APB-SAL is a blog about education, science, science education, fiction, science fiction, literature, literary stories, poetry, and anything else that strikes the blogger's fancy.
NOTE: This blog interrogates art. It rarely make moral proclamations. For that attend the church or politician of your choice. This blog concerns aesthetics, not propaganda. Consider this as interviews with books where the interviewer presents interviewees, so you get what you need to do your own thinking.
The town of Derry in 1989 is losing so many of its young people, that they've issued a curfew. Only one boy has done the research to learn this happens every 27 years. A group of "losers," the targets of local bullies, have banded together against their common enemies: said bullies and a clown called Pennywise, which each of them sees, one by one, next to their greatest fears.
The camaraderie is potent here. They band together. The cast may be a little too large to let each have a little more of their own distinctiveness. But in the end they are characterized enough.
Movie Comparison (spoilers implied):
The first part of the TV series was effective as well, albeit more limited by budget, time, and special effects, but Tim Curry and the kids made this one work. In fact, even with the shorter screen time, the camaraderie of the first series is a little tighter. While inferior, some of the special effects were effective. Mostly they involved cut-aways that required the audience to fill in the gaps, but it also squeezed more out of space, squeezing victims and clowns into narrow drain pipes.
The movie version has only the kids appear, and they do get a stronger development. Most have their own unique and powerful experience with Pennywise, but Georgie and Beverly take best advantage of the increased screen time. Beverly especially becomes the bond that glues their group together in the new version. Pennywise, from the trailer, looks to be a stillborn failure, but Bill Skarsgård does a better job than his trailer displays. His coaxing of Georgie is terrifying, and the special effects push him further.
I've heard that seeing multiple screenwriters credited on a movie is supposed to be bad, but in the remake the writing works hard to push beyond what we saw in the TV series. It pushes boundaries and uncovers surprises. Even in the novel, Georgie is found dead. In the remake Georgie and all the disappeared are just that: gone, leaving the townspeople to worry over the disappearances But that opens a can of worms about why adults haven't been combing the countryside looking for the disappeared. Surely this town would be crawling with reporters from all over the country, and surely a majority of parents would be keeping their kids home.
The near finale image of the disappeared is quite haunting, giving a new sense to the movie's catch-phrase.
An interesting side-note is how the TV series goes back into 60s for its past while this movie goes back near to when the TV series was made for the movie's past.
The TV series dives into the mythos of Pennywise, if simply. The second does not although it sketches some of the history. The teaser trailer for the second half of the remake suggests that we will go into this, fingers crossed. I simply linked to the teaser trailer since it isn't very good, resting too heavily on heavy-handed horror and uses much footage from the first film.
Part Two (spoilers implied):
The TV mini-series failed to live up to the promise of its first part. One wonders how the forthcoming movie sequel will fare. It almost seems impossible to deliver. These are, after all, childhood fears, for one. Since they are all adults, how can it have the same impact? Of course, some of our fears will carry into adulthood, but can they have the same power? The other problem is that they know how to defeat it. So how can the second movie do more than retread without the oomph?
We'll, have to wait until September 6, 2019 to find out if it can live up to its first half.
It's a bit rare in fiction to mix SF and horror--that is a tale whose telling has fear as its modus operandi, but at its base, the speculative conceit hinges on a scientific concept. When it comes to movies, they don't shy away: the Alien franchise and look-alikes and zombie movies come to mind. Often a scientific disaster or mad scientist is the cause.
The trailer here makes the movie sound simpler than it is. It seems to have laid out its entire poker hand, which made the film seem less interesting, which explains my only getting to the movie now. Luckily, this is not the case. It mixes SF and horror well although it leaves a number of head-scratchers.
Get Out summary
Chris, an African American photographer, is headed out, with his girlfriend Rose Armitage, to visit her parents. He thinks it's a mistake not to tell her parents that he's African American, but she assures him that her dad would have voted a third time for Obama.
Rose, driving, hits a deer and she calls the police, who informs Rose that she needn't have called them. The cop asks for Chris's I.D., and Rose defends Chris, saying that an I.D. is unnecessary, creating a tense moment. Chris hands over his ID, anyway, and the cop lets her belligerence go.
When Chris meets the family, there seems to be a string of microaggression incidents where the members say a series of racially off-putting things. He meets their African American servants, who put on a show of being happy if a bit vapid.
Chris thinks he dreams that he sees the African American servants behaving strangely (running at him, staring in the mirror and adjusting her hair) and that Rose's mom puts him under hypnosis, using tea cup and spoon, to get him to stop smoking. But also she uses his feelings of guilt about his complicity in his mother's death (he didn't call right away when she didn't come home, and since she was involved in a hit-and-run accident, it was possible he could have saved her life if people had searched for her in time). The hypnosis works. He doesn't want to smoke. He later finds out, through Walter, that none of it was a dream.
Things get worse when at a party, the party-goers make more and more racially odd statements. They seem to compliment on the one hand but stereotype on the other. The movie's title comes when Chris tries to take a surreptitious photo of an African American he thinks he knows, Andre, who is a spouse to an older white woman. The photo flash starts Andre's nose to bleed (a common but unexplained motif in movies), and he rushes at Chris to tell him to "Get out."
Get Out spoilers + analysis
Chris is unnerved, but the Armitage family take the gentleman into a back room, and he's back to normal. Chris sends the photo to his TSA friend, who tells him that the guy in the photograph has been missing. Maybe they're some kind of sex slaves, he suggests and tells Chris to leave. Chris agrees and tells Rose to pack up to go. She seems to go along with this.
However, Chris finds a stash of photographs in a tiny closet that shows Rose in what appears to be relationships with the former servants. She seems to be the lure.
This appears to freak him out, but he somehow still trusts her. How the Armitage mother is privy to his guilt about his mother's death should have at least have made him wary before now--all of these data points leading to distrust. Instead of running, though, he yells at Rose to find the car keys, and she can't seem to. This doesn't seem to make him distrust her, either; he just yells more. Maybe he's in denial. Or maybe he can't drive himself. After all, when asked for his driver's license, he said he had a state ID, which suggests that maybe he didn't know how to drive or that he lost his license. (He does drive later and seems competent at it despite the accident, so maybe he just lost license.)
Mrs. Armitage taps her tea cup twice and he's under. They drag him downstairs and strap him to a big chair. Here, I wondered if he could have worked his limbs loose from his bonds, but maybe we're to assume he cannot. Or maybe he never gets the opportunity as the videos keep putting him under.
The series of videos indoctrinate him into what will be happening to him. That is useful to him and us the audience, so that we know what's going on, but I'm not sure what that gains the Armitages to reveal their hands. But the one guy who was reasonably nice to him at the party--a blind guy--plans to use Chris's eyes.
Chris, meanwhile, finds enough armchair stuffing to apparently dull the hypnotic effects of the video, and when the Armitage brother unstraps Chris, he goes on a killing spree of his captors. (The father may not need to be killed to make an escape, but one can hardly fault this. The weapon is unusual: a deer head. The antagonistic brother and the mother, who holds his hypnotic jailer keys, do seem critical deaths to make an escape.)
Other people also bar his escape: Two are the African American servants, which Rose reveals as Grandma and Grandpa. Chris accidentally runs into "Grandma" and feeling guilty (remembering his own mother), he backs up to take her with him in his getaway car. However, she wakes up and forces him to drive into a tree.
Next, "Grandpa" (or Walter) comes after Chris, but Chris uses his cell flash to bring back his true consciousness and shoots Rose with her rifle and then himself.
Did Walter need to shoot himself? It depends on how Grandpa is riding inside him. My first thought was that it was a radio connection, and Grandpa was an invalid, stuck in bed. If that were the case, I would think that 1) Grandpa would rather get healthy and be himself unless this is terminal (but then if it's terminal, he probably wouldn't be conscious much, leaving Walter to control his own body), and that 2) Walter could just run outside of radio range and be free of Grandpa's influence. Since the earlier photo-flash moment with Andre had to be corrected by the family, it would seem that Walter had the opportunity to escape if the mother isn't around to re-hypnotize.
Another possibility is that Grandpa is otherwise dead and has taken over Walter's body via hypnosis and brain surgery. Dr. Armitage did say that Grandpa had died. So we're talking a living consciousness transferred and uploaded into a living brain. While this technology seems improbable now, perhaps it will be possible in the future although one might suspect a hundred years down the line--if we ever figure out what consciousness is. But this would explain why he kills himself since Grandpa might at any point take him back over.
On the other hand, what if there's a procedure that could cure him? The blind guy said Chris would still be there, just not at the wheel. I'd think these guys might have been hatching escape plans if they ever got the chance. Why does Andre, when freed by the flash, come at Chris instead of running away himself? On the other other hand, it is possible to demoralize a person into inaction.
Another difficult thing to wrap the mind around is Grandma and Grandpa. Have they lost interest in each other? Why aren't they seeing each other like a couple? Also Grandpa Armitage looked to be the family patriarch in the video. Why were he and Grandma made into servants? This suggests an even stranger family relationship. You'd think they, too, would want out of this situation.
There are interesting parallels involving hit-and-runs.
Chris lost his mother due to a hit-and-run.
Rose hit a deer. One might think that the deer hit was designed to have happened, but it'd seem a formidable and fortuitous accident to create. However, that might have intended to put Chris into a more suggestible frame of mind. There's an alternate ending where Chris ends up arrested when he's caught choking Rose. This might mean that a larger conspiracy was intended at one point. This event seems to have haunted Chris as he dreams about it, so there may be more to unearth here. Dr. Armitage does call them an ecological problem, so he's glad they're gone. If significant, does that make the Armitage the deer or the car? Maybe the car, and Chris the deer is enacting his revenge.
Walter, jogging, almost runs over Chris, but swerves.
Chris runs over Rose's dad with a deer. This could be poetic justice if the deer were intended and was part of the greater conspiracy.
Chris runs over a woman whom he tries to save but ends up killing, given her Grandma trying to kill him.
There may be more. I haven't formulated anything overarching for this. Just intriguing.
What kind of people would get wrapped up in such a conspiracy? These people admire and maybe are jealous of African Americans. They want to be them. So they aren't your garden-variety racists, who would probably look down on being African American. They may be racist in the sense of seeing African Americans as the superior race and eager to become or marry one. Unless the Armitages are using Liberalism as a cover, they claim to be Liberal. Perhaps these people met online somehow and congregated. There were a lot of them at the bidding war--enough that you'd expect there to be more than one lure trying to satisfy their desires. This suggests territory for a sequel, especially since there are so many unanswered questions.
In terms of drama, the alternate ending would have amped up the drama, but it would have probably added too many extra complications.
"Cinema sins" does this "Everything Wrong with ..." series. Although they apparently do it whether they like a movie or not, this is one they seem to like. They make a few salient points, and a lot of minor ones, like whether or not Chris is a hipster with a lot of lamps. I did notice an interesting photo with a child in a mask that I might have noticed otherwise, but I'm unsure how to load it with meaning. Who is the masked child: Chris or his antagonists?
If you've read this far, I'm assuming you watched the movie, but this video has a lot of spoilers, too.
Here's a movie that's great as long as you keep squinting. Turn off the critic, and just flow.
As you can tell from the trailer, Miles becomes a spiderman, and through a battle with Kingpin and the Green Goblin, a bunch of spidermen nabbed from their universes and gathered into Miles's. Miles has to get them home, or they'll die, but he can't seem to master the basic Spiderman skills yet.
Exceptionally brilliant are the family relationships--especially Miles with father and uncle--and the spidermen--in particular, Miles and the two Peter Parkers.
Above is the trailer. Below is a clip the first nine minutes. It doesn't quite establish the scenario, but it does feature some of the movie's strengths.
There are number of things that make no sense (spoilers dead ahead).
Spiderman is supposed to be super strong and have and have sticky fingers from the second he's transformed. One second he can walk on walls; later he has to be saved by Spiderman when he can't hang on or pull himself up.
Spiderman (our first Peter Parker) and Miles recognize each other immediately. Why don't he and the female Spiderman recognize each other? How did she not know immediately what was happening with his sticky hand and help him out?
Spiderman should know whether he's going to live or die. Why give up his life? Why not have Miles carry him to safety or to a hospital?
There's a panel with a USB port with a green button that sits behind a panel a way-tall ceiling of your collider. It will blow up the collider. Who designed that? Apparently all Spidermen have the spidey senses to find which panel it's hiding behind.
Miles has no training or fighting skills one minute, and then after he believes in himself, the MMA and kung fu skills necessary to kill the man who killed the first Spiderman in his universe, appear in his skull. Who needs training?
Parker also stresses the importance of a mask and seems shocked when his mask is removed, but he's got a comic book with his accurate biography, and everybody knows who he is when he dies. Also there's a comic with Miles's young face on it. So what's the point of the mask and hiding one's identity?
Another strange element is the fidelity to reality in this particular universe--some elements of the background almost convince you of its authenticity--but there's apparently a black and white one, an anime one, and a Looney Tunes one. Maybe it's a wink-wink-let's-break-the-fourth-wall, but as the last problem shows, the movie doesn't seem to know what constitutes reality. Are they all just drawings without basis in reality or is one supposed to take these as reality with breaks? Does the movie even know?
"The Mystery of Aunt May Kicking her Own Back Door Down" may explain some of these choices. Why does she do it? Possibilities:
She's very angry at the door.
She's angry at all the Spider creatures--that her perfect Peter is dead leaving these losers behind--but she doesn't want to take it out on them. However, she doesn't seem too angry, later. (Actually, she doesn't seem too grief-stricken about the loss of Peter. Is she cold-hearted? Or is she not the real Aunt May?)
Maybe the door's locked (although if it is, why not unlock it? The lock would be on the inside, right?).
The door sticks. However, this kick might have made her lock worse. How safe is her neighborhood, anyway?
She's showing off, trying to impress these young punks to keep them from underestimating her, but she will need a locksmith shortly.
Some other half-baked reason that reveals her impulsive nature that rules over her calmer nature, which causes her to wreck things around the house periodically.
Since none of these character explanations make much sense, the reason I suspect she does it is because the writers thought it would be cool to make Aunt May be a BA, logic be damned. This might explain the other choices above as well.
Maybe "Aunt May Kicking her Own Back Door Down" will be like "Jumping the Shark": the writing risks taken that maybe ought not to have been done.
Conversely, for some, it may symbolize what good writing does: It takes chances. You listen to all of the "Wouldn't This Be Cool?" ideas floating in your head instead of nixing them.
I used to pride myself in being able to read anything, but then I read what they call "torture porn" (not that it's porn, but that it details and seemingly revels in a non-stop torture) or the story that merely tries to be offensive. One asks, "What is the merit?" One could say it's exercising free speech. So be it.
I ran up against this in this short novel, Quiet Days in Clichy, a misnomer, which apparently Miller knew when he chose it. I picked the novel up because it was short, and I was grooving on Miller's observations of people and certain stylistic passages that passed muster for poetry. But here, I had to ask myself why I was reading this.
Where some of his narratives fail to cohere, here it was a more traditional cause-and-effect although it was told out of order for no reason I could fathom. Apparently this has been filmed twice, in 1970 and 1990 (IMDb: 5.4 and 4.9, respectively). The second half of the book (minus Colette) was also filmed and fared slightly better at 5.7. I'd probably pass on them. I'll include trailers here for the curious, but fair warning: the 1970 version displays in abundance a word many find distasteful. The second one is also NSFW.
The narrative might go something like this: Two impoverished writers look for money, food, and sex with prostitutes. Along the way, Carl picks up an underage girl whom they call Colette and who then lives with them. The narrator finds little merit in the women they pick up, or if he does, it's an almost strange ineffable-ness.
What is interesting is actually left outside the narrative: The underage girl is described as a doll, maybe dull, dim-witted. However, I kept wanting to look around the limits of the narrator to see who she really was.
From what little we get of her, she seems dreamy, lost in reverie. She'd disappear. Sometimes for days. Obviously free to do as she pleased, she comes back. One day the men follow her, and she meanders on long walks, contemplative. She sticks with the men. Whatever they have is apparently superior to whatever her presumably rich mother and step-dad have. What is that?
There's something sad in that: to prefer the company of two destitute men, perhaps to carve out one's independence and domestic bliss with men who probably had less interest in her domesticity although apparently they enjoyed it to some extent. Interestingly, the parents know Carl has committed a crime but don't prosecute. Why? What would prosecution bring to light that they don't want raised? Or are they of a more morally relaxed bent? What drove Colette out and that she was willing to return to (not that she may not leave again) or had she been caught on her wanderings? I can't help picturing her mind on those walks dreaming about a better life, or maybe she thought that this would become a better life, eventually
My challenge for another writer, as I think it'd need a female hand, is to write the story from the underage girl's point of view. How does she see this arrangement? At first it seems more desirable yet it becomes less so--living with two intelligent men who are actually shallower than they think--at least with the women they bring into their lives. I suspect, if the writer were able to maintain some objectivity with a focus on aesthetics, this would be a more literary approach than what's here presently.
This raises the question of what makes good art. What is obscenity or porn without merit, and what is "literature with erotic motifs?" I just discovered that phrase in comparing this to Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita since both involve similar subject matter. That phrase belongs to Nabokov in this case as it hints rather than displays. However, Miller goes beyond that.
Back in the 20s and 30s there seem to have been a number of novelists like D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce and Henry Miller who were challenging what could be included as literature. For some reason in the 50s and 60s, we as a society loosened up our morals and opened the gates to sexual situations in literature, citing the First Amendment for free speech.
As a person with biological and literature training, I find this natural. How does this impact character relationships? For me, this is the dividing demarcation between art designed to make us think and work that is designed to stimulate and be sold.
I read five pages or so of porn novel in Junior High. We were in a hotel lobby and a fellow swimmer had ducked into a hall and discovered a vending machine with porn novels in it. He bought one and ended up with two copies. This stirred conversation in the room as the books circulated, and of course, I had to read it. It was non-stop "action" thriller, which meant the author had to come up with some bizarre stuff to maintain the reader interest. Obviously, since I read only five pages, the stuff was a little too bizarre.
If that is a marker of porn, then Quiet Days isn't porn, but it is one step below. Because it's Miller, I want to dub it literary erotica, but I don't know that it merits "literary" if I were to follow my own definition above. It fails to focus on language. There is some interesting observation of characters, but rather like a weak tea. This landmark case of Miller vs. California [different Miller] redefined what obscenity was. A number of famous novels have apparently been deemed as obscene in the past, some of which might surprise you.
The new way to configure obscenity were three ideas:
whether the average person, applying contemporary "community standards", would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest;
whether the work depicts or describes, in an offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions, as specifically defined by applicable state law (the syllabus of the case mentions only sexual conduct, but excretory functions are explicitly mentioned on page 25 of the majority opinion); and
whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.
Does this novel pass muster? I'll leave that to you to decide. If you've read it, what did you think?
I wanted a comparison of Tropic of Cancer (previous commentary) to Black Spring. Is one better than the other? They're both written by the same guy with a similar stylistic verve, yet one can see why one book might be preferred. Tropic of Cancer has a more personal feel, but it is also grimier. Black Spring has subject headings. I read someone call them stories, but I'm not sure they're that. If you take “The dreamers dream" quote below, it is a complete paragraph. It could stand alone, or be lumped with another "story" entirely. I suspect that one inspired another, yet I also suspect a completely new book could have been achieved by reshuffling. Perhaps Tropic of Cancer could have used an organizing principle, even if the organization were arbitrary. I'm sure academics have staked their careers on the organization.
It seems to me my initial impression was correct, in terms of savoring a passage and setting the book down. A movie will never be made out of his books*--or at least not a faithful one based on the events since what are the events? Moreover, this book quotes and structurally a kind of Lewis Carroll's Alice-in-Wonderland surrealist logic. There is a dialogue but it doesn't feel like a real one (see the last quote). No, Miller may best read as a prose poet, as a writer of passages, as etcher of lyric essays. The books may cohere as a poet's as well. Note that Lawrence Ferlinghetti quotes Miller for the famed title of his collection, A Coney Island of the Mind.
Opening a Miller book is like opening a box packed with poets' toys. Karl Shapiro called Miller's work wisdom literature, and in some cases as in some of the quotes below, I believe he's correct.
Cool Quotes:
"I do not have to look in my vest pocket for my soul; it is there all the time bumping against my ribs, swelling, inflated with song."
“The dreamers dream from the neck up, their bodies securely strapped to the electric chair. To imagine a new world is to live it daily, each thought, each glance, each step, each gesture killing and recreating, death always a step in advance. To spit on the past is not enough. To proclaim the future is not enough. One must act as if the past were dead and the future unrealizable. One must act as if the next step were the last, which it is. Each step forward is the last, and with it a world dies, one’s self included. We are here of the earth never to end, the past never ceasing, the future never beginning, the present never ending. The never-never world which we hold in our hands and see and yet is not ourselves. We are that which is never concluded, never shaped to be recognized, all there is and yet not the whole, the parts so much greater than the whole that only God the mathematician can figure it out.”
"She's got millions of them inside her and they're all whirring around in there dying to get out. Whirrrr ... whirrrr. And if you'd just put a needle inside and puncture the bag they'd all come whirring out... imagine it... a great cloud of soul-worms... millions of them... and so thick the swarm we wouldn't be able to see each other.... A fact! No need to write about China. Write about that! About what's inside you..."
* Bold proclamation that has already turned out to be untrue after a few minutes. He's had four or five, but none of them are especially well received. This one for Tropic of Cancer got a 71 tomatoes from critics, 25 from the lay audience, and a 5.7 from IMDb, which rounds out to a so-so movie. The others, linked to here when the post is finished, fared slightly worse, but still within the so-so range. I do think Black Spring would be particularly difficult to film, so I won't edit out the statement. I don't see how a movie can capture Miller's strengths as a writer.
W. S. Merwin passed away. His poem "Language", with its Biblical overtones, could be read as his own eulogy/elegy:
"Certain words now in our knowledge we will not use again, and we will never forget them.... they are, trembling already for the day of witness. They will be buried with us, and rise with the rest."
A number of people are using his poem, "For the Anniversary of My Death," which sounds like someone will speak to us wisdom from the grave, but it's a little tricky like Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken." It's actually a living man who speaks:
"Every year without knowing it I have passed the day"
"I have passed" indicates he's alive (also it's a clue, too, that the poet was alive when writing the poem). The phrase "without knowing" is key. The lack of knowledge but the presence and possibility of death seem to hang over him. It is both definite and mysterious. He later alludes to life as a "strange garment."
The next five lines discuss death, but the last seven address his life right now--not just the love of a woman, or the problems of the world--but this very moment, staring into nature, observing its beauties. The final line is almost Biblical, a warning about what one serves in life, knowingly or unknowingly.
In a similar vein--at least, the logical next step--here's an answer to the question about poetry careers which, given that it is a poem, is no answer at all:
When we were younger, guidance counselors steered us
toward respectable occupations: doctor, lawyer,
pharmacist, dentist. Not once did they say exorcist,
snake milker or racecar helmet tester....
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I'm not sure to what extent Theodore Sturgeon could be a called a poet, but he does use poetic techniques, and this interviewer had that in mind.
This post is rated PG, but it discusses and links to R-rated material or higher. There's a reason this is listed among the most banned books.
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When I first read Henry Miller in college, I had no idea he'd been banned in the US and Great Britain. I picked up a volume called The Henry Miller Reader--a volume compiled to get around the ban by leaving out all of the salacious bits, which is the volume I would recommend to those who want to get a taste for his work but don't want their sensibilities offended--and was smitten by the prose. I read what amounted to a feast of food and words and swooned. I read and reread the passage, seeing what he'd done. I bought a metric ton of his books based on that five-page work alone.
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But I never returned--at least not systematically. Instead, I read him haphazardly. I'd pore over a passage, fall in love, and close the book, feeling no compulsion to read anymore. I thought it a flaw, at the time. South Park creators, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, call this "And, then" writing (see video clip on right), which they consider bad--at least from the standpoint of getting most people to follow your art.
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I was inspired to revisit Miller thanks to the Bradfield video here (he discusses a book I suspect was never banned and might be a safer exposure to Miller). Bradfield recommends Tropic of Capricorn and Big Sur over Tropic of Cancer. However, others have recommended it over other books--for example, the Modern Library lists as one of the top one hundred books of the 20th century, so why not?
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The way to view Miller's work is through the lens of a lyric poem. In a narrative poem, we expect to be centered in the world. In Miller's work, we are centered in the mind of the narrator or persona who may or may not give you a map, who may or may not lay out entrances and exits, who may or may not (well probably not) give you transitions in place and time. All he lends the reader is his consciousness and unique voice.
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I thought I'd hit upon an original perspective of Miller but no, at least not completely. Karl Shapiro suggested this in part in his introduction to Tropic of Cancer:
"I do not call him a poet because he has never written a poem; he even dislikes poetry, I think. But everything he has written is a poem in the best as well as in the broadest sense of the word."
Side note: I am curious if Miller's autobiographical fiction influenced the confessional mode of poetry. Clearly poets like Shapiro were reading him in the 50s before the ban was lifted.
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There will be those who struggle with Miller's work, not just sexual prudes or narrative prudes, but also moral prudes. He will push all the buttons. He will test readers whether they read for aesthetic purposes or political ones. It's a kind of litmus test. If you don't pass, well, try out his Reader mentioned above. If this had been twenty years ago, I would have been surprised at even the necessity of discussing the distinction between art and morality.
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I don't find his work as sexy although it is full of sexual situations, rather grimy ones--sometimes repulsive. You can try out the Miller Tropic of Cancer excerpts here. The first one links to the first forty pages. The second is an edited excerpt about Germaine--more of a character portrait than a story. It appears about a page and half after the first excerpt. This one cuts out Claude from the original text, which is a comparison of whores. I felt no arousal but found the description a fascinating perspective.
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How can I recommend a writer without sharing his values or suggesting that others have to agree with him? How can one be a good reader and not read about people different from him? Sure, we are free to condemn, but that lies outside the scope of aesthetics and art--two separate issues.
The difference might be likened to watching a nude master swimmer in a public pool. You can comment on his skill on the one hand, and talk about the indecency on the other. Sure, you can focus on only the indecency, but you've missed out on much of the experience.
Do you have to read Miller? Should Miller be forced on others? No and no, respectively, but he is worth experiencing. What I notice in complaints is that a sample represents the whole, missing out on the bigger picture. One could say that he missed the boat on some aspects of human experience, but that is the human experience in literature: It is largely filtered by a human being who may be flawed.
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That said, there are vulgarities that repel me from reading--offensiveness for the sake of being offensive which is not an aesthetic perspective. Maybe if Miller had spent too much time on vulgarity I would not be able to read him [ETA: I just read Quiet Days in Clichy, which did test my resolve. Link will function as soon as I finish writing about it]. It is not even just a matter of quantity but of quality. Miller is an observer, a student of himself, others, and humanity, which is part of what imbues his work with charm. He's a hungry artist, wandering the streets, apartments and brothels of Paris. He is perpetually looking for food and money, perpetually short of both. He is perpetually hungry for words and sex and finding a vitality in both. He is living in Paris after most of the famous literary artists had been there, following footsteps but making his own imprint. He is living in Paris during the Depression and the coming Second World War. His appetites are phenomenal to caress both aurally and on the page.
Since much of the work is within the narrator's consciousness and lacks the kind narrative thread one can follow, I'm not sure if an audio book is the best way to experience Miller, but then his words are also an aural feast, so I'm not sure if even that assessment is correct. There may be multiple paths into Miller's work.
Here's an excerpt that captures much of the elegance and energy and perspective that Miller offers:
As luck would have it I find a ticket in the lavabo for a concert. Light as a feather now I go there to the Salle Gaveau. The usher looks ravaged because I overlook giving him his little tip. Every time he passes me he looks at me inquiringly, as if perhaps I will suddenly remember.
It’s so long since I’ve sat in the company of well-dressed people that I feel a bit panic-stricken. I can still smell the formaldehyde. Perhaps Serge makes deliveries here too. But nobody is scratching himself, thank God. A faint odor of perfume . . . very faint. Even before the music begins there is that bored look on people’s faces. A polite form of self-imposed torture, the concert. For a moment, when the conductor raps with his little wand, there is a tense spasm of concentration followed almost immediately by a general slump, a quiet vegetable sort of repose induced by the steady, uninterrupted drizzle from the orchestra. My mind is curiously alert; it’s as though my skull had a thousand mirrors inside it. My nerves are taut, vibrant! the notes are like glass balls dancing on a million jets of water. I’ve never been to a concert before on such an empty belly. Nothing escapes me, not even the tiniest pin falling. It’s as though I had no clothes on and every pore of my body was a window and all the windows open and the light flooding my gizzards. I can feel the light curving under the vault of my ribs and my ribs hang there over a hollow nave trembling with reverberations. How long this lasts I have no idea; I have lost all sense of time and place.
I discuss (or will discuss shortly) two other Henry Miller novels:
"When it comes to writing fiction, you don't owe your English teachers or grammar Nazis anything. If you need to crack the rules to keep the rhythm or poetry of a sentence, do it. As long as a reasonably intelligent reader can parse the sentence that's all that matters."
One writer may be trying to say he (or his character) loves those three people/groups. However, another writer might have been using the comma to define who his parents were: Lady Gaga and Humpty Dumpty. A reader could become confused. Some use this example to command the necessity and inflexibility of the Oxford comma rule.
[Sidebar: In the above law case, I don't see a second reading of the sentence that would make the legal sentence understood in more than one way. It claims a list of exemptions to follow, so why would a writer list a non-exemption? Nonetheless, pay the time and a half overtime unless they're salaried upper class. Overworking someone means workers have to spend more time recovering. If you don't understand this, you may be a robot which should distribute its wealth to working human beings.]
As Grammarly points out, their sentence could be rewritten with the comma after "Gaga":
"I love my parents, Lady Gaga and Humpty Dumpty."
Conversely, one could still omit the comma and rewrite it:
"I love Lady Gaga, Humpty Dumpty and my parents."
Now there is no confusion. No one (no one reasonable) will think he is trying to define Lady Gaga as an amalgam of Humpty Dumpty and his parents. But you never know.
Some writers might want you to conflate both notions at the same time:
"My greatest influences are my parents, Lady Gaga and Humpty Dumpty."
Here a writer might want you to experience both sentences simultaneously and to explore those implications. However, the rest of the work--that is, the context--should suggest this as well.
Note in the above Kadrey quote, he omits a comma in the last sentence, separating the dependent clause from the independent clause. Now, were I proofreading, I'd probably place it there in case he missed it. In some sentences it might confuse readers. Here it does not. I missed it on the first read.
Some writers remove commas (or pauses) for a reason--probably to speed up the passage, even if technically there should be one there. Whether you can get away with it probably depends on 1) if the sentence can makes sense without it, 2) how famous you are, and/or 3) how much of a grammar nazi your editor is.
Amazon Prime did it's own version of Agatha Christie's The ABC Murders [link to movie], which is one of her more striking and elaborate mysteries. Thanks to the BBC, viewers have a certain expectations. While one expects murder, gore and the unpleasantries of life are minimized. What is maximized is the puzzle of the murder. This type--the "cozy"--has been so well defined that even Merriam-Webster has an entry for it:
This definition already contains its critics' own condemnation as "light." A true aficionado would probably bristle at that and suggest that the puzzle is foregrounded, which can be an intellectual if a reader so chooses to match wits with the detective, so that it is not necessarily light. The "light" probably refer to its shrugging off of violence (hence, realism, in some minds) or perhaps of literary pretensions.
It's little wonder that viewers would bristle at an Agatha Christie mystery where violence in presented (if not gruesomely so) as well as the seamier side of life (if not salaciously so). Any fan upon first viewing this three-part series may balk, wondering if the additions are gratuitous moderizations of Christie's work. But if you liked Sherlock Holmes' updated, more personal treatment from Ian McKellen's portrayal in Mr. Holmes, you might well be intrigued by John Malkovich's portrayal of an older Hercule Poirot. They aren't mirror images. This one has a murder mystery at its heart whereas Mr. Holmes has a personal mystery.
Hercule Poirot has no sidekick (no Captain Arthur J. M. Hastings, OBE to bounce ideas off of), which makes sadder and lonelier. Worse, he's lost his ally in the police with only a detective (played surprisingly well by Rupert Grint) who isn't interested or doesn't trust Poirot. Poirot has been receiving taunting letters from "A.B.C." who eventually resorts to murder. The murderer seems to have a personal vendetta against Poirot, forcing him to rake through his brains for someone in his past. Since the police won't help, Poirot has to take on the murderer alone.
Poirot's own past and his ability to detect are called into question and have a bearing on the case. The mystery is not quite well delineated as a puzzle to match wits with the private detective as in most of Christie's work, yet I do believe well worth watching, even if (especially if?) you've seen it before.
clothes once pressed but now starting to wrinkle where they've been bunches up,
pants ragged from wear,
pants over-patched.
I was expecting a lot of grime but there is very little except for one worker toward the bottom of the set. For instance, this street vendor would be lower class, so she'd be portrayed as dingy, probably to earn our sympathies, but these people appear to take better care of their appearance than we might.
I've been a Peter Jackson fan since Heavenly Creatures (which is far underrated), not to mention his work on bringing Tolkien's oeuvre to life, so I was curious about his new documentary, They Shall Not Grow Old, which I watched a few weeks ago. The title comes from the 1914 poem, "For the Fallen," by the Great War poet, Robert Laurence Binyon (1869-1943). The fourth stanza reads:
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
The movie displays a kind of genius for rendering that time period, imbuing it with reality. They used not only actual archival footage throughout but also voices from those who fought, sharing their experiences. There is embellishment where the filmmakers made the silent footage come to life once they reach the war front. It is like the famous shift in The Wizard of Oz (1939) from black and white to color. The war becomes more visceral.
The perspectives of that era are rather shocking--their initial zeal to fight and the ambivalent reception of soldiers marching home afterwards. You can see how this lead to the subsequent anti-war attitudes later.
My complaint is that there is no break. The voices are non-stop. Given no breathers, the film becomes a marathon. Silence in a movie is like white space in a poem: It gives the person time to soak in what's been said. Plus it allows emphasis. I thought of simple solutions like title cards or voice-overs, explaining the war. But really silencing the voices could itself be the only markers needed.
I do recommend the movie, but it may be more effective at home where you can introduce your own silences.
