Cormac Mac Airt

No word yet on when the Cormac McCarthy interview with Oprah Winfrey will take place. (Sweet jesus, did I just write that sentence?)

I still can't believe The Road has garnered all this praise (the Pulitzer Prize, mainstream celebrity, etc.) when earlier, better novels didn't. It seems sort of like Scorcese getting the Best Director Oscar for Faithful Departed when he directed Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, and Raging Bull all over twenty-five years ago. I guess McCarthy's old and those in literary officialdom decided they hadn't celebrated him enough.

He won the National Book Award for All the Pretty Horses back in 1992, and I thought that strange as well. Blood Meridian was published only seven years before, and it was a masterpiece on the order of Absalom, Absalom!. I remebered ATPH as a good novel, and less demanding of the reader, but not as one of his very best. No Country for Old Men, I thought, was better than The Road in certain ways, and I couldn't understand why it won nothing, wasn't on bestseller lists, etc., even though it was published just a year before The Road.

Then I started reading ATPH again (and I'll probably cycle through the rest of the border trilogy) just for comparison with the present Road phenomenon. Holy crap. Listen to this:

"Bye and bye they passed a stand of roadside cholla against which small birds had been driven by the storm and there impaled. Gray nameless birds espaliered in attitudes of stillborn flight or hanging loosely in their feathers. Some of them were still alive and they twisted on their spines as the horses passed and raised their heads and cried out but the horsemen rode on."

Those are just a few sentences buried in a paragraph a third of the way into ATPH. Having read the novel before, I know that the weird image of the birds perfectly foreshadows all of the awful shit about to happen to the protagonists, and even why it will happen. And those are magnificent sentences.

And so I am reminded--even when a McCarthy novel is not his best, it's better than just about anything else. And, in time, I can forget about the Matt Damon movie.

In time.

Carpe Diem?

I didn't tell you about the interview I had last week with the prep school. You may remember from a previous post that they had considered me (without my knowledge) for a teaching post a couple of years ago, and they tracked me down through the English department last month. Anyway, I agreed to go in for a series of interviews on Tuesday. It was weird.

On the way there I nurtured fantasies of a Dead Poets Society sort of gig (but without any student suicide and subsequent firing). You know, eating my lunches in a posh, mahogany-panelled room in between classes in which I found new ways to inspire my students by standing on furniture. That all seemed ok, I figured, if I got paid enough.

Well, I arrived and discovered no one had put much planning into my visit. The chair of the department had sent me an e-mail Monday afternoon--less than a day before the interview--informing me that I would teach a class on The Scarlet Letter. Good thing I reread it (a couple of years ago).

Because I am a bit of a planner, and because I did not care to look like an ass in front of a room full of students, I worried over the lesson. I spent the evening looking at crucial chapters and planning a discussion before going to bed. Then I awoke at 3 AM and neurotically rehearsed said lesson until the alarm rang at 6:30 AM.

So, after my unpleasant night with Hester Prynne, I arrived at the sprawling, 25-acre campus and jauntily strode to the main office--it was 8 AM, sharp. The chair of the department introduced himself and then promptly dropped me off in a colleague's empty classroom where I could wait. And wait. I guess they weren't ready for me.

45 minutes later, he retrieved me and thrust an itinerary into my hand. When we set up the interview, I was told I would be there from 8 AM until noon. The itinerary showed meetings until 2:30 PM. Sigh.

If only I had known that the itinerary was not real. Some of the meetings would be moved around, and one would be cancelled. I still had to roam the campus until after 2 PM, awash in confusion. I've seen more organization in single-celled bacteria.

Anyway, I met with the whole department for a chat in an enormous room which did, in fact, have mahogany panelling. I liked the younger people. There was an old-timer, as well, who has been teaching at the school for 34 years--after having a previous career at another school in New England! He is a great big guy, broad-shouldered and well over six-feet tall, but can best be described as doddering.

The only remotely Dead Poets Society-esque moment came when I taught. I gave a lesson to a group of sophomores, and they were excellent. They were, in fact, better than any college students I've ever had. Of course, the tuition at this high school runs about $12,000 per year more than my former college students' tuition, so they'd better be good. In fact, the students should probably have valets following them around, brushing off their sportcoats and carrying their books for them.

Later on I met the Head of School. Apparently she had decided to hate me before we met. I sat down in her office, and, after saying "hello," she asked me what I could possibly know about teaching in an "independent prep school" anyway? The hostility in her voice was disconcerting.

I replied that I helped to design and found a high school in California. (A damn fine college prep school, in fact.) In the middle of my sentence, though, she waved her hand dismissively at me and muttered, "Yes, yes; I read your resume."

Okey-dokey.

Somehow, I managed to struggle on. It turns out she's moving to a new job in Southern California. To the same ultra-rich town in which I grew up, in fact. She started to warm to me, which made me feel creepy. The conversation got around to the California state senator who wanted to hire me as a campaign advisor and sent me packing for graduate school in terror over the offer. At this point, the woman seemed genuinely impressed that I'd turned down a political career for academics. Things were going swimmingly.

Then the chair of the English department walked in and said I had to get to another meeting. The Head of School made the same sort of dismissive hand sweep that she'd used on me just ten minutes earlier. "Get out," she said to him, "I knew you were lingering out there!"

Then, with him standing just outside the open door directly behind me, she inveighed against him. Railed against him, really. "I hate lingerers!" she said. "He's a lingerer--always hanging outside my door! Don't you hate that type?"

I thought, "What the hell am I supposed to say?" I said nothing. You might say I felt uncomfortable.

Then it was back to lunch, eating a prepared meal in the panelled room and listening to my potential colleagues making jokes about the students. This time, they were discussing the giving out of awards.

Again, I sat silently.

By the time I got home, I was sick. I mean truly, physically sick. I spent three days with the flu. Coincidence? You decide.

Well, there has been no mention of money--but it would have to be more than the typically poor private school pay for me to give up my writing life and teach there. Harumph, I say.

Dead Rat

I located the source of the odor in our basement. For the last two weeks, I thought it was due to the mold that flourished after our tenant's hot water heater ruptured. No amount of bleach seemed to clear away the stench.

Then, last night, T was collecting the laundry when she noticed a bizarre, highly viscous drizzle from some insulation in the ceiling. She told me about the drizzle (it had the approximate color and flow of rubber cement), and I went down into the basement for what I realized would be a nasty job. I put on a mask and gloves and pulled the insulation down.

I now know the meaning of the word "miasma;" I feel what it means in the center of my being.

Because I Love You

This video appeared briefly on YouTube and has since been yanked. It is one of the best uses of the Internet I have ever seen: storage for a public access TV program from Atlanta.

Let Alexyss Tylor's zen-like ramble about sexual power wash over you as it appears to wash over her mother. I found two still-active links here

http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2007/04/another_excitin.html

and here

http://www.glumbert.com/media/power

Go. Watch. You'll be glad you did.

And so it goes.

Today I was building a bookshelf, and I found out Kurt Vonnegut died.

Tideland

Richard Roeper and A. O. Scott got together (sans Roger Ebert) to hate Terry Gilliam's new film Tideland. This once again proves what a couple of boneheads they are. Roeper said there was "no real fairy tale" element in the movie. "Real fairy tale"? Does he mean it doesn't contain the Disneyfied version of fairy tale-telling that somehow supplanted the older tradition of grotesque fairy tales in our culturally malnourished civilization? In that case, he's right. Tideland isn't Disney's version of Alice in Wonderland; it's Gilliam's.

A real fairy tale is cold and cutting and factual as death. And that is why fairy tales are beautiful--because they're honest in a way stories aiming at realism somehow cannot be. This is what Gilliam gets right, and why the film is worth seeing. It is also unpredictable, which goes far with me. No guns, no car chases (although there are explosions), and a resolution hard to foresee and yet mythically satisfying. I would pay to see any recent film that pulls off all of that.

Gilliam gets, I think, some things wrong, too, but the movie is certainly good enough for me to recommend it. He flirts with some cliched characters and ideas, the brain-damaged man-child for example, but in the end I think he pulls them off satisfactorily.

I think Tideland is unsafe in a way general audiences could not help but hate; people who have a particular fancy of what a little girl is like will most likely fear it—and therefore hate it—the most. I think the success of Little Miss Sunshine's protagonist could be instructively contrasted with the nearly uniform critical attack on the protagonist in this film; it might help us diagnose our cultural inability to see and understand children (which is why we crank out so many damaged ones).

This isn't Terry Gilliam's best film, but, thank god, neither is it The Brothers Grimm. Grimm was a look at fairy tales and folklore designed to make money, where Tideland is simply art.

See it. My only suggestion is NOT to listen to Gilliam's introduction, which is just a publicity stunt and quite misleading about the nature of the film. I suspect he's joking when he says the little girl is "innocent"—playing on the empty, self-deluding definition we tend to assign to the concept of innocence. Something far more interesting is going on here than edenic childhood bullshit, and I think critics are pissed because they wanted edenic childhood bullshit with a smattering of trendy dysfunction (viz Little Miss Sunshine). This is not neo-Indie Hollywood-approved dysfunction, it's sordid desperation—including such unusual subjects as mummification, necrophilia, incest, child abuse, and sociopathic mass murder.

Elsewhere, I heard Gilliam dryly say, "Children are resilient. Drop them and they bounce." The comment gets to the heart of the film: we're watching a little girl get dropped and seeing how she bounces when she hits the ground. Unpalatable, sure, but good fiction and a good film.