LITERARY CRITICAL REFLECTIONS ON CHRISTMAS EVE

This morning, while I was having my daily lemon poppyseed muffin and coffee at the Cafe Carolina, I idly glanced through the Arts section of the TIMES, the Tuesday crossword and Ken Ken puzzles requiring very little time, as usual.  I happened on a story about John Goldwyn, grandson of the legendary Samuel Goldwyn of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer fame, who is trying to make a comeback as a movie producer with the just released The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.  I have seen previews of the movie, a fifty million dollar spectacular, starring the always egregious Ben Stiller.  My first reaction to the previews was a silent "Oh, no!  That is all wrong!"

Anyway, the TIMES piece got me thinking about the larger question of the appropriateness of adaptations and modernizations of classic literary works.   You know the sort of thing I mean:  King Lear set in 1930's Weimar Germany, Romeo and Juliet as a musical about New York gangs.  Sometimes these work exceedingly well.  West Side Story is, for my money, a completely legitimate take on the Shakespeare play.  Sometimes these adaptations are disasters.  Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law as Holmes and Watson are so completely wrong that their version of the great Conan Doyle characters struck me as a deliberate piece of camp [and a bad piece at that.]

The problem, as I see it, is this:  a great author integrates the characters and plot lines so perfectly with the social, legal, political, and cultural milieu in which the story is set that the two cannot be disambiguated.  Pride and Prejudice is set in a world in which property and marriage and family connection are inseparable.  Darcy's hesitations about marrying a daughter of the Bennett family makes no sense if the story is transported to 1990's San Francisco.  Richard III is incomprehensible if Richard is figured as a New York corporate executive.  The motivations of the characters, the constraints on their choices, the tragedy of their situation are all inseparable from the social world they inhabit.

Now, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is a delightful James Thurber short story about a meek little man -- a Casper Milquetoast, if I may show my age -- who carves out a tiny interior space in his imagination into which he can retreat from his overbearing wife [A Thurber standard] for fleeting moments of satisfying fantasy.  One of his little flights of fancy, for example, takes place in the brief time that he sits in his car at a traffic light, waiting for the red to turn to green.  To render this fiction cinematically by a series of dramatic, expensive special effects episodes completely loses the charm of the original story [you will notice that I say this confidently despite having not seen the picture.]  As for the casting of Ben Stiller, words fail me.  Walter Mitty is not a mugging self-referential clown.  Far from it.  Kevin Kline might be able to carry it off, but not Ben Stiller.

If I may recur to Aristotle -- always a permissible move for a philosopher -- the great writers succeed in finding the universal in the particular.  They do not write the universal and then arbitrarily set it in some particular to which it bears no intrinsic relation.

Very much the same thing is true of great composers, I believe [although here I suspect I will get a strong argument from some performers as well as from some composers.]  The original pianoforte [soft-loud -- rather like the pushmepullyou in Dr. Doolittle] is very different from the modern concert grand.  It makes a different sound.  When Mozart wrote for the pianoforte -- I am convinced -- he did not write for some ideal perfect piano which, alas for him, the available pianoforte only imperfectly instantiated.  He wrote for the existing instrument.  Had someone made a modern concert grand available to him, mirabile dictu, he would have written different music.  That is why not even the immortal Glenn Gould was able, on a piano, to play harpsichord music as it was meant to be played.

Well, as I say, I have not seen the movie.  I am still trying to find the time to see The desolation of Smaug.

MUST READ

My old friend, Enver Motala, has just sent to me a lengthy document adopted by a meeting of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa [NUMSA].   I have archived it as a pdf file at box.net, accessible via the link at the top of this page.  I very strongly urge you to read it.  This is what real worker thinking and action looks like.  I weep at the realization that there is no organization in the entire United States capable of producing a document of this sort about America.  Note, by the way, that the South African Communist Party [SACP] is now hand in glove with the ruling ANC against the interests of the workers.

FILM ECHOES

One of the most enjoyable pastimes of dedicated film buffs is finding deliberate directorial echoes, moments in which one director frames a scene or a bit of action as a kind of silent homage to an earlier work.  Yesterday afternoon, Susie and I were idly watching a television screening of The Wizard of Oz when I saw just such a moment.  I am going to assume that everyone has seen both The Wizard of Oz and The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Recall that after Dorothy has been captured by the Wicked Witch of the West [Margaret Hamilton, who was, believe it or not, only 37 when she played that memorable dual role], Toto escapes and leads the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, and the Cowardly Lion back to the Witch's castle to rescue Dorothy.  The three distinctly trepid saviors clamber over some patently fake rocks and finally crouch behind an escarpment, peering over at the entrance to the castle as the Witch's mock-fearsome troops march in and out, singing as they go. 

As I saw that scene for the hundredth time, I suddenly recalled the genuinely scary scene from The Lord of the Rings in which Frodo, Sam, and the gollum crouch on a high cliff and watch Sauron's very scary Ork forces marching through the large gate into Mordor.   As soon as I made the connection, it was obvious that Peter Jackson had made a conscious allusion to the iconic Wizard.

I invite my faithful viewers to tell us their favorite examples of cinematic allusions.

WINTER SOLSTICE

Today is the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year.  I saw a hawk this morning as I walked.  Even though it has been unusually warm, even for North Carolina, I have a primal desire to pull the covers over my head and stay in bed.  Indeed, it was almost six before I got up, dressed, and went walking.  I find this time of year depressing in general -- too many days without mail, without the regular affairs of the world to distract me.  This year is a bit harder, because my eightieth birthday approaches.  Exactly six months from now, we shall be in Paris for fete de la musique on the longest day of the year.  That is a very much more cheerful time.

Next week I shall play Mozart's great violin/viola duet, K423, with a violinist I found listed in the Amateur Chamber Music Players' membership catalogue.  The ACMP is a world-wide organization of amateur musicians who enjoy playing chamber music.  One is required to self-evaluate one's skills and list oneself as Professional, A, B, C, or D in skill [with pluses and minuses, to boot.]  I chose to list myself as Viola B, which is certainly not an undervaluing of my skills.  I have been practicing K423 for days.  My secret hope is that I do reasonably well when we play and that she in turn talks it about in the Triangle musical world that I am OK violist, thereby perhaps making it possible for me to get into a regular quartet.  A bit like an old-fashioned version of Internet dating.

TFIOS Tagline - "It shows the humor of the story"

On Wednesday morning, the official TFIOS movie poster was released, causing many to tweet "OMG," "DYINGGGGG," and "How am I going to suvive June 6?" While many were excited, some were actually shocked by the tagline written underneath Hazel (Shailene Woodley) and Augustus' (Ansel Elgort) faces. "One sick love story." As huge fans of the book, we actually loved it because it's not a cheesy love tagline, it gives an insight to the humor that is the book and will be in the movie.

John Green, who did not write the tagline, talked a little bit about the tagline on his "Project For Awesome" livestream.

"The book has a reputation of being dramatic and making people feel all of the things. One of the things is humor," John said. "I think it cuts the softness of the image to say 'You're not going to be watching a soft sentimental movie, you're gonna watch a movie that has an edge to it.'"

When a commenter wrote that the tagline was "sick-ploitation" John responded that he did not think so.

"I don't think so. I think this is pretty much a joke Hazel would make," John replied. "Hazel is pretty explicit about her illness and makes fun of it quite a lot."

John also addressed a question about the tagline on his Tumblr page
Watch the entire video below

WHAT IT IS TO BE A TEACHER

Several e-mail responses to my "small triumph" post yesterday expressed distress at the lack of real mentoring these days in the Academy.  As I was taking my walk this morning at 6:30 [a lovely full moon hanging low in the western sky], I thought back to my first year as a senior member of the Columbia Philosophy Department, forty-nine years ago.  The department at that time was like a three generation family party.  There were the old wise men, at or near retirement -- Ernest Nagel, John Herman Randall, Horace Friess, and James Gutman -- the grownups -- Justus Buchler, Bob Cumming, Albert Hofstadter, Charles Frankel -- and the kids -- Sidney Morgenbesser, Richard Kuhn, Richard Taylor, Arthur Danto, James Walsh, Charles Parsons, and myself.  I had been told when I was hired that my "teaching load would be two and two" -- academic shorthand for a responsibility of teaching two courses each semester.  But the old men in the department, all of whom had come up in the Great Depression, had no conception of a teaching load.  They were simply teachers, and when students wanted to learn something they taught it, whether that meant teaching two courses a semester or five.  The year I arrived, Randall, Friess, and Gutman were teaching a seminar on something or other, joined by Frank Tannenbaum, a distinguished historian.  They asked whether I would like to join them and I said sure.  The seminar, if you can call it that, was a hoot.  We sat in a room with maybe fifteen graduate students from all over the university and talked about whatever the students were interested in.  There was no sense of "fields," or "specialties."  We were all just teachers.  There were some delicious moments.  Every so often, for example, Jimmy and Horace would have a disagreement, and like as not Jimmy would say, "Horace, I seem to remember you took a different view of that question in 1937."  Then Jack and Frank would try to recall whether Jimmy was right.  I was thirty at the time, and I felt really privileged to be allowed to take part, sort of like being permitted to join in the conversation as a kid when my parents had friends over of an evening.  I never forgot that window on an earlier time, when teachers taught, not counting credits or teaching loads or contact hours.

In the Spring of 2000, I was a Professor of Afro-American Studies at UMass and Graduate Program Director of our new doctoral program.  None of our graduate students knew anything about Marx, so I decided to teach them.  I announced a series of evening classes on Marx and about seventeen students showed up -- almost all of our doctoral students at that point.  We met for as many weeks as it took for me to give them the elements of Marx's thought, and to their credit, these overworked students all stuck it out.  There was one wonderful moment, but a little background is required.  At that time, not a single member of the department had anything that could by the wildest stretch of the imagination be called a religious belief, but at least half of our students were serious Christians of one sort or another.  [When you called Chris Lehman on the phone, for example, if he wasn't in, you got blessed three times before the beep.]  Anyway, I was lecturing on Marx's early views one rainy evening, and a propos of I know not what, I remarked in an  off-hand fashion, "Of course, there is no God."  Just at the moment, there was a tremendous clap of thunder.  I did not know it at the time, but I later learned that a number of students took it as a sign.

Official The Fault In Our Stars Movie Poster!

BuzzFeed revealed the official movie poster for TFIOS. It features Shailene and Ansel lying on the ground, eyes closed, facing each other. We are so excited. Check it out below!