But don't forget: you and I reached this conclusion nearly 50 years ago, in the Union, over a cup of coffee, listening to the chimes of Altgeld Hall. So we beat on...
That cup of coffee in the Union cemented one of my oldest friendships. Bill Nack was sports editor of The Daily Illini the year I was editor. He was the editor the next year. He married the Urbana girl I dated in high school. I never made it to first base. By that time, I think he may have been able to slide into second and was taking a risky lead and keeping an eye on the pitcher. We had a lot of fun on the Daily Illini. This was in the days before ripping stuff off the web. He insisted on running stories about every major horse race. We had only one photo of a horse. We used it for every winner. If it was a filly, we flipped it. Of this as his editor I approved.
After college, I was out of the basement of Illini Hall with its ancient Goss rotary press, and running up the stairs. I immediately sat down right here and started writing this. Nack went to Vietnam as Westmoreland's flack and then got a job at Newsday. On Long Island, he and Mary raised their three girls and a boy. One year at the paper's holiday party he jumped up on a desk and recited the names and years of every single winner of the Kentucky Derby. Bill told me:
I dismounted from the table in the middle of the city room and Dave Laventhiol, the Newsday editor and closet horse player, came up to me immediately and said, 'Why do you know that?' I told him I'd been studying it since I was a kid and loved the history, color and lore of the racetrack. "It's the Damon Runyan in me," I said.
"Would you like to cover the races for Newsday?" he asked.Five minutes later, after consulting with wife Mary, I was the Newsday turfwriter.
Voila! Laventhol asked me to write a note asking for the job, so he could post it on the bulletin and not have to explain this unusual move to everyone thinking I'd lost my mind. The only thing I can remember of that memo was this: "After covering politicians for four years, I would like the chance to cover the whole horse."
Bill was part of the story of Secretariat from before the great horse was born, or maybe a few days later, I forget the details. Discovering the greatest horse in history became the greatest event in his professional life, as seeing Scorsese's first film became mine. Bill saw the stallion for the last time very shortly before his death. "After the autopsy, the vet said he had a heart twice as big as the average horse," Bill told me. "There was nothing wrong with it. It was simply a great heart." He wrote about this in the best-seller Secretariat: The Making of a Champion, which is now being made into a movie.
By then he was working for Sports Illustrated, where he became a senior writer. He wasn't the kind of writer who covered a particular beat. He was and is a great American prose stylist. At a reading for his book My Turf, he read a story and made a woman cry. Then he read another story and there wasn't a dry eye in the house. One was about the death of Secretariat. The other was about a filly breaking down and being destroyed on the track.
Bill Nack, a performer in words. (Photo by Roger Ebert)
Bill was the writer who exposed the scandal of how owners and vets conspired to use cortisone in order to race horses who were not ready to be raced. "I started seeing horses breaking down all the time," he said. "You hardly ever used to see that." No one at the tracks would give him the time of day for a couple of years. It was a rotten business.
Nack has met everyone. Here is the kind of thing that happens to him. It is from the opening of an article he and our mutual friend Lester Munson wrote for ESPN.com, where Bill now works as a commentator. Munson is speaking:
On Sunday, as I was sitting in my summer cabin in Vermont, completely absorbed in a New York Times story about John Edwards' affair with Rielle Hunter, I began reading a paragraph whose message shot through me like a sudden bolt of electrical current. The story centered on Ms. Hunter's refusal to take a DNA test to determine the paternity of her 5-month-old daughter, but that was not what startled me. It was this: "Ms. Hunter was born in Fort Lauderdale. Fla., in 1964 as Lisa Druck and moved to New York City in her 20s, becoming part of a Manhattan social scene that included the writer Jay McInerney ...Here, I jumped up and blurted loudly to my wife, Judy: "Good God! John Edwards was having sex with the daughter of the guy who taught Tommy Burns how to kill horses by electrocuting them!"
Bill covers the waterfront. One of his stories involved tracking down every eyewitness he could find to the Long Count fight between Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney.
All this is prelude. My favorite spa in all the world is Rancho la Puerta in Tecate, Mexico. If I say it is my favorite, somehow you know it is not Bianca Trump's favorite. Bill was like me until Chaz dragged me kicking and screaming down there. He didn't need no stinking spa. I talked him into it with the help of his wonderful wife Carolyne. Yes, they loved it. We all meet there at least once a year. I wrote Rancho telling them Bill was the most gifted reader I had ever heard, and so he is, reciting his choices from memory, including "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and no end of Yeats. We started reading together in Boulder at Diane Doe's book shop, during the Conference on World Affairs. When Bill visited me in Chicago right after the Obama victory, he was memorizing one of the e. e. cummings poems I always used to read, which begins:
anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn't he danced his did
I appointed myself as Bill's impresario. I told Rancho they should schedule an evening titled "A Concert in Words, with William Nack." That's exactly what you want at 8 p.m. after you took the morning mountain walk and busted your ass in the gym all day, right? Some guy standing up there readin' po-ems. The room was pretty full however, because I 'd been working the dining room at meal times, flogging the great event.
Bill dimmed the lights just a little, and read for an hour, mostly standing in front of the podium without a book. The campers demanded an encore. He read for another 30 minutes. Then he got a standing ovation and they marched on the concierge to demand a second performance. He read the next afternoon for another hour, but he had to stop at six because you don't want to be late for dinner after busting your ass all day.
I have heard Bill read maybe 20 or 30 times. We both read books all the time. He reads them like a musician searching for notes. When he finds something he's like a kid. Of all writers I believe he loves Nabokov the most. He'll give you the opening page of Lolita or passages from Speak, Memory. "There's something I want you to hear," he told me one morning on a hike. He always starts that way. "It's from Nabokov's Pnin. Have you read it? About a university professor. I think this might be the most profound metaphor I've ever found.
With the help of the janitor he screwed on to the side of the desk a pencil sharpener--that highly satisfying, highly philosophical instrument that goes ticonderoga-ticonderoga, feeding on the yellow finish and sweet wood, and ends up in a kind of soundlessly spinning ethereal void as we all must.
One sentence. Perfect. The sound, the image, the shrugging resignation. No comma after void. To fully appreciate it, it has to be read aloud. Get somebody in your house, or call somebody on the phone. I can wait.
When Bill is doing a reading, I want to call out requests like a drunk who can never get enough of "Melancholy Baby." Frost! Seamus Heaney!
Vladimir Nabokov and a Ticonderoga
I still have the first real book I ever read. It has a passage I want him to read someday. He's holding the very volume it in that photo. It is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The inscription says, "To Roger from Uncle Bill, Christmas 1949." I was halfway into second grade.
My grandmother, Anna B. Stumm, said, "Do you think Roger can read that, Bill?"
Uncle Bill said, "Bud, can you read?"
"Yes," I said.
"Then he can read it."
I lay down on my stomach on the living room rug and started reading. I hardly stopped. "That boy always has his nose in a book," my Aunt Mary said. "Mary, he's reading," my Aunt Martha said. I didn't know a lot of the words, but the words I did know were a lot more interesting than "Run, Spot, run!" and I picked up new ones every time through, because I read it over and over for a year, getting to the end and turning straight back to "You don't know me without you have read a book by Mr. Mark Twain..." It was the best book I had ever read.
I've read Huckleberry Finn I don't know how times. At the University of Cape Town I grew sentimental about Johnson's 1964 Civil Rights Act, and read it again. "All American literature comes out of a book by Mark Twain named Huckleberry Finn," Hemingway wrote, measuring it out in that reporter's way of his. It is a profound turning point in the American dialogue between black and white, all told in Huck's Mississippi River dialect.
Mark Twain was a magnificent stylist. I'd never read one word of James Fenimore Cooper when I read Twain's Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses in about the fifth grade. I didn't need to, Twain was so damnably funny. His essay had a direct and obvious influence on many of my reviews. Whenever I start picking the logic of a plot to shreds, I am Mark Twain's pupil. Here is a sample:
Cooper's gift in the way of invention was not a rich endowment; but such as it was he liked to work it, he was pleased with the effects, and indeed he did some quite sweet things with it. In his little box of stage properties he kept six or eight cunning devices, tricks, artifices for his savages and woodsmen to deceive and circumvent each other with, and he was never so happy as when he was working these innocent things and seeing them go. A favorite one was to make a moccasined person tread in the tracks of the moccasined enemy, and thus hide his own trail. Cooper wore out barrels and barrels of moccasins in working that trick. Another stage-property that he pulled out of his box pretty frequently was his broken twig. He prized his broken twig above all the rest of his effects, and worked it the hardest. It is a restful chapter in any book of his when somebody doesn't step on a dry twig and alarm all the reds and whites for two hundred yards around. Every time a Cooper person is in peril, and absolute silence is worth four dollars a minute, he is sure to step on a dry twig. There may be a hundred handier things to step on, but that wouldn't satisfy Cooper. Cooper requires him to turn out and find a dry twig; and if he can't do it, go and borrow one. [1]
Natty! Natty Bumppo! Look out for your right foot!
There you hear Twain's voice, genial, direct, and poker-faced. He could be poetic when he wanted to, but he never seemed to be reaching for an effect. He had that gift of using only the words that seemed natural, even inevitable, to use. No adornments. And he could do that in dialect, as he does with Huckleberry Finn.
Call your audience back into the room and read them this, from Huckleberry Finn, which I believe Bill is memorizing:
Pretty soon it darkened up, and begun to thunder and lighten; so the birds was right about it. Directly it begun to rain, and it rained like all fury, too, and I never see the wind blow so. It was one of these regular summer storms. It would get so dark that it looked all blue-black outside, and lovely; and the rain would thrash along by so thick that the trees off a little ways looked dim and spider-webby; and here would come a blast of wind that would bend the trees down and turn up the pale under-side of the leaves; and then a perfect ripper of a gust would follow along and set the branches to tossing their arms as if they was just wild; and next, when it was just about the bluest and blackest -- fst! it was as bright as glory, and you'd have a little glimpse of tree-tops a-plunging about away off yonder in the storm, hundreds of yards further than you could see before; dark as sin again in a second, and now you'd hear the thunder let go with an awful crash, and then go rumbling, grumbling, tumbling, down the sky towards the under side of the world, like rolling empty barrels down stairs -- where it's long stairs and they bounce a good deal, you know.
How did you think Mark Twain wrote? Four sentences. The fourth one 179 words long. As a boy, I thought it was the realest thunderstorm I had ever seen. It plays like Beethoven. Mark Twain introduced America to its vernacular. Not how we speak, but how we caress and feel words. Before him, there were great writers like Poe and Melville, who I still read with love. But I sit on the porch steps next to Sam Clemens in his rocking chair, and he speaks in the voice of his Hannibal childhood--straight and honest, observant and cynical, youthful but wise, idealistic and disappointed, always amused, and sometimes he rolls the words down stairs--where it's long stairs and they bounce a good deal, you know. They bounce themselves right into poetry.
The long sentence isn't a stunt. Thunderstorms do seem to sustain themselves forever and then suddenly lull and regather. The flashes and claps punctuate the constant rolling uneasiness. I don't know if you can describe one in short sentences. That was the limitation of Hemingway's style. "Grumbling, rumbling, tumbling" when it comes is not an effect, but like all good descriptions simply the best way to say it, evoking the way storms wander away from us, still in turmoil. Look how he uses fst! to break the flow.
Pretty soon it darkened up, and begun to thunder and lighten; so the birds was right about it. The word was throughout is always better than the word were, and keeps Huck's voice in view. The remarkable thing is that we accept this poetic evocation as the voice of an illiterate boy. Darkened up is better than darken, and darkened down would be horrible. Lighten is the right word, perhaps never before used like this, allowing him to avoid the completely wrong thunder and lightning, without having to write the pedestrian and there was thunder and lightning. It keeps it in Huck's voice. An English teacher who corrects lighten should be teaching a language he doesn't know. And look at these words: It would get so dark that it looked all blue-black outside, and lovely...No, don't look at them. Get a musician to compose for it. Notice how lovely softens the blue-black and nods back to it soothingly.
While I was anticipating Bill's visit to Chicago and musing about this essay, a reader named Luke posted a blog comment beginning, "For my money, the greatest lines in literature come at the end of the The Great Gatsby." Then he quoted some of them.
The green light at the end of Daisy's pier
I e-mailed the comment to Bill, who responded with the lines at the top of this entry. After that cup of coffee in 1961 at the Ilini Union, I've heard Bill recite those very lines, conservatively, a hundred times. He even performed them at our wedding banquet. And at his own with Carolyn, of course. And every Wednesday night during the Conference on World Affairs in Boulder, when a group of pals would have dinner together at the Red Lion Inn up the mountain. Yes, the night Studs Terkel and Molly Ivins were there.
Most of the big shore places were closed now there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes--a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
And as I sat there brooding about the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--to-morrow we will run faster, stretch our arms our further . . . And one fine morning --
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
If The Great Gatsby is, as some people believe, the greatest American novel, there's the most important reason right there. Fitzgerald does what no writer should do, and reveals his cards. He states his theme in so many words. He sums up. Not cool. The theme should be implied. It should be expressed with indirection, as if about something else. It should coil secretly among the words. Yes, yes, yes, and the hell with it. A great writer knows not only when to break the rules, but how to. How could you change one word of the sentence beginning, Its vanished trees...
Now gather your audience again. That is the paragraph that started Bill Nack off on a lifetime of memorizing. His most beloved passage of American prose, and mine. Read it to them. Bill tells me his pal Hunter S. Thompson once warmed up by copying out every word of The Great Gatsby on his typewriter. Not that you can immediately see Fitzgerald's influence in Hunter's style, although perhaps the words compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired is the best possible description of Thompson's life's work.
And now we arrive, as you knew we must, at Cormac McCarthy's Suttree. I have read all of McCarthy's fiction, and for my money this is his best novel, but ("therefore," I want to add) appears to be his least-mentioned. Just read this:
It is little more than dawn when the general comes down Front Street slumped in the front of his coalwagon, the horse named Golgotha hung between the trees and stumbling along in the cold with his doublejointed knees and his feet clopping and the bright worn quoits winking feebly among the clattering spokes. In the whipsocket rides a bent cane. There is a gap in the iron of one tire and above the meaningless grumbling of the wagon it clicks, clicks with a clocklike persistence that tolls progress, purpose, the passage of time. When they stop it is a violent shudder, as if something has given way. The general climbs and climbs down from his seat and goes to the rear and takes up his blackened basket and sets it in the street. He levers up the lantern glass and blows out the tiny flame. He hands down coal lump by lump until the basket is filled and with pain he hefts and carries it to the dim house, through the chill fog bent and muttering, returning lightened but with no better speed or humor to where the horse stands sleeping in the traces.
They come trundling and slowly aclatter up the empty street, pass under the bridge and take the bitter and frozen fields toward the river. In the hoarcolored dawn they seem to be drifting, closed away in the cold smoke until just the general's shoulder and the slouched back of him with his hat perched on the shoulders of his clothes and the hat the horse wore float over the cold grey void like transient artifacts from a polar dream.
Ooh coal, kindling wood
Would if i could
Hep me get sold
Coal nowIt was six degrees above zero. Suttree crawled from his bed, pulled on his coat and got his trousers and climbed up onto the bed so cold the floor was. He squatted and fished his socks out from beneath the cot and shook out the dust and pulled them on and stepped into his shoes and went to the door. Mist swirled about him. The old black coalpedlar sat his cart, the horse sidled and stamped.
Couldn't you just leave a basket and go on?
I see you ain't froze, said the general, climbing down.
The most recent time I read those words, it was 10 o'clock at night in the rehab center. Dead quiet, in the dead of winter. My room chilly. I was holding the book while seated in a wheelchair by the side of my bed. The wheelchair tilted back to ease the pain of my shoulders, where flesh had been removed to try to patch the hole in my chin. I had a blanket wrapped around me, even covering my head and the back of my neck.
When I was drinking, I went to O'Rourke's on North Avenue, which was heated in the early days only by a wood-burning stove. Dress warmly and drink in a cool room, was my motto. Now in the hospital those cold, cold words of McCarthys' transported me. At a point beneath desire, I was there on Suttree's leaking houseboat in the hopeless dawn, sharing the ordeal of Suttree, the general, and Golgotha. It was an improvement. I was not trapped in a bed and a chair. I was not hooked up to anything. I was miserable, but I was alive, and McCarthy was still able to write that perfect terse dialogue. That is the thing about McCarthy. He is both the teller and the subject of Suttree. I do not mean anything so banal as that the book is autobiographical. It is the merciless record of a state of mind, the alcoholic state of mind, even when Suttree is not drinking but is white-knuckling it.
Do not assemble your audience again. First, I want you to read those words to yourself one more time. Go away and have a cup of coffee. What works for me, I start with a good teaspoon of instant, and then I stir in a scant teaspoon of Postum, just a little cocoa powder, and some skimmed soy milk.
Are you back now? Then read McCarthy again. How at the top he writes the horse named Golgotha hung between the trees and at the bottom he writes where the horse stands sleeping in the traces. Trees above, and traces below. Hung between the trees goes up, and makes the death and Crucifixion connection without stating it. Sleeping between the traces goes down, and closes. Reverse the use of the trees and traces and see how you like them now.
Regard the pedlar's cry:
Ooh coal, kindling wood
Would if i could
Hep me get sold
Coal now
How did this construct itself for the old man over the years? What cry of need softened into a song? Has it grown into solace, or is it only a hopeless chant? How must it sound approaching over the frozen fields? ...the horse named Golgotha hung between the trees and stumbling along in the cold with his doublejointed knees and his feet clopping and the bright worn quoits winking feebly among the clattering spokes. Which evokes the awkwardness and the agony and the sound and the sight. You don't know what a quoit is, but you know by reading it. And then: In the whipsocket rides a bent cane. A short sentence to bring a full stop to the long one.
The general climbs and climbs down from his seat... This sentence is in a different universe than The general climbs down from his seat, which would be jarringly pedestrian. The old black coalpedlar sat his cart, the horse sidled and stamped. The right sentence. The wrong one would be: The old black coal peddler sat on his cart, and the horse sidled and stamped. The word and would turn it from evocation into description. The horse sidled. The wrong words would be: shivered. stirred. shook. The right word:
sidle |ˈsīdl| verb [intrans.] walk in a furtive, unobtrusive, or timid manner, esp. sideways.
The novel is written entirely with that attention. You haven't even started it until you've started it the second time. After weeks of depression, hopelessness and regret, realizing the operation had failed and I would probably not speak again, after murky medications and no interest in movies, television, books or even the morning paper, it was the bleak, sad Suttree that started me to life again. Spare me happy books that will cheer me up. I was fighting it out with Suttree. I didn't want a condo in Florida. I wanted a fucking basket of coal. I picked up the book indifferently and started it the third time, after another failed surgery and at another low ebb because "at least I know it's good." Nor was I inspired by Suttree's struggle. I was inspired by McCarthy's. I sensed that McCarthy in every moment at his work was like Suttree waiting for the doublejointed Golgotha to stumble down the hill.
I don't believe Cormac McCarthy is an alcoholic. But I believe he knows what one is. Suttree is the most true account of being drunk, being hung over, and the temporary elation of possible sobriety that I have ever read, better than Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, because it is written from the outside, and Lowry was still inside.
No good movie is depressing, I like to say. All bad movies are depressing. I once ordered ballpoints bearing that motto, and gave them away to idiots. In that long season of my life, Suttree affirmed the worth of getting the hell up and starting over again. Not long after, Chaz brought me the DVD of "Queen" and said, "I think you might like this one." I did. I took one of her yellow legal pads, me who had not written in longhand since high school, and wrote my review, Suttree glancing in my direction.
What did they receive from Bill's reading, the audience at Rancho la Puerta? From 90 minutes of great poetry and prose, told to them by a master? In their real lives they are busy getting and spending, as we all must. I believe Bill reawakened in them the restless stirring we all felt, taking a class in literature, when we were asked to read someone we found that we loved, like Jane Austen, Emily Dickenson, Mark Twain or Shakespeare. In those days we walked with kindred spirits on the Quad in the moonlight and shared our aspirations. Now here was Bill, starting again:
Whose woods these are I think I know...
At that moment for them he was the green light at the end of Daisy's pier.
¶
[Footnote 1] Mark Twain's Rules for writing:
Cooper's art has some defects. In one place in 'Deerslayer,' and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offences against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record.
There are nineteen rules governing literary art in the domain of romantic fiction--some say twenty-two. In Deerslayer Cooper violated eighteen of them. These eighteen require:
1. That a tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere. But the Deerslayer tale accomplishes nothing and arrives in the air.
2. They require that the episodes of a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it. But as the Deerslayer tale is not a tale, and accomplishes nothing and arrives nowhere, the episodes have no rightful place in the work, since there was nothing for them to develop.
3. They require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others. But this detail has often been overlooked in the Deerslayer tale.
Mark Twain: No rule against writing in bed
4. They require that the personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there. But this detail also has been overlooked in the Deerslayer tale.
5. They require that when the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject in hand, and be
interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say. But this requirement has been ignored from the beginning of the Deerslayer tale to the end of it.
6. They require that when the author describes the character of a personage in his tale, the conduct and conversation of that personage shall justify said description. But this law gets little or no attention in the Deerslayer tale, as Natty Bumppo's case will amply prove.
7. They require that when a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven-dollar Friendship's Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a negro minstrel in the end of it. But this rule is flung down and danced upon in the Deerslayer tale.
8. They require that crass stupidities shall not be played upon the reader as "the craft of the woodsman, the delicate art of the forest," by either the author or the people in the tale. But this rule is persistently violated in the Deerslayer tale.
9. They require that the personages of a tale shall confine themselves
to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable. But these rules are not respected in the Deerslayer tale.
10. They require that the author shall make the reader feel a deep
interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones. But the reader of the Deerslayer tale dislikes the good people in it, is indifferent to the others, and wishes they would all get drowned together.
11. They require that the characters in a tale shall be so clearly defined that the reader can tell beforehand what each will do in a given emergency. But in the Deerslayer tale this rule is vacated.
In addition to these large rules there are some little ones. These require that the author shall:
12. Say what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it.
13. Use the right word, not its second cousin.
14. Eschew surplusage.
15. Not omit necessary details.
16. Avoid slovenliness of form.
17. Use good grammar.
18. Employ a simple and straightforward style.
Roger,
Very glad to see the allusion to Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening in there....probably the most perfect poem ever written in English....perfect iambic quadrimeter in every verse, a sophisticated rhyme scheme...multiple levels of meaning branching out from a concrete, day-to-day experience.
Here's a fact about the poem that not everyone knows. Frost wrote a line one way, and was very particular about it, and an overly-officious editor added a comma that wasn't supposed to be there, which drastically changed the meaning (yes, you can hear absence of the comma when someone speaks the line aloud, and how important the absence of the comma is to the meaning).
Frost wrote "the woods are lovely, dark and deep."
The officious editor changed it to read "the woods are lovely, dark, and deep." totally changed.
Before: "the woods are lovely = dark and deep"
After: "the woods are:
> lovely,
> dark, and
> deep.
I'm reminded of what you wrote about 'Batman Begins':
"[T]his is the Batman movie I've been waiting for; more correctly, this is the movie I did not realize I was waiting for..."
This is the essay I did not realize I was waiting for.
Thank you thank you.
Roger,
As long as we are on the subject of perfect sentences, may I offer this one from Moby-Dick:
Ship and boat diverged; the cold, damp night breeze blew between; a screaming gull flew overhead; the two hulls wildly rolled; we gave three heavy-hearted cheers, and blindly plunged like fate into the lone Atlantic.
Sound, temperature, humidity, motion, momentum, fate, foreshadowing and "heavy-hearted cheers" to boot -- all in one sentence, and not a word wasted. Just gorgeous.
Ebert: I love Melville. Pierre, which few people read, shows him really pushing the boundaries of his language.
I note readers are sending in favorite passages, which I elcome.
By the way, the reason there seem to be so few entries is that the Comments feature didn't get activated until 11 a.m. Wednesday CST. Whew! I thought this entry was being greeted with complete indifference!
Roger,
What a great way to start my day! My favorite thing to do in the morning is get a nice cup of coffee and curl up with my laptop and read one of your Blog entries! Beats the NY Times any day. Imagine my surprise to see a new entry!
Quick aside:
Over the summer while in San Francisco, I happend upon a bookstore. Having been engulfed in No Country For Old Men (the film) since its March release on DVD, I decided to buy the book. While in the McCarthy section I struggled to remember which book of his you referred to as "a masterpiece" to purchase along with NCFOM. Luckily, I had my blackberry with me and went to your webstite and reread your review of the film. Ah, "Suttree" it is!
After reading this post, you have inspired me to finally begin reading it! I know what I'll be doing over the next couple of days.
Thanks again for continuing to inspire!
Your friend,
Chris
Ebert: It is a very...absorbing...book. If you like it, you might want to next look at McCarthy's Blood Meridian. Harold Bloom wrote an introduction for it in which he confessed he broke down in his first two attempts to read it. This is from a transscript of an interview:
I teach it steadily in a course called How to Read
and Why, so I must have read it by now--since I re-read everything I
really care for--20 or 30 times. Probably I have it memorized by now.
But it's fascinating to me that you ask that, Brian, because the first
two times that I read it, I could not read it. And I admit this to my
students and I admit that in this book. I broke down--I don't know
what--after 15 or 20 pages the first time and after 70 or 80 pages the
second, because the sheer carnage of it. Though it is intensely
stylized, is nevertheless overwhelming. It's--it's--it's shocking.
It's--it's horrifying. And it takes a very strong stomach, but if you
break through it, if you--if you read your way into the cosmos of the
book, then you are rewarded. You get an extraordinary landscape. You
get an extraordinary visionary intensity of personality and character.
You get a great vision, a frightening vision of what is indeed
something very deeply embedded in the American spirit, in the American
psyche. And the more you read the book, I find, the more you will be
able to read the book. It is--it's as close, I think, to being the
American prose epic as one can find, more perhaps even than Faulkner,
though there are individual books by Faulkner like "As I Lay Dying,"
which are perhaps of even higher aesthetic quality and originality
than "Blood Meridian." But I think you would have to go back to "Moby
Dick" for an American epic that fully compares to "Blood Meridian."
Ha! A stirring blog entry that caught me just I am 3/4 into "Roughing It". I'm too lowbrow to appreciate much good fiction, but I do love a good story and Twain had a seeming endless supply.
Loved the blog post. Have to search for Mark Twain as soon as I am done my finals. Thanks for giving me material to read over the Christmas break.
My beautiful friend Roger,
My mind was immediately taken in (on the first and second reads) by this glorious slice from Suttree.
"It was six degrees above zero. Suttree crawled from his bed, pulled on his coat and got his trousers and climbed up onto the bed so cold the floor was."
Pragmatic and wasteful. Evocative and common. Classic and inspired. The first six word sentence plays magnificently off of the twenty-four word sentence to follow. "so cold the floor was" NOT "because the floor was so cold". Words are primarily a piece of music and secondarily carriers of meaning, plot, story and function. The Greeks knew this, their language flowed with melody implanted in the grammar. But the text of novels especially depends upon such a melodic awareness. The relationship between language, meaning and words is a fascinating one. Not necessarily the definition and common use of a word, but the word itself must strike us with its own affective qualities. Steinbeck in my opinion is the greatest of American novelists... The second paragraph of "East of Eden" interweaves the double affect of the words meaning and sound into a tapestry of image and nostalgia...
"I remember my childhood names for grasses and secret flowers. I remember where a toad may live and what time the birds awaken in the summer - and what trees and seasons smelled like - how people looked and walked and smelled even. The memory of odors is very rich"
You just can't help but keep the projector of your mind silent when reading these words. Though not in the American vein, as this conversation has progressed, I feel the most astounding of all novelists of any time and place is Dostoevsky. Once again, a deeply introspective and flowering paragraph from "The Brothers Karamazov"
"He longed to forgive everyone and for everything,and to beg forgiveness. Oh not for himself, but for all men, for all and for everything. “And others are praying for me too,” echoed again in his soul. But with every instant he felt clearly and, as it were, tangibly, that something firm and unshakable as that vault of heaven had entered into his soul. It was as though some idea had seized the sovereignty of his mind – and it was for all his life and for ever and ever. He had fallen on the earth a weak boy, but he rose up a resolute champion, and he knew and felt it suddenly at the very moment of his ecstasy. And never, never, all his life long, could Alyosha forget that minute."
Words are a gateway to the soul which is the gateway to the man which is the gateway to the mind, the heart, the emotions the body the touch the taste the feeling, which are collectively and comprehensively a gateway to the w-o-r-d-s. In my mind my heart is right and filled with nothing but words and images with no differentiation or separation. The trinity is the enfolding and compeller and sourceorigin "beginning" of all life and all words... The most wonderful thing about having a library, any library of sorts is to be able to just take out a book from the shelf, no matter how tattered or ugly or unimpressive and simply read. Open to page 133 and read... the second paragraph. If it's not great the book is not great. It is that simple... thank you for this Roger.
This world and this life is not enough for me.
Ebert: The opening pages of Crime and Punishment make it impossible not to continue.
This is the post I was looking for where you generously share your "secrets".....it was easier to read thru than some others....particularly looking forward to reading these three books......Twain's paragraph is really like a barrel lurching down long stairs.....I can imagine the words forming and appearing as he wrote, perhaps in his bed.....Suttree is new to me and when I do get hold I hope it's not too local in language....
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang
and
But, look, the morn, in russet mantle clad,
Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastward hill:
Ebert: If you admire that paragraph from Suttree,, you'll admire the book. It's not a speed-read.
Roger,
Thanks so much for this incredible posting. I had come to your website hoping for a post about the Blagojevich scandal, seeing as you're from Illinois and usually have pithy comments about the failings of inept people.
As it turns out, I'm very glad that the post was not about Blagojevich and instead was about books. I'm a junior at an all boys high school, and as you said in your post about the CelebCult, I feel as if we are being taught to not think.
I had an interesting experience the other day. I overhead a student I was in class with say, "[to someone else] you should really read a book once in a while...it's a good thing to do." I initially thought he was joking, because he is the last person I had envisioned as spending any time reading. Turns out he was serious, but the way he said it struck me. He was embarrassed to be making that statement, that admission that he, too, enjoyed reading.
I'm young so I have to have some hope, but I worry about the future of books. Thank you for reassuring me that they will always be alive and well if I want them to be.
Roger, your story about receiving a copy of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” kind of spoke to me. I had a similar experience when I was 8 years old. I sat in the corner of the playground one day reading a battered issue of The Incredible Hulk when the long shadow of my second grade teacher fell across my face. She had her hands on her hips and was looking disappointed. “Come with me”, she said and rather than take me to the principal’s office, she took me back to our classroom where she reached in her desk and handed me two books. One was a hard-bound edition of “Moby Dick”, the other was the dictionary.
“If you cannot understand the words, just look them up” (I thought about this years later when I saw "Born Yesterday"). When I got home, I positioned myself under my mother’s end-table with the book under my chin and my hands on my cheeks and began with “Call me Ishmael. Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation.”
“This is going to be death”, I thought but I proceeded and by the end I was dazzled. This is a book that I would describe in my teenage years as “A dance of words”. It was the beginning of a very long, very fruitful love affair with the printed word. Mrs. Taylor asked me to write a book report on it and I was happy to oblige. When she gave me back the report (complete with smiley face and a note that said "Welcome to the wonderful world of words") I tucked it just inside the front cover and intended to give it to my future self.
Eight years later when I was 16, I pulled out the book report, read it and then fell head-first into Melville’s wonderous dance of words. Again, I wrote a note to my future self and when I was 24, I repeated that process and again when I was 32. Those reports of how I feel about this book are a part of me, they identify who I was at that specific moment and how this tale affected me. I can’t wait to be 40 because I know that the adventure awaits me again.
Ebert: Moby Dick is to you as "La Dolce Vita" is to me. You know, children happily read books that adults find difficult, because for them all books are new and are supposed to be difficult. One of the first great novels I read was Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop, which at about 9 I took out of the lending library in the vestibule of St. Patrick's Church because it sounded neat and had a cover illustration of a man on horseback. I didn't know what a "cruciform tree" was, but so what? I loved it. Now it is a different book for me, but at 9 it was what it was, which was a book I couldn't stop reading.
I am horribly sad, but suddenly. This mood has stalked me all day, in and out of my grass-lined reveries, and then I finished your mysterious, deep-souled journal entry, and all at once it swooped down on me, wings curling into the corners of my eyes and then limitless black leather rushing down my throat till it stopped against my skeleton. I do not mean to say your piece could have or would have or was meant to cause such a reaction, but maybe instead to say that its opened heart was just the revelation of humanity, just the reminder of “the human deal” I had missed all day sitting at work, and it tipped the scale for that mood to sneak in and ruin everything. In this light, even Hamlet sucks.
I don’t know why. And why I don’t know why, I know that even less. It seems I would rather be smarter than the mysteries today, such a sinful and stupid stance to take. Like any good piece of art, this particular journal entry opened up the emotional sluices at both ends, and the emotions I happened to be harboring were of the bleak variety. But better than nothing.
But I read the Huck Finn passage deeply, sucking in one word at a time as milkshake through a milkshake-straw, and I wondered if Twain sat looking at this very thing before he wrote about it; I wondered if the bit about the “pale underside of the leaves” is the kind of detail one could retract from simple memory, or whether you had to be there, pen in hand. I love the rainfall, and a raging storm is love and lust for me – I grew up in Hermosa Beach, near Los Angeles, and even as a child I seemed to print more thorough memories of the days when it was raining. When sunny days pile up, rainy days by necessity gather romance. Why, I’ve got a memory of my father driving me through a riotous rainstorm to get the latest issue of Fantastic Four that takes up more real estate in my head than all of grade school. It wasn’t the fact that it was raining, and it wasn’t the fact that my favorite comic book was on the other end – it was both. Seems like it’s happening right now. Maybe it is.
The end of Gatsby might have done it, guys, as far as solidifying this mood. I’ve of course read that as many times as you have, and I can even proudly say that – of the novels that were force-shoveled into my transom during high school – I actually recognized much of Gatsby’s greatness at the time. (That may not be the story you would hear from my English teacher that year. I was also heavily into the theater department, so I was notoriously less-invested in the other subjects. I believe I was cleaning out the prop room on the afternoon that my teacher held her annual Gatsby party, where each kid in the class was asked to come as a particular character from the book, right down to his clothes, and stay that way throughout the 52 minute period. I was cheeky enough to think that, since my teacher had taken slight advantage of my supposed acting chops and cast me as Jay Gatsby, she would have appreciated the fact that I didn’t show up to my own party. She did not, at least visibly.)
But reading those lines again, in my office with the darkening windows and someone’s computer tuned to an all-Christmas channel (one Ella Fitzgerald for every twenty-five Mannheim Steamrollers, it’s just that kind of world), the blues came a-knockin’ in full.
Because I realized I would never write anything that good? Because I envied a writer who lived at that moment and could feel to say those things about this country before anyone else? And that how Fitzgerald’s American greatness chipped away at our chances the same way they knocked down trees to make room for Gatsby? Or simply because of the words themselves, unchanged, flashing back at me changed as always, catching me at a different day of a different mini-epoch? And because of what those words now mean with all my experiences stuffed into them?
Anyway, there’s somehow a hurricane in this journal entry, unless of course I’m experiencing what they call “a subjective reaction”; It’s a concept album in blog formation; in any case, if your proposed autobiography comes out like this, Oprah is gonna shit.
But one last thing: Isn’t it quite fetching the way that a horse can have a “giant heart” in both senses like Secretariat did? Doesn’t that cross-over of the deeply real and the hopelessly clichéd right here in the land of truth speak of a larger twinkle at play in all things than some of the much-discussed Peter Lorre types would have us believe? (And by Peter Lorre types, I of course mean the types of parts Peter Lorre played; My lifetime and his don’t even exist on the same timeline, so it would be presumptuous on my part to presume to make some kind of judgment call on the kind of guy Peter Lorre was, you see what I’m saying?)
Ebert: Thank you for this beautiful prose. Now read you some Wodehouse and cheer yourself up!
After reading this blog, it inspired me to pick up my copy of Jane Austin's "Pride and Prejudice" and start reading it.
I thought perhaps you had become so disgusted with the evolution conversation that you had decided to forgo reader comments altogether.
You sent me searching for a box in which I keep a set of journals of my favorite words. As a kid I got into the habit of copying down favorite passages from books, things people said, film lines, etc. My mom noticed my habit and finally went out and bought me one of those fancy blank books so that I could keep them instead of scribbling onto scrap paper. They are among my prized possessions. All of my favorite words in one set of books, and in my own handwriting, as if they had been my thoughts to begin with. I know that passage of Gatsby by heart, so I thought that I would choose something else to add to the thread.
Picking up the volume at the top of the box, I saw that a sentence from your review of "Terms of Endearment" is right there on the first page next to the "And so we beat on" sentence. (The line about life always having an unhappy ending.) It's kind of spooky.
You are joined on that page by Voltaire, Carly Simon, Betty Miles, and a line from "The Philadelphia Story." Flipping through, I see that I have quite a few of your sentences. In fact, I think Cole Porter was your closest rival in my early teenage years. Oh well, I am going to make a cup of tea and wade through the words. I don't know whether I can narrow it down to second favorite passage.
Okay. I thought I was well read, but now I feel dumb. I am more drawn to dialogue, and find that long sections of descriptive prose cause my eyes to start skipping down the page on the search for quotation marks (made reading Hardy a real chore!). As much as I love books, especially Canadian literature, I think all but the most obvious metaphors are lost me. Having said that, I still enjoy your blogs. :)
Ah, so which was the first Scorsese film you saw? Or should I just pick up Scorsese by Ebert and presumably find out there?
Ebert: The first one.
You article on amazing prose resonates with a passage from 'Catcher in the Rye.' I am re-reading it, slowly, so as not to miss much. I hadn't read it since high-school, liked it ok then, and now, I am really appreciating what its really about. So, a particular passage has been stuck in my psyche for about two weeks now, and I thought I would share it:
Holden is talking about his brother, Allie, who died of lukemia, and about his red hair:
----
...he had very red hair. I'll tell you what kind of red hair he had. I started playing golf when I was only ten years old. I remember once, the summer I was around twelve, teeing off and all, and having a hunch that if I turned around all of a sudden, I'd see Allie. So I did, and sure enough, he was sitting on his bike outside the fence -- there was this fence that went all around the course -- and he was sitting there, about a hundred and fifty yards behind me, watching me tee off. That's the kind of red hair he had.
----
I have no idea why this stays with me. Part of what I love about this passage, is that I have no idea why I love this passage. He says he will say what kind of red hair he had, and then doesn't tell what kind of red hair he has, except he absolutely does, and it almost makes me cry in how perfectly he describes his brother's red hair, precisely by not describing it. How wonderful is that, that he can sum up his brother, by his red hair, and not mention it at all.
Well, I need better words to talk about this. But thank you for your moving post about the power of the right word, and the images that words can make, without ever seeming to try. Perfect.
Roger...
I've now experienced what I've been longing for. An exceptional Lit course - and it was 'free'! I've been trying to get back in touch with my love of reading, and reading this has helped a great deal.
I'm also considering getting 'Suttree' for my father. He's recently had colostomy surgery for cancer, and is now in the throws of chemo and radiation. He despises what the treatments have done to his memory! Because he used to be an avid reader of popular westerns and military fiction, I thought this might be good for him. It sounds like a good slow, meandering read, and also includes the 'lone' characters he seems to love. My thoughts are that reading would be a good 'memory boost' for him.
If there's another book or author you can recommend for him that would be better, I'd be forever in your debt. I very much trust your judgement in these regards. (And probably many others as well!)
Thank you for the post Roger! Your avid fans are obviously very grateful!
kj
Ebert: Much as I love it, that might not be the book for your dad. Better maybe All the Pretty Horses or Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove.
Roger, as I read your blog entries, particularly this one, it dawns on me what is the foundation of your success as a film lover, historian, and (most publicly) critic: your earnest love of the written word.
Your knowledge, love, and appreciation of film give you an ability to see movies with a depth of focus that escapes most of us. But it's your knowledge, love, and appreciation of the written word that gives you the ability to share that focus with the rest of us.
I share your passion for McCarthy's works, and heck, given the opportunity here, was curious to ask you what you thought of THE ROAD. I thought the book was as dark a work as I've ever read, a museum of despair, yet through McCarthy's sterling talent imbued with a stirring and genuine beauty throughout. In particular, the book's final paragraph, coming as it does on the heels of 250+ pages of unrelenting bitter darkness (literal and metaphorical), plays like what Stephen King once called "the type of quiet epiphany all writers hope to find." It is, for those who haven't read it:
"Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery."
Glad you shared your long and literature-filled friendship with Bill Nack. I had the good fortune to be at Rancho La Puerta when you and Bill were featured guests.
I attended Bill's "Concert" because of your enthusiasm about it, fearing that I'd be subjected to "sports writing." What a revelation! It as one of the most wonderful readings I've ever heard, even though he read Nabokov, a writer I can't stand.
You forgot to mention how Bill can bring everyone to tears (as he did that evening) reading his story of the death of the great racehorse Secretariat.
Oh, and the Nabokov? I tried to read him again and found I still hated him. But if the audiobook comes out with Bill narrating, I'll be first in line with my money.
Ooops! You did mention how Bill had us crying with is Secretariat story.
I've been found out. I had to skim this entry because I needed to rush out the door. Thought I'd read it more slowly later, but foolishly put a comment without waiting for that longer read.
Ten lashes for me with a wet bookmark and a slap on the wrist with a copy of Lolita.
The discussion of words as music makes me think of a recent video featuring Sarah Palin's interview with Katie Couric accompanied by jazz piano: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nlwwFZdXck. The video highlights the verbal dance between Palin and Couric, and also reminded me of a rather humorous jazz reinterpretation of an angry tech support phone call that circulated around the web a few years back: http://www.stretta.com/~matthew/other/angry/mp3/helpsong-jazz80.mp3.
The implicit musicality of words is also emphasized and even recontextualized in much of the 'Sampledelia' sub-genre of hip-hop music. Artists like Steinski, who chopped up news of JFK's assassination rather ingeniously on his song "The Motorcade Sped On," and the fittingly monikered Books, who explore masculinity through bits of recorded phone calls on "An Animated Description of Mr. Maps."
I'm studying hip-hop culture at NYU, and I am an avid reader of your site Mr. Ebert. As a reaction to your blog posting, I wonder what your thoughts are on the often scoffed about audiobook format, and if you are preferential towards any rap music or slam poetry.
Ebert: I love audiobooks. Two of my favorites are Sean Barrett reading Perfume, and Kenneth Branagh reading The Diaries of Samuel Pepys.
One of my favorite sentences comes from Ray Bradbury in "Something Wicked This Way Comes". I have not even looked at the book for five years, yet somehow I recalled this line (although I had to look it up to get an accurate quotation):
"The train skimmed on softly, slithering, black pennants fluttering, black confetti lost on its own sick-sweet candy wind, down the hill, with the boys pursuing, the air so cold they ate ice cream with each breath."
Ebert: 13. Use the right word, not its second cousin.
This rule reminded me of one of my favorite quotes regarding anything related to the literary world, which also happens to be by Mark Twain:
"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug."
Since you are a Mark Twain fan, I am curious about your take on his supposed dislike of Jane Austen. Given that Mr. Twain and Miss Austen are responsible for two of the greatest opening sentences in English Literature, my wish is that he understood her perfectly but was just teasing a friend.
Ebert: I don't think he was teasing. Here is one of his statements on the divine Jane:
I haven't any right to criticise books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticise Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.
When I was a child, my grandmother would recite poetry from memory to my sister and me - lengthy poems like "Sea Feaver" by John Masefield or "The Children's Hour" by Longfellow were favorites because it meant she would sit at our bedsides longer. Although, nothing the old favorites beat "The Owl and the Pussycat," "The Snowman's Resolution" or "The Animal Store." Words like "runcible," "banditti," "whetted," flowed like water on worn stone steps. The sound of her voice, the lull of the well-chosen words by authors long dead, her smooth fingers brushing my forehead, create the symphony of my childhood. It is more than the words themselves, but the soft, mellow voice that breathes them to life.
Though I do not yet have children of my own, I repeat the poems to my best friend's young son. Until your post today, I thought little of his choice of words for our special time: he asks me to "sing him poems."
Thank you for your words - may they touch others as deeply.
Roger,
I appreciated your prescription of Wodehouse as a cure to glum brown studies (viz. your comment to Yancy Berns above). Beyond the wonderful humanity (and humanism) found in his characters, he is surely amongst the greatest writers in history. Such lists, of course, are arbitrary, subject to change by the day of week or even hour of day, yet Wodehouse is always in my top five of greatest writers. Including Wodehouse in the literary pantheon usually elicits sneers in certain lit-crit quarters, but so be it. The truth hurts.
As a long-time admirer of your prose, I confess that the clarity and ease of your writing reminds me of Wodehouse. Him, and Reynolds Price. Many comparisons could be made, but for some odd reason those two come most to my mind. It is meant as high praise.
Thank you for putting the effort into this blog. I particularly enjoyed this entry.
Cheers,
Dan
This short course in language appreciation, and the wonderful responses with passage sharings, makes me wonder why there are so many wine tastings and so few word tastings.
Here was my Grandfather's favorite, courtesy of Dorothy Parker:
See the happy moron,
He doesn’t give a damn.
I wish I were a moron,
— My God! Perhaps I am!
Seeing as I had the comments section to myself, I'm leaving a section of "Roughing It" here that particularly tickled me. In Ch 53 he recreates the words of a man who, when well in his cups, would tell a story in a peculiarly stream of conscious sort of way. I'm not going to say it adumbrates James Joyce, but judge for yourself.
THE STORY OF THE OLD RAM
...
'I don't reckon them times will ever come again. There never was a more bullier old ram than what he was. Grandfather fetched him from Illinois --got him of a man by the name of Yates--Bill Yates--maybe you might have heard of him; his father was a deacon--Baptist--and he was a rustler, too; a man had to get up ruther early
to get the start of old Thankful Yates; it was him that put the Greens up to jining teams with my grandfather when he moved west.
'Seth Green was prob'ly the pick of the flock; he married a Wilkerson-- Sarah Wilkerson--good cretur, she was--one of the likeliest heifers that was ever raised in old Stoddard, everybody said that knowed her. She could heft a bar'l of flour as easy as I can flirt a flapjack. And spin? Don't mention it! Independent? Humph! When Sile Hawkins come a browsing around her, she let him know that for all his tin he couldn't trot in harness alongside of her. You see, Sile Hawkins was--no, it warn't Sile Hawkins, after all--it was a galoot by the name of Filkins-- I disremember his first name; but he was a stump--come into pra'r meeting drunk, one
night, hooraying for Nixon, becuz he thought it was a primary; and old deacon Ferguson up and scooted him through the window and he lit on old Miss Jefferson's head, poor old filly. She was a good soul--had a glass eye and used to lend it to old Miss Wagner, that hadn't any, to receive company in; it warn't big enough, and
when Miss Wagner warn't noticing, it would get twisted around in the socket, and look up, maybe, or out to one side, and every which way, while t' other one was looking as straight ahead as a spy-glass.
'Grown people didn't mind it, but it most always made the children cry, it was so sort of scary. She tried packing it in raw cotton, but it wouldn't work, somehow--the cotton would get loose and stick out and look so kind of awful that the children couldn't stand it no way. She was always dropping it out, and turning up her old dead-light on the company empty, and making them oncomfortable, becuz she never could tell when it hopped out, being blind on that side, you see. So somebody would have to hunch her and say, "Your game eye
has fetched loose. Miss Wagner dear"-- and then all of them would have to sit and wait till she jammed it in again--wrong side before, as a general thing, and green as a bird's egg, being a bashful cretur and easy sot back before company. But being wrong side before warn't much difference, anyway; becuz her own eye was
sky- blue and the glass one was yaller on the front side, so whichever way she turned it it didn't match nohow.
'Old Miss Wagner was considerable on the borrow, she was. When she had a quilting, or Dorcas S'iety at her house she gen'ally borrowed Miss Higgins's wooden leg to stump around on; it was considerable shorter than her other pin, but much she minded that. She said she couldn't abide crutches when she had company, becuz they were so slow; said when she had company and things had to be done, she wanted to get up and hump herself. She was as bald as a jug, and so she used to borrow Miss Jacops's wig-- Miss Jacops was the coffin-peddler's wife--a ratty old buzzard, he was, that used to go oosting around where people was sick, waiting for 'em; and there that old rip would sit all day, in the shade, on a coffin that he judged would fit the can'idate; and if it was a slow customer and kind of uncertain, he'd fetch his rations and a blanket along and
sleep in the coffin nights. He was anchored out that way, in frosty weather, for about three weeks, once, before old Robbins's place, waiting for him; and after that, for as much as two years, Jacops was not on speaking terms with the old man, on account of his disapp'inting him. He got one of his feet froze, and lost money, too, becuz old Robbins took a favorable turn and got well. The next time Robbins got sick, Jacops tried to make up with him, and varnished up the same old coffin and fetched it along; but old Robbins was too many for him; he had him in, and 'peared to be powerful weak; he bought the coffin for ten dollars and Jacops
was to pay it back and twenty-five more besides if Robbins didn't like the coffin after he'd tried it. And then Robbins died, and at the funeral he bursted off the lid and riz up in his shroud and told the parson to let up on the performances, becuz he could not stand such a coffin as that. You see he had been in a trance once before, when he was young, and he took the chances on another, cal'lating that if he made the trip it was money in his pocket, and if he missed fire he couldn't lose a cent. And by George he sued Jacops for the rhino and got jedgment; and he set up the coffin in his back parlor and said he 'lowed to take his time, now. It was always an aggravation to Jacops, the way that miserable old thing acted. He moved back to Indiany pretty soon--went to
Wellsville-- Wellsville was the place the Hogadorns was from. Mighty fine family. Old Maryland stock. Old Squire Hogadorn could carry around more mixed licker, and cuss better than most any man I ever see. His second wife was the widder Billings--she that was Becky Martin; her dam was deacon Dunlap's first wife. Her oldest child, Maria, married a missionary and died in grace--et up by the savages. They et him, too, poor feller-- biled him. It warn't the custom, so they say, but they explained to friends of his'n that went down there to bring away his things, that they'd tried missionaries every other way and never could get any good out of
'em--and so it annoyed all his relations to find out that that man's life was fooled away just out of a dern'd experiment, so to speak. But mind you, there ain't anything ever reely lost; everything that people can't understand and don't see the reason of does good if you only hold on and give it a fair shake; Prov'dence don't fire no blank ca'tridges, boys. That there missionary's substance, unbeknowns to himself, actu'ly converted every last one of them heathens that took a chance at the barbacue. Nothing ever fetched them but that. Don't tell me it was an accident that he was biled. There ain't no such a thing as an accident.
'When my uncle Lem was leaning up agin a scaffolding once, sick, or drunk, or suthin, an Irishman with a hod full of bricks fell on him out of the third story and broke the old man's back in two places. People said it was an accident. Much accident there was about that. He didn't know what he was there for, but he was there for a good object. If he hadn't been there the Irishman would have been killed. Nobody can ever make me believe anything different from that. Uncle Lem's dog was there. Why didn't the Irishman fall on the dog? Becuz the dog would a seen him a coming and stood from under. That's the reason the dog warn't appinted. A dog can't
be depended on to carry out a special providence. Mark my words it was a put-up thing. Accidents don't happen, boys. Uncle Lem's dog--I wish you could a seen that dog. He was a reglar shepherd--or ruther he was part bull and part shepherd--splendid animal; belonged to parson Hagar before Uncle Lem got him. Parson
Hagar belonged to the Western Reserve Hagars; prime family; his mother was a Watson; one of his sisters married a Wheeler; they settled in Morgan county, and he got nipped by the machinery in a carpet factory and went through in less than a quarter of a minute; his widder bought the piece of carpet that had his remains
wove in, and people come a hundred mile to 'tend the funeral. There was fourteen yards in the piece. 'She wouldn't let them roll him up, but planted him just so--full length. The church was middling small where they preached the funeral, and they had to let one end of the coffin stick out of the window. They didn't bury
him--they planted one end, and let him stand up, same as a monument. And they nailed a sign on it and put--put on--put on it --sacred to--the m-e-m-o-r-y--of fourteen y-a-r-d-s--of three-ply--car---pet--containing all that was--m-o-r-t-a-l--of--of--W-i-l-l-i-a-m--W-h-e--"'
...I learned then that Jim Blaine's peculiarity was that whenever
he reached a certain stage of intoxication, no human power could keep him from setting out, with impressive unction, to tell about a wonderful adventure which he had once had with his grandfather's old ram--and the mention of the ram in the first sentence was as far as any man had ever heard him get, concerning it. He always maundered off, interminably, from one thing to another, till his whisky got the best of him and he fell asleep. What the thing was that happened to him and his grandfather's old ram is a dark mystery to this day, for nobody has ever yet found out.
Ebert: Good gravy! Here I sit, just a-readin' the comments, and I start laughing so hard the tears pour from my eyes--and I'm dry-eyed you know, from a childhood tumble in a sandbox. The part about the glass eye is particular.
Roger,
This was a breath of unexpectedly fresh air.
I am, oh, eight years out of college. I read, but not as much as I should. This is a personal embarrassment; sort of like stepping on the scale at the doctor's office, the sum of all your meals resulting in an inescapable Moment of Truth.
This morning, while sitting at my desk like any other morning, sipping coffee underneath a grid of relentless flourescent lights, I happened upon this post during the course of checking news and the weather and my email. It threw me backward in time: I remembered school and literature in a way that I'd seemingly forgotten; as filtered through the perception of someone not only learned, but passionate, and...yearning? Yes, I think yearning.
I think it's probably too rare for a lot of people my age that our post-collegiate lives contain so few encounters that exchange true emotion. Where we feel like we've actually connected, even if it's indirectly, over the internet. When you explicated and defended (though it needs no defending-- all attacks on it are in vain)Twain's use of the word "lighten" the way that he's used it, I sat transfixed. I did not expect to imbibe such a specific observation. I said to myself, yes. Yes. Yes.
Likewise-- but more broadly-- your experience with "Suttree" as detox for the soul is not unlike something I felt reading "Requiem For A Dream," or listening to songs written by David Bazan (who can make religious faith seem like a beautifully terrible burden), or watching a film like "Magnolia," a film I watch as if prescribing myself a wonder drug that is meant to cleanse me. It is sad; but to call it "sadness" is too simple. Sometimes sad songs and sad stories seem to uplift us maybe because, beneath our superficial differences and distances, we find our companions. And when we're together, sometimes it's possible to even feel brave.
Anyway. Thanks for the thoughtful entry.
Roger.. Thank you so much for the suggestion! I'm fairly sure he's read Lonesome Dove. I read the 'note' on Amazon for All the Pretty Horses... it looks perfect. It's hard to know what to do for loved ones that are going through physical and emotional difficulties... I appreciate the help.
And... I'm looking forward to picking up Mark Twain after a long hiatus. My first literary love was Dickens. And yes, my parents also thought it would be too hard for me at 10 yrs old. I loved the cadence of the 'old' English! Escape to another world is somehow a precious thing. My 10 yr old granddaughter is an avid, and almost verocious reader. From me - she's getting two versions of Lewis Carroll's 'Alice' stories - annotated and classic.
Wishing you the best...
kj
I admit that I came into "Huckleberry Finn" late in life; a Junior-year American History/American Literature block class at my high school, a military boarding school in New Mexico. I fell in love immediately. During the reading of the book, we would occasionally be called upon to read passages aloud. I tried to read the following, but couldn't, as I was laughing too hard. Therefore, it is with longing that I imagine a reader of Mr. Nack's stature reading it aloud. From chapter 21, the character Duke speaks:
'"Hamlet's soliloquy, you know; the most celebrated thing in Shakespeare. Ah, it's sublime, sublime! Always fetches the house. I haven't got it in the book--I've only got one volume--but I reckon I can piece it out from memory. I'll just walk up and down a minute, and see if I can call it back from recollection's vaults."
So he went to marching up and down, thinking, and frowning horrible every now and then; then he would hoist up his eyebrows; next he would squeeze his hand on his forehead and stagger back and kind of moan; next he would sigh, and next he'd let on to drop a tear. It was beautiful to see him. By and by he got it. He told us to give attention. Then he strikes a most noble attitude, with one leg shoved forwards, and his arms stretched away up, and his head tilted back, looking up at the sky; and then he begins to rip and rave and grit his teeth; and after that, all through his speech, he howled, and spread around, and swelled up his chest, and just knocked the spots out of any acting ever I see before. This is the speech--I learned it, easy enough, while he was learning it to the king:
"To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would fardels bear, till Birnam Wood do come to Dunsinane,
But that the fear of something after death
Murders the innocent sleep,
Great nature's second course,
And makes us rather sling the arrows of outrageous fortune
Than fly to others that we know not of.
There's the respect must give us pause:
Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou couldst;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The law's delay, and the quietus which his pangs might take,
In the dead waste and middle of the night, when churchyards yawn
In customary suits of solemn black,
But that the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns,
Breathes forth contagion on the world,
And thus the native hue of resolution, like the poor cat i' the adage,
Is sicklied o'er with care,
And all the clouds that lowered o'er our housetops,
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.
'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. But soft you, the fair Ophelia:
Ope not thy ponderous and marble jaws,
But get thee to a nunnery--go!"'
Absolutely brilliant.
There are other passages from other books that I can quote, but I need them at my fingertips to reference, and not all of them are public domain. Since I only have internet access at work, my home library is of no use right now. If you don't mind, I'll post this response, put a more comprehensive reply together tonight, and post it tomorrow.
Ebert: Mark Twain must have had so much fun writing.
Roger,
I only recently discovered your blog, and was so delighted to do so. Your classic movie guides from the 80's (which I devoured nearly every Christmas), along with the Movie Loft on old Channel 38, were the two biggest reasons I first fell in love with the movies, and I thank you for helping to excite me about one of the great pleasures of modern life. Because I can't help but consider you an old friend I am so saddened to hear of your health problems. So many people wish you well.
On the specific subject at hand, I must mention "the Wind-Up Bird Chronicles" by Haruki Murakami. It is a book that worms its way into your extra-conscious brain through simple sentences and a metahpor that can feel very strained at times yet is very powerful. It reminded me of the obelisk in 2001; you know it means something and everything, but you don't know exactly why. It is the only book I've ever read that really reminded me of the Brothers Karamazov; in so many ways they are totally unalike, yet they both grasp and communicate truths about God and existence. The only problem is that it helps to have read other books by this wonderful author first, as this novel is the capstone of his career, but one can't very well recommend two books by the same author at the same time!
A sample: "Here's what I think, Mr. Wind-Up Bird," said May Kasahara. "Everybody's born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person from the inside. I have one too, of course. Like everybody else. But sometimes it gets out of hand. It swells or shrinks inside me, and it shakes me up. What I'd really like to do is find a way to communicate that feeling to another person. But I can't seem to do it. They just don't get it. Of course, the problem could be that I'm not explaining it very well, but I think it's because they're not listening very well. They pretend to be listening, but they're not, really. So I get worked up sometimes, and I do some crazy things."
My dad used to read both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn aloud to my sister and I when we were in first and second grade. It never occured to him that we wouldn't "get it" or that the themes of slavery and freedom were "too much" for children. As children, we loved the humor and excitement (the chapter "The Pinch-Bug and His Prey" had us rolling every time we heard it) and our questions about how one person could own another made each subsequent reading deeper and better. There's no way I would have read half the authors in my life if we hadn't been read "adult" books at a young age. I've read Rememberance of Things Past, all of Jane Austin, and am hugely enjoying Anna Karinina at least partly because our parents assumed we were intelligent, could handle most of the books we read, and could think about what we had absorbed.
Roger,
You have forced a reminiscence: back in 1980, in grad school, living in a dorm, I was lucky to have a friend--still do, despite half a continent's separation--who enjoyed being read to. I would get a call from him in the evening, and would go to his room, where--I kid you not--he was all tucked in and ready for his bedtime story. (I pause to note that today we are both happily married--not, unfortunately, to each other, but to two wonderful women--one for each of us, as it turns out.) I usually read Raymond Chandler--the trick is not to sound hard-boiled, no matter how hard-boiled the situation becomes--or Golden Age science fiction--I fondly remember reading "Fondly Fahrenheit," the "All reet!"s ringing in our ears. We have both become lifelong read-aloud-ers, to our children, our students, anyone willing to put up with us. Language flying out there in the air is a miraculous thing.
And as long we're sharing, let's not forget George Orwell's short pieces--"Shooting an Elephant," of course, but also "Marrakech," "A Hanging," and others--and Flannery O'Connor, cantankerous and Gothic-Mystical. Both heart-stopping when heard.
Have a good week.
Paul
Ebert: All you're doing is just setting me off. Chandler. Orwell. Clarke. People don't value Orwell as a novelist, but Burmese Days, yes.
Jeff asks you what you think of McCarthy's The Road. That's something I'd like to know as well. I had hoped to see the film version last month, but as you probably know, the release was delayed. The book haunted me for days and I talked about it for weeks afterward to anyone who would listen, but I have to say that Suttree really eclipsed it. And I, too, loved Nabokov's Pnin! What a wonderful image & metaphor that pencil sharpener makes.
Ebert: I've not read the early books, but in my experience McCarthy just hasn't written an unsuccessful book.
I consider myself such a terrible slow slog of earth to think
I could post a fitting comment in here. So sickly pale with delinquency,
my stumpy thoughts seem a cruel joke of nature before this blog entry.
Guns, gods and golgothas! My mouth, rich with sour muteness,
marks the veritable shame that I have no good books to quote from.
I do own a copy of Willa Cather's Death Comes
for the Archbishop, sitting on a dusty shelf in my living
room as part of my todo list of reading. I think it's time
I blow the dust off proper, and get to it. Who knows?
Maybe when my daughter turns 9, I can introduce her
to it, and get her thoughts.
Roger, thank you for posting this. It should be required
reading for anyone needing an idea on what a love
of reading is all about. It sure awakened mine! What I admired
is how it starts off interesting and unassuming. I would read on,
until I was drawn in to how it all worked. Plus, I did what you said,
reading the Suttree lines once, then read it again (and got it!),
and read it a third time. You know those weird 3-D art pictures
that you look at once, and see it as pretty but nothing special,
until you unfocus your eyes, and see the image of a ship?
Re-reading that excerpt from Suttree worked just like that for me.
I read it the first time, appreciated it, read it again as told, and
I saw more than what I thought I read the first time. I read it again,
then saw more depth the third time around. Classic.
Sadly, that's a lesson I should have learned when I memorized
the "To be, or not to be" soliloquoy from Hamlet, simply because
I was bored, and curious. I found that the more I said the lines aloud,
the more I saw, until the horizons of my comprehension expanded to finally
including the stars.
God bless you Roger.
John
P.S. - I remember purchasing Cather's book thanks to you.
Now I have more to add to my Amazon wishlist. Thank you.
Ebert: The Library of America has a handsome set of Cather.
I've noticed that every time I read - or even think of - the last few paragraphs of "The Dead" I can't help shivering a little. Prose like music. Sometimes I shiver more than a little.
Ebert: Oh, yes. The snow falling. And John Huston's film somehow finds a way to evoke that. http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051009/REVIEWS08/510090301
Another great Twain line about Jane Austen, from a letter to William Dean Howells written a hundred years ago next month: "It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death."
Roger: I want to say "Wow", click Print and save this with my favorite books on writing.
Except, of course, sentences, paragraphs and phrases keep jumping into mind. For me it's short stories and there focused, perfectly crystallized moments of sadness and longing. I think of last lines of Raymond Carver's Where I'm Calling From and Sherwood Anderson's I Want to Know Why or Richard Ford's Rock Springs or all of Tim O'Brien's Things They Carried. My head is spinning.
So I'm going to pay your article the best compliment possible. I'm going to go home and read.
One of the best novels I ever read was Orphan Pamuk's "Snow". I felt it perfectly captured a moment in time as well as a specific state of mind. It also serves as a window into one man's soul and forces readers to understand the love he feels for one woman. Its also pretty easy reading, so it’s good for youngsters to pick up as well as a breezy read for adults.
As a child I enjoyed "The Hobbit", because I admired its attention to detail and I also loved Bilbo Baggins because he we was such an everyman. We followed his every move and it’s very easy for a child to get swept up in it. Though it may not be Shakespeare or Moby Dick, it gets your heart pumping.
A teacher once told me that he preferred books over films because he claimed that movies "did all the work for you". I for one, respectfully disagree. If viewed correctly, I believe that movies can have just as much emotional/mental depth as some of the greatest of novels; you simply have to catch yourself during the right moments. An evening at the movies, with family and friends can be a magical thing. Sadly, I feel some of that so-called "magic" has worn out at of late; mainly due to the uncontrollable attention-deficit culture we live in (I hear that they're even doing away with paper altogether and replacing them with electronic I-pods, which contain complete text novels). I prey that day never comes when we do away with paper altogether. There is just something special about sitting in a warm room, with the light bouncing off the window in the early morning, sipping coffee as you hear the birds chirping outside. You breathe in the dewy fresh air as you smell the fresh new page of a great book.
Then again, maybe that isn't you but hey, books are fun to read.
For me, Hamlet will always be the holy grail of the composition of words, its just perfection. I could read that upside-down, backwards, forwards and all over again and still not crack down on every nuance of the beauty and complexity of that piece (and I've read a sh*t load of books, pardon my French). If the aliens descended from heaven tomorrow and wanted to realize the extent of human knowledge and perfection, we would probably hand them over a couple of things, and they would be: "The Wizard of Oz", the theory of relativity written down on paper, The Mona Lisa, Jessica Alba and a copy of "Hamlet".
I was wondering if you've ever read Playwriting 101: The Rooftop Lesson by Rich Orloff (1951)?
I will try to find this Cormac MacArthy novel you keep raving about.
I once heard in a movie (I don't remember which) a character saying: "I hate books, they're just words, words can hurt people and be deceiving; that's why Math is beautiful". I for one, don't entirely agree, but he makes a good point. Actions speak louder than words.
Ebert: Funny, how many people link coffee with reading.
Wondeful words. A quick question (don't know if this has already been covered above): your "relationships" (I use that term loosely - I'm referring to more professional relations) with actors/directors/screenwriters has been well-documented through your articles. But what of your relationships with fellow writers? Did you happen to fall into a situation with dear Dr. Thompson or Mr. McCarthy, or perhaps another? I'm not looking for name drops, per se, but in your field (writing in the broad sense, journalism in the specialty sense), what would your writer-to-writer contact be like?
Ebert: I am not a writer in the sense of those you mean, but anyway..
The one I knew best was Daniel Curley. Others I have known to a greater or lesser degree have been Paul Theroux, Nelson Algren, Woody Allen, Donald Westlake, Dow Mossman, Dave Eggers and James T. Farrell. Studs of course. What they all liked best was discussing books by other writers. Theroux and I would sit on his veranda in the Ohau forest and discuss books and books and books. It is so good to find you are not the only person you know you has read more than the usual novel by George Gissing. Mossman informed me that one of the greatest works of American literature was Chapter 5 of Twain's autobiography.
Priglashinie na Otceshinie Golovi------this is all the Russian I have retained-------Invitation to a Beheading------the title of a novel by Nabakov. One couldn't drive out the opening paragraph of Lolita-----and part of his resonances were precisely of a language learnt not born into. His was a concert of English words but the melody was European.
I have read many authors, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Austin, Twain, and McCarthy all of them I admire greatly. But I'm sorry I couldn't let these comments go any further without somebody mentioning Dickens. To me he is the master, I accept no substitutes.
A few years ago I read "David Copperfield" for the first time, it was my first Dickens book and after I read it I remember thinking "where have you been all my life". That summer I took it upon myself to get more familiar with his work. I read "Oliver Twist", "Nicholas Nickleby" (My absolute favorite), "The Old Curiosity Shop", "Great Expectations", and "A Tale of Two Cities". More recently I read "The Pickwick Papers" and "Barnaby Rudge".
I'm not a very good writer so I can't put in words just how much Dickens means to me, but suffice it to say I am richer with his novels in my life, I don't know where I would be without them. Please everyone out there who hasn't read a word of Dickens go out and do so please.
I don't really have an interesting story about how Dickens found his way into my life, other than I felt the urge to read him and it is one thing I will never regret. I find inspiration and affirmation in his books and now that I have said my peace, the comments can continue.
I am shocked to read that you find Suttree a better depiction of drunkenness than Under the Volcano, whose sentimentality brought to the novel what Hamlet did to drama. I find both works, even for all their Christianity, to be the purest literature has given us: both include, very simply, two solipsists who, as Nietzsche said of Hamlet, "have once looked truly into the essence of things... their action could not change anything in the eternal nature of things; they feel it to be ridiculous or humiliating that they should be asked to set right a world that is out of joint."
The reason I adore both works so much is that they are both, or should be both, too sentimental, but we have no problem allowing them to be because their main characters happen to be correct about the way of things, and brilliant at conveying it. Thus do they encompass pure epistemological awe and interruption.
Not having read Suttree of course I can't judge, but I MUST read it if it's true that it's better overall than Under the Volcano. I have read The Road and Blood Meridian, brilliant but for my money neither as good as Lowry's "UTV," Jerzy Kosinski's "Steps," "Gravity's Rainbow" or any Beckett novel except "Dream of Fair to Middling Women." Oh, and I haven't read "Watt."
I've always wondered what my true opinion of "The Great Gatsby" is and its place in literature. I need to revisit it. I think it's a crying shame that high schoolers the country around hate the book because it's forced on them. But I guess the ones who would reject it are those high schoolers we don't want reading it anyway. >;) Or maybe not.
Ebert: You can't go wrong with either novel.
"One is the "priest's-eye-view" often used in overhead shots, which Scorsese has said are intended to reflect the priest looking down at the implements of the Mass on the altar. We see, through Travis' eyes, the top of a taxi dispatcher's desk, candy on a movie counter, guns on a bed, and finally, with the camera apparently seeing through the ceiling, an overhead shot of the massacre in the red-light building. This is, if you will, the final sacrifice of the Mass."....Review of Taxi Driver
Oh, by the way, this is a complete toss-in and not relevant to the article, but I wanted to take this opportunity to recommend a movie to you because why not now-- "If not now, when?"
I don't know what's making me presume to recommend a movie to YOU of all people, or even presume that you might not have seen it or whatever. You, my favorite and I think the best American (I throw in 'American' because I know no film critics from elsewhere) film critic. But I only even begin to think to mention it because I've never seen you mention it, and it's in my top three films beside "Taxi Driver" and "2001: A Space Odyssey." It is Elem Klimov's "Come and See."
I wept non stop for the last 1/3 or 1/2 of this movie, I was pounding my desk with anger, I was wondering whether I would be able to finish the film but knew I would have to go all the way; and I had thought before seeing it that I was largely desensitized, like a truly immersed American, from images of suffering. Schindler's List, while a sad and horrible story, remained a story to me. This movie showed me what is meant when we say the words "The Holocaust," showed me what people have experienced during our absolute worst moments as human beings. I truly felt myself an in-moment witness, as sad as if that was my family being treated with the worst viciousness, because it was, and I didn't realize this until watching "Come and See."
Hanyway, moment of presumption over. I hope you don't hate me for recommending a movie as if you asked me to.
Ebert: I read some more reviews, and just now ordered it.
I am a student at the University of Southern California, studying creative writing. I've followed your site for a long time but have never felt the desire to comment. In high school, my English teacher used the Mark Twain line "Eschew surplusage" frequently (he was a huge Hemingway fan, obviously), and it always stuck with me. The condensed phrasing of the rule is nothing less than brilliantly ironic.
However, I've always been more emotionally responsive to authors with a more flowing, Faulknerian style, which is why I love McCarthy so much. In my opinion, he's the greatest living American writer, and, for my money, his best lines come at the end of The Crossing:
"He sat there for a long time and after a while the east did gray and after a while the right and godmade sun did rise, once again, for all and without distinction."
The simultaneous invocation of a bleak and hopeful sun that rises for each of us yet makes no distinction between any living being--the truthful, the murderous, the passionate, the sinful--has been an image that I return to again and again. The sadness of those lines--and of the novel--doesn't make them depressing, but, rather, reverberates with truth, an acknowledgment and even a celebration the many, albeit sorrowful, facets of life that make it worth living.
Speaking of Larry McMurtry, this piece reminded me of his wonderful little book 'Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen', in which he discusses that glorious and disturbing contradiction that exists within every writer, namely, the need to read and the need to write, and how difficult, if not impossible, it is to balance both succesfully. One impulse inevitably gives way to the other; one passion suffers at the hands of the other. And yet both inevitably feed each other, sustaining each other, so it truly is a bizarre kind of symbiotic, parasitic relationship.
We sit shamefully at our desks as all those books silently, disdainfully lining our shelves judge us, watching us as we write. Don't these unread tomes know that if it were not for them, we would have nothing to look forward to when the keyboard or pen and paper is pushed aside? I'll get to you, I tell these books. I swear I will. Just give me time.
Your post also made me think about how rare it is to read thoughtful, humane writing on another interesting topic: ourselves, our books and our friends.
There's nothing like sharing the books we love with the friends we love. (Unless, of course, the friends you love HATE the books you love, which can often be an even more rewarding, stimulating conversation, one that lasts a lifetime. Neither friend will ever entirely convince the other that they are COMPLETELY missing the point of 'insert title here', but the fact that we are willing to engage in our deepest passions with our closest allies, with neither expecting to win, is what makes these lifelong arguments/lectures/duels so rewarding. So rich.
Ebert: There you are. By the way, the most recent entries in your blog have caused me to bookmark it. Does everyone know that if a name is underlined and blue, it links to the author's blog? I mentioned that over on Ben Stein, but we seem to have a different crowd here.
"Traveler,
From whence do you come?
And where do you go?
The moon has set,
But the Sun has not yet risen.
In the chaos of darkness before the dawn
Seeking the light,
I advance
To dispel the dark clouds from my mind
To find a great tree unbowed by the tempest
I emerge from the earth."
">Daisaku Ikeda
It's something when I enter a website devoted to reviewing films and, given the choice, I click on the critic's personal blog before I click on the reviews of the new films....
Keep it up.
oh yay! finally the ability to leave a comment. when first i read your entry yesterday i was crushed to see there wasn't an option to do so.
i love mark twain's writing and manner of storytelling. this past summer i read "the complete short stories of mark twain" to my great delight. what i didn't realise was that he didn't publish short stories. they were usually contained within a longer tale. the editor of the volume published in 1957 painstakingly compiled the volume from combing through twain's body of work.
i would read one short story each night before turning off the light for bed. it guaranteed a smile on my face which would lead to a pleasant night's sleep.
thank you for introducing me to mccarthy and nack. i shall search for their books.
i am especially interested in the one concerning the big red horse, secretariat. i remember well his running for the triple crown successfully.
I thought this was beautiful. I have never loved the use of language as much as Les Miserables. Perfect book and Victor Hugo had such a way of writing, even his forty pages about the sewers in Paris was insightful. There is a particular passage when Jean Val Jean leaves a coin for Cosset in a shoe she had hidden in the fireplace (I forget the name of this Christmas tradition) That left me near tears and wanting to cheer aloud at the same time. Besides Hugo, and yourself, I have always loved reading anything by David Mamet. His plays yes, but also his nonfiction. He has a great book on acting, but also collections of essay's and a great little book called 3 Uses of the Knife. He is a brilliant wordsmith that I often find myself not fully understanding his sentences, but completely grasping his thoughts. What a genius!
Ebert: Victor Hugo. Roger Ebert. David Mamet. Which name does not belong here?
Roger,
Have you ever been to Hannibal? I picked up some great Twain stuff...including a copy of Mark Twain's Notebooks and Letters From The Earth.
I want to publicly thank three groups of people for getting me on the road to reading and of Mark Twain. A hospital, my parents and my teacher. Each had their role.
My love of Twain that began in a Shriners Hospital at second grade; it will end when one of his books is taken from my grasps at the nursing home. They had books available for the kids and I was lucky enough to get Tom Sawyer. The added bonus that I read the book in St. Louis...having crossed the Mississippi. On the way home, I knew I never could look at the river the same way again.
My parents, though not readers themselves, always bought a book if we asked. It could be any kind of book too...from Comic Books to a collection of poetry. Their opinion was: "If the kid is interested, let them read about it." When my love for Twain grew-my parents actually took me to Twain's home town Hannibal.
The third is my high school college prep literature teacher: Mr Stephen Hawkins of Effingham High School. This was a man who always had a smile on his face and a kind word for every student. Mr Hawkins would always take time for explinations. As a teacher, he encouraged us in creative ways-such as acting out a Spoon River poem in full costum. But above all-he showed us how to understand a story to get the most out of it. He passed away last year and the world is a lesser place for it.
Perhaps it's because I am from the Midwest; perhaps it's because I've seen the Mississippi River in it's glory but Mark Twain will always be Americas Author. While Hemingway and Fitsgerald captured patches of the American Tapestry, only Twain words weaved the whole cloth.
Ebert: My former Sun-Times colleague Ron Powers, also born in Hannibal, has written an acclaimed biography of Mark Twain.
With about half of McCarthy's novels going into film production, how do you think a Suttree film would hold up. Having read all his books it seems to me to be the least adaptable. It's structure is all together too labyrinth. Perhaps an HBO miniseries?
Ebert: What a challenge it would be. And who could play him? Tommy Lee Jones? Billy Bob Thornton?
Sorry, but I will use my space less to comment on your blogs them and more to praise a writer I think you failed to praise. Edgar Allan Poe! Constantly pegged as a horror writer, he nonetheless inspired Jules Verne and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and those in their respective fields, as well as wrote such wonderful pieces as 'The Power Of Words', which is about two angels discussing humanity. 'Never Bet The Devil Your Head' is the funniest thing outside of Twain, and the perfect piece for anyone thinking the Transcendentalists had gotten too big for their britches.
Also, the last paragraph, the last sentence even, of The Masque Of The Red Death is by far the most damning and final piece of writing in the English language. No one here gets out alive. Brilliant.
Never before have I been so struck by the impression that somebody else's friends are cooler than mine.
I had to comment on the Hemingway's style. I always thought of his sentences as pretty long...so, I decided to open up two books of his to see. I know Twain is famous for his long sentences, and am not having a contest.
I grabbed "The Old Man and the Sea" first.
In the first paragraph, there is a sentence 50 words long and in the same paragraph, the next sentence is 45 words long.
Okay, its no 179, but they aren't short either.
So, I go now to "A Farewell To Arms".
Again, in the first paragraph, there is a sentence exactly 50 words in length.
I searched some more.
In the third paragraph, there is a sentence 85 words in length.
In the first paragraph of chapter 2 (only page 3), there is a sentence that is 164 words long!
Here it is:
People lived on in it and there were hospitals and cafes and artillery up side streets and two bawdy houses, one for troops and one for officers, and with the end of the summer, the cool nights, the fighting in the mountains beyond the town, the shell-marked iron of the railway bridge, the smashed tunnel by the river where the fighting had been, the trees around the square and the long avenue of trees that led to the square; these with there being girls in the town, the King passing in his motor car, sometimes now seeing his face and little long necked body and gray beard like a goat's chin tuft; all these with the sudden interiors of houses that had lost a wall through shelling, with plaster and rubble in their gardens and sometimes in the street, and the whole thing going well on the Carso made the fall very different from the last fall when we had been in the country.
It psychologically feels like its going on forever, which is used to kind of give it an intensity....the longer you go without a pause, the more intensity it builds up...and when its not doing that it--in intense rhythm---just quickly gives you one image after another. So, there's always an intensity going on.
I did like the raining passage of Twain...it was poetic and very real....like "snake in the grass" by Emily Dickinson.
Ebert: I was careless in my reference to Hemingway, and admire him greatly. After 9/11, when I had to rent a car and drive from Toronto to Chicago, I listened to the audiobook of The Sun Also Rises, having read it a couple of times, and was struck by how well Hemingway's prose sounds as speech.
Here is Emily's amazing "narrow fellow" poem: http://www.bartleby.com/113/2024.html
Roger:
I have read this post three times now, and what can I say but thank you? More like this please.
Y'see? The view from your window is everything I thought it might be.
--Alfred
Roger,
This was just wonderful.
When my father was nine years old, his father bought him a copy of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
Inside the cover of that book, the very young John Van Dyke wrote, "John Van Dyke read this book in just three days!" I have dibs on that book when my father passes on.
When he was done reading it, my father told his Uncle Bill that he wished his new favorite book was longer. His Uncle surprised him by telling him he was in luck, as Tom's best friend had written about going on a river with an escaped slave.
My parents read to me every day and bought me books like these every Christmas. It took me until adulthood to realize that the fact that they did this changed the course of my life for the better. I would never have gone to college, never have become a teacher, never have instilled a love of books in my own child.
Thank you for this, Roger. It just meant so much to me.
-David
as an urdu speaking avid reader of the english language, i find that many a times i have to read a book three or four times to grasp the beauty of all the nuances the writer has used in his words, to grasp the concept that words can be coy, can flirt with you, and to grasp that there is more beauty in a well written story than in a story that's just plain engrossing. in my own language, i can identify all this quickly, even instantly....in english, it takes me a while to get there.
of the writers i have read, the one whose prose was brilliant from the very start was Mark Twain. and perhaps to a slightly lesser degree Robert Frost.
With these two, the nuances of the written word in what is a foreign language, comes through instantly. the words flow, every sentence is a revelation, every line rolls off the tongue, the world makes sense, sleeping seems like a silly idea, and who would want to?
Ebert: I am wondering what tiny percentage of native writers of English would be capable of such writing as yours. Small wonder that so much of the best English-language fiction of recent years has been written by Indians. Keep writing, Urdu and English. It's your gift.
I'm so happy that I finally picked up a Cormac book (mostly on your past comments about his writings). I started with The Road, and then went onto All The Pretty Horses, and then The Crossing. In a way his voice is similar to Croenenbergs, with a cold fevor and an objective lens. Cormac's books have to be read slowly. You need to hear the words, not just see the scene. Using speed reading techniques to get through the story means that you miss half of the book. Heck, one is probably best off getting it on audio so that he hears everything.
I should go back and read more Mark Twain. I've only read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Mr Ebert, sir.
I notice in your Years Best list you pay no mention to the fantastic New Zealand movie, Out of the Blue, which tells the true story of the Aramoana massacre in 1990.
Has that had a release in the US? Have you been able to see it? I strongly recommend you do so. It is quite simply one of the best movies of the year, despite having a terribly mishandled release here in the UK.
It is a lean and thoroughly gripping piece of documentary-style filmmaking, playing as a reconstruction of a fated twenty-four hour period, making no bones about setting the deaths of thirteen people in motion at the hands of a crazy 33-year-old loner simply because he was charged $2 at his bank for cashing a cheque.
The film is consistently chilling, but often extremely moving as it makes the somewhat brave decision to focus not on the murderer, David Gray (nope, not the “pop star”) but on the terrified yet courageous ‘civilians’ caught up amongst the senseless violence. It goes out of its way to strenuously avoid anything that could be found within a conventional “Hollywood” thriller and it refuses to allow its sense of pace be dictated to by attention starved, blockbuster-loving teen audience members either.
Out of The Blue excels because it is almost resolute in messing around with your expectations as an audience member. Enough time has passed since the real life incident for events to be particularly murky to many a person outside of New Zeland. Director Robert Sarkies and his co-writer Bill O’Brien know that many an audience member needs to know the what’s, why’s, when’s and how’s of every movement within their cinematic experience. They also know that the presence of Karl Urban (now living it up on Hollywood soil in big action extravaganzas like Doom, Pathfinder, Bourne Supremacy, Chronicles of Riddick and Lord of the Rings) in the cast, is going to make people expectant on heroic set pieces that will bring about the end of this mad man’s rampage.
Sarkies and O’Brien know all of that but they still smile politely and set about making no effort to explain or analyse David Gray’s actions nor in portraying Urban’s character, Nick Harvey, as anything but what he was in real life; a brave man who did his best but wonders whether it was enough to the point of breaking himself up over it. Instead, the focus remains wholeheartedly on the confusion, panic and horror of everyday people.
The film is sublime in mixing professional actors with amateur and undeveloped types. This is none more the case then when you witness the work of seventy-two year old amateur thespian Lois Lawn, who will undoubtedly break your heart like she did mine in her portrayal of the real-life Helen Dickson, an old infirm neighbor who crawled repeatedly along a ditch to check and comfort a wounded man AND continually try for an ambulance, despite having just had hip surgery.
Out of the Blue is shot with great restraint but also with an eye for the unconventionally beautiful held within the New Zealand landscape. It is every bit the masterpiece that Paul Greengrass’ Bloody Sunday is considered to be.
I had a wonderful moment in an Ottawa cab this summer. The driver was a 50-something Iranian and he had an old paperback copy of Saul Bellow's Herzog on the front passenger seat. I asked him if he enjoyed it, and he became serious and rhapsodic, saying that he had owned it now for 15 years, and it taught him English through its beauty. He then opened up his glove compartment , where there were two more Bellow titles, both of them yellow and obviously pored over.
He said it was a shame that Bellow only wrote three books. I said he had written dozens, and he did a double take from the road to my face and back to the road. He said that only three were listed inside the cover of Herzog. I explained that the edition was old, and that he had written many many more books. He wanted me to be absolutely sure of this, that I was not thinking of another writer. I assured him that a trip to the Chapter's bookstore in downtown Ottawa would prove me right.
He was ecstatic and confused, but he became alive. I envied him - wouldn't we all love to discover that a treasured writer had a trove of books we were unaware of?
Roger said: "I love audiobooks. Two of my favorites are Sean Barrett reading Perfume, and Kenneth Branagh reading The Diaries of Samuel Pepys."
Normally I steer clear of audiobooks because the reader has the personality and enthusiasm of my vacuum cleaner bag. Yet, a friend steered me toward the Harry Potter audiobooks read by Jim Dale. Dale reads the story like a parent reading to a child, giving each character a different voice and therefore a personality (it also helps that he is British). I like to listen to the audiobook after I’ve read the book itself (as I did with Harry Potter) provided that the reader will perform and not just sit and read blandly read the words.
I guess my major reason for steering away from most audiobooks is because there is an intimacy between author and reader, as with Mark Twain, you can read the words and hear them in your mind as Twain might have said them.
Thank you for this post. Beautifully written! Now that I've finished it, I feel I need to run out and pick up some books by McCarthy. I've been trying to find time to get a start on his works since I read your comments on Blood Meridian in your review of "The Proposition". That passage from Suttree seals the deal. I couldn't agree more with you on the beauty of "the general climbs and climbs down from his seat". That was enough to sink the hooks into my mind and force me to go out and read the book. Any lesser author would have written that the general climbed down from his seat. Besides Suttree and Blood Meridian, are there any other works from McCarthy you would particularly suggest?
This is one of my many second-favorite closing passages. I suppose that it's not a very sophisticated choice, but it was another one that I loved and memorized as a kid:
"And there she remains, puttering around the kitchen. Alone with Queenie. Then alone. ("Buddy dear," she writes in her wild hard-to-read script, "yesterday Jim Macy's horse kicked Queenie bad. Be thankful she didn't feel much. I wrapped her in a Fine Linen sheet and rode her in the buggy down to Simpson's pasture where she can be with all her Bones...."). For a few Novembers she continues to bake her fruitcakes single-handed; not as many, but some: and, of course, she always sends me "the best of the batch." Also, in every letter she encloses a dime wadded in toilet paper: "See a picture show and write me the story." But gradually in her letters she tends to confuse me with her other friend, the Buddy who died in the 1880's; more and more, thirteenths are not the only days she stays in bed: a morning arrives in November, a leafless birdless coming of winter morning, when she cannot rouse herself to exclaim: "Oh my, it's fruitcake weather! "
And when that happens, I know it. A message saying so merely confirms a piece of news some secret vein had already received, severing from me an irreplaceable part of myself, letting it loose like a kite on a broken string. That is why, walking across a school campus on this particular December morning, I keep searching the sky. As if I expected to see, rather like hearts, a lost pair of kites hurrying toward heaven. "
The other thing that I memorized compulsively was Dickinson. I love the one that begins "I can wade grief -."
I gathered Gatsby and Huck (total $2) but Suttree or even Corman is not to be found that easily, so I content myself with savoring the quote from your favorite a couple of times…
It’s unusual prose, not having read Joyce or Finnegan’s…...
It reminded me of the tank clobbering through the remnants of a town towards the end in Saving Ryan
“At a point beneath desire, I was there on Suttree's leaking houseboat in the hopeless dawn, sharing the ordeal of Suttree, the general, and Golgotha. It was an improvement. I was not trapped in a bed and a chair. I was not hooked up to anything. I was miserable, but I was alive, and McCarthy……..”
And that other chariot which opens Amadeus, this one plunging headlong into insanity, despair and doom….and that macabre ( second cousin) one that kicks off Wild Strawberries….hope all these depressing thoughts succeed in cheering……..
Is it eyes of alcohol ? If at all we are thinking of a substance, should be something more potent. ….it’s a dry cold that bites to the bones of age….
the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleeve of care,
The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,
Chief nourisher in life's feast,--.
Corman’s is a a continuously fertile flow of words, a synchronicity of language that testifies to an achieved internal rhythm and harmony, a mind which has come to terms with Time ,at least for a while....
All of the comments inspire me. I am a Star Wars fanatic, and I have been reading pulp sci-fi novels for the past 3 years. I got to a point where I could not have cared less for any nuance, I just wanted to get the damn book done. Find out the facts, as it were, that were germane to the story. Law school really took the joy out of reading for me. Cramming 300-400 pages of 8 font single-spaced textbooks will do that I propose. I loved the classics in high school and in college. I think I am due to go back in reinvest my time into good literature.
And for a good chuckle, read "she being brand new" by ee cummings for some unsubtle irony. Gets me everytime.
I still have the first (longish) book I ever read. I was seven, and stuck in bed with strep throat. I was so very tired of little books; I demanded a thick one like Mom read. She bought me a Bobbsey twins book, which is in my library now. I didn't understand at the time, of course, but now I know the purchase would have been a hardship for her - that alone makes it the most valuable book in my library.
Poetry wasn't emphasized at my high school, but I loved words, and collected laboriously-typed poems in a lime green binder. Still have it. One of those poems was the e.e. cummings poem you mentioned. That binder is the second most valuable book in my library.
Another poem in that binder is this one, which spoke to me when I was 16, but speaks to me more at 55. "Inscription for the Tank" is by James Wright, and it doesn't appear to be anywhere on the internet in its entirety. How is that possible? No matter. It is in my binder.
My life was never so precious
To me as now.
I gape unbelieving at those two lines
Of my words, caught and frisked naked.
If they loomed secret and dim
On the wall of the drunk-tank,
Scraped there by a raw fingernail
In the trickling crusts of gray mold,
Surely the plainest thug who read them
Would cluck with the ancient pity.
Men have a right to thank God for their loneliness.
The walls are hysterical with their dank messages.
But the last hophead is gone
With the quick of his name
Bleeding away down a new wall
Blank as his nails.
I wish I had walked outside
To wade in the sea, drowsing and soothed;
I wish I had copied some words from Isaiah,
Kabir, Ansari, oh Whitman, oh anyone, anyone.
But I wrote down mine, and now
I must read them forever, even
When the wings in my shoulders cringe up
At the cold's fangs, as now.
Of all my lives, the one most secret to me,
Folded deep in a book never written,
Locked up in a dream of a still place,
I have blurted out.
I have heard weeping in secret
And quick nails broken.
Let the dead pray for their own dead.
What is their pity to me?
One non-native English-speaking author that has amazed me is Joseph Conrad. Literate in three or four languages, supposedly he liked writing in English best because it was best-suited for ambiguity....The Secret Sharer worked the concept of self as alienated other so very much better than Fight Club, for example...and the original Heart of Darkness contained so much more complexity than ever could be captured in Apocalypse Now....and even the great Peter O'Toole could only capture a portion of the complexity of Lord Jim....
This is one of my favorites, from John Steinbeck.
Once again, the world was spinning in greased grooves.
Nine succinct words, in a perfect phrase, changes my entire perspective from whatever self induced drama I am playing to the realization that at the ultimate, none of it makes any difference at all.
I am not so sure about this.
It seems like performing with words is a little bit like a cop-out. Like playing guitar with a cell phone. Why not just... play the guitar?
Maybe people who perform with words are just people who can't perform without them.
NS
http://sciencedefeated.wordpress.com/
Off topic, but I wanted to say that (per your December 4 article) I too love to see films set in Chicago, because it almost always means that I'm going to recognize familiar streets, parks, buildings and neighborhoods.
But then again, I live in Toronto.
Ebert: Ouch!
Okay, feeling better today. Thanks for the Wodehouse prescription. Reading my entry above, I can see myself straining to turn out blueberry-cheesecake prose, and that may be more than obvious to some of you guys. And by "blueberry-cheesecake", I mean the kind of prose you want to nibble word-by-word.
But I look at the entry by natasha-lahore above, and I am humbled. There is no straining for effect in that piece of writing, and the bit about "words flirting with you" tickles the grey matter in an enviable way. It doesn't help that my entry was about being in a "brown study" and hers was about the joy of reading (which, indeed, was the topic at hand.)
So inspiration, perspiration, desperation, masturbation - all in a day's work for a struggling writer, and probably for Twain as well.
Thanks to all you guys for being in this Roger's Blog club. I feel like I'm part of a community of smart people, and I haven't felt that way since the last time i watched GOSFORD PARK.
Incidentally, my favorite use of two or three words in any book (off the top of my head) is Nabokov's reference to a pre-birthed Lolita as a "curved fish" in her mother's belly.
Mr. Ebert:
I don't believe I've been to your blog ever before, though I've certainly read many of your film reviews over the years. I was directed to this entry by one of the denizens of the Harlan Ellison web site, where I hang out, and I must say it was well worth the trip. I see several comments have wished people read more, or even read aloud more. Nearly five years ago, I embraced my love for reading aloud by launching an ongoing series of literature readings at a Portland, Oregon coffee shop that I call "Story Time for Grownups."
Of course, I had plenty of old favorites to draw on -- Ray Bradbury, MFK Fisher, Italo Calvino, Woody Allen, Stephen Vincent Benet, Shirley Jackson, Mikhail Bulgakov, Timothy Findley, Joseph Heller, Dr. Seuss, A.A. Milne. . . . But in having to generate a reading every month, as the years passed, I was forced to seek out writers with whom I had little or no acquaintance, to my and to my audience's great benefit: Jack London, O. Henry, Ambrose Bierce, Richard Yates, Guy de Maupassant.
In the past I have also read at Powell's Books, local Borders outlets, local libraries, and for recordings and radio broadcasts for the blind. So you may be assured that "concerts in words" are alive, well, and ongoing in the Pacific Northwest.
Ebert: I met Harlan when we both both shy of 21, at a Midwestcon. Great about the readings! You should video some stuff and post it on YouTube. IMHO despite all the YouTubes of "anyone lived in a pretty how town," no one reads it musically, and no one reads it as if they know anyone and noone are two people.
I gave Roger Ebert hardly a moment's thought until the last couple of years or so. By way of background I am an inveterate snob and regard anything from television with enormous prejudice. (I like to think--hope--that my acquaintances realize that I judge myself as severely as I do others.)
Some time ago I read that he had had a disfiguring surgery yet would attend a film festival nonetheless, and around the same time I saw the Siskel vs. Ebert McDonalds smackdown. I was surprised and amused to perceive game emanating from this unlikely quarter. Later I came to regard his "100 Great Movies" list as a treasured resource (however let it be known that True Confessions ought to have made the list, whereas even the distant memory of Do the Right Thing makes me wince).
Lately here on the blog I've come to appreciate what a strong, dignified, and wonderful race Ebert has run. I'm glad and feel privileged to learn of his many friendships, marriage, and love of literature and of course movies. I remember feeling poignance and satisfaction when I realized that a chef of my acquaintance enjoyed both haute cuisine and the Big Mac far more than I ever could. So it is with Ebert.
A bone I must pick--just when I am once again comfortable in a lazy cocoon of literary non-discrimination, here comes Mr. Ebert to jar me from my sofatic reverie and reawaken the desire to read something good (besides Mr Ebert's own writing, of course.)
So, Mr Ebert, thank you very much, for at the feet of your post I now have no choice but to endure the itinerant annoyance of leveraging myself up off my beloved mental couch, in order to become further acquainted with McCarthy. How inconvenient!
When the weather finally turns here in northern California, I always find an unwitting person to whom I may quote this poem by Margaret Wise Brown:
One by one the leaves fall down
From the sky come falling
And leaf by leaf
the summer is done
One
by one
by one
by one
I know this is off topic but I just watched Wooden Crosses by Raymond Bernard. It's an old war movie that Criterion unearthed and it's a masterpiece. I wish as many people to see it.
You can rent it on the criterion website.
http://www.criterion.com/library/online?page=2
Roger:
Does your love for Huckleberry Finn extend to the chapters in which Tom and Huck play pranks on Jim for what seems like an extended period of time near the end of the book, or is it restricted to the previous 2/3 of the book and the closing chapter?
I admire the book and appreciate its importance, but that section always grates on me - Huck treating Jim like that after all they've went through. It seems so out of character, and thematically off....
Ebert: I agree with you, especially since Huck earlier expresses remorse for allowing Jim to think he might have died.
Talking of horse carriages (and favourite passages), what could ever be as awesome as the one below . It's the one that brought me cheer and hope when I hit the rock bottom of existence, twenty five years ago. I hope you can feel the grandeur of this ,which goes beyond Dante and Milton...
"The two characters for hell can be interpreted to mean digging a hole in the ground. Can anyone avoid having a hole dug for them when they die? This is what is called “hell.” The flames that burn one’s body are the fires of the hell of incessant suffering. One’s wife, children, and relatives vying for position around one’s body as they move toward the grave are the wardens and demon guards of hell. The plaintive cries of one’s family are the voices of the guards and wardens of hell. One’s twoandahalffootlong walking stick is the iron rod of torture in hell. The horses and oxen that carry one’s body are the horse-headed and ox-headed demons, and the grave is the great citadel of the hell of incessant suffering. The eighty-four thousand earthly desires are eighty-four thousand cauldrons in hell. One’s body leaves home for the mountain of death, while the river beside which one’s filial children stand in grief is the river of three crossings. It is utterly useless to look for hell anywhere else."
Nichiren Daishonin (1222-1281)
Not only is this very nice reading and reflection, it also moves Ben Stein's picture closer to the edge of the universe. Thanks on both counts.
Well, I guess my favourite passage from a book has already been covered. Cheers for the shout-out, Roger. Nice to see so many pieces of great fiction in one place.
Two more passages that are in every way perfect. The first from Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing. Another bit of writing that really summarizes America, and couldn't help thinking of it when Hunter was mentioned above.
"There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."
I know it was his favourite bit of his own writing, and he's really not wrong.
Second passage I'm actually not going to write down, because it would spoil the fantastic book with an even more fantastic ending. If anyone has read it, they'll know. The ending to Something Happened by Joseph Heller, a book I'd argue is even better than Catch-22.
Sorry about that anti-climax. Bit redundant really.
Anyhow, what I fervently hope is that each writer on this list wrote their defining passage, they leant back and knew, on some level, that they had written something so good it was untouchable, worth rewriting a novel just to fit that passage. (Of course, given the people on the list, Thompson, Fitzgerald, McCarthy, they probably had a drink)
Sometimes the words seem too good, too perfect, too far removed from an ordinary person to have come from a long process of sitting and refining and tweaking, but instead come from white-hot bolts searing the brain - prose written by lightning.
Thanks for this entry. I'm somebody who reads a book every two weeks on average and writes several thousand words a week (some for hobby, some for a living), and it is so rare to see anything that gets you really EXCITED about reading and writing.
Writers don't seem to choose each word so carefully as some of the classic authors you cite here. Even modern writers who are very successful, and even ones who are very good. Words and prose have been somewhat devalued in an OMG LOL society. Of course, language would get boring if it always stayed the same.
Among modern English-language writers, Jonathan Lethem and Richard Russo are the ones that most make me "vibrate", as you say in regards to the directors you admire. Lethem nails the marvels of urban life, while Russo understands the cadence of small-town life (as represented on the screen in "Nobody's Fool").
Congratulations on one of the first uses ever of the word "fucking" in one of your public writings!
Thank you for this. At college, I kind of get bogged down in the class readings that we have to do and my fiction reading has somewhat fallen by the wayside, but to read a good novel, especially the work of Mr. McCarthy, is a dream. Personally, I prefer "Blood Meridian," but to each his own.
I know you've mentioned Stephen King's brilliant book "On Writing"? several times in reviews, but he says ,"If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write." I think about that every time I pick up a book. I am a firm believer in their healing powers, and a believer that much of the beautiful prose of the past is falling by the wayside. The best book I've ever read was Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five," and I think his work speaks for itself in lines like "Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt." (I have So It goes tattooed on my right foot.)
Here are some other amazing paragraphs, some of whose meaning I am still deciphering:
CORMAC MCCARTHY: BLOOD MERIDIAN
Someone snatched the old woman's blindfold from her and she and the juggler were clouted away and when the company turned in to sleep and the low fire was roaring in the blast like a thing alive these four yet crouched at the edge of the firelight among their strange chattels and watched how the ragged flames fled down the wind as if sucked by some maelstrom out there in the void, some vortex in that waste apposite to which man's transit and his reckonings alike lay abrogate.
JACK KEROUAC, ON THE ROAD
"They danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn..."
THE ROAD, CORMAC MCCARTHY
“Years later he’d stood in the charred ruins of a library where blackened books lay in pools of water. Shelves tipped over. Some rage at the lies arranged in their thousands row on row. He picked up one of the books and thumbed through the heavy bloated pages. He’d not have thought the value of the smallest thing predicated on a world to come. It surprised him. That the space which these things occupied was itself an expectation. He let the book fall and took a last look around and made his way out into the cold gray light.”
V FOR VENDETTA, ALAN MOORE
I don't know who you are. Please believe. There is no way I can convince you that this is not one of their tricks. But I don't care. I am me, and I don't know who you are, but I love you.
I have a pencil. A little one they did not find. I am a women. I hid it inside me. Perhaps I won't be able to write again, so this is a long letter about my life. It is the only autobiography I have ever written and oh God I'm writing it on toilet paper.
I was born in Nottingham in 1957, and it rained a lot. I passed my eleven plus and went to girl's Grammar. I wanted to be an actress.
I met my first girlfriend at school. Her name was Sara. She was fourteen and I was fifteen but we were both in Miss. Watson's class. Her wrists. Her wrists were beautiful. I sat in biology class, staring at the picket rabbit foetus in its jar, listening while Mr. Hird said it was an adolescent phase that people outgrew. Sara did. I didn't.
In 1976 I stopped pretending and took a girl called Christine home to meet my parents. A week later I enrolled at drama college. My mother said I broke her heart.
But it was my integrity that was important. Is that so selfish? It sells for so little, but it's all we have left in this place. It is the very last inch of us. But within that inch we are free.
London. I was happy in London. In 1981 I played Dandini in Cinderella. My first rep work. The world was strange and rustling and busy, with invisible crowds behind the hot lights and all that breathless glamour. It was exciting and it was lonely. At nights I'd go to the Crew-Ins or one of the other clubs. But I was stand-offish and didn't mix easily. I saw a lot of the scene, but I never felt comfortable there. So many of them just wanted to be gay. It was their life, their ambition. And I wanted more than that.
Work improved. I got small film roles, then bigger ones. In 1986 I starred in "The Salt Flats." It pulled in the awards but not the crowds. I met Ruth while working on that. We loved each other. We lived together and on Valentine's Day she sent me roses and oh God, we had so much. Those were the best three years of my life.
In 1988 there was the war, and after that there were no more roses. Not for anybody.
In 1992 they started rounding up the gays. They took Ruth while she was out looking for food. Why are they so frightened of us? They burned her with cigarette ends and made her give them my name. She signed a statement saying I'd seduced her. I didn't blame her. God, I loved her. I didn't blame her.
But she did. She killed herself in her cell. She couldn't live with betraying me, with giving up that last inch. Oh Ruth. . . .
They came for me. They told me that all of my films would be burned. They shaved off my hair and held my head down a toilet bowl and told jokes about lesbians. They brought me here and gave me drugs. I can't feel my tongue anymore. I can't speak.
The other gay women here, Rita, died two weeks ago. I imagine I'll die quite soon. It's strange that my life should end in such a terrible place, but for three years I had roses and I apologized to nobody.
I shall die here. Every last inch of me shall perish. Except one.
An inch. It's small and it's fragile and it's the only thing in the world worth having. We must never lose it, or sell it, or give it away. We must never let them take it from us.
I don't know who you are. Or whether you're a man or a woman. I may never see you or cry with you or get drunk with you. But I love you. I hope that you escape this place. I hope that the world turns and that things get better, and that one day people have roses again. I wish I could kiss you.
Valerie
And yet another elegant, thoughtful, and exquisitely written post by one of my favorite writers of all time.
I have been on a reading tear of late, looking for the best translations of Paolo Coelho and Giorgio Bassani and trying to immerse myself in the world of the sad and doomed Veronika and the equally sad and doomed Finzi-Continis. But I also got sidetracked halfway through Bassani's unforgettable novel by the recent arrival from Amazon of a collection of works by counterculture author Richard Brautigan. I promptly opened it and landed on the opening line of In Watermelon Sugar:
In Watermelon Sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar. I'll tell you about it because I am here and you are distant.
Those words and the appearance of the word iDeath immediately hooked me. It's a maddening, Joycean wonder of a story, but I'm loving every minute of it.
So then my Shakespeare loving eldest daughter walked off with my Bassani, and my Coelho sits beside me on my desk, both put aside by me because of the inventive nature of an author I had never read before, bought on a whim and a vague recommendation in a book about books. Both will be read, of course, for I read everything I can. This feeling of excitement takes me back to junior high, when I managed to convince the librarian who kept the "banned" books behind the counter to let me have Slaughterhouse Five and began my love affair with the words of Vonnegut ( and later, Mailer, Heller, Thompson, Ginsburg, and Kerouac). This is the same librarian who handed me my first Kael and Sarris. I remember him fondly.
Thank you, Mr. Ebert.
This blog reminds me of a review you did for 2007's "Starting Out in the Evening",
"Do you sometimes feel like you're the last serious reader left? Do you remember when the New York Times best-selling novels were by Faulkner, Mailer, Updike, Cheever, Welty or O'Hara? Do you thank heaven when Oprah chooses a great novel like A Fine Balance? Have you noticed that people have stopped obsessing about J.D. Salinger's disappearing act? Have you never found a later novelist as entertaining as Dickens? Did you study English in college and carry around Shakespeare a little conspicuously?"
I feel like I'm one of the few "last serious readers", who right now is studying English in college (my Shakespeare is too heavy to carry around alas) and I understand why people should get together more often to talk about books. It's fading so much in our society now, and I marveled when only a century ago, the real celebritys were authors. Sad, that it isn't too often we get them now.
P.S. I loved the movie I referred to earlier, and everybody who is a bookaphile should see it.
Ebert: Someone once asked a Shakespeare professor, "Do you think Shakespeare's language will ever die out?" And he said, "Not with Shakespeare still around to keep it alive."
Roger--
POSTUM??
Ebert: Have you had any for awhile? Tastes good,no calories, enriches coffee, great bedtime drink, and is a no cal-salt-fat way to enrich the taste of various soups and stews.
Way off topic. I know you don't have much interest in gaming, but I just wanted to share with you how Seth Schiesel, the NYTimes staff gaming critic (one of the best I might add), cites you in making him a better critic (he cites your blog entry about your simple film critic rules).
http://www.slate.com/id/2206243/entry/2206436/
Ebert: Yeah, I saw that. I am still not sure video games can be "art" in the sense that we use it in this thread, but I am convinced they are getting a lot better. However, if I had at the beginning of my career been told I would spend the next 41 years playing video games, I would have taken up professional knitting.
LOL
I know where you're coming from. I enjoy great books and great video games. I think it's a generational thing. Most fanboys love to bash how the new (gaming) supposedly defeats the old (traditional art). I won't add to the debate. All I'll say is that both give me different types of pleasure, but I rarely find the sense of discovery, illumination, or insight in video games than I do in a painting, a score, or a book.
And to all the gamers reading this, no I am not bashing games. It's just the way I feel.
I go out to more theater than movies and by doing so I am constantly coming against words being recited--some familiar and some unfamiliar.
My Shakespeare teacher--a disheveled man who always came to class in a long sleeved shirt with collar, a sweater vest and a tie, even though we were on a campus where some professors surfed between classes and many students roamed around in beach wear--told us that Shakespeare's plays and even his sonnets were meant to be heard and not read silently. Plays must be seen and not just once, but several times because the words could be interpreted differently.
There is a great beauty of words and poetry is tied to language. The meter of Chinese is different from English or Japanese.
Yet not everyone can hear and perhaps by seeing how language and sound can be appreciated by the deaf can we truly appreciate sound.
In Los Angeles, we had a group called Deaf West Theater. Seeing and hearing deaf and hearing actors perform "Streetcar Named Desire" was a revelation, particularly because the seats actually trembled when the streetcar was supposed to pass and when Stanley cries "Stella," it is more shocking because it's the first word we've heard that actor speak.
They had boldly done something astounding a few years ago. They took a musical and mixed deaf actors with their voice actors and hearing actors. The musical they choose was "Big River." For those that do not know, "Big River" is based on Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn." From Los Angeles, this musical went to Broadway and on to a national tour. Words expressed by movement and words expressed by actors with lovely voices and then the absence of words to be expressed only with movement.
Sounds can be wonderful and the spoken word can be glorious, particularly if the words have been arranged like a musical piece, melodic and with lyrics that have great meaning.
There is music all around us and we who can hear it are lucky if only we stop to listen.
Dear Roger,
In a world gone mad, it is one of my great pleasures in life to read your words and have the opportunity to bear witness to rational and measured thought. Your latest entry has stayed in my head. Memories of great books from my childhood float in and out of reverie. I can clearly remember the feel of those pages in my hands while I found shelter in my favorite corner of the house, sprawled out on the floor as our cat was by my side. Reading was a way for my to forget that my eyes were crossed and the kids at school would taunt me. While the shouts of " cocked eyed" rang in my ears; I could momentarily forget the ugly words and escape to other worlds and soar on the wings of Hans Christian Anderson and Louise May Alcott and tales of spirited girls who had perfect brown, blue or green eyes which looked normal and were not an object of ridicule. So I understand your commentary from first hand experience with the transformative power of language to open up the mind to a better and happier place to be.
My eyes no longer look different thanks to a famed surgeon, who my mother likes to tell me, once operated on the Queen of England as well as performing experimental surgeon on monkeys to learn his valuable skills. The hurt child remains untouched by time, buried deep within; yet the excitement of reading and writing and hearing the spoken language of poetry is paramount to a life well lived.
To walk inside an old fashioned book store, yes they still do exist, and touch these books and choose one to add to my library is a joy. I am like an explorer seeking to enter into new worlds and go on a long journey.
Some of the books you have mentioned will be my new selections because you have once again opened up new pages for me to discover. With all the chatter that is part of our 21st century, it is necessary even vital to retain that quiet space that is just you and the page and the author. A partnership greatly to be treasured.
Roger, I will be first in line at the small bookstore around the corner to buy your memoir. All your entries have the feel of a work in progress.
Judy Shuster
Humbly, I'll contribute what may be my favorite few lines of American writing, by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
"In the spring of '27, something bright and alien flashed across the sky. A young Minnesotan who seemed to have nothing to do with his generation did a heroic thing, and for a moment people set down their glasses in country clubs and speakeasies and thought their old best dreams."
Nobody does wistful better than Fitzgerald. In those two sentences, all of the swagger and optimism, disillusionment and regret, of the American 20th Century, and so gracefully done, too; I close my eyes and can see the Spirit of St. Louis bobbing against a sepia sky. (Why the sky should be sepia in my mind, I can't say, but there you have it). No matter how many times I read this, my heart aches and swells at once with "their old best dreams."
This discussion also reminds me of a passage from Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, describing the experience of reading a new writer, and the joy of recalling a beloved one:
"She is like a person striking a match that will not light, I thought. But why, I asked her as if she were present, are Jane Austen's sentences not of the right shape for you? Must they all be scrapped because Emma and Mr. Woodhouse are dead? Alas, I sighed, that it should be so. For while Jane Austen breaks from melody to melody as Mozart from song to song, to read this writing was like being out at sea in an open boat. Up one went, down one sank."
I am a very amateur writer and have bookmarked your essay so that I may return to it for guidance and motivation. So, thank you, Mr. Ebert, for this. And happy reading.
Random thoughts:
A poster above mentioned how he felt his writing seemed a little forced; a little... show-offy if you will. I think that's probably true of many of the first 50 or so posts. But I think it's great. I think it's wonderful that there exists a place on the internet where people want to show off by producing the best writing they can. I can only hope that people who come here, and read these posts, and are affected by them or even inspired by them, take those same feelings and ambitions and spread them around the rest of the internet. Words are the easiest of things most people have to make beautiful; if only more would take the time and effort; and respect and admire the time and effort of others who do.
Mark Twain gets universal love as a brilliant satirist; I was dismayed to see it took nearly 80 posts before Joseph Heller was mentioned. I could have done it earlier myself, but didn't have time to make a proper post before. Catch-22 is a marvel of English and of satire and runs circles around the wit of most anything else I've seen or read.
Mr Ebert I know you're no fan of video games, but you should take heart that video game enthusiasts are not being 'turned stupid' by the medium. Aside from your own writing, the best regularly updated entertainment writing I've found on the web is www.penny-arcade.com where 'Tycho Brahe' a pseudonym of course, regularly produces excellent prose (and may even share many of your favourite novels). Since you now seem to have so much internet time on your hands, I thought you might take 5 or 10 minutes to check it out, even though the main subject, video games, is outside of your line of interest. In any event, at the moment they are primarily engaged with their annual charity 'Child's Play', which raises millions of dollars in cash and toys from gamers for children's hospitals around the world.
Dear friends,
Let us to introduce ourselves and invite you to visit our film and literature magazine, “Sangri-La. Detours and Fictions Aside”, in:
http://www.shangrilaediciones.com/Shangrila-Derivas-Ficciones-Aparte7.pdf
Thank you in advance and best regards.
Shangri-La
www.shangrilaediciones.com
Roger,
Not to veer off topic, either, but if you enjoy Postum, you might also enjoy Roastaroma, a delicious roasted-grain tea made by Celestial Seasonings. Over the past two or three years I have lost my taste for coffee (the aroma of it still delights me); Roastaroma with Silk soy creamer gives me almost as much pleasure as did my morning cup(s) of coffee--which I, too, link with the pleasures of reading.
Cheers,
Dan
All of the best video game reviews I've ever read are by people who admire Roger Ebert.
The best of them actually agree that games aren't really art.
By the way Roger, it's somewhat on topic here, but what do you think of the latest McDonald's ad for "unsnobby" coffee? It makes me cringe every time I see it, the way the guy quickly casts his book aside and the way they sneer at all these "films" they "have to watch." What is happening to our country?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cg87E1tjTOE
Ebert: The link doesn't seem to work.
Here is something akin to "Golgotha Sleeping in the Traces"
http://www.abcgallery.com/R/rembrandt/rembrandt95.html
Ebert: I must say the coalpedlar looks more robust than I imagined him.
I would love to be an avaracious reader, the kind of person who can pick up any book and just dive into a hole in the page. Yet, the book has to really grab me (it helps if I know nothing about it). I often find myself returning to books I've read in the past - like "Moby Dick" and "Catcher in the Rye" and "A Christmas Carol".
But, if I have an evening free I usually spend it curled up with a great movie. I've been working on a project lately in which I've been choosing my own personal choices for Best Picture, Actor and Actress and it has been a great resource of films that I have yet to experience. What I have found in really delving into the great films of the past is that they can be as lyrical and poetic as a good book. I realize that a film is not as intimate as a book because you have the directors, the producers and the actors in between you and the writer yet somehow I find a much more emotional and satisfying experience from film than I do from books.
Roger, you and your readers have inspired me to reminisce about my own favorite literary works. I imagine that you will all be familiar with the works that I mention here, but if not, I hope that you and they find some inspiration in what I have to say, as well.
Like you, “Huckleberry Finn” was my first Real Book, given to me as a birthday present at the age of 12 by my beloved aunt. Like you, once I began reading it, I couldn’t put it down. Like you, it changed my life forever.
Here is my favorite short comment on “Huckleberry Finn”, from “The Greatness of Huckleberry Finn”, by Lionel Trilling:
“Certainly one element in the greatness of ‘Huckleberry Finn’ – as also in the lesser greatness of ‘Tom Sawyer’ – is that it succeeds first as a boys’ book. One can read it at ten and then annually ever after, and each year find that it is as fresh as the year before, that it has changed only in becoming somewhat larger. To read it young is like planting a tree young – each year adds a new growth-ring of meaning, and the book is as little likely as the tree to become dull. So, we may imagine, an Athenian boy grew up together with the ‘Odyssey’. There are few other books which we can know so young and love so long.”
***
When I thought about style, the piece that kept coming into my mind was this lovely segment from Ursula Le Guin’s “Always Coming Home”:
“What works for words may not work for things, and to say that because two sayings that contradict each other cannot both be true is not to say that opposites do not exist. The word is not the thing; word and thing have each their own way. It is true that a town is made of stone, clay, and wood; it is true that a town is made of people. These words do not deny each other at all. It is true that a bird’s way and the wind blowing make a feather fall; it is true that finding that feather in my way I understand that it has fallen for me. Those words deny each other in part. It is true that everything that is must be as it is, and that nothing is but the play of illusion upon the void; it is true that everything is and it is true that nothing is. These words deny each other wholly. The world of our life is the weaving that holds them together while holding them apart. The world is the bridge between the walls of a canyon, the banks of a river in an abyss, and words are the birds that fly across and across. They cannot be in two places at the same time. But they can cross and come back. It takes all one’s life long to cross the bridge to the other side. But the birds fly back and forth across the canyon, singing and speaking from one side to the other.”
***
There isn’t much that I can say about Cormac McCarthy that hasn’t already been said by previous correspondents, other than that I agree with Harold Bloom in his assessment of him as one of the four greatest living American authors, along with DeLillo, Pynchon, and Roth. I love McCarthy’s writing, to the point that I have read aloud to my wife, and will continue to read, all his works that I own. Still, it wouldn’t have killed him to have used a comma here and there….
***
In 1939, the New Yorker published E. B. White’s “The Door”, which Clifton Fadiman considered the most brilliant piece of prose ever to appear in that magazine. It may still be, after all these years. It contained what I consider to be the greatest single line of lyric poetry ever written, by one of White’s deceased friends (and one of ours):
“My heart has followed all my days something I cannot name.”
***
As for the best opening lines from any novel of my acquaintance, “Call me Ishmael…” is hard to beat, but I would like to submit this one:
“Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo….
His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face.
He was baby tuckoo.”
That story is everybody’s story.
I thought of another:
“riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.”
But then it occurred to me that I wasn’t sure that that was really the beginning of the story, or that it came from a novel, or at least what we usually think of as a novel, and when I looked into the book again, I felt as though I was a stranger at a wake.
That story is everybody’s story, too.
Finally, I submit a few lines from the best ending of any novel - then, now, and for all time:
“… O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”
Ebert: It's nice how Joyce allows Molly such poetic liberties and then, at the quickening moment of truth, allows her to fall into everyday Irish vernacular: "his heart was going like mad."
Dear Roger,
I'm a former English major, U of I grad, and the mom of a 2-year old boy, so the air in our house is always thick with stories. Haven't quite graduated to Moby Dick yet--we seem to stuck on multiple iterations of "Goldilocks."
Speaking of telling stories, here's one of my favorite passages from a story about storytelling--"Death in the Woods" by Sherwood Anderson:
"Now the crowd of men and boys had got to the clearing. Darkness comes quickly on such Winter nights, but the full moon made everything clear. My brother and I stood near the tree, beneath which the old woman had died.
She did not look old, lying there in that light, frozen and still. One of the men turned her over in the snow and I saw everything. My body trembled with some strange mystical feeling and so did my brother's. It might have been the cold.
Neither of us had ever seen a woman's body before. It may have been the snow, clinging to the frozen flesh, that made it look so white and lovely, so like marble."
And then these lines, from the very end:
"You see it is likely that, when my brother told the story, that night when we got home and my mother and sister sat listening, I did not think he got the point. He was too young and so was I. A thing so complete has its own beauty.
I shall not try to emphasize the point. I am only explaining why I was dissatisfied then and have been ever since. I speak of that only that you may understand why I have been impelled to try to tell the simple story over again."
Thank you for this journal. I've always admired your work.
Ebert: These comments are becoming an anthology.
Did you hear they're tearing down the English Building? Before it falls down,I guess. Too bad. I loved those labyrinthine upper corridors and the dormer cubbyholes of the professors.
Roger:
You speak of performing a concert in words. I'm pleased to say I have actually had the pleasure of doing that.
A few years ago, I participated in a "Reader's Theater" reading of Charles Dickens's "A Christmas Carol." There were five readers onstage, alternating between narration and speaking parts for the characters. At various times in the program, I performed the roles of Scrooge, Marley, Bob Cratchet, Nephew Fred, and the Ghosts of Christmas Past and Present. (The four other performers and I traded parts during the performance like basketball players moving the ball down the court.)
You really get a feel for Dickens's words when you read the "Carol" aloud before a live audience. As you listen to the words, you experience a flight of fantasy which is sorely lacking is the numerous movie versions of the tale.
For example, no movie or stage version I've seen has yet to truly interpret the metaphysical wonder of Scrooge's first meeting with the Ghost of Christmas Past. Here is Dickens's description:
"Even this, though, when Scrooge looked at it with increasing steadiness, was not [the Ghost's] strangest quality. For as its belt sparkled and glittered now in one part and now in another, and what was light one instant, at another time was dark, so the figure itself fluctuated in its distinctness: being now a thing with one arm, now with one leg, now with twenty legs, now a pair of legs without a head, now a head without a body: of which dissolving parts, no outline would be visible in the dense gloom wherein they melted away. And in the very wonder of this, it would be itself again; distinct and clear as ever."
Dickens was ahead of his time in the writing of metaphysical fantasy elements.
Another thing that my fellow readers and I found in performing the "Carol." Some parts of the story seemed to take on a new life or provide the audience with a fresh interpretation when you read them aloud in words.
Take Fezziwig's party. In most film versions I've seen, this scene is always the dullest scene in the movie.
But when you read the story aloud to an audience, Fezziwig's party becomes the highlight of the first half of the story (even more so than Marley's ghost).
Imagine reading the following passage aloud (no disrespect intended, Roger) at a brisk pace of speech, like an auctioneer. You are trying to convey the manic joy of the dancers at Fezziwig's party, and Dickens helps you with his descriptions as the dancers take the floor.
"And away they all went, twenty couple at once; hands half round and back again the other way; down the middle and up again; round and round in various stages of affectionate grouping; old top couple always turning up in the wrong place; new top couple starting off again, as soon as they got there; all top couples at last, and not a bottom one to help them. When this result was brought about, old Fezziwig, clapping his hands to stop the dance, cried out, "Well done!" and the fiddler plunged his hot face into a pot of porter, especially provided for that purpose. But scorning rest, upon his reappearance, he instantly began again, though there were no dancers yet, as if the other fiddler had been carried home, exhausted, on a shutter, and he were a brand-new man resolved to beat him out of sight, or perish."
"There were more dances, and there were forfeits, and more dances, and there was cake, and there was a great piece of Cold Roast, and there was a great piece of Cold Boiled, and there were mince-pies, and plenty of beer. But the great effect of the evening came when the fiddler struck up "Sir Roger de Coverley." Then old Fezziwig stood out to dance with Mrs Fezziwig. Top couple too; with a good stiff piece of work cut out for them; three or four and twenty pair of partners; people who were not to be trifled with; people who would dance, and had no notion of walking."
"But if they had been twice as many -- ah, four times -- old Fezziwig would have been a match for them, and so would Mrs Fezziwig. As to her, she was worthy to be his partner in every sense of the term. If that's not high praise, tell me higher, and I'll use it. A positive light appeared to issue from Fezziwig's calves. They shone in every part of the dance like moons. You couldn't have predicted, at any given time, what would have become of them next. And when old Fezziwig and Mrs Fezziwig had gone all through the dance; advance and retire, both hands to your partner, bow and curtsey, corkscrew, thread-the-needle, and back again to your place; Fezziwig cut -- cut so deftly, that he appeared to wink with his legs, and came upon his feet again without a stagger."
Reading the "Carol" aloud, you find yourself falling into the rhythms of Dickens's words. He was right to call it a "Carol" -- it's a song of words without music.
We had a wonderful time doing the "Carol." Since then, other commitments have prevented me from taking part in the readers' theater workshop. But I'm hoping to be able to return to it at some point. There are other works by other authors -- Faulkner, John Cheever, Anton Chekhov, Bernard Malamud, Robert Penn Warren -- whom I have often thought would be good material for Readers' Theater performance.
Merry Christmas, Roger.
P.S. If I were to recommend one little-known book where the author has truly "performed a concert in words," it would be Beryl Markham's memoir West With The Night. Her descriptions of flying a plane over Africa, or of thoroughbred racehorses, or elephant stampedes on the Serenghetti plain were enough to make Hemingway say, "She can write rings around the rest of us [writers]."
I love the prose of Marilynn Robinson! Every word is like a prayer, or a sigh, or a barely expressed hope... What sweetness and then there were passages like the following:
But one afternoon a storm came up and a gust of wind hit the henhouse and lifted the roof right off, and hens came flying out, sucked after it, I suppose, and also just acting like hens
"My mother groan'd! my father wept.
Into the dangerous world I leapt:
Helpless, naked, piping loud,
Like a fiend hid in a cloud."
This is what the general and his horse reminds me about.( I hope your favourite para is not too worsened in the excess of commentage.) I believe I'm trying to lense my mind to hit the exact shade of meaning, and not a "cousin".Come to think of it, what precision there is in the homely "cousin"---cousin is no cousin.
I'm reading Gatsby with a zeal to reach it's innard, something which as a professional in things like engineering I never did before to except to maths books and a bit with Shakespeare and Anna Karenina.
As the buddhist text states, without an inner anchorage one is as helpless as a "monkey on a string" when confronting the daunting realities of birth,sickness, old age and death.....this essential nakedness of the human condition is what the exhausted and shivering horse and the "general" who seems an extension of the "beast" .... a mellifluous flow of words, powered by grammar....
Drafted in '72....were it not for books and Irish Whiskey and cigarettes and letters from home, I'd be dead today. Great post. Of course, this being, in general, a nation of morons, today's best-sellers are written by the likes of Madonna, Dr. Phil, and ex-presidents.
My vote for he best opening lines to a literary work by a forgotten author are from Thomas Heggen. No need to name the book.
Ebert: Mister Roberts. But give us the lines.
Dear Roger,
The written word was never my medium; film was. I understood films, very instinctively, intuitively. My introduction to literature and words happened through films. And you played a big role in that transition.
With so many wonderful film adaptations of literary works, it was hard for me to ignore words and books for too long. But when I had to educate myself and choose the right authors and books, I needed guidance. I needed someone whose taste and judgment I could trust. With time, you learn to pick your sources, and listen to the right people.
Your reviews played a big role in leading me to the right sources/books/authors. I always trusted your judgment in films (of course, we had our disagreements). Your review of "Stonereader" led me to "Fan's Notes". You also led me to Stephen King's "On Writing" - both books I cherish. And now through this blog, you have given me a walking tour of your favorite literary landmarks - how can thank you for this.
You also led me into writing. Over a period of time, your informed, clear and thoughtful reviews seeped through me, and without my realizing it, I was drawn into movie reviewing (at a more modest level). And between you Kael and Kaufmann, I learnt to triangulate and learn what is right and what is wrong in a film.
My question to you is (the question that I have been harboring for long), why haven't you (or for that matter many journalists, non-fiction authors who undoubtedly have a flair for the written word) venture into writing fiction. Why didn't Kael churn out novels. Do you think some people are wired for non-fiction and some for fiction?
Thank you very much, for everything.
NM
Ebert: Why haven't more novelists been painters?
Dear Roger,
In response to your previous comments about gaming not being art, I think games are a very different kind of art. Unfortunately, gaming is still in puberty, complete with an obsession over violence and the female body. However, every once in a while, there are games that can break through the mold, and I think this where the advantages and the disadvantages of the medium come to light.
I think the major advantage of gaming is the level of interactivity. I can't think of another medium, outside of theatre, that helps immerse yourself more into the experince, because YOU are a part of the story. I also think that having to (at least metaphorically) act out powerful events meant to send you a message is much more powerful than simply reading or watching it.
Consider this scene from CALL OF DUTY 4: MODERN WARFARE - http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=r2S3N0uSSho . The whole game has an anti-nuclear warfare stance, but all the lectures on the dangers of radiation in the world can't drive the message home like experiencing your player character become a victim of a nuclear strike and playing the last few minutes of his life, crippled and slowly dying of radiation poisoning. The power of that sequence cannot be overstated, and the level name, "Shock and Awe", is just that. The subtlety may have been taken down a notch, but the message is more profound than I've ever seen it.
I'd be happy to provide more examples if you're interested, such as in METAL GEAR SOLID 3: SNAKE EATER, where you have to actually press the fire button in a tear-jerking sequence where your old teacher turned nemesis must sacrifice her life by your hands for the greater good.
I think games HAVE reached the point of storytelling genius, but not everyone can do it. All there needs to be now is a consistent and easy way for developers to bring their stories to life without sacrificing gameplay, and games like those mentioned above are one step closer to a fully immersive, powerful and artistic experience.
Don't mean to keep bugging you, but I saw the comments on video games. Funnily, for a few years now I've considered that while I agree video games are nowhere near the level of books or films, I think of them as the "final" art, in the sense that at their most developed, they will be the ultimate art experience, which is to say, experience itself. The ideal video game would encompass almost all of the senses, would bring you into an entire world so that you nigh on directly experience the story you would otherwise be reading or watching. A fantasy reality, much like the one in Minority Report except not purely for the fulfillment of fantasies, an artistic experience of true empathy, I think will certainly happen eventually and will provide the fullest artistic experience we've yet known.
Am I talking from my a**, or does this sound possible even to a video game skeptic of a previous generation?
Ebert: But there has to be a you for the experience to act upon. In your version, you become the game.
And how does immersion in video games make you a better person? More civilized? Wiser? More thoughtful?
And what do the video home skeptics of your generation think? And by the way, you yourself are a member of a previous generation.
I am utterly frustrated at your never ending attacks on Video Games not being art. Put down your axe, pick up a controller and play a game like BioShock, Braid, Grand Theft Auto IV (not the other three), and Oblivion. These games all have stories to tell - stories that are better than most modern major Hollywood pictures. By ignoring them you just look more and more like a curmudgeon.
Ebert: Please post us some of the prose from a video game. Or some of the artwork. Or some of the music. Or some of the drama. Or some of the comedy. Or some of the philosophy. Or choose the art form you think games most resemble.
No, I hadn't heard about the English Building. Sad news. Wasn't the story that the building used to be an insane asylum? When I was there as a graduate student, I remember the newly appointed chair vowed that, if nothing else, he would finally get us hot water in the sinks. Still, it was a beautiful old place.
I now teach writing at Georgia Tech and so particularly enjoyed this entry. The Cooper (well, Twain) stuff was hilarious...I plan on posting it for my students next term. By the way, I've often thought that bad novels sometimes make good movies. "The Last of the Mohicans" is one example...not a great movie, but compared to the novel--come on.
Ebert: No, no, no. It was plopped right down there in the middle of the Quad and was never anything other than the English Building. Maybe you heard that was an insane asylum. I simply cannot read Cooper. Maybe Twain permanently derailed me. Still, contemporaries like Hawthorne, Poe, Thackeray, Dickens and Trollope wrote prose I enjoy to this day, so maybe Twain was right and has saved me a lot of time.
Roger,
One of my favorite prose endings is from "A River Runs through It":
Then he asked, "After you you have finished your true stories sometime, why don't you make up a story and the people to go with it.
"Only then will you understand what happened and why.
"It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us."
Now nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them.
Of course, now I am too old to be much of a fisherman, and now of course I usually fish the big waters alone, although some friends think I shouldn't. Like many fly fisherman in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.
Eventually all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.
I am haunted by waters.
I love Maclean's poetry and word choice. For example, consider the line: Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.
How much more perfect is "Then in the" than "Then, in the" or "all existence fades to a being with" than "fades into being with". Try inserting even a single comma after any of the and's; read the line aloud and see how the change damages it. Reading Maclean's stories breaks my heart; analyzing his word choices delights and humbles me.
By the by Roger, did you ever have occasion to meet Norman Maclean during your studies at U of C? I surmise he must have still been teaching there when you were in grad school. It is a dangerous fantasy to extrapolate from a writer's prose to her or his personality and character, but I sure would like to believe that Maclean was as gracious a man as he was a writer.
Cheers,
Dan
Ebert: I never met him, but his son John was a Tribune reporter coming up at the same time I was in the late 1960s, and we hug out with a lot of the same people.
[i]I am haunted by waters.[/i]
Those words stay with me. From both the book and the film, those words often come to mind as a connection to my childhood. My early passion for Moby Dick might have something to do with it.
Ebert: ""Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters."
It's pretty simple, for me. In order for art to work on the one consuming it, the "experiencer" has to be separate from the art. One has to drop one's ego and allow the artist's ideas to become one's own; one has to throw down pretensions and defenses, and allow different wisdom in.
In a video game, there is too much emphasis on trying to convince the player he is the amazing adventurer, as opposed to watching an INDIANA JONES movie, where there is no confusion as to who is Indy and who is you. (And yes, I would say the INDY movies are certainly art, of a kind...)
Also, video games are meant to seem (these days) like a universe of thousands of choices, and the more YOU are in control, the more successful the game will be.
But the more the player or watcher or reader is in control, the less the artist is, the less possible the delivery of new concepts from artist to the one experiencing it.
I know it may seem like a wonderful future, but the more "immersive" the art becomes, the less we will be able to successfully ponder it, wouldn't you say?
Dan, thank you for mentioning MacLean! I consider A River Runs Through It perhaps the most perfect piece ever written. While some of the brilliant writers mentioned above occasionally drift into self indulgence, MacLean never does. His writing is as spare as can be, while still being lyrical and honest. I never could bear to watch the movie because this book was something meant to be read and savored, not viewed. Anyone who spent as much time on the words as he did deserved to have them read.
In the interests of full disclosure, I have to mention that MacLean, in his broad strokes, has told my story as well as his. I, too, am haunted by waters. That will have swayed my opinion, no doubt. Therefore, I am willing to entertain the suggestion that it isn't the most perfect piece ever written, mistaken though it may be. ;-)
Anyway, thank you again.
[i]Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.[/i]
Oh! How I love Herman Melville.
Dear Roger,
Speaking of taking a book of the shelf, opening to any page, and reading; There is no better prospect in my mind than P.G. Wodehouse.
Pure joy...
"Honoria Glossop," I wrote, "was one of those large, strenuous, dynamic girls with the physique of a middleweight catch-as-catch-can wrestler and a laugh resembling the sound made by the Scotch Express going under a bridge. The effect she had on me was to make me slide into a cellar and lie low there till they blew the All Clear."
Ebert: I took your challenge, and picked up one of Wodehouse's Hollywood novels, Laughing Gas. Cross my heart, my finger fell upon another train reference:
I rose to my feet with some of the emotions of a man who has just taken the Cornish Express in the small of his back. She was standing with her hands on her hips, grinding her teeth quietly, and I gazed back with reproach and amazement, like Julius Caesar at Brutus.
Dear Roger --
As a lover of _The Great Gatsby_, you may want to know about a change to the text. The great Fitzgerald scholar Matthew Bruccoli (who passed away suddenly a few months ago from brain cancer) established that the word Fitzgerald used was not "orgiastic" but "orgastic." I believe it was Edmund Wilson who had changed it back in the 1940s or 1950s because he could not find "orgastic" in a dictionary and figured it was a typo. The problem is that "orgiastic" would suggest a future of massive and decadent parties. However, as readers of the book know, Jay Gatsby threw those parties solely to entice Daisy over to West Egg. He did not even participate in them and would have had no interest -- let alone belief -- in a future comprised of them. Fitzgerald, though one of the great prose stylists of the 20th century, was neither the most fastidious writer nor one hide-bound by convention. Clearly he wanted the word "orgastic" to mean something like "orgasmic." Gatsby believed in a future of utter joy and unreflective happiness, a sublime future in which the passage of time does not matter. Incidentally, the current Scribner edition of the book restores "orgastic" as the correct word.
Because I know you love poetry, you may also be interested to know that whole passages of _The Great Gatsby_ are cribbed from Keats. I mean nothing untoward here, no plagiarism. Fitzgerald quite publicly worshipped Keats, naming one book _Tender is the Night_. I believe he expected people to catch the many references. For one extended example, compare the scene in which Gatsby flings his shirts (made in England!) into a heap in front of Daisy with stanza XXX from Keats's "Eve of St. Agnes." Both involve a man trying to woo his beloved with items brought from a closet or cabinet. It's virtually the same scene, in fact, just with shirts substituting for food:
Fitzgerald:
He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them one by one before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many-colored disarray. While we admired, the soft rich heap mounted higher — shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple green and lavender and faint orange with monograms of Indian blue. Suddenly with a strained sound Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.
“They’re such beautiful shirts,” she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such — such beautiful shirts before.”
Keats:
And still she slept an azure-lidded sleep,
In blanched linen, smooth, and lavender’d,
While he forth from the closet brought a heap
Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd;
With jellies soother than the creamy curd,
And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon;
Manna and dates, in argosy transferr’d
From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one,
From silken Samarcand to cedar’d Lebanon.
Look at the words in common: heap, lavender['d], silk[en], linen, apple, and the substitution of the mildly exotic "Indian" for the too-exotic for prose "Samarcand" ("Indian blue" was not a standard name for a color).
Why this passage? Because it is justly celebrated as the most synaesthetic passage in English poetry. Keats studied medicine, including chemistry (his theories of poetry, as seen in his letters, are filled with chemical metaphors) and anatomy. If one reads this passage allowed, the rapidly alternating vowel sounds -- alternating between those that stretch one's mouth sided to side, like "ee," and those that stretch it back to front, like "oo" and "our," actually milk the salivary glands. One's mouth waters, and this reinforces the description of food. I routinely have my students read this passage aloud and ask them how their mouths feel. They always say wither "dry," in which case I tell them to drink more water because they are dehydrated, or that their mouths are watering. They think it's because of the description of food, until I point out that they probably haven't had much desire for "creamy curd" or a "gourd" (which actually meant a melon back then) lately. No, it's the language -- literally the efforts of speaking the sounds aloud -- that creates the effect.
All the best,
Richard Nanian
George Mason University
Ebert: Completely fascinating. Since my salivary glands are not tip-top at the moment, I will leave it to readers to test this information.
BTW: If he did mean "orgastic" instead of "orgasmic," it could still amount to about the same thing, since the word is considered by the dictionary as an (uncommon) alternative spelling. I think you're canny in observing that Fitzgerald was not the most exact writer.
I frequently amuse myself by slipping quotes or echoes of poetry into my writing. If I refer to a virgin as being "brand new to the experience of sex," there is a smile there for anyone who likes to find the prize in the Cracker Jack.
Liz,
My pleasure. Without shame I share your bias for Maclean. "River" is the best short story (or novella, if one wishes to classify it as such) known to me. To call it the most perfect story is a perfect description. (And I think arm-chair grammarians the world over can agree that "perfect" is not an absolute modifier; some things can be less or more, least or most perfect, whether unions or art!)
Seemingly like you, I respond most honestly and fully to elegant prose, which in my reading is different from ornate, impressive, cute, or as you put it well, self-indulgent literary writing. For example, as much as I like much of McCarthy's or Richard Ford's writing, and though I would never deny the brilliance of DeLillo (I confess I am not a fan), on occasion I encounter in their work the kind of Lookatme! missteps and ego intrusions I never find in Maclean.
I like William Trevor and Reynolds Price for similar reasons. They, too, write with unforced grace, though I think I love Maclean most of all.
Cheers,
Dan
This article has inspired me to share one of my favorite passages from one of my favorite books. Vonnegut was one of our finest authors and he's sorely missed. Never has anyone meshed sadness and laughter so well.
"People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore. I’ve finished my war book now. The next one I write is going to be fun. This one is a failure, and had to be, since it was written by a pillar of salt. It begins like this: “Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.” It ends like this: “Poo-tee-weet?”
I have three children. My youngest daughter, a twelve-year-old aspiring everything, and I are writing a book in which I write the odd-numbered chapters and she the evens. We portray characters separated by time and space who write each other back and forth. She talks like this: "I've taken my character as far as she can go. She doesn't live in the days where exciting things happen, like getting your head cut off." My middle daughter and I enjoy arguing how a great song makes its impact. Was it the haunting bass line, unexpected tempo change, and so on. Same with music videos and movies. Last night my son and I were rolling on the floor and knocking over furniture, insane with laughter, as the the grenade in my hand had just exploded at the exact same moment he was landing on my head with my own powerboat he had stolen not ten minutes before! Our spirits soar in all these moments, and we are passionate about these experiences. There is struggle and growth, adventure and achievement--and above all, joy. But writing is writing, music is music, and video games are...
Regarding prose in movie narration, just hearing those five words about haunting waters makes me ache to see "A River..." again, and I am reminded my children have yet to see it. So I'm off to Netflix, but not before I leave you with this:
"Sometimes it makes me sad, though, Andy being gone. I have to remind myself that some birds aren't meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright and when they fly away, the part of you that knows it was a sin to lock them up does rejoice, but still, the place you live in is that much more drab and empty that they're gone. I guess I just miss my friend." You could change the name Andy to whomever or whatever and stick that line in almost any work of fiction or cinema and improve it. Same with any folksy prose that rolls so freely from Mr. Freeman. Guess Stephen King ultimately gets the credit, though.
Thanks for this, Roger ("this" being what your blog is becoming), and God bless.
I had been feeling so embarrassed that I couldn't remember my first proper book. I do remember that I learned to read before I started first grade. Like any ordinary working-class South Side Irish family we took all four "mainstream" (white folks') newspapers. With all that print around, it was perhaps inevitable that I'd "get reading" before I was supposed to. My first real discovery was "Prince Valiant" in the Sunday comics. The strip took up a full page each week with glorious color artwork, and no dialog balloons! Hal Foster put the narration in paragraphs at the bottom of each panel, so I was learning how punctuation worked, as well as how to carry a continuing story in my head from week to week. Awesome.
AAAhhhh, now I remember what happened! One evening when I was six or seven, the Collier's Encyclopedia salesman paid us a call. And the Old Man bought the pitch. Only time it ever happened in my memory. Part of the package was a bound set of "Children's Classics", which included "Gulliver's Travels". Of course, Swift never intended the book for kids, and I certainly didn't get the satire until I was much older and could refer to history books whenever I got stuck, but as a fantasy it worked just fine.
All this was happening while in first grade they were trying to teach us to read using books manufactured by Ginn & Co. whose vocabularies were scientifically designed to be the smallest you could get away with and still actually complete a thought. Heaven forbid we should run into a word that was "above our grade level"; we might be so traumatized by the impact that we'd never read again. What rubbish! Nothing delights a child more than learning new words, and the bigger the better. One of my early accomplishments was reading the names of the artificial preservatives on the cereal boxes. I didn't know what the words meant, but I could sound them out!
Mr. Ebert:
Just a note on artforms. I too, am an avid reader, with a well developed personal library. I have sung since I was a toddler, play a variety of instruments, draw, paint, and sculpt. I consider myself very lucky to have grown up in an artistic household. I'm also a Gen-X'er and I've grown up with video games. And while I will admit that most early video games and a good percentage of current games are not art, per se, I also readily give credit where it is due.
You were around when World War 2 was still being fought. Your generation played its games in a completely different manner than a Gen-X'er does, or for that matter, in the way that the millenial children do. Kids these days play games based on events that unfolded just after you entered this world. I'd wager you haven't played many video games in your life, just as a boy of 10 in the year of 2008 has probably not spent the majority of a day playing stickball in a field (and the evening in a rousing round of crokinole or backgammon). You've probably never had the inclination to play a more "advanced" video game on your computer.
Your lack of knowledge of video games is nothing anyone should be surprised with, because you are quite probably as tech-savvy as many of the grandparents around these days. Thats not a bad thing but put simply, and not meant with disrespect, you do not have the experience to comment disparagingly on a topic you quite obviously know very little about.
You asked a previous poster to provide you with links to art in gaming. Instead, I will challenge you to use your search engine. Google is a good one and I guarantee you'll find something quickly.
You want award-winning music in gaming? Search for any of the multitude of classical composers that have created wonderful scores for any number of PC and console games in the last five years. Truth be told, one of the most important aspects of a video game-turned-art is the music and any game developer worth his salt will say the same thing.
You want an engaging storyline? Try on the Ultima series - and that one is going back to "early" video gaming, circa 1980 and forward. More contemporary you ask? How about the story of a post-apocalyptic survivor, searching for their father in a brutal and war-torn Washington DC? Try on Fallout 3, a new game released recently. I doubt you could find a horror film that is as gut-wrenchingly frightening as the Resident Evil video game series (movies aside).
Mr. Ebert, you have provided criticisms for decades now, on artforms that you grew up with and readily accept. If you don't have the time to give video games a chance, I understand and respect that decision. But if that is the choice you are going to make, please keep your criticisms to the artforms you understand and enjoy. To do otherwise makes you seem unwilling to recognize and accept change and unfortunately, it is those who are unwilling or unable to change that get left behind when the apocalypse claims DC... you know, the ones that feed the hordes of ravening zombies created by evil corporations bent on world domination. :)
Ebert: when the apocalypse claims DC... you know, the ones that feed the hordes of ravening zombies created by evil corporations bent on world domination.
ood gravy! Will Marvel be claimed too?
Yes, I am uninformed. I am working entirely on hypothesis, as I tell the ID-ers not to do. But indulge me, and let me ask: Do the great musical scores on video games require the game in order to be enjoyed? Could they stand alone? If so, are they edited to underline the action? Is the post-apocalyptic storytelling in "Fallout 3 as effective as McCarthy's novel The Road? Is "Resident Evil" as gut-wrenchingly frightening as the bathtub scene in "Diabolique," or is it simply more graphic? How does it frighten you? Do threats attack out of nowhere, and do the dead come to life? Oooooh! I know I'm being unfair, but I can't stop myself. Does the art you praise require a video game as its platform, or is there another medium more suited to it?
I have never played or seen anyone playing stickball. I spent hours and hours playing baseball and softball. As a creaky grandfather, am I missing out on the superior experience of the very best video game based on baseball? Would the avatars of other game-players be more fun to play against than my buddies? I had never heard of crokinole, but at your suggestion I googled it, and it sounds like fun, especially played by four living people, instead of a solitary hunched over his hypnosis.
I am not too worried about the ravening hordes evil zombies, because your generation has spent years training to vanquish them.
I appreciate your debating spirit, and admire your reading, singing, drawing, painting, sculpting. Are any of those more absorbing for you than video games?
Roger,
What a pleasure to leave your blog alone for two days: I return, and find all kinds of pleasant startlements.
Matt Kaufman wrote on December 11, 4:09 PM:
"Does your love for Huckleberry Finn extend to the chapters in which Tom and Huck play pranks on Jim for what seems like an extended period of time near the end of the book, or is it restricted to the previous 2/3 of the book and the closing chapter?
"I admire the book and appreciate its importance, but that section always grates on me - Huck treating Jim like that after all they've went through. It seems so out of character, and thematically off ..."
I blame that rat-on-a-string Tom--he enters, and it becomes for a while a "boys' book." To quote a friend (and mother), a keen observer of boys of all ages, "Boys do stupid things." Ah, Huck; no matter how much you and Jim have moved on together, you're still a boy.
And Jerry Roberts quoting the final words of Ulysses prompts me to ask if anyone remembers The Firesign Theater. One of their surreal-satirical "radio plays," How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere at All?, ends with that monologue.
Paul
Has anybody read Borges' Labyrinth, a collection of his short stories and essays? Some of the best metaphysical, moral, and just plain strange/interesting writing I've seen. What I like best is how Borges constructs his stories around a single thought, a paradox, or an original observation, and wraps up the consequences or unwinds the logic within a few pages. So that reading through the stories, and essays, one after another, is to experience fleeting fantasies of the mind, random, unconnected, except for a single overriding impression; here is a man whose mind clearly works in a different way than mine, and my mind has been enriched for the exposure.
I wish I could copy down some quotes but alas I was borrowing it from a friend.
Writing seems to involve two things a) a message and b) it's delivery .Ofcourse one could write for the sake of writing but that could be like a video game. I suppose good writing must be powered by a sense of purpose like changing the world ,sharing an experience ,making a bridge between a movie and it's audience, selling a product......Goethe says to write noble prose one must have a noble soul.......
What about the "style" of the scriptures.....can anything match the Holy Bible .....stylessness is the essence of style.....perhaps as usual I am stating the over-obvious ?
A thing about these blogs is that one is interacting with Ebert and not The Ebert.....O'Toole as Lawence of Arabia says towards the end of his Movie "I just want my share of common humanity"
Part of the tragedy of being human is the gulfs between "souls"...literature is an attempt to cross seminate and enlarge and build...something new, something unheard,unknown ,unimagined....the common future...
As a one month practitioner of the occult art of writing, let me shsre my secret.....the secret of writing is to write....first one writes and then It takes over and the moving finger (in spurts) has a life of it's own....and as Ebert earlier said you write what You write ....at least it's off your back.
Daisaku Ikeda says, only one life can awaken another......it's a war of words....it's the century of philosophy...
Talk about a sidetracked comments thread! I don't want to encourage dragging us off topic anymore, but I think the video game discussion deserves some middle ground.
There's a moment in the game "Mother 3", created by novelist and journalist Shigesato Itoi, you see a small garden and a sign at the end. When you walk through the garden to read the sign...
"To read this sign, you had to trample the flowers at your feet. But really, the person to be blamed should be the one who posted this sign... I'm sorry."
You couldn't really do that in another medium, because it has to be the player's fault for the joke to work.
A player who feels like ruining the game could finish reading that sign, and then run in circles around the flowers, trampling them for no good reason but to pervert the game designer's intentions. This prevents games from ever really being art.
But the focus shouldn't be on whether games are art, but whether they're worthwhile and personally enriching. Most of them aren't. Most of them are just blasting zombies with a sawed off shotgun. The games that can make you shed a tear with tools ONLY available to game designers can be counted on two or three fingers.
Roger,
I'm not going to hold your hand through this. You're well versed enough to be able to do this on your own. If you're the critic you should be the one exploring the medium for art. But since you want to paint things with a broad brush - notice in your positive comment on games you failed to actually mention a game - I guess I'll have to throw this one underhand. Go play Braid. Go read Braid. Go look at the beauty of Braid in motion: http://braid-game.com/
Until you actually show the world that you've taken the time to play a game - don't bother talking about them. It would be the same as asking Tara Reid to tackle the budget deficit.
Ebert: I don't have an X-box, so couldn't download the demo.
By far my own favorite game is chess. It has been a lifelong passion. I find it bottomless and absorbing. I lose track of time when playing it. I enjoy playing against another human. The chess game on my Mac is excellent, but I get no satisfaction out of competing with software.
When I do use the chess program, am I playing a video game? Why, or why not?
To answer Roger's questions...
The music in Mother 3 definitely stands on its own while being vitally important to the game's atmosphere, and most video game scores actually do heat up and cool down in time with the action.
Maybe a small handful of games are meaningful in a way that only video games can provide, but for the most part, the meaningful parts are shown in pre-rendered movie sequences intercut with playable action scenes.
Resident Evil isn't too bone-chilling, but killer7 is. You play as a schizophrenic with a weak grasp on reality, so you never know whether the threats you're attempting to deal with are real in the first place.
I actually never play sports games, because they simulate something I can do in reality. I quit playing Street Fighter when I took up Karate, for example. Same reason I despise those Guitar Hero games.
I think that gamers are kind of afraid to admit that Roger is right on most counts. 99% of games are completely devoid of meaning or resonance, including many of today's most celebrated games, and it really is hard (and kind of pointless) to defend them as art.
An excellent review that discusses the ways games can be personally rewarding (while completely disposing of the "Games are art" argument): http://www.actionbutton.net/?p=409
Dear Mr. Ebert,
I fell in love with reading through the works of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Years later, I still find her prose Some of the most beautifully-written passages concern two young men (and their sled horses) in a desperate race between blizzards-- they are trying to bring wheat back to a starving town on the Dakota prairie:
"Almanzo thought that perhaps they had crossed the neck of Big Slough. He could not be sure where they were. He could see Prince and the slowly moving bulk of the loaded sled. Beyond them the darkness was like a mist thickening over a flat, white world. Stars twinkled far away around part of its rim. Before him, the black storm climbed rapidly up the sky and in silence destroyed the stars."
--Wilder, "The Long Winter"
Thank you for your wonderful post, Mr. Ebert. I have given it much thought over the past few days.
Words, used in the correct manner, have power beyond imagining.
Just look at "End" by Langston Hughes.
"There are
No clocks on the wall,
And no time,
No shadows that move
From dawn to dusk
Across the floor.
There is neither light
Nor dark
Outside the door.
There is no door!"
That exclamation point at the very end always annoyed me. It feels like a boo moment in a bad horror movie. Apart from that though, the mounting dread is note perfect. Yes, it's supposed to be a poem about mourning, but to me it'll always be a completely self contained horror story told in 33 words. Just long enough to whisper in someone's ear in the dark and depart before they have time to look up.
I've always said that I will forgive a badly written film if it's pretty enough. Just look at Dario Argento's work. Suspiria and Inferno should by all accounts be awful films, but they're made with such beauty and style and passion that it doesn't matter that the dubbing sucks and that the music feels like jackhammers in your ears and that the editing seems to have been done with a machete. So what? Watching Argento for his writing ability would be like eating Italian food because you think it's healthy.
The same goes doubly for the written word. One of the first things I ever did when I started writing was list what I personally felt were rules of writings. Things that I had learned as a reader, things that I thought were relevant, things that I felt would be useful and things that no one else had mentionned. I don't deny that this was a bit arrogant, but in my defense I did put them up right next to Elmore Leonard's and Twain's rules.
Anyway, one of the rules I wrote which I feel is applicable here, is this: "Story is nothing, Plot is something and Narrative is everything."
Sometimes a hack, like myself, can stumble onto a bit of truth by accident; and I think I did. In fact, I always keep that rule in mind because the older and more experienced I become, the truer it seems.
Story? Any story will do. How many times has Dracula been made? How many times has Earth been invaded? How many times has a boy become a man? Story is for hacks and producers. Writers can and should write about anything.
Plot? A bit more important. It keeps your muse reigned in so it doesn't run off into the land of digression. There's no art to plot, merely technique and tricks of the trade. Plot is something your learn in writing class. It's important enough to know about, but not important enough to lose sleep over it. A good General always has a battle plan, but a great General knows how to act on instinct too.
Narrative. Ahhh... there we are old friend. Narrative is the storytelling ability of the writer. A gifted writer can make anything good. Just look at someone like Elmore Leonard. His books are simplistic to the point of being cliché sometimes, but it never becomes an issue when you read them. Not because of what he says, but because of how he says it. His books are interesting because he's interesting. The reverse is also true, boring people write boring books or make boring movies. Unimaginative people write unimaginative books or make unimaginative movies. When I watch Herzog, for example, I don't just watch a movie but see mind in action.
That's why I think so many films and books and songs fail, because you can't learn to be fascinating, you can't practice holding someone's attention. You can fake it a little bit, but in the end you'll be found out.
A note about video games:
Video games aren't like a book or a movie, they're supposed to be immersive rather than plot driven. It's not about the story, plot or anything else, but how you react to those things. A good game designer gives you just enough info to set your mind going then knows when to back off and let you loose. It's this quality that make games almost impossible to adapt with any fidelity into film.
I agree with Kodiak. To say that no game at all is art is incorrect, however I sure as heck don't blame you for thinking that, because most games are utter rubbish when it comes to storytelling. Off the top of my head I can think of only one game that is pure art "Killer 7" and a whole three games that I believe are artistic: "Okami", "Portal" and "Silent Hill 2" and... uhh, well, that's kind of it. I have a soft spot for other games like "Resident Evil 4", but that's like saying that you really enjoy watching "Up The Creek" with Tim Matheson. Just because you have fun don't mean it's good.
As someone who enjoys film, music, literature, and gaming, I have to say I agree with Mr. Ebert. There is no game equivalent to the language of cinema, to the sympathy one experiences with characters in fiction, or the emotional impact that music has. The things that film, music, and literature offer are profoundly human and I've never experienced anything similar in a game.
I think this is primarily due to the fact that games are a relatively youthful and very expensive medium. The limitations of videogame technology are a huge hurdle in creating believable, meaningful situations that measure well against human experience. Further, the best technology is so expensive that it can only be applied to projects with widespread appeal, which in gaming means products that appeal to young men. So, let's say, someone has some great ideas and is ready to go make art in the form of game-- not only are they bound by the limitations of the technology, but they're further impeded by the economic realities. There is no stealing a camera and going and making something amazing. There is no writing a great piece of literature on scrap paper or creating great music in a garage with local musicians.
So the discussion in premature. I'm sure that at some point, some where, great art will happen in the form of a videogame. People want to do it. It will happen. But suggesting that it's already happened presents a very limited view of what the possibilities are.
1. Tom and Huck are boys, as noted. Those "tricks" played on Jim, aren't played on Jim at all in their minds; they're aids in the escape, which Tom insists must follow form. Go back and re-read the discussion at Uncle Silas' table there at the end -and just try not to laugh. Don't you know Tom types? Huck is in awe -like we all are. Neither Jim nor any other adult has a clue what those boys are doing. That novel is great for the fun poked at all kinds of Americans. A Southern boy born before 1975 will probably have heard every voice and every word of dialogue; I don't know about our Northern cousins. The day may soon come when folks suppose that the characters are trying to talk alike, and not succeeding.
2. It must be obvious that many of us seriously appreciate your work as well. You write like a reader, but more importantly like a human who recognizes the compatibility of intelligence and humor. That builds trust, you know? It's refreshing.
" I want a fucking basket of coal." Roger Ebert
This is a veritable Lear-like cry and I can well imagine it substituted for the sad sad sad lines in the final scene.
Having read the Golgotha passages numerous times the wine has started it's effect and having worked up quite an appetite and I'm really looking forward to devouring the whole hog,which you said is as good as this.
Dan -
Of course perfection can be quantified! Consider a row of perfect strawberries. All are red, succulent, without flaw, perfect. Yet, one will be a little larger, or redder, or more succulent. The most perfect.
That's my story and I'm stickin' to it.
(And a pox on the houses of grammarians who seek to keep words in boxes. ;-)
I remember quite well that passage you cited from the Great Gatsby. I think your blog post has helped me to realize why that book and Catcher in the Rye in particular are a couple of my favorites. The descriptions of the characters, the metaphors, it's basically poetry in motion. In fact, when I watched the Godfather again after reading the book for the first time a couple years ago, I couldn't believe how closely the descriptions of rooms and conversations in the book mirrored those in the film. It was like, even if you hadn't seen the movie first as I'm sure many people have, you could still have a sense of exactly what was going on and where all of these events were taking place in your mind. This post reminded me how being in college has precluded me from reading as many actual novels as I used to, because I know the last book I read was the final Harry Potter novel which, ironically enough, I liked for many of the same reasons as the other novels I mentioned here.
And, since everyone else is talking about it, I'll be perfectly honest when I say that when it comes to the "games as art" argument that people seem to vociferously defend or highly criticize people who don't fully agree with them, I say who cares. It's difficult to judge video games on the same standards as movies anyway because in many cases, they're trying to acheive different goals in terms of entertaining their audiences. Plus, one of the ultimate ironies in my lifetime is the general rule that most video games based on movies tend to be horrible (exceptions being Star Wars and such), and most movies based on video games are REALLY horrible (see Street Fighter, Super Mario Bros, etc.). Besides, as much fun as I have playing games, I know I've learned more from reading books and novels over the years, and as far as I'm concerned, games are in their own seperate sphere on my pop culture landscape. Anyway, I hope this was somewhat illuminating for you Mr. Ebert since I'm the type of person that has grown up with books, movies, and games, and has loved all three. I eagerly anticipate your future reviews and blog entries!!!
Ebert:
Good gravy! Will Marvel be claimed too?
Thank you for recognizing the spirit of my message, Roger. I hope that your comment above is not an invitation to discuss the legitimacy of comics, because that would be opening a can of fanboys that even I don't want to involve. :)
Yes, I am uninformed. I am working entirely on hypothesis, as I tell the ID-ers not to do. But indulge me, and let me ask: Do the great musical scores on video games require the game in order to be enjoyed? Could they stand alone? If so, are they edited to underline the action?
Like any piece in cinema, Mr. Ebert, a game's score is integral. And in many cases, you are correct - that without the game, the score falls to the wayside. The same can be said for any number of movies. Would Patrick Swayze have had a recording contract without Dirty Dancing? I think not, though his voice was passable enough.
Could they stand alone? Yes, in some cases they stand alone, and in some cases they are sold, just like movie soundtracks. Are they editted to underscore tone within and apart from the game? You betcha! Just like any movie soundtrack. After all, who would want to purchase the background acoustics of Forrest learning to run?
The creators of the Gump soundtrack made piles of cold, hard cash by using the music of the era to illustrate the simple charms within the movie. In the same manner, video game sound producers will illustrate any of the idioms they use in their art.
...I know I'm being unfair, but I can't stop myself. Does the art you praise require a video game as its platform, or is there another medium more suited to it?
Its good that you recognize that you are being facetious, Mr. Ebert. I'm fairly certain that trait has shown up in my own writing. :) To answer your question, no, the art I praise does not necessarily require a video game as its medium, however, often a video game can be a succinct collage of mediums in which to engage the viewer/player/user of the art. Like any other medium, it can also be a travesty if used incorrectly.
...As a creaky grandfather, am I missing out on the superior experience of the very best video game based on baseball? Would the avatars of other game-players be more fun to play against than my buddies? I had never heard of crokinole, but at your suggestion I googled it, and it sounds like fun, especially played by four living people, instead of a solitary hunched over his hypnosis.
Like another poster, I do not often play video games based on sports or activities I could (or would want to) participate in, in real life. That being said, try playing Wii Sports Baseball with your grandchildren and I'm sure you'll have a difficult time saying you didn't enjoy yourself. Granted, there is nothing about Wii Sports that I would deem art... Would the avatars be more fun? No, not necessarily, but they may provide more (or less) of a challenge than your in-person buddies. This is taking us away from the topic though, of whether a video game can be art. By the way, Crokinole is a great game... not many holidays have gone by without a board being pulled out at some point. I highly recommend it, if you have never played.
I am not too worried about the ravening hordes evil zombies, because your generation has spent years training to vanquish them...I appreciate your debating spirit, and admire your reading, singing, drawing, painting, sculpting. Are any of those more absorbing for you than video games?
You sir, have absolutely nothing to worry about! :) Don't you worry about those animated corpses. We, the members of Generation X (and younger) will blow away those zombies with fierce abandon. I'm flattered that you chose to reply and happy that you recognized my writing style for what it was. And to answer your last question, it depends on what I'm doing.
I've been lucky enough to be completely absorbed in any number of mediums. A good musical performance with give me goosebumps, just like a good acting performance. I've laid in bed reading an uncountable number of times because I couldn't stand to put a book down, just as I have been so involved in the storyline of a video game that I play all day long.
Any artist, using any medium, will often describe a moment of complete and utter absorption, in which the art - whatever form it takes - seems to become all-encompassing. Such is the affliction of the Muses. But while the medium in which the art is delivered may be important (even integral), it is the user/viewer that determines the success of a piece and not the artist. That's one of the peculiarities of art, Roger. It is as engaging and absorbing as the user allows it to become, based on that individual's own idiosyncracies and its effect is often unrelated to what the artist may have had in mind upon creation of the piece.
At the end of the day, sir, I stand by my previous post. One shouldn't offer opinions on topics in which they have little factual knowledge. Pick up and play even one award-winning videogame, critique it as you would a combination of a book/movie/musical score. Once you have given a game the chance to impress you, then you can rain on the parade of a hard-working game developer. If you're unwilling to entertain the possibility of enjoyment and the evolution-to-art status of truly great games, then you certainly should not be offering your opinion. Don't knock it before you try it, so to speak.
Ebert: Well, you have me there.
I come to this blog entry in no fit state for company, having buried a 19 year old girl today (a dear friend to my own 19 year old girl), and a father in law just out of ICU. While not quite in free fall, I have been trying to rebuild my walls of jello with indifferent success. The world is as bleak as an empty box of chocolates for me these days.
Thank for you the reminder that truth and beauty, both lush and bleak are present in the world.If nothing else, I can hold on to that. I have not read Suttree, but my mindset seems open to it now.
No Raymond Carver? How about this contribution: "My husband eats with good appetite. But I don't think he's really hungry." (from Too Much Water Too Close to Home). I also heartily recommend "A Small Good Thing" which is as sad and bleak as anyone could want, until one realizes that it's a Eucharist story.
While I can appreciate (most times) Literature, I find solid writing in popular fiction as well. Here is a favorite line from Agatha Christie, which rivals Hemingway for succinct characterization: "He was an old man and his feet hurt."*
For me, nothing beats the final line Gatsby. Are we not blessed to have so many writers able to describe and record the human condition so well? I don't know why authors are not painters, but I suspect it is the same reason why musicians (composers) are not writers. The muse chooses the artist in the end. I think Mozart is right in that it comes from heaven.
*actually, now I think on it, it might not be A. Christie, but Georgette Heyer. I can't find the passage, but that sentence and the entire person and his life has stayed with me for years.
Ebert: When reading cannot provide consolation, it can at least provide companionship in grief with no small-talk.
This enry is not to praise your current piece but to praise your obvious committment to read the submitted comments on it and respond as well.
Bravo!
You make a passing response to a comment about videogames in one of your blog entries, it gets picked up by videogame blogs, and now every other comment on here is about games. Unfortunately, I'm going to be another drop in the barrel. It doesn't seem necessarily impossible that a game could end up being considered art, and there have certainly been some games with good soundtracks, art direction, acting, even writing, but the art is derivative of other established medium.
The aspect of videogames which allows them to be different from movies, books, music, is user input. Personally I don't recall many high-art "make your own adventure" childrens books - but if there were an adult "make your own adventure" book with excellent, poignant writing, is it conceivable?
When it comes to choice, its presence within entertainment transforms it into a game, and in that sense, the concept of a game isn't all that confounding or alien (though certainly different in fundamental ways). The power of user input must seem trivial from a predominantly static media standpoint, all the examples I can think of turned out to be campy, and yet, how many times have I yelled "don't go down that hall" in a horror movie, or "don't tell her that" in a romantic comedy?
The challenge game developers have is in expounding on the kind of user input and player choices games present. I can see ways that you could disagree, but it seems that games have the ultimate power (out of any entertainment) to put the end user into moral dilemmas; if the choice is yours, its always more personal. Active media is novel and unexplored, it has a long road ahead of it. While I am quite optimistic toward games, I can certainly the disesteem.
Sorry for contributing to the echo-chamber of the internet.
Do it, Roger. Learn a video game and let us know if it's any good.
I'm out of the demo for them, too, like you, but I see them advertised and taking up more floor space than DVDs. I've never taken the time to figure one out because I assume they're worthless, truly worthless.
But I could be wrong.
It would be very cool to see what you come up with. This would be a great piece for Esquire or VF, or even something longer.
or something documented on film...
Okay, friends and readers, that's it! No more comments about
*** Video Games *** Video Games *** Video Games *** Video Games *** Video Games *** Video Games ***
One reader mentioned them in passing, I made the mistake of responding, and suddenly the gamers hijacked our discussion about reading.
A certain irony there.
Maybe they could join the book discussion?
Henceforward, I will delete all comments on video games in this thread. I will devote a later blog entry to the subject, however, and then we can get back into it again.
You mentioned above discovering Willa Cather at age nine. Her use of language staggers me. There's a passage in My Antonia in particular:
"I can remember exactly how the country looked to me as I walked beside my grandmother along the faint wagon-tracks on that early September morning. Perhaps the glide of long railway travel was still with me, for more than anything else I felt motion in the landscape; in the fresh, easy-blowing morning wind, and in the earth itself, as if the shaggy grass were a sort of loose hide, and underneath it herds of wild buffalo were galloping, galloping…"
For the past several months I've been reading The Iliad aloud, bit by bit, to my three oldest daughters, ages 13, 10, and 7. They often ask me to repeat a certain line or phrase that has enchanted them...the 7yo especially loves catching the epithets: wine-dark sea, swift-footed Achilles, goddess of the white arms, etc. One morning we sat around in great merriment thinking up epithets for all the members of our family. I am, apparently, a "sweet-voiced mama" but also prone to being "frazzled in the buckling," my 10yo's description of my state of mind while overseeing the buckling of the 4yo and 2yo into their carseats on mornings when we're late for piano lessons.
And speaking of the shrewd insights of children, I thought you might enjoy this account by Kate Douglas Wiggins, author of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, of her encounter at age ten or eleven with Charles Dickens himself.
There on the platform stood the Adored One. His hands were plunged deep in his pockets (a favorite posture), but presently one was removed to wave away laughingly a piece of the famous Berwick sponge-cake offered him by Mr. Osgood, of Boston, his traveling companion and friend.
I knew him at once: the smiling, genial, mobile face, rather highly colored, the brilliant eyes, the watch-chain, the red carnation in the buttonhole, and the expressive hands, much given to gesture. It was only a momentary view, for the train started, and Dickens vanished, to resume his place in the car next to ours, where he had been, had I known it, ever since we left Portland.
Shortly thereafter, the intrepid Kate slips into Dickens’s car, where she finds him alone and launches into a discussion of his “stories”:
“Well, upon my word!” he said. “You do not mean to say that you have read them!”
“Of course I have,” I replied. “Every one of them but the two that we are going to buy in Boston, and some of them six times.”
“Bless my soul!” he ejaculated again. “Those long, thick books, and you such a slip of a thing!”
“Of course,” I explained, conscientiously, “I do skip some of the very dull parts once in a while; not the short dull parts, but the long ones.”
He laughed heartily. “Now, that is something that I hear very little about,” he said. “I distinctly want to learn more about those very dull parts,” and, whether to amuse himself or to amuse me, I do not know, he took out a note-book and pencil from his pocket and proceeded to give me an exhausting and exhaustive examination on this subject—the books in which the dull parts predominated, and the characters and subjects which principally produced them. He chuckled so constantly during this operation that I could hardly help believing myself extraordinarily agreeable; so I continued dealing these infant blows under the delusion that I was flinging him bouquets.
Over the past three years I have become very fond of the films by Yasujiro Ozu. I believe I have now seen all of the films by him that are available. I admire his work so much, I believe of all the filmmakers around, he makes the films that are close to my heart, I find such comfort in them, a film by him always makes me feel content and at peace. Many of my friends who had never heard of Ozu thought I had gone off the deep end for a long time. At one point I was convinced that Ozu was the only director who could film what life was all about, and it was like falling in love with movies all over again.
I remember listening to your commentary on "Floating Weeds" where you described Ozu's work similar to Jane Austin's in that they both concentrate their stories more on character than on plot. I also read Donald Richie's book "Ozu" where he compares his work more to Chekhov.
I started reading books and stories by these authors because of my appreciation for Ozu, Checkov in particular has had a great impact on me. In college I was an understudy for a production of "The Seagull" where perhaps I was too young and impatient to fully understand his work. When I read Chekhov now I feel much the same as when I watch an Ozu film, they are full of sadness, but they are about the human experience. I sometimes feel a deep sadness when I read Checkov, but I'm never depressed. I have grown to love his plays, and find new things each time I read them. The same can be said for his short stories, my favorite being "The House with the Mezzanine" where he has his main character describe the importance of art and science.
"Genuine science and art don't strive towards temporary, personal ends, but towards the universal and eternal: they seek truth and the meaning of life, they seek God, the soul. But if you reduce them to the level of everyday needs, the mundane, to dispensaries and libraries, they only complicate life and make it more difficult. We have loads of doctors, pharmacists, lawyers, lots of people who can read and write, but there's a complete lack of biologists, mathematicians, philosophers and poets. One's entire intellect, one's spiritual energy has been used up satisfying transient, temporary needs. Scholars, writers and artists are working away-thanks to them life's comforts increase with every day."
As far as Jane Austin goes, I must admit I have not read as much of hers as I want to (two books). However I stated in a comment about two days ago this blog inspired me to begin reading "Pride and Prejudice" and just to let you know I'm on page 200.
Ebert: Reader, I salute you.
I'm not sure I should thank you. My plans for this Sunday morning have gone by the wayside as I track down books and read loved passages. There are many! Years ago, in my pompous, hoighty-toighty arts student phase (culturally above the mob), I read Joyce's Ulysses. Of course, I didn't get most of it. But I do remember the opening and the wonderful end (Yes). While it was way above and beyond me, I remember how damn funny it was. It was an aspect I hadn't expected. I had never heard anyone write or discuss the humour to be found in Joyce. And while I didn't understand what I was reading, I did understand that Joyce, serious as he was, was having fun as he wrote.
As for passages in books that have stayed with me, two of the strongest are by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I wish I could read and write Spanish, but I can't. It amazes me that these are so strong, even in translation. The first is the opening sentence of One Hundred Years of Solitude:
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
I live in Canada so the use of the word "discover" in relation to ice floored me. But it made me think of something that I hadn't previously: there is a first time for everything, even ice. I thought of that last winter when my dog (Molly Bloom!) experienced her first winter, leaping and running in the snow. Her first reaction was puzzlement as she sniffed at the snow, then she started licking it, and finally began playing in it. I thought, "Molly just discovered snow!" It may seem a small thing, but that sentence was one of the first times I realized the importance of the right word.
The other passage I love, also Marquez, is from Love in the Time of Cholera (translated by Edith Grossman). It's the ending:
The captain looked at Fermina Daza and saw on her eyelashes the first glimmer of wintry frost. Then he looked at Florentino Ariza, his invincible power, his intrepid love, and he was overwhelmed by the belated suspicion that it is life, more than death, that has no limits.
"And how long do you think we can keep up this goddamn coming and going?" he asked.
Florentino Ariza had kept his answer ready for fifty-three years, seven months, and eleven days and nights.
"Forever," he said.
The entire book seems to have been building to the simplicity of that final sentence. Rather than precede it with, "He had kept his answer ready for almost 54 years," Marquez uses the longer, more rhythmic, "...fifty-three years, seven months, and eleven days and nights." So the final sentence's simplicity is even more powerful.
I can't read that ending often enough.
Thanks for sending me off in this bookish direction!
I love reading other peoples' favorite literary passages. It reminds me that there is so much treasure I have yet to discover.
My favorite opening is from Thomas Wolfe's 'Look Homeward, Angel":
...a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; of a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces.
Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother's face; from the prison of her flesh have we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth.
Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father's heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?
O waste of loss, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this most weary unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When?
O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.
My favorite closing line is from Richard Llewellyn:
How green was my Valley, then, and the Valley of them that have gone.
And then there's the line from the last scene of King Lear that inexplicably moves me to tears every time I read it:
Lear: And my poor fool is hanged.
Thanks for indulging me.
Ebert: From Lear's sadness at the end, to Larry Woiwode at the beginning, in the best description I've read of a young man's ecstasy after a hard-fought breakthrough into triumph. These are the closing words of What I Think I Did. He has described a day when his son accidentally shot himself in the leg, but escaped more serious injury--even death. Woiwode describes that day, and there his memoir could close. Instead, he transfers without segue into a day years earlier in his life, when he has just sold his first novel:
A wonderful piece about the allure of the written word. Thank you.
I wanted to concur about McCarthy. I have not yet read Suttree, but I am (slowly) making my way through his whole body of work. So far I find it to be truly excellent.
I first discovered McCarthy in the early months of 2000. I was in college, was spending the spring of my junior year in Italy, and had begun to feel rather isolated – from my home, from my native language, from my friends…
My anxieties then all sound terribly insignificant and silly to me now, nine years (and much life experience) later – but at the time they felt very real. I was homesick, depressed, had suffered a panic attack less than a month after arriving in the country, and soon found myself carrying around a small packet of Xanax. Sufficed to say, my coping skills weren’t at a very high ebb.
One day I wandered into a small bookstore and located the English language section. I was running low on reading material, and I wanted something to take my mind off the panic attack. The bookshelves were filled with an eclectic array of titles – a little Crichton, a little Christie, a little Pynchon and McCarthy. Needing English-language reading material – any English reading material – I bought titles from a variety of authors and read them. I soon returned to the bookstore for more.
The semester that I spent in Italy was one the most concentrated bouts of serious, independent reading that I’d engaged in at that point. Some of the titles (by authors like Grisham and Crichton) I read largely because I needed something to read. While diverting, they were read quickly and were less than fully satisfying. Other work, however, had a more lasting impact on me. It was this material – the meatier works – that helped me through those initial weeks abroad. I read through Peter Matthiessen’s Lost Man’s River and Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved. And it was in Italy that I first read Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Even now I find that that book has a very strange allure.
But back to McCarthy. I read three books by McCarthy while in Italy – The Orchard Keeper, All the Pretty Horses, and Blood Meridian. I read Horses first, and enjoyed it immensely. In retrospect, however, it was probably the wrong McCarthy book with which to begin – at least for me, for it gave me the impression that this man was an accessible writer. Ha.
I moved on to The Orchard Keeper, and was befuddled. Like Horses, it is a slim volume, but I found its style far more challenging. “Okay,” I said. “Let me think about this” – and so I moved on to another author. But I soon came back to McCarthy and read Blood Meridian.
Wow. That is a book. I am not sure if Harold Bloom is correct in saying that is the modern American epic, but I would willingly wager that it is one of the greatest American novels of the 20th century. And yes, it is very violent – but it is also incredibly rich in theme and style. Thank you for highlighting McCarthy in a column. That man can write.
This blog is really the most delicious thing on the whole world wide web. Imagine! "a celebrity" reading and responding to commenters thoughts on life, literature, popular culture, and the movies. This tweaks the rules of normality and in so doing really opens a great big crack in the world wide web. Look! The web has been humanized a bit... and celebrities... and we are not just reading your comments but each others... and suddenly--in a non-artificial way--we are part of a really delightful course on topics wide and divergent. I love it.
The midwest really does create amazing thinkers. We have talked a lot of Fitzgerald... There is also Dylan...
What I think is really special about midwestern intellectuals is that they attempt to understand those emotions that other dismiss as sentimental.
Thanks for this little space for community you have created in this strange, new world of hypertexts and hyperreal, and vapidness....
Just got back from exulting over Kristin Scott Thomas "in French" and went here for a second reading of your entry.
Paused at Hemingway's comment about Huck Finn being the starting point of our lit. I particularly like the continuation of his remark: "There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since."
Also, along the line within this lengthy entry and myriad comments, I know I found reference to Frost's "Stopping by Woods..."
I don't know if the story is apocryphal or not since I heard it back in my undergrad days, and I'm now a septuagenerian on the far side of the sept, but supposedly in an interview Frost was asked how he chooses the words he uses in a given situation for there are undoubtedly many possibilities and his choices seem so perfect. Response: "I choose the only word."
Take care.
I just reread this crazy, jewel-studded, bouncearound thing, and found a Vonnegut quote from the introduction of Slaughterhouse-Five that made me glad. Here is another Vonnegut, that whacked me in the side of the head right out of High School:
The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them.
That's from Breakfast of Champions.
I'm happy A Fan's Notes has already been mentioned. Here is my favorite passage:
Whether or not I am a writer, I have---and this is both my curse and my virtue---cultivated the instinct of one, an aversion for the herd, without, in my unhappy case, the ability to harness and articulate that aversion. For my heart will always be with the drunk, the poet, the prophet, the criminal, the painter, the lunatic, with all whose aims are insulated from the humdrum business of life. A raincoat? That a raincoat could solve my problems! Would it have come from Lord & Taylor? I say this truly, Patience: never again in my life will I feel easy in anything but the cheapest corduroy, the corduroy that calls up the odors and the tastes, the laughter and the tears of Avalon Valley. Could I have accepted your belief that I was wasting my life, could I have promoted ideas without substance, products without value, cigarettes that kill, could I have sat all shiny-faced and regimental necktie in the carpeted skies of Manhattan and joshed myself that I was engaged in things consequential, then we might have laughed and loved and joined the Westchester Country Club and lived forever. I couldn't do it. With me you were very patient, Patience. And good, too. In that goodness I was aware of the dignity you were affording my shabby humanity: indeed, dwelling in it I at times felt something like grace. Not that it matters, but I tried to think of a way to repay your generosity; and such a payment invariably settled on the truth that you'd be better rid of me. Be happy and tell my sons that I was a drunk, a dreamer, a weakling, and a madman, anything but that I did not love them.
My favorite Kurt Vonnegut piece...
"Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind."
The first time I read it, I actually hadn't yet read the book it was from, but immediately recognized it as Vonnegut anyways.
...Not exactly looking forward to seeing Harrison Bergeron stretched out to ninety minutes.
The thing that has struck me about this discussion is the joy that people have in quoting from their favorite literature. And it is a joy that we can all share, those of us who have read the literature. While a bit of music or a particular fragrance may bring back individual memories for us, shared quotes transport us to worlds that we can remember together.
--"Curiouser and curiouser!"
--"ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL, BUT SOME ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS"
--"I am the Ghost of Christmas Present," said the Spirit. "Look upon me!"
--"Okie use' ta mean you was from Oklahoma. Now it means you're a dirty son-of-a-bitch. Okie means you're scum. Don't mean nothing itself, it's the way they say it."
--"Kill the pig! Cut his throat! Kill the pig! Bash him in!"
--"The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home."
--"My father's family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip."
--"All for one, and one for all."
--“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”
--“Call me Ishmael.”
--“I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.”
--“You did not kill the fish only to keep alive and to sell for food, he thought. You killed him for pride and because you are a fisherman.”
--“As God is my witness, and God is my witness, the Yankees aren't going to lick me. I'm going to live through this, and when it's over, I'm never going to be hungry again.”
Roger, Thanks for the Wodehouse quote.
My father and I would often trade favorite passages.
His was always Bertie Woosters' comparison of Atilla the Hun to his Aunt Agitha. Saying she had no equal except for Atilla, but only on his good days.
Thanks to everyone else for expanding my reading list.
The Moon is Down , by Steinbeck, is a really beautiful book that very few people seem to have read. It gets heavily archetypal on occasion, but it's absolutely haunting for most of it. There's a peculiar melody that underscores everything.
The room was silent for a moment. The sentry shifted his position a little and his rifle clinked on a button.
Orden said, "I can talk to you, Doctor, and I probably won't be able to talk again. There are little shameful things in my mind." He coughed and glanced at the rigid soldier, but the soldier gave no sign of having heard. "I have been thinking of my own death. If they follow the usual course, they must kill me, and then they must kill you." And when Winter was silent, he said, "Mustn't they?"
"Yes, I guess so." Winter walked to one of the gilt chairs, and as he was about to sit down he noticed that its tapestry was torn, and he petted the seat with his fingers as though that would mend it. And he sat down gently because it was torn.
And Orden went on, "You know, I'm afraid, I have been thinking of ways to escape, to get out of it. I have been thinking of running away. I have been thinking of pleading for my life, and it makes me ashamed."
And Winter, looking up, said, "But you haven't done it."
"No, I haven't"
"And you won't do it."
Orden hesitated. "No, I won't. But I have thought of it."
And Winter said, gently, "How do you know everyone doesn't think of it? How do you know I haven't thought of it?"
"I wonder why they arrested you, too," Orden said. "I guess they will have to kill you, too."
"I guess so," said Winter. He rolled his thumbs and watched them tumble over and over.
I particularly like the way that he sits on the chair, and the brutal conversation that could only be had at such a situation, between two people who had known each other their whole lives.
Brilliant entry, Mr. Ebert, I value your criticisms very much. I'm looking forward to your promised video-game blog.
It is amazing to find such a well written blog about Cinema, literature and Philosophy on the internet. I feel I am an old soul and the taste and writing style of this generation concerns me greatly.
I am working on a philosophical/cartooning blog here
http://iamanimportantman.blogspot.com which uses humor to make insightful observations about life.
Keep up the good fight Roger!
-Grant Rogers
Don't you just love the way words come into your life at just the right time. When I got married two years ago my wife and I decided to write our own vows. I worked on the words and worked on them and worked on them. At the time I was reading some of the writing of Thomas Jefferson and found a lot of it to be very beautiful, but there was one passage that I kind of fell in love with:
"The first object of my heart is my own country. This solitary republic of the world is the only monument of human rights, and the sole repository of the sacred fire of freedom"
I thought it was beautiful and I ended up paraphrasing the first line and my wife was very touched. I didn't initially tell her where I got it but later I reluctantly had to tell her that I plagerized the third president. She knows I love words and I love great writers so she wasn't surprised.
Many of us have a book we reread year after year. Mine is Patrick O’Brian’s twenty-volume serial masterwork that begins with Master and Commander, the tale of naval captain Jack Aubrey and his brother-in-all-but-blood, the intelligence officer and polymath Stephen Maturin.
One unforgettable episode: Jack and Stephen escaping Napoleon’s agents, wending their way through provincial France. Ursine Jack disguised as an actual bear, sewn into a stinking hide, prostrate in a wood:
You know, it’s funny how one’s favorite contemporary fiction can be so un-contemporary. And O’Brian’s 19th-century mode has made me reconsider the Dickens and Austen I neglected in college when I thought I knew it all. I’ll be reading Pride and Prejudice next.
Dear Roger, A while back, while condemning some artless piece of slasher ordure, you noted that you had given 4 stars to Last House on the Left, which Wes Craven( can that possibly be his real name?) had billed as a remake of The Virgin Spring. I suspended judgement, having managed to get through since 1972 without seeing LHOTL. I regret to say that is no longer the case. Craven's film isn't just bad, but aggressively, purposely, even purposefully, bad. Bad setups. Bad camerawork( really, no camerawork).Ugly, dirty,inane, pornographic( in Joyce's terms),callous, disgusting. Downright evil. It makes Pink Flamingoes seem like, well, The Virgin Spring. There can be no valid system of reviewing, (LHOTL is not a fit subject for criticism, any more than is the dog-do consumed by Divine) that can bear scrutiny if it places LHOTL in the same universe, 11 dimensions or not, with Bergman's film. Maybe instead of stars there could be a 4-garbage can or 4-piles of pick-em to designate LHOTL from say, the Brown Bunny( 1 star: you were right the first time). Honestly, I can't see why anybody who would bother to read your work would have any interest in Last house on the Left, even as an harbinger of civilization's final decline.
Ebert: Thanks for letting me off easy. At least you didn't say you'd never read another one of my reviews again.
I would like to thank Steve P. for quoting Llewellyn and making me pull my grandmother's copy of How Green Was My Valley off the shelf. I haven't read it since high school, where I did a compare and contrast essay for my grade twelve English class ( and got an A, thank you very much).I never forgot that closing line.
On the topic this time.
"I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita. "
I think that about sums it up.
I am so glad that a recent post (by Matt Genné) made mention of Patrick O’Brian’s wonderful Aubrey/Maturin novels. I absolutely adore that series – have read all twenty books – and I return to it time and time again. And while I certainly have my favorite entries (Post Captain, The Reverse of the Medal, The Letter of Marque and The Commodore leap to mind), even the weakest of the series is better than much that has ever been written.
I fear that two factors might prevent more people from discovering these fine novels, however: the perceived notion that they are simply ‘naval novels,’ and a vague prejudice against series fiction. I hope I am mistaken, for these books are among the finest I have ever read. They are an incredibly deep, informed exploration of naval life and male friendship in the Napoleonic era, one that includes discourses on botany, biology, medicine, literature, music, marriage, and warfare.
Oh – and O’Brian can also be really, really funny. Simply brilliant.
And since we’re talking about great historical fiction (though I am reluctant to describe O’Brian in such a manner, as I feel he transcends any genre definitions), I’d like to mention Dorothy Dunnett. She wrote two incredibly detailed series of novels (The Lymond Chronicles and The House of Niccolo) that, while perhaps not as thematically rich as O’Brian, are nonetheless masterful examples of a great writer in full command of her talents. Those are wonderfully exciting books.
Hark! the raven flaps his wing
In the brier'd dell below;
Hark! the death-owl loud doth sing
To the nightmares, as they go:
My love is dead,
Gone to his death-bed
All under the willow-tree.
Thomas Chatterton
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/song-from-aella/
Passage, O soul, to India!
Eclaircise the myths Asiatic—the primitive fables.
Not you alone, proud truths of the world!
Nor you alone, ye facts of modern science!
Walt Whitman
Suttree is slow poison. It works from the feet upwards.
"No good movie is ever depressing. All bad one's are."
Perhaps the most exhilarating and uplifting literary encounter of my teens was a pencil illustrated edition of Edgar Allan Poe's poems and stories! That vengeful Dwarf! The infamous Bird, echoing the Lear Nevers! Those dark pestilence ridden wastelands reminiscent of the Seventh Seal! That Pendulum striking ever closer to the heart like the trapped girl shrieking in Buffalo Bill's Well!
When I think of a concert in words, I'd have to look to Michael Ondaatje. I don't think he gets the recognition he deserves in the States. I think his writing is extremely evocative. A new novel from him is always an event for me.
Here's the prologue from "In the Skin of a Lion"
"This is a story a young girl gathers in a car during the early hours of the morning. She listens and asks questions as the vehicle travels through darkness. Outside, the countryside is unbetrayed. The man who is driving could say 'In that field is a castle,' and it would be possible for her to believe him.
She listens to the man as he picks up and brings together various corners of the story, attempting to carry it all in his arms. And he is tired, sometimes as elliptical as his concentration on the road, at times overexcited - 'Do you see?' He turns to her in the faint light of the speedometer.
Driving the four hours to Marmora under six stars and a moon.
She stays awake to keep him company."
I wholeheartedly agree with Mike regarding the Aubrey/Maturin novels. Some readers might shy away, but they would miss Patrick O'Brian's funny, earthy, sweeping portrait of the nascent British Empire — the age of sail during the Napoleonic wars — and especially the astute (but never sentimental) depictions of Royal Navy officers and foremast jacks, high-born ladies and grasping bourgeois matrons; street urchins and manservants; amateur naturalists, village pugilists, South Seas cannibals, and Members of Parliament; preachers, revolutionaries, and whores; Hindu untouchables and American whalers; murderers, spies, and the odd secular saint — a portrait to rival Geoffrey Chaucer in its encompassing totality.
Plus, they'd miss the relationship between Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, the surest study of brotherhood I've ever read. Two characters as unalike as possible, Jack the ship's captain: an unsubtle, sanguine, jolly Tory; Stephen a man of science: melancholic, paranoid, meta-aware, ur-modern — each discovering the humanity in the other through all twenty books, through times bountiful and bankrupt, through the courtship of sweethearts, the getting of wives, and the begetting of children. Throw in a few circumnavigations of the globe in a wooden sailing ship two hundred feet long and crammed with as many men. The stuff can't be beat.
I had been given to understand that Postum was discontinued last year. Do you have a stockpile of it?
Ebert: You are right. This is shattering news, even though I can no longer drink it. First Merrill, Lynch, and now this.
"The Nirvana Sutra states: “People have been suffering since numberless, uncountable kalpas ago. The bones one leaves behind in a kalpa pile up as high as Mount Vipula near Rajagriha, and the milk one sucks is equal to the water of the four seas. The blood one sheds surpasses the quantity of water in the four seas, and so do the tears one sheds in grief over the death of parents, brothers and sisters, wives, children, and relatives. And though one used all the plants and trees growing on the earth to make four-inch tallies to count them, one could not count all the parents one has had in the past existences of life.” These are the words the Buddha uttered lying in the grove of sal trees on the final day of his life. You should pay the strictest attention to them. They mean that the number of parents who gave birth to you since innumerable kalpas ago could not be counted even with tallies made by cutting all the plants and trees growing on all the worlds of the ten directions into four-inch pieces."
Nichiren Daishonin (1222-1281)
Dear Roger,
I am a graduate student in physics, and so my time for literature has been severely limited recently. I find that in between exams, research papers, lab reports, and just trying to keep up with class notes, I'm lucky to have even an hour per day for non-curricular reading. It seems that whenever I try to pick up a novel, I rarely make it more than halfway through before something comes up at school which demands my full attention for several days. I wind up shelving the book, and by the time I return to it, I need to start over.
The solution I've found that works best for me is to read short stories. Lately I've been alternating between an anthology Doyle's "Sherlock Holmes" stories and a well-thumbed copy of the works of Edgar Allen Poe. Can you suggest any other collections of short fiction that I might enjoy? I'm thinking maybe something by Wodehouse (whom I've never read), but he's so prolific that I don't quite know where to start...
Ebert: With Wodehouse, literally, start anywhere. Also try Raymond Carver, Annie Proulx, Hemingway, Kafka, "Nine Stories" by Salinger.
"I believe Bill reawakened in them the restless stirring we all felt, taking a class in literature, when we were asked to read someone we found that we loved, like Jane Austen, Emily Dickenson, Mark Twain or Shakespeare. "
The present platform is like that too......Bill talking.....and sharing.....
Fitzgerald's direct stating of his theme in "The Great Gatsby" proves that if a writer is as great as Fitzgerald was, he can get away with just about anything. Case in point, "The Great Gatsby" is my favorite book. Still, I will have to agree with Ernest Hemingway that if a writer is really good, they need not reveal more than the tip of the iceberg. Do you think Fitzgerald's wordiness (especially in contrast with Hemingway's short sentences), is what made Hemingway categorize Fitzgerald as one of the formerly great American writers who, well, "cracked-up" in his explanation in "The Green Hills of Africa"? The Hemingway/Fitzgerald friendship was never the same after that and their glory days in Paris were a faded memory.
Roger,
Really enjoyed your 12-08-08 journal entry. I am a friend of your performer of words, Bill Nack, as well as a professional actor who is currently doing the one-man show, Mark Twain: An American Story here in the D.C. area.
Additionally, I met you and your bride at Bill & Carolyne's nuptials. In fact, I gave you a ride to the reception!
Bill is obviously a raconteur of long standing and he delights his audiences with tales at the drop of a hat.
Huck Finn is a classic, but my favorite Twain tome is "The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson." It was inspired by Plessy vs. Ferguson, the separate but equal law case in the 1890s. To me it strikes an even deeper tone against racism. It is a witty & satirical account sprinkled with quotes from Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar, such as, "There is no character, however good and fine, but it can be destroyed by ridicule, however poor and witless. Observe the ass, for instance: his character is about perfect, he is the choicest spirit among the humbler animals, yet see what ridicule has brought him to. Instead of feeling complimented when we are called an ass, we are left in doubt!"
Happy Holidays!
Dwane Starlin
Dear Roger,
I think that if you are a fan of Lowery's book that your might try a book by James Welch called The Death of Jim Loney. It opens with the quote from Under the Volcano.
Ah, to have a horse, and gallop away, singing, away to someone
you loved perhaps, into the heart of all the simplicity and
peace in the world; was not that like the opportunity afforded
man by life itself?
Welch was a poet first and novelist second. This book and
Winter in the Blood are both set in modern times. His later book
Fools Crow is set in the 1800's. All are well written and very much
worth reading. Welch was an American Indian and lived and worked in
Montana.
Take Care,
C E Taylor
I left a comment on the 3D entry about the last paragraph of George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, and I thought I post the paragraph itself here. I love it with the heat of a thousand nuns.
Still I can point to one or two things I have definitely learned by being hard up. I shall never again think that all tramps are drunken scoundrels, nor expect a beggar to be grateful when I give him a penny, nor be surprised if men out of work lack energy, nor subscribe to the Salvation Army, nor pawn my clothes, nor refuse a handbill, nor enjoy a meal at a smart restaurant. That is a beginning.
You might have to read the whole book to see what he's going on about. Then again, you might not.
Incidentally, Down and Out... is regarded as many an Orwell afficionado's favourite of his works, even though, they admit, it might not be the best book he wrote. What was that Pauline Kael line about great movies again?
I have ordered a copy of the novel, MISTER ROBERTS, so I can send the correct opening lines....they went something like this, "The USS Virgo travelled between Tedium and Ennui...."
The story of Heggen's life was particularly sad...as was that of another author from the same post-war years, the man who wrote Raintree County (Ross Lockridge)...both died of the same sad fate.
It's hard to get copies of these books anywhere...not in our local library...which is a very good one....amazing how many works have been lost and forgotten.
Dear Roger, a very mighty thank you for this post. This entry of yours is just the right panacea for someone who has been busting his ass for the past week. December is the most hectic month at my job.
I'm reading this for the second time. During the first time, which was last Saturday, there was an interruption. Since then, I was not able to connect continuously to fully dip into your blog, but only read in short, sporadic instances.
~~~~~~~~~~
I didn't know that Mark Twain detested Jane Austen. It seems even George Eliot and Robert Louis Stevenson were not spared of his attacks. Even Charles Dickens sort of came under his scrutiny.
This is all very well, but here's the suspicious thing, taken from a letter Mark Twain wrote to a very close friend,
Every time? Or maybe he was being forced to read Pride & Prejudice against his will? Perhaps by his wife, or William Dean Howells, to cure his uncouthness? I thought that was Einstein in the picture. (^_^)
S M Rana:
Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter,
Sermons and soda-water the day after.
Lord Byron
Robert -
Mark Twain, like Lord Byron, another personal favourite, also might have detested the Turks, as this study rather persuasively argues.
Here is a particularly interesting excerpt from The Innocents Abroad:
Ashore, it was--well, it was an eternal circus. People were thicker than bees, in those narrow streets, and the men were dressed in all the outrageous, outlandish, idolatrous, extravagant, thunder-and-lightning costumes that ever a tailor with the delirium tremens and seven devils could conceive of. There was no freak in dress too crazy to be indulged in; no absurdity too absurd to be tolerated; no frenzy in ragged diabolism too fantastic to be attempted. No two men were dressed alike. It was a wild masquerade of all imaginable costumes--every struggling throng in every street was a dissolving view of stunning contrasts. Some patriarchs wore awful turbans, but the grand mass of the infidel horde wore the fiery red skull-cap they call a fez. All the remainder of the raiment they indulged in was utterly indescribable.
The shops here are mere coops, mere boxes, bath-rooms, closets--any thing you please to call them--on the first floor. The Turks sit cross-legged in them, and work and trade and smoke long pipes, and smell like--like Turks. That covers the ground. Crowding the narrow streets in front of them are beggars, who beg forever, yet never collect any thing; and wonderful cripples, distorted out of all semblance of humanity, almost; vagabonds driving laden asses; porters carrying dry-goods boxes as large as cottages on their backs; peddlers of grapes, hot corn, pumpkin seeds, and a hundred other things, yelling like fiends; and sleeping happily, comfortably, serenely, among the hurrying feet, are the famed dogs of Constantinople; drifting noiselessly about are squads of Turkish women, draped from chin to feet in flowing robes, and with snowy veils bound about their heads, that disclose only the eyes and a vague, shadowy notion of their features. Seen moving about, far away in the dim, arched aisles of the Great Bazaar, they look as the shrouded dead must have looked when they walked forth from their graves amid the storms and thunders and earthquakes that burst upon Calvary that awful night of the Crucifixion. A street in Constantinople is a picture which one ought to see once--not oftener.
Ebert: I love the way he uses dashes before punch lines. And his descriptions! Think how boring the Turks would have found Hannibal, although the dogs would have been the same--mostly.
Roger:
I seem to be walking on popular ground, but your story of Huckleberry Finn really struck a chord with me. In 1977, my parents were having marital difficulties, and my sister and I were placed on the Amtrak out of Union Station to be delivered to my grandparents in Arkansas. As we packed our 3-week suitcases, my mother gave me a copy of Tom Sawyer, and my sister a used copy of Little Women. As we rolled along the rails to St. Louis, Joplin, Western Springs, and Walnut Grove (I'm no railroad purist, I may be relating then-future car itineraries), I was so taken by Tom and friends that the first thing I asked for on arrival in Arkansas was a trip to a used bookstore. Huckleberry followed soon after.
I won't attribute my love of reading to Twain solely (there have been others...Lloyd Alexander in young days, Pynchon and DFWallace in later days, and all the Fitgeralds, Joyces, Terkels, Roykos, Wolfes, and Keats somewhere in the interim), but it matched a situation so perfectly for a month that I can't forget it in piece or whole.
Be well, and strong.
-Tony (UIUC '92)
Ebert: Your mom knew her books. I hope you traded. I loved "Little Women" too, but Huck it ain't.
Bill Nack's gallant work "Pure Heart" is available in Sports Illustrated's Vault, as well as his wonderful anthology you mention. For those who doubt the tears shed at his reading:
http://vault.sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1005832/index.htm
How incredibly fortunate we are that your hardship has focused your attention on writers and writing. I have always enjoyed your writing, but lately I am compelled to read all that you give us.
I've read "Suttree" three times, and each time I approach it, it grows more impenetrable in its sorrow. I agree that it is McCarthy's best book, though "Blood Meridian" comes in at a close second. I'm going through a divorce at the moment, and "Suttree" has somehow been a tremendous source of inspiration for me. I hope I don't end up like the weary old protagonist, but I sympathize with his journey. It a strange way, it reminded me of the film "Umberto D" - both pieces deal with a man who's broke but never quite broken.
McCarthy is my favorite living writer, and I've taken a long journey in literature to make that desicion. Growing up, I tore into the works of H.G. Wells, Jules Vernes, and Twain, and Poe (and Cooper, admittedly). I remember reading "The Invisible Man" even though it was above my reading level and knowing that I had truly accomplished something. Then a teacher, noticing my fascination with Poe, turned me onto Gothic literature, and I was hooked. I read "Frankenstein," "Dracula," "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," and an old, weathered copy of Jane Webb's little-known "The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century" (published in three volumes in 1820; I found it at an anitique store and still have all three bound together with a shoe-string), and I'd found the loves of my life. I still dive into my old copies of those books from time to time and cherish every page and chuckle nostalgically at the parts I underlined as a child. No wonder I went on to get a B.A. in English - when you're instinctually underlining passages as a nine year old, what other degree option is there?
I'm close now to signing a publishing deal for my own first novel. I don't pretend to think it will win any awards or have passages underlined, but it will be enough to know that it will appear on someone's bookshelf with a worn spine.
What is worse than going through a difficult time in your life? Believing that everyone else is happy with theirs. My greatest solace is great literature, and great movies where people are going though difficult times. It makes me feel less alone with my pain. And I want to know how the character and ultimately the author keeps putting one foot in front of the other.
I went into Scarecrow video one day (a marvelous place for movie lovers) and they had a display shelf labeled "Dysfunctional Family Movies". It made me smile and from it I picked Sling Blade which I had never seen although it had been out for years. Great movie.
I don't want to be "cheered up". I want clues on how to keep going. Thanks, Roger and I am glad you continue to write.
Ebert: Scarecrow in Seattle. A mecca. A model for video stores. Alert them that with the release of "Marley and Me" there is an occasion to dedicate a section to Dysfunctional Dogs.
From what I hear, the used bookstore in this town used to take up the entire building it's in. Today, it's about the size of a living room, with three rows of romance, a shelf or two per every other genre, a magazine rack with about a dozen "classics", a single wall for "general fiction", and five or six new releases in the front window. On the upside, most of their used books cost about a dollar fifty.
Without eBay and Amazon, I might never have read any Kobo Abe or Jim Thompson.
Ebert: Nothing can replace the experience of browsing through shelves of books, seeing something intriguing you know nothing about, taking it down, seeing how it looks, feels and smells, reading some pages, buying it, and finding you have made a discovery. You can't get me past a used book store.
"Ebert: Victor Hugo. Roger Ebert. David Mamet. Which name does not belong here?"
None. You are, as far as I am concerned, the finest living non-fiction writer, and one of the greatest writers, period, of the last half century. And I don't think a single person commenting here would disagree.
People don't love your writing because of your subject matter or your encyclopedic knowledge of film - they love it because of the writing. And that love has inspired countless people like me to become writers ourselves, knowing that it doesn't matter whether we choose to write about movies, or politics, or horses, or a trip down a river on a raft. If the prose is tasty and the words speak from one heart to another - that is great writing.
Never doubt, sir, that you belong in that pantheon.
Ebert: Oh, but I do doubt. I have just been reading Larry Woiwode again, who was in a writing class with me at Illinois. When I read one of his short stories, I knew I would never make a short story writer. By the way, to boast where it's deserved, adding to my list of firsts: I ran Woiwode's first published fiction in a weekly newspaper I ran at Illinois in 1960-61, in addition to writing the first reviews received by Scorsese, John Prine, Mike Leigh and Gregory Nava.
I used to spend half my week in the bookstore a block from my apartment when I lived in California. That's where I managed to find almost every single novel by Vonnegut, where I discovered a bunch of cult genre writers like Joe R. Lansdale and Harry Harrison, and where I bought the novelizations of Rambo III and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome so I could read passages aloud to my friends for a cheap laugh.
I try not to be too cynical about living in The Sticks, USA, but every used book at our bookstore is an airport novel, which strongly suggests that this town's only readers traveled here by plane from somewhere else in the country. My girlfriend bought a volume of Saki, some William Carlos Williams, and a collection of Mark Twain stories, and now I think they're fresh out of books that aren't about lawyers, secret service men, guys that look like Fabio, or ways to tell whether or not you are, in fact, a redneck.
Sadly, I really don't read as much as I used to these days. The only books I really read anymore are books that I'm specifically looking for, and where I used to read five books a week, staying up all night and showing up for work incredibly tired the next day, now I probably get through about one novel a month, and it's usually a novel I've already read more than once. You don't impulsively buy cookies through the internet, you impulsively buy cookies when you're walking through the mall and the scent lures you in. It's hard to impulsively buy used books online.
Ebert: Saki. In a used book store I found such a holdable, readable volume of his work.
...And I want to back up Jennifer Smith. If I can ignore the distinctions between poetry, fiction, screenplays, and journalism, you are one of my favorite writers.
I feel a bit guilty when I think that, since that all-too-long hiatus, the writing has only been getting better and better. I felt the same way when comedian/director/TV host/tap dancer Takeshi Kitano was in a motorcycle accident which paralyzed half of his face, and he somehow became funnier by virtue of only being able to smile out of one side of his mouth.
Roger,
This is heaven created by a bibliophile, and I can only barely touch it.
You mentioned that Huck Finn was the first real book that you had read? Well, mine was either The Scarlet Letter or The Sea Wolf, I forget which of the two came first (for junior highschool term paper, forced). But while yours was a pleasant experience, mine was off to a very rocky start; so much so that it largely (though not fully) discouraged me in later years to pursue serious reading as a hobby.
These are honest confessions: I surfaced from the laborious torture of reading The Scarlet Letter without fully comprehending what Hawthorne's novel was all about, or what really transpired in the novel. As for The Sea Wolf, I recollect that I got lost in its sea of philosophising. Or rather, "I drowned in its sea of philosophising" is a better-suited description. My problem was in the difficulty of following up with the authors' thoughts and their modes of expression.
Come to think of it, I never considered Mark Twain or Louisa May Alcott (also Frances Hodgson Burnett and L. M. Montgomery) to be "serious" writers because their works are so easily read and understood. I am aware that these people are universally considered as authors of classic literature; and yet somehow, their works don't feel as hard as reading the Authorised King James' Version Bible (if you will allow me to make that comparison).
Hello Ali Arikan,
Twain's account of Constantinople obviously sprang from culture shock; though I get this curious feeling that nothing really surprises/awes him. The way he baedekered his experience is brilliant in its simplicity.
I like Mark Twain in that he was one of the reader-friendly authors that I have encountered in my short excursions in biblioland. I have read his Tom Sawyer twice before. Of course that is nothing to you peeps, but considering that I almost never read serious books twice, that alone speaks of Twain's effect on me.
Roger, I think the time to revisit Mark Twain is nigh once more. I'll be sure to pay Huck Finn my first visit. But that will only be after I had vacated the drawing room of David Copperfield and immersed myself in The Ancestor's Tale. Though nigh, it won't be sometime very soon. FCFS.
Now Roger, see what your mischief has done--I love it!
If it makes you feel any better, I was originally planning to accuse you of being "the greatest non-fiction writer of the past 50 years". And then I remembered Hunter S. Thompson and thought better of it.
But you are a VERY close second.
Ebert: You are much too kind. No, really. Have a read at Austerlitz, by W. G. Sebald.
I come to this blog entry in no fit state for company, having buried a 19 year old girl today (a dear friend to my own 19 year old girl), and a father in law just out of ICU.[snip]....I don't know why authors are not painters, but I suspect it is the same reason why musicians (composers) are not writers. The muse chooses the artist in the end.
To clarify: my FIL is out of ICU and is home on hospice. RE why aren't novelists painters etc, I meant to say that the muse chooses the art form (but may choose the artist as well. I'm probably misusing the word muse, but what the hell. I'm trying to say that the creative drive chooses its manifestation, the writer, the artist, the composer is merely the vehicle). I really must preview my posts.
And thank you for your kind words to me. They are much appreciated. I confess to blenching at McCarthy (probably because it's so close to Christmas--he seems a January author to me), so I picked up some Wodehouse. Thank god for Jeeves and Bertie. I have also taken to watching Little Miss Sunshine as a kind of panacea. It works.
Ebert: Wodehouse for Christmas. McCarthy for winter solstice.
Good article, bro.
So my favorite book is Less Than Zero. The emptiness of the characters was so striking to me at 18 years old when I first read it and it stuck with me. After moving around and having trouble connecting with many I've since visited home and have fully moved back after 2 years. I am pretty much Clay. All of my friends are drained and everything is so stagnant. We go out and have nothing to say.
Some friends and I went to a waffle house and were talking about sleeping with our eyes open and how to train yourself to do so. A hobo/drifter overheard us and started talking with us about religion and certain verses that will help us "close our eyes at night". I thought it was a dumb conversation and he had no business being in it but my friends ate it up. I was stuck at waffle house for 30 extra minutes and when we left my friends were so affected by it. The convo went, "Don't you ever wonder if hobos are actually angels?" "Yeah, I read that in the bible God would come in the form of beggars and the way you treated the beggar would say how good a person you were." "yeah, I mean I'm too scared now to turn around to talk to him some more and him just be gone." "I see hobos around a lot and they're always so strangely religious." "I mean it's always like that, holy shit."
They clung so much to that idea and I thought it was so silly. Our lives are so mundane we debate over the existence of a hobo.
Anyways, the last paragraph of the book always stuck with me.
"There was a song I heard when I was in Los Angeles by a local group. The song was called 'Los Angeles' and the words and images were so harsh and bitter that the song would reverberate in my mind for days. The images, I later found out, were personal and no one I knew shared them. The images I had were of people being driven mad by living in the city. Images of parents who were so hungry and unfulfilled that they ate their own children. Images of people, teenagers my own age, looking up from the asphalt and being blinded by the sun. These images stayed with me even after I left the city. Images so violent and malicious that they seemed to be my only point in reference for a long time afterwards. After I left"
Derek:
I'm an atheist, so I most certainly don't believe hobos are angels! But experience has taught me that you can learn amazing things by listening to people who want to talk to you - strangers in stores, in lines, on buses, in restaurants, wherever. It might be a lesson you need to learn, or a story that you need to hear. Sometimes it may seem a waste of time, with no good lesson or story involved, but in those cases, I figure my listening has helped that person in some way. You just never know. Listening is easy to do - no work or money involved - and the payoff can be enormous.
Ebert: Look at that scene where Sally Hawkins speaks with the homeless man in "Happy-Go-Lucky."
Dearest Uncle Ebert,
Wow. I realize, again, that reading in volume does not fill the hole. You inspire to read better and less, though less seems unlikely so I shall try for better.
Merry Christmas to you. I hope you like the tie.
Your (favorite) nephew, Andres
Ebert: Wodehouse for Christmas. McCarthy for winter solstice.,
I like it--it's a plan. I am also going to tackle Simon Schama's History of Britain. It's a trilogy. It looks somewhat formidable, but I need to challenge myself a bit. It's so easy to read the escapist stuff (and thank god for it all) and not continue to grow as a reader. I find that nonfiction cleanses the palate (so to speak) for more challenging fiction like McCarthy.
I am starting to feel the same way about film, thanks to your books and this blog. I've seen a Bergman film, finally saw Citizen Kane, now I need to "catch up" and watch things like 2001 Space Odyssey, and Mulholland Drive and others (I should probably make a list). I tend to like films that either feature good characterization or stories. I don't follow films as Film (or does one call it Cinema?), but I am starting to see how elements come together to make a great film. Some of it is common sense (like dialogue and editing of plotlines), but much of it only seems obvious once it's pointed out (camera angles, scores, lighting). Thanks for doing so much of the pointing.
But first, I will share Wall E. with my daughter this afternoon (nice day out, eh? I like winter, but truly this is a bit much) and finish Jeeves And The Tie That Binds. Happy Christmas to you and yours, Roger.
Robert -
Mark Twain visited the German city of Heidelberg towards the end of his life, where he also learned German. He wrote one of the wittiest pieces on the Teutonic tongue (Meatloaf might do anything for love, but I will do anything for alliteration--or Aliteration), which you can find here.
Two choice passages:
"Gretchen: Wilhelm, where is the turnip?
Wilhelm: She has gone to the kitchen.
Gretchen: Where is the accomplished and beautiful English maiden?
Wilhelm: It has gone to the opera."
In the German it is true that by some oversight of the inventor of the language, a Woman is a female; but a Wife (Weib) is not -- which is unfortunate. A Wife, here, has no sex; she is neuter; so, according to the grammar, a fish is he, his scales are she, but a fishwife is neither. To describe a wife as sexless may be called under-description; that is bad enough, but over-description is surely worse. A German speaks of an Englishman as the Engländer; to change the sex, he adds inn, and that stands for Englishwoman -- Engländerinn. That seems descriptive enough, but still it is not exact enough for a German; so he precedes the word with that article which indicates that the creature to follow is feminine, and writes it down thus: "die Engländerinn," -- which means "the she-Englishwoman." I consider that that person is over-described.
He actually wrote a truncated German version of the essay, too, but I was unable to locate it online. I have it in my archives, and I'll try to dig it out next time I'm in Ankara.
And then there is the infamous speech he gave at the Stomach Club in Paris in 1879, which includes possibly the only euphemistic use of the Colonne Vendôme in the history of oratory.
I believe I have provided enough search keywords for interested parties without giving the address.
Ebert: Look at that scene where Sally Hawkins speaks with the homeless man in "Happy-Go-Lucky."
I await the dvd. That movie is unlikely to play where I live.
Liz:
First of all thanks for reading what I wrote and commenting.
Secondly I understood he probably needed someone to talk to. I was overall mad that he interrupted a decent conversation to bring religion into our night. I didn't go to waffle house to hear about it. I'm agnostic but I mean I don't tell people things unless they ask, it's just the way I am.
One of top 5 movies is Mike Leigh's "Naked". David Thewlis's character was a hobo was both a nihilist and an existentialist of sorts. The conversations he had in the movie really stuck to me and I identified with him. He also was nice in the way he approached people(at least from what I remember), just none of them cared what he had to say.
In a way, at least in relation to the movie, I'm like one of those innocent bystanders he tries to talk to and ignores him. And in retrospect I feel a little bad because I hated seeing how passionate he was about existence and purpose and nobody cared. But it goes back to the approach. You don't interrupt somebody and rub your bible knowledge on them.
I probably sound mean but even if this gentlemen wasn't a hobo I'd be aggravated.
"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" is my favorite Frost—my favorite poem, period—but I've found it difficult to recite since learning in college that it could be sung to the tune of "Hernando's Hideaway." Very hard to keep the "Hernando" cadence from creeping in.
Ebert: Thanks a heckuva lot for telling us!
Hi Ali Arikan, that is indeed a funny account from Mark Twain. Thanks for sharing it.
Yes, one can expect a jolly irreverent speech like that to come out of Mark Twain. Hmmm, .... he shouldn't have despised Jane Austen. Though they are two generations apart, I believe he's the right person to open her up. I'm saying this because I just revisited Merchant & Ivory's A Room With A View.
This Christmas I am working over Tolstoy's "Resurrection". His shorter works are under-scrutinised, especially the marvellous "Hadji Murat." You could squeeze an action film out of it with a bit of imagination. Still not so much fun as Dostoyevsky but required reading for Russian lit buffs. My favourite author remains Mikhail Lermontov, after whom they named a ship and then a New South Wales common law case.
It took me some time to warm to American literature but after finally falling in love with Fitzgerald, I have never fallen out of love with him. "O my beauty boy! - Reading Plato so Divine."
My love of Russian and American literature stemmed from a close study of modern history. Reading can be ferocious, stirring passions and insights.
“God save us from ever doing that again. For the United States did that. Our Guilt. My country. No, never again. And then one reads in the papers “Second bomb blast in Nevada bigger than the first!” What obsession do men have for destruction and murder? Why do we electrocute men for slaughtering an individual and then pin a purple heart on them for mass slaughter of someone arbitrarily labelled “enemy”?..This country has a lot, but we’re not always right or pure. ..When you come right down to it, I do believe in the freedom of the individual – but to kill off all the ones who could forge a strong nation? How foolish! Of what good – living and freedom without home, without family, without all that makes life?”
Sylvia Plath, 1951, unabridged journals.
These words of protest echo through the decades, through history, of a 19 year old woman commenting on an event – the dropping of the Nagasaki bomb – that occurred during her living memory. Though at the time she was powerless to stop the event, she later formed a view, she set it down, it shaped her identity and it mattered that she did so. In her maturity she wrote some of the finest anti-fascist, anti-war poetry ever written.
Roger,
I am just plain filled with joy to hear you expand on life and literature. Wasn't it Bill Nack whom Butkus threatened to whip in the Daily Illini office because of what Bill was quoted as saying in the DI. Or am I having another of my more frequent false memories? Such as how J.W. Carey opened a seminar on by reading from the opening page of The Great Gatsby: "The truth is that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island was a platonic conception of himself. A phrase, which, if it means anything, means just that. And he must be about his father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty" I memorized it the next day and have held writing up that one paragraph ever since.Yours is holding up beautifully. Please keep it coming!
Ebert: Hi, Currie. If it wasn't Nack, it should have been. Jim Carey and Nack used to read "Gatsby" to one another--or recite, I should say.
In later life, Butkus, my exact contemporary, cleaned up nicely. I now suspect many of the Butkus stories circulating around campus were urban legends.
A great line; anyone who can tell me who the originator of it is?
"There is nothing in the world quite so useless as advice unasked for."
I have often wondered to myself; is this a stronger condemnation of the giver of the advice, or of the subject that doesn't want to hear it?
I suppose in some sense this doesn't fit in because it is a translation, but it is nevertheless wonderful prose. This is from Yvonne L. Sandstroem and John Weinstock's translation of Lars Gustafsson's short story, "Greatness Strikes Where it Pleases".
The hourglass-shaped ribbon of light moved across the surface of the planet, dawn line and dusk line rushing forward like great wings across distant plains and mountains. Slowly or swiftly, depending on how you chose to measure it, the earth moved in its orbit and would never return to the same point where it had once been. Slowly or swiftly, the solar system moved in its orbit, and with silent, dizzying speed; like a disk of light, the galaxy moved in its mysterious rotation around itself.
In the wombs of the mothers, unborn embryos were growing, membranes and tissues folded and pleated themselves cleverly around each other, exploring without sorrow, without hesitation, the possibilities of topological space.
Of this he knew nothing: heavy and huge like a boulder in the woods, he sat in his chair, moving it with effort a few inches every hour so that it always remained in the patch of sun.
He was as slow as the galaxy and as mysterious.
After reading through this amazing thread, again, I decided to try something new which I hope to adopt for the sake of my children. Inspired by previous comments, I started reading poetry to my daughters (ages 7 and 4) last night. Honestly, it was done in faith that something good would come of it, and that their horizons would be broadened far beyond the latest Hannah Montana episode.
So I opened a book of poems, and read a few aloud. To my happy surprise, they listened, particularly my 7 year old. She loved it and wanted to hear more, smiling and clapping afterwards. I want them to have that love of words in concert. Whether they grasp the music in whole, or in part, at the very least I want them exposed to such word-music. As a father, I'm trying my best with what I have.
I also have to say that, thanks to this wonderful post, it got me reading TEXT again. For years I had been listening to unabridged books on CD, which I love to indulge in. But I'm finding there is something to actually reading text that is held in your hands. With a book, you come across a delicious turn of phrase, or paragraph, and the simple immediacy of swimming in the experience of those words over and over again is far greater than by hitting the rewind button on your CD player (unless the reader is exceptional, then who cares?)
I know I said thank you before, but seriously Roger, thank you AGAIN.
Your love of the written word is so blinding in it apparency, how could I not put you up alongside among any of the literary greats? You may not have published fictional works of fine prose, but you definitely are an essential guide to what's really good out there. And that's good enough for me.
Have a wonderful and Happy New Year Roger.
John
P.S. - Is there any way you could, maybe one day in the future, put out a list of novels or books you'd recommend? Roger Ebert's Top 100 Books To Read? I'm aware of classics like those mentioned here, but there are so many that are lesser known to me. Just a few weeks ago I came upon Shusaku Endo, and fell in love with his prose. However the only reason I came upon him was through another book I'm reading, The Jesus I Never Knew by Philip Yancey, where he was mentioned. I'd love some more recommendations. I don't come by them often enough.
Ebert: That's really the way it happens: One book leads to another.
Do you know Willa Cather? The handsome $11 Library of America paperback linked below has O Pioneers!, My Antonia and Song of the Lark. Also don't miss Death Comes for the Archbishop, Shadow on the Rock and The Professor's House.
http://www.amazon.com/Cather-Novels-Stories-1905-1918-Pioneers/dp/1883011744/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1231372830&sr=8-1
I am proud to have grown up in one of the "on location" sites of America's first Big Entertainment Hit in Anything, James Fennimore Cooper's WHATCHAMACALLIT. You know, starring Uncas and Chingachgook, and those two women always holding onto each other in the wagon cowering. I often took brooding walks to that described location, down by the Gordon "crick," as we authentic rustics pronounced it.
150 years after Cooper this same town, Ballston Spa, New York, and just down the street from where Uncas tomahawked somebody I think, served as the location for not so big a hit, "The Way We Were," with Streisand and Redford. Locals gawked from behind the keep-out barricades and remarked how ugly those two looked in person. My younger brother was one of them. I was busy. But that's what you get for looking so beautiful on a big screen.
Oh, maybe 20 years after that, I sat in Mark Twain's hewn log cabin on a hill above Angels Camp, Calaveras County, brooding at the dirt floor. Hardly a thought came to mind. I went home and started interjecting "HhhhhHHHK. Pa-TOOEY! Dinnnng! (wipe) Wellsir?" between sentences of the tiny column I wrote for a tinier Calaveras County paper, and so far as I know, people are still walking around that little town of 800 doing that... if they hadn't been in the first place. They too had cricks, and sech.
But now I'm reminded how Twain used to make fun of Fenimore Cooper to earn his bread. That son of a bitch. So I have some dirt on him, dirtier than the floor of that cabin. He can't hide it now.
HE did not start the "vernacular industry," as its originator called it, appalled as it had spread from one of his own amusing columns called "Little Johnny." Ambrose Bierce inadvertently started the vernacular industry in America. Twain took this and many other cues from this brilliant man.
That rascal Clemens spent so much time smoking and pocketing Bierce's ideas at his home, Bierce's daughter thought he lived there. This wasn't a very big house. He also stole Bierce's fine arabesque mustache. In addition, he was quite thin-skinned.
HhhhhHHHHK. Pa-TOOOEY! Dinnnng! (wipe) Wellsir? Bierce made one little joke about Twain in public. ONE, LITTLE, JOKE. It was about his marrying rich. Twain never spoke to, or of, Ambrose Bierce again. Ever.
As fate would have it, I later wound up living in Elmira, New York, family home of Twain's wealthy wife, to where they vacated after the slight wound. I brooded over the Tom Sawyer Motel, the Huck Finn Furniture shop -- or was it the other way around -- Injun Joe's All You C'n Eet, etc. etc., and the Big Mark Twain Theater In The Round Summer Festival Tourist Thing, or whatever that was, where the late Samuel Clemens had long since been transformed into a kind of literary Santy Claus.
Driving past these things, I thought the thought that Bierce thought and wrote which had so insulted his former friend.
"Poor Mark. He was a good scheme while he lasted."
Ebert: Ambrose Bierce's greatest book review: "The covers of this book are too far apart."
Still here, Rodge. I was JUST thinking about that shortest of reviews. Been wondering for years if it could be topped.
How about "Yeah, I read it."
'nite.
Ebert: A slight variation on a famous letter:
Sir, I am seated in the smallest room of my house. I have your book before me. Soon I will have it behind me.
I remember the place and time when I began to love reading. Before this time I knew of no magic in books, after it, I could never stop searching it out.
My seventh grade English teacher had a rule that the first ten minutes of class was for reading and nothing else. You had to bring a book, a magazine, a newspaper, whatever you wanted but you had to be reading. I found it tedious to sit still for 10 minutes trying to read whatever scrap of paper I managed to find. The teacher had a secret weapon however, a couch! A big inviting comfy couch at the side of the class that could only be sat upon by four students, for ten minutes, at the start of every class. Oh how we coveted that restful place! So foreign to the butt numbing plastic chairs and elbow mashing wooden desks. This relative paradise wasn't bestowed on just anyone however. We had the impression that only earnest readers need apply. I gave up my little scraps of reading material and brought in an actual book that was on my reading list. It was The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien.
That was the first time I was absorbed in a book. The first time that curious thing happens, when that hypnotic spell starts to weave around you. The edges of the page disappear, the room dims, the sounds mute, there is only you and a story. And what a story for a little kid! About a place I'd go to, in a shot. Soon ten minutes wasn't enough, in fact it felt like a blink of an eye. At night, I remember tucking my flashlight under my chin and shrouding it in such a way so only half a page would be illuminated at a time. If I felt that was too bright I'd tuck under the sheets and read in my little light cave, lest I rouse my parents. I finished The Hobbit and read The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. Remember that scene in Shadowlands, when the little kid is in the attic spying out the wardrobe? He opens it up, waits a.... hopeful.... pause, then checks the back of it. He 'knew' there was no gateway to Narnia, but he had to check didn't he. That little scene rang very true to me so many years later.
Of course as I grew older I moved on to other books. James Clavell found a lifelong fan when I read Shogun for the first time, he also sparked my interest in history so I read H.G. Wells. Thomas Harris moved me deeply with Red Dragon when he described the making of the monster. I dabbled in Dashiell Hammett, but got a bigger kick out of Frederick Forsyth. Then I discovered other books that I loved more for their language then their stories, enter Joseph Conrad and Charles Dickens. And so it goes, on and on, never knowing where the next discovery will come from or who will inspire it.
I've read this particular article before Roger, I just wanted to pop back in to tell you that I'm a third of the way through Suttree.
Ebert: And is it working for you?
Oh yes, it's working. The opening paragraph set the hook.
Dear friend now in the dusty clockless hours of the town when the streets lie black and steaming in the wake of the watertrucks and now when the drunk and the homeless have washed up in the lee of walls in alleys or abandoned lots and cats go forth highshouldered and lean in the grim perimeters about, now in these sootblacked brick or cobbled corridors where lightwire shadows make a gothic harp of cellar doors no soul shall walk save you.
One of the things I like about this breathless opening is the perfect placement of the comma!
It does require concentration. I appreciate your comment that you haven't begun to read it until you read it for a second time. He's constantly painting landscapes and you have to be careful to get out of the car and appreciate them, lest you just drive on through oblivious.
I read 'No Country' awhile back because I enjoyed the movie so much. I was surprised to see how closely the movie followed the book. They did an excellent job with that. By far my favorite passages where the narrations of the sheriff, when he speaks directly to the reader. For me, that story is completely about the sheriff.
Ebert: You're very right about the comma. Just re-reading that paragraph put me back in the book's world.
I am sitting with nothing worse then the flu annoying me. I am working on my novel that looks to rise out of the Liffey and pour something back into Dublin. For inspiration, I go looking for reviews of Suttree and I find your writing.
And I find again why he is one of the finest writers, why such work is important, why we need such meanings and narratives.
Thank you kindly.