A Bountiful History

Well, I'm back to the world of non-fiction once again! After a few days of reading American Heritage magazine, I decided to launch into a book I bought years ago and had started reading before putting it aside. It's a history entitled The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty by Caroline Alexander, published in 2003.

It got good reviews when it came out, and I agree that it's well written and interesting. So far it seems to be an account that will be more sympathetic toward Captain Bligh. But whether this is an objective account or biased toward Captain Bligh, I'll find out soon enough.

The story starts at the end, with a description of the aftermath of the mutiny, when the survivors get back to England and the king sends a ship out to search for the culprits and bring them to justice.  Where it will go from there, I'm eager to learn.

As ever, I'll let you know what I think.

The Book with the Multiple Mysteries

This week, I decided to leave off reading the film book and begin a murder mystery. I chose one of the novels by Stieg Larsson that have become quite popular in recent years, The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo. Though it was slow going at first, after a couple of chapters I was quite involved. I'm pretty sure it was the appearance of the "girl" of the title that made my interest pick up. It was quite a good read, which is why I've already finished it, despite its length of 465 pages.

The Girl is a fairly standard murder mystery in that it presents the murder fairly early, with the detective trying out various possible theories and suspects until he homes in on the culprit who is brought to justice at the end. But the original crime isn't the only one being detected over the course of the novel; new plot threads are added as the narrative continues, and each one has to be "unknotted" by the time the novel ends.

The plot is no more complicated than the characters, however. Each of the major characters change over the course of the novel, growing in some ways but not in others. At the end, it seems fairly certain that readers will not be seeing the last of Blomqvist and Salander, not to mention some of the other characters who feature prominently in this story.

I spent most of the novel wondering why it was titled as it was. I still haven't figured that out yet, but maybe after the next one in this series I will know.

Some of you may know that the author, Stieg Larsson, died of a heart attack in 2004. At the time of his death, none of the books he is now famous for were published. During his life, he was a very controversial figure who was openly Communist but also an anti-Nazi activist who received many death threats. You can read a biography at Wikipedia: Stieg Larsson.

The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo was definitely an engrossing book. I recommend it highly!

Not Simply a Movie

Well, I've gotten through more chapters of How to Read a Film, and I've learned some things I didn't know about film.  Chapter 2, about the technical aspects of film, was quite informative. I had no idea producing a film was so complex! So much goes into the finished product, so much to take into account: the film, the camera, the merging of sound and image, the recording of sound, the lighting, the frame, the lens, the shot, the editing and mixing, the projector.  It's mind boggling!

Of course, that's just the technical end of things.  It doesn't include the human factors: the writers, directors, cinematographers, actors, and the many other professionals who create the film.

Making a film comes down to three things, according to James Monaco: choosing what to shoot, how to shoot it, and how to present what you've shot.  But getting there involves much more technology, many more people and much more time than other art forms that are not nearly so technologically intense.

For instance, staging a play seems a fairly simple affair when compared to producing a film, even a play with elaborate sets and costumes, mainly because the technology of a film is so much more complex. 

If you need an example, witness the difficulties of staging Spider Man on the Broadway stage.  It was scheduled to open around Thanksgiving, but they still can't get the production finished and it's nearly Valentine's Day!  The estimated opening date is now March 15.  Though not yet open, Spider Man is already the most expensive Broadway show ever produced. And all because of the many technical problems associated with scenes that were routine for the film's producers. And then there's the danger of recreating Spider Man's antics live.  A number of people have been badly hurt trying to do the stunts.

I think Spider Man's producers and its preview audiences have come to the same conclusions I have: 1) a stageplay is not a movie and never can be; and 2) we don't appreciate all that goes into bringing a movie to an audience, especially these days when with just a few clicks we can see just about any movie we want.

In fact, I was wondering what James Monaco, the author of How to Read a Film thinks of YouTube and its impact on movie making today.

Speaking for myself, I worry what YouTube is doing to how we think about quality films.  It seems that everyone is making a movie and putting it on the world wide web for all to see, but most of those movies are, frankly speaking, crap.  Making a great movie takes more than turning on your video camera or worse, your cheap digital camera, or worst of all, your cell phone's camera and pointing it at some mundane or crudely contrived activity, imagining that you're creating great art.

On the other hand, YouTube also brings us the quality films: old silent films, art-house films, foreign films and obscure films that we might not get to see anywhere else because they're no longer screened or made into videos, as well as the mainstream films (in segments) that you can pick up at the video store or on TV.

And YouTube is not the only outlet for such films. There are other places that will allow us to view films, even in their entirety, such as the many websites that make public domain films available on line. So aspiring filmmakers have many examples of quality films to study and strive to emulate.

But even for those of us who just want to enjoy a good movie, knowing something about how it all comes together just for us helps, I think, to make us appreciate the movie even more.

Moving On: From Reading Stories to Reading Films

I finally finished reading the twenty stories in Best Short Stories of 1990.  I only liked about six of them, I'm afraid.  The stories I liked were straight forward with a satisfying conclusion and characters who were sympathetic in some way.  Of those I haven't talked about yet, here are the ones I liked: "Nothing to Ask For," by Dennis McFarland, about a man who visits a friend dying from AIDS; "Wigtime," by Alice Munro, about two women friends; and "In a Father's Place," by Christopher Tilghman, about how the catalyst of a son's controlling girlfriend changes a father's relationship with his children and his past.

I'm thinking this is not the way to read these books--all at once, I mean.  In the future, I think I might just pick one out once in a while as a change of pace from reading a novel or a non-fiction book.

In the meantime, I've started reading a new book, How to Read a Film: Movies, Media, Multimedia, by James Monaco.  I have the 2000 edition, but there's a new one out, published in 2009. Both are available on Amazon.com. 

It's intended to be a textbook, apparently, having been written as a result of the author's teaching film at the New School for Social Research in New York City.  It's a very comprehensive discussion of film, including its history and technical aspects.  I've always wanted to learn more about the art and technique of filmmaking, and I figured: why not start now?

So far I've read the first chapter, covering "Film as an Art," and part of Chapter 2, which gets into the technology of film.  Chapter 1 is an interesting overview, but I was particularly struck by James Monaco's idea that abstract painting started in part as a response to the availability of photographic images.  Once people could take a photo, they no longer needed someone to paint the world around them as a way of recording the phenomenon.  Painters were then free to interpret the image rather than merely reproduce it.  It's an interesting idea, although I'm not sure I entirely buy it as an explanation of abstract art. 

Another important point made in Chapter 1 is that paintings and even photographs are static forms, unlike novels or stories, narratives which move forward in time.  Film seems to have features of both media.  Not only is it visual, like a painting, but it is also narrative, like a novel.  Both are important, I think, for a film to be successful, something movie makers occasionally forget, especially these days, when special effects are so popular with audiences.  The second trilogy of the Star Wars series are examples of that mistake.

In Chapter 2, the author gets into talking about image and sound and how those aspects of film can be used to create various effects.  It's interesting and will be helpful in my understanding of how films do what they do.

I'm not sure yet if I'll be able to stick with this book--after all, it's not a narrative and is kind of slow-going, but I'll keep you posted on how I do and share what I learn from it and how well I think it's presenting the material.  I also intend to look at films to see examples of what is being discussed, so I'll probably be talking about those films too.  So stay tuned!

Detour: To 17th Century Italy

One of the books I read this summer was Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love, by Dava Sobel.  It is a book that is part history and part biography of Galileo and his daughter, Sister Maria Celeste, a cloistered nun.  Maria Celeste wrote letters to her father throughout her short life and those letters are translated and included in this well-researched historical account.  The letters help tell the story of Galileo, his career and his times, but they also help to tell Marie Celeste's story and another story that is not well known--what 17th century Italy was like for women, especially women who served the Church.

From Galileo's Daughter I learned an enormous amount about Galileo. Before reading this book I had a general knowledge of Galileo and his contribution to science, but I knew next to nothing about his life and career.  And I certainly didn't know he had five children, all illegitimate, and that two of his daughters became cloistered nuns.

In reading the book I became aware of how very complicated his situation was, and that it wasn't just a matter of the Vatican's punishing him for daring to say that the earth revolved around the sun.  There was much more to it than that; in fact, his problems with the Vatican were more or less minor until late in his career. 

I also learned that Galileo was no rebel in the pure sense. Throughout his career, he tried to address the concerns of the Popes as each came along and to comply with the Vatican's wishes with respect to his published writing. When he had a friend in the Vatican, things worked out pretty well and he was able to carry on his work. But when the political situation changed, he found himself in trouble.

I think what I found most surprising was that Italy (that is, the Vatican) was one of the last holdouts in refusing to accept the Copernican view of the universe.  In other words, Galileo was not telling the world something they didn't know; he was, however, helping to prove what was until then only a theory. What he saw and showed the world through his telescopes made the truth about our solar system hard to deny.  And the fact that his works were available outside of Italy made it possible for everyone to learn of his discoveries and discuss them in learned circles, despite the Vatican's official denial of their validity.

Everything I learned about Galileo was very interesting.  But what I learned about his daughter was even more interesting, because it gave me a window on women of the time.  In her letters, Sister Marie Celeste talks about her life in the monastery, a home she never left, not even for an hour or two, until her death. This was the cloistered life, shut away from the world, spent working and praying. But though the cloister was separated from the world, still the world's concerns were allowed to filter in, through letters, primarily, but also word of mouth. 

Marie Celeste was a pious woman, but she knew what was happening with her father, and she conveyed her opinions about it, however covertly, through her letters.  And though it would seem that a woman in such a situation would be meek and subject to the dictates of her mother superior or the priest in charge, Marie Celeste suggests through her letters that she had some power over her circumscribed world, power she seemed to relish.  Though forced into the convent at a young age because of the circumstances of her birth, she nonetheless made the best of it.  No doubt many other women of her time did the same, but not many of them were able to write of their experiences. We're lucky to have Marie Celeste's letters to give us a glimpse of her times.

Dava Sobel published another book, Letters to Father, which contains all of Marie Celeste's 124 surviving letters covering a ten-year period.  They are translated and edited by Dava Sobel, who also wrote the introduction.  Sometime I'd like to read them all, and if you get the chance, I recommend them along with Galileo's Daughter, a book I enjoyed very much.

The Illusion of Plot

I'm continuing to read the twenty stories in The Best American Short Stories 1990, but so far the story I've enjoyed the most is the one that is most unlike the other stories. "Eisenheim the Illusionist," by Steven Millhauser, is "based on the pseudo-mythical tale of a magician who stunned audiences in Vienna in the latter part of the 19th century" (Wikipedia). 

I liked the story because it kept me reading, eager to find out what was going to happen next; yet it was structured more like a report or a historical essay than a short story.  The characters in it remained opaque, and therefore mysterious, an effect the author was apparently going for, if I'm correctly interpreting his "Contributors' Notes" at the back of the short story collection: "The birth of a story, at least for me, is a genuine mystery" (351).

Since I'd never heard of the author, I looked him up and found that he received a Pulitzer prize for his novel, Martin Dressler.  (Read the Wikipedia article: Millhauser.)  From Wikipedia I learned that the story was made into a movie which I have also seen and liked: The Illusionist, starring Edward Norton.  What's interesting is that I was reminded of that movie while I was reading the story, and with good reason, apparently.

"Eisenheim" is in stark contrast to the other stories I've read so far in this collection. In those stories, we are never left in doubt about what the main character is thinking or feeling.  It strikes me that in literary stories, the action is mostly unseen.  Instead of being about events, the stories are about people's interior lives--how they respond to events.  While I enjoy a character-driven story as much as the next English major, I still relish a story with a strong, action-driven plot. But lately those seem in short supply in the average literary collection.

In reading The Best stories, I've started to wonder how we arrived at the place where most of our short fiction (at least what could be judged quality writing) is of this interior type.  Are we to believe that writers cannot produce a well crafted story that is focused on plot rather than character?  I think a story such as "Eisenheim the Illusionist" shows that it can be done, but just isn't--at least not very often.

But perhaps I'm wrong.  Are there really only two kinds of story--the "literary" kind, focused on character and realistic, ambiguous outcomes--and the "popular" kind, focused on plot and outcomes that may seem a bit contrived but are comforting in their satisfying conclusions?  Can a story ever be both?

What do you think?  Have you read stories that have been beautifully written, thought provoking and profound but also can't-put-it-down riveting?

Four Tales, Fairly Hopeful

All is not lost.  My second set of choices from The Best American Short Stories 1990 proved to be more uplifting, if not exactly cheery.  This time I decided to abandon the order altogether and go with writers I knew or knew of.  I started with one of my favorite writers, Alice Munro, probably the most famous of the group. 

Richard Ford included two of Munro's stories in this collection, but I've read only the first so far, "Differently," a story about two women's friendship. The protagonist, Georgia, is rather conventional until she meets Maya, a woman who is pretty wild, but interesting. Under Maya's influence, Georgia changes, not entirely for the worse.  It's one of those stories in which the events of the narrative are not in themselves earth-shattering but serve to point the way toward the main character's realization of some truth, an "accidental clarity" (214) as the narrator puts it.

Elizabeth Tallent's story, "Prowler," is also of that kind. This story is about a man's coming to terms with his ex-wife and his son's feelings about her.  I chose it because Ms. Tallent was once my teacher and I admire her work and her ideas about writing and fiction.  She didn't disappoint me. "Prowler" was a fast read and the most hopeful story I've read so far in this collection.

The other two stories also ended on a hopeful note, I think, if a bit more tentative.  "Finding Natasha," by Madison Smartt Bell (an author I'd heard of but not read), is the story of a recovering addict's search for his girlfriend who's also an addict. As he moves through his old haunts, revealing his past, we worry that he will fall back into his old ways. It's not clear if he learns anything along the way, though, so when he finally finds Natasha, we're not sure what will happen next.  It could go either way.

Much the same is Patricia Henley's story, "The Secret of Cartwheels," about Roxie, a 13-year-old girl whose mother has to go to a mental hospital for a few months, leaving her to cope with the painful upheaval her mother's sudden absence causes.  At the end, her feelings about her mother have changed, but we're not sure if it's a change for the better. Because Henley is the only writer of the four I hadn't heard of, I looked her up and found that the story is largely autobiographical.  It made me wonder whether the author eventually came to terms with her mother's illness.

As I was reading these stories I got to thinking about how different they are from stories that are "action-packed"--adventure stories, mystery stories, spy thrillers--that propel us toward a conclusion that puts everything right. Not realistic, perhaps, but satisfying nonetheless. Often people who like such stories don't like the more interior action of what's sometimes referred to as a "literary" story, the kind usually found in short fiction anthologies. They might see such stories as boring, incomprehensible, or just plain weird. And the reverse also tends to be true: many people who prefer literary stories won't read what to them is "pulp" fiction, shallow stories that don't engage the mind. Negative stereotypes attach to both sides of the divide, it seems.

But some of us, like me, read literary and non-literary stories, finding each type enjoyable in its own way. I draw the line, however, at stories that don't seem to have a plot or a point to make or that are just poorly written.  And there are plenty of stories out there like that, even (maybe especially) in literary anthologies.

As for these stories, I enjoyed all four. I'd like to check out other work by these writers sometime, especially their novels. You might want to give them a try as well.

All Those Sad, Sad Stories

Whenever I start reading one of the Best American Short Stories volumes, I always like to read the  guest editor's introduction, just to see how he or she managed to pick twenty stories from the 150 or so the series editor had passed along.  In his introduction to The Best American Short Stories 1990, Richard Ford does not explain, exactly, how he chose his twenty.  He spends a great deal of time explaining his disdain for theorizing about short fiction, and then goes on to say that his twenty were the best stories because they were "excellent" or "wonderful" (xiv) or "interesting" (xix), which, he admits, doesn't really explain anything.  So from his introduction I didn't learn very much about the stories I was soon to read, except perhaps that Mr. Ford is a bit prickly, and that I don't really like him very much.  And it made me wonder if I would like his selection of stories.

But I went on to read them anyway, and as of this morning I've read three: Edward Allen's "River of Toys," Richard Bausch's "The Fireman's Wife," and Pam Houston's "How to Talk to a Hunter."  Of the three authors, the only one I've read before is Pam Houston.  I started out determined to read in alphabetical order, the way the stories are arranged, but after the sad Allen story and the depressing Bausch story, I thought I'd skip to someone I know.  A woman, perhaps, would have a more uplifting tale to tell.

But, alas, I was disappointed to find that Houston's story completed the trio of sad stories about failed or failing love affairs.  Richard Ford admits that there isn't much humor in his collection of interesting stories.  I will admit that all three of those I read are interesting.  "River of Toys" uses a river to tell a story about a young man's life; "The Fireman's Wife" has an unexpected ending; "How to Talk to a Hunter" reads like a list of instructions.  And all are well written.  But still depressing.

I wonder if it's the year that's the problem.  Was the sad, interesting story in vogue then?  Maybe.  Or maybe those who write short stories are sad, interesting people?  I guess I'm kind of old fashioned; I want a story that's a "good yarn," as people used to term it.  So far . . . not so much.

But I'm hopeful as I read on.  And I'll let you know what I find!

Next Up: A Collection of Short Stories

I've decided to step back into fiction on my next read, but this time I intend to read a collection of short stories.

The series entitled The Best American Short Stories of [insert a year] brings together what editors (series editor plus guest editor) believe are the best short stories published that year.  I have a number of these collections that I've been meaning to read, so I though I'd read one of those next. 

I've chosen the 1990 collection, guest edited by Richard Ford.  Ford is from Mississippi and has written both novels and short stories.  One of his novels, Independence Day, won a pulitzer prize.  I've never read anything by Richard Ford and in fact had never heard of him before choosing this collection, so I'm interested to see what stories he's chosen as the best.

As always, I'll let you know what I think.

When the World Changed

Waiting for Snow in Havana opens at the pivotal moment in history when Fulgencio Batista flies out of Cuba to exile and Fidel Castro and his rebels take over. Says the author Carlos Eire of that moment, "The world changed while I slept, and much to my surprise, no one had consulted me" (1).

Eire was one of over 14,000 children who were flown to Miami from Cuba following the Cuban revolution, an event that was called Operation Pedro Pan. Because their parents could not get visas right away, the children had to emigrate alone, whether or not they had relatives or friends waiting for them.

Eire begins his memoir with the success of the Cuban revolution because it is the point around which everything else in the story revolves. From there, the narrative dips into the past, showing the reader what life was like for him before everything changed.  He was an upper-middle-class child of a judge and a stay-at-home mom.  Because of their privileged status, the family escaped most of the brutality of the Batista regime and lived quite comfortable lives.  Eire went to private Catholic schools with other children of his social class, and had a pretty much carefree childhood.  He describes his childhood before the revolution in some detail in the early chapters, presumably so we can see all he lost when Castro took over and he was sent to the United States.

The author was eight years old when the world changed and we see events through his eyes, although he occasionally gives us information from the perspective of the older Eire.  The narrative travels back and forth in time, always returning to the revolution, its aftermath, and his escape to Miami at the end.  But Eire also often flashes forward, describing in brief vignettes how he fared in Miami and then Chicago, and how the trauma of his childhood affects him still, though he is now a distinguished university history professor.

The spiral movement of the memoir--from past to future to present to past again--is what keeps us reading.  Because he starts with the Cuban revolution, we know he will return to it, and that is what we most want to hear about.  Yes, the description of what Cuba was like in the before time is interesting.  I learned a lot about middle-class Cuban culture and I marvelled at some of the differences in how children were raised there and here.  But I felt myself wanting him to skip that part and get to the action of the memoir--what happens after, when the bad stuff starts.

He doesn't disappoint; over the course of the memoir, the author returns--over and over again, more and more frequently--to the after time of Castro's Cuba, and each time he does, it gets a little worse for Carlos.  And that build up of his (and our) anxiety increases the momentum toward the final scenes when he leaves Cuba.  (Since he has written a sequel to this memoir, that seems an appropriate place for Waiting for Snow to stop.)

The effect is to make us remember the past the way Carlos remembers--in bits and pieces, snatches of scenes that repeat in our minds and accumulate meaning over time. One motif that repeats is lizards--they show up in all phases of the memoir, and each time, the writer finds them significant.  They become a kind of touchstone: though things in Carlos' life change drastically, the lizards remain the same, and they help Carlos (and us) put his experiences into perspective.

Waiting for Snow in Havana is a compelling story and a worthwhile read, I think. It taught me a lot about Cuba and made me want to read more, especially about some of the events--such as the Bay of Pigs Invasion--that I was taught only briefly in school. I would definitely recommend it.