Speaking of Gone with the Wind
http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2009/06/30Now, can someone please say this to me?
"Well, I dare say. Really, I wouldn't take you for the type to write a successful book. You don't take your life seriously enough to be a novelist."
Then I'll just scramble together five feet of manuscript and rush them over to my New York publisher...
I would adore a passage like this somewhere in my obituary:
"It was published on this day in 1936, and immediately it was a sensation. Reports abound of people in Atlanta staying up all night to read Mitchell's novel that summer of 1936.
It revitalized the publishing industry. The next year, Mitchell won the Pulitzer Prize. Her book was made into a movie starring Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh, and when it had its premiere in Atlanta in 1939, Margaret Mitchell was there at the Loew's Grand Theater with the movie stars."
I Dream in Scarlett
“When she arose at last and saw again the black ruins of Twelve Oaks, her head was raised high and something that was youth and beauty and potential tenderness had gone out of her face forever. What was past was past. Those who were dead were dead. The lazy luxury of the old days was gone, never to return. And, as Scarlett settled the heavy basket across her arm, she had settled her own mind and her own life.
There was no going back and she was going forward.”
--
Gone with the Wind, 356
So many surprises in
Gone with the Wind. Surely Margaret Mitchell indulges in a bit too much, “…something that was youth and beauty and potential tenderness had gone out of her face forever…” But still, Scarlett’s development – even as I have read only to page 405? I can't think of another book that has dragged the protagonist through such hell by mid-story. The courage it takes to take a character so far in so few pages (especially considering the steady stream of the indulgences cited above)!
This is a surprising work of twentieth century feminist lit. Popular notions of who Scarlett O'Hara is do not do her justice. She is not a southern belle. The things of which she is capable are spellbinding! I'm unsure of how much Mitchell is aware of - was she looking to simply create a good story, or to comment on the world around her - but she makes Scarlett 'manly' in her resolution. She needs to remind the reader of Scarlett's tiny waist and perfect complexion, otherwise we lose connection with the feminine value of her character.
This passage marked the first time I truly connected with Scarlett. Grudgingly, I knew that we were sisters. (I stifle mountains of the bitchiness that she doesn’t even recognize! And so I hated her even more, for indulging herself…)
The successful of us all settle our own mind and our own life, at whatever provocation. But I think Scarlett misses an important detail (which Melanie understands). We settle our own minds and our own lives – but with a sense of fatality and sense of humor to allow for love, life, and the pursuit of happiness.
But maybe we are given this from birth. We must remember the time Scarlett spends angry at her mother Ellen for not providing any behavior of society through which she may understand the cruel world set before her. It's amazing to think of the changes that happened in Scarlett's world in so short a time. And makes you consider if this may happen in our own time.
Perhaps the biggest surprise of all is the ways that this novel sticks with me. Throughout the day I consider what Scarlett will do next. I write my movements in my head as Mitchell might describe them.
Maybe it was a symptom of reading 100 pages after 10pm. Maybe there was too much southern sympathizing. Maybe something about work is like a civil war – serving on the losing side of the marketing agenda. But holy cow! Last night I dreamt Gone with the Wind in Janome (work) language! I was serving under my boss Randy – and we were combing the south as part of the commissary department. And I was a man wearing a dingy Confederate Uniform. But I was still myself: trying to be as polite as possible under unendurably impolite work orders.
Truly The Greatest
Cat Power’s new album is a surprise, to say the least - but the surprise is a good one, and for better or worse, her fan base is about to explode.
Her last album was 2003’s
You are Free, and now she returns with a revolutionary album,
The Greatest. It is satisfying in a way that Cat Power has never been. While her previous work leaves you longing (and this is precisely why it is so
good), the effect of this album is strangely fulfilling. It’s almost…happy. The tunes are even catchy, with rocking roadhouse piano and finger-snapping accompaniments. It is less singular than her other records, but the fact that it is easier to like doesn’t detract from its soulfulness or its sincerity, if anything, it adds to its musicality.
‘True’ followers of Indie rock will no doubt be pshaw-ing when they hear it, with its wide-range potential appeal and anodyne flair. Secretly they’ll be playing it on their ipods – allowed this indiscretion (it IS still on Matador) but somehow indulging in a guilty pleasure. Sure, this album is sad and hopeless in a way that only Chan Marshall can be, but it’s not bleak, and it’s not baleful. Those indie fans not so die-hard in their singularity will be pleased to discover that her lyrics are still nearly-imperceptible, but her melodies now have a prominence. It’s hard to say how much influence her Memphis-based back-up band had, for there is a hint of this more mainstream tendency in some of her later work, especially on 2003’s
You are Free (most notably “I Don’t Blame You” and “Fool”).
Songs like “Living Proof” and “Lived in Bars” would never have been possible on a previous Cat Power album. There are no screeching guitar riffs here, no truculent melodies or atonal lyrics. These are reminiscent of swinging ‘70s southern rock songs. And the fact that her amazing voice is at the front of these songs makes them stunning. These songs are not representative of why we have come to love Cat Power, they are too easy. It has always been the hint of beauty that has kept me coming back to her, but now she allows us full exposure to her exquisite voice. It feels she’s awarded us something - the delight experienced after a prolonged exposure to dissonance.
“Empty Shell” comes closer to being a true country song than most songs that currently try to label themselves ‘country’. With its down-home violin progressions and heartbreaking lyrics it reckons back to the music your pa taught you to know and love; this isn’t a song about drinking whiskey or pick up trucks, it’s about hurt, with a surreal hopefulness that is the true medium of country.
“All that is left is an empty shell / Of my heart that is crushed / I don’t never wanna see / What my mind has seen / When you loved me / Every night every night alone with you / Every night alone now.”
It is somewhat reminiscent of 2003’s “Good Woman,” though the latter’s violin is more menacing and unpolished. But again, the tendency toward this album is evident.
“Could We” is a fun romp, its horn accompaniment reminiscent of Springsteen’s “E Street Shuffle.” Elsewhere I’ve read a lambasting of this tune, but it’s free and easy, characteristics I suppose most Cat Power fans aren’t expecting from her.
The unadulterated beauty of “Where is my Love” would be unthinkable on Cat Power albums of the past. The strings and words are evocative of an interlude in a musical, a beautiful belle staring out her window, Snow White sure that someday her prince will come. It occupies the same eccentric space as Bjork’s harp-accompanied “Like Someone in Love” off
Debut, though somehow a happy fairy-tale is more believable on a Bjork album.
“After it All” is her most successful union of southern blues and her own sound, though it tilts away from her standard toward the country. On this track, we find her lilting and singular voice, backed with fantastic blues piano.
“Hate” and “Love & Communication” are Chan Marshall as we know her. And they are a fitting ending to this wonderful album. They remind us that this apple hasn’t fallen too far from the tree, despite what our own expectations may be. To me, this album feels like a more grown up Chan Marshall, one perhaps more concerned with things outside her insular world. It's looser, more accepting of fate, less hateful of circumstance. And I think that’s a fitting reminder to us all. Hopefully it will bring some of our more revolutionary indie lovers back to the basics, reminding us to like it because it’s good, not because we are different for liking it.
Dead Man
Certainly belatedly, I was first introduced to the work of Jim Jarmusch with
Broken Flowers, not even a year ago. My reaction to that film was very mixed. Add that to Netflix’s insistence on saying things like, “Only Jim Jarmusch could make a film like this,” and I was a bit skeptical when I popped
Dead Man into the DVD player last night. But
Dead Man was amazing. It certainly contained the ponderousness of
Broken Flowers, but there was a surprising drive behind
Dead Man and a message that was lacking in the former film.
I have recently discovered a love of westerns, through films like
McCabe and Mrs. Miller and books like
Lonesome Dove, so
Dead Man seemed just a continuation in this blossoming affair. What was surprising was its seeming reluctance to make itself a western; the movie seemed to follow the trajectory of William Blake’s realization that he was acting out a western story. This was tantalizing, and it caused the viewer to discover the film seemingly along with the film itself. I think this was due at least in part to Johnny Depp’s amazing portrayal of his character. He showed the great otherness of the easterner in the west - the fact that he could not understand this culture or what it required of a man. The viewer has the same relationship with the western. It is a foreign culture that we study through these films; it is never something that we can relate to through our past experiences.
The black and white format of the film, of course, reinforced this. In certain scenes Jarmusch made the viewer acutely aware of this with camera tricks. There is an amazing scene where Blake believes he is seeing things in the dark, and three Native Americans in war paint appear to him in the shadows of the trees. Jarmusch carries this off remarkably, and the viewer’s eyes must adjust to the scene as if she too is looking for something in the dark. The characters come out of the background in the way that you find a camouflaged bug in nature movies. It was a fantastic and ingenuitive use of the medium.
The scene with the trappers, played by Billy Bob Thornton, Iggy Pop, and Jared Harris was also marvelous. The speed of the film was slowed down, jarring the viewer from her complacence in the story. The group represented a kind of deformed family unit, with Iggy Pop playing a cross-dresser who plays the female among the men. Besides being hilarious, it also showed how distant the western and its players are from contemporary American society, yet at the same time, how similar in their insistence that anything goes. This idea is reinforced by an interview with Jarmusch, by Jonathan Rosenbaum for Cineaste, (which can be viewed in its totality
here)
“Cineaste: In the Sixties and Seventies, there was an attempt at a sort of makeshift genre that might be called the Acid Western, associated with people like Monte Hellman, Dennis Hopper, Jim McBride, and Rudy Wurlitzer, as well as movies like "Greaser's Palace"; Alex Cox tapped into something similar in the Eighties with "Walker."
Jarmusch: Yeah. And I think when Blake encounters the trappers [Iggy Pop, Jared Harris and Billy Bob Thornton], it's the same thing. It' s like here is a trace element of the family unit that has gotten so perverted out here, because these guys live out in the fuckin' nowhere. Yet there's some slight thread of a family unit that they' ve adapted between themselves—which is absurd on one level, but on another level it's exactly what you're saying. They're way out there.
I don't know if you can hear it, but when Iggy's trying to load his shotgun, he's complaining, "I cooked, I cleaned. . ." Incidentally, I recently came across this interesting Sam Peckinpah quote: "The Western is a universal frame within which it's possible to comment on today." Of course, I only saw this quote after I made the film.”
In his introduction to this interview, Rosenbaum also makes a very intriguing claim about the violence in the film. He says,
“Perhaps the film's most courageous defiance of commercial conventions is a response to the current cinema of violence that is so unsettling that audiences generally can't decide whether to wince or laugh. Every time someone fires a gun at someone else in this film, the gesture is awkward, unheroic, pathetic; it's an act that leaves a mess and is deprived of any pretense at existential purity, creating a sense of embarrassment and overall discomfort in the viewer that is the reverse of what ensues from the highly estheticized forms of violence that have become de rigueur in commercial Hollywood ever since the heyday of Arthur Penn and Sam Peckinpah, and which have recently been revitalized by Tarantino, among others.”
I think this is spot on. This “defiance of commercial convention” draws us deeper into the film, because we can sympathize with Blake’s awkwardness with a firearm, and it’s a great commentary on the ambiguity we have with the culture of violence that most movies represents.
Lastly, Jarmusch’s choice of soundtrack was genius, and not just because I love Neil Young. The brooding electric guitar that accompanied the fade-ins and outs of each scene was haunting, and oddly appropriate. Obviously this is anachronistic, but if there is a sound created to accompany the events of this film, Neil’s guitar is it.
Kiwi the Child: The guitarist and piano player are HOT!
Leave it to the Neuroeconomists!
As a close friend of the brilliant economist, Noah Masters, (view his blog
here) I am forever working to broaden my understanding of economics, a branch of social science quite outside my realm of easy understanding. So it was with great pleasure that I stumbled upon a few articles in recent publications of
The Economist that caused me to question the essential nature of what drives markets, and what makes consumers tick.
First, From “
Aggro of the Agora”
The Economist, January 14, 2006:
“Mr McFadden's speech leaned on the work of neuroeconomists, who claim to prove what Adam Smith long ago asserted: man's ‘propensity to truck, barter and exchange’ runs deep in our nature. According to brain scans, it lurks in the same primitive, limbic vaults of the cerebrum as our instinct to fight, flee and feed ourselves. Indeed, ‘shopping and sex share the same neurotransmitters and receptors,’ Mr McFadden jokes.”
This idea really fed into my liberal lit-major’s tendency to question the superiority of capitalism as an economic system. Isn’t one of the principles of polite society to overcome just these instincts -- ‘to fight, flee, and feed ourselves’? Then again, the major argument against a socialist economic system is the assertion that people are naturally greedy, and predisposed to fight for individual gain, as opposed to collective security. My response to this is always that overcoming these primitive urges is what makes us human. Besides, intelligence is not rewarded monetarily, and to sooth the soul, one must find a spiritual outlet - again, something that cannot be purchased at Target or Bergdorf Goodman.
These ideas aren’t that revolutionary to my understanding of economics, but the thought that shopping is a part of an essential human nature is kind of baffling, considering that an economic system that supports disposable income and the unnecessary acquisition of goods is only a few centuries old. Does this support the claim that capitalism is the essential economic paradigm, as it is a system that finally supports the needs of human nature, or does it take us backward in a theory of social evolution?
With these ideas in mind, I was giddy to come across this article in
Intelligent Life, a spin-off magazine under
The Economist. The article describes the decline in the cachet of luxury goods, as brands create materials that a wider audience can afford – the democratization of luxury, if you will.
From “
The four facets of chic”, by Rosemarie Ward,
Intelligent Life, Summer 2005.
“A luxury product has ‘four pillars’, says Milton Pedraza, head of the Luxury Institute, a consultancy that tracks trends for the wealthiest 10% of American households. First, the item must demonstrate superior quality. Second, it must be truly unique and difficult to acquire. Third, it must enhance one’s status. And fourth, it must brighten one’s self-image, making the buyer feel special. Mr Pedraza is worried that the growth of ‘masstige’ (mass-market plus prestige) will devalue a luxury brand’s worth.”
So how are we to understand the primitive nature of the urge to shop in light of the ‘four pillars’ of luxury products? Wouldn’t it hold that the acquisition of these luxury items would appeal to our basest primitive natures? I believe the branding establishment of these luxury items would lead you to believe that an appreciation of the ‘finer things’ is a mark of sophistication, though perhaps the neuroeconimists among us may beg to differ. But maybe we have to wait for the study on the impact of price tags on brain scans.
Edmund Wilson, mon amour
Reading this week’s
New York Review, I fell in love yet again. This time the honor is bestowed upon Edmund Wilson, the literary critic and journalist who wrote for
The New Yorker,
The New Republic, and
Vanity Fair (among other things) for over sixty years. Gazing at his picture, one is struck with his pudgy literary critic exterior; it his not his appearance that causes my heart to flutter. His writing speaks through ages: describing the literary scene of Paris, alongside Hemingway, dos Passos, and Fitzgerald in the twenties; bemoaning the unquestioned literary authority of Eliot, Joyce, and Yeats in the thirties; and forever contemplating the plight of the alienated American liberal.
John Updike, reviewing his journals, described his commentary on the American scene of the thirties as having renounced, “the hope of a civilized intelligence to identify itself with America.” Ahhhhh, such truthful words, but applied in our present context, so eerily prescient. It is this prescience which really characterizes much of his later writing. Of course, in time eternal quotes on the state of society continually recycle their applicability. But Wilson hits the nail so directly on the head so often; one cannot help but revel in his genius.
To investigate:
In his preface to
Europe without Baedeker, written during the Vietnam War, Wilson claimed that, “our talk about bringing to backward peoples the processes of democratic government and of defending the ‘free world’ is as much an exploit of Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy as anything ever perpetrated by the English.”
In the sixties, Wilson wrote of his growing distrust of what he denounced as “the policies of the lying governments; the inevitable standardization of what we assume to be ‘exotic’ and ‘backward’ peoples; the stupidity of applied ideologies; the competition of ‘success’ with ‘status.’”
In the twenties, he claimed that “the landslide of American nationalism had already begun’, and he feared that, “the United States will develop into a great imperialistic power with all its artists, critics, and philosophers as ineffective and as easily extinguished as the German ones were in 1914.”
And finally (and isn’t this a feeling we’ve all had, at the very least on November 3, 2004) “I find – with a certain surprise – that I am rather out of tune with the US. It has suddenly come over me that, whatever you are doing, functioning in America is a terrible struggle – in the long run, it wears you out.”
There is more to love about Wilson than just his dissatisfaction with the state of America. Inside his dissatisfaction is embodied a kind of loss of innocence, which I think any critic/appreciator of society and literature happens to stumble upon at some point. But still, despite his bitter nostalgia, he held on to a focus that directed his reading and pursuits, (and one which I continually site as my own
raison d’etre), as he had, “made it his business to extend himself into every kind of human consciousness with which he can establish contact.” He was forever seeking, “the untried, unsuspected possibilities of human thought and art.” These sentiments, however radically optimistic, are so necessary in our society, and so easy to bury beneath the clutter of Fox News and People Magazine. As I sit listening to the confirmation of hearings of Samuel Alito, Jr., I can’t help but think that this biography has come about at a most auspicious time.
(all quotes from “The Unquiet American.” Pankaj Mishra.
The New York Review, January 12, 2006)
