Curse of the Propertied Class

Yes, I really am trying to write a novel with this outside my window

Maybe it’s my venerable fifty-two years; maybe it’s because I’ve been living in Emeryville,California, for five years—though it feels like fifty especially with the racket of that goddamn condo construction project right outside my office window; maybe it’s the gentle nudging of my dear darling wife; and there’s that current implosion of the market . . . but . . .

We’ve decided to go buy ourselves a house.

Let us do the laughing here (and believe me, there’s plenty to laugh at, but little of it is at our expense). Those of you who have known me awhile may be chopfallen to learn this, and a certain subset may wonder if perhaps I might be rousing from slumber some Cthulu-oid monster of American materialism who will devour every penny in my pocket and every bit of brain matter before reaching saturation; have I not seen Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House and other cautions about this corner of the American Dream? I’ve also seen Roman Polanski’s The Tenant and if that doesn’t put you off renting, them maybe you’re the one who needs medication.

So, what the hell’s spurring this decision anyway?

I could give you the address of all the thirty-five plus apartments I’ve lived in during my life. You could go visit most all of ‘em (whatever hasn’t been torn down). But you’ll find no trace of me, not even the cold sweet scent of a ghost.

I’ve grown tired of moving and leaving nothing and taking little. Renting is easy, goes the song, but it’s a level of impermanence I’m finding unlivable. (Yes yes I know, everything is impermanent . . . God, I’m so sick of hearing we’re all going to die anyway, it makes me want to strive for immortality just to spite fashionable despair.) If a roommate isn’t moving on (or going batshit), it’s the property being sold from under me; if not the sale, it’s condo construction erupting ten feet away. (My moves have only ended happily twice: the first time when I got my very own place by myself; the second time, when I married Elizabeth.)

I believe most everyone feels this way (except for bin Laden and his evil minions, scuttling from cave-to-cave; and anxious antsy jet-setters and other of life’s chronic perambulators), at least eventually. Sure, change is normal and inevitable, but why make a fetish of it like Americans seem to? Gracefully accepting it as a fact of life is one thing, but change for change’s sake is to live like a psychopath. Life is full of “existential” moments (i.e.; unpredictable), but living that so-called “philosophy,” I’ve learned, leads to its own prison: drifting and cold, like an asteroid,waiting only to get bumped by other asteroids. Slackerhood has its own ennui.

Make no mistake, this is not a scheme for warp-speed profits—especially in this market-- but an actual quest for an ancient, nostalgic concept known as a home. For nihilistic reductionists, this may be only a reactionary expression of the territorial imperative, a license to make like Dustin Hoffman swinging that man trap in Straw Dogs (that wasn’t his house, BTW, if you watch it closely).

I believe my reasons have more to do with nostalgia for my Christopher Robin boyhood in that old Andrew-Jackson-era house on Red Mill Road outside of Mohegan Lake, New York. Officially, it was three-acres of fields and woods; unofficially, it was miles and miles: To boys, trespassing is an adult’s abstract legalism; remember the “TRESPASSERS W” sign in Winnie-the-Pooh? My buddies and I weren’t concerned about doing anything wrong. I only worried about getting yelled at. (A Google map search shows that, amazingly, much of those woods and fields remain!)

Of course, if I ever do find that world again, I won’t experience it as wandering with the forest creatures to the Enchanted Places. In earlier posts (July 1, '07), I’ve quoted that line from The Wild Bunch about being a child again, but that, in its pure form, is neither possible, nor morally right. Home ownership will be full of existential moments as Mr. Blandings knew, too. But God’s gonna go “Ha!”, whether or not we make plans. His laughter is not a call to passive surrender—no one, not even a monk, dies saying, “Well, at least I didn’t do anything”—but, I hope, a call to courage, grace, and flexibility. A Main Street businessman’s practical sense bred with a nose for life’s best surprises and possibilities and the guts to meet them.

The loan documents have been submitted. Monsters and man traps lie ahead. So does possible joy, satisfaction, and a sense of accomplishment. Sure, I’ve got plans. And I’ll make new ones, if I have to. I’ll make some place of my own to wander.

A Hell House Revisited

The time: Winter, 1980. While preparing for a long bus ride home to Minneapolis from Winona,Minnesota, I buy a paperback at a small bookstore: a horror novel, a genre I loved as a boy, but now consider myself too highbrow and hairy-chested to read much anymore. I’d dug Stephen King’s The Shining, plus his two other earlier novels Salem’s Lot and Carrie, but—sniff sniff—no, my earnest sensitive young man’s ego would not allow me to even touch the notion that this childish fiction deserved the dearly sought label of “literature,” a category that only, in the last hundred years, had been defined as books read only by a relative few.

What snares me about this particular volume is its five pages of praising blurbs—not only from Stephen King, but also such high-brows as Christopher Lehmann-Haupt at, yes, The New York Times! One review even claims that “ . . . it tells us something about ourselves.”

Oh yeah! We’ll see about that, we will!

That novel is Ghost Story. Its author is Peter Straub. The opening lines sink their cold fangs into my nerves, right away:

“What was the worst thing you’ve ever done?”

“I won’t tell you that. But I’ll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me. The most dreadful thing.”

(Never mind the chill you feel; consider the moral implications of that exchange; the evasion of responsibility it implies).

After that, for maybe the first hundred pages, I am treated to an undeniably extremely intelligent, literary, well-written, if a little plodding, novel. For a time, I worry that it might be a “shaggy ghost” stories where the threat turns out to be only a hologram image concocted by some evil, but very reality-based, trickster, or caused by LSD in the water supply, (these almost always make me groan; even then, I believed literary and cinematic monsters should be “real,” even though I don't believe in their real-world existence.)

Then somewhere after page 100, a switch flicks on in a far corner cave of my mind. Two nights later, in a sweat of ecstatic horror and suspense, I close the book and think something like, Golly . . . that's best book I've read since Gravity’s Rainbow.

Now, at last close to completing a horror novel of my own (with several worthy, but unproduced,screenplays between), I decided to open the door to this haunted monument for the fourth time. Of my two precious signed first editions, I chose the British Jonathan Cape one with its terrific hallucinatory dust jacket. (But, unfortunately, the text is poorly proofread in spots.)

Ghost Story’s plot, like most in the genre, is simple. Here, four old white men, rural representatives of a generation of courtly conservatives now seen only in the likes of Senator John Warner, are struggling with their fears of aging, death and the changes ringing through 1970s American society. After the death of one of their own, they seek solace and therapy by telling each other ghost stories during their monthly get-togethers.

Bad idea, because, instead of comforting them, this tale-telling conjures up a militantly angry feminine demon seeking revenge for an insult suffered fifty years ago. After another member of their “Chowder Society” mysteriously dies, they dig themselves a deeper grave by inviting one of the dead men’s nephews in to help them investigate what is happening. The nephew, a writer himself,named, significantly, Don Wanderley, tries to grasp the weird events swirling around the upstate New York town where the novel is mostly set through his own writing, but they find this only empowers the demon even more, as she and her minions cut a bizarre path of destruction through their snug little world.

Like all good literature, Ghost Story is about more than its plot and story, more than scaring its readers: It’s fear with psychological, social and literary context and themes throughout its densely gothic and wintry prose: aging, loneliness, death, romantic obsession, misogyny, the long implacablle shadow of the past, the changes happening in society at large and their impact on insular, rural worlds. Peter Straub's book is deeply grounded in classic American gothic fiction of the past: Poe, Hawthorne and Henry James (two of the characters are named after the last two authors.)

Horror fiction is a conservative genre, in both the good and bad sense of the term (which maybe explains the angry scorn it faces from utopian, politically progressive readers) and this novel worries about the good things that may have been lost: for example, a cultured sense of human dignity and restraint, which has its roots in Anglo-European bourgeois society. Considering the brute cacophony of so much twenty-first century American culture, Ghost Story may have a point. (A simple trip to the movies these days requires earmuffs and Valium. Yeah, right: It marks me as an old white fogy. Well, fuck ‘em if there aren’t enough explosions in The Seventh Seal.)

Three decades later, I find Straub’s novel as intense and eerie than ever. (It’s a great book for a cold, snow-swept night.)As with all long books, some parts seem rushed while others rustily grind and clank. The novel’s gory climax—set in a movie theater showing Night of the Living Dead—seemed clever and daring when I first read it, feels a little ham-fisted now, though thankfully, the book never sinks into sniggering post-modernism. I was happy to read it once again.

Ghost Story opened my mind to the literary value and potential of genre fiction; it taught me that art and entertainment are never really in opposition. While most of the field does remain the junk our parents and professors wagged their fingers about, the best of it—and it’s a long list that weaves its way from Poe to John LeCarré—provides more than the lazy wish fulfillment of the routine popular novel. In genre fiction, unlike the inward turning—sometimes frozen--characters of other forms of literary fiction, people make big choices and take big actions . . . and they often lead to very human dilemmas. The worlds of genre fiction, whether cold war Berlin, a haunted snowbound New York town, or the Wild West, may not be “real-life” but, in the hands of wizards, they may be no less real, complex,and, yeah, even profound.

The Politics of White Noise

President Richard B. Cheney with unidentified assistant.

My post description mentions politics, which means exposing the contents of my brain matter on this matter, which resembles nothing so much as extra-finely ground sausage derived from all the animal parts of all available species. In other words, you really don’t want to know everything that’s there, believe me: “Why does Hillary Clinton sound like my mom telling me to clean up my room?” "Yes, if I were a girl, I could take Barack Obama home to my parents, but would that make him the president we need?"

I long ago shunned any association with political and religious extremists and fanatics, long before the rise of President Cheney and Lord Bin Laden but no matter how I stiffen my arm and supplement it with a ten-foot pole, their voices, strident with righteous certainty and bruised with resentment, seem to dominate the discourse, especially in this medium of the Internet: this playground for digital nihilism.

How do I write about politics without sounding like I’m merely murmuring assent to something I scanned from Keithiana Huffpolbermann or Stevjon Colwart? How do I avoid sinking to crackpotism, all cross-eyed passion and self-ennobling, but murderous purpose. With many of the blogs and comments I review—though not all of them-- real worldisms like gravity, death and the air we breathe start to look like mere opinion: there are people who never die, objects that never fall and the astronauts float in space, free of even oxygen.

Take the war in Iraq (please): there are numerous positions a mind can take. Supposedly, the more educated one is on this matter, the more solid the ground the opinion stands on. But then there's the supposedly well-educated expert William Kristol of The National Review. Being not at the center of events, either in Bagdad or Washington D.C. myself, but in desolate Emeryville, California, I’m forced to form my opinions from the experience and expertise of those who stand closer to the fire. I feel like a short man in the back of a large crowd, dependent on the whispers coming in from far away. Even so, no matter how hard they try, the war’s supporters continue to sound more and more unhinged with every passing casualty. “We now seem to be on course to a successful outcome,” declares Kristol (Modern conservatives: the new crazy-hippie potheads).

I don’t have much confidence, even in the people I agree with and, especially, in those, who both fiercely love and passionately hate them, whether it be President Cheney or Cindy Sheehan. In the online world, on its many blogs, wrath and resentment is what fuels most discourse. Anyone can turn into a troll—yes, me, too. And I’m ashamed of my trollness, but here, this environment of uninhibited voices, regrets sound as loud as a flower’s breath. It is too much nuance and it indicates a surrender of power.

The digital world is made up of ones and zeros, eithers and ors and so, it seems, are most of the
minds that occupy it. Nuance is missed altogether or regarded with suspicion. “We need to take al Qaida real seriously” can be read as code for “I love President Cheney!”; “Impeach President Cheney” becomes “Yay al Qaida!” My real point of both those original propositions, which I firmly believe, seems to have a better chance registering in traditional print. Even “President Cheney” to most blog readers, is evidence of ignorance and not the dour satire I intend. I say “one;” You say “zero.” I say “zero” you say “one.” That’s how it is. Maybe I should leave. Or maybe I should see if anyone has the brains and balls to throw me off. But that would take too much thought and work, wouldn’t it? Better to keyboard “asshole!” and hit “Send.” That’ll show me!

Don’t believe everything you think: Considering my reality-based experience, words of wisdom.
ORRRRR: Isn't it really just an elitist attack on the already damaged self-esteem of the disenfranchised and the powerless? Who am I to challenge the beliefs of others? After all, wasn’t it so-called “expert” scientists whose decisions led to both space shuttle disasters . . . why, they might even have done it on purpose! If you can think it, it’s true. And once you say it in public, it can become even more true. Paranoia is therapy. The most reasoned, evidence-based argument cannot penetrate the armor of a deluded certainty.

The Internet seems to like nonsense memes. Where this commons is concerned, Yeats is right. The center cannot hold, because, in this case, there isn’t one. Some of the blogosphere’s most ardent supporters believe they are supporting the vanguard of some sort of village square democracy, a true conversation among people that will lead to progress. But Cheney supporters, Matt Drudge, al Qaida and other tyrants and totalitarians believe something else and they all use the Internet, too: Very well, from what I understand. The Internet works better as soapbox for the mad than as a forum for serious thought, useful ideas and sly, subtle wit. I will continue to read The New Yorker.

The Internet is amoral. Not only does it, in itself, lack any kind of moral content, its consequences are both good and bad. Like hammer that can be used to build a house, or for murder, it’s indifferent to good intentions. From where I keyboard, this battle has no end, until, at least, the power grid that civilization so deeply depends on melts down and humans creep back to our fire-lit caves.

The liberal blogosphere’s belief in the power of good to overcome the Internet’s core amorality is based on the, sad-to-say, false assumption of Universal Human Goodness. This amorality, and its consequences, cannot be explained away anymore than al Qaida can. Especially here, on the Internet, this commons, where every comment has equal voice and it all adds up to a sizzling fury of white noise.

Shop Talk #3: A Long Long Trail A-Winding

The last we visited this subject, I’d just finished Draft #2 on that upcoming smash-through-the-roof bestseller you are—of course--all going to read, The Vampire of Alpine Canyon. By the time of posting, I was ending a mini-vacation from writing and was starting to comb through the manuscript to see what hell I had wrought upon the computer screen. Here’s what I learned:

1) Draft #2 came to a total length of 618 pages, or around 174,000 words. At least 130 pages,or around 35,000 words, must go.

2) As far as writing—execution, style, control of narrative, spelling—your correspondent is still attending the Danielle Steel School of Keyboarding Your Way to Bestsellerdom. Misspellings and bad sentences abounded like repeated stakes through my heart. I found no howlers—I really wasn’t looking for them—but there was plenty to roll my eyes to the ceiling in search of that lightning bolt that God fires down on all bad writers (or should anyway). Discontinuities remain: I’ve only settled recently on the name of a significant geographic feature—not the eponymous canyon—while a couple minor characters changed monikers throughout. Is there a cat in this book, or not?

3) However, I did detect significant improvements. The plot and story are much more clear, focused, and coherent now. The time and place are set as are my major characters and most minor ones. I have all the basic plot I need, and may even be able to snip away a few knots and strands and sew together a few others to spin a swifter, more graceful yarn. As I read Draft #2, I started grading each chapter, A through F. I gave myself mostly Cs, a couple of Fs, and more Bs and As than I expected to find. At least one chapter had leapt from a D-minus to a B-plus, simply by radically rethinking a character. The ending still pleases me though, of course, I might be wrong. Some of you may get to tell me.

4) Research: One of my major characters is a rural professional, but don’t expect a Tom Clancy novel with entire chapters of step-by-step instructions on doing whatever; nevertheless, in those scenes when my character practices his profession, I want it to ring true, not in only in terms of basic procedure, but also in terms of his role in the community. I’ve purchased several books on the life of rural professionals and have been in contact with at least one. Wikipedia has also turned out to be helpful

5) Other research: I have a supporting character who is a county official, so I must learn more about his business, too; another supporting character is a fanatical sports enthusiast,so at least some reading must be done to capture the experience and some—but not too much—of the lingo involved; still another is a character who lives on the dole, so how does the welfare system operate in such situations? And then, there’s all that wonderful flora and fauna.

About research: it’s not my tip-top, number-one strength. The reading part I’m one hundred percent on, but, like a lot of writers, I cringe when it comes to actually approaching strangers and asking questions. I feel like Ken Tobey opening that door in The Thing (the good version). What waits on the other side? “None of your goddamn business!” or “Ohhh, I get it! You’re gonna put me in your stupid book and make me look like a buffoon! Here’s my middle finger! How’s that for information, asshole?”

Interesting note: one of the greatest genre writers ever, Donald Westlake, has claimed he hates research and actually hires out for it! I have mixed feelings about that. I also tend to fudge a little regarding what my book is about when talking to people. As any of you who have written supernatural fiction might know, of all genres, outside of pornography, it can elicit the most hostile reactions, no matter how many allusions to Shakespeare, Poe, or Nathaniel Hawthorne you toss around (“A vampire novel!? Uh-uh! No way! Step back, or I’ll break your nose with this door!”)

I’m already up to Chapter 7 of Draft #3 and seem to be making good progress. The characters and their world now seem to be knit more tightly than ever. The people act more decisively with deeper, stronger emotion and clearer purpose: less like hapless stick puppets, more like flesh and blood characters. I can already see saying good-bye to several chapters that fail to do anything but cure insomnia. A couple things still seem too long and I feel like I’m sometimes packing too much information into too small a space.

Another field trip disguised as a camping excursion to lovely Alpine County, California, lies just ahead, next week. If I can avoid certain Vile and Dangerous Diversions, I may be typing “The End” before I know it!

And then the next step: taking this baby on the road for a spin. Presenting it to a select sliver of the reading human population—both writers and non-writers--and seeing what gives: seeing if I have successfully painted the world and its creatures that exist in my head into the minds and dreams of those whom I offer entrance.

There’ll be more about that, later.


A Vile and Dangerous Diversion! (Photo by Elizabeth; cat by Flo!)

[NOTE: I WILL BE POSTING ON SATURDAY OF NEXT WEEK, INSTEAD OF SUNDAY! SET YOUR WATCHES!

Them Thar Hills! #1: The Perfect Swimming Hole

Most of what occurred during our vacation in Lake Tahoe was chortle-provoking somehow or other: On the first night, for example, I sliced my fingers open on my razor and staggered about our super-luxurious lodgings, bleeding like Saw X before finding first-aid. For the rest of the night, I stared at the ceiling and wondered if would ever see Emeryville again.

The following incident is perhaps best illustrative of both the adventure I sought and the lesson that brought home that Boy Scout motto: “Be prepared.”

On Wednesday afternoon, my brother-in-law Charles and I took a noonday hike from a trailhead south of Emerald Bay into the Desolation Wilderness. Our destination was Granite Lake, but cartographic confusion took us instead over rocky Cascade Falls Trail to its eponymous destination: a huge fall of granite that rises up from Cascade Lake, before sinking back down into a bowl of high mountains. Numerous streams carved narrow paths through this field, with little hint of the power they carry during spring runoff, but that was OK: We were after bigger game. We were determined to find the perfect swimming hole, even if it killed us. Which it almost did. Me, that is.

Not far from the end of the trail, up the gray slope, Charles heard the sweetest song in nature: the echo of fast running water plunging into a deep pool. The sound led us down into a ravine that was choked with hundreds of fallen conifers, white as bleached bone: It had seen neither fire nor axe in at least a generation. It was so choked with riparian vegetation we could barely find ground to stand on: It was like walking through a game of pick-up sticks played by titans. Charles, the taller of us, bushwhacked on ahead of me, high-stepping like Paul Bunyan through the trackless forest, while I cautiously waded behind like Woody Allen.

My caution failed me, anyway. Despite my careful steps, some support I expected to greet my foot turned out to be illusory. My left hand shot out to stop my fall. Sharp dry wood gouged into my flesh at the base of my thumb and the tip of my first finger. I saw that blood, first. Then I turned my hand over: Saw XI.

“Charles . . . .”

Musn’t panic. Musn’t seem unmanly. My tiny voice bravely squeaked above the woodland hush and the first chatter of birds waking from their afternoon siesta. Crawling one-handed over high horizontal trees, I cautiously followed the sound of falling water, grateful I hadn’t sprained an ankle, or worse.

“Charles.”

I imagined how Charles would react when he saw my blood-spattered form, gaunt and hideous in the green-shadowed woods. (“Oh my God! Tom! Quick! Lie down! No! Don’t move! Here’s all my water! I’ll get the Medivac and fly it in myself!”)

“Charles!”

Finally, the last of my blood gushing from my body, I crawled over one last fallen conifer. I imagined the heartfelt concern on Elizabeth’s face; the crowds gathering around Charles, congratulating him on his quick thinking and undaunted courage—

“CHAR-RELS!!!!--Oh. There you are.”

Charles stood ten feet away. I showed him my gashed, bloody hand, ready for him to spring into action.

“Eww wow, man.” Then his big blond face beamed as he pointed up ahead.

“I found it!” He wore his best proud happy kid’s face. “I found the perfect swimming hole!”

Charles had spoken Truth: It was the perfect swimming hole, a boy's secret, fed by a still fast mountain stream. Before I knew it, cold mountain water had washed my nerves away, while washing the crud that my fall had embedded in my hand—-most of what was pulled up was only surface skin.

We weren’t alone. A family, ranging in age from five to fifty, joined us from further upstream. Unfortunately, they weren’t looking for a swim; they were a funeral party looking to return their patriarch’s ashes to nature.

We politely claimed first dibs, promised it would be a quick swim to which they kindly acceded: The first time Charles came up gasping and sputtering, he said: “Are you sure you want to leave your Dad’s ashes here? It’s darn awful cold.”

Afterward, I sat drying in the sun and patched up my wound with the first-aid kit I always carry with me. Actually, these wounds are so common they can be a badge of honor: especially when you’re prepared to deal with them. If this had happened in the city, I’d be whimpering in bed for days.

We joined the mourning party to find the way out. Here’s when that kind of worry reared its head: Instead of going back the way we came—which we couldn’t find anyway; we’re no Natty Bumpo’s here—we headed down creek, before cutting back toward the rock slope. Soon, the deadwood piled to heaven. We had to make like the Flying Wallendas, walking along the tops of fallen logs. One wrong step could have made me the star of Saw XII.

As you can tell, we all made it safely. Later on, over the best-tasting beer ever, Charles and I concocted a Tall Tale about how I received my wounds while rescuing Charles from a bear attack. For some strange reason, the only reactions we received were tiny headshakes and rolled eyes.

Everybody’s so goddamn serious these days. . . .


(Photo by Author; model, Elizabeth Burchfield)

This Wizard Business

I haven’t been keeping up on Harry Potter since I read the first book and saw the first movie in 2001. In an earlier e-mail incarnation of these postings, I offered my opinion. I now submit it again edited, but still held.

I’ve read the book. Seen the movie. Now my report on the matter.

When I finally read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, a few short weeks ago, it was already sagging under its fame. Thanks to the juggernaut of modern post-movie Hollywood (they haven’t made films or movies in decades; it’s all product spinoff now.) we have not a fine children’s book that’s transcended its intended audience like Alice in Wonderland or Winnie the Pooh, but the phenomenon of ballooning expectations, punctured by oversell.

While initially enthusiastic, I finally found the novel entertaining, but rushed and perfunctory. J.K. Rowling draws her inspiration from two English storytelling traditions: the schoolboy novel (Tom Brown’s School Days) and the sturdier, enchanting tradition of the fantasy (Tolkien, C.S. Lewis). But her voice is modern: straightforward and spare. She seems to take for granted the wizard world that Harry enters and so, it seems, does Harry and everyone else. It’s meant to be whimsical and sometimes it is funny, but in rushing to tell a breathless story, Rowling misses something I need in any alternate universe story: a sense of being there: that feathery touch of poetry that seduces me into believing in Harry’s world as much as my own.

For example, just what does Hogwarts School look like? We don’t get much of an idea as Rowling sums up Harry’s first look at this supposedly wonderful place in a brief and uninspired paragraph: No sense of landscape, drama or awe. The book never feels “as real as a dime,” to quote Dashiell Hammett’s description of M.P. Shiel's The Lord of the Sea, another adventure classic.

True, I’m being a Muggle about a book aimed at preteen boys, who may be bored by that much detail (Full disclosure: at eleven years, your correspondent was attempting, badly, to read Dr. Zhivago).

But this does raise a question: how have the Harry Potter books managed to leap into the warm embrace of grown-ups, many of whom presumably remember Alice in Wonderland and The Hobbitt?

I’m not an expert on the English whimsy/fantasy tradition (I prefer their supernatural tales) but I do remember that sense of “being there” in The World of Pooh. Like I could look out my window and see A. A. Milne’s furry befuddled creatures wandering right through my snowy back woods in Lake Mohegan, New York. A recent re-reading of those tales poignantly confirmed my nostalgia. Milne’s stories are short, but the sweet details of Pooh’s universe are chosen right, supported by E.H. Shepard’s vivid drawings and watercolors: A remarkable feat for a book written seventy-five years ago for an audience younger than young Potter’s.

“Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” never got that close. It reads more like a Hardy Boys adventure, and really, who among you has ever re-read them and cried like babies? I finished Harry Potter with a shrug and hurried on to The Fellowship of the Ring which, whatever its problems, creates a world as real as Hammett’s dime.

In that respect, the spectacle recently rolled out by Hollywood genuinely tries to bring Harry Potter to visual life. It does conjure up some of what Rowling’s prose missed. Especially impressive is how the wizards douse the neighborhood lights during the opening. The special effects for the Quidditch match are shaky, but the film makers imagine it well and cleared up my confusion about this Polo on Broomsticks.

The film was shot at numerous old English schools, so nothing looks like a set. It all feels rightly British, thanks especially to the adults in the cast including Richard Harris, Maggie Smith and the transcendentally evil Alan Rickman, whose Professor Snape deserves his very own movie. The second Rickman bounds onto the screen like Basil Rathbone or Vincent Price on steroids, the movie springs to magical life. Too bad they didn’t make more use of him. (Never mind the kids; they’re *all* terrible: Next to them, Haley Joel Osment looks qualified to play Hamlet.)

Finally, the movie suffers from the very Harry Potter phenomenon itself. J.K. Rowling was understandably fiercely protective of her creation, and as are its millions of readers. But the film makers wind up chained by the material. With a mob of fans armed with torches and pitchforks ready to storm the set at the first sign of tampering, there wasn’t much they could do with Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone except shoot the Classics Illustrated version. They include only a lame wisp of the amusing dragon incident, when they should have cut it altogether. The ending lacks suspense (The only surprise is that main villain Voldemort looks amazingly like, of all people, Lee Van Cleef!)

In a sense, it’s a shame that Terry Gilliam, who was touted as the original director, didn’t get to turn his wizardly eye on Harry Potter. But that may have resulted in his burning at the stake and the reduction of Warner Brothers studio to rubble, no matter how well the movie stood on its own, which all good adaptations must do.

REMINDER: The blog will be on vacation until August 12! Thanks for stopping by!

Culture Vulture in a Cage

Congratulations to everyone who made it through two hours of President Cheney.

Numerous editing projects and work on that someday-to-be-a-skyrocketing bestseller of mine—the one I know you’re going to buy because you read these postings—has lately kept me caged at home. I know the description above promises you essays on travel and nature, but when you live in a place like Emeryville, California, it really is a long way from here to there: a lush desert island surrounded by a grey sea stretching to a flat gray horizon . . .

In my spare moments, I’ve been watching DVDs and, on occasion, getting out to the movies. For example, Live Free or Die Hard, which met my—and its own—not-too-high expectations. If you hate Bruce Willis and loud action movies, your mind will remain unsullied by change. I’ve pretty much lost my taste for the second item, but I’ve enjoyed Mr. Willis in the past (16 Blocks is a recent movie of his I liked) Justin Long—to Americans, the straight guy in those hilarious Apple commercials on TV featuring "Daily Show" Resident Expert and blogger on this service, John Hodgman (sorry, no link)—is the expected sidekick and does well playing . . . a computer, now that I think of it, albeit one that has been hacked by bad guy Timothy Olyphant, a central member of that wonderful Deadwood ensemble. Olyphant here takes a spin with Alan Rickman-type villainy . . . but maybe that’s not quite his tea (also, he suffers a very boring death for this type of movie). What I liked most is the use of real stuntmen for most of its cartoony—and typically confusing--action sequences. For sure, this movie is likely the last of its kind I’ll see for awhile. Back to Gunga Din and The Wild Bunch for me.

Apparently, the New York Times critic closed his review of the new Pixar animated film Ratatouille with “Thank you.” As I live two blocks from that rightfully legendary studio, I suppose I’m obliged to say likewise, but . . . . OK, as animation, Ratatouille shows Pixar blowing past the edge of all that can be done. The colors and shading of every frame are enchantingly beautiful, especially the shades of blues and reds and the full design of the characters . . . thank God, it distracted me from the flat script and story. I also admire the amount of research they did, not only on French culinary practice, but on rats. Unfortunately, I didn’t laugh much through most of it, until the end when . . . well, I won’t spoil it for my readers in Spain and Tunisia.

The great S.J. Perelman wrote a series of essays called “Cloudland Revisited” about his experiences rereading the books of his childhood as an adult. In an earlier post, I offered some thoughts about nostalgia. Of course, I couldn’t have written such a thing if I wasn’t caught in its grasp. My Netflix subscription—an American DVD rental service, for you international readers—acts as my time machine.

In the past year or so, I’ve revisited such boomer childhood TV highlights as The Wild Wild West, the James-Bond-Out-West spoof that ran for four years. I’m happy to say this has weathered well and seems to get better as I slowly move through the first season. Aside from Robert Conrad’s terrific stunt work (I just know Jackie Chan was a fan), there’s his rapport with his sidekick, the pseudo-master of disguise Artemus Gordon, played by the exuberant *Ross Martin.* The scripts are often funny; their spoofy aspects are played with straight faces, which is why this show is funnier than Batman. The episodes where Jim West battles the evil dwarf Dr. Miguelito Loveless (Michael Dunn) and his sidekick Voltaire (Richard “Jaws” Kiel) have been the best so far. (Fun note: the series creator, Michael Garrison, was openly gay . . . and it shows.)

When it came to The Untouchables, I couldn’t wait for Netflix and so bought disk 1 of season 1. This gangbuster series that ran from 1959 to 1963 has been a favorite of mine forever. Even so, I confess that it’s a mixed bag now: its view of law enforcement is pretty stale and its way with 1930s gangland history is stupidly cavalier, even though I forgive the nonsense of Eliot Ness (pictured here) fighting every gangster who ever lived. But this ancestor of Miami Vice and The Sopranos is a great production with punchy action, wonderful old cars, great clothes and scenes full of chewy dialogue spoken by a parade of the great character actors of the day.

The best surprise of all has been Combat!, a World War II series that stretched out that conflict for five years from 1962 to 1967. For its time, and considering its TV budget and censors’ restrictions, this manages to sometimes be a very evocative and unglamorous picture of Men at War. The scripts are thoughtful and even stretch toward daring in their treatment of certain themes. The best episodes so far have been helmed by a director known to serious film lovers everywhere: Robert Altman.

BLOG NOTE: Next weeks’ schedule will be altered. I’ll post briefly this Thursday or Friday but I will be absent the following Sunday, returning 8/12. And I may have actual Adventures in Nature to share!