Culture Sandwich

Perfume: The Nose Always Knows

The impossible happened. Patrick Süskind’s “unfilmable” novel, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, was adapted for the big screen (2006). This was no easy feat because scent, the book's theme, is difficult to portray cinematically.  

Some critics have pointed to the film's political undertones, even interpreting it as an allegory of the Third Reich. The producer, Bernd Eichinger, is no stranger to this subject, having gained international acclaim for The Downfall, a Hitler biopic. Apparently, Eichinger had been bugging Süskind to let him at Perfume since its publication in 1985.  His perseverance paid off. 

The film does an impressive job with a difficult concept. Tom Tykwer (Run, Lola Run), no stranger to frenetic subject matter, had a tricky job with this tale of a homicidal perfume maker. The result is a charmingly bizarre hybrid that plays like the love child of Chocolat and Silence of the Lambs.

In this nightmarish fairytale, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (Ben Whishaw) is born, despite his mother’s efforts to the contrary, in a filthy fish market.  The scene of his birth is perfectly executed and particularly striking; the pressure mounts as the baby’s heart struggles to pump amidst the many pounding elements of the market, climaxing in Grenouille's only real achievement— his own life.  

Years later, on a rare outing, he comes upon his first victim (Karoline Herfurth).  The camera masterfully highlights the pieces of her that obsess him; she is all bosom, shocking red hair, and plums. The search to preserve this experience through scent starts as a troubling fixation and leads to the composition of his master scent, the essences of 25 virgins, finishing with the lovely Laura (Rachel Hurd-Wood). 

Perfume is an ode to the nose; it opens with a dark shot of Grenouille’s face, with only his sniffer eerily lit. The film is slow in many places, but the result is a disturbing  examination of the horrors and pleasures of the senses. 

The Birth of the Luminous

One day I will find
a way to write you,
to make a place in words
that speaks what it is 
that causes you to shine
as if from the beginning of light.

You have entered me, brighter than
the birth of the luminous,
piercing, with quiet claws,
a never-entered space. 

I have in me a universe, and guard
closer than calm the moment
when, moving Queensward,
you listened to music
through my ears.

Weekend Waltz with the Bartender

Those who neither drink nor over-think won't recognize this dance. “What the bloody bleep is this windbag going on about?” they might ask.  But to the thought- and drink-heavy, these Friday night drinking dynamics, this weekend waltz with the bartender, will be all too familiar.

Let me write a picture for you: It's the weekend and someone, inevitably, wanted to go to a bar. I'm standing, holding my wallet. Sometimes things run smoothly and I walk away with the frothing fruit of my labors, but sometimes there are road bumps on the way to imbibing, especially if the establishment is bustling.

Now, I must be careful here. If I'm too passive, I will wait, awkwardly holding my money and conspicuously drinkless, for an inordinate amount of time. On the other hand, if I'm too pushy, I will remain similarly awkward and drinkless.

My friend and I were talking about this the other weekend, wondering whether these bartenders really didn’t see us, or whether making us stand there, dollars blowing in the beer breath, was their own bar version of philosophy, a Nietzschean will-to-power-trip.  

This power trip involves making you stand alone at the social apex of a weekend, inelegantly shifting your weight, seeking things to do with yourself, pushing strands of hair behind your ears and suddenly becoming fascinated by your phone, by your surroundings, by something in your bag, all in order to avoid making eye contact with the world of people around you who already have their drinks and are talking happily with friends.

In a way, it was easier in the days when I smoked because this waltz would be the perfect time to light up. Although, perhaps I should thank my lucky stars that I quit because if I could still smoke whenever I was in humorously uncomfortable situations, I might be dead by now.

Staging a Coup Against Writer's Block

Although I often suffer from its opposite, verbal diarrhea—that most unfortunate state in which mediocre words indiscriminately pour forth--no writer is a stranger to the dreaded squeak of the brain valve shutting off that is writer’s block.

My lexical obstruction often stems from the anxiety that what I create won’t be groundbreaking. On bleak days, I suffer from premonitions of shame—the nagging foreknowledge that what I’m fervently typing away at won’t be something that will cause me to beam.  Yet I find that in writing, as in life, that stranglehold of perfectionism will only assure that I create less, both qualitatively and quantitatively. 

In my bouts of blockage, the act of going on is what is commonly referred to as a leap of faith; but on a deeper level, it’s what Kierkegaard (the originator of the concept) actually called it, a leap to faith. You don’t leap with knowledge that everything will be okay; rather, the great hope on the other side of the leap is faith itself.

The concept is so stunning not because it is without doubt, but because it exists in the face of it. You will never stop having writer’s block, but you do have to take that writing leap, even when you have no faith that you’ll reach the other side of tour de force. In the end, the coup you stage is not against the block, but against your own voice that whispers, “you don’t have it in you.”

Abstract concepts aside, the single most effective laxative that I’ve found to combat textual constipation is stubbornness. You just have to storm past it, treating it as though it isn’t even there. How do you do this? By never allowing yourself to stop writing, even if you fear that it’s a load of hooey that will culminate in kindling; even if all you’re writing over and over is, “I’m a hack,” you must keep on writing. Sure, your output might look a little like Jack Torrance’s in The Shining from time to time, but you’re a writer; you’re allowed to be a little screwy.

 

 

Sometimes, when it gets to be a certain kind of dark, I get that childhood feeling that I just might disappear. 

Katt Williams' Pimpadelic

With a name like Pimpadelic, I wasn’t expecting this interweaving of  footage from an interview with comedian Katt Williams (First Sunday, Norbit, Friday After Next) and clips from one of his performances to be quite so cerebral. The whip-smart Williams reveals himself to be a man with a mission, constantly striving to reach the next level of comedy.

The portrait that he paints of the comedian is not, as he puts it, a “happy-go-lucky” one. He stresses that the jester’s role is one of hard work, copious preparation and the attitude of a disbeliever--a trust no one sensibility that keeps the mind sharp.

In his assessment of the methods behind his success, we start to recognize the degree of thought that goes into each gag; but his greatest gag is his transformation in the name of humor. The soft-spoken, brainy guy in the interview emerges onstage as the pimped-out, loud-mouthed purveyor of the “N” word.  Yet, when he describes the 5-blunt rotation of chilling with Snoop as a “ghetto track meet,” we see Williams the wordsmith again.

This guy is darn funny, and the intelligence that crouches behind his façade of inanity makes him darn funnier. His quips are built on a keen understanding of sociopolitical issues that is framed as an ignorance of them. Pimpadelic reveals Williams to be what all of the best comics are, an irreverent cultural commentator. 

The Future of Media

Where Are We Now?

It’s no secret that recent changes in media have radically recast our world. Our lives have become data for us to slice, dice and share with other slicers and dicers. Of course, this invites certain snafus, but it also opens up whole new galaxies of innovative possibility. People are no longer willing to take their cues from Big Brothers. With the rise of social media, citizen journalism and user-generated content, everyone can be a part of the conversation—and usually about a thousand conversations at once. As we can see from the current measure of the human attention span--the ubiquitous 140 characters or less--with new formats come changes in how we absorb information. I realized that I had caught the multitasking bug when I found myself listening to a podcast while reading an article. Some claim that this sort of thinking in two directions at once is more productive, while others argue that it hinders retention. For me, it depends on the day. There are times when I can barely focus and times that I swear I could wash my hair, devour my daily news and write an article all at once. Please note, I am usually wrong about this one, a fact that becomes all too obvious when I emerge with dirty hair, no new knowledge and a page full of excrement. What is Our Media Future? Although everyone’s trying, nobody can predict the future of media--not even Eric Schmidt, the superhero I like to call MediaMan--but I will add one more opinion to the fray. Although everything seems to be migrating online, this doesn’t mean that the mobs chanting “print is dead” are entirely correct. People are still reading books and magazines in paper form. I’m guessing that print will take on a role akin to radio in the time of the televisual—functioning as a supplemental tool in the the annals of knowledge. I think the biggest change, however, will be in outlook. More and more, identities and ideas will be viewed as democratic and dynamic rather than static. This will lead to a climate in which the media is for the people and by the people, with all the innovation and mess that comes with that shining ideal. This trend can be seen in the new Twitter lists. People are no longer awaiting official tastemakers; they are forming their own tastes and then unleashing them on the world. It will be interesting to see the transformations these imagined communities of social media undergo. When I look into my cultural crystal ball, I see a future in which countless pieces of moveable text have replaced facts in our understanding of knowledge. Ultimately, if you’ll pardon a technologically antiquated metaphor (I’m over 25 now, practically over the hill), a given community will be defined less by its music and more by its cultural mixtape. Excuse me, I have some mixing to do.

Things I Wish I Saw More Of

Rebels

Redheads

Female cabbies

Flying trapezes

Cartoon characters come to life

Cars driving themselves

Trumpets and horns

Freckles and moles

Monocles on someone besides Mr. Peanut

Talking horses other than Ed

A repository of intellectual provocation 

All the teeth the tooth fairy took together at last

The Brave New World of Cultural Curation

Recently I've become really interested in the concept of cultural curation, or the aggregation of floating, creative tidbits that hover all around us, on the internet and in books, films and mouths.  

Curation, often thought of as the exclusive domain of cultural institutions, such as museums and galleries, has evolved to encompass other media. 

In digital curation, electronic data are collected and preserved, or put in simpler terms, you collect the cool stuff you find online and share it with others.  

This new way of conceiving of curation not only represents a shift in media, but it also presents a sort of paradigm shift, with the figurative replacing the literal in many cases. 

When you expand the significance of curation, it's no longer limited to concrete exhibits; these days, many brave souls seek to curate the mental.  

Instead of going to a musuem and enjoying a collection of paintings, you might frequent certain blogs where you savor  ideas, memes, snippets of digitalia.  

One of the most marvelous examples of such a site is Brain Pickings. Here, Maria Popova leverages her own substantial mental dexterity to take the concept of curation to new levels. She goes beyond data collection to ideological revolution.  

Her aim is to zero in on new or overlooked thoughts that have the power to change everything. Here's a cultural tip, take a look at her site and replace that tired, old apple with an epiphany a day.

Strangers in a Strange (Wine) Land

California’s wine country is full of stories and that wacky grape elixir has a way of drawing them all out. There’s a lot to keep track of in Sonoma and Napa because both the wines and the people serving them present you with items to store in your mental bank--names, histories, characters.

A woman that we met at one of the friendlier wineries had left her Office Space style job in Jersey City to work at a Napa winery and play in an Electro-Bluegrass band (talk about a change of life). She had lively eyes and was able to draw deep connections between the complexity of the wine and the larger world around it. When I left, I felt like I had had a life lesson rather than just a wine lesson.

“This one would go really well with a grilled eggplant,” she told us as we sipped, reminding ourselves not to guzzle. As she offered up more food pairing suggestions, she followed the geometry of our drinking motions with those alive eyes of hers as though she were lending us her lover rather than merely pouring us wine.

Everyone we met was as passionate about wine, but not everyone was as sweet as old lively eyes. After our tour of the Robert Mondavi Winery, we sat around the table, tasting what we had ostensibly just learned how to make. The MC of this event was the punchy tour guide whose obvious pride in the Mondavi wine empire impressed us, but whose obvious resentment of the people on the tour and their questions, didn’t.

From the look she gave us when we drank our Pinot Noir too quickly to experience the metamorphosis it undergoes upon exposure to air, we knew it was strike three; but we just weren’t clear on what the previous two strikes had been. By this point, with a good deal of mental snickering, I had begun logging our faux pas in the inner notebook of my mind to be deposited here later. They ranged from minor gaffe to egregious indiscretion in the etiquette of wine tasting department.

Our gaffe involved fluttering excitedly to two generously-pouring wineries in the course of 15 minutes without eating first, and having to take a lengthy walk through the vineyard--shotgunning tortilla chips from an earlier Mexican meal all the while--before we could get back on the road.

We committed our chief indiscretion (that proves its richness by making me laugh even as I write this) at our second winery. We entered, buoyed by the confidence of not having made fools of ourselves at our first winery, only to flub the last tasting at our second. We were genteelly (we hoped) sipping what we would only realize later to be one of the best wines of the trip--a peppery white wine for which my mouth still waters, and I am not a white wine gal--when it happened.

I suppose neither of us were paying too much attention, so busy were we with smiling stupidly at each other and clinking our glasses together every single time we drank. After we clacked our newest samples and grinningly sipped, we confessed to the wine lady that there was something a little odd about the last vino; she had described the heavenly tones we could expect and they were nowhere to be found.

She summoned the kindest smile she could and said, “I thought it was strange that you were cheersing with the water, but to each his own.” In our embarrassment, we quickly did the only worse thing we could, and briskly chugged the water intended to be poured out after it had done its cleaning job, in one shamed gulp.

Yet our trip was not limited to shaming. It was frequently filled with kind, wise, wine souls, like sailors who knew and loved every dip of the waves. A woman at one of the last wineries we went to had black hair and the face of a 40-year-old, though she swore she was 60 (it must be the health properties of the wine, I knew we were both thinking).

She poured for her customers in a room covered with pictures of Marilyn Monroe and she was just as pretty. When she saw that we loved the red Zinfandel, she pulled out the Reserve, which she swore she never gave to anyone. We were happy, whether or not her oath held true.

The highlight of the evening, however, came when we all got a bit more comfy (read: buzzed) and one very elegant woman pulled smelly cheeses out of her Louis Vuitton bag, telling me I could “cut her cheese” whenever I pleased. Now, that’s wine country for you. Over the course of the trip, many wine and food gurus tried to convert me to the jubilant California wino way of life. I must say, as I thought of the sad-angry faces of my fellow subway mates, I was almost converted.

Tips for the Indie Filmmaker

This is a bit of an oldie but a goodie, but here is my summary of the tips on indie filmmaking to come out of the "Produced By" conference:

 

In short, to make it in the movie industry, know your audience and fundraise "Obama-style." If you want to earn some dough, ditch the genre films.  For a surefire indie darling, make movies about people that are Jewish, French, or gay, and put "wedding" in the title.  Take heart, it's not all "doom and gloom" because the internet is your "ray of hope." Oh, and if you want to make an environmental documentary, apparently all you have to do is call the producer and ask him if he likes the electric guitar.

The Virgin Suicides' Journey to Screen

 

Jeffery Eugenides’ first novel, The Virgin Suicides, appeared on the scene in 1993. In 1999 Sofia Coppola adapted it for the screen in her directorial debut of the same name. Coppola wrote the screenplay for the film and was fiercely protective of the project.  She was concerned that Nick Gomez’s script (the director who had a shot at writing the screenplay before she did) had upped the sex and violence quotient and would not be an authentic representation of the book. "The Virgin Suicides" is an exemplary feat of adaptation; Coppola’s screenplay stays faithful to the book, transporting significant chunks verbatim. Her script, which distills the book down to its most vital parts, is not so much a rewrite as a visual re-imagining of Eugenides’s written world. 

The book tells the story of five sisters whose lives, and subsequent suicides, obsess a group of teenage boys who have appointed themselves custodians of their memory.  Like detectives, they piece together “the effluvia of so many young girls becoming women” through interviews and bits of evidence. Although they may not complete the Lisbon puzzle, their lifetime of obsessive dedication does result in quite the tale.

The conservative community is appalled when the youngest Lisbon girl, Cecilia, is found floating in the family bathtub after her first suicide attempt. The tragedy isolates the sisters, turning them into the intriguing outcasts of their conformist community.  As a result of Coppola’s respect for Eugenides’ creation, the plot and structure of the movie are almost identical to that of the book. Early on, the voice-over  (Giovanni Ribisi’s spot-on man-boy rumble) tells us that “Cecilia was the first to go,” as we are confronted with the image of a young girl’s body floating in a tub of bloody water. 

From costume and décor, to gossipy dialogue, Coppola deftly depicts both the small-town feel of the 1970s community and the Lisbon girls' personal world; but it is with the more personal aspects that she excels.  With its whimsical explosion of girlish possessions, the set of the Lisbon home is packed with symbols of the girls’ budding womanhood and imminent deaths.  Cinematographer Edward Lachman’s shot of the house in all the different phases of light between day and night captures perfectly the inert sadness of the creatures within.

Most importantly, Coppola's treatment of the suicides is tasteful rather than exploitive. When the boys get inside the mythic house, a hanging saddle oxford is all that we are shown of the suicides. Just as the inaccessibility of the sisters makes them more desirable, withholding visual access creates a morbid curiosity in us. The image is more powerful because we are forced to imagine the upper hanging parts of a dead girl we cannot see.

Although there are some serious issues that the movie doesn’t broach--with all its focus on downy limbs and sublimated desire, it can gloss over the book’s commentary on race and class, for example—in many ways, it picks up where the words leave off. Its use of voice-over capitalizes on the evocative qualities of the text by coupling them with the aural and visual power of film. Coppola's intuitive grasp of the material draws the audience into the tragic and dreamy world of the film so effectively that, regardless of sexual preference, you'll find yourself obsessed with the Lisbon girls, their world, and why they left it.

Where in the World is Roethke's Soul?

Animism, or the belief that nature has a soul, only provides a partial explanation of poet Theodore Roethke’s relationship with nature. He doesn’t merely believe in the existence of a soul in nature, but rather he identifies with nature to the extent that he believes in the existence of his soul in nature. In his writing, he often describes the spiritual process by which he merges with nature.  This invocation of the natural world and his expression of the parts of himself that he finds in the process place the reader at the core of his mystical experience.

The protagonists of Roethke’s poems appropriate the language of nature as a mode of self-expression. Ill at ease to the point of misery when surrounded by matter of the human world, the speaker of “Dolor” laments the “inexorable sadness of pencils…The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher”  (1-6). Roethke’s narrators feel as much kinship with nature as they do alienation with humanity. The speaker of “Slug” says of the slimy creature, “I longed to be like him, and was,/ In my way, close cousin/ To the dirt”  (78).  Accordingly, in his notebooks, Roethke admits that he can project himself “easier into a flower than a person”  (135).   Therefore, it is not through human objects, but through natural objects that he seeks to express his complicated and painful inner life.

Roethke’s speaker in “The Lost Son” invokes the natural world to communicate his feelings. As he dwells on the memory of his father’s greenhouse, he asks his power of expression to manifest itself in nature: “Voice, come out of the silence./ Say something/ Appear in the form of a spider/ Or a moth beating a curtain”  (20-24).  Here, he uses nature to gain access to a part of himself that he feels unable to reach on his own.

When Roethke’s narrators find themselves unable to get in touch with their innermost thoughts and feelings, they undergo a mystical transformation.  As he puts it in “The Pure Fury,” “”Stupor or knowledge lacking inwardness…Every meaning had grown meaningless./ Morning, I saw with second sight,/ As if all things had died, and rose again./ I touched the stones, and they had my own skin”  (1-7).   In this way, the haze that covered the speaker’s inner truth is cleared when he is reborn as a part of nature.

Roethke’s poems reveal the painful emotions that he finds hard to express without the help of nature.  In “The Pure Fury,” the speaker laments: “The appetite for life so ravenous/ A man’s beast prowling in his own house,/ A beast with fangs, and out for his own blood/” (16-18).  Here, he depicts the hunger for being that consumes him through the image of a wild animal let loose in the safety of his own home.  The use of the nature metaphor doesn’t hide his feelings, but rather vividly conveys the experience of a man whose desire for life is so intense that it turns against itself and consumes him instead.

Roethke’s use of nature doesn’t impede the confessional nature of his poetry. Although he deals with his emotions in the realm of nature, this is not a ploy to disown them.  On the contrary, they are still very much his own, but have merely been projected onto nature as a means of coping with them.  Since Roethke sees nature as the realm of spiritual truth, for him, to examine his emotions within that context is to see them in their most profound clarity. In “Unfold! Unfold!” he says, “At first the visible obscures:/ Go where light is”  (56-57).   A deeply mystical poet, Roethke takes his reader there, for, in his mind, “deep in their roots, all flowers keep the light” (130).

Where the Wild Things Are Invented

A few of the reviews have taken cracks at Spike Jonze’s re-imagining (directing and co-writing the screenplay with Dave Eggers) of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are.  In doing so, they miss the film’s most visionary aspect—its vivid study of storytelling. With painful acuity, Jonze captures how authors (Sendak, Jonze, Eggers), but also all people (Max, his mother, the audience members), must construct stories about their world so that they can live in it. 

“Where the Wild Things Are” ushers the audience into the inner world of Max (Max Records), the little boy from Sendak’s story who runs off to a wild island of his own imagining after being naughty to his mother (Catherine Keener). The process of story making is ingeniously captured in a shot of Max’s mom, shown from his perspective, telling him she could “use a story,” and then typing up the fanciful tale he tells. In this instance of good mothering, she honors his creations by requesting and recording them.

When Max arrives on the isle of the Wild Things to be their king, they ask him to build them a world without pain. Max’s failure to protect his wild new family from suffering serves as a reminder that no matter how well-constructed the utopia, the dystopian inevitably creeps in. In keeping with this, Jonze spares us nothing, not even the pile of human bones that is all that remains of the previous kings.

In short, the bad reviews are humbug. The film’s motor is Max’s imagination and its potential for transformation; in a comic, meta-moment, even the Warner Brothers emblem has been drawn over with wolf ears. 

Every shot and line of dialogue reflects Max’s creative methods of confronting the rage, hope, and heartbreak of childhood. With characteristic whizzing speed, Jonze refracts Sendak’s story through the whip-smart, aggressively beautiful  prism of his own cinematic storytelling, while still maintaining its original light.

 

 

Thought for a Rainy Sunday: how to summon cheerfulness out of the wet leaves of these trees?

Word Pornography

Despite the difference in the smell of the night,

this is our typical post-work evening: you sleep while I type,

but in this after-dark, the sight of your sleeping elbow,

hair-kissed, stroked by the last light of 6:30, 

maybe even holy somehow, slays me. 

There are so many things that I should be doing right now,

but I refuse to stop staring at you. You so often sleep

in long sleeve shirts, it’s cruel, really, we women

are insatiable, too. So this peek of meat is a rare treat, 

and I am either a pervert or a disciple.  

Seeing this unguarded part of you, my mind unfolds

its wonder layers.  It’s true that I get overwrought too easily,

but who in their right mind wouldn’t covet this unseen slice of you?

this glistening man-thing that lies in my bed, 

and belongs, miraculously, to me.

I feel lucky on this rainy Thursday to be able to say

that the elbow I have to look at for the rest of my life

is rather ravishing.  I write this because, if I don’t, 

I might combust, or run around the neighborhood,

a mad saleswoman hawking your sleepy wares,

and that would be awkward.

The green polka-dotted sheets set it off nicely

and I pay tribute to it with my word porn, 

making of you a centerfold in the magazine of my mind.

Right now, I love you so much that I could go fly a kite,

but somehow I resist that humiliation. 

Maybe I watch you sleep just for the marital perk 

of seeing pieces of your skin illuminated

by the dying evening light. They remind me

of the promise I made to love you for always,

but really of the pieces of your skin

illuminated by the dying evening light.

Copyright 2009 Caroline Hagood

Going Gaga for Gay Rights

Although there has been some fun poked at it, Lady Gaga's speech at the National Equality March for gay rights on October 11 in Washington, D.C. is pretty wonderful. 

I realize that there's a hint of kitsch to the details of her performance--the big, blonde wig ablowing in the wind, the sunglasses gesturing towards hidden tears, the howled "are you listening?!" that is part inspiring, part horrifying, the Judy Garland quip that fell flat--but there's also the undeniable importance of her act, and even of what the Lady herself has come to stand for. 

Gaga is a fascinating figure of counterculture, an activist for the right of all people to live out loud. She employs a shockjock sensibility that borders on the Howard Sternian, but uses it to empower her observers, rather than doling out spankings to porn stars à la Stern.  

As her appearance in Washington demonstrates, she fights for her public's quality of life, demanding for them the same things she demands for herself: the right to freedom of gender, sexuality, and self expression, even when the outcomes strike others as outlandish. 

I believe her when she identifies addressing the Washington crowd as, "the single most important moment" of her career. I mean, let's not forget that those suspenders hold up the pants that cradle her own equal opportunity genitalia (or at least the small, symbolic dildo that represents it). 

In the end, as a result of her bizarreness and balls (heh heh), she is able to deliver the statement, "I refuse to accept any mysoginistic and homophobic behavior in music, lyrics, or actions in the music industry," which amounts to a declaration of cultural war, a revolution of words.  

Have a look for yourselves and let me hear your thoughts.

The Mermaid's Song

The first breath I took 

was not air but water.

I was born a fish woman

in the salt of the sea.

My hair was long then,

mouth unfolded as always,

but I did not drown

in my water, my world,

my womb of the sea.

The first time I walked on land, 

my knees pointed in all directions

and I lost my way.

The first time I knew a man,

it was terrestrial,

but I could still hear the sea.

Our bodies were dyed brown 

by the mysterious mud of the earth

and the ocean of air that hovers

between the pasty thighs

of the clouds and their skies.

He said I smelled of the sea.

The first time I knew a man, 

I gave up my fish tail for legs

so I could wrap them around him,

tangle my mermaid’s hair with his,

souvenirs of the sea.

I told him quietly in his ear

that if another tongue

were to take the place of mine,

I would drown him, drown me.

The first time I knew a man, 

I was still of the sea.

Copyright 2009 Caroline Hagood

The Manic Pixie Dream Tramp

Marc Webb’s “500 Days of Summer” (2009) reveals the anatomy of a failed fantasy. The doomed days of Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Summer (Zooey Deschanel) are presented out of order, yet the trajectory will be all too familiar to any man who has ever had his heart stolen.  One scene in particular captures the sting of amorous expectation squelched: when Tom reunites briefly with Summer, a split screen shows his expectations on one side and the reality on the other.  This clever construction captures onscreen that sinking feeling that comes when soaring hopes go splat.  But there’s something else that happens when romantic dreams descend: the rise of the gorgon. 

The Summer character has been labeled what film critic Nathan Rabin calls the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl,” (MPDG) and Jezebel’s Sadie Stein deems the “Amazing Girl." Rabin coined the phrase to describe that cheerful, mysterious, compulsively loveable, but ultimately empty, female filmic creature sent to awaken the potential and happiness of somber male protagonists everywhere. 

The Manic Pixie figure is merely a projection of the longings of the male lead; but there’s something else at play in the various articles written on this gal, be she Amazing or Manic Pixie: anger and resentment.  The male writers have had their hearts broken by her and the female writers have lost men to her. In her piece, Stein is open about her jealousy of the real-life Amazings she has known.

Yet, the emotions surrounding the MPDG run deeper than mere resentment. They are Amazing Manic Pixies only while they are loved. Before that, they are merely everyday women, and afterwards, they are harpies. It seems that the MPDG is just the vamp, the tramp, the femme fatale before she destroys the fantasy of the male lead (as in the “expectations” versus “reality” scene). When Summer is loved, she is the normal woman imbued with paranormal significance, but when she trashes the romantic comedy formula of boy meets girl, boy marries girl—and let’s not forget that co-writer Scott Neustadter is open about the fact that he’s out for romantic vengeance—she starts to resemble those fatal women of film noir.  

Ultimately, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl is the flipside of the man-eater—just another invention to protect the frightened male mind from female potency. If you squint your eyes, you can see snakes starting to peek, Medusa-like, out of Summer’s 1950s hairdo after she dashes Tom’s dreams.

Faulkner's Magical "Maybe"

Jennifer Burg, Anne Boyle, and Sheau-Dong Lang claim that Faulkner’s stories can leave unseasoned readers with a “jumble of incidents related through the ramblings of memory, but this “jumble is not a flaw in his writing, but rather the way he constructs his characters’ identities. In his short stories, “A Rose for Emily,” “Race at Morning,” “Mountain Victory,” and “That Evening Sun,” the protagonists are characterized by their recognition of irreconcilable oppositions in their identities. While most authors will resolve their characters' conflict in the interest of the reader’s comfort, Faulkner highlights their ability to recognize that a choice between opposing adjectives is a linguistic fiction, not an ontological revelation. Because no real human being is ever absolutely one thing or the other, he is able to write characters who inhabit the space between conflicting perspectives, and are therefore so realistic that their confusion can be felt through the pages. Faulkner's characters appear authentic because, like real people, they inhabit neither presence nor absence, but the flickering space in between. He creates his characters with the knowledge that every representation bears the mark of what it is not. It appears that Faulkner’s quest is to keep the world of ideas safe from any pronouncements that would limit possibility for his characters. He positions his created people not in what they are or what they are not, but in a third space, the “maybe” that leaves all possibilities open. In his characterization, Faulkner seems to be inspired by the concept of “negative capability” created by a poet he greatly admired, John Keats. Keats defined the term as a writer’s capacity to inhabit “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts.” In Faulkner’s story, “Race at Morning,” soon after telling the young protagonist that the gun was not loaded during the hunt around which the story centers, Mister Ernest deems "maybe" "the best word in our language." He revels in the power of perhaps because he recognizes that there's a certain imaginative thrill to inhabiting uncertainty. In “A Rose for Emily,” Faulkner explores even more incomprehensible outposts of human conflict. When the townspeople finally gain access to Miss Emily’s home after her death, they find a corpse, but more horrifying still, a pillow that holds a strand of gray hair and the indentation of a human head. Through Faulkner's nuanced depiction, a wrinkled pillow and a single hair reveal the story of a woman who killed her lover only to lie next to his corpse over the years. Faulkner himself attributes this impulse to Emily’s inner conflict, that "she knew that you do not murder people...she was expiating her crime." “A Rose for Emily” is an allegory of divided humanity. Miss Emily is aware of the moral boundaries she transgresses, and her way of seeking forgiveness, according to her author, is to cradle the life she has taken. Faulkner imbues his protagonists with an awareness of language’s complicated role in identity formation. In “Mountain Victory,” the protagonist Saucier Weddel says, "Our lives are summed up in sounds and made significant...especially if you are unfortunate enough to be victorious." Weddel cleverly understands that his life is constituted through language. He theorizes that it is the winner who gets to construct the world in words, and that, if this is the case, he would rather be the loser (he is referring to the Civil War, yet also to life itself, it seems). As in the case of Wedell, Faulkner’s characters’ dilemmas remain irreparable because he refuses to superimpose false solutions that reconcile conflict. Instead, he lets their contradictions be their defining characteristics. They are not defined by the aftermath of a resolved fixation, but by the ongoing clash of its internal divide. Even when they try to solve their problems by defining themselves by one side of the split, instead of choosing between one space or the other, they only succeed in positioning themselves once again in the third space of indeterminacy. Remarkably, it is this very spirit of ambiguity that gives Faulkner’s characters their lifelike essence because it echoes the conflict through which actual human identity is constructed. In “That Evening Sun,” the Compson family’s African American laundress, Nancy, is terrified that her absentee husband will return to punish her for her infidelity. This terror manifests itself in a sound that is “not singing and not unsinging.” What makes Nancy a character of such eerie depths is that Faulkner positions her neither as a singer nor as a non-singer, but in a third space, as though she had begun to sing before the book came to be and was suspended mid-action by the fact of being written. This strange circumstance leaves her in an evolving state-of-being that resembles not fiction, but truth. Like the citizens of the nonfictional world, Faulkner’s invented people continue to search for an ultimate truth; but their author demonstrates that, regardless of efforts to pin them down, people (real or created) are creatures of contradiction. Despite Faulkner’s characters' quest for clarity, in the end, it is the "maybe" to which they cling for a sense of identity. Perhaps this is because Faulkner realizes that, although language often forces choice, no human ever truly chooses, but rather floats back-and-forth between extremes. Language may be Faulkner's tool, but he does not accept its reductive tendency. Instead, it is as though he believes so wholeheartedly in the reality of his characters that he introduces two opposing possibilities and lets them navigate the metaphysical terrain themselves without forcing them to choose between the flickering moments of presence and absence.

Being away from the city is like quitting smoking--panicky and peaceful, like a fast train squeaking to a halt.

A Night at The National Arts Club

I had The National Arts Club experience the other night. Founded in 1898, the club itself is as lush and dramatic as the members, performers, and artists who fill its Gothic Revival brownstone in the Gramercy Park area. Upon entering, I was greeted by a parrot and a collection of beautifully textured people and paintings.

While I was there, I caught the film committee’s presentation of Donald Boggs’ striking documentary, “A Ripple of Hope.” The film traces the tense moments before and after Robert F. Kennedy’s speech announcing the death of Martin Luther King Jr.  The showing was followed by lively conversation led by the committee’s effervescent chairwoman, Sharyn Grossman.

Boggs’ expert interweaving of the importance of King and Kennedy culminates in a shot of the Landmark for Peace Memorial that shows the two dead idols reaching out to each other from their metal confines. At the film's end, the audience was filled with the faces of people who had just relived a powerful slice of history. 

Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen as Psychological Text?

In light of Spike Jonze's adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are coming out on October 16, let's take a serious look at Sendak's In the Night Kitchen. This strange and wonderful book explores the rich possibilities for identity exploration in children’s literature.  That the text is for young people (as the picture book format implies) is crucial because the story of the Night Kitchen is one of discovering and claiming the earliest threads of selfhood.

With the question “Did you ever hear of Mickey?" Sendak propels his reader into the world of the Night Kitchen.  This world is characterized by Mickey’s varying identity formulations.  He falls “through the dark,” “out of his clothes,” “past the moon,” and “into the light of the night kitchen?” The question mark following “night kitchen” highlights the mercurial nature of his transformative journey.

In the course of his cosmic, culinary travels, Mickey progresses from a sense of oneness with his surroundings, to a sense of difference.  As the night bakers craft their “delicious Mickey-cake,” Mickey informs them: “I’m not the milk and the milk’s not me! I’m Mickey!”  In this way, a 34-page book comprised mostly of images manages to convey the complex psychological processes of ego formation in early childhood.

Sendak’s text explores the developmental progressions of youth in the light and playful format of a children’s picture book. In the Night Kitchen reveals that medium doesn’t determine intellectual rigor, but only the manner in which it will be presented.  This teaches the dedicated critic to seek the deeper meanings of the text regardless of format.  This also teaches dedicated critics that if they find themselves naked and falling through the universe into the kitchen of the night, it’s not insanity, it’s personal progress.

For My Friend Daniella

More like moon drops than women we walk

in beaming circles, your brain makes the music

of my mind, your ever-changing eyes bring me mars

and other unforgettable mental planets.

You, my wildest imagined multiverse carried

in the curve of a beautiful woman. Sometimes I see,

in many-mirrored verses, memories of us

that have not yet happened.

While playing some space instrument, 

your gloriously muscled fingers lift away

my imagined faults,showing me

the wonder of my own thoughts--

"hay for the brain horses," you say.

Have I ever told you that languagemusicmagic

is your voice? We remind the world of sisters

siamese-cat-twisted by our shared tale,

one illuminated point in the sky, fidgeting

just to feel the other's motion, dissect it, 

feed the star pieces to each other.

With our magnifying glasses, we see 

the self-luminous world as we want it to be, 

the necessary exchange:

that the enjambment in this poem is for you,

and you are for me.

Copyright 2009 Caroline Hagood

My Scandalous Affair...with Twitter

There is so much to say about the strange landscape of the Twitterverse, but what interests me most is how it forces the mind to function differently.  These brain shifts result from the unusual form that the processing of information and socialization takes on Twitter. Because of its combination of deceptive simplicity and intrigue, the site spawns a good deal of confusion. I can’t count the number of first tweets that ask some form of the question, “How on earth does this place work?” A peculiar mixture of marketing and social life, and even the marketing of social life, Twitter is certainly a strange bird.  I like to think of it as the Facebook status update on cyber-crack.

 

In many ways, the affair with Twitter is an affair with yourself. Although many tweets (the messages posted on Twitter) get responses, some of them don’t, which is only natural since it’s nobody’s full-time job to follow the scintillating tale of what you ate for dinner and when you last wiped your bottom (you know who you are).  This makes at least part of the conversation between you and you. 

Indeed, there is a whole new language to learn when you enter the Twitterscape.  The ingenuous citizens of Tweetville have found a mode of converting standalone topics into trends. # marks indicate topics that people are following, or that you hope they will follow, even if the topic is once again #the wiping of your bum (you know who you are). If used correctly, these bewitching symbols have the power to make the subject of watching paint dry an irresistible one. 

 

Twitter may be an inane form of self-promotion, but it’s also a powerful communication platform and discovery machine. If blogging evolved as a sort of pared down and sassed up version of the article, then micro-blogging has brought even more paring and sass to the online scene, but it also serves some serious purposes. Twitter is a burgeoning news hub (with many pundits even live-tweeting from important events), emergency information dissemination tool (as in the case of the 2008 Mumbai attacks) and even a means for astronauts to communicate with earthlings.

 

The Twitter format will undoubtedly sadden the crusaders against the fragmentation of language, but it will also excite those interested in new linguistic possibilities. This is a world where words run together and thoughts must be spliced and diced into 140 characters (the limit on post length). As a writer, this potential for the taking apart, and putting back together, of phrases is appealing to me.  I think of the tweet less as a bastardization of the sentence and more as a different structure entirely.  I have spent inordinate amounts of time figuring out how to sound remotely clever and grammatical while still saying what I wanted to say in 140 symbols or less. 

 

Sometimes this enforced shortening results in humorous creations and omissions.  Simple, innocent messages can become strange stepsisters of your original intention. And don’t even get me started on how this whole process of transformation is exacerbated when alcohol has been imbibed.  I have seven words for you that would comfortably fit within the confines of a tweet and should be emblazoned on the pages of all Tweeps (word on the street for Twitter members): whatever you do, don’t drink and tweet.

The Outlaw Writer

I have been enthralled by the outlaw, outcast and outright lunatic in literature ever since I tried to explain the lure of the monster to my baffled little friends on play dates. Part of my fascination stems from this figure’s ability to pierce the part of us that believes we have seen it all. I loved what many have deemed grotesque in the work of Flannery O’Connor and Sherwood Anderson. Yet, my propensity for the infuriating wasn’t limited to the written character. I also liked my writers punchy. Even when I disagreed with them, I favored the authors who got me worked up, made me want to write a letter to the editor, punch a wall, run away and join a motorcycle gang, even though I could barely ride a bike. I idolized Camille Paglia and Germaine Greer over the safer and more palatable feminist alternatives; I constructed a private shrine in my heart for Allen Ginsberg; I lived for Lolita. When I discovered the pop-cultural enfants terribles Mark Simpson and Elizabeth Wurtzel--the man Philip Hensher dubbed “the skinhead Oscar Wilde” and the woman America knows as the princess of Prozac and controversy (she is most famous for her book, Prozac Nation)—I added them to my pantheon of malcontents, rebels and freaks. I wanted my writers raw and possibly even arrested for refusing to shut the heck up. I vowed that when I grew up, I would run with the bulls as far as writing was concerned. I would don metaphorical leather and ink and worship at the altar of the countercultural. The strangest part of all of this is the way these interests contradicted who I supposedly was. Many people believe that character should be aligned with whatever it is that turns your creative lights on, but this would never fit in my case. Kind and cheerful never really sat with my artistic impulses, which have often leaned towards the dark, unsettling and sometimes downright offensive. There is a lot of humor and even happiness in the pages of novels worn down by my repeated readings, but the overall tone is always somewhat offbeat. When prompted to think of a happy song recently, I could only come up with my perennial favorite--Buckley crooning Cohen’s ballad of sorrow, “Hallelujah.” If I subscribed to such simplifications, I would be the “good” girl with “bad” interests. Instead, I decided that people are probably more polarized than they realize, and that these poles should be embraced. So I wanted the overblown and translunar when it came to art. Was that such a crime? When I read Wurtzel’s Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women, I realized that she fit the paradigm I’ve been describing to a tee. She angers people and has been called everything from the title of the aforementioned book, to a fraud and a dilettante. Guess what? I have no interest in those accusations. When I read her writing, my brain switch is turned on by the livewire that is her mind, and that’s all I care about. The real performance of her piece is this: she embodies the brilliant but difficult women she describes, even as she traces the etiology of her own fascination. As a reader, I was not so much watching her tell, as watching her. Her writing dripped with all the indicators of the female subversion she described, the trappings of the femme fatale, the beauty that maims. I write this in praise of Wurtzel’s erudition on the subject of difficult writers, even if we are both a pain in your posterior, and perhaps because of it. As you are reading this, beware, because perhaps my writing also holds a cloak beneath a comma, a dagger behind a sentence, a ransom note right before your very eyes.

Jesus Christ Superstar

Bring on music, the symbol of the stars,

heck, bring on the stars themselves,

radiantly perched on sweating skin,

the celestial ship fallen from peripheral skies.

Bring on the singing, fleshy mouthpieces opening upon the city.

Because this verbo-musical molasses was all that was left

when the stars arrived.

Music remains the experience of experience for the masses,

the field where they find abandon, the space where limits,

like the limp body of language and other created systems,

fall away at last. Upon finding that their bones were invisible, 

the people danced. It’s time for the song, the time of the strong,

a revival of that inborn melody that has become as familiar

as the descent of the stars.

When the stars came, the children put their night eyes on

and sang the music through their teeth.

Moving in partial circles, parting their lips like legs,

turning their faces skyward, as if to swallow the songs.

There was one girl who turned at the same moment

as the record and lost her cool among spinning notes,

legs pedaling the path of music past,

of all the lost be-bop idols, who turned

at the same time as a record and then died

to the beat they could not sing.

Because they still had  night eyes and nasty hangovers,

the kids lounged on the ceiling, smoking their fingers

because the cigarettes were still hidden in the couch cushions,

eggs in a nest of forgotten clothing and seas of beer.

One boy remembered gravity and fell like a face.

Some loud sound and the rest knew his fate.  

Covering eyes with hair, they mourned him with their music.

Some graveyard it was, with people for sky and music for air,

nothing was customary. Then came the rock music

and he rose from the dead, head in hand,

sorry to have scared the scatters and belly dancers,

he sang them a lullaby.

When they saw the stars for the first time, 

the children tried to draw them with chalk,

but when they realized they couldn’t capture them,

everyone went home with a headache,

halting every few blocks to tie shoes

and secretly reflect on the night of tunes and faith.

The reborn boy didn’t leave at once, 

but lingered to take one last look

at the chalk drawings of stars

that had bled and become like veins.

He bent down and wrote his name,

as if anything is ever remembered.

He twirled, using a firefly as a lantern

despite the abundance of light,

and then he wrote, “goodnight.”

Copyright 2009 Caroline Hagood

Would You Stop Calling Hillary Clinton a Witch Already

I am so very tired of people trying to cripple potent women by throwing around the “W” word; no, I’m not talking about “Woman” or “Welfare,” I’m talking about “Witchcraft.” What century do we live in? I half expect to see villagers outside my home with torches every time I write a saucy piece.  Excuse me for a moment, I have to get the door.

Sadly, the witch stigma is not merely a relic of the past. It has been used against Hillary Clinton, among others, in so many different ways that it is beginning to border on the creative.  That powerful women in politics continue to be referred to as witches reveals that, far from being an historically localized phenomenon, the witch-hunt is still alive and well today. 

One reason that females have been conflated with evil  is because they engender life, which is, of course, the flip side of death. In the case of midwives and mothers, for example, the reverence for those who can produce life is often confused with the fear that they can take it away. Yet the “W” word is most frequently used to circumscribe the power of a woman who seems to have just a little bit too much of it.

The witch-hunt is yet another socially sanctioned persecution.  For centuries, societies have resolved their psychosocial dilemmas through the sacrificial female, often in the guise of the witch. Historically, the women accused of witchcraft have been singled out as a result of their powerful or nonconformist natures. They are often figures, such as healers and spiritual or sociopolitical leaders, on whom the community is deeply dependent.  The sacrifice of the witch serves the dual purpose of eliminating women who threaten carefully regulated, patriarchal societies, and symbolically exorcizing those societies of their psychic demons.

The crimes that people dream up often reveal more about the accusers than they do about the accused. The hatred and hysteria of those pointing the fingers is often far more sinister than any of their accusations.  I hope that people stop dropping the witch bomb, but until then, give me back my broomstick so that I can hit you with it.

 

Anne Sexton's "Red Riding Hood" Speaks Back

Oh wolf, I am the only one

who knows what you are: the gentle caress

so feared by the mother, the beast she has made

of the first lover, in order to keep me

the color of snow, so afraid that I might discover

a taste for the forest and the murk

of its trembling trees.

 

She fears that you have found my little red hood,

peeled my many-colored petals, 

cradled my balmy leaves, made of me

a rasp of womanly stirring in the big bad woods

as trees witnessed, silent and wakeful,

the strike of my coming alive.

 

Fear turns lover into beast, and body

upon which  my punishment awakens, to warn

young girls that to color their snow

is to die, all briny in the liquid of new life, as mothers

of monstrous children.  No one saw

my transformation, that I had become

a woman.  But mother, 

the wolf is a tender lover.

 

Oh wolf, Anne has made of you

a transvestite pregnant

with murderous deception, just to rub

against the page on which she has written:

“death,” the orbit of her obsession.

She wanders our poem, high-smiling

through high society, 

while her blind, mutated heart

roams the labyrinth of its deformity.

 

She conjures from my story the ashes

of her soured infancy, inserting her eye

at the periphery of a moment. But she is too busy

lusting after death to see the blood 

of my beginning.  Anne dreams of standup comics

sliding dead down shower walls, making red capes 

on white tiles, as she watches,

envious and alive.

 

After all these years, I speak back 

to my authors, to my grim fathers

and even to Anne, I say:  “Let the river run red.

All who have filled me with fear

of my little red hood, know that my lover is dead

and that Red Riding Hood is pure no more.

Let the river run red.”

Copyright 2009 Caroline Hagood

A Talk with John Blumenthal About Writing

John Blumenthal: Caroline, you're just starting out as writer. How did you decide that writing was what you wanted to do? And what genre do you hope to specialize in?

Caroline Hagood: I thought about what I liked doing (reading, writing, watching movies) and what I was good at doing (reading, writing, watching movies) and, poof, there was my career.  

The genre question is harder because right now I'm all over the place. I recently finished my first novel and I write poetry, reviews and articles. I think I may suffer from wanting to be all things as a writer.  

How did you get started?  Do you have any life lessons or juicy stories that you want to share from your adventures as a novelist, humor writer and editor?  

JB: I always wanted to write novels, but ended up doing just about everything else first -- magazine pieces, editing, nonfiction books, spoofs, TV, movies, and now, finally novels. So it's OK to dabble, I think. Anything will help to hone your skills.

Got my first job out of college at Esquire, and then became an editor at Playboy for 8 years. It was a real rollercoaster. But my experiences at those two magazines made me realize for the first time that I was good at writing humor. I hadn't known that before.

You know, of course, Caroline, that writing poetry will get you nowhere. What's the novel about in 50 words or less?

CH: I am well aware that poetry isn't exactly the road to celebrity, but it's the kind of writing I've done for the longest and I doubt I'll stop any time soon.  What can I say, I'm a stubborn one.

Hmmm...the novel in 50 words or less: a daughter goes back home to help her mother who's dying of cancer finish her last book; I guess you could say it's about the powerful, albeit perverse, relationship between the daughter and her mother who's as powerfully creative as she is destructive to those who love her.

What are your thoughts on the lifestyle of the writer? How did you cope with an industry so heavy on competition and rejection? I ask in the past tense because, looking at your track record, I'm guessing you don't face that anymore.

JB: Your book sounds promising, depending on how well it's plotted and written of course, and how well the characters come to life. As I'm sure you know, most book buyers are women, and your book sounds as if it might appeal to that audience -- the Amy Tan, Kingsolver, Lovely Bones readers. But it's all plot and character. In any case, no matter how good it is, be prepared for a lot of rejection. It's the name of the game.

Even after all my credits, I have to start anew every time I write something. It's a drag. Guess I'm just not famous enough to get my shopping list published. As for rejection, I've developed a thick skin. I could wallpaper a room with the rejection slips. Maybe I'll do that tomorrow. The bathroom wallpaper is peeling...

As for lifestyle, the thing I hate the most about freelancing is the waiting periods. You've got a novel circulating and it takes months and you have nothing to do. That's one reason why I write for Open Salon -- to keep me busy. It was different with scripts. There were tons of meetings, mostly useless, but at least they got me out of the house.

Do you have an agent yet? If not, you'll need one for the novel. They're not easy to get nowadays. Some say it's harder to get a good agent than it is to get a publisher.

CH:  No, no agent yet.  That's just a pipe dream for now.

Yes, I have often thought of the rejection wallpaper. To date my career can be summed up as: nebulous, darn frustrating and downright delightful. The writer's life is a strange one; you live so much in your own thoughts and creations that sometimes you need that outside recognition just to make sure you’ve actually said it out loud. I didn’t know the exquisite pain of the professional writer till the rejection letters started pouring in.  I have often thought of projects I could do to put them to some use, spawning such lucrative ideas as rejection letter wallpaper (but I think you might have beat me to that one), toilet paper, or more perverse still, stationary—on which I could send out pitch letters that already spell out my future failure. 

What I think it comes down to is that you won't survive the ups, downs, or the bouts of hovering stasis, without a well-developed sense of humor.  There are times when I see myself, as if from the outside: hair rumpled and crumpled, post-it notes covering where the walls used to be white, computer keys stained brown from repeated coffee-spills (some writers never learn to maintain a safe distance between their machinery of creation and their drug of choice), and I think to myself: just look at each gaffe as a stepping stone on your way to a literary somewhere; and then I laugh, and then I laugh a little more.  

I'd say you know a little something about humor, John. You have a new novel making its way around, too, don't you?  Tell me about that one. 

JB: I write because I have to, because I want people to read my stuff and for money, the first being most important. I think it was Mark Twain who said something like: "any writer doesn't write for money is either an idiot or a fool."

Unfortunately my sense of humor doesn’t serve me that well when the rejections start pouring in.

My new novel is more serious than the last 2. It's 2 stories -- one that takes place in contemporary America, involving a young guy who's sick because he inherited something from his grandfather. The other story is about his grandfather, a Berlin cabaret comedian who ends up in a camp, then escapes. Long story short, the contemporary guy's life is saved by his grandfather's arch nemesis -- a Nazi who killed his beloved uncle.

But it probably won't sell -- too quirky. And not directed to a female audience. You also have to keep in mind that editors don’t look at books in the same way we do. They see dollar signs.

How important is making a living at writing to you? Do you do it for the same reasons I do?

CH: Actually, it sounds like the kind of book I would love.  

I think it would be great to really make it as a writer, but I'll keep on writing regardless.  I do it because it's what I've always done--that's what you get when you spend your childhood as the quirky, bookish kid.  Of course I love to reach readers. The moments where I can tell that my very personal idea has resonated with someone are transcendent, the Holy Grail of writerdom.

But, in the end, it all comes down to laughs and rejection wallpaper, eh?

JB: Every now and then I'd get a review of one of my novels that clearly indicated that the critic really understood the underlying themes of the books. Most people thought of them as just stories. Sure, good plots are necessary, but it's always been my belief that there has to be some kind of message lurking beneath the surface.

Of course, that doesn't happen much with scripts, original ones anyway. Not much wisdom lurking under a car chase.

The greatest moment, to me, is holding the finished product in my hands. A book! With a cover! Pages! And I wrote it! Of course, this wears off as soon as the first sales figures come in.

When you say make it as a writer, what do you mean exactly?

CH: Oof, I haven't even started thinking about the next level of potential rejection--the review.

I realize that "making it as a writer" is one of the most subjective phrases out there; for now, it means getting to a point where the mention of my name would result in a look of recognition from at least one person other than my mom.  How about you? What's your barometer for writing success? 

JB: Don't worry too much about reviews. Most outlets won't review it if they don’t like it, unless you're Philip Roth and you just wrote a real stinker. Plus, you can get all your friends to review it on Amazon.

Looks of recognition? Good luck with that. Nobody remembers an author's name anymore. It's worse for screenwriters. Think of 10 of your favorite movies and tell me who wrote them without Googling.

My barometer? Recognition would be nice. Good reviews, money and the feeling that I've written something really good, the last being the most important.

Why You Should Write that First Novel

Writers are warned about the fiasco of their first novel before they even begin covertly scratching bits of dialogue on legal pads during business hours, much less birthing characters and their capers.  Of course there are many good reasons why writing and sending out that first novel can be hairy at best, but before images of the martyred writer start dancing in your head, consider the six little words that have sparked many a revolution: what have you got to lose?

If you fear that your book will not make you a literary celebrity, that's probably true; but you have more of a chance of remaining in anonymity if you aren’t finishing and sending out that first work.  The worst that will happen is that your novel will be forced to endure the writer’s spring cleaning, taking up residence in the sock drawer with the sobering knowledge that the socks are more likely to get a publishing contract. Just remember the old adage that the first novel is meant to function as a sort of lubrication for the next tome to come shooting out of the writing mind. 

Besides, you’re a writer and must be prepared to make a living off being a glutton for punishment. The act of creating even the briefest anecdote involves a number of verbal sacrifices and downright word deaths. Each term is chosen over countless others that could have filled the same slot. You are the alchemist who can convert your joy and pain into words, but you dream of the impossible: of placing your thoughts down whole on the page.

The crux of the writer’s pain, then, is that, although you have articulated some part of your imaginings, you know those images will always exceed that attempt, remaining imprisoned in your head. However, the real artistic impasse is that, although the image will not make it to the other side whole, it won’t make it there at all if it’s not translated. This makes the art of a writer like a creation myth; the idea must be sacrificed before it can be resurrected into words.

Writers are doomed to repeatedly undergo this perverse exercise in order to make their art.  Ultimately, what you hear when you read is the torture music of the author caught in the midst of the painful process of expression.  Let me leave you with one thought: if you live with this ache every day, you can handle the rejection letters.

An Interview with The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus's Quinn Lord

Caroline Hagood: Your talent and breadth of experience would be impressive for any age, but to have delivered 25 strong performances in films and television by the age of 10 is astounding. You must have a talent and energy secret stored away somewhere.  Do you have any advice for other young actors?

Quinn Lord: My advice would be to just have fun and do what you like to do. Maybe it’s hockey, baseball, soccer, playing music or acting. It’s all fun, and sometimes people are better at certain things; I stink at skating, but I’m going to keep trying!

CH: Getting a role in a film like Terry Gilliam's "The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus" at such a young age is also pretty special.  What are your thoughts on this production?

QL:  It’s a really fun film with an enormous amount of talent; I’m just lucky to be a small part of such an amazing, wild ride of a film. Lots of people are talking about it and can’t wait for it to come out.  I’m a huge Monty Python fan so just to meet director Terry Gilliam was amazing! He has a wild imagination and the better technology gets, the more he gets to show everyone what cool stuff is in his head!

CH: You've mentioned that you love "The Goonies."  Was that the film that caused you to gravitate towards acting?

QL: I love so many films and have so many favorites.  "Army of Darkness" is one of my favorites, as well as "Goonies," "Gremlins" and a lot of 80’s films. I would love to work with Bruce Campbell; he’s pretty cool; I bet it would be a lot of fun. Oh yeah, of course I have to add "The Hole," "Trick ‘R Treat" and "The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus." They are all awesome films!

CH: You've worked on a number of horror and science fiction projects. It's almost as though your childhood games of make-believe have been replaced by movies.  How does your imagination play into your performances?

QL: Well, I have a wild imagination and that helps me really get into the characters that I play. You are right that it's like playing make-believe games, but you follow a script and are video taped. It’s so cool. I like experimenting with my video camera. I once attached my camera to my chest and video taped my hands while walking around like in a first person shooter game.  When my mom saw me with a plastic knife and a camera attached to me, she said, “What the heck are you doing”? She ruined the shot so I said, “Mom when you see me walking around with a camera and a knife, don’t say anything”, she laughed really hard and said, “Do you know how wrong that sounds”? It was very funny.

CH: I just got a great mental picture of that.  I'll try not to disturb you when you have the camera and the knife.

Do you tend to admire other child actors or older actors?  Who is your biggest role model right now?

QL: I admire all actors of any age. Everyone is learning; even the very best actors are trying to challenge themselves. That’s what I like: challenging myself, so the harder the role, the more fun it is. I really want to do an emotional role and make the audience feel sad and cry, that’s my next challenge for myself. Some of my role models would be Ben Stiller, Tom Cruise, Jake Gyllenhaal, Harrison Ford and Sean Connery.

CH: I'm sure you would make the audience bawl with those acting skills of yours.

Where do you see your career going in the future? What projects do you have lined up?

QL: I just finished a movie called "Second Chances" with Melissa George, and then spent a lot of time at the Toronto International Film Festival where I got to see the two films I was in, “The Hole,” directed by Joe Dante, and “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus,” directed by Terry Gilliam.

Who knows what my career will be in the future. Hopefully I will still be acting and doing some directing and producing, but when I go to college I might totally change my mind and want to be a physicist or video game designer or something; so I don’t really know yet. I’m only 10 so I guess I have some time to think about it. Right now, I’m having so much fun that I would say I will be acting until the day I die, and then come back from the dead and do a little bit more!

Genius Uses the Back Door

(An excerpt from a longer work)

Some days, from the window of her study she would start to see the other side of things, the stranger, more sacred side; some kind of disembodied, semi-wakeful truth about the nature of people and pavement, the story of a soul striving to move from Point A to Point B. Something had been brewing in her for as long as she could remember--a story demanding to be told.  Sometimes she felt that she was nothing but a repository of image and desire, the wake left by the she-ogre within that wanted to shelter her planets in its hairy womb.

On Wednesdays, she liked to sit and stew in her own magic; it was why she was a writer: because she hadn’t swallowed the same old story that life was merely ordinary.  She saw the whizzing life of things, the Donnie Darko wormhole, Mars in its many earthen embodiments, the leaves falling upwards.  She had a story to tell.

She often stood in her kitchen, a little drunk off evening wine, and prayed to her muse, saying, “I know you see me, hiding, floating, or sinking, you see me.  Sure, you know everything about me; you know that I’m flawed and full of many stories; you know that I’m jealous and scared and lazy and imperfect.  But you also know that with my pen I could find the unbearable beauty even in a corpse.”

So she prayed to her muse in her tipsy night kitchen.  She asked in an invocation, a sort of modern muse-ese, for her story to flow out of her.  All she needed was to go to sleep with no idea and wake up with her last book, the one she had been trying to write for her whole life. She needed to find one of those literary midwives accused of Nobel witchery to get that fat baby of a book out of her.  It hurt; it was tearing at the walls of her like a sullen turd trying to come out, just waiting at the threshold. On that Wednesday, she thought the question of the writing woman came down to this: How to transcend creative limitations and finally give birth to that work of genius, even if it used the back door.

Copyright 2009 Caroline Hagood

Gangster Poker Night: "Reservoir Dogs," Meet "GoodFellas"

I always wanted "GoodFellas" and "Reservoir Dogs" to meet. I've often imagined poker night at my house with the two films sipping beers at the same table.  But something tells me that if they met, they wouldn't be friends.  Just thinking of the stilted conversation, the averted glances, maybe even the full-on fight that might ensue has put me off this train of thought. So, I must make do with bringing them together here on the page.

For the directorial debut of a video clerk, Quentin Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs" is quite a film. As a director who admittedly steals from the greats, Tarantino has managed to create a niche of his own—the nonlinear, talky gangster flick.  

The film is essentially a series of off-colored anecdotes told to the tune of a first-rate 70’s score.  This soundtrack is said to have been inspired by Kubrick's unlikely concoction of upbeat pop music and carnage in "Full Metal Jacket."

Reservoir Dogs depicts the dealings before and after a heist that is never shown on camera.  One of the postfactum revelations is that they have been set up.  The different stages of the crime—from the bloody aftermath in a warehouse to the origin—are reconstructed in order to gradually unveil the rat.

The film opens on the tough guys arguing about the significance of “Like a Virgin” as the camera drifts around their faces. This scene captures the effortless moxie of the gangster, which is such that he can discuss Madonna’s oeuvre without any aspersions being cast on his manhood.

The weight of words and their association with status can be seen in the flashback to the group of gangsters receiving their colorful pseudonyms—“Mr. Brown” (Quentin Tarantino himself) complains about the scatological nature of his name, while “Mr. Pink” (Steve Buscemi) is equally displeased with his effeminate moniker.

Although there are iconic pulp gore action sequences, such as “Mr. Blonde” (Michael Madsen) cutting the ear off the kidnapped cop (Kirk Baltz), it is speech that is central to the film. What makes the men of "Reservoir Dogs" so darn smashing is their encyclopedic knowledge of marginalia and their consequent ability to spin a mean yarn.

 

 

Opening with the much-quoted line from young gangster-in-training, Henry Hill (Ray Liotta): “As far back as I can remember I always wanted to be a gangster,” Martin Scorsese's "GoodFellas" is a fetishized vision of the outlaw life as seen through the eyes of an idolizing fan boy. To Hill, being a mobster is a way of evading anonymity—a fast track to respect, power, and glory that will allow him to be somebody in a town of nobodies. 

The film traces Hill’s rise to glory and subsequent descent into drug-doing-and-dealing. As a red-nosed Hill speeds towards his inevitable doomsday on Sunday, May 11^th, 1980, his actions grow more frenzied.  The narrative becomes correspondingly frenetic, causing the viewer to feel similarly drugged-up and out of control.  

The film also showcases some great performances, including Joe Pesci’s Oscar-winning role as Tommy, the diminutive psychotic whose most dangerous quality is his cowardice.

Scorsese is as adept at capturing smoke-lit rooms where the eyes of his gangsters glow, as he is at quantifying body counts.  He is an artist when it comes to rolling out the corpses—whether it’s bloody dead couples in fancy cars, bodies churning out of garbage trucks, or hanging in meat freezers so frigid they take days to thaw for the funeral.

Scorsese’s vision, as executed by cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, results in splendid moments of cinema, from the celebrated three-minute tracking shot of the “Copacabana,” to the most ingeniously crafted action snapshots since Truffaut’s Jules and Jim.  

This inspired use of stills superimposes contemplative moments on fast-paced and often violent sequences by pausing them momentarily for the viewer to ponder.  Scorsese’s filmmaking has a razor-sharp precision that makes him unbeatable, and GoodFellas is Scorsese at his best.

Which films would you invite to your gangster poker night?

What Sex and the City Taught Me About Writing

Now, I realize that Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) is no Simone de Beauvoir, but the sight of her at her computer, doing the writer’s jig that turns thoughts and experiences into words, still gives me the chills.  The very phrase, “I couldn’t help but wonder,” that signals the beginning of her musings on sexology, can propel me into convulsions of creative identification.

I came to rely on the formula of her posing the question, followed by what she finds out about herself, her friends, her world, as a result. That one little sentence, along with the image of her wispy body poised before her Mac, sometimes with a cocktail, sometimes a cig, has become one of my archetypal images of the working writer.  Unlike the promise of dolorous sentence scrawling offered by so many of the other far more pretentious and far more dead authors in whose image I have constructed my bardic fantasies, Carrie represents a modern view of a successful writer who seems to love what she does for a living.

I’m aware of the human tendency to frame what we enjoy according to how we want to see ourselves.  It is this impulse that convinces avid porn watchers that they are really erotic sociologists; that teaches peeping toms to fancy themselves flâneurs; and prompts liars to perceive that they are merely gifted enough to see the world as it should be.  In other words, I understand that I might be imbuing Darren Star’s brainchild with cerebral qualities that don’t rightfully belong to it; but, accurate or not, it was a formative element in my understanding of the writing life.

Doggone it, I learned from Carrie. I watched her deal with creative rejection; who can forget seeing her torn apart by Enid (her Anna Wintouresque editor at Vogue)? Sure, she has her other editor (Jon Rifkin) to get her drunk on one-too-many diurnal martinis and take her on a tour of the Vogue closet complete with a peek at his no-no, but she still has to confront that crushing feeling and adapt. I also watched her cope with writer’s block, a scenario that culminated in the wordsmith’s magic trick of manufacturing inspiration out of nothingness.

Most powerfully, however, there was the meta aspect. Hearing Carrie’s voice throughout the show, narrating the bizarre situations in which the gals often find themselves, I realized that what I was listening to, my Virgil and Beatrice through the hells, purgatories and paradises of "Sex in the City," was none other than Carrie’s writing.  This is when it hit me that what I thought was merely a superficial, albeit well written, TV show was also a sinfully entertaining examination of what it is to be a writer. 

On Moving in with You and Becoming Your Wife

When I come, I will bring songs with their powers of pain,

of Sunday morning transporting to the heartbreak

of sad eyed giants,an encyclopedia of hurt,

but also the joyous spider lines of my depraved inventions, 

all clammy and slime-beautiful in the dust of a remembered attic;

from a time of hands moving in twilight searches,

nerving my way to poignant emotion distilled to written mist

in fits of spiritual nakedness. Do you know what you are doing

when you ask to see my apparitions?

To our home I will bring a trunk to clunk up the stairs,

heavy with my shaking universe.

Copyright 2009 Caroline Hagood

Fraidy Cat's Top 5 Favorite Violent Films

Okay, so I'm not a total fraidy cat, but let's just say I don't seek out violence in movies.  That's why I was so impressed by these films.  Not only did I not mind the violence, I thought it was crucial to the movie, and, in some cases, its most well-executed aspect.

1. Apocalypse Now (1979) – Apocalypse Now is one of my favorite movies, and every time I see it, I’m impressed by the nihilism of its violence. The film is a thoughtful meditation on horror, packed with unforgettable imagery, such as the helicopters that bomb villages while playing Wagner, the graphic sacrifice of the water buffalo, and Colonel Kurtz’s horrifying kingdom.

2. eXistenZ (1999) – I tend to like stylized violence, so I’m a sucker for everything David Cronenberg. He has a knack for crafting the kind of violence that hovers between artful comic crudeness and aesthetic achievement. There’s something almost beautiful about the blood in his movies. eXistenZ is full of delectable grossness, including a gun made of flesh and bone, and plenty of that blood of which I spoke so highly. Every time flesh is torn (which happens quite frequently in this film) I find myself wondering what strange universe of disturbing oddities will emerge.

3. Natural Born Killers (1994) – As perverse as it may sound, the violence in Natural Born Killers strikes me as a natural extension of the love between Mickey and Mallory. The two characters’ damaged nature is so well explained that it seems that there could be no other way of life for them. Once I made that decision, their savagery played more like passion gone terribly awry. They kill just to kiss in the bloody aftermath; they destroy to keep from falling apart. That a string of deaths brings these offbeat lovers life is the film’s unexpected revelation.

4. A Clockwork Orange (1971) – A Clockwork Orange is hard for me to watch for the very reason that I include it on this list: its violence is so masterful. The more abhorrent the scene, the less I want to watch it, and the more culpable I feel when I do. The image of Alex raping a woman in her phallic-symbol-covered flat, while crooning “Singing in the Rain,” hits the scene’s intended note of horror so skillfully that it becomes wonder.

5. The Untouchables (1987)– I remember watching The Untouchables with my father at a fairly young age and being blown away by the polished coolness of the violence; you’re not rooting for the good guy or the bad guy, but whoever is about to shoot, just so you can see the bullets tearing through the air. This movie almost made me drop out of school and become a gangster. Although my life has taken a slightly different path, I will never forget sitting on the couch drooling over the cool speed of it all.

What are your favorites?

originally posted on PopcornJunkies

Said the Chair On Not Being Able to Love, to Age, to Play Chess

I hallucinate myself living,

giving off little tendrils of breath,

sending technological love sounds

through telephone lines

to my dear. In these dreams, 

my legs are people legs,

long and spindly, wrinkled,

 dusky with personhood.

In this illusion, instead of stasis, 

I am defined by moving forward;

I am the white knight, 

the black pawn, the morning after.

Copyright 2009 Caroline Hagood

Images of Iraq

I started smoking differently that night

of newscast bodies twirling in candle light

and tears tripping in the eyes of the dead.

In things unspeakable,

we tell the children

that the people are just flame dancing,

but not that they are headed

to the valley where ribs go

when they are all that remain.

How to speak of bodies

tied together by bodies,

a still life to be hung in memory,

like the old woman who does laundry

as bombs howl over her dead son

and then hangs herself with her own hair.

Never close your eyes

to the slit of the human still visible.

That sound you hear beneath pistol fire

is the clatter of the machinery of life

forcing its way up through a garden of tanks.

You of the sleeping pills and saucer eyes,

there is change still to be seen with your ravaged sight.

I started smoking differently that night.

Copyright 2009 Caroline Hagood

Where Art Meets Commerce: The September Issue

In committing to celluloid the compilation of the 2007 edition of Vogue to which the title refers, RJ Cutler’s "The September Issue" chronicles the perennial clash between art and commerce, beauty and the buck.  It opens with American Vogue’s infamous editor-in-chief, Anna Wintour, saying, “There is something about fashion that makes people very nervous,” by which the audience is meant to understand that there’s something about Ms. Wintour that makes people very nervous—and by something, I mean everything.  Yet this is not a sentiment that she wishes to dispel, as it, along with the signature pageboy bob, shrewd business sense and undeniably high style IQ, is what she has built her career upon.  And what a career it is.

The film reveals the almost religious quality attached to the wonder that is Wintour, with her style disciples describing her as everything from the sartorial pope to the high priestess of fashion.  Indeed, with her flashing eyes and shining talent, she is both sacred and profane. You get the sense that when the cameras are rolling, she is a wolf in sheep’s clothing (or maybe more like lambs wool couture).  In this sense, "The September Issue" has some of the trappings of a horror joint.  Watching Wintour turn high-level fashion execs to mush and scare the bejesus out of starry-eyed wannabe tastemakers becomes a spectator sport, alternately fascinating and horrifying.

Reign of terror aside, it’s hard for the fashion world to argue with the capitalist bottom line that when Anna gets behind something, it sells.  But there’s something more to it.  Citing the 90210ers’ “I Hate Brenda” club as evidence, I would say the citizens of the pop cultural sector love them a compelling villainess.  Would we really want the ice queen to melt before our eyes? Another question that surfaces where Wintour is concerned is whether there would be so much controversy concerning her iron-fisted rule if she were named, say, Aaron Wintour, instead?  Put another way, how much can the hullabaloo surrounding her management methods be chalked up to uneasiness at the sight of a diminutive, bird-like lady getting men to snap to it?

In all of this, however, it is the creative director of American Vogue, Grace Coddington, who emerges as the real star, and perhaps even the tragic heroine, of "The September Issue." She is the artist in a commercial world, the one with the vision that keeps getting scrapped.  To put it in the language of accessories, Coddington has all the accoutrements of the martyr; she had to stop modeling and start working in a creative capacity after a car crash; a waif nurtured by fashion, as a young girl she survived on specially ordered issues of Vogue consumed in a small Welsh town.  Yet, far from a hothouse flower, she is the only one who can stand up to Anna--a fact that gives the documentary its pluck.  The tension between these two beau monde behemoths is palpable. It’s a passive-aggressive action movie played out on the miniature stage of fashion; but, alas, with the cameras there, the catfights remain implicit.

 Wintour and Coddington are both deeply talented in their separate spheres; with all-knowing eyes, they take mere seconds to analyze complex trends in beauty.  There are many who don’t consider fashion to be a form of creative expression, thinking only of leggy anorexics who dissolve the egos of American teens (which is certainly part of the equation); but "The September Issue" shows us that what Wintour, Coddington, and many other talented fashion workers, create, is art. 

Many of Vogue’s spreads are nods to famous photographs from the past; its pages bulge with the haunting, Kohl-darkened eyes of the jazz-drunk flapper, the hardboiled, fatal woman of noir, the hungry-faced, depression era pin-up.  As a consequence, we feel Coddington’s artistic heartbreak as Anna nixes shots she has nourished, seemingly with pieces of her self.  When, in a quiet moment, Coddington confesses that she is a romantic that the modern world has left behind, she reveals both the crux of her struggle and the underlying focus of the film: she is a casualty of the commerce upon which her art depends. 

Free Spike Jonze's Wild Things

The pilgrimage that is Spike Jonze’s adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s "Where the Wild Things Are" is well documented in The New York Times Magazine.  Tracing Jonze’s ascent from craftsman of surprisingly original skate videos to the Emperor of Avant-garde, the article conveys the texture of his passion for this unique project that is currently in peril. 

In the face of executives who want him to tone down the John Cassavetes-inspired dialogue and Sendakian strangeness of the Wild Things world, Jonze soldiers on.  If you have seen his "Being John Malkovich" (1999), for example, you know what oddities and wonders await us if he is allowed to make the film as he imagines it.  Avid proponents of Jonze’s imagination are speaking out, urging Warner Brothers execs to let him have it his way (in a non-Burger Kingian sense).  

How can I make this any more clear: Jonze acolytes of the world, Unite!

Letters to Myself: The Life of the Freelance Writer

It's hard to explain the peculiar existence that is the freelancing life to people who don't, well, freelance. Sometimes it becomes difficult to separate my personal life from my professional one since both occur in pajamas, with 5 cups of coffee, and my ancient, chubby cat with the crazy eye on my lap. These are strange and wonderful days.

Let us imagine for a moment a day in the life of the freelance writer (okay, it’s me). Mid-morning finds me padding into the kitchen for a snack in my uniform of ragtag, and probably unsettling to the outside eye, assortment of pajama clothes.  A little bit of work later, there I am shuffling (and sometimes marching, depending on how much coffee I’ve consumed) back to the kitchen for my reward for said work—some combination of meat and cheese if I’m lucky, cold soup out of a can if I’m not.  Often, when feeling particularly dedicated to a project, I transform from writer to adventurer. I know I must eat to go on, so I dutifully forage for sustenance and then slurp my Progresso so that I can sally forth, trusty steed (okay, it’s the same fat cat with the oddball eye) beside me, to add another sentence to my city of words.

Really, all the hours of work, cans of soup, and pajamas to launder, come down to that one shining moment in the verbal zone. This zone often emerges out of the most difficult of writing tasks; you know the ones: they initially appear so confounding and insurmountable that you avoid them for as long as you can.  Avoidance techniques differ from person to person, but my evasion is usually of the aforementioned meat and cheese variety; but it can also involve a number of pointless activities, including, but not limited to, internet research that is really just gussied up social network prowling, searches for long-lost items that have fallen behind furniture, and the organization of the iTunes library; the one item it never seems to include, though, is cleaning—a fact immediately apparent upon entering this scribbler’s apartment. 

However, on those rare occasions, the avoided chore becomes a piece of writing I can be proud of.  Watching that growth process, which many people describe as something that takes place outside of them, is rather extraordinary. It may not be the same as seeing a human born, but these word babies are the closest we logophiles get to that maternal miracle.  Face it folks, sentence spawning is sexy.

Yet the maternal imagery doesn’t end there.  As my link to just about everything writerly, my computer has become the umbilical cord that connects me to my aspirations.  Every morning, I wake up and rush to turn it on, hoping to find a missive alerting me that I have become a writing success overnight (please note, this missive has not yet arrived). One of the most thrilling aspects of the life of the cyber-scribe is the refresh button, which seems to offer an eternal promise of newness; with a single click, everything could change.

The flipside of this button’s potential ecstasies involves refreshing up a storm and seeing, with supreme glee, that I’ve received a message, only to discover that it’s a) a rejection letter, b) the last person I would ever want to hear from in my life, or, worst of all, c) a piece of writing that I’ve emailed myself.  I often use the email method instead of the perpetually misplaced memory stick that contains all my important writing, proudly purchased from a guy at Radio Shack who promised it would “change my life.” It didn’t;  what it did do was remain permanently lost, causing my inbox to bulge with souvenirs from writing travels past.

If my email is ever successfully pilfered, the pirates will find themselves with slices of thought fraught with inconsistencies, typos, and, my personal favorite, evidence of interest lost. There is one reason, and one reason alone, however, that I would recommend that you don’t engage in this method of cyber memory: good old auto-epistolary disorder, or the unfortunate ailment that comes from accidentally receiving letters from yourself.  Let me put it this way, there is nothing more deflating than waiting for a sign of extra-writerial life, only to find that you have been contacted…by your own writing. 

Ah well, what’s a gal to do?  The writing has become the best of friends over the years; indeed, the sound of a computer turning on has replaced the turning of a knob or the thump of a door in my social sonics.  At certain points, living becomes writing with brief, almost surreal, interludes of “real life.”  It starts to feel like my stories are reality and the outside world is the mad thing I’ve invented.  Yet, at the same time, I need that outer world to write about and, oh that’s right, to have some extra-writerial fun. I’m telling you, the life of the freelance writer can be so insular that next time I receive a letter from myself, I’m going to respond.  You never know, there may be some rich pen pal potential there.

 

 

The Cowboy Sage in Poetry

 

The comic tone of Edward Dorn’s book-length poem, Gunslinger, allows the reader to absorb its serious societal critiques without the distance created by a dry delivery.  Consumer culture is one of the text’s central concerns; the poem often pokes fun at a character named Howard Hughes (an obvious icon of wealth).  One of the characters, Miss Lil, says of him, “They say he moved to Vegas / or bought Vegas and / moved it” (9). This last line indicates that having money in twentieth century America enables individuals to reshape their world, as though Hughes could relocate an entire state.  This idea is further reinforced by the way the text relocates its own meaning (from “moved to Vegas” to “moved” Vegas) and the fact that the line, “moved it,” is literally moved out to the right of the rest of the text on the page.

The Gunslinger is a gun-toting, spurs-wearing, spoof of a cowboy sage, of whom the poem’s “I” is a disciple.  As they sit in a brawling bar, the Gunslinger enlightens his devotee, telling him, “this place is / in the constructive process / of ruin” (16) and that the principle of what he sees is “Auto-destruction” (19).  The term “Auto-destruction” is reminiscent of Heidegger’s “destruction of metaphysics” to which Jacques Derrida’s “deconstruction” is a response.  In keeping with this philosophically deconstructive tone, the worst fate in the poem is to be “described” (25). 

 In another humorous intercourse, the “drifting guitarist” salutes the “Bombed Horse” with “Hi! Digger” to which the eager “I” chimes in, “Heidigger? I asked / the Xtian statistician / is that who you are?” (25), to which the horse responds, “Are you trying / to ‘describe’ me, boy?’ ” (25).  With its deconstructive tone, it is no coincidence that the poem puns on a philosopher concerned with the nature of being, only to recommend that the world not be pinned down through “description.” The amusing form in which this cerebral subject matter is addressed highlights the absurdity of a logocentric (or the pursuit of the final word on any given subject) search for truth. 

Dorn may have chosen to write a paraodic Western because he sought to transcend the tyranny of the grand narrative, or an idea that seeks to explain and contain experience, such as Western Philosophy (Heidegger) and Americana (cowboys and Westerns).  Thus, when the “stranger” who walks into the bar seeks to label the Stoned Horse within the distasteful description “negra horse,” the Gunslinger (the poem’s symbol of resistance to the aforementioned narratives), true to his moniker, pulls a pistol on him. 

 When Lil warns him that the “plain, unassorted white citizen” (28) has got the upper hand, the Gunslinger counters, “Your vulgarity is flawless / but you are the slave / of appearances-- / the Stockholder will find / that his gun cannot speak / he’ll find / that he has been Described” (27).  In a turn of phrase at once clever and loaded with social significance, Dorn has, through his language, turned the onlooker who believes in the imminent victory of the white supremacist (as determined by his use of the racial slur “negra” and his designation as an “unassorted white citizen”), into the slave.  In Gunslinger, Dorn performs quite the postmodern feat by using the grand narrative against itself.

Jazz

You play it like this:

turn wide, darkened eyes on something small

and improvise; make each twig,

from moment to moent, a labyrinth of sound.

 

Because all lines live backwards,

we begin with the early days,

when out of a singing egg, came warbling you,

a force yet unseen, unmanning them all;

 

planting, like clock sounds,

something real in all this falling sky, a great tune

amidst fields of  flimsy sound systems

that fingers can be drawn through.

 

What I like best is riding piggyback

on the charged wings of your rhythm.

Because you have always been there,

inside my beating neck, waiting,

like the next song, to be played.

 

In this sandpaper land, you are smooth,

surrounded by reams of music,

throbbing beside my very own

Jiminy Cricket-crackled heart.

 

How do you do it, bring the boom endlessly?

In the time I turned around

to stretch my leaning limbs,

you became the riff I had always wanted.

 

When I closed cracked eyes and ceased to see,

inside was a note wonderland,

a city of floating sound, and underneath,

a sonic carp pond without the carp.

 

Play for me, rhapsodize

till you hang over the edge of the ballad

like a wet sock over a worshipped ankle,

under and over the skin at the same time.

 

This is how you enter my rhymes,

counter Bach-wise and outlandish

in your rugged perfection,

like a coyote in a corsage.

 

So far from boring are you

that I carry your chewed fingernotes

in my brain purse, like puffs of pelt

that I peel to find more parts of you,

tearing away at the beat of what came before.

 

Carry me forever upon shoulder tops of song,

come slowly to radiance above an everglade

spun deep in resonant sound;

and let my tune be yours.

Copyright 2009 Caroline Hagood

How Tennyson Teaches Us to Read

 

In Idylls of the King, Alfred Lord Tennyson strives to bring the vitality of life to the legend of King Arthur by telling it, not as a dusty, old tale, but with all the force of real life.  Yet, built into his account is a consciousness of the limitations of writing, and the consequent importance of close reading.

One metaphor in particular, describing Elaine’s infatuation with Lancelot, reveals the project of Idylls of the King: “His face before her lived,/ As when a painter, poring on a face,/ Divinely thro’ all hindrance finds the man/ Behind it, and so paints him that his face,/ The shape and color of a mind and life, / Lives for his children” (Lancelot and Elaine, 327-335).  Here, just as Elaine’s passion for Lancelot causes him to live in her mind, Tennyson hopes to transcend static storytelling in favor of placing the “shape and color of a mind and life” on the page for his reader, to render a verbal simulation real.

In order to accomplish this, Tennyson captures transcendent moments in the lives of his characters.  On finding his fading brother, Balin “on his dying brother cast himself/ Dying; and he lifted faint eyes; he felt/ One near him; all at once they found the world,/ Staring wild-wide”  (Balin and Balan, 582-585).  In this way, Tennyson expertly renders the transformative moment that takes place during an intense experience such as this; Balin doesn’t merely weep over his dead brother, but rather, the curtains that usually conceal it part to reveal the gaping world.

Tennyson recognizes that perfection in reading and writing is an impossibility; writers can never entirely communicate the vibrant universes they envision, and readers can't fully absorb what the writers do successfully communicate. When Vivien grills Merlin to learn the “charm” that is housed in his magical book, he says, "Every margin scribbled, crost, and cramm’d/ With comment... but the long sleepless nights/ Of my long life have made it easy to me / And none can read the text, not even I;/ And in the comment did I find the charm”  (Merlin and Vivien, 675-681).  Tennyson places the solution to the problem of flawed written communication in Merlin's lips.  The old wizard recognizes what many literary critics have missed: that the ultimate secrets of his text remain hidden, even from him; but he is satisfied to read carefully, regardless, and find the “charm” therein.

Ultimately, no matter how masterfully Tennyson renders the tale of Arthur, it is but a rendering, and the original remains remote.  Idylls of the King teaches its reader that although stories are representations of thoughts, memories and histories that they can never fully embody, there is still a “charm” to be found in the process of close, impassioned reading.