800 Words: St. Augustine - The Original Blogger?

There are large swaths of the Confessions of St. Augustine that are unreadable. I say this not as a Jew, but as a reader whom I’m sure would be equally bored with watching people kiss God’s ass if I pretended to believe in any other faith than the religion I choose to pretend to believe in. But for a few choice passages which I must find with a fine-toothed comb, The Confessions of St. Augustine sucks. There’s no promised place in heaven or hell which can make me finish this book.

But let’s be kind to poor Augustine. He was the pioneer of his genre, not the summit - though he was perhaps the summit of early Christian thought (and I’m far from qualified to pontificate in such matters). But as another overrated Christian writer once declared, “In my end is my beginning.” And T S Eliot’s maxim can apply, among many other things, to Early Christianity’s obliteration of paganism, and particularly of the material worldview which paganism provided - a materialism which probably ruled our species since the dawn of its sentience.

Augustine of Hippo was an almost exact contemporary of Emperor Theodosius, and converted to Christianity at precisely the same age that Theodosius was when he made Christianity the state-sponsored religion of the Roman Empire (incidentally, they were both 33... Christ’s age when he was put on the cross). Their generation was the founding generation of Christianity as the world’s dominant religion, the first generation for whom the entire world practiced Christianity with a universal standard as determined at the Council of Nicaea. And therefore, their perception of Christianity was unfettered from the existential threat which every previous generation of Christians lived with. The world they lived in was suddenly Christian, and because of that unfettered access to a world which shared their beliefs, Augustine was free to meditate upon existences’ mysteries in a manner which no Christian before him was able:

“And what is this? I asked the earth, and it answered me, "I am not He"; and whatsoever are in it confessed the same. I asked the sea and the deeps, and the living creeping things, and they answered, "We are not Your God, seek above us." I asked the moving air; and the whole air with his inhabitants answered, "Anaximenes was deceived, I am not God. " I asked the heavens, sun, moon, stars, "Nor (say they) are we the God whom You seek." And I replied unto all the things which encompass the door of my flesh: "Ye have told me of my God, that ye are not He; tell me something of Him." And they cried out with a loud voice, "He made us. " My questioning them, was my thoughts on them: and their form of beauty gave the answer. And I turned myself unto myself, and said to myself, "Who are You?" And I answered, "A man." And behold, in me there present themselves to me soul, and body, one without, the other within. By which of these ought I to seek my God? I had sought Him in the body from earth to heaven, so far as I could send messengers, the beams of mine eyes. But the better is the inner, for to it as presiding and judging, all the bodily messengers reported the answers of heaven and earth, and all things therein, who said, "We are not God, but He made us." These things did my inner man know by the ministry of the outer: I the inner knew them; I, the mind, through the senses of my body. I asked the whole frame of the world about my God; and it answered me, "I am not He, but He made me.”

(Book X)

This may seem like the most obvious Sunday School kindergarten pablum to us, but in the 4th century, this was absolutely revolutionary. The idea that not only is God invisible, but that he is also absolutely unknowable, is not a concept which comes from the Bible itself. The “Old Testament” abounds in passages full of divine intervention, and also of God as a character made flesh and blood. Read Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers; Yahweh is a character as real as every pagan god in Homer who presents himself in the lives of his subjects with the freest of hands. Ample evidence exists which even shows that the Israelites of the Davidic/Solomonic Court also worshipped a goddess whom they believed was Yahweh’s wife - Asherah, and that El is in fact not a second name for Yahweh but a god in his own right. It is only in the Seventh Century BC(E) in the era of the Prophets and Deuteronomy that monotheism became generally accepted as the correct interpretation -. Israel and Judea were not subjegated by Assyria and Babylon because Yahweh was a weaker God than Marduk or Ba’al, they were subjegated because the One True God used these Empires as a means to punish the Israelites for their iniquity. But even in the next millenium is full of examples of direct divine intervention - from the Book of Job to the Gospels themselves.

But it was only a thousand years after the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem (586 BC”E”), when Christianity finally became the religion which ruled the world, that Christians had to reconcile themselves to the fact that God does not appear to them, even if He appeared to generations past. The Christian “New Testament” would not be officially canonized for more than a century after Augustine’s death, but the New Testament’s contents were determined by meetings in Augustine’s hometown of Hippo which he himself attended called the Synod of Hippo Regius. Augustine embodied the moment when Christianity became itself.

With Augustine, we find the official end of the Age of Paganism, and with its completion, the end of belief in the divine as a substance of our own world. God may control the heavens, but human beings, finally, are masters of our own kingdom; and however trivial that kingdom seemed in relation to God’s kingdom, it was still a place ruled by an invisible force for which there was no definite accountability. Therefore Augustine signaled the dawn of individual as the world’s most important subject for study. Man was no longer the plaything of a god, he was his own master, an object worthy of his own study. It was a long-fought dawn for individualism, and the world of spirits and magic continued their influence over even the highest discourse until the High Renaissance and beyond. God may be in the heavens, but the remnants of his earthly kingdom cling resolutely to the ground.

And as the beginning of individualism as we today understand it, much of Augustine’s Confessions seem quite anti-individual, perhaps invidiously so. So much of the book is giving to “stirring” paeans to God that it’s very difficult to see the revolution taking place. But take place it does. Skip the Confessions themselves and go straight to Book X and Book XI of the Confessions, you immediately see a mention of the greatest problem of every generation that has occupied every great thinker from Augustine’s time to our own - memory.

Memory is the ultimate problem, and the ultimate definition, of the individual. And it’s difficult to believe that any writer has ever written more accurately of precisely what memory is than Augustine. And certainly no writer has been more hopelessly wrong at diagnosing what causes memory than he. Like all theologians, the end answer is simply God - a divine gift from a divine being, tied neatly in a bow and with no need for further examination. I can’t help but be reminded of Sarah Palin talking about her brother-in-law, saying that he’s an extremely knowledgeable amateur biologist who can tell all about the history of each species. I always imagined his conversations with Palin’s children going like this:

How old is this species?

Six Thousand Years Old.

How about this one?

Six Thousand Years Old.

And this one?

Six Thousand.

Augustine was the beginning of theology as we generally know it, but he was also the beginning of the mystery of the individual - a mystery that resounds through the ages in all sorts of soft sciences as to what makes each of us unique? The problem of the individual, and particularly of individual memory, is something which we gather from all sorts of pseudosciences: from theology, to phrenology, to theosophy and anthroposophy, to social Darwinism, to (yes) philosophy, and even to psychology. Psychology may yet be remembered as the final exhalation of the mystic, unknowable individual - the final ponderings an unknowable inner psyche which is not yet explained by carbon-fused wiring, and as crude a first attempt at a scientific explanation of the human mind as Augustine’s was a crude literary explanation. I wouldn’t bet on it, but perhaps we have, finally, moved past God, and investigations of the individual into a world of pure materialism in which all the world can be controlled by science and therefore we must have the added complex of analyzing ourselves as our own Gods. In the pagan era, we humans were merely the playthings of the world. In the monotheist era, we are the world’s inhabitants. In the scientific era, we are the world’s masters. Naturally, Augustine would warn against this advancement.

In using his personal self, his experience, and his observations, as the beginning of personal meditation, Augustine was the first memoirist. Does that therefore mean that he is also the beginning of the Blog? Well, if he is, then he’s not the Blog in the sense of Perez Hilton (though the earlier chapters are not as far off as you might imagine), but perhaps the blog as chronicler of history, of an era, of an ethos, of a culture, of a life, and of an eyewitness who attempts to view his own life with dispassionate equanimity. In all these regards, Augustine of Hippo was utterly without precedent, and therefore should probably be forgiven if he ended up viewing his life with the most messianic imaginable self-conceit.   

But we should cut him still more slack. Augustine’s chronicles were the first chapter in the book of an era that did not yet exist and an era that awaits - and has perhaps arrived at - its final chapter. It is the era into which you and I were born, and the era into which today’s children may not have been. It is the era of individual mystery. If science and DNA can eventually provide concrete explanations what makes individuals individual, then the mystery which Augustine presented is no longer a mystery at all. If personality one day becomes something with which we’re born, but something which we can change as we might a shirt, then how much less space will there be for personal observations?

800 Words: The Survival of Les Miserables - Part 2

I have now seen the new Les Mis movie, and can say with a reasonable degree of confidence that with the exception of two scenes, this is the worst movie imaginable that could have been made from this source material. It is not simply bad, or even a disaster, it is perhaps a once-in-a-generation cinematic apocalypse of poor judgment and bad taste.

There is one simple reason why this movie so bad. And that is because this movie insists on trying to make Les Mis into something good. I love the musical version of Les Miserables. I can’t help it, I memorized it when I was six years old and it was the first inkling to this precociously insufferable music lover that opera could exist in English and even in a non-classical idiom. At this point in my life, I can still sing virtually every song in the show from memory. But even in its best performances, Les Miserables has long since become a guilty pleasure for me. Les Mis is a decent musical whose runaway success is entirely disproportionate to artistic worth. The only thing about Les Mis which speaks to any kind of creative genius is the marketing which made it the most profitable musical of all time. And yet here is a movie that insists to us that the material behind this financial deluge is strong enough to support one final attempt to transform a solid musical into a work of immortal art.

The infinite ambitions of this movie are scrawled around every shot that gives you a good view of a singer’s larynx and every new scrap of plodding material written specifically for this movie. The stage show content has been edited hundreds of times for the movie, and as you see them, you marvel at how much sense these edits make. In all fairness, the musical direly needs editing. Not only does the musical sprawl, but at many points it’s downright incoherent. There are literally hundreds, perhaps thousands of edits, from the tenses of verbs to whole new songs and scenes. Some of these edits exist because they make more sense for a movie, some of them exist simply to correct the long plot muddle in the play. Just to take the most obvious example, in the play, we have no idea why Javert is still pursuing Valjean. To the best of my memory having seen four live productions in two different languages, two TV versions, and listened two cast albums, there isn’t a single line that refers to exactly how Jean Valjean broke his parole. So basically, we’re expected to believe that Javert harasses Valjean because he’s an a**hole who has some sort of Kafkaesque explanation for the fact that Valjean committed another crime even if he didn't. The movie solves this in one simple stroke – the first scene contains a line (from the novel) about how Valjean must carry the yellow ticket to any potential employer and landlord which says he’s an extremely dangerous man until the end of his life and has to report to a parole board thirty days after his release. The yellow ticket is in the stage play, but the contents of the yellow ticket are never revealed to us. At the end of the song (really just an ultradramatic monologue) “What have I done”, Valjean tears up the ticket – something he's too busy singing to do in the stage musical - thereby refusing to acknowledge his lifelong parole sentence. And thus twenty-five years of muddle was cleared up in two simple, ingenious edits. I could point out a dozen other edits that are similarly ingenious which make a more coherent plot. And yet nobody seemed to mind the fact that Les Mis was a muddle in the first place.

The problem is that the lyrics in these new edits are every bit as uninspired, and sometimes moreso, than what came before them. The stage show’s been honed for twenty five years, and even in the awful 25^th anniversary concert (as seen every hour of every day on PBS for the last two years), it was still incoherent, but it nevertheless took you directly from one over-the-top flight of fancy to the next. This show is ridiculous, it knows it’s ridiculous, and it doesn’t care. Neither should you. But in trying to tie everything together for a coherent narrative, in hewing closer to the Hugo novel than the stage show ever dared, it loses the headlong momentum which made you forget for an hour at a time that the show was ridiculous. The great bulk of the new material is simply dull at the most fundamental level. Les Mis is grand opera, and every bit as ridiculous and stupid as the 19^th century Auber and Meyerbeer operas which inspired it.

And then there are those close-ups.  I completely understand why Tom Hooper elected to use close-ups, as a movie version requires the kind of intimacy which the grand over-the-topness of theater does not provide. But why did he keep all the singers in extreme closeup when it was time to let their voices soar. The best directorial choice in the entire movie, coming in an otherwise risible scene, was to have Russell Crowe sing the famous belting aria “Stars” as he stares at Notre Dame Cathedral – no doubt to distract from the fact that Crowe can’t sing it. And that’s the moment when I realized… where is the landscape in this movie? The main character of Les Miserables is not Jean Valjean, the main character is France. And the moment the movie arrives in Paris, it completely loses whatever little interest it had in the surrounding landscapes and almost every scene takes place in an enclosed set. That may have been a choice made for budgetary reasons, but it ruined any chance of redeeming the movie in its second half. Rather than give us the epic view of French life which a movie of Les Mis desperately needs, it ruined the movie version’s most fundamental asset by focusing every song in the sort of extreme close-up that even Wayne and Garth knew was a terrible idea. Instead of showing real scenes of French peasant life, it opts this once to preserve the integrity of the stage show in the choice where it’s most crucial that it shouldn’t. Rather than showing the poor of France in all their misery, it shows the poor in the kind of highly stylized dance moves that alleviates us from the burden of taking their miserableness seriously. When it comes time for the prostitution scene, the prostitutes look like dancing zombies from A Chorus Line. 

And then there are all those unconvincing, sometimes absolutely hilarious set-pieces. The chain gang moving the galley ship which looks like a pleasant day at the beach, the spontaneously singing and dancing beggars who seem like they should be get a scholarship to go to the high school from FAME, the aforementioned zombie hookers and the delivery of I Dreamed a Dream after having sex in her prostitution bed, the fake sword fight in the confrontation scene, the 1960’s style crowding of the cops by the revolutionaries, the barricade so small that it reminded me of This Is Spinal Tap’s ten-inch Stonehenge, Marius’s resolve to immediately leave his own wedding after finding out where Valjean is without even a word of explanation to his grandfather, or poor Colm Wilkinson playing the Bishop of Digne and forced to wear a 1000-watt grin as he welcomes Jean Valjean to heaven, and my personal favorite,…the endless river of shit in the Parisian sewers. Not even Paris can manufacture the smell which that much feces must give off. 

But the ultimate nadir of this movie was Hooper’s choice to have the singers record live in real-time. Tom Hooper makes costume dramas, and like most costume drama directors, he is charitably known as an “actor’s director.” But in this case as in very few others, the moniker seems to be deserved. The King’s Speech is an overrated movie, but Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush were both fantastic. The John Adams miniseries sprawled at times, but it had uniformly wonderful performances from every lead actor (Paul Giammati, Laura Linney, Tom Wilkinson, David Morse, Stephen Dillane, and John Dossett). But most amazingly, he coached Helen Mirren through what might have been the performance of her career. The (deserved) hype about The Queen overshadowed the fact that she played Elizabeth I in an HBO miniseries that has to stand as one of the very greatest TV movies ever made.  

Clearly, Tom Hooper loves actors and they love him. But his trust of actors proved to be the movie’s ultimate downfall. To make the movie more intimate and conversational, the singers recorded live in real-time, accompanied by a live piano. Singers could take their time on every line they wished, they could make any interpretive choice to mold every scene precisely as they felt it. As a G-list conductor who works with singers every week, I feel confident in saying that any competent musical director of a show will tell you the same thing – NEVER GIVE SINGERS A RUBBER STAMP! Conductors should be held accountable for their whims as well, but the nexus of narcissism for which this choice allowed boggles the brain. The sheer coddling it must take to indulge every egotistical interpretive choice in this cast is stunning. Tom Hooper obviously spent months patiently forming an interpretation of this show in which he corrected all the continuity errors, found ways to stage scenes which made far more sense than they ever did on the stage, and yet when it came time for big numbers, he indulged the singers to go as far into ham territory as they wished. And nearly every one of them took him up on his offer. Sometimes the actors inserted their own lines of spoken dialogue into songs that must have been improvised on the spot, and none more hilarious than the one towards the end in which Jean Valjean finally confesses his past to Cosette, to which the always gorgeous but not always the most talented actress Amanda Seyfried utters a superbly awkward and casually plot-changing “I knew.” Maybe it wasn’t her idea, but whoever came up with it will have probably earned a place in movie history’s hall of shame.

Anne Hathaway recently did a skit on Saturday Night Live which spoofed Homeland, in which she made fun of Claire Danes for giving precisely the sort of over-the-top hammy performance she gave here – only Anne Hathaway’s performance as Fantine is far more over-the-top than Claire Danes has ever been in Homeland’s most far-fetched scenes – with as many painfully awkward grimaces and diva pauses as there are syllables in the words of her role. Of all the awful performances in this movie, Anne Hathaway gave the worst, and to think that she’s being commended as the joy of the film is still more bizarre than her facial contortions. Hugh Jackman clearly had no direction as Jean Valjean, because his vocal performance stays on the same monotonous dynamic, one shade of vocal color, and bleating-like-a-sheep vibrato through the entire movie. He has as many portentious pauses as Anne Hathaway, but at least his acting is merely boring rather than Olympian-level bizarre. For all the complaints about Russell Crowe’s vocal performance, Hugh Jackman’s is far more inexcusable because he’s the professional singer. During his every scene, Russell Crowe seemed to have only one thought go through his mind: ‘Get me the f-ck out of here!’ Crowe’s Javert has all the menace of Paul Giamatti playing a tollbooth collector, and his vocal performance occasionally bore the subtle but unmistakable sound of an auto tuner.

It’s doubly a shame, because on Friday night I saw a truly great movie version of Les Miserables that is less than 15 years old which hardly anyone seems to have seen. The performances of Liam Neeson, Geoffrey Rush, and Uma Thurman, are as wonderful as Jackman, Crowe, and Hathaway are risible. The direction of Bille August (best known for Smilla’s Sense of Snow), is as pitch-perfect as Tom Hooper’s is disgustingly wrong-headed.

If the movie can be said to have real strengths, it comes in scenes which the earlier movie either doesn’t  cover (the Thenardiers are in one scene and Young Eponine is simply an extra), or does a bit worse than the rest of the movie (Marius and Cossette). Both Sacha-Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter are mildly funny and suitably slimy for the Thenardiers. And while the Master of the House sequence is nowhere near as fun or funny as it can be onstage, the staging is far more logical and coherent. But their performances wear badly as the movie goes on, and by the time we see them at the wedding, they’re simply an annoyance rather than funny. To my endless surprise, the best sequence in the movie is by far the sequence with the ingénues, which is usually the point when stage show sags the most. In My Life and A Heart Full of Love were almost downright moving, with the endlessly drab colors exchanged for the lush landscape of the Parisian spring and three young actors who can convincingly play young lovers. The rendition of On My Own was passable, but it suffered from all the same problems as the rest of the movie. Samantha Barks’s singing was decent, but done in immovable closeup even when it came time for Samantha Barks to belt the song’s climax, the belting of which could not erase memories of Eponine’s past, or even memories of how dumb the song is. Eddie Redmayne and Amanda Seyfried were both serviceable even if they’re not particularly great singers. Redmayne in particular is a very fine actor whom I’ve seen live onstage, but his rendition of Empty Chairs and Empty Tables was just plain dull.

The good intentions of all these choices are absolutely clear, and the result is that Cameron Mackintosh and Tom Hooper made a real movie instead of simply a filmed stage version. The only problem with this is that they made a tragicomically terrible movie, whose awfulness will become increasingly recognized with time like so many long-awaited movies. The only event in our lifetime that can probably compare to this is the arrival of the Star Wars prequel trilogy. When The Phantom Menace was first released to the American public, the reaction was simply lukewarm – the shock of seeing the badness of something so long awaited muted the first reaction. And yet the sense of outrage at the mind-crippling horribleness of what transpired only grew with time, and as the years wore on, it deservedly became known as one of the biggest disappointments ever to reach the screen. I have no doubt that this movie will have a similar trajectory.

(A fan video made from the musical with the far better movie. Compare and contrast if you like and mourn what might have been.)

800 Words: The Survival of Les Miserables Part 1

I just saw Les Mis last night, and it is a truly great movie. Not the Les Mis out in theaters now, I mean the 1998 movie version. I will probably see Les Mis at some point this weekend. But I doubt this movie will be half as good as the 1998 Les Miserables – a movie so absolutely underrated as to be a scandal. Les Mis stars Hugh Jackman and Russell Crowe, the latter of which is featured in more overrated crap than any movie star since Clint Eastwood or Robert Redford (it’s amazing how often boring movie stars make good directors…), whereas Les Miserables is not a centimes short of magnificent. It’s directed by Bille August, an Ingmar Bergman protégé, and stars Liam Neeson and Geoffery Rush – who between them seem to have made more great movies nobody but me and five other people remember than any two stars in Hollywood today. Geoffrey Rush is particularly great. Not that this should surprise anybody, anyone who’s seen Quills knows that he is the equal of any screen actor in movie history, and all he has to do to inhabit Javert as no one else ever could is to dim the wattage of his eyes. The terror implicit in that scowl is enough make viewers jump three feet out of their collective seat.  Claire Danes’s overacting notwithstanding, the rest of the cast is just as wonderful. Hell, even Uma Thurman is great as Fantine. To put it simply, I don’t see how  there can ever be a greater, more moving, more hallucinatory, or higher reaching cinematic vision of Les Miserables than what we got in 1998. And unlike the novel, it takes two-and-a-half hours to get through the whole thing.

As perhaps none of the other ‘loose baggy monsters’ of 19^th century literature do, Les Miserables cries out for a movie. The story itself is nothing less than a primal myth about how humanity is kept wretched. Would that other novelists learned from Victor Hugo’s example and wrote novels about the world rather than their own navels. And yet, in my experience, this novel is much less than its parts. I realize that this is the view from 2012, but from the vantage point of our era, Victor Hugo seems to do everything he can to dull his story’s inherent drama.

Now I should specify, I have not read Les Miserables from cover to cover. But I’ve tried to dip into it many times, and I’m constantly struck by the woodenness of Victor Hugo’s writing. Whether in Les Mis or Notre Dame, Hugo is an amazing writer of descriptive prose. When the situation calls for action, he has the entire world of language at his disposal. But when it comes to the kind of repose that makes the characters truly breathe that illustrate his ideas, Victor Hugo seems rather hopeless.

That Victor Hugo was a great writer of action and an indifferent student of human nature shouldn’t surprise anyone. Action was his entire life. He was born in 1802, the year Napoleon was elected France’s Consul for Life. Hugo was the son of a Bonapartist general and raised in the milieu of the Napoleon's iron fist. Napoleonic self-belief and humorlessness also seems to have passed to the young writer, and it stayed with him all his days. Some French wag is said to have remarked “Victor Hugo was really a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo.” When the writer was in his seventies or eighties, a friend expressed to Hugo his belief that the soul dies with the body, to which Hugo replied “For your soul that may be true, but I know that mine is eternal.”

Whether or not Hugo’s soul is eternal, he seems to have done absolutely everything within his power to ensure that posterity would not forget him. By the end of his life, he’d written seven novels – nearly all of which are of Les Miserables length – he wrote twenty-one plays, countless numbers of polemics and pamphlets, and 155,000 lines of poetry! And that doesn’t count any private correspondence.  No one but a person of messianic inner conviction can create an output so large, and anyone who writes at such a frenetic pace for so many decades has neither the time to make sure everything is of equal quality nor the self-awareness to realize that the quality of his writing might improve if there were less of it, nor the leisure time to make a proper study of human nature.

And yet Victor Hugo is probably the most widely beloved writer in French history. His fictions are about very real issues, yet they make no real intellectual demands on the reader. Even if insipid, the prose is always crystalline, and when he was at his considerable best, the excitement of his plots carried his writing forward through whatever weaknesses they possessed. In both his time and long after his death, there was probably not a single person in France who did not have strong feelings about Victor Hugo. If you could read French, it’s likely you read every scrap of his writing you could find. If you couldn’t, somebody probably read it to you. In order to understand the importance of Victor Hugo to 19^th century France, you’d have to combine Stephen Spielberg, Bob Dylan, Christopher Hitchens, and Norman Mailer. His only contemporary peer in this regard is Charles Dickens, who like Hugo, was the voice of his entire country: every region, every social class, every ethnic group, every background. There might be a few 20^th century writers who served the same purpose to give voice to the stories of small nations, but none of them have anything resembling the enormous international presence which Hugo commanded as well. 

800 Words: Friday List #20 Part II - The Confessions of Zeno, Les Miserables, The True Believer

Fiction: The Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo Let us praise any work of art that has the courage to be about absolutely nothing. Let us praise Uncle Vanya and Waiting for Godot, Seinfeld and The (original) Office, Tokyo Story and Lost in Translation, The Adventures of Augie March and …. The Confessions of Zeno. The subject within each of these is as often as not the total lack of subject. Our lives pass us by without needing a particular story to make it meaningful, why should its art need one? As a result, the work becomes as much about everything as nothing. But at the same time, to say that any of these works are ‘about nothing’ is a gross misrepresentation. A great work whose subject seems so unfocused is so for a reason – the subject of them is life itself. How do we pass our time, how do we cope with the slow crawl of living, how do we deal with the minutia of everyday life? I’m a sucker for any great work without a subject, because it’s that much harder to make it great. If The Confessions of Zeno can be said to have a subject, it’s lying. Not conscious lying, but the unconscious unreliability of the way we perceive ourselves, and the nothingness of self-awareness that lies behind it. Italo Svevo is the pen-name for Ettore Schmitz, an Italian/Jewish writer from Trieste of German extraction. Zeno Cosini, like Schmitz, is a successful businessman, a model bourgeois gentleman; devoted family man and husband, interested in art, literature, music, and science. Yet by the end of the book, his appearance of passion for every one of these things seems like an almost complete lie; not because Zeno set out to deceive us, but because Zeno has no more idea of who he is than anyone else does. Like all of us, he evolves, and his beliefs and desires seem to change and shift so quickly that we can't keep up, and he is a different person on every page. After 460 pages of living inside Zeno’s head, we ultimately know Zeno less well than we did at the book’s beginning. He is the perfect example of how the more closely we study a person, the more unknowable that person becomes. Some desires completely conflict with others, people think they understand each other yet they’re completely mistaken; the harder people try to be competent at life the more they display their incompetence, and the luckier they are to be rewarded for it. Pop Music: Les Miserables Read what I wrote about it last year here I know I know. It’s a total cheat. But since seeing the trailer for the movie version of the musical this Monday, it’s been in my head almost non-stop (except for when Mahler 9 ‘s been there…). How can you not be excited for a version that not only has Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, Anne Hathaway, Amanda Seyfried, Sacha Baron Cohen, and Helena Bonham Carter; but is also directed by Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech, John Adams, Elizabeth I)? Some very good stage musicals become great on the screen, though Fiddler on the Roof is the only one that comes to mind right now… Like so many fine operas of any period, Les Mis does not have particularly great music when taken on its own merits. It takes glee in skirting the line between art and popular trash, and errs more on trash end than most great operas ever dared. The shameless tugging at the heart-strings, the recycling of melodies, the vintage-80’s synthesizers, the incessant merchandizing all make you want to write it off as something tawdry. But the success of Les Mis did not come cheaply – it’s a damned good musical about the 19th century which recaptures all the outsize emotions and sentimentality of so much of the 19th century’s art. It is probably the closest experience which most music-theater audiences will get to a grand opera. Perhaps this is why Les Miserables was the first piece of popular music I ever loved. I’d practically memorized it by the age of 7, and by the time I was eighteen I’d seen it four times though never since – easily the most unforgettable of them being a Tel Aviv production in Hebrew with direction that thought through and revised the original concept to a level no touring Les Mis in America could ever approximate. I went with my parents, my uncle and my Bubbie – all of us were in tears by the end. Leaving aside the amazing marketing...there's clearly something about Les Mis that appeals to the entire world. Has any show in the history of Broadway grossed more money? No one can say for sure what the reason is, but I at least have a guess. For all the lavish production values, this is a musical about poverty and deprivation. It is the perfect Reagan-era musical for the contradictions of an aging Baby Boomer and soixante-huitard crowd grown opulent in its tastes and desiring lavish entertainment that can nevertheless reassure them that their once-cherished passions for social justice are still aflame. It is, surely, one of the more noxious things about Les Mis's success, but no one can deny that whatever hypocritical elements it brings out in its fans, it brings them out brilliantly. Non-Fiction: The True Believer by Eric Hoffer (one of the most inspiring interviews I’ve ever watched) Oh how I wish I’d read this book before I was sixteen. Understanding fanaticism is all too easy for anyone who’d ever escaped from its iron grip. But for those who have never been through an experience which seems like a revelation - whether intellectual, spiritual, or personal, only to later find everything of which you were so certain come crashing down, it is nearly impossible to understand the circumstances which make such dramatic beliefs possible; particularly because the people who try hardest to make you understand what it’s like to believe in something so fervently seem like stark-raving lunatics. What Eric Hoffer does a better job of explaining than any writer I’ve ever read is the particular type of person who is susceptible to mass movements and extremism. It is neither poverty nor wealth, intelligence nor lack thereof, which compels fanatical belief. It is instead a divided self, lacking the self-esteem which a sure place in nature’s balance provides. Those who are poor and have known nothing else find it nearly as manageable to contend with poverty’s curses as those who have always been rich deal with the blessings of wealth. It is the newly poor and newly rich, the newly immigrated and the immigrant’s next door neighbor, who are most susceptible. When a person’s self-conception is uprooted, he becomes frustrated - a misfit who has no certainty upon which to base his conception of himself, and is therefore prone to belief in any movement which tells him that the self does not matter. It does not matter whether the movement is Fascism or Communism, Opus Dei Catholicism or Radical Islam, Revisionist Zionism or Pan-Arabism, (ahem) Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street. The person who is most susceptible to a mass movement is the person who feels the most need to believe in a power and purpose beyond oneself, and any one of those movements could switch members with the ‘opposite’ number listed, and their basic conduct would be almost completely the same. Their true enemies are not each other, they in fact have mutual enemies, and those enemies are moderation, scepticism, self-confidence, and security. It should come as no surprise that in the years around when Italo Svevo/Ettore Schmitz wrote The Confessions of Zeno were the years when Mass Movements like Communism, Fascism, International Socialism, and Falangism, were beginning to assert their stranglehold upon the world. After World War I, there was an epidemic in the loss of confidence for everything, every belief, every institution which people once held dear. The story of Eric Hoffer is one of the most inspiring stories of American History - a lifelong longshoreman from San Francisco who became one of the great American writers and thinkers with no education credential but a library card. Hoffer was a lifelong outsider from any academic or intellectual circle, yet could outthink and outwrite nearly all of them. The only reason anyone has ever heard of Eric Hoffer is because Harper’s Magazine thought his first-hand account of life and work at a Federal Transient Camp was useful - a consideration only made possible because of programs from the Roosevelt Administration like the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps), WPA (Works Progress Administration), NIRA (National Industrial Recovery Act), and the TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority). Because none of these programs existed after The Great Depression’s End, it is a consideration that could never again be shown to another member of the American underclass. How many other potential Eric Hoffers are there about which will the world never know?

800 Contrarian Words about Ray Bradbury

Instantly we’re aboard a frozen ship, thousands of degrees below absolute zero, built with refrigerating capacity that can withstand the most excoriating rays of the sun itself. The ship edges ever closer to the sun, seven-thousand degrees, ten-thousand degrees, ever higher, until the icicles of the ship itself melt, leaving the vessel within a hare’s breath of meltdown, incineration, decompression, or god knows what else. And just when the ship seems on the verge of collapse, the Captain sticks his hand inside a metal glove, and out from the ship’s hull comes a giant replica of this glove that’s kinetically connected to the Captain’s hand. The captain literally scoops up part of the sun with his hand as we would a piece of earth, and puts his piece of sun into a sealed container as we might put sod into a plant pot. Here’s Bradbury:

“The Cup dipped into the sun. It scooped up a bit of the flesh of God, the blood of the universe, the blazing thought, the blinding philosophy that set out and mothered a galaxy, that idled and swept planets in their fields and summoned or laid to rest lives and livelihoods.”

There are a few lines afteward, but The Golden Apples of the Sun fundamentally ends with one of the most indelible images in any work of fiction I’ve ever read – as unforgettable as any myth or Bible story. Yet after the captain scoops up the sun, the story is practically over. There is no musing about whether or not this is a good or bad development, no personalities involved, nothing except for a terrifyingly beautiful image. To have that image, and then not see what comes afterward is like a literary blue ball. Is there any point to the story?  

…and then it occurs to you to go back to the sentences written just before the unforgettable image:

“My God, we'll say, we did it! And here is our cup of energy, fire, vibration, call it what you will, that may well power our cities and sail our ships and light our libraries and tan our children and bake our daily breads and simmer the knowledge of our universe for us for a thousand years until it is well done. Here, from this cup, all good men of science and religion: Drink! Warm yourselves against the night of ignorance, the long snows of superstition, the cold winds of disbelief, and from the great fear of darkness in each man.”

And herein lies a much bigger problem than lack of memorable characters or fully-fleshed ideas. If Ray Bradbury were simply a great purveyor of images, it would be worth the time to read so much more of his output than I actually have. But in the stuff I’ve (attempted to) read, which I can’t imagine is so much less than many of those people who celebrate his work, Bradbury seemed to take it for granted that learning and technology was always on the side of goodness and light, and with enough proper application could tame the baseness of human nature itself. It purported to be a genuinely humanistic outlook, but it was just another form of transhumanism which states that technology will never let us down.  

In this way, he occupied almost precisely the opposite point of view from Kurt Vonnegut, the other pop-culture ‘hero-author’ of their day. Both writers acquired millions of fans who read their books not simply for entertainment but as a kind of secular scripture. Their most devoted readers would not merely see Bradbury and Vonnegut as enlightening authors, but as a kind of enlightment itself. Both writers provided their fans with an entire worldview– which is all the more confusing when one realizes that their opposite points of view were fundamentally taken as gospel by the same readers. But when one lives in 2012 America, Vonnegut and Bradbury don’t seem as far apart as all that. It’s very easy to see that either point of view is absolutely preferable to the combination of religious darkness and blind faith in American power that many rightly fear may engulf our country much more than it already has. But had we lived in the Soviet Union, I can’t imagine we wouldn’t see a certain similarity in Bradbury’s view of technological progress or Vonnegut’s view of human nature’s current state to the Communist Party’s official view. Context is all.

Not that it necessarily matters, but as it happens, Bradbury was fundamentally a conservative. He certainly would not be much of a conservative by present day standards, but he was a dyed-in-the-wool libertarian and one of his favorite movie was Ayn Rand’s screen treatment of her book, The Fountainhead. Unlike the socialist Vonnegut, he believed very deeply in the importance of self-reliance and optimism, and it’s difficult to imagine that his rosy view of mankind didn’t color his books as much as Vonnegut’s  view.

I’m clearly the wrong person for science fiction and fantasy. I listen to my brother Ethan and dozens of friends enthuse for hours upon end about their favorite books of conceptual fiction. They patiently indulge my crippling blind spot and tell me that the right book simply hasn’t come along – some of them are even nice enough to loan me books of their own, and I wish I could repay their debt by telling them that I ever find the books they’ve loaned me worth the trouble they’ve taken to convince me. But for whatever reason, there are so few books of conceptual fiction that do anything for me. Whenever I work up the willpower to read the spectacular scenes of sci-fi and fantasy, I first wonder to myself – what is there on this page that wouldn’t be 100 times more effective in a good movie or TV show? Perhaps my visual imagination is limited, but I could give hundreds of examples of this problem: I barely made it to page 100 of Game of Thrones, yet I watch the TV show with ever growing fascination. At times I still despair that I ever gave 12-or-so hours of my life to J.R.R. Tolkein, yet I have real affection for the Lord of the Rings movies. Hell, I could even just compare Ray Bradbury, whose work leaves me cold, to Star Trek, the existence of which would be impossible without Bradbury’s entire ethos and whose every episode I gobble up hungrily.

I then wonder, does reading really mean so little to us anymore that we have to create cinematic scenes in our books in order to make them worth reading? Even the most well-read among us – and surely there are some who are still much better read than me – read very little fiction in comparison to what people gobbled up 70 years ago (let alone 170). We’ve long since transferred our loyalty to the movies, to television, to internet content – and it’s to these mediums which we turn for truly enlightening entertainment. But there are certain things which only books can do – and one of them is to explain ideas, something which Ray Bradbury did admirably. But another is to get inside the heads of other people, to literally read their thoughts. It’s probably easier to grasp ideas from a single well-written piece of non-fiction than any amount of speculative fiction on the same issue. But to this day, nothing beats fiction at explaining people to each other – their thoughts, their personalities, their souls.

Currently I’m reading books of fiction by two Italian writers from the beginning of the 20^th century, Giovanni Verga and Italo Svevo. Svevo is a brilliant elucidator of ideas, and Giovanni Verga is a creator of spectacular scenes. But both keep these more sensational gifts as a great condiment to the main course, which is to understand the people who populate their stories. Writers like them, like Chekhov, like Bellow, like Tolstoy, are primarily interested explaining the human-ness of their characters. Does this automatically make them better writers? Certainly not, but it does give them a kind of ‘home field advantage’ in that they do what fiction has time and again been proven to do better than anything else.

It takes a very different kind of writer to be particularly attracted to the idea and spectacle drivenness of sci-fi/fantasy than to create stories that realizes the full implications of the characters who populate them.  I have to wonder if the popularity of so much fiction with a lack of memorable characters means that we’re less curious about one another in our era than we were in some previous ones. Surely that isn’t out of the question in this era when facebook and twitter can let us know virtually anything we want about each other. When we can learn anything we want about another person at the click of a button, what reason is there to go out of our way to find it?

Ultimately, the problem of most science fiction and fantasy is the problem of most realist authors too. Life is too complicated, too rich, too dynamic to be contained in a single genre. Sci-fi and fantasy limits existence as much and as little as any other genre, no more, no less. The problem is not this genre, the problem is genre itself.

This narrowness isn’t the only reason for which many major critics condescended to Bradbury, but it is one of them. Critics have ripped Bradbury apart for years for all sorts of reasons – some deserved, some entirely not. On the one hand, they said he wrote bad prose, and that was nonsense – Bradbury wrote gorgeously in a prose style that any number of writers would kill to recapture. They talked down to Bradbury for writing a fiction of ideas yet refused to talk down similarly to realists who wrote a fiction that was similarly one-dimensional. On the other hand, Bradbury’s work is limiting; it’s almost polemic disguised as fiction. It’s one thing to write about ideas, but if your books traffic in ideas, you should explore the implication of every idea to its fullest potential. Ray Bradbury had fantastic ideas, but he usually stopped following his thoughts before the ideas became a reality.