TV: Warhol—Complicated in His Implications

Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film
Directed by Ric Burns, written by Ric Burns and James Sanders
PBS
September 20-21


By David Sterritt

When he got the idea of painting well-known commodities and their labels—Campbell’s Soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles—the young Andy Warhol hoped he’d found the key to changing his image and transforming his career. He was already New York’s most sought-after commercial artist. But he wanted to be a serious artiste with a vision independent enough to distinguish him from the likes of Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein, who were already launching Pop Art as a radical reaction against the Abstract Expressionism of Jackson Pollock and company. Painting everyday items from the supermarket, he decided, might be just the ticket.

Anyone who thinks Warhol simply jumped into his new style will learn differently from Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film, a four-hour movie directed by Ric Burns for PBS’s long-running “American Masters” series. The artist invited four friends and opinion makers to his studio and showed them two different versions of the Coke-bottle motif. One had marks of painterly technique, with detectable brushwork and other signs of the artistic “interpretation” that true paintings were supposed to have. By contrast, the “tight” version was almost photographic in its direct, uninflected effect. The friends voted for the tight one, and Warhol cheerfully accepted their verdict, just as he’d have accepted the opposite verdict if that had been handed to him.

Warhol has plenty of detractors, and they’re likely to see this as confirmation of the view that he was no less a commercial sellout during the “art” phase of his career than he’d been in the advertising/journalism phase, happy to deploy any trick or gimmick that would titillate the art world and satisfy his hunger for money and fame. His defenders might argue that Warhol saw himself as a tabula rasa, less an “original” thinker than a conscientious reflector of the signs and signals beamed out by contemporary American culture. Firing back, the detractors might say this was nothing but passive-aggressive nonsense, fueled by the narcissistic notion that if Warhol liked staring at a boring thing then everyone would like staring at the boring thing. Firing back in turn, the defenders could say that things aren’t boring when transplanted into an artistic context. To which the detractors could say …

And on it would go, soup can after Coke bottle, arguments without end, amen. To my mind, much of Warhol’s art is as daring and beautiful as it is witty and, yes, original. But one of its most appealing strengths is its capacity to open up thought and debate on an enormous variety of fronts, from the merits of particular works to the theoretical import of terms like “style” and “content” and “originality.” Warhol’s best achievements, from the early Coke bottles to the stunning self-portraits and monumental Mao pictures of his late career, are forever oscillating among multiple levels of meaning and interest, rewarding both the casual gaze in the gallery and the deeper ideas prompted after you leave. As an art dealer interviewed in Burns’s movie puts it about the “simple” soup cans, “They’re complicated in their implications.”

Despite the deadpan image he cultivated, Warhol was complicated too. Born in 1928 to an immigrant family in Pittsburgh, he was afflicted as a child by everything from poverty and his father’s untimely death to a case of rheumatic fever that left him with blotches on his face, tics in his movements, and many days home from school. He whiled these away by drawing, perusing his mother’s movie magazines, and getting infatuated with Shirley Temple, who sent him an autographed photo he revered.

After studying design at Carnegie Tech he overrode his mother’s objections and headed for New York, quickly establishing himself as a hugely inventive commercial artist. One of his trademarks was a blotting procedure that made images look “printed” fresh from the drawing board. As an expert in Burns’s documentary notes, this showed he intuitively understood the magazine world’s mania for mass production as a way of life. It also meshed with his affection for the assembly-line sameness of modern artifacts. When his first work was published, a typesetter’s error dropped the final letter from Warhola, the last name he was born with. True to form, he stuck with the tighter version.

In all, Warhol was doing mighty well for someone “with a bad nose and St. Vitus's dance and blotches, et cetera, who was gay and really, really swish … and was bad with people, was probably dyslexic, a little autistic,” as writer Wayne Koestenbaum puts it in the documentary. He had some disappointments, as when he replaced his long-distance Shirley Temple crush with a fixation on Truman Capote, who showed no interest in even meeting him. But such eccentricities rarely interfered with work, work, work. Warhol sometimes appeared to be sabotaging himself in peculiar ways—why did he use those cheap, ill-fitting wigs to hide his thinning hair?—but Burns’s film provides a salutary reminder that he was a very hard, very disciplined worker in every stage of his career.

It was in the 1960s that Warhol started to click with his Coke bottles and soup cans, which drew little attention at first, but soon became a sensation on the art scene and beyond. Some of that sensation was couched in sneers and derision, of course, but I’ve always thought Warhol was smarter than his negative critics realized. Looking up something recently on the Wikipedia online encyclopedia, for instance, I glanced at the Warhol entry and was delighted to see one of my all-time-favorite Warhol quotes there. Finding an utterly American democracy embedded within low-end consumer culture, he said:

You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.

I don’t agree that all Cokes are good; quite the opposite, I think all Cokes are bad—useless bottles of junk-food crapola produced only to make money for corporation stockholders. But hey, the stuff is democratic, and Warhol is astute and witty to point this out.

Finally recognized as more than a commercial artist for hire, Warhol turned to silk-screening as a way of cranking out large quantities of work—without violating his aesthetic for a second—and moved his base of operations from an Upper East Side apartment to a large loft. This was dubbed The Factory after a friend decked the walls with spray-painted silver, a color that Warhol associated with the future, the past, and the trait of narcissism, since mirrors are backed with it.

In this larger space Warhol could experiment further with sculpture and, most dramatically, with film. Moviemaking appealed to him in many ways, since it hooked up with the glamour of Hollywood and stardom, and also with his assembly-line aesthetic—a film strip contains picture after picture after picture, each slightly different from the next, rather like the serial paintings and prints he was already making. These lines of thought converge in the idea of movie studios as dream factories. Warhol had The Factory and the dreams, so nothing was stopping him.

Roughly speaking, Warhol’s films can be divided into three groups: silent pictures made with a fixed camera, such as Empire, his eight-hour portrait of the Empire State Building, and Eat, in which artist Robert Indiana slooooooowly consumes a mushroom; sound productions with zooms and camera movement, such as Vinyl, based on Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange, and the epic Chelsea Girls, with two reels projected side by side; and narrative movies with dialogue and editing, such as Trash and Flesh, which Paul Morrissey directed under the “Andy Warhol Presents” rubric. Even more roughly speaking, these three categories recapitulate cinema’s history, moving from silent to sound and from black-and-white to color.

Warhol’s movies, especially before the Morrissey period, drew highly deserved praise in enlightened precincts of the avant-garde community, which recognized them as adventurous, often phenomenally creative works. Playing into his public image as an ultracool artist with a minimum of emotions, Warhol gave the impression that he liked film because the camera did all the work, and because transforming ordinary people into “superstars” was an amusing diversion. In reality, though, he took painstaking care with framing and lighting. It’s no accident that his best pictures—such as the silent Haircut and the sound Vinyl, both excerpted in Burns’s documentary—are stunning visual experiences.

It was The Factory that allowed Warhol to move in these fascinating new directions, but it was also The Factory that caused the greatest problems of his career. Looked at from one angle, the place was as democratic as a case of Coke, welcoming anyone who wanted to join the gang and allowing rich celebrities to rub elbows (and other body parts) with working-class hustlers and drag queens. Looked at from another angle, it was a magnet for deluded and sometimes seriously disturbed people ill equipped to handle the drug abuse and hyperactivity that eventually ran rampant there.

Warhol has been harshly criticized by detractors and supporters alike for maintaining his inexpressive, voyeuristic posture even when a close companion like Edie Sedgwick was visibly falling apart at the seams, and I agree that his failure to intercede at such times was deplorable. He paid an extremely high price for standing mute while The Factory slid downhill, however. One day in 1968 the Factory denizen Valerie Solanas showed up packing two pistols, furious that Warhol had lost the script for her play Up Your Ass, which she’d expected him to adapt into a film. She fired several shots, wounding Warhol almost fatally in the process. Turning herself in to the police, Solanas said she’d done it because Warhol had “too much control over [her] life.”

Some feminists applauded Solanas for her act, which is preposterous—as my girlfriend observes, Warhol posed about as much threat to women’s rights as Liberace did. In any case, he never got over the terror of the attack. When he’d recovered from his wounds and his lease on The Factory ran out, he moved operations to an office suite and entered the final phase of his career.
For all the frenetic activity of his ’60s period, Warhol hadn’t made a great deal of money then, so his closest associates got together to put things onto a more stable financial footing. While the artist focused on commissioned portraits for wealthy collectors, the others took his enterprise into related fields—starting Interview magazine, for instance—so that different facets of Warhol’s talent would support one another financially. In his 1975 book, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, quoted in the documentary, Warhol said, “Making money is art, and working is art, and good business is the best art.” That may be rationalizing, but it’s consistent with Warhol’s longtime rejection of boundaries between culture and commerce.

Warhol died in 1987 after gall-bladder surgery. It’s likely he was still weakened by the wounds Solanas had inflicted. But the immediate cause, as Burns’s film makes clear, was outrageous medical negligence by a hospital that failed to monitor his postoperative condition and allowed him to be drowned by fluids backed up into his lungs.

Burns’s movie, narrated by performance artist Laurie Anderson, gives as thorough an account of Warhol’s life as can be expected from a four-hour condensation. Its archival footage is accompanied by interviews with experts—filmmaker Morrissey, brother John Warhola, critics Dave Hickey and Stephen Koch, curator Donna De Salvo, art dealer Irving Blum, author George Plimpton, and more—plus Warhol quotations spoken by artist Jeff Koons.

Inevitably, the documentary has flaws along with its considerable merits. Some moments are simplistic, as when the iconostasis in Warhol’s childhood church is discussed as if it single-handedly explains the icon-like look of his celebrity pictures. As usual, the six-hour Sleep is talked about as if were a single unbroken shot rather than a highly edited film, and the superb Sedgwick movie Poor Little Rich Girl is said to be good even though half of it is out of focus, whereas Warhol deliberately chose its out-of-focus footage. Warhol’s links in the 1980's with other artists (Jean-Michel Basquiat, Julian Schnabel, David Salle) are pretty much ignored. The occasions when he remade his public personality are either superficially psychoanalyzed or passed over with too little comment. And it’s tiring to hear the narration hype one Warhol period after another as his most explosive burst of creativity.

Such shortcomings aside, Andy Warhol is engrossing almost every step of the way. If he could see it, I suspect Warhol’s main complaint would be that it just isn’t boring enough.

David Sterritt, chair of the National Society of Film Critics, was film critic of the Christian Science Monitor for more than 35 years until his recent retirement. He is professor emeritus of theater and film at Long Island University and has taught most recently at the Maryland Institute College of Art. He is also programming associate at the Makor/Steinhardt Center of the 92nd Street Y in New York. His books include The Films of Alfred Hitchcock and Screening the Beats: Media Culture and the Beat Sensibility, and his writing has appeared in Cahiers du Cinéma, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and many other periodicals. His most recent book is Guiltless Pleasures: A David Sterritt Film Reader.




Photos courtesy of PBS:
Andy Warhol (Billy Name/OvoWorks, Inc.)
Andy Warhol on the phone at the Factory. (Billy Name/OvoWorks, Inc.)
Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Andy Warhol and Mario Montez on the set of Chelsea Girls. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

STAGE: Slipping Away

Christopher Lane as Neil, and MaryBeth Wise as Jennifer in 'In the Mood.' Photo by Stan Barouh, courtesy of Olney Theatre Center.

In the Mood
By Irene Wurtzel
Directed by Jim Petosa
Olney Theatre Center
Through September 24



By Alexander C. Kafka

The D.C. artist Jennifer Workman’s career is taking off. The Phillips is going to feature her work in a show of “Contemporary Women Artists” and interview her in an accompanying symposium. She’s afraid, though, to revel too much in what should be a delicious moment because her husband, Neil, has a way of losing control during delicious moments. Jennifer, he chides, is becoming increasingly like her Aunt Julia, who used to dampen every celebratory occasion with a wary, superstitious two spits. And it’s true, Jennifer fears “too much happiness.” “There is,” says Neil, chilling the champagne, “no such thing.”

Yet, of course, there is, and that is the subject of Irene Wurtzel’s insightful and stirring new play, In the Mood, in its world premiere at Olney Theatre Center's Mulitz-Gudelsky Theatre Lab. Neil has had bouts with too much happiness for years. A charismatic undersecretary of state for democracy, his visionary euphoria can be constructively contagious when drafting his brilliant and exhaustive briefing papers and cajoling egotistical statesmen into delicate and time-sensitive negotiations. It can also explode into near-messianic grandiosity, with all its accompanying intellectual distortions and horrid insensitivities. His situation has a name: bipolar disorder. And Wurtzel’s drama is at its best when tracing the fine line between the fickle power of mania and the Beltway’s equally fickle mania of power. Also clever is the way the playwright reverses the stereotype of the crazy artist coddled by the sensible, worldly mainstays in her life. After all, Washington's full of unhinged visionaries, and few of them are represented by galleries.

As the booster rockets ignite on Jennifer’s career, Neil is coming off the high of a visit to an unnamed African nation shaking off the bonds of tyranny, a visit that he decides to extend by two weeks incommunicado from his boss Charles, a paternally indulgent but increasingly worried secretary of state who has brought Neil into the corridors of power from Neil’s less glamorous but stable and productive teaching position at the University of Michigan. Neil, we gather from their chats, counterbalances the older Charles’s careful diplomacy with his youthful, idealistic energy and big-picture worldview. But in manic mode, Neil crosses a line, insulting what he sees as his boss’s insufficiently lofty ambitions for his term in office.

Effectively grounded by Charles, who takes understandable umbrage but, more important, can’t trust his loose-cannon right hand to keep national priorities and policies in focus, Neil spins to the other pole of his bipolarity. He hunkers down at home, repeatedly views a football game with its resurrection of a sacked running back, resumes his smoking habit, and is unable to get himself to leave the house to accompany his wife to an important opening. “Neil, you’re slipping away from me,” she says, “…and it’s scaring the hell out of me.” Aggravating the situation is a visit from Neil's mother from L.A., Clara, who's ready for some quality time with the apple of her eye and his wife, on whom she also dotes. Instead, she finds him distant, muted, and rude, asking unenthusiastically how long she plans to stay. Leaving her to her own devices, he says dispiritedly, “Enjoy Washington, Mother. There are those who do.”

Jennifer prods her husband into seeing a shrink, who prescribes meds that keep him from the despondent depths and the orbital heights of an illness Neil is still loathe to admit he has. The pills are supposed to keep him, in the doctor’s words, “blissful and ordinary.” But to Neil, bliss and ordinariness are a despondent depth all their own, never mind the side effects—sexual dysfunction, frequent urination, insomnia. He’s become a zombie and hints unsubtly of offing himself with sleeping pills. His diplomatic skills are intact enough to persuade Jennifer to let him go off the meds. “I love you,” he tells her. “You are the only thing that is right in my life.” She confesses that she too, “wanted him to be alive and alert and a little manic.” After all, this was the man who gave her the courage to quit a job teaching math and to make art more than a weekend undertaking. She lets him abandon the medication, under the condition that they use that date, January 5, as a code for her to signal to him if he’s losing control.

He quickly returns to his old best self, confident, competent, and masterful as an executive and as a husband—if, that is, you don’t make too much of that third glass of champagne he’s slurping down, his quickly accelerating speech, and that sort of thing. Charles finds that he has a heart ailment that requires immediate surgery and gradual recovery, and sounds out Neil and Jennifer on Neil’s fitness to represent Charles at a Mideast summit. Jennifer, though worried, vouches for her husband. It is, she confides to us, “a simple choice between the good of the country and my marriage”—the kind of statement that might sound more melodramatic if you didn’t live in Washington, where such personal forks in the road are encountered by one hapless couple or another just about hourly.

The summit goes well—suspiciously well, both benefiting from and spurring a meltdown on Neil’s part. As he tries to follow up on the progress stateside, Jennifer prepares for a key show in New York. Suffice to say that worlds will collide, and finances, marriage, generational ties, and more are at risk. Whatever an undersecretary is supposed to look like, it’s probably not stalking around his wife’s studio, wielding a hammer and spitting out predictions like “You and I shall probably have a conversation about enlightened sexual behavior.”

Christopher Lane is excellent as Neil, coming off his manic Norwegian energy as Stockmann in Olney’s recent Enemy of the People into his preppier present-day manic incarnation. Lane’s talents are well-suited to Neil’s changes not just from mania to depression, but to those within the manic channels of domestic Casanova, office superhero, condescendingly bullying father, dismissive son, and manipulative whip-cracking boss. And he’s handsome enough, in a smart way, to be plausible as a rising political star and sometime squash partner to the president.

MaryBeth Wise recently excelled in another intelligent and emotionally demanding persona in Round House’s Midwives. Here again she wows us with her wise and wrenching depiction of Jenny, as Neil, Charles, Clara, and Jenny herself all look to her to save a man on the edge of abyss, while also protecting her family and the integrity of her own artistic career.

Leo Erickson is wonderful in the key role of Charles, whose urbanity, humanity, and classic political skills we must believe in for his character to work as the fulcrum between Neil’s personal and professional prospects. We must feel what’s at stake as he gambles that Neil can keep himself in check, and we do indeed believe in his belief in his protégé, even as we squirm at the prospective downside.

Halo Wines excels in the poignant role of Clara, who at first appears a somewhat nebishy stage mom to her darling Washington star Neil, but quickly unfolds as a complex, loving, and long-suffering strongwoman of a sort seen all too often in the families of the mentally ill. Her oblivious denial of her son’s condition—and of her late husband’s—is both tragic and a little heroic. Wines and Tim Spears, as Neil and Jennifer’s college son, Josh, have a sweet connection in their scenes together. And Wurtzel’s dialogue here, as so often throughout the script, is admirably nuanced in the way it alternately targets and swerves around the difficult topics at hand. Spears also holds his own, within the dramatic context and against the practiced dynamism of Lane as an actor, in their confrontational father-son scenes. Therese Barbato makes the most of her small role as Neil’s assistant, embodying the ubiquitous attractive D.C. gatekeeper who can, in the same instant, flatter you and shut you out.

Milagros Ponce de Leon has created a fabulous set—a brick-walled studio with metal balconies and circle-within-circle high windows that resonate visually and psychologically as third-world town square, D.C. jail, and Jennifer's prison of bittersweet memory. Director Jim Petosa, who helped Wurtzel develop the script, has a great feel for its optimum pacing, its prickly pauses, its stops for bewildered breath. With the help of lighting designer Donald Edmund Thomas, unfolding event, flashback, and aside are almost always quickly distinguishable.

As I head to the polls Tuesday, In the Mood will come with me, making me wonder what scenarios are hidden behind the campaign placards and photo-op smiles. I’ll be thinking, admiringly, of Doug Duncan’s candor and wisdom in looking to his health. I’ll be remembering the disheartening headlines about Vince Foster, Sol Wachtler, and about so many other brave, struggling, strong and fragile people in our public and private capital lives.

Along with the appropriate perspective and, if necessary, pills, a night at the theater might be therapeutic for so many stressed out Washingtonians. Perhaps they'll then pause and ponder multiple meanings if their loved ones one day tell them, a little too enthusiastically, “Everything is breaking our way.”

FILM: 'Half Nelson' and 'Idlewild'

By Steve Vineberg

Ryan Gosling is one of the handsomest leading men to come up in the last five years, but as an actor he doesn’t appear to have any vanity. (If he did, presumably he would have chosen a more graceful professional name.) There’s nothing self-protective about the way he plays Dan Dunne, the crack-addicted high school history teacher and basketball coach in the new movie Half Nelson. It’s a down-and-dirty performance. At one point Dan tells his ex-girlfriend, Rachel (Tina Holmes)—they grew apart when she made it through rehab and he didn’t, and now, back in the old neighborhood to visit her ailing mother, she lets him know she’s engaged to someone else—that he’s still an asshole, and he often is. He maintains a junkie’s remoteness from his family, even when he spends time with them; his latest relationship, with a fellow teacher (Monique Curnen), is mostly opportunistic—a chance for sex, with no emotional follow-through—and he behaves so insensitively to her that she slugs him and retreats to her bedroom until he’s cleared off. Gosling doesn’t try to make Dan lovable; when he turns off the people who care about him—usually with a long-distance stare or a delayed, faraway reply—the actor doesn’t peek through with a reassurance that he’s really a good guy who’s just operating at diminished capacity. We have to judge his potential for salvation in his moments of consciousness (as we did, for instance, with Michael Keaton’s doper in Clean and Sober)—and in his interaction with his students, who are all African American and who respond easily to his hipster humor and his obvious delight in their street wit and his efforts to find a way to make history meaningful to them. (He starts by acknowledging that they hate coming to this tough Brooklyn school—or at least, that they’d never admit they didn’t—and then rides over their renegade pose by sparking their interest.) He’s a gifted teacher, when he’s not too distracted or hung over to turn the key in his own ignition.

The key to Gosling’s performance—which is, I think, amazing—is the way he balances Dan’s engagement and disengagement. He alternates druggy, deep-interior rhythms with the balls-of-his-feet, ricocheting rhythms of a basketball player, feinting and bounding. There’s a sorrowful scene in the movie where the father of one of his former students sees him drinking in a bar and heads over to say hello. The man is eager to tell him that his daughter is majoring in history at Georgetown and to thank Dan for inspiring her, but Dan’s so stoned that he can’t place the girl’s name; he just echoes it foggily. You know, from what you’ve seen of him in the classroom—and from the friendship that’s grown up, awkwardly, between him and one of his students (who also plays on his team), a wiry African-American girl named Drey (Shareeka Epps)—that he must have cared deeply about this man’s daughter, but he doesn’t have the wherewithal at the moment to hook up with whatever he felt for her when she was his student. And there are times when he deflects Drey’s attempts to get closer. Drey’s older brother is in jail for peddling dope; the man he ran for, Frank (Anthony Mackie), who sells crack to Dan, warns her to stay away from him because “he’s a basehead, and baseheads got no friends.” The arc of Dan’s character is his disproving Frank’s analysis—despite his own lack of faith in his own ability to stay connected to anything outside drugs. In his own words, he has to fight his tendency to behave like an asshole.

There isn’t much of a movie around Gosling, Mackie, and Epps, a fine young actress with a talent for being open and guarded at the same time. The script by Anna Boden and director Ryan Fleck sets up the basic irony—that a crack dealer and a crack addict are in competition for the loyalty—the soul, really—of an impressionable ghetto kid. (If there’s any moral ambiguity about which way she should be leaning, when Frank tempts her to run deliveries for him the screenwriters tip their hand. The movie doesn’t really rise above melodrama.) But they don’t provide the kind of dialogue that fills in the characters. When Dan begs Frank to stay away from Drey for her own good, and Frank, indignant, asks him if he thinks he’s in a moral position to make that demand, the best Boden and Fleck can do is to have Dan repeat several times, “I—don’t—know!”; it’s the intensity of Gosling’s reading, and the layers of anguish and self-doubt he supplies, that carry the scene. And Fleck is a clumsy director; he not only lacks technique—he lacks basic skill. The camera is almost never in the right place; sometimes you have to squint and crane your neck to see what exactly is going on, the way you do in a small theater when the patron in front of you keeps shifting his head. Drey finds out about Dan’s habit not from Frank but from her own observations; after a basketball game one day, she wanders into the locker room and finds him high, with a pipe clenched in his fist. This scene of odd, unplanned-for intimacy, where the adult and the child switch roles—he asks her for a wet paper towel for his face, and gets her to stay with him until he can regain some balance—is so beautifully acted by both Gosling and Epps that the terrible camerawork feels like an insult.

On the other hand, except for the narrative contrivances (one sets up the crucial scene where Drey—whose own father is even less of a presence than her jailed brother—chooses between the two strong male influences in her life), the filmmakers try hard to maintain naturalism. That is, Fleck does—he has an authentic touch with the actors, including Collins Pennie and Karen Chilton as Drey’s brother and her mother, a hard-working paramedic, and the stage actor Denis O’Hare as a colleague of Dan’s whose ironic style masks real concern for his well-being. The only sequence that feels phony is the one where Dan has dinner with his family and we’re cued to see his alcoholic parents (Deborah Rush and Jay O. Sanders) as the sources of his drug problem. The rest of the acting bears the hallmark of truth, especially that of the three principals, and that’s why Half Nelson, for all its glaring faults, tends to stay with you. You can do a lot worse than spend a couple of hours watching Ryan Gosling burrow his way inside the white-hot skin of Danny Dunne.

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Big Boi and friends in 'Idlewild'

The Prohibition-set African-American gangster musical Idlewild, written and directed by Bryan Barker, with songs by the hip-hop artists Outkast and starring that duo, André Benjamin (André 3000) and Antwan Patton (Big Boi), is a fiasco. But it doesn’t make you cringe or turn away in embarrassment as other recent musicals have: De-Lovely, Beyond the Sea, The Phantom of the Opera, Rent. Barker has talent but lacks the kind of skill you need to realize ambitions as big as his, and though he’s bursting with ideas, for every good one he comes up with there are 10 or 12 you wish he’d killed at the drawing board.

The movie is so distracted it’s exhausting. Rooster (Patton), who inherits a speakeasy called The Church in the southern city of Idlewild when his boss and mentor, Ace (Faizon Love) gets shot, has a fight with his wife Zora (Malinda Williams) when she catches him talking up a pair of showgirls, but one fight isn’t enough for Barker; he has to intercut it with a scene where Rooster’s pal Percival (Benjamin), the piano player at The Church, quarrels with his father (Ben Vereen), who wants to keep him in the family undertaking business and away from The Church’s latest attraction, a singer named Angel (Paula Patton). The two scenes aren’t connected, and they don’t bring anything out in each other; it’s like trying to watch two TV sets at the same time, tuned to different channels. A number begins, sung by Macy Gray, that foggy-voiced embodiment of sass, leading a band of long-legged chorines, and you settle in to enjoy her and the Hinton Battle choreography, but you find you can’t, because Barker keeps cutting away and the soundtrack mix is so chaotic we can’t make out the lyrics amid the din of the customers.

The staging and design, impressive as they are, are absurdly extravagant for the context. Barker wants to do The Blue Angel and Busby Berkeley and Cabaret in a black honky-tonk setting—and, following Baz Lurhmann’s coup in Moulin Rouge, with anachronistic music. What he’s mostly inherited from Lurhmann is his ADD style of direction (which was equally in evidence in his Broadway staging of La Bohème). The difference is that when the images in Moulin Rouge rush by or pile up, none of them seems compelling enough for you to want to slow down the breakneck parade. The frustration of Idlewild is that you feel sure that if Barker could pare away four-fifths of what he’s got going at the same time, he’d have something worth lingering on.

The women, for example. In addition to Gray and Williams (who has an exquisite face and figure and a steam-heat presence) and Paula Patton, Barker has cast Paula Jai Parker from Hustle & Flow as Rose, the platinum-blonde knockout who belongs to Ace but whom Rooster dallies with in the back of a car. If Williams is built for speed, to quote the old Billie Holiday song, Parker is built for power, and she has perhaps the sexiest honky-tonky style since Mae West in the early thirties, so you can’t understand why Barker doesn’t want to do more with her or at least keep his camera trained on her a little longer. He does more with Paula Patton. She gets a big duet with Benjamin, whose Percival persuades her to learn a new song he wants to introduce at the club. Understandably, they can’t get the attention of the speakeasy patrons at first, because it’s a bebop ballad, some twenty years before anyone thought to write one, but let that go. It’s a good song, they perform it well, and Barker mostly curbs his tendency to wander away from his subject or layer so many other things on top of it that you lose track of what you’re supposed to be looking at. The conceit of the number is familiar, of course—from Show Boat and Funny Girl and Lady Sings the Blues and the Streisand-Kristofferson A Star Is Born and lots of other backstage musicals: It’s the moment when the novice overcomes the initial hostility or disengagement of the crowd and shows off her gifts. It almost always works, and it does here. But Paula Patton is the only one of the stunning actresses in the cast who gets the break she deserves—with one exception: Cicely Tyson shows up in one scene, as a grandmother on the road with her family who’s waiting for God to tell her how to keep them from starvation, and she’s truly great, in the way that Lillian Gish could be in her best older roles (The Night of the Hunter, TV’s A Trip to Bountiful).

Barker can be inventive and playful: A number involving Percival and a wall full of elaborate alarm clocks with figures carved on them is an enchantment, and every time Rooster pulls out his hip flask and Barker animates the rooster on it (its craggy falsetto voice is supplied by Farnsworth Bentley), the effect is disarming. But he’s addicted to clichés. I didn’t mind the one about the chorus girl who pretends to be a big star (Angel has stolen the name of a headliner, briefly played by Patti LaBelle, and shown up in her place to take the job at The Church), but I couldn’t believe the ones that go back beyond old Hollywood to 19th-century melodrama: the unyielding Victorian papa last seen in The Jazz Singer, the pure soul who stops a bullet meant for the man she loves. And the gangland violence has that overscaled, meant-to-be-mythic quality you find in the Coen Brothers and Quentin Tarantino and Sam Mendes’ The Road to Perdition—bullets that create holes in walls big enough for the smoky light to pour through and so on. I can accept the interpolation of bebop and hip-hop into this setting more easily than the way Barker mixes in these new American-movie clichés with the older ones. Terrence Howard is an electrifying performer, but his sadistic sociopath Trumpy is too modern a creation for this milieu. He rubs out both Ace and the bootlegger Spats (Ving Rhames) while Rooster is screwing Rose in the back seat of Ace’s car—a scenario that sets up all the misplaced over-the-top gun battling that ensues.

Benjamin is a good-looking fellow but a bit dull as an actor (I thought so when I saw him last year in Four Brothers), and the fatuous Vandyke he sports here doesn’t help him. Antwan Patton is livelier, but only when he sneaks around and plays the trickster; when he has to play it straight, he becomes a hole in the screen. And for my money he’s outclassed by Bobb’e J. Thompson, who plays him as a fast-talking boy in the opening montage. The lightning-streak con man ends up the hero of the movie, but at the cost of his charm. Barker just doesn’t seem to know when he’s got hold of a good thing.

Steve Vineberg teaches theater history, dramatic literature, and film at College of the Holy Cross. He is the author of three books: High Comedy in American Movies: Class and Humor from the 1920s to the Present (2005), No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade (1992), and Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style (winner of the Joe A. Calloway Prize for Best Book in Drama, 1991). He writes regularly on movies and theater in The Boston Phoenix, The Threepenny Review, The Christian Century and The Perfect Vision, and has also been published in The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Pakn Treger, The Oxford American, Sight and Sound, American Film, Film Quarterly, and other publications.

POETRY by J.D. Smith

A Transition

When does one no longer wish
to move like a dancer, instead
being a dancer
like whom others wish to move?

In mid-step, when effort
ceases to be effort.

In sleep, when practiced rhythms
assimilate into the limbs
at last, as one drop
turns a crown of surface tension
into a cascade.

In an instant like those
observed in the most minute physics,
known only by before and after.


Otherwise

The invisible man of the movies
must go naked,
unless we are to believe
that his clothing turns invisible on contact,
the way one paper-clip
will magnetize another,
the way, as once was feared,
the world's water might begin
to tilt from the inside of its molecules,
one setting off the rest
until the seas turned to gel.

Otherwise, his unseen, contagious touch
might push all matter out of sight,
make it unknowable, like assumptions
before they clash, or turn to speech.
We'd be good as blind,
or witness to a vacant light,
and the plenty before our eyes
is already not enough.

We are bound to hope
the invisible man is, in fact, unclothed.
Our world depends upon his naked state.


Depressive

Overshadowed by a blade of grass,
soaked by one rain-drop,
struck down by a dandelion seed.

Carried off by a sparrow
that will soon despair
of the bitter taste in the flesh,
the millstone's weight.























Fifteen Death Poems

Let's see
if the burning
outlasts the candle.

*

By an invisible rope
I am hanged
from the clouds.

*
Egg, tadpole, frog—
then what the frog becomes.

*

A melon left on the vine
until the frost
outgrows its skin.

*

A robe
laid out at my birth
now fits.

*

To be released
from four seasons,
or bound to a fifth.

*

A petal falls
on breaking ice
and floats downstream.

*
This reflection
will weigh down
no more puddles.

*

Moss that grew ten thousand years
would not offer shade, or bear a plum.

*

One last oar-stroke
between a shore I've forgotten
and one I've never seen.

*

In bottomless water
a salmon's leap
begins and ends.

*

Ice water
cools the cup,
then the encircling hand.

*

Noon sun, full moon—
two more coins
that buy me nothing now.

*

There is air,
there is water,
and no bubble.

*

Time to pay for the bowl
that has kept the rice
from spilling, losing flavor.



J.D. Smith lives in Washington, D.C. His books include the collection Settling for Beauty (Cherry Grove Collections), his first collection, The Hypothetical Landscape (Quarterly Review of Literature Poetry Series), and the edited anthology Northern Music: Poems About and Inspired by Glenn Gould (John Gordon Burke, Publisher). His children’s book The Best Mariachi in the World is forthcoming from Raven Tree Press in 2008. His poems have received three Pushcart nominations, and his essays and reviews have appeared in American Book Review, Grist and Pleiades. His literary and genre fiction has appeared in a variety of publications, and his play Dig was produced by Chicago’s Squaresville Theatre in 2003. His work currently appears in the anthologies In a Fine Frenzy: Poets Respond to Shakespeare (University of Iowa Press) and Poetic Voices Without Borders (Gival Press). His work is forthcoming in the anthology Enopoetica: A Collection of Poetry Inspired by Wine, to be published by Story Line Press in 2006. His op-ed "Pop Viagra and Save a Rhino" recently appeared in The Los Angeles Times.


Photos via stock.xchng. Top photo by Dirk D.

PHOTOS OF LAOS by Frances Borchardt

Frances Borchardt lives in Churchton, Maryland. She can be contacted at francesborchardt@comcast.net.

SHELF LIFE: A Memorable 'Forgetfulness'

Forgetfulness
By Ward Just
Houghton Mifflin
258 pages
$25




By Alexander C. Kafka


Well, he said finally, what do you think?

Oh, she said. It’s beautiful.

I’m pleased, then, he said.

Do you mean that?

Oh, yes, he said. Of course.

Naturally I wonder, she said.

Why would you wonder?

You’ve made me look so sad, she said, and burst into tears, her hands over her eyes. She made gasping sounds as though she were short of breath.

He was astonished. … He explained what he saw in her eyes, which was not sadness or disappointment but understanding. Sympathy, he said, and wit. At some level sympathy implied knowledge and knowledge had a melancholy aspect. He believed that was universally true, no exceptions. When you knew too much you felt a natural distress but that was something quite different from fundamental personal sadness, sadness as a trait, like blue eyes. Her distress was not temperamental but intellectual. They argued the matter all that night and the next night, and in the end there was no resolution. God, she was stubborn. So the portrait had not been a success, at least with Florette, and he never forgot the sound of her weeping, a moan that seemed to reach to the heavens.

That’s Thomas Railles, an American expatriate artist in his mid-60s living near a remote village in the French Pyrenees, describing his late wife, Florette, and the way she reacted to his portrait of her. Railles, the focus of Ward Just’s latest, and 15th, novel, Forgetfulness, could also be describing Just’s writing, which also has a melancholy aspect, but one that leads to empathy and musing, not nihilism, because its basis is also sympathy and knowledge. Like his artist protagonist, Just has an economy of line, a spot-on sense of perspective, and the practiced observer’s suspension of ultimate judgment that shows the most profound kind of worldliness—nuanced rather than cynical.

Florette is taking a winter walk near their mountain home while Railles entertains two of his regular guests, Americans both—the mysterious and somewhat sinister Bernhard, and the more vulnerable but cagey Russ. When Florette injures her ankle, she is rescued, but in a strangely rough and ungracious manner, by a group of Moroccans. Soon their ostensible aid turns to rude neglect and then to violence.

When she succumbs to their assault and the cold, Thomas is left to his loneliness, feeling not just the loss of his wife, a proper but sweet and candid village local, but of his longtime friend, the reclusive older and larger than life British World War I deserter St. John Granger, the Railles’s neighbor and Thomas’s confidant and billiards partner. Thomas indulges in the company of their ghosts, in his Billie Holiday albums, and in his booze. His mental and physical health are unsteady, and he’s losing his artistic momentum, though he tries to recapture it by sketching the churches of nearby towns.

Interrupting this solitude are Bernhard and Russ, who it turns out grew up with Thomas in Wisconsin and entrusted him with occasional odd and delicate assignments after Bernhard and Russ joined the CIA. Though Thomas’s assignments entailed no direct violence, one especially—the befriending of a cosmopolitan Spanish communist with important connections—ended in betrayal and murder and haunts Thomas along with his more recent specters. Now Bernhard, seeking an unlikely “closure” and suspecting that Florette’s murder may be connected to Thomas’s tangential intelligence work, urges Thomas to observe the interrogation of the captured Moroccan suspects by a shadowy French official (and, interestingly, a sometime actor) named Antoine. Skeptical that vengeance is desirable, or even possible, Thomas reluctantly trudges along to the violent interviews in the port city of Le Havre.

The book’s title contains ironies within ironies. Forgetfulness is a book of memories—not just of Florette and Granger, but of Thomas’s Wisconsin childhood; of his friends Bernhard and Russ as boys; of Thomas’s physician father and his waiting room, where he and Bernhard started exploring the various kinds of intelligence that can be gleaned from the faces of a doctor and his hopeless patients; memories of history writ large; of 9/11; of European culture; and of painting in particular. Forgetfulness is the result of aging, of mental decay, and yet also the necessary precursor to creation and artistry. It is the loss of the lost intimates’ companionship, but also the imperative of moving on and living as they would have wished. Forgetfulness is the failure to heed history, but also the element required to escape history’s petty bonds and make new history.

Art, too, is a coiled concept here—salvation for Thomas’s soul, and maybe ours, but also a weapon he yields when he’s at last left alone to confront the Moroccan ringleader, whose name may or may not be Yussef. Thomas begins that interview of the poker-faced suspect by confronting him with a portrait of Florette. And Bernhard—and perhaps Thomas and the reader too, in a perversely voyeuristic way—appreciate the artistry of Antoine’s interrogation techniques.

Just has long probed the unpredictable workings of power and its effects not just on the world at large but on the often hapless and well-meaning people who wield it. Here he does so through an artist’s poetic and unvindictive eyes, even as those eyes are starting to lose some of their acuity in the mists of mountains and harbors and age, and the philosophical mists of earthly chaos. The mists of twin tower debris, of Iraqi bomb smoke and sand storms, and of Abu Ghraib rage are also suggested here. But with the possible exception of the unredeemed Yussef—and even he is all too human, suffering at the violence against a younger comrade who may be son or may be lover—Just gives us no thoroughly good or bad guys. Russ is forced into retirement and mourns after the suicide of his mentally ill one-time golden girl daughter. Bernhard reinvents himself as head of a high-end international security outfit, only to suffer a debilitating heart attack that no bodyguard could shield him from.

But if Thomas’s potential soul salve is art, it’s art with a deep appreciation of the worldly, of grand technique where it intersects with inspiration and fundamental speculation as to our purpose, our desires, our worth. The kind of art that can be distressing, but in a way quite different from personal sadness, as Thomas might say. Art that's also beautiful, as is this melancholy but vivid and most involving tale.

Photo of Ward Just by Nina Bramhall from Houghton Mifflin's Web site

TV: Working Poor

Jerry Longoria


‘Waging a Living’
Produced and directed by Roger Weisberg
PBS
Aug. 29, 2006


By Alexander C. Kafka

“Hustling backwards” is how Barbara Brooks, a 36-year-old single mother of five in Freeport, N.Y., describes her situation. Raised as a young child in abusive homes, sexually abused further while living in a juvenile detention center where she now works as a counselor, she scrapes by on $8.25 an hour plus a number of government services.

She works toward an associate’s degree at a community college, excels at her job, and gets a raise, but the $450 gain per month is more than wiped out by $600 lost in government aid. She wants to get off welfare, but her financial life is quicksand. “The more money I make,” she says, “the harder it gets.”

Brooks is one of four people featured in Roger Weisberg’s exceptional—and devastating—documentary, Waging a Living, part of the "P.O.V." series. In a low-key verite style, he and his East Coast and West Coast teams bring into view the trials of the working poor that author Barbara Ehrenreich and others have explored so effectively in print. Weisberg explains in a statement that the program follows up his recent Ending Welfare as We Know It. “We succeeded in getting millions of Americans out of the welfare system,” he writes, “without getting them out of poverty.”

Brooks, a full-time student and full-time employee, says that, with the kids, she gets maybe three or four good hours of sleep a night. We follow her as she scrambles to the check-cashing store to get the close to $200 she needs for Claritin and Cortaid for a son with breathing problems—she’s lost her Medicaid because she earns too much.

Things look up for her when, after getting her associate’s degree, she moves to a $15-an-hour job, with benefits, at a private nursing home. We sit in on her 90-day evaluation, in which, aside from the money, simply the praise from her new boss brings Brooks to tears. She tells that same boss soon after that she needs to lessen her hours to go back to school part time and earn her bachelor’s. “I believe that, through education, everything is going to change,” Brooks says. Heading off to classes again, she sure looks like she means it, and we sure hope she’s right.

Jerry Longoria, a 42-year-old security guard in San Francisco gets by on $12 an hour. A recovering alcoholic and drug user, he pays $530 a month in rent, has $30 in his pocket, and $10 in the bank, toward a long-dreamed-of trip to North Carolina to visit his two teenage children, whom he hasn’t seen in nine years. He works part time, in addition, at a center advising homeless people, which he says he’s happy to do because he was once homeless himself. His clothes are from Goodwill and Thrift Town. He marches with the security-guard union, aiming for a better contract. The guards eventually do get better medical benefits, but their raise? Twenty-five cents an hour. Still, maybe it’ll mean he won’t have to choose between rent and insurance.

“Nobody owes me anything,” he says he has realized in his rehabbed maturity. “I needed to work for it.” Not long after, though, he loses his job because of a disagreement with his boss, and his salary sags from $12.75 to $10.50 an hour in the new job his union got him. It’ll take eight years for him just to get back to his recent salary, he figures. Usually well groomed, carefully dressed, health conscious, and perennially optimistic, he says in a moment of discouragement, “Shoot, I’m making less than when I first started. It just doesn’t seem right. ... Some people’s dreams get torn down.”

Mary Venittelli, a 41-year-old single mother of three in southern New Jersey, had a stable middle-class life until she and her husband split in a bitter divorce. All she can find now is a waitressing job at $2.18 an hour plus tips. Some nights, she says, she might bring home $30 and hand $28 of that over to the babysitter. She loses her car and is in danger of losing her home. She owes thousands in lawyer’s fees and has $15,000 in credit-card debt. In a bitterly humorous moment, she and her friend contemplate Venittelli’s pre-approved platinum Visa-card offer. Her friend warns her about putting her Social Security number on the application. “What are they going to do,” Venittelli says, “steal my identity? Please do.” Her long hours are taking a toll on the kids, especially her son Quinn, who’s acting out like mad. She goes to a food pantry in a neighboring county, she says, “because I don’t want to run into anyone I know.” Things look up a little when she meets a guy, a barber, who has Christmas presents for Mary and the kids and some time and attention for Quinn.




















Jean Reynolds


Jean Reynolds, a 51-year-old nursing assistant in Keansburg, N.J., supports three children, including her cancer-stricken daughter Bridget, two of Bridget’s four children, and two other grandkids. Her ex sends no support. After 15 years working at the same nursing home, she’s hit maximum pay, $11 an hour, but that doesn’t stop her from helping the union organize her coworkers. Reynolds has no health insurance and is drowning in bills, including the hundreds of dollars monthly that Bridget needs, and isn’t always getting, for medication and treatment of the metastasized thyroid cancer that threatens her life in her late 20s. Evicted, with seven dependents, Reynolds turns, in desperation, to the government for help, and gets it, for now, because of Bridget’s illness. “They said, ‘Go home and have a good Christmas,’ Bridget explains matter-of-factly, “because it’s more than likely my last.”

Reynolds goes to church weekly to light a candle to St. Jude because, she says, “my life is impossible.” Of God, she speculates “not that he’s forgotten me, but that he’s neglecting me.” “I’m handling human beings,” she says in quiet indignation, “and I’m being paid less than garbage men.”

Weisberg and his crew seem to have won the confidence of their subjects, who let them into some of the most delicate moments of their lives. The filming and editing are smart, lean, and subtle. For instance, as Bridget and her mom discuss the medicine Bridget’s not getting because they can’t afford it, she quietly and diligently scrubs the kitchen of the well-kept home—controlling, one supposes, one of the few things in her life that she can.

Missing, deadbeat dads are a constant, and facts about the relative incomes of single moms, as compared to couples, as well as other data, quietly emerge on the bottom of the screen. For instance: Thirty million Americans make less than $8.70 an hour, the official poverty level for a family of four; housing costs have tripled since 1979; real hourly wages for male workers in the bottom quintile have decreased 5 percent since 1973; and in 1997, only 37 percent of custodial mothers received child support from nonresident fathers.

What the statistics add up to, or rather don't, Reynolds puts succinctly: “There’s no American dream any more.”

ESSAY: Reading Habits

From Stock.xchng

By Mikita Brottman

Not many of us get through school, not to mention college, without developing our own imperatives and superstitions around reading and the feelings associated with it, whether these are feelings of pleasure, affection, guilt, dread, anxiety, or simple indifference. As we grow older, these emotions tend to linger in our private lives, whether we continue to read avidly, or recoil at the very sight of a book. No one has more insight into the confluence between reading and memory than Marcel Proust, and no one has written so well on the subject, or at such length. In this passage from Time Regained, the narrator describes the effect of this synergy:

A book which we read at a certain period does not merely remain forever conjoined to what existed around us; it remains also faithfully united to what we ourselves then were and thereafter it can be handled only by the sensibility, the personality that were then ours. If, even in thought, I pick up from the bookshelf François le Champi, immediately there rises within me a child who takes my place, who alone has the right to spell out the title François le Champi, and who reads it as he read it once before, with the same impression of what the weather was like then in the garden, the same dreams that were then shaping themselves in his mind about the different countries and about life, and the same anguish about the next day.

How well do you remember what you read? Think about a work of fiction you've read recently—what scenes, images or characters come to mind? Memories of reading can often be far more complex than memories of “real” events, since they combine “factual” memories—like your personal situation and social context at the time of reading—with the power of an aesthetic experience. So when you think of a book that had a profound impact on you, you often can't help but remember what you were doing and where you were when you first read it. Now think of a book that had no impact on you at all. Can you even remember one?

Do you see visual images of the story you're reading as it unfolds? If so, do you base the characters on people you know—friends, family, famous people, or composites of all three, as in dreams? Or are they totally new? Are the images in color, or black and white? Are they consistent, or do they come and go? For some, reading fiction can engage other sensory responses besides the visual, like smell, sound, taste, and ... well, I'm sure we've all had the experience of being sexually aroused by a fictional scene, or a character description. Some people say they have rich sensory experiences, as intense and realistic as an IMAX movie, that radiate outward from a verbal text, while others, including those who've been blind from birth, have experiences that are more conceptual. I wonder if these images are retained, stored in our memory long after we've finished reading, and whether, by focusing carefully, we're bringing them back to the surface of consciousness, or whether we're actually creating them afresh every time.

Some people regularly make friends with fictional characters, or even fall in love with them, or with their authors. Some can't prevent themselves from skipping to the end to find out what happens. Some feel compelled to read especially resonant passages aloud, to themselves, or to others. Have you ever had the strange experience of reading a book you hate, but you still can't stop reading it? Have you ever read a book that left a bitter taste in your mouth? What about a book you love to death, but nobody else seems to get?

In order to make sense of these emotions, you need to think carefully about your reading habits. Ask yourself the following questions, and compare your responses to those of the 56 readers I surveyed (equal parts British and American, men and women, academics and “laymen”).

(1) What book are you currently reading?

Of my 56 respondents, only one reported that he wasn't reading a book at the moment, though a few people could give me a title but not an author. About 16 said they were reading two or more books at the same time; 14 were reading history or biography, and the rest were reading works of fiction, mostly by contemporary bestselling authors like Dan Brown, J.K. Rowling, Dean Koontz, Stephen King, and Walter Mosley.

(2) How do you decide what book to read next?

Thinking about this question is a good way to discover how flexible or schematic you are in your reading habits. I know it's a generalization, but women seem far more easygoing than men in this respect (and in most other respects too, for that matter), but then, every regular reader has his or her own system of reading, however unacknowledged or unconscious. Think about it. Do you go for a long time between books, waiting for something to strike your fancy, or to be given something to read by friends or family, or do you go immediately from one book to the next? Do you make reading lists (in paper or in your head), and, if so, how strictly do you stick to them? Do you know exactly what you like, and stick to the work of particular authors, or a certain genre? Or maybe you never read anything but sword-and-sandal fiction, detective stories, literary “classics,” historical novels, or Harlequin romance. Do you go through binges? I do. I can recall, in the last couple of years, a true crime binge, a biography binge, a Philip Roth binge, and a binge on campus novels.

Twenty-two of my respondents said they rely on reviews in the Sunday papers, or recommendations from friends and family members. Eighteen said they just pick up whatever catches their eye in the bookshop or library, or on their bookshelves at home. The rest varied. Some people said they have a small group of favorite authors whose work they follow closely, buying each new book as soon as it comes out. Others said they have a bedside stack to work through, sometimes systematically, sometimes at random. (I always have a stack of around 10 books, and I'll almost never take them out of order, however tempting they may look—but then, I also have few qualms about giving up on a book if it doesn't engage me.) Some said they like to read books that correspond with their current situation—European novels while traveling in Europe, romance fiction when they're in love, and so on. Some said they visit bookstores to find something to read, picking up different books and reading their first pages; others pay more attention to price. For others, it's entirely a matter of serendipity—as one person put it, “a mysterious coalescence of urges and interests.”

(3) Do you always finish books, or do you give up on them? If you give up on them, how many pages does it usually take?

Out of the 56 readers I surveyed, only three said they never, ever gave up on a book (and I'm not sure I believe them). One commented: “I only start books I know I'm going to like;” another claimed, “even in high school, I read every assigned book cover to cover,” and the third said, “if I'm going to hate something, I want to hate it fully and thoroughly.” Everyone else admitted to giving up on books from time to time (though some confessed to feeling guilt about it), either because they find themselves struggling and losing interest, or because something more interesting comes along, or for other reasons (“I put it down for too long”; “It's due back at the library”; “I'll put them down and forget where I've put them”). Some people will give up after 10 pages or “one bad chapter,” others draw the line at three chapters, 30 to 60 pages, 150 pages, or “half-way.”

The last book I gave up on was Samuel Beckett's Molloy, which I added to my stack after my boyfriend enjoyed it so much. He went on to read the other works in the volume—Malone, and The Unnamable. I first gave up after about 60 pages, then a couple of days later I decided I'd try again, and made it through another 60 pages before conceding defeat. When I asked my readers to name a book they recall giving up on, titles mentioned more than once included Moby Dick (six), Don Quixote (six), As I Lay Dying (four), A Clockwork Orange (two), Midnight's Children (two), Foucault's Pendulum (two), Breakfast of Champions (two), The Three Musketeers (two), White Noise (two), Gravity's Rainbow (two) and—thank you—Molloy (two, including me).

(4) Do you generally separate your reading into “work” and “fun”?

This question was mainly directed at the academics, but I thought it would be interesting to find out whether this was a common distinction. Interestingly, those whose work involved “literary” reading—writers, literature students, journalists, academics in the humanities—did not, as a rule, separate their reading into “work” and “fun,” which I suppose makes sense, because, as one of my respondents commented, “there's no separation between work and interest—I work out of interest.” Those who did make a clear distinction between “work” and “fun” were generally engaged in administrative or managerial positions, where “work” reading consisted of reports and other business-related documents, so, as one person said, “most of my reading away from the office is fun—novels, newspapers, etc. I tend to do work reading at work.” A couple of exceptions were a woman doing a Ph.D. in history, who said “The reading I do for work and the reading I do for fun are so completely different, I consider them different activities,” and a philosophy professor, who made the comment: “I don't read pulp just to relax. TV is for that.”

(5) Do you ever re-read books you love? If so, how often? Please give examples, if possible.

Most people, it seems, re-read their favorite books on a regular basis, from every single year, to once every four or five years. About a quarter of my respondents said they'd re-read classics like The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Divine Comedy, Ulysses, Jane Eyre, The Great Gatsby, and The Time Machine. Others re-read mainly stories, poems, and sections of longer novels. A lot of people said they like to re-read their favorite contemporary novels, especially science fiction and fantasy—titles mentioned included Catch 22, Portnoy's Complaint, Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, Talisman, Dune, Blood Meridian, and the Harry Potter series. I was interested to discover that 17 of my respondents said they regularly returned to books they enjoyed in their childhood; particular favorites seem to be Catcher in the Rye, Watership Down, The Plague Dogs, A Wrinkle in Time, The Book of Three, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, and anything by Dr. Seuss.

By Antony Ruggiero, via Stock.xchng

(6) Can you read books in noisy places (e.g., on trains and buses)?

I tend to be a very relaxed reader, able to lose myself in a book whatever the circumstances around me, but my friend Mark can't read anything, not even a newspaper, if there are people talking nearby (his new method is to wear a pair of Bose earphones and listen to white noise on his iPod). From the readers I interviewed, there seem to be more people like me than like Mark. Only nine of my respondents said they couldn't read in noisy places. While many people said they preferred quiet, most people seem to have no problem tuning out external noise and absorbing themselves in their books. One person said, “I have even read under shell fire. It kept the fear from becoming overwhelming.”

A few people mentioned feeling uncomfortable and restless if they found themselves on public transport without having a book to read. I know this feeling well. Since I'm lucky enough to be able to read pretty much anywhere, regardless of circumstances, and since books are a part of my academic work, I rarely leave home without something to dip in and out of during the day. Even if I'm going out for dinner or to a movie, there's still sometimes a few moments when I might find myself alone, waiting for a friend, or for the lights to go down, and it's difficult for me to simply sit and wait. I read on the train and the subway—I even read standing up, if it's not too crowded. Of course, I'll read in all the usual places, too, during the little hiatuses in the day—in waiting rooms and in between appointments, while eating lunch (I know, mother, it's not polite).

Our notion of what reading is, and what it involves, is still defined by the physical and economic restraints it grew out of, from the texture of paper to the geography of libraries and bookstores. These notions generally depend on the material constraints of “real” books—but for some up-to-date types, these constraints no longer apply. None of my readers said as much, but some people have moved away from “real” books, preferring to read e-books on their laptops or Blackberry's, especially at work, when they can snatch only the occasional reading break. This is a natural side effect of our changing habits. We're busier than ever today, and, due to the increased pace of our lives, we apparently tend to read in very short “spurts” compared to the readers of two or three generations ago. These days, when we pick up a book, it's usually for 10 or 15 minutes rather than an hour or so—a fact that some people attribute to the influence of the media, especially television, with its commercial breaks every 12 minutes, and its six-second shots.

(7) Can you remember if a book has ever made you laugh out loud, or shed tears? If so, please give examples.

Everyone I interviewed could remember laughing out loud while reading, though not all of them could remember specific titles—which is interesting, because, while I'll often find things I read very funny and engaging, the pleasure always remains internal; I don't think I've ever laughed out loud at something I've read in a book. But everybody I interviewed could remember not just laughing out loud, but even the specific passages they laughed about. Portnoy's Complaint and Catch 22 got the most mentions, followed by The Corrections, The World According to Garp, The Diary of Bridget Jones, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Much Ado About Nothing, anything by P.G. Wodehouse, anything by Terry Pratchett, and Marley and Me: My Life with the World's Worst Dog. There were a few surprises here, too—for example, a psychiatrist confessed to laughing aloud only at Dilbert cartoons and a book called How to be a Jewish Mother; a writer mentioned often laughing out loud at his own fiction.

Crying is a bit more complicated, since most people don't cry as readily as they laugh—there's more of a taboo about shedding tears, especially for men. And tears seem more permeable, more labile than laughter: if you're already upset, or grieving, or broken-hearted, the slightest thing can set you off, though some books will make you cry no matter what mood you're in (Lolita does it to me every time). Twenty-six of my respondents (19 of them men) said that, while they know they've felt sad or emotionally moved by a book, they couldn't recall actually shedding tears. Others said they cried a lot, at “anything sentimental” or “any books about animals.” Titles mentioned were eclectic, and included The Pianist, Metamorphosis, A Child Called It, Jude the Obscure, “the last few pages of Finnegan's Wake,” The Corrections, Little Women, and Marley and Me (from the same person who said it made her laugh out loud).

_____________________

"A psychiatrist confessed to laughing aloud only at Dilbert cartoons and a book called How to be a Jewish Mother."

_____________________

Personally, I'll never forget the odd experience of crying helplessly over Beloved while absolutely hating the book—partly, I think, because at the time it felt as though the author was playing heartlessly, almost manipulatively, on my private emotions. Or maybe it was just me.

A couple of men made interesting connections between passages that made them cry and their own emotional pressure points:

The last two books that made me cry out loud were Coetzee's Disgrace and Chang Rae Lee's Aloft. Now that I think about it, both are about the collapse of their patriarch protagonist's life-worlds; that probably says loads. Towards the end of Aloft I just couldn't take it any more. I think it's the only time I had to take a few deep breaths before continuing to read.

I remember crying when reading the end of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. I found my mother finishing it in the kitchen one morning. She almost never read novels at this time. But here she was all red-eyed over this book. I read the novel after that. She handed it to me. I was about 23 then; I was having problems figuring out what to do in life, and I was butting heads with my father. I identified with the predicaments of the young men in the novel, the conflicts, and the complex bonds—sometimes unacknowledged—with the “fathers.”

Of course, where you read is going to effect how you read. If you mostly read in public or semi-public places, and if you tend to read in 10- or 15-minute intervals during your work day, then, unless you're a very gifted reader, it's going to be hard for you to get deeply involved in your book. If you're reading fiction, it's difficult to identify with characters and keep up with a nuanced plot when you have to stop reading every few minutes, and not many of us feel comfortable laughing aloud or shedding tears in public. One reader confessed to feeling overcome at the closing chapter of Brick Lane by Monica Ali: “I was on the tube and had to stop reading it due to tears!” Another recalled: “At school we had an hour a week of private reading time. I remember bringing in Spike Milligan's war memoirs and being nearly thrown out of class because I couldn't read it without laughing.”

(8) Where do you buy most of your books? How much do you spend on books each year?

I asked this question mainly out of curiosity, since I never go to bookshops any more, and buy all my books used, from Amazon. While online book-buying seems to be more and more common, according to my survey, most people still also buy from bookstores, and even when buying online, prefer new books to used. A number of people commented how much they used to enjoy hunting for bargains in used bookstores, and how sad they felt that the Internet had “put an end to all that,” since now “everybody knows exactly how much any book is worth.” I was surprised to learn how little even the most prolific readers seem to spend on books (though it's also possible that people were underestimating their expenditure). Nobody thought they spent more than $1,500 a year on books, and the average estimate was between $150 and $200. A lot of people said they rarely bought books at all, borrowing them instead from libraries, friends and family, or relying on desk or review copies; others said they get all their books from thrift stores, charity shops, and library sales.

(9) Do you use bookmarks, or dog-ear the pages of your books? Do you make marginal notes? If so, do you use pencil or pen?

Those who tend in the direction of fetishism responded to this question with expressions of mock outrage, perplexity, or disapproval. “Bah god no! ... I'd seriously punch someone who dog-eared my books”; “Turning pages down makes me cringe. NO MARGIN NOTES. ... Why would I make notes in the margins?”; “Dog-earing is to be frowned upon. It is analogous to twisting the arm of a child.”

Personally I have little restraint about dog-earing my corners (but then, I'm also often tempted to twist the arms of children). Since I buy my books used whenever possible, I also tend to make notes in the margins, in pen (if I can't find a pencil, which is most of the time), so basically, I'm with the person who said, of his books, “I don't mind how they look, as long as they're stuck together.” Surprisingly, we dog-earers are in the majority—most people, including people you might expect to have fetishizing tendencies, such as writers and literature professors, said they usually dog-eared page corners to keep their place, and often made notes in the margins. Others said they keep their place with Post-its, note cards, pens, pencils, loose book covers, hair pins, subway cards, candy wrappers, sticky tabs, receipts, plane tickets, photographs, paper clips, or other devices:

I have these bookmarks that I make from torn pieces of paper. ... When I am finished with a book ... it can have as many as 40 of these bits of paper sticking out at the top—like some kind of headdress or rooster's comb. It's totally inefficient and ridiculous and I will probably never quit sticking these papers in.

Anybody who reads a lot will probably recognize that, over the years, they've picked up a few funny habits, which makes it a bit easier to understand how some people come to fetishize their books, and perhaps even to sympathize with those people.

Think carefully for a moment. Do you have any unusual tendencies, while reading? For example, I have an odd habit—odd but not perhaps so unusual—of checking the page numbers every time I turn over a new leaf. I'm not sure what I'm checking for—just to be sure that they're in the right order, I suppose. (Though what would I do if they weren't? Write a letter to the Times?). Also, I usually check how long the chapter is before I start it. I'm not exactly sure why I do this, though I suppose it has something to do with my need to be in control, since I find it very hard to stop reading at random, so books without chapters, or books with uneven chapters, annoy me very much—though it's unclear why I should turn myself over like this to the power of the book. After all, I could stop anywhere, wherever I wanted to. (Couldn't I?)










By Michal Koralewski, via Stock.xchng

How quickly do you read? Do you skim through pages at top speed, or do you stop to savor the sentences along the way? I'm sure we've all had the experience of not being able to put a book down, but for some people this seems to be the norm: “I will read a book obsessively in a single sitting, doing nothing else all day,” said one person; another commented: “When I'm really reading a book, that's all I do until it's over!” I've noticed that, with books I'm especially enjoying, I have a tendency to want to draw out the pleasure as long as I can by allowing myself only a few pages at a time, and reading with extra care, taking my time, enjoying the foreplay, as it were. But then, when I come to the last few chapters I find it hard to restrain myself, and once I know the end is in sight, I charge ahead to the climax in one long session, unable to stop, rather like the way some people let themselves slurp, guzzle, and smack their lips when coming to the end of their meal.

And finally...

(10) Where, and when, do you do your best reading?

When truly absorbed in a book, you're in a kind of liminal zone between inner and outer worlds—awake, but unaware, inwardly focused, but, ideally, without the slightest bit of self-consciousness. The reader who's totally engrossed has no notion of time or place, no bodily sensations, no existence outside their book. This is why books can be so vital for those in dire circumstances—people who are bedridden, in prison, or in hospital. Books can remove you, however temporarily, from your ongoing ordeal.

According to Freud, reading, like art and creative writing, is a kind of daydreaming, childish and retrogressive; those with happy, fulfilled, distracting lives should have no need to escape into fiction. But most readers seem to feel that, in moderation at least, fiction enhances their lives, making them richer and more interesting. Almost everyone who's in the habit of reading tries to carve out some time to spend every day with a book, even if it's just a few minutes at night, before falling asleep. In fact, morning and night—the liminal edges of the day—are the times most people seem to spend with their books.

The etiquette of reading when you're not alone can be quite a touchy subject. Some people feel it's rude to read in company, and of course this is often true, but it all depends on the company, and how comfortable you are around them. For example, when you're in the first stages of a love affair, it seems absolutely inconceivable to get out a book and read; you have no interest in anything except being with your lover. Even waiting in a bar or restaurant, you're a mass of nerves, hardly able to order a drink, unable to focus, incapable even of reading a menu. But there comes a time when there's nothing more natural than for you and your lover to spend the evening together absorbed in your separate books.

Getting to this stage, however, can be a fragile and delicate process. How many nights do you have to spend with a new lover before it's acceptable, when, in his or her company, to reach out and take a book from the nightstand? In doing so, you're tacitly admitting that you've reached a stage when your lover's presence is less interesting to you, at least for a while, than printed words on a page. It's a sensitive moment, not to be undertaken without a clear knowledge of the risks involved. Will your new lover recoil with dismay at your thoughtless indifference, or will they smile agreeably, and reach for a book of their own? And what if they reach for their book too soon, too early in the relationship, before you're ready, before it feels right? Is there anything you can do? Should you say something, or should you just take it as a sign that the honeymoon is over?

And then, think about this: How many people do you know in whose company you'd feel comfortable losing yourself in a book? On the one hand, naturally, it's hard to imagine any more blatant signal that you're not interested in other people's conversation, and there are times—if you took out your book during a dinner party, for example, or in the middle of a first date—when no other interpretation could be possible. In different circumstances, however, settling down with a book can show that you feel completely at ease with somebody, so much so that you feel no obligation to make small talk, especially in circumstances when there's no need to stand upon ceremony—if you're both on a long trip, or enduring a tedious wait.

The readers I interviewed came up with a wide variety of responses to the question of where they do their best reading, from the general (“anywhere”; “at home”; “on vacation”) to the specific (“lying on my BACK with my head propped up”; “on the lounge chair with my feet up, something to drink and a cigarette”; “on a blanket or towel, in nature, with a glass of Sauvignon blanc”). People seem to have all kinds of favorite spots for reading: “in the chair in my office”; “at the pool”; “in Starbucks”; “on trains”; “on the beach”; “in my backyard, on a folding chair”; “in the library”; “in Central Park”; “on planes”; “on the sofa”; “in my easy chair”; “in the back seat of the car”; “in coffeehouses”; “in trees”; “in the hot tub.” And, while lots of people freely admitted to reading in the bath, nobody confessed to doing their best reading on the loo.

Like most people, I do most of my reading in bed at night. In the morning, if I don't have to get up right away, I'll spend at least half an hour reading in bed, which is, as most people seem to agree, the best place for intensive, immersive leisure reading. You can burrow down into the covers with your book or plump the pillows and sit up in your pajamas like a dainty invalid. You can stretch out, curl up, or snuggle under the quilt. If you feel guilty about staying in bed, or if it makes you antsy to look at the clock, you can lie on top of the covers and do some leg lifts while you read. You can make a nice pot of tea for the bedside table (it's even better if you can get somebody to make it for you). Of course, there are other places that are more commonly associated with reading—airport lounges, long flights, hospitals—but here we tend to read by necessity, as a way of passing the time, or to keep our mind off things. Lying supine in bed, everyone seems to agree, is the ideal place to read, the most conducive to immersion in the richness and complexity of another world.


Mikita Brottman is a professor of language and literature at the Maryland College Institute of Art. This essay is part of a book in progress about reading. Send your responses to these 10 questions, or any other thoughts about reading habits, to mbrottman@mica.edu.

POETRY by Stephen Cushman

Photo by Neil Gould, via stock.xchng

À Grande Vitesse

Beside the tracks, Paris to Bordeaux,
leafless trees keep breaking out
in balls of mistletoe

whose parasitic pompoms
clot the crotches of the branches
with promises of kisses.

Le gui they call it here,
where Roman farmers planted vines
and this or that exceptional year

still tastes of Caesar.
But why buy wine
one could die before drinking

at full maturity, a decade or so
off in the future? Farsighted sybarites
presumably know

just the right ratio
of pleasure to providence;
yet where in these vineyards, their chateaux

flashing past, where in quick villages,
each with its own, Decembery cold,
unheated churchful of ether-sweet incense,
do you find one of those?


Jogger at the Bloody Angle

She lopes upon the frenzy of the past
in blue running bra, red running shorts,
her ponytail keeping time in steady stride
like a metronome as yellow as new buttercups
along the road beside these sunken earthworks.

Her shoes and music cost more dollars
than some who died here made in a year,
but dollars meant something different then,
and if she gives no thought to men
calf-deep in mud and purple puddles

from foggy dawn till long past midnight,
when the shot-up oak crashed down in rain
and soon became a shorthand sign for all
that Clio can shrink to a paragraph,

it’s only fair. They gave the same to her.
A park’s a park and green land rare
in so much progress, so many houses
standing now where Barlow crossed the Po.
Why should she know a thing about it?
Why should she care? She does her share

just running the route of that morning attack,
quitting the road and cantering the field
to disappear in dips and ripples of the ground
and teach the contours of that topography,

of dead space that gave a little more life
to those who sheltered a few minutes there,
even better for her detachment.


Forgot Your Password?

Your mother’s maiden name,
Your mother’s date of birth,
Your father’s favorite food
When he still ate food,

Your best friend’s street address,
Your sister’s telephone number,
Your brother’s blood pressure reading
The last time you saw him,

Your lover’s license plate,
Your president’s net worth,
The population of a country
Where few would need a password.


To a Predicted Pandemic

Here at graybreak it’s hard to believe
cousins of songsters who sauté the air
in butterfat love calls
could spatter us all with fatal virus.

All people.
At least you’re not elitist,
and equal rights might be nice for a change,
everyone masked, even-stephen, fair shake,
when it comes to headache, fever, chills,
pneumonia. Or will you make

division worse: who’s got a doctor,
who gets vaccine, who lives clean
and cared-for enough to fend off advances?

O whom will you smite and what can we smear
on our doorposts and lintels?

Hand soap? (Now there’s a good investment.)

Or maybe you’ll spare whoever can hear
amidst avian uproar this boisterous morning

the white-throated sparrow
on its way elsewhere?

If so,
could one take your clemency
in the form of a gift certificate,
as schools empty, economies totter,
and give it to another
more afraid to go?


Etymological

What not. What have you. What if.
What of it. What’s what. What with,

as in, What with one’s having so little say
in making it rain, healing the brain,
redistributing lopsided gain,

it’s best to eat less, hug more,
vote and pray and give away
whatever one can, or,

What with a grizzly killing a cub
so he can mate with its milkless mother
all the sooner, what does it matter

that Japanese has no word for menopause?

The cries, the claws,
alas, alack, the woesome’s winning out
it seems, even if we behave ourselves,

and yet and yet
a cup of clean water,
a spell of good weather, the clearing up
of a cold or an ache, and all right! whoopee!

hot diggety! from Nilo-Saharan
or Malayo-Polynesian or Uralic-Altaic

for grateful acceptance sometimes mistaken
for comfy complacency.

Frequently Asked Questions

What time is it? How much does it cost?
Do spiders have dreams? Where are we going?
What difference does it make? Will this plane crash?
Why do you ask? Does that feel good?

What’s Sanskrit for ecstasy? How long have I got?
Can you use it in a sentence? If it’s high tide here,
is it low tide there? May I see your driver’s license?
Where did you get such a ravishing rib cage?

Does life exist elsewhere? What’s the point? Is it hard
to perform your own tracheotomy? Would you call a taxi?
Where’s the bathroom? Is service included? Do you think
I look fat? What is prayer?

Got a light? White or red? Do you have this
in a larger size? What grade are you in?
Which way to Pisa? Why did I ever say yes?
Who is my neighbor? Business or pleasure?

Is this seat free? What’s the local specialty?
Haven’t we discussed disgust? Why have you forsaken me?
Does my vote count? What kind of bird was that?
Do they speak English? Am I hurting you?

Spare some change? Which way’s north? Will you wait for me?
Think it’ll snow? What does she want for her birthday?
Where’s the nearest emergency exit? Will you take a check?
Is there stuff in my teeth? Faster or slower?

Have you seen my glasses? Do I need a reservation?
How do you spell that? Anything from the mini-bar?
What are you wearing? Does it help to fight back
when attacked by a mountain lion? Promise?

Abraham Sacrificing Isaac, 1650; Laurent de La Hire; oil on canvas; Musée Saint-Denis, Reims; from Web Gallery of Art

For a Son Who’s Just Been Jilted

What if one morning, during hurried shaving,
as water boils and weather’s foretold,
a foggy mirror said from its steam,
Take now your son, whom you have loved

dangerously close to idolatry,
and get thee into the land of Moriah,
which doesn’t appear on a map by the way,
and offer him there on an altar in flames?

How about that Abraham, who doesn’t demur
or kick a fuss but instead of squawking
saddles an ass and cuts some wood?

As for Isaac, not a peep
after Where’s the lamb, Dad?
but something must have passed between them
as he tied him up and laid him carefully
on the improvised altar they wrestled together
out of local limestone chunks,

something at least when the blade came close
to unwhiskered throat and Adam’s apple,
tappuah haaddam, stuck there always
and swallowing hard, though not yet
enlarged with a lowering voice

when the father of a multitude,
having committed to God will provide,
kissed his lips and said good-bye.


Stephen Cushman is a professor of English at the University of Virginia. His books of poetry include Blue Pajamas and Cussing Lesson (both from Louisiana State University Press), and he's working on his next, called Heart Island.