White Matters

Now I'm going to use something very familiar to you. You've seen these things before, in fact, you use them yourself all the time, but I'm going to make you forget about them. They're as common as clouds on a sky, chill in a wind, warmth in the sun. You're already forgetting that you’re seeing them. They are familiar, everyday objects. They are words.

I like to keep my pens handy, caps off, ready to jot down any immediate thought without fumbling for ink. That’s the way Gomez Addams did it. On the old TV series, Gomez would pull a cigar from the Indian, from a box, from his own chest pocket already lit. Always already lit. No idea is worth saving for later—smoke it now!

The challenge is that every reader already knows every word you're going to say, or they can look them up readily. Writers have to work with something as stupid and known as a common language, then do tricks with it. Anyone can learn the methods, the art is pulling off the tricks, especially when the reader is aware he’s being tricked. Ah the sleight of hand putting ink on paper, chapters in a book, paragraphs in chapters, sentences in paragraphs, and words into sentences. It is the combination and dexterity by which you use words which makes writing magical, lifts ideas off paper fibers, beyond the ink into the liquidity of the reader’s imagination. Any technique has to be invisible as a card trick.

Writing is about creating dialogue. It is not a flat static pose. You require input from the reader's experience in order for it to work. Writing is an excursion in empathy, with the reader and writer walking together. You must leave space for the reader’s response, a break between chapters, a pause behind each period.

Liars tend to have more white matter in their brains. It pushes out of the way some of the gray material that honest people have. Sonny, in I ROBOT, seems to have a thoroughly white brain. Now I ROBOT is a movie about a robot so intelligent it begins to think for itself, a prototype for what all robots could become. Or they could become V.I.K.I., the evil HAL-syndrome motherboard doomed to charm electronic Eden into the Dark Ages. It’s up to actor Will Smith to sort it out; after all, he is our go-to-guy for all funky futuristic problems. In the case of I ROBOT, it takes a black guy to figure out a white lie.

Fiction writers too, have thoroughly white brains. Fiction is a wonderful misappropriation of facts. In the beginning was the word, but by the end, it’d become a novel.

Fast Times--Experimental Starvation

Lent must be easier to follow if you live in a place frozen solid during those forty days. I live in thermal winter, temperate at all times holy and un-Godly.

I worked for a guy who told me he hated his job, which he clearly didn't. It was towards the end of Lent, so I brought him a box of chocolates. He ate three of them before he realized they were alcoholic. He had to go to confession over that. He always made such a big deal of not drinking for 90 days. Try nine months I said to him when I was pregnant. I figure he deserved whatever Hail Marys he had to say.

This year I gave up lunch for Lent. I decided I could eat before sunrise and after sunset, like Ramadan, plus help me to understand another culture as well as the general idea of sacrifice. It was really tough the day I slow-cooked a pot roast, but I’d already given up gasoline and disposable income, so one out of three meals was all I had left.

I could definitely go vegetarian; that would be too easy for me. It wouldn’t be giving up much that I can already not afford. But I couldn't go without milk and cheese. I could give up yogurt for Lent, but God would laugh at me. He knows I'm not real keen on yogurt.

How long is Ramadan? When is sunset? Giving up lunch is by far the hardest thing I've ever done for Lent. It is way more than an aggravating inconvenience. I might even learn something.

I need a slow religion, you know, one where you don't go to fast. Do you count sunset earlier with cloud cover? I accidentally ate a strawberry before 6:11, but I was doing it to inspire my son to finish his math homework and have his strawberry treat reward. I don't think that really counts. I was hungry later that afternoon and I thought, well, it's just another hunger pang, and then I realized oh glory it was time to fix dinner!

This really would be a lot less sacrifice if I ate breakfast. Despite my best efforts, whether I eat a lot or nothing at all, I’m always hungry at ten o’clock even with the fasting. Whatever I eat first thing in the morning doesn’t seem to count. Regardless of well-meaning studies, I am not a breakfast person—I’m a brunch person!

It is finished. I didn't make it to the end of Lent. I got sick. My right eye tried to glue itself shut. So I took medicine, and not on an empty stomach. If it were me, in the desert, alone...I wouldn't be taking the medicine. And I also probably couldn't find enough locusts to eat. However, me being sick has a major detrimental effect on my family, so I have quit fasting. I am not going to save the world through my starvation, but I do have a greater appreciation of sacrifice and satisfaction, and greater thankfulness for what I do have. I admire God more. I can’t do all the things God can do, but I can learn how better to rely on Him.

Dubliners

The only Dubliner I knew was named Ennis, just like “penis” without the P and except the E was pronounced as short I, so really it was more like “Guinness” without the “guh.” That was her last name anyway. Brown haired, green-eyed, dark brown freckles to match the hair—she was the portrait of Dublin. She was tall, long in every direction, and the worst tennis player I’ve ever seen, like she had grown faster than her flexibility could account for. Still, she lacked discouragement, and she played like she could see over the top of adolescence, knew she’d outgrow it. There was a grace to her ungainliness, like a joke played against her good nature to make others comfortable around her. I used to tease her about Leprechauns. “I assure you there are no Leprechauns in Ireland,” she’d say. I loved to hear her call her parents to come “collect” her.

Domestication breeds for large eyes and diminutive chin, the better to take a bit. Throw a group of people together for a thousand years and they’ll come out Irish. They’ll look like me. Put me in a pair of John Lennon glasses, and I could be James Joyce. Minus the moustache.

John Lennon stole those spectacles from James Joyce, don’t you think?

Nuclear physics gained the term “quark” from Joyce’s book, ULYSSES. I always meant to read it, especially after Hemingway writes about how dirty it is. But I have looked at PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN. It’s on my shelf of half read books, along with EAST OF EDEN, which I found south of good; and O LOST—I understand why the editor cut sixty-six thousand words (book length) from that manuscript to make LOOK HOMEWARD ANGEL. PORTRAIT is high-falutin’, high style, Catholic guilt set against sins of the flesh. PORTRAIT isn’t even a long book, I just got tired of the nail bitingly pretty language all the way down to the spine.

James Joyce was a famous Dubliner, you may have heard of him. Wrote a stack of tales about people of that city, put them into a collection called DUBLINERS.

Most of the DUBLINERS’ tales are well rounded, so much so that it’s hard to get a footing on what is interesting beyond reality. They have a beginning, middle, and end, just most of them aren’t very interesting. They play out as pale allegory to something, but what? Their artistic nuance is far too great for me.

“After the Race” is worth its weight in spit more than any of them. A dumb little guy who makes bad bets, but enjoys himself doing it. Cars careering is something any NASCAR fan would like.

“Counterparts” is a chilling tale of a father who comes home to beat his son.

“A Painful Case” has a ring tone of ROMEO AND JUIETTE.

“A Little Cloud” has the most potential of all of the stories in DUBLINERS. Someone could do something with it, expand the storyline, stretch out the metaphor into a novel-sized portion. Now that could be really good. “A Little Cloud” could be interesting, especially with the right writer behind it.

I remember reading “Araby” in high school. I remember because I was expecting something very different from what it is. I thought it was going to be related to ARABIAN NIGHTS, not about boyhood crush. As it is, it isn’t bad. I don’t see the significance of the geography, though. It doesn’t matter where it happened; boyhood crush is common human experience. It could have happened anywhere, even in Arabia.

And the other tales are also common human experiences—death, love, expectation, unrequitement, longing, loneliness, politics, scrutiny, corruption, wickedness, betrayal, crookedness, shame, honor, pride, drinking, murder, redemption, suicide—a paddy wagon full of things that happen to these people, these Irish people who are living in Dublin. One tale doesn’t relate to another tale, only the streets sometimes cross paths story to story. It is a grouping of collected experience of a population of one time and place, an anthropological drawing, but not terribly provocative fiction.

My grandmother’s family emigrated from Ireland in the Sixteen Hundreds. Before that, they had been Catholic. They dropped the “O” off their name into the Atlantic Ocean and arrived in the United States as Protestants. So I think I have a genetic predisposition to reject Joyce’s characters. They’re the branch of family we moved away from. If it ain’t brogue, don’t fix it.

Thank goodness for the Ennis of tennis. Without her, I’d have no good opinion whatsoever of Dubliners.

Ed Harris Campaign

Family entertainment versus violence is the meat and potatoes of domestic conflict. It’s worth having cable just for the wrestling match over the remote. What’s appropriate, versus who’s going into therapy.

In NATIONAL TREASURE, BOOK OF SECRETS, Nicolas Cage and Ed Harris pair up once again to demonstrate good against bad, just like they do in THE ROCK. Cage plays a PG-mouthed good guy, exactly as he does in THE ROCK, versus Ed Harris, except Ed’s swallowed a bar of soap and presents menace minus profanity. He’s the thinly disguised heir of Lincoln assassin, John Wilkes Booth. Both men are trying to make honor for their ancestors’ names.

The first NATIONAL TREASURE movie I kept crying out, “Why are these actors doing such a poor job of acting?!” I do recognize that a star-spangled cast is often a recipe for disaster (from Nicolas Coppola Cage, Jon Voight, Harvey Keitel, Chris Plummer…), but I was really more complaining about the lines they had to say. The plot was unbelievable and stupid.

Unbelievable I could handle. I am an American. I have lived under the reign of George Bush W. Sometimes it doesn’t always work out for me, but I am well practiced at suspension and disbelief. Comes naturally as shock and awe.

Stupid, I could also manage (the President goes without mentioning). RETURN OF THE PINK PANTHER was stupid, but I laughed anyway.

However, unbelievable AND stupid was like going cold weather camping in the rain. Cold you can take; and wet is messy but survivable, yet the two conditions combined make a misery of marshmallow roasting. ALIEN does not try on elements of ACE VENTURA, PET DETECTIVE. DUNE and UNCLE BUCK are not related. HAPPY FEET and RAMBO have little neutral ground. As the first NATIONAL TREASURE movie progressed and I kept choking down facts, I realized this is a children’s movie, not just an historian’s wet dream of antiquities.

The second NATIONAL TREASURE movie is no different. NATIONAL TREASURE, BOOK OF SECRETS puts Harry Potter’s singular CHAMBER OF SECRETS to shame. NT has MANY chambers, all secret; the scenes are chain-linked, one secret chamber to the next. The book, the all-important documentation—is simply a prop along this chain, a gateway from one set of chambers to the next.

Both NT movies are primarily educational in nature, to pique the interest of young minds, to inspire kids to look beyond the facts they get in school. Big-name actors have bent their talents toward a charitable cause in value of this nation’s youth. Otherwise no one would go to see these movies. Very similar to EMPIRE FALLS.

I tried to read EMPIRE FALLS years ago. It’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Richard Russo. I picked it up again recently. By page 63, I knew why I’d put it down at page 59.

They’ve made a movie of it, an HBO special, so I’ll watch that. Believe me, I would have never gotten through the story without cinematic form. Paul Newman, Helen Hunt, Robin Wright Penn, Aidan Quinn, Joanne Woodward, Dennis Farina, all the way down to the Disney darling, Danielle Panabaker—without them, the story would not have made it. It has some interesting scenes of dialogue, where tension is sustained without resolution, but over such subtle qualities. Most people would have given up on similar circumstances and stormed out long ago, but not these characters.

I kept watching. I kept drinking caffeinated beverages and watching one useless flashback into another, each revealing something I didn’t care about for a character with whom I didn’t identify, until at the end—finally at the end!—the Boo Radley-type wakes up and shoots a bunch of people in the school.

Light bulb.

That’s why it’s Pulitzer Prize-winning. A work boring enough to be literary, yet dealing with a modern problem. Literary breaks into mainstream by means of a cheap device of tacked on trauma. Anybody could have written that. The plot, however, does not suggest this ending. The story fails to write itself. Boo hiss. Boo hoo.

The main character, Miles Roby, is unbelievably depicted by…Ed Harris. He’s supposed to be overweight. Harris is not. He’s supposed to be out of shape. A-hem. When Dennis Farino whips off his jacket to challenge Harris to an arm wrestling match, it’s a good thing Harris doesn’t accept or there would be a shattering loss of disbelief. Harris’ hair is another non sequitur. What baldish guy in that good of shape would grow hair like a fur stole for his pate? Harris looks more like an actor trapped in a movie that’s supposed to be good, rather than a man stuck in a small town with big problems.

Harris is probably the worst actor among the cast. He always plays himself, though convincingly so. He’s good with his short-cropped military roles, like APOLLO, RIGHT STUFF, THE ROCK. His unforgettable blue hand emerges with a wedding ring in THE ABYSS, as he blatantly defies the proverb: That which you have thrown into the toilet, probably you should not retrieve. (This applies in TRAINSPOTTING as well, and is equally disregarded to large comic effect.) There is a certain luxury, though, of watching an actor who is behaving as an actor, whom you know is acting and he knows he’s acting, and he’s not being false.

Madam Bovary lied even when she didn’t need to lie.

Holly Golightly was so good at being a fake, she didn’t know she was a fake.

I’d elect Ed Harris for president, certainly over Nicolas Cage.