So Long, Paul Auster

One of my favorite authors, Paul Auster, died last month, and it was one of those deaths that had me glum for a few days. No more new books from this brilliant man. He published his last, Baumgartner, just six months ago, and I devoured it in a few days. It may not have been his best work, but each of his books had something to offer, and I regret that I’ll no longer be able to experience the pleasure of reading a book of his for the first time.

I first learned of Auster by happenstance. His wonderful novel, The Brooklyn Follies (and a good place to start for the uninitiated), was displayed on the “New Fiction” section of my local library, and I found its cover compelling. A man stands at the corner of a crosswalk peering into a plastic grocery bag. Is he lamenting having forgotten to purchase something? Did a carton of eggs break? I don’t know, but I was drawn to it. Chalk one up to the lost art of browsing (it just isn’t possible to do so on-line with any efficacy).

And so began a love affair.  In fact, I took a line from Brooklyn Follies for my 2016 song, “You.”

I think of Nathan Glass and his Book of Human Folly
All the blunders and pratfalls, embarrassments, the foibles, oh good golly
But you.  I wouldn’t change you.

The first and second lines are all Auster (except for the “oh good golly”) and I thank him for the inspiration.

As much as I loved Auster’s fiction, I found his memoirs positively fascinating. In 2012 I blogged about his book, Winter Journal, a one-of-a-kind memoir that defies convention. 

“(It)describes a nonlinear history of Auster’s physical body: the injuries it sustained, the physical pleasures, the scars – both mental and physical – it endured.  At various points, Auster describes the different sensations and actions that his body (and all of our bodies) have experienced:

‘Your body in small rooms and large rooms, your body walking up and down stairs, your body swimming in ponds, lakes, rivers, and oceans, your body traipsing across muddy fields...’

He spends 52 pages identifying the twenty-one permanent addresses his body has lived in, ten pages describing the plot of a movie he identifies with (and he does it so well that I feel I’ve already seen the 1950 film, D.O.A.), and a page and a half listing the countless activities of his hands (“brushing your teeth, drying your hair, folding towels, taking money out of your wallet, carrying bags of groceries...”).

Unconventional?  You bet.  But so much more interesting than a play-by-play of his life.”

The start of Auster’s published career was also a memoir, The Invention of Solitude, a haunting recounting of the aftermath of his father’s death, and in 2013 he published Report from the Interior, a companion peace to Winter Journal, in that the latter is a history of Auster’s physical body while the former recounts his psychological development through adolescence.

These are the books I will likely keep going back to. His fiction is fascinating (besides Brooklyn Follies, my favorites are The Book of Illusions and Man in the Dark), and – admittedly – sometimes over my head, but his memoirs speak to a shared humanity and mortality that we all reckon with, and one that I find endlessly compelling.

Thank you, Paul, for your significant contribution to defining the human condition. Peace.

3 Books on Filmmakers

You may have heard some recent buzz about Mark Harris’s book, Mike Nichols: A Life.  It’s a great read, and it also serves as a gateway to two other books on filmmakers authored by Harris: Five Came Back and Pictures at a Revolution.  I wish there were more, as over the past six weeks I’ve immersed myself in film history and wish I could stay a little longer.  Harris’s gift for writing accessible yet meticulously researched prose, while providing historical context and contemporary criticism, makes for quick and enjoyable reading; it’s not often that I devour 1600 pages over three books so willfully.

Pictures at a Revolution tells the tale of the five Best Picture nominees for 1967 and how they represented a shift in Hollywood from the old system of strong studio moguls to an auteur-led revolution influenced by European filmmakers, a movement that was enabled by the unravelling of the production code of self-censorship that had entrenched itself in Hollywood for thirty-five years.  The book is also a lens into how films are made.  How?  Almost always painstakingly.  Threads of a film are woven, untangled and woven again, screenwriters are hired and fired, studios and directors are wooed and wooed again, budgets are slashed, insecure and egotistical actors are mollified – it’s a wonder that films get made at all.  Bonnie and Clyde took five years from its inception to its completion, and even then it required Warren Beatty’s indefatigable drive, charm and the threat of a lawsuit to overcome dismissive reviews and lackluster studio support to get the film widely distributed. 

Most interesting to me was Harris’s portrayal of actor Sydney Poitier, who appeared in two of the five nominated films that year – Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and winner In the Heat of the Night – and who was the biggest box office star in America in 1968, the year I was born.  His success and exposure came at a price, as Poitier struggled to toe the line of pushing for more three-dimensional roles that would still play well with white audiences, while simultaneously taking heat from a black populous who was tired of being patient with racial progress.  Poitier was quoted at the time, “Wait till there are six of us – then one of us can play villains all the time.  First, we’ve got to live down the kind of parts we’ve had all these years.”  Namely, maids and butlers.  I can not imagine what Poitier must have gone through, and I may have to read his memoir next.

If the stakes seem high in Pictures at a Revolution, they are off the charts in Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War, a book that documents how five Hollywood film directors offered their services to capture war footage and produce films for U.S. soldiers and citizens during World War II. Once again, Harris provides the social context of the time, when there were strong forces opposing any effort to promote the war – especially by Jewish studio heads – and he also illustrates how the challenges of filmmaking were no less arduous within the bureaucracy of the military than within dictatorial Hollywood studios.  Budgetary and supply constraints, inept leadership and egos make the art of movie making difficult in any situation, and certainly more so when the state of the world is at stake.

Five Came Back helped to humanize directors who were only names to me: I feel like I have a better understanding of who John Huston, George Stevens, Frank Capra, John Ford and William Wyler were, and I also have profound respect for their sacrifices and heroism. Wyler shot footage from bombers flying over Germany (and suffered major hearing loss as a result).  Stevens and Ford were on the beaches of Normandy.  Huston made an important film about returning soldiers suffering from mental ailments. (Unfortunately, the film wasn’t released when it could have done some good.)

But here’s the added bonus: not only is Five Came Back a stellar book; it’s also a three-part documentary, currently streaming on Netflix.  But wait…there’s more!  You can also view the films that the book references, from John Ford’s Battle of Midway to George Stevens’s important footage of the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp, an experience that forever shaped the director’s life.  Between the book, the documentary and the original films, it’s an abundance of riches for film buffs and historians alike.

I’m looking forward to Mark Harris’s output in the coming years.  If there’s one minor quibble I have, it’s Harris’s penchant for offering attributions deep into a long quote, so that the reader doesn’t initially know who’s doing the speaking.  I wish he’d rectify this habit.  But hey, he writes better than I do!

I highly recommend all three of Harris’s books to date.

Ode to my Departing Refrigerator

My son says it’s been like a pet,
except it’s lasted longer.
Come and gone are two cats, one dog,
two hamsters and half a dozen goldfish.
Gone too is the mouse we caught and whom we named Jim
and placed in Tupperware upon our aging appliance
before he unwisely escaped,
apparently forgetting that our two cats at that time
were alive and well.
Poor Jim.

But our Whirlpool,
this beast of refrigeration,
has been steadfast and true,
its cooling coils
coming to my emotional rescue
after a long day,
awaiting my arrival when I would
enter its cavern and retrieve a bottle of frosty goodness
or a slice of last night’s pizza.

This relic of the 90s
is older than my 18 year-old son,
older than my 23 year-old daughters.
It’s seen the eastern hills of Pennsylvania
and witnessed the plains along the highways
of Ohio and Indiana,
at last dropping its weight upon a hardwood floor in suburban Chicago.
It’s outlasted dishwashers, washers and dryers, stoves and ovens.
Hell, aside from their parents,
my children’s most consistent companion
has been our refrigerator,
whose plastic veneer tolerated their smudgy fingerprints,
held annual holiday cards and calendars,
retro magnets with funny sayings,
(my favorite, “You use a wine stopper?  That’s adorable!”),
and the coolest marble maze toy you’ve ever seen.

Its surface has lacked luster for some time now,
and I’m ashamed to admit that I started researching
a replacement over two years ago.
“Surely, it can’t last much longer,” I said to my wife.
And I’m certain that our Whirlpool overheard this slight,
kicked its coils into overdrive,
and thought, “I’ll show you who can’t last much longer!”

But now it freezes lettuce in the crisper drawer
and leaves puddles of water on its top shelf,
an incontinent aging edifice.
It knows.  It knows its time has come to make way
for a young strapping Whirlpool
who’s supposed to save me up to $200 a year in energy costs,
but who will likely only live to be 10-15 years old,
this according to the saleswoman who took $100 off the asking price.
Ten to fifteen years!  What a joke.
Why, these young up-and-comers don’t know the first thing
about loyalty and stamina.
They’re not fit to chill my Whirlpool’s lunchmeat.

But even if I live to buy another five refrigerators
I will remember.
I will remember this cooling companion
who kept our vegetables fresh,
our leftovers tasty,
and our ice cream delicious,
taking off the edges of trying days,
cooling over 25,000 meals in its lifetime.

Thank you, old friend.

A Death Poem

Death has been on my mind lately because there’s been a lot of it, some of it personal, some of it the public figure variety, most recently that of Neil Peart of Rush who I’d seen perform live numerous times.  The outer circles insulating my charmed life have been breached by the passing of those around the same age as me or just a few years down the line, so mortality has taken on new resonance.  I’m not depressed about it nor am I fatalistic, but I can’t pretend it’s not there.  It has to be reckoned with.  So, time for some poetry!

WHEN DEATH IS ALL AROUND

When death is all around
not even breath can be assumed.
Hyper-conscious.  Present. Aware.
It’s what you’ve been aiming for all along.
Yet the privilege shared by
witnessing others’ passing
falls flat upon weary ears
like a stone on the sunken earth.
Whether it’s “wrapped in the cradle of His bosom”
or “a dot of light in the sky’s sphere,”
there is no comfort in words of comfort.
Because lately it’s been friends
and friends of friends,
and mothers and lovers and brothers and sons,
wives and husbands
and old acquaintances.
No, not even breath can be assumed,
nor the sunrise,
nor lilac’s bloom,
nor pangs of hunger,
nor sated desires,
nor sacred moments.
For in another’s absence 
beckon those final empty seconds,
when all we hold dear
will be loosed into the ether
of God’s hollow embrace.

A Recording of my Short Story, "James's Arrival"

Ten years ago, after writing fiction for a number of years and working with a local writers group, I received my first little success, winning the James Jones Short Story Award for my story, "James's Arrival." At the time it was a great thrill, but more importantly, it spurred me on to continue and try to reach the next level. Ten years later, I'd be lying if I said I've reached the goals I'd hoped to achieve, but like I've said repeatedly, I'm not dead yet. 

Ten years after my little blip of success, I've had a chance to enjoy my story as if for the first time due to the work of the Elmhurst Public Library with their recent addition of "Adult Storytime for Grownups Podcast!" on the library website. Actor and writer Duard Mosley does me the huge honor of reading my decade-old story and breathing new life into it, offering nuances I never would have included in my own reading of the story.

Feel free to listen and download above or go to this link and scroll down to Episode 2, starting at about minute 5:35. If you go this route, before my story is a short bit of fiction from Duard himself! Enjoy.