Isn't there a "Love is the Drug" joke in here somewhere?

Oh, and To the Lighthouse.

Books I should have read by now:

*Great Expectations

*1984

*Brave New World

*Pride and Prejudice

*For Whom the Bell Tolls

*A Farewell to Arms

*The Awakening

*Jane Eyre

*Vanity Fair

*"The Turn of the Screw" and 99 percent of anything by Henry James.

Meghan O'Rourke in Slate goes Nicholson one better on the wimpering necrophilia of The Hours -- indeed, she nails it on the head as no other reviewer:

Woolf would hate the movie, which depicts her as a jaw-clenched nut job and designates its neurotic latter-day protagonists her spiritual heirs.

What would distress Woolf most, though, is the film's sentimentality about women and suffering and its suggestion that the abiding truth of Woolf's life and work was her madness.

The Hours ... revels in death and sickness and refuses to face loss in its sternest form. It promotes the hoary notion that illness gives us depth: Death—Woolf's, or Richard's—helps us all to "value life more," as the Woolf character in the movie puts it. The artists are sacrificed so that the rest of us ordinary (but sensitive!) people can live better. How extremely fortunate for us.

A-plus, Meghan.

No idea who these W.H. Smith people are -- but do they read books all the way through?

Great piece from Adam Nicholson on the hagiographic sentimentality of The Hours, which:

relies for its effects on the myth of the agonised and finally crucified artist, in much the same way that films about Van Gogh and any of the Romantics have always done.

Nowhere in the Virginia Woolf of The Hours is there any sign of what I know to be the talkative, unforgivingly sharp, intellectual, witty, funny, joking, gossiping, deceitful woman that emerges in her letters. That sometimes malicious, often light-hearted person, endlessly curious about the world and other people, either interrogating them about the details of their lives or behaving suddenly and intimately with great warmth and tenderness towards children - none of that sheer variability of mind, temperament and person is allowed to appear in the film.

Why English majors love Bruce Springsteen.

More old content I dug up that I thought I'd post:

I have just finished B.R. Myers article A Reader's Manifesto and my general impression is not good. I found it, on the whole, reactionary and disingenuous; it isn't a manifesto at all -- it's a philippic, or, to use a less literary term, a bitch session. It ought to be called "In Praise of Straightforwardness;" he yearns for an imaginary past where literature was more plot-oriented, less "wordy", but I daresay there isn't a sentence in the article that couldn't have been written anytime in the last 75 years, with a plenitude of examples. It would not be at all difficult to dig through the works of any of Myers' own heroes -- Proust, Conrad, Melville, James, Faulkner, Bellow (whom he cites for "verbal restraint"!)-- and come up with perfect examples of the purplish or the "tautological." What, for example, does Myers mean when he says that Annie Proulx's writing amounts to "fake Dos Passos, easy detail flung in for the illusion of panoramic sweep." If that isn't a perfect description of genuine Dos Passos, I don't know what is.

All Myers did was pore through a lot of books he couldn't stand, yanked out a few wriggling examples of wretched writerspeak, and decided today's literature is somehow typical of an anti-literary age. Yet Myers never really, convincingly makes a case for where today's fiction went wrong, let alone why.

I will grant, in fairness, that he made some worthy points along the way, and that he roasted a few writers to a nice turn -- especially Cormac McCarthy. But on the whole, I didn't trust Myers as a dependable guide; just a bitter one who had tired of the scenery.

For starters, I found his distinctions a little too easy.

Today any accessible, fast-moving story written in unaffected prose is deemed to be "genre fiction" -- at best an excellent "read" or a "page turner," but never literature with a capital L.

Ever heard of James Ellroy? Myers apparently hasn't. I'm not that crazy about Ellroy's staccato style of writing, but critics everywhere are more than willing to confer on him the title of artist, only in his case they speak of someone breaking the boundaries of his genre (in his case, lit noir.)

The only Annie Proulx I've ever read is what Myers quotes, and so far as I can tell he exaggerates her offensiveness. On a particularly petty note, he waxes wroth that Proulx thanks her children in the acknowledgements to Close Range for "putting up with my strangled, work-driven ways." "How can anything," Myers writes, "no matter how abstract, be strangled and work-driven at the same time?" To which I easily reply that if your ways -- as in, day to day writing habits -- are "work-driven," they will invariably stifle, choke you off or strangle you in other ways -- in Proulx's case, perhaps, spending time with the kids. Myers also cites a scene in Accordion Crimes where a woman's arms are sliced off by a piece of sheet metal and yet she manages to notice a good deal of the scenery at the same time. Again, I didn't find this all that odd; traumatizing events do have a way of slowing things down, and the most horrendous events in life can seem to happen in slow motion.

(Perhaps it is also worth mentioning -- just to show how easy this game is to play -- that Shakespeare himself penned a perfectly ridiculous similar scene in Titus Andronicus, in which Lavinia -- having been raped, had her tongue cut out and her arms hacked off -- appears before Marcus. While the audience screams "Call 911!" Marcus jabbers on endlessly: "Why dost not speak to me?/Alas, a crimson river of warm blood,/ Like to a bubbling fountain stirr'd with wind,/Doth rise and fall between thy rosed lips,/Coming and going with thy honey breath./But, sure, some Tereus hath deflowered thee,/And, lest thou shouldst detect him, cut thy tongue./Ah, now thou turn'st away thy face for shame!" No, Marcus -- she's going into hypovolemic shock.)

Myers point throughout is that writers today make up for their deficiencies as writers with obscure, "fancy-pants" language. He cites Oprah Winfrey's story of how she complained to Toni Morrison that she sometimes had to re-read Morrison's sentences. "That, my dear, is called reading," Morrison replied.

Sorry, my dear Toni, but it's actually called bad writing. Great prose isn't always easy, but it's always lucid; no one of Oprah's intelligence ever had to wonder what Joseph Conrad was trying to say in a particular sentence.

This is just the kind of bad writing that Myers accuses his select writers of applying to their fiction. Great prose isn't always easy -- meaning it is sometimes hard to read -- but it's always lucid -- which means "easily understood." I'm not sure what Myers is talking about here -- but it certainly does make one wonder what he thinks of the Quentin section of The Sound and the Fury or the "Oxen of the Sun" chapter of Ulysses or the second part of Goethe's Faust. Great prose is not always perfectly lucid -- at least, not in parts.

"You see, Mr. Gittes, most people never have to face the fact. At the right time and the right place, they're capable of ... anything!" -- John Huston as Noah Cross in Roman Polanski's Chinatown.

Lately rediscovered notes:


Henry Adams

I am ill-equipped to discuss history very much at all, but I do read it on occasion, and one of my favorite American writers, Henry Adams, was by trade a historian. During his lifetime, he was primarily known for the massive History of the United States Under the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison -- considered something of a classic among those who have actually plumbed all 3,000 pages of it. Today, of course, Adams is known, if at all -- I suspect he isn’t any more a part of today’s American Lit curriculum than he was when I was in school -- for the two extraordinary works of intellectual biography he privately published in his declining years: Mont Saint Michel and Chartres and The Education of Henry Adams. One is positive, one is negative, and together they work like an electrical charge on the brain.

As old men will, Adams became increasingly self-introspective as he and the 19th Century he was born in reached old age. He -- and most of the people he knew -- seemed increasingly out-of-date, dwarfed by a period of progress both unmatched and unchecked. The Industrial Age bred not only change but a chaotic, fractured society -- one which had gone, as he put it time and again, from unity to multiplicity. History, which Adams had devoted his life to charting, suddenly seemed beyond his reach; it had become a “dynamic force” of such volatility that it required a physical scientist. In these books, Adams tries to trace the arc of history’s trajectory and his own role in it.

In the first, Adams visits the classic cathedrals of France to rediscover a 12th-Century world before the Enlightment or Darwin had played havoc with faith in God. Adams peers deeply not only into the sheer craft of these vast, meticulously rendered cathedrals -- the apse, the transept, the glass, the vaulting -- but the mind and world that produced them: the efforts of “man’s littleness to grasp the infinite.”

There’s an optimistic yearning in all this -- within the smooth, luminous writing there’s a prayerful desire for a time when, despite its limits, the vision of mankind could see beyond earthly boundaries. But the hopeful tone of this “Study in 12th Century Unity” gives way to bitterness in the Education, “A Study in 20th Century Multiplicity” that is one of the most eloquently sour books ever written -- a Boston Brahmin’s long and very jaded look back.

For one thing, the metaphor for infinity was different: the Virgin of the 12th Century had been replaced by the dynamo. Looking at the dynamo at the Exposition of 1900, Adams

began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross. The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving within arm's length at some vertiginous speed, and barely murmuring -- scarcely humming an audible warning to stand a hair's-breadth further for respect of power -- while it would not wake the baby lying close against its frame. Before the end, one began to pray to it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before silent and infinite force. Among the thousand symbols of ultimate energy the dynamo was not so human as some, but it was the most expressive.

Ultimately, Adams -- who pleads ignorance of just about everything all the way through the book -- posits the possibility that unity is multiplicity, since all matter is reducible to atoms and atoms may be nothing more than pure motion. Chaos is the only game going. History itself, rather than being a cause and effect sequence of events, begins to seem at the turn of the century to have assumed the nature of sheer force:

The motion of thought had the same value as the motion of a cannonball seen approaching the observer on a direct line through the air. One could watch its curve for five thousand years. Its first violent acceleration in historical times had ended in the catastrophe of 310. The next swerve of direction occurred towards 1500. Galileo and Bacon gave a still newer curve to it, which altered its values; but all these changes had never altered the continuity. Only in 1900, the continuity snapped.

Adams sees a modern world that has become a slave to its own progress: “Prosperity never before imagined, power never yet wielded by man, speed never reached by anything but a meteor, had made the world irritable, nervous, querulous, unreasonable and afraid.”
Nearly a century later, it is hard to imagine a work that is more prescient.

Lately rediscovered notes from 1999:


The distance between us: Philip Seymour Hoffman gets down and dirty with Lara Flynn Boyle in Happiness.

Happy Now? Hardly

Every now and then, I watch the TV sitcom “Friends” with my 12-year-old daughter. If I’m lucky, the plot will be on the mild side of PG, and the antics of this group of beautiful young people will require from me no rejoinders, corrections, sighs of discomfort or fights for the remote. That usually isn’t the case -- the jokes are always about sleeping around, which I couldn’t care less about as an adult but which I tend to blanch at as a parent. Promiscuity on prime time TV has a way of looking hip, witty and wholesome. If there is a dark side to sex, the “Friends” have somehow failed to discover it -- there’s no despair, no anguish, no fear, and heaven knows no diseases. It’s just an endless source of cheery banter, fleshy goodwill and knowing laughs between pals. The child whose picture of love and relationships is shaped by this Disney version of it is in for a hard fall.

Would a young person be better served by watching Todd Solondtz’s Happiness? This is of course a non-issue, since I personally intend to put it out of my daughter’s reach until she is deep into her thirties, when she’ll be jaded enough to take it and “Friends” will be yesterday’s joke. But I question whether she’ll buy its premise then any more than her old man does now. This seamy semi-comedy from the director of Welcome to the Dollhouse is a virtual catalogue of middle-class sexual hang-ups, most of which seem inspired by the tabloids. It’s an anti-sitcom: the kind of deeply unfunny comedy where the laugh track is real, but the laughter sounds nervous and defensive, and eventually peters out altogether.

As you can guess from the title, it’s pretty depressing, not to mention cranky and puritanical. There are a fair number of orgasms in the movie, but not one cry of joy -- just weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth.

It’s the kind of film a repressed nun might make to convince herself to stay safe within the walls of the convent.

The story generally centers on the multiple connections and disconnections of the Jordan family, which range from the banal to the bizarre. Starting from the top, there’s the dad, Lenny (Ben Gazzara) who wants to leave if not exactly divorce his wife of 40 years, Mona (Louise Lasser) for a fling with Diane (Elizabeth Ashley.) The couple’s three adult daughters have it a good deal worse, and are in varying stages of denial. First we meet Joy (Jane Adams II) who is of course joyless -- an aimless musician who is no better at picking men than she is day jobs. Then there’s Trish (Cynthia Stevenson, in an apparent self-parody of her trademark insufferable cutesiness) who prattles on forever about how she “has it all.” Being the happiest character she is also the most blind, unaware that her successful therapist husband Bill (Dylan Baker) would rather rape their eleven-year-old son’s friends than sleep with her. The boy, Billy (Rufus Read) has his own troubles -- he wants to be able to ejaculate like all the other kids, so naturally he turns to Dad for advice on length over girth, and the finer points of caressing one’s self. The successful sister Helen (Lara Flynn Boyle) can have any man she wants, but the ease bores her -- she wants it raw and dirty, like the characters in her presumably best selling soft-porn novels. She finds the man of her dreams when she gets an obscene phone call from the guy down the hall, Allen (Phillip Seymour Hoffman, who is excellent). Unfortunately, he can only relate physically to himself. No wonder he ultimately hooks up with his neighbor Kristina (Camryn Manheim), who like him is overweight, unattractive, and desperate for love. She also has a murderous hatred for sex. Perhaps the most tender moment in Happiness is when these two crawl in bed, and turn away from each other. Welcome to the new frontier: one-night stands where nothing happens.

There are several images from Happiness that linger in the head after you’ve seen it, most involving masturbation or semen. The vital fluid -- which seems to be asserting itself as a major presence in movies today, from The Doom Generation to There’s Something About Mary -- is splattered in at least a couple of scenes, talked about ad nauseum between Bill and Billy, and constantly siphoned by Allen . Semen is the film’s McGuffin -- the thing everyone wants, in one way or another: to receive it, to be released from it, to be free of it forever. And of course freedom is exactly what it doesn’t deliver. When Lenny comes too early, Diane tells him not to feel guilty. “I don’t,” he replies, “I don’t feel anything.” He isn’t alone, of course. The people in this movie are shell-shocked survivors of their own private desire.

Solondz’s picture of family life as this swarm of worms coated with oily bourgeois charm made its debut in Welcome to the Dollhouse, wherein poor 11-year-old Dawn Weiner underwent one adolescent disaster after another. There’s a natural sympathy between the director and the Dawns and Billys of the world, born into families which will bequeath them a burden of bullshit and despair.

Unfortunately, I never really bought the whole package. Watching Happiness you never get the feeling you’re seeing the grimy truth peeled back from the layers of suburbia, just the director’s own somewhat angry vision of it, and like any film bred in anger it comes across looking thin and hollow. The characters seem less like people than they do cardboard representations of modern-day anomie and ennui. And so much of the film just seems punishing to sit through -- partly because the ugliness is so unearned. I am thinking here particularly of an irredeemably nasty scene at the end between the Bill and Billy -- one of several moments when I found myself praying for projection failure. To begin with, it struck me as completely implausible, and because it’s implausible, because it seems a nightmare located entirely within the brain of the director and outside of reality, even the reality of the film, I felt needlessly assaulted --which I can only guess was the intent. There is nothing like a film that takes a hard, close look at the truth we would all like to avoid; there’s nothing worse than one that wants to, and fails.

Because Todd Solondz’s obsessions are neither persuasive nor searching, I wonder about his future. How many audiences will be willing, after this and Welcome to the Dollhouse, to join him on one more masochistic trip through Depravity Lane?
I, for one, think I’ll pass.

P.S. No, I didn’t bother to watch Storytelling.

Heard of a van that is loaded with weapons,

packed up and ready to go

Heard of some gravesites, out by the highway,

a place where nobody knows

The sound of gunfire, off in the distance,

I'm getting used to it now...

Standard lists of books I should have read by now always make me queasy. At this stage of my life, shouldn't the top three be in my dust by now?

My defense: I once bought a used paperback of Tristram Shandy but have never been all that interested in tackling it. I have, on the other hand, tacked Middlemarch a number of times, and always lose interest by page 98. I could stand to read
Great Expectations, but the sad fact is no one ever forced it on me in school. I'll probably read it sometime soon. Just this week I'm reading A Tale of Two Cities for the first time. No one ever made me read that either.

Never read any Graham Swift, either. I know and like all the rest on the list. Of these, the one I'd most look forward to reading again -- if only for easy pleasure it affords -- is Waugh's A Handful of Dust, a novel of wicked perfection.

Rodney Welch's Top Movies List

Ever wonder what happens to comedians who ridicule the dictator of Iraq? The same thing that happens to graffiti artists who write "Fuck Saddam, his wife and daughters" in the men's room at the Baghdad Zippy Mart.

Nice Guardian profile about a comedy act I hope we all live to see.

El (This Strange Passion) is one of a handful of masterpieces from Luis Bunuel's "middle period" of the 1950s -- long after his auspicious 1928 debut with Un Chien Andalou, and just prior to his great creative period of the 1960s.

From the time of his official "comeback" in 1950 with Los Olvidados, Bunuel worked steadily in Mexico and Spain crafting a series of what might be called "Surrealist melodramas." Genre films they no doubt were, but as was true with Douglas Sirk in America, they brought out the best in him. He turned them inside out.

"With El," he later told an interviewer, "I worked as I always did in Mexico: a film was proposed to me and instead of accepting it outright I tried to work out a counterproposal. Though my proposal was still commercial, it nevertheless seemed a better way of expressing some of the things I wanted to say."

Soap operas and melodramas were, after all, what that stalwart Surrealist phrase l'amour fou, or "crazy love," was all about. Bunuel took tales of heated love and thwarted desire and turned them into personal statements about obsession, repression, bourgeois propriety, Catholicism, and fetishism.

El, in fact, manages to get all this in the very first scene. During Holy Week, Don Francisco Galvan de Montemayor (Arturo de Cordova) is taking part in a Catholic foot-washing ceremony when he very suddenly falls in love -- with a pair of feet. The middle-aged Don Francisco is a wealthy businessman, a devout Catholic, and, we come to find out, still a virgin. The problem isn't that he can't find anyone; he's handsome, vigorous, confident and a sharp dresser. The problem is that no one has ever been good enough. He's a romantic purist. These beautiful feet, then, present a challenge. He's a believer not just in love at first sight, but at first and last sight; having held out for a lifetime for the woman of his dreams, he is committed to possessing her for eternity.

The feet belong to Gloria (Delia Garces), who resists his charm but is just fearfully attracted enough by his self-assurance to leave her fiance Raul (Luis Beristein) for him. Of course, she doesn't quite know what she's in for, but her wedding night gives her a good idea: no sooner does Don Francisco embrace her than he works himself into a jealous rage over the possibility that she loved someone before him. For the duration of their honeymoon, he tortures himself with paranoid fears that Gloria is being stalked by a man she barely knows. In the couple's married life, reconciliation leads to violence, arguments end with gunfire, and a day's peaceful outing concludes with Don Francisco's Vertigo-esque threat to pitch Gloria from the top of a bell-tower. Gloria's efforts to change the situation come to naught; the rest of the world, including her own mother, are too impressed by Don Francisco's devotion to ever see through him. Far from satisfying Don Francisco, love turns this professional control freak into a raving nut and his new bride into his prisoner. Fernando goes berserk; first in a clumsy attempt at suturing Gloria's vagina and then later in church, where his ordered world implodes before his eyes.

*****

"What happens with the cinema is that people have written and said a great deal about its technique," Bunuel told an interviewer in his later years. "There's a lot of hot air in all that: cinema is easy to do, and has no secrets ... The specialists solve the technical problems. To be a good director in the cinema is the same as being a good writer -- to have clear ideas, to know what you want to say and to say it as directly as possible."

This wasn't just the view of a wily old man, eager to blaspheme his own status as a sacred cow. Long before he got anywhere near a camera, film had always been for him a matter of simplicity, of pursuing a clean, uncluttered style that didn't rely on unneccessary effects.

"No one ever talks about the technique of films like [Buster Keaton's] College," he wrote in an early film review, "and it is because it is so indissolubly mingled with the other elements, that no one even notices, just as if you live in a house you do not take note of the calculated resistance of the materials which compose it." How easily one could say the same thing about so many of his own films, except that people did talk about his style; a style that was so effective because it eschewed "style" altogether. He made complex films that proceed with remarkable economy; so much so that it sometimes throws viewers off-guard, especially with his editing. Rather than a title-card that says "Six years later," he uses a "straight cut" that not only tests your alertness but gives the story an appropriately dream-like touch.

There is, to be sure, some fancy camerawork in his movies -- non-synchronous sound, freeze-frames, slow-motion, jump-cuts, and warped dream images were all things he either originated or toyed with, usually before anyone else -- but what really defines Bunuel is not the way he manipulated the lens but how he arranged images in a suggestive, even shocking way. We never actually see Don Francisco trying to stitch up Gloria, for example; we just see him him take a needle, thread, razor and rope into the bedroom. The suggestiveness of juxtaposed objects: key to dreams, key to the Surrealists, and the key reason why Bunuel's compositions are so distinct and recognizable. Will anyone ever forget the ants crawling out a hole in a man's hand in Un Chien Andalou? The poor blind street musician in Los Olvidados, staring into the face of a rooster? The laughing portrait of Christ in Nazarin? The group of beggars in Viridiana, having a pagan orgy to the strains of Handel's Messiah?

In time, Bunuel would have total freedom to choose his own mad projects and say everything he had only hinted at before. But as El reminds us, the hints themselves could be pretty damned powerful.El reminds us, the hints themselves could be pretty damned powerful.

If, like me, you still mourn the good old days of suck.com, take heart. Frequent Suckster Ana Marie Cox started her own blog: the antic muse.

Maybe it's the lay-out, but I think of Mizz Cox as the anti-Eve Tushnet, which should not exactly be taken as an anti-Eve dig. I really don't care if you're a conservative lesbian or a leftist wife so long as you write well and wittily.

Okay, so I'm lukewarm. Spew me.
---------------------------
I'm afraid I have nothing much to say about Omoo, Melville's sequel to Typee. I find it quite boring. It's an episodic ramble through Polynesia -- "omoo" means "wanderer" -- and the many incidents Melville (now under the nom de plume "Paul") describes in so many blessedly short chapters are neither inspired nor amusing. I can't wait for it to end.
---------------------------
Listening throughout the day to the late, great Eric Dolphy, the multi-talented jazz instrumentalist -- equally at home on flute, tenor sax, clarinet, you-name-it -- who died in 1964 at the tender age of 36, amidst an extraordinary career as a straight session player, a vital component of Charles Mingus' band, and a remarkable solo artist.

This is the kind of wild jazz you either love or loathe. I don't know the first thing about music, but I think this is the kind of jazz they call "modal" which, if my own experience accounts for anything, means that it is effortlessly melodic, maddeningly repetitive, and also full of wild swooping squawks, squeaks and grunts -- you know, very much like Ornette Coleman. Indeed, these are the things I like most about it; if you're going to make some noise, make it adventurous.
--------------------------
Another perfect summation from Stanley Kauffmann, this time on Kurt Russell: "His acting seems made of cards that are well-thumbed."
--------------------------

God only knows what to make of Mel Gibson's new movie.

Gibson, long known as a conservative Catholic, turns out to be what one might call a fundamentalist Catholic, presumably one who looks on the Vatican with at least as much contempt and loathing as the Bob Jones crowd looks on the Southern Baptist Convention. From the surface of things, it looks as if Gibson's self-financed, -produced and -directed forthcoming film, The Passion, could be as controversial as The Last Temptation of Christ, although for entirely opposite reasons. A lot of people hated Scorsese's film because they thought it blasphemous; most notably in that -- in keeping with the Kazantzakis novel -- it considered the possibility of Christ having lust in his heart. Some people even thought the movie was part of a plot by "Hollywood Jews."

Those very people may be just the audience for Gibson's film; the Times article hints that the film's take on the crucifixion is that Christ was murdered not by humanity, but by Jews.

I'd like to think Gibson is beyond that kind of doctrinaire hatred, but that may be too much to hope for if his views are anything like his dad's. The elder Gibson comes off sounding like a certifiable anti-Semitic loon.

Is anyone going to see this picture? Who is going to distribute it?

Note to self: How I'll spend Saturday. No, wait -- Sunday.

Laid-Off: A No Nothing Production -- Watch this. My current choice for "Funniest Movie on the Web."

A New Musical Express article raises the question: just how do you say "I laid a gin-soaked barroom queen in Memphis" in Chinese?

The folks at kitchencabinet have some interesting but rather callous remarks on Shane and High Noon. My response:

I enjoy both films enormously -- and while your reductive comments are interesting and intelligent, they come across as rather horribly snotty. I mean, come on -- The Faerie Queen? That's not even a fair comparison. "Highly developed levels of meaning" aren't neccessarily what one yearns for in a Western film -- especially ones such as these, which draw so much of their strength from their leanness, their focus, and their single-mindedness of purpose. If you want an ambiguous Western, maybe you should have watched a Sam Peckinpah film or a Monte Hellman film or one by Anthony Mann -- but don't blame Stevens and Zinnemen for not being them. What grips the viewer in Shane and High Noon is the starkness of the situations.

You say: "There's almost nothing else to do while watching it but think about more complicated situations and issues." I'm all for the critical assumption that one's own objections to a work of art will be experienced by all others, but both these films show this view has its limitations. It's fair to say that almost no one watching these films for the first time is going to be wondering about "more complicated situations and issues."

You state that "Both deal with the battle in western towns for law and order but neither profits from the greater dramatic range that this setting makes available" -- I find the opposite to be true. Both films, especially Shane. employ landscape for dramatic purposes; I am thinking in particular of the low-angle shots of Ladd as he rides to the showdown with Jack Palance, and the ending as well -- where he is silhouetted against the sky.

Townshend goes free.

Good.

January Magazine presents an admittedly shitty interview with Rohinton Mistry, whose Family Matters I glowingly reviewed last year. It does, however, have an interesting sidelight about Germaine Greer that I wasn't aware of. Dumb bitch.

Promised Land

"Your mom has good taste."

So reads a recent e-mail from Hershel Parker, who apparently saw a note on this site -- or somewhere -- where I said that my mom had given me the first volume of his massive Herman Melville biography. I look forward to the book; for now, I continue to commit myself to an ass-backwards Melville reading program: very casual and at whatever pace I choose. Having started with Pierre and the later works, I have proceeded to the very beginning and will work my way up to where I first arrived. This way I wind up at Moby Dick.

Melville is a writer of great symphonic depths, and he's sometimes a dull one; Faulkner is the same way. People who push the limits can push your patiernce, too. Typee is neither a dull book nor a masterly one, but there's no question a master wrote it. Part of the excitement of reading it is that you know the author has greatness within his reach; it's lovely in and of itself, but there's also a sense you have of how those talents would blossom; you can see a style that has found itself and is ripening. You see someone born to write.

Typee is a superb book of travel and recollection and amused thoughtfulness, and it suggests the full, restless, unquenchable and unsatisfied spirit oif a writer who can never plunge deep enough into experience, and will tax his memory and imagination to the last dreg to bring his art into fruition. It has an easygoing but muscular style; casually philosophical and not that complex. It's the work of a young man, sticking to what he knows, drawing out of the material all he can, which is a lot.

The book is about life amidst a strange sort of paradise: a Tahitian society that is the opposite of 19th Century life, and of civilized life since. Melville arrived in such a place when he and a felllow sailor, Toby, ditched the ship Acushnet in 1842; in this purportedly true "peep at Polynesian life," Melville is Tommo and Toby is Toby and how accountably true the book is is, I suppose, anyone's guess. The island of Nukaheva where they arrive is one ruled by the most casual joys and easy amusements, a land of milk and honey, of manna, a land generously blessed with breadfruit for food and trees whose bark can be rendered into clothing. People don't wear themselves out with work or trouble themselves all that much with God; the Deity is somewhat iffy, religion as a formalized practice is largely unknown and the enforced customs and taboos seem to have been chosen at random. People run around naked, the sex (Melville suggests) is free and easy, and people are happy -- happier, certainly, than the missionaries who are so intent on civilizing them and the armies who exploit and terrorize them.

It's no wonder why Melville's debut was the most popular of his books in his lifetime. It describes in rich detail every custom, from how breadfruit is processed into food to the uses of tree bark to make cloth to the intricacies of using a shark's tooth as a tattooing needle. It's like a National Geographic special with a touch of Rousseau, as our narrator reflectively ponders whether this new world is more or less savage than the one he grew up in. Cannibals they are, but cannibals who only eat their enemies, and who only respond violently when their way of life is threatened: "Thus it is that they whom we denominate `savages' are made to deserve the title."

Among the characters are the servant Koro-Koro -- in whom one sees shades of Queequeg -- his father Marheyo, the chief Mehevi, and the thoroughly delightful Fayaway, a bare-breasted tropical houri:

How captivating is a Peruvian lady, swinging in her gaily-woven hammock of grass, extended between two orange-trees, and inhaling the fragrance of a choice cigarro!

But Fayaway, holding in her delicately formed olive hand the long yellow reed of her pipe, with its quaintly carved bowl, and every few moments languishingly giving forth light wreaths of vapour from her mouth and nostrils, looked still more engaging.

We floated about thus for several hours, when I looked up to the warm, glowing, tropical sky, and then down into the transparent depths below; and when my eye, wandering from the bewitching scenery around, fell upon the grotesquely-tattooed form of Kory-Kory, and finally, encountered the pensive gaze of Fayaway, I thought I had been transported to some fairy region, so unreal did everything appear.

I'll leave it to scholars to say where truth ends and imagination begins in Typee; whatever this book is, it unfolds like a dream.

PETA's new ad campaign is obscene -- that's the first and most obvious fact about it. The second is that it reveals a dogmatic mindset that is impervious to reason. The great tragedy of Hitler's camps is that human beings were treated like animals; worse than animals, in fact. The point of PETA's campaign appears to be that animals are being treated like humans -- an argument which not only doesn't have the same forcefulness, but reflects a philosophy that sets animals above humans. Typically, PETA's effort to express their supposed belief in the sanctity of life only reflects how little they value it beyond the chicken or rabbit level.

Elie Wiesel put it best in Thursday's Ventura County Star:

Wiesel suggested that PETA's campaign exemplifies perhaps his greatest disappointment in life.

"I am not afraid of forgetfulness," he said, referring to society's memory of what happened in the Holocaust. "I am afraid of banalization, of trivialization and this is part of it.

"Why I'm disappointed is ... if the Holocaust didn't change the world, what could change the world?" Wiesel said. "Hatred for minorities in certain cases, religious minorities, ethnic or national minorities, the disdain we feel for poor people, or AIDS patients -- we haven't learned that the 'other' is not the symbol of enemy to you."

Wiesel said PETA "defeats their purpose by exaggerating" and by producing "the banality of evil" in the campaign.

"They could simply say they're killing," Wiesel said. "What's wrong with the word 'kill,' that they are against killing animals? All right, then I could support them."

The Civil Rights review hits print.

What I'm listening to -- the last great blast of the Velvets, a radio-friendly LP of typically dark songs that radio very typically snubbed. An additional disc to this set is the "alternative album" of Loaded -- a much looser, sloppier version of the final product. Wildly different in parts, and not usually better, except in the case of "New Age."

He's Dorian Gray! No wait -- he's Humbert Humbert! No, no -- Gandalf! And he's going broke!

This is what is known as "spinning the Times obit."

A few weeks ago, in preparation for a Book Club discussion of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, I re-read Heart of Darkness, as well as Achebe's famous essay.

Some notes from the time:

Feb. 5, 2003: "Conrad is, as always, like walking through molasses -- thick turgid style and I can't say I always followed it. Marlow in England one moment and on the Congo the next, gliding to the heart, etc. Read Achebe's essay on it, which is rubbish -- he thinks it's not a work of art because it's racist, which would exclude most works of art or a number of them anyway, from the beginning of time."

This was not the only point on which I disagreed. The other was Achebe's assertion that there's no "filter" between Marlow's point of view and Conrad's own. Marlow, he said, "seems to me to enjoy Conrad's complete confidence." Personally, I thought Conrad put some distance between him and his character, and that he deliberately created in Marlow a outsized narrator of some rawness, a slightly daft character, perhaps, whose visions of Africa were certainly true for him if not his creator.

I became growingly disappointed in the essay as I went on to read Achene's Things Fall Apart, which intrigued and surprised me. I thought the book was going to be a mere anti-colonial rant, but it was much more complex than that, as the African village in the book is hardly a haven of paradise -- in many ways, it is downright evil -- and the missionaries and government officials who upset their way of life are not stereotypical blundering do-gooders who have taken up the white man's burden. Some of them are actually decent people who make progressive changes.

In a most interesting piece in the London Guardian Caryl Phillips -- whose superb The Atlantic Sound is a remarkable journey into the African-American, African-English past -- interviews Achebe and finds himself revisiting and revising his own pro-Conrad views:

* But is it not ridiculous to demand of Conrad that he imagine an African humanity that is totally out of line with both the times in which he was living and the larger purpose of his novel? In his lecture, even Achebe wistfully concedes that the novel reflects "the dominant image of Africa in the western imagination."

* However, despite Achebe's compelling "evidence", I am still finding it difficult to dismiss this man and his short novel. Are we to throw all racists out of the canon? Are we, as Achebe suggests, to ignore the period in which novels are written and demand that the artist rise above the prejudices of his times?


* Achebe is right; to the African reader the price of Conrad's eloquent denunciation of colonisation is the recycling of racist notions of the "dark" continent and her people. Those of us who are not from Africa may be prepared to pay this price, but this price is far too high for Achebe. However lofty Conrad's mission, he has, in keeping with times past and present, compromised African humanity in order to examine the European psyche. Achebe's response is understandably personal.

Good piece from the folks at The Kitchen Cabinet on Almodovar's Talk to Her. Nice to read as I prepare to watch All About My Mother.

Derbyshire responds:

Thanks, Rodney. I'll give it another try...

...when I'm through with Sponge Bob (see my next NRO column).

JD

Great Jonathan Yardley piece on the late John Marquand leads to the following e-mail exchange.

Welch: Just thought I'd point this out -- the Library of America has yet to include Hemingway either.

Yardley: That's because Hemingway is still under copyright and I'm sure Scribner refuses to release him.

Depending on your point of view, John Derbyshire, in his rather weird argument for the social values of Married...With Children, is either cynical or just brutally realistic. Quoting Orwell, he finds the show reflective of “the working-class outlook which takes it as a matter of course that youth and adventure — almost, indeed, individual life — end with marriage.”

Marriage is hell and always has been, he lets us know, but ours would be a poorer world without it:

For the principle underlying Married With Children — it would be too much to say that the show actually celebrated it, but it was there anyway — was the principle of duty. This is not a very fashionable principle in an age like ours, an essentially hedonistic age; but without some widespread sense of duty, of selfless adherence to custom and principle and social obligation, no civilization could persist for long.

He explains that in his native England people like this kind of thing -- harsh and unsentimental, which is why he claims never to have liked "The Simpsons."

To my way of thinking, though, the jokes in "Married ... With Children" were merely crass and cloddish; it was one of those sitcoms where you spent most of the half-hour yearning for comic relief. It was the kind of show the Simpson family might have watched while the rest of us watched "The Simpsons."

My letter to Derbyshire:

You've simply got to watch The Simpsons again. Everything you said about Married ... With Children is true of The Simpsons with the added distinction that it mocks virtually everyone and is funny on a regular basis.

At the risk of sounding un-American, I think Homer Simpson is the true American icon. You look at this filthy slob and lazy employee, this commonest of common denominators, this loving dad and faithful husband and you recognize it -- mostly in others, but also probably in one's self. Homer is the man who has devoted his life to always taking the easy way out. You look at him and think "You know, this isn't the best America has to offer, but it is something we offer. It's something we are."

Give it another look -- it's possibly the most vital artistic artifact of the latter third of the 20th Century. To the child in 3345 A.D. who wants to understand American life in the last ten years, I'd say look at The Simpsons.

It is us.

Saw Unfaithful this afternoon. Dynamite performance by Diane Lane -- that's the first thing about it anyone's going to notice. She's this mid-thirtyish wife who has a disastrous but highly charged affair with a younger man, and she goes well beyond the role; just puts her whole self into it, and fully conveys the range of emotional fragility: stop, don't stop, do it, don't do it, this is insane, let's do it again -- that whole rollercoaster of being addicted to something dangerous and forbidden and fulfilling. She has enormous guts as an actress and it really pays off.

The movie itself -- well, it's an Adrian Lyne film, which are all rather off-putting, mainly because of their look. Film for film, you recognize that same stylized claustrophobia, that same fashion ad aura in every scene. He's always real heavy on shadows to convey emotional tension, shadows and primo movie-star ass. I must admit the sex scenes in Unfaithful are very hot, which is something I don't always like admitting about other films of his I've seen. He likes to push the emotional tension and sometimes it works. It works more often than not on this go-round becsause of his lead actress. She's nominated for Best Actress and I hope she wins, though I suspect that honor will go to Nicole Kidman.

Started reading Typee. I have this goal over the next little while (no set date) to read all of Melville, as well as Hershel Parker's bio (Mom delivered Vol. I for Christmas; maybe I can squeeze Vol. II out of Father's Day) and Lorant-Robertson's sadly out-of-print one (which I had to return to the library unfinished; the first 150 pages are beautiful though) and Newton Arvin's little book (months overdue from S.C. State Library, which thankfully does not charge overdue fees. I've kept books out for over a year.)

I've only gotten to page 75 of Typee, but it's a thoroughly absorbing adventure.

I've bitched and re-bitched, written and re-written my little review of The Hours. I now have this strong hankering to re-read the Woolf novel and to read Michael Cunningham's novel on which the movie is based -- if only to further test out and explore any thoughts on the issues the movie raised. Seeing the Vanessa Redgrave film of the novel wouldn't hurt either.

Endlessly chatty woman at church: I'm having one of those days where my brain is not connected to my body.

Me, privately: You mean one of those lives, don't you?

Prelude to a kiss: Virginia (Nicole Kidman) and Vanessa (Miranda Richardson) do the soulful sisterly stare thing in The Hours

And the Oscar for Best Picture goes to...The Hemlock Society for The Hours!!!

I didn't buy The Hours. It's a movie with one point, but I'll break it into two. One is that suicide is a noble option from the crushing pressure of existence. The other is that if you're a sensitive soul, you're probably gay, that a heterosexual union is therefore by its very nature repressive, and that any option for escape -- especially suicide -- is an act of courage. It operates from a gay weltanschaung that says heterosexuality is lethal, death is beautiful and suicide is heroic. The movie is well-acted, well-made, and tells a complex story in an intriguing way. But It's bullshit, and I shifted in my seat nervously, rejecting it almost all the way through.

The movie intertwines three stories. One is that of Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman with her nose out of joint; like the other two principals she is made to look as unflattering as possible), who commits suicide as the movie opens. In flashback the familiar story of the doyenne of Bloomsbury is replayed: she and her husband, Leonard, have left London for rural England, where they set up Hogarth Press. Virginia is suffering from a variety of mental problems, which apparently inspires her to write Mrs. Dalloway, a rather Joycean novel about one day in the life of the society woman Clarissa Dalloway. Although the movie sets this episode in 1921, it gives the impression that the novel is her own suicide note; actually the real Woolf would not kill herself for another 20 years. Anyway. From there we glide to another pair of stories, one in the 1950s, when a housewife, Laura Brown(Julianne Moore) is reading Mrs. Dalloway and one in 2001, when Meryl Streep is living out the Woolf story; her character's name is Clarissa, and her ex-husband Richard (Ed Harris), a poet who is dying of AIDS, calls her "Mrs. Dalloway."

What do the three have in common, besides a book? Virginia, as we all know, took her own life and according to the movie death was about the only thing she ever talked about with any passion. Certainly, Leonard does not evoke passion, although there is love and concern between them; the only person that apparently really trips Virginia's trigger is her sister Vanessa (Miranda Richardson). Laura, thirty years later in some dull American suburb -- from the looks of it, the same gilded Douglas Sirkian cage that traps Moore in Far From Heaven -- has a dull marriage that is all "Father Knows Best" on the surface. Her husband (John T. Reilly. who seems to be getting trapped in these nebbishy roles) loves her, her son Richie loves her but, as if we couldn't guess from her thin, plastic smile, she hates the domestic life she's been pretending to love. She doesn't fit into Eisenhower America, and when her pal Kitty (Toni Collette) comes over, we begin to understand why.

Kitty is the very picture of 1950s complacency; she looks like the cover of a Butterick pattern. Kitty is another prisoner of domesticity, although she doesn't know it. She wants to have a child and can't; instead, as she tells Laura, the doctors have found a growth on her uterus. Instead of a growing foetus, she gets a growing cancer; a cancer that is clearly indicative of her sense of failure. As she tells Laura, she had always grown up to believe that you're not really a woman unless you bear children. As Laura comforts her, the two women wind up sharing a lingering mouth-to-mouth kiss. Laura, who has devoted most her day to baking a cake for her husband's birthday, to being everything Kitty thinks a woman should be, now decides she wants to die. The life Kitty wants is the life that is killing her.

And then there's Clarissa, some fifty years later, who has been living for some years with a girlfriend; in the spirit of "if you can't beat `em, join `em," she has left her gay husband to find her own gay self. Like her literary doppelganger, and like Laura, she is hustling about preparing for a party for the dying Richard; she is doing all of Richard's living for him, and he can't stand it any longer; he wants to let go of a life that has become a pain, a long procession of hours.

Virginia, Laura, Richard -- the woman who wrote the book, the woman who read it, and (as it turns out) the son of the woman who read it; all gay and all romantically fixated on death, more or less with the movie's approval. Someone has to die, Virginia announces to Leonard, speaking of her novel and her life. Why, he asks. So that others will value life more, she replies -- at which point I began to grimace. Do the perpetually unhappy have any recourse to this state of affairs? Well, yes, as we learn later; Laura saves herself by abandoning her family, which will turn her son against her for life. But hey, she explains later, she chose life -- another grimace from me.

I suppose on reflection I can up the movie's overall score a tad by noting that it doesn't try to resolve the fact that life is about choices and choices, such as Richard's eventual suicide, sometimes involve the pain of others. What I find harder to forgive is that the movie seems to dole out equal nobility to choosing to live or choosing to die, which is not only simplistic but seems to me almost cruel. Virginia Woolf was mentally ill and feared another nervous breakdown. Whatever one may think of her art, she was not a sentimentalist. Does it honor her memory to turn her into some kind of latter-day Ophelia?

"The Last Days of Ben Chester White" -- Jerry Mitchell's excellent Clarion-Ledger story ably places the event of the killing in the context of the times.

Ben Chester White

"I have a dream that even here in Mississippi justice will come to all of God's children."
-- Martin Luther King.1966


Addendum: in case you couldn't tell, I often read Reporting Civil Rights in a fit of rage. Anybody would -- the sheer injustice of treatment of black Americans through most of the 20th Century just boils the blood. Not just the fact that murder was rampant, but the fact that you couldn't do anything about it. That was one of the salient sticking points that lawmakers had to deal with in the Civil Rights legislation of 1957 and 1964; it didn't matter if you the muscle to catch abusers if all-white juries were just going to let them go.

Today's story about the sentencing of Ernest Avants for the 1967 murder of Ben Chester White is one more grim reminder of that evil system. The facts are grim enough:

[Federal prosecutor Jack Lacy], in his closing argument, described how three Klansmen, Claude Fuller, James Jones and Mr. Avants, hatched a plot to kill a black man so brutally that it would draw Dr. King away from other concerns, so that they could get at him.

Under the premise of searching for a lost dog, they lured Mr. White into their car with the offer of a strawberry pop and $2. "They stopped at a store, bought beer and drove Ben Chester White out of his life," Mr. Lacy said.

According to Mr. Jones, a long-dead witness whose testimony was read into the court's record, Mr. Avants blew Mr. White's head off with a shotgun after Mr. Fuller fired 15 to 18 bullets into him from an automatic rifle, murdering him in the back seat of a 1966 Chevrolet as he cried out, "Oh Lord, what have I done to deserve this."

The fate of Avant was the usual fate of white trash with a head full of booze and a bellyful of hatred:

He was acquitted in state court in 1967, despite the testimony of an F.B.I. agent who said that Mr. Avants had confessed to the crime, and he seemed destined to live out his life a free man.

Luckily for the prosecutors, the killing turned out to have taken place on federal land, allowing for a new trial. But it's disturbing to note, as the story points out, that this was the first federal murder trial, and the first to involve a victim who was not a civil rights hero or well-known casualty, like Medgar Evers, a civil rights hero in Mississippi, or the four girls killed in the Birmingham church bombing.

How many other Ben Chester Whites were blown away while their killers got off scot-free? How many more ghosts of Mississippi? How many more ghosts of the South, of the country in general?

My guess: too many to count.

Force and Counterforce

Reporting Civil Rights, Part One: American Journalism 1941-1963. Library of America. 996 pages. $40.00

Reporting Civil Rights, Part Two: American Journalism 1963-1973. Library of America. 986 pages. $40.00

Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.
-- Henry David Thoreau, "Civil Disobedience"


Early in 1941, the United States began to feel the rumblings of a war that had been a long time coming, and which had nothing to do with Germany or Japan. In January of that year, A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, sent out a call for 10,000 black people to march on Washington to demand an end to segregation in the armed forces and in the hiring of defense workers.
By June, President Franklin Roosevelt was beginning to feel the heat. Late in the month, he met Randolph halfway, with an executive order prohibiting discrimination among defense contractors, but not in the military. Randolph was sufficiently mollified to call off the march, understandably losing some supporters. It didn't matter. Within a few months, civil rights for black Americans would be the last thing on anyone's mind, except black Americans. On segregated military bases and in major cities, decades of suppressed rage were beginning to boil over.

The tension only torqued up when Johnny came marching home. Black soldiers who had defended their country against Hitler came home to find his spirit alive and well, especially on city buses. In February of 1946, within ten hours of being discharged from Camp Gordon, Ga., a black soldier named Isaac Woodard was riding home on a bus with some white soldier pals. When the driver thought they were getting too rowdy, he ordered the whites to sit up front. Woodard complained, and when the bus stopped in Batesburg, SC, the driver had him arrested. Accounts would differ on what happened after that, except that a police officer beat Woodard so badly that he was left permanently blind. In what would become South Carolina's first Civil Rights case, the officer was brought before federal court in Columbia. After deliberating for 28 minutes, an all-white jury let him go; Woodard had "resisted arrest."

It was a story that would be repeated many times in the years to come. The Civil Rights leader Medgar Evers Ð who would go on to become one of the early martyrs for the cause -- recalled how he too was beaten "within an inch of my life" on his return trip home, after refusing to move to the back of the bus. "Hell, I'd just been on a battlefield for my country," he said. The attack had it's effect: "After that, I was a different man."

James Baldwin wrote some years later: "The treatment accorded the Negro during the Second World War marks, for me, a turning point in the Negro's relation to America. To put it briefly, and somewhat too simply, a certain hope died, a certain respect for white Americans faded. One began to pity them, or to hate them."

One black man, who would spend most of the war years in prison as a conscientious objector, chose neither. Bayard Rustin, a Randolph protege and a committed Gandhian, instead decided to test out non-violent civil disobedience at home. Boarding a bus in 1942 from Louisville to Nashville, he took a seat in the front and refused to move. When the bus pulled into Nashville, Rustin was greeted by a bevy of cops who beat, stomped, kicked and finally arrested him. Through it all, he refused to fight back, but still kept his wits about him long enough to win his case in court.

So begins America's longest struggle; one war ends, another begins at home -- along with the means to fight it, at least part way. Rustin would go on to convert a young minister named Martin Luther King, Jr., to the philosophy of non-violence, and Randolph and Rustin would organize another March on Washington, with King in the starring role. Some 250,000 people would gather for the event -- 40 years ago this week -- and this time, it wouldn't be called off.

This is just part of the story assembled in this magnificent two-volume set of Civil Rights journalism from the Library of America, a wide-ranging if necessarily patchwork history of three troubled decades of American life. There's no way to summarize nearly 1,800 pages of text and over 150 writers, but one must try.

First of all, it brings together star journalists like David Halberstam, Garry Wills, John Hersey, Renata Adler, Harrison Salisbury, Joan Didion -- all working at the top of their game -- and the largely forgotten foot-soldiers who were there on the front lines, sometimes getting their heads broken. There's a great 1952 profile by James Poling on Thurgood Marshall, written before he got his halo, when he was the country's ablest and wiliest civil rights lawyer. Superb pieces by L.D. Reed and Ted Poston on the Montgomery Bus Boycott illustrate the sacrifices of all those involved, and how the white citizenry fought and lost: blacks went without jobs and car pools got ticketed, but the buses stayed empty until the city fathers capitulated. William Bradford Huie's highly influential Life magazine stories are here: his coverage of the 1954 murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till for allegedly whistling at a white woman, and the 1963 murders of the civil rights workers Cheney, Schwerner and Goodman. The first volume nicely sequences three of the greatest hits together: Baldwin's "Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind," Norman Podhoretz's response to it, "My Negro Problem -- and Ours," and King's "Letter From a Birmingham Jail," which still brims with the moral authority of "De Lawd," as King's followers called him.

There are great columns throughout by the late Murray Kempton, who could squeeze more truth out of a thousand words than almost any of his peers. Accounts from black reporters like Louis Lomax and Claude Sitton reveal the divisional rifts within the movement; one sees throughout that the NAACP didn't lead, it followed, and that groups like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) almost always took the initiative.

There are also first-hand reports from activists like Tom Hayden, Michael Thelwell, Anne Moody, Tom Dent, and Fannie Lou Hamer, as well as two students, Charlayne Hunter and James Meredith, who would find themselves at the center of separate whirlwinds -- in Mississippi and Georgia -- when they tried to attend college with white students. In an effort at balancing out the picture a bit, Tom Wolfe's "Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers" finds that smug but often hilarious little man having a high old time explaining how black radicals take advantage of white guilt.

Equally impressive are the on-the-spot accounts; although sometimes it's hard to tell if youÕre reading great writing or if a terrible event just wrote itself. There's Pulitzer Prize Winning Relman Morin, phoning in his story from a Little Rock phone booth as he watches the city turn into a war zone; Robert Richardson, another prize-winner for his reportage on the Watts riots; the photographer Bob Clark, also in Watts, telling what it's like to nearly get beaten to death by white cops. CORE leader James Farmer describes in riveting detail how he barely escaped from a Louisiana lynching.

Not every piece holds up. In this company, Robert Penn Warren's book-length Segregation does not justify all the space it eats up in Volume I; the same can be said for Pat WattersÕ piece on the Poor People's March in Volume II. The brilliant New Yorker critic Elizabeth Hardwick sounds completely out of her element in Mississippi, and Nora Sayre's gooey piece on the Black Panthers succeeds only in making her seem just the kind of white liberal Wolfe had in mind. There are also some lapses. Given the range covered, you can't help but wonder how the editors could have overlooked either Hubert Humphrey's 1948 pro-integration speech to the Democratic Convention, or the Dixiecrat revolt that came about as a result. The book also could have included an excerpt from Marshall Frady's book on Wallace, and maybe Rustin's "From Protest to Politics." But these are quibbles; as a whole, these books are a startling and sobering experience.

Of all the books' multiple impressions, two in particular stand out. One is that dramatic social change demands everything from the people involved, especially if they're going up against centuries of tradition. For anyone who wasn't there or has forgotten, account after account reminds you of how deeply segregation was woven into the fabric of the country, particularly in the laws and attitudes of the South, but by no means strictly there. This fact sometimes eludes the people writing about it. In HuieÕs story on the killing of the three civil rights workers, which involved the participation of a deputy sheriff, the Mississippi governor tries to downplay the death by saying such murders happen nightly in New York. Huie lectures in reply that murders in New York "are not the result of plans in which the police have participated." He was wrong; Lez EdmondÕs story on the 1964 Harlem race riot shows cops gripped by sheer homicidal rage, randomly beating and shooting blacks right and left.

In retrospect, the response of King Ð who stands astride these books like a colossus -- looks like a stroke of genius; he and his followers met violent hatred with a peace that confused and wore down their oppressors. They engaged by disengaging, and by disengaging they pulled the plug on the system.

The other thing that struck me wasn't so much a revelation as a stark reminder: when things heat up, the press doesn't just report the story; it becomes the story, unavoidably. Through the 1950s and 1960s, the press held a mirror up to America, and the face looking back only got more frustrated, more ugly.

In Montgomery, Alabama in 1961, a mob of thousands made no distinction between the Freedom Riders testing interstate bus segregation and the reporters on hand to cover them. Dan Wakefield, reporting for The Nation, was attacked by a band of hoodlums after leaving a meeting of the White Citizens Council during "Salute to Law and Order Night." Amidst the rioting in Oxford, Mississippi, as James Meredith tries to enter Ole Miss, a man with a gun walks up to the French reporter Paul Guilhard and kills him.

"Why can't you report the facts without romanticizing the Negro race?" a newspaper subscriber pitifully writes, after reading about school integration in Memphis. More to the point is the angry young woman who stares down a wire reporter in Little Rock, after a day in which whites had stormed the school and brutalized black students: "Why don't you tell the truth about us? Why don't you tell them we are a peaceful people who won't stand to having our kids sitting next to niggers?"

Just as they were affected by events, the press shaped them, too. Huie scored a coup in his coverage of the murder of Emmett Till when his magazine, Life, paid $4,000 to the exonerated killers to tell what really happened. Huie would also report on how he personally offered a reward for information in the murders of the three civil rights workers. Willie Causey, a black Alabama farmer, would find the future of his family seriously imperiled after telling Life magazine about the racial problems in his home town. James N. Rhea and Ben H. Bagdikian report on how they broke the law in Louisiana by entering an all-black nightclub. (The law of segregation cut both ways in many places; whites were forbidden from entering certain black businesses.)

Things really heat up, of course, with television; as both Robert Coles and David Halberstam point out, the racist tactics of Birmingham Police Commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor (firehoses, dogs) and Selma Sheriff Jim Clark (nightsticks, random brutality) did as much for the movement as Dr. King. Every time "a bomb went off, a head smashed open," Halberstam writes, "the contributions would mount at King's headquarters." They werenÕt the only one, of course; counter productivity ruled the day in every state in the South, as well as in New York, Philadelphia and California. No matter how bad things got, how out of control, how incendiary, the elected officials and police were always there to make sure they got worse for everyone involved.

In the end, perhaps nothing so disproved the myth of white supremacy as white supremacists themselves. The following reflection by a young black girl in a newly-integrated school in Americus, Ga., in 1970 has the bell-like ring of common sense: "After all these years now, we realize that the whites are just human beings, not supermen without any faults or weaknesses. I can sit there and look at them now and think, `You're not like we been told -- you're no different from me.' Maybe this is what the whites have been scared of all these years, us catching on to the fact that there are some of them just as dumb as anything ever walked on two feet. Why, a boy in one of my classes, he just sits there all the time eating pencils."

A few months ago, I did something really insane: I joined the Folio Society.

Why would a raggedy beggar such as I, someone without so much as an ounce of class, aspire to such a bourgeois lot? Obviously, because I can’t read. Certainly I have no eyes for fine print. The deal here is the usual one, you get a pile of nice books for a few bucks, with a commitment of some kind I never bothered to read, which turns out to be four more books at prices way beyond my range.

Well, a deal’s a deal. I went through the catalogue and found the two cheapest volumes they had. One was Graham Greene's Brighton Rock, which I've always meant to read, and the other was called Diary of a Nobody, which is apparently some kind of a small classic of English wit. They were the cheapest books I could find and together, they cost about ... oh don't make me say it. I'm still in denial.

Anyway, today at lunch I finished reading the Greene novel and it's fantastic. I want to read it again, which is good considering it costs a week of lunches. It's about this 17-year-old mob leader named Pinkie, who manages to kill a down-on-his-luck journalist named Hale. The murder looks clean, except for two things. One is Ida, the good-hearted and big-breasted -- Greene never lets us forget that her tits could apply for their own zip code -- gal who sees Hale on his last day of life and suspects something fishy about his death. The other is Rose, a 16-year-old waitress who may have seen a little too much on the day of the crime. Pinkie isn't yet aware of Ida, but in Rose he sees something close to a soulmate. Rose is starved for affection and, Pinkie discovers, will do just about anything for love, even marry Pinkie so she doesn't have to testify against him. Not only that, she'll die for him, if that is what it comes to.

Brighton Rock reads like a suspenseful thriller, and I guess it is that; a thriller who went to Catholic School, and never got death, hell, sin, salvation, guilt or redemption from it's blood. The book is about damnation, more than anything else, the lure, perhaps, of inoculating yourself against the reality of evil by committing it. Something. Anyway, it's completely spellbinding and I hope to plow through its multifarious moral themes again real soon. Shit, I may even pay for it.

Leonor Watling, Rosario Flores in Pedro Almodovar's Talk to Her.

Men on the Verge of an Emotional Breakthrough

I’m tempted to say Talk to Her is the best Pedro Almodovar film in years; unfortunately, I haven’t seen one in a few years, not even All About My Mother or Live Flesh. The last one I saw was The Flower of My Secret, and I don’t recall being all that impressed. But I saw most of his early work, which ranged from the good (Matador and Law of Desire) to the superb (What Have I Done to Deserve This? and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!). His break-through film, of course, was Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, and I was alone, among critics as well as in the theatrical audience, in either not getting the joke or just not thinking it all that daring or funny. (People wailed with laughter as I sat there stone-faced; not an uncommon happening with me and independent films. Laughter in an art theatre has such a self-consciously “with-it” ring to it.)

Talk to Her is a different case. This film about two men who are both involved with women in a coma brings to mind everything I ever liked about Almodovar: his playfulness, his wit, and his unashamed tenderness. The film explores with graceful agility a theme he has touched on in the past -- the degree of blind trust any romantic relationship requires -- and adds to it a new twist: the degree of imagination it requires, too, and the way in which love can and often does exist on a purely imaginary plain. Lest I forget, I must add that it has at least two scenes, possibly more, which I can safely say I’ve never seen in any other film. One is of a beautiful woman on the phone, telling a friend: "I’ve just taken an elephant-sized dump." The other involves a silent surreal movie within a movie that likely plays only in the brain of one of the characters, a movie in which a man is miniaturized by a scientific experiment and manages to crawl inside his wife’s vagina.

When we first meet Benigno (Javier Cámara) and Marco (Darío Grandinetti), they are strangers to each other, sitting in a theatre watching some avant-garde ballet where women dance blind on a stage that is full of empty chairs. As the women move about freely, a man on-stage serves as their spotter, hastily moving chairs out of the way so they won’t bump into them. In the next scene, Benigno, a male nurse, is describing the performance to Alicia (Leonor Watling), the comatose young beauty whom he serves as fulltime attendant. Alicia responds to nothing, and Benigno looks after her more than any lover ever could; he’s her man on the stage. He talks to her constantly, massages her face, bathes her, and cleans up after her periods.

Marco’s case is different. He is a journalist who is pursuing a female bullfighter, Lydia (Rosario Flores), in hopes of writing a profile. Both are just coming out of love affairs gone sour and wind up turning to each other, although in either case they are still obsessed by the people they left behind. Lydia, who seems to find her career a form of suicide as a way of spitefully destroying herself for an old boyfriend, also finds herself in competition with Marco’s memories of his old girlfriend. She wants to make Marco forget her; she wants them both to purge old loves from their brains.

When Lydia is gored by a bull, she winds up in both the same hospital and condition as Alicia. While Marco accepts the fact that Lydia is brain-dead, Benigno can’t accept the same fact about Alicia – mainly because she’s always existed for him on a somewhat untouchable, ethereal, and Freudian plane to begin with. The less there is to know, in other words, the more there is to love; the more love and imagination can work their own strange magic, can fill in a personality where there is none.

Between these two, Almodovar is rather naturally on the side of the romantic Benigno, but he doesn’t ask us to choose; in the end, he seems to say that love -- whether it’s a matter of passionate reality or yearning fantasy – is still love: still believing, still forgiving, still stronger than death.