Category: Literature

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Mary Badham in “To Kill a Mockingbird”

“To Kill a Mockingbird” is, in many ways, a very likeable undistinguished film.  The music by Elmer Bernstein saves the film: it coats the events in the beautiful nostalgic gauze of melancholy and revelation.

Gregory Peck– regardless of the adoring ministrations of thousands of fans–and the Oscar for “Best Actor”  was a wooden actor of limited range. Pauline Kael says, “Peck was better than usual, but in that same virtuously dull way.”  He won the Oscar for the role, not the performance.

That his performance almost perfectly suited the tone of “To Kill a Mockingbird” was an accident, or the result of a director’s choice to leave well enough alone. Brock Peters was very good as Tom Robinson, and most of the supporting cast was adequate. Philip Alford as Jem was okay.

But Mary Badham as Scout was actually quite awful. She was stiff and awkward and had no sense of timing at all. Look at the scene in which a dinner guest pours syrup all over his plate of food:  it is hacked to pieces.  It looks like they tried desperately to save it in the editing but I can’t imagine that the director was ever happy with the end result.

There is a story that Philip Alford (Jem)  became irritated with her because he was forced to eat the same food over and over again while she tried to get her lines right in the syrup scene.  He and and John Megna (Dill) took their revenge when they later filmed a scene in which she gets into a car tire and rolls  down the street.   The two boys pushed her so vigorously she was almost injured.

It is quite believable that the director and casting crew thought they had the right girl after an audition and then discovered, gradually, that she was really not very good.  It would have been difficult and expensive to replace her once footage had been shot.  I suspect they tried to make the best of it.

The scene with Boo Radley at the end makes me cringe.  Scout just snuggles right up to this strange frightening recluse without the slightest reserve.  In fact, that whole plot sequence, of Bob Ewell trying to assassinate Scout, is ridiculous and here is once case when they should have abandoned the book.

It is a mistake.

Incidentally: why did Harper Lee never write another novel?  I believe she couldn’t.  She had one book in her, a pleasant combination of memory and social activism, and she knew, better than anyone else, her own limitations, that anything she tried to put out afterwards would be a terrible disappointment.

[Edited 2022-05-06]

By the way, did you know that the character of “Dill” was inspired by the young Truman Capote?  Yes, young Capote and Lee lived in the same town for a time, and they continued their friendship through the 1960’s when she helped him write “In Cold Blood”.

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Beautiful Losers

A Lost Rant

Before I was out of high school I read the brilliant, obscene, and intoxicating novel Beautiful Losers, a gush of orgasmic narrative that forever demolished every remaining preconception I had of love as a delicate waltz of chivalric gestures and sentimental aphorisms.

From Beautiful Losers I learned that love was desperation and cunning, flagellation and mysticism, grunting and grasping and kissing and licking and scratching for the tiniest fragment of grace in a world of obscene emotional brutality.

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Oprahfied Culture

I watched the debate about James Frey’s book, “A Million Little Pieces”, unfold, with interest. If you’ve read through my previous stuff, you won’t be shocked to find that I think the book is a sham and should be relabeled as “Bullshit” (not as “fiction”, because that would require some art).

Frey says “the emotional truth is there”. Nobody said it wasn’t. It isn’t, but who said it wasn’t. The emotional truth is weighted to an enormous degree by our understanding of what is true and what is not. But who cares? But most people don’t like liars. We especially don’t like liars when they try to manipulate our emotions with their lies. Like James Frey.

But nor should it surprise anyone that Oprah defends the book. The “underlying message”, she said, “still resonates for me”. Oprah’s entire career has been built on catering to her audience, delivering something that “resonates” with millions of viewers. And what “resonates” with millions of viewers? Manipulation and pre-packaged pseudo-emotional experiences.

“A Million Little Pieces” is about, in part, the ordeal of pulling yourself out of deep shit by your bootstraps and remaking your life into something good. How can you not feel cheated if the author misrepresents the actual scale of the problem? If his own triumphant journey started halfway down the track? This book has implants.

Oprah is not a journalist. She is an entertainer. The Oprah show is always, first and foremost, about Oprah. Every interview is about Oprah. Every gift she gives does not announce to the world that this cause or this person or this service is so worthy and so honorable and so true that it deserves a gift. It announces that Oprah is so worthy and so honorable and so true because she has bestowed this gift on people she deems worthy. When she interviews Elie Wiesel, the show is about Oprah being somewhere up there with Eli Wiesel– the high priestess of compassion on those with low self-esteem– the holocaust is incidental.

Oprah says she chooses books of the month based on the quality of the book. But if the author won’t show up on her show to conduct a session of mutual admiration, that book no longer deserves a second of her time. If she had any class or journalistic integrity, she’d keep the book as her choice and promote it and say, “just because the author doesn’t like schmoozing with a tv celebrity doesn’t mean the book isn’t worthy of your attention.”

Now Oprah might rightly complain that this is a bum rap because most news “journalists” in America do what she does.

And that, sadly, tragically, is true.

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James Frey Gets Oprahed

I watched the debate about James Frey’s book, “A Million Little Pieces”, unfold, with interest. If you’ve read through my previous stuff, you won’t be shocked to find that I think the book is a sham and should be relabeled as “Bullshit” (not as “fiction”, because that would require some art).

Frey says “the emotional truth is there”. Nobody said it wasn’t. It isn’t, but who said it wasn’t. The emotional truth is weighted to an enormous degree by our understanding of what is true and what is not. But who cares? But most people don’t like liars. We especially don’t like liars when they try to manipulate our emotions with their lies. Like James Frey.

But nor should it surprise anyone that Oprah defends the book. The “underlying message”, she said, “still resonates for me”. Oprah’s entire career has been built on catering to her audience, delivering something that “resonates” with millions of viewers. And what “resonates” with millions of viewers? Manipulation and pre-packaged pseudo-emotional experiences.

“A Million Little Pieces” is about, in part, the ordeal of pulling yourself out of deep shit by your bootstraps and remaking your life into something good. How can you not feel cheated if the author misrepresents the actual scale of the problem? If his own triumphant journey started halfway down the track? This book has implants.

Oprah is not a journalist. She is an entertainer. The Oprah show is always, first and foremost, about Oprah. Every interview is about Oprah. Every gift she gives does not announce to the world that this cause or this person or this service is so worthy and so honorable and so true that it deserves a gift. It announces that Oprah is so worthy and so honorable and so true because she has bestowed this gift on people she deems worthy. When she interviews Elie Wiesel, the show is about Oprah being somewhere up there with Eli Wiesel– the high priestess of compassion on those with low self-esteem– the holocaust is incidental.

Oprah says she chooses books of the month based on the quality of the book. But if the author won’t show up on her show to conduct a session of mutual admiration, that book no longer deserves a second of her time. If she had any class or journalistic integrity, she’d keep the book as her choice and promote it and say, “just because the author doesn’t like schmoozing with a tv celebrity doesn’t mean the book isn’t worthy of your attention.”

Now Oprah might rightly complain that this is a bum rap because most news “journalists” in America do what she does.

And that, sadly, tragically, is true.

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Where is Mr. Greene’s Nobel Prize for Literature?

I used to think the Nobel Prize was the greatest honor this corrupt little world had to bestow upon a person. That was a while ago. Some time before Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize for threatening to bomb North Viet Nam into the stone ages if they wouldn’t hold their fire long enough for America to get the hell out and pretend they settled for peace with “honor” in Viet Nam.

greene01.jpg (8190 bytes)

  • End of the Affair
  • The Third Man
  • Heart of the Matter
  • Power and the Glory
  • The Quiet American

So I’m being fey. I don’t have illusions about the Nobel Prize for literature.

And you shouldn’t either. You should know that the writers listed below have received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Not a bad bunch, I suppose. Some of them, like Sartre and Solzhenitsyn seem rather dubious in light of historical developments. was Sartre really all that important? And Solzhenitsyn turned out to be Hester Prynne’s bad uncle and nobody wants to invite him to parties anymore. William Golding? For what? Saul Bellow?

Sure I’m being irreverent. In my opinion, Solzhenitsyn was a good writer who stood up to the authorities and thus became regarded as a great writer. Now that the Berlin Wall is down, we can go back to thinking of him as a good writer. A fine writer. A decent writer. He was also a Russian Nationalist and an anti-Semite.

But then, is the Nobel deserving of grandeur?

John Galsworthy? For “The Forsythe Saga”? You’ve got to be kidding.  “The Forsythe Saga” is grandfather of the modern soap opera.  Sure, he has his rustic charms, but it’s still soap.

Eugene O’Neill? Even Solzhenitsyn is never as boring as “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” (although “The Iceman Cometh” was entertaining, at least, when Lee Marvin played Hickey.).

Steinbeck is the American writer that most resembles Solzhenitsyn, though even he is more interesting. He was important, at least, as the dramatist of the depression. Hemingway is deserving, for his innovations in style as well as for the acutely modern sensibility he brought to his work, so clearly missing from Galsworthy and Steinbeck. T.S. Eliot? I never liked him much, but even I have to admit that the line “I have measured out my life in coffee spoons” deserves some kind of special recognition, if not Eliot’s fondness for fascism and idiotic obscurantism and anti-Semitism.

Toni Morrison is the weakest entry on the list. In ten years, everyone will finally get over the novelty of race and come to know just how uninteresting her work really is. I rarely give up on a book once I’ve started reading it, but I had to slog through “Tar Baby”, and I can’t remember anything about “Song of Solomon”. Is she really better than Richard Wright or James Baldwin, neither of whom made the list?

Isaac Singer is a brilliant choice– one of the most distinctive voices of the 20th century. V.S. Naipaul? I honestly don’t know. I’ve always liked his writing, especially his travel pieces, and he is unfailingly thoughtful and perceptive, and provocative.

William Golding? “Lord of the Flies” is undoubtedly a brilliant book, but I’ve never liked it. I always wondered where the girls were. I was never able to make sense of his other books. I always felt that if he hadn’t been famous for “Lord of the Flies”, nobody would have cared about “Pincher Martin”.

Besides, there are some historical examples of boys being trapped in an isolated environment: distressingly (to every high school teacher), they tend to end up cooperating and building little peaceful communities together.

You may have noticed an astonishing omission from the list. An omission so monumental that it is stunning in it’s audaciousness: Graham Greene.

I have read somewhere that Graham Greene would have won the Nobel Prize but for the objections of the Americans, who hated him for criticizing their actions in Central America, and elsewhere. I’m puzzled by the story. I don’t know where it comes from, or if it is true. I am flabbergasted by the idea that the Americans can block the selection of the Nobel Selection Committee. How do they do it? Who do they phone?

I have also heard that Arthur Lundquist, a member of the Academy, had it in for Greene. “Over my dead body” was the phrase someone used, to describe Lundquist’s feelings about Greene getting a Nobel prize.

But one thing is obvious: on merit alone, Greene should have been selected miles ahead of Morrison, Gordimer, Golding, O’Neill, Faulkner, Galsworthy, or half a dozen others.

It is probably appropriate that Greene never won. One of the most remarkable traits of his work is its utter lack of sentimentality, and prizes–even big ones– especially big ones– are all about sentimentality. There is a way of being correctly incorrect, and there is Greene’s way, which is to dissect why we need to believe that we are somehow appreciative of “incorrect” writers, like Naipaul and Solzhenitsyn. There is a subplot in “The Power and the Glory” about a book a pious mother reads to her children, about a great Catholic martyr, and his heroic life and death. It’s all phony, of course, and Greene contrasts this phony iconography with the “real” adventures of the whiskey priest, who believes himself worthy of damnation. He also contrasts the whiskey priest to “Padre Jose”, who obeys the edict of the revolutionary government and marries and sells out the faith in order to save his own life, and present the people with a living, breathing illustration of the corruptibility of the church.

Is there any other way to imagine a speech at the Nobel banquet, than as the imprimatur of acceptance, respectability, and public honor? Is there anything that would make a writer safer for all of us?

While Solzhenitsyn was a virtual prisoner within the Soviet Union, he was honored with a prize, because he stood up to the godless, inhuman communist government, with courage and conviction. After he moved to Connecticut, he stood up to the inhuman, godless materialism of the West… and promptly disappeared from view.

Novelists Who Have Won the Nobel Prize for Literature

V.S. Naipul
Gunter Grass
Seamus Heaney
Toni Morrison
Derek Walcott
Nadine Gordimer
Joseph Brodsky
William Golding
Isaac Singer
Saul Bellow
Heinrich Boll
Jean-Paul Sartre
John Steinbeck
Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn
William Faulkner
T.S. Eliot
Andre Gide
Earnest Hemingway
Herman Hesse
Eugene O’Neill
John Galsworthy
George Bernard Shaw

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Atwood Wins a Plaudit

The novelist will travel to Chicago Sunday to pick up the Harold Washington Literary Award, recognizing significant literary achievements. “Atwood was selected because we felt her work so acutely depicts relationships and human interactions in modern society,” said Bonnie Sanchez-Carlson, executive director of the New South Planning Board which has presented the award since 1989.” CBC, June 6, 2003

Yes indeedy, and you could add, Margaret Atwood is a quality writer.

All right– so you have an award. The Harold Washington Literary award, named for the former mayor of Chicago, and let’s hope the writers write better than the mayor governed. And let’s hope the writers write better than the executive director of the New South Planning Board speaks.

I’m sure Bonnie Sanchez-Carlson is not a writer. Or maybe she is. But no writer should ever be subjected to this kind of mealy-mouthed shlop: “relationships and human interactions in modern society”. As opposed to the writers who like to write about the wiper knob on the 1972 Datsun.

What writer doesn’t write about relationships, and what story is not about “human interactions”, and why would it be especially acute of Atwood to write about “modern” society as opposed to “ancient” society or society in 1931? Especially since she doesn’t, always– “Alias Grace” is set in the 19th century.

What this statement makes naked is how artists that become famous and successful because they wrote subversively are almost always cleverly co-opted by the very society they claimed to skewer. Atwood is known for her proto-feminism, her examinations of female identity in a world she considers hostile to women. Her heroes are edible women, murderers who defied their oppressive circumstances, or wholesome, wise women who suffer grievously at the hands of institutionalized male oppression (“Handmaid’s Tale”).

But you can’t say that at an awards ceremony, can you? So Ms. Sanchez-Carlson makes up some wimpy generalization that sounds vaguely laudatory and vaguely profound. Then they have a catered banquet and a ceremony and a little reading and Atwood gets her money and flies off to the next award show.

This is an award for being famous for writing– not for writing itself. I’ll the first question they asked when they contacted her was, “would you be willing to attend?”

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Conrad Black

So it’s now Lord Black.

I personally find it completely offensive that there still exists, within the British Empire, an institution whose very foundation rests upon assumptions about class and lineage that should be utterly repellent to any democrat. The House of Lords is a bastion of exclusive White Rich Male Privilege (no matter how many token women and blacks are added) and British Upper Class Twittledom. And now, Mr. Twittledom himself, Conrad Black, who started a newspaper (and did a good job of it) just so he could show bad pictures of Jean Chretien and declare the Alliance winners before the election was held, is a Brit and a Lord and gets to wear hysterically funny costumes that remind me of the arch stereo-type of British Lords as, well, er, gay. Shall we say, fops. Precious. Delicate and righteous.

It’s Barbara Amiel who really annoys me, though. She once wrote an interesting article on Leonard Cohen, and I believe admitted that she agreed to strip for him in exchange for the interview. Correct me if my memory fails me, Barbara. She also wrote an article for Chatelaine once– my memory is clearer about this– in which she provided a vigorous defense of the art of gold-digging, which is, of course, the art of offering sex in exchange for position, power, and vast amounts of capital. Other than the prostitution angle, I suppose, not much to quibble with there, but it should suggest to us that perhaps Lord Black wasn’t himself so passionate about the cause of privilege as his wife, who now gets to be known as Lady Golddigger. Perhaps Mr. Cohen, recently descended from Mount Baldy (I kid you not) would consent to strip for the aristocracy.

The only thing that disturbs me is that she was a fan of Leonard Cohen. She should have been a fan of Frank Sinatra instead. Maybe she was. That would have been perfect. Frank was exactly the type of man who could see the value in an expensive Lordship. Perhaps she admired both. That’s possible nowadays. There was a time when any person acquainted with the work of Leonard Cohen could be counted on to be a dissident in some way, and remarkable for independence of thought, and, perhaps, a passionate spirit. Nowadays, it is obligatory to honor Mr. Cohen, which is precisely what is beginning to make Mr. Cohen boring. I say it makes Mr. Cohen boring not because his earlier work has become boring, but because Mr. Cohen has begun to believe in it himself.

Which leads me to the question of how one becomes a Lord. Well, it’s quite simple, really. If you have any doubts about my insinuations above just ask yourself a really easy question: is there any way that you or anyone you know could become a Lord? Yes, there is, of course. You simply have to have enough money.

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How to Raise Children

I’ve been thinking a lot about this question. I have three children. I feel fulfilled as a woman, but unfortunately, I’m a man. I was so good at bringing them up I have nothing to say. I am really disappointed that those idiots who didn’t know how to bring up their children and never listened to me, as a result, brought up their children.

No civil liberty is so important that it can’t be arbitrarily infringed upon in the name of the safety of our children, even if, 98% of the time, it ends up being Uncle John who molests them and not the porn dealer down the street or the gay couple demanding the right to extended health care benefits.

Our children will be better off and happier in the future with the second car we are buying today with our tax rebate than they would be with safe schools, bridges that don’t collapse, and trees.

It is important to expose your children to important artists, musicians, and film-makers when they are young, because when they get older, they want to know what not to do in order to establish that they are their own persons.

Children will adore Buster Keaton if you make them watch ten minutes of any of his films. Children assume you had sex once, or maybe twice if they are not as old as your marriage. Watching a gaggle of giggling adolescents awkwardly maneuvering around each other at a school party makes me wonder where all the promiscuous ones I keep hearing about are.

Nothing is more boring than bragging about your children. Tell me about yourself instead. Zzzz.

The worst thing about kids is this: if life seems shitty to them at 21, it really does look like the absolute end of the world. They can’t imagine why a 45-year-old would sell his soul to Satan himself to be 21 again. They can’t believe life could be a hell of a lot better in five days, let alone five years.

They have no idea why anyone would bother with foreplay.

They consider themselves so entertaining they are surprised you don’t want to pay them to be around, but they’re essentially right.

What most amazes me: there are 365*24 hours in a year. 8700 hours a year. When I was first married, it seemed like I had about 4000 of those hours to write and think and play and have sex, without interruption. Now, I have exactly 3 hours and 14 minutes a year, and I think they’re home.

Is it worth having kids? I’m with Steve Forbert whom I have often quoted even though Mark thinks he’s a weasel:

I know that life is strange,
but compared to what?

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Some Thoughts Upon Hearing Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” One Too Many Times

Some thoughts on the Leonard Cohen song, “Hallelujah”.

I think it should be sung at weddings,
but I’m sure many would disagree.
So maybe it should be sung
at divorces,
but what we need
is a corresponding sacrament to go with the divorce.
The couple marches into church from different directions
at different times
and meets at the front. Then they say, “I don’t”,
and smash wedding cake into each other’s face.
The guests take sides
and a food fight breaks out.
Everything in the church
is destroyed
and then the lawyers come in and present their bills. Counselors descend
upon all concerned
and advise them
to take off their clothes,
writhe on the floor, and make various gestures of affirmation and support for their preferred un-partner. Lastly, the florist
comes in
and heaves
a gigantic
bouquet upon the bride. While she’s is pinned to the floor,
kicking her feet into the air,
the groom slides a garter up her leg and the best man steals her ring. Then a dwarf in a top coat and a tutu
sings Hallelujah,
and all the guests sing Hallelujah
race over to the couples’ house
and sing Hallelujah
and take back their gifts.

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Satirical Misappropriation: Gone With the Wind

Randall said she did not know about any of that. “It was just my simple understanding that I thought you were allowed to write parodies in America,” she said, “I have read parodies, and I wanted to write one.” NY Times, April 26, 2001

Alice Randall, a black country and western song-writer, has written a novel called “The Wind Done Gone” which sounds like it might be a wonderful parody of “Gone With the Wind”. But the soul-less Scarlet police who guard the “legacy” (ha ha ha) of Margaret Mitchell’s ridiculous novel have taken Randall to court to prevent her novel from being published by Houghton-Mifflin (preview copies now fetch $250 each on eBay). They have argued that the novel is an infringement of copyright because she uses characters and settings from the original Mitchell novel.

Well, duh.

Exactly how would you do a parody without referencing the subject of the parody?

A Federal District Court in Atlanta decided that Randall would just have to do her parody without the subject. It ruled that Houghton-Mifflin could not publish and sell her book. The ruling is being appealed.

And it should be. It’s a dumb ruling.

Update – May 25, 2001: A higher court has just ruled that publication of the book can proceed, because the lower court’s ruling makes too great an infringement on the right of free speech, because it is “prior restraint”.

Interesting note: Microsoft, Dow Jones & Company, and AOL Time Warner have filed briefs in support of Ms. Randall. I’m not sure why, but it’s curious.