Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, by the Sieur Louis de Conte (1896)

I was tiring of Mark Twain somewhat after diligently reading a fair portion of his work, mostly chronologically, I almost skipped this gem and its strangely reverent fictionalized treatment of the life of Joan of Arc. The narrator of the formal long title, Sieur Louis de Conte, is based on a real person who grew up with Joan. She is a historical figure I never learned much about, only what I know from the epic silent movie of 1928, The Passion of Joan of Arc, which is only about her trial and death. This novel tells the whole weird, glorious story—tells it well, too—of the illiterate country girl of 17 who restored France’s faith in itself and was burnt at the stake for her troubles two years later, at 19. She has “Visions” (Twain’s capitalization). Sure, here in the 21st century we may be more inclined to account for a lot of it as mental illness. As if to shore up her credibility, Twain includes anecdotes that seem to indicate supernatural powers. Not sure how true some of these stories are. It’s fair to call the Joan of Arc story, even in its simplest terms, amazing—and of course it gets better when you make up miracles to go along with it. But it seems unlikely to me that Twain made up the apparent miracles we see here. He did have long-honed journalistic instincts, after all, although he is also plainly smitten with Joan, so maybe gullible in his readings. The same story about seeing through a ruse to correctly identify the king of France on her first meeting with him, for example, also appears in the 1999 Luc Besson movie The Messenger, but it’s not corroborated in Wikipedia. Now I want to seek out a good biography. Anyway, I found it interesting that Twain considered this his best novel, which is saying something considering the high general regard in the 20th century for Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. But I’m inclined to agree. Huck Finn, the only other contender (or maybe The Mysterious Stranger?), has beautiful passages that cement it with American experience in unusually pure ways, but as a novel it is deeply flawed. Even its most ardent advocates tend to dismiss the last third wholesale. Twain spent much of his career mocking and excoriating Romantic literature, yet here he betrays certain affinities with it. At the same time, Twain has much latitude to exercise his misgivings and prejudices about organized religion, as the trials of Joan of Arc represent a low point (among many) for the Catholic Church. A lot of the most annoying yarn-spinning tics of Twain are restrained here, though they do appear. It is historical fiction and a swooning romantic story, but it’s easily the most competent novel Twain ever wrote. If it doesn’t hit the heights of some of those Huck Finn passages, the voice that made them work commands this whole novel.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (Library of America)

8. Quicksilver Messenger Service, Happy Trails (1969)

The only album that matters by Quicksilver Messenger Service offers up a jam band San Francisco ballroom act live in concert(s)—and live in studio, and not above overdubbing either—working over a couple of Bo Diddley numbers, “Who Do You Love” on the first side and “Mona” on the second. There may be a case that Quicksilver is no better with Bo Diddley than the Grateful Dead were with Chuck Berry, but I’m not inclined to it. As a teen I adored the first side of Happy Trails and still do. They work it like jazz on “Who Do You Love,” politely passing around the soloing honors. Like the Allman Brothers they take way too long to wrap it up, but I am generally in a forgiving mood by then. The 25-minute so-called suite is divided into parts, depending on the soloist, even as the Bo Diddley beat carries on. The first, “When You Love,” features Gary Duncan delivering one of the most lyrical electric guitar solos I know with effortless purity, a thing of riveting beauty. It’s the section I always specifically listen for and it remains transcendent. I also liked “Where You Love,” which follows, featuring drummer and singer Greg Elmore, but that was mostly because I was so enamored of live recordings and crowd interactions then. It seems more a slight and somewhat silly interlude now, but “How You Love” picks up the pace again with John Cipollina’s abrupt, snarling electric guitar. David Freiberg follows with a bass solo on “Which Do You Love.” Don’t turn away from me just because I said “bass solo”—I see the expression on your face. This is no self-indulgent morass like too many of them, but an upbeat barn-burner less than two minutes that likely left his wrists sore.

And that was it for me with Happy Trails for a very long time. Friends would remind me the second side is good too, and yeah yeah, but it’s cut from a different cloth. More recently, however, on revisiting the album, I believe I have finally grokked it. The seven-minute cover of “Mona” is one thing, a good showcase for the much-vaunted electric guitar interplay of Duncan and Cipollina, but the drift is increasingly toward outer space and alien planets. “I’m gonna tell you Mona what I want to do” are practically the last words we hear. The singer seems to be losing his train of thought. “Maiden of the Cancer Moon”—is that Mona?—is only three minutes but follows the bent and takes it further. The guitar licks seem to be asking questions and then they are turned to hard labor. Where is this thing going? The 13-minute “Calvary” may or may not have the answers. It has the answers to something anyway. Note, on an elaborately themed western album that finishes off with a Roy Rogers chestnut, that it is “Calvary” and not “Cavalry,” as my brain keeps thinking it should be. This is a hostile landscape we occupy now. I think I can hear Ennio Morricone influence in spots. It has the feel of the harsh spaghetti western desert, but it put me in mind even more of a novel still nearly 20 years away when this was recorded, the desolated landscape of the 1985 Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, where Judge Holden and the Kid roamed, the antelope were slaughtered for hearty dinner by gangs of marauders, and all unimaginable things go on. I even hear touches of flamenco like seasoning and a heavenly vocal chorus for texture, but there’s no resolution. They leave us stranded on this strange planet. No wonder they threw on 90 seconds of “Happy Trails” to close. We need the soothing familiarity of Roy and Dale.

Nostalgia for the Light (2010)

Nostalgia de la luz, France / Germany / Chile / Spain, 90 minutes

Director/writer: Patricio Guzman

Photography: Katell Djian

Music: Miguel Miranda, Jose Miguel Tobar

Editors: Patricio Guzman, Emmanuelle Joly
With: Luis Henriquez, Gaspar Galaz, Lautaro Nunez, Miguel Lawner, Victor Gonzalez, Vicky Saaveda, Violeta Berrios

Nostalgia for the Light is a thoughtful documentary that teases us with wonders of the universe as seen from the sophisticated, internationally funded telescopes in Chile’s Atacama desert, conflating them with the atrocities of the Augusto Pinochet fascist regime. It attempts an elegiac exploration of the past on many levels, including explorations of exploration itself. Interviews with Chilean astronomers are included—perhaps because the conditions of the Atacama offer such opportunities, a fair number of Chileans take up the discipline. There’s a good deal of heady star-gaze cinematography too, suitable for dropping jaws. Then, later, there are also interviews with grieving relatives still looking for the remains of their disappeared loved ones. On the science side, archeologists and geologists are also heard from. A strong sense of the eerie, disquieting history of the desert grounds a sense of suspense.

But too often the two sides of this picture—the wonderful universe and the hideous humanity—struck me as strained, however sincere. The conceit is that everyone here, scientists and Pinochet victims alike, is looking into the past one way or another. Looking for the light, literal and metaphorical. And, indeed, the light from most of the stars we see at night is millions of years old by the time we see it. All those stars and galaxies might have burned out or got together and staged a musical before human beings even existed and we still wouldn’t know anything about it yet. One scientist here notes that, even between two people standing close the image they see of one another is in the past—millionths of a fraction of a second, but in the past. Moonlight takes a minute to reach us, sunlight eight minutes. So on so forth.

“Ladies in Waiting” (1975)

[spoilers] I recently reread Hugh B. Cave’s epic long story “Murgunstrumm,” which put me in the mood for some more of his luscious pulp—I understand it’s all he wrote and he wrote for decades. The premise in this one is that, a few months earlier, our young couple had visited a house in the New England countryside. They were shopping to buy, the realtor handed off the key to them, and they had been trapped there overnight in a freak snowstorm. It was plainly a traumatic experience but now it is August and they want to look at it again. Or the wife does—is quite insistent, in fact. The experience in April was harder on her and the husband can’t understand why she wants to look at it again. Maybe we can guess? I love how Cave piles on with the heavy-handed foreshadowing about this so-called Creighton house: “The Creightons had lived here for generations, having come here from Salem where one of their women in the days of witchcraft madness had been hanged for practicing demonolatry.” Clang clang clang! I love the word “demonolatry.” I mean, what do you think is going to happen? The thing is that this is Hugh B. Cave and it is the ‘70s, with sexual liberation in the air. Skyrockets in flight—afternoon delight! So that’s what happens and in its way it is beautiful:

He lay on his back, naked, with his nameless partner half beside him, half on him. He saw her scaly, misshapen breasts overflowing his chest and her monstrous, demonic face swaying in space above his own. And as he screamed,, he saw that she did have more than two hands: she had a whole writhing mass of them at the ends of long, searching tentacles.

The last thing he saw before his scream became that of a madman was a row of three others like her squatting by the wall, their tentacles restlessly reaching toward him as they impatiently awaited their turn.

Tentacles, yes! Note that this extended quote is the actual end of the story. It’s really the only appearance of tentacles, reserved by Cave to shock and pretty good at it. He is setting us up to think of witches which I believe are not usually associated with tentacles. Very Lovecraft in a way, very ‘30s and very ‘70s at once, and very Hugh B. Cave. Bravo.

Hugh B. Cave, Murgunstrumm and Others
A Century of Horror 1970-1979, ed. David Drake
Story not available online.

May December (2023)

I thought the Mary Kay Letourneau story provided a better frame for May December than Persona or any other cinematic references director Todd Haynes and writers Samy Burch and Alex Mechanik may have planted along the way. Julianne Moore has the Letourneau role, playing Gracie Atherton-Yoo, who was caught having sex with 13-year-old Korean-American Joe Yoo when she was 36 (by comparison, Letourneau’s 12-year-old paramour Vili Fualaau was Samoan). It’s 20 years later, prison sentence completed, back at home in Savannah, Georgia, together, Gracie and Joe now married with children. A TV movie is being made about the case. Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman) has been cast to play Gracie. She is visiting the family and their home to research her role. The dynamics between Gracie and Elizabeth (and one or two or three carefully composed shots) are where the Persona parallels originate. Portman and Moore are great, as they usually are, but I thought Charles Melton as Joe virtually stole the show, underscoring the kind of silent damage that goes on with sexual abuse. Joe is 36 in this picture, the same age as Gracie when she seduced him (in May December she is not a teacher but a coworker with Joe at a pet store). Their children are nearly grown—a pair of twins are graduating high school as part of the story here. Facing an empty nest at an age when many are starting a family, Joe is sad to see, a lost soul. His son thinks he is a joke. He is on the prowl for an affair but has no idea how to go about it. Deep resentments toward Gracie seem to be surfacing more and more undeniably. She still controls and manipulates him, treating him like a child. Moore plays Gracie as at once an innocent, a loving mama bear defending her family, and a monster, which is the picture’s subtle drift even as she goes on like the head of a happy brood. Portman is unsurprisingly very good as an awkward, intrusive, and in many ways unwelcome presence, asking inappropriate questions. When she’s called on it—she’s not often called on it—she grows defensive about the work and craft of the actor. She glides through many encounters on her star power. In a scene where she visits a high school theater class, one boy who is obviously a class clown asks her about shooting sex scenes. She takes the question seriously, answers in detail, and keeps calling him by name. It feels notably icky—like she might have some ideas about seducing him, inspired (she would no doubt say) by her studies of Gracie. I thought the picture at large was a bit muddled, though anchored by the stellar performances of the principals. There are times, likely because I’m male of a certain age, where Vili Fualaau strikes me not as victim, but as lucky, why if my 7th-grade biology teacher (who once told us to go home and tell our parents we had learned about “mastication” in science class) had ever approached me... Et cetera. You know how we can think. But May December in that regard is more realistic, showing the sad wreck that comes with all sexual abuse.

Jawbreaker’s 24 Hour Revenge Therapy (2018)

This 33-1/3 volume by Brooklyn-based writer Ronen Givony was something of a disorienting experience for me. I know so little about Jawbreaker and its milieu that it felt like reading about an imaginary band, like Spinal Tap. I did know contemporaneous Jawbox enough to realize I may have been mixing up the two acts, who are associated in various odd ways beyond the first syllable, including a split-single release in 1991. Both are considered “post-hardcore” but Jawbreaker leans decidedly more toward “emo,” a category I have long instinctively avoided. Not surprisingly, I’m not much into 24 Hour Revenge Therapy, which sounds to me like fairly uninspired, uh, post-hardcore. But Givony makes a reasonable case for it, delving into the lyrics at will. I take it as given that the album is important to an audience, although I must also note that Givony says it had sold only 70,000 copies by 2018, nearly 25 years after its release. Of more interest to me here was the narrative of punk-rock authenticity in the Bay Area, based around the fanzine Maximum Rocknroll and the Berkeley all-ages club on Gilman St. In that scene, signing to a major label was considered heretical and the price for doing so was banishment (“canceled,” it’s called today). Again, this is a corner of rock—“pop-punk” is another label—I just don’t know well. Green Day is probably the most famous example. They were banished. So was Jawbreaker, who not only signed with a major label, but also committed the sin of touring with Nirvana. It’s a tough world out there. Most purist impulses tend to be bullshit, but also I don’t hear that much of merit in the band or album, just between you and me. I can hear the Husker Du influence, and I was interested to learn what a landmark act Husker Du is for emo. It makes sense. Givony spends a lot of time on the mostly unintelligible lyrics, reaching for literary comparisons like John Milton. Well, maybe. The Wikipedia article even says their influence “has led some critics to label Jawbreaker as the best punk-rock band of the 1990s.” To me that’s ridiculous, but Givony makes a good case that the album is important and sincerely embraced by at least 70,000 people, so maybe so. I’ll just call it one more blind spot on my part.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

On Dangerous Ground (1951)

USA, 82 minutes

Directors: Nicholas Ray, Ida Lupino

Writers: A.I. Bezzerides, Nicholas Ray, Gerald Butler

Photography: George E. Diskant

Music: Bernard Herrmann

Editor: Roland Gross

Cast: Robert Ryan, Ida Lupino, Ward Bone, Ed Begley, Cleo Moore, Charles Kemper, Ian Wolfe, Sumner Williams, Frank Ferguson, Anthony Ross

The oddly structured and executed On Dangerous Ground is kind of a lumpy affair, arguably stagy and affected in many places. IMDb credits Ida Lupino as an uncredited director with Nicholas Ray, who also gets a credit as writer. Wikipedia has nothing to say about this so I’m not sure what the issues are. Just looking at it, it’s pretty clear most of the first 30 minutes are wasted on establishing that Jim Wilson (Robert Ryan) is a sadistic cop who beats confessions out of criminals on the regular. It’s not that it’s a bad plot point—indeed, it’s an important one. But they take too long with it in a movie that is already short.

There’s a strange, prolonged, and inadvertently hilarious scene, for example, where Wilson’s boss, Captain Brawley (Ed Begley), is eating solo at a restaurant. He’s going at it like a starving squirrel that just discovered garbage treasure. “More peas,” he orders, telling Wilson the restaurant serves unusually excellent vegetables. He has asked Wilson there to reprimand him, between mouthfuls, for Wilson’s brutality. But the warning doesn’t take, Wilson ruptures the bladder of a suspect during an interrogation, hospitalizing him. He is subsequently sent “upstate” to work a case and cool off. These scenes upstate are shot mostly on location in Granby, Colorado, at which point the picture notably comes alive.

Cane (1923)

This novel by Jean Toomer is short but difficult—I’m not even sure it’s a novel. It struck me as more a montage of poetry, script, and strangely written prose pieces. The first two-thirds is mostly very short pieces, and the last third is one long piece. Toomer is connected with the Harlem Renaissance but it was an association he resisted and rejected. His feelings about his heritage were complicated. His father was born into slavery. But Toomer, understandably enough, already wanted to live in a post-racial society. He identified as “American” and chafed under the “Negro” label. In many ways Cane represents these confusions and resentment. I didn’t get much from it. It seemed to me little more than occasionally interesting fragments and a lot of eccentric prose. Some pieces are written as or include passages set out like lines from a script for a stage play. The last, long section is mostly that. As usual, most poetry is lost on me. I note the rhyme schemes as such and rarely have the patience to parse it out. I’m reading this because it’s on Larry McCaffery’s list, “20th Century’s Greatest Hits: 100 English-Language Books of Fiction.” I see on the internet that Cane was generally liked in its time and after. Langston Hughes liked it. So did Richard Wright. W.E.B. Du Bois, reviewing it, wrote, “Toomer does not impress me as one who knows his Georgia but he does know human beings.” I can see that, in glimpses, but mostly it strikes me as distracted writing. Toomer was working a full-time job while he worked on Cane, principal of the Sparta Agricultural and Industrial Institute in Georgia. Wikipedia classifies Toomer and Cane as “High Modernist,” which maybe explains the weak or nonexistent narrative through-line. The novel it reminds me of most is William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, also deeply fragmented, in part because of the demands of a full-time job, but with more apparent story to it. I’m willing to take the word of the majority on Cane and think maybe I was in the wrong frame of mind for it. It’s a short book, but could well stand up to the scrutiny of multiple sessions of a reading group. From his biography more than his novel, I feel some affinity with Toomer, human being stuck with a demanding full-time job and the ambition to write.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.