21 Thursday May 2009
Posted in link
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Following on from last week’s review of War and Peace, I stumbled upon a wonderful blog reviewing a chapter a day of War and Peace – http://relentlesspursuit.wordpress.com. Matthew from Sydney is the dogged reviewer, and he’s nearly finished. It’s the sort of quixiotic project that delights me.
21 Thursday May 2009
As a child, one of my prized books was a book of baby names and their meanings. Not because I was planning names for my own children, but because I found it fascinating to discover what people’s names ‘really meant’. I thought it gave me insight into their true character. It also gave me a certain type of power, coming to school and announcing to other children what their names meant.
My name is of Hebrew origin and means ‘Gift of God’; I tried to read as much as I could into that. I told James at school he had a very bad name, as his name means ‘Deceiver’. I wondered how anyone could call their child James, knowing this.
And then there was Matthew C., whose name was Greek for ‘Gift of God’. I always wanted to be his best friend, and I thought this linked us in some special way. I told him this theory, but he was not entirely convinced. When he moved to Iceland, he didn’t reply to the letter I sent him.
Perhaps I have disabused myself of some of the primitive notions I had about names as a child, but not entirely. Instinctually, I still feel that other ‘Nathans’ should (a) be friendly to me and (b) have some trait of Nathanness to them. Time has proven neither of these things to be true.
Just as important as the ‘meaning’ of names has been the antecedents for names. I have always loved the tension present in my given names – Nathan David – from the Old Testament figures with those names. Nathan is the brave prophet who rebuked the poet king for adultery and murder. David is my father’s name; that irony interests me too.
‘Nathan’ used to be a fairly rare given name, of which I was very proud. ‘Hobby’ is uncommon too, and it was strange when another family of Hobbys moved to our country town when I was eleven. We didn’t think they were related; years later we discovered they were second cousins, separated from our awareness by family secrets.
One of these Hobbys was called Joshua, and was about the same age as my brother Joshua. I didn’t know what to make of this idea – would it be like having a twin brother to have someone with the same name? Or did it make a person un-unique, did it compromise their specialness, their distinctiveness in the world? I leaned toward the latter interpretation, and thought it a terrible cruelty to be a Smith, or even worse a John Smith.
In the year below me at high school, there were two Laura Smiths. Different years were never known beyond vague rumours, and it took me a long time to work out they were talking about two different Laura Smiths. One of them I knew by sight; the other I didn’t. A year after I graduated, one of them died in a car accident. I wondered if it was the one I knew by sight, or the one I didn’t, and tried not to think of it as sadder if it was the one I knew by sight. I wondered what the surviving Laura felt, if it seemed a close call.
And then, finally, last year I met, in a manner of speaking, the only other Nathan Hobby I know of in the world. I found him on facebook. He’s younger than me and into football, from what I can gather about him. I thought there would have to be something essentially similar about us. But of course, there didn’t have to be. I still get a shock on my facebook feed when I read statements like ‘Nathan Hobby is no longer in a relationship’.
But then perhaps the more remarkable twin, an almost Borgesian one, is my literary twin, Nathaniel Hobbie. When I was working in a public library in 2004, his book arrived about the same time as my book came out. It was called ‘Priscilla and the Pink Planet’ and it’s about a little girl obsessed with pink. His career has been more successful than mine so far; he’s followed up with four other books about Priscilla.
It sounds like a Vonnegutian alter ego for me; I even started a novel called Lazarus the Pacifist Superhero with Nathaniel Hobbie as the main character. It makes it seem there must be some power to names and that out in the world are variations on each person.
Do you have a twin out there in the world?
21 Thursday May 2009
Posted in this blog
Despite knowing how shallow it is, I do check how many visitors I’ve had and am excited to have passed the 30 000 mark yesterday! (If only my next book sells this many.) Thanks to you for stopping by. (The counter can be seen in the sidebar.)
In celebration, I would love to meet more of you – why not leave a comment introducing yourself if you haven’t made yourself known yet, or even if you have already made yourself known? Let me know your interests, the things you wish I’d write about more or write about less, and feel free to promote your blog or your book or your manifesto.
18 Monday May 2009
Posted in death, film review
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Spoiler alert
Synecdoche, New York is one of the most ambitious films I’ve ever seen. It has a span of decades and attempts to depict, on a huge scale, themes of mortality, loss, the meaning of life and the relationship of art to life. It’s the directorial debut of my favourite screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Adaptation; Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) and stars my favourite actor, Philip Seymor Hoffman (Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead; Capote; Charlie Wilson’s War).
The film begins mutedly. A sad, poetic meditation comes over the clock radio announcing the first day of fall and reflecting on the decline of all things. The main character, theatre director Caden, is entering the ‘fall’ of his life. Over breakfast each morning he reads a new obituary of someone famous dying.
The mode is mainly realist in these early scenes, as Kaufman skilfully documents the breakdown of Caden’s marriage and the way the small success of his production of Death of a Salesman is unfulfilling. There are beautifully handled, bleakly funny scenes of domestic drama and conflict – driving in the car, their daughter becomes distressed when Caden tells her she has blood running through her body. His wife Adele assures her she doesn’t have blood; Caden tells her it’s not good to tell her daughter she doesn’t have blood.
As Caden’s health deteriorates and he visits doctors in dark Kafkaesque corridors (another text mentioned early is Kafka’s The Trial) his wife leaves for Berlin with their daughter. His search for his daughter becomes a recurring subplot for the rest of the film, a surreal nightmare as he reads of her being tattooed, sees a poster of her as a stripper and final only meets her again as a dying middle-aged women who blames him for what happens.
If I’m getting ahead of the film it’s because from here the narrative fragments further and further; time and reality become unstable. Rather than a cause and effect narrative, we have echoes, recurrences and variations of themes, played out on a loose narrative.
The loose narrative is this: just as Caden’s life has unraveled, he receives a genius fellowship, a massive grant to do something important for his community. He buys a massive warehouse to stage his biggest production ever. Working with a burgeoning cast of actors, he begins rehearsals that are to go on for the rest of his life. He is attempting to recreate the experience of life itself on the stage, with hundreds of scenes in different buildings running simultaneously. The play just keeps on expanding, a new warehouse built over the top of the city to engulf the previous warehouse and blocks of the city, and then another.
Meanwhile, he becomes entangled in a love triangle that has a key part in the film, a triangle that evokes the spirit of Woody Allen, albeit played out in a surreal universe. Over the decades he switches between the two women, but the relationships are further tangled as actors are recruited to play their parts in the play.
Caden’s own part begins to be taken over, first by the man, Sammy, we’ve glimpsed throughout the film, a man who has dedicated years of his life to following Caden, observing everything he does and is now capable of assuming his role in the great play. The idea of Sammy, of an observer who cares about everything someone does, is one which has fascinated me in the past: if only there was someone watching and remembering, then what we do wouldn’t be forgotten and wouldn’t be wasted.
Life and art inevitably blur; what is being staged and what is being lived? I let go of any attempts to completely comprehend what I was watching and just let the scenes delight me in their variations on the themes Kaufman set up.
Just as the whole thing seems impossible to end, more time passes; Caden moves out of the director’s chair and a final apocalyptic scene ends things perfectly. The last years of his life, Caden has what perhaps we might sometimes long for: a director speaking to him through an earpiece, telling him exactly what do next, right down to the final command, ‘Die now.’
14 Thursday May 2009
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War and Peace / Leo Tolstoy (1865-8; translated by Rosemary Edmonds 1958)
It’s common to hear that War and Peace contains all of life, depicting the full range of human experiences. As a reader, it also evoked the full range of reading experiences for me, from the exhiliration of acute insight that resonated with my experience of life, to boring pages I wanted to flick over; from thrilling narrative drive to moments of narrative listlessness.
I have spent so long reading it – five weeks – that I have begun to feel that I was never going to read another novel, that this was the novel which would last me the rest of my life.
My dad asked me to sum up the plot. I couldn’t do that. How about this: it’s about three Russian families in the time of the wars against Napoleon’s army between 1804 and 1812, with an epilogue set several years later?
Percy Lubbock thinks ‘War and Peace’ is a bad title and I agree. (Even though it captures the epic nature of the work and has become a cliche in itself.) Or it’s not a bad title, but it focuses attention on one half of the novel, and the less interesting part to my mind – war and peace are the backdrop for an exploration of ‘Youth and Age’. Has a ring to it, I think. Better than its insights into war are the insights into the impetuousness of youth, the mad zeal which would drive young men to throw their lives away for the sake of glory; or the dive into marriages ranging at first from the unsatisfying to the miserable; and the insights into the quiet wisdom of age, or the fastidious fussiness of it; or just the depiction of characters – particularly Pierre and Natasha – moving from youth and into age.
In the first half, as possible ideas for this review ran through my head, I was going to write how remarkable it is that Tolstoy avoids the intrusiveness of so much nineteenth century writing; he doesn’t intervene with pages of boring exposition about history or culture but lets the story tell itself. And yet in the second half, Tolstoy becomes very interventionist, hammering home several key points that are worthy in themselves but are belaboured and out of place.
A lot of the problem seems to come about because Tolstoy spends so much time debating the historians of his age. He wants to rehibiliate the reputation of the commander of the Russian army, Kutuzov, who Tolstoy saw as a hero and not a fool for abandoning Moscow and refusing to directly engage the retreating French army.
He wants to prove that Napoleon was no genius.
He wants to elucidate his own theory of history and of war, that it is not made by Great Men but by inscrutable forces, the sum of millions of individual decisions which no one person can particularly influence one way or the other. A theory that sits well with contemporary views of history, but that he shows so well in his novel he doesn’t even need to explain.
In short, Tolstoy addresses the concerns of his day, the debates around the Napoleonic Wars that were going on fifty years after the event but which matter very little to most readers of War and Peace today. If only he knew that he would one day be as famous as Napolean and that readers would be more interested in the brilliance of his psychological depictions of his characters than in his contribution to historical debates.
My favourite character is Pierre. He has an ineffectual idealism; he stumbles into life. The illegitimate son of a rich prince, he receives a massive inheritance thanks to an older woman’s political acumen. He goes from being treated as a shabby, uncouth zealot to a desirable bachelor. He marries the wrong woman because she charms him; he lets himself be robbed and mistreated over and over. Stuck in a carriage with a freemason, he joins that movement with high ideals, only to find that the other members don’t share them, that the movement can’t live up to its own claims.
Perhaps the most fascinating, almost Dostoeveskian passage, involves him staying behind in Moscow as the French army invades and getting in his head the idea that he is the chosen one destined to assasinate Napoleon. Being Pierre, it doesn’t turn out right and he is captured as a prisoner of war while rescuing a baby from a fire. Perhaps I should have known that there had to be a happy ending for him; after being set free, he finally marries the woman who was meant for him all along.
Tolstoy finishes with two epilogues; the second is regrettable, a long meditation on war and history not at home in a novel at all. But the first is fascinating, a glimpse into the lives of the characters years later, as the surviving ones come together, now with children, another generation arising, and yet so many of the old quirks and problems remaining. It gives the novel an even bigger sense of expanse, a glimpse that this could keep on going on forever if only Tolstoy had more pages.
12 Tuesday May 2009
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I’ve updated my links at the sidebar.
A friend of mine, the editor, theologian and writer Christopher Walker has been quietly keeping an excellent and eclectic blog for quite a while now – but such is his modesty that I only just discovered it! (What do you think of people who relentlessly promote their blogs? Do great blogs sell themselves? Not always, I guess.)
Another friend of mine keeps a blog reflecting on sexuality and cultural history which often challenges me as a christian (when he actually posts!) http://theschoolofmines.blogspot.com.
And I’ve mentioned before neglectedbooks.com. What a wonderful project! To remember forgotten books! An act of recovery, of resurrection, of beauty.
07 Thursday May 2009
After attending a party, we found ourselves near the house we lived in when we were first married. Both being so sentimental, we drove past it.
‘Wouldn’t you love,’ she said, ‘to buy all the houses you ever lived in? So you could have them forever.’
And I felt excited she said this, because it was one of those times when someone articulates something in my head that I thought unarticulatable or simply too unformed or silly to say.
Sometimes it’s an unbearable thought, all the houses I ever lived in still existing in their own ways, inhabited by someone else who now has more claim on them than me. But it’s less unbearable than the thought of the houses no longer existing, of their being chewed up by bulldozers and a different buildilng existing in the same space. On a long enough timescale, I suppose this is the fate of all the houses I ever lived in. If I could imagine a future for them or for the Earth one million, one billion years hence. But in human timescale, at least one of them will, in all likelihood, outlast me.
The two families that merged to form me – the Winnings and the Hobbys – are wanderers. My parents each lived in maybe ten houses over their childhood. Perhaps this made them want stability when they had their own children; and thus I lived at Lot 105 Railway Parade in Allanson for thirteen years.
In my dreams, this house is always home. I haven’t lived in it since 1996, but I keep returning to it. It sits at the top of a hill on three acres with a gravel driveway which seemed so very long as a child. The brown donkey shed, the rainwater tank, the trees which I knew so well. But usually it’s the inside of it I dream about. I wonder how I know that it’s this house when I wake up? Perhaps I see the orange kitchen. (A childhood friend, reading my novel The Fur remarked that she noticed the kitchen she remembered so well too.) But it’s more than colours or a physical geography, it’s a spiritual knowledge that it’s the same house.
I once started a writing project where I intended to decribe, exhaustively, each room of that house and the memories associated with them. I started with the laundry, of all places, and its first aid cabinet full of icecream containers of aging treatments, expired ointments.
Since that house, I have lived in fourteen houses, returning to the wandering roots of my family tree. Now I’m exiled from each one; I can only hope to drive past and see what it has become from the outside. And being so pathologically fearful of what people might think, hating to think of them saying, ‘What’s that car doing out there,’ I’m scared to stop.
My wife’s family is good at staying put; I visited the house her mum grew up in a few years ago, still in the family. I could feel all the memories and family history in that house, it was the pantina of so many decades.
I felt sad hearing this year that, just weeks after its sale, the new owners demolished it. Such disregard for the beauty of a house, the years of life poured into each one.
What about you? Do you long to own all the houses you ever lived in? Do you drive past when you find yourself in the area?
30 Thursday Apr 2009
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In 2002, when I borrowed Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being from Murdoch University library (it is in South Wing Level 2, if you wish to borrow it yourself) there was a beautiful postscript to a letter tucked between the pages midway through.
It is unfinished; instead of sending it, the writer cast it out into the world, like a message in a bottle. She thought the next reader of Unbearable Lightness would be the appropriate reader, as I hope the readers of this blog are appropriate readers too. It is written on a postcard size piece of white card in black pen printing, small and crowded. This is what it says.
[front]
Hey again babe, I know I finished the letter (supposedly) but I went looking through my box for rafeta & found all my old letters from my friends – like years + years back & now I’m feeling a little fucked. I lost most of my friends somewhere along the way y’know – there’s so much love in all those letters +I have nothing like that now. I don’t know what happened. It’s kind of like everyone’s made their own life now – like I did, but now mine’s all changed + I need their support but they’re all too busy. And I feel terrible because I know if you were here I’d be fine but you’re not and my friends don’t seem to care about how
lonely I must be. And I am. So lonely. It must really suck for all those people, like thirty years old, who have nothing. Sitting at home watching the Simpsons (like me – I love the Simpsons – they’re the greatest television show I swear – the reason it was invented – fuck ed o’ sullivan its moe + monty burns) but yeah the people who are alone that must bite. At least when I’m alone I can think of my friends & you. At least my biological clocks not ticking (yet, heh heh) oh I just made dinner + grated my finger. again. but with a big shredding grater so it took of this whole layer. And hurts. the bloods soaking through the band-aid but the food’s good.
but back to missing you. I do.. do you miss me? like really? It may just be how I’m feeling at the moment
(actually I know it is) but sometimes I get the[back]
feeling you don’t really. or not as much as I want you to. anyway. Am I being foolish trying to push on you something that doesn’t exist? not really anyway. I’ve no doubt you want to love, to love and be loved, you seem so much like you want to be in a long type relationship but do you with me? like honestly? honestly. I need to know. I feel like I’m just reaping the benefits of you wanting to have someone. I fit the bill after all. of being someone.
Why didn’t she finish the postscript? Why didn’t she give it? Did she start again and give him another? What did the first letter say? What’s changed in her life? Is her lover far away?
It starts off calmly. Sadly, but thoughtfully – I think she was writing it slowly. Yet with my knowledge of what is to come, I picture her straining to avoid mentioning the doubts and fears and hurts about her lover that are actually at the forefront of her mind. The first seventeen lines (until the ‘do you miss me?’) scream about what they do not say, rather than what they do say.
Yet from then she drops the pretense. (I’m saying this because this is what I’ve known in my own life – the unexpected phonecall which tries to be polite, which insists it’s about nothing in particular, and then suddenly explodes at some flashpoint; the brooding silence insisting it is not brooding which suddenly turns to accusation; I have done these things and had them done to me.) What had not been said is now said!
And then at this climax, at this point of intensity – it ends! What a poignant line – ‘I fit the bill after all. of being someone.’
I hope, all these years later, you’ve found the right person. I hope you still watch the Simpsons. I’m glad you left the letter in the book. It’s the most interesting thing I’ve ever found, a window into a stranger’s heart.
23 Thursday Apr 2009
Posted in history, Series: Thursday 3pm feature posts (2009)
For my eighth birthday, my uncle gave me a discarded library copy of the 1983 Guinness Book of Records. It became one of my favourite books. To my child mind, conditioned by test scores and sports statistics, it told the whole story of the world, of everything important.
One of the few records I remember vividly was that of the world’s tallest man, Robert Wadlow. The book featured a photograph of a plastic model of him, with Britian’s tallest living man and a man of average height standing next to it. At 8 foot 11 inches or 282 cm (and of course I memorised this measurement) he stood over a metre taller than a typical man.
He seemed a figure from the distant past, with nothing more to be known of him than his height, his date of birth in 1918 and his death at age 22. Twenty-two sounded quite old to me at eight. I wished I was the world’s tallest man and found my way into the Guinness Book of Records. Now, 22 sounds so young and I realise that he was born the year after my grandfather. And I would hate to be the world’s tallest man.
Last week I saw Robert Wadlow mentioned in passing and I went looking for him on the internet. I discovered there was so much to his story.
He was born in small town America – Alton, Illinois – and it seems the town has never got over its only claim on world attention. Today a bronze statue, life-size, of Robert is found at a local university, as well an exhibition at the museum.
Robert was normal height when he was born, but started growing rapidly in the first few months of his life because of an over-active pituitary gland. He attracted attention in newsreels as the world’s tallest boy scout; but he tried to be a normal American boy, collecting stamps and joining the Freemason youth club (presumably this what one did in small town America).
One source says he was happy at high-school and lived semi-normally, but when he got to college, people were not so understanding, and he returned home after one semester.
Accounts of his life on the internet and contemporaneous media have the glow of one-dimensional quirky human interest stories. He was called the ‘gentle giant’ and the photos show him smiling. Yet the suggestion of tragedy lies beneath the facts of his life. On imdb.com, a user-contributed biography (offering no sources and complete with many spelling errors, but having a certain passionate appeal) insists he lived a miserable life:
A tragic figure who hated his size and his life. He was forced into the role of a first-class freak by his father, who paraded him around the country in a specialized Ford Model T (it had the front passenger seat removed, and Robert sat in the back.) His father quit his job as worker at an oil company to devote himself to Robert and his career. In all, Robert made 747 personal appearances around the country, appearing at everything from store grand openings to Ringling Brothers/Barnum&Bailey Circus. He was born of normal size, but early in his life he developed a problem with his pituitary gland, and by age 9, he was 6 feet tall. He lived in a racist time in America, growing up in lilly white Alton, IL. He listened to the radio a lot and followed the rise of Hitler. He was fascinated by Germany enough to switch his foreign language class in high school from Latin to German. He was experimented on for many years at Washington University in St. Louis by a doctor who was from Germany. Robert would always insist on the doctor sharing stories of his homeland. His intelligence was limited. He graduated from high school, but dropped out of college after one semester. That is when he began his career. In his first job he promoted a shoe company, which supplied him with his size 37 shoe. For most of his life he was the center of attention. He made the newsreels anually on his birthday. The Alton Telegraph, the local newspaper, often followed his life. In July 1940, in Manistee, Michagan, Robert was being paid to appear in a 4th of July parade. The tempature was sweltering and the humidity unbearable. His father wrote a book along with a ghost writer in 1945 about Robert. It was a PR puff piece which glowed with anecdotes about what a great father Robert had. But, great father, or not, Robert had an infection on his left ankle which was left untreated, and on that hot summer day, the tallest man who ever lived finished his 4 hour appearance in the parade (he rode in the back of a truck,) and when he got back to the hotel room, he collapsed, and a doctor was summoned. He lingered in the hotel room for 3 days before he died. Two beds had to be placed end to end to accomodate him. In Alton, it was reported that 30,000 people attended his funeral. Remarkable only for his size, Robert Pershing Wadlow died an unfulfilled soul.
If nothing else, the imdb.com account is a fascinating embellishment of Wadlow’s life. I can’t find any other reference to the Nazi flirtations or the experiments. The official account agrees that he did spend the last years of his life promoting shoes. The circumstances of his death are also relatively uncontested. But most accounts stress how his parents did everything they could to prevent him becoming a freak. They sued a newspaper that described him as a ‘freak’; they destroyed all his belongings upon his death (the museum claims ‘We want to continue to honor their wishes, and are displaying what items we have in our museum with pride and dignity’) and they filled his grave with concrete to prevent his body being excavated for medical experiments. I keep thinking of his body lying under all that concrete.
The only book that seems to have been published about him besides the ‘PR puff-piece’ is an Alton published one from 2003 called ‘Boy Giant’. I think his story is worth exploring in a novel. And a film.
An interesting post on Robert can be found here. A short documentary can be found here.
20 Monday Apr 2009
Posted in film review
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I saw an advance screening of the Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In on the weekend. It is getting rave reviews (it’s in the 90s on the Rotten Tomatoes review aggregator) and a huge fan base (it’s in the all time top 250 for imdb.com, based on user ratings).
The film opens with a black screen in silence. Then snow starts falling. It’s an icy setting appropriate to the film. One review said that it will warm your heart as it chills your blood, but I only got the second feeling. A bullied 12 year old boy, Oskar, makes friends with a strange 12 year old girl named Eli as a series of gruesome murders happen around the area. It’s in the awkward adolescent friendship of two outsiders that we’re meant to have our heart warmed, but I didn’t connect with them. Oskar is too dazed and passive for me to care about him much, and, to heighten the suspense, the director holds us back from learning too much about Eli.
It’s a strange and chilling story and a final twist is still resonating with me (but only after my wife explained it to me). The direction was original, with constant defamiliarisations, throwing us into scenes we don’t immediately understand. (An effect heightened by reading the dialogue off subtitles.)
The best vampire film I’ve ever seen, but that’s not saying much.
Nathan Hobby, a biographer in Perth 