Friday, April 29, 2005
See these laurels? Totally resting on them.
A wonderful thing has been happening these past few months. The English department seems to be making an actual effort to keep me from leaving. I mean, not like secret memoranda were circulated or women and fruit baskets delivered to my door. It's just that, independently, all of my teachers, past and present, have been trying to talk me into staying. They've all been saying, "So why are you leaving again?" or, "we're sorry to have you leave us," etc. Only they appear to mean it. Maybe I just want them to. But they seem to actually regret my departure, which comes as a complete surprise. I mean, you do your best to make a dent in a department that has seen countless mavericks and smartasses come and go, but you don't really expect your impact to be felt--not any more than a mosquito bite. At Horace Mann I was accustomed to being seen maybe as a curio, an object of mild entertainment value, though not to be taken entirely seriously, because in any case there would be more like me. And I think my grades there, which I never paid much attention to, reflected that. B+'s across the board. I couldn't be arsed applying myself. But I've changed since I've been here, developed considerably. I've gotten better at this whole school business. I caused a few ripples last year, but these dissipated as quickly as they appeared. This year, on the other hand, something seems to have clicked, like I finally figured it out, and I seem to have left something like an impression on the department (to say nothing of the class). It has been by far the most successful academic year of my life (at least since 4th grade), and the best part is, I seem to have pulled it off without compromising myself too much. I haven't stopped having fun.
Okay, so once or twice this year, I had too much fun. My two lowest scores, the 40 (which I'm now even more bitter about, and I'll tell you why in a moment) and the 62 (Po' Mo'Fo'), were granted to the essays I'd worked hardest on--or, at least, thought most about, and consequently gone far beyond the purview of the course. Each of those had been the work of about a month (not their writing, but their researching). The 64, for Fables, was written in a day (and the book, Utopia, read the day before), and suffered from a total lack of secondary sources--incidentally the only "straight," formal, uncolloquial essay this year. The deuce of 70's, Victorianism and Renaissance Poetry, were chancy: for Victorianism, I wrote the wrong essay etc., and also completely forgot to mention Victorianism, and R'Sance Poetry, well, Donne's dong did good. Then out came the 78 and the 85 (my Old English tutor from last year, who's kind of a buddy by now, told me today she never gives about 72). The 85 you may remember was the result of something like torture. But torture, it seems, is integral to the alchemical process: it's the "smoky persecution of nature," the torture of the base materials, which revealeth ye philosopher's stone. But it didn't enter my mind when I wrote my last paper, a garbled, gargled backwash of Le Morte Darthur, that lightning could strike twice. I made no bones about it: I thought it was atrocious, the worst thing I'd ever written. I even told Deirdre so, to prepare her. I was massively apologetic about it. It was full of baseless assumptions (which I've finally, finally learned--the hard way--to avoid making when the tutor knows her stuff) and shot with holes you could ram a buffalo through. It was the first essay on which I actually had to struggle to make the word count (this came three days after Il Monstro). I had so utterly given up on it that I left in lame throwaway lines like "everyone is cool with 'trew love.'" I told her in no uncertain terms, This one sucks.
And yet when I get it back this morning, neatly written and circled in the top right-hand corner of the coversheet is the number 75.
I don't even know. Because this is insane. I don't deserve this. No one, but no one, gets these grades this consistently. Five firsts already is rare as five home runs, but when three are grand slams--shit, maybe they're grade-inflating me. I think maybe the lesson here is, "lower their expectations." That, or, "Sam, if you were any more golden you'd be bulletproof." Or, possibly, "I love Deirdre Parsons, the Minerva of Oxford." She writes: "You know you are walking on the edge as regards your prose style. However, since you also know that I know that you know that this is a deliberate choice, you won't be surprised that it hasn't made a difference to your mark."
Hot coals? Broken glass? Little metal bottle tops upside down? Bring 'em on!
<<>><<>><<>><<>><<>>
In other news, I finally rented Bloom last night, the recent adaptation of Ulysses for the screen (it's actually written Bl,.m, pronounced Bloom, which should have been a tip-off). There's already one movie version of Ulysses, made in 1967, and it's not bad. It's mostly an adaptation of episode 15, "Circe," which is the most cinematic in the book. This one has Stephen Rea and Angeline Ball, and they're okay. Stephen Rea, actually, seems to get it. But the movie itself is so appalling that their decent performances are obliterated. Did anyone read the book? Anyone? Firstly, the Stephen Dedalus. The actor, Hugh O'Conor, tousled fair hair, delicately sharp long nose, big innocent blue eyes, is so clearly miscast that no amount of decent acting can correct the casting director's fuckup--to act like Dedalus while looking nothing like him might unsettle the audience. Fortunately, though, he never makes the slightest effort to act against his features, instead using them to the fullest, and is therefore an exquisite trainwreck of a Dedalus. It should come as no surprise that I am rather a bit attached to Stephen, even putting our history behind us, I still, in my more dour moments, think I should more like to play him than any other character I could think of (excepting, perhaps, Portnoy, but that's different). I understand Stephen well, too well, almost. Not that I am the only one. Joyce makes it pretty easy. How this guy fucked it up so bad, I can't imagine. He plays him as gentle, almost Apollonian, acquiescent, sanguine, not angry at his dead mother, not even guilty, but actually sad, which he isn't, really, and, most egregiously, not arrogant--the list goes on. Stephen is Dionysian (the whole fucking book's Dionysian), dark, brooding, taciturn, and, of course, spectacularly arrogant: "a man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and lead to portals of discovery." He and the director do everything wrong. They leave out details everywhere, from the minimal (they didn't even try to render Bloom's 7 Eccles Street apartment as it was in the book, which actually makes a big difference--there is a whole to-do with the railing, and Bloom's having to jump it because he, like Stephen, is keyless, which is a universal sign for emasculation, and they leave the railing out entirely; also, the telegram recalling Stephen to Dublin, which read "Nother (sic) dying come home father," is read without the mispelling, and Joyce purists howl in agony), to the incredibly crucial (Stephen is not going back to the Martello tower, for one, because Haines is a sleepwalking psychopath who nearly shot him last night, thinking there was a panther in the room; also, the Citizen/Cyclops is restrained from following Bloom out the door and hurling a boulder/breadbox after him, as he does in the book, and thus we lose the lovely image of the escaping Bloom ascending in a chariot like Elijah "at a forty-five degree angle like a shot off a shovel). I could catalogue at length the inexcusable editions, but even they pale against the sheer amateurishness of the movie as it remains. They try to cram in nearly all the episodes, where the '67 version had the good sense to rush right to Circe, and spend an hour there. Here though, they do leave out entirely two very cinematic episodes, Laestrygonians (8) and Sirens (11). And then the more than actable Nausicaa episode, in which Bloom has a surreptitious wank on the beach, and which depends ENTIRELY on the internal monologues of Gerty MacDowell (Nausicaa) and then Bloom, is actually fucking done in silence, with cheap crescendoing music animating Bloom and Gerty's indiscretion. It's really like they never read it.
I think of all the great epics, Ulysses is one of the most geared towards cinema--more than the Aeneid, more than the Commedia, and certainly a hell of a lot more than Paradise lost. They fucked up Troy pretty good, but that's no reason they shouldn't give it another shot, only this time don't let it suck. But Ulysses wants to be a movie. "Circe" alone is loaded with stage directions that no stage can ever accommodate, but that film can. Joyce was very interested in cinema--in an ill-starred business venture (as all of Joyce's, père et fils, were), he and two swindling partners gave Dublin its first movie theatre, the Volta. It has not been preserved, but the memory alone is testament to his affection for the medium. He very consciously wrote through a lens: "ineluctable modality of the visible. At least that if no more. Thought through my eyes." Ulysses would make a phenomenal movie, if only directors would stop trying to cut it to feature length. That's just stupid. You cannot cut Ulysses. This isn't the purist in me talking. It's just impossible. The key to Ulysses is simple: read every word, because every word is repeated. Ulysses, too, is a commodious vicus of recirculation. It doesn't make sense if you cut it. The book is as much about the text as it is the story. You may not need to speak EVERY word (you might have to do something clever with episode 14, Oxen of the Sun, which is the history of English literature, and not only unfilmable, but also unreadable: I think the answer there is, translate it into a history of film, which would be awesome), but you cannot leave out details. Maybe HBO should take it on. They whack together half a dozen thirteen-hour-long series per year, why not take a shot at an 18-part--or maybe just 13-part--Ulysses? I think it'd make a phenomenal movie. Granted the director would have to be a goddamn genius--or have a different director for each episode? Whatever his offenses with Alexander, after seeing The Doors, I'd more than willingly give Oliver Stone Circe. Tim Burton would take Hades--though he could do some of Circe, too. I wonder how Jim Jarmusch would like Ithaca (another episode you'd have to reinvent), and I'd definitely give him Eumaeus, as no one else could make a deliberately boring episode (the only one you can really elide) watchable. Imagine Kevin Smith taking on Scylla and Charybdis (really talky)--not that he's really up to it. I'm blanking on directors here. I'd probably trust Tom Stoppard to do the screen treatment, though.
Anyway. Get carried away. Have all this time on my hands now. Got my exam schedule and it's ridiculous. May 25 to June 11 (yeah, Ma, we need to change the fucking tickets). That's over a fortnight for six exams. May 25, 27, 28. Then June 3. Then June 10. Then bang, right on it's heels, June 11. So there's a two-week period with only one exam. Fuck it, I'm going traveling. My average is more than solid: 68. I mentioned that that 40 was irritating? Without it, my average jumps to a 72--a first for the year. Though a 68 is none too shabby. I talked to Diane, the Freshmen Secretary, aka Mother of Us All, about sending an official-looking summary of this year's scores to Chicago (they just deferred me to Regular Application because of a documentation snafu--they didn't get my transcript in time, very annoying). They want my term grades. We don't get term grades. So they're getting my essay grades, which are half of our final grades. She, though, offered to leave the 40 off the summary, and I suddenly felt very stupid: I'd sent an email to the tranfer guy at Chicago a few days earlier in which I'd mentioned the 40--made a defense of it. Never figured we could just leave it off. Stupid honesty. Last time I do that.
Okay, so once or twice this year, I had too much fun. My two lowest scores, the 40 (which I'm now even more bitter about, and I'll tell you why in a moment) and the 62 (Po' Mo'Fo'), were granted to the essays I'd worked hardest on--or, at least, thought most about, and consequently gone far beyond the purview of the course. Each of those had been the work of about a month (not their writing, but their researching). The 64, for Fables, was written in a day (and the book, Utopia, read the day before), and suffered from a total lack of secondary sources--incidentally the only "straight," formal, uncolloquial essay this year. The deuce of 70's, Victorianism and Renaissance Poetry, were chancy: for Victorianism, I wrote the wrong essay etc., and also completely forgot to mention Victorianism, and R'Sance Poetry, well, Donne's dong did good. Then out came the 78 and the 85 (my Old English tutor from last year, who's kind of a buddy by now, told me today she never gives about 72). The 85 you may remember was the result of something like torture. But torture, it seems, is integral to the alchemical process: it's the "smoky persecution of nature," the torture of the base materials, which revealeth ye philosopher's stone. But it didn't enter my mind when I wrote my last paper, a garbled, gargled backwash of Le Morte Darthur, that lightning could strike twice. I made no bones about it: I thought it was atrocious, the worst thing I'd ever written. I even told Deirdre so, to prepare her. I was massively apologetic about it. It was full of baseless assumptions (which I've finally, finally learned--the hard way--to avoid making when the tutor knows her stuff) and shot with holes you could ram a buffalo through. It was the first essay on which I actually had to struggle to make the word count (this came three days after Il Monstro). I had so utterly given up on it that I left in lame throwaway lines like "everyone is cool with 'trew love.'" I told her in no uncertain terms, This one sucks.
And yet when I get it back this morning, neatly written and circled in the top right-hand corner of the coversheet is the number 75.
I don't even know. Because this is insane. I don't deserve this. No one, but no one, gets these grades this consistently. Five firsts already is rare as five home runs, but when three are grand slams--shit, maybe they're grade-inflating me. I think maybe the lesson here is, "lower their expectations." That, or, "Sam, if you were any more golden you'd be bulletproof." Or, possibly, "I love Deirdre Parsons, the Minerva of Oxford." She writes: "You know you are walking on the edge as regards your prose style. However, since you also know that I know that you know that this is a deliberate choice, you won't be surprised that it hasn't made a difference to your mark."
Hot coals? Broken glass? Little metal bottle tops upside down? Bring 'em on!
<<>><<>><<>><<>><<>>
In other news, I finally rented Bloom last night, the recent adaptation of Ulysses for the screen (it's actually written Bl,.m, pronounced Bloom, which should have been a tip-off). There's already one movie version of Ulysses, made in 1967, and it's not bad. It's mostly an adaptation of episode 15, "Circe," which is the most cinematic in the book. This one has Stephen Rea and Angeline Ball, and they're okay. Stephen Rea, actually, seems to get it. But the movie itself is so appalling that their decent performances are obliterated. Did anyone read the book? Anyone? Firstly, the Stephen Dedalus. The actor, Hugh O'Conor, tousled fair hair, delicately sharp long nose, big innocent blue eyes, is so clearly miscast that no amount of decent acting can correct the casting director's fuckup--to act like Dedalus while looking nothing like him might unsettle the audience. Fortunately, though, he never makes the slightest effort to act against his features, instead using them to the fullest, and is therefore an exquisite trainwreck of a Dedalus. It should come as no surprise that I am rather a bit attached to Stephen, even putting our history behind us, I still, in my more dour moments, think I should more like to play him than any other character I could think of (excepting, perhaps, Portnoy, but that's different). I understand Stephen well, too well, almost. Not that I am the only one. Joyce makes it pretty easy. How this guy fucked it up so bad, I can't imagine. He plays him as gentle, almost Apollonian, acquiescent, sanguine, not angry at his dead mother, not even guilty, but actually sad, which he isn't, really, and, most egregiously, not arrogant--the list goes on. Stephen is Dionysian (the whole fucking book's Dionysian), dark, brooding, taciturn, and, of course, spectacularly arrogant: "a man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and lead to portals of discovery." He and the director do everything wrong. They leave out details everywhere, from the minimal (they didn't even try to render Bloom's 7 Eccles Street apartment as it was in the book, which actually makes a big difference--there is a whole to-do with the railing, and Bloom's having to jump it because he, like Stephen, is keyless, which is a universal sign for emasculation, and they leave the railing out entirely; also, the telegram recalling Stephen to Dublin, which read "Nother (sic) dying come home father," is read without the mispelling, and Joyce purists howl in agony), to the incredibly crucial (Stephen is not going back to the Martello tower, for one, because Haines is a sleepwalking psychopath who nearly shot him last night, thinking there was a panther in the room; also, the Citizen/Cyclops is restrained from following Bloom out the door and hurling a boulder/breadbox after him, as he does in the book, and thus we lose the lovely image of the escaping Bloom ascending in a chariot like Elijah "at a forty-five degree angle like a shot off a shovel). I could catalogue at length the inexcusable editions, but even they pale against the sheer amateurishness of the movie as it remains. They try to cram in nearly all the episodes, where the '67 version had the good sense to rush right to Circe, and spend an hour there. Here though, they do leave out entirely two very cinematic episodes, Laestrygonians (8) and Sirens (11). And then the more than actable Nausicaa episode, in which Bloom has a surreptitious wank on the beach, and which depends ENTIRELY on the internal monologues of Gerty MacDowell (Nausicaa) and then Bloom, is actually fucking done in silence, with cheap crescendoing music animating Bloom and Gerty's indiscretion. It's really like they never read it.
I think of all the great epics, Ulysses is one of the most geared towards cinema--more than the Aeneid, more than the Commedia, and certainly a hell of a lot more than Paradise lost. They fucked up Troy pretty good, but that's no reason they shouldn't give it another shot, only this time don't let it suck. But Ulysses wants to be a movie. "Circe" alone is loaded with stage directions that no stage can ever accommodate, but that film can. Joyce was very interested in cinema--in an ill-starred business venture (as all of Joyce's, père et fils, were), he and two swindling partners gave Dublin its first movie theatre, the Volta. It has not been preserved, but the memory alone is testament to his affection for the medium. He very consciously wrote through a lens: "ineluctable modality of the visible. At least that if no more. Thought through my eyes." Ulysses would make a phenomenal movie, if only directors would stop trying to cut it to feature length. That's just stupid. You cannot cut Ulysses. This isn't the purist in me talking. It's just impossible. The key to Ulysses is simple: read every word, because every word is repeated. Ulysses, too, is a commodious vicus of recirculation. It doesn't make sense if you cut it. The book is as much about the text as it is the story. You may not need to speak EVERY word (you might have to do something clever with episode 14, Oxen of the Sun, which is the history of English literature, and not only unfilmable, but also unreadable: I think the answer there is, translate it into a history of film, which would be awesome), but you cannot leave out details. Maybe HBO should take it on. They whack together half a dozen thirteen-hour-long series per year, why not take a shot at an 18-part--or maybe just 13-part--Ulysses? I think it'd make a phenomenal movie. Granted the director would have to be a goddamn genius--or have a different director for each episode? Whatever his offenses with Alexander, after seeing The Doors, I'd more than willingly give Oliver Stone Circe. Tim Burton would take Hades--though he could do some of Circe, too. I wonder how Jim Jarmusch would like Ithaca (another episode you'd have to reinvent), and I'd definitely give him Eumaeus, as no one else could make a deliberately boring episode (the only one you can really elide) watchable. Imagine Kevin Smith taking on Scylla and Charybdis (really talky)--not that he's really up to it. I'm blanking on directors here. I'd probably trust Tom Stoppard to do the screen treatment, though.
Anyway. Get carried away. Have all this time on my hands now. Got my exam schedule and it's ridiculous. May 25 to June 11 (yeah, Ma, we need to change the fucking tickets). That's over a fortnight for six exams. May 25, 27, 28. Then June 3. Then June 10. Then bang, right on it's heels, June 11. So there's a two-week period with only one exam. Fuck it, I'm going traveling. My average is more than solid: 68. I mentioned that that 40 was irritating? Without it, my average jumps to a 72--a first for the year. Though a 68 is none too shabby. I talked to Diane, the Freshmen Secretary, aka Mother of Us All, about sending an official-looking summary of this year's scores to Chicago (they just deferred me to Regular Application because of a documentation snafu--they didn't get my transcript in time, very annoying). They want my term grades. We don't get term grades. So they're getting my essay grades, which are half of our final grades. She, though, offered to leave the 40 off the summary, and I suddenly felt very stupid: I'd sent an email to the tranfer guy at Chicago a few days earlier in which I'd mentioned the 40--made a defense of it. Never figured we could just leave it off. Stupid honesty. Last time I do that.
Monday, April 25, 2005
Good art
It's rare you read a book that makes the room brighter, as though by its magic it has, on this cloudy Dublin day, commanded the sun's own gleam into your apartment, and set the white walls to dazzling. The page itself stays plain and gentle, presuming no special scintillation or lustre; the brilliance comes from everywhere else, windows, walls, carpet, drapes, ineffable, warm, pulsing. Your ears feel hot. You catch yourself holding your breath until the end of the paragraph and realized you're feeling lightheaded, your blood thin, skin translucent. The lights are off and the day is grey but in the living room is an iridescence more shimmering than any lamplight.
On every page. All five hundred and thirty-one of them.
Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides. Never mistrust the people at Pulitzer again. Wow. Must have read it in a week--300 pages in the past two days, finished it this morning. Breathtaking. Same thing happened when Sadie read it: lost her to it for a week, as she never looked up once. Not even going to try and summarize it. Go read it, don't argue, it's fast as Harry Potter, only it contains whole countries ("I am large; I contain multitudes").
<<>><<>><<>><<>><<>>
Last night Sadie and I were at Crawdaddy to see Money Mark ("the fourth Beastie," but so much more) and Kid Koala, the world's cuddliest DJ. Also one of the best. He was so cute! You wanted to poke him with a stick and make him giggle. Smiliest DJ ever, too. At one point, he played keyboard for this song, and because they hadn't really practiced it, he would fuck up the chords, and he was laughing so happily that it was even better than if he'd played it straight (conversely, the atrocious support band frontman, who should never, ever be allowed to sing in public, or anywhere, ever again, struck a really wrong note on the guitar, and it was mortifying). And what he did to "Moon River"--I can't even begin to describe it. He kind of bent it and strung it like a longbow and fired flaming arrows of flow. So a phenomenal show. How often do you see a performer you'd happily follow around the world?
On every page. All five hundred and thirty-one of them.
Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides. Never mistrust the people at Pulitzer again. Wow. Must have read it in a week--300 pages in the past two days, finished it this morning. Breathtaking. Same thing happened when Sadie read it: lost her to it for a week, as she never looked up once. Not even going to try and summarize it. Go read it, don't argue, it's fast as Harry Potter, only it contains whole countries ("I am large; I contain multitudes").
<<>><<>><<>><<>><<>>
Last night Sadie and I were at Crawdaddy to see Money Mark ("the fourth Beastie," but so much more) and Kid Koala, the world's cuddliest DJ. Also one of the best. He was so cute! You wanted to poke him with a stick and make him giggle. Smiliest DJ ever, too. At one point, he played keyboard for this song, and because they hadn't really practiced it, he would fuck up the chords, and he was laughing so happily that it was even better than if he'd played it straight (conversely, the atrocious support band frontman, who should never, ever be allowed to sing in public, or anywhere, ever again, struck a really wrong note on the guitar, and it was mortifying). And what he did to "Moon River"--I can't even begin to describe it. He kind of bent it and strung it like a longbow and fired flaming arrows of flow. So a phenomenal show. How often do you see a performer you'd happily follow around the world?
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