Running Between the Raindrops

Breaking Bad (AMC, 2008-2013) had concluded its run by the time I saw it on disc.  My response on viewing the first season largely echoes the many critical praises already given the show.  Breaking Bad is very strong, provocative television drama.

II.

Walter White (Bryan Cranston) once had the scientific talent to study chemistry at the graduate level. Despite that talent, he has not pursued an academic or research career. Instead, we get the feeling that he has underachieved, in becoming a high-school chemistry teacher.  At his home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he lives with his pregnant wife Skyler (Anna Gunn) and their teenage son, Walter Jr. (RJ Mitte).  Throughout this expository phase of the show, Cranston plays White to be a vaguely timid man, quietly living out the hand that life has dealt him.

The orderly pattern of White's existence is suddenly shattered when he receives the diagnosis around his 50th birthday that he has inoperable lung cancer.  As might be expected, fear and panic seize White.  But once the shock starts to wear off, White's sense of duty to his family asserts itself.  How are they going to survive financially after the cancer kills White?  White needs money, lots of it, and he needs it fast.  He settles on a criminal plan:  to make and sell methamphetamine with a former student of his, Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul).  Complications follow of course, and these are often related with a dark comic tone by the show.

III.

As Walter and Jesse begin their meth operation, our sympathies have been skillfully played by the show to be on White's side.  After all, his actions are being motivated by a commendable duty to care for his family - no?

But before White knows it, the moral math turns exponential.  He and Pinkman are forced to kill a couple of greedy meth-distributors. (The scene in which White has to kill the one distributor is especially powerful, with its pathetic and wrenching dramatization.) As the chemist of the team, White had envisioned keeping his hands clean of additional criminality. All of that is shown as having been naive in the extreme, for now White has very real blood on his hands.  Curiously though, as White's situational criminality increases and he keeps getting away with it, it lends him an unsettling vigour.  When his wife asks him, for example, why their public-indecency sex in their car is so good, he replies, "because it's illegal".

IV.

The narrative of Breaking Bad is very much in the noir tradition. And in noir, immoral means, even for a moral end, usually lead to ruin or doom.  I have four seasons of the show still to watch, but already I can see the outlines of a bleak destiny for Walter White.  Call it a bad feeling.

Robert Galbraith | The Cuckoo’s Calling | JK Rowling

I came to JK Rowling’s pseudonym Robert Galbraith having read none of Rowling’s work, Harry Potter or after.  Reader of Rowling or not, there is no escaping her fame; the extraordinary popularity of the Potter series has made its author a rare publishing phenomenon.  It was the rarity and size of this Rowling Effect that drew my attention back to her work, which, following the conclusion of the Potter series, began a more adult phase with the publication of The Casual Vacancy (2012).

The news then came that Rowling had published another new book, The Cuckoo’s Calling, a mystery-thriller, under the name Robert Galbraith.  As a longtime fan of mystery and crime novels, it was truly on then.  The Cuckoo could consider itself good as read! Happily, a good read it is, too.

II.

Cormoran Strike is a former British Army investigator who has lost most of a leg to a land mine in Afghanistan, and now finds himself struggling to make a living as a private detective. Business is bad. Clients aren’t breaking down his office door, but creditors are threatening to.  Strike breaks up with his serious girlfriend, the gorgeous and temperamental Charlotte, and he's forced to move out of her flat.  This puts Strike in the humiliating and inconvenient position of having to live in his office.

In walks a plot development, the wealthy lawyer John Bristow. Bristow's sister, the supermodel Lula “Cuckoo” Landry, passed away some months ago, having fallen from a high balcony.  The police investigation had concluded that Landry’s death was a suicide, but Bristow is convinced that his sister was murdered. Strike’s reaction is to be hesitant to take a case that the police have already investigated, and closed.  Bristow’s offer to double Strike’s going rate does have the detective mull over his bottom line, but it's still not enough for Strike to take the case. 

Bristow, however, is a man who won’t be denied.  As things get heated in Strike’s office, Rowling writes, “’All I want, Strike,’ said Bristow hoarsely, the color high in his thin face, ’is justice.’  He might have struck a divine tuning fork…calling forth an inaudible but plangent note in Strike’s breast…He stood in desperate need of money, but Bristow had given him another, better reason to jettison his scruples.” <1> The justice that Rowling has in mind through her narrative is the social kind, especially as it relates to the issues of family, class and race in modern English society.

III.

The novel is set in contemporary London, and this gives Rowling a chance to compose some fine descriptive passages of the famous city. “This was the hour when [Strike] found London most lovable; the working day over, her pub windows were warm and jewel-like”; how “her streets thrummed with life…her aged buildings…became strangely reassuring”; and “while the heavens turned indigo above him, Strike found solace in vastness and anonymity”. 

But as Strike turns his full attention to investigating the death of Landry, he finds anything but solace.  Instead, he uncovers that Landry’s milieu is of the shallow and the corrupt, intersected by grasping lackeys, all documented by a swarm of paparazzi. It is in this company that we find one of Rowling’s most effective characters in the book, the homeless Rochelle Onifade, who's been pulled into Landry’s world by chance.  Through the desperation of her need (and greed), Onifade makes the perilous decision to try and blackmail a murderer.

IV.

Strike’s discovery of Landry’s murderer is aided by Robin Ellacott, who begins employ with Strike as a temp.  By book’s end, Robin is Strike’s permanent secretary.  This is certainly good news for Strike, and as it turns out, for us; Rowling has revealed that she plans to make a series of Strike’s cases.  In fact, the next Strike book is due for publication in 2014.  On the strength of The Cuckoo’s Calling, I am curious indeed about Rowling's continued story for Strike and Ellacott.
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<1>Galbraith, Robert (JK Rowling). The Cuckoo's Calling. Mulholland Books, Little, Brown & Co. 2013.

Breakthrough and Through

The life of Nietzsche received a fictionalized treatment in Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus.  (Mann also addressed the problem of Nietzsche in his Last Essays.)  One comparison with Mann is Muhammad Iqbal, who spoke directly of Nietzsche in his long poem Javid-Nama. "I said to Rumi, 'Who is this madman?'. He answered, 'This is the German genius [Nietzsche] ... seeking the station of Omnipotence ... he broke from God, and was snapped too from himself' ".

Wodehouse the Shorter, the Compact, the Concise

P.G. Wodehouse wrote over seventy novels during his career as a comic writer.  In the middle of all that novelizing, he also found the time to compose a short story or two. Enough stories to fill the pages of a good twenty collections, in fact.

II.

"The Truth About George" is the first story from the collection Meet Mr. Mulliner (1927). <1>  And we do, meet Mr. Mulliner, a middle-aged man with an "extraordinarily childlike candour [to] his eyes". This honesty of gaze serves Mr. Mulliner well in what seems to be his chosen pastime - recounting vaguely improbable stories in the pub Angler's Rest, gently aided by a series of drinks.

The story that Mr. Mulliner has in mind here is to do with his nephew, George Mulliner. George had the misfortune to be born with a stammering condition.  This condition didn't pose a problem in George making a living, as his father left him enough of an inheritance so that George needn't pursue gainful employment. George lived comfortably in the English countryside therefore, and developed a passion for crossword puzzles.  It's when George found he had also developed a passion for the vicar's daughter (and fellow crossword-solver) Susan Blake, that his stammering became an obstacle he had to resolve.

III.

To London George travels, to see a specialist in speech-problems. The specialist advises George that shyness was the root of George's stammering, and to rid himself of the condition, he had to make a regular effort to engage strangers in conversation, no matter how shy he felt at the prospect.  George puts the specialist's advice to practice on the train back from London, and ends up trying to trade small talk with...another stammerer.

On goes the train. George's next attempt at conversation results in him meeting the Emperor of Abyssinia. The "Emperor" turns out to be an escapee from an area psychiatric asylum. In any case, George is no further ahead in applying the specialist's cure.

It's only when George returns to his village, and speaks to Miss Blake in their crossword synonyms that things change for the better: "'I am suffering from extreme fatigue, weariness, lassitude, exhaustion, prostration, and langour' [George said].  'I'm so sorry' [Miss Blake] murmurred. 'So very sorry, grieved, distressed, afflicted, pained, mortified, dejected, and upset'".   This "sweet sympathy" of Miss Blake's is just the thing to cure George's stammer, and right then he delivers an ardent, unstammered marriage proposal to the young lady.

IV.

Miss Blake's reply to George's proposal rounds out Mr. Mulliner's tale about his nephew, as well as Wodehouse's amusing and fine story.  "Yes, yea, ay, aye! Decidedly, unquestionably, indubitably, incontrovertibly, and past all dispute!"
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<1>Wodehouse, P.G. Meet Mr. Mulliner. 2008 Edition: Arrow Books, London.

Blue Birds

Hitchcock's The Birds (1963) is an extraordinary film that I do not  enjoy watching.  Compared to the enormous pleasures afforded by Rear Window, for example, Birds is a colossal downer.  In the filmography, The Birds directly follows Psycho.  Such a proximity is entirely fitting, as Psycho is among the bleakest of Hitchcock's work.  But where Psycho is clear and direct, Birds is abstract and subtle.  

II.

By the time of The Birds, the beautiful hot-ice blonde had become a recognizable figure in Hitchcock.  Here, that role is taken up by Tippi Hedren, as Melanie Daniels.  The film begins with an introduction to Daniels. It is Daniels's desire to deliver a flirtatious lesson, to the handsome Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor), that has Daniels find and follow Brenner to the town of Bodega Bay.  Arriving with a cage of "lovebirds" that Brenner noted at their first meeting in a San Francisco bird shop, she rents a motorboat to get to Brenner's lakeside house.

Soon enough, Brenner discovers Melanie's mischief with the delivery of the lovebirds.  It is just then, as Melanie seems to be enjoying the effects of her prank from the view of the motorboat, that a gull suddenly dives from the sky and strikes Melanie in the forehead, drawing blood.  As the film progresses, there are more bird attacks on humans, building to a lethal ferocity.  Criticism on The Birds has suggested all kinds of explanations for these attacks in the film.

My interpretation turns around the character that has led us to Bodega Bay, Melanie Daniels.  (A viewer will note that the first human bird-attack in the film is on Melanie.  And the last?  Also on Daniels.) There's a scene in the film where a hysterical woman accuses Melanie of being "evil", and thus bringing the attacks upon the town by her very presence.  But, of course, there's nothing really evil about Daniels at all.

III.

There is an unsettled quality to Daniels, however.  And I think this dissonance has to do with Daniels secretly being a neurotic.  It's through these hidden eyes of Daniels that Hitchcock portrays the world of The Birds, as the cause and the affect of the depressed.  So it is in the film that human beings are shown as being coldly alienated from one another; that even when relationships are formed, they are fated to end in sorrow and regret; that there are the scenes of seemingly arbitrary violence, chaos and death.  Similarly goes the apocalyptic thinking that often obsesses the anxious, depressed psyche.  Hence, the bird-attacks may also be seen as a metaphor for the irrational, furious attack of neuroses.

Using the terms of neurosis, I ask to unclaim them from their Freudian baggage.  Instead, the neuroses I mean refers to those problems of the nerves, of the melancholic temper, that sensitive men and women have grappled with long before Freud's analysis. Not that Melanie Daniels is shown to be especially sensitive in Birds.  Her chic exterior is unconvincing though, and suggestively so.  The reason for Daniels's neurosis, in any case, may have to do with loneliness.  But as in his best work, Hitchcock is indirectly pursuing much bigger game.  That game in The Birds has to do with the liebestod appetites of the modern world.    

IV.

So it is that near the conclusion of the film, we find Daniels wide awake in the early morning hours, at the house where she and others have taken refuge from the bird-attacks.  Suddenly, she hears the sound of bird wings from an upstairs room.  As she alone climbs the stairs to investigate, it's as if Melanie is being led up those stairs, right into harm's way.  Daniels does survive the final massed bird-attack that follows.  But that shouldn't detract from how Hitchcock has orchestrated his picture that Melanie Daniels is first trapped, and then shown compelled by the film's nihilistic logic.  There is plenty of compulsion in Hitchcock, and where it takes me here does not allow me to describe The Birds as a film to be enjoyed.

Splash

Come a ways with me 
my dear Mr. N,
down to the river, and then 

Narcissus looked into his ripply reflection and fell in love.  Love became a watery end.

Later, much later, psychology added lustre to its theories by picking through the ancients, literature and myth.  One of its appropriations was the myth of Narcissus.

Later, somewhat later, psychiatry formalized narcissism into a specific personality disorder, NPD (Narcissistic Personality Disorder).

II.

Narcissus, myth or disorder, doesn't get a direct reference till late in Graham Hurley's fine crime novel, One Under.  But when the issue of narcissism arises, it leads to some striking passages, especially if your sense of humour includes schadenfreude.

III.

Mark Duley is an artistic type besotted with romantic love to a, well, narcissistic degree. When his married lover ends their affair, he won't have it.  But when have it he must, he won't have it as any kind of normal breakup. So, he invites his lover to a "last supper" (oh), for after all, she had "crucified" him (ohh), betrayed him with a "kiss" (ohh!). <1>

And when Jenny Mitchell (the betrayer) tries to sympathize, all he can focus on is the "music", the music that only Mark and Jenny can hear.  Mrs. Mitchell's response, when asked later how she addressed Duley's speculations about this music: "'I lied. I said I could hear it too.'" 

IV.

There's much more that concludes this line of black comedy in Hurley, but to outline further would involve spoilers.  Suffice it to say that Narcissus wasn't the last to find his fate looking back at him.
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<1>Hurley, Graham. One Under. Orion Books Ltd. 2007.

Talk About a Soap Opera!

I was introduced to the soap opera by TV's most recent rival for a popular audience, the internet.  Leisurely surfing had tossed up the info-bite that the American soap Guiding Light held a Guinness Record, for being the longest-running fictional show in television history, having then been continuously on air since 1952.  As it happened, I'd learned about GL just in time; the soap was destined for cancellation in a couple years' time, and ended in September 2009.

II.

Since its growth into a massively popular medium, television has proved an easy target for intellectuals. The criticisms focus on the medium's passivity as encouraging a lazy disengagement, or even, being a softening agent for all kinds of purposed messages.  But these critiques are often raised as if all communication media did not present through a freighted discourse.  To be an informed audience of media depends on what the audience is bringing to the experience, and this is equally true of high and popular art forms. Now television is a popular art form that I happen to like, so that when GL's record came up on the net, I was eager to see for myself a show with such longevity, and hence, such staying power.

III.

My first few weeks with Guiding Light mostly served to underline the derisive characteristics associated with the soap opera.  Here indeed was the bold acting: the bald plot-twists: all of that bold melodrama. <1>  After a time I began to consider a soap title of my own.  The Bold & The Bald.

But after a time, I also began to notice that I had developed a curious attachment to GL.  First, there was the appeal of the romantic passages that began with the linear energy of new love, but then didn't end in a linear way, shown to be cyclical instead. The sharp edges of romantic endings were reconciled by a coping acceptance, and the possibility of many second chances. Secondly, this viewpoint that relied on acceptance, on second chances, was also extended in Light's universe to the issues of daily life, quite apart from romantic relationships.

Taken together, Light presented the dramas of a tranquilized romanticism, embedded in the detail of a continuous story.  The charm of this storytelling could be described as negligent, but the negligence went beyond its immediate pleasures, informed by a consoling generosity of vision. Like all good art, Light revealed layers to its meaning imperceptible on a first, or single encounter.

IV.

Guiding Light is several years gone now, and television soap operas in general have seen hard times. Less than a handful remain on the major American networks where they began, and once flourished.  This diminishment of the soap opera, a narrative form unique to the development of the medium, makes television the lesser for it.
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<1>But melodrama can be more than just sentimentality. David Cook, for example, has suggested that melodrama can also be a type of "heightened realism". (David A. Cook, A History of Narrative Film (1990).

Invisible Mask

Grace Kelly made just eleven films in her time as an actor.  A full handful were released in 1954.  Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, The Country Girl, Green Fire and The Bridges at Toko-Ri.  Kelly won an Oscar for her performance in The Country Girl, as Georgie Elgin.

II.

Seeing The Country Girl (George Seaton) almost sixty years on, the picture comes across stagey and static.  The dialogue too, based on Clifford Odets's play, is given to theatrical exaggeration. Indeed, it's very much the quality of the film's lead performances - by Kelly, Bing Crosby, and William Holden - that raises Country Girl from curiosity status.

Crosby and Holden would go on from the film to finish their careers in show business.  But fate held a very different conclusion for Grace Kelly.  In 1956, Kelly married into European royalty, and took on the title of Princess of Monaco.

The demands of her role as Georgie Elgin, however, asked Kelly to mask her real-life upbringing.  Kelly's couture dresses and jewellery were replaced by drab cardigan and skirt, the deglamourizing complete with a set of simple eyeglasses. It is Kelly's use of masking as metaphor, though, that makes for one of the intrigues of this film.

III.

Georgie's marriage to Frank Elgin (Crosby) has sunk to depressive levels.  Frank was once a successful singer-actor, and father to the couple's child, a son. A moment of carelessness on Frank's part, leading to the accidental death of their son, has set the Elgins in their miserable present.  Frank has become an alcoholic, his onstage confidence shaken.  By their circumstances, Georgie is now something of a nurse-mother to Frank, her love of her husband tested, but still loyal and steadfast.

Along comes Bernie Dodd (Holden), a director of stage musicals. Despite Frank's alcoholism, Dodd believes in him enough to give Elgin a chance to redeem himself, as a lead in the new musical he is directing.  Will Elgin stay sober enough to take advantage of what might be a last opportunity to save his career?  Is Dodd correct in unmasking Georgie, especially but not limited to, that she may be enabling Frank's self-destructive behaviour?

IV.

Throughout her performance in The Country Girl, we see glimpses of what Grace Kelly possibly has brought of her self to the role of Georgie Elgin.  But possible glimpses are what they remain, as looking into a mask, the ancient mask of the actor. 

After Words

Even if he had never written a single play, Shakespeare would have a lasting reputation as a poet. We need look no further than his sonnets, first published in a collected volume in 1609, to have evidence of the playwright’s brilliance as a poet. With all the eloquence of his language on display, the sonnets engage with the subjects of love, time, beauty and mortality.

Formally, the sonnet can be exacting.  But Shakespeare’s sonnets would seem to make slight of formal difficulty, as the collected volume comes to a total of 154 poems. To get a sense of Shakespeare’s achievement with these many sonnets, I would invite the reader to compose a sonnet - just one - of their own. 

II.

A recitation of Sonnet 54. <1> 

O, how much more doth beauty beauteous seem
By that sweet ornament which truth doth give:
The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem
For that sweet odour, which doth in it live.
The canker blooms have full as deep a dye
As the perfumed tincture of the roses,
Hang on such thorns, and play as wantonly
When summer's breath their masked buds discloses;
But, for their virtue only is their show,
They live unwoo'd, and unrespected fade,
Die to themselves. Sweet roses do not so:
Of their sweet deaths are sweetest odours made. <2>
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<1>Princess Grace of Monaco. Birds, Beasts & Flowers: A Programme of Poetry, Prose & Music (1980). CD. Nimbus Records, 1992.
<2>Missing from the recording, the final couplet:
And so of you, beauteous and lovely youth,
When that shall vade, my verse distills your truth.

Soul Translation

I read as broadly as I could during my school days.  The reading often involved works in English translation.  Translation is necessary to access some text, and the task of translators is challenging and admirable.  There are limits for translation, however, to the extent it can convey an author's meaning in the original language.  If you are seeking for example the closest access to Plato's thought, you should learn ancient literary Greek.  Turgenev below, Russian.

II.

Among Ivan Turgenev's many tales, "Faust" is of the obscure.  An  epistolary narrative, the letters in "Faust" are between two Russian gentlemen, one living in the country, the other the city.  Turgenev gives us only the letters from the country, and there lies the story.  The country correspondent, Pavel Alexandrovitch, has recently moved back to his rural home after a nine-year absence.  Settling in, he goes through the bookcases, and rediscovers his volume of Faust.  Pavel is something of a book-lover, and his passion is great for Goethe's classic.  "There was a time when I knew Faust by heart...word for word" <1>, he writes in his first letter.

One day, Pavel has a chance encounter on the country roads with an old university friend, who is now married to a woman Pavel himself once admired.  This meeting brings back nostalgic memories for Pavel of Vera Nikolaevna, and her opinionated mother, the widow Madame Eltsov.  Among Madame Eltsov's eccentric opinions, Pavel recalls, there was her view toward imaginative literature, the reading of which she had strictly forbidden Vera.  Pressed by Pavel, she had remarked:  "'You tell me, that reading poetry is both useful and pleasant...That's impossible, and leads to ruin or vulgarity'".

When Pavel meets Vera again now, she is a contented wife in her early thirties, and much to Pavel's surprise, Vera is still following her mother's advice not to read imaginative works.  Pavel's not only surprised, but annoyed even. "This incomprehensible indifference to the highest pleasures of the intellect irritated me."  He sets about meddling, by convincing Vera to let him read Faust to her.  Turgenev makes it easy for us to surmise that Pavel's motives are informed by eros.

The reading of Faust has a startling, and as Madame Eltsov might have put it, ruinous effect on Vera.  Such is the power of Goethe's words that Vera confesses "'there are things in [Faust] I can't get out of my mind; I feel as though they were simply turning my head.'"  Vera's disturbance reaches its peak in a scene so fragile that it almost falls apart.  A bewildered Vera questions Pavel about his reading to her.  "'What have you done to me?'" [she said] "'I love you, that's what you have done to me.'"

Despite its adulterous nature, Vera surrenders to the passion between her and Pavel.  As often happens in Turgenev however, eros is bittersweet.  Soon, Vera begins to see the ghost of her mother, and remembers what she had once said to Vera. "'You are like ice; until you melt as strong as stone, but directly you melt there's nothing of you left'".  Vera's imaginings of her dead mother increase, until beside herself, she falls into a feverish delirium which, incredibly enough, leads to her death.

III.

Could guilt have been the cause of Vera's hallucinations?  Can guilt become so overwhelming that it can destroy mental and physical health?  Is the power of great literature always benign?  Was Turgenev just being playful with German romantic tropes?  No matter the questions it raises, "Faust" dramatizes the submerged eros of art, and moreover, the ontological analogue that animates great art and thought.
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<1>Turgenev, Ivan. "Faust". Translated by Constance Garnett.