Jim's Literary Soapbox
Friday, July 11, 2014
Last One to Kansas City Is a Hippie
Rick Hill has written a compelling (but hilarious!)
narrative of the Great American Road Trip, a journey from Southern California
to Kansas City by hitchhiking, train hopping, and automobile stealing. Fueled
by copious amounts of liquor and marijuana, four men, led by Mac (a KC hipster
trying to recapture his glory days in the 1940s), set off in 1970, determined
to travel with such style and ease that they’re sure to impress the fairer sex.
Along the way, however, they encounter mobsters, drug dealers, possible Charles
Manson supporters, and cops, all of whom threaten their lives.
Last One to Kansas City Is a Hippie is told through competing points of view and
through various stylistic devices, including flashbacks, but it never becomes
confusing or seems “gimmicky.” Instead, the story is propelled forward as the
four men have a series of adventures and encounters with bizarre people. One of
the more outrageous escapades is when they hook up with two young women in
Oklahoma City, never suspecting that they are the daughters of the local
gambling and pornography kingpin. This low-rent mobster then swears to kill
them and uses his private plane to chase their car.
Most of the story, including the “framing device” set in
1993, is told by Dan, a man whose life has fallen apart. When he remembers the
greatest month of his life—the road trip to Kansas City 23 years earlier—he
becomes determined to both recreate it and to write a screenplay for a movie in
vein of Easy Riders. The novel then
repeatedly shifts from 1970 to 1993 as we follow the young Danny and the
alcoholic, melancholic Dan on their respective journeys to discover themselves.
Both journeys are entertaining, absurdist romps, and I can say that I enjoyed
every minute of them.
In conclusion, all I can say about this novel is, “Well
done, Mr. Hill!”
Friday, January 31, 2014
Justifiable homicide?
Sounds justified to me. As a character says in a Graham Greene novel," I'm a prose man."
MOSCOW, January 29 (RIA Novosti) – Poetry can kill after all.
A former teacher was detained in Russia’s Urals after being accused of stabbing an acquaintance to death in a dispute about literary genres, investigators said Wednesday.
The 67-year-old victim insisted that “the only real literature is prose,” the Sverdlovsk Region’s branch of the Investigative Committee said.
The victim’s assertion outraged the 53-year-old suspect, who favored poetry, and the dispute ended with the ex-teacher stabbing his friend to death, investigators said.
Both of the men were purportedly drunk at the time.
The incident took place last week, but the suspect fled the scene and was not tracked down until days later.
The man, whose name has been withheld, was placed under arrest and charged with murder, punishable with up to 15 years in prison.
This is not the first time high-brow disputes have led to bloodshed in Russia. In September, a man was shot in a line for beer in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don after enraging a fellow beer drinker with his views about the work of Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant.
Sunday, January 26, 2014
Honoring Ray Wheeler
Dickinson State University will honor Ray Wheeler tomorrow (Monday) evening with a reading from his collection of short stories. Details:
Having retired after more than four decades of teaching at Dickinson State University, L. Ray Wheeler is an Emeritus Professor of English and Philosophy. For several years he chaired the Department of Language & Literature and was the founding editor of The Dickinson Review. Wheeler has published poetry and short stories, as well as had his original plays staged by college and university programs. He continues to reside in Dickinson, North Dakota.
This program will feature current and former DSU faculty reading from Wheeler's recently published story collection, Bar Talk and Tall Tales, and offering anecdotes about their beloved colleague. The collection will be for sale during the reception that follows the presentation.
For more information on this or other Heart River Writers' Circle events, contact Dr. Peter Grimes at peter.grimes@dickinsonstate.edu or 701-483-2142.
Having retired after more than four decades of teaching at Dickinson State University, L. Ray Wheeler is an Emeritus Professor of English and Philosophy. For several years he chaired the Department of Language & Literature and was the founding editor of The Dickinson Review. Wheeler has published poetry and short stories, as well as had his original plays staged by college and university programs. He continues to reside in Dickinson, North Dakota.
This program will feature current and former DSU faculty reading from Wheeler's recently published story collection, Bar Talk and Tall Tales, and offering anecdotes about their beloved colleague. The collection will be for sale during the reception that follows the presentation.
For more information on this or other Heart River Writers' Circle events, contact Dr. Peter Grimes at peter.grimes@dickinsonstate.edu or 701-483-2142.
Tuesday, January 14, 2014
Mark Twain & Ambrose Bierce
The second of the special
programs associated with Civil War 150 is this evening (7:00, Beck Auditorium)
when I speak about the American authors Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce. I’ll be
drawing from my recent New York Times
articles for this presentation.
Saturday, January 11, 2014
Attending your own funeral
Kevin Baker tells what it's like for an author to attend a book club scheduled to discuss his novel:
Soon someone cleared his throat, told us his name and said he was usually the club’s discussion moderator. But not tonight: “I just didn’t like this book that much, so it’s fine with me if somebody else wants to lead the discussion.”
Wait a minute. People were going to give it a thumbs up or down right from the beginning? Uh-oh. But so it went with the next person. And the next. And the next: “I didn’t really like it that much either.”
This was a disaster. And now it was my turn. I was embarrassed not only for myself but for the members of the club. How would they feel once they discovered the author they had just dissed was sitting right there? Everyone stared at me expectantly. I swallowed hard and did the only decent thing — I gave them the name of an old roommate. “I’m Richard Feeley,” I mumbled, eyes downcast, “and I rather liked it.”
Soon someone cleared his throat, told us his name and said he was usually the club’s discussion moderator. But not tonight: “I just didn’t like this book that much, so it’s fine with me if somebody else wants to lead the discussion.”
Wait a minute. People were going to give it a thumbs up or down right from the beginning? Uh-oh. But so it went with the next person. And the next. And the next: “I didn’t really like it that much either.”
This was a disaster. And now it was my turn. I was embarrassed not only for myself but for the members of the club. How would they feel once they discovered the author they had just dissed was sitting right there? Everyone stared at me expectantly. I swallowed hard and did the only decent thing — I gave them the name of an old roommate. “I’m Richard Feeley,” I mumbled, eyes downcast, “and I rather liked it.”
Saturday, January 4, 2014
In the Garden of Beasts
In
the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin
is the third of Erik Larson's popular
history books that I've read. Like the first two, The
Devil in the White City (2003) and Thunderstruck
(2006), Larson's latest book compellingly tells a true story that is
"stranger than fiction."
This book centers on William Dodd,
American Ambassador to Germany from 1933 to 1937, and his family, especially
his daughter, Martha, as they live in Berlin while Adolf Hitler rises to power.
Larson is curious how the Dodds reacted as they witnessed first hand the Nazi
Party seize complete control of Germany. He especially wonders, for example, if
the ambassador could have helped to prevent the horrors that were about to
envelope Europe by insisting that President Franklin Roosevelt take a stronger
stand against Hitler and the National Socialist Party.
In the summer of
1933, as FDR struggled to get a recalcitrant Congress to pass his economic
proposals to combat the worsening Great Depression, at least four men passed on
his invitation to be Ambassador to Germany. Roosevelt finally offered the
position to a historian of modest renown, currently teaching at the University
of Chicago, William Dodd, who reluctantly accepted what everyone in Washington
knew would be an extremely difficult job. Dodd packed up his family, including
his 24-year-old soon-to-be divorced daughter, and moved to Berlin.
That daughter, Martha,
a literary editor at the Chicago Tribune,
had had a number of tempestuous romantic relationships over the previous few
years, including an affair with Carl Sandberg and a
flirtation with Thornton
Wilder, and her father hoped that life abroad would settle her into
adulthood. But Martha, enchanted by the bright lights of Berlin, shrugged off as
“rumors” the talk about concentration camps springing up to house communists
and Jews and threw herself into the nightlife. She took a number of lovers,
including at least one senior Nazi official as well as a Soviet spy. After the Night
of the Long Knives, however, she, like her father, would resolve to work
against the Nazi cause.
In addition to telling the story of the Dodds, Larson provides
background to life in Germany at this time. For example, he explains why the
laws restricting Jews from certain professions didn't matter to American
tourists and why even many Jews thought that the threats made by Nazis were
primarily bluster. He also details the origins of the ubiquitous Nazi salute,
the mandatory sterilization of "defectives" laws, and invention of
the deadly Zyklon
B gas used in the concentration camps.
Larson's book, like
the other two that I've read, is narrative history at its best, and I
definitely recommend it.
Early American literature
Could we just admit that colonial American literature is
terrible and stop pretending that it’s worth reading?
If you enjoy Puritan religious screeds about how people are
condemned to Hell, regardless of their good works, or if you enjoy political tracts
about how an enlightened government should function, then, without question,
colonial American literature is for you. For most readers, though, it’s
God-awful boring stuff.
The comparable
period of English literature (1600-1800), which is the late Renaissance through
the early Romantics, has such luminaries as Shakespeare, Milton, Jonson, Swift,
Pope, Coleridge, and Shelley, among many others, who are certainly worthy of
the 1,000 pages they take up in the Norton
Anthologies, but the 1,000 pages of the Norton
for the same years are devoted to the likes of Mather, Edwards, Jefferson, and
Franklin. What’s going on?
Understand that I
certainly recognize the genius of these colonial writers, and their works are
well worth studying if you’re interested in religion or political thought. My
argument is that they aren’t “literature.”
So what is literature?
Literature has an imaginative complexity and ambiguity that forces
readers to think deeply about human nature, their relationships with others,
and their place in the universe. By “imaginative,” I mean the opposite of
“functional,” which is prose that has a utilitarian purpose. In other words,
narratives (fiction or non-iction), poetry, and drama qualify as “literature.
By my definition,
which is admittedly subjective, American literature begins with Washington
Irving’s Sketchbook
in 1820, but it doesn’t fully blossom for another couple of decades until
Hawthorne and Poe began writing their stories. Poetry took another decade or
two (believe me, you can skip Longfellow and Whittier!), but by the Civil War,
Whitman and Dickinson began writing, and so America truly had some original
poetic genius to claim as its own.
Perhaps it simply took a few hundred years for American literature
to get grounded, or perhaps it took a traumatic event like the Civil War to
kick it into a higher gear, or perhaps simply too many intelligent men and
women were too busy establishing a new republic to focus on the production of
literature, but maybe it’s time to admit the obvious: American literature
really begins ca. 1820. We can skip what came before.
The Reluctant Fundamentalist
The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2013) makes me feel conflicted, but not
for the reasons that Mira
Nair would like. In other words, I have no doubt that she wants the
audience to feel conflicted by the film’s protagonist, the Pakistani youth
Changez, who wavers between simply opting out of Western values and becoming a
jihadi, and on this level, the film succeeds. But I doubt that Nair would like
the audience to feel conflicted on whether or not the film itself is any good.
To start, I
should say that Mira Nair is one of my favorite directors. I have seen nearly
all of her films, from Salaam Bombay
to The Namesake,
and Monsoon Wedding
is one of my all-time favorite films. I admire not just her stories but also
her incredible visual
sense, complemented by stunning music soundtracks. Moreover, her actors,
many of them not professionals, usually give extraordinary performances. So
what’s wrong with The Reluctant
Fundamentalist?
First off, the
lead actor, Riz
Ahmed playing Changez, is exceptional as a brilliant Pakistani who attends Princeton and, determined to make a fortune, then takes a job on
Wall Street as a financial analyst. He soon falls in love with Erica, a young,
wealthy woman (played by Kate Hudson), and so he seems set for life in the
adopted country that he has come to love, America.
9/11 changes
everything.
Returning to New
York after a business trip a week after the attacks, Changez is treated harshly
by airport security officials, who strip search him with barely restrained
brutality. Over the next few months, he is treated with scorn, if not outright
hatred, by the people around him, including the co-workers who had been his
friends just a month earlier and by strangers he meets in his day to day life.
In response, Changez begins to speak positively about Islam and to grow a
beard. Predictably, he then encounters even more hostility until he decides to
resign his career to return to Lahore, where he becomes a college professor the
government later accuses of radicalizing his students.
My problem with
the film is that the Americans—from his love interest (played by the mediocre Hudson)
to his boss (the wooden Kiefer Sutherland)—are cardboard figures that act in
the most stereotypical ways. We’re to believe, for example, Erica would really
mount an art exhibition around the theme “I Slept with a Pakistani” that she
intends as an expression of her love for him. She’s baffled that Changez feels
deeply insulted and exploited. This scene is simply unconvincing and
irritating, as are most of the scenes with Changez and his venal, greedy boss.
It’s surprising
(and disappointing) that Mira Nair goes for predictable conflict and easy politics in The Reluctant
Fundamentalist. I hope she back on track with her next film!
Friday, January 3, 2014
Enduring Love
Ian McEwan is one of the
major novelists of contemporary literature. Although he's written a dozen
novels—and many short stories, screenplays, and even librettos—he never gained
much recognition outside of England until the film version of Atonement, which
won a number of awards a few years ago. Since then, his novels have sold well
in America, and some of his earlier works, such as Enduring
Love (1997), are starting to gain more recognition, too.
Enduring Love
begins with suspense, literally, as Jack Rose, enjoying a picnic with his wife,
Clarissa, finds himself trying to grab a rope on a runaway helium balloon that
has a terrified boy in its gondola. Five other men, including the balloon's
captain, desperately grab the rope, too, but a sudden gust of wind, estimated
later to be 70 mph, launches them into the air. Most of them hang suspended a
few feet before they become frightened and let go and drop safely to the
ground. One man, however, doesn't release and is then carried more than one
hundred feet into the air before he loses his grip and plunges to his death.
Surprisingly, the
rest of the novel doesn't really directly dwell on the aftermath of this
bizarre accident but, instead, focuses on how one of the other men who released
the rope, Jed, a fanatical Christian, begins to stalk Jack, who writes for
popular science magazines and is scornful about religions. Jed will not accept
that Jack has no belief in God and will never seek solace through prayer, and
so, increasingly more frantic, he pursues Jack because he feels compelled to
"save" him. These traumas—witnessing a death that he might have
helped to prevent and then being stalked—have a terrible effect on Jack's
emotional state and, consequently, on his marriage.
But what if Jed isn't stalking Joe? What if, in fact, Jed
doesn't exist except as a figment of Joe's anxieties about his personal
failures in life?
In addition to this disturbing plot, Enduring Love is a meditation on many themes, including the nature
of time, the inter-complexities of human relationships, and the impact of
science on the modern world. McEwan, for example, speculates about the limits
of empirical knowledge and rational thought in the face of seemingly random,
inexplicable tragedy.
I've read a half dozen of McEwan's novels, and although they
all, like Enduring Love, wrestle with
challenging philosophical questions, they are written in such lucid prose that
they are accessible for general readers who want to read about interesting
characters placed into compelling situations.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)