Purple State of John

A few days before Sarah Palin announced her resignation from the governorship of Alaska, I watched the extended version DVD of last year’s pot-head comedy extravaganza The Pineapple Express. For me, it’s the funniest of recent Judd Apatow flicks, and an early scene reminded me of what I loved about it. After rampant weed consumer Dale, played by Seth Rogen at his dog-faced best, and his dealer Saul, played by the revelatory James Franco, smoke a mad joint of utopian dope called Pineapple Express, another customer shows up at Saul’s door to kill the buzz, and Saul tells Dale that the new arrival won’t be getting the good stuff.

No Pineapple Express for him. Nope. He gets Snicklefritz!

Meaning, he gets the cheap stuff, but I don’t need to tell you that because the word says it all. When I first heard this term in the movie, I thought it might be a common coinage in the world of marijuana afficionados, a widely used snub of any sub-standard pot, but after Googling, I discovered that the movie marks its first usage.

Bravo!

The word deserves wider circulation, and this morning I feel compelled to inject it like an experimental drug into the body of American politics. Ever since viewing of The Pineapple Express, the thing has been lying around in my brain like a stray Dorito, and the Dorito snapped the minute I heard the news about Sarah Palin’s resignation.

“Snicklefritz!” I thought. I wish that were true.

What really happened is this. A few minutes after she announced, a fellow alarmist and apocalyptically minded friend emailed me with the notion that she was leaving to start the great crusade against liberalism, that this was the equivalent of the moment when Mussolini launched Fascism–my interpretation of his idea–a march on Rome with thousands of godly blackshirts.

That’s when the word really came to me. She’s no Mussolini. She’s no political leader of any kind. She’s raw, uncut snicklefritz.

It may help that Snicklefritz is also the name of a Christian clown and woman of God, self-identified on her website, and if you don’t believe me, have a look.

But I don’t think that helpful coincidence is necessary. The heirarchy of dope in the movie is already the perfect analogy. Palin has always been dope to the social conservatives who loved her, a narcotic rather than a solution, a way of wishing away their quite serious and very real political problems rather than a means of confronting them. When Palin first appeared at the Republican convention last year she wasn’t just any dope. She was the undiluted Pineapple Express, and millions climbed aboard.

Right from the start, she seemed a puff of holy smoke for mortal men and women trapped in the opium den of American politics.

As it turns out, she’s the best anti-drug advertisement since the death of River Pheonix. The smoke has blown away, and in the decision to quit her job, we see her true nature. She’s a quitter. She’s a bummer. She’s a looker. She’s snicklefritz, and her place is not on the national stage. It’s in media.

My own prediction is that she’ll be offered gazillions of dollars to host her own television hour on cable or possibly do day-time for social conservatives. If she does, and if her handlers are smart, she’ll be a hit. No matter how much a certain segment of the population loves her, it has never loved her as much as the camera, which conferred that particular kind of cinematic grace on her in the first instant. She has a movie star relationship to the lens, but she’s not an actress.

She’s a personality who hasn’t yet found her groove. She may yet turn out to be a white, blue collar Oprah. She may eventually become an Alaskan Senator. Hell, years from now, after a successful run on television, she might go for the presidency.

But I don’t think so. For me, the governor always was and always will be snicklefritz. For those Republicans who now see the light, it’s time to move on. The Pineapple Express has rolled away once and for all.

A few years ago, I arrived late for a Loretta Lynn concert, walking in just in time to see a full house swept away by the opening act, headlined by a blonde in black dress and pearls. Her name was Eilen Jewell. I saw the last couple of numbers, but one in particular, “If You Catch Me Stealing”, really grabbed me. Jewell drove the crowd wild, and even after Loretta Lynn came onstage and blew people away, I could still hear them talking about that opening act, a compliment if ever there was one.

Two years later, I am an unabashed Eilen Jewell fan, a commitment reinforced by her contribution to last year’s Sacred Shakers debut, a record of gospel tunes made by a bunch of Boston musicians who pulled off convincing hints of western swing, bluegrass and the blues. Jewell’s vocals on numbers like “Twelve Gates To The City” and “Travelin Shoes” gave those spirit-filled songs a sensual tug that was bracing, and for my money she’s a big part of the reason why that record works.

Nothing on the Sacred Shakers prepared me for her new effort, though. Sea of Tears is my favorite album of the year, a collection of snake-charming, vibrant, haunted songs, mostly written by Jewell herself, and kicked into wild life by her band: Jason Beeks on drums and harmony vocals, Jerry Miller on electric, acoustic and steel guitars, and Johnny Sciascia on upright bass. On the song “Sea of Tears”, she and the band make you feel the joyful annihilation in a broken heart. On “Rain Roll In”, they snap the twig of mortality, and it’s unbearably sweet. On “One Of Those Days”, they summon up a western town worthy of Katherine Anne Porter. On “Shake It All Over”, her voice drapes classic guitar pop in the darkest suede.

I could go on and on, but I’ll say just one more thing. She’s from Idaho, a state that has a special place in our hearts. The first full screening of Purple State Of Mind took place in Boise. The final cut of the film was edited there, and the celebratory cheeseburger was eaten on its streets. Our first film festival was Boise, an unforgettable time. In my praise of Eilen Jewell, whom I saw around the first time I ever set foot in Idaho, I also want to express my affection for a state–and state of mind–that’s been extremely good to us.

Now it’s time to hear from Eilen.

Before we talk about your new record Sea Of Tears, I have to ask you about the first song on the record “Rain Roll In”. That’s the first tune I heard off Sea Of Tears, and it really took me aback. Such a beautifully fatalistic song, or is the right word nihilistic? One way or another, in my opinion, it has the kind of simplicity and steel that I associate with the greatest folk standards. How did it come about?

2008 was a joyful but difficult year for me, and a lot of those conflicting elements made their way onto Sea of Tears. My band and I saw new successes that I had before then only dreamed of, which was great. But it was also a trying year because of the various difficulties of touring, and because I lost a few friends in separate freak accidents. It was the year of accidents. I had never really lost a friend before and had just been taking it for granted that we were all going to stick around and still be friends well into our old age. So “Rain Roll In” was my way of processing that–the sweetness and the impermanence of things. In a way it is fatalistic, because I realize that no matter how I feel about this fact it still remains: I can’t make the things I love about life stay the same, and I can’t make them last forever because I won’t last forever. So what is there to do about this? I guess just enjoy it as best I can, while I can, and savor even the little things like the sound of the rain.

In general, this record is such an arresting mix of doom and vitality. A lot of the darker songs—like “One Of These Days”, “Codeine Arms” and Loretta Lynn’s “Darkest Day”—have got loads of raw power, and a more upbeat rock song like “Shake It All Over” sounds sort of haunted, if that makes any sense. Of course, it may just be my sensibility, but I seem to hear a lot of pregnant silence loaded up behind the guitars and vocals. When you were writing the songs, did they seem particularly dark to you?

My songs don’t seem at all dark to me, though I can see why people think that they are. My personal opinion is that music is cathartic and triumphant no matter what the lyrics are about. When Billie Holiday sings “he isn’t true, he beats me too, what can I do” I feel just as happy as when Hank Williams sings “there’s soda pop and the dancin’s free, so if you wanna have fun come along with me.” No matter how bad your trouble is, if you can sing about it then you’ve got it beat, right? And if people hear you singing about it, and they share that same trouble, then they know they’re not alone.

What about that stripped-down sound? On your website, you talk about a desire to show some of your rock influences, and it really shows, but it seems to me you walk a really fine line between trying something new while maintaining continuity with previous records. Was that intentional?

All I knew going into it was that I never want to make the same record twice. On the other hand, I definitely don’t want to fix something if it’s not broken. So I took a few sounds that I had hinted at on my previous two records and put them in the forefront a bit more for Sea of Tears. Songs like “Where They Never Say Your Name,” “Too Hot to Sleep” and “Back to Dallas” were part of the inspiration for the new songs, like “Sweet Rose,” “Everywhere I Go” and “Sea of Tears.”

Tell me about the evolution of the band. You’ve been together in this configuration for four years, which is a long time for most bands, and you all seem to be in sync across a wide range of influences both on the record and in concert. How did you all find your way to each other, or do you basically throw a rock in Boston and hit a gifted roots musician?

There are a lot of great musicians in Boston, so I never had to worry that I wasn’t going to find anyone to play with. I met Jason Beek, the drummer, first. He introduced me to Johnny Sciascia, the bass player. For years, Jason had been a fan of Johnny’s bass-playing when he was in the Tarbox Ramblers. So when it came time to record Boundary County, in December of 2005, Jason suggested Johnny. And Johnny suggested Jerry Miller, the electric guitar player, who he’d been playing with in various local bands on and off since the 80s. We went on our first tour together sometime during the summer of 2006, which is when I feel like we really got our start together, as we didn’t perform together regularly until then. Three years later, here we are. It’s hard for me to imagine wanting to play with anyone else. They’re my dream band.

A lot has been made of the fact that you started out in Idaho and ended up in Mass. Can you talk at all about growing up in Idaho? Am I right in thinking that you spent some time in Boundary County, which you sing about so beautifully on the album of that name?

Idaho was a great place to grow up. To my mind, it’s one of the best places on earth. Granted, the more homesick I get for it the more I tend to glorify it, but it really is a unique part of the country. All of my family is there, and I plan on living there again someday when the time is right. I’ve never really spent much time in Boundary County, just drove through it once or twice with my parents when I was a kid. I’ve always thought that the name of it, Boundary County, was really pretty and evocative of a faraway, beautiful place.

Did you hear a lot of country and gospel in those parts?

No, only the Bob Dylan and Beethoven tapes my dad played on the car stereo.

Speaking of Gospel, let’s talk about the Sacred Shakers record in light of Sea Of Tears. When I listen to the records back to back, I definitely hear a lot of Saturday night and Sunday morning in your line delivery. You’re equally convincing with the sensual and spiritual side of things, and part of what makes your voice so interesting is the way the two can seem one and the same. Are you thinking about any of that stuff when you sing, or does it all just come naturally?

I just try to sing in a way that seems true to me. I don’t think about much of anything while I sing, except for the words. I figure if I have in mind what I’m singing about, chances are pretty good that my voice will reflect that.

Did you sing in a church choir as a kid? Are you a churchgoer, in general? I ask as the non-believing skeptic on this website, but we all try to be open-minded here.

I’ve never really been a churchgoer, though I did do a brief stint in the First Presbyterian Church choir when I was in grammar school. My family wasn’t religious, but my mom was a secretary at the church and new all the people there. I think I agreed to join because a friend of mine from school was in the choir so it seemed like fun. We mostly just goofed off and made nuisances of ourselves, but I have good memories of the whole thing. We sang a song about Jonah and the whale that I still remember, though of all the sermons I’ve heard in my life so far I can’t recall a single one. Frankly, I can’t stomach organized religion. I respect the fact that many people in the world value their religion very deeply. But for me, personally, religion and religious discussions just make me feel slightly nauseous. A lot of people have asked me how it is that I can love gospel music, being so non-religious. I guess I love certain concepts behind the music. And the earliest recordings of gospel music sound so loose and ragged, even though they contained a lot of harmonies. I love that about gospel music too–it’s structured and harmonious but full of raw conviction about things like crossing over to the other side and reuniting with our friends and family.

This site, Purple State Of Mind, is devoted to a dialogue across the lines that divide people over religion, politics and culture, and it seems to me that one place where those lines make little or no sense is music. It’s possible to love gospel music and not believe a word of the gospel, and at the same time to be completely spiritual and embrace the Kinks or the Clash or whoever. Did you win new fans with the Sacred Shakers or were their fans who wrinkled their noses at the thought of church music?

There are definitely some fans of ours who won’t go near the Sacred Shakers stuff, and there are some fans of the Sacred Shakers who have no ear for my stuff. I think there have been a few people who have said they don’t normally care for gospel music, but they like what we do. There’s no accounting for taste. I find myself saying that often.

When Loretta Lynn played Northampton, she devoted an amazing section of the show to gospel, and her audience, many of whom were lesbians who might have been expected to revile anything that smacked of Christianity, got to their feet in abandon. It was an amazing moment. You opened for her on that tour. What was that like? Did the great lady have any words of wisdom for you?

We were her opening act for her show at the Calvin Theater. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to tour with her. But we were very grateful to the folks at the Calvin for letting us do the one show, and to Loretta and her management for letting us meet her. She was very sweet and friendly. We didn’t exchange many words, as there wasn’t much time, but it was enough for me just to meet her.

Now that you’ve done rock and gospel-inflected records back to back, are you feeling a restless urge to take on another genre? Delta blues anyone?

Not really. I don’t think of music in terms of genres. When I write a song, it more or less tells me what it wants to sound like, based on its lyrics and the rhythm the words have in them. And then the band interprets that concept and the song springs to life. I’m not that calculating. The songs are the boss. I have, however, been threatening to incorporate the Hammond B3 into our live show. I had so much fun playing it on Sea of Tears. I just wish it were more portable.

Personally, I’m waiting for Quentin Tarantino to fall in love with Sea Of Tears and put your songs in one of his movies. It may seem like an odd comparison, but both of you have an amazing comfort level across a variety of styles and genres and yet manage to put your own spin on things. You’re both sort of punk, too, in your own way, and your sound has a definite cinematic quality. It’s big and dramatic. Have movies influenced your sound at all? Which ones? Is it possible that you’re a closet fan of westerns?

I like movies and all, but I don’t think any of them have influenced my music, unless they did so subconsciously. There could be any number of things influencing my brain without my knowledge of them. I like westerns, though I haven’t seen very many. The Good, The Bad and The Ugly is the only western that really stands out in my memory. I love that one. I think the west itself is more of an influence on my music than westerns, and it’s a pretty huge influence at that.

When we suck at something, life seems difficult. We face hard choices.

We can admit that we suck and try to do better. We can repress our suckiness and repeat our mistakes until the pain becomes too great. Or we can take a more daring route. We can say that it’s not we who suck, but the thing at which we have so obviously failed.

If we fail at prosecuting a war, for instance, we can say that it’s not our fault at all. It’s the fault of a media that never adequately supported the war. It’s the fault of terrorists who shouldn’t even have been there. We can even say it’s the fault of war itself, which has the inherent flaw of being hell.

If we fail at marriage, it’s easier. We can simply say that marriage isn’t for everyone, as everyone knows, and leave it at that. Or we can go one step further and claim that in our failure we are in fact superior. We may look like a train wreck, but we have in fact triumphed. We are not bad. Marriage is.

Mission accomplished. Case closed.

Thus, in the bunkering spirit of President George W. Bush and his administration in the response to criticisms of the Second Gulf War, Sandra Tsing Loh goes for broke in one of the most unintentionally hilarious essays ever written by a serious writer. The article is entitled “Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off”, and its subtitle reads: “The Author Is Ending Her Marriage. Isn’t It Time You Did The Same?”

Rather than accept her failure on the grounds that she sucked at it—and this is an indictment she prosecutes herself–she makes a fantastically spurious case against marriage itself, aided and abetted by The Atlantic Monthly editors, who thought highly enough of her misadventure to feature it on the cover of the magazine.

Let me say up front that I’m opposed to all advocates of so-called “family values”. I don’t believe marriage is a perfect institution by any means and understand fully that many marriages deserve to die for the sake of the adults and the children involved. I’m not at all defensive or sentimental about the institution and can without much anxiety foresee a day when our culture comes up with a better or at least different solution to the current arrangement. I should also say that I’m happily married and haven’t cheated on my wife and have a good sex life, but I would never use any of these facts to push a case in favor of marriage.

Sandra Tsing Loh, on the other hand—after telling us that she never “generally” even enjoyed men; that she subjected her kids to “lazy” attachment parenting; that she is an awesome mother and wife in every way imaginable, though she cheated on her husband; that her two close friends are trapped in loveless marriages to kitchen bitch guys who can build furniture, but scold their wives for not being able to properly deglaze a pan and won’t make love to them; after regaling us with tales, in other words, out of a social freakshow that conjures up a Sid and Marty Krofft version of Brideshead Revisited—after all this—she declares herself to be in a position to make the case against the entire institution.

It’s a breathtaking exercise in self-absorption, and we understand the magnitude from the start when we come across an early detail about Tsing Loh’s therapists’s office and grasp that we’re in for the literary equivalent of a movie so bad it’s going to be awesome. Here we are in the office as the couple come crashing down: “We cried, we rent our hair, we bewailed the fate of our children. And yet at the end of the day—literally during a five o’clock counseling appointment, as the golden late-afternoon sunlight spilled over the wall of Balinese masks—when given the final choice by our longtime family therapist, who stands in as our shaman, mother, or priest, I realized…no.”

So did I, and at the very same moment. Weird.

It was when “the golden late-afternoon sunlight spilled over the wall of Balinese masks”. Why give us that particular detail? Are we meant to understand that we’re not in the presence of an ordinary family therapist, that, in fact, we’re talking about a quite expensive and fashionable family therapist? Is this one of those telling details that creative writing programs tell us can make or break a scene? If so, what are those masks telling us? That the therapist isn’t one of those dead white male types who favors the analytical approach but rather a tribally down type who is all about the nurturing instincts of more primitive peoples?

None of the above. I suspect it’s the first tip-off that a writer who is going through a divorce is going to turn her personal disaster into a jeremiad in the same way another person might take Paxil in order to numb the pain.

There are many such revelations, and all of them suggest the perpetration of a fraud. I like this one: “It has been almost 10 years since I dined with adults on a weekly basis.” Ten years? Really? I can see two or three or five or even seven, but ten? Sounds like she didn’t like people any more than she liked men. Instead of making a case against marriage, maybe Tsing Loh should have made a case against her own priorities and social skills. If having weekly dinner with other adults was important to her, it could have been easily done. You do have to like people, however. Or is she merely exaggerating for effect?

This one is good, too. “I secretly worried that using domestic help was exploitative—recall Barbara Ehrenreich’s dictum that she’d never let another woman scrub her toilets. Yea, these are the various post-feminist hurdles that stretched before me at 2 a.m. as I lay awake in our bed, contorted not just by cats but by two children kicking me from both sides—Exhibit A of lazy, undisciplined attachment parenting.”

Wow. Instead of making a case against marriage, how about making a case against “lazy, undisciplined attachment parenting”? A lot of attachment parenting people are fanatical zealots who believe the civilized world will fall if their children don’t sleep in their beds, and yet they have a worldview that can be ardently defended, and many of them appear to pursue the discipline in good faith and without the self-pity. Sandra Tsing Loh let’s that one lie, however, in pursuit of the real game–men, who she never really enjoyed,  remember, though she did marry one and agree to raise his kids. The bastard!

Here’s her description of the true monster of the piece, her friend Rachel’s husband Ian: “Picture him in bike shorts (he’s a cyclist), hovering over a mandala of pots that are always simmering.” This is not a compliment. It is a portrait of a hectoring, wood shop eunuch. Ian won’t have sex with his wife because he says she’s too fat, Tsing Loh tells us. That’s not all.

“The list of violations unfurls. Last week, Rachel [his wife] mistakenly gave the wrong medication to the dog, a mistake Ian would never make. She also forgot to deglaze the saucepan and missed the window to book the family’s Seattle flights on Expedia, whose chiming bargains Ian meticulously tracks.” Moreover, and here’s the killer, “at night, horny and sleepless,” Rachel “paces the exquisite kitchen, gobbling mini Dove bars.” She’s the breadwinner, the tortured Traditional Dad. Ian Bike Pants is the smug married Nagging Mother who always has a headache. Now the Hell Will Start.

My Lord these people are awful as described by Tsing Loh. And yet I can’t imagine they’re too pleased by their portraits, even if the author tries to somehow make their weirdness representative. And that’s the rub, the true failure in the piece.

Hint: It’s not about bad marriage. It’s about bad writing and even worse thought.

Tsing Loh wants us to believe that her story is somehow larger than itself when clearly it is not. She and her crowd have their own problems that need not be of concern to the rest of us, though they might make a delicious subject for satire; these are beautiful people who can afford family shamans whose Balinese masks bask in the glow of Los Angeles sunlight, who build beautiful kitchens and care to deglaze pans often enough for the practice to become a marital flashpoint, wives whose husbands don’t beat them but do beat eggs.

There are many cases against marriage. It can be a grind. It can be lonely. It can be sexless. Bill Maher makes such cases every week on his HBO talk show, and with far more honesty, though with an equally strong tendency to make his rarefied life into an example. Compared to Maher, though, Tsing Loh is off the charts in her class and sensibility marginality.

We are faced with an imploding reality here. From inside it, perhaps understandably, the author tries to see her failure as part of a larger corruption, not her own. In fact, the only real corruption may be ours. As readers, we are encouraged to believe in a very post-modern fiction: if someone can write well, they de facto have some wisdom to impart with their literary abilities. As anyone who knows writers can tell you, however, there are a huge number of human Chernobyls whose advice on interpersonal relationships should be shunned at all costs.

The Atlantic piece is ostensibly a review of five books about marriage, and these books may all have valuable advice for people stuck in ruts or worse, but Tsing Loh does these authors no favors by linking their work rather shallowly to her own experience. While telling us that anthropologist Helen Fisher posits the existence of four different categories of married people–the Explorer, the Builder, the Director, and the Negotiator, each of whom are attached to telling adjectives like “libidinous”, “analytical”, “touchy-feely” and “traditional”—Tsing Loh leaves out a fairly significant fifth group, the Nomad. Her husband was evidently a traveling musician on the road for many weeks out of the year. Hmmmm. Could that have something to do with the failure of her marriage? Or did they fail because she was an Explorer, and he was a Negotiator?

Human beings are so much more complicated than anything suggested here, and so is marriage, though I imagine we’ll see a book out of the author’s woes, one more entry in the genre of creative non-fiction, which sounds to my ears more and more like credit-default swap, a shell game to sell one sort of project as another. When the book comes out, we’ll hear a lot more about the trend, and at some point, there may be more serious articles and more trenchant analysis not so compromised by dishonesty.

Meanwhile, Tsing Loh seems sanguine about the prospect of never marrying again, and why not? She’s a good-looking, literary woman who will never lack for male attention if she wants it. It’s part of the article’s fraudulence that she never says so. Still, her fraudulence is hardly original. It’s part of a much larger problem that doesn’t get acknowledged enough. Marriage is many things to many people. It’s a refuge. It’s a prison. It’s a church. It’s hell. It’s highly erotic. It’s utterly devoid of sex. In other words, it doesn’t yield easily to shallow, instant bear-baiting arguments of the kind familiar from cable television.

At what point will the rest of us wake up and realize that most of our current descriptions of the way we live are lies? Even our more gifted writers have contributed, and even our brightest readers have been all too happy to lazily play along. As a culture, as a country, we have all worked long and hard to portray ourselves, whether married or single, gay or straight, black or white, childless or fecund, as cardboard cut-outs of realities that doggedly refuse to surrender to our cliches. Maybe Tsing Loh’s editors think her piece was somehow hip and edgy, a favored industry word for so many years. Instead they should be asking themselves if they haven’t become a lot like the president that so many people in the publishing industry despised, creating false worlds in order to justify aims that do more damage than good to their readerships.

As for Sandra Tsing Loh, I hope her next marriage works better than her first. Despite her arguments, because of them, in fact, I’d put money on husband number two.

It started quietly last year at the Venice Film Festival when her new movie The Hurt Locker premiered to lavish praise. And it didn’t hurt last fall when Alan Ball, the creator of HBO’s new vampire hit True Blood singled out her horror masterpiece Near Dark as a key inspiration for the series.

Now we come to the moment of full bloom for 57-year-old director Kathryn, as her new movie about a bomb squad in Iraq garners the best reviews of any movie this year. The Hurt Locker is an unlikely hit!

Let’s hope the resurrection isn’t short-lived. Our cinema desperately needs an action-film director like Bigelow, someone who understands that an explosion in the physical world is far more terrifying and thrilling than anything computer generated imagery will ever devise. She loves the world of men in action as much as any filmmaker since the days of Howard Hawks and seems to have an inexhaustible appetite for exploring the aesthetics of violence. She’s been a welcome nightmare for cultural studies majors who want to insist on the proper spheres for women in art, and an absolute boon to any lover of cinema who despises the puritanical instinct to subdue art through theory.

So far, commercially, things are looking up. The Hurt Locker had a great opening weekend in four theaters, meaning it will probably open wide throughout the summer. Critics who now lavish her with praise may remember that her career was helped into oblivion by a sustained drubbing that began with the trouncing of Blue Steel as the work of a gun fetishist, continued through the savaging of Strange Days as the product of a woman getting off on the torture of other women, and reached its apex in the dismissal of K-19: The Widowmaker as the last gasp of a woman who really didn’t know her way around big budget action.

Let’s say for the record that all of these films had their problems, but if Michael Bay of Transformers fame was able to keep his career after the twin ghastliness of Pearl Harbor and The Island, there was never any justification for kicking Bigelow off the lot.

Her return is cause for rejoicing, but it’s fragile. Something tells me the goodness won’t stop with the new movie, but she’s just ornery enough to piss off critics again and make herself scarce for audiences once more. If that happens, let’s hope we get a couple of masterpieces before she flames out.

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Until a few days ago, I’d never read Katherine Anne Porter. A Charles Baxter review of a new edition of her stories and essays, recently published by the Library of America, provoked my interest, though I’d always been aware of her work. My parents had a copy of her critically vilified bestseller Ship Of Fools on their shelves, and I must have seen the spine a thousand times without ever picking the book up.

The Baxter review, which appeared in the New York Review Of Books, made clear the extent to which that 1962 novel has colored the reception of her work to this day, so I picked up the Library Of America edition and read her three novellas in the collection Pale Horse, Pale Rider. Sufficiently impressed, I can now do my own small part to undo the neglect. Porter deserves better. Two of the three tales, “Old Mortality” and “Pale Horse, Pale Rider”, strike me as among the best American short fiction I’ve ever read. “Noon Wine,” which is unforgettable, falls somewhat in the shadow of Flannery O’Connor, but nevertheless suggests an poorly explored terrain in our literary landscape.

I should disclose my bias here. Porter is a Texan, as am I, and the novellas, particularly “Noon Wine”, give us an account of a mentality too seldom seen in representations of the state, a sense of cultural memory that feels closer to the world of Faulkner and the South and yet remains true to its own space. Her women are exemplary creations. Reading these stories, it seems especially galling to me that Porter would be dismissed as a pretentious highbrow when at her best she wrote close to the gut and even closer to the bone.

A movie based on Ship Of Fools didn’t help much. Directed by the most famous moralizer—and I don’t mean moralist—of the American cinema, Stanley Kramer, the 1965 film appears to have magnified all of the perceived faults of the book and remedied none of its flaws. It died at the box office, but I have a vague memory of seeing snippets of the movie on Channel 11 when I was a kid. Lee Grant comes to mind assaying one of her many portrayals of disaffected, difficult, intellectual women, though I realize as I write that I’m actually thinking of Voyage Of The Damned, a movie about another ship made a decade later. Clearly, Kramer’s forgettable film helped sink its source.

Another filmed version of her work helped to save whatever was left of her reputation. Now mostly forgotten, never available on video or DVD, it’s a 50-minute production of “Noon Wine”, directed by none other than Sam Peckinpah and broadcast on ABC’s Stage 67 in 1966, one year after Ship Of Fools fizzled. The adaptation is routinely described as one of the director’s finest hours and remembered as one of the high points in the history of American television until the era of HBO. Like most people, I’ve never seen the production.

Yet the idea of it always intrigued me, the notion of the most masculine and even chauvinist of great American directors making a masterpiece of a relatively obscure work by the woman who had written Ship Of Fools. The mere fact of the existence of Peckinpah’s Noon Wine suggested hidden qualities in both artists. Perhaps Peckinpah had not only been a purveyor of male fantasies of the violent West, and maybe Porter had been more than just a highbrow mediocrity who became famous on the basis of her social connections.

Having read “Noon Wine” twice now, I can see exactly what attracted Peckinpah to this material and inspired him to great work, and I know without a doubt that Porter’s reputation was unfairly sullied by her version of Grand Hotel on a boat, as Ship Of Fools has been scornfully described.

Here’s an excerpt from her account of how she came to write “Noon Wine”, a beguiling attempt to do the impossible and reconstruct from early memories the genesis of a work of fiction:

“In this society of my childhood there were all sorts of tender ways of feeling and thinking, subtle understanding between people in matters of ritual and ceremony; I think in the main a civilized society, and yet, with the underlying, perpetual ominous presence of violence; violence potential that broke through the smooth surface almost without warning, or maybe just without warning to children, who learned later to know the signs. There were old cruel customs, the feud, for one, gradually dying out among the good families, never in fact prevalent among them–the men of that class fought duels and abided, in theory at least, on the outcome; country life, ranch life, was rough in Texas, at least. I remember tall bearded booted men striding about with clanking spurs, and carrying loaded pistols inside their shirts next to their ribs, even to church. It was quite matter of course that you opened a closet door in a bedroom and stared down into the cold eyes of shotguns and rifles, stacked there because there was no more room in the gun closet. In the summer, in that sweet-smelling flowery country, we children with our father or some other grown-up in charge, spent long afternoons on a range, shooting at fixed targets or clay pigeons with ordinary domestic fire arms, pistols, rifles of several calibers, shotguns to be fired single and double. I never fired a shotgun, but I knew the sounds and could name any round of fire I heard, even at great distances.”

I read these words and feel a kindred spirit. I grew up in a world where one could be a child and still feel the presence of an unseen and unspoken violence and know guns without holding them or firing them. Porter goes on to write about the specific memories that led to “Noon Wine,” hearing a rifle shot one morning at the age of three, followed by the death screams of a man, then hearing talk much later about a shooting.

It would give away too much to explain what these details have to do with the story, but I will say that they eventually became harnessed to a tale that summons up an entire world of feeling and sensibility now vanished, a time and place that lay between the end of the wilderness and the explosion of modernity in southern Texas. In that sense, “Noon Wine” holds distant echoes of Faulkner’s “The Bear” and Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard To Find”, but doesn’t feel derivative or second rate.

At the same time, the other two novellas in the Pale Horse, Pale Rider collection made a deeper impression. In “Pale Horse, Pale Rider”, a young woman endures a bout of Spanish Influenza, and the struggle to live takes her back into the past and forward beyond death, a disquieting saga that is unlike anything else I’ve read in the literature of illness. This is one of Porter’s indisputable masterpieces, along with “Old Mortality”, which ruthlessly describes the way that the young absorb, reject and survive the overwhelming past of their elders. In these two stories, at least, Porter has no equal in her ability to convey the slippage between emotional and what I would call geological reality. Her people cling to the world as if it were a rock in a storm.

Here’s a characteristic bit from “Pale Horse, Pale Rider”:

“Almost with no warning at all, she floated into the darkness, holding his hand, in sleep that was not sleep but clear evening light in a small green wood, an angry dangerrous wood full of inhuman concealed voices singing sharply like the whine of arrows and she saw Adam transfixed by a flight of these singing arrows that struck him in the heart and passed shrilly cutting their path through the leaves. Adam fell straight back before her eyes, and rose again unwounded and alive; another flight of arrows loosed from the invisible bow struck him again and he fell, and yet he was there before her untouched in perpetual death and resurrection. She herself before him, angrily and selfishly she interposed between him and the track of the arrow, crying, No, no, like a child cheated in a game, It’s my turn now, why must you always be the one to die?”

I want to say that Katherine Anne Porter is the perfect Texan fatalist for our time, the era of wars, plagues, threat and fear, but that feels limited and traps her in a topical vortex into which she may disappear once more. She’s been unjustly sidetracked, to say the least, and merits a new appraisal. Here’s hoping this excellent new Library Of America edition serves as a relaunch.

In the meantime, it certainly wouldn’t hurt if some enterprising DVD company–hint, hint, Criterion Collection–would release Peckinpah’s adaptation of Noon Wine. Something tells me that production alone would do a lot to resuscitate Porter’s reputation.

For the last week or so, a few of us of have been talking about the theological and/or philosophical ramifications of a particularly brutal triple homicide in the east Texas town of Alba. For a rundown of everything that’s come before, have a look at the bottom of this post. Or if you’d prefer, read Nora’s moving and thoughtful remarks–which give some sense of the overall framework–and then check out the rest.

For a lot of people, the problem of evil is either non-existent or irrelevant. It’s understandable. Either one accepts as a follower of one religious belief or another that it’s god’s will or the absence of god’s power or any of a number of divinely ordered possibilities, or one simply shrugs as a non-believer or non-participant and says, “That’s life. It’s nasty, brutish and sometimes really short.”

For me, the “problem” is fundamental to the human condition, a key to the heart of our existence, and a challenge to people of all serious dispositions to think harder about why they believe what they believe. Here’s Nora’s response (I broke it up into smaller paragraphs to make it easier for people to read):

John,

I can not even begin to know the depths of sorrow that this man must feel in this tragic situation….or the people who suffer in other parts of the world….such as the genocide that took place (and still does)….nor the painful hollow feeling you felt when you met that man who lost his sons (that you wrote about in your book and spoke of in the movie). I do not know why some people are faced with more pain than others.

It seems to me that your underlying problem and contention with God is… you do not think God is fair because some people go through terrible tragic situations where others seem to live life untouched by that kind of pain. So just because you were born into a privileged family, country and time in history…..and someone on the other side of the world is not……that is the place that makes you stuck….unable to believe in Jesus as Savior? Is that a correct reading of your thoughts?

In the movie and book, you said because that man you met who lost his sons was a Muslim and according to the Bible….will not go to heaven. (your words) How do you know he will not go to heaven? How do you know that….even if he never hears of Jesus….in this mans heart….according to the knowledge revealed to him….that is enough….since God is the only one who can see and understand the human heart. Maybe that man did not have a brilliant mind like you and in his simple mind….when he prays to God….he worships the Creator…..not creation…..and God sees and knows his heart and knows the limitations of information revealed to him. I know there is so much mystery about God that our minds can not comprehend….but there is enough revealed about Him through His creation that requires our respect for His awesome power.

The fact that He is so powerful and so much more than I can comprehend…..and at the same time is still intimately involved in our lives is so amazing to me. In my life, I have not faced terrible tragic situations like the article you make reference to and I have not been in a war zone or been singled out and tortured. Most of my hard times in life have been the result of my stupid choices….the Bible calls it “sin”….going outside of the boundaries that God put in place for my protection and for my best interest. I trusted Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior at an early age….I was raised in a Christian home….I have loving nurturing parents who gave me many opportunities.

At age 17, I began to stray and make my own rules and live life however I felt like. I suffered the consequences of those decisions and at the age of 22 I was in a difficult situation that was a consequence of sin….and I was at a fork in the road. Was I going to keep making my own decisions…..or was I going to step out in faith and really trust God with my life? I knew God was trustworthy….I just did not know if I was ready to give up my agenda. I decided to trust Him fully with my life.

I was a returning “prodigal” ….and God did meet me with open arms. Even before that day….He was pursuing me with loving circumstances….too many to say it was coincidence! But that day I trusted Him fully, I was filled with an overwhelming peace that I had never experienced before. He helped me through that difficult situation and it has been a journey of faith ever since then. I still sin and will until I see Him face to face and join Him in the journey and adventures He has planned for me in eternity.

When I read about people in the Bible or biographies who suffered and relied on the Lord, my faith is strengthened and I only hope that if/when my faith is tested to the degree of the tragedies I mentioned and you wrote about….that I would be able allow God to help me through it. I may never understand “why?” in this lifetime….but I will in eternity. I love the word picture of a tapestry…..we are underneath the tapestry and cannot see the whole beauty of the finished work….we see some beauty but we also see the knots and rough places.

Maybe that is too simple a viewpoint for you….but it goes back to your original question. Why does God allow bad things to happen if He can intervene but chooses not to every time? How can He be good and allow all the terrible wars and crimes to happen? According to the Biblical worldview….we are given a choice….and we chose in the Garden to disobey and it set things in motion. But God knew we would disobey…so why did he make us? Because He planned all along to redeem us!

In the garden of Eden, the man blamed the woman and the woman blamed satan….so if satan tempted us to disobey….why did God make angels when He knew a third of them would disobey and cause pain and trouble for people in the world? I have no idea?! Would we have sinned even if we had not been tempted by the devil? Probably!

Going back to my original point that without a choice, love does not mean anything….we would be puppets if we could not choose to love. I know you think I am quoting from some apologetic textbook. I am not. I am trying to have an open conversation about it all. You can tell from my poor style of writing and vocabulary that I am not an expert in philosophy or religion….and I do not know all world history like I should. (I read as much as I have time to)

I do believe the Bible is true and I am teaching my children that the Bible is God’s word. But just like I had to take that step of faith and continue that journey of faith, they will experience God in their own unique ways. God made us to enjoy relationships with each other and He made us to enjoy being in a relationship with Him. My daughter is a deep thinker and has expressed her doubts many times about God and the Bible. My advice to you is the same I have given her….ask God to reveal Himself to you. He will if you ask. Her faith has grown because she knows its okay to question God and she does. She journals her doubts and questions and I have seen her faith grow. Her faith is many times stronger than mine. Sorry for the “war and peace” answer….but I realized a short quick answer is never okay for the hard questions of life.

I have a question for you. If you agree that a civilized society must have some order and laws….then what is wrong with God’s plan? (according to the Bible) How would you do it different? I am not trying to “slam dunk” or give you the “venus fly trap”….I care and I am curious to know your thoughts and response.

Respectfully your friend,
Nora

Here’s the original post that launched this conversation.

Go back and watch the videos of Michael Jackson’s two most famous songs, and one thing becomes readily apparent. Long before his decline, he had begun to see ghosts, and one of them was himself. Early on, he was a haunted man.

Watching the music video for “Thriller” for the first time in two decades, I recalled that Jackson doesn’t just defend himself against the zombies with dance in the mini-movie. He becomes one of the walking dead, and his performance is convincing. He’s the scariest of all the creatures and seems to know it.

At least there he remains corporeal. In “Billie Jean”, by the end of the clip, the dancer himself disappears, leaving behind only small flashes of light to mark his passage.

In both clips, spooky as they are, he’s also a joy to watch, which is the point of the movie and maybe the secret to his entire career. Like a handful of the world’s great pop stars, Jackson reached the afterlife years before his death yesterday of a heart attack at the resonant age of fifty.

After the artistic high point of the 1980’s, he continued to rule the celebrity heavens for a few years, but the strangeness began to set in, and what had seem only an intimation of melancholy before became a consuming image. Jackson was eaten alive by the demons—or maybe the zombies—in his imagination.

They weren’t just in his imagination, of course. The dead walked right through his front door. The line between his fantastic version of fear and the day-to-day work of being himself seems to have vanished, leaving him in that big house with the monkey and the children, huddled against forces that no vision of art in the world could protect him from.

I don’t know whether the man actually molested the kids, but I’m almost certain that he would never have understood the experience that way. For all his amazing success, his unbelievable sense of motion, he himself was never more than a child caught in a dark corridor, dancing like hell to save his own life.

What rules, if any, govern heated conversation? What do we talk about when we talk about gov, to borrow a phrase from the title of a Raymond Carver book? And hate? How do we bring that into the dialogue? Where do anger and humor belong? Do words matter at all? Or is money the only thing that really talks?

Before we went to Orlando for the annual meeting of Leadership Florida, we’d dealt with these questions on an occasional basis, but no one had asked us to codify our responses until a few weeks ago when Executive Director Wendy Abberger urged us to come up with a tool kit for members of her organization, practical ideas and even solutions for people whose dialogue appeared to breaking down in offices, neighborhoods and homes.

We complied with the request, and the results were extraordinary. I don’t mean the results of our effort to come up with rules, which were mostly common sense. I mean the results of our encounter with a large and important slice of the Florida business community. On the evidence, it appears that the vast majority of people in the room have sickened of the endless culture wars and media exploitation of division and genuinely want to find a different way forward. But how?

In 2010, Florida will elect a new governor–two of the leading candidates were in the room–and this small sampling of elites has already begun to work on ways to circumvent the worst of the conflict. It’s a big job. The opportunities for nastiness will be legion. No one in Florida can be under any illusion about that.

In a Quinnipiac poll released this month, the Republican and Democrat frontrunners were running close, almost within the margin of error, Republican Bill McCollum falling four points behind Democrat Alex Sink. But it’s a long way to election day, and on a familiar variety of issues, Floridians disagree. You name it: health care, Israel, stem cell research, gay marriage. In the last election, more than seven million people voted on a family marriage amendment, which passed with 62.1 percent of the vote. That’s a safe majority, but 2.8 million people voted against, and that means the fight isn’t over yet.

What advice could we possibly have? We kept it simple.

For starters, we urged the members of Leadership not to take conversation for granted. Too often in this country, we’re lazy. We treat talk as if it’s some version of the conversation at a fast food joint.

When it comes to fast food, everyone generally agrees on the rules. Language sits secure. The options glare from a big board. The word for cheeseburger means, more or less, some kind of meat between two slices of bread plus extras. The same goes for the words for milkshake and fries. One person names those things. Another person understands perfectly. The first person pays with an agreed-upon currency and then gets exactly the thing they named.

If only the rest of our conversation operated on such simple terms, but it doesn’t, and when we try to order up gay marriage bans and Iraqi wars in the same easy language, it never works. Before we know it, one misplaced order lights a fuse, and we’re shouting at each other and saying things we regret. Even though we seem to think that we all share the same names for things, the same histories, the same tastebuds and memories, we don’t. In fact, more and more, we insist on the primacy of our own histories and mythologies. We want to drown out the pasts of others and insist on our own unstained records.

Since there are no unstained records, the effort to turn ourselves into heroes almost always makes us liars, too. Has anyone noticed the extent to which Americans have become the most outraged people in the world, a nation of perpetual victims constantly offended by one slight or another? We have become the most ruthlessly and tediously offended nation on earth, and the addiction to this frame of mind is a disease that makes communication virtually impossible.

When the sense of entitlement to outrage and offense amounts to no more than bad theater, as it so often does–witness the skirmish between Sarah Palin and David Letterman—communication itself becomes a joke, hence the success of fake news over the real kind, an acknowledgment that most of what passes for information in our media has become a blatant and fairly ridiculous lie.

We have to start thinking in tougher and better ways about the way we speak to one another.

I don’t mean that we all need to get even more politically correct than we are now. Most people are sick of the cautious and toothless language encouraged by human resources departments the world over. No one wants to see a return to the various deplorable slurs of yesteryear, but it’s no good walking on eggshells all the time.

If anything, the eggshells should be pulverized, and people should start getting real about what they actually want. If what they want is social justice, rather than polite language, maybe it’s time to drop the insistence on acceptable terminology and get down to the core issue.

To do that, again, we have to treat our words as if they matter. On television, for the most part, conversation is sports commentary. Politics are discussed in the competitive spirit of football or baseball, and points often go to the commentator who floats the most divisive, confrontational or extreme line. Major political events become the functional equivalent of forward passes or interceptions. In such an environment, extreme thought, no matter how dangerous, no matter how many times recycled, passes as mere entertainment.

The list of the sins of punditry goes on and on. We can all recite it in our sleep. Personalities matter more than substance, yadda yadda yadda. We’ve heard it all before, but what if our urge to treat politics like a sport quietly but inevitably aided and abetted our urge to treat politics as total war. What is the line between total war in politics and war itself? Will we recognize it in the dark?

One obvious way to back off from extreme language and polarized positions is detox.

Stop watching 24-hour cable news and listening to talk radio and see how quickly your ire melts away. People can stay informed by giving themselves an hour a day to check the Internet or even read a newspaper or watch one show, but when the hour is up, they need to back away from the blazing screen, give the remote to someone who loves them (but isn’t an enabler) and get back to the raw and gorgeous world of physical interaction. Lift a weight. Make love. Eat a fried donut. Whatever.

One way or another, we have to be more direct and focused on rage prevention. In Orlando, someone told us about an Obama poster that poisoned the atmosphere in an office. Whoever put the poster up intended to inspire people, but those who hadn’t voted for Obama weren’t inspired at all. They felt insulted and became angry.

What’s to say, except that it’s no small thing to hang a poster in a public place in this day and age, and no one should feel so secure in a divided environment that they make such a gesture without at least sending off a warning shot. Repressing our beliefs and dislikes isn’t the answer. It’s no good simply putting the posters away. People like their posters. But an annual or bi-annual meeting of the office to talk about posters, to let people talk openly and fearlessly about how they see race, politics, religion, gender and sexuality might not be a bad idea.

We’re not talking about debate clubs here. We’re talking about giving office mates a chance to confront each other with their own social realities and deeply held convictions. Yes, it might get stormy, but is that worse than watching a seemingly small thing like an Obama poster explode in recriminations, razing relations between old friends and possibly even damaging business?

There may be such a thing as early intervention conversation. Sure it might take work. Sure it might hurt. Such conversations could easily lead to wounded feelings and broken fences. But if people enter into the field early, they may be surprised at the results. They may come away from these early interventions, these rage prevention sessions, with a new sense of why they get so offended, and why they tend to give offense. As a result, when culture wars do erupt, and they will, the early intervention conversationalists may more readily see the humanity in their political, cultural and religious opponents.

Craig Detweiler and I have spent at least three years involved in our own such conversation. It’s never been easy. It certainly isn’t foolproof. It’s better than ending the friendship, however.

In Orlando, the members of Leadership Florida seemed to agree, but it remains to be seen whether their intervention will help in the gubernatorial race.

This press conference is a consequence of disobedience to god?! Did the governor of South Carolina just say that in public in his soft, sorrowing voice?

Hmmmm. It’s a consequence of other things, too, like cheating on his wife with a gal named Maria. That’s my interpretation anyway, but I’m a fiction writer, not a theologian.

In a way, I’m sympathetic to Sanford. Too long we have paraded private virtue as political power. It never works that way. Powerful people, no matter their convictions, will always cheat on their loved ones and fly down to Argentina or drive across the Jersey state line to have illicit sex. In that sense, Sanford is one more victim of the world’s most dangerous political organ, but the rest of us are the real dupes.

Take Republican strategist and pundit Mark McKinnon, for instance.

I wonder if Mark McKinnon still considers mealy-mouthed, lying, hypocritical South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford a hardy contender for the GOP presidency in 2012.

He is wonderful, isn’t he, Mr. McKinnon, this stalwart example of “family values” virtue? He was so brave when he refused to let South Carolina have that stimulus money! So brave, so true!Marching down the Appalachian trail, did you imagine him with a straight back and an upthrust chin? You were close, except he wasn’t hiking. He was making love to Maria. Slight rejiggering of the image, I know, but it still kinda works.

As he works his way up to revealing the lie in this video clip, do you want to apologize for acting the fool? For presuming too much? Are you going to resign for turning him into a political hero so quickly, without even waiting for the hero’s return?

For the last time, the media isn’t the problem here, though plenty of pundits–who are emphatically not journalists–suggested that it was the nasty media that created much ado about nothing. The governor was hiking! How dare we impugn his honor?

Self-rightous conservatives, wake up! Moral crusaders of all stripes, wake up! Your sexual hypocrisy has become an addiction. You can’t give up the illicit sex. That’s clear. It’s the sweet and necessary oil of your faith. You have to give up the hypocrisy, though, of brandishing “family values” as a weapon against gay people who want to marry and as an argument in favor of a better, cleaner, more virtuous America. Then, at least, you can pursue these rites of degradation and purification in private, where they belong.

It is not. The uprising has a huge, bloody life of its own. Listen to this taped phone conversation, courtesy of CNN.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei made at least two critical errors. He made the mistake of taking the possibility of election fraud half-seriously when a large part of the population took it completely seriously, and when he discovered the fact, he compounded the original mistake by backing away from his pretense of openmindedness and cracking down. One way or another, as an unimpeachable leader, he’s finished.

That doesn’t mean we’re going to get a revolution, but the weakening of his authority is a necessary step in that direction.

A question: is this one more element in the enormous transition in the Middle East that began on 9-11? Or is this the start of something new?

The Iranian Revolution in 1979 dramatically changed the political, social and cultural landscape of Islam. In many ways, it marked the beginning of the modern conflict between Muslim militants and the United States. If that revolution is now overturned, and in the name of democracy, and at the hand of the outraged peoples of Iran rather than through any perceived American intervention, it would be hard to overstate the ramifications.

The United States owes it to the Iranian people to stay engaged but aloof. This has to be one hundred an Iranian show. Those who are urging President Obama to be more bellicose don’t really understand the dynamic of the moment.  In 1989, President George Bush Sr., understood that history was his to derail, so he leaned back like a wise spectator and let the chips fall. He didn’t cheerlead–he didn’t have to–but he nevertheless got to applaud the downfall of one regime after another. Obama is following his example.

How could Senator John McCain have missed the boat here? He’s supposed to be some kind of a foreign policy expert.
In any case, our contribution is a sideshow. This is about the Iranian people and their right to defend the legitimacy of their own elections. The best we can do is let them know we’re watching. And we are.