The Last Movie I Saw in the Theater

It's been a while since my last blog post; the delay can be written up to my creative energies, and thus my time, being invested elsewhere.

Nor have I had the opportunity to see many movies, for whatever that's worth. Still, the last one I saw, Winter's Bone, was well worth the wait between trips to the movie house.

El hijo

I decided to translate Horacio Quiroga's short story “El hijo” (“The Son”) partly for its low word count: the amateur translator would be led to believe the story lends itself to a manageable project. But the story's brevity masks its philosophic weight, as well as the difficulty of its prose for the nonnative Spanish-speaker. Brilliantly and devastatingly, Quiroga's story dramatizes how we believe what we want to be true. Would-be literary translators are not immune.

My lack of familiarity with Quiroga's style (I have not read his work in English) undermines a bit of my confidence in the translation. If anyone reading this blog has suggestions for improving said translation, feel free to contact me with those suggestions.

Wonder Boys, Wonder Boys

Grady Tripp is a middle-aged, mid-list novelist and academic whose aimless (white?) whale of a novel-in-progress, Wonder Boys, mirrors his own chaotic life. Given Tripp's startling narrative and descriptive talents, the more tolerant reader might wish excerpts from the novel actually appeared in Wonder Boys, author Michael Chabon's rendering of Tripp's midlife crisis. The less tolerant will thank Chabon for so beautifully harnessing Tripp's talent, throughout most of the novel, in his version of a fateful weekend literary symposium at the Pittsburgh-area college where he teaches.

The weekend could have provided subject matter for a handful of novels. Criticism levied during Tripp's final workshop of the week so disturbs undergrad writer James Leer that Leer cannot lift himself out of his chair. But Tripp's compassionate response turns out to be less professional reflex than karmic pre-pay: Tripp's agent, Terry Crabtree, will arrive in town that evening, fully expecting the draft of Wonder Boys to deliver on all Tripp's early promise. Meanwhile, Tripp has impregnated the (married) academic dean of his college, and his own marriage is less passionate than his marijuana habit. Still, father-to-be Tripp has already adopted something of a paternal role in the lives of student writers Leer and Hannah Greene, a wunderkind in her own right. The painfully beautiful Hannah already has published stories in The Paris Review – and is boarding with the Tripps, further straining their relationship.

It is testament to Chabon's consummate skill that he's able not only to weave the stories together but that in the process he's tailored a relatively hip udpate of the campus novel. Indeed, Chabon's vivid rendition of Grady and his milieu keeps the reader flipping the pages of what, from a lesser talent, could have been a much staider novel. Minus the pot-induced ennui, the episodic few days might have been culled from an Irving novel, while Chabon's eye is nearly as sharp as Updike's, his voice as super-charged as T.C. Boyle's.

Yet the opening and closing movements read as if they belong to a disparate work. The elegiac tone of the opening movement, in which Tripp recalls the drunken fate of horror writer August Van Zorn, and the minor key in which Trip tells of his eventual flight, remarriage, and resumption of career (albeit with lowered expectations) do not quite cohere with the picaresque comedy of the symposium weekend. That split begs a question about Grady's writerly struggles: Why would an author capable of the former spend so much of his talent on the latter?

Hey, Pete: Why not a Job for Casey too?

It appears that one of the nation's worst former mayors -- whose claim to that distinction includes convictions on ten felonies committed while in office -- has a new job. Detroit media have been abuzz with the news of disgraced former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick's hiring by Covisint, a subsidary of software products and services provider Compuware. During the scandal that would end Kilpatrick's tenure in office, Compuware CEO Peter Karmanos remained a vocal supporter of Kilpatrick. "He certainly should not resign," said Karmanos, "because he's the best we have."


Karmanos, it seems, would set the bar much lower than would the citizens of Detroit or the news media. An April 2005 Time magazine article named Kilpatrick one of America's worst municipal chief executives; the mayor had just eliminated 3,000 city jobs and ended 24-hour bus service in the face of a $230 million budget deficit -- while he maintained a 21-man security detail and shortly after his admittance of using city funds to rent a Lincoln navigator for his wife. "A tin ear for symbolism" was how Alan Ehrenhalt of Governing Magazine described Kilpatrick's apparent deafness to context.


So it would seem that Karmanos suffers the same sort of hearing impairment. The Kilpatrick hiring came as Compuware laid off 250 workers, or about 4 percent of its total workforce. But in local interviews, Karmanos cited Kilpatrick's "talent" and "charisma" as the reasons for the hiring.


All of which got me thinking about another potential reclamation project for Karmanos: Casey Anthony.


The parallels between Anthony's character and Kilpatrick's are more fundamental than their public faces would seem to suggest. Each suffers from some sort of compulsion to obscure the factuality of a situation, yet neither actually possesses the brains to tell a convincing -- that is, freeing -- lie. Anthony might have forever concealed her inability to conceal, had she not given birth at such a young age, while her apparently soft moral core still privileged shit-faced shenanigans over maternal duty. Likewise, the true dreadfulness of Kilpatrick's mayoralty might never have come to light, without exposure of the infamous Manoogian party. The title for this episode in the national reality show? Why not: "For the Life of the Party"?

I would have to argue that Kilpatrick is the more compromised of the two. As no rumor of Kilpatrick's misdeeds has proved false, it's tough for me to imagine that he had no hand in the murder of Tamara Greene. Anthony, meanwhile, never bilked a city out of $9 million or ruined the careers of any honest cops.

Anthony may not have Kilpatrick's "talent" and "charisma" (indeed, these may be euphemisms for Kilpatrick's narcisstic willingness to broker shady deals). But she is young, female, hedonistic -- and pretty, albeit in a "Girls Gone Wild" sort of way. It's hard for me to imagine that that wouldn't count for something, to Karmanos, whose name has become synonymous with the accused in a recent sexual-harrassment suit...

So, I'm waiting for Karmanos to foot Anthony's legal bills and create a high-paid position (as it were) for her once she's released. At least there'd be no questioning Karmanos's motivation, questionable though it would be.

Poor Yorick

Nearly a decade after publication, David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest remains a literary ink-blot test. At a length of 1,079 pages (including nearly 400 footnotes), and with its fondness for gags, pharmacology, cultural theory, popular culture, scientific minutiae, and Latinate vocabulary, the novel still divides readers on matters of literary technique and the question of Wallace's literary talent.

I tend to believe that David Foster Wallace's stylistic pyrotechnics are not bright enough to hide the comparatively dull substance of his writing. Infinite Jest is not the Next Big Thing (except for the size of the tome itself), but nor is it the fodder for the Moronic Inferno that Dale Peck and the rest would have it.

The novel's tragic flaw is its lack of emotion depth. Wallace seems more interested in inventing acronyms and an "après" filmography than in developing characters. The author's utilization of the language of pop psychology and millennial technological frenzy to portray teenage tennis phenoms does truly capture their milieu and their fixations. Wallace hits false notes, however, using that same language to draw the mostly lower-class residents of a halfway house, as if they were operating from the same frame of reference as the rich kids at the tennis academy.

Focusing on such young, shallow characters violates the Big Rule of compelling fiction: There has to be something at stake in a work. You may not forget Hal Incandenza, the teenage tennis and linguistic prodigy who is as close to a protagonist as this novel offers; but it is this implausible combination of natural gifts (and Wallace's pretentious character names), not Wallace's rendering of boy or his story, that make Hal memorable. Hal's lower-class counterpart, Don Gately, a thirtyish petty thug recovering from drug addict at the nearby halfway house, is more intriguing for the difficulty of his situation and his more advanced age. But Wallace presents Gately as lacking self-awareness to a degree that kills whatever sympathy readers might otherwise be willing to invest in him.

Wallace's experimental style does not disguise the essential weakness of his writing here either. Few of the narratives coalesce, and it is often difficult to imagine why editors did not simply send certain passages off to the exosphere. The apparently arbitrary chronology works against any sort of pace Wallace might have established. And, though the novel wisely ends on an ambiguous note, this note is frustratingly oblique. It's difficult to imagine why a writer blessed with such intellectual gifts would offer up a shaggy dog story as his magnum opus. Infinite Jest feels like it should have ended at least 500 pages before it actually does -- and yet it hasn't earned an ending.

Wallace should be commended for his attempt to add intellectual depth to modern American fiction without sacrificing the traditional literary devices of characterization and narrative, and to dramatize the effects on the consciousness, and the conscience, of our hydra-headed consumerism. But there's disparity between a laundry list of contemporary social maladies and a novel that compellingly addresses these. And that disparity is, well, just about limitless.