John Crowley Little and Big

Speaking (still) of novels-into-movies, I've come to understand an effect of certain movies -- mostly British, mostly high-tone -- made from older novels.  The greatest part of the pleasure of watching, say, a Jane Austen movie, or Brideshead Revisited, or Les Liaisons Dangereuses, or any Forster novel or James novel in film, is watching the clothes and the scenery, the automobiles, the carriages, the houses and gardens.  And yet these things are almost invisible in the novels themselves, particularly Austen's.  There is a lavish generosity about the films that's gratifying, they feed nostalgia, but all those are effects the novels never strive for.  In a new or original movie set in the past, like Gosford Park or LA Confidential or There Will Be Blood (based but only just barely on a novel) this effect is of course part of the original impulse of the film, so you can't say it's a distraction or a distortion.  And it's not a distortion in films based on books where the scenery and the clothes and the stuff were important parts of the pleasure or effect of the book (The House of Mirth, Last of the Mohicans).  But it's what makes Clueless in some sense a more true Austen film than the others.  Barry Lyndon makes it the subject of the film, which is its achievement.

Many interesting responses to the good book-mediocre movie and vice versa question.  I think a difficulty arises as to what counts as  a Good or even a Great book.  A couple of people mentioned The Maltese Falcon, which is a "classic" but is it Great?  If this query makes no sense to you, you are probably one of the cultural wayfarers who has gone beyond the now-arid wasteland of Greatness and into the variegated fields and forests of Whateverland,  What works works.  The Maltese Falcon, like Superman or Elvis Presley, doesn't have to be Great to be great.  This map is by now common.  There were no doubt many who didn't even respond, as the question is so vitiated by cultural prejudices, and who maybe prefer "Joe Macbeth" (the movie) to "Macbeth" (the play).  I now take a dose of Manny Farber to clear my mind.

Another interesting question arises about "Great" books that are actually in that Nobel Prize-winning, life-affirming, humanity-embracing, rock-solid mode that generates films that are just like themselves:  To Kill a Mockingbird, Grapes of Wrath, and half the films of Stanley Kramer (On the Beach, Ship of Fools, Not as a Stranger).  Here the two media are in fine agreement.  What Preston Sturges called "deep dish movies" attract similar audiences and responses as the books they were based on.  I remember a time when such films were regarded as the only "serious" movies and they all had to be treated respectfully. 

Kubrick's Lolita -- a fine film that has no Lolita and in which Humbert is not a lover of nymphets but only a lover of a cute young girl.  The line at the time was "How could they make a movie of Lolita?" and the answer was "Not this way" or maybe "They couldn't."  I'd say it was a test case of that error filmmakers make, of thinking that they can sort of download the pictures that the novel makes in their heads and put it on the screen.  (After I read the book ca. 1959 my casting was Charles Boyer and Faye Emerson as the mom.)

But Clockwork Orange worked better, as many have noted, and Barry Lyndon (run-of-the-mill novel) is one of my top-ten despite its horrendous flaws -- Ryan O'Neill saying "Have a nice day" to his wife, the slow-mo come-together kiss Kubrick has always thought is sexy and isn't.  It's the mirror reverse of 2001.

I've never seen Slaughterhouse Five and now I will.

For the hundreds eager to hear more of the pile of miscellany I collected in the seventies, unedited and transcribed as is or was:

You may talk as other people do; you may say 'Sir, I am your most humble servant.' You are not his most humble servant.  You may say, 'These are bad times; it is a melancholy thing to be reserved to such times.'  You don't mind the times.  You tell a man, 'I am sorry you had such bad weather the last day of your journey, and were so much wet.' You don;t care sixpence if he is wet or dry.  You may talk in this manner; it is a mode of talking in society; but don;t think foolishly.
                                                                                           Samuel Johnson

...he experienced in his consciousness that moment when music breaks glass...
                                                                                             John Cheever

He had been bitten gravely. ---The train pulled out just as he brought his car to the station, and the longing he felt for the coaches as they drew stubbornly away from him reminded him of the humors of love.
                                                                                              John Cheever

He would be spared nothing, then, it seemed, that a fool is not spared, ravening lewdness, this hurt to his feelings that put tears in his eyes, even scorn -- for he could see clearly now the image he presented, his arms spread over the steering wheel and his head buried in them for love.

Trade could not be managed by those who manage it, if it were difficult.
                                                                                                 Johnson

Methinks there be not impossibilities enough in Religion for an active faith.
                                                                                                    Thomas Browne

They neither work nor weep; in their shape is their reason.
                                                                                                 Virginia Woolf

Drunkenness is said to be a substitute for art; why, then, should artists get drunk?

A Swiss German girl gave me the following rhyme, which she wrote in my book in Swiss German, and I tried to translate it.  Here it is, minus umlauts, as nearly as I can make it out:

Hans Dampf in Schnage lock
HAd alles was es will.
Was es will das hat es nod
Und was es had das will es nod.
Hans Dampf in Schnage lock
Had alles was es will.

Hans Dampf lived in a shell
Had what he liked and liked it well.
What he had he wished he didn't
ANd what he hadn't he wished he did.
HAns Dampf lived in a shell
Had what he liked and like it well

(Corrections welcome.)

To fall in love is create a religion whih has a fallible god.
                                                    Borges

...Bergson's well known theory of the comic: the imposition of geometrical form on the formless contents of consciousness.
                                                      [Harry Levin]

One of the things in my life I have been unhappy about is that I was not better looking than I actually was.  On the other hand one of the things I Have been pleased about is that at least I was as good-looking as I was.
                                                             Isaak Dinesen

....minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic.
                                                                   H.G. Wells

Loud, heap miseries upon us yet entwine our hearts with laughters low!
                                                                      Finnegans Wake

Remarks about Night of the Hunter brought up the standard critical opinion that good movies are often made from second-rate books.  Great books often result in second rate movies.  I'm sure that many many second rate movies have been made from second-rate books, but what are the really great movies made from really great books? 

Dream:  Driving into my driveway, I felt I had run over something alive, but couldn't be sure.  I got out and looked under the car, and then saw a crow that had got entangled under there.  It came out, shaken and hurt but not badly.  I tried to urge it to go into the garage, where i would care for it and nurse it back to health.  The crow had meanwhile grown considerably larger, buzzard-sized.  I did get it to go into the garage, and wwe began a conversation about his recovery and rehabilitation; the crow was doubtful about the plan.  By now it had transformed into a young woman with long glossy black hair, while still remaining a crow.  Sure, I said, you can rest here and we'll soon have you back to your hunting again.  Ugh, she said, I hate hunting.

Northrop Frye says that one of the components of what he calls romance (along with dark journeys to underworlds, brothers and sisters parted in youth, and pirates, is talking animals, and intense human/animal relations.  Dreams are fiction, or the reverse, or both.

Advance copies now in my hand of the Overlook "upper back" edition of Dæmonomania, which naturally resemble the others, though it's blueish rather than brownish.  Only now and far too late do I realize that the cover pictures should have been taken from Arcimboldo's series The Seasons (or The Elements, maybe even better.)  Like Joyce accounting for the oddities of Ulysses by connecting them to episodes in the Odyssey (or letting Stuart Gilbert do so) I can show how each of the four books of the Cycle, as it is now denominated, is  a Season and an Element of the old four as well as  a Quaternary of the zodiacal houses (only this last was exactly planned in advance) and probably a Body Part and an Erogenous Zone and a Liberal Art too.  What smart fellow was telling me the other day about Joyce responding to someone claiming that his fussing over the multiple meanings of a word in the Wake was trivial:  No sir, it's quadrivial."

Events are now arranged for the Yale Summer Session Creative Writing Program Visiting Writers Series, which I organize in my role as Director of the Yale Summer Session Creative Writing Program.  (Can I fit in any more capitalized words here?) For those anywhere near New Haven,  come hear/see/meet --

• Nalo Hopkinson, June 3
• Richard Price, June 10, interviewed and showing clips from The WIre
• Junot Diaz, June 17
• Sebastian Barry, June 24, the US Premier of his play Pride of Parnell Street
• Augusten Burroughs, July 1

All events (except the Barry play, at famed Long Wharf Theater) free. 

 

Everyone knows there is a danger in revisiting books or movies you were amazed or knocked out by long ago.  The difficulty is in knowing which ones to avoid or let lie.  Something L. said a few weeks ago convinced me that she should see "Night of the Hunter", the film made from the Davis Grubb novel, script by James Agee, directed by Charles Laughton (his debut and never repeated).  Robert Mitchum cast against type as the creepy serial-killer preacher. 

Well no.  It begins sort of all right, though the Kentucky townspeople are cliches and over the top.  Shelley Winters as the hot confused wife has moments, and so does Mitchum, though everything is pitched a little high -- it might have made a good opera.  Expressionistic shooting, okay.  But it rapidly becomes ridiculous, and the last half hour, in which Lillian Gish as a hardy old keeper of a house fro strays and runaways, is mawkish beyond belief, with hours of dramaturgy crammed into minutes of film time.  Laughton's direction has some interesting moments -- he liked closeups of frogs, birds, and weeds along the paradigmatic river -- but then he spoils it by showing an owl falling upon a rabbit just as Mitchum shows up to threaten the children.

By then L had long since left the room and gone to bed.

Thanks for all the information and hints from so many people expert in gaming lore, history and possibility.  It seems that if I really want to explore the best on offer I'll have to spring for an XBOX and the games too.  Ah well.  The last game I played that required use of the keyboard or other tools to manipulate things and people was Pong.  I never played text games either.  As readers of this may remember, I tried out Second Life for a while and found it impossible to manipulate my avatar, who kept falling into an endless ocean.

No I don't have an inclination to write a game of my own; I may be too old a dog to learn the trade conceptually, that is to actually conceive what's possible.  I am amazed that the best games now are constructed by hundreds of programmers and designers and artists and cost years and millions of dollars to perfect. 

I did try to work with ("read" would be the wrong verb) a couple of the early interactive fictions, in fact I still have one somewhere that Kathryn Cramer sent me to try out -- I can't bring up the name.  I found that it combined the worst features of novels and video games -- no pictures or illusionistic action to observe, and no unfolding aesthetic design to grasp.  Not even a way to win, though of course that was part of the point...  What was the name of that novel...?

It's been a long time since I've got one of these in the mail; I'd thought that spam engines had put an end to a burgeoning "cutup" art form.  But here's a very nice one, just arrived today, attached ot a nearly unintelligible appeal about a night with my beloveed and being Macho.  The subject was "Shoemaker:"

Going on. Is there, perhaps, madness in his reluctantly that
ship not back yet! In another minute i appeared pleasing.
a fern a spray of maiden'shair loses much planned! Fate hath
proved adverse, we have lost have secrets which we want
to keep. I knew that wandering for months or years on a
desert island? bioiddlajdks he reached the head of the stairs,
he stopped, naval authorities, and so on. There will be
no where they had sought shelter from some of those in the
pilgrim's progress, or in the old folio were unbearable
to her, in this small room on and eat them, without bread
or any other food, are%MP%l it was. What did you do? My
flippancy was all the stewards absolutely, but i think myself
it's port and brandy and sodaboth very good in their.

I heard a nice story on NPR tonight about the music fo rvideo games -- how sophisiticated and symphonic it has become.  Real music, in the way that music for films can be and sometimes has been.  One of the breakthrough scores was the score for the Myst series.  I found the first iteration of Myst compelling -- I thought at first that here was a video "game" that was actually novelistic, that it would function like the best kind of SF novel, a continual surprise, opening outward.  I was disappointed that its core was a game, a series of puzzles to solve; myabe if i'd actually solved them all I would have found the game unflding in the way I hoped it would, but I lost interest (well to tell the truth I found the puzzles to hard, and too boring to tackle.)  The second iteration of the game looked gorgeous but by then I was leery of a structure I din't think I'd enjoy, and I never took it on.

So given al that, what video game do you think might actually fulfill my vision of what Myst was going to do -- be an open ended novel that develops along many lines?  (I am a novice here -- the answers might be obvious.)  Are ther eany that don't depend on a) solving puzzles or b) killing people or others?  (My hand-eye coordiantion isn't up to the shooter games.)

Dropping L. at the airport today, I noticed the sign pointing to the Teletheater.  I have been seeing these signs for years, and occasionally speculated on what they are, why they are only at airports (at least I only see them there), and what goes on inside them.  Are they still extant? Has anyone reading this ever been in one?  What do you do in there, and why?

I heard an NPR plug for an upcoming segment about the popularity (therefore income-generating properties) of obituaries, and the  speaker said they were sometimes termed the "Irish sports pages".  Longtime readers of this page know Ilike collecting these slurs or shall we see ethnic distinctions, but I wonder what this one means.  Why would the obituaries resemble sports pages, and why only for the Irish?

Over at the Little, Big 25 site, link on the right, some interesting questions and thoughts on the Least Trumps that appear throughout that book, with my answers (or attempts at same).   Worth a visit.

Here is a further selection from my 1975 copybook of wit, wisdom, private reference and oddity, reproduced just as taken down and in the original order, random except insofar as my reading was not.

If you had no chance to study when young, then certainly you should still do so when when you are grown up -- but the things you studied as a child are as the light of the rising sun; the studies in your maturity, a candle.
                                     --  Emperor Kang H'si

If racing were truly democratic, the race would go to the tortoise.
                                        -- Osbert Sitwell

(This si wrong, of course, which is why I liked it.  The race does go to the slow-but-steady tortoise.  The popular vote went for the hare, a real crowd pleaser.)

Tennyson once told Carroll that he had dreamed a lengthy poem about fairies, which began with very long lines, then the lines got shorter and shorter until the poem ended with fifty or sixty lines of two syllables each.  (Tennyson thought highly of the poem in his sleep, but forgot it completely when he awoke.)
                                   -- Martin Gardner, Annotated Alice

One thought, one grace, one wonder at the least
Which unto words no virtue can digest.
                                    -- Marlowe, Tamburlaine

I don't think impotence has been exploited in the past.
                                      -- Beckett

(I thought this scrap was not funny without the context, and so I quoted it more fully:)

[James Joyce]  is tending toward omniscience, and omnipotence, as an artist.  I'm working with impotence, ignorance. I don;t think impotence has been exploited in the past.

Have you a stool there to be melancholy upon?
                                  -- Ben Jonson

.... an "operose and diabolical machination," as he graphically described the act of buggery...
                                   --  Richard Holmes, Shelley:  The Pursuit

The same covert atheism which has put down duelling, put down drawing lots, and is trying to put down taking oaths, will put down all attempts to acknowledge a Divine Ruler or Arbiter in war.
                                          -- Charles Kingsley

We were both sons of doctors, as so many writers are. 
                                            -- Brendan Gill on Sinclair Lewis

And starting up, he walked out into the park, not choosing the swept path, but wading knee-deep in snow where it lay thikest in the glades.  He was recalled to himself by sinking up to his shoulders in a hollow.  He emerged with some difficulty, and retraced his steps to the house thinking that even in the midst of Love's most dire perplexities, dry clothes and a good fire are better than a hole in the snow,
                                --  Peacock, Gryll Grange

Egypt is a country created by Aesculapius -- all sicknesses are cured there.
                                 -- Maxime du Camp,Le Nil, Egypte et le Nubie

Unmerited gratitude is embarrassing; it is the reward for something that hasn't cost one anything; one feels ashamed, and as though indebted to the one who feels indebted to you.
                                     -- Flaubert, Egyptian Journals

The shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with Love, and found him a native of the rocks.
                                         --  Samuel Johnson

[Johnson's} attitude to alcohol varied at different times of his life, but underlying it was the consistent fact that, like most persons of strong appetites, he found abstinence easier than moderation.
                                              --John Wain, Samuel Johnson

To remark the folly of the fiction, the absurdity iof the conduct, the confusion of the names and manners of different times, and the impossibility of the events in any system of Life, were to waste criticism upon unresisting imbecility, upon faults too evident for detection, and too gross for aggravation.
                                                     -- Johnson, on the plot of Cymbeline

More to come...

The Conoco refinery at night from approximately the former location of the Van Damme-Aero B-36 "Pax" bomber plant and adjoining worker's housing ("Henryville," named for Henry Van Damme). An hour earlier might have been better for lining up the gas flare and the moon.  In the book they will be.

So what did I learn about Ponca City, location of my new novel, which is already written, and about O-K-L-A etc.? 

The main thing I missed, though I could have gathered it from the websites I visited, was that Ponca City is the home of the Continental Oil Company (cable CONOCO, now its actual and only name).   The city of Ponca City, 25,000 people in 1940 and about the same now, is matched by an oil city almost as large -- well pretty large anyway, a tank farm a mile square I bet, and the entire refinery, the works all alight like the towers of a fairy  city, and the flare stacks burning off gases all night.   The smell of petroleum prevails throughout. I have a photo of the evening settling cloudless over the refinery, the torch of the gases burning, and a white full moon arising behind.  I will post it soon.

So that will merit a mention.

And there's Cuzalina's drugstore, where my hero buys his condoms (in three-packs, as I learned from the Smartypants who answered my condom questions here).  And the moonshiner, who had the rock house out behind the pigstand on Route 60.  (I understand these terms even if you do not.)  I didn't know  that the train station (which L and I were taken to by a  local antiquarian) was overshadowed by the immense grain elevators and flour mill of the Robin Hood flour company, which still stand, though now deserted like the station itself. (Oklahoma tends to leave abandoned structures to die natural deaths, declining into deracination and Alzheimers, rather than tearing them down; they don't seem to mind living with their aging relations and abandoned machines.  Something about Christianity?).

Anyway I know much more now.  A few pages must change.  But not many.

We drove from Dallas in the now brilliant weather with the two ladies, marvelling at the new-laid fields of McMansions (which L now asserts were invented here) laid out across brown fields.  There's a style of architecture here I don't understand:  the Big Roof.  Every new house has a large, a very large, sharply peaked roof, covering a space big enough for an added story but usually without gables or windows, so not.  On broken-fronted Big Fancy type houses, it wasn't so noticeable, but on one-story low square houses these huge outsize hats were very peculiar.  They seemed higher and containing more space thatn the house below them.  They looked like haystacks.  What's with that?  Why provide that much attic, if that's what it is?  Anybody from around there know?

That and the churches:  in country that seems so thin in population, who fills these huge churches that stand by the road?  There's one every three or four miles.  A dozen or fifteen denominations, or none (Town & Country Christian Church).  Not even tithing would seem to be able to pay for them.

Then to Tulsa, where we had a walk in an old shingle-style neighborhood of cottages and more elaborate places, ate dinner, and put ourselves to bed in a Motel EIght full of truckers. 

Ponca City today, but too tired to recount a remarkably interesting day.

Weather Channel devotees who are also apprised of my personal schedule (these folks number in the thousands) might have noticed that flights to Oklahoma from New England must pass through Dallas-Fort Worth Airport (also known as Dis) and that yesterday horrendous thunderstorms and what at least one report called a tornado made landing there impossible; our pilot came inches -- well, a hundred feet or so -- from the runway before lifting off again, unable (he would tell us later) to see the runway at all.  Instead we were borne to Shreveport, LA, to rest and wait and get gas (I myself anyway was having a little discomfort with nothing to eat but peanuts), and sat there for the next three hours on the tarmac while decisions were pondered among the Archons.  At last we were offloaded and put on busses back to Dallas, where, of course, all our connecting flights had been cancelled, all rental cars were taken, and American Airlines had nothing furhter to offer, not even explanations.  The soonest flight we could get to to Tulsa, closest airport to the fabled Ponca City, was Thursday night, which somewhat obviates the journey, which would then have begun after it ended.

L rose to this occasion as she always does, with bravery, good cheer, disregard of discomfort, and inventiveness.  She is actually an afficionado of disasters ("ones that don't hurt anybody").  We have now spent a night in Fort Worth (the nearest place with motel rooms) and have acquired two similarly stranded elderly ladies (one as old as I am) whom we will be taking to Tulsa .

But a tornado!  My book ends with a tornado!  A disaster, in fact, in which nobody gets hurt.

So in that sense, hey, on our way.

I said in a previous post that "Gorey's very early work, The Unstrung Harp; or, Mr Earbrass Writes a Novel, is, as far as I'm concerned, the very best and most exact description of the process of writing and publishing a work of fiction ever written -- though I have not read them all, and competing suggestions are welcome."

I just thought of another, in another universe entirely.  I believe it was a novel by the African American writer John A. Williams, and I'd have said it was his best-known,  The Man who Cried I Am. There is a wonderful passage in the book (this one or whichever one it was) where a youn black writer determines to write a book, and gets a cheap Harlem apartment, and a bag of beans and a bag of coffee and a bag of rice, and settles in to write; he chroncles how with one ham hock he flavors the beans he cooks, then carefully removes and saves the hamhock to flavor the next batch.  THe rules of poverty eating and older black wisdom  applied to getting writing done on no endowment and no grant.  If I could find the piece again I'd give it to my students to read.  Which I guess would be like telling them how I walked to school barefoot carrying my shoes, to save the leather.  Uphill.  Both ways.

Here are some furhter pages out of my 1975 copybook (which is not a diary but only a record of bits out of reading, formerly wise sententiae and maxims and moral sayings, but in my case mostly oddities.

No rains shall fresh the flats of sea
Nor close the clay-field's sharded shores
And every heart think loathingly
Its dearest turned to bores..
                   G.M. Hopkins,  A Summer Malison

But the Rabbi answered, "I am going to get so many whips in Gehenna that a few more won't matter.  Why are they so afraid of Gehenna? Since the ALmighty created it, it must be Paradise in disguise.
                   Isaac Bashevis Singer

...a man once said:  Why such reluctance?  If you followed the parables, you would yourself become parables, and with thath rid of all your daily cares.
       Another said:  I bet that is also a parable.
       The first said:  You have won.
       The second said:  But unfortunately, only in parable.
       The first said: No, in reality; in parable you have lost.
                   Franz Kafka

Attention is the natural prayer of the soul.
                   Malebranche

Narcissus leaned over the spring, enthralled by the only man in whose eyes he had ever dared or been given the chance to forget himself.
                   Dag Hammarskjold

This elaborate ceremony [Egyptian mummification of cats] was not an exception but the rule.  In the latter nineteenth century some 300,000 cat mummies were uncovered at Beni Hassan and shipped to Liverpool, England -- where the cargo was sold to farmers, who used it as fertilizer.
                   Anthony S. Mercati, The Zoo of the Gods

If, after the manner of men, I have struggled with beasts at Ephesus, what advantageth it me, if the dead rise not?
                   St. Paul

It is idle to encourage oneself in metaphysical distresses.
                   Samuel Johnson

It would be unfair to say that I prefer the back of a book to its cover, but it is true that the sight of a lot of books gives me the the hope that I may some day read them, which sometimes develops into the belief that I have read them.
                   Kenneth Clark

For the heart is, in a sense, like the Prince of Wales; we would not have it cut in stone, but how pathetic it is when, as at Wembley, we see it modelled in butter.
                   John Collier, His Monkey Wife  [A statue of the Prince of Wales in Canadian butter was shown at the Empire Exhibition in Wembley in the 1920s]

When we see a natural style, we are astonished and delighted; for we expected to see an author, and we find a man.  Whereas those who have good taste, and who see a book expecting to find only a man, are quite surprised to find an author.
                   Pascal

If we had keen vision and feeling of ordinary life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.
                   George Eliot, Middlemarch

Yes they're really there.  An LJ Customize your Page glitch that I rather like and will leave (for a while).