Neil Serven

Baz Luhrmann’s treatment of The Great Gatsby requires a bit more letting go than we tend to grant most screen adaptations. This is not just due to Luhrmann’s reputation as a hyper-electrifier, prone to deploying all the effects tools he’s given to play with. Gatsby is a richly polished novel, delicately written in so many places that it is easy to damage, and already worked over so ritually that we feel more urgent to protect our angles to it.

Luhrmann can’t be accused of deviating too much from the text, because so much of the film is the text. We literally hear Tobey Maguire, as Nick Carraway, recite lines from the novel to us, and key words are scrolled over the picture in cursive to punctuate the important parts. The one big conceit we’re asked to forgive is that Nick, not F. Scott Fitzgerald, is writing these words—on the advice of the psychiatrist to whom his testimony comprises the narration we hear. Nick Carraway, our bewildered observer, has apparently been driven to drink, and being the wingman and sole defender of his wealthy monomaniac neighbor has made him that way.

Luhrmann has tried to make a movie that is as elegant and opulent as the story it tries to tell, but rarely lets the camera hold still enough for us to bask in that opulence. There are pearls swinging around dancing necks; delicate fingers pinching martini glasses. From our helicopter vantage point the party floor at Gatsby’s mansion looks a little like a mosh pit. Part of this is the 3-D angle (why that was deemed necessary is anyone’s guess; when Gatsby’s shirts are tossed around they are meant to land on top of us); the rest smacks of a threatened boredom with the inner narrative. But while the effects are showoffy, it is hard to call them contrived when the movie is about a man doing all he can to show off.

And there are the symbols. We are already hypersensitive to them, so having them weighed on us is embarrassing. Gatsby reaches his arm out for the green light across the bay, nearly plucking it like an unripe apple off a tree. We practically choke on the ash rising up from the heaps whenever we pass them coming to or from West Egg. T. J. Eckleburg’s blue eyes pierce through his lenses and the rotted wood so intently we expect them to blink. It is as though Luhrmann is trying very hard to prove to us that he read the assignment and checked off all the avenues of comprehension on which he might be tested before presenting his diorama to the class.

We are asked to overlook a few of the slicker details. The character of Klipspringer, in the novel a boarder occasionally roused out of slumber to entertain guests on the piano, here is for some reason chained to a built-in, two-story pipe organ that seems to be giving him an electric shock. At The Atlantic, Esther Zuckerman notes that the scene in which Gatsby and Nick cross the Queensboro Bridge didn’t include the funeral procession that passed them:

The friends looked out at us with the tragic eyes and short upper lips of south-eastern Europe and I was glad that the sight of Gatsby’s splendid car was included in their somber holiday.

While the Jay-Z soundtrack pumps along, African-American servants stare like gargoyles out of the woodwork, or play serenading trumpets on window ledges over the steaming streets.

Then there are the actors, against whom I came in with a bias. Tobey Maguire will always look and sound like a fourteen-year-old to me; Leonardo DiCaprio, his face compressed and rubberized over the years since he was that homeless kid in Growing Pains, just doesn’t pull off millionaire polish well; and this Carey Mulligan, with her big, frightened eyes, eliminates any chance of complexity in the character of Daisy. At times, this Great Gatsby feels like a very expensive school play.

And yet, there are so many worse things one could do to a story. No morals were upstaged, no fates rerouted. (I could never understand why Gatsby let Tom take his car for the ride to the city—or for that matter, why Tom let Gatsby take Daisy.) Seeing the film made me want to pull out my beat-up Scriber paperback—with Matthew Bruccoli’s annotations, purchased for a summer reading assignment in high school—and read the novel again, take a fresh inventory of its lyrics and images. We have been presented the excuse as a gift.

Slow reading month, because I’ve had the workshop (mentioned below, more about which later) and other things going on.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark. A used bookstore pickup from back whenever. There haven’t been nearly enough women authors on my reading list (and picking a dead one doesn’t do much to improve my score, I realize). But Spark seems to be coming up in conversations a lot recently, particularly in my writer circles, regarding her reputation for clean, icy prose.

Spark was born Muriel Camberg and retained the name of her first husband, with whom she had a brief and miserable marriage, because it had “some ingredient of life and fun.” There is a good deal of mischief in Miss Jean Brodie. The title character is a teacher at an all-girls private school who has tossed aside the assigned curriculum (even training the students to have textbooks open in front of them, should the headmistress walk in) in favor of a coordinated effort to groom the “crème de la crème” of her class on more important matters of sex, politics, art, manners, and independence.

The girls graduate to Senior School but keep in close touch with their teacher. As Brodie acquires two suitors—one-armed married art teacher Mr. Lloyd and bachelor music instructor Mr. Lowther—the obsession of the girls with Miss Brodie’s sex life turns the focus around to her. Her former lover, Hugh, had been killed in the Great War, a week before the Armistice. Through a narrative method that intersperses future scenes with the present, we learn that one of her pupils will betray her somehow.

The story is of an era (published in 1962, set in 1930s Edinburgh), finding part of its energy in the mock-theatrical pronouncements of its characters:

“I should like you girls to come to supper tomorrow night,” Miss Brodie said. “Make sure you are free.”

“The Dramatic Society…” murmured Jenny.

“Send an excuse,” said Miss Brodie. “I have to consult you about a new plot which is afoot to force me to resign. Needless to say, I shall not resign.” She spoke calmly as she always did in spite of her forceful words.

Miss Brodie never discussed her affairs with the other members of the staff, but only with those former pupils who she had trained up in her confidence. There had been previous plots to remove her from Blaine, which had been foiled.

“It has been suggested again that I apply for a post at one of the progressive schools, where my methods would be more suited to the system than they are at Blaine. But I shall not apply to a post at a crank school. I shall remain at this education factory. There needs must be a leaven in the lump. Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life.”

Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard, Richard Brody. A dense critical biography of the pioneering, enigmatic French New Wave director. Brody is a New Yorker film critic whose specialty is mid-century auteur cinema, so you are more likely to find his writings online or in the retrospective capsules at the front of the magazine than the Critics section, where Lane and Denby reign. Everything Is Cinema took Brody ten years to write; the painstaking research put into the book (Godard himself granted Brody one interview, over the course of two days, from his castle home in Switzerland) is supplemented by thoughtful critiques of the work on the screen.

Each chapter is devoted to one or more films, telling us of the inspiration for each, the financing, the recruiting of cast and crew (increasingly tricky as more and more bridges are burned), the difficulties in shooting. Godard often didn’t write scripts until the last minute—this is why whole scenes of Bande a Part consist of Sami Frey and Claude Brasseur reading the newspaper—and seemed bent on making his actors as uncomfortable in front of the camera as possible for the sake of not appearing rehearsed. Brody doesn’t play favorites with the material, nor the films, and as a result the second half of the book is an uphill climb. This isn’t so much Brody’s fault as it is Godard’s. By the time the director completes Weekend, in 1967, the majority of his best (and best-known) work is behind us and we still have some 300 pages to go. Fortunately, a thick chapter on Malraux, Henri Langlois, the ’68 student revolution and the closing of the Cinemateque Francaise helps to orient things somewhat on a social and political level.

Godard is a misogynist, and, in a challenge for someone whose art requires him to direct our attention to other people on a screen, a narcissist. All three of his wives (Anna Karina, Anne Wiazemsky, Anne-Marie Miéville) have been centrally featured in his work, and the times he has turned the camera on himself, either directly or indirectly, it is not with any of the coyness or amusement of Woody Allen or Alfred Hitchcock. Brody is polite about all of this while making it easy for us to draw our own conclusions.

I can watch À bout de souffle and Bande à part and Masculin féminin over and over again and find new things to be enthralled about. But nothing in this book made me want to see any more of the films than the ones I have already seen, perhaps with the exception of Detective. As a work of biographical and critical journalism, I suppose this should not matter, but I suspect it would be a disappointment to Brody.

See also: “Behind the Scenes of an Iconic Godard Scene,” from Brody’s The Front Row blog, 5 April 2013.

Barrelhouse #11. A thickly loaded issue, with ten short stories, four essays, an eclectic collection of poetry, and a comic by Jordan Jeffries that illustrates another story, “Me & Gin” by Lindsay Hunter, that appears on the magazine’s web site. I read this issue with particular interest as I am currently enrolled in the Barrelhouse Online Fiction Workshop, and as discussion there has touched upon what kinds of stories are likely to get picked up for publication over others, it has been tempting to try to identify the giveaway areas, which parts clearly sold the editors on these choices.

There is a lot of rambunctious narration here, fiction as well as non, and on more than one occasion I had to flip back to confirm if a piece was essay or fiction because the authority of the writing blurred the line. A nonfiction piece by Casey Wiley, “You Are All Welcome Here (Unless, Of Course, You Take Photos),” documents the far-out tattooed and obsessedly remaining-in-character individuals who frequent the Stoogeum, the world’s only museum devoted entirely to the Three Stooges, located in a nondescript office park in Ambler, Pennsylvania. I also enjoyed Edward Porter’s second-person-narrated “The White Guy’s Guide to Marrying a Black Woman” and Ethan Chatagnier’s “Oyster Shell,” with the first line: “I drive the retards to the library is what I do.”

The voice in Chatagnier’s line here, with that wraparound “is what I do” at the end, reminds me of that of Jack Keefe, the letter-writing busher pitcher in Ring Lardner’s You Know Me, Al, for some reason. Its weight is not an accident. Barrelhouse bolds the first line of each of its stories, as though to emphasize the importance of plunging the reader into a situation immediately. Other examples:

The first rule is, never mention she’s black to your white friends, or your family. (“The White Guy’s Guide to Marrying a Black Woman”)

As a kid I had a perpetual cowlick and a meager collection of autographs I kept in an envelope in the back of my underwear drawer. (“Smear the Queer,” Dave Madden)

The man says he doesn’t even know the stripper’s name. (“Let’s See What Happens,” Amy Butcher)

You’ll never hear me claim to be exceptionally smart, and I’m nowhere near good-looking, and my moral compass, so I’ve been told, points roughly in the same direction as that of Idi Amin’s. (“Young Arsonists in Love,” Andrew Brimstool; not sure if the redundant possessive is deliberate here, but it sounds true.)

The first guy has “Why Scointly!” tattooed to the back of his neck.  (“You Are All Welcome Here (Unless, Of Course, You Take Photos)”).

I picked up Issue 8 along with the collection Bring the Noise at AWP, but at some point I will need to come back to this one.

Maria Popova at Brain Pickings notes that Susan Sontag liked making lists, and that lists are “very much a currency of culture, today’s favorite attention-exploitation device in an information economy of countless listicles and innumerable numerical headlines.” The latest volume of Sontag’s collected journals, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980, is dotted with a good number of them (some of which Popova shares), and in an entry from 1967, Sontag digs into her fascination with them:

I perceive value, I confer value, I create value, I even create — or guarantee — existence. Hence, my compulsion to make “lists.” The things (Beethoven’s music, movies, business firms) won’t exist unless I signify my interest in them by at least noting down their names.

Nothing exists unless I maintain it (by my interest, or my potential interest). This is an ultimate, mostly subliminal anxiety. Hence, I must remain always, both in principle + actively, interested in everything. Taking all of knowledge as my province.

Lists are about segregation, compartmentalization: sorting out what belongs to a category from what does not. Books you wish to read, favorite films, possible names for your children. Cities you have visited. They become useless when left open-ended. We are by nature segregators, even in our relationships: we choose particular people to pursue getting to know better, and in doing so leave others behind.

Also: it is notable that among Sontag’s list of dislikes are “being photographed” and “taking photographs.” This from a writer who called photography “the inventory of mortality,” a predatory activity reductive in its storytelling, and who wrote, “In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past but the one who invents it.”¹

¹“Melancholy Objects,” in On Photography (1973), 1990, p. 67

Very sad to hear of the news today that MudLuscious Press has ceased operations, and doubly sad because I was only just beginning to get to know their work.

From the Facebook page:

We are officially closing. This decision wasn’t made lightly, but suffice it to say, the time has come to shut it down. We’ve had the enormous pleasure of publishing the words we loved, and we couldn’t be more grateful for our audience, our authors, and all the friends we made along the way.

You can follow the links on the MLP page (http://mudlusciouspress.com/books/) if you’d like to buy any of the remaining copies at SPD, Amazon, or Powell’s. Some last Nephew titles are also available directly from us here: http://mudlusciouspress.com/nephew/.

Thank you all for being a part of what we did, the words we adored, and the books we spent so much of everything on. We are extremely proud to have had a small place in your literary heart.

J. A. Tyler, founding editor

I will particularly miss MudLuscious’s Nephew imprint, which published standalone stories and novellas in nifty stylish pocket editions.

Here’s hoping many new and profitable enterprises await these folks.

Edited to Add, 04/26/2013: One project that was left in the lurch by the closing, Gabe Durham’s Fun Camp, has already been picked up by Publishing Genius Press.

Claudia knew she could never pull of the old-fashioned kind of running away. That is, running away in the heat of anger with a knapsack on her back. She didn’t like discomfort, even picnics were untidy and inconvenient: all those insects and the sun melting the icing of the cupcakes. Therefore, she decided that her leaving home would not be just running away from somewhere but to somewhere. To a large place, a comfortable place, an indoor, place and that’s why she decided upon to Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

—From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, 1967.

(Per Entertainment Weekly‘s Shelf Life blog.)

Next week’s New Yorker cover, “Shadow Over Boston,” by Eric Drooker.

Also, from earlier this week, Dennis Lehane:

Bostonians don’t love easy things, they love hard things — blizzards, the bleachers in Fenway Park, a good brawl over a contested parking space. [And bowling with skinny pins. –N.] Two different friends texted me the identical message yesterday: They messed with the wrong city. This wasn’t a macho sentiment. It wasn’t “Bring it on” or a similarly insipid bit of posturing. The point wasn’t how we were going to mass in the coffee shops of the South End to figure out how to retaliate. Law enforcement will take care of that, thank you. No, what a Bostonian means when he or she says “They messed with the wrong city” is “You don’t think this changes anything, do you?”

“Your intellect may be confused, but your emotions never lie to you.” –Roger Ebert (1942-2013)

For a while after seeing a film I would go to Roger Ebert’s web site just to see what, if anything, he had written about it. Not to see if he liked it or not, but to see if there was anything he may have noticed about it that I had missed. The fairest methods of criticism might distill authorial decisions—what the director chooses to show and chooses to withhold—and assess how it lines up with intent. But that doesn’t jibe with how we respond to stories. Some of the best artistic work is made on gut alone. The images and sequences cast a feeling that we struggle to explain later. To just say you liked or hated something is too easy to be of any value. To try to grasp why it moved you or didn’t, as Ebert (and Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris) eloquently and painstakingly did, reminds the artist where his strengths are, which shouts into the hole are being heard at the bottom.

His Last Bow, Arthur Conan Doyle. A Book-of-the-Month-Club edition that I picked up for $4.99 some time ago. The eight Sherlock Holmes stories were written after Conan Doyle had so tired of the detective that he had already once tried to hurl him over Reichenbach Falls. So they are told in a “retrospective” style, the idea that Watson is revisiting old cases from the Holmes portfolio now that the man is retired. A few of the stories I remember from other venues—“The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans” from the PBS series starring Jeremy Brett and Edward Hardwicke; and others, including “The Devil’s Foot,” from the Strand Magazine reprints put out by Stanford Continuing Studies a few years ago. These stories don’t seem to feature as much sleuthing as the earlier ones in the Holmes canon.

Participants, Andrew Keating. My first read from my AWP haul, Participants is a compact collection of eight short stories from the founder of the journal Cobalt. (I had a nice conversation with the author about baseball and other things.) The protagonist of the title story is a man who makes his living participating in sleep studies and drug trials. The theme of passive existence sets the tone for the stories that follow, including a series of stories involving Mel Leopold, a veteran journalist at a dying city newspaper.

“Accept/Decline” is a particularly harrowing story mainly because of the inevitable, grossly familiar path it takes. The paper’s new owner rallies the troops on the first day, only to announce later a need to make across-the-board cutbacks in payroll and expenses.

The paid internships were cut first, but most of the students stuck it out for credit. Then it was the expense accounts and anything else the paper could easily push onto the employee. It wasn’t until day twenty-three that they first called someone into the conference room and commenced the firings.

“Davis Field” ends the collection on a sentimental note. A local baseball field is slated to be razed, and a teenage ballplayer can’t understand why his father, an ex-player himself, isn’t more upset about it.

Microtones¸ Robert Vaughan. A chapbook of flash fiction and poetry from the co-editor of Lost in Thought, and a good Fictionaut friend. Each piece, no matter how slight, includes a dagger of a line.

From “A,B,C”:

As the floss slides in and out I think of the guillotine. Her head on

the chopping block.

I’d be thinking what bill did I forget to pay.

…

“Most people don’t like a sarcastic cancer patient actually,” I said.

Aunt Sally replied, “Well, most people don’t have cancer.”

Microtones is published by Červená Barva Press.

Parcel, Spring/Summer 2012. This slim, handsome journal is published by the Raven Bookstore in Lawrence, Kansas. This issue includes fiction by Sarah Malone, whose work I have enjoyed at places such as fwriction : review and The Collagist. “Apples Horses Brides” is another layered work that reveals more by what it avoids, forcing the reader to piece together hints regarding its characters’ pasts.

I was struck by the prose-poem “Alice in Adolescentland,” by Alyse Knorr, which starts off like this:

In eighth-grade algebra Alice knits together equations for amount of blood spilled during an average episode of Oz and writes teen manifestos on her graphing calculator. Then it’s architecture she loves, and sketches of levitating mosque-casinos bloom on the backs of her tests and homework.

There is dynamic choreography here, between the reference to a show that alludes to another kind of wonderland, and the word choice of algebra, derived from Arabic (al-jabr, “the reduction”), seeming to set us up for the introduction of the mosque along the thread of probability and risk? It is perhaps too short a piece for me to be drawing these conclusions, but this is how it hit me.

The issue includes some interesting visual art as well. And I like the word “parcel.” True to its name, Parcel tries to bring back the element of richness and surprise to the hand-mailed print journal; apparently, if you subscribe you get a number of “limited edition broadsides and postcards,” fan-club style. When I picked up this issue at AWP it came with this neat bookmark:

Object Lessons: The Paris Review Presents the Art of the Short Story, edited by Lorin Stein and Sadie Stein. This collection is “not a greatest hits anthology,” as the editors explain; twenty “masters of the genre” (we assume that’s the short-story genre) were asked to go through the Paris Review archives and identify their personal favorite and talk a little about why it sung to them. How those “masters” were selected is not revealed, but it is interesting that the collection begins with a story by Joy Williams (“Dimmer,” selected by Daniel Alarcón) and ends with one selected by Williams (“Night Flight to Stockholm,” by Dallas Wiebe). Norman Rush is the selector and selectee in back-to-back stories. The selections vary among the well-known (Raymond Carver’s “Why Don’t You Dance?” and obscure (Craig Nova’s “Another Drunk Gambler”). Dave Eggers is owed a debt of gratitude for introducing me to another James Salter story (“Bangkok”); ditto Ben Marcus for Donald Barthelme (“Several Garlic Tales”). If one story stood out to me, it might be “Old Birds,” by Bernard Cooper, selected by Amy Hempel:

My father calls one afternoon to ask if I’ve made funeral arrangements. “For you,” I ask, “or me?”

“I know this is a morbid subject,” he says, “but your number’s gonna be up someday just like everybody else’s. You could be walking down the street, minding your own business and-Wham! Heart attack or truck, you’ll never know what hit you. It wouldn’t hurt to be prepared.”

…

Only then do I hear the whoosh of passing traffic. I brace myself. “Dad,” I ask, “where are you?” Silence, as my father no doubt peers around for a familiar landmark, squinting at street signs, cocking his head.

“You’d think someone would have the common decency to help me open a jar of peanut butter,” he says.

At some point, I just accepted that my “natural breath”—to use Frank O’Connor’s phrase—was longer. I don’t think I can understand my characters unless I see them in a complete world, with a distinct texture and sense of place. I like to take the time to build that world, and I like to have them bounce off other characters, and that takes up space, too.

–Jim Gavin, interviewed by Roxane Gay at The Rumpus. Gavin’s new collection Middle Men ends with the story “Costello,” which I greatly enjoyed in The New Yorker last year.

I am easily mesmerized by the greenness of peas. I am easily mesmerized by good china.  And she’s nearly through it, too, the kitchen, and on her way to the deadbolt safety of her bedroom when her mother, my wife, stabs through my plate with a steak knife, partly to get her attention and partly to make sure I’m giving mine.

–Mel Bosworth’s wonderful story “Tuesday,” at fwriction : review.

On the bus to school, Lily sucks fat purple grapes through her lips. Ruth tells herself to stop staring, but her eyes lock tight on Lily’s mouth. She watches until Lily catches her watching, then hops across the aisle and squishes into Lily’s seat. Lily clutches the bag of grapes to her chest, snarls, “Do you have to sit so close?”

“Did he invite you yet?” Ruth asks.

“Stop asking,” Lily says.

“Are you sure you’re eating enough?”

“If I eat more grapes, I’ll barf.”

Lily’s eaten nothing but grapes for a month. Chic magazine says grapes boost natural pheromones, attracting the boy of any girl’s dreams. Lily’s got her eyes on Bobby Litchfield, a senior with biceps thick like tree trunks and dimples on his knees. He’s Lily’s number-one hottie, and she’s laid her claim for prom. But as a ninth-grader, she needs him to do the asking. So she’s taking Chic‘s advice to heart. Now, it seems there might be a catch.

–from “Dye Job” by Tessa Mellas, at The Collagist.

I was sitting in a parking lot in Ipswich, Massachusetts—just a few blocks from the house at 26 East Street where Updike lived when he began Rabbit, Run—late for work because I just had to get to the ending of Rabbit at Rest because I knew what was going to happen.

It was hot in the car.

From his expression and the pitch of his voice, the boy is shouting into a fierce wind blowing from his father’s direction. “Don’t die, Dad, don’t!” he cries, then sits back with that question still on his face, and his dark wet eyes shining like stars of a sort. Harry shouldn’t leave the question dangling like that, the boy depends on him.

“Well, Nelson,” he says, “all I can tell you is, it isn’t so bad.” Rabbit thinks he should maybe say more, the kid looks wildly expectant, but enough. Maybe. Enough.

And then I went to work, and I don’t think I got much done that morning.

John Updike would have turned 81 today.