Feature Film Friday: "VoiceOver"

Extended metaphors can be hard to pull off. To illustrate this, I thought I’d share this short film that tries, and tries, and tries to come up with just the right metaphor for… well, you’ll see.  It's pretty good. Enjoy!

Nabokov's Tree Test

There is a famous account, perhaps apocryphal, of a visit made by a student to Vladimir Nabokov’s office at Cornell. The student declares to the writer his  great desire to be a writer, too, at which point:

Nabokov looks up from his reading he points to a tree outside his office window.

'What kind of tree is that?' he asks the student.

'What?'

'What is the name of that tree?' asks Nabokov. 'The one outside my window.'

'I don't know,'says the student.

'You'll never be a writer.' says Nabokov.

The Nabokov test was born. This conversation, whether or not it actually took place, came to mind the other night as I read this passage from Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety :

“A dirt road, the road I walked this morning, burrows along the hillside under overhanging trees—sugar maple and red maple, hemlock, white birch and yellow birch and gray birch, beech, black spruce and red spruce, balsam fir, wild cherry, white ash, basswood, ironwood, tamarack, elm, poplar, here and there a young white pine.”

It would appear that, despite any other failings he has as a writer, Mr. Stegner passes the Nabokov test with flying colors.

From the Pen of Wallace Stegner

At the suggestion of the one and only Tucker McCann, I am working my way through Wallace Stegner’s last novel, Crossing to Safety .  And, as happened the last time I picked up a Stegnerian opus, I am loving the pants off his writing style. Here are a handful of highlights from the first hundred pages or so. All emphasis is mine—they’re just the lines and phrases that really buttered my toast:

“Cataract sufferers must see like this when the bandages are removed after the operation: every detail as sharp as if seen for the first time, yet familiar, too, known from before the time of blindness, the remembered and the seen coalescing as in a stereoscope.”

“Dew has soaked everything. I could wash my hands in the ferns, and when I pick a leaf off a maple branch I get a shower on my head and shoulders.”

“I am sitting with my back to the window. On the bed table is a tumbler of water that I set there for Sally last night. The sun, coming in flat, knocks a prismatic oval out of the tumbler and lays it on the ceiling.”

“The wind moves the silver maple over our heads, and some leaves rustle down. Offshore a boat comes about with wooden knockings, watery slappings, a pop of canvas.”

“Our last impression of her as she turned the corner was that smile, flung backward like a handful of flowers.”

“Between the taking of a cinnamon toast and tea she let drop bits of information that my mind scurried to gather up and plaster against the wall for future use, like a Bengali woman gathering wet cow dung for fuel.”

“Vigorous, vital, temperate, and hence not hung over, they flush us out of our culvert of duty.”

“The view is spreading, bronzed, conventionalized like a Grant Wood landscape. The air smells of cured grass, cured leaves, distance, the other sides of hills.”

—"Near Sundown", by Grant Wood 

Review: Don Quixote Part II, by Miguel Cervantes

Why is this book getting two reviews? Well, because Parts I and II were originally published as two different novels, ten years apart. Also, because it’s Don  Freaking Quixote .

Now, in my review of Part I, I expressed my admiration for the brilliant satire, and for literature willing to poke some fun at itself. But I also kind of lamented Cervantes’ penchant for narrative wandering, for squeezing unrelated stories and novellas into his tale of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. I think I might have used the phrases “storyteller’s orgy” and “a Canterbury Tales  Smorgasbord of travellers’ yarns.”

Thankfully, Part II opens up with some frank admissions of the author’s prior lack of focus, and a commitment to stick to the main story in the second part. There are even times later on in the book when he is tempted to launch into something more, but restrains himself:

“Here the author depicts all the details of Don Diego’s house, portraying for us what the house of a wealthy gentleman farmer contains, but the translator of this history decided to pass over these and other similar minutiae in silence, because they did not accord with the principal purposed of the history, whose strength lies more in its truth than in cold digressions.”

But even with a greater focus on the core story of his famous knight errant, this book is a long one. And rather than apologize for his verbosity, Cervantes hangs a lantern on it and helps the reader appreciate the author’s attention to detail:

“Really and truly, all those who enjoy histories like this one ought to show their gratitude to Cide Hamete, its first author, for his care in telling us its smallest details and clearly bringing everything, no matter how trivial, to light. He depicts thoughts, reveals imaginations, responds to tacit questions, clarifies doubts, resolves arguments; in short, he expresses the smallest points that curiosity might ever desire to know. O celebrated author! O fortunate Don Quixote! O famous Dulcinea! O comical Sancho Panza! Together and separately may you live an infinite number of years, bringing pleasure and widespread diversion to the living.”

And what a pantload of awesome detail we get. I love how Cervantes takes the 17^th century reader reaction to Part I, and makes it a plot driver in Part II. He’s interacting with his audience and blurring the lines between fiction and reality in a way that was lightyears ahead of its time. And he’s hilarious while doing it. Sancho is a veritable proverb-generating machine, and in a “didn’t-see-that-coming” plot turn, he also turns out to be a pretty competent governor. Don Quixote, too, is a fount of eternal wisdom in Part II—to the point where other characters are constantly asking themselves how such a well-spoken, reasonable man can be so completely off his rocker when it comes to knight errantry. Which brings me to Cervantes’ real piece-de-resistance: his turning the question of Quixote’s insanity completely on its head.

We’re absolutely convinced, when he descends into the Caves of Montesino and produces a fanciful tale of all the wonders he saw there, that the man is flat-out delusional. But after the knight and his squire are supposedly flown blindfolded through the sky on what is actually a stationary wooden horse in front of a mocking audience, and Sancho makes up a story every other character knows to be false, Quixote delivers an aside that made me question all my assumptions up to that point:

“Sancho, just as you want people to believe what you have seen in the sky, I want you to believe what I saw in the Cave of Montesinos. And that is all I have to say.”

By the end of the book the reader is forced to say, wait a second, who’s actually crazy here? The supposed lunatic? Or all the people who make fun of him, but who may in fact be falling for some masterful, rope-a-dope scheme by an old man trying to carve a little adventure out of his remaining years? I was leaning toward the latter, even before Cervantes gives us this passage:

“Cide Hamete goes on to say that in his opinion the deceivers are as mad as the deceived, and that the duke and duchess came very close to seeming like fools since they went to such lengths to deceive two fools…”

Part I, despite its faults, was entertaining. In Part II, we see Miguel Cervantes flat out kicking ass and taking names. Quixote finally earns some long-overdue victories (along with one crushing defeat), fiction melts into reality, the stupid turn out to be wise, and the crazy may not be who we think they are. Oh, and he absolutely eviscerates AlonsoFernandez de Avelleneda for infringement on his Intellectual Property. How this thing was written in the early 1600s absolutely blows my mind. I highly, highly recommend it.

Poet's Corner: Consolation, by Billy Collins

Not going to  battle the harried masses in a European capital this summer? Take heart, you ol' stick in the mud. Just remember how hot, crowded, and miserable it can be. Especially with a backpack and a Baby Bjorn hanging off of you. Or you can just read this poem:

Consolation

By Billy Collins

How agreeable it is not to be touring Italy this summer,

wandering her cities and ascending her torrid hilltowns.

How much better to cruise these local, familiar streets,

fully grasping the meaning of every road sign and billboard

and all the sudden hand gestures of my compatriots.

There are no abbeys here, no crumbling frescoes or famous

domes and there is no need to memorize a succession

of kings or tour the dripping corners of a dungeon.

No need to stand around a sarcophagus, see Napoleon's

little bed on Elba, or view the bones of a saint under glass.

How much better to command the simple precinct of home

than be dwarfed by pillar, arch, and basilica.

Why hide my head in phrase books and wrinkled maps?

Why feed scenery into a hungry, one-eyed camera

eager to eat the world one monument at a time?

Instead of slouching in a café ignorant of the word for ice,

I will head down to the coffee shop and the waitress

known as Dot. I will slide into the flow of the morning

paper, all language barriers down,

rivers of idiom running freely, eggs over easy on the way.

And after breakfast, I will not have to find someone

willing to photograph me with my arm around the owner.

I will not puzzle over the bill or record in a journal

what I had to eat and how the sun came in the window.

It is enough to climb back into the car

as if it were the great car of English itself

and sounding my loud vernacular horn, speed off

down a road that will never lead to Rome, not even Bologna.

Happy Friday!

“Customers of Irish descent need not apply”

Profusion of Proverbs from the great Sancho Panza

“That may be so,” replied Sancho, “but if you pay your debts, you don’t worry about guaranties, and it’s better to have God’s help than to get up early, and your belly leads your feet, not the other way around; I mean, if God helps me, and I do what I ought to with good intentions, I’ll be sure to govern in grand style. Just put a finger in my mouth and see if I bite or not!”

“God and all his saints curse you, wretched Sancho,” said Don Quixote, “as I have said so often, will the day ever some when I see you speak an ordinary coherent sentence without any proverbs? Senores, your highness should leave this fool alone, for he will grind your souls not between two but two thousand proverbs brought in as opportunely and appropriately as the health God gives him, or me if I wanted to listen to them.”

—     A taste of the dialogue in Don Quixote , by Cervantes

Author Look-alikes Vol. 14

Henry Miller and Jean Luc Picard. “Engage:”

Who can match Evelyn Waugh’s aristocratic airs? Lord Grantham, that’s who:

Swap the pince nez for regular specs and Anton Checkov isn’t that different from a goateed Robert Downey Jr:

Fyodor Doestoevsky wasn’t exactly handsome. In kind of the same way that Ron Howard’s brother isn’t handsome:

I wasn't sure this was really William Butler Yeats, and not a Steve Martin bit character. I'm still not completely convinced:

Title Chase: The Red Badge of Courage

Yesterday we reviewed Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage , but said next to nothing about what the title actually means. Is it a military insignia? An honor bestowed by one’s superiors for valor on the field of battle? Not exactly. Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 9, the one and only place the term is mentioned in the narrative:

“The youth fell back in the procession until the tattered soldier was not in sight. Then he started to walk on with the others.

“But he was amid wounds. The mob of men was bleeding. Because of the tattered soldier's question he now felt that his shame could be viewed. He was continually casting sidelong glances to see if the men were contemplating the letters of guilt he felt burned into his brow.

“At times he regarded the wounded soldiers in an envious way. He conceived persons with torn bodies to be peculiarly happy. He wished that he, too, had a wound, a red badge of courage.”

Review: The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane

My reading’s been all over the map this year, but since I hadn’t tackled any Civil War-era war stories, I didn’t see any reason to turn my nose up at Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage .

Truth is, I had no idea what I was about to read. If you asked me a week ago, I would have been hard-pressed to tell you the difference between Captains Courageous , Profiles in Courage , and The Red Badge of Courage . All reportedly great books, all on my mental To-Be-Read list for years, but all of them a confusing jumble of "courage" in my poorly-read head.

Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage , as it turns out, is not a daring rescue at sea or an examination of valiant senators, it is a fictionalized account of the Battle of Chancellorsville, and of the second bloodiest day of the American Civil War as told from the perspective of a “youth” who is seeing battle for the very first time. And while there’s lots of tactical blow-by-blow, that’s not what makes it great. What makes it great is Crane’s fascinating probing into the psyche of soldiers who are in fact scared spitless.

You see them wrestling with the same questions we would all probably face in their shoes: Will I run when it gets ugly? Or will I have what it takes to stand up and fight? And what’s great about it is that we get to follow a main character whose experience runs the gamut: over the course of a few days he turns tail and runs, he deserts wounded comrades, he finds his regiment again and then fights bravely, he picks up the flag when the color sergeant goes down- and through it all he doesn’t come to consider himself a coward or a hero, so much as he comes to truly know himself and grow through the experience. It’s a book that’ll make you think.

And the language is beautiful. Here’s the first paragraph:

“The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. As the landscape changed from brown to green, the army awakened, and began to tremble with eagerness at the noise of rumors. It cast its eyes upon the roads, which were growing from long troughs of liquid mud to proper thoroughfares. A river, amber-tinted in the shadow of its banks, purled at the army's feet; and at night, when the stream had become of a sorrowful blackness, one could see across it the red, eyelike gleam of hostile camp-fires set in the low brows of distant hills.”

Anyway, it’s short, and it’s sweet. You should do yourself the favor of checking it out.