Category Archives: Books and literature

The Great Gatsby: A review

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It’s terrific.  Let me get that out of the way; it’s a wonderful movie. The new Baz Luhrman movie, The Great Gatsby is deeply moving and powerful, not just Moulin Rouge set in Jazz Age New York.

As I watched the closing credits, I overheard this conversation from a woman seated behind me.  She said, “It was so stupid.  They didn’t have rap music back a hundred years ago or whatever.  And they shoulda got a good actor to play that Gatsby guy.  Like, I don’t know, Shia LaBeouf.”

There’s buzz about this film, and it’s mostly not good. 48% on Rotten Tomatoes. But I’ve read a lot of the negative reviews, and consider them about as insightful as the comments of the Shia LaBeouf lady. I’ve seen Gatsby compared to the Elizabeth Taylor Cleopatra for example. Seen it touted as a classic Hollywood disaster.  I can only say that they didn’t see the same movie I saw last night.

The main complaint I’ve heard is one you often hear about Baz Luhrman films: all style, no substance. Yes, he can do excess, he can do the big musical dance number, with writhing bodies and swooping cameras and garish lighting.  But can he tell a story, can he deliver believable human characters and make us care about them.

I suppose it’s fair to say that if you liked Moulin Rouge, you probably will like Gatsby, and if you hated Moulin Rouge you won’t much like Gatsby.  And yes, I really loved Moulin Rouge.  But Moulin Rouge is way more over-the-top than Gatsby.  What I don’t understand is critics who found Gatsby empty, who complain that they didn’t feel anything at the end.  I don’t mind admitting; I was a puddle.  I wept at the end.

And so many reviewers also insist that Luhrman’s not true to the spirit of the novel.  The Great Gatsby, they insist, is too important and powerful a novel to be given the Baz Luhrman treatment.  To which I would say this: we’ve seen a reverential Great Gatsby.  It had Robert Redford and Mia Farrow and was a movie so listless it just died.  F. Scott Fitzgerald was about energy.  His novel moves with the orgiastic excess of the Jazz Age.  The nightmarish party sequences Nick Carroway (Tobey Maguire) wanders through, lost and bewildered and excited and fascinated and titillated: pure Fitzgerald.

And why not use Jay-Z’s music there?  Why not make that connection aurally explicit, between the gin-fueled superabundance of the Jazz Age, and the coke-fueled excess of party scenes today?  Jay-Z’s a producer on the film, so why not let his rap comment on Nick’s self-destruction?

And those early party scenes are crucial, as establishing shots for what will come next.  But what I admire about the movie is, in fact, its restraint.  Luhrman clearly loves this great novel, and understands that at its heart, it’s basically a deeply tragic love story.

And that’s why Leonardo DiCaprio is so perfect as Jay Gatsby.  He can play Gatsby’s confidence, his quiet, easy off-hand competence.  But he also gives us layers, the insecurity that underlies the confidence, and the moral compromises that formed him.  When Nick says to him, ‘you can’t re-create the past,’ he responds, in one of the novel and film’s classic lines, ‘of course you can!’  But Gatsby isn’t actually re-creating the past.  He’s burying it.  He’s inventing an entirely new past, as he reinvents himself.

The film wouldn’t work without an actress capable of meeting DiCaprio’s brilliance in the role, and with Carey Mulligan, as Daisy Buchanan, Luhrman shows his gift for pitch-perfect casting.  She’s luminously vulnerable in the role. Daisy’s motivations are complex, both in the novel and the film.  It’s not as simple as leaving her cheating husband for the love of her life.  Mulligan gets it. The major dramatic question, of course, is ‘will Daisy leave her husband and marry Gatsby.’  And Joel Edgerton’s Tom Buchanan is splendidly vile.  Why wouldn’t she want to leave him? Because it’s not that easy.

It’s a movie about love, in all its variety.  There’s Gatsby’s (how to describe it?) confident desperation, self-assured neediness.  It’s not enough that Daisy declare her love for him.  She has to add something; publicly state that she has never loved Tom.  We wonder why she doesn’t just say it. But she knows things about Gatsby’s actual past.  Where did his money come from?  Will she be safe with a man whose fortune is built on criminality?

And when Tom (who is thuggish, but by no means unintelligent) goads Gatsby enough, we see that undercurrent of violence beneath Gatsby’s urbane exterior, and she’s frightened again.  (It’s DiCaprio’s finest moment, in a superb performance).  There’s Daisy’s love, confused and vulnerable, torn between her philandering husband and the various Gatsbys that reveal themselves. There’s Tom Buchanan’s love, brutal and loathsome, but maybe more real that Gatsby’s fantastic history.  There’s the elemental, inchoate, inarticulate, desperate love of George Wilson (the ever amazing Jason Clarke), married to the cutie-patootie party girl Myrtle (Isla Fisher), whose sordid affair with Tom Buchanan ends in such terrible tragedy.  And finally, there’s the love Nick Carroway has for Gatsby. In a lot of ways, it’s the most honest love in the whole movie, the masculine, straight friendship between Gatsby (who finally finds, in Nick, the one friend he can genuinely trust), and Nick, who sees in Jay Gatsby everything he wants to become.

It’s an intoxicating movie, not just because of Baz Luhrman’s dab hand with cinematic excess, but because, half-way through, he trusts these marvelous actors and that marvelous story and takes the time to let all the complicated emotions and competing objectives play themselves out.

And, yes, The Great Gatsby is also a political novel, with Gatsby as the living embodiment of the American Dream, with all the compromises and short cuts and moral ambiguity that implies.  It’s about the ultimate American success story, and the dark side of that success.  The politics aren’t front-and-center (in the novel or the film), but class issues and race issues remain in the background, quietly festering.

Anyway, it’s a brilliant movie.  Afterwards, my wife and I went out for ice cream with some friends, including their teenaged daughters.  They loved it too.  So, really, this is one where it might be best to ignore the critics. (Except, you know, me.)  It’s a remarkable film.

 

Rabid: A review

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I haven’t slept for two days. And that’s a good thing.  This book has its hooks in me, and for some reason I tend mostly to read it late at night.  And then, I can’t sleep.

Rabid: A Social History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus, it’s called.  By Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy.  And they’re not kidding about that ‘diabolical virus’ stuff.  Rabies is one scary kind of sick.

You get rabies, and you go viciously, violently nuts.  Rabies victims become irrationally furious.  Raving, maddened, biting mad.  Murderous.  Capable of horrific acts against their nearest and dearest. Frothing at the mouth.  It’s also called hydrophobia, because rabies’ victims are consumed with a terrible, unslakable thirst.  Simultaneously, they’re completely terrified of water, incapable of even being near it. That’s the part that keeps me up nights–thinking about that, about literally dying of thirst, while also utterly petrified with the fear of water. That’s one exquisite torture.

And the mortality rate is right up against 100 percent.  Occasionally, anecdotal evidence emerges of a rabies’ survivor. Most have been discounted. The thing is, rabies has a very long gestation period, and if you get to a bat or dog bite in time, there’s a perfectly fine treatment: a vaccine, developed by Louis Pasteur (the hero of the book).  It’s very effective.  Basic medical protocol nowadays for any bite victim is immediate application of the Pasteur treatment.  So folks, if you’re reading this, and your kid got bit by something, get ‘em to the doc.  Now.  If you wait too long . . .

There is now a treatment, a last ditch, experimental, only occasionally effective one.  One of the really remarkable stories in the book is the story of Jeanna Giese.  This Wikipedia article explains it well.  Jeanna was a teenaged girl, bit by a bat, who didn’t think anything of it until she’d developed full-on rabies.  With no effective treatments in the medical literature, her doctor, Rodney Willoughby came up with one.  It’s called the Milwaukee protocol, and it saved her life.  Willoughby figured he’d give her immune system a chance to fight it off by putting her in a coma. It worked.  Jeanna Giese survived, though when she came out of the coma, she’d lost most motor functions.  She had to learn how to walk again, how to feed herself, how to ride a bike.  But she lived, and is today a happy, healthy recent college graduate.  Since 2004, Willoughby’s treatment has been tried on thirty-five patients world-wide.  Six (including Giese) have survived.  It seems to help if, like Giese, the afflicted patient is a healthy, active young person.

Rabies has been essentially eradicated in the US and in most western societies.  There’s a vaccine for dogs, and an effective treatment for humans, if you catch it in time.  But rabies is still a killer in developing nations.  Some countries can’t afford to go on a vaccination program for dogs.  Can’t afford the post-bite protocols of Pasteur’s treatment for infected people. The island of Bali had essentially eliminated rabies entirely.  No native bat population, no infected dogs, on an island.  Then one guy smuggled in a dog that was, it turned out, infected.  And that dog bit another dog.  Within a few months, 250 humans had died from rabies.

Wasik and Murphy, however, are particularly interested in the social history aspect of rabies.  They believe in (and make a convincing case for) the idea that the basis for folk myths about vampires basically comes from rabies.  Think about it; a bite, leading to irrational vicious violent behavior. Plus, you know, bats. Works for zombies too, come to think of it. And (dogs, right?) werewolves.

And so Wasik and Murphy explore the whole history of vampire/werewolf/zombies. All three monsters are created by bites, all three are otherwise inexplicable, all three are terrifying. I learned a lot about vampire lore. I hadn’t realized that Bram Stoker’s Dracula didn’t start a vampire craze, but was sort of the culmination of an existing fascination. There’d been lots of vampire tales before his.  What Stoker accomplished was to connect vampires with aristocrats.  His Dracula is a nobleman seducer, at least somewhat charming, not the vicious indiscriminate killer of previous iterations.

But the larger point of the book has to do with the relationship between mankind and the animals we befriend.  Rabies disproportionately affects dogs, and we think of dogs as man’s best friend.  We love our dogs.  We prize them for their loyalty and affection.  I had a dog growing up, a wonderful mutt that I would have trusted with my life.  I named her Prancer, leading to reindeer names for her one and only litter of puppies (a Donner, a Blitzen, a Cupid).  She was part toy collie, part something else, and I think probably part sheep; her coat was white and thick.  Two of my children have dogs.  It’s difficult to imagine human society without dogs.

And yet, rabies turns that inside out and upside down.  Dogs, our loyal friends, become unrecognizable: treacherous, ferocious, deadly.  It’s awful.  And when humans contract the illness, they also become Other, ravening, mad strangers.

And isn’t that the tragedy of zombie movies?  That these insensate beings bent on our destruction were once human beings, once our friends and neighbors and family members?  The tragedy of rabies becomes the fictional tragedy of popular fiction–friends become dreadful and strange and lethal.

It’s not just rabies.  The book also discusses other zootropic diseases (transmission from animals to humans).  The great 1918 flu pandemic killed 3 to 5 percent of the world’s population–possibly 100 million people world-wide.  It was most likely a variant of swine flu.  The black death, plague, was transmitted via the fleas on rats, while smallpox, maybe the worst killer in human history, is from cowpox.  Cattle, pigs and dogs, and rats; the Four Horsemen of the apocalypse.  Man’s best friend, mankind’s favorite sources for meat, and our garbage dump neighbors.

Wasik and Murphy write superbly, with just enough sense of snarky irony to take the edge off their subject matter, but with genuine erudition and insight.  After my daughter recommended it, I couldn’t put it down, though it’s also in many ways a horrifying read.  Rabies, man.  Scary stuff.  And this is a great book about that scariness.

The Shakespeare authorship (non) controversy

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There isn’t a Shakespeare authorship controversy.  No such controversy exists.  Shakespeare’s plays were written by William Shakespeare, glover’s son from Stratford-on-Avon and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s men.  They were not written by the Earl of Oxford or Francis Bacon or Queen Elizabeth, or Christopher Marlowe, or anyone else. There does not exist any evidence whatsoever to support any other conclusion. Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.  Period.

I hate doing this.  First, I hate just stating something dogmatically like that; it goes against my deepest instincts. I’m not that guy.  And I hate debunking conspiracy theories.  It doesn’t do any good. People who believe that the CIA/Cubans/Mafiosi killed Kennedy, or that Obama was born in Kenya, or that George W. Bush blew up the Twin Towers, will NOT be persuaded otherwise; they are, in my experience, completely impervious to evidence.

And the Shakespeare authorship conspiracists are, in my experience, an agreeable bunch of people.  First one I ever met was many years ago, when I was acting in a summer stock company in southern Indiana.  One of my co-actors was a committed Oxfordian, and he challenged me to read The Mysterious William Shakespeare: the Man and the Myth, by Charlton Ogburn Jr.  I thought, why not?  I read it, and had two reactions–a violent dislike for the writing style of Charlton Ogburn Jr., and an utter conviction that Shakespeare of Stratford wrote the plays. But I stayed friends with my co-actor. He was a nice guy, and a good actor.

Jim Bennett is a Facebook friend of mine, and another agreeable guy.  Also an Oxfordian.  He recently published an an article in the Deseret News, arguing that the plays attributed to William Shakespeare were actually written by Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford.

Now, I think there are lots of very good reasons to summarily reject this theory.  First, there exists absolutely no evidence to support it.  We know Oxford wrote and published poems, and he was praised for his plays, though none have survived.  And he liked the theatre, sponsoring a boy’s company.  But none of that constitutes evidence.

Jim Bennett’s article says that a guy in Oxford’s position couldn’t write plays openly, and so used a pen name.  But that’s silly.  Oxford wrote plays publicly, was known to do so, and was praised for it.  His plays haven’t survived, but that’s not remotely unusual; most plays that were produced in the Elizabethan/Jacobean period, at least 90%, weren’t published.  Plays were owned by acting companies, in the sense that the manuscripts were physically owned and controlled by someone, in that pre-copyright era. Publishing them worked to the company’s disadvantage.  You might sell a play that wasn’t in your performance repertoire anymore to a publisher for a little extra cash, and publishers were known to steal manuscripts, or hire folks to sit in the theater and write down as many lines as they could and publish that–it was an unscrupulous and deeply competitive publishing environment.  But mostly plays weren’t published.

There were two kinds of publications in the Elizabethan/Jacobean period; quartos and folios.  Think of them as ‘paperbacks’ and ‘hardbacks.’  Quartos were smaller and cheaper, folios larger and more expensive.  The reason we have the Shakespeare canon today is because after his death, two actor friends, John Heminges and Henry Condell, published them in the First Folio.  Only one other playwright from that period had his plays published in a Folio edition–Ben Jonson, who self-published a Folio, basically a vanity project. Anyway, the First Folio has thirty-six plays, and is the only reliable source for twenty of them.  It’s missing two: Pericles, and Two Noble Kinsmen: we have those plays in quarto form.  But without the Folio, well, our world would be terribly impoverished.  We owe Heminges and Condell a great debt.

So, okay, Heminges and Condell had profited their entire lives from those plays. Literally profited–they were shareholders in the most popular theatre company in England, their popularity derived mostly from the plays for which they held more or less exclusive performance access. They published the plays, partly, because they weren’t as popular anymore, but also, as an act of friendship, as their preface makes clear.  They wanted to correct old errors: previous publications were, in their words, “maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of injurious imposters.”  The First Folio came out in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death, and nearly twenty after Oxford’s death.  If Shakespeare, the actor, didn’t write them, wouldn’t his claimed authorship be a perfect example of a ‘fraud’ by an ‘injurious imposter?’  Perfect opportunity for two guys in the know to set the record straight.  If in fact Oxford used Shakespeare as a pen name because it was politically dangerous of him to claim authorship while he lived, well what possible harm could come from coming clean twenty years after his death?

But Heminges and Condell continued to assert that their old actor friend, William Shakespeare, had written them.  Why would they do that?  Well, best answer is because he did write them.

Now, you can say that ‘William Shakespeare’ was simply a pen name for a different author, who for reasons of his/her own chose to remain Anonymous.  So who was the real author?  Well, presumably a female writer might have wanted to use a pseudonym. We don’t know how many ladies-in-waiting Elizabeth had–we have names for twelve.  Could have been any of them.  What about Elizabeth’s Privy Council?  Cecil, Bacon, Walsingham, Raleigh, Dudley, Essex, Devereaux?  Coulda been any of them too.  I mean, Oxford’s not a terrible choice, but he’s by no means the only possible choice.  His girlfriend, Anne Vavasour–also a lady-in-waiting, and boy did Oxford get in trouble when he knocked her up–is every bit as likely.  In the sense that there’s no evidence for her either.

Jim makes a big deal of the Sonnets, arguing that they have a biographical component that works for Oxford and doesn’t work for Shakespeare.  Sorry to say, but parsing the Sonnets for biographical info is a pretty fruitless exercise; there’s just nothing in the Sonnets that rises to the level of evidence for authorship.  It can be legitimately ‘proved’ that whoever wrote the Sonnets was straight, gay, male, female, old, young, ugly and gorgeous.  They’re poems.  They’re works of fiction.  They’re also really good.  A few of Oxford’s poems have survived, and they’re not half bad. They’re also not Shakespeare.

And there is a biographical problem that eliminates Oxford entirely. We know when he died, in 1604.  Macbeth was first performed in 1606, and makes specific repeated reference to the Gunpowder plot of 1605.  Shakespeare wrote Macbeth, and Oxford couldn’t have.  So there’s that.

You’ll hear stuff like “the plays are full of politics–they had to have been written by a politician.” Piffle. The Inns of Court was where government types hung out, and it was across the river from Southwark. How much could an enterprising playwright learn just hanging out in pubs?  Plus, most of the politics he just got from Holinshed’s Chronicles.  The first big book of British history, and a huge bestseller–it was Shakespeare’s favorite source.

Ultimately, though, I find the notion that Oxford had to have written the plays because a half-educated hick from Stratford couldn’t have repugnant.  There’s a class thing going on there, an assumption that of course the author of those magnificent plays had to have been an aristocrat.  To me, though, if we read the plays and have to conclude any single thing about their authorship, it would have to be this: they were written by an actor.  They were, first and foremost, written by a man who spent his life working professionally in the theatre.  They were not the product of an amateur, a dabbler, a dilettante playboy like our pal Eddie de Vere.  They were constructed by a master craftsman, a man who knew how to build a character and sustain dramatic action, how to keep a story moving on-stage.  They were written, in short, by William Shakespeare, professional actor, and also a glover’s son from Stratford.

Conspiracy theorists are ultimately unpersuadable. If you’re on the fence, though, remember this.  Nobody, absolutely nobody has been studied more thoroughly than Shakespeare.  The numbers of scholars who earned tenure by writing about Shakespeare has to number in the thousands. And the percentage of people who have spent their life studying Shakespeare and who believe Oxford wrote the plays is effectively zero.  This isn’t just professional jealousy and prejudice. They believe the Stratford Shakespeare wrote the plays  because that’s what all the evidence says.  All of it.

 

Oz, the Great and Powerful: a review

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Oz, The Great and Powerful has been in town for awhile, a movie my wife and I wanted to catch, but one that was always sort of a second choice.  Great cast: James Franco, Michelle Williams, Rachel Weisz, Mila Kunis.  Sam Raimi directed.  The trailer was terrific, gorgeous. Finally, Saturday, we took it in.  The trailer was right–it’s a lovely film to look at.  Oz is magical, luminescent.  The film, however, not so much.

Terrific production design, a first-rate cast and a really fascinating premise, turns out, isn’t enough. You can have all that, and still end up with a lackluster, even annoyingly smug little movie, if the writing’s bad.  As we left the theater, I overheard folks dissing the actors: “James Franco was terrible, wasn’t he?”  That kind of thing.  Audiences do that–think an actor is to blame for a weak performance.  Most of the time, the actor’s up there doing the best s/he can with a poor script.  And that’s what dooms Oz, The Dull and Mediocre.

I used to teach a class at BYU, TMA 114, remember it fondly, a class on basic dramatic structure. Basic Protagonist/Objective/Obstacle kind of stuff–a class for freshman.  And when we talked about the attributes of an interesting protagonist, the most important one was volition.  A protagonist, to be compelling, has to drive the action of the story.  The protagonist has to make the most important decisions, has to have a strong and interesting objective, something s/he wants desperately.  A non-volitional protagonist is a character to whom things happens, as opposed to making things happen. What you want is a volitional protagonist.

Sometimes you can write a non-volitional protagonist and make it work: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, for example, manages to be an interesting film despite a non-volitional protagonist.  Forrest Gump has a fairly non-volitional protagonist.  But more often, you end up with a film like Glitter, the Mariah Carey vehicle from like ten years ago, where the main character makes no major decisions about anything, ever, and as a result comes across as the most weak-willed, unwatchably annoying character ever filmed.

So you want a strongly volitional protagonist.  Look at the Wizard of Oz.  You know the film, 1939, a young Judy Garland incandescent as Dorothy, with the great Margaret Hamilton as the Wicked Witch.  Dorothy arrives in Oz, and essentially from the beginning of the film tells everyone she meets that she wants to go home.  That’s her objective throughout, and there’s hardly a moment in the film when her character’s not pursuing it.  And the Tin Woodman and Cowardly Lion and Scarecrow (even Toto, the dog) are there to help her achieve it.  And they also have strong and interesting objectives of their own. And the result, of course, is one of the greatest films ever made, with a tremendously compelling main character. Dorothy is the protagonist, and we root for her throughout. Even the song, “Somewhere over the Rainbow” supports her quest: ‘why, oh, why, can’t I?’

And that’s precisely the problem with Oz, the Quotidian and Unremarkable.  James Franco plays Oz; short for Oscar Something Something.  He’s a conman, a circus conman, a stage magician.  He’s all misdirection and showmanship, but fundamentally shallow and soulless, with a tawdry seduction routine involving music boxes, which he buys en masse.  He climbs in a hot air balloon to escape a jealous husband/boyfriend, and a gale blows him away to Oz, shifting the movie from black and white to Technicolor (in a meaningless homage to this film’s much superior predecessor).  He arrives in Oz, meets a pretty girl, Theodora (Mila Kunis), a witch, who takes him into the Emerald City and tries to enlist him to kill the wicked witch.  He pulls the music box act on her, and seduces her.  (It’s a family film, and the question of what exactly happens sexually between them is left deliberately vague, but her subsequent actions only make sense if we assume he really does seduce her, and then dumps her.)

Turns out, though, that the wicked witch he’s agreed to kill for Theodora, is actually Glinda (Michelle Williams), the good witch, and Theodora and her sister Evanora (Rachel Weisz) are the evil witches.  Glinda’s been waiting for the fulfillment of a prophecy from her father, a powerful wizard, that after his defeat, another wizard would come and free Oz.  Glinda convinces herself that this new wizard is James Franco.

But through most of the film, Franco’s Oz doesn’t know what to do or how to do it. He sort of drifts through the film, following the lead of whichever pretty witch he’s happened to talk to most recently.  When he’s with Theodora, he does what she says; when he’s with Glinda, he does what she says.  Finally, the last twenty minutes of the film, he figures out a way to con the Wicked Witches, and uses his prestidigitation to Win the Day, and with it, Win the Girl. He’s interesting for twenty minutes. Otherwise, he’s a weak character, skating by on charm.

Of course, in part, that’s James Franco.  In something like 127 Hours, when he’s playing a character with a strong objective, he can be terrific.  But he’s a good looking guy, a bright guy, almost too talented for his own good.  When asked to host the Oscars, he basically floated through the night, grinning and reading his lines, but adding nothing of his own to the occasion.  It was a lazy performance.  In this, he’s certainly convincing as a conman and sleaze.  But when he tries to deepen and enrichen the character, it seems perfunctory. And the writers did him no favors. He’s playing a character without a strong objective, and he seems, as a character, correspondingly aimless. I’m not sure he’s a good enough actor to manufacture a forceful personality not directly suggested by the script.

He’s not, in other words, Rachel Weisz. The actresses fare a bit better, although the character objectives they’re asked to play are non-specific and vague, and you can see how hard they have to work to give this gorgeous-but-listless film some energy.  Rachel Weisz is the queen of strong character choices, and makes the most of an underwritten role.  As unconvincing as Evanora is, Weisz commands the screen in all her scenes; also she looks terrific.

Poor Mila Kunis has the worst-written part in the film, poor thing, an innocent girl who for some reason is also just wicked–no explanation, she just is.  Then, when seduced and spurned, she literally turns green with envy, puts on the whole Margaret Hamilton regalia.  In other words, at the very point where her character gets interesting, she has to assume a characterization initially created by another actor.  And basically her role is to fly around, cackling, and making dire threats she never seems to act on.  It’s a thankless role; I suppose she does her best with it.

And Michelle Williams; my gosh, what a waste.  Raimi has Michelle Williams in his film, and can’t think of anything more to do with her than have her play The Pretty Girl.  She’s the most astonishing actor, the queen of indies, a woman of extraordinary range and interpretative power.  She actually even does some nice work here.  Glinda is a woman of faith.  Her father said a wizard would come, and by golly, here one is, so I’m going to believe in him, period.  She has no illusions about Oz’s integrity or magical abilities; she decides to Believe, as an act of will.  That’s a subtle thing to convey, and Williams sells it; sells religious faith and basic goodness.  And then at the end of the film, this strong and faithful woman, having saved her kingdom, is supposed to be satisfied with her big reward–some projection booth nookie with James Franco.  Blech.  That ending left such a sour taste, I couldn’t wait to leave the theater.

It’s the kind of film that gets more depressing the more you think of it.  We saw it on Saturday, and I’m writing this on Monday, during which time my reaction has gone from “it’s okay, not terrible” to “major disappointment.”

It’s not the source material.  They could have done more with it, the writers. (For one thing, why does Oz never question, like, his own sanity, being transported to a completely different magical realm named after himself?  Wouldn’t you be looking around for the guys with the butterfly nets?)  The musical Wicked also plays fast and loose with both the Oz myth, and its own source, the Gregory Maguire novel Wicked.  I like Maguire’s novel a lot more than I like the musical, but the show does have some great songs, and Elphaba is a strong, volitional protagonist.  Oz: The Moronic and Offensive will be deservedly forgotten this time next year.  Dorothy’s Oz will live forever.

 

The Zen of the Knuckleball

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A major league fastball arrives at the plate at a velocity of around 90 to 95 MPH.  To throw a ball that hard requires that a pitcher turn his entire body into a sling, generating power, not just from his arm and shoulder, but also his thighs, knees, back.  Throwing a fastball is a violent and unnatural act, one which puts tremendous pressure on the shoulder, the elbow, the arm. A list of pitchers who have undergone Tommy John surgery, an ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction, in which the ulnar collateral ligament is replaced with a tendon from another part of the body, would fill an All-star roster.

The point isn’t just to throw the ball hard.  Imagine trying to hit a baseball with a stick, thrown at top speed from a distance of 60 feet 6 inches.  Sounds impossible, doesn’t it?  But in fact, professional hitters have extraordinary reflexes and fast-twitch fibers and hand-eye coordination, and if you just throw the ball hard, you’ll get clobbered.  The point is to spin the ball, impart movement on it, change speeds, try to disrupt the hitter’s timing.  Put enough spin on the ball, and it slows down, and drops precipitously at the last second–a change-up.  Or you can spin it so it changes direction–a curve.  Or move laterally–a slider.  And there are dozens of deadly variations on each of those pitches.  Splitters and cut fastballs and circle changes and screwballs and slurves.  All attempts to fool a pitcher, to disrupt him.  To throw the ball past him.

And then there’s the knuckleball.The anti-pitch.  Fluky, freaky. This video shows how you throw one–you push the ball out of your hand using your fingertips.  It’s not really thrown with the knuckles at all.  Thrown much softer–a relaxed, easy motion.  The point is to impart as little spin as possible.  Let the ball float up there, acted on by air currents.  Maybe it drops.  Maybe it sails.  As the pitcher, you don’t know where it’s going, and of course, neither does the batter. It looks like the easiest pitch in the world to hit–a batting practice fastball.  And then it jumps around unexpectedly.  The batter takes his best home run swing, and ends up whiffing, looking completely foolish.

It’s kind of a beautiful thing.  The point of a fastball/curve/change/slider pitcher is to control the outcome–you want the ball to cross a tiny corner of the plate, spinning and curving, at a velocity that makes it nearly impossible to hit.  A knuckleball pitcher, on the other hand, trusts to forces beyond his control.  Invisible air currents control the pitch.  Whatever happens, happens, dude.  But, man, can it be effective.  Here’s the great Tim Wakefield against the Yankees, a playoff game in 2003.  Best hitters in baseball completely helpless against a pitch arriving at home at 63 miles per hour.

And now we have a terrific new documentary, Knuckleball! documenting the 2011 season, and featuring Wakefield, in his last season, and R. A. Dickey of the (then) Mets, who emerged from the shadows that year. It makes sense that it would focus on just two pitchers, because throughout the history of baseball, there are really never more than a couple of knuckleballers working at any given time.  Hoyt Wilhelm and Wilbur Wood, when I was a kid. Then it was Phil and Joe Niekro and Charlie Hough in the 70s and 80′s, Bert Hooten after that.  Wakefield came up in ’92, and just retired, and now it’s R. A. Dickey, the new kid on the block.

But when you consider how few of them there have been, it’s remarkable how good they’ve been.  Two knuckleballers, Wilhelm and Phil Niekro, are in the Hall of Fame.  Joe Niekro could be.  Wakefield’s credentials are perhaps just a titch below that standard, but with over 200 career wins, he’s been an extraordinarily effective and consistent pitcher.  For the most part, knuckleballers turn to the pitch out of desperation.  Guys who want a career, and can’t figure out any other way to get batters out, turn to the knuckler, hoping against hope they can master it.  Most can’t. It’s a tricky and difficult pitch to learn how to throw consistently.  But if you can manage it, you can throw it basically forever. You throw so softly, it doesn’t put much pressure on your arm. Phil Niekro pitched ’til he was 48; Wilhelm until he was 50.  Wakefield had a 20 year career.

But they’re also an interesting bunch of guys.  When I was a kid, my favorite baseball book was Jim Bouton’s Ball Four.  The first great baseball tell-all, profane and funny and moving.  Bouton had been a great fastball pitcher for the Yankees, then blew his arm out.  Ball Four describes, in part, Bouton’s attempt to refashion a career by throwing the knuckleball.  He describes the frustration of it–one day, it dances like a ping pong ball in a hurricane, the next day it spins, and gets hit very hard by large hairy men with clubs in their hands. You get Bouton’s love for the game, his dogged determination and grit.  You also get a sense of a locker room, the rude humor, the casual insults, the camaraderie.  Bouton’s also in the doc; who knows how long his career as a knuckleballer might have lasted, were it not for being effectively black-listed by the baseball establishment for writing his book. But the point is that Bouton was a smart, observant, interesting guy, and a fine writer. (After his baseball career finished, he became wealthy by inventing Big League Chew–a bubblegum that looked like chewing tobacco, for kids who wanted to look especially cool.)

So is R. A. Dickey.  He’s also got a book out: Wherever I wind up: My Quest for Truth, Authenticity and the Perfect Knuckleball.  It’s a wonderful book, warm and insightful and funny.  I also love his blog.

It makes me think that there’s something fascinating about this pitch, this odd sort of anti-pitch.  Everything about it seems backward.  You control events by losing control of them–you admit you don’t know where the ball is going, and you’re okay with that fact.  It’s pretty Zen, really–I’ll got with the flow here, I’ll let the ball do whatever the ball wants to do. Only some guys can do that, and they tend to be interesting people, unusually thoughtful, outsiders and mavericks.

And then you get in trouble–walk a couple of guys (always a knuckleball possibility), maybe a wild pitch.  (If you don’t know where it’s going, and if the batter doesn’t know where it’s going, then obviously the catcher doesn’t know either!).  A conventional pitcher, in that situation, wants to throw harder.  The pitching coach comes out, says ‘okay, Ace, time to really bear down.’  If you ordinarily throw 93, now is time to throw 94.  You want to spin the ball more severely, catch even less of the corner, really hum it in there.

But not a knuckleballer.  If you try to throw a knuckleball harder, you’ll spin it, and it’ll get hit. A knuckleball pitcher wants to throw the ball softer. Try less to control events.  Trust even more to chance and fortune.  Like I said: Zen.

I love that.  I especially love it as a writer.  When you’re up against a deadline, and facing writer’s block, the temptation is to force it.  You work yourself into a state, you beat yourself up, you go ‘come on, damn it, think of something.  Write.  Now!

It never works.  And I’ve come to realize there’s a real wisdom to knuckleballing.  Maybe the answer, in times of high stress, is to relax. Trust the air currents more.  Let happen what’s going happen.  Leave things, a bit, to chance.

Throw softer.

John Dies at the End: A review

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Let me just put it out there; you either like this kind of movie, or you don’t, and there’s an easy way to tell if you’ll like this one.  John Dies at the End begins with a riddle. The riddle scene is completely self-contained; doesn’t have anything to do with the rest of the movie, except it also captures perfectly the movie’s style and approach.  It involves decapitation, and the axe with which it was performed.  It takes about 90 seconds. I honestly don’t know the answer to the riddle. I watched it with my daughter, and when that first 90 seconds was over, we both jumped out of our chairs exclaiming stuff like ‘holy freak, that was awesome!’  And we both loved the rest of the movie.  Other family members were less enthusiastic, and didn’t stick around.  So, honestly, give it 90 seconds, and you’ll know.

And also, SPOILER: John either does, or does not die at the end.  It’s actually closer to the middle, and it doesn’t seem permanent.  But that’s a great title, is it not?  Or not?

John Dies at the End is based on a novel by David Wong, who also writes for Cracked.com, and is not, in any sense, Asian.  It’s directed by one of the great nutbag kooks imaginative innovators of contemporary cinema, Don Coscarelli, otherwise known for the four films of the Phantasm horror series, and also such films as Beastmaster and (I love this movie) Bubba Ho-Tep, in which Elvis and JFK, both still alive and living in nursing homes, fight an ancient Mummy.

Dave Wong is also the name of the main character in the movie, played by a guy named Chase Williamson, who I think was an acting student at USC when he got cast in this, and who has essentially no other IMDB credits.  But he’s great; sort of looks permanently bemused and put-upon.  John (Rob Mayes) is his best friend.  John and Dave have apparently dropped out of college to pursue a career as ghost busters.  Paranormal investigators.  Because two years previously, they got involved in some seriously weird stuff.  And Dave feels compelled to tell his story to Paul Giamatti, playing a reporter named Arnie Blondestone.  So that’s the conceit; we’re seeing these events from two years ago play out as Dave tells Arnie the story.

Two years ago, then, Dave attended a rave, where he met a psychic Jamaican drug dealer named Robert Marley.  The rave was also attended by Dave’s amputee girlfriend, Amy (Fabienne Therese), her dog, Bark Lee, John, a hip-hop spewing blonde kid named Justin (Jonny Weston), and an Asian kid named Fred, (played by an actor named Jimmy Wong, and no, I don’t know for certain that they didn’t cast an actor with that name as some kind of inside meta-cinematic joke). The rave ended badly, with everyone dying of some new street drug called soy sauce, which probably isn’t a drug at all, but an advanced alien species. When we see the drug, anyway, it’s black and sentient-looking.  Anyway, John was among those killed, which is why Dave thinks it’s disconcerting to keep getting calls from him on his cell phone.  A detective (Glynn Turman) is busy investigating the deaths, and is spooked when the bodies don’t seem to want to stay dead.  They’re being re-animated, turns out, by the evil overlord of an alternate Earth, Korrok, out to conquer our earth.  I mean, he’s called Korrok, what else would he want?

Oh, yeah, there’s also a TV psychic, Dr. Albert Marconi (Clancy Brown), who never goes anywhere without his two female assistants and sort of shows up at random times.  Marconi has built a bomb that he thinks can destroy Korrok, if only we could cross inter-dimensionally to Korrok’s world.  Which turns out to be possible, crossing over, as there’s a ghost door located in the mall of the dead.  And so when John is re-animated by the dog, he and Dave (and the dog) volunteer to go do that, take out Korrok, armed with a bomb and also a baseball bat festooned with Bible quotes.

Far and away the most heroic character in the movie, BTW, is the dog.  Bark Lee kind of walks off with the movie.  Like, the dog can drive Dave’s car, and does, one of the (many) times Dave needs to be rescued.

Oh, I forgot the bratwurst phone.  At one point, Dave’s cell phone breaks, shattered in a fight with a one-armed cop.  But he still needs to communicate with John, who, though dead, keeps calling him.  So he buys a bratwurst from a street vendor, and that functions just fine as a phone.

Oh, I forgot the meat monster.  Yeah, there’s also a monster made from all the different kinds of meat in a freezer, so you see all this meat on the floor assemble itself into a scary dude.  That’s the kind of creature John and Dave deal with, you know, professionally.

Oh, and Paul Giamatti seems to think he’s a black guy, which he’s not.  I think he’s actually a space alien, though that was not made entirely clear.  And there’s a massive space spider hanging around, that you can’t see directly but can see using peripheral vision.  Not quite sure what that’s about, but it’s pretty cool looking. Oh, and I forgot the woman whose body explodes and turns into snakes. And on Korrok’s planet, all the people wear masks for some reason, but not, as it happens, clothes.  This is likewise not explained.

What we have, in other words, is a very strange movie, one which I enjoyed inordinately, but which may not actually be your cup of ginseng.  I went on Rotten Tomatoes, and found it had a score of 60, which seems about right, with an audience score of 57, which likewise.  (What those scores don’t measure, though, is passion).  I think this is one of those Donnie Darko/Evil Dead/Scott Pilgrim/Revolver/Sucker Punch things, which you totally geek out on if you’re the kind of person who geeks out on self-indulgent and gratuitously weird wildly imaginative sci-fi/horror kinds of things.  This one has lots of heads blown to pieces and lots of slithery gross looking monsters, which are not scary but examples of its seriously warped and off-beat humor.  I thought it was hilarious, and mind-bending and wonderful.  Your mileage may vary.  My daughter and I both completely loved it.  But seriously, if the first 90 seconds doesn’t grab you, don’t bother with the rest of it.  You won’t like it.

 

Ulysses Grant, in war and peace

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And then the war ended, and the South had to cope with having lost.  And so they turned to the novels of Sir Walter Scott, that world of romantic myth.  They turned to Ivanhoe, to that great tale of the cruel tyranny of Norman overlords and valiant Saxon rebels.  Of course the Saxons could not win.  But they could inspire the world with their courage and nobility.  In the antebellum South, no novelist was more admired than Scott.  His popularity became, if anything, more pronounced after the war.  And so the myth of the South, the thrilling tale of the ‘lost cause.’  And that romance became history.

When I was in high school, that was the history of the Civil War we studied.  The dashing J.E.B Stuart, and the noble Robert E. Lee, and the intrepid Stonewall Jackson and Longstreet and A.P. Hill and Nathan Bedford Forrest.  Of course the war wasn’t about slavery, it was about state’s rights. Lincoln, of course, was a secular saint, his immortal legacy tarnished by his successors, the alcoholic and incompetent Andrew Johnson and the naive and corrupt Grant.  Grant, who won the war through thuggish means, Grant, who hammered Lee’s positions with superior firepower and manpower, but who hadn’t the native wit to really strategize.  That was the Civil War.  Fought for noble purposes, won by bullying power.

It’s all there in Gone With the Wind, isn’t it?  Sure, there are slaves, but they’re, you know, more friends than slaves, and unfitted for any other life, aren’t they?  What matters is the lifestyle of cotillions and fetes.  What matters are the romantic affiliations of pretty Southern belles.  Birth of a Nation was earlier, the most popular film in America in 1915.  Evil Yankee carpetbaggers, with the heroic cavalry riding to the rescue of those same pretty girls.  The heroic cavalry dressed in the hoods and robes of the Ku Klux Klan.

It’s all nonsense, of course, all of it.  The War was about slavery.  March, 1861, Alexander Stephens, the Vice-President of the Confederacy and a man Lincoln liked and admired, put it thusly:

“Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.”

The South was about slavery.  It was the basis of the Southern economy, it was the heart of the Southern culture.  Post-war historical revisionism may have distorted the views of my much-admired high school history teacher, Mr. Hurt.  But we’re just starting to know better.

H. W. Brands new biography of Ulysses S. Grant, The Man Who Saved the Union is another piece of masonry in the construction of a truer Civil War narrative.  Grant: who was U.S. Grant?  According to Mr. Hurt: he was a fine general, possibly, though no match for Lee.  But he won because he had more men and better armaments, because he had the resources of the industrial North behind his efforts.  And when he became President, he was a colossal failure.  His administration was corrupt, the Credit Mobelier scandal.  He was outwitted by Jay Gould and other crooked Eastern bankers.

Balderdash.  First, Grant was a genuinely brilliant general. Look at his Vicksburg campaign, for example.  Grant’s Army of the Tennessee fought entirely in hostile territory.  He had to constantly keep supply lines open, and communications were exceedingly complex.  Vicksburg took six months, involved eleven different battles, all against what was regarded as an impregnable position, an elevated and well-armed bluff in the river.  Robert E. Lee never once managed anything nearly that complex.

Did Grant consistently send men to charge fortified positions, with the loss of life such a foolish strategy entails?  He did once, at Cold Harbor. Mostly, though, he maneuvered, he did what he could to minimize slaughter.  In fact, Grant’s Army of the Potomac suffered fewer casualties in its campaign against Lee than were suffered by the Army of Northern Virginia.  The idea that Grant wasn’t much of a general is simply preposterous, and after the war, antagonists like Lee and Longstreet and Johnston were the first to say so.

Grant didn’t particularly want to be President, but once in the White House, he proved decisive and energetic and effective.  He fought for, and shoved through a very reluctant Congress, an anti-Ku Klux Klan bill, and sent troops to enforce it.  He thoroughly investigated claims that freedmen (former slaves) were being intimidated and denied their right to vote, and he did what a President could to combat it.  He passed, and was glad to enforce, the most comprehensive Civil Rights bill until Lyndon Johnson.

Economically, Grant was what was called a ‘sound money’ man, and pushed for efforts to reduce greenbacks, and limit American currency to gold and silver coins.  This proved contractionary, and inevitably a recession resulted.  This would be, in my mind, his biggest failing as President.  But it was a failing based on the limited economic understanding of the 1870s.  And he did set the stage for the economic expansion that would make the US a colossus.

Grant was deeply concerned by the Indian policies he inherited.  He met frequently with Native American leaders, and did what he could to limit access to miners trying to find gold in the Black Hills, which were sacred to many tribes of Plains Indians.  He did not succeed, and war broke out.  Grant was persuaded, against his better judgment, to give Custer an army, and was unsurprised when catastrophe resulted–he never thought much of Custer’s capabilities.  Grant did reform the Bureau of Indian Affairs.  He generally favored civil service reform, but that legislation did not pass until the administration of Chester Arthur–Arthur’s one Presidential accomplishment.

Was Grant corrupt?  No.  As Brands points out, ethical standards were evolving in the 1870s.  As railroads expanded, the way in which railroad contracts were acquired did change. Grant’s close friend and secretary Oliver Babcock, was corrupt, and Grant took too long to acknowledge it. Grant did defeat Jay Gould’s efforts to corner the gold market.  The stain of corruption will always attach to Grant’s Presidency; what is unquestioned is that Grant himself did not profit.

Without question, though, Grant’s greatest achievements as President were in the area of civil rights, and voting rights.  Jim Crow laws preventing black citizens from voting were not the product of Grant’s administration; they came as part of the corrupt bargain by which Rutherford Hayes became President.

But nothing became Grant’s life more than the way he died.  Grant’s good friend, Samuel (Mark Twain) Clemens thought there would be a lucrative market for a Grant auto-biography.  Late in his life, Grant discovered that he was suffering from throat cancer, and only had a few months to live.  He was desperate that Julia Grant, his beloved wife, be properly supported.  And so, dying, he wrote what would become one of the great American auto-biographies.  And Clemens was right; the book sold well, providing for a comfortable retirement for Julia and the Grant children.

Brands’ book is an easy read, a biography intended for a general readership.  It’s not an in-depth or complicated account. It’s judicious, fair and accurate.  What it has going for it is truth.  No one wants to re-fight the Civil War.  But it’s time to combat pro-Southern revisionism.  It’s time to get the history right.

 

 

 

 

 

‘Mormon’ literature

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This past Saturday was the Annual Meeting for the Association for Mormon Letters.  I’ve been a member of AML for twenty years, and try never to miss the Annual Meeting.  It’s basically an academic conference–lots of great papers, exploring this arcane world of Mormon literature.  And some poetry reading, some readings of other works.  Plus–and I always love this part–awards. Outstanding achievement in poetry, drama, fiction in a variety of categories, personal essay.

Anyway, Saturday, my wife and I had some things we had to do in Salt Lake City, and so I missed the Meeting.  I always feel bad about missing it–I do love AML. And it turns out, I probably shoulda gone.  I won an award, a big one.  I won the Smith-Pettit award.  A life-time achievement award.

I’m incredibly honored and grateful. I mean, everyone likes to be recognized for what they do, and I’ve been writing plays and getting them produced for thirty-five years now. I honestly never thought I’d be a candidate for the Smith-Pettit.  But it rocks. Just wish I could have been there to receive it.

But even talking about AML gets me thinking about Mormon literature generally.  It’s a tiny niche category of literature, and it’s even a bit ill-defined.  What do we mean by Mormon fiction, or Mormon drama, or Mormon poetry.  Definitions aren’t terribly important, I guess–what matters is writing well.  And when I served as President of AML, I sort of resisted having, like, a mission statement.  I worried about limiting our field of study.

To me, Mormon literature comes in basically three categories, all of which I think should count as legitimate.  First, it means literature written by Mormons, for Mormons.  That is, novels or plays or poems in which Mormons write about our own culture.  A great example, for me, is Levi Peterson’s novel The Backslider.  It’s a tremendous novel, about a young LDS cowboy growing up in Southern Utah, and it’s brilliant, a novel about guilt and expiation and family and love and self-hatred.  I mean, we can call it a Mormon novel, and that does describe it, but it’s also just a great novel–as good a novel as anything written by an American.  I think it’s every bit as important and profound as Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, or Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Brady Udall’s The Lonely Polygamist is perhaps the most brilliant recent work in this category.

Second category: literature written by Mormons about anything else.  Obviously, Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game comes to mind, as does Anne Perry’s The Face of a Stranger.  Card writes about Mormon culture from time to time too, but he’s basically known as a sci-fi/fantasy author.  And a a lot of Mormon authors have been very successful as fantasy authors, from Dave Wolverton to Brandon Sanderson to Brandon Mull to, you know, Stephenie Meyer.  I would also include Tim Slover’s plays; what a smart, compassionate, literate voice.

Final category, Mormon literature also includes works written by people who aren’t Mormon at all, but find Mormonism a fascinating subject for literature.  The best two works in this category have been plays, I think–Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, and The Book of Mormon, the musical.  Neither piece is without controversy in Mormon circles–both also have their defenders, and I count myself as one.

But the main thing I believe about Mormon literature is this: it’s a very big tent.  Authors of literary fiction consider ‘genre fiction’ a less important or valuable category.  Popular Mormon culture faces off against ‘High’ Mormon culture, just as pop v. high arguments disfigure the larger world of cultural criticism nationally.

Me, I like to read good writing.  I don’t care about genre and I don’t care about style, and I certainly don’t care about the membership status or current level of actual or perceived Church commitment.  I want to read good prose, an engaging story, interesting, complex, believable characters.  I like Lance Larson’s poetry, which is dense and powerful and moving, but I also like John Harris’ cowboy poetry, which has its own insight and impact.  I like Dave Wolverton’s fantasy fiction, but I also like Dean Hughes’ Children of Promise series of historical novels.  I’m a big fan of Julie Jensen’s marvelous plays, though I don’t think she has any formal connection to the Church anymore, but also Scott Bronson’s plays, who is a very active practicing Mormon.

The two best novels by Mormons I’ve read recently, in fact, you probably don’t know.  Sarah Dunster’s The Lightning Tree is a terrific historical novel–find it, buy it, read it.  And I read Ryan Rapier’s novel, The Reluctant Blogger, a terrific first novel which isn’t even published yet.

The one idea that ties all of this together is our 13th Article of Faith “if there is anything virtuous, lovely, of good report or praiseworthy, we seek after these things.”  A good reader needs to seek, and I try to.  And I think that seeking needs to transcend parochial concerns, about genre and popularity and whatever facile judgments we might make about the lives of our brothers and sisters.  Find good stuff to read, read it, write about it.  That’s the mission statement for the Association for Mormon Letters, if we never needed one.

Meanwhile, I’m going to keep writing.  More plays, more blog posts, perhaps a novel or two, something I’m not good at but want to keep trying.  Just keep on keepin’ on.  We’ll see what comes of it.

 

Five Myths about Nuclear Weapons: A Review

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Let’s talk about nuclear weapons.

Honestly, I almost didn’t bother with Ward Wilson’s book, Five Myths about Nuclear Weapons.  I wasn’t sure what more there was to be said about the subject. Especially after Rachel Maddow’s Drift, which had great, very scary things to say about our current nuclear arsenal.   Turns out, there’s a ton more to be said.  Conservative, liberal, libertarian, this is a book for everyone.  Thoughtful and smart, not just some anti-nuke rant. Get this book and read it.

Start with this, the first myth Wilson explodes.  Let’s talk about Hiroshima.  I know it’s still a controversial subject.  Was Truman morally justified in making the decision to drop the bomb?  What would have happened if he hadn’t dropped it?  Was Japan close to surrender?  Also, what about Nagasaki?  Was that bomb necessary?  Nukes have only been used once, in one war, dropped by one country.  Us, the United States of America.  So were we justified?

Here’s Ward Wilson’s response: he couldn’t care less.  All that hand-wringing?  Completely unnecessary.  What he thinks is this: Hiroshima didn’t accomplish anything.  It did not end the war.  It was not decisive.  It did not force Japan’s surrender.  It had, essentially, no impact on the end of the war.

Wo.

So here’s his evidence.  We dropped the bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.  The Nagasaki bomb was dropped on August 9.  The Japanese Supreme Council met to discuss the war on August 9; the Nagasaki bomb fell while they were meeting, and they didn’t hear of it until after they’d already decided to surrender. This is according to the minutes of the meeting, which are now in the public record.  Okay, so the conventional narrative is that it took them three days to assess the damage in Hiroshima, and when they did, that was it, that bomb was too fearsome and destructive for them to continue fighting.

But from Japanese sources, we learn that the Supreme Council knew about Hiroshima, and knew it was an atomic bomb, on August 7.  Japanese scientists were, after all, working on one too.  They knew what an A-bomb was.  The exact extent of the damage wasn’t known–they called for an investigation, and a preliminary report was delivered, but not until August 10.  Basically, the bombing of Hiroshima didn’t bother the Supreme Council  enough to even think it worth meeting about.  And when they did finally meet, it wasn’t even on the agenda.  It just wasn’t important.  They’d lost another city. Big deal. They’d lost a lot of cities.  Conventional bombing had already destroyed 68 Japanese cities, most of them almost completely obliterated.  300,000 civilians had already died, another 750, 000 injured.  1.7 Japanese people were already homeless.  And that’s just from conventional bombing.  Hiroshima just meant they’d lost another city, to a more destructive bomb.  The Japanese Supreme Council had already decided that the loss of cities was an acceptable cost of war.  There’s no evidence to suggest that the introduction of a more deadly weapon changed that calculus.

If I can step in here and offer a parenthetical comment, let me suggest an example closer to home, one that Wilson doesn’t mention. During the American Civil War, the main weapon for the troops on both sides was a muzzle-loaded rifled musket, firing Minie balls for bullets.  They were much more accurate than the guns used in previous wars, but they still took awhile to reload; they were clumsy and inefficient weapons.  So what happened when a new weapon was introduced, a repeating lever action breech-loaded rifle?  Because the Henry repeating rifle was invented during the Civil War, and Northern soldiers had them as early as 1862.  Mass production began in 1864, and maybe 14,000 were in service by the end of the war.

Southern soldiers hated those things.  And even when they were able to capture one, they didn’t have ammo for it.  What a huge advantage, to have a weapon you could fire five times before reloading (and which you could reload really easily).  Should have changed the course of the war.  Should have been as decisive as an H-bomb.  But it didn’t change anything.  The North had this far superior weapon, much superior firepower, but the South kept fighting nonetheless.  And they killed plenty of Northern soldiers too, with those old-fashioned muzzle-loading muskets.  They were ferocious opponents before the Henry rifle went into production, and they were just as formidable afterwards.  They weren’t about to surrender based on a technological advantage, and didn’t give up until Lee’s army was finally surrounded.

Same thing. So the Americans had this nifty new weapon, way more destructive than what they’d previously been using.  One bomb could destroy an entire city.  Well, so what?  Conventional weapons had already destroyed plenty of cities.  One bomb wasn’t a game-changer.

So what happened in Japan?  Between August 6, 1945 and August 9, what new element was introduced that changed the nature of the war so completely (from a Japanese perspective) that they immediately met and immediately surrendered?

On August 8, the Soviets invaded Manchuria.

That was it.  A one-front war suddenly became a two-front war.  The non-aggression pact they’d signed with the Soviets was violated.  From that point, the remaining Japanese war objectives (basically to hang on long enough to negotiate a peace with better terms than the unconditional surrender the Americans were calling for) were unaccomplishable.  From that point on, the war was over.  And at that point, the suffering of the Japanese people really did seem to be in vain.

Is this just supposition on Wilson’s part?  Just a theory?  Not at all.  Every extant Japanese source confirms it.  They didn’t care about Hiroshima.  Manchuria was the game-changer.

And there’s the first major myth about nuclear weapons, rendered null and void.

Nuclear weapons are valuable as psychological weapons.  That’s the way we’ve sold them, and that’s why North Korea and Iran want one. They’re so scary that if you have one, it changes the way the rest of the world views you.  Proof?  The Japanese surrendered three days after the first time anyone used one.  But if that initial proof turns out to be untrue?  Maybe it changes how we view them overall.

I don’t want to give away the ending, but the whole book is that good.  It’s a slim book: less than 150 pages.  But you’ll never think of Hiroshima the same way again after you read it. It’ll change what you think of the Cuban missile crisis (easily the most terrifying chapter I’ve ever read in any book ever).  It’ll change how you think about international politics.  And it’ll change what you think about nukes.

Right now, as I speak, the President is meeting with Republicans, trying to figure out some places where our government can cut spending.  Let’s start with nukes.  Let’s get rid of them, all of them, everywhere.  It can be done, and it’s time.

 

The Lightning Tree: A review

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Sarah Dunster’s The Lightning Tree is an outstanding example of a tough genre in which to publish–Mormon-oriented historical fiction.  To call it that, though, may be to limit its appeal.  Mostly it’s just a really really good novel.  Smart, honest, real, moving. Let me put it this way; if this review seems a bit incoherent, it’s because I’m short sleep right now.  And the reason I’m short sleep is this novel.

It’s set in Provo, Utah, the town where I was born and currently live.  The family at the center of the novel lives sort of on the west side of town, West Center street.  I used to live more or less in that same neighborhood.  The main character looks over at Squaw Peak, and imagines jumping off the cliff there–I’ve passed an idle hour or two in the same sort of reverie. And none of that is why I liked the book so much.  It’s the story that compels.

And the main character.  And she’s a fifteen year-old girl named Maggie Chabert, a convert to Mormonism, feisty and tough and insecure and disobedient and rebellious and proud.  She’s not particularly nice and though she’s a hard worker, she’s bad at things girls are supposed to be good at.  She likes to fish.  She’s good at cleaning out the chicken coop, and milking the cow, and she’s a terrific rail splitter; good with an axe. I liked Maggie tremendously, and couldn’t wait to see what she’d do next.

She also has a deeply tragic history.  Her parents both died on the trek West.  She’s been adopted, along with her younger sister Giovanna, by the Alden family, who have two daughters of their own.  She has an older brother, but he was apprenticed at their parents’ death, and is in Salt Lake City, which might as well be the moon.  Maggie also had a baby sister, now deceased–her death, and how it happened, becomes a central mystery in the novel.

Maggie has two best friends, one of whom, Mariah, is moving to Salt Lake City as the novel begins–from that point on, their friendship is epistolary, unreliably so.  Her other best friend–and favorite fishing partner–is Henry Clegg. The Clegg family is very fond of Maggie, and Mrs. Clegg becomes a central character in the book–a woman of extraordinary kindness and insight.  Henry, meanwhile, likes to tease Maggie and taunt her and play tricks on her.  That this might suggest a growing amorous interest on his part never seems to occur to Maggie.  And so the budding romance between Maggie and Henry is another thread the novel follows.

But all the characters are beautifully drawn.  Pa Alden, a quiet and haunted soul, but a deeply compassionate and honest man.  Ma Alden, a hard, tough frontier woman, direct and straight-forward and not much interested in tending to the emotional needs of a vulnerable teenaged girl, a tragic figure in her own right.  Uncle Forth, Ma Alden’s brother, a renegade and an apostate Mormon, with an endlessly cynical–but it turns out, not always mistaken–grasp on frontier politics.  Liz Ellen Hoster, an orphaned teenaged neighbor girl doing her best to raise her two little brothers in a tiny shack they share with a cow.

Above all, Maggie has chores.  Many many chores.  She’s a hard worker–she has to be.  Everyone is, in a frontier society where at any given time there was more work to do than hours to do it in.  Where a reasonably successful family, like the Aldens, can show off by hiring three fiddlers for a wedding.  Where Maggie’s fishing helps, because they can trade trout for salt pork.

The novel is set in Provo, Utah, in 1857.  The year of the Mountain Meadows Massacre.  But it’s not about that massacre, not really, but about how the MMM affected the lives of people in Provo, Utah, couple hundred miles to the north.  It’s about Judge Cradlebaugh, and the continuing federal investigation into the massacre.  And it’s about people living in Utah, and the way information about the Massacre came to them, in dribs and drabs, through gossip and innuendo and whispered stories in the dark.

It’s not enough for a novelist to research, say, the MMM.  She has to create for us the atmosphere of it, the role gossip plays, the divisions and dissenters and arguments. Not every character in the novel is an orthodox Mormon, and the ones that are don’t strike us as kinder or better people than some of the dissenters.  And Sarah Dunster nails it. She nails all of it, gets every detail either right, or at least convincingly plausible. It’s like chores.  Ma Alden doesn’t just say to Maggie, ‘do some chores.’  The chores she assigns are specific, varied, and authentic.

So the book’s great.  And what I’m really trying to decide here is whether to buy a copy of the book for my Mom’s birthday, or whether I can wait ’til Christmas. (Mother’s Day!  That works!)  Sarah Dunster’s first novel is terrific.  Get it, read it.  I couldn’t put it down.