The Sex Queen’s Daughter Slashes the Social Ladder MOLLY JONG-FAST THE SOCIAL CLIMBERS HANDBOOK “My book is coming out in 23 days and I can feel myself slipping into prebook insanity … not as bad […]
Content
Someday This Will Be Funny, by Lynne Tillman
For a good two years living in New York City, I was bitter each time I would see a couple out in public holding hands or making out, because I was single—eating alone, going […]
The Illumination by Kevin Brockmeier
What if you broke your arm and a shaft of light came shooting out of your elbow? Or if your boyfriend left you and your chest glowed with brilliant radiance–the pain could be an illumination.
So is the basis of Kevin Brockmeier’s new novel The Illumination. He takes the most tragic of human condition, both emotional and physical, and gives it beauty that never ceases to reveal new interpretations of pain. A woman cuts her thumb and a sword of light shoots out of the wound; a young boy’s bum has a lit up square-edged mark from a paddle spanking; a girl’s skeleton swells white as disease rushes through her bones. Though written with lyrical and beautiful phrases, there is no uplift in this theme that one would normally ascribe with radiance, not in the figurative sense anyway. It has more to do with tenderness. In one scene, after a young Chuck Carter is beaten by fellow classmates, Mr. Brockmeier describes the episode: “For a few seconds, the light poured out like water. It hurt just a little too much to be beautiful.”
The six characters that are protagonists to each of their stories (a data analyst; a photojournalist; a schoolchild; a missionary; a writer; a street vendor) are all at a loss–not only from what is obvious, but from what is underneath them, emotionally and psychologically–and where there is injury, there is light. It’s a global phenomenon. One wonders if Mr. Brockmeier’s intention is to illicit a kind of empathy for those in pain, especially from members of the ‘fend-for-yourself’ culture. Would the immediacy of being able to witness pain invite more compassion? Perhaps, if you were to cross the street and see someone’s arthritic knees spark like a disco ball, you might be inclined to help him.
It isn’t just The Illumination that threads these six narratives; there is also a journal, a love diary: I love sitting outside on a blanket with you, my bare foot brushing against yours. I love how embarrassing you find your middle name. I love how irritated you get at smiley face icons, or, as I know you love to call them, “emoticons.” I love seeing your body turn into mosaic through the frosted glass of a hotel shower. The diary is comprised of reasons why a husband loves his wife. But they get into a car accident. Carol Anne, one of the protagonists, shares a hospital room with the wife for whom the journal is written. The wife, before she dies, gives the diary to Carol Anne, and from one story to the next, the journal ventures on its own journey, coming across characters that find themselves touched by the emotional radiance it reveals.
Light and Language in True Grit
True Grit – by Mario A. Zambrano
There might be a better reason why I was impressed after seeing True Grit, the latest Coen film, other than that it was a film masterfully put together; from soundtrack to dialog to cinematography. I didn’t watch Westerns growing up, even with the insistent coaxing from my father. It wasn’t in my interest to watch cowboys ride horses and spit tobacco while abusing Indians making them out as if they were lesser than the horses they rode. John Wayne was mentioned more than a dozen times, and there was a particular tune my father would sing when he’d feel he’d performed some heroic deed. If I tried to sing it now it’d sound like the opening track to an Indiana Jones flick, but if I heard the melody I’d recognize it and be half-certain that a man was nearby with his chest filled with pride because of some stunt he’d performed to make him feel like John Wayne.
I’m not sure why I agreed to see True Grit, if it was because I was on vacation at home in Houston during the holidays⎯meaning that days are spent mostly making meals and waiting to see what my parents would like to do⎯or if it was because I’d heard hype about Jeff Bridges’ lead performance. I didn’t know at the time that this new adaptation, inspired by the novel by Charles Portis, had already been made into a film in 1969 with John Wayne himself, whom won an Academy Award for his role as Rooster Cogburn. I have my father to thank for letting me know. As the movie began, he leaned over to me and said, “Let’s see if this is as good as the original.”
Before an image is revealed, a track played, the movie begins with a young girl’s voice, prim and strong-willed, and a faint golden light slowly illuminating at the center of the screen. Mattie, the young girl, tells the story of how her father was killed, who killed him, and her plans for finding the man so that justice prevails. She finds the U.S. Marshall Rooster Cogburn, a drunk, one-eyed official known for his easy hand in shooting criminals, and offers him fifty dollars to find the man that killed her father. He hesitates at first, shocked and amused at the fourteen-year old’s insistent proposition, but finally accepts.
As I reflect on the film I realize that there are different kinds of films for different kinds of interest. If one wants to be wowed with the latest technological feats and cinematic effects then one could choose a film like Transformers or Harry Potter to sit back and be bedazzled. But if one prefers character and dialog then there are recent films like The Social Network and The Kids Are All Right to satisfy the itch. True Grit is one of those films.
There is a scene where Mattie haggles with a vendor trying to sell back a few ponies that her father had bought before he died. She’s only fourteen, and yet her wit and brilliance pierces the scene like a shaft of light in a dark tunnel, the way she handles the language is sharp and acerbic. I couldn’t help but feel a sense of loss for vocabulary and conversation, something that has gotten loose and easy over the years, especially amongst our teenagers. I was sitting atop a moment of irony: the most impressive highlight of the scene was the speed of mind and eloquence of rhetoric, yet there were no interchangeable vehicles or sweeping visual effects that could turn a human into a mongoose, and make it seem ‘real’. And there I was in a theater with a TMX sound system next to a young woman who a few minutes earlier had chanted with her husband such sophisticated phrases like, “OMG,” “For real?,” “She is so not right.”
What’s happened to our language? Was a Western film really impressing me on the grounds of verbal skills in a way that I thought could only be done in an English novel? Yes, it was. The Coen brothers, who wrote and directed the film, were doing a fantastic job in transcending me to a literary experience not commonly felt in blockbuster hits.
Overexposed by Susan Shapiro
Susan Shapiro, a New School professor since 1993, instructs students to live the “least secretive life you can.” Her latest comic novel, Overexposed does this for her characters and reads like a tell-all expose. Rachel […]
The Adderall Diaries
“…I became curious about things and my curiosity kept me going.” The Adderall Diaries, S.E. Note: Adderall is a brand-name medication intended for people with ADHD. It increases alertness, libido and concentration, and, because it […]
Great House
‘I wanted to be judged on what I did with my life, but now I will be judged by how I described it.’ – Great House, Nicole Krauss
Sensibility veils the language in Nicole Krauss’ new novel Great House, not in the way that obscures the images of life on the other side of the narrative, but in a way that perceives a character’s past—reflecting on loss, the inheritance of one’s history —in a sort of nostalgic embrace that finds poetry in meditation: ‘When at last I came across the right book the feeling was violent: it blew open a hole in me that made life more dangerous because I couldn’t control what came through it’/ ‘…my mind went to it like a tongue probing the tender spot of a missing tooth.’
All the narrators that compose this orchestrated collection share a poet’s sensitivity and point of view. Two of these characters are writers: Nadia, a middle-aged novelist in New York City who has a brief affair with a Chilean poet named Daniel Varsky, who gives her a wooden, nineteen-drawer desk, once owned by Lorca, to look after when he goes back to Chili, and Lotte Berg, a former Kindasport chaperone (her story his narrated by her husband Arthur Bender) who writes elliptical stories in the privacy of her attic studio, on the same desk Nadia looks after years later⎯the desk being the object that threads together all four narratives. Other participants in the trajectory of ‘the desk’ are Leah and Yoav Weisz, children of an Israeli furniture dealer who specializes in retrieving heirlooms lost to the Nazi’s during the war. And finally, there is Aaron, a man writing to his estranged son Dov after his wife’s death, trying to piece together the puzzle of their relationship that has been obscured by misunderstanding. Dov, who left Israel and went to London to become a judge, is alluded to as the connecting line to Nadia, who narrates her story to a judge, ‘Your Honor’, whom she has fatally injured in a car accident in Israel.
*Editor’s note – there’s so much more to this review – click more and keep reading.
Peter Orlovsky Memorial at The Poetry Project
The East Village was alive this past Wednesday night with both those who haunt and those who need to be haunted
In St. Marks Church on 10th Street, hundreds of people filed into the Poetry Project’s Memorial for the poet Peter Orlovsky who died this past May. His name becomes more recognizable when it precedes the fact the he was Allen Ginsberg‘s lover and life-long companion, immediately positioning Orlovsky as a shadow amongst the great Beat poet. He never howled as loudly as Ginsberg, but he was bursting with creative energy and feelings so dynamic that when Ginsberg encouraged him to write, it was only natural that he did so.
Throughout the evening, music, poetry, storytelling, and memories compounded in unraveling Orlovsky as a true poet. Some friends, like Patti Smith, recalled “always being in the same room with Peter, but never speaking a word to one another.” They bonded through the unspoken – from being surrounded by an intellectual circle of those who were accustomed to speaking.
Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go is that rare book that eludes categorization. Is it literary fiction, or sci-fi? A thriller or a quiet rumination on the human condition? Is it a dystopian tragedy, or a coming-of-age love story? Astoundingly, the answer to all of these questions is simply “yes.”
It’s difficult to review the novel without giving away some of its more surprising plot points—discovering the world of Never Let Me Go is both its joy and its sorrow. (The film adaptation is premiering this Oscar season, so read the book before the movie hype spoils it for you.) I’ll reveal only as much as the first ten pages do: The novel is narrated by Kathy H., who works as a “carer,” in England, in the 1990s. She and her two best friends, Ruth and Tommy, grew up and were students together at Hailsham. Kathy H. has had a chance to reconnect with her friends after many years apart, since they were both “donors” she “cared” for. Hailsham, which seems very much like a boarding school, was much better than any of the other places. We see the “guardians” there are interested in art and creativity—the students take classes in drawing, poetry, music appreciation …and little else. One “donor” shudders when Kathy asks where he went, however, “he wanted… not just to hear about Hailsham, but to remember Hailsham, just like it was his own childhood.” Indeed, Kathy’s observant yet naïve reminiscences allow it to become our memories as well (though we learn in Chapter One that she’s not exactly sure where Hailsham is.)
Let The Great World Spin
Who would’ve thought that in this craze-filled city, on an early morning in 1974, most every New Yorker would’ve stopped what they were doing to turn their heads and see, 110 stories above them, […]