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The
Maplewoods Mirror #22 - January 2008
Welcome to my monthly newsletter on life and
writing. If you want to see my website for past issues and other
news, please visit www.chrismeeks.com.
IN THIS ISSUE:
Thoughts on No Country for Old Men (essay)
Who Lives? Wins an
Award (news)
Top Films of 2007
(essay)
A Film We Wished We Liked
Michael Connelly Novels
(essay)
New Short Fiction
Series in Beverly Hills (news)
iTunes vs. Amazon (news)
Spontaneity (photo
essay)
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN BY CORMAC MCCARTHY
In the last two months, I’ve seen the
Coen Brothers’ film No Country for Old Men twice, and in between
each viewing, I read Cormac McCarthy's novel on which the film was
based. The film has been nominated for eight Academy Awards.
As squeamish as the movie made me at times, the
story is haunting, and the end suggests there is much more than meets the
eye. The ending of the film, in fact, made one person in the theater
stand and raise his hands to the screen and shout, “That’s an
ending?” That drove me to the book, and the book ends the same
way. In the book, however, you learn even more about the characters
of Bell, Moss, Chigurh, and Wells. All are war veterans, and each has
adapted to his post-war life differently.
The greatest difference in outlook is between
the sheriff, who sees his calling as helping people, and Chigurh, who is a
hard-hearted existentialist and says, “Every moment in your life is a turn
and every one a choosing. Somewhere you made a choice. All
followed to this.” The reader comes to see that perhaps America, with
many of its citizens like salmon swimming desperately upstream for money,
power, or drugs, is like a war zone. It’s no country for old
men.
In the book, I was first thrown by the lack of
quotation marks and apostrophes, so you have to figure out what’s dialogue
and what’s not (or as McCarthy would write: whats dialogue and whats
not). I came to see he’s a minimalist. He writes with a minimum
of what’s needed to tell a story, including standard punctuation and much
if any character description. Chigurh is described as medium build
with a slightly dark complexion, and, “He looked like anybody.” The
amazing thing about McCarthy’s writing is that you fall into his style, and
it’s easy to read. McCarthy has won several awards, including a
Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, so clearly he knows what he’s
doing.
Cormac McCarthy rarely gives interviews.
He writes out of passion and doesn’t like talking about it. His first
of ten novels, including The Orchard Keeper and Outer Dark,
were not financial windfalls of any sort. In fact, he remembers once
he was so poor, he couldn’t afford toothpaste, but positive things would
nonetheless happen to him—including a free sample of toothpaste in the
day’s mail. In the early eighties, he lived off of his McArthur
Fellowship grant.
Fellow writer Lee Wochner directed me to McCarthy’s
one and only television
interview, which was for Oprah. You can see the interview at
. You will have to fill out a simple form for Oprah, but it’s worth
it.
One of the things McCarthy speaks about in the
interview is his style. He says, “James Joyce is a good model for
punctuation. He keeps it to an absolute minimum. There’s no
reason to block the page up with weird little marks. If you write
properly, you shouldn’t have to punctuate… It’s to make it easier, not to
make it harder…[Use] simple declarative sentences. I believe in
periods and capitals, and the occasional comma. You can use a colon
if you’re about to give a list.”
Later in the interview, he reflects on what it
takes to write, and he often lets his subconscious mind guide him.
I’m the same. The best time I write is in the morning shortly after
waking because, I sense, I’m still tethered strongly to the dream state,
and my internal editor is willing to be loose.
McCarthy says, “The unconscious is always with
us. Even as I’m talking to you, I’m very busy talking, and I’m
watching you to see what your reactions are and I’m saying these words but
somewhere in my head someone is making up the next thing I’m going to say,
which I don’t even know what it is yet. But you can’t do two things
at the same time. And it may be that the subconscious is really a
committee, and they may have meetings and say, ‘What do you think we should
tell him? Should we tell him that? No, he’s not ready for
that.’ It’s a way of putting things. The sense of the subconscious
and its role in your life is just something you can’t ignore.”
I heard Joel
and Ethan Coen interviewed about adapting the book. One of them
said that because Chigurh in the book is not described physically, he
retains a certain sense of mystery that they knew would be lost the moment
he appeared in the film. So they gave him a slightly odd haircut and
cut his dialogue down to very little compared to the book, thus regaining
some of his mystery.
I plan to try other Cormac McCarthy novels.
With No Country for Old Men, I came to see why some people love
him: he examines our society, morality and individual philosophies a great
deal, sometimes bringing more questions than answers and making the reader
think. He's a good compass.
“WHO
LIVES?” WINS NOBLE AWARD FOR 2007
With the rise of the Internet and with
the decline of book reviews in newspapers, the way people learn about books
has been changing a great deal. Literary websites and blogs provide
new ways for people learn of books. I have set Google Alerts to tell
me if anyone happens to mention “Christopher Meeks,” and thus I just
learned that my play, Who Lives?, published last year, just won a
Noble (not Nobel) Award for 2007 on one of the literary websites, MyShelf.com.
You can read about this year’s Noble awards,
the fifth annual, at http://www.myshelf.com/backtoliterature/column.htm.
Carolyn
Howard-Johnson created the awards for books not on the best seller
lists that “show excellence in use of the English language, present themes
or premises that might help even one reader recognize and curtail bigotry,
or explore the human condition in other important ways.”
I give her my deep thanks.
Carolyn
Howard-Johnson
To get a sense of other well-regarded literary
websites, go see those below. You’ll see a sense of how they
vary. Some primarily review books. Some give publishing
news. Some give insights and readings about local authors. Some
also give extensive lists of other literary blogs. Consider the
following a door to a new world:
The
Elegant Variation - Well-designed and elegant, too.
The
Literary Saloon - A biggie and much to offer
GalleyCat
- a lot of publishing news
Bookslut
- highly regarded
Vermin
on the Mount - a Los Angeles landmark
TOP
FILMS OF 2007
While Ann and I don’t see as many movies
in theatres as most younger people or Academy members, we see a few movies
a month, and so here are our favorites that we saw this year:
Juno –This is truly fun
and funny, this year’s Little Miss Sunshine. A Minnesota
high school girl who gets pregnant decides to have the baby and give it to
a qualified adoptive couple, who she finds in the Pennysaver. Juno
goes through her nine months and its complications with insight and
wit. This film, by the way, comes after two other movies about
pregnant young single women who don’t ponder abortion much but decide to go
through with pregnancy: Waitress and Knocked Up.
All three films have their own styles and are delightful. Who’d have
thought the subject matter would be funny?
Ratatouille –
This is an animated film that came out in the summer, which for many people
gives two strikes against it. My friends without young children tend
to not consider seeing any animated movie because, well, it’s animated—only
for kids, right?—but the characters have depth, and this film shows that
animation is an art form not just for children. If you want a good
comedy, this is one.
Once – This
low-budget Irish film about a Dublin street musician who repairs vacuum
cleaners for a living has so much heart and great music, I’ve seen it
twice. The musician sings his self-penned stories about his
girlfriend who betrayed him. Nonetheless, he still yearns for her,
and a young woman from the Czech Republic that he meets reminds him
of his need. The soundtrack is so great, I have the album, and one
song, “Falling Slowly,” has been nominated for many things including an
Academy Award.
No Country for Old
Men – As noted at the start of this newsletter, I saw this film twice,
and it’s a fabulous adaptation. Every shot serves a purpose.
Nothing seems extraneous. I heard a great podcast
interview of the directors Joel and Ethan Coen, who felt compelled to
film this story.
The Hoax – Based in large
part by true events, this Lasse Hallstrom film stars Richard Gere as
Clifford Irving, a charismatic writer who desperately wants success and
persuades the world that he is the authorized biographer for the reclusive
billionaire Howard Hughes.
American Gangster
- I admire what screenwriter Steven Zaillian had to do in this
script: take two characters who on the surface are highly unlikeable—Harlem
drug lord Frank Lucas and detective Richie Roberts, who clearly isn’t a
great husband or father—and make us care for them. About halfway
through, I started wondering who I wanted to come out on top. I liked
them both. It’s an interesting corner the screenwriter paints himself
into. The ending nonetheless satisfies.
In seeing this movie, I also came to understand
the copyright challenges the film industry has. I was visiting my
mother at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and was using a computer
in one wing’s Visitors Room when a man wheeled his wife in and asked would
I mind if he used the DVD player? I said go ahead. He put in a
DVD and up came a pristine copy of American Gangster. This
was two days before the film was released in theatres. I asked him
how he happened to get this copy. He said a computer geek friend in
Chicago gave it to him. I know nothing else about who this man
was. I figured if he had it, so did hundred if not thousands of
others. Filmmakers’ investmens are being eroded.
A Mighty Heart
–Angelina Jolie stars as Mariane Pearl, wife of slain journalist Daniel
Pearl, in director Michael Winterbottom's adaptation of Mariane's
memoir. I came away with a deeper understanding of our problems in
the Middle-East. Jolie was not nominated for her performance, but the
film reminded me that outside of people’s obsession of her celebrity, she’s
a great actress.
Atonement –
The first half of the film and Venessa Redgrave at the end are great.
A huge chunk of the movie wanders to mirror the state of mind of one of the
characters—but he’s not the protagonist. Thus, the structure feels
off. As a love story, “Once” is far richer, simpler, and more
surprising. Still, the end of Atonement won me over
anew.
Nightmare Before Christmas 3D –
We saw this in October, and it’s the first non-documentary I’ve seen in
3D. Even though I saw the movie in when it premiered (in 2D) in
theatres, and I’ve seen the DVD, this version made me perceive new
things. You have to wear new special glasses far better than the old
red/blue ones of yesterday. These are polarized and look like
sunglasses and are handed out in the theatre. Directed by Henry
Sellick from Tim Burton’s story, the film is a masterpiece in any form, but
the 3D version puts you deeper inside. It’s a special experience.
Films that we haven’t seen but hope to: Michael
Clayton; Lust, Caution; There Will Be Blood; Percepolis; The Diving Bell
and the Butterfly; Eastern Promises, and Into the Wild.
A FILM WE WISHED WE
LIKED
A film we wished we liked but didn’t: Sweeney
Todd – So much about the film works well: a clear
well-motivated story based on the Stephen Sondheim’s dark musical; the
actors including Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter; and Tim Burton’s
direction creating a gray nearly colorless 19th-century
London. Yet the film has so much close-up killing and blood, it’s
overwhelming. After we left the theatre, friends of ours said a woman
was crying so hysterically in the bathroom that they’d never witnessed a
woman crying so hard. The woman did not accept any help. Who
knows what specifically triggered such a reaction, but the core of the film
shows there’s little to redeem in human beings, and maybe the woman did not
like that. We didn’t.
MICHAEL CONNELLY’S
NOVELS
I’ve grown to love Michael Connelly’s
work. Is it a guilty pleasure? No, just a pleasure. I had
a hard time with his first book, The Black Echo because much of it
seemed like showing off—which may be what it takes to get recognized.
His later books, though, settle on me as Raymond Chandler’s have done with
a rich protagonist whose observations reveal the human animal in
action. While many people may read Connelly’s books for the whodunit
factor alone, his characters stay with me long after I reach the last
page. It’s hard to create strong stories with vivid characters, and
Connelly has become masterful.
For example, in Lost Light, the book I
read before this one, Detective Harry Bosch tries to find the murderer of
his mother 35 years after the fact much in the same way novelist James
Ellroy, in real life, tried to find out why his mother was murdered in
Temple City in 1958. (Read Ellroy’s nonfictional My Dark
Places to see what was probably Connelly’s inspiration.) In Lost
Light, Bosch’s mother is revealed to have been a prostitute trying to
find an out and a better life to help her son. Just when she was about
to do so, she was murdered.
Connelly’s Chasing the Dime, which I
picked up at an LAX bookstore on our flight to San Francisco last weekend,
and I finished on the short trip, is a different book in that the
protagonist is not a detective but a 34-year-old scientist, Henry Pierce,
with a start-up biotech company looking for venture capital. The
story begins as Henry, obsessed over his science and his company’s needs,
has just lost the love of his life, a co-worker. He’s in emotional
turmoil. When his new telephone at his new apartment keeps ringing
with men looking for someone named Lilly, Henry learns his new number
matches an escort’s on a pornographic website. He also learns that
Lilly has been missing for more than a month. He’s compelled to find
out if she’s okay because it connects eerily to his sister’s disappearance
when he was young.
What I admire in this novel in particular is
that the protagonist does not have the tools or interviewing techniques of
a working police detective, yet Henry is driven and uses what he has.
He’s also under time pressure and the possibility of a sleazy PR disaster
just when he’s seeking millions of dollars for his company.
Chasing the Dime as
a title works on a few levels. It’s a phrase about trying to earn a
living, yet the return does not match the effort. It suggests the
futileness of the working life, yet we Americans like to work—and Henry is
the epitome of that. The rewards of work are even less for the
prostitutes that Henry comes to know, particularly Lilly’s coworker
Robin. She may earn big money, but she pays for it in physical and
mental abuse.
Americans are often major innovators, too, and
Henry’s goal, using organic molecules, is to create electrical circuitry so
small, computers could become the size of a dime. This is real
science Connelly writes about, our future, and it makes me think how we as
consumers, in chasing the latest gadgets, may be doing so at the expense of
losing something else.
Contrasting all this, yet becoming a suspect,
is Henry’s former girlfriend Nichole, who has a small tattoo of a Chinese
character pictogram that means “happiness comes from within, not from
material things.”
The twists in the end of the story amaze.
Just when I thought it was over, wham, something else happens.
Connelly mixes plot and character like few others. After I
recommended one of his books to a friend, another working writer, she
complained that she was spending too much time reading Connelly instead of
working. Maybe that’s what we all need.
NEW SHORT FICTION
SERIES in Beverly Hills
Over two years ago, just after a reading
I’d given at Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena, a beaming dark-haired woman
came up to me and introduced herself. “Sally Shore,” she said.
“I run a special reading series at the Beverly Hills Library, and I like
your work.”
“Thank you.”
“Is it possible to feature you in the
future?”
“Absolutely,” I said. “How wonderful,”
and I started thinking which stories from The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea
that I would read. She must have read my mind because she said, “We use
actors to read the stories, not the author—one actor per story. They
rehearse the readings, finding the nuances and the voices. Each story
is like a one-person show.”
“That sounds great,” I said, and I gave her a
copy of my book to choose from.
“Actually,” Sally said, “we’re booked three
years in advance, and I’d prefer we read from a new book. Might you
have a new book in three years?”
I laughed. She was booking me for three
years hence? “For sure,” I said, thinking probably I’d have another
book.
Sally
Shore
Last spring, she called me up, reminding me
that 2008 was the year my book would be featured. I hadn’t started a
new short story collection because I’d been focusing on novels. Even
so, I said, “I’m getting stories together,” and quite quickly I started
writing short stories and reworking some older unpublished ones. I’ve
had two of these stories appear on Amazon
Shorts, which works like iTunes—short stories downloaded for 49 cents
each. This month, I have a story in Rosebud
literary magazine, too, which you can get in big bookstores or online.
Sally and I have arranged to have the
publication party for my upcoming book, now titled Months and Seasons,
at the reading, which will be on June 13. Mark the date. You’re
invited.
In the meantime, know that every second Friday
of the month at The Beverly Hills Public Library, 444 N. Rexford Drive,
Beverly Hills, a different author’s work is featured. Performance
begins at 8:00 p.m. Box Office opens at 7:30 p.m. Admission:
$10.00
Yes, there’s a cover charge, but that covers
the cost, and with publication parties, there is free food and
drinks. Think of it as entertainment because you get lost in the
stories, comfortably ensconced in a great auditorium. I went to see
the stories of Elaine Barnard read recently, and it was most
enjoyable.
Elaine
Barnard (center) and cast
The series has been in the Los Angeles
Times Calendar as a Best Bet, has been a Pick of the Week in the L.A.
Weekly, in the Top Ten Guide in Los Angeles Magazine, and a
pick in City Beat L.A. Think of it as an unusual experience, and you’ll
see what I mean.
This is the twelfth year of the series, by the
way. “There's such a richness to the West Coast literary voice,"
says Shore, who was born and bred in L.A. and has read voraciously since
she was a child. She says to think of the late Spalding Gray, and his
deftness in combining storytelling with performance, and you'll begin to
get a sense of what her shows are like. "I think the L.A. literary
audience has been neglected,” Shore asserts, and she's pleased that her
events are no longer drawing just Gen X and Y attendees, but also
"older" people. "The series has grown so much," she
enthuses. “It's just a blast to do it … and I have the pleasure of working
with some of the best writers on the West Coast.”
On February 8th will be Stephanie
Waxman’s new collection of fiction, Sex and Death. She
happens to teach at UCLA Extension where I also teach, and she’s a delight.
You can see YouTube clips at www.youtube.com/newshortfiction.
ITUNES VS. AMAZON
Ellen (age 9) fell in love with the
Beatles’ “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” but she didn’t like the later Beatles’
songs from the new Love album. Wanting to help create
another Beatles’ fan, I went to the iTunes store to buy a few tracks from
Meet the Beatles. I discovered there are no Beatles albums for
sale.
I then went to Amazon.com to explore the new
MP3 downloads I’d heard about. Amazon doesn’t sell Beatles albums via
download, either. The Beatles don’t allow downloading by these
companies yet, but one can purchase CDs at Amazon, of course. I then
explored what one can download on Amazon. What I learned there made
me a new fan.
Amazon sells MP3 for 89 cents each instead of
iTunes’ 99 cents each. I happened to see on iTunes earlier that the
Pink Floyd album Wish You Were Here downloaded for $11.99.
On Amazon, it was only $4.45. The difference is that there are only
five tracks on the album, but iTunes doesn’t sell the longer cuts
alone. Amazon does.
Guess wish one I downloaded? Also,
Amazon’s MP3 downloads work on both MP3 players and on iPods while iTunes
songs only play on iPods. I predict the iTunes store will have to
change its tune to stay competitive.
SPONTANEITY
In an effort to do something fun,
impulsive, and celebratory, I found inexpensive flights to San Francisco on
Expedia, and Ann, Ellen, and I flew up for two days and one night to
celebrate Ann’s birthday. We stayed at the Hyatt in Fisherman’s
Wharf—also a deal on Expedia—and I hoped to find THE great Fisherman’s
Wharf restaurant, which we did when it started raining and we ran to the
closest restaurant with a view. It was Alioto’s, at #8 Fisherman’s
Wharf, which has been going for 83 years and was around before the Golden
Gate Bridge was built. The restaurant’s food, service, and views are
all incredible.
This
is on Pier 39 -- and a worthy tourist trap
Now
imagine a 9-year-old finding my laser pointer and putting red dots on
waiters' chests
Another
view from Alioto's
Below are more photos of our weekend. One
has to play every now and then.
See you next time,
--Chris
"Babies don't need a vacation. But I still
see them at the beach. It pisses me off." ~ Steven Wright
For
reviews or more information on either of my two books below, click on the
cover.
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