The Oncoming Hope

Just Kids is not a rock biography in the traditional sense; it's a manifesto on the birth of creativity, and how it emerges simultaneously with discovery of the self. This is not the Patti Smith of legendary Saturday Night Live satire; this is not the angry woman who essentially invented punk rock; the Patti Smith of Just Kids is a wide-eyed androgyne who escaped the backwaters to the big city, and faced every challenge with wit and grace.

Smith details the symbiotic and often tense relationship between herself, then-lover and future photography legend Robert Mapplethorpe, and the ever-morphing mystery of New York City. Apart from a pair of journeys to Europe to find the soul of Arthur Rimbauld, Smith remains, transfixed, in the center of the cultural whirlpool of the Chelsea Hotel, visited by playwrights, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and countless other dreamers, not to mention the burgeoning cult of Mapplethorpe. Shirley Clarke stopped in, Diane Arbus became the class historian.The only thing separating Smith from the rest of them? She was sober at the time, and she lived to tell the tale.

Everything about New York City was beautiful to her, even the parts that so many artists and aesthetes profess to disdain:

"The skyscrapers were beautiful. They did not seem like mere corporate shells. They were monuments to the arrogant yet philanthropic spirit of America."

Even in the most horrible, dingy and darkest corners of NYC, she finds poetry. Tell me that you are not at least marginally interested in visiting a rundown cafe she describes as "the Edward Hopper version of Dunkin' Donuts."

The picture we get of Patti Smith is someone who is impossibly erudite and incredibly well-read; did you know she worked in the trade of rare and valuable books for Scribner's before becoming one of the world's most legendary rock stars? Again and again, she provides little bits of cultural commentary that make me want to know her better, to converse with her, to find a way, against all odds, to befriend her:

"I didn't feel for Warhol the way Robert did. His work reflected a culture I wanted to avoid. I hated the soup and felt little for the can. I preferred an artist who transformed his time, not mirrored it."

That last statement eloquently expresses why I simply cannot connect with certain art, particularly Jonathan Franzen's Freedom (which I wrote about at length). Like me, Smith identifies with the 'mutinous spirit' of Zelda Fitzgerald. Could it be that I can be her? Smith didn't find success until she was 27; I am 26 now, there is still time.

I always felt that her music was something I ought to like rather than something I actually enjoyed. But now, understanding the context and the courage involved in creating her work, it's impossible not to marvel at Horses or its successors. And so a petite obsession is borne.

So this is the 2nd book I've ever read through on my wonderful new Kindle (hooray!).

Jonathan Franzen has vocally expressed his opposition to e-readers, saying that they spoil the experience of reading books. Having completed the novel, this is definitely an act of self-defense; the Kindle lets you highlight frequent examples of shockingly turgid prose, to spy every repetition, to easily go back and spot inconsistencies. Basically, it lets you be a close reader without the immersion-destroying activities of picking up a pen to mark the text.

It's been a week since I've finished the novel, in a 3 night burst that left me staying up until five in the morning and still getting up in time for work. I have to say, this is the way you should read it; don't try to savor it, for there is little to savor. Appreciate the ambition of Franzen's work, appreciate the scope, but still, don't dwell. Because there are a lot of problems.

THE CHARACTER PROBLEM

The novel has a serious character problem. It's not only that the characters are completely unlikeable (though that's certainly true), it's why they're unlikeable. They're completely flat! One almost gets the sense that Franzen spent years crafting the particular world and circumstances that his characters will live in, and then dropped in a bunch of tropes to populate that world. So we're left with Patty Berglund, the unhappy housewife, Walter Berglund, the long-suffering husband, Richard Katz, sex-addled and universally adored rock star, and Joey Berglund, the golden son (we are meant to accept this at face value, despite the fact that there is literally no evidence whatsoever that Joey deserves that sort of adoration).

The characters even behave like stock characters; we watch as Walter, in the middle of a wrenching fight with his wife where she has clearly submitted to the futility of all things, rants for pages on end about the overpopulation problem, about the relative merits of dealing with that problem, with global warming, with bird extinction. Franzen expects us to believe that a man at the end of his tether is actually capable of constructing reasonable A>B arguments about policy options while in a phone screaming match with his wife.

A good chunk of the novel is in the form of Patty's 'autobiography.' The plot elements are interesting when taken on their own, but you never lose the sense that this is a man writing in a woman's voice; her thoughts and conclusions are what a man imagines a woman to think, rather than what she actually thinks. This is made worse because Patty is writing about herself in the third person, and frequently refers to herself as 'the autobiographer.' The psychic distance is just too great to care much about what she has to say, or to try and empathize with her.

THE EDITING PROBLEM (AKA THERE IS NO EDITOR)

Franzen also seems to have a little difficulty in treating his readers like they are living, thinking people (maybe the stock character problem is actually a representation of how he views all people in the world). Take this sentence, for example:

Walter was frightened by the long-term toxicity they were creating with their fights.

It's short, it's succinct, it says everything you need to know, and with poignance. It's a clear and uncomplicated metaphor, which is why it's vaguely insulting when placed in context.

Walter was frightened by the long-term toxicity they were creating with their fights. He could feel it pooling in their marriage like the coal-sludge ponds in Appalachian valleys. Where there were really huge coal deposits, as in Wyoming County, the coal companies built processing plants right next to their mines and used water from the nearest stream to wash the coal [...]...there was no way around the fact that when you dug up coal you also unearthed nasty chemicals like arsenic and cadmium that had been safely buried for millions of years. You could try dumping the poison back down into abandoned underground mines, but it had a way of seeping into the water table and ending up in drinking water. It really was a lot like the deep shit that got stirred up when a married couple fought: once certain things had been said, how could they ever be forgotten again?

Did you get it? Did you understand the metaphor? Cause if not, Franzen not only expanded on it, but used another lazy simile at the end to remind you in case you'd forgotten! This is not entirely his fault; it's overwritten, and any decent editor would have attacked it with his red pen. But Freedom's editor dropped the ball repeatedly.

See here, a lazy writing device that never fails to drive me up the wall, the stuff of bad screenplays:

"I assume Joey's already taught you our house game?"

"Yeah, I totally suck at it," Joey said.

"[That's good, but let me explain all the rules anyway!]"

THE BUSH PROBLEM

To make this novel seem modern and relevant, Franzen seemed to have occupied himself in the masochistic job of figuring out what the hell happened in the Bush administration. But I don't think I'm wrong in saying that no one cares anymore except to wonder who we can prosecute; that was an era of cynicism that has long been replaced by something else; something represented only tangentially in the Berglund daughter, Jessica. Jessica gets no time in the novel, despite being the only one who might actually speak to the realities of modern liberal activists; we are not so bothered by the tricks marketers and politicians use because we know what those tricks are, and therefore are not as prey to them. We are less willing to compromise our ideals; and we are more willing to use so-called 'tools of oppression' to our advantage, for better or for worse.

But instead of Jessica, we get a hundred odd pages of Joey's pointless, irritating, and retrograde perspective. We learn, in gratuitous detail, how often he masturbates, what he masturbates to, and the general state of his dick at any given moment. Representative sentence:

"His dick, in his boxers, bestirred itself again, as if to declare its upness for the challenge."

Boring and inane. In Joey's section, we are also subjected to the arrant stupidity that leads him to becoming a Republican toadie, which would be interesting if it didn't have the depth of a puddle. His roomate's dad is one of the higher ups in the Jewish Republican establishment, and somehow seduces Joey into it. That's it. That's the only explanation for why Joey turns his back on his family's core beliefs and commits some truly heinous acts later on (that and some inexplicable loyalty to a girl that he seems to hate, but marries anyway. Actually we spend a lot of time on that relationship, and yet we have no understanding for why we are expected to think of this as a happy marriage, or a relationship that would have, in any way, continued after high school. Franzen tries to offer explanation, but none of it rings remotely believable).

OVERALL

If I am excessively harsh on this novel, which I did enjoy at the end, it's because I cannot for the life of me understand the praise it has received. The first quarter is excellent, the last quarter is excellent, but the middle sags with pretension and pseudo-political nonsense. I haven't even mentioned the Richard Katz section, which, like the Joey section, the novel would have been better without. If I wanted to read about some aging hipster ragging on Bright Eyes fans, well, I don't. Nor do I wish to read about how boring and awful it is that so many hot girls want to have sex with him, or how mainstream success somehow equates to selling out your soul. Representative Katz quote:

"And now that his prophetic dick, his divining rod, was again pointing him in her direction, he was at a loss to recall why he hadn't taken fuller advantage of his opportunity with her."

I have a feeling this book may have rung more true to me if I were a college freshman, as it is filled with the sort of cod philosophy we would espouse in the dormitory hallways at 4 in the morning, high on nothing but caffeine and dreams. But just like our youthful musings, this novel seems to bear little relationship with the real world. And I am speaking as a disillusioned liberal about a book whose core theme is the disillusioning of liberals. In fact, if I didn't already know that Franzen was liberal, I might have assumed this novel was written by someone with a Fox News view of them; one without understanding or actual vision, just a bunch of assumptions and stereotypes.

If you feel compelled to read it, read it fast, so you won't feel like you've wasted tons of time on it. But that said, if you're in the mood for a doorstopper with socio-political commentary, there are other books I'd recommend instead. Vanity Fair is the first to come to mind.

Everything you need to know about the film is in the opening scene: 17 year old J sits watching Deal or No Deal as his mother sleeps, or so it appears until the cops show up. Turns out she's dead of a heroin overdose. J proceeds to call his grandmother, Jacki Weaver's fantastically disturbing 'Mama Smurf' Cody, to figure out what do next. She brings him into her lion's den, and so J ends up in a surreal home where the matriarch not only enables her criminal grandsons in their lives of crime, but forces them to kiss her full on the lips (eww).

J quickly learns firsthand how dangerous the Cody world is, as his terrifying uncle drags him into the family business even while the cops turn up the heat, leading to bursts of extreme violence at the most unexpected moments. Let's just say that until the credits roll, no one is safe.

Jacki Weaver plays everything close to the vest until the final quarter of the movie, where she finally shows her true colours (they run blood red). It is the performance of a lifetime, where you don't even realize how subtly she's manipulating her family until all is revealed.

Actually, all the performances are great, especially Ben Mendelsohn as "Pope," the scariest, most ruthless member of the family. Every look he gives speaks danger, even when he's just offering to lend an ear after tragedy strikes. You don't want to take anything from him, because the cost will inevitably be too high.

Guy Pearce appears in yet another minor role (seriously I think he signs to these small indies just so the films can get funding), in a mustache from another century. He's J's only hope, and once we find out exactly how limited that help is, we truly understand the hopelessness of J's situation.

If I have one criticism of the movie, it's that it wraps up a bit too neatly. It's not so bad as to undercut the rest of the film, but it's definitely improbable. That said, it's a great movie, you should go see it! Am most pleased that Jacki Weaver got the token 'out of nowhere' Oscar nomination.

Blue Valentine can be adequately described with one word: brutal. Do not watch this if you are just embarking on a serious relationship. Don't watch it if your relationship is on the rocks. If you watch it when you're single, you might never enter a relationship again.

It presents a harsh reality that's all too real; sometimes there is no grand turning point when a relationship ends. Often it's just a steady chipping away by one against the other, until the very foundation breaks and the whole tree falls, smashing through everything in its way.

It has occurred to me of late that there has been a strange cross-pollination between mainstream and indie films, to the point where some indies like Kids Are All Right look as shiny as whatever Vince Vaughn tripe they're pushing down our throats. Similarly, you get mainstream films like The Town that pay a lot more attention to nuances of character than you'd expect in a mainstream action movie.

I've been missing that particular 'look' that indies of the late 90's and early 2000's had, not grainy exactly, but somehow gritty, a bit dirty, perfect in its imperfection. Random shots go out of focus when they perhaps shouldn't, fades and cuts seem to take just a little bit longer than they ought to. Everything is lit a shade too bright.

Something about that style of filmmaking makes the actors work harder; they can't act just with gestures, eyes or voices; every last bit of their bodies need to make a statement. It's poetry of sorts - just as every single word matters, every vibration is essential. I wish there were a term for this style (or maybe there is and I'm just ignorant). Blue Valentine is a great example of this; it's a very small movie with no fancy tricks but terrific actors, and still manages to loom so large in viewing and in memory.

We watch Michelle Williams as she steps onto the wrong train, a train which never seems to stop to let her off, or even stretch her legs. It's heartbreaking to see, as her journey moves forward in time, she loses her looks, her spirit and her very will to live. We don't even need to see her face to recognize this, it's in her posture. This is her story, from the first frame to the last, her attempts first to cope and then to escape.

And just so, Ryan Gosling's character grows up and becomes, well, horrible! He somehow becomes a vacuum, sucking the life out of everything around him at a velocity that's nearly impossible to break free from. It's not just his words, not just his actions, but something in his entire being makes it plausible that this is how he always faced life: looking for a way to take it for granted. He starts off desperately needy and transforms into desperately possessive. Who wouldn't break under that sort of pressure?

What makes the whole thing bearable, in the end, is that Blue Valentine is very much a story about these two people. It's not a referendum about the institution of marriage. It's not the grand story of the disillusionment that comes with age, when you learn that fairytales are not real. It's a close-up portrait of two people, one who is breaking at the seams, and one who is speeding up that process without even realizing it. This is the sort of movie that lives and dies on the strength of its actors, and they absolutely excel.

News of wondrosity!

Anne Hathaway has been cast as Catwoman.

Anyone who knows me, or follows this blog, knows the high regard in which I hold her, which is doubly astonishing given that I used to hate her.

But some question whether she has the requisite darkness and/or sultriness for the role, to which I will answer you with two homework assignments:

-If you don't think she's dark, watch Rachel Getting Married
-If you think she can't play terrifying, I refer you to Brokeback Mountain.

I can't wait!

It's been one of those days, the kind of day that happens once a year - we reminisce about high school.

This poem has nothing to do with high school, but for whatever reason, the reminiscences that I have with my high school friends always seem to come back to one influential English teacher. Influential how? It's hard to explain.

She made us read Heart of Darkness, and we all hated it, but after six months of discussing it, we fucking loved it. We understand every word choice, every emotion, every intent written within the text. We will never see the words "little sticks" again without imagining ourselves under assault by a team of people who have the unfortunate bad sense to fight guns with bows and arrows. We are still personally offended when someone writes it off as literature that supports empire, when we know that it is the ultimate anti-colonialist text, if you would only let it oxidise for a moment.

I've been struggling with this Poem of the Day column. On the one hand, it has been one of the most popular series here on The Oncoming Hope. On the other hand, I worry that I've just been showcasing poetry that's already popular, and not giving a voice to other writers. I love a lot of poetry. Some of it (a lot of it) you would have already read, so am I adding anything by putting a soft-beam lens on it?

But then, I think to myself, how many of us bother to read any poetry after high school? We were forced to do it then, so we forced ourselves to find styles we liked, just to make the study tolerable. But I've been finding that with poetry, as with music, I actually continue to enjoy some of what I convinced myself to like when I was sixteen. When you think about how much time we devoted to working hard in high school (for many of us Americans, I still wonder if it might be the hardest we worked in our lives) -- then for god's sake shouldn't we enjoy it when we're older?

Guest Post by: Lumos_Aeternum, otherwise known as "Most Honorable, Venerable, and otherwise Deplorable Peter"

My friend, the owner of this most excellent blog, has given me a chance to post about things of interest on here - whether my access will be removed quickly remains to be seen. I figured I would start somewhere close to my heart, a tool I've used for the last year in my writing, Scrivener.

In the past, I've primarily used OpenOffice Documents to write. It isn't as pretty as Word, but has most of the functionality, plus...it's free! (open source). For writing fiction, though, you only really need space to put down your thoughts. At least, that's how I once thought about it.

Enter Scrivener. This was once a Mac only product, but no longer! I'll get to that near the end. It has many features I probably won't use much, at least not at this stage in my writing. It is a product designed simply for the process of writing in an organized fashion. As such, it doesn't kill itself to provide a million different formatting options like Word would (although the export tools are remarkable). Instead, this beast is packed with tools to help you plan and organize your thoughts, ideas, chapters. It has index cards on virtual corkboards that you can move about if you need to reorder something.

It was this aspect that had me wary of trying it out. I was a bit more of an off-the-cuff writer, at least until I neared the end of a story. When I first heard about Scrivener, I had reached a part in my work-in-progress where I found it difficult to keep things straight (location names, random characters, themes I began in chapter one that I forgot to carry forward). I wondered if these tools could help with that, and I was happy to discover that It really has.

My latest novel attempt (begun during National Novel Writing Month) was pre-planned within the application. I had a map of my fictional world scanned in and added character descriptions and information about the political situation in the different nations my characters would visit. When you're in the trenches, seeking to tell your story, wasting time and momentum trying to figure out what color hair your main character's cousin had is counterproductive.

Another nice feature, for me, is the ability to go into Full Screen Mode. I can escape from my desktop and all of its marvelous distractions. It even lets you determine how strong the fade is on the background. So, if you want to see your wallpaper in the background, you can. This is something I've wished for for ages with Word, but they took their own sweet time. So if, like theoncominghope, you find concept art for Tron: Legacy a useful point of reference for the scene you're working on? You can literally make it surround your words.

Of course, it costs money. Not something to laugh at in these times. I bit the bullet and bought a copy last year, because the free trial made it clear that this was a program I would and could use to my advantage. Also, having won National Novel Writing Month, I got 50% off. I think that's a pretty sweet deal.

Recently, they have come out with a new version for Mac. I haven't used it, but they have added some interesting features that might entice me to upgrade. Also, for you non-Mac users, there is good news, finally! The creators of Scrivener have developed a Windows version (sorry Linux gurus, I feel your pain). The Windows version is in Beta at the moment (free to try out), and will be available for sale early this year.

There are other, and free, applications out there, some of which they mention at the bottom of this page http://www.literatureandlatte.com/links.php.

And here's a final thought: no matter what tool you use to write, just get out there and write. That is the key. Write, write, write!

"It is trying being a liberal in Dalton," begins "The Barber," the second story from O'Connor's masters thesis.  It's all too easy to relate to this story; the story of the educated Southern integrationist faced with all the ingrown racism and insensitivity of the ignorant. Naturally the topic of politics comes up when he's least able to escape - trapped in his tormenter's chair, half lathered and half shaven.

The protagonist gets angrier and angrier as he fails to find the right words or the perfect cutting phrase to disarm his mob of opponents. He then makes the ludicrous decision to go home and write a speech to convince the barber and other patrons of their ignorance and stupidity in matters of race and politics. And naturally, the whole episode ends in complete and utter humiliation.

While one of the great pleasures of reading O'Connor is the fun she makes of ignorant rednecks, there is equally an element of frustration reading such stories (or perhaps that's just my own frustration coloring my reading of the story). Maybe it's because race seems to have re-entered the national conversation in such heinous ways (There's no KKK in Barbour land!). But at least this story is quite funny, in the sense that you want to laugh even while you grit your teeth.

Mark Twain on Huck Finn:

"A book of mine where a sound heart and a deformed conscience come into collision and conscience suffers defeat." - Notebook #35 (reprinted in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Univ. of California Press, 2003)

An Alabama publisher will be releasing an altered version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, where certain objectionable words will be replaced with placeholders. We'll get to the others in the postscript, but lets start with the most egregious. The 215 (!) uses of the word 'nigger,' are to be replaced by the word 'slave.'

Just think about the two words. 'Nigger' is specific. When a white person says it, it hits like a crack of the whip. We all know what that word means, who it refers to, and what its implications are about American society and racial attitudes past and present. But slave? 'Nigger' reveals of its user a powerful, institutionalized hatred and a complicity with the evils of Southern society. Slave does not. 'Slave' certainly implies dehumanization, but the word doesn't refer to one specific type, era, or object of chattelry. In today's modern culture, 'slave' just as equally calls to mind indentured servitude in the Roman Empire as it does contemporary sex trafficking in Eastern Europe and Russia.

So what you're doing is taking a specific and awful human experience and subsuming it into a still evil but more broadly drawn human condition. And to do that, you have to minimize the impact of history.

When you change the word 'nigger' to 'slave,' it's not just political correctness run amok. It's second guessing the aesthetic choice of the original author. Changing that word does not in any way change the theme, the meaning, the overall point of the novel. But it does harm its authenticity. Changing that word would have us believe that somehow Huck is a magical being in Mississippi who managed not to be raised with the same values and patterns of speech that everyone else in his social class was. Changing that word undermines the aesthetic authority of the author. Changing that word fundamentally undermines the poignance of Huck's journey and eventual enlightenment.

You are taking a story about how one boy learns that love and friendship are more important than the expectations of society, no matter how much cultural and legal pressure that particular society places on him. These internal conflicts make Huck Finn who he is; they make him complex, dynamic, and eternally memorable. But to do that, you have to show that he is part of the society. The transformation is hollow if he is already born somehow 'better' than everyone else; enlightened without any experience to justify that knowledge.

POSTSCRIPT

1. As for correcting "injun" to "Indian." Again an aesthetic voice. The author chose to depict the dialectic form of the word. It's the way they pronounce it, for godssakes. And still do, in the South. Correcting this is like correcting all usage of the word 'ain't.'

2. And as for changing "half-breed" to "half-blood." Are you kidding me? That word is plastered through all seven books of that other beloved children's series: Harry Potter. Who says it? The racist Malfoys and their flunkies. These words are intended to shock us. We are meant to feel the full impact of their use. It gives us context for a world in which hatred and intolerance were ingrained into the very psyche, and to pretend that didn't trickle down into language is a fallacy.

3. At the end of the day, it is not the word that offends us. It's the entire sensibility of dehumanization. If you are offended by the word, you are missing the point.