Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino

I found Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972) strangely moving.  Everything about it is elliptical, elusive.  It is framed as a series of stories told by the traveler Marco Polo to the Kubla Khan.  Khan is vaguely aware that while his empire has grown to enormous size he can already detect the first hints of its collapse.  Polo’s tales, all of them about various cities he has visited, are intended to give Khan a sense of perspective.  Each of the cities is different, marked by various fantastical qualities, but they also have elements in common.  One point of these tales is that travel makes one aware of how large and diverse the world is and therefore reduces one’s sense of importance, in both time and space.  Another point is transience.  Many of the cities are tearing themselves down even as they rebuild.  And the stories illustrate that one's individual perspective on the world is nothing more than that—an individual perspective among many others. 

This book should have irritated me.  Occasionally it did.  I think of books such as Einstein’s Dream, over which many have raved, which to me seemed a kind of lazy trick.  But Calvino’s fictional urban vignettes are so deftly rendered, in a sometimes hypnotic, rhythmic manner (the book as a whole has distinctive rhythms) that they form entrancing and unsolvable puzzles that draw the reader in. 

The only actual city named here is Venice, the traveler’s home city.  All of the places he describes may in fact be some version of Venice, gradually sinking beneath the waves.  But what’s most at work here is Calvino’s incredibly fertile creativity.  

The Memory of Skin, by Russell Banks

The Memory of Skin (Ecco, 2011) glows with the beautiful and well-wrought prose of Russell Banks.  He evokes setting in an effective, forceful manner, so that you envision the surroundings of his characters.  And he’s especially good with characters, especially the two main characters of this novel, one a young man recently released from prison where he had been sentenced for trying to seduce a young girl, the other an enormous professor of social science whose history is a monstrous concatenation of contradictions that might or might not be fabricated.  He reminded me of Ignatius J. Reilly in Confederacy of Dunces, though he is not so amusing as Ignatius. 

Banks delineates these characters so that we understand and, to an extent, sympathize with them.  But he does not fully explain them.  The Professor in particular enters and exits the novel followed by a number of significant questions and mysteries.  He may be a self-created liar, or he may be a deep cover CIA operative who is the focus of a federal manhunt.

In the Kid, the unsuccessful seducer of an under-age teenage girl, Banks offers an amazingly intricate and full portrait of abject isolation—social, mental, familial, physical.  The Kid was formerly a porno addict and chronic masturbator with no social life or personal connections beyond his mother, with whom he lived.  When he was arrested for his crime, his mother disowned him.  Released from prison, he wears an ankle bracelet and cannot legally live anywhere within 1000 feet of children, so he lives with other former sex-addicts and vagrants underneath a bridge, where they are all subject to occasional raids by the local police.  His arrest and imprisonment has cured him of his interests in pornography and masturbation, but he still feels an attraction to young girls.  The only social connections he makes are with a few of the men under the bridge.  Most of them cannot hold the few jobs they manage to find.  The Professor takes a professional interest in these people, and in the Kid himself.  Does his interest stem from his recognition that the young man might be fairly intelligent, from sympathy for his plight, from a homoerotic attraction, or from his own possible past as a pederast—Banks implies without confirming these possibilities.

The Kid at one point seeks to heighten his separation from the world by retreating to the isolation of a nearby swamp.  He also is capable of some terrific lies, some of which he admits to, and all of which are obvious to the reader. 

The Kid is the sort of character we should find repellent and contemptible, for whom we might feel isolation and social castigation are not adequate enough a punishment given his crime—the one he never commits.  Yet Banks forces us to see him as a three-dimensional human soul.

Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival, by John Valliant

This detailed and always intriguing book shows the interconnecting lines of history, politics, international relations, wildlife, and human personality.  Of the non-fiction books I’ve read recently, many of them were intelligent but superficial accounts of their topic.  I think in particular of the recent The Destiny of the Republic and of the seemingly encyclopedic Columbine.  Tiger is intelligent and deep.  We learn much about tigers and their natural behavior, about the inhabitants of Siberian Russia.  It details the attack of a male tiger on residents of Luchegorsk, in far eastern Russia, near the Chinese border, and of the efforts to hunt it down.  In the beginning I was mainly interested in tigers, but soon found compelling the discussions of Yuri Trush, the man assigned by the Soviet Union to head up the Inspection Tiger unit that protects tigers, tries to prevent poaching, and deals with various aspects of human and wildlife relations. 

For me the attractions of this book beyond the tiger himself lay in its coverage of a part of the world that I and most other western readers would normally dismiss as an uninteresting backwater of the old Soviet Union—Siberia, shades of Solzhenitsyn, Dostoevsky, Stalin.  It is much like a frontier, even as elements of the contemporary world gradually make their way in.  The region also hovers on the cusp of the Russian and Chinese borders, and the differing attitudes of the Chinese and the Russians towards preservations of tigers and other wildlife is an indication of the tensions between these two large nations.  Chinese expansionism, Perestroika, Stalin’s purges all have had an impact on the region and the welfare of the Siberian tiger.  Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival, by John Valliant (Vintage, 2010) provides a glimpse into a subject that was largely unknown to me before, and leaves me feeling more ignorant, more parochial, less worldly than before as well.  

Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte

Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights is about two generations of would-be lovers who never manage to connect. Chapters 23 and 24 of the second part contain some of the most insipid banter imaginable between two young people--a 17-year-old girl who speaks with the maturity of a 9-year old, and a somewhat younger terminally afflicted boy. The first section of the novel is, to me, stronger than the first, which tells the doomed story of Catharine and Heathcliff, while the second tells about the doomed relationship of their offspring. Heathcliff himself, who plays a major role throughout the novel, is by the second such a dark, malevolent villain that he hardly seems real.

Class and gender conflict are issues here. Romantic love is an issue too. Are we to see Heathcliff in some sense as a monument to love, driven to near insanity if not beyond by his grief over the loss of Catherine? And is Catherine’s insanity the result of disease, grief over her inability to be with Heathcliff, or over her unhappy marriage to Edgar Linton. The characteristics of these individuals are not adequately justified in the novel, and romantic love, if it is shown to be anything, is destructive and death dealing.

Sadly, there is not much of relevance to modern readers in this novel published in 1847. Women are weak and fragile vessels whose passions can ruin them—they’re incapable of ruling their lives. Men are, well, simpletons and dullards. The narrative is melodramatic, with irrational transitions and actions. The tragic force at work here is class, and neither Catherine nor Heathcliff possess sufficient will to overcome it.

Perhaps I should give Wuthering Heights another chance, at some other time in my reading life.

The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War, by Peter Englund

Oral narratives, especially from people who are not professional writers, can offer powerful insight into the age that produced them.  Often you wade through pages of insignificant discussion of personal and mundane issues, and then happen on a phrase, a sentence, an image that plunges you into the mind and times of the writer.  Last night I read a paragraph from a letter written by a seventeen-year-old girl about her encounter in 1834 with the frontiersman Davy Crockett.  More than any biographical study, certainly more than Crockett’s self-inventing narratives, this one paragraph gave me a personal and physical sense of Crockett as a human being.

So I came to The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War (Knopf, 2011), by Peter Englund, with anticipation.  This book promised to be an account of the First World War told through the experiences of 20 random participants and spectators—soldiers, medical workers, businessmen, displaced mothers, and so on.  Their stories would, I hoped, plunge me as a reader into the war in a direct and vicarious way.  Not so. Instead of presenting their oral or written accounts, Englund treats them as characters in a narrative that he constructs.  He does the narrating, sometimes quoting and sometimes paraphrasing diaries, newspaper accounts, published and unpublished journals, letters and other documents to construct the thoughts and activities of his characters on a particular day of the war.  He moves from one individual to another, following the war’s progress chronologically, comparing and contrasting and interweaving until a comprehensive overview, of sorts, emerges.  Individual accounts here can be powerful.  Others seem banal.  The power of the individual voice, whether through oral or written narrative, is replaced by Englund’s authorial voice, which surely, inevitably, must take some license as he constructs the lives and thoughts of these people as they experience the war.  This patchwork approaches comes at the cost of narrative effect—we’re constantly moving from one person’s perspective to another, and there are so many participants, flung far and wide across the globe, in so many contexts and roles, that coherence never emerges.  Perhaps that was Englund’s intention.  Even as I enjoyed this book, I was disappointed.

The Elephant in the Living Room

Ostensibly, The Elephant in the Living Room (2010, dir. Michael Webber) is about Americans who keep dangerous animals—bears, lions, tigers, poisonous snakes, etc.—in their private homes as pets.  The film contrasts the personalities and views of those who insist on their right to own such animals and those who regard the practice as a danger to both the animals and public safety.  Weird personalities and disturbing scenes abound.  The film eventually focuses in on Tim Harrison, an animal rescue expert, and Terry Brumfield, a retired, disabled truck driver who found that owning lions cured his depression.  I have to say that I was more interested in the general phenomenon of exotic pet ownership than in these individual examples.  Though there is much pathos in the tale of the retired truck driver and his lions, it is finally difficult to feel that the particulars of his situation justified the miserable conditions in which his lions lived.  In a painful and difficult scene, his prized male lion is accidentally killed when an electrical short circuit electrifies his cage.  A heart-rending soundtrack and numerous close-up images of the truck driver’s grief-stricken face muck up the sentimentality.

Admittedly, in the story of Tim and Terry the film encapsulates some of the issues in the ownership of exotic pets.  It does touch on the growing problem of wild snakes in the Florida Everglades, but it does not do much with the possibility of African lions and monkeys escaping and establishing populations in the United States.  Maybe the odds are against that happening.

In general this documentary substitutes the pathos of an individual anecdote for a genuine exploration of the topic.

Trailer

The Grey

The Grey (2011, dir. Joe Carnahan) aspires to be a good film. It ponders weighty questions: mortality, death's inevitability, individuals in a naturalistic world, the void. The scenario: workers at an isolated Alaskan pipeline facility are being transferred stateside to see their families. The jetliner carrying them home crashes in the middle of the Arctic. We don't know exactly where, but we are told early on that there is no chance of their being found. This seems unlikely. Airplanes are tracked on radar, they have transponders, when they go down people know about and come looking for survivors. The idea that a large airplane would just vanish in the Alaskan wilderness and attract no one's attention is the premise the film urges us to accept.

The survivors band together and make plans. Their leader is Ottway, played by (you guessed it) Liam Neeson. He is actually often effective in these kinds of roles. Sometimes he shows a certain amount of depth and insight. Sometimes he doesn't. In this case he does, to a certain extent. Ottway believes survival might be possible if he doesn't give up. These are all rough and ready men, with problematic personalities and histories, who for whatever reason have chosen to isolate themselves in the wilderness of the Alaskan oilfields. The movie seeks to humanize them by inserting glimpses of their home lives, of the daughters they think about, the lovers they're going to see. In the case of Ottway, we keep seeing glimpses of a young woman lying next to him in bed.  They’re speaking tender words that we can’t hear. We learn through various comments and through a suicide note that Ottway has lost this woman and that he can never get her back, so he's surrendered to an empty, pointless life bereft of hope. We even see him in an early scene putting a shotgun in his mouth, on the verge of committing suicide. The is interrupted when he has to shoot a wolf that suddenly comes into view, attacking one of his colleagues. Only at the end of the film do we learn about the kind of loss Ottway has suffered and although it makes his plight all the more bitter and full of despair, it also imbues the final scenes with sentimentality. It's the memory of this loss that he is running away from and that he can never get back.

Unfortunately, the plot of The Grey is all too familiar. Men are trapped in a difficult situation. They try to extricate themselves. One by one they’re picked off.  We've seen plenty of other films where characters are picked off by dinosaurs or Nazis or aliens or crazed monstrosities in the night. In this film, they’re picked off by wolves. The Grey therefore takes a predictable course.

The final scene reminded me of the conclusion of Runaway Train (1985), with Jon Voigt, standing atop the speeding locomotive, facing obliteration.

Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury‘s writings captured my interest as a child and fueled my passion for reading.  He was at his best as a short story writer.  His Martian Chronicles (1950) and Fahrenheit 451 (1953) were remarkable books.  Martian Chronicles was as I remember a wistful, lyrical memory of lost settlements on the Red Planet.  As an adolescent reader I returned to these stories repeatedly, seeking to regain the kind of experience I had when I first read them.  This was one of Bradbury’s best works, and in my reading experience he never equaled it.  I read book after book by Bradbury, hoping to find again that experience of The Martian Chronicles, but it was never there.  I’m afraid to reread the book now, fearful that my immature adolescent reading created in my mind a work that would no longer exist if I read the stories again 

Fahrenheit 451 shows how totalitarian regimes stifle free expression, control individual lives, and censor literature and readers.  Written with the recent memory of the McCarthy hearings, and of the Nazi regime, which was notorious for censorship and book banning among much worse evils, Fahrenheit 451 celebrated the passion of readers, the community of those who read and its essential relationship to individual lives.  It was prescient in its suggestion that technology would become all dominant, often oppressive, in our lives.  Truffaut’s 1968 film adaptation of the novel was good, I thought.  Other Bradbury story collections I read included The Illustrated Man (1951) and Golden Apples of the Sun (1953), and novels such as Dandelion Wine (1957) and Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962)

Although I still occasionally read and enjoy Bradbury, much of his work strikes me as aimed towards a younger audience.  There’s a derivative, sophomoric quality to his political and philosophical musings.  His work can be uneven—he wrote a great deal and apparently didn’t hesitate to publish work that wasn’t his best.  The influence of Thomas Wolfe is sometimes apparent—the mawkish, excessively lyrical and ebullient Wolfe.  Walt Whitman is also an influence.

Still, Bradbury was a science fiction writer who brought occasional moments of fine prose to his work, which aspired to be, and sometimes was, the best of its genre.

Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President, by Candance Millard

In what I take to be an imagined scene in the first chapter of Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President (Doubleday, 2011), Charles Guiteau, the future assassin of President James Garfield, stands on the deck of the S. S. Stonington, contemplating his future.  The Stonington collides with another ship, which quickly sinks, in flames and smoke.  Guiteau manages to survive.  He takes his survival as a sign that he has a divinely inspired purpose.  The facts of this scene are beyond dispute.  The ship did sink, Guiteau was aboard and did survive, and his diaries tell us its effect on him.  What bothers me is the fictional frame of the scene.  How do we know, factually, what Guiteau was thinking at the moment of impact?  We know only what Guiteau’s diaries, and other sources, tell us.   Everything else is speculation.

Author Candace Millard’s narrative is smoothly written and highly readable.  She tends to divide her characters into binary categories: the good and the bad—Guiteau, Senator Roscoe Conkling, Vice President Chester B. Arthur, for instance—are the bad, while Garfield and his secretary Brown are the good.  When Arthur, faced with the possibility of becoming President after Garfield is shot, is somehow redeemed, the exact nature of his conversion remains unclear.  Millard suggests that the enormity of the challenge before him had something to do with the change, but she never really questions the change itself.

The failure to recognize shades of moral coloration in these figures is a failing in this book, which dwells more on personalities and superficial events than on causes and meanings and implications.  

Remarks for Lamar Dodd School of Art Graduation Ceremony, May 9, 2012

I am pleased to be here on behalf of the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences to extend congratulations to all of you students, parents, friends, as well as to the faculty and staff of the Lamar Dodd School of Art, on this most important day. Students, you have earned a degree from one of the finest schools of art in the nation. You should be proud. Many of you will go out in the world to become practicing artists, or to teach and create art at a university, or to do research into the history and meaning of art, or to help prepare future teachers. Many of you will go out into the world and take up vocations that have little to do with what you have studied for the past four years—that is OK. You’ve had a great preparation to be an active and contributing citizen, whether as an artist or businessperson or teacher or parent or journalist or whatever. Use the creativity and appreciation for art and beauty that this UGA education has helped nurture in you to make the world a better place.

The public perception of the artist, a perception that some artists encourage, is that the artist stands apart from society, devoting him- or herself wholly to the production of art.

This is a false perception. You can’t allow it to persist. The main thing you must do in the world—a world fraught with serious problems and perils—is engage. Commit yourself to improving the world around you, and do it using the skills and values acquired through your experience with the Lamar Dodd School. Art doesn’t exist in isolation from society. The artist does not stand apart. The artist is part of a larger matrix of humanness, more important than any one individual, more important than art itself. Be a citizen of the nation and the world. Prove the values of the arts by using them to help others, to assuage the sick, to enhance the quality of individual lives, to elevate the thinking of people and of nations, to bring passion and insight to the business world, to give pause to those who think purely in terms of numbers, to enable those who suffer and despair to see above and beyond the constraints that hold them down. Make the arts your avenue towards doing things that matter in this world and this time that need your help.

Once again I congratulate you on this propitious day.

Remarks for Hugh Hodgson School of Music Graduation Ceremony, May 10, 2012

I am pleased to be here on behalf of the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences to extend congratulations to all of you students, parents, friends, as well as to the faculty and staff of the Hugh Hodgson School of Music, on this most important day. Students, you have earned a degree from one of the finest schools of music in the nation. You should be proud. Many of you will go out in the world to become practicing musicians, to compose or conduct or to sing, to teach at a school or university, or to research the history and forms of music, or to train future teachers. Many of you will go out into the world and take up vocations that have little to do with what you have studied for the past four years—that is OK. You’ve had a great preparation to be an active and contributing citizen, whether as a musician or businessperson or teacher or parent or journalist or whatever.

Whatever avenue you follow, the main thing you must do in this world—a world fraught with serious problems and perils—is engage. Use the creativity and appreciation for art and music that you have acquired through your experience with the Hugh Hodgson School to make the world a better place.

Performers and teachers and lovers of music play a crucial role in our society. The oldest musical instrument ever discovered—a 35,000 year old flute made from the wing bone of a vulture—suggests that music has been an innate and essential aspect of human experience since its recorded beginnings. None of us can imagine our lives without music. Yet musicians and lovers and teachers of music are part of a larger matrix of humanness that is more important than any one individual, more important than music itself. Be a citizen of the nation and the world. Prove the values of the arts and of music by using them to help others, to assuage the sick, to enhance the quality of individual lives, to elevate the thinking of people and of nations, to bring passion and insight to the business world, to give pause to those who think purely in terms of numbers, to enable those who suffer and despair to see above and beyond the constraints that hold them down. Make your passion for music your avenue towards doing things that matter in this world and this time that need your help.

Once again I congratulate you on this propitious day.

Remarks for 18th Andrea Carson Coley lecture, April 6, 2012

On behalf of the Franklin College and the University I welcome you to the 18^th Andrea Carson Coley lecture. This is always an important event on the spring semester calendar for Women’s Studies. In memory and honor of Andrea Coley, a young woman who came out as a lesbian and suffered hostility and non-acceptance that led to her suicide, the Coley lecture seeks to foster understanding and acceptance of people who are different. It speaks for the spirit and practice of fairness, tolerance, appreciation and equity for all people. This year in particular seems particularly relevant. The current political campaign, as surly and uncivil as I can ever recall a campaign having been, has focused unfortunately on a very narrow and singular definition of what it means to be an American, of what it means to be human. Those who don’t fit that definition are regarded by some as suspect, second-rate, undeserving of full status as human beings. Not only do we witness attacks on gays, lesbians, transgendered, and others who are different. We are also witnessing attacks on women in general, on the fundamental concept of difference and self-empowerment. We recently heard a young woman lambasted on a national radio program for the mere fact of her testimony before Congress. And we have seen in Florida how a teenage boy with dark skin, who behaved and dressed in what one observer interpreted as a suspicious manner, ended up dead on the lawn of a small-town neighborhood. These are extremist attacks, extremist acts, extremist views, you might say, but the current political climate demonstrates all too well how fast extremes can become the middle ground. In this environment, where the gains of the last fifty years are cast into doubt and sometimes even scorn, the importance of programs that highlight, study, teach, and promote issues of gender, race, and difference becomes all the more clear.

I am so pleased to see everyone at this important event today. Thank you to the staff, students, and faculty of Women’s Studies for all that you do. Since the Institute was established 35 years ago, more than 10,000 students have completed Women’s Studies courses. These students – and thousands of others who experience a first-class liberal arts and sciences education – are equipped to enter the public discourse with tolerance and generosity: the wisdom, justice, and moderation that are the pillars of the UGA Arch. Thank you to Kathy and Andrew Coley for endowing this event in honor of their daughter. I cannot imagine a more powerful legacy for Andrea, than fostering those crucial values for our students, faculty, and community. And thank you in advance to my friend and colleague, Tricia Lootens, for the talk she is giving today. As a teacher, scholar, and citizen, she has had a tremendous and beneficial impact on her department, this institute, and the University. I look forward to her remarks. Thank you.

Vesuvius: A Biography, by Alwyn Scarth

This history of Mount Vesuvius and its impact onthe lives of the people who lived nearby and the Italian peninsula itself is the slave of its own subject. Meticulous in a prosaic way, the book chronicles every eruption, every flow of lava and burst of steam and ash, that is recorded in written history, oral accounts, legend, and in the geological record. There is an underlying premise here—that long-lived natural phenomenon such as active volcanoes have a deep and lasting effect on human culture and history. A good thesis. My objection to this book is that it rarely raises its head above the ground level. We learn a great deal about the volcano, how it formed, what happened in various eruptions, how many people were affected, who wrote about it, its impact on settlements and farming communities, and so on. Mount Vesuvius is probably the best documented geological activity in human history. The interest of the account varies directly in relation to the detail available on particular eruptions—such as the famous eruption in AD 72 that destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum, and chronicles by such writers as Pliny the Elder (who died in the eruption), Pliny the Younger, and many others—and to historical figures that emerge in the course of the story. The 18^th century British diplomat Sir William Hamilton (1730-1803), whose writings about Vesuvius became one of the most detailed accounts of volcanoes ever produced, is an example—he was my favorite character. And there are moments, when eruptions threaten villages and force thousands of people to flee in panic, that the story comes alive. But for the most part charts, scrupulous lists and deadly prose hold sway.  Princeton University Press, 2009.

The Tree of Life

Terrence Malick has defined his own kind of filmmaking. His use of visual imagery, voiceovers, philosophical and religious contemplation, his contrasting of the natural world with the technological, of agrarian and industrial dimensions, his study of the meaning of consciousness and human identity--not in the meaning of culture or ideology but of pure self--these set him out as distinctive. It’s interesting to see how his films have progressed, from the early Badlands (1973) to the most recent, The Tree of Life (2011). One could almost view the last three films—The Thin Red Line (1998), The New World (2005), and The Tree of Life--as a coherent piece, with their emphasis on the individual in nature, their contrasting of the inward contemplative nature of the individual against the destructive forces of the outer, modern world. As an example, all three films use trees as unifying iconic symbols.

The contending forces that most interest Malick are laid out for us in the opening scene of The Tree of Life. The quotation from the Book of Job (“"Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? . . .  When the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?") focuses us in particular on the calamity that is the starting point—the death at the age of 19 of one of the O’Brien children, for reasons probably war-related, delivered through a telegram. Mrs. O’Brien questions why God would allow her son to die. The quotation from Job suggests that there are reasons for events on the earth, that there is a greater scheme of things into which the small details of individual human lives fit.

Mrs. O’Brien’s voiceover comments about grace and nature in the opening scene set down for us the struggle between mother and father in the film, Mrs. O’Brien representing grace, and Mr. O’Brien, nature. “The nuns taught us there are two ways through life. The way of nature, and the way of grace,” she tells us. “You have to choose which one you will follow.” (We cannot schematize Tree that easily. I’m deliberately oversimplifying.) The O’Briens’ oldest son Jack, the focus of much of the film, is the product of these contending parental forces.

The Tree of Life is recognizably a Terrence Malick film, but it is different from his four previous efforts. Set in a small Texas town during the 1950s, it focuses on one family that is in many ways a standard 1950s small town family. The father returns from the second world war to marry his wife, and they have three sons. Jack, who by expression and behavior seems constantly disaffected once the birth of a younger brother shatters the harmony of his world, bears the brunt of his father’s willful attention, and even from an early age he is caught up in a battle of wills, as are in one way or the other his brothers and mother, with their strong-minded father.

The telegram’s arrival in the opening scene becomes the center of a fluid movement between past and present, between the early days of the family’s life, and the efforts of the mother and father to come to grips with their son’s death. But the past isn’t merely the human past of a single family. It’s the history of the world, of the entire universe, of life’s development. How does Malick show this dimension? Literally. With images of the big bang and the birth of the sun and the earth, some of them digitally created, others digitally altered images of Hubble photographs, he shows the movement of the universe towards that one moment in time when the telegram arrives and the parents learn of their son’s death.

The point of this must be to contrast with the birth and development of the universe the mother’s questioning of God about why he allowed her son’s death. It suggests that in the grand scheme of things the death is a miniscule detail, yet at the same time it shows that in the life of the parents, of the family, of the surviving brothers, it is calamitous tragedy. It is also shows that in Malick’s view his death is part of a divine grand scheme.

An inevitable comparison to Malick’s film is Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia (2011). Both films link the lives of human beings with a encompassing vision of the universe. Both question the meaning of human experience cast against the sweep of cosmic history. In von Trier’s film, the character Justine expresses his view that “Life is only on earth. And not for long,” as the planet heads for its inevitable collision with the earth. There is no existence beyond this final moment in this film. Malick’s view is the opposite. Though he doesn’t consider the issue of life elsewhere in the universe, his film suggests, at least implies (unless we are dealing with scenes of pure metaphor), a life after death where his characters are reunited with one another and where reconciliation, redemption of some sort, is possible. Malick’s view is a Christian one, while von Trier expresses a decidedly naturalistic one.

It’s pointless to ask which film is “better.” I can’t rank them on the basis of my agreement or disagreement with them. I found Melancholia a powerful and sobering experience the first time I saw it. With my second viewing I continued to admire it but was less moved and was bothered by the film’s stylistic dogmatism—von Trier not only expressed his message but also insisted that we understood it. Both films are beautifully made. I wondered why Melancholia was set on an elegant seaside estate somewhere in the United States, and why its first half was devoted to a serio-comic disaster of a wedding while its second half focused on the preparation of the main characters for the end of the world. The two halves of the film, titled “Justine” and “Claire,” suggested two conflicting treatments of character, yet Justine dominated the film.

While I tend to agree with Melancholia’s view philosophically, The Tree of Life impressed me more. Stylistically, Malick’s film is not dogmatic. It presents a particular view of life, one that is undoubtedly religious in nature, but never presses that view. It simply displays, and with the long sequences showing the birth and development of the universe, and the final scenes where family members reunite on a heavenly beach, we are left to our own explanations. It’s possible to come away from The Tree of Life with a naturalistic view, and it’s possible to come away religiously inspired. Maybe both feelings are possible. In Melancholia Kirsten Dunst as Justine stands out. Deeply mired in depression, then passively accepting of the annihilation she knows is coming, the authenticity of her performance is compelling. Yet it’s a monochromatic performance—she doesn’t have to do much more than act convincingly depressed. In The Tree of Life Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain give performances more complex and nuanced. The children in this film are truly outstanding.

While the swank seaside estate where the wedding collapses and the world ends in Melancholia may give von Trier a vehicle for suggesting disdain for a human existence that measures itself on material possessions, one is tempted to wonder whether the estate also gave him a setting for the beautiful images that proliferate through the film, images that in themselves are distinct and stunning but that may also be gratuitous—they’re part of the intentional artifice of the film. One could make the same argument about the small Texas town where Malick centers The Tree of Life, yet there is a logic to the setting anchored in the film’s treatment of a family in the 1950s of Texas. One never has to wonder why Malick’s film is set where it is, while in Triers’ film there’s always the question.

Key images in The Tree of Life are trees, doors, portals, dividing lines (land and sky, under water and over water, inside and outside).

Finally, given my interest in films about the American South, I must consider whether this one fits the category. Because the South is associated with nostalgic notions of childhood (To Kill a Mockingbird), family (The Sound and the Fury), and an idyllic past (Trip to Bountiful), I would argue that Tree of Life fits tangentially. It is not about the traditional “Southern” issues that many other “Southern” films address, but it does use mythic associations of the South with family and childhood and small towns to provide a context for its larger philosophical ruminations.

The Leftovers, by Tom Perrotta

The unsettling premise of this novel is that one day millions of people suddenly, inexplicably disappear. There is no logic as to who they are or why they vanish—some good people remain on earth, some bad people disappear. Is this the fabled Rapture? The novel doesn’t spend much time wondering. Nor does it give much satisfaction on the moment of disappearance—all the accounts are second-hand--apparently people simply vanished, dematerialized, without fanfare. Instead the novel focuses on the survivors, those left behind, how they cope with the loss of loved ones, with the uncertainty left in the world and in personal lives.

The Leftovers (Tom Perrotta, St. Martin’s Press, 2011) is like Ordinary People in ways. It melodramatically surveys various individuals affected by the event and centers on the family of Greg, which is torn apart even though no member of the family disappeared. The mother Laurie joins a cult whose members never speak and who wear white clothing. The son Tom drops out of college and disappears for long periods of time. He joins a cult called the Healing Hug, which he discovers is really just a cover beneath which the organizer sleeps with young girls. Greg is elected mayor. Daughter Jill shaves off her hair and suffers teen angst. It’s all just a blasé sort of soap opera.

So really this novel is about loss. There’s no theological rambling. This is not a religious novel.

What exactly is it? Its real interest ought to lie in what happened to the departed. Where did they go? Are they ingredients in some alien cookbook? Are they in heaven or hell? The novel offers little satisfaction on these questions or anything else.

A Peculiar Tribe of People: Murder and Madness in the Heart of Georgia, by Richard Hutto

In the mode of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, but on a lesser scale, Richard Jay Hutto’s A Peculiar Tribe of People: Murder and Madness in the Heart of Georgia (Lyons Press, 2011) delves into the events and people of a murder in Macon , GA, in 1961. Not always effectively written or organized, sometimes burdened by too much detail, the narrative is nonetheless entertaining and interesting. It’s woven from interviews with many of the people who knew the principals in the story, as well as by newspaper accounts and legal documents. Hutto provides much information about the main characters and generations of their family histories. He is as interested in many of the people he interviews as he is in the story itself. Part of the interest of this book lies in the quality of the gossip (much of it documented) it contains—there’s a growing sense of amazement in Hutto’s narrative about the information he presents, as he is often incredulous that people behave as they do.

A Peculiar Tribe of People reminds me of Faulkner’s story about the rise of the Snopes clan in northern Mississippi. That tale, like this one, is a tale of class rivalry and jealousy, of old blood and money vs. new, in which the people resisting the outliers who want to enter into their social class reveal their own prejudices and foibles. Racism plays a role in this story, but mostly it is class conflict, and family.

Many people named in this book have familiar names. The Reynolds family is mentioned, as are, briefly, people from the literary and musical worlds of Macon, including Little Richard, who according to Hutto began his career singing under the name of Princess Lavonne in a lounge known as the Tic Toc Room.

Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, Joe Paterno and Occupy Wall Street

Phi Beta Kappa Address, December 7, 2011

I recently had the opportunity to attend the UGA Department of Theatre and Film Studies’ production of the Arthur Miller play All My Sons. The production was excellent, and after seeing it I made a point of rereading the play. It seems particularly timely. All My Sons was the first major success for Miller, one of the great American playwrights of the 20th century. Produced in 1947 at the Coronet Theatre in NYC, it focuses on a middle-class American family shortly after the end of the Second World War. Three years after the fact, family members still struggle to accept the death of their son and brother Larry, who was lost at sea, his body never recovered. The play unfolds almost as an overwrought melodrama. Early on, you become aware that something is wrong. The mother Kate believes Larry is still alive and that one day he’ll return. Any mention of her son upsets her. The father Joe Keller is a loud and boisterous man who seems to love his wife and his family. He presents himself as a consummate family man, a successful factory owner, and a paragon of civic virtue. Gradually this illusion of a family grappling with tragedy evaporates. The dead son’s widow Ann returns from New York for the first time since Larry’s death. The surviving brother Chris, we learn, has been writing her and now he wants to propose. Joe is upset, supposedly because this marriage would force his wife to accept Larry’s death. But other facts come out: Ann’s father, Joe’s former partner, is in jail, imprisoned for manufacturing and selling faulty cylinder heads for use in military warplanes. 21 deaths were the result. Then we learn that Joe himself was imprisoned, blamed by his partner for the same crime. Later exonerated, Joe says it was all a mistake, but then we learn that he could have prevented the sale of the faulty parts and that he basically set his partner up to take the blame. Finally a letter that Larry sent to Ann on the day of his death reveals that he couldn’t live with newspaper stories about his father’s involvement with the faulty parts, and that he plans to kill himself by crashing his plane into the China Sea. What this means is that Joe caused his son’s death, on top of the deaths of the other airmen. He betrayed one son, lied to the other, betrayed his business partner, and has to get up every morning and stare at himself in the mirror. He did so, he explains to Chris, to save his business.

All My Sons is about how a man builds his vision of the American dream on a fantasy—that he has lived a good life, he’s been honest, he loved his sons and his wife, that he’s much beloved, that the unfortunate things that have happened to him were the result of people who took advantage of him, people he unwisely trusted. This was the image he presented to his son Chris. What he didn’t want Chris to know was that it was more important to him to protect his livelihood, his business, than it was to withdraw the faulty parts and save American lives. The play is about failure of responsibility, about evasion of the truth, about breaking the basic bonds and values of human connection that keep us all going, that prevent us from diving our own planes deep into the China Sea.

And so we come to the sad and awful story of Joe Paterno and Jerry Sandusky at Penn State University. You all have heard the details of this tragedy. I won’t repeat them. Let me say that though I am not a football fan (other than of the Georgia Bulldogs), I have always regarded Joe Paterno as a man who set a standard for character, excellence in academics, and service to his University. He was a model for other coaches and for players to emulate. His career is marked with many good deeds and accomplishments, with an excellent record in football, but now more than anything else, it is marked with this scandal. Shakespeare, in his play Julius Caesar, wrote that “the evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.”

We don’t know all the facts of the Penn State scandal, and more of them will undoubtedly come out. What is clear is that in one way or the other Mr. Paterno and other university and athletic officials failed to act in a responsible and moral way. They failed to report one crime, at the least, and failed to prevent other similar crimes from happening. These men might not even have wanted to admit the truth, they might even have hidden it from themselves. Where was the failure? What and who failed? We’ve heard many answers: Coach Paterno did not report the crime soon enough, or Assistant Coach McQueary did not report it soon enough; neither of them followed up; they all allowed Sandusky access to University facilities even while rumors of his activities were flying. Friends were protecting friends. University officials –the president and vice presidents--were complicit because, wanting to protect the university’s reputation, they suppressed what they’d been told. College football was blamed for becoming such a money-making industry that it made decisions on the basis of profit margins, rather than what was good for the players or the school’s academic mission or the welfare of young boys. Our whole society was blamed.

We can find blame for this mess in a whole lot of places. But I’m less interested in sweeping generalizations about higher education or college football or modern American culture than I am in understanding how presumably decent people could fail in such a fundamental way. Here were men who heard rumors, received reports, even directly witnessed events that they ignored because they couldn’t believe them, or they wanted to protect friends, or they wanted to protect their own jobs, or they wanted to protect the football program, or they wanted to protect their university, or they simply didn’t want to put their reputations on the line. They didn’t take responsibility.

Arthur Miller’s play is about men who fail to do what is right, about a man whose desire to protect his name and his business causes the death of his own son and of other American young men fighting in the Second World War. Joe Keller loses his son because he allows profit motives to corrode and destroy basic human values. When his surviving son calls him a murderer, the accusation is not unjust. “You can be better,” Chris chastises his mother at play’s end when she asks him what more than sorry can she and Joe be for how events have turned out. “Once and for all you can know there’s a universe of people outside and you’re responsible to it, and unless you know that, you threw away your son because that’s why he died.”

Numerous works in literature pose this question of responsibility. Think first of the parable of the Good Samaritan in the Book of Luke in the Bible. In the novels of Charles Dickens, social and moral injustice is a major target. In Herman Melville’s story ”Bartleby the Scrivener” an entire office staff sits by, first joking about and then ignoring a man whose repeated statement “I would prefer not to” signifies his decision to die. In Franz Kafka’s story “The Hunger Artist” a man’s decision to starve himself becomes a sideshow attraction in a circus. Spectators don’t care that he is dying—they are just entertained by his advancing emaciation. Think also of the 2008 film Doubt, based on the play by John Patrick Shanley, in which the principal of a church school struggles with her growing suspicion that the priest of her church is molesting a young student. Finally, consider this statement by Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Atticus tells his son: “The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.”

The Penn State scandal is doubly shocking for those of us who work in higher education because it forces us to pause and wonder whether, in a similar situation, we also would fail to act, whether we would fail do to what was right, or whether we would just ignore it and hope that the machine rolled merrily on.

In a larger sense, the scandal should prompt all of us to ask similar questions: am I failing to be responsible to my fellow man and woman? Are there injustices in our neighborhood or our community or our nation or our world that we should not allow to go unchecked? Should we act on behalf of the fellow human beings with whom we share this globe?

One might not have to agree with their methods, or everything they believe, to acknowledge that both the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street movements are based in part on the desire of citizens to call attention to what they believe is wrong. These are both, in my opinion, flawed movements, but at least their members are not willing to sit still and do nothing. The members of Occupy Wall Street are expressing their belief that the American banking and investments industry is, like Joe Keller, putting the desire to make money above the welfare of millions of other Americans, above the welfare of this nation. Lives are destroyed, people suffer. One can think of many other injustices and problems in the world that demand our attention: poverty, economic disparities, the national debt, the global economy, climate change, environmental decay, pollution, disease, intolerance, violence, racism, sexism, resource depletion, over population, the list goes on and on, and it seems a darker and more difficult list than it has ever seemed in my lifetime. Unfortunately, this is the list that confronts you in the life ahead.

Our hope of survival in this troubled world may depend on your willingness to take responsibility.

As Phi Beta Kappa graduates of the University of Georgia, I know that many of you have already taken steps to be responsible by volunteering in service programs and charitable organizations and other activities that serve the campus and community. That service can’t end when you leave here. Having done good work here at the University, ready to go out into the world to take on jobs or further study or even a stint of leisure time, none of you is free of the necessity of doing more. Your achievements here suggest that you will lead good and comfortable lives. But those same achievements make clear that you have much to give. My hope for the future lies in the abilities and new ideas and intelligence and enthusiasm and commitment of people like you. Our world needs you. You have an obligation to give, and to exercise courage in the face of injustice. I hope you will. Thank you.

The Last Airbender

I had read the reviews of this film (2010; dir. M. Night Shyamalan)--uniformly negative. I came to it with the lowest expectations. It offered a quasi-mythic comic book tale of magic and fantasy. It offered cartoon-like special effects. I knew I would not have to think much while I watched and dozed. And I wasn't sure how much of it I would watch. I was just curious—another chapter in M. Night Shyamalan's sad decline—what would it be?

So it is perhaps a symptom of senescence when I confess to how much I enjoyed this half-witted film and its febrile mysticism and hyper-dramatic, faux epic, Kung-Fu saga of how a boy frozen in ice for a century emerges back into the world and with the help of young friends defeats the kingdom of fire that is trying to destroy the kingdom of water and ice benders. The thawed-out boy is the Avatar who kept the world in Balance, and with his disappearance the world fell into chaos. This is a world in which special individuals within each nation can bend or control the four basic elements of air, fire, earth, and water. The Avatar can bend all four elements.

I do not know enough about Asian cinema to say with certainty that it had an influence on this film, especially the balletic movements and fighting that make up much of the action. The Last Airbender seems built on a faintly Tibetan form of Buddhism, and the Avatar himself, who is reincarnated from one generation to the next, may have something in common with the Dalai Lama.

At any rate, though I was not of the target audience, I was entertained.

Letters to a Young Contrarian, by Christopher Hitchens

In Letters to a Young Contrarian (MJF Books, 2001) Christopher Hitches explains his position as one of the great skeptics of our generation. By this point in his career he was retreating from some of the leftist positions of the first half of his career. Although he has often been described as having become a conservative, especially after the World Trade Center attacks in September of 2001, what is more accurate is that he backed off from the absolutism of Old New Left and Marxist thinking. He remained committed to human rights, to most of the positions he had previously held, but no longer saw himself as a leftist—rather, as a skeptic, a naysayer, a contrarian. Of course, with the events of 2001 (which had not occurred when he wrote this book), he found himself in support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, though he disagreed with the administration conducting them.

In these letters to a fictional “young contrarian,” Hitchens defines a position of intellectual, philosophical, and political independence from any absolutist position, any position that does not stand up to logical thinking. This includes, of course, religion, whose rejection Hitchens explains in several of the letters. Along the way, he takes shots at the Dalai Lama, Princess Diana, Bill Clinton, and others for whom he did not care. At the same time, he expresses admiration for Eugene Debs, Emile Zola, and others.

Hitchens sometimes g"ets caught up in the rhetorical glibness of being Hitchens. But for most of the pages in this book he exemplifies, and insists on, a position of intellectual rigor and moral courage. This paragraph in the last of the letters sets down his basic advice to his correspondent:

“Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the “transcendent” and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and for others. Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.’

Hesher

Hesher (2011; dir. Spencer Susser) is an indie film in which damaged people join together to assuage pain. On the surface, the film is hard and relentlessly grim, even while it is funny. It focuses on a young boy, T. J., trying to deal with the loss of his mother in an automobile accident. His father is so passive and depressed that he can’t help the boy. Their grandmother, with whom they live and who is caring for them, can’t do much to help other than cook their meals. She chooses to let the wildness of her family go on around her, although in fact she hears and absorbs everything that happens. The boy is obsessed with recovering the family car in which his mother died. It’s at a junk dealer’s office and is scheduled for destruction.

The son of the junkyard owner harasses the boy, and after he defaces the car and flees, he runs into Hesher. Played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt in one of his best roles ever, Hesher is a foul-mouthed, hostile, heavily tattooed young man with a long mane of hair. He tells wild tales of sexual bravado to everyone he meets, including Natalie Portman, who plays a secondary role in the film as a grocery store clerk..

Hesher begins living at the boy’s house—he isn’t invited, he just shows up. Gradually we learn that he is in his own way as wounded as the others, and that he takes solace from this connection with a grieving family. They come to take solace from him.

The film really doesn’t have the courage of its convictions. That is, an underlying sentimentality gradually emerges. Hesher himself really doesn’t ever change. We just learn more about him and understand that beneath his brash and unpleasant exterior is a genuine human being.

Hesher gives an unusual speech at a funeral, and his last gesture of comic defiance is a profanity inscribed on the roof of the boy’s house, but by then we have succumbed to the unconventional charms of his character. The boy and his father begin recovering from their grief, and Hesher goes his way.