I've been way far behind on my movie-going; I run in such cycles. My one-track mind that cannot deal with balance. You either read all day or watch movies all day. You either smoke and eat high-fat food, or you quit and exercise. A life of virtue or a life of vice. Ideally, I think I should constantly watch films, read books, and listen to music and create whatever of my own I can, but I don't -- I just choose one of the above and stick with it over long periods of time. I suck at multi-tasking.

Around this time of the year, I always try to catch up on movie-going; see all the Best Picture nominees, not because I place any stock in the awards or anything as a guarantor of quality but because I like watching the annual Oscar pageant, and having seen the Top Five at least gives you a little of an investment in it. A few weeks ago I saw Cold Mountain, which I thought was moderately entertaining if not particularly gripping at an emotional level. It seemed like just the kind of film that would get nominated, sort of for the reasons Out of Africa was, or Director Anthony Minghella's previous The English Patient was: epic love story, historic background, big stars. But like Out of Africa -- if not The English Patient -- Cold Mountain was just a bit on the hollow side, as a whole: it never quite reached the kind of grandeur it was aiming for.

Saw two other films this weekend: Ed Zwick's The Last Samurai and Clint Eastwood's Mystic River, both quite absorbing. The Last Samurai is reminiscent in theme of David Lean's Bridge Over the River Kwai and in style of much of Kurosawa, if only because of the exciting battle scenes with all those charging horses, warrior masks, and spewing blood. Set in the late 1870s, it's about this American Civil War hero who is hired to get Japan's army into shape to fight a rebel army of samurai warriors -- only to be captured by the rebels, and find himself bonding with them (a little like the Alec Guinness character in Lean's masterpiece.) Tom Cruise is his usual reliable self as the disheartened Civil War vet, and Ken Watanabe is most captivating as the rebel warlord who befriends him, and who is as willing to be his teacher as his student. How true the story is, I have no idea.

Mystic River got fantastic reviews -- more than it deserved, really. If there is greatness in it, it eluded me, although it is an above-average crime drama.

Three boyhood pals -- Jimmy, Sean and Dave -- are united by a painful event from the past: Dave’s abduction and rape by a pair of men posing as a cop and a priest, an event the other two are helpless to prevent. Fast-forward thirty-some years later: Dave, played by Tim Robbins, is scarred by his experience and ambles about slowly; Jimmy (Sean Penn) is running a convenience store, and Sean (Kevin Bacon) is a cop with whose wife has just left him. Dave comes home one night bloodied up, and tells his wife (Marcia Gay Harden) that he thinks he may have killed a mugger; on the same night, Jimmy’s 19-year-old daughter is murdered. Sean and his police partner, played by Lawrence Fishburne, arrive to investigate, and naturally find that the present horror will have a connection to the past one, if not quite the one we expect. (Pay close attention, by the way; the plot gets comp-licated, and I lost a few of the details toward the end.)

As a devoted Irish Catholic dad with a criminal past and a twisted moral code, Penn is perfect, particularly in scenes where this kind of hardened, volatile character finds himself trying to bear up, to pretend not to feel what he’s feeling, to shoulder more anguish than he wants to deal with; there’s one scene in particular where he hears some especially horrible news and expresses himself with just the slightest exhalation of breath -- slight because if he gave it anymore room he’d lose all control. Excellent support from all the others; Laura Linney's in it, too, and she's not bad physically -- less fresh-faced than we're used to, her natural good looks made fleshy and suburban -- but I think she's just along for the ride.

Clint Eastwood reminds me in a way of Sidney Lumet: he’s made some excellent films that don’t seem distinguished by any particular style. The working-class Boston he shows here reminded me a lot of Lumet’s in The Verdict -- bluish as a pair of faded jeans; wintry; a place where the family ties are strong and you get through life with hard work, hard liquor, cigarettes, the church and maybe guns, if it comes to that. Eastwood seems to have hewed closely to Brian Helgeland’s script (based on Dennis Lehane’s novel, which I haven’t read) and he nicely captures this world without ever really expanding it.

Also this weekend: picked up two CDs. Television’s The Blow-Up is a two-disc live set, certain early selections of which are so badly-recorded they ought to be marked "For hardcore fans of the band only." Television flourished in the studio, and the Tom Verlaine's guitar loses a little of its shimmer when it's released into the great outdoors. It improves though as it goes along, and I'll probably wind up liking it more than I do now. It also has two nifty cover versions: "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" -- surely the most covered Dylan song outside of "Blowin' in the Wind" -- and the Rolling Stones' "satisfaction."

Also got the SACD version of Dylan's Desire, which yields no new audio revelations but is nice to have on CD, considering it was the first Dylan record I ever bought.

What I'm Reading: Goya by Robert Hughes, which I ought to resist saying anything about since I'm reviewing it, but damn is it ever good. Written with that distinctive, conversational, wholly personal and impassioned voice of Hughes, it makes you care greatly about Goya even if you never gave him two thoughts before picking the book up.

What I'll Soon be Reading: Billiards at Half-Past Nine by Heinrich Boll, for my book club.

Also got a new battery on Saturday.

Missed church today.

And, try though I might, I'm having a hard time putting together any reasonably coherent thoughts on Absalom, Absalom! Maybe I ought to scrap coherence. Shit, Faulkner did.

Sometimes you read a quote or learn a fact that summarizes a great deal about living, and you know immediately it's going to stick with you forever. Here is the best thing I've read in days:

And in practice we find that those poets or political leaders who come from the people, and whose experiences have really been searching and cruel, are the most sanguine people in the world. These men of the old agony are always optimists; they are sometimes offensive optimists. A man like Robert Burns, whose father (like Dickens' father) goes bankrupt, whose whole life is a struggle against miserable external powers and internal weaknesses yet more miserable -- a man whose life begins grey and ends black -- Burns does not merely sing about the goodness of life, he positively rants and cants about it. -- G.K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens

The quote comes by way of Goliard at the NYT "Meander Where You May" Forum, in response to my own belated tribute to the Jan. 26 birthday of Robert Burns, it reads as follows:

I first heard the Burns song "Duncan Gray' in Jane Campion's marvelous 1990 film An Angel at My Table about the life of the New Zealand writer Janet Frame -- who, incidentally, died just a few days ago. The song serves as something of a leitmotif in the film, mainly I think to signal Frame's own childhood; the song melody is key to the film's score, lyrics serve as epigraphs, and there is a scene of marvelous simplicity in which a group of children sit on a grassy cliff, singing it accapella. I was so intrigued by it -- this was in the pre-Internet days --that I went to my small local library and tracked it down; took some doing, as I recall, as it doesn't appear to be the most anthologized of his works. Anyway, since then I've rounded up about six recorded versions of the song from various sources.

Here it is, although for a better explanation of the Scottish terms, try here.

1. Duncan Gray cam' here to woo,
Ha, ha, the wooing o't,
On blythe Yule-night when we were fou,
Ha, ha, the wooing o't,
Maggie coost her head fu' heigh,
Look'd asklent and unco skeigh,
Gart poor Duncan stand abeigh;
Ha, ha, the wooing o't.

2. Duncan fleech'd and Duncan pray'd;
Ha, ha, the wooing o't,
Meg was deaf as Ailsa Craig,
Ha, ha, the wooing o't:
Duncan sigh'd baith out and in,
Grat his e'en baith blear't an' blin',
Spak o' lowpin o'er a linn;
Ha, ha, the wooing o't.

3. Time and Chance are but a tide,
Ha, ha, the wooing o't,
Slighted love is sair to bide,
Ha, ha, the wooing o't:
Shall I like a fool, quoth he,
For a haughty hizzie die?
She may gae to-France for me!
Ha, ha, the wooing o't.

4. How it comes let doctors tell,
Ha, ha, the wooing o't;
Meg grew sick, as he grew hale,
Ha, ha, the wooing o't.
Something in her bosom wrings,
For relief a sigh she brings:
And oh! her een they spak sic things!
Ha, ha, the wooing o't.

5. Duncan was a lad o' grace,
Ha, ha, the wooing o't:
Maggie's was a piteous case,
Ha, ha, the wooing o't:
Duncan could na be her death,
Swelling Pity smoor'd his wrath;
Now they're crouse and canty baith,
Ha, ha, the wooing o't.

What so appeals to me about this song? Because it's about love and death -- a song about courting, and a kind of meditation on the brevity of time. Duncan Gray loves Maggie but she spurns him; he keeps trying, then finally says the hell with it. Then Maggie gets sick, thinks of the life she may have given up, and if Duncan doesn't return, she will certainly die -- Duncan, being a lad of grace, returns. Happiness ensues; now they are blithe and happy spirits. Boy wants girl, boy loses girl, girl wants boy, girl gets him -- oldest love story in the world, yet with this somber, melancholy edge to it that says everything we want a love song to say -- namely, that love is more important than death, and may even beat it.

Funny how some images just define the Deep South, applying as easily to Allison as Faulkner.

A friend writes: Edwards is more Martin Short than Dennis Quaid. Yeah, I can see it.

That fucking Ehrenstein.

Despite disappointing finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire, the Dennis Quaid candidacy rolls into South Carolina, hoping to sink it and win...

Checking e-mail, wherein I discover that the pathetically ass-kissing post below merits an obligatory I'm-too-busy, I-owe-you-nothing "Thanks!" Does she think I'm a stalker or just too stupid to converse with?

Letter to Cynthia Tucker, Editorial Page Editor, Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Hi, Ms. Tucker.

Just wanted to let you know that this morning I was reading "Absalom, Absalom!" when it suddenly occurred to me that Strom Thurmond is Thomas Sutpen.

Both are engines of racism: Sutpen tries to vindicate an incident from his youth in which he is demeaned by a black servant by forging together a "design," a dream of a sort of white dynasty where he and his kin can rule over black folk, the very kind of dream which Thurmond stood for in 1948 as the candidate of racial separation. Both share the same obstacle -- a relationship with a woman whose blood is not 100 percent white. In the book, Sutpen is destroyed; in life, Thurmond dies a hero of sorts to many, his secret buried until months later. Both do however have as a legacy the opposite of what they wanted: generations of mixed blood -- the very prospect of which Dixiecrat Thurmond used to fan the flames of fear in rednecks far and wide.

So I'm thinking to myself what a brilliant connection I've made and how I can maybe get some kind of an article out of it -- only to Google the words "Sutpen" and "Thurmond" and find that you figured all this out a month ago.

Damn your well-readness!

Good work.

Congrats.

Rodney Welch

Relevant lyric of the late afternoon:

"Let me know, babe, about my fortune
Down along my restless palms."

Cabin Fever IV.

The car starts. Off to get gas, mop up new debt, try not to skid. Trust in the Lord.

Cabin Fever Part III

I had hoped to start the car yesterday because I seriously needed to make a deposit at the bank, mop up the incoming debt. Well, I finally decided, no one else will be getting out in this weather, either; no one will be cashing checks. Every other business is closed, the bank probably isn't even open.

Wrong. Oh how wrong.

I re-read a cheerful note arrives from my best friend in college: "I am so jealous that you are a famous writer and I'm still trying to find a 9th grader who can write an effective paragraph. My classes are reading Romeo & Juliet, and I sat through 3 classes of low readers struggling through the balcony scene today. They just slaughtered it. I am not sure I will make it through to the end of the play. They all snicker every time someone reads the words "breast" or "bosom" (pronounced bossom.) So what else is new with you?"

Famous. Yeah right. And broke. And the car still will not start.

Well, Anthony Minghella's day is no better, with Cold Mountain all but ignored by the Academy of Arts and Sciences. I'd trade in my day for his in a second.

I need to get rich and famous. Maybe I could write a self-help book: Review Your Way to Prosperity.

News to me: if you type the words "miserable failure" in Google and then hit "I feel lucky" you are taken to Bush's official White House biography. Just learned this from my daughter, but it's apparently old news.

Steven Soderburgh's film version of Traffic, as opposed to the miniseries on which it was based, "grows shallower with repeated viewings: Today, its indictment of American drug policy registers as easy and undercooked, and its plotlines—which culminate with the daughter ofAmerica's drug czar selling her prep-schooled self to an inner-city crack dealer—seem obvious and exploitative," says Alex Abramovich in Slate.com.

My take exactly -- although actually I thought was shallow on the first take, not to mention so badly shot you had to wear shades to watch it. I never saw what all the fuss was about.

Andrew Jarecki's Capturing the Friedmans is the documentary of the year, and if the Academy of Arts and Sciences doesn't give it the Oscar -- let alone nominate the film tomorrow morning -- then they're just full of shit. It is now on DVD; see it, see it, see it if you haven't already.

In the interest of equal time, Allen Barra says the Kaplan bio of Twain is "the clearest, most comprehensive portrait yet of the man William Dean Howells called 'the Lincoln of our literature.'"

"As Gawd is mah witness, I'll nevah pick the bones of another dead awtha again!"

Cabin Fever, Part III

We played Masterpiece. I won. The TV News says it will get worse before it gets better. I think this means we have another day of life in the cabin.

Cabin Fever, Part II.

We’re sitting here in Elgin freezing, the car won’t start, nothing is on TV, and I have excellent evidence that people on the other side of the world are having a better time.

An e-mail comes from a family member: "It is Sunday evening around 1045 and we just got back from a restaurant ...inside the Eiffel Tower. We have been here a full day and a half and have packed in a lot, including visits yesterday to the chapel of St. Chapel, Notre Dame ... and a walk along the Seine. Today we spent most of the day at Versaille, the former palace of Kings Louis 14, 15, 16 and then came back to the hotel to meet a friend ... who went with us to the Eiffel Tower ... We also learned to navigate the Paris subway system, which is cheap and fairly easy to figure out." Another e-mail, a few hours later: "...[we] headed off to see the Lizard King via the subway around 9 this morning, it was snowy and rainy. You would have loved the cemetery, (Cemetiere du Pere Lachaise)it was right out of Poe or Shelley, or Creepy/Eerie magazine. I tried to scratch my name into a nearby crypt, along with millions of others but was stopped by one of Paris' finest gendarmes. Others buried there were Chopin, Proust, Molliere, but everyone at the cemetery was there to see Jim ... After that we went to the Louvre, saw Mona, the venus de milo, winged victory, et al. Amazing Place. Walked from Louvre up the Champes Elysee to the Arch de Triomphe."

Well thanks, that’s all I need to hear. Makes the day that much richer. Now I can ponder how, given the opportunity, I, you know, wouldn't even want to do those things, because I'd be, like, too busy, or something -- you know, so fucking content with my existence that I don't need to travel. Like I am now, going through the songs on the computer and coming up with a mix CD of variously somber or chilly songs -- or ones I just felt like hearing -- and one poem (to state the theme) -- to listen to when I head outside, watching my hands go completely numb as I narcotize myself with coffee and a smoke or three. The CD, after too much wonkish pondering and fearing it would sound too NPRish and not quite ballsy enough -- but who needs ballsy on this oddly lovely day -- includes the following:

1. An Oddly Lovely Day Alone -- John Updike

2. Angel (Lust) -- Joe Jackson, Suzanne Vega

3. Come In From The Cold -- Joni Mitchell

4. Teardrop Sea -- Tonettes

5. See The Sky About To Rain -- Neil Young

6. Just The Way You Are Today -- Barbara Lewis

7. The Ghost of You Walks -- Richard Thompson

8. I'm Not In Love -- Tori Amos

9. The Little Black Egg -- The Nightcrawlers

10. Jesus, Etc. -- Wilco

11. Kentucky Avenue -- Tom Waits

12. Frank Sinatra -- Cake

13. Where Were You? -- The Mekons

14. Road To Nowhere -- Talking Heads

15. Home -- Iggy Pop

16. I'll Be Your Mirror -- The Velvet Underground

17. Elevation -- Television

18. Can't Hardly Wait -- The Replacements

No work today; we've been invaded by the kind of mini-ice storm that shuts down South Carolina once or (if we're lucky) twice a year, usually around now. The car won't start either -- not that there's any real place to go -- so we're all pretty much stuck inside today. Tomorrow, too, if I'm lucky. Can't do much more than blog or read Absalom, Absalom! or, maybe, watch one of several movies I have laying around. At the top of the list is an old Stephen Frears movie called The Hit, which I saw years ago -- after reading where Jim Jarmusch listed it as one of the ten best films of the 1980s --and quite impressed me, although I've forgotten everything about it except that it stars Tim Roth and Terence Stamp.

I've been reading Absalom for a little over a week. It's one of my favorite books; a contentious favorite, you might say, as it's alternately frustratingly hard to understand, ponderous, and brilliant. Like The Sound and the Fury it starts out very dense and complex and then gets easier, although not actually until you're well over half way through. This is the sixth time I've read it in twenty-some years, so all the crazy chronology is no longer a problem; now all the snags come in the sentences, which are these hyper-abstract rambles that can go on for for well over a page or two; there's something very Proustian about Faulkner's sentences, the way he'll get some thought or idea between his teeth and just can't let it go until he's squeezed the last drop of life out of it, until he's gotten to the absolute utter core. I always think of him as a farmer who has to get several acres plowed before dusk; he works his sentences like dray-horses, whipping them further and further on as the evening sun goes down.

Some years ago, Carlos Fuentes was on television talking about Don Quixote. It is a book, he said, which he reads annually, and without it he can't function -- can't eat, sleep, make love. It may be you have to be either a high school girl or have a certain strain of swoony Hispanic romanticism in your blood to make that kind of statement, and I remember both admiring and rejecting the idea at the same time. I live like I need art to live, but I like to think I could get along just fine without it, at least I do until I start thinking of all the books I want to read yet, and how sad I'd be not to be able to read a number of them over again. I liked the idea of settling on one book to re-read every year of life until I die, and many came to mind; maybe all of January and February should be reserved for Shakespeare. But I suppose such a book would choose you, wouldn't it, as it probably did Fuentes. Is there a book I need to live?

I don't know if it's this one, although it's as good a contender as any. Absalom, Absalom! is a torture and a pleasure, and if I tallied up all the hours I've spent with it I'm not sure which extreme would win.

Charlotte Observer review of Still Holding by Bruce Wagner.

Funniest thing I've seen in days.

Nice fan's piece by Steven Rubio on The Velvet Underground.

My New York Times review of Katherine Shonk's The Red Passport.

Ana Marie Cox, late of The Antic Muse, has unleashed an ambitious new blog: Wonkette, "an online roundup of gossip from Washington, DC and the US political arena." Hip, sharp, and witty -- a creation of perfect beauty, symmetry, strangeness, originality and moral truth. Okay, I stole that last bit from Mary McCarthy's review of Pale Fire, but the blog is cool-looking and it reads well.

There was an old "Cheers" episode where Diane -- the overeducated sylph played to perfection by Shelley Long -- recalls writing a college thesis titled "Hello Jung Lovers." She could well have been talking about the people crowding into the New York Times' "Book News and Reviews" forum, following Dinitia Smith's review of Deidre Bair's Jung bio.

"Carl Gustav Jung," Smith begins, "was an insufferable egotist, cruel to his family, a womanizer, with bad table manners to boot. He was a founder of psychoanalysis, but today his teachings have little importance in the treatment of mental illness."

Smith says the book "exercises a kind of appalled fascination ... It was written with the cooperation of members of the Jung family, who, as beneficiaries of his royalties, have refused access to his papers to authors they deem unfavorably disposed to him.

"One feels sorry for Ms. Bair, having to wade through Jung's lectures ... Nevertheless it is unlikely that another biography can ever equal this in its scrupulousness and the depth of its research."

Smith goes into some detail about Jung's multiple weirdnesses -- once "setting a firecracker off between a daughter's legs, rendering her deaf in one ear" -- his long-time affair with a patient, and his oddball relationship with Freud, whom he literally pissed-off. ("Once, when they were arguing, Freud urinated in his trousers.")

"Perhaps to justify her work's thoroughness and the years she spent writing this book," she concludes, "Ms. Bair tries valiantly to make Jung sympathetic. In the end it's a losing proposition."

The Jungsters -- the "jung and easily freudened," perhaps, to borrow Joyce's phrase -- were not pleased:

* "...the sketchiest, most absurdly biased and simplistic toss-off I've yet read in the NY Times. Perhaps it was her daughter's high school book review that got sent in to the Times by accident. Please check into it, or have her checked out... ideally by a Swiss therapist, of course."

* "Dinita Smith seems poorly chosen for reviewer of Bair's biography of Jung. She limits her assessment to taking sides in the Freud v. Jung match, ignoring what Bair contributes to our understanding of Jung's debt to his cultural milieu, in particular to the developments in occultism and anthropology. She displays a rigid hostility toward Jung, rather than exploring the fascinating sources of his complex humanity. Despite Smith's unimaginative assessment, I look forward to reading Bair's biography." (How does he know what Bair's contribution is if he hasn't read the book?)

* "I have a different bias as a psychologist who has undergone Jungian analysis and studied Jung's original works. Jungian analysis turned my life around. Although Jung's personal life was flawed, you can also tell a tree by its fruit. My analyst was kind and ethical. I know many others dedicated to Jung's work and find much dedication, ability, and integrity to their work and their lives. Jung's personal flaws are overshadowed in my experience by his being an insightful pioneer who shed new light on deep transformation. It's all too easy to attack someone long dead who can no longer defend himself. The New York Times should take care to choose reviewers who don't have an axe to grind but actually know something about the area they're reviewing, unlike Ms. Smith."

* "This was so poorly written-- Since when does the NYT publish high school book reports? what is going on ?!"

Other posters, likewise, know exceedingly bright teenagers:

*"I agree with the gist of what some other posters have said about the review of the new Jung biography by D. Bair. For instance, one poster said it seemed like a high-school book report. I agree with that statement, with the qualification that I've actually seen many high-school book reports that were better than this review."

*"The review of the biography was a biased travesty."

*"...offers little more than the poorly informed and researched impressions and opinions of C G Jung. I doubt the biography which is reviewed would support the reviewer's ridiculous comments regarding the significance and continued influence of Jung today on a wide spectrum of professionals, artists,intellectuals and `laymen'."

*"Ms. Smith sounds like a candidate for a personality transplant, not like a bona fide critique of ideas. I am disappointed to see such a travesty committed upon Ms. Bair, who obviously has done due diligence to produce a biography that actually has something new to say about Jung. As far as Ms. Smith's feelings about Jung himself, she is crying out for help, maybe the editors could make a good referral. Try the Jung Institute ..."

* "...astoundingly uninformed review."

*"...little more than an occasion for the author to express her contempt and vitriol for a subject of which she reveals herself to be poorly informed."

*"...a disgraceful excercise in character assassination ... Please, someone help this reviewer learn her craft. This article harms not only the memory of a gifted and flawed human being (most of us only share the latter adjective), but also it hurts those sensitive people who have entrusted their souls into the care of hundreds of gifted and loving therapists who have learned their art at the feet of this flawed giant."

And so on and so on. You'd almost think Smith had reviewed an Ayn Rand bio.

CORRECTION

There are TWO Fred Kaplans -- surprise, surprise -- and I've just been informed by the one who wrote the excellent article on Rules of the Game that he's NOT the one who was lambasted by Christopher Hitchens.

The one who wrote the Renoir article also covers national security for Slate.com.

The other Mr. Kaplan -- Mr. Hitchens' target -- is a biographer of Henry James, Gore Vidal and Mark Twain.

My apologies. I should have checked.

Just when you thought you'd never need another search engine, here comes Booble. Yes, I entered my name. No, I didn't come up with any hits. Guess that's a good thing.

What in the world is Michael Moore doing supporting Wesley Clark? Michael Hastings in Slate.com is intriguingly baffled.

Remember that Simon and Garfunkel song about Bleeker Street? Those days are gone.

Avoid buying any DVD from Cascadia Entertainment. Based on the two I bought over Christmas, their DVDs are based on the worst, most unwatchable print available. Well, what do you expect for $2.50. They absolutely, positively, 100 percent suck.

Hitchens -- does the man never sleep? -- is here, too, writing elegantly on the new Proust translation, which is high on my list of "unnecessary expenses."

Speaking of Kaplan, I suppose he is the same one who has a meltdown in the Letters section of the new Atlantic Monthly. Christopher Hitchens cut him a new one last month over Kaplan's new book on Twain, which as I recall Hitchens said violates every rule of good biography. In his reply here -- scroll down toward the bottom -- Kaplan thinks the review was purely personal:

A review of my book The Singular Mark Twain, by Christopher Hitchens, appears in the November Atlantic. I've exercised sufficient discipline not to read it, but others have told me that it is a meanspirited, hostile, and ignorant review.The author and I were once friendly. But Hitchens is a Gore Vidal acolyte, even worshipper, who treasures his relationship with Vidal. He was apparently miffed when I did not think his relationship with Vidal important enough to interview him at length or to give him any sort of prominent role in my biography of Vidal. In regard to anything to do with Vidal, he certainly seemed his usual combination of fawning and aggressive. When I declined, in line with the terms of our written agreement, to allow Vidal to vet my biography of him and exert pre-publication censorship, Vidal turned on me and the book. So did Hitchens. Unfortunate, but no big deal.

Hitchens' motives, he goes on to say, were made even plainer by the fact that the damaging review hit the streets before the book did (not, I might add, all that unusual an occurence for the magazine; I've noticed in the past that certain of their reviews have hit before the official publication date)

All music to Hitchens' ears, of course, who loses no time whetting his blade:

Fred Kaplan's letter would stand out in any collection of pompous letters that typically begin, "If your reviewer had troubled to notice ..." But it also belongs, as far as I know, in a class all by itself, since on his own admission Kaplan has not read my review ... Kaplan's imputation to me of questionable motives is simply risible. For one thing (and just to begin with), he and I were never "friendly"—indeed, I do not think we have ever met except briefly and in company. I was most willing to help him with his biography of Gore Vidal when he approached me, and was slightly sorry that we were never able to arrange the interview—"slightly" only because I had not played much part in Vidal's life and could have been of little assistance ... Kaplan imagines himself the victim of an occult committee that is willing to degrade the standards of a nationally renowned magazine just to give him un mauvais quart d'heure. This boast is enough on its own to make a cat laugh. I say nothing about the mad extent to which it promotes and overstates my influence: it ought to be plain to any reader that the editors of The Atlantic are spoiled for choice when it comes to books, and cannot hope to review them all, and have no time for vendettas against writers of the second rank. Kaplan was lucky in his choice of subject, and that's it. For him to complain further about being reviewed early is a self-promotion from mere solipsism to something more like full-blown megalomania.

Addendum to news of the Rules of the Game on DVD: Fred Kaplan has an interesting piece in yesterday's NYTimes on putting the classic on DVD:

The outcome is not just aesthetically pleasing. In the rejected version (and more still on the laser disc and earlier film prints), the contrast between dark and light is glaring; the characters' faces seem harsh, their vast palaces icy. In the version used for the DVD, the natural grays soften this impression; the people look more sympathetic; their environments are lush. Renoir's film is a biting satire about the French aristocracy between the two world wars, but it is also about universal human frailty ("Everyone has his reasons," one of the characters famously says), and the DVD, finally, lets us feel this.?

Is it as it was?

First, Peggy Noonan reported in the wall Street Journal that Mel Gibson had screened his embattled film The Passion of the Christ for the Pope, who supposedly liked the film -- which has raised all kinds of controversy for being potentially anti-Semitic -- and said of the depiction of the Crucifixion: "It is as it was." Yesterday Frank Rich questioned this holy endorsement: "... the marketing of this film remains a masterpiece of ugliness typical of our cultural moment, when hucksters wield holier-than-thou piety as a club for their own profit." The Pope now appears to be backing off -- a little, anyway:

One prominent Roman Catholic official close to the Vatican said today, "I have reason to believe -- and I think -- that the pope probably said it."

"But I think there's some bad feeling at the Vatican that the comment was used the way it was," the official added. "It's all a little soap-operatic."

Stephen Lyons'' review of the new Walter Mosley book begins with the kind of knee-jerk gripe people always resort to when they're groping for a lead, and it's just a hoary old cliche: "Today's fiction seems to rely on the man or woman in irreversible crisis. Protagonists spiral down to their last buck. They drink and drug too much, lust after the wrong lover and obsess on nameless angst. Endings are almost always dire." You could say the same thing about fiction from the beginning of time -- it's all about tragedy. And you can just as easily pick out books from the last year which turn out rather well for all concerned; Brick Lane or Mortals come to mind.

"...[F]atefully, in the early sixties young Bill Clinton chose the profession of politics: the one area of American life where traditional Victorian attitudes would not be successfully challenged and modernized. Instead of going down in history for his political achievements, he would go down -- in every sense of that verb -- for two simple, scandalous words: oral sex." -- from Nigel Hamilton's new "psychobiography" of Clinton, reviewed here. The book sounds like a nightmare. I must read it.

Emily Jones on Baxter -- a true original and a dog story like none other ever filmed. I could definitely stand to see it again.

I'll go ahead and reprint the salient news from this link, so you won't have to click on it: Galatea 2.2 By Richard Powers (Picador $13) -- "A novel about a writer who becomes involved with a bizarre project involving artificial intelligence" is now out in paperback -- and you simply must read it. It's a perfectly heartbreaking story about a man who builds a computer, gives it intelligence and emotion -- and then must destroy it. A beautiful, first-class piece of work. Came out ages ago, why it's only now in paperback, if that's the case, is befuddling.

Joanna Smith Rakoff likes Julianna Baggott's The Madam -- I did, too, when I reviewed it last summer for the Washington Post, and for the same reason: there was nothing sexy about it. The prose, to borrow Gore Vidal's description of his own The City and the Pillar is "plain and hard," and also strangely dream-like, very Sanctuary in feel, but very much the author's own.

Terrence Rafferty writes with typical eloquence on Jean Renoir's masterpiece The Rules of the Game, specifically the new DVD -- which I suddenly want want WANT -- in today's Times: "`The Rules of the Game,' improbably, retains even in this mechanical form its stubborn unfamiliarity, its mysterious poise as it contemplates the end of something and the beginning of something else, and its generosity in allowing us to share with its characters the pleasures and the terrors of freedom."

Whenever I'm asked to name my favorite films, my choices sound horribly staid and ordinary and quite boring: Citizen Kane, Vertigo and Renoir's one usually vying for top place. I always sounded like I consulted the latest Sight and Sound poll and just want to sound smart. But the truth is I love all these filoms -- and this one, God, it's just so special, special in the way few films are, films that aren't about technical mastery at all -- although this certainly one had it -- but about richness, story, character, meaning, depth; films that are purely cinematic and purely artistic at the same time. Rules of the Game is the kind of film that says: a kiss, a broken heart, passion, human life in general -- in all of its joy and horror -- is more worthy of enshrinement on celluloid than disasters or killings. That sounds terrible bland (I'm writing in a hurry!) but it's true: it's a very fine, very artistic and very piercing slice of a certain kind of life, and every time I watch it, watch the story unfold in all of its madness, the only thing I can think is that this is what cinema really is all about, and so few ever understood it quite the way Renoir did. (Bunuel is another.)

Hate to harp on this over and over, but why oh why am I the only one in the world who can actually see through this piece of shit? The author, I learn, thinks it is "perfect." She was probably thinking of Absalom, Absalom! -- which gave her something to work with as a plot.

The Free-Times didn't post my Top Five of 2003 on-line, so here it is:

Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War by T.J. Stiles -- This fantastically readable history places the famous outlaw in glaring perspective: as a kind of fundamentalist terrorist with a raw political talent both for exploiting Southern fears and capitalizing on publicity. Besides telling a riveting story, Stiles debunks the James myth, such as it is: by hitting banks and railroads, James and his fellow thugs didn’t do much more than wreck the economic interests of the farmers they claimed to be helping.

Reporting Civil Rights (Library of America) -- Monumental two-volume collection of reportage of the Civil Rights Movement, stretching from before World War II to the early 1970s. Includes terrific on-the-spot reports, first-person encounters, and brilliant profiles of key players, both by the best writers of the era and many who are less well-known but who speak just as strongly. Whether you were there or not, this compilation is an education: an infuriating, heart-breaking and overwhelming story about race in 20th-Century America, and the personal costs involved in breaking an evil system.

Best Friends by Thomas Berger -- With his 22nd novel, Thomas Berger is in top comic form with this story of two friends -- and complete opposites -- whose lives turn into a brutal game of oneupmanship. Berger delivers a deceptively light read that sneaks up on you; nearing 80, he can still nail the passive-aggressiveness of modern life like no other writer alive.

The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri -- I liked this book so much I bought it for someone for Christmas. As was true in her Pulitzer-Prize story collection Interpreter of Maladies, Lahiri’s debut novel follows the lives of Indian- American emigres with intelligence and sympathy and total narrative drive. The story of a young man struggling under the weight of his name is the story of a family struggling to fit in to their opposing cultural worlds. Lahiri traces the shape that lives acquire with admirable ease.

Shakey: Neil Young’s Biography by Jimmy McDonough -- Actually, this came out in 2002, but I didn’t get to review it until this year. Better late than never, because it’s a terrific biography of one of the last true rock icons. McDonough combines detailed reportage, generous interviews with everyone involved — including a few obsessive fans — as well as Young himself. Best of all, the book is charged with McDonough’s own very personal, feisty voice: the voice of a fan who has always been obsessed and mystified by this particular star. I might also add that the experience of reading the book is only enhanced by playing the recent reissues of Young’s superb On the Beach and his spotty but interesting American Star ‘N Bars, both from the mid-1970s -- as well as his recent Greendale, easily one of the best discs of the year.

Honorable Mention: Mortals -- Any consideration of Norman Rush’s novel brings to mind its third-act flaws as well as its virtues. Although not the triumph its predecessor, Mating, was, Norman Rush’s messy, massive new work-- which follows a Milton scholar and part-time CIA agent on a kamikaze mission into the heart of Botswana -- makes for absorbing reading, at least up to a point. The concluding events evolve neither naturally nor credibly, and the book is often talky, sentimental and self-consciously “literary.” Still, it’s a fascinating failure; the work of a potentially great writer who has simply bitten off far more than he can chew.

Books & Culture has a very interesting and informative review of a new book on Flannery O'Connor, but I came away not liking it much. I read this site now and then and I think I like the idea of it more than the reality, and this review is an example of why -- it's too clubby. It preaches to the choir. What do you expect, of course, it's Christianity Today. But it's like reading New Left Review or National Review; doctrine rules. A few years ago I would have added "Unlike The New Republic, which tests every idea," but that's not really true anymore in their book pages (although it's still true in their political content) -- although, God knows, I'd still love to write for them if they said okay. But Leon Wieseltier and James Wood, who run the joint, both affect this churlish, cranky atheism; Wood, in particular, seems to read everything for echoes of what he already thinks. Every novel he reads seems to either be about the death of God or supports his classical ideas about the novel -- toward that end he's always on the lookout for a new Messiah and every now and then he finds one, like Norman Rush or Monica Ali, both of whom he praises far in excess of their gifts, or that big bag of wind Saul Bellow -- adoration of whom seems to be a bit of an English fetish (e.g., Christopher Hitchens, Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis).

Dennis Miller on Lenny Bruce: "Once I hear a guy is a heroin addict, and they tell me he's a genius, I think, really? I'm not trying to be judgmental. But anybody whose last vision is of a tile pattern on a bathroom floor, I don't know what kind of genius they are." Words I hope he'll remember when he's delivering Rush Limbaugh's eulogy.

Why is Goya suddenly breaking out all over? Strange how a great name lays dormant and then -- boom! -- a flood. First there's this one by Julia Blackburn, then this one by the Big Kahuna of arttalk, and now -- just this month -- this one by Evan S. Connell. Picked up the Blackburn (now in paper) and the Connell yesterday with the idea of nailing all three in an 800-word piece for the Free Times, which is all the space they let me have or will ever let me have -- a point that has been made to me many times. I'm a pure and simple masochist for overdoing small jobs -- it's all I've done for the past month and a half when, among other things, I read all of Bruce Wagner's book just to read his latest (slated for next Sunday's Charlotte Observer). Then last summer I read all of Norman Rush to review Mortals. I read a huge pile of Dickens some time ago just so I could review Jane Smiley's puny bio. And don't get me started on Byron. You look at all the work and the result is so tiny.

"He's this guy who leaves his mom and dad, goes on the road and favors a radically egalitarian society, befriends outcasts." --Stephen Prothero on Jesus Christ.

Wow -- so I'm not the only one. Other people had a hard time plowing through Underworld,too. Gary Marshall in Spike:

"...other stories are neglected for over 400 pages before reappearing at the end of the novel, causing an unwelcome jolt as the reader tries to remember the pertinent details.

"In this respect 'Underworld' is a victim of its own ambition: by trying to cover such a wide range of characters and situations, DeLillo loses track of some of them and, in the latter parts of the novel in particular, the writing feels as if it is on autopilot while the author works out what to do next. "

See, I started thinking about this book today. I saw a girl reading it a lunch and I asked her if she liked it. She said she had only read the first 50 pages and thought it was pretty good; I told her the first 50 pages of that monster were all I remembered. She was a student and if I'm not terribly mistaken she looked at me as if I'm a superficial reader of the genius DeLillo, which, hell, I may be. All I recall is that the son-of-a-bitch took me three or four months to read and that by the end I was moving on sheer willpower. It bored me. What wearied me about it was DeLillo's ironic tone, which was more tolerable in books like Libra or Mao II, both well under half the length of Underworld. I got tired of listening to him, and thinking back over the book these several years later all I can remember is that it had something to do with a baseball, waste management, and a painter who seemed to vaguely resemble Georgia O'Keefe. And something at the end about the Internet. Maybe I ought to return to it, read it with more energy, connect with it in the way all its many advocates did. But maybe I'm just not a DeLillo reader; I started White Noise some months back and set it down after 20 pages -- that voice of his just bugs me; he's the kind of writer Dr. Spock from "Star Trek" would be if he were a novelist, I think. He writes like a Vulcan would, as if he sees the human race as this rather enigmatic species.

"...a third person present tense which, with guileless vocabulary and an appealing lack of stylisation, somehow conjures a bleak, arm's-length mood, a sense of a life spooling inevitably on."

"She has a talent - magical, sly, cumulative - that most writers would kill for. Peer closely at any single sentence, and nothing about it stands out. But step back and look at the whole and you're knocked out."

Julie Myerson, perfectly nailing Lahiri's The Namesake

Should I do this? Nah. Who cares.

Ever heard The Mekons? I must hear more. Who among us doesn't want to stand at a mike in some shitty puke-soaked bar and spit out a heartbroken rant like this one?

When I was waiting in a bar -- where were you?
When I was buying you a drink, where were you?
When I was crying home at bed, where were you?
When I watched you from a distance, did you see me?
You were standing a queue, did you see me?
You had yellow hair, did you see me?
I want to talk to you all night, do you like me?
I want to find out about your life -- do you like me?
Could you ever be my wife? Do you like me?

Song of the evening.

The next thing I'll be blowing good money on.

Today's helpful hint: how to pronounce Nabokov and Bunuel -- although, as you will notice, the Merriam-Webster people have no idea how to spell Bunuel.

Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill has largely confirmed what most of us have by now already guessed: that the Bush administration was looking for a reason to oust Saddam Hussein, and found the perfect one with 9/11. Michael Kinsley, it at first seems, is properly skeptical, and writes an article titled (on the Slate.com home page anyway) "The Dubious Confessions of Paul O'Neill." And what is so dubious about O'Neill? Nothing -- just that he's a self-aggrandizing asshole, that the phrase "like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people" maybe isn't the most literate phrase, and that Kinsley doesn't like him. It's pure ad hominem, and raises no reason not to believe O'Neill is telling the truth. Kinsley is just pissed that he did.

Faye Fife from The Rezillos

Thank God for No Thanks!

If you entered college in the late 1970s, there was no way to escape the impact of punk, but the means of acquiring it were somewhat restricted. Rolling Stone, my guide to life back then, would hail this or that new band, and if they proved big enough to get on the radio and be stocked at the local Wal-Mart --The Clash, the Pretenders, B-52s -- I snapped them up. Unfortunately, there was no real indie music scene back then, no Internet, and you had to live in a big city to find a cool record shop, which meant I never got around to hearing X-Ray Specs, the Dead Boys, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, X, and God knows how many others.

Actually, I do know how many others, or at least a few, because Santa brought me Rhino's gorgeous 100-cut box set: No Thanks! The `70s Punk Rebellion -- a nostalgic blast, a revelation, an education and, let it be said, an inspiration. Here are bands that had a good run, a great run, and no run at all, but left behind some wonderful little scrap of beauty

The set has one glaring omission: no Sex Pistols, as the surviving members apparently said fock your focking greatest shits album, bugger, or at any rate, no. Well, fine by me; as the enclosed booklet points out, you should already own Never Mind the Bollocks by now anyway. While most other well-known punk/New Wave acts -- Elvis Costello, Television, Patti Smith, Talking Heads, Blondie, the Clash, the Modern Lovers, the Ramones, Joy Division, and Iggy -- are tastefully represented with less than obvious choices, the real joy, for me anyway, comes in the many black-hole classics I've always read Greil Marcus or someone raving about, but never actually heard: X-Ray Specs' "Oh! Bondage Up Yours" (Yes, it's my first time; I can almost hear Barry the arrogant record store clerk from High Fidelity laughing at my cluelessness), the Buzzcocks' "Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn't Have?)" which I always thought was a Fine Young Cannibals original (Barry points at me, laughs, makes fun of my clothes), the Dead Kennedys' "California Uber Alles" (Barry eyes me suspiciously) and Richard Hell's "Blank Generation" (Barry violently shoves me out of the store, threatening bodily harm).

There are many more I've never heard of at all, ranging from the wildly violent to the absurd to the beautifully silly. I am particularly enamored of the ones that show that for all of its surliness, punk had a lively and lovely sense of humor: "(My Baby Does) Good Sculptures" by the Rezillos, "You Drive Me Ape (You Big Gorilla)" by the Dickies, the Cramps' marvelous "Human Fly," Johnathan Richman's dweeb classic, "Pablo Picasso," and the Soft Boys' indescribable "(I Want To Be An) Anglepoise Lamp."

As they showed with their great Nuggets box sets and their recent and immaculate Television reissues, no one has a better time than the Rhino guys at restoring rock history. This set is a jolt of electricity that makes you want to run into the streets and have a revolution for fun -- the great punk party your mom wouldn't let you attend.

Words about congregants, to be pondered when reciting the Apostles Creed:

"In a world that celebrates individuality, they are actually doing something together. In an age that avoids commitment, they pledge themselves to a set of convictions and thereby to each other. In a culture that rewards novelty and creativity, they use words written by others long ago. In a society where accepted wisdom changes by the minute, they claim that some truths are so critical that they must be repeated over and over again. In a throwaway, consumerist world, they accept, preserve, and continue tradition. Reciting the creed at worship is thus a countercultural act."

-- from The Creed: What Christians Believe and Why It Matters By Luke Timothy Johnson -- reviewed, most interestingly, by Edward T. Oakes in the Washington Post.

Death comes to Iran...

Don't know if the Times will let me use this -- but isn't this a great, stark, evocative photo?

Platform by Michel Houellebecq

The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

Love Stinks

Love by Toni Morrison. Alfred A. Knopf. 212 pages. $25.00

Toni Morrison's new novel is a patchy, ill-conceived, uninspired disaster. It's the kind of book that starts in the present and works its way back to the past in fits and starts, clumsily delaying significant information for no other reason than to jerk the reader around. Plowing through it -- and I plowed as patiently as I could -- yields nothing more than a catalogue of gaping plot-holes and infatuated prose in the service of a dull theme.

The story involves two old women, both living together in the same house for twenty-plus years, both hating each other, and both connected to the late owner of a former hotel, whose legend dominates the cannery town of Silk, located somewhere on the Southern coast. One is Heed, widow of the late Bill Cosey, who pulled off the unusual feat of establishing a black-owned resort during the Depression, popular with celebrities and a top draw for jazz artists. The other is Christine, whose relationship is a little more obscure at first, and which Morrison is at pains to keep that way as long as possible.

What stands between the two is Cosey's will, which was so ambiguously worded as to make it unclear whom he intended to inherit his money. When Heed hires as a companion a runaway juvenile offender named Junior Viviane, Christine suspects that her illiterate nemesis is going to get the girl to draft a fake will that will settle Heed's claim. Obviously, this should set off warning bells in the minds of most readers, as Cosey died in 1971 and any investigator could spot fresh ink on a will, even if it was written on old paper. But Heed, for all her wisdom, is no brighter in this regard than her creator. Junior, at any rate, isn't all that sure what is up with either woman, and concentrates most of her energy on seducing Romen, the 14-year-old neighbor boy who sweeps up around the place.

Cosey, as we learn by bits and pieces, was something of a demon to his community, having gained his wealth by betraying and exploiting his own people. Late in life, having already lost one wife and one adult son, he married Heed, an eleven-year-old ragamuffin discovered on the beach and befriended by Christine -- his granddaughter, we discover, by May, surviving daughter-in-law of Cosey's late son. This information, which drove a lifelong wedge between the former playmates, is touched on and toyed with for about a hundred pages before it is made clear, by which time we also learn that Morrison has been cheating the reader in hopes of sustaining the mystery. Any half-awake reader will surely wonder how it is that when the now-elderly Heed shows Junior -- who doesn't know any more than we do, and who in any case is more concerned about getting her freak on with Romen -- a picture of her wedding day, she somehow fails to notice that the bride is a child.

As the story backtracks all over the place to bring us up to speed about all that's evolved over the half-century stand-off between Heed and Christine, the multi-tasking Morrison is busy trying to forge some kind of mystical link between Junior and Cosey, whose portrait hangs in Heed's bedroom. This aspect of the novel just gets sillier and sillier, as the conniving Junior somehow fancies she is being watched and encouraged by her "Good Man," as she calls Cosey's malefic ghost.

But Cosey isn't the only ghost in the novel; at the end we learn that chunks of the narrative have been assigned to another ghost, who has been dead many years but who, for most of the story, has been very much in the present, commenting not only on the events but on what's on TV, as well as changing fads from one year to the next. I suppose ghosts can do anything they want, but even Caspar has more ethereal qualities than this one.

No surprise that none of this come together plausibly in the end, when the struggle over the will brings Heed and Christine to a largely unmotivated heart to heart that could have just as easily taken place any time in the last two decades and -- given the information it contains -- probably would have.

Putting the plot aside, which takes some effort, Morrison is also hampered by her prose style, which, to borrow her own description of masturbation, she does not quite whip into unbelievable creaminess. Instead, time and again this thin book suffers from bloat, especially at the end, when she tries to plow in a few clumsy points about how black people, and specifically black women, continue to make themselves slaves -- "it's like we started out being sold, got free of it, then sold ourselves to the highest bidder."

This is a hackneyed point even if Morrison could have developed it, which she couldn't, as the random series of dreary scenes that comprise the novel make for far too rocky a soil to nourish any point at all.

It's probably worth noting that these faults have not stopped the book from becoming a bestseller. I'd like to meet the person who bought it on the strength of the author's name and reached the last page with undimmed affection. Me, I'm sick of Love.

Anyone have any idea what Steely Dan's song "Gaucho" is about?

My guess: it's about a Hollywood agent telling a secretly gay client to get rid of his outrageously gay companion -- the gaucho -- whose presence threatens to out the client, thereby screwing up career plans for everyone.

The song brings to mind a story I once heard -- from Michael Korda, in The New Yorker a number of years back -- about Swifty Lazar upbraiding Truman Capote for bringing along some "rough trade"-type to some social function.

Dan songwriters Becker and Fagen, of course, never work on an obvious level; they keep it deliciously obscure, so you kind of have to guess at their meaning. The lyrics of the song are like an overheard phone conversation -- they leave it to us to figure out who is talking to whom about what.

More interesting thoughts here and here and probably many places -- SD fans are worse than Dylanologists when it comes to figuring out what this or that song is really about.

An honor held for many years by the late Strom Thurmond...

I swear -- set down a fucking Jhumpa Lahiri book for five seconds, and some bastard steals it. And I was halfway through. Crap, crap, crap.

Some Notes on a Grimly Unfunny Movie That is Making the Rest of the World Crack Up

Alcoholic Customer: Do you serve beer or any alcohol?

Enid: I wish! Actually you wish... after about five minutes of this movie, you're gonna wish you had ten beers.

-- Dialogue from Ghost World, screenplay by Daniel Clowes and Terry Zwigoff


Many years ago, I took a date to see a comedy that didn't make me laugh once. She didn't laugh either -- maybe because I didn't; movies are best watched alone, and they're risky date events, at any rate. Anyway, the movie was Porky's, it was thought by many movie-goers to be the funniest movie of all time, and spawned at least two sequels, so great is the apparently inexhaustible flow of mirth from the vein of humor known as the "teen sex comedy." A few critics chimed in too, almost always with the familiar caveat that yes, it's crude and vulgar, but it's also really, really funny; not a few championed themselves as regular guys who aren't afraid to lower their sights a little where comedy is concerned, and some questioned how anyone could not laugh.

How could I not laugh? I have nothing against crude and vulgar, and silly and senseless go a long way with me. I draw the line, though, at witlessness, which was my problem with Porky's. I was all but alone with this problem, I'll admit, as everyone else in the theatre was laughing while I sat there like a rock. Friends didn't understand, and tried to get me to fess up that surely I secretly snickered at the scene where the dykey gym teacher grabbed the kid's dick when he jammed it through the peephole in the girl's locker room, or that I privately busted a gut when the girl howled like a dog during sex, or that I absolutely lost my shit when a prank phone-caller sent a waitress on a furtive search for Mike Hunt. Nope, nope, nope. Instead, I was just bored, and I wasn't real sure why. Actually I did know why; I just couldn't find the right word -- bad movies are sometimes bad in a unique way, and they make you search for the root cause of your dislike. All the jokes in the movie were loud and flat. It seemed to be the work of someone who clearly thought he was funny, and the box-office that movie racked up proved he was not alone in thinking so -- much in the way that the most popular radio deejays are the ones I least hope to be stuck with in an elevator. To my taste, the jokes were too broad, and all the way through it I felt like I was being elbowed in the ribs by the most obnoxious creep in school.

The same director, Bob Clark, went on to direct a really awful yuletide favorite, A Christmas Story, which I hated for exactly the same reasons. Now it was as if that obnoxious creep was at your dinner table, trying to fit in, impress your folks, laughing a little too hard at his own jokes, trying to be affable, and just embarrassing the shit out of you. The movie was the definition of "treacle"; it was so cute it made your teeth ache. It's an enormous hit every year on television, and I'd rather have nails driven through my eyes than watch it again.

In fact, I fully understand the impulse to dive-bomb the annual Christmas movie, for all the obvious reasons. When I found out that Terry Zwigoff had directed just such a movie, I knew I'd watch it, as Zwigoff directed two of the best movies of the past decade: Crumb and Ghost World. I was rather enamored, in fact, of the latter. I loved it so much I went out and read the Daniel Clowes' graphic novel on which it was based, spent maybe an hour and a half reading background material on the movie's website, looked up the official Thora Birch website, and even used a still from the movie for the wallpaper on my iMac. It was as if the movie had turned me into a damn fourteen-year-old girl. I loved the world of that movie and the people in it, and I just wanted to stay there as long as I could.

Why then, was sitting through Zwigoff's Bad Santa a replay of my Porky's experience? Because it milked a one-joke situation for as many laughs as possible, or because, perhaps, it seemed a little too much like a Bob Clark movie, both pushy and mean-spirited? Both, I guess. Most critics are absolutely wallowing in it, as are the folks at Milk Plus, with me being something of a lonely exception.

This mix of Scrooge and Leaving Las Vegas -- whose story was drafted by Joel and Ethan Coen, who also executive produced -- is about an full-time alcoholic and part-time safecracker named either Willie T. Soke (according to Roger Ebert) or Willie T. Stokes (according to Elvis Mitchell and Mim Udovitch of the Times) who annually plays Santa as part of a robbery scam. Every year, Willie and his midget accomplice (Tony Cox) sell their services as Santa and elf to some unfortunate shopping mall, the idea being to rob the joint on Christmas Eve and then spend the rest of the year blowing the dough. Their plan is complicated when a dorky little fat kid with rich but absent parents takes a liking to Santa, mainly because he desperately wants someone to like him back. A cranky, cynical adult and an innocent child -- the formula for a "redemptive" story, which the movie takes considerable delight in not being.

But the story, for me anyway, wasn't really the point; the point is to see how long you can stand looking at Billy Bob saying fuck you, fuck this and fuck that in front of a lot of little kids and their parents. Five minutes in, I was almost praying that the movie would do something besides remind us of what a foul-mouthed, butt-humping, chain-smoking retard the major character is; unfortunately, this is the major joke, and enjoying the movie more or less depends on how subversive you think this is and, more than that, how many times you can hear the same joke played out. The answer from critics and at least a few of the people in the theater is: extremely, and plenty.

What seems to give most of the critics a woody is the fact that Billy Bob basically stays a pitiful excuse for a human being down to the bitter end, and that even the fat kid doesn't soften him up that much. They like the fact that the character doesn't change, which I can appreciate; on the other hand there's no character development either. If I thought it was actually a funny movie, of course, I wouldn't care; absent any laughter on my part, the movie struck me as just relentlessly unpleasant and -- coming from the director with such a heretofore fine track record -- hugely disappointing.

My advice likely won't mean much, because success often encourages people to do what they are worst at, but I wish Terry Zwigoff would get back to writing his own scripts instead of picking up rejects from the Coen Brothers. Those two have yet to make a film as good as either of Zwigoff's first two, or as bad as his third one.

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Isn't that picture of Michael Jackson freaky? It just repulses me everytime I turn on the news. It looks like one of those "If They Mated" segments on Conan. Diana Ross and Pee Wee Herman maybe?

At the request of my friends at MilkPlus:

Top Ten: 1990-1994

1. The Crying Game (Neil Jordan, 1992) is one of the rare films in this period which has my total and whole-hearted enthusiasm. It’s an A+ example of a certain type of movie I like, that I guess we all like: what I call an "unexpected journey" film. These are movies that start out in a somewhat familiar place, and instead of taking that straight road, take a wild turn toward a place that couldn’t have been imagined. Two other examples come to mind, both wildly different, come to mind: Psycho and L’Avventura. These are stories where we find ourselves as surprised as the characters in them, as surprised as the people who made them; what is revealed to them is revealed to us. I knew there was going to be a surprise midway through, but I thought it was political; I didn’t know it was going to be sexual -- more than that, I didn’t know it was going to be about love and sacrifice, and I certainly didn’t know it would move me the way it did, or that it would end with such a perfect snap. I just can’t say enough good things about The Crying Game.

2. Life is Sweet – (Mike Leigh, 1991) Federico Fellini once titled a film "the sweet life," but he was just kidding – there was nothing dolce about his vita. The title of Mike Leigh’s film is a little more straightforward, but with an edge; the middle-class Middlesex family he depicts here do not, in the usual sense of the word, have a sweet life, but they do, kinda. Wendy and Andy (Alison Steadman and Jim Broadbent) have no money to speak of, although they do have an abiding love and friendship. Their twin daughters are studies in contrasts: Natalie (Claire Skinner), a hard-working plumber who saves her money and never has an idle thought, and Nicola (Jane Horrocks), a bulimic little bitch with a permanent scowl and an addiction to chocolate. The plot of the film, such as it is, is rather cinema verite: we follow the giggly and plucky Wendy as she good-heartedly helps a family friend (Timothy Spall) open a restaurant that is doomed to failure, Andy as he naively blows good money on a broken-down van pawned off on him by his weasely pal Patsy (Stephen Rea), and Nicola – a knock-out performance by Horrocks, by the way – as she wolfs down chocolate bars, alienates her boyfriend (David Thewlis) and her sister, and slides further into depression. As the film lopes along, it also gradually builds to a confrontation between the happy-go-lucky mom and her woe-is-me daughter that is so emotionally shattering you’re reminded that this is what movies are all about: palpable human drama, shot and edited with utter simplicity. Leigh, in his usual improvisational style, sets out to find the drama of ordinary life, and when he does, it takes your breath away. It’s a bravely sweet film – although some may find it a little too feel-good. The director may have been in that camp; he followed this with Naked, which may have been his own way of puking after eating too much candy.

3. In its own strange way, the Southern California of Short Cuts (Robert Altman, 1993) resembles nothing so much as William Blake’s “London” -- it isn’t the outer world that’s eating them up, but the world of other people, particularly significant others. Blake’s people are stuck in a “marriage hearse,” and so are Altman’s -- they’re in dead or dying relationships of one kind or another, full of secrets, lies and -- in a couple of cases -- mutually assured destruction. This cross-cuting series of storoies adapted from raymond Carver starts with insecticide-spraying helicopters descending like locusts on the Southern California landscape, and it ends with an earthquake; people endure both, but it’s anyone’s guess how long they can endure each other. The plague of modern life has them in its grip, and Altman captures them with bitter sympathy, irony, and a cold unblinking eye. Put this film in a time capsule: it’s America at the end of the millenium.

4. La Belle Noiseuse (Jacques Rivette, 1991)– With Camille Claudel, the best film about art I’ve ever seen. As soon as I saw it, I called a sculptor friend of mine and told him he had to see it -- then i went over to his house and watched it with him again. This story of an artist and his model is four hours long and never feels like it; it’s one of those odd films that moves at an ordinary pace without ever being the least bit boring. Part of the reason is obvious, as the model is one of the most beautiful women in the world, Emmanuelle Beart, and she spends most of the movie completely naked. This is where the length of the movie works in its favor; as the artist dawdles around, adjusting this and that, gradually starting to work and finding his focus, he becomes our source of interest -- no small trick.

5. Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994)– I guess this is the most influential film of the decade, and certainly one of the most entertaining. It’s a work of art, and quite useless.

6. Red (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1994) -- A car hits a dog and the driver seeks out the owner, thereby bringing together a young woman and a retired judge with a voyeuristic interest in the lives of others.

7. Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990)

8. Schindler’s List (Stephen Spielberg, 1993)

9. Dazed and Confused (Richard Linklater, 1993)

10. Exotica (Atom Egoyan, 1994)

Claude Brasseur, Anna Karina and Sami Frey take a crack at "The Madison" in Godard's Bande a Part

Godard, 24 fps

Saw Godard's fantastic Bande a Part for the first time. It’s a so-so story -- two guys, a girl, a robbery, some dancing -- transformed by his highly distinct style, which in this case means absorption in the doe-eyed beauty of Anna Karina, the loose, devil-may-care spontaneity of the actors Claude Brasseur and Sami Frey and the story they are in, and the casual, tossed-off quotes to literature and pop culture -- none of which I got on my own (or likely you will, whoever you are), but which the DVD helpfully points out. What do you feel in a Godard film? You feel a love of the moving image and its possibilities; a love of faces and streets and the flow of everyday life, and that is not a love you feel in what you generally see at most movies or in TV -- what you feel there is people just doing their job. You feel he is a genius and that he is one of a kind. You don’t feel a whole lot for the characters, though -- you don’t even think of them as characters so much as actors in a Godard film, and the story is too ordinary to get much of a response. You just know whoever made it is fucking marvelous, and one feels affection toward him, although I can’t say it is repaid. He’s like Kubrick; he gives off the nerdy cineaste vibe of someone who has disappeared into his own craft (and craft does seem like the right word), like Nabokov’s Luzhin disappearing into the chessboard. He’s Jean-Luc Cinema Godard alright; he is the film and the film is him. This is not all there is to say about him or the film, but it’s all I feel like saying at the moment. I really did love the movie though, and I’m sure I’ll see it again. I am particularly enamored of Karina’s distended tongue when Brasseur gives her a kiss.

If there was ever a film that is so funny it hurts, it is Barbet Schroeder’s fascinating 1974 documentary General Idi Amin Dada -- A Self-Portrait. The former butcher of Uganda, at the height of his power, allowed Schroeder near-total access, apparently in an effort to present dictatorship with a happy face. Certainly, no one could tell this story better than Amin himself, who is quite the camera-hog, and very much the star of his own life, if not the hero he imagines himself to be. Amin, who was publicly fond of Hitler, ruined the economy of his country and butchered some 300,000 of his own people, comes across like some big lumbering bully who’ll kill you if you don’t let him win. In fact, that’s exactly the impression you get watching him win a swimming meet against the country’s top athletes by crowding his way across their path. We also see him laughing helplessly at his own lame jokes, chatting away with the local wild animals as if they were his subjects, and talking with his subjects as if they were children: whether it’s to assemblies of athletes or medical professionals, there seems no one whom Amin doesn’t feel can benefit from his immense, and immensely banal, wisdom. With the same self-absorbed stupidity that led him to allow Schroeder to film him in the first place, Amin believes his people see him as a beloved, benevolent, and straight-shooting head of state; "I speak the truth," he says about a thousand times. Actually, their fear is palpable, and for good reason; in one scene, he delivers a fierce reprimand to his foreign minister, who will be found dead two weeks later. Schroeder wisely keeps his own commentary at a minimum, fully and mischievously aware that no one makes a better case against this chubby-cheeked thug than the man himself.

Pow!

Samuel Fuller's The Naked Kiss (1964) smacks you across the mug like an angry dame with a pocketbook -- which is also how it begins. The first thing we see is the prostitute Kelly (Constance Towers) beating the fool out of some poor sap who tried to rip her off. We watch from his point of view, a man so drunk he can barely stand, as Kelly's blows send him reeling backwards down the hall of his apartment. She swings so wildly, angrily, and literally in your face (as well as his) that you almost think she's going to break the lens, which is frantically trying to keep up with her. Her unfortunate john makes a wild grab at her hair, which turns out to be a wig, and Kelly goes apewire: a bald hooker in black bra and panties beating the son of a bitch senseless and then finishing him off by by spraying a seltzer bottle in his face. She readjusts the wig and stares into a mirror, and at us. As the opening credits appear and the music swoons, she combs her hair into shape, restoring the hard, sculpted beauty of her face. It's one of the most jarring opening scenes in American cinema.

"If a story doesn't give you a hard-on in the first couple of scenes, throw it in the goddamned garbage." Such was the famous advice Fuller gave to Jim Jarmusch. Worshipped by independents, a figure of honor to in both the French and German New Wave -- he appeared in both Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou and Wim Wenders’ The State of Things -- Fuller crafted melodramas that push the border of art, and this one throbs with expectancy from the get-go. It’s a B-picture of considerable purity - the setting is worm-in-the-apple suburbia, the laughs are mean, the dialogue is lousy and the acting is wretched. It is also operatic; a hyperdrama with an impassioned sensibility and a sense of mood that is masterfully shaped by composition and lighting. Fuller puts his characters in worlds full of extremes. He doesn't peel away social camouflage to reveal the dark side. He starts with the dark side, the place where his people live, and shows the camouflage as it accumulates.


After Kelly's episode with the deadbeat john, we move ahead a few years. Her hair has grown back -- it isn't until much later that we discover how she lost it -- and she moves to the small town of Grantville to ply her trade. Posing as a champagne saleswoman, she meets Griff (Anthony Eisley), the local cop, who quickly puts his moves on her. Griff doesn't learn that the champagne lady is a hooker until she's already popped his cork, whereupon he tells her he doesn't want her type in his town. Griff is the kind of cop you might meet in a Jim Thompson novel, a hot-headed defender of public morality who sees no contradiction between his private life and his public one. He's not totally heartless; he even recommends a good bordello in the next county, where "Bon-Bon Girls" with names like Redhead, Marshmallow and Hatrack offer their sweets to the highest bidder.

Kelly isn't interested. Instead, she rather all of a sudden decides to change her life completely. She gives up champagne and whoredom, takes a room with a kindly if dotty old woman, and becomes a physical therapist for handicapped children. She rises in this line of work with lightning speed, tough-loving the youngsters into health and winning the total respect and admiration of all her fellow nurses, who trust her wise, been-around-the-block counsel on all matters.

Naturally, this rise in her fortunes doesn't sit well with Griff, who has a strong, old-fashioned belief in "once a whore, always a whore." What ticks him off even more is when his friend J. L. Grant (Michael Dante), the town's wealthy playboy as well as its leading son, takes a special liking to Kelly. When Griff learns of their upcoming marriage, he threatens to expose the newly-reformed Kelly if she doesn't scram, but Kelly beats him to the punch: she tells Grant everything about her past, he forgives her, and Griff can't do much more than sulk.

Where can the movie go now, you wonder - half way through and the central MacGuffin already MacGuffed? Lots of places, as Fuller is just getting cranked up. The charming, Byron-quoting, good-looking Grant of Grantville proves just as prejudiced against Kelly's past as Griff, only in a much nastier way. Grant, she discovers, is a child molester who needs someone as abnormal as he is for a wife, and figured an ex-whore was as good a place to start as any. When he winds up dead, she gets charged with murder. Life turns bleak and hopeless as it only can in a film noir -- or a D.W. Griffith silent like Broken Blossoms or Way Down East. Like Griffith, Fuller is violent, achingly sincere, corny, and a true original when it comes to storytelling. He easily glides into extended poetic reveries, such as when he shows groups of children singing or playing at the hospital, without ever once making it seem extraneous. I think Fuller could have gotten in the ring with Griffith and other great silent directors -- he’s at his best when he scraps dialogue and becomes strictly visual, such as the end, when we see Kelly’s distance from a crowd of townspeople, or earlier, when Kelly discovers Grant with a little girl. Forced by the conventions of his time to be purely suggestive, Fuller lures us into the scene unawares, as Kelly is -- she comes home, hears Grant’s tape recording of the children singing at the hospital, sees a child exiting the house, sees Grant, and her slowly stunned face tells us all we need to know.

Tawdry, silly, over-the-top, totally compelling, and brilliantly photographed by Stanley Cortez (one of the greats: he also shot The Magnificent Ambersons and The Night of the Hunter) this kiss delivers a beginning-to-end knock-out punch.

Times' A.O. Scott Claws "Cat in the Hat" to pieces: "I am tempted to say that this Cat should be tied up in a sack and drowned, but I wouldn't want to condone cruelty to animals, even metaphorically. Cruelty to classic works of children's literature is bad enough."

What's the best way to generate content for your own blog? Respond to someone else's. My thoughts on Liz Penn's review of Kill Bill:

Well, it looks like I'm going to have to take the opposing opinion. I saw Kill Bill the weekend it came out and loved it so much I went back the next weekend to see it again with my seventeen-year-old daughter. All week long I had to bite my tongue to keep from talking about it; I wanted to tell her in detail about all the scenes. Shit, I wanted to tell the whole world about it.

I don't usually see movies more than once, but when I do, it's almost always for the same reason: I want those thrills to hit me all over again. There are movies of considerable depth where you need more than one viewing just to really get it, and there are movies with great stories you love seeing again, but the movies I'm referring to here are roller-coaster rides -- once it's over you just want to climb back on and do it again. Once, for me, simply was not enough to see Indiana Jones chased by the boulder, or to see the ghosts in Poltergeist, or the fantastic opening sequence of Blow Out (and everything that came after as well, nutty as it sometimes was.) And once was not enough to experience the bloody menace of the mace-wielding Go-Go Yubari, or that blood-drenched anime sequence, or the tremendously theatrical slaughter of the Crazy 88's in Kill Bill. At times, it kind of reminded me of the blood in Kurosawa's Ran; I'm thinking of one scene where a guy is on the ground profusely bleeding, and all the blood around him forms a very deliberate, artistic pattern -- hyper-realistic, hyper-aesthetic violence.

Part of the movie's pull is that it is almost a kind of anti-movie; not in the purely Godardian sense, but not all that far from it, either. This became especially clear to me over the weekend, a good month after I saw it, when I was watching that Martin Scorsese documentary about American movies. It included a clip from Vincente Minnelli's film about Hollywood, The Bad and the Beautiful, where Kirk Douglas, as a film producer, is reading the riot act to a director for the way he had handled a particular scene. The director replies: “I could make the scene a climax.  I could make every scene a climax.  If I did, I would be a bad director.  A picture of all climaxes is like a necklace without a string.  It falls apart.”

Well, I thought: that's it. That's what Kill Bill is -- a film that is all climaxes, and it works. I think that's what makes it such a jarring film, besides the violence; it's a little disorienting that we aren't given much build-up; hell, the movie begins the way most movies end, and it keeps, well, climaxing and climaxing. It's a brilliantly choreographed, multi-orgasmic bloodfeast.

P.S. I am fascinated by your comments on Salo. I hated it -- I thought the movie was an act of cruelty on the audience. Pasolini was in a position a bit like Bunuel's with Un Chien Andalou: he wanted to provoke and offend the audience's liberal sensibilities. Pasolini didn't like the people who watched his movies, I don't think, and he wanted to rub their nose in this one, and he went way, way, way past overkill. I think if you're going to find a point in that movie, that's where you have to start, with Pasolini's hostility to the audience, with how much they are willing to take; nothing about the story itself really justifies the way he filmed it, because whatever point he wanted to make about the connection between de Sade and Naziism could have been made in far less time. I think he wanted, rather, to say the audience was somehow culpable in the horrors that allowed the Holocaust to happen, that he wanted to indict them, to punish them for watching all this shit-eating and eye-gouging. It's an awful picture, a horrible picture, an unwatchable picture -- but so were Warhol's, weren't they? Like his, it's an unwatchable film about the act of watching. It's an essay, a cruel essay, on the viewer.

Maybe I'm just getting older, but I have no great quarrel with Rolling Stone's Top 500 list.. Any such list is bound to failure unless you wrote it yourself. If anything, I wish it had been more irritating, more upsetting -- the titles we see in the Top 50 are the same ones. more or less, w've seen for years. It's like the Sight and Sound poll of great films: Citizen Kane, Vertigo and Rules of the Game are there, and you couldn't move them with a blowtorch.

Some notes:

*I admit with some shame I've never heard Pet Sounds and that I don't own Rubber Soul.

*I read the little article about Highway 61 Revisited. Not sure I've ever heard that Edie Sedgwick was the inspiration for "Like a Rolling Stone," and I don't recall the Stein-Plimpton bio, Edie, making a case for it. It makes sense lyrically, but that song came out in 1965, when Edie was still riding high in the Warhol world. She hadn't reached the point of having to get used to living on the street, so to speak -- with her dough, of course, she never did, really, just one rehab center after the next.

* I'm fully aware of the influence of What's Going On, but I've never really dug the record that much.

* I completely wore out my last copy of Exile on Main Street, but I still would put Beggars Banquet over it anyday.

*Is Blood on the Tracks Dylan's greatest 1970s album? I prefer Desire.

*Out of place in the Top 50: The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars and Hotel California.

Molestation.Murder.

Hail, hail, rock and roll.

I don't know why, but I find myself liking this guy.

Must-Have Recordings? That's their opinion, anyway, and surely to some degree they (whoever made up this list) are surely right. But what oddities are the following:

*David Bowie, Hunky Dory
*Elvis Costello, Get Happy!
*Blondie, Plastic Letters
*Devo, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo
*Tom Waits, Swordfish Trombones
*Bruce Springsteen, Greetings From Asbury Park or Darkness at the Edge of Town.

Not real sure Devo deserves a rank at all -- the others are generally less-than-stellar work by major artists.

I wrote a paragraph or so about that crazy Samuel Fuller movie The Naked Kiss, but I left it at home. I need to say something about that movie, but I'll have to do it later. For now -- all I can think of is shadow and light, Fassbinder and Sirk. Very much in the mood of all that. High, heavy, rub-your-nose-in-it melodrama, and the dialogue is pretty awful at times, but there's no denying the visual impact, the visual mastery. Fuller could have directed silents; that's how good I think he was. Maybe he was born too late and wound up lasting forever. Anyway, later, later.

I bought the CD of Another Side of Bob Dylan, one of those early discs of which I've heard much (on various compilations) but not all.

Best surprise so far: I Shall Be Free No.10, one of Dylan's typically hilarious and thoroughly surreal raps:

Well, I set my monkey on the log
And ordered him to do the Dog
He wagged his tail and shook his head
And he went and did the Cat instead
He's a weird monkey, very funky.

The book provides as memorable a portrait of a young writer's apprenticeship as the one William Styron gave us in Sophie's Choice ... -- Michiko Kautani on Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Living to Tell the Tale. Hope to God it's a LOT better than that. Memorable, my ass -- Sophie's Choice is one of the laughably bad novels of the 1970s. You're really scraping the bottom of the barrel if that's your idea of memorable.

I turned 45 today. Family party at the Olive Garden earned me pants, underwear, socks, a Gamecock sweatshirt, a gorgeously framed copy of a review I wrote for the Post, and a White Stripes CD.

Spent some hours staring at the short story that won't move; pondered whether there's any truth to that saw of Bunuel's about how the imagination must be trained, and considered writing a furious response to Martin Amis's latest valentine in the Atlantic Monthly to that flaming bag of gas Saul Bellow. It put me in what might be called a Peckish mood: "'Saul Bellow is the worst writer of his generation -- and if you don't agree, you're part of the problem."

American Beauty is a film I never tire of hating; I can fall out of bed and discuss how shitty it is.

Mere praise of the movie is enough to get me going, as I did today at Blogcritics.org:

American Beauty was terrible: a hollow yammering fake of a movie that had nothing to say about life in suburbia, and an extremely snide, smug way of not saying it. It was nothing but a collection of platitudes. It was the kind of movie educated liberals could look at and find confirmation for every muddle-headed notion they ever had about the middle class. It was dishonest, too; when the blonde girl at the end announces she's a virgin I felt like throwing up my hands. At times it was just stupid, such as that wet dream of Kevin Spacey's with the girl in a tub of rose petals -- only art directors have dreams like that. And don't get me started on the performances, especially Annette Bening's, which was a case study in histrionics.

Today's inspiration

Franz Kafka's Letter To His Father was the topic at last Tuesday's Great Books discussion, and the group was in general agreement that Franz was a whiny little wuss. This is inevitable. Anyone who writes a forty-page letter to his dad blaming him (although he insisted over and over he wasn't blaming him) for all of his problems isn't going to gain much sympathy with most of us. A number of people began siding with the father, about whom they knew nothing except what Kafka had told them. They disliked the writer and his yammering voice. He put them on the defensive.

My take on it was this: Kafka seemed to think his father was a lion who had spawned a zebra; that is, a natural enemy, which is why he says repeatedly that his father is not to blame for being the overbearing, autocratic, hypocritical fin de siecle shithead that he basically is. It was only natural for his father to try to force Franz into being something he wasn't -- it is what fathers do. Franz lives inside his father's disapproval; it defines him, shapes him, gives him identity. His father is the God of his universe, and Franz is a bit like Job -- the Joban characteristic was pointed out by Zadie Smith in her ferociously smart New Republic essay of a couple weeks back -- a Job who is totally befuddled by a mysterious God who will grant him no relief whatsoever. this is not merely unique to Kafka, though; I think it is true of a lot of parents and children. Children are often raised with a basic sense, a basic residual understanding, that parents are right; or perhaps, not always right, but still the boss, which basically means they have a freedom to be wrong that children are simply not afforded.

Your opinion was correct, every other was mad, wild, meshugge, not normal. Your self-confidence indeed was so great that you had no need to be consistent at all and yet never ceased to be in the right. It did sometimes happen that you had no opinions whatsoever about a matter and as a result every conceivable opinion with respect to the matter was necessarily wrong, without exception. You were capable, for instance, of running down the Czechs, and then the Germans, and then the Jews, and what is more, not only selectively but in every respect, and finally nobody was left except yourself. For me you took on the enigmatic quality that all tyrants have whose rights are based on their person and not on reason. At least so it seemed to me.

It follows that a child who challenges a parent often feels wrong, simply because the parent has said otherwise. So in a sense what I think Kafka is dealing with as regards the old man is one where as an adult he knows his father is a crass, cruel vulgarian, but he still regards him much as he did as a child -- he quakes before him. Kafka's father can, in the immortal words of David Keith to Richard Gere in An Officer and a Gentleman , "shit all over people and still sleep like a baby at night." Franz has no suck luxury.

What was always incomprehensible to me was your total lack of feeling for the suffering and shame you could inflict on me with your words and judgments. It was as though you had no notion of your power. I too, I am sure, often hurt you with what I said, but then I always knew, and it pained me, but I could not control myself, could not keep the words back, I was sorry even while I was saying them. But you struck out with your words without much ado, you weren't sorry for anyone, either during or afterward, one was utterly defenseless against you.

This is a painful and wearying read, and it is not really likeable; the person who wrote it is pathetic, but his pathos is so intense and flamboyant, so rigorously anti-Dr. Phil, anti-John Rosemond that it gains a certain intellectual momentum, as well as digging out a lot of wormy, uncomfortable truths.