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Novels Vis-a-Vis Screenplays

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Novels Vis-a-Vis Screenplays

At the request of an actor who’s interested in pitching my novel Today, Oh Boy to producers he’s worked with, I’ve written an adaptation of the novel for the screen.[1] It’s not an official screenplay per se, but a roadmap for the actor to determine what scenes he will use to produce a short “teaser” reel consisting of would-be shots from the would-be movie. I have no idea how this is done. Via AI I suspect.  Anyway, with the final proofs from the novel to the right of my iMac’s screen and a blank Word document on the left, I began writing and cutting and pasting.

The good news is that originally, using present tense and employing crisp visual imagery, I consciously composed Today, Oh Boy to read like a movie progressing. For example, here’s the opening of the novel.

A mango-hued, pockmarked bulletin board hangs on a classroom wall of pale lime green concrete blocks, the bulletin board pencil-stabbed and compass point-gouged. Among the graffiti are the names of the star-crossed lovers: Sandy + Tripp. Tragic Tripp, whose body was found last week tangled in blackberry bushes along the banks of the Ashley River, his skull smashed after falling off Bacons Bridge.

S-A-N-D-Y + T-R-I-P-P.

Rusty Boykin, a skinny, freckled redhead sitting on the bulletin board row in Mrs. Laban’s homeroom, traces his index finger in the depression of Sandy’s name. He supposes it’s Tripp’s work – the letters inartistic, juvenile. Sandy hasn’t been to school since Tripp’s death, four class days ago, and now it’s Monday, and she’s still not here. She should be sitting right in front of Rusty, her honey-colored hair hanging like a curtain to her waist. 

How to adapt this for the screen?  One way, you could have Rusty tracing his finger in Sandy’s name and then suddenly cut to Tripp falling off the bridge, or you could begin with Tripp’s accident. What I did was to begin with Tripp’s last meeting with Sandy, a conversation through her open bedroom window, his leaving in a rage, jumping into his GTO, pealing off, and ultimately driving his car off the road at Bacons Bridge into the Ashley River.

Actually, Tripp’s death is what Hitchcock called a McGuffin, a misleading device that’s irrelevant to the overall narrative.  After all, Today, Oh Boy is a comedy. Its title comes from the Beatles’ song “A Day in the Life.”

I read the news today oh boy

About a lucky man who made the grade

And though the news was rather sad

Well I just had to laugh 

So, by having Tripp drive off the bridge rather than falling off the bridge, what I gain in cinematic excitement, I lose in the comic pairing of his first and last names. As it turns out, Tripp was a bully, a high school version of Trump.  At one point in the book, Alex Jensen, a junior at Summerville high, says to a friend Will, “Your last name is Trotter, you name your son Tripp, and he falls off a bridge to his death. What a surprise.”

In addition, the novel employs a great deal of what critics call “indirect discourse,” a device that allows a narrator to report what someone is thinking without using his exact words. For example, in the above excerpt, the sentence, “She should be sitting right in front of Rusty, her honey-colored hair hanging like a curtain to her waist” is rendered second-hand through Rusty’s consciousness. In a screenplay, you have to “show” rather than tell “tell,” which can lead to really awkward exposition, like you find in bad fiction like “The Most Dangerous Game”:

You’ve good eyes,” said Whitney, with a laugh,” and I’ve seen you pick off a moose moving in the brown fall bush at four hundred yards, but even you can’t see four miles or so through a moonless Caribbean night.”

That I couldn’t use direct narration or indirect discourse meant I had to omit some characters, like Camilla Creel, the impoverished girl who lives in an abandoned school bus with her mother and sister, and Weeza Waring, Will’s mother, who added several comic touches throughout the narrative.

So, overall, the script is much tidier than the novel, much more streamlined, yet not as rich in my attempt to capture the zeitgeist of Summerville, South Carolina in 1970, during integration, the beginning of the counterculture, and during an influx of Northerners moving to what at the time was a staid, conservative community.

Then again, I’m sure a professional screenwriter could do a much better job.

[1] By the way, it’s on sale at Amazon for a mere $10. 

Beach Bum Bummer, Boomer Edition

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thebeachbum_1024x1024

Caroline and I have invested/wasted time over the Thanksgiving holidays checking out two films and a flick. On Monday night, we watched an HBO documentary on the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and an experimental film called Notes on an Appearance, a slow-cut edited paean to stasis, directed by Ricky D’Ambrose, .

On the following evening, we watched the recent stoner film The Beach Bum directed by Harmony Korine and starring Matthew McConaughey, Snoop Dog, Isla Fisher, and featuring Jimmy Buffett playing himself.

Here’s my amphetaminic spoiler-infused synopsis.[1]

Moondog, the eponymous beach bum, is supposedly a genius poet, though the pap he recites isn’t even, strictly speaking, verse, much less poetry.  Perpetually drunk and stoned, he divides his time cavorting with multiple sexual partners in Key West or at his obscenely rich wife’s mansion in Miami.

Despite being deemed loveable by a host of movie critics, including the New Yorker’s Anthony Lane, Moondog shows up late for his daughter’s wedding, strides up to the couple taking their vows, grabs the groom’s crotch to measure his manhood, and calls him “a limp dick.”

Tee-hee.

After the ceremony, Moondog and his wife (who has been having an affair with Snoop Dog’s character Lingerie) go for a drunken drive, crash the car, and Moondog ends up a widower cut out of his late wife’s will until he publishes a significant collection of poetry.[2]

Pissed off at having his inheritance delayed and predicated on productivity, Moondog recruits a host of homeless people and trashes his daughter’s house (tee hee), which results in his going to rehab to avoid prison. At the rehab facility, he and an arsonist named Flick (get it?) become buddies.  They escape in a golf cart that somehow outraces the pursuit.

Short of money, the unlovable rogues attack and rob an old man in a mechanical wheelchair, bringing to mind A Clockwork Orange, except in that movie brutalizing an old man managed to be funny, thanks to Alex’s “Singing in the Rain” routine, whereas in The Beach Bum the assault seems simply cruel.

Moondog and the Flick split ways, and our antihero takes up with Captain Wack, who charters a swim-with-the-dolphins business.  With a family of tourists on board, including pre-pubescent children, Moondog spews vulgar sexual terms (the daughter actually puts her hands over her ears).  Despite his love for dolphins, Captain Wack can’t distinguish them from sharks, dives in to model swimming with them, and loses a foot.[3]

After copping some magic muse-like ganga from Jamaica, curtesy of Lingerie, Moondog writes what Wikipedia calls “a poetic memoir,” receives critical acclaim, and wins the Pulitzer.  Now, he can receive his inheritance, 17 millionaire dollars in cash delivered in a freshly purchased yacht.  Sailing off into the sunset, Moondog purposely sets fire to the money (which killjoy me thinks could have bought some food insecure children a Big Mac or two).  The yacht explodes; some bills rain down about a party that has gathered to celebrate the occasion.  Of course, Moondog escapes unscathed as he floats along in a dingy, one of Dionysius’s chosen.

The End.

 

Now, don’t get me wrong; I can love movies that thumb their cinematic noses/give double barrels to the establishment, movies like A Night at the Opera or Jean Vigot’s Zero for Conduct, and I’m okay with a dash of  gratuitous sex, but as my wife Caroline so aptly put it, the entire movie is gratuitous.

What exactly is the point? Unlike Fellini’s The Satyricon, The Beach Bum isn’t mocking Late Empire extravagance or moral turpitude; it’s celebrating it, hence the presence of that Apostle of Hedonism, the venture capitalist Jimmy Buffet, who, I understand, is  marketing “a string of Margaritaville retirement homes” where the bald and cellulite-ridden can bask in what remains of their days (and nights).

Wasting away in Margaritaville

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Here’s a spiel for you golden-agers:

“It’s always been that happy place in your mind, the spirit of adventure in your soul. It’s the state of mind when it all comes together in one of life’s perfect moments. When your mind wanders to this paradise, why not follow it home?” reads the site. “We have heard your call… Minto Communities and Margaritaville welcome you to Latitude Margaritaville!… Inspired by the legendary music and lifestyle of singer, songwriter and best-selling author Jimmy Buffett, your new home in paradise features exciting recreation, unmatched dining and FINtastic nightlife. With Minto’s 60 years of experience developing award-winning, master-planned communities and building quality homes for over 80,000 families, innovative new homes are a given.”

Perhaps if Donald Trump weren’t president, I might have been less caustic in this review, but to me, Moondog is what Trump would be like as a stoner: vulgar, narcissistic, privileged, someone whose supposed “genius” gives him license to be a perpetual asshole.  Although Moondog shares some characteristics with Jeff Spicoli of Fast Times at Ridgemont High and The Dude of The Great Lebowski, he, unlike those sympathetic characters, is arrogant, entitled, not in the least bit clever.

That said, he only harms himself, his family, and the occasional wheelchair bound Boomer. I just happen to find Barabas of Marlowe’s farce The Jew of Malta to be much more of a hoot.

FRIAR BARNARDINE. Thou hast committed—

BARABAS. Fornication: but that was in another country;
And besides, the wench is dead.

[1] Charleston’s own The City Paper pegs the plot as “hilarious misadventures” and rogerebert.com calls it a “funny, ultimately sweet movie.”

[2] Several times this not yet published collection of words is referred to as a novel, though what we get at the end is a Pulitzer winning collection of poems.  It’s almost as if the screenwriter, Mr. Korine, doesn’t know the difference.

[3] Okay, no doubt a fan of the film will note that this is a farce, that the shark fins are cardboard, that it’s not supposed to be realistic, to which I say, Moondog-style, fuck off.

 

“The Waste Land” vis-à-vis “Apocalypse, Now”

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Eliot and CoppalaJoyce would call it an epiphany – I’d call it a cartoon light bulb flashing above my head —  me slouching in a seat of a movie theater located in a strip shopping center off Sam Rittenberg Boulevard.  Apocalypse, Now had just come to town, and I was catching it at the first matinee I could.

I teach Heart of Darkness and was, of course, interested in how the transplantation from the Congo to Viet Nam would work out.

Here’s what switched on the light:

image from Apocalypse, Now

And here, Ol’ Possum, Groucho’s pal, TS Eliot hisself letting us in on a secret about his sources for “The Waste Land.”

Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston’s book on the Grail legend: From Ritual to Romance (Macmillan, Cambridge) Indeed, so deeply am I indebted, Miss Weston’s book will elucidate the difficulties of the poem much better than my notes can do; and I recommend it (apart from the great interest of the book itself) to any who think such elucidation of the poem worth the trouble. To another work of anthropology I am indebted in general, one which has influenced our generation profoundly; I mean The Golden Bough; I have used especially the two volumes Adonis, Attis, Osiris. Anyone who is acquainted with these works will immediately recognise in the poem certain references to vegetation ceremonies.[1]

Originally Eliot wanted Mistah Kurtz’s last words “the horror, the horror” to serve as the epigraph, but know-it-all il miglior fabbro Ezra nixed Kurtz’s utterance as “not weighty enough” and suggested this admittedly weightier snippet from Petronius’s Satyricon to serve the purpose of cross reference point.

“Nam Sybillam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi
in ampulla pendere, et cum pueri illi dicerent: Στβμλλ
τί Θέλεις; respondebat illa: άπσΘνειν Θελω.”[2]

So I say that “The Waste Land” and its sources From Ritual to Romance and The Golden Bough are key in understanding Willard’s relationship with Kurtz, the ritual double sacrifice of caribou and the colonel, which/who are obviously linked.

Trigger warning:  This clip is not for the squeamish; two mammals are hacked to death.

 

Amphetaminetic  Synopsis of “The Waste Land”

Part 1:  The Burial of the Dead

Chaucer’s Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote becomes

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

This is Eliot’s MO – picking up post WW1 shards of Western Civilization’s shattered stained glass window and collagificating [copyright pending] them back together in ironic juxtapositioning. In Chaucer’s day, spring was a blessed rebirth, in Eliot’s god-vacated poem, a dreaded reoccurrence.

You see, winter is preferable to resurrection when we can keep warm beneath forget snow.

ZAP!

We’re in a Biblical desert among stony rubbish where Isaiah shows us

[. . . ] something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

The Sibyl!

ZAP!

A tarot reading where Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante doesn’t find The Hanged Man, i.e., a god to be resurrected, not only a harbinger of spring, but what engenders the spring.

But there he  is – the Hanged Man — at Colonel Kurtz’s compound in Apocalypse, Now.

image from Apocalypse, Now

ZAP!

We’re in Danteville, headed to Hades/Hell/Work:

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many

I had not thought death had undone so many.

 

 Jacobean echoing, a corpse “planted,”  dogs digging up that corpse, which is beginning to sprout.

 

There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: “Stetson!

“You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!

“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,

“Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?

“Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?

“Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,

“Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!

 

Baudelaire:  “You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!”

 

Part 2: A Game of Chess

Cleopatra hanging at the equivalent of Dorian Gray’s where a golden Cupidon peep[s] out among sevenbranched candelabra.

Among the ornate decorations

Above the antique mantel was displayed

As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene

The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king

So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale

Filled all the desert with inviolable voice

And still she cried, and still the world pursues,

“Jug Jug” to dirty ears.

ZAP!

Neurotic banter:

“My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me.

“Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.

  “What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?

“I never know what you are thinking. Think.”

ZAP!

Those are pearls that were his eyes.

ZAP!

O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag—

It’s so elegant

So intelligent

So mechanical, so not Shakespeare, so-so-so civilization-in-decline.

ZAP!

We’re eavesdropping in on working class abortion gossip in a pub as the barkeep trumpets England’s equivalent to “last call for alcohol”:

HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME

HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME

Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight.

Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight.

Speaking of death by water, enter Ophelia:

Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.[2]

 

Part 3:  The Fire Sermon

Spenser:  Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.

Not so sweet the Thames in the 1920s.

empty bottles, sandwich papers,

Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends

But wait!  The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,

Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends.

 The city is empty.

ZAP!

The Fisher King:

While I was fishing in the dull canal

On a winter evening round behind the gashouse

Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck

And on the king my father’s death before him.

Human sacrifice, the king must die to generate the spring, like Jesus does every spring — dead, buried, resurrected — like those Neolithic god-kings Frazer writes about in The Golden Bough whose health and sickness are associated with fertility and famine.  They must be sacrificed and replaced, i.e. must die and be resurrected, to insure healthy crops, like Osiris, Attis, Adonis.

White bodies naked on the low damp ground

And bones cast in a little low dry garret,

Rattled by the rat’s foot only, year to year.

 ZAP!

Gay hotel assignation, barren sex as far as procreation goes.

Under the brown fog of a winter noon

Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant

Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants

C.i.f. London: documents at sight,

Asked me in demotic French

To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel

Followed by a weekend at the Metropole.

ZAP!

Enter voyeuristic but blind double-sexed Tiresias who witnesses arid copulation in interlocking sonnets:

At the violet hour, when the eyes and back

Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits

Like a taxi throbbing waiting,

I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,

Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see

At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives

Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,

The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights

Her stove, and lays out food in tins.

Out of the window perilously spread

Her drying combinations touched by the sun’s last rays,

On the divan are piled (at night her bed)

Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.

I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs

Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest—

I too awaited the expected guest.

He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,

A small house agent’s clerk, with one bold stare,

One of the low on whom assurance sits

As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.

The time is now propitious, as he guesses,

The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,

Endeavours to engage her in caresses

Which still are unreproved, if undesired.

Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;

Exploring hands encounter no defence;

His vanity requires no response,

And makes a welcome of indifference.

(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all

Enacted on this same divan or bed;

I who have sat by Thebes below the wall

And walked among the lowest of the dead.)

Bestows one final patronising kiss,

And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit . . .

 

She turns and looks a moment in the glass,

Hardly aware of her departed lover;

Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:

“Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.”

When lovely woman stoops to folly and

Paces about her room again, alone,

She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,

And puts a record on the gramophone

ZAP!

Wagnerian canoe coitus:

Trams and dusty trees.

Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew

Undid me. By Richmond I raised my knees

Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe.

 

la la

 

Part 4:  Death by Water

Here’s the whole shebang:

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,

Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell

And the profit and loss.

                                   A current under sea

Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell

He passed the stages of his age and youth

Entering the whirlpool.

                                   Gentile or Jew

O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,

Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

 

Part 5:  What the Thunder Said

We’re thirsty!

If there were only water amongst the rock

Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit

Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit

There is not even silence in the mountains

But dry sterile thunder without rain

There is not even solitude in the mountains

But red sullen faces sneer and snarl

From doors of mudcracked houses

 

Things fallin’ apart:

Falling towers

Jerusalem Athens Alexandria

Vienna London

Unreal

ZAP!

I have heard the key

Turn in the door once and turn once only

We think of the key, each in his prison

Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison

 We’re talking Holy Grail gone missing:

I sat upon the shore

Fishing, with the arid plain behind me

Shall I at least set my lands in order?

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down

Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina

Quando fiam uti chelidon—O swallow swallow

Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie

These fragments I have shored against my ruins

Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.

Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

Shantih     shantih     shantih

 

The End!

 

 

So as Eliot relied on Frazer’s The Golden Bough and Weston’s From Ritual to Romance as subtext so Coppola uses “The Waste Land” in a similar fashion.

When Willard kills Kurtz, he’s the new god, yet he gives up that honor to return to Babylon, so to speak. I’ve read that Coppola filmed two different endings, one in which Willard goes home and one in which he stays in the jungle.  The studio viewer-tested the ending, and, of course, the rabble wanted Willard to return to home-not-so-sweet home, to the cinema in the strip shopping center off Sam Rittenberg Boulevard where he would have a roof over his head.

I’ll give Conrad’s Marlow the last word.

I found myself back in the sepulchral city [i.e., Brussels after his ordeal in the Congo] resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretence, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew. Their bearing, which was simply the bearing of commonplace individuals going about their business in the assurance of perfect safety, was offensive to me like the outrageous flauntings of folly in the face of a danger it is unable to comprehend. I had no particular desire to enlighten them, but I had some difficulty in restraining myself from laughing in their faces so full of stupid importance.

 

[1 ]i.e., rituals of human sacrifice

[2]With my own eyes I saw the Sybil of Cumae hanging
in a bottle; and when the boys said to her: Sybil,
what do you want?” she replied: “I want to die.”

[3]Once again, the low and high are juxtaposed

 

The Power of Glove

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The filmmakers: Andrew Austin and Adam Ward (sporting the Power Glove)

Several years ago, my son Ned, then a graduate student, brought home to Folly Beach a friend, Andrew Austin, who was studying film-making at Wake Forest. A native of Lake Charles, Louisiana, Andrew is an interesting, quirky cat (as we old beatniks say).[1] For example, he always sports red socks (in honor of his grandfather), has mastered the art of rolling coins across his knuckles, and juggles so well you might guess he spent his childhood on the vaudeville circuit.

Here he is in 2011 performing in our living room to the dulcet sounds of fellow Louisianan Dr. John.

 

I caught up with Andrew last week when he crashed at my place in between film festivals where his first feature (co-created with Adam Ward) A The Power of Glove is making the rounds.

I got a chance to view the film, and if you ever get the chance, jump at it.

It’s a tribute to the documentary that I found it completely engaging even though it concerns the realm of video gaming, a pastime that interests me about as much as the private lives of minor league baseball umpires.

The movie chronicles the rise and fall and semi-resurrection of the Power Glove, a 1980s contraption that was supposed to revolutionize video gaming but ended up being a colossal critical and commercial failure. Nevertheless, the glove has managed to enthrall certain gamers and has over the years provided hackers with hardware that they have readapted to interface with whatever their obsession might be — electronic music or virtual reality, for example.

Take a peek at the trailer.

The scope of the research is beyond impressive. The Austin and Ward assembled a wide range of people associated with the glove — its inventors, marketing executives, engineers, aficionados, musicians, artists, and a “virtual reality evangelist – to name a few. From the coloring to the graphics to the soundtrack, the film has a real 80s feel.

I certainly hope whoever picks up its distribution will do the film justice.

Andrew and I-and-I at Chico Feo 

[1] Is there any such thing as a young beatnik, a twenty-year-old-bongo-playing-beret-wearing-goatee-sporting-Ginsberg-reciting hep-cat?

Protest the Rising Tide of Intolerance

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As Crass Casualty and Dicing Time[1] would have it, in the week of my wife’s memorial service, I have to box up the contents of my classroom for a move to a brand new Upper School building.

This chore is especially taxing because when I moved into a former colleague’s room a quarter a century ago, he asked if he could keep some of his books in the room, which were housed in three enormous bookcases that belonged personally to him. I said, sure. He eventually died without heirs. His collection includes some of his late mother’s books as well. There are inscriptions. “To Catherine S____________ 1925.”

Of course, I also have books, 31 years worth, not to mention file cabinets gorged with quizzes, study guides, lecture notes, honor contracts, resumes, book order receipts, etc.

So I’m in the process of sifting through the contents, recycling, shredding, and yesterday I discovered this anti-bullying speech I gave to the Upper School during the first Clinton Administration. I don’t know the exact date, maybe 1994. At any rate, I haven’t altered the text, so some of the allusions may seem odd or anachronistic.

At any rate, I think the speech holds up fairly well, so why not expose it to a wider audience than the 300 or so who originally heard it?  I doubt if it will alter the behavior of bone fide bullies (like our current president), but it could offer the victims of bullies some solace.

I’ve also included the video clips that accompanied the speech.

 

 

[Note the original movie clip went a bit longer and depicted an older nurse who delivers the food the younger nurse was incapable of providing.]

John Merrick, the Elephant Man, is, of course, an extreme example of someone being shunned because of the way he looks, but we all know that every day all types of people are excluded for all types of reasons — it might be their race, their looks, the way they talk, their sexual orientation, the way they dress.  I took a poll of my classes and discovered that 100% of my students, every single individual, has been made fun of here at Porter-Gaud, and I mean maliciously.  I suspect everybody in this auditorium has been shunned, been put down at one time or another, been made fun of.  We all know what it feels like, and it doesn’t feel good.

A couple of weeks ago, I saw Maya Angelou, perhaps America’s most famous living poet.  She was being interviewed by David Frost on PBS.  Maya Angelou is black and grew up in segregated Arkansas.  So like John Merrick, she knows what it’s like to be excluded.  Growing up as a little girl in Arkansas, she probably wouldn’t have been able to see the movie The Elephant Man because of the color of her skin.

When Maya Angelou was only 10-years-old, she was raped.  After the rape, she refused to talk for over a year.  Her pain was so terrible she couldn’t give voice to it.  She remained silent, mute. I guess sort of like John Merrick, she couldn’t find the words she needed.

Fortunately, she eventually did find her voice and became a poet.  In a poem she read at President Clinton’s inauguration, she linked humankind to extinct species such as dinosaurs and mastodons and voiced her concern that we may follow in their footsteps and become “lost in the gloom of dust and ages.”  She sees a real danger in fragmentation.  She writes

[. . .] the Asian, the Hispanic, the Jew
The African and Native American, the Sioux,
The Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek
The Irish, the Rabbi, the Priest, the Sheikh,
The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher,
The privileged, the homeless, the Teacher.
They hear. They all hear
The speaking of the Tree.

And what is the tree saying?

Do not be wedded forever
To fear, yoked eternally
To brutishness.

In the interview, David Frost asks Maya Angelou what the poem means, and she says, “It means we have to stop minimizing other people’s lives.”

We have to stop minimizing other people’s lives.

Look at John Merrick.  The Elephant Man.  An extreme case, as I said, but look how others minimized him.  In the movie, the doctor Treves at first is more interested in John as a specimen than he is as human, but at least he treats him humanely.  The younger nurse is so weak a person she runs like a child when she sees “the elephant man.”  Runs screaming out of the room. [The following references don’t appear in the above clip].  Did you notice the second, older nurse?  She never makes eye contact with Merrick.  That’s what people do when they are uncomfortable; either they avoid eye contact, or they giggle, or both.  This older nurse is beyond the giggling stage so instead she stays busy making the bed and talks about Merrick as if he were an idiot or weren’t there.

She is minimizing his life.

The head of the hospital is eager to get rid of Merrick.  He is minimizing Merrick’s life.  And not only John Merrick’s life, but his very own life.  Because as it turns out, John Merrick possessed an extraordinary soul.  His indomitable spirit has made him famous — the stuff of biographies, plays, movies.  The head of the hospital would have been long forgotten if he had not encountered John Merrick.  And how will the head of the hospital be remembered in these biographies, plays, and movies?  His legacy lies in how he treated John Merrick.  And I suspect that’s how we will be remembered after we leave Porter-Gaud.  Others will remember us in light of how we treated them.

Now, this assembly’s not really about John Merrick.  it’s about us — about you and me — and how we treat people.  Do we minimize other people in the mistaken belief that we “grow” when we “put them down?”

That we grow when we exclude someone from our group?

Let’s face it.  Everyone has weak points. We may be great at volleyball but lousy in math.  Great in math but hopeless in history.  We all have features we’re self-conscious about. Frankly, I’d just as soon not be bald, but like John Merrick, I didn’t have the luxury of choosing my parents. Nobody does.

Genetics deals us our facial features, our body types, our athletic prowess (or lack thereof), our intellectual potential, and even, according to the latest studies, our sexual orientation.  We have no control over our parents’ wealth.  Whether or not they’re getting divorced.  Where we were born.

Of course, it’s really no mystery why people harass and pick on others.  It’s obviously to compensate for low self esteem.  Inevitably cowardice is also involved.  Bullies rarely pick on the golden boy star quarterback who looks as if he’s stepped off the cover of Seventeen Magazine and sports 1550 SAT scores.  The victims are going to be someone younger, smaller, less popular.

So when we hear somebody cutting someone else down, we ought to tell him or her to quit. We’ll be doing, not only the victim a favor, but also the bully a favor, because frankly, he’s making an ass out of himself.  To those who see through the psychology, it’s embarrassing. Moreover, in doing nothing when we see unkindness occur we are abetting the creation of a climate that allows bullying  to flourish.

We should be the heroes, not the villains, in the movies of our lives.

Of course, cutting people down isn’t the only way we can minimize their lives.  Sometimes we shut others out because they are different.  Ignoring someone is also minimizing his or her life. It’s obviously not as bad as being overtly cruel, but we do actually cheat ourselves when we hide in our little homogenous groups.

Let me give you an example.

I have a friend, Josephine Humphreys, who is a somewhat famous novelist.  She wrote Rich in Love, a novel on the 9th grade reading list.  You older students and faculty members might remember that her son Willy actually played Merrick in a senior play production of The Elephant Man a couple of years ago.  Anyway, Jo grew up South of Broad, grew up in the Episcopal Church, attended Ashley Hall, in other words, lived a fairly typical Porter-Gaud-like life.  However, she and her husband Tom are now in the process of producing records — cds that is — for local gospel groups.  How did this come about?  Through serendipity and the willingness to try new things.

About four years ago, Jo and Tom went to a gospel concert at Spoleto and were knocked out by this local quartet called the Brotherhood.  They decided they wanted to see them again.  The only thing was that back then the Brotherhood only performed in all black churches.

That didn’t stop Jo.

I asked Jo what it was like being a middle aged white woman going as a complete stranger to an all black church.  She said she was nervous and that some of her white friends told her not to go, that blacks wouldn’t want her at their church, that it was intrusive.  But she said to me, “You know, Wes, I’m 50 years old and that type of thing I don’t have time for.”  So she and Tom went, were welcomed warmly, loved it.  Over time, they became very good friends with the Brotherhood and their wives.  Jo says that every time she hears them, they restore her faith in the world.  She firmly believes that getting to know the Brotherhood is one of the very best things that has happened to her.  And it’s been great for them, too.  With Jo and Tom’s help, they’ve gained a wider audience and have toured Europe.  Their European audiences loved them; they loved their European audiences.

The courage to take a chance and reach out has certainly enriched Jo’s life.  The Brotherhood’s lives.  And some Europeans’ lives as well.

But the thing is — integration isn’t only about mixing colors — it literally means “to make whole by bringing all parts together.”  As long as we cut others off, as longs as we limit our peers by only seeing them as computer nerds, jocks, rednecks, math people, preppies, 7th graders — we too are cut off.  We’re a piece of something.  The stranger you see everyday at lunch sitting by himself may have an important gift to share — might possess a missing piece of your puzzle.

For example, in the film after Treves discovers that Merrick can speak, Treves leaves the hospital room and encounters Merrick’s sadistic manager, a man who exploited Merrick by exhibiting him in freak shows and who severely beat him. The manager threatens Treves by saying he will go to the authorities unless Treves does not release Merrick.  The head of the hospital overhears the conversation and orders the manager out, saying he’s sure the authorities would be glad to hear of how he treated Merrick.  The hospital head tells Treves he would like to meet the patient the next afternoon.  Treves knows there is no chance keeping Merrick in the hospital if Merrick does not show himself to be mentally competent.

 

There’s no telling what wonders may exist in that person we have shut out.  Merrick had already learned the “23rd Psalm” from the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer.  Where, no doubt, he also ran across these words, the wisest words I know of to be found anywhere:

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Thank you for your attention.  Any announcements . . .

 

[1] i.e., fate

On Star Wars, Samurais, and a Future So Bleak Everyone Will Wear Mining Helmets

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by WLM 3 based on Zdzistaw Beksiński

I’m ashamed to say that I’ve never seen any of the Star Wars movies — not the blockbuster first installment of 1977 nor any of the vast array of sequels and prequels that in subsequent decades have rolled off the Lucas assembly line like so many gold-plated Model-Ts.

As a subscriber to the NY Times crossword puzzle, I have been punished for being ignorant of such worthies as Jabba the Hutt and Obi-Wan Kenobi, the same way I have punished for not having read any of the Harry Potter books.[1]

What’s the 5 letter word for first name of the astromech droid that appears in every Star War movie?

Search me.

I did try to read the first Potter novel but got about as far as I did when I attempted The Hobbit as an eighth grader. Blame my lack of interest on a leaden suspension of disbelief. I prefer Robin Hood to the Arthurian legends, the Lone Ranger to Flash Gordon, Sopwith Camels to starships. In other words, I don’t dig fantasy and most science fiction, which is not to say they’re not worthy genres. I don’t dig opera either, but I realize my lack of appreciation stems from ignorance and that I’m ultimately missing out on something truly wonderful.

But as far as Jabba the Hutt and Harry Potter go, personal predilections are no excuse for my ignorance. As a self-anointed anthropologist/social critic/prophet-of-doom, it should be my duty to study these cultural phenomena, these projections of our collective psyches, these myth-equivalents that shed light on “deep down things.” [now removing tongue from cheek]

Nevertheless, it ain’t gonna happen. I still haven’t read Proust or become closely acquainted with the films of the supposedly great Soviet director Tarkovsky so the idea of spending the ever decreasing number of my allotted Sunday afternoons matriculating into Hogwarts is way too much of a cross to bear.

What has brought these considerations to mind is that last week a candidate for a position in our English Department taught a demo class to my 9th graders as a sort of audition. Surprisingly, rather than reprising some proven boffo performance of poetic analysis from his past, something tried and true — as most aspirants do — he decided to go with what I am teaching, Orwell’s 1984.

He started the lesson by discussing Newspeak and the implications of the ruling party’s attempt to strip language of all nuance, a topic we’d already covered at length. Why complicate your life by having hundreds of words like grackle, wren, and bunting when the simple word bird would suffice? Does language play a role in helping us distinguish nuances?

Is the Jesuit Pope a communist from Argentina?

Do heavy, furry, hibernating, clawed mammals defecate in areas thickly covered with trees?

Are rhetorical questions possible in Newspeak?

Things got cracking when he shifted from language to genre. He said that he first read the novel as an undergraduate in a science fiction course. He asked the students to define science fiction and coaxed them into coming up with the idea that science fiction is a realistic depiction of the human condition featuring technology that doesn’t yet exist but is central to the plot.

He then asked if Star Wars were science fiction. One student said that no, it was fantasy, and the teacher agreed pointing out that each planet has a singular topography – desert or swamp or city or forest – so what we’re essentially dealing with is the planet earth. He added that the weapons are essentially swords, and spaceships lie well within the reality of current technology. He argued that we’re talking magic, not science here, and basically Star Wars is a Samurai movie set in outer space. As his name suggests, Obi-Wan Kenobi is in a sense a by-product of Japanese cinema, particularly Kurosawa’s 1958 samurai epic The Hidden Fortress.

The teacher then shifted back to Orwell, and the students identified telescreens[2] as the technology that qualifies 1984 to be considered as science fiction. In 1948, the year it was written, television was in its infancy, and telescreens did not exist (nor did they in the teacher’s undergraduate days).

They do now, however. After all, when I was with my wife in Houston at MD Anderson at the beginning of the school year, I taught this very class via Skype, which is essentially a telescreen but one that allows for two-way communication. So according to this line of thinking, 1984 can no longer be considered “science fiction.”

The teacher pulled his cell phone from his pocket and said, “Unlike the citizens of Oceania, we subscribe to our telescreens, actually pay Big Brother to collect the goods on us. (Of course, these aren’t the exact words he used).

Anyway, he went off on a rift on technology and dystopia and an era in the near future (about the time they’d be graduating from college) when automation might be eliminating quaint old human orchestrated procedures like cancer surgery. He mentioned nanobots replacing surgeons, and I imagined hordes of ravenous Pac-Men seeking out and devouring malignant cells.

A rather sobering and a subtle suggestion that future competition might be, shall we say, cut-throat, and that studying might be a good strategy, especially when it’s not only coal miners and sales clerks who will be out of work but also CPAs and surgeons.

At any rate, class ended, and the actors marched off leaving me alone in my room (101, by the way) contemplating a smog-smothered future where it’s always twilight or pitch black night, a future where hordes of the unemployed have devolved into urban tribal communities, in other words, the world of Blade Runner.

But, hey, fa-la-la-la live for today, in this case Sunday, 9 a.m EST. With Kim-Jong un, Putin, and the Donald rattling their lightsabers, we might not have to worry about the future at all.

So I think I’ll have a bloody mary and look out over the real life Darwin-themed drama my back deck provides.

Or maybe scrounge up a copy of À la recherche du temps perdu.

photo from our back deck of a wood stork

[1] As far as Star Wars goes, I do know that Darth Vader is evil, Princess Leia wears white, and that Luke Skywalker is the coming of age hero.

[2] Telescreens are ubiquitous two-way-mirror-like devices that allow the party to spy on citizens and to broadcast propaganda.

 

Celebrating My Two Favorite Commies, Jesus and Santa, to the Tune of Mojo Nixon’s “Santa, Get Straight to the Ghetto”

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I know this blog’s been a downer since the election – a negative screed, a longwinded lamentation, a Cassandra-like catalogue of bleak prophecies heralding the end of civilization as we know it.

But, as my ace commentator Sherman T Langston suggests I should, I’m putting on a happy face for this post by providing a heart-warming movie that boasts moving picture images of yours truly introducing Mojo Nixon’s “Santa, Get You to the Ghetto,” which serves as the soundtrack for the rest of the film, featuring Folly Beach’s Christmas Parade.

Hope you enjoy.

 

David Foster Wallace and Samuel Johnson

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posterAt one point in The End of the Tour, the David Foster Wallace character (Jason Segal) introduces the David Lipsky character (Jessie Eisenberg) as “Mr. Boswell.”

It’s what we used to call a “cut” when I was a kid, a playful little knife nick to the ego’s epidermis. As future biographer Thomas Boswell followed the Great Samuel Johnson around the salons of 18th Century London scribbling down his every word so Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky follows the Great David Foster Wallace around the fast food joints of Bloomington and Minneapolis scribbling down (and recording) his every word.

A major difference, though, is that Boswell worshipped Johnson, and being 30 years younger, looked up to him as you might an adored father. True, Lipsky recognizes that Wallace is a genius (and he was) and that he Lipsky is not (and he’s not); unfortunately, though, Lipsky suffers from that common young male testosteronic compulsion to see any contemporary as a rival. In his head he knows when it comes to Foster and him, it’s the literary equivalent of Bogey versus Barney Fife, but in his heart – or at least in his testes – he wants to be considered Wallace’s equal.

So the Lipsky character is both an ardent admirer and a resentful rival, and this tension provides the slight dramatic arc of the movie. Frankly, if I were you, I’d wait until the film comes out on Netflix.

Not that the film’s not well crafted and superbly acted (Segal might deserve an Oscar). However, this little movie with its appropriately washed out colors straining in winter light to render those undistinguishable commercial corridors that lead to every city in the US as soulless as possible ain’t exactly crying out to be seen on “the big screen.” The movie’s sort of claustrophobic. Our characters don’t talk about fiction, much less Infinite Jest, which could be a multi-generational novel set in Alaska for all we know. They migrate from emblematic soulless room to emblematic soulless room talking mostly about themselves, and the Wallace character’s social awkwardness doesn’t make you wish you could trade places with Lipsky.

What would have made the movie more interesting (and let me assure any Hollywood moguls out there reading this that I am available) is if we could have peeked inside of Wallace’s head on occasion. For example, when Lipsky asks Wallace why Wallace wears a head bandanna, we could have been treated to a montage from Wallace works – surreal scenes – for example, rapidly edited shots of wheelchair bound terrorists . . . a father strapping a Raquel Welch mask to his daughter before abusing her . . . a rollercoaster ride at the Indianapolis State Fair . . . dinner on a cruise ship with its Felliniesque diners, etc. etc. – all of these quick cut images gaining momentum until DFW’s head literally explodes.

The good and bad news is that this movie is very stage adaptable.

Dave and SamBut here’s why I’m glad I went. A cartoon light bulb went off over my head as I was watching. The DFW character as Segal plays him is a lot like the Great Samuel Johnson. He’s straggly-haired, overweight, disheveled, stooped, ursine, shambling, prone to a soul’s darkest nights, pitifully self-absorbed, and, despite his genius, someone who strives as hard as he can to be a good man.

I love Boswell’s Johnson, and in my way, I love David Foster Wallace, but not Lipsky’s Wallace. In fact, in this movie, he’s not as clever or fun or witty as at least three friends I can think of – Furman Langley, Jake Williams, and Melissa DeMayo Reiss.

I’d much rather spend a couple of hours with them on a rainy Sunday.

Freud, Jung, Hamlet, and Joyce

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A Finger Puppet Play in One Act

freud pyschoanalyzes Hamlet

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scene One : The castle at Elsinore.

Enter Hamlet moping

Hamlet: O, would this too, too solid flesh melt

and resolve itself into a dew.

O, how weary stale and flat seem to me

All the uses of this world. Fie on it. Fie!

 

Goddamn it! What a rogue and peasant slave am I!

 

The night sky that wheels above us,

That brave o’er hanging firmament,

That majestic roof fretted with golden fire,

Why it appearth no other thing to me

than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.

 

O, to be or not to be that is the question.

O, to sweat and groan under a weary life.

 

Fie on it. Fie.

But soft! Methinks

I hear that most pernicious woman

whose name is frailty.

 

Enter Gertrude:

 

Gertrude: Hamlet, O Hamlet.

Hamlet: Yes, mother.

Gertrude. O Hamlet, cast thy nighted color off and

let me giveth thee a sponge bath.

Hamlet: O mother, you know I have that appointment

Today with Dr. Freud.

Gertrude: I had forgot. Cancel it, love.

Hamlet: You knoweth what a procrastinator

I be. I shall go to the appointment.

Gertrude: Well giveth your mother a little kiss,

my love, before thou leavest.

 

Scene Two: Dr. Freud’s Offices.

Freud and James Joyce engaging in “the talking cure.”

Freud: Keep Going, Mr. Joyce. Get it Out

Joyce: Well, you know or don’t you kennet or haven’t I told you every telling has a taling and that’s the he and the she of it. Look, look, the dusk is growing!

Freud: Very well then, Mr. Joyce I’ll see you next time.

Joyce: By the way, Doc, to say that a great genius is half-mad, while recognizing his artistic prowess, is worth as much as saying that he was rheumatic, or that he suffered from diabetes. Madness, in fact, is a medical expression to which a balanced critic should pay no more heed than he would to the accusation of heresy brought by the theologian, or to the accusation of immorality brought by the public prosecutor. Good Day

exit Joyce

Freud: His Inflated ego is furthered pathologized by anal expulsiveness. What is that last book of his Finnegan’s Wake by a vast shit explosion? Anna!

Enter Anna Freud.

Anna: Yes, Father?

Freud: Whose next?

Anna. He calls himself Hamlet, Hamlet the Dane.

 

Scene Three: Hamlet and Freud’s session

(Hamlet lying on the psychiatric couch)

Freud: Enough about your mother. Tell me about this step father of yours.

Hamlet: O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain! Bloody, bawdy villain!

Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!

Freud: So I take it you do not like this man.

Hamlet: I should have fatted all the region kites

With this slave’s offal.

Freud: My son, it’s quite clear that you suffer from an Oedipal complex, that you are fixated in the phallic stage.   Our work is done here. That will be 500 marks.

Hamlet: You joketh. That’s it? I want another opinion.

Freud: Very well. Anna!  Bring in Dr. Jung

Enter Jung.

Freud: Dr. Jung, this young man wants to kill his father.

Hamlet: Stepfather!

Freud: To kill his father so he can be with alone with his mother, which obviously denotes the Oedipal complex.

Jung: I’ve been thinking, Herr Mentor, that you over-emphasize the sexual component in mental illness. I have a slightly different take.

Freud: I dare you! How dare you! Contradict me!

They fight.

Scene Four: Hamlet alone on the Battlement.

Hamlet:

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back

When the wind blows the water white and black.

 

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

The rest is silence.

Enter Joyce doing a jig

Joyce: If others have their will Ann hath a way. By cock, she was to blame. She put the comether on him, sweet and twentysix. The greyeyed goddess who bends over the boy Adonis, stooping to conquer, as prologue to the swelling act, is a boldfaced Stratford wench who tumbles in a cornfield a lover younger than herself.

End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousandsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the

Exeunt.

The End.