WHAT MAKES IT GOOD?

Left: CAGED SKYLARKS




Maybe I hate golf. At least I’m uninterested in it. How can you make me care about the game in general or your particular interest in it? What makes three or four hours on a golf course worth a story? Worth an essay? To some withered nerd of a skeptic?

Soon I’ll be back in the classroom, teaching Basic Composition. In an attempt at a unifying, useful, thought-provoking question for the course and for the rest of our days, I’ll probably offer this to the students: “What makes it good?”

Whether we are evaluating a golf outing, or a blog, or a poem, or the architecture of a building, or a car, or a C.D., or an assist in basketball (only assists and defensive moves are interesting), or a strategy for starting up a business, or choosing a prospective date, or approaching her or him, or finding a restaurant or movie, or decorating a home (dorm room or house), the question arises, “What makes it good?” Isn’t it possible that there are at least a couple of answers that would apply to any human endeavor?

Surely the question of what is good might also include, "What makes it beautiful?" Or, "What makes it functional?" Must it include those? Surely it would include the question of what is important.

Or would it? Is there something I’m not seeing about the question? Or the nature of eighteen-year-olds? How much would, and should, answers change according to age, gender, ethnicity, and background (suburban, urban, small-town, farm), or region (Northeast, South, Midwest, West Coast)? And those factors don’t even take into account, as they might, parts of the world other than the U.S.

Have I gone totally pie-in-the-sky to think this is, and should be, more interesting than golf? Or brands of beer? Or models of cars? Far, far beyond a course in basic composition?

And if all this sounds elementary or condescending, if you’re thinking I should just re-take Dormitory Bull Session 101, please think back to conversations or other social situations (like poetry readings, concerts, golf outings) you’ve recently been involved in. Were you a participant, an interested spectator, or a victim? Why?

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The Hurt Locker, Movie Review

sand-colored cat



The Hurt Locker: 4 (on a scale of 1 low to 4 high )

In this study of a U.S. Army bomb squad in Iraq in 2004, director Kathryn Bigelow grabs us by the throat in the first few minutes and never lets go. I find myself tempted to say this is the best war movie I’ve ever seen, though spending much thought on art as a competition can become as wrong-headed as the Oscars are. So I'll just say I don’t remember feeling any more involved in the elite films of this genre—for example, Apocalypse Now, Deer Hunter, Platoon—than I was during Hurt Locker.

Original but not self-conscious in technique, the action scenes, along with the landscape of a distressed city and its inhabitants, feel absolutely immediate and real. Ditto the desert scenes. There is some gore, though not the mindless exploitation of it that I've come to expect in action movies. More prominent is the interplay among the three main characters, which poses important questions about leadership, friendship, recklessness and responsibility, courage, grace under pressure, loyalty, obedience, heroism, the independent personality--and, always one of my favorites: when and how a character can seem both arrogant and sympathetic.

Toward the end of the movie, I find two problems, neither of them fatal. First, there are indications of the probable outcomes of two of the three main characters. Why not the third, who might be the noblest of the group? Did I miss a line?

Secondly, there’s a bit of drift toward didacticism, or at least summarizing. However, it is fairly well controlled, never develops into full-blown propaganda, lasts for only five or ten minutes, and doesn’t even begin to override the method that has dominated: action, and imagery, and characters revealing themselves without a lot of instruction from the script on how we should feel or what we should think.

If you assume this will be, or should be, a facile anti-Bush or “War is Hell” flick, stop supposing and go see an admirable effort to avoid both glorification and condemnation. The Hurt Locker is closer to work than play for an audience; good art requires more effort and attention than entertainment does. But see it anyway. It's a disturbing wealth of visual and psychological experience, concerning some of humanity's oldest, most troubling themes.

Post-Modern Science-Lite

Music is a conversation.

Above . . . Barnacle Doug
Riffs to His Rock

A friend of mine, who knows what he’s talking about, suggests that science must be a conversation between a well-intentioned human investigator and nature, who will reply if asked the right questions in the right way. In that spirit, I offer the following, based on lay research and lay understanding.

The barnacle is a shell-like creature who attaches himself to a rock. When the seas get rough, the barnacle sends out a thread, like a spider web, which attaches him more firmly to his friend, the rock.

Because barnacles are stationary and fixed, they must mate with their closest neighbor. This is accomplished by having a strong and stretchable penis. After the mating season the penis is thrown away, and a new one develops the following year.

If adaptability and faith are major factors in determining which species will survive, surely the barnacle, with one of his other friends, the cockroach, will outlive humans by at least four eons.

Equally hard science, based on extensive research throughout Scandinavia, Tibet, and Wisconsin, has revealed no greater act of focus, strength or will to survive in animals, plants, or humans.

Philosophers and poets are gathering in Lithuania and West Virginia to study the chemistry of the barnacle thread and its relevance to love, both erotic and Platonic. Stay tuned.




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Richard Russo's Bridge of Sighs

Has anyone out there read Richard Russo’s Bridge of Sighs? What did you think? I’d be especially glad to hear women readers responding to Russo’s female characters, who strike me as fascinatingly complex and individual, yet fulfilling certain archetypes of womanhood. I think he keeps them constantly above the level of stereotype, but I wonder what the other gender would say.

As usual for long novels that I finish (in this case, I have about 100 pages to go, so don’t tell the ending), the architecture of the main plot and its subplots and the interplay among its main and minor characters create a structure that gives me the shivers. I cannot imagine anyone’s planning and then accomplishing this. Applause, applause.

For what it’s worth, in terms of plot(s) and main characters, I’ve come to think of the whole as a river with dozens of tributaries, or a freeway with many entrance ramps. So it's astonishing that any mere human can make sense of so many factors, the wiggles of each stream. Not one of Russo's events or characters takes an unrealistic turn, yet very little in plot and characterization is predictable.

I’m pretty sure I see sentences better than I see chapters, trees better than forests, and I must add this: Shame on Mr. Russo and his editors for not taking better care of his syntax or otherwise clunky sentences that pop up too often. Is this what the computer age has brought us? Speed reading over careful editing? Deadlines over details? And I don’t mean typos; I mean phrasing, diction rising above cliché, and deletion of unnecessary words and phrases that over-explain.

But I cannot, would not, quit reading Bridge of Sighs, with its complex characters, almost every one sympathetic in one way or another, as are their relationships. I’m impressed by Russo’s avoidance of simplistic solutions to complex moral, sociopolitical, and psychological issues. I care about every character and what will, or has, become of them.

I guess this is the bottom line: I rarely, rarely, finish a book this long, but these people have become part of my life, as do the characters in other compellingly realistic novels. I will miss the folks in this irrelevant, yet essential upstate New York town fed by its contaminated river.

FINCHES AND THE MEANING OF LIFE

Okay, I’ve gone a couple of blogs without talk about birds, and you’ll yelp if I don’t keep you posted on finches. Sunday I bought two new net socks and another small feeder, the old kind that forces the bird to eat upside-down, which finches weirdly do.

Problem is, you see too much of their white rumps. What is the evolutionary advantage of a white rump, when the rest of you is electric yellow, a lit-up target for near-sighted cats?
Another factor about the upside down finch-prayer to gravity: they look a little dead, hanging there that-a-way.

Speaking of which, my window has felt the impact of two drunken pilot deaths in the last three weeks or so. I’m attributing that to teen or female drivers—because both little cadavers were olive, not yellow. (You thought you had me on misogyny charges, didn’t you?).

Here’s one more series of events. By far, the majority of my finches lately have been female (I thought). What’s up with that? Did the males go on bloody skirmishes against each other, concerning territory? What kind of irrational creature would do that to others of his species? Over a some air space? Over some dirt?

Then I half-remembered, and then confirmed in The Books, that juvenile finches look like the olive-ocher female, weenie or no weenie. So I’m apparently teaching a ton of finch teens to come back here, or never leave.

But shouldn't I then worry about inbreeding? And in a finch version of Deliverance, who would play the banjo?

Random: Shakespeare, Tragedy, Modernism

Left: King Lear or Polonius?

Even with The Bard, sometimes we just have to love the boy in spite of himself. A couple of years ago, in the final scenes of an excellent production of King Lear, the play came to its predictable conclusion of dying humans flopping around the stage like hooked fish flailing on a pier. It might have been worse in Hamlet, sometime later, again in an otherwise excellent production.

This business of death as group seizure, or Shakespeare's intimation of the mosh pit four centuries later, would be absurd under any circumstances. Add to it the sound of bodies thumping against the wooden stage floor and the eloquent dying declarations (as our TV cop and lawyer shows might say, “excited utterances”), and it is all simply comic. Shakespearean tragedies must give directors fits.

All that flopping and thumping ruin my willing suspension of disbelief, along with any empathy or glee I’d developed toward the dying. It makes me long for Gary Cooper in a dusty ten-gallon hat, mumbling “Yes, Ma’am, this here eight-inch hole in my gizzard, it hurts a might.” Or Yogi Berra’s “Pain don’t hurt.”

I know, I know, you don’t go to a Shakespearean tragedy if you want Amy Hempel or Raymond Carver minimalism. But classic theater, along with the excesses of opera, might instruct us on why we have come to value understatement and restraint the way we do. Maybe the Renaissance showed us the idealized human, what we hope we can be at our very best, but an occasional or permanent attempt to see what we really are cannot be an entirely bad development.

Poetry, Two Movies

Not sure why, but a Cowbird for the two movies seems right, though I give each a 3--for doing something new?

First, about poetry:

Yesterday I stumbled onto a Dan Chiasson review of Frederick Seidel's poetry, and both had the kind of excitement that's often lacking in poetry and talk about poetry--bold but plausible statements, lines, and images, ideas you cannot dismiss even if they seem extreme or mean, and cleverly turned phrases by the dozen. I'm eager to get a book or two by both those guys, so I wonder if anyone out there has a comment or recommendation. I'm embarrassed that Seidel has escaped my attention till now.

Movie Reviews, 1 (low) to 4 (high):

Whatever Works, Woody Allen's newest, starring Larry David. 3.

I'm not a huge Woody Allen fan, though I've liked some of his work. I liked Whatever Works in spite of overwriting and overacting in the the female lead's stereotypical rendering of the dumb southern belle. If you remember A Streetcar Named Desire fairly well, you might have fun seeing Woody's uses of it. Or that might just be grating.

As always, I found a lot of the supposed wisdom of Woody Allen to be very ordinary, if not trite--and certainly repetitive. In the mouth and antics of Larry David, the best lines and gestures are terrific, but there's also a lot of dead weight (no pun intended--oops. See the movie).



Bruno, the ballyhooed follow-up to Borat. 3.

If you liked Borat well enough to see Bruno, I don't think you'll be disappointed by the new show. Bruno probably lacks the substance (meaningful social criticism, for example, or implied questions about the role of spontaneity in art and definitions of art) that Borat might have had, and Bruno's best moments aren't quite as good. But I did find them funny, and so did others in the theater. My psychic jury will be deadlocked for a long time regarding the merits of these two films--if they're saying anything, do they have to say it that way? But apparently they are turning new earth, and anyone who can handle the notion of film as an offensive weapon should enjoy Bruno well enough.