole's fine farewell in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner suggests that Nicholas Hughes was not someone who toiled in the darkness of his parent's shadows.

After earning a bachelor of science degree and a master of science degree at Oxford University in England, where Nick spent his childhood, Hughes became a prominent fisheries scientist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where he earned a doctorate in 1991 and joined the faculty.

He made lasting friendships in Fairbanks with those who shared his inventive interests in such varied pursuits as stream ecology, pottery, woodworking, boating, bicycling, gardening and cooking the perfect pecan pie. Nick guided many people in the winter to spots along the Tanana to savor the art of burbot fishing through the ice.

He spent countless summer hours in his research of grayling and salmon in the Chena River, exhibiting all the patience and wonder that defines a great fisherman. One of his innovations was rigging underwater cameras to get a three-dimensional view of the fish feeding in the passing current.

Many of the best days of his life were in the company of his partner Christine Hunter, also a biologist. He resigned from the faculty more than two years ago, but continued his research.

The focus of Nick’s professional life, one of his friends said, dealt with what might appear to be a simple question, but was extraordinarily complex: “Why do fish prefer one position over another?”

The logic of his research was that the combination of water flow and the streambed guide the way natural selection influences the behavior of individual salmon, grayling, trout and other species. And the behavior of individual fish can help explain population dynamics and other questions about life beneath the surface.

He was a mathematically gifted biologist who also was able to express himself with the written and spoken word.

Nick gave the keynote address at the 2007 Ecohydraulics Symposium in Christchurch, New Zealand, and no one dozed off.

“He was simply awe inspiring, leaving a lasting impression on all we spoke to afterward,” a New Zealand scientist recalled.

In the Times obit, a family friend had this to say:

“Nick wasn’t just the baby son of Plath and Hughes and it would be wrong to think of him as some kind of inevitably tragic figure. He was a man who reached his mid-forties, an adventurous marine biologist with a distinguished academic career behind him and a host of friends and achievements in his own right. That is the man who is mourned by those who knew him.”

It does sound, on balance, like the life of someone who struggled against great odds to forge his own destiny, and to at least some extent succeeded.