Friday's Forgotten Book: KILL YOUR DARLINGS by Terence Blacker

Kill Your Darlings  by Terence Blacker, first American hardcover edition published by St. Martin's Press, New York, 2001.  It was published the previous year in Great Britain by Weidenfeld & Nicholson.

I was reminded of this forgotten comic gem by Declan Burke's recent blog, at this link, discussing the flak over the tentative title of his next book, Kill Your Babies, which was suggested to him by Raymond Chandler's musing over comments originally made by William Faulkner.  Faulkner said that, as a writer, you must sometimes "kill your darlings," your favorite bits of prose, when editing your own work.

A number of other writers have subsequently picked that up as a title, including Max Allan Collins in his 1984 bibliomystery about a lost Hammett novel.  The title in Terence Blacker's noir thriller carries a double meaning and jells well with the irony within.  He doesn't use it as an epigraph, but he uses it well in the concluding chapter.

His novel has no epigraph, in fact, but there are numerous quotes throughout the text which might serve, including these from page 16:

"The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art." --Bernard Shaw.

"Marriage is about roughage, bills, garbage disposal, and noise.  There is something vulgar, almost absurd, in the notion of a Mrs. Plato or a Mme Descartes, or of Wittgenstein on a honeymoon.  Perhaps Louis Althusser was enacting a necessary axiom or lyrical proof, when on the morning of November 16, 1980, he throttled his wife." --George Steiner

"I believe that all those painters and writers who leave their wives have an idea at the back of their minds that their painting or writing will be the better for it, whereas they only go from bad to worse." --Patrick White

These quotes serve as foreshadowing, forearming the reader for the comic noir that lies ahead.  And Blacker's humor gets blacker as he goes along.  In places the novel made me think of the dark parts of John Cheever's Falconer.  That dark.  But unlike Cheever's novel, there is comedy here as well.

The protagonist is a fine writer whose talents are unappreciated while the inferior work of others gets rewarded every day.  He devises a scheme to achieve recognition, but as with any Faustian pact in which the ends justify the ethical hedging of means, things wryly go awry.

And the writing is superb, loaded with insights and humorous asides and gossip about authors.  In my opinion, this forgotten novel ranks up there with James Hynes's The Lecturer's Tale: A Novel and Francine Prose's Blue Angel: A Novel and so many others that now spring to mind.  Academic noir ought to be recognized as a separate genre.  Down these dark halls of academia a writer must go who is himself not mean.

Terence Blacker has his own wikipedia page, at this link, and it lists this novel but doesn't say anything about it.  I have not yet read any of his other books, but it's about time I did.
________
Forgotten Book Friday is a national holiday, or should be, observed by the collected authors and bloggers on their own blogs, organized by author Patti Abbot, at this link, and many other little known gems are to be found by backtracking the friday links.

Friday's Forgotten Book: The Eye of the Tiger by Wilbur Smith

THE EYE OF THE TIGER by Wilbur Smith, first published in 1975.  On  its face, this is a crime novel, an adventure story, a light hearted romance with a love story too.

When I first read it, it was as if the protagonist had stepped out of Hemingway's To Have and Have Not (Scribner Classics), in a delightful way.  For although this is also a charter fishing boat tale, and although the protagonist is similar to Hemingway's Harry Morgan (played by Humphrey Bogart in the film), he is not so cynical but rather more light-heartedly existential.  A jaded, sardonic Bogart could not have played Wilbur Smith's protagonist.

My wife and I recently listened to the abridged audio book, and it was very good, but there is nothing like the first reading of the novel.  It was published in 1975, in an era of unparalleled sexual and economic freedom.  Art Bourgeau, in The Mystery Lover's Companion (1986), called it Smith's masterpiece, "possibly the greatest adventure novel ever written."

The novel garnered a large international readership and ardent fans who sponsered special editions, but still not much respect.  And while there have been many fine movies made of Smith's other novels, this one never made it to the screen.  Sylvester Stallone bought the movie rights, and it looked as if he cast himself in the lead, but somehow the movie fell through.

One cannot read the title of the book now without thinking of the rock song, written and sung by Survivor for the soundtrack of the Sylvester Stallone movie, Rocky III.  You should read Jim Peterik's story behind the writing of the song at this link.  I sometimes ran to that song back in the 1980s, and I can conjure up the sound of that tiger's heartbeat any time.

Wikipedia, at this link, shows the amazing number of parodies, covers, and influences the song has had over the years.  There are a number of fine covers available for free at youtube, mostly by trios or even a full orchestra.  Igor Presnyakov, while nothing to look at, generates amazing sounds in his solo version on acoustic guitar, at this link.

And if you've a hankering for some other charter boat novels, you might like my list at Amazon, at this link. 

This is a tag-along, one of many contributions to the Friday's Forgotten Book series, here.

Off and Running Monday: Mindfulness Monday

My idea, on Monday mornings, is to look at the weather and schedule my week, at least regarding such things as jogging and exercising.  I subscribe to weightchart.com (which is completely free, by the way), and they automatically send me daily reminders to enter and chart my weight.  Mindfulness.  

And I know it's a cliche: the body is a temple.  Like all cliches, it lends itself well to parody, sometimes in the form of tee shirts marketed across the web:  "My body is a temple, and you don't have a prayer."  And, "My body is a temple but it has fallen into ruins."

Cliche or not, the mindfulness of daily exercise is a healthy habit to develop.  My wife and I, like almost everyone else, string I-love-you's into every cellular call between us, no matter where we are.  This could become a rote, but when you say it and mean it, it is simply a form of mindfullness.  The busy material world closes in every day, and every day we need to remind ourselves of who we are and who we love and the order of our priorities.

Haruki Murakami, lover of jazz and the brilliant author of many novels involving magic realism, wrote a wonderful running memoir in his most laid-back style.  He had taken up running at age thirty-three, after he sold his jazz bar in Tokyo, and he wrote this particular book in his fifties.  He says,

"I just run.  I run in a void.  Or maybe I should put it the other way.  I run in order to acquire a void."

Like me, sometimes he listens to jazz as he runs, and sometimes to his old favorites, such as the Lovin' Spoonful or the Beach Boys.  

Murakami says he took the title of his book from the title of the Raymond Carver short story collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Stories, and he thanks Carver's widow for giving him permission. Murakami has translated many of Carver's works into Japanese, as well as other American fiction.  He says:

"One other project I'm involved in now is translating Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and things are going well. I've finished the first draft and am revising the second. I'm taking my time, going over each line carefully, and as I do so the translation gets smoother and I'm better able to render Fitzgerald's prose into more natural Japanese."

"It's a little strange, perhaps, to make this claim at such a late date, but Gatsby really is an outstanding novel.  I never get tired of it, no matter how many times I read it.  It's the kind of literature that nourishes you as you read, and every time I do I'm struck by something new, and experience a fresh reaction to it.  I find it amazing how such a young writer, only twenty-one at the time, could grasp--so insightfully, so equitably, and so warmly--the realities of life.  How was this possible?  The more I think about it, and the more I read the novel, the more mysterious it all is."

Music, baseball, literature, and running.  My kind of writer. Runners looking for a similar read might want to try Don Kardong's Thirty Phone Booths to Boston.  Readers new to Murakami who enjoyed this one might be inspired to try one of the author's many novels, and I highly recommend them, especially The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel.

Transcendental Tuesday: Some Books For February

Chicago is gearing up for an historically big snow, and hopefully folks will prepare and stay safe and warm.   It looks like rain here.

My wife already has her Groundhog Day ginger cookies made, and we'll probably watch the movie,  Groundhog Day (Special 15th Anniversary Edition) tomorrow or the next day.

In case you didn't know, Groundhog Day is a parable about a shallow superficial man, played by Bill Murray, who lives Groundhog Day over and over again.  At first, he uses his power hedonistically, but as time goes on, or doesn't, he learns compassion and lives his days as a kind of bodhisattva, selflessly helping the same people who need it every day.

Valentine's Day shapes some of our reading for the next two weeks.  I never tire of reading The Book of Love, an 827 page anthology of love literature, gleaned from the world's best fiction, poetry, essays, and memoirs and edited by Diane Ackerman and Jeanne Mackin.

Richard Matheson's Somewhere In Time is also a Valentine's Day  favorite of ours, both the book and the movie made from it.  There are a couple of special hardcover editions, the most beautiful of which is  the Dream Press edition in a pictorial slipcase featuring a picture of the watch from the movie.  This large hardcover also includes What Dreams May Come, another transcendental novel.

Seeing as how it is not Valentine's Day yet, here's a selection from The Book of Love that always leads into a discussion about what love is and what love isn't.  It is by American author Kenneth Fearing, who died fifty years ago.  Fearing was best known as the author of the classic thriller, The Big Clock (New York Review Books Classics).  See what you think. 

Love 20 Cents the First Quarter Mile

All right, I may have lied to you and about you,
     and made a few
     pronouncements a bit too sweeping,
     perhaps, and possibly
     forgotten to tag the bases here or there.
And damned your extravagance,
     and maligned your tastes,
     and libeled your relatives,
     and slandered a few of your friends.
O.K.
     Nevertheless, come back.

Come home.  I will agree to forget the statements
     that you issued
     so copiously to the neighbors and the press.
And you will forget that figment of your imagination,
     the blonde from Detroit;
I will agree that your lady friend who lives above us
     is not crazy, bats, nutty as they come,
     but on the contrary rather bright,
And you will concede that poor old Steinberg
     is neither a drunk, nor a swindler,
     but simply a guy on the eccentric side,
     trying to get along.

Because I forgive you, yet, for everything.
I forgive you for being beautiful and generous and wise.
I forgive you, to put it simply, for being alive,
     and pardon you, in short, for being you.

Because tonight you are in my hair and eyes,
And every street light that our taxi passes shows me
     you again, still you,
And because tonight all other nights are black,
     all other hours are cold and far away,
     and now, this minute, the stars
     are very near and bright.

Come back.  We will have a celebration to end all
     celebrations.
We will invite the undertaker who lives beneath us,
     and a couple of boys from the office,
     and some other friends.
And Steinberg, who is off the wagon, and that insane
     woman who lives upstairs, and a few reporters,
     if anything should break.
______

I'll explain my interpretation in another post.  Meanwhile, here's the official website of Somewhere In Time, link.

Saturday's Best Book Diary: DEATH AND THE GOOD LIFE and DELIVERANCE, Richard Hugo and James Dickey

The first novel by poet Jim Dickey and the first novel by poet Richard Hugo have a lot in common, though you might not think so.  I love the uncredited cover on the Avon paperback edition of Death and the Good Life: A Mystery, pictured above, but the first edition hardcover had been issued in a bland beige dustjacket with only a badly drawn axe and the description, A Murder Mystery By The Acclaimed American Poet Richard Hugo.

Didn't any of its editors consider its literary possibilities, even though they may be harder to discern?  Whoever drew that face of a human skeleton on the Avon cover had the right idea.  It is a work of naturalism, at least as this reader sees it.

Deliverance, first published in 1970, is now highly acclaimed both as a thriller and as a literary masterpiece.  It was also transformed into a highly popular and now classic film.  The first edition dustjacket had that wonderful eye.

Epigraph: a passage from the book of Obadiah: "The pride of thine heart hath deceived thee, thou that dwelleth in the clefts of the rock, whose habitation is high; that saith in his heart, Who shall bring me down to the ground?"
When I was reading James Dickey's novel, Deliverance, and I came upon the archery passages, it struck me that I had read this before.  Indeed, they seemed to have been taken directly from Eugen Herrigel's Zen in the Art of Archery.

I recently sent for the DVD of the movie made from the book.  In an interview on the DVD, Burt Reynolds says that Dickey gave him a copy of Herrigel's Zen in the Art of Archery on the set.

This DVD has a nice selection of other back segments as well, several interviews with the cast and crew, with Dickey and later with Dickey‘s son.  There was a clash of egos on the set, most importantly between Dickey and John Boorman, but also between Dickey and Burt Reynolds who didn’t like Dickey referring to him as Lewis, his character's name, rather than Burt. Boorman says that macho and egocentric Burt Reynolds was perfectly cast to play the egocentric Lewis in the film.

The biggest clash was a clash of visions. Dickey saw his book and the film as a study in naturalism, while director Boorman saw it as a cautionary film, an ecological film, man raping nature.  Boorman says that at first, Dickey promoted the film by going along lines in front of the theater, telling patrons what a great movie they were about to see. Years later, Dickey wanted to remake the film and do it his way.

I liked the ambiguity as to whether Jon Voight’s character shoots the right man or not. Ed Beatty’s character later asks him, “Are you sure you shot the right man and not just some guy out there hunting?” Neither Beatty or Voight are certain they recognize him, and there is a scene where Voight’s character looks inside his mouth because the only thing he recalls for certain is that the man was toothless. He finds that the man he killed has teeth, but then he discovers that the teeth are false. At the end, he still doesn’t know.

The hand coming out of the lake at the end, reprising the upraised hand of the mountain man whom they buried, was not in the book. Burt Reynolds said that he didn’t like this at the end until he saw the movie with an audience and heard the gasps of people affected by this. The director said that he wanted it to represent both the repressed guilt of the killer inside us and the hand arising out of the unconscious.

Body, mind, and spirit.  Animal man, middle man, and spiritual man.

Drew is the spiritual/civilized man.  We don't see him die but he disappears as soon as the narrator sides with Lewis--or "comes to ground," to paraphrase the epigraph.  Lewis is the animal man.

Ed is the middle man, an everyman, a mind-dominated man who must make a decision between following Drew or following Lewis.

Bobby at first seems to be a civilized man like Drew, but unlike Drew, Bobby has no principled or spiritual depth and without Drew he reverts to an animal man.  Dickey says that he represents "superficial man."

Above is the fine cover of the latest edition of Richard Hugo's Death and the Good Life: A Mystery.

First paragraph:  "I imagine the three men having a good time.  I imagine them singing."

The novel was first published in 1981, eleven years after Deliverance, and its theme is the same, a novel about modern man's denial of his animal nature and the consequences that entails.  Naturalism.  It is all over the novel, symbols of it here and there, with smaller nuances hidden in the descriptive details that you might not notice, such as:

A cat who looked like a superb survivor ran across the street.  He looked tough enough to eat people and smile while he did it.  With the gray sky and the wind and the empty field, I got one of those lonely chills you get when you think you've found a sad, sad, place, a place where loneliness goes when it leaves the cities.

For here, Hugo subverts the formula.  Here is a lawman protagonist who is a poet by avocation.  So gentle is he that he has compassion for the people he arrests, falls for many sob stories from speeders, wants to ignore petty crime whenever he can.  The one law enforcement role in which he excels is in the solving of murders, an activity of the mind.

The good civilized life, dominated by the life of the mind, is what the protagonist, Al Barnes,  yearns to continue.  But one of the three men, mentioned in the opening line, is killed while out fishing.  One witness who may have seen the murderer is Shelly Percy Bailey, a drunk and cartoonish professor/poet.  James Crumley-like, you might say.  Or James Dickey-like.

The witnesses describe a tall woman, "a Big Mother," an old Amazon-like woman with green eyes and wild gray hair, some six feet eight inches tall and carrying an axe.  At one point she's described as "a force."

Richard Hugo was too fine a poet not to mean this "Big Mother" as symbolic of the violent forces of Mother Nature, the dark side of the Eternal Feminine.  Just when you think the case might be solved, and everything explained away, it isn't.  This is a killer that strikes randomly, and in different guises.  It is not one particular killer but three, the furies, and you cannot solve the problem by jailing or killing anyone in particular, because the force is karmic, and one act of violence leads to another.

After the hacked body of the second man mentioned in the opening lines is discovered murdered, the town grows hushed and tense.  Barnes feels the need to connect with his animal nature,  the only way he knows how.  He goes to see his lady friend, a bartender:

Arlene poured me some coffee.  We forced grim smiles at each other.  In our minds the same thing was going on, I was sure.  We were both glad we were alive and had each other, and we were both feeling a bit guilty that we were feeling that, instead of grieving about Robin Tingley. .

"You know what?  The whole business makes me want you more and more, like all the time, like right now."

"Me, too.  It makes me feel exactly the same."

  We went into the back where she kept a small single bed and gave the world our only answer to the horror that had struck the little town of Plains.

So, the first two men in the trinity of the three mentioned in the opening line of the novel have been killed.  Where does that leave the third man?

I'm not saying that this novel is the equal of Deliverance, but it is a novel with a great many literary merits.  And the lesson in both of these cautionary tales is the same: that we should not live in denial of our animal nature, we should not live in denial of death.

Say your life broke down.  The last good kiss
you had was years ago.  You walk these streets
laid out by the insane, past hotels
that didn't last, bars that did, the tortured try
of local drivers to accelerate their lives.
Only churches are kept up.  The local jail
turned 70 this year.  The only prisoner
is always in, not knowing what he's done.
---from "Shades of Gray in Philipsburg"

The prisoner, in Richard Hugo's poem above, is everyman, under a sentence of death.

Friday's Little Known Gem: Michael C. White's A BROTHER'S BLOOD

A Brother's Blood: A Novel by Michael C. White, HarperCollins Publishers, New York, New York, 1996.  This is a splendid literary mystery and a haunting crime novel but also much more.  It features an anti-war, anti-bureaucratic slant, with beautiful writing and a strong female protagonist.  This was a first novel, and the author has since written several other fine books, but none of them grabbed me like this one. 

Dustjacket: A human hand reaching out between double strands of barbed wire, a blurry human form can be made out beyond, glowing as if in a luminous spotlight or maybe a spiritual being.  Design by Nina Gaskin.

Epigraph: "The voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground."

During the time of the first Gulf War, a German named Wolfgang Kallick comes to Maine in an attempt to learn the obscure details of his brother's death, his brother having died there during World War II.  His brother's letter back home serves as the prologue, and it is a very literate letter, quoting Goethe and ending with the closing lines:  "Sometimes I feel I am little more than a caged animal, a beast prowling back and forth in a pen.  Like Rilke's panther."

Opening lines of Chapter One:  "Saturday morning, early. The road up ahead is quiet and dark.  The headlights slice through the darkness like a sharp filet knife cutting fish.  But what spills out isn't the gleaming entrails of morning but only more darkness.  In the rearview mirror it closes seamlessly together again and goes on forever."

 
The first few sentences are a metaphor of the theme of the novel, cutting open the past and exhuming the buried crime. In the first paragraph we discover that the narrator is a woman and we get the feel of the strength of her character; we learn that she is not skittish, not prone to the fear of dangers real or imagined. She is aware of dangers around her, bears she can hear, and she smells them too, "a smell as hard as axle grease."

 
The rest of the first chapter is packed with good things: beautiful language, moody asides, foreshadowing and subtle revelations of character. The narrator is a 61 year old woman (she sounds younger, but 61 is not as old as it used to be).  She runs a roadside cafe that caters to truckers, loggers, hunters, and tourists. We like her immediately.

 
There is a nice bit about the radio, loneliness, the cover of darkness. "I slam headlong into that darkness, hoping that if I go fast enough I'll shatter it like a piece of smoked glass. And on the other side? Maybe morning."

 
The glass symbol is reprised later in the chapter, when the red-faced man looks in her car window at her, startling her out of a sleep, "as if I'd fallen asleep during those war years and just woke up."

Sleep is a metaphor, as it is the lack of sleep, she says, "that finally begins to hit me--makes me feel my age like a heavy woolen coat that smells of rain."

 
And the red-faced man has parallel symbols in "the solemn red face of the alarm clock, waiting for first light." Then later the oil light in her car comes on, "a red demon eye staring back at me." Luckily, she finds a Shell service station open, and there is an interesting exchange with the young cat-eyed man who works there.
 
Comments on war, oil, the control of government, the lies, the play of masculinity and femininity. And this is all in the first chapter.

The chapter ends with a reflection on Time: "Time seems to have lost its texture, is able to expand or contract, to take on new shapes like a cloud on a windy day."

 
The panther, cat, wolf, bear and other hunter allusions intrigue me. But all men aren't predators. Leon, for instance, has rabbit eyes.

 
Back to that wonderfully multi-leveled and understated scene where Libby is driving in the snow and nearly runs out of oil. Her old car has a degenerative ailment, like cancer. She finds the yellow Shell station (not a Gulf station) in the fog and the young blond man comes out to help her in orange overalls. He has nocturnal eyes too, and he works "with the slow fussy movements of a raccoon."

 
He checks the oil and brings the dipstick back to show her, "pointing it at her the way a matador aims a sword at a bull." But he doesn't want to hurt her, just to warn her and not just about the cancer in her car. He wears the orange overalls of the oil company, but detests the ongoing Gulf War where men are asked to die for oil.

 
He tells her the story of his father who fought for them in the Viet Nam War and was sprayed with Agent Orange, and got cancer from it. He is angry about this, not so much about the dying as about the lies, "We're just looking for the bastards to tell us the truth."

 
This thread, the individual vs. the lies of the military-industrial complex, is mocked when Libby mentions that the souvenirs she sells tourists actually come from the Smokey Mountains. "What do they know?"
 
And the question is reprised again when Libby discusses the newsreel propaganda pictures of goose-stepping blond giants wearing swastikas and jackboots. But it turns out that these German kids look like kids anywhere. "What do we know?"

Know this: this is a little known gem of a mystery novel that looks into the human condition with verve and insight.  As this is a cold weather novel, I prefer the moody windswept cover that adorns the Harper trade paperback edition of the book.  I prefer its easy-to-read print size too.

This is a tag-along to Patti Abbott's Friday's Forgotten Book series which is to be found

here, and here.

JAWS and MADAME BOVARY and ZEN: Thursday's Critical Anaylsis

You can see John P. Anderson's excellent Flaubert's Madame Bovary: The Zen Novel at google books, at this link.


Anderson gives the classic a wonderful Zen interpretation.  Gustave Flaubert drew from several influences when writing his great novel, including Flaubert's own family and the historical Delphine Delamare, the real Madame Bovary.


Flaubert invented new literary techniques to subvert reader expectations in order to bring them to a new awareness, not just of literature, but of their own daily lives as well.  One way he does this is through the counterpoint of style and plot.  "The style of the novel is grounded in Zen-like detachment and freedom whereas the plot is mired in desire, illusion, and determinism."


"Flaubert finds a principal enemy of human freedom [free will] deep in the guts of mankind in the tapeworm of desire.  The desire tapeworm feeds on freedom and excretes dissatisfaction.  Emma (Madame Bovary) is not free because she has the worm.  Emma wants, Emma gets, but she is quickly dissatisfied and then the worm wants more.  Emma could be a poster girl for our 21st century credit card society."


For a definition of Zen, Anderson uses the one in the Encyclopedia Britannica:

"...the Buddha-nature, or potential to achieve enlightenment, is inherent in everyone, but lies dormant because of ignorance.  It is best awakened not by the study of scripture, the practice of good deeds, rites and ceremonies, or worship of images but by a sudden breaking through of the boundaries of common, everyday thought."


This sparkling study is nearly line-by-line and is 229 pages long, full of insights and wisdom.  Many authors and philosophers are cited, but in particular Anderson uses Schopenhauer's The World As Will And Idea and Parerga And Paralipomena: A Collection of Philosophical Essays.


Anderson says that the first chapter of Madame Bovary is about the establishment of the self.  The change in the narrators, between Charles and an anonymous "we" and an anonymous "I" leads to the detached observer with a Zen perspective.  The observer is free, while Madame Bovary is a slave to mindless desire:  "Me me me.  More more more. Shop shop shop.  These are the call signs for Emma Bovary."

So what do JAWS and MADAME BOVARY have in common?


A lot.  The insatiable will to consume especially.  Dean Sluyter, in a marvelous essay entitled "All You Can Eat," draws a fine Zen interpretation from Jaws. 


As with Flaubert's novel, the movie of Peter Benchley's Jaws opens with the point of view of the shark, "the shark-as-self" established with an underwater camera, nosing through the seaweed as if looking for prey with that dualism of its driving music in the background.  The collective "we" of the audience looks through the shark's eyes, traveling through the ocean.  Consume, consume, consume.


The shark is the great white, the great blank, the great nothingness.  It is an emblem of what the Buddhist's call "the hungry ghost," the all consuming desire.

Sluyter says, the first victim is the long-haired girl who runs off from the beach party to skinny-dip at sunset, a naked Eve calling to her impassive passed-out Adam to join her.  "Shown in a long shot, she swims tranquilly in the twilit water, which glows with a jewel-like radiance and fills the screen with its vast expanse, a tiny figure easily at one with the ocean of wholeness."  As in Tim Winton's Breath: A Novel and all the other such transcendental works I review here, the ocean is a symbol of the collective Oversoul in this interpretation. 

Then the shark approaches and we see her from below, from the shark's point of view.

In the movie, the forces of material consumption live in denial.  They want to cover up the truth with illusions and salesmanship.  The three men who resist the denial and set out to hunt the shark represent a trinity, and the way Sluyter uses it is consistent with the way it is used by Emerson, Melville, McCarthy, Conrad, and so many others frequently discussed in this blog.

Sluyter says that the shark is the main character, that Hooper, Brady and Captain Quint "are supporting characters who exemplify three different ways to confront the hungry self."  Sluyter says that the three approaches are what Buddhists could call the fundamentalist, the Hinayana, and the Mahayana.  These approaches yield three different outcomes.

1.  Quint has the fundamentalist, eye-for-an-eye approach.  "It is the way of an aggression rooted in dualism."  You might say that Quint is  a basic man dominated by his animal-nature.  He is the body in the body/mind/spirit trinity.

Quint's fundamentalism is driven by a perpetual struggle against any adversary conceived as Other than the one who struggles.  This is reflected in everything he does, the song he chooses to sing, the destruction of the radio, in everything he says.  His consuming hatred of the shark becomes self-consummation. 

2.  Sluyter says that monkish Brady represents the Theravada/Hinayana branch of Buddhism, the "smaller vehicle" as befits the small cage in which he descends in an effort to kill the shark.  If Quint is the body in the body/mind/spirit analogy, Brady represents the mind, the scholar, the shark expert always seeking more knowledge, a better understanding.  It is Brady who, after confronting the shark face-to-face, declares, "You're gonna need a bigger boat."

3.  Sluyter says that Hooper represents the Mahayana or "greater vehicle" of Buddhism.  Hooper contains metaphorically the spiritual force of our common humanity that finally blows away the shark, the nothingness blown to nothingness.  The last scene shows Hooper and Brady paddling together on two of the buoys lashed together.  Hooper, representative of the spirit, says that he believes that the tide is with them.  Brady, representative of the mind, tells him to keep paddling.

Mind, body, spirit.  You should read Dean Sluyter's entire essay, which runs a long twenty pages and is collected in Cinema Nirvana: Enlightenment Lessons from the Movies.

Wednesday's Western: Elmore Leonard's HOMBRE

Hombre by Elmore Leonard.  My copy, scanned above, is the first printing of the hardcover Armchair Detective Library edition, published in December, 1989.

Dustjacket:  A snakeskin appears wrapped fore and aft against the black of both front and rear covers.  Against the skin, the author's name is high on the front cover in black.  The title is in a eclectic mixed western font on the bottom half, the capital "H" protruding into the blackness in a blocked blood red.  The standard western accoutrements are overlaid on a board in the middle: two guns in holsters, silver spurs, saddle and saddle blanket, but sideways rather than at a normal angle.

A great dustjacket resonating with the text, suggesting a nonconformist naturalism and the blood of darkness.  Below the title in small print: "Selected by the Western Writers of America as one of the 25 best westerns of all time."

Indeed it was, and still is, though it is quick read, a rather short novel with lots of dialogue.  It would make a fine play.  The print in this edition is large and easy to read, yet it only runs to 190 pages.  In the introduction, written thirty years later, Leonard says that he finished it in 1959, that it was then rejected by publishers for two years before Ballantine bought it for 1250 pounds and brought the book out in 1961.

"Five years later 20th Century Fox acquired screen rights and in 1967 Paul Neuman appeared as the taciturn hero no one understands.  It was Richard Boone who came up to the assay shack with the white flag tied to his Winchester, and Neuman who asked him, "How are you going to get down that hill?"

After decades of institutionalized racism, Hombre seemed a very relevant novel in the sixties.  The novel was not only a reaction to the conformist and cliched television westerns of the fifties, it plays today as a constant argument weighing the relative values of altruism and individualism, civics and existentialism.

The movie follows the book, though the book is told in the first person by an everyman who observes for us all.  Leonard doesn't stop short of showing the hypocrisy and corruption in the human condition, yet the ending has an abiding faith in the law as a vehicle that can make things right--or at least better.

He might change a word here or a word there if he were writing it anew today.  Still, even after fifty-two years, the book stands as a small masterpiece.

Transcendental Tuesday: REINCARNATION and COTE DE PABLO

The January issue of Prevention has Cote de Pablo on the cover and a lovely Kate Hahn interview with her inside.  She is best known for playing the NCIS agent, Ziva David, on television.


Her character is a former Israeli Mossad liaison, but Cote de Pablo herself is latino, having arrived in the United States from Chile when she was ten.  In the interview, she says:


"I had literally forty-eight hours to learn a monologue in Herbrew.  That was terrifying.  I used to look down on people who were, for example, playing a Latin role, because I could tell that they didn't speak Spanish.  It would get on my nerves.  Then I realized, Oh, God, I'm in that place right now.  Everything I had judgments on has turned around and bitten me in the butt."


In the interview, she describes the warm relationship she has with her mother, despite a difference in religious views.  "I always tell my mom, 'My gosh, when I see you in the next lifetime, how much fun are we going to have?'  But because she's Catholic, she just turns her head away.  She doesn't believe in any of what I think."


Cote says that he believes in reincarnation, but that she doesn't try to fit her belief system under the label of Buddhism or anything else.


The number of books involving reincarnation far outnumber those involving Buddhism, and of course not all Buddhists believe in reincarnation or life after death.  In this space in the last week, I reviewed Raymond L. Atkins' Sorrow Wood, and a long annotated list of other such novels using reincarnation could quickly be compiled.  I'll post one soon.


Anyone looking for a scholarly history of the concept of reincarnation should peruse Joel Bjorling's REINCARNATION: A Bibliography.


Cote de Pablo, by the way, is interesting all the way around.  You should read the complete interview.  She is also an accomplished singer.  Her torchy rendition of "Temptation," from an episode of NCIS, can be found on Youtube at this link. 

Off and Running Monday: Good Advice Is Where You Find It.

In case you missed it, 73-year-old Jane Fonda was on the cover of USA Weekend.  Inside, she offers some good advice for seniors.  Stay active, she says.  In town, I saw several people reading it over their coffee, a couple of them grumbling about her stand on Viet Nam long ago.  Never mind that, what this exercise guru says about the importance of staying physically active is absolutely right.

Then today came the news that 96-year-old Jack LaLanne has passed away.  It was just last year that he was giving interviews all over the place, working out with Vince Vaughn, promoting a book, celebrating his 50th wedding anniversary with his wife Elaine.

Ninety-six is a lot better than three score and ten, especially if you can stay as vital as he was.  But even if being a Jack LaLanne or a Jane Fonda is unrealistic for you, your health will be greatly improved if you can just find some time to exercise every day.  Walk, jog, swim, lift light weights, or whatever.  Just keep moving.  Make it a daily practice and be mindful about it.  Treasure this body that is the temple of your mind and spirit.  As Jack LaLanne was always saying to seniors, it is never too late to begin.