"Helping" (1987)

Read story by Robert Stone online.

Robert Stone's story is an absurdist and vaguely comical tale of an alcoholic relapse. It's gnawing at something deeper, but I'm not sure I know what that is any better than the two central characters, Chas Elliott and his wife Grace. He is a social worker giving in to burnout. She is a Child Protective Services lawyer. She wants to help but needs the layer of legal formalities to shield her from raw human drama. Chas is also a Vietnam veteran. At this point, I'm tired of Vietnam veterans and recovering alcoholic stories. I appreciate that the focus here is on the relapse, as that is one of the hardest and most mysterious sides of addiction and recovery. But I don't think it has much more to offer than the usual self-dramatizations. There are some exchanges between Chas and Grace that are bitter and caustic, but not particularly believable. They seem too disconnected from their evident rage, too poised and cool and articulate. The drama of alcoholism was popular and widely embraced in the '80s. We saw another example in a story earlier in this collection, Richard Bausch's "All the Way in Flagstaff, Arizona," which I didn't find much more convincing than this. Partly it's the literary aspects, so deliberately thought through, such as the many meanings and tones of the one-word title in the Stone story (or the parallel ambiguities of using "in" instead of "to" in the Bausch). Am I saying they're too good to be good? Well, yes, in a way. The drama in "Helping" is strange and hard to understand from the outside looking in, which is where Stone puts us. The attitudes of Chas—you can't understand if you're not a Vietnam veteran and/or recovering alcoholic—are difficult to separate from Stone's, if indeed they are different at all. They probably are. The two novels by Stone that I know—Dog Soldiers and A Flag for Sunrise—are very good as I recall. And "Helping" is obviously worked over and thought through to an admirable degree. I'm just not sure that the drama of alcoholism (which more and more seems to me related to narcissistic disorders) offers enough to support the long and artful exercise of this story.

The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories, ed. Tobias Wolff

Gone to New York (2005)

This collection of pieces by Ian Frazier looks a little like one of his collections of humorous pieces. Most come from the New Yorker and most are very short, under five printed pages. But the themes and style are more like his travel books, focused on his adopted home of New York City. He moved there in the '70s to work for the New Yorker and has lived there ever since, making it his base. He has lived in lower Manhattan, Brooklyn, and suburban New Jersey. He pokes at New York life in ways no one else ever seems to but that are perfectly characteristic of him. He researches how the Holland Tunnel was built in one of the longer pieces, for example, and piles on with unusual detail. In another piece, a short one, he collects comments left by people signing the registration book at a Brooklyn art museum. One continuing theme is funny in a droll New York kind of way, and that is his obsession with cleaning out plastic bags that collect in the highest branches of trees. He and a friend even design and patent a device, the "bag snagger," which they take on day trips around the city to clean. He says it replaced golf for them. Jamaica Kincaid writes an affectionate foreword—I'm not sure why, but it cheers me to find they are friends—and along the way asks perhaps the most salient question about Ian Frazier. "I asked myself, How did he do that? And that thought has never stopped occurring to me; to this day, when I read something new that he has written, I think, How did he do that?" It's true, and in addition he makes whatever it is look easy. One thing I admire and even envy is his prodigious reporting capability, which only means his willingness to sit and talk to people, ask questions, listen to the answers, and then report them out in his light and easy-rolling essays that nonetheless stay with you. And even though I have read his amazing family history more than once (Family), I don't think I ever realized before how proud he is to be from Ohio. He's careful to make sure we understand New York City—which he doesn't even love as much as Russia or the American Great Plains, let alone Ohio—is only his adopted home. It's not his real home. He's just been living there for a while. Maybe that explains why this is his slenderest travel volume. Certainly worth a look.

In case it's not at the library.

"Flight" (1938)

Read story by John Steinbeck online.

John Steinbeck's story involves a lot of elements familiar to his work, including a setting in Monterey, California, and a poor Hispanic family, living and working on a farm, eking out an existence. The father is dead and there are three children. The oldest is Pepe, at 19, who seems friendly and open and is described as lazy. He loves the switchblade knife his mother gave him as a keepsake of his father. In the story, she sends him to town for supplies, but when he returns he is in trouble. A confrontation occurred and he has killed someone. Now he must flee into the mountains. But he is ill-prepared for the flight, as the story now veers into man vs. nature business for most of its bulk, good stuff if not much new. It quickly becomes apparent this is going to be a doomed enterprise. There's little social commentary beyond the basic premise of the family's impoverishment. The story supplies concrete details of the trail, the escape, and what happens, as Pepe begins to lose everything piece by piece: the knife, the horse, his hat, the rifle he brought with him, and finally water. He's not prepared for any of it and his end is a sad one, but Steinbeck doesn't spend much time on that. He was a natural storyteller, able to move his narratives with physical description, and this story is a fine example. It's rarely surprising but always vivid and engaging, the kind of thing Jack London was also good at, including making its social points in quietly effective ways. Pepe's troubles have little to do with his ethnicity, but it's also obvious his ethnicity never makes anything easier. Early in the story we learn how his father died, and we meet his younger sister and brother, who are 12 and 14, and it's hard to see rosy futures for any of them, but that is never dwelt on. We are simply privy to this one terrible episode in their lives, reminiscent of the scene in a song by Neil Young, "Powderfinger." It's sad and terrible but feels eternal, like a biblical parable. Your heart can't help but go out to the good nature and stupidity of this typical 19-year-old, who believes he is an adult but is not. So it goes. This is a good one.

Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine

Faces Places (2017)

This documentary is a collaboration between Agnes Varda and JR, who travel the French countryside in a van that looks like a camera, taking pictures of people and plastering the results giant size on the sides of buildings. Both have established careers as photographers, though Varda's name is likely more associated with filmmaking because she was a key figure in the French New Wave of the late '50s and early '60s with such films as Cleo From 5 to 7. Lately she is better known for documentaries such as The Gleaners and I and The Beaches of Agnes. They are personal, quirky, and charming, and so is Faces Places, which might be my favorite of the three. It's a real collaboration too, as the van, the plastering aesthetic, and a lot of the ideas are JR's. We see them working out some of them here. With over 50 years' difference in their ages, the first surprise in a picture full of them is the kind of working chemistry they establish and maintain. Their sensibilities are well matched. JR's work shades over into realms of graffiti and even vandalism—he's a bit of a French Banksy. He takes the streets as the ultimate art gallery and he likes to work big. His van not only looks like a camera but has a photo booth in the back that churns out prints bigger than life. Cool Aunt Agnes Varda has an appreciation for JR's outlaw instinct but her own is more toward humanity and the pure pleasures of art, which rarely fail this movie. She just wishes JR would take off his shades once in a while. Faces Places is warm, generous, tender, insightful, and often very funny. They go to villages and make portraits of miners, farmers, goats, baristas, the wives of dockworkers, a postman, and more. They find an abandoned village, throw a picnic party, and cover the decaying buildings with faces. They have a sad encounter with Varda's long-time friend and colleague, Jean-Luc Godard. In one sequence they look for a place for an old photograph of Varda's and finally find it on a bunker that has fallen from a cliff onto a beach. The result is beautiful but the next day the elements of wind and tide have completely erased it. But that never stops them, or even discourages them much, and that commitment to the work, doing it and moving on to the next thing, may be the most moving element here. Although it could be the palpable connection they share. Or any of a number of brilliant images and many of the people they meet. It's hard to say because there are so many good things about this movie.

The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831)

I was surprised by how short this is—less than 20 pages, after all the attestations, certifications, and such. But then I realized I had it confused with the 1967 novel by William Styron, which I don't know. The incidents related here are certainly ripe for novelization (and a reportedly abysmal movie too just a year or two ago): 55 white men, women, and children slaughtered. Turner's dead-eyed confession is a compressed list of activities that took place on August 21 and 22, 1831. There's a sense Turner feels justified by a higher power, which he discusses as well. But much of it goes like this: "Having murdered Mrs. Waller and ten children, we started for Mr. William Williams' —having killed him and two little boys that were there; while engaged in this, Mrs. Williams fled and got some distance from the house, but she was pursued, overtaken, and compelled to get up behind one of the company, who brought her back, and after showing her the mangled body of her lifeless husband, she was told to get down and lay by his side, where she was shot dead." It's no exaggeration to call it a brutal massacre. It holds the record for numbers of victims in a slave rebellion. Interestingly, there weren't that many slave rebellions in 19th-century North America, as the Southern system was highly effective at controlling them. The savagery of this massacre, the rage it speaks to behind it, says at least as much about that system as any presumption of natural animal savagery among the slaves, which of course was the explanation given at the time. Most Roy Moore voters today doubtless still agree with that, but try to imagine how you would feel, enslaved. Inevitably, there are also questions about the motives of the lawyer who recorded Turner's confessions, a local attorney and white man named Thomas R. Gray. This text has to be taken as only a narrow window into the mind of the rebels. Gray includes Turner's spiritual beliefs as expressed, for example, but it's certainly possible he just made them and all of it up. It doesn't finally matter that much. We learn a great deal about the details of the massacre itself. It's the rage behind the incidents that's most palpable, whoever is relating the details. It took place in Southampton County, Virginia, which among other things suggests that the options for running away were limited. The slaves were very far from any place they could consider safe. The massacre appears more to be an act of righteous retribution—kill as many white people as they could before they were run to ground. And that sounds like about the way it went down. The results were as to be expected: 56 slaves executed for the deaths of 55 white people, and hundreds more lynched or violently abused. Slavery to continue for decades.

In case it's not at the library. (Library of America)

Truth (1968)

Some years ago, after I wrote about the first Led Zeppelin album, someone dropped by and left the following comment: "Gotta admit, I loved this album the first time I heard it - when it was called Truth, by the Jeff Beck Group." This was intriguing. I knew Beck and Jimmy Page both spent time in the Yardbirds but I hadn't realized there were such invidious distinctions to be made between them, with Beck as the genuine article (and/or first to it) and Page the talentless commercial copycat, or so I read the implication. Of course, most of Zepp's various plagiarism lawsuits speak for themselves. But it's not as if Beck and company are so much above that particular fray, with two songs here credited to Willie Dixon (same as Led Zeppelin) and three to "Jeffrey Rod" (that's Beck and Stewart, respectively), with "reworkings of previous blues songs" (it says in Wikipedia). I mostly missed Jeff Beck's early albums in their day and didn't really catch up with him until the mid-'70s and Blow by Blow and Wired, which are closer to jazz fusion. I liked them very much. It's interesting to circle back finally. Plainly I missed a lot. Truth is not only Beck's first solo album, but also a big break for Ron Wood and Rod Stewart (or Sir Roderick David Stewart, Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, as he is known now). I've never known what to make of Rod Stewart. In general, his voice is so singular it calls too much attention to itself for me. It can be effective at evoking a certain melancholy with remarkable resonance, e.g., most famously, "Maggie May," but a little of that can go a long way (and radio gave us a lot of it).

Within parameters, he always sounds the same. On Truth he sounds like Rod Stewart, with all his future history which we now know, in front of a blues jam, which works as well as anything, kind of, although the most melancholy track here is an instrumental, the traditional "Greensleeves." If that commenter intended a one-on-one comparison it does raise interesting questions. Who is the better singer, Robert Plant or Rod Stewart? Who is the better songwriter / band leader / guitar player, Jeff Beck or Jimmy Page? Of course, these things are easily muddied. That's Jimmy Page himself, and John Paul Jones for that matter, on one of the best tracks here, "Beck's Bolero." Jones is on other tracks too, and not just playing bass. Yet, whatever the reason, I can't concede Truth as the superior album to Led Zeppelin—Led Zeppelin's whole mood is not only more coherent, but operating on higher levels generally (keywords: dazed and confused). Truth is a bit tentative and patched together, uncertain of its direction and confecting a few different ones: the production polish of instrumental novelties like "Beck's Bolero" and "Greensleeves" (which come to think of it look forward to Blow by Blow), the spaces for Rod Stewart to ham it up and preen (notably the show tune "Ol' Man River," which unfortunately never fails to remind me of a Stan Freberg sketch) (note that no show tune appears on Led Zeppelin), and finally, my favorite, the longer bluesy rock band workouts. They are the longest tracks here, "Blues Deluxe" (by Jeffrey Rod) and "I Ain't Superstitious" (by Willie Dixon). My answer to my first question above, by the way, is Robert Plant, flaws and all. I just always hear too much of the ridiculous in Sir Rodney and really like only one or two early albums and some of the disco singles. The second question is not as easy, but I lean toward Beck. Certainly he is more lyrical and wide-ranging than Page as a guitar player, and perfectly capable of matching the power. From "Greensleeves" to "Blues Deluxe," Truth is a hodgepodge. But an interesting one with some great moments.

Love and Death (1975)

USA, 85 minutes
Director/writer: Woody Allen
Photography: Ghislain Cloquet
Music: Sergei Prokofiev
Editor: Marilyn McLaren
Cast: Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, James Tolkan, Harold Gould, Georges Adet, Despo Diamantidou, Frank Adu, Olga Georges-Picot, Jessica Harper, Lloyd Battista

Woody Allen's lampoon of Russian literature remains one of his funniest movies, arguably the best of the early comedies, and the last of them. But it was also an early sign that we might have a pretension problem on our hands. In Love and Death, people often erupt in philosophy jargon babble—"but judgment of any system or a priori relation of phenomena exists in any rational or metaphysical or at least epistemological contradiction to an abstract and empirical concept such as being or to be or to occur in the thing itself or of the thing itself"—which, even as it makes fun of such affectation, also serves to let us know Woody Allen has read philosophy. He's no nebbish. He's a real intellectual. (He also gets to have it both ways, as this particular speech is punctured by Allen's laugh line response: "Yeah, I've said that many times.")

The Russian setting of Love and Death is plainly Tolstoyan, taking place during the Napoleonic era. The scheme by Boris Grushenko (Allen) and his cousin Sonja (Diane Keaton) to assassinate Napoleon (James Tolkan) wallows in obvious Dostoevskian angst. And Sonja's life is Chekhovian. (I'm sure there are nods to Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, and others as well.) But the structure of the movie is more like a 19th-century American novel, Moby-Dick. That's the way of classic Woody Allen comedies, indeed of a certain style of movie comedy still used all the time today, from the Zucker brothers' Airplane! to Judd Apatow and beyond, and dating back to the Marx Brothers: set a quick pace and use everything you can think of that might work, visually, verbally, and every which way, and never stop doing that. But Love and Death has even one more secret weapon.

"A Country Love Story" (1950)

Story by Jean Stafford not available online.

Jean Stafford's story bears the familiar theme in postwar US of the tragedy of divorce. I use the word "tragedy" a little mockingly because it's so much more common and expected now. But it wasn't then, and if the implied alarms about societal breakdowns now seem overdone, the sadness and bewilderment of divorce is often effectively captured here. But there's also a sense that Stafford is leaning conveniently into the perception of tragedy, at least a little. At least in the biting title. The countryside is where this marriage goes to die, hand in hand with husband Daniel's illness, which first puts him in a sanitarium for a year and then, on doctor's orders (for the good air), to the place in the country he buys with his wife May, an old farmhouse in New England. It sounds like Daniel has tuberculosis, which I admit puts me in mind of The Magic Mountain, though that's probably me. Anyway, setting aside the amazing privilege so taken for granted in their lives, it seems like a good relationship, or has been for five years. It's now being tested by the intrusion of this disease and/or aging into another phase. At first things go well, "like a second honeymoon, for they had moved to a part of the North where they had never been and explored it together." As the first summer ends, however, Daniel turns to a writing project, and soon May feels isolated and abandoned. The relationship breaks down—we know enough to guess a few credible theories for why, but the story is not about explaining it, only charting it. They bicker. They can't make decisions. They talk less and less. The point of view is May's, and she is in pain but apparently helpless to do anything to make it better. This is very familiar to us, nearly 70 years on (a lifetime), though as I say it may have been more of a novelty then. The original source, which is common to so many of the stories in this collection, is the New Yorker. I know Stafford's name but haven't read much of her. This story is nicely put together—the characters are interesting, the language a pleasure. But it seems more of a type (early midcentury divorce American style), at least at this distance. There could well be many more good stories by her.

Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine

The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899)

The social scientist and economist Thorstein Veblen was born in Wisconsin and educated at Yale. His most enduring and famous contribution is probably the term "conspicuous consumption," which is explained at great length in this short book. His language is dense with minute logical connections and repetitive social science jargon of the time. Some of his favorite words include "invidious," "emulation," "reputability," and "honorific." I'm not sure I can exactly recommend The Theory of the Leisure Class, because it's kind of a slog, but I will say Veblen is capable of undercutting the stuffy tone with a lacerating wit. In his social science way he is a student of the Oscar Wilde school of paradoxical statement. "The ancient tradition of the predatory culture is that productive effort is to be shunned as being unworthy of able-bodied men.... The walking-stick serves the purpose of an advertisement that the bearer's hands are employed otherwise than in useful effort, and it therefore has utility as an evidence of leisure.... The possession and maintenance of slaves employed in the production of goods argues wealth and prowess, but the maintenance of servants who produce nothing argues still higher wealth and position." The latter nugget, for example, is a de facto explication of field slaves and house slaves. The book is rich with observations such as these. One of my favorites is an anecdote about a king whose servant inadvertently places him too close to the fire before hurrying off on other duties. His Majesty must suffer the pains of burnt feet because it would be undignified for him to get up and move the chair himself. I first read this book in the early '80s. Coming back to it throws things into relief. Now that we are deep into the decadent phase of this second Gilded Age, which was only starting then, it's more obvious how much these issues of economic inequalities were driving Veblen's thought—and his contempt. The interesting thing to me about his greatest hit, "conspicuous consumption," is that I suspect it needs no explanation whatsoever to anyone in the US who hears it. Everyone knows it intuitively and has their examples. Mine is the Rolex watch—or perhaps diamonds. At any rate, this book is more exactly about two types of conspicuous consumption: conspicuous waste and conspicuous leisure. But it all amounts to the same thing. The wealthy are entitled to use a lot of resources doing silly and/or reckless things, because they can—and you can't. It explains a lot about the way we live, and incidentally takes the caustic bitterness around the bend into a few dark night laughs. And the ethnic Norwegian name notwithstanding, it's as American as Wisconsin apple pie.

In case it's not at the library.

Matinee (1993)

USA, 99 minutes
Director: Joe Dante
Writers: Jerico, Charles S. Haas
Photography: John Hora
Music: Jerry Goldsmith
Editor: Marshall Harvey
Cast: John Goodman, Cathy Moriarty, Mark McCracken, William Schallert, Simon Fenton, Lisa Jakub, Kellie Martin, Omri Katz, James Villemarie, Dick Miller, John Sayles, Robert Picardo, Naomi Watts, Kevin McCarthy, Jesse White

Director Joe Dante's affectionate treatment of midcentury science fiction monster movies and the industry that spawned them is a mixed bag. It probably has too much nostalgia by rote and certainly way too much inadvertent '90s period detail, such as the boys' variously feathered haircuts. Officially the time setting is 1962. In fact, it's even more precise than that: October 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. But some fine Cadillacs in restoration do little to overcome those haircuts, let alone the ways of interacting. But never mind. John Goodman takes the reins as Lawrence Woolsey, a swaggering producer of shock cinema in the mold of William Castle, though he's also something of an Alfred Hitchcock wannabe. In Matinee, Woolsey is opening a new picture in a small Florida coastal town.

Castle, of course, was the man responsible in the late '50s and early '60s for gimmicky horror movies such as House on Haunted Hill, The Tingler, and 13 Ghosts. They were released with arcane come-ons such as "Emergo," "Percepto," and "Illusion-O," which amounted to rigging the actual theaters where they played with things like joy buzzers under seats, or pulleys and ropes overhead for floating skeletons at strategic points. Castle concocted brilliant and hilarious gimmicks like distributing $1,000 life insurance policies to attendees, in case they died of fright. He also produced (and even made a cameo appearance in) Rosemary's Baby. In many ways, you're likely in for more entertainment with a good biography of Castle than this movie, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth checking out.