PCA/ACA: film studies galore, from Coriolanus, war, docudramas to Haneke, Lean & Young Adults

Boomerang, a street scene from this film noir, docudrama(1947)

From Part 3, The Bomb, The Untold History of the US by Stone and Kuznick

Dear friends and readers,

More from the PCA/ACA conference.

Though I didn’t count the number or work out what percentage of the total number of panels film studies represented, I’ll hazard a guess it was at least one-half. Sometimes the film study was in service of some other agenda or exposing some conflict, but the session’s prime documents were films. You might say this was a conference of very intelligent people who had put away their books to concentrate on films.

There are themes running through the group. First, fidelity criticism is useless except insofar as a comparison enables us to bring out the film-makers’ contrasting purpose. That films can be a reflection of a single maker’s vision, but is so much more likely to be a group mirroring of a set of themes thought appropriate by the financial backers, in their interest. They are (most of the time) cultural barometers of what is socially acceptable that year. Gov’ts typically and without having to act directly exercise control or the film-makers bow to what they think the gov’t wouldnot want. The way to analyze films is to study the shots, the filmic techniques as well as the kind of source material and the psychological baggage associated with their stars.

If I were able to make the choice again, I would probably not spend so much of my day on film studies. If the PCA/ACA ever comes to town (DC) or close (Philly or NY) again, I’ll be sure to go to children’s literature and fashion sessions. There was a session on a comic book retelling Austen’s Sense and Sensibility which I missed.

There was a paper by Zara Wilkinson “Defending Jane Austen: Rozema’s Mansfield Park as a narrative of abolition” (Thursday, at 1:15 pm, No 2436, “Adaptation”, V: Race and Adaptation”), but as bad luck would have it, that was on against another one I really preferred to go to as my friend was giving her paper then.

I offer brief accounts of papers in a day-long immersion in film studies.

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Wednesday at 4:45 pm, “Shakespeare on Film and TV 3 (1337) offered three papers on Ralph Fiennes’s Coriolanus.

Vanessa Redgrave was Coriolanus’s undoing

Noel Slobada in “Riding the Lonely Dragon” began by insisting there was something odd in Fiennes choosing to film this play. It’s rarely done, unfamiliar, and abrasive; Caius Marcus might be Shakespeare’s least sympathetic hero, he’s a dynamo of violence, cannot articulate an idea, distrusts words, despises those “beneath” him. It has no subplot; it ends on an assault and utter crash. The Shakespeare text was severely trimmed by John Logan, and what we are left with is a man who cannot re-invent himself in the way Fiennes, the actor, can. Even at the close Vanessa Redgrave as the mother says to Fiennes as Coriolanus: “you are too absolute.” Slobada felt Fiennes was attracted to this figure as someone who cannot remake himself. No redemption at the close; the politician’s life a nightmare.

Rachel Hogg saw Coriolanus as an outsider, a lonely, going it alone, risk-taking. He only commands language when inciting other men to kill. He destroys his home. He’s a man without a head, a sort of cast off which leaves him vulnerable to violent brutal treatment. The dismaying (revealing) thing about the session was how unwilling the people were to discuss the women, and leaving them out of such a paper was to leave out a core part of experience. When I brought up Volumnia and Vanessa Redgrave’s role, one of the panelists insisted she was not a woman but a commanding officer. They wanted to forget the sex scenes with his wife, to cut the film off from contemporary politics too. Again and again during this conference I saw people take on a masculine point of view as universal.

Jessica Chastain chosen for her sexiness and soft femininity

Finally, Kimberly Huhn: this play “is not reassuring,” shaped by “emotional immediacy” and action. The camera was often hand-held in 2005. The hero not reflective, not super-handsome and sensitive, but someone who can do terrifying things and attracts terror. One man came who was interested in Shakespeare and had read the play (as had I) but the speakers were not interested in talking of how this production differed from other filmed Coriolanus’s, nor the usual psychoanalytical analyses.

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Carrying on the theme of war and reality in film I went to “Film and History II: the great War,” on Thursday, 9:45 am (2244), Jamie Schleser presented the new trend in films to combine commercial fiction with powerful non-fiction (then not limited by the code). As the war came on, film noir combined with crime docudrama to create films of pessimistic uncertainty. Most of these in the 1950s had themes of active persecution of supposed communists; the popular pres showed the absence of due process as a miscarriage of justice. The code in such movies is you are “guilty until you are proven innocent,” even if you don’t go to jail.

Boomerang, earnest hero and sarky heroine (Jane Wyatt)

She analysed two movies, 1947 Boomerang with Dana Andrews, Elia Kazan and Jane Wyatt and many non-professional people; Call Northside 777 (1948), with James Stewart, Lee J. Cobb, Richard Conte. (I noticed how she left women out.) A man is wrongly given a life sentence and Stewart comes to his rescue. Both films show devious politicians in a culture of pervasive corruption. They filmed an actual film Schleser argued that the use of real events helped carry the social message as you could not as easily argue to censor something that had actually happened.

Northside 777: Jimmy Stewart filmed inside a real prison

The last paper of this panel, “The best and worst of times for American cinema,” was read aloud by three people, Joe Moser in the dominant role. They had watched over 100 films and charted the presentation of war in film over the course of the early past the mid-20th century. They discovered significant trends; early on in WW1 the US presented itself as neutral, but during that time German foreign films could not get over here. Then as the US entered the war, films began to be used for propaganda and showed open sympathy for the allies. Pearl Harbor exploded into a culture of killing, with the Japanese presented as evil. Films discussed included Big Parade which was against privileges, A Very Long Engagement about mental breakdown trouble.

She seeks him no matter what … again heterosexual romance at the center — this paper made me long to read the book, and in French.

I asked if there were difference between America and European gov’t and was told the US gave people more fair warning. European gov’ts and groups treated film more respectably and it was seen as an art; European art saw the war from a social collectivist point of view, where the US consistently sees each story as individual with individual heroes winning out (or losing), epitomizing the culture. It seemed to me there was not enough on this business of cultural reflection but what the panel was interested in was the depiction of history on film. How successful does film tell history; are films history itself in the way they intervene and influence people.

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I had meant to go to at least one panel on Indian film but it turned out only one person showed up for two panels (5 could not get Visas — why did they wait until the last minute). I did hear some talk about how Indian films at their close are always redemptive. The gov’t would not let anything else through and the average person would be shocked not to have some happiness at the close, some security. This is ultimately a religious censoring, in favor of a benign providential pattern.

When that was over, I hurried off to a nearby panel on Teahouse of the August Moon. Still Wednesday , 11:30, “Film Adaptation III (3340).

Marlon Brando carefully made up to look Asian

I came only in time for the last paper on the infantilization of Okinawa and Okinawness by Risa Nakayama but heard the basic thesis of the others, about the story based on the play by John Patrick and the novel by Vern Sneider. The point was made first the play was to be done by one actor and director, but when Brando showed interest in the project, he replaced the original actor, chose a different director, changed the age of the female lead, so that a sweeping transformation was undertaken. The end result was one which differed significantly from the play and the novel. In one clip we watched a man playing an American sergeant berate Brando as Sakini for not having a goal in life, nor “get up and go.” Brando was de-sexualized. The actress, a successful singer on American TV in the 1950s was presented as a child hanging laundry. A kind of fake version of Asian music was played to which some traditional dancing was done. If an attempt was intended to cross cultures and make US viewers understand and sympathize with this culture through “charm” (and Brando had been involved in serious ventures in On the Waterfront), it failed utterly. We are invited to laugh at stereotypes.

I learned a lot in this session. As with all the sessions I went to, there were few people in the room, this time perhaps 4, all from Okinawa. I did not know that the US still controls this island as a military base. I was reminded of how we bombed and destroyed much on the island during WW2 and learned of how little was done for the people when we took over. For example, no schools were built as had been promised. One woman in the audience was old enough to have been on the island in the 1950s and told us of what she experienced. In 1962 there was a cholera epidemic, and mob scenes over vaccination. The question was asked, If there is any value in any of this material. They seemed to suggest that the novel won the Pultizer prize was worthwhile. The play won the Critics Circle award.

I was startled when I saw the film. I did see it in the 1950s and after all this time (I must’ve been about 9) I half-remembered something. Now it just appalled me.

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I stayed for Film Adaptation IV and went on to V that afternoon (3440, at 1:15 pm, and 3543 at 3:00 pm).

A scene from upper class British berth in Nazi Titanic

Sethuraman Srinivasan read a paper on a Nazi film about the sinking of the Titanic. Gramsci said socialism can get nowhere because an agenda of capitalism is enforced from the time of everyone’s earliest years of childhood. The ruling group asserts intellectual and cultural hegemony. We see this in the way Goebbels took over the cultural industry in order to influence people; his aim was to monopolize the media, to control the artists, shape the audience, appoint the financial group, enact a fascist state agenda. The film industry was nationalized, undesirable artists arrested. He knew he had to make a movie entertaining too. He especially liked to use history as for the average person what is said to be true will be taken as more convincing in argument so like other people he turned to the Titanic for its mythic power A large budget of 16 million to make anti-British propaganda: passengers attack heroic crew; wealthy are saved first, people in steerage left to die. The accident could have been avoided, but the crew was taken orders from a corrupt financier; mercantile alliance cared more for enriching themselves than the people aboard. There were heart-rending scenes of horror in this film, and much eroticizing of women. It does not seem to have been popular.

I found of great interest Kathleen Turner’s paper on making films from Young Adult fiction because she described the fiction too: it often shows a search for an identity; a need for connection to others and yet to be left alone; most often it’s narrated by a teenager, so a subjective self is at the center of the film. She conveyed the tone of these books; it’s often violent and there are intense zigzags in the stories. She wanted to see what was transferred from Lion, Witch and Wardrobe, The Hunger Games, Twilight, Harry Potter, Golden Compass to their respective film adaptations. The problem with her paper was when she looked for evidence of 1st person narrator and subjectivity in the films she became vague, had not clearly identified analogous filmic techniques except for voice over.

Pip looking up

Tien-Ai Chin gave a fine paper showing how David Lean used light and darkness (artificial candle-light and shadows), profile photography, together with gloomy splendid architecture and parallels shots and outfits to convey the moral world and themes of Dickens’s Great Expectations. Profiles (Lean felt) make us feel people are hiding from their pain She began with the opening still of Pip coming to Miss Havisham & ended on the repeat closing still of Pip and Estella escaping, going through the film at key points. Estelle is filmed to show her replicating Miss Havisham, others to show them humiliating Pip who is caught off from warmth.

Pip with Estelle in Miss Havisham’s place

By the end of the film Miss Havisham knows she has done great harm to Pip, and as she does the sunlight begins to be felt. I could see that Andrew Davies in his Little Dorrit had for the characters of Mrs and Arthur Clenham imitated Lean’s film.

A very complicated abstract paper on remediation in films was read by Darren Zufelt. If he was trying to teach what is meant by remediation, he certainly went about it using the most difficult abstract language one can find. Basically you take something found in one medium (say theater components, say a painting) and adopt it into the new one. Example: we see a book being read inside the movie and then the camera moves into the book. We have to place the film adaptation on the same level as its textual source, and interpret its web of intertextualities or re-makings (remediations). Some texts resist remediation more: for example a play whose words have become important to us. At the end he discussed new media; his example was audio books. Listening to a book read aloud dramatically by a single person changes the experience.

There was good discussion after these papers. I contributed the idea from my S&S book that when a movie is seen mostly from a single character’s point of view, when he or she is in every scene we have an equivalent of first person. I suggested the power of the 1995 S&S with Emma Thompson is she is in almost every scene and the way the camera is used suggests we are seeing everyone from her point of view.

There are normative moments in the The Piano Teacher

David Young had a hard sell. He argued that in Michael Haneke’s films, violent, cruel, out of alienated points of view, we repeatedly have instances of tender love. In Amour the elderly man loves his wife so selflessly that he kills her because she wants this. He cannot himself bear to lose her. We see humane acts in their daily routine. In the Time of the Wolf where there is such terror, savagery, nonetheless a feral Rumanian boy witnesses love and compassion between a man and wife; people attempt to survive and join other survivors. Young found love within a scene where a man axes a family fish tank and watches the fish slowly suffocate. I must say I missed the “small act of relentless love” he described. Even The Piano Teacher where love is shown as alienated sex and the ending is a brutal rape, we see that Isabelle Huppert wants to be loved; she prefers the hard relationship because she fears being hurt. Young quoted Haneke: “In general everyone has an expectation of love … most of the time I do not care about your expectation, I just care about my own.” This is what he studies, and when people do care for another.

For the last film paper I heard, Michael Rennett on Judd Apatow, a TV producer, director, screenplay writer, and Stone and Kuznick’s presentation of Part 3 of Untold History and question and answer period afterward see the comments.

Ellen

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NY Trollope Society’s Winter Meeting: Prof Birns on Trollope’s La Vendee

Death of Henri de la Rochejaquelein, painting by Alexandre Bloch

Dear friends and readers,

We’ve been to NYC with the excuse of hearing an (in the event) wonderfully suggestive lecture by Nicholas Birns on Trollope’s La Vendee. Prof Birns spoke at the Groliers’ Club, an older building with full library along 44th Street.

On the novel itself, we read this twice on Trollope19thCStudies and I’ve put the postings onto my website so the reader can find many good essay-postings on the novel there. What I have to offer here are notes I took from Professor Birns’s talk: heads of topics, sketches of themes, historical writing, and an insight into the visualization of place in La Vendee which connects it to Trollope’s novella, Cousin Henry where Professor Birns ended his talk.

One problem with the talk wwhich Prof Birns confessed upfront was Prof Birns had not read the French aristocratic woman’s memoir on which book is based: Memoirs of the Marquise de la Rochejaquelin (translated by Scott). It’s very difficult to access. Trollope did much research and other sources are Lamartine’s recent history, The Girondists and a long history of the French revolution by one Archibald Alison whom Disraeli mocked as Mr Wordy. Trollope did general research too — as he did for his travel books, one of which (abortive) was an Irish one around this time.

First Prof Birns offered a preliminary set of thoughts as a preface. This is Trollope’s third novel, and comes out of intimate relationship with Ireland and his experiences of countryside and marginalized world there. Trollope knew French culture and history. Prof Birns suggested that Trollope was looking for successful topic, and his two Irish novels didn’t sell. Representing a place became for him a way to represent hus metaphoric thinking … There is rich forest and landscape in novel. (Trollope is not known for his descriptive abilities but they are important as is his use of place, houses as symbols, landscapes too.)

Professor Birns reminded us that 1848 was a year of revolution in Europe. (There was much interest in revolution in this era of open class struggle and the first building of unions.) Carlyle has a real success with his French revolution book which is hard to read; Dickens writes or will write Barnaby Rudge and A Tale of Two Cities. Trollope, though, chooses counter-revolution emerges. Why? He asks and tries to asnwer, Why did peasants not support revolution? They are guerillas. Prof Birns instanced the Spanish peninsular war as analogous complicated event. Prof Birns brought up Balzac’s Les Chouans, a violent book (it seems), but it was of course Scott who Trollope is centrally imitating in La Vendee. Prof Birns also recommended Flanigan’s 20th century historical fiction, Year of the French as a companion insightful book, showing French and Irish parallels? (I have it and could not get into it. Must try again.)

As to the kind of historical fiction, La Vendee represents: Trollope uses real historical characters. It is probably also true that place is central to historical writing. It was Prof Birns’s insight that Trollope resorted to historical fiction to write a book and used the characteristics of historical fiction to try to get into what was to him another time and place and also present an inner meaning or vision about the way human politics works:

What happened was the provinces resisted a central power. Rich lords against any revolution; military leaders had allegiance to ancien regime. This was also a conflict between modern secular groups and Catholic conservatives. Trollope take sides, clearly with rebels. The question would be, why.

The central appealing character killed off in Trollope’s novel, which comes alive around that point. There is an emotionally held-in unhappiness here (said Prof Birns). Trollope also against romanticism and revolution; Prof Birns then connected book to Cousin Henry, a self-flagellating book, where place is crucial. Wales the setting of this novella and Henry ostracized and terrorized by others in the village; Henry cannot understand brutal unsubtle culture.

Prof Birns said Trollope resorts to ekphrasis because he has trouble getting into these cultures. Ekphrasis is a word that has become fashionable nowadays; it appears frequently in academic discourses (and also talk about poetry). Myself I don’t recall Cousin Henry as visual but rather an intense psychological study of a man who is outcast and susceptible to cruel bullying, but I do recall La Vendee is striking in its visual portraiture, especially one scene where the wife of an openly loving married couple (unusual for Trollope) look out a window and the wife describes the battle seen to her husband much in the manner that Rebecca describes a battle to the wounded Ivanhoe.

Olivia Hussey as Rebecca from the famous scene, and a felicitious still of Anthony Andrews as Ivanhoe (from the 1982 mini-series)

(Trollope’s novel has never been filmed.)

At this point my notes give out. I was really cheered by the friendly greeting of the man who runs the society, Randy Williams; by meeting Stephen Amarnick and hearing how his edition of the complete Duke’s Children is coming along. Two people told me they are on Trollope19thCStudies and read my postings sometimes. One woman said she could not stand I gave away something about Downton Abbey (! see my P.S). I hope now that I’ve retired to be able to find time to come to NYC to attend the society’s meetings, e.g., go to this year’s dinner and come far more regularly to the lectures.

For the rest of our trip, a diary journal (we saw 3 operas, 1 play, a movie, went to Central Park, the Met Museum, the Strand, and walked a hellavu lot: From NYC: a diary of shopping, theatre-going, walking …

Ellen

Postscript: Still on the train earlier in the day, coming into the station. We are waiting in the space between seats in a crowd of people pushing holding luggage, I see a young man with largish black laptop at the same time watching his screen. I peek. There’s Miss Obrien in her usual corner spot at the table next to her Shirley Maclaine’s maid, POV Anna, across the way Mrs Hughes … .. Later I go to lunch and open New Yorker, first joke I come to: lady visiting prison on phone reporting to husband “the bad news is Lady Sybil died but Bates is home … “

Jim now tells me the man had all 3 seasons of Downton DVDs on his table set up in his seat area …

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Accurate electoral maps: maps as an exercise in power

Dear friends and readers,

You must allow me one more centrally political blog before I return to our “regularly scheduled programming:” cultural, literary, on art, opera (music), films. This year’s presidential election in the US has been important, and when I’ve come across some enlightening pictures and information I feel I ought to disseminate what I can.

Maps are a fundamental exercise in power as is the division of space. “All maps,” one aware geographer argues, “strive to frame their message in the context of an audience. All maps state an argument about the world, and thee propositional in nature. All maps employ the common devices of rhetoric such as invocations of authority … selection, omission, simplification, classification, the creation of hierarchies, and ‘symbolization.” It’s a small step – and one which those trained in the visual arts, literary and cultural studies, would easily anticipate, along with readers of Foucault-to move to a second level of analysis, which insists that maps don’t only embody in disguised form the power of nations, empires, a ruling class, but further at the act of mapping is in itself an exercise of power.

Foucault wrote of how a critical geography would need to be attuned to the role played by maps “in shaping mental structures, and in imparting a sense of the places of the world” that blocks the circulation of alternative visions and definitions.

Now look at the map above which reflects the voting patterns of a couple of days ago now: it’s set up by county, not state, and thus enables us to see the popular vote, where it comes from, and (as it keeps the state lines just enough) thus that Obama beat Romney by a large margin popularly (51 to 48% — I’m not making these numbers up — 332 to 206). Republicans on mainstream TV (Fox, CNN, even MSNBC) are saying Obama’s was a close win. Nonsense. He has a real progressive mandate. They get away with this because the way the map is drawn leaves huge red spaces where few live as big as small blue spaces where many do. Here’s a map that is drawn proportional to votes and people — by county. The great thing about this one is if you are in a “red” state, the parts of the state that went “blue” are shown, and vice versa.

I don’t know how one gets the mainstream stations to stop using maps which favor conservatives — because they do it knowingly. When the electoral college map was first introduced in the early televised elections, it was clear the map did not reflect the popular vote, but it was the map children learned in school. Since the 1990s and the real divergence of two points of view (one which Fox tells lies to support, and CNN supports, and the others more subtly), these maps become invidious. Maps of the earth re-adjust themselves to what is disseminated popularly every once in a while. Australia used to be wholly unreal but it’s been adjusted so it doesn’t look like a tiny island.

Even this less adjusted one while going state-by-state, reveals the real popular vote state of the case:

The corollary lie one is hearing is that Obama is a man of the left. Not a bit of it. He’s centrist as this is understood today. We need not return to a stalemate of reactionary pro-super-rich, pro-evangelical religion versus everyone else, something sustained in Obama’s administration last year because he bought into the Republican’s point of view. He’s a hawk on foreign policy; he did not save Detroit, nor its people; he saved General Motors. He has not set up Employment offices (with healthy jobs programs to do much needed social services across the country), but left to us the same tired useless (how not to do it) unemployment offices — which have no jobs. He does not re-expand the Federal Gov’t the way Roosevelt did; he appoints more centrist and progressive types on the supreme court, he does not work directly to stop mass incarceration and brutal treatment of people for protesting peacefully, of minority young men for being black. At best he’s a mild ameliorator. But let us hold him to that. NO cutting our social security, medicaid, present programs at all. What has to happen is if they can his constituency and local leaders must push him to do the right thing strongly.

Huge numbers of people defied the harassment, the long hours they had to wait to vote. It took courage. The Occupy Movement has not been forgotten. All of us need one another to improve their lives. Let us think up and implement new programs (to shape and control global warming); let us re-fund older ones which worked to bring people together as friends, not competitive rivals and enemies. Talkin’ about a revolution. Keep as a goal Martin Luther King’s dreams of equal opportunity, human rights for all, time for pleasure and self-fulfillment; enacting one’s heart’s desire and finding peace.

Think of the arrogance for Romney to have run for president, accuse 47% of the population of not paying taxes at all, when it was he who paid no taxes from 1996 to 2009. See Bloomberg News and the comments below. Bill O’Reilly the last two days said (disdainfully sneeringly) how the many in the US want “stuff,” “things.” Fine for bankers to collect billions of course, and how the election was very close. Not so, and for just reasons.

Ellen

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George McGovern died yesterday — may his spirit & ideals live as an example to imitate

Recent photo

Dear friends and readers,

George McGovern died yesterday, Sunday, October 21, 2012. He was a great and a good man. He achieved nomination as the candidate for the Democratic Party in 1972. He genuinely garnering a majority of votes at the convention after having managed to change the rules of such conventions so that a small pre-, & self-selected elite of rich & powerful could not limit the choices. Had he been able to win the election in 1972, the world would be a much better place for the majority of peoples in it today.

He vowed to stop bombing Vietnam upon taking office. He was against supporting military & fascist dictatorships around the world. He would change the goals of NATO: to support the peoples of Europe toward a better life. He made commercials showing how a huge percentage of the elderly in the US are living on the edge of poverty, arguing for a support of college education for all, bringing into the picture of the US world the way the poor live in the US (white as well as black). He would set in place social programs to enable these people. His nomination included a platform from the Democratic party which was the first to announce women’s needs as part of a goal for the party; the first to support GLBTQ rights.

I sent two checks to this man, $20 each time, real money for me at the time (1972). Since then I’ve sent only an equal amount in 2008 to Obama (or I thought I was sending to Obama, but it turns out I sent it to Moveon.org) and $50 last year and $85 this to DemocracyNow.org. This is Amy Goodman’s news-show and this weekend I watched excerpts from the film about McGovern’s summer campaign in 1972: One Brief Shining Moment. I listened to him say how wrong it was to spill so much blood, to destroy so many young lives, so many people in Vietnam, Cambodia, their homes, their fields, their food. How he would end all bombing the day he took office. I’ve never heard anything like this from Obama. McGovern had no anti-racist rhetoric but black people were behind him and for the first time ever everywhere in a convention were ordinary people (all ethncities and in ordinary clothes). In 2012 the Democratic as well as Republican conventions were scripted performances run by fat cats (corporations, donors) with their fancy parties more than half paid by the gov’t. In this film you will not make the mistake to think that Nixon was a better choice than Romney today. We see him vowing no demonstration will alter his course as the police beat up, maim, murder young adults on US campuses (who are refusing to die or silently acquiesce).

New York City went for McGovern. I understand Alexandria City (where I now live), Va. did. The electoral college after gerrymandering made him look bad: he took DC and Massachusetts’ electoral votes. But he also took 39% of the people who voted. As did Mondale. Clinton didn’t get much more but they were differently distributed and there was a 3rd party candidate.

I had to wipe away the tears from my eyes as I watched Abe Ribicoff’s shock, horror at the Gestapo tactics of Mayor Daly’s Chicago police beating up white young people in the streets of Chicago who were refusing to go or send others to Vietnam to die, be maimed, and kill others. Who is shocked today to see police beating, pepper-spraying even aged people in the streets protesting civilly against the egregiously unjust economic systems of our era? The film was made in 2005 and so the interviewed had in mind our present era; yet they were prophetic: Gore Vidal spoke of the way the rich and elite despise the 75% and in effect predicted Romney’s scorn for 47% of the US population.

So many obituaries. From the New York Times to the Huffington Post. He is blamed for losing in 1972; there was some fatal flaw in him. Nonsense. His capturing of the nomination was a sort of fluke that was “fixed” by 1984 when the coteries were back in the driver’s seat of the convention again. Whatever he did in 1972 would have been turned against him. Nothing so easy as to ridicule someone when a dominant group are determined. William Grieder says it right: McGovern was the last genuinely open and honest presidential campaign.

We must not give up. McGovern never did. If it be that in this money-shaped gerry-mandered Presidential election, we can fend off the destruction of a civil, socially decent society, based on public education for all (under attack) with people allowed to unite on behalf of their shared working lives by electing Barack Obama, sobeit. A minimum to hold to. Better times may come. We are reeling from the effects of 30 years of reactionary legislation destroying jobs, changing the tax system to create globally-wide ruthlessly exploitative monopolies backed by brutal military action. We need time and Obama will provide another 4 years to re-group, defeat Citizens United, find a socially progressive candidate.

My father said McGovern lost because he was a genuinely nice person. Voters want someone like themselves, and most people aren’t so not only do they not appreciate such traits; they resent them. McGovern was not devious enough to hide himself — like FDR — during campaigning. But I like to remember that after that bruising campaign 39% of the voters did vote for him.

I’m sad tonight to think of this man gone, how he was treated in 1972. Humiliated, shamed, and stirred to remember how he stood up against it. How I admired him for that. I admire few people and think few deeds in the world equivalent to this in importance and personal cost.

Ellen

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Winston Graham’s Poldark novels: the second quartet (2)

‘He was quite capable of living a normal life, if other people would allow him (Dwight of the disabled Music Thomas, The Loving Cup, Bk 1, Ch 2)

‘Public wars, I call ‘em. Reckon you was lucky ever to come safe ‘home from that one in ‘Merica. Public wars is no good to no one. Small wars, private wars, they’re different, can profit you upon times.’ — Tholly Tregirls, dying words, The Twisted Sword (Bk 3, Ch 4)

The little room became a little corner of comfort in a black world — Graham’s narrator, The Twisted Sword (Bk 3, Ch 6)

Jill Townsend as Elizabeth Warleggan, she turns away having told Robin Ellis as Ross that her husband suspects that Ross is Valentine’s father (1977-78 Poldark, Pt 7, Ep 5, from Four Swans)

Dear friends and readers,

To continue: Perhaps it’s a good place to mention that these second quartet differs from the first 7 novels where most of the characters are fictional, wholly imagined. Wee may hear of some historically real characters and authors and books as part of re-creation of historical time in passing, but they do not appear (Poldark 1-7). In these we do meet historical characters who matter but while they create history, they do not give rise to the novels’ plot-design. That’s still the result of acts of the imagined characters.

I have two copies: one a hardcover American edition, 1991, Carroll and Graff; the other a 1991 Pan reprint with the photographs of the seacoast that became prevalent covers just before and during the time of the two mini-series (they are seen on the Fontana reprints). Both lacked this subtitle and date; that’s why I began to think that the epigraph was supposed to be emphasized (with its tragic and bitter Biblical implications, anti-war especially) rather than the place and year. And much of the novel takes place in Paris and the Belgian killing fields. I would agree that it ends back in Cornwall. It may just be an oversight but I’d like to know when the imprints other cited were published. Was it at first nuded of the usual regional framing and then that was put back as a selling point?

More important, they re-define Regency romance. Accurate Regency romances, historical fiction, need not be pseudo-silver fork novels about silly people romancing in Bath: this is a time of depression, riot and revolt, war, powerful people who have no consistent ideologies and thus ever-fluid parties. It’s also a time when such movement changes and endangers the choices available to people sexually.

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John Bowes as the older Ross talking to Ioan Gruffudd as Jeremy (1996 The Stranger from the Sea); The Loving Cup has never been filmed, but scenes like this occur in it

The second time round I loved this book. Looking at what I wrote I do think I was spot on, but this second time see the book more fully — in the context of this second quartet.

The Loving Cup is a kind of “push back” against the larger or war-torn conflicts and depression across the UK, Europe, Northern American and the high seas — whence its title. We’ve been where we experience or glimpse Regency England as war-ridden time, of depression, dislocation, It’s as if Graham is deliberately resurrecting the Cornwall community now against his first the first two books (Stranger from the Sea, Miller’s Dance). While we are made aware how bad things are elsewhere, our focus is really solely back in Cornwall. One reason for this is Geoffrey Charles has returned so there is no one to write letters from the front.

I find myself identifying with the parents, Ross and Demelza, who find themselves unable to rescue Clowance, their daughter from her bad decision to nurse and then marry the renegade (scoundrel) but plausible and ever so human Stephen Carrington or their son from enlisting and going off to the dangerous wars. In this sense this novel turns back into centrally a story of Ross and Demelza.

Last time I wrote at length about how Demelza risks her life to get at the left-over booty from the robbery that Jeremy and his two friends stole at the close of Miller’s Dance, and hid deep in an old mine (a cave) only available by climbing a rickety ladder down to the sea; all she takes away is the small silver loving cup. I did not know what this was at the time: a symbol of love where people intertwine arms as they exchange the cup. It was Harriet’s aunt Darcy’s (an allusion to Pride and Prejudice). Jeremy knowing that that could implicate him (because of its specificity) asks her not to keep it on the mantelpiece but in a drawer. He’s not sure whether it will bring bad or good luck. What I didn’t realize was their conversation is laden with ominous notes anticipating this death. He says he will tell her someday all “about it.” How he came to participate in the robbery. She ways don’t wait too long – there have been other ominous notes suggesting that Jeremy will die — as he does at Waterloo, the great shock of Book 11.

A thread on a Women’s Studies list-serv alerted me to something else I had not noticed the first time round: that the story of Clowance’s marriage to Stephen Carrington is the story of a bigamist from a woman’s point of view. This, like rape, especially presented sympathetically, is highly unusual in a novel, even more seriously in a historical fiction. Most of the time the “other” woman, the second wife is presented as vile, stealing the husband, to blame for not knowing. Here it’s convincing that Clowance would not know, and that while she suspects there are things in Stephen’s past, she partly (from what she does know), doesn’t want to know, and partly has no way of finding out.

The novels are not sequels to one another and I must jump ahead to explain. It’s upon rereading one feels the cutting edge of Ben’s comment that the engagement and marriage of Clowance and Carrington “gates like a knife on a bone every waking hour” (to Jeremy, Loving Cup, Bk 1, Ch 4).

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Hans Mathiessen as Ben Carter, one of three decent men Clowance turns down over the course of this quartet (1996 Stranger)

When Stephen lays dying in The The Twisted Sword (Bk 3, Ch 9), Jason sits by Clowance’s side, grieving over his father. Jason had aroused her suspicions when earlier he revealed that he had grandparents an Uncle Zed, an Aunt Looe (Bk 1, Ch 9); a whole family existed where his mother and father were married and lived (which Stephen had denied, presenting himself as an orphan dependent on the tolerance of strangers). Stephen had told her that his first wife, Marion (whom she had not heard of before The Twisted Sword) and he were 17 when married: he did married Marion because she was pregnant, hardly ever lived with her, and she died of small pox when Jason was 10; he now admits to 37 rather than 34 (Bk 1, Ch 3).

When Jason now nervously fingers his scarf, something left him from his mother, and says his mother knitted this for him more than 2 years ago, Clowance askes when did Marion die? this past winter? He becomes embarrassed and finally is driven to admit it could be his mother died January 1814.

Looking back, Clowance and Stephen were married May 28th, 1814 (The Loving Cup). But he arrived Nampara fall 1810 (Clowance refers to this when she says he came here 5 years ago (Stranger from the Sea); he began to court her immediately. @e know he was having an affair with Violet in midsummer’s Eve 1811 (Stranger from the Sea) had sex with her just as she lay dying, July 1812 and she died August 2, 1812 (all Miller’s Dance). He has a kinky taste of the captain in Tarchetti’s Fosca (turned into an opera called Passion by Sondheim). There are strong hints he has been having Lottie Kempthorne (Miller’s Dance) and was one of Selina Pope’s lovers (Loving Cup, along with Jeremy and Valentine who marries her). They were engaged for first time April 1812 (Miller’s Dance) to be married in November. This was broken off after time at fair, Clowance sees Stephen lie to Andrew, Ben finds old medieval warren in mine and confrontation (October 1812). So it’s apparent Stephen was ready to commit bigamy.

Clowance also has by now learned of Stephen’s unnecessary (gleeful) murder of a man who was part of a team trying to press him and Paul Kellowes into the UK navy; has to live with him and listen, and knows how he leaps to justify, and moves from lie to lie. And yet she stays. Pride? Not wanting to show others what she has chosen? Partly.

An important difference is how this situation unusually. Demezla early on knows the great danger of marrying a man because something “in your blood” responds instinctively to his feral presence — this is how Clowance accounts for her love for a man she knows before she marries him is at least a liar, careless of others, an unworthy man. In most the woman is punished by overt abuse and becomes abject. For women such erotic awakening brings erotic renunciation — in too many novels to cite, but they include Lfayette’s La Princesse de Cleves, Montolieu’s Caroline de Lichfield, Austen’s Sense & Sensibility, Mary Brunton’s Self-Control, Bonte’s Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Trollope’s Small House of Allington (Lily Dale – yes men write these too), E. h. Young’s Jenny Wren, Forster’s Howards’ End. James’s Portrait of a Lady is turned into a punitive experience, harsh, by Jane Campion.

Graham’s Clowance grows thin, silenter, starker, gradually withdraws from this man emotionally as she comes closer to another of Demelza’s feared prediction: dislike, intense distaste. We see that Stephen is moving in that direction towards her too. But his accidental death cuts this trajectory off when he is insulted by Harriet Warleggan who sneers at his idea that she maneuvered George Warleggan into not turning Stephen into a bankrupt because she was sexually attracted to him. He tries to outdo her in racing horses and literally leaps to his death.

Clowance withdraws and at the end of The Twisted Sword says only that if she ever marries again, it will be for money and position — as Harriet Warleggan who also married early and for love, in her case a gambler, has done. The point I want to make is Clowance makes no renunciation, is not punished and therefore not blamed.

The revelation happens in now Aug/Sept; Stephen dies October 13, 1815 (The Twisted Sword, Bk 3, Ch 12). The last novel of the quartet is structured so this relevatory scene is preceded by the one where Valentine ferrets out of Ross that Ross may be (is?) his father (Bk 3, Ch 8). In Loving Cup a paralleled are set up between Clowance and Jeremy and Valentine. (Valentine was omitted from the 1996 movie, along with Geoffrey Charles so I have no stills to help us along), and the first is fulfilled at the end of Twisted Sword; not until Bella is Valentine’s need of Ross and tragedy of a lost soul seeking another vulnerable creature in need made clear. Valentine is not blamed either. but this does not emerge until the very end of Bella.

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Battlefield of Waterlook photographed 21st century), The Twisted Sword has never been filmed

My first essay-blog on this novel was adequate but I find I have more to say, much to add, but will confine myself to a few points.

Something interesting in its first editions — even if dropped later. All of the Poldark novels but one are subtitled: “Cornwall,” with some group of years next to that. The only one which hasn’t got this is The Twisted Sword. It doesn’t even say 1815. As I begin it the characters move to London and then to Paris. Much of the book does take place in Europe — or more than usual, and this opening is an attempt to dramatize and picture France just after Napoleon was first defeated and sent to Elba. A quiet place as yet, even if with so many wounded. He gets it right that what was hated about the replacement of the old order was that order and especially the Bourbon king who went right back to the old behavior of utter indifference to everything but his appetites and desires and that of his narrow court. What ever may be said of Napoleon, he was deeply concerned with the people and structure of France, its laws, its codes, its commerce.

In later editions the subtitle is attached and the year — to make the book conform. Editor and publishers like “their” product to be branded clearly.

In London we are told of the results of this regency, the devastation of the marketplaces and continual depression, dislocation underlying the assassination of Perceval and one of Liverpool’s concerns.

The Twisted Sword was also originally presented as the last of the Poldark novels and there was a 13 year period between the time of publication of TS and Bella (which returns to the formula Cornwall plus dates.) Bella of course ties all the knots and its tragic climax (well penultimate chapter with qualified contented ones for some to follow) brings us right back to the consequences of the rape (Warleggan) and that to the opening when Ross returns and Elizabeth is about to marry Francis, but if I was reading this book in 1993, TS does feel like an ending — a tragic one I know as I’ve read it already. On the field of Waterloo.

Its epigraph: Deliver my soul from the sword;/my darling from the power of the dog. Psalm 22, Verse 20. None of the other of the Poldark books has an epigraph either.

Twisted Sword in its last phases is a depiction of the experience of devastating murdering in mud and rain, relentlessly, on the field of Waterloo. As I wrote last time, Graham got all his details of where Jeremy died and where the various positions were from Keegan’s Face of Battle:

Very moved once again though I knew a chief beloved hero was to die. I noticed a passages I had overlooked before. Tholly himself dying comments on Jeremy’s death: these public wars are useless and counterproductive to all but the elite (the book was written in
1991so a slightly broader view of the elite is meant than would be today); it’s only private wars that are in the interest of the a age person, those he or she engages in directly. Not always even then. He smuggles as well as works on the Packet Service. private war is defined in such a way as to capture far more than illegal activity.

A couple of the political insights I’ve gained from these books I used at the Burney meeting, and people liked them. I of course did not tell them these came to me from reading the Poldark novels. I would not want embarrass anyone or be disbelieved so I said I found them in John Stuart Mill. I used one for my argument in my paper on liberty in the first seven Poldark novels. Understandable riots include the one instigated by Ross in Demelza, and again in this community to keep hecklers and mortifiers away from Music and Katie’s wedding.

Perhaps most beautiful in these four novels is the not just compassion but respect for the disabled that Graham evidences. If other people would just allow them to flourish, they would. But some single difference, and the smell of vulnerability is too much for the average person and the prevalence of bullies, encouraged cruelties (teasing) and for others to leave alone. Rosina who marries Sam (lame), Ben (a loner, unable to socialize easily), Music Thomas (sensitive and a little slow in reaction) are made outcasts and we watch all of them become good people even — recognized only by those who are themselves outsiders (Sam, Katie Carter, Ross and Dwight). Dwight is most responsible for this and the character almost re-arouses a respect for doctors in me mostly destroyed by what I’ve seen of the profession in the US today my attitude is more like Francis Poldark when he first meets Dwight — disbelief — Francis later turns to him when he becomes suicidal.

I made myself read the last part of this novel (Book 4, the coda after Jeremy and Carrington’s deaths) slowly so as to savor the poignant semi-tragic, semi-bitter close, another of Graham’s barely-endured Christmases, with its quiet compensations as life moves on.

I agree with those who say of Graham’s novels that this too does not come to a close — but then life never does and many of the books have this continuation aspect. My students the two times I set Ross Poldark said it felt like much more to come. In Twisted Sword though Clowance has learned a bitter disillusioning lesson and there is Fitzmaurice on the horizon to marry for money and position and Jeremy is dead. There’s Valentine but he has at least been told if indirectly and by Ross he’s Ross’s son and we know Harriet will carry on holding her own against George and protect her twin daughters adequately. Probably Graham meant to end it — again my paperback edition has a cover which says this is the conclusion of the series. But in 2003 he decided he would indeed develop Valentine much more — and he does, beautifully I think.

Among the last stills of Ross and Demelza at the close of Warleggan and the 1977-78 film series

To me particularly effective and personally inspiriting was Dwight and Ross’s outwitting and maneuvering using another scavenging of a wreck by impoverished ignorant brutal people in order to allow one marriage, Music Thomas with Katie Martin, to go forth. I so admire Graham for his depiction of disabilities deeply empathetically. Where do you find that even today? This marriage though repeats a pattern we’ve seen elsewhere, the woman who will not at first at least have sex with a man once married — for example Morwenna (so wounded) when first married to Drake. An irony as in life often a relationship does begin with sexual encounter and after all that’s how Ross and Demelza clinched theirs (says she smiling)

And the ending here really put me in mind of some Leopardi poems (I’m an 18th century literary scholar and have an interest in Italian poetry) as we watch the disillusioned characters with the various losses preserve something positive amid the wreckage. We cannot live our lives out without the relief illusions and companionship offers, and the ending with Ross and Demelza, her tossing that bitter loving cup deep into a well repeats other similar endings only this time (“life is all there is” is at one, and Demelza says it’s enough), but this time the reflective sadness goes on for longer as if to take into account the winding up of the different stories.

I’m actually dreaming — thinking of — writing a novel using these character. I’d like to try Elizabeth Chynoweth Poldark Warleggan. I’ve used a still of her (at the head of the first part of this blog) on the Literary Society’s message board. In this novel when I’d done I found myself hunting for the passages where characters come across her spinning wheel, hear her firm but quiet steps, listen for her gentle presence and hear her ex-husband and two sons ferociously argue over the things they assert they cherish. She had a fine spirit, meant to have as much integrity as she could, tolerant, well-meaning, egalitarian at heart, thoughtful, she out of inability to cope with finances married a bully (George Warleggan) whose behavior led her to risk death to persuade him to leave her and her son by Francis Poldark (Geoffrey Charles) and her son by Ross (Valentine Warleggan) alone in peace.

Jill Townsend as Elizabeth she lies there dying from her effort to make her husband like her boy by Ross; she realizes she is dying and says how she’s afraid of the dark. Her life’s decisions were based on wariness, and yet all decisions are leaps, and the harsh relentless George was too much for her.

Ellen

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Alexander Cockburn has also died, let us honor his memory

Alexander Cockburn, a recent photo

Dear friends and readers,

For a long time I was a subscriber to the Village Voice so that I should not miss Alexander Cockburn’s columns. I didn’t worry about him the way I have his heroic brother, Patrick (who has spent years wandering around the Middle East reporting what actually occurs and staying alive despite his blue eyes, so I know he must be recognized by many as a true friend), and be relieved when I saw a new column (an example of a typical column), but I was aware Alexander’d been around for a long time and yesterday when I read he had died of cancer, was not surprised. Today there have been many obituaries, columns, blogs honoring him, his writing, his views, his courage, his integrity, his career.

I probably can’t add to what has been said: I can qualify though. Repeatedly I keep coming across the assertion this or that writer didn’t agree with Cockburn on many issues, e.g., Jesse Walker. Why this need to distance oneself? Even Anthony Gregory feels this need to qualify, though at least not on grounds Cockburn was too much a man of the left. I admit in late years (in the Progressive Populist for example), sometimes Cockburn’s rhetoric seemed to turn him into yet another overly-fierce, reductively distrustful voice. I put that down to the increase of not just reactionary rhetoric but shameless buying and selling, killing, (in effect) lawless imprisonment, legislation which increases homelessness, unemployment, the destruction of middle class jobs, job security, any social safety nets to the extent that thousands and thousands are now dependent on food stamps to keep from starvation. Now we have the threat that the small help Obama’s Affordable Healthcare bill will offer people will not only be repealed, but only Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Cockburn’s language, stances, and jokes register this.

So, in his honor, I copy and paste one of his parodies that Jim found on a blog called Blood and Treasure. Tonight I have in mind especially anyone who talks of balance in seeking effective gun control legislation after the blood bath in Aurora at midnight at the first screening of a new stunt-man violent move, The Dark Knight:

Why Eat Human Flesh, transcribed from the McNeil-Lehrer report:

NEIL: Good evening. Reports from the Donner Pass indicate that survivors fed upon their companions. Tonight, should cannibalism be regulated? Jim?

LEHRER: Robin, the debate pits two diametrically opposed sides against each other: the Human Meat-eaters Association, who favor a free market in human flesh, and their regulatory opponents in Congress and the consumer movement. Robin?

MACNEIL: Mr. Tooth, why eat human flesh?

TOOTH: Robin, it is full of protein and delicious too. Without human meat, our pioneers would be unable to explore the West properly. This would present an inviting opportunity to the French, who menace our pioneer routes from the north.

MACNEIL: Thank you. Jim?

LEHRER: Now for another view of cannibalism. Bertram Brussell-Sprout is leading the fight to control the eating of animal fats and meats. Mr. Sprout, would you include human flesh in this proposed regulation?

SPROUT: Most certainly, Jim. Our studies show that some human flesh available for sale to the public is maggot-ridden, improperly cut, and often incorrectly graded. We think the public should be protected from such abuses.

I can also add an insightful informative interview of Cockburn by Amy Goodman.

Finally, see Defiant to the End; people who knew and loved him, The Nation; the Boston Herald.

And here is Counterpunch.

He will be missed. We need many more people like him.

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A recent appearance in debate

An appropriate poem — by Dylan Thomas:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light …

Ellen

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Disney’s Dumbo, Jean de Brunhoff’s Babar & elephants

One of the lesser cruel images from Disney’s Dumbo

Dear friends and readers,

For the first time ever I’ve been made aware of the ceaselessly cruelty of the child’s movie, Dumbo.

I’m shocked. I don’t remember seeing it since I was a small child, but were I a parent taking a child to this movie, I’d leave. The bullying and humiliation of the small elephant are endless, and seem to be put there shamelessly to encourage watchers to enjoy it. And yet he’s a small elephant and would not the viewer-children be upset? The blog suggests most children show deep upset at the separation from the mother and call this film “gender violence:” it seems to me the gender violence is part of the larger revelry in scapegoating. The imagery is sheer nightmare.

When I read the first story of Jean de Brunhoff’s Babar the Elephant to my older daughter, Laura, and the mother died, Laura was stunned and deeply upset. I remember being startled and not having realized how seriously she would take it. I suppose no fuss has ever been made about Dumbo and if one did, the Disney forces would mock to mock anyone who tried to expose this. I had quite a time trying to console her and was made to see how real stories are to a child. We had a similar experience several years later when Laura watched Faerie Tale theater’s Rapunzel with its mean ugly mother-witch. She again became very upset; this time I shut the TV off.

On July 4th here in the US we are subject to celebrations of military violence (in effect). Bob Dixon singles this out in his political analysis of US and UK boys’ adventure stories.

But here is something more deadly underlying it. The very name of the little elephant is a mock on intelligence, a saturnine jeering. Elephants are mythically (and in reality) intelligent creatures. It’s horrible. Look at this wikipedia article which never once mentions the meaning and thrust of this tale for real, only its popularity at the time! It was followed by Disney’s cartoon Pinocchio, which I remember still becoming so terrified by I began to scream and my parents had to take me from the movie-house. They were shocked at me, at my reaction, and tried to make something of a joke of it, but my father soon stopped.

The French story has but one brief moment and a few frames when the mother dies and the rest of the story is humane. Here is where the poignant sequence in Jean de Brunhoff’s first tale begins:

Brunhoff condemns the hunter and especially the power of his gun. Afterward I felt bad bout reading this book to my daughter and then that my first impulse was not to take her distress seriously enough. The librarian (we were in a library) told me to read the next tale, and the Laurent de Brunhoff sequels became a beloved series for Laura with their real celebration of the “Pachyderms” as my father (her grandfather) would call them. In these the stories eventually become silly; the elephants all stand up on two feet, they are crowned, all is easy luxury; they image much snobbery. (The father’s books are much simpler and truer to realities.) Still I never forgot that first moment, and tellingly, my younger daughter, Isobel, never seemed to care much about the later Brunhoff books.

Now I wonder what is the relationship between the Brunhoff book and Russell Banks’s novel, The Sweet Hereafter. I probably discounted the power of the tale and its central death in my blog on Egoyan’s film too emphatically.

People interested in disability issues should also be alerted to what Disney’s Dumbo is and how it functions. One reads of the continual defense of bullies in US culture, the refusal to recognize victims, how still disabled people are subject to punishment by police. Here we have before incarnated one reinforcing source. It seems to me no coincidence that at the time Disney was doing all it could to destroy the union people who worked for them depended upon to protect and to use for group and individual support.

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For perhaps twenty years now Jim and I have had this poster on the wall of our bathroom. I picked it up in a thrift shop:

I’ve never considered its relationship to the Brunhoff (father and son) books nor the way elephants are regarded in myths. I’ve never given it a lot of thought: it’s just this poster stuck inside a cheap plastic frame that I like. Well, I like what it images, it has a kindness like the Babar stories generally do, and celebrates something associated with upper class French ways (wine-drinking). It’s also old-fashioned: the bathtub has feet. The two elephants are relaxed. But it also runs exactly counter to the Dumbo story and realities of Jean de Brunhoff’s first (and later) books.

I wrote this little personal coda partly to soften the content of this blog.

Stunned into writing a blog,

Ellen

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Splendeurs et misères: George Bellows at the National Gallery

George Bellows (1882-1925), Paddy Flannigan (1909) — the insolence with which he guards himself is not going to help him much in life

Bellows, Madeline Davis, the post-master’s orphaned grand-daughter (1914) — the pathos and loneliness of her expressive face has a wounded feel

Moonlight Skating — Central park, the Terrace and the Lake, 1878 (by John O’Brien Inman) — the kind of picture Bellows sought to replace

Dear Friends and readers,

Another must-see! Splendeurs et misères (as in Balzac’s novel). This one is just chock-a-block with these magnificent brilliant stunning pictures, intelligently set up so you can journey through a career and age:

Knowing that I cannot do justice to the initial impact, social vision, painterly splendor, and wide range of the pictures (they seem to come from so many museums, private collections, and books) by George Bellows at the National Gallery, I thought I might suggest why people should be sure and go to this exhibit either in DC, or New York (it’s coming to the Met next) or London (the Royal Academy) by at least displaying unusual images reprinted in the generous catalogue book edited by Charles Brock, but I find that lots of people have beat me to it. The Net has a slew of images of Bellows work readily available, and armed with a few titles and a little effort the viewer can find many lesser known lithographs:

Bellows. A lynching (the caption says the law takes too long it’s meant ironically);

illustrations:

Bellows, Hungry Dogs;

(a favorite subject for Bellows), Hudson River landscapes:

Bellows, Rain on the River (1908);

paintings of widespread banal poverty and mutually-inflicted human misery:

Bellows, Cliff Dwellers (1914) — as a child I watched my mother string out wet clothes across a street in the Bronx (circa 1950);

hugely crowded (not a space, not a place of rest in the canvas) and exhilarating or nearly people-less and desolate nightmare city- and industrial landscape:

Bellows, Building Grand Central (a series);

and of course savagely violent boxing:

Bellows, Both Members of the Club (the way elites watched illegal boxing was to allow the instruments of their appetite to become members for a night).

The Net even has caches of Bellows’s lesser known exquisite John Singer Sergeant (or Cecilia Beaux) type portraiture:

George Bellows, Geraldine Lee (1914) — I just love the tone of that pink outfit, and don’t miss the dark pink hat

So what could I say that would suggest maybe there is something there you’ve not seen before? or remind you of what there is to see in huge and vivid size? or suggest what this particular exhibit might offer them?

Well, first, I lead with two portraits I found especially arresting, and a third picture card landscape (Inman’s populist Central Park). Then show by choices from the wide selection on the Net and my new book that while partly denying this (nervously), the exhibit nonetheless cannot help but insistently demonstrate the moving socialist and pro-people point of view that Bellows spent much of his art making electrifyingly visible.

I hope this choice suggests something of the variety and themes Bellows favored for most of his career. He worked for a magazine called The Masses, and was close with John Reed (Ten Days that Shook the World) whose name pops up repeatedly in the little explanations on the walls of the exhibit. The electrocution is one of these:

Bellows, The Electrocution.

A note of critical evaluation: Wonderfully attractive & sharply incisive, some with satirical commentary (as in his huge pictures of Billy Sunday with huge crowds labelled by his as evil for art, spiritual life and decency) as most of the paintings and drawings are, they did fall off after or around the time of World War I. The exhibit reveals how quickly Bellows was tremendously successful despite his apparent iconoclasm and radicalism. If he did make visible what the elite and powerful did not like to look at in real life, they didn’t mind when it came to his art. And as he grew successful, he seems to have stepped away from painting scenes of modern half-crazy slightly nightmare-like city life and landscape, from exposures of human cruelty.

In the exhibit World War I was a kind of turning point for Bellows’s art. While his WW1 pictures were certainly shocking and determined to show the viewer Writ Large the hideous violence and indifference to human suffering that war causes (hands cut off, a woman with her breast cut off by a man who sits next to her smoking a cigarette) and how people have no problem inflicting inhumane gov’t policies:

Bellows, Return of the Useless [from POW and slave labor camps] (1918),

they are also overt propaganda which falsifies, makes theatrical and turns war into crass displays of sentiment. As Bellows grew richer, went to live in Grammercy Park, took his holidays in Maine,and built a home in Woodstock, he began to idealize and make enigmatic landscapes, which if lovely felt child-like or cartoon-y.

One example: until this turning point, I was so aware of the hard life of horses in Bellows pictures. Big dray ones, tired, men standing nearby with whips; they were ubiquitous, used carelessly and ignored (in the picture at any rate). Then suddenly there was this vision of a horse at last without a harness, making its way towards a heavenly sky:

Bellows, The White Horse (1922)

Now the dog is happy, tail wagging, getting plenty to eat.

His later work is made up of more landscapes (now undistinguished from postcard type), pictures of himself, Emma, his wife, and daughter as, fore example, an exemplary fisherman and family, of the daughter dressed like an upper class lady of long ago, jumping rope in the privacy of Grammercy Park. These show the same splendors of paint and strong theatricality of all the paintings, maybe show it up.

Maybe one of the reasons Bellows did so well was finally his paintings do not disquiet, even the most savage of them. They celebrate being alive; nature is a dynamic glorious force and if many people have to live anonymous hard lives, they are not doing it alone and they do it vigorously.

Throughout the exhibit one read of how “masculine” was his vision and it is true that except as John Singer Sergeant type ladies or young working girls painted with unusual compassion and dignity in the same mode, the pictures are crowded with men, show male activities, present young working boys (rather than girls) bathing in the city rivers. Women appear: scolding children, as prostitutes, as fancy paid mistresses of fat cat males with top hats, but they are more in the mode of side affairs, decorations, there like the horses with male as the main dominating sufferers and power. When his style changed, and grew more stylized, flatter, I liked his pictures less. I found too that I sometimes got more out of his drawings, the lines bringing out clearly what he was showing than the colouristic treatment of the paintings.

Perhaps had Bellows lived into the depression, he would have found a new angle and returned to his original subject matter and perspective, moved into another new style. He did die young: aged 42, of peritonitis after his appendix burst. Cut off but not forgotten.

I do not mean to detract from the value of the paintings at all, but rather suggest that a viewer sees enough to begin to think for herself beyond the incessant praise of the explanations. The exhibit was accompanied by tables in the center of the rooms with hand-written notes by Bellows or his wife of prices, exhibits, their plans of what to do next. You felt them as people, two lives and a career unfolding before you.

As I particularly love meditative landscapes, I was entranced by the vivid variety and intense colors of these, the appropriate objects and things in them, like a particular kind of tree, a lone house, sparkles in just the right corner of something. Winter and (the real effects of) snow were favorite themes for Bellows — and so too for me. And I spent many years of my life walking up and down drives along the Hudson river so was drawn in repeatedly:

Bellows, Winter Afternoon (1908)

Bellows, Easter Snow (something we may not see any more) — I do like that boy and girl (I have a photo of me aged 2, in spring, standing on a mountain of snow)

It seems that Bellows’s wife, Emma (who was a fellow art student) managed to live quite well after her husband died. She had been a central person in his life; one sees that immediately after his death, a wide exhibit was set up in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, that she carried on selling his pictures for higher and higher prices. His loving picture of her which suggests a fulfilled domestic life is one of the lead pictures for the exhibit:

Bellows, Emma at the Piano (1914)

The National Gallery has quite a summer schedule of exhibits. There’s a fine small display of photography called “I Spy” (“the theater of the street”); pictures by the Renaissance writer, Castiglione; and coming in another couple of weeks
another blockbuster show, this one featuring alluring pictures which remind me of E. M. Forster scenes

Jim and I are lucky to live within a hop, skip and jump of Washington D. C.
We get to the National Gallery by driving at around 2 pm to a street about 5 minutes away from our house which allows three-hour parking. The three hours is over at 5 pm. So we are safe from a ticket. The Metro train is a block away, the trip about 20 to 30 minutes depending on vagaries of fixing, time, crowds. Then we walk a block in the Penn Quarter which is just the sort of place that Bellows would have painted.

Ellen

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The last of Sherlock?: The Reichenbach Fall; or, What does infamy matter?

Psychologist [the black woman the 1st episode of the 1 season began with, Ella, played by Tanya Moodie]: “Why today?
John [Martin Freeman]: “Do you want to hear me say it?”
Ella: “18 months since our last appointment.”
John: “You read the papers?”
Ella: “Sometimes
John: “And you watch tele … you know why I’m here … I’m here becau … se … [cannot speak it]
Music starts.
Ella: “What happened John?
[the theme music for this series in minor poignant key]
John: “Sher … ummm … [looks up] …
Ella: “You need to get it out
John: “My best friend Sherlock Holmes [very faint on that last syllable] dead
[Harsh raucous music, rhythmic begins and we switch to that busy city neon-lit street, and the city with the ferris wheel] Sherlock BBC 2012

John Watson (Martin Freeman), first shot, close up

John and Ella (Tanya Moodie), second & far shot

It is with a heavy heart that I take up my pen to write these the last words in which I shall ever record the singular gifts by which my friend, Mr Sherlock Holmes was distinguished — Arthur Conan Doyle, The Final Problem

Silent, restrained, dignified grief (we do not see David Burke’s face), 1988 The Final Problem

Dear friends and readers,

The contrast is striking, no? the camp, contemporary, steely-edged sarky Sherlock opens with the intense distress, unguarded, of a man left alone. The 1890s bravura short story with an impersonal distanced grave memorialization (as seen in the 1988 Final Problem).

Not that Conan Doyle’s text has not got the usual pizzazz: Moriarty was first introduced in this tale (intended to kill off this character) thus: “He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson.” His reach makes Osama bin Laden look feeble: insidious inexplicable evil everywhere. Wild crazed paranoia? Literary and historical critics tell us (in speaking of where Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde gained its popularity, Dracula its force) of racism, the tiny embatttled middle and upper middle class of the great cities of Europe understandably terrified by the underclasses they made and exploited. All Conan Doyle can reference is this inexplicable spider with paid agents so ubiquitous, several are ready by the Reichenbach Falls (Switzerland) to lure Sherlock to his death (after duly separating his faithful supposedly sane friend Watson back to the nearby hotel inn).

But except for this important direct parallel of demonizing Arab and Southasian people (for similar reasons, today’s 1% making huge sums off their wars, weapons, exported industries, imposed infrastructures), we must forget the literal details of the originating story. And for me also forget its 1986 transposition in the Jeremy Brett version, scripted by John Hawkesworth, as the IMDB reviewer says “beautiful scenery, thoughtful reflective,” with just that note of doubt: one which turns the first story into a personal rivalry of psychological dimensions. (I’ve not seen any of the other versions.)

The 2012 Reichenbach Fall by Steve Thomson is not an external chase, but an inward one. In brief, Moriarty drives Sherlock to suicide by heaping infamy on Sherlock, by shaming him, by disgracing him. Sherlock is revealed to have been a fake. We open with a montage of cases solved, good done, grateful near- and ex-victims. Sherlock has much to be proud of. Then the topple. It matters not how this is managed only that Sherlock himself at the crucial point of the episode suddenly confesses. Yes yes. He has been lying all along. He is no genius. (Shout this at the top of your voice, anguished tones.) And we see him fill John in on how he researched his disquisitions before he flared out with them, apparently on the spot, spontaneously.

W. Turner, The Upper Falls of the Reichenbach (a Turner was used in the episode)

St Bartholomew Hospital, showing its name on the side

Well, who can live with this? The final moments need not be in Switzerland; they are on the roof of an ancient hospital in Smithfield, one still going strong, St Bartholomew’s (recently expanded once again). Sterling performance by Andrew Scott as Moriarity of seething hatred (cool, self contained, camp) as he goads, needles and jeers Sherlock (Benedict Cumberbatch) into jumping. Actually the argument is offhand: “oh just kill yourself it’s a lot less effort.”

No need to go through the ins and outs of Sherlock’s infamy. I suppose the reference is to the way we live now — the public image all. Juvenal (the Roman satiric poet), asked “What does Infamy Matter: when you get to keep your fortune?” Well to Sherlock his fortune doesn’t matter. Apparently in this world we are really supposed to care what other people think. Why?

Mycroft separated himself from his brother. Why? Because others do and he fears what? he will lose what? Lestrade too.

To the point that what intimate beloved friend believes and feels doesn’t count.

Surely reactive defiance was the way to go, turn and laugh at Moriarty in turn. I thought again of Orson Welles on top of that ferris wheel in The Third Man laughing at the idea he should imitate Ronald Colman (“it is a far far better thing …”) and jump.

I agree with Judy Shoaf who commented on my second blog on this series that these films are disturbing, disquieting, especially in their depiction of Sherlock:

The question posed is whether Sherlock himself is good or bad -– capable of friendship or merely manipulative.

At graveside, we have to listen to Mrs Hudson fall in with the crowd. Now she is complaining about her lodger, Mr Holmes, all the trouble he caused her. But John doesn’t. John believes his best, his one friend is dead.

Standing there John says it was okay by him that “you weren’t a hero. There were times I didn’t think you were human. But you were the best man … human being I’ve ever known and no one will convince me that you told me a lie … so … [music starts, soft, harmonic] there … ” He goes over and pats the gravestone.

“I was so alone and I owe you so much.” Turns and walks away. Turns back. “Oh please there’s just one more thing, one more miracle for me, don’t be … dead” (tight voice), “just for me” (light tones, strained) stop it, stop this.” These games.

Cries, the poignant theme comes back. Deep sighs. Stands up straight. Military person suddenly at attention. Turn right. Turn back. March off.
Then the camera shows us the POV has a statuesque, expressionless Sherlock Holmes as the music turns lightly raucas.

What to make of this? he is betraying his one friend. Causing him intense grief. Lying to him. Does Sherlock not trust John?

A film exists in its own right. It may be next year we will have some explanation. The next season has not only been announced (see The Empty House which will be the first episode) but the makers know most readers of Sherlock Holmes stories know this is the story that came half-way through the set), but the gap is long enough to let this moment sink in. Years will pass of loneliness for Watson. What excuse can there be for this? is the way we are pushed to feel.

It’s not too much to see it as the image of the broken vet and a rejection of marine mentality that glorifies war and invents, indeed makes evil. Of hollow men. The pale face is vampiric and come to think of it the way his long coat flares out cape-like as he falls.

Either a stunt man (action-adventure movies are stunt movies), or computer generated

The Reichenbach Fall with its comic pun is still an anti-costume costume drama where historical fiction with all its luxuriant nostalgic ambivalence presents us with a usable past to comment on our present.

What should we take to heart? what should we steel ourselves against? The episode does not really make a joke of infamy (or paranoia).

Ellen

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May Day in New York City and around the world

Tom Morello and his “Guitarmy” perform his “World Wide Rebel Song” and Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” for the crowd at Union Square.

Dear friends and readers,

It’s been a week since I last blogged and I have been longing to blog here, and tonight at last I have a topic so important and dear I hope all my friends and readers — our hope for change for the better for us all –, that I must blog. May Day. I did post twice on my Sylvia blog (That dog: he ran away; women without men ought to be ought there working from Day One; May Day) but in neither case did I have the material I really wanted: good talk, films, songs, dancing, conveying the immediate experience of what was going on in so many places as well as a history of May Day and all it has meant and could mean again since it was first promulgated in the 1880s in the US.

I came across that tonight: Amy Goodman’s DemocracyNow.org podcast: she does first interviews Tariq Ali (British-Pakistani political commentator, writer, activist, and editor of the New Left Review. Author of numerous books, including The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad) and Amy Wright (retired US Army colonel and diplomat) on Obama’s midnight visit to Afghanistan: both are worth listening to. But what I am hoping you’ll stay for is what follows: over 40 minutes of broadcast of the Occupy movement joining with unions, all sorts of associations, people in the streets from colleges, to make their voices and reality known. I wanted to embed this video onto this site, but found when I went to UTube (where I have an account), it must be under 15 minutes. I can though provide a link and if you click you will have a bloody great picture, good sound and be inspirited as I was:

May Day in New York City and around the world

Two poems:

Poem

I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane.
The news would pour out of various devices
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.
I would call my friends on other devices;
They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.
Slowly I would get to pen and paper,
Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.
In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,
Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,
considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,
We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,
To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile
Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,
Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means
To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,
To let go the means, to wake.

I lived in the first century of these wars.

–Muriel Rukeyser

The Proletariat Speaks

I love beautiful things:
Great trees, bending green winged branches to a velvet lawn, Fountains sparkling
in white marble basins,
Cool fragrance of lilacs and roses and honeysuckle

Or exotic blooms, filling the air with heart-contracting odors; pacious rooms,
cool and gracious with statues and books,
Carven seats and tapestries, and old masters,
Whose patina shows the wealth of centuries.

And so I work
In a dusty office, whose grimed windows
Look out on an alley of unbelievable squalor,
Where mangy cats, in their degradation, spurn
warming bits of meat and bread;
Where odors, vile and breath-taking, rise in fetid waves
Filling my nostrils, scorching my humid, bitter cheeks.

I love beautiful things:
Carven tables laid with lily-hued linen
And fragile china and sparkling iridescent glass;
Pale silver, etched with heraldries,
Where tender bits of regal dainties tempt,
And soft-stepped service anticipates the unspoken wish.

And so I eat
In the food-laden air of a greasy kitchen,
At an oil-clothed table:
Plate piled high with food that turns my head away,
Lest a squeamish stomach reject too soon
The lumpy gobs it never needed.
Or in a smoky cafeteria, balancing a slippery tray
To a table crowded with elbows
Which lately the busboy wiped with a grimy rag.

I love beautiful things:
Soft linen sheets and silken coverlet,
Sweet cool of chamber opened wide to fragrant breeze;
Rose-shaded lamps and golden atomizers,
Spraying Parisian fragrance over my relaxed limbs,
Fresh from a white marble bath, and sweet cool spray.

And so I sleep
In a hot hall-room whose half-opened window,
Unscreened, refuses to budge another inch,
Admits no air, only insects, and hot choking gasps
That make me writhe, nun-like, in sackcloth sheets and lump:
of straw
And then I rise
To fight my way to a dubious tub,
Whose tiny, tepid stream threatens to make me late;
And hurrying out, dab my unrefreshed face
With bits of toiletry from the ten cent store

—-Alice Dunbar-Nelson

Ellen

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