“31 Days of Oscar” on TCM usually means there’s always something on cable in February to prevent one—-well, all right, to prevent me—-from watching endless reruns of “Project Runway” as if I don’t know every button and ruche. Last night I caught a movie I haven’t watched in many, many years: the 1980 Best Picture winner, “Ordinary People.” Just as I was once in thrall to the Marchmains, the dysfunctional family in Brideshead Revisited, I was also drawn to the Jarretts of Lake Forest, Illinois. I was drawn to the setting, drawn to the brittle, even unpleasant performance by Mary Tyler Moore, and drawn to the dramatization of “a failure to communicate.” I realized, watching the film after nearly thirty years, that I too made the mistake of once believing that communicating was enough.
They’re called movies for mechanical reasons, but I think we Americans also mishear the idea of emotional ones in the label: they move us to laugh, to cry, to “come to terms,” as the ad campaign for another Best Picture would have it a few years after “Ordinary People.” Well, I was moved all right: moved to recognition of how young I was when Judith Guest’s airless family melodrama transferred to screen. But I was also too young to know that the story was airless, or was a melodrama. Watching it now, there didn’t seem to be an authentic note in Mary Tyler Moore’s performance, which I was once naïve enough to think “one of the great all-time screen performances” (as if I’d seen anything yet). But then Moore has always been an odd screen actress. Her girlish, brittle vulnerability worked in television comedy, but on the larger screen she didn’t really connect with the audience until “Flirting with Disaster.”
Donald Sutherland and Judd Hirsch are fine—-Sutherland, with his odd, reptilian face, has never really gotten his due, but seems to be getting it now, and Hirsch is very nearly a caricature of a “Feel! Feel!” movie psychiatrist (a role he ultimately, laughably took in “Independence Day”). Gene Hackman was supposed to play the role of Dr. Berger, but stepped out at the last minute. Hackman would have set up a different and more powerful resonance in the father-son dynamic and resolution, but also might have overshadowed the actor who holds the film together, Timothy Hutton. It’s an amazing performance, and if Robert Redford “deserves” his directing Oscar, it’s for whatever he did to help Hutton in the role of the son coming back to life. Hutton is scared and twitchy at the start, but grows steadier and warmer and stronger. His scenes with Hirsch were shot in nine mere days, and they are the core of the performance in the movie that genuinely deserves to be called great.
As for Redford, he didn’t deserve the Oscar as Hutton deserved his. Scorsese and Polanski were nominated, and probably “deserved” one for the work they did, but so did David Lynch and Richard Rush (if you haven't seen "The Stunt Man" you're missing out). Redford really deserved a directing Oscar for "Quiz Show," however, his deft, sly, marvelous, subtle black comedy about the game show scandals of the 1950s, which was everything I mistook "Ordinary People" for at the time: a rich, complex, and ultimately unresolved story about truth and authenticity, about identity, and yes, love. Love of money, love of fame, love of celebrity. Even love and misunderstanding about and between a father and son—in this case, Mark Van Doren and his son Charles.
The problem with Guest’s story, as I see it now, is that the plot device of the boating accident doesn’t ring true. Not as backstory, but in the quasi-Classical, quasi-Freudian purpose it serves in the life of Conrad-as-hero. Hutton makes Conrad’s suicide very plausible, but I wish Guest’s book editor had directed her to make the circumstances that haunt Conrad the death of a very close friend. Every element in the novel and the movie adaptation would still work—and above all the character of Beth would work even better had her psychology been that of a mother frozen with love and grief and anger over nearly losing a son she didn’t actually lose. There would even be a homoerotic subtext to the passage through loss and love that leads to the (hetero)sexual awakening of Conrad. Some of this is there: the scenes with the other swimmers, the relationship between Conrad and Berger, the final clinch between Calvin and Conrad, the destruction of Beth. But as we have it now, it isn’t entirely real or authentic, even though it insistently calls itself ordinary.
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Silver
I recently realized that I have been writing for twenty-five years. And have been a published writer for twenty. I am not a bestselling author, and in comparison to anyone on such a list and many writers who I am privileged to know personally, very, very few people know my name or my work. Many of my "readers" are family and friends, but even as I write that I realize how much writing I actually generate these days, and where and how often it gets published. As my publication record lengthens and the range of places I’ve been published broadens—-newspapers, magazines, and journals from San Francisco to Chicago to Fort Lauderdale to New York City, not to mention the web—-I realize that a significant amount of my work has been read by people I will never know.
Those twenty-five years began a long time ago in a class at West Valley College in Saratoga, California. I was living with my parents then, and was taking classes at the local community college. Although my awareness of my interest in writing goes back to fourth and fifth grade, it was at West Valley, in English 70, Creative Writing, with Carol Abate, that I really began writing—and reading. I remember many of the students from those first classes. Sometimes the writers’ group I belong to here takes me back through some basic discussion of terms and such; sometimes I sense a lack of authenticity in writing and it reminds me of those who were just dabbling in writing in that class. We have a tradition in my writer’s group of beginning our sessions with a timed writing based on a quote; someone is designated to bring the quote each week, and then we write in response to it for seven-and-a-half minutes. Back at West Valley, those of us who were most enthusiastic about writing were just discovering literature—not the classics, but contemporary writing. I’d recently discovered a writer named Breece D’J Pancake who had been published in The Atlantic (I’d also only recently discovered The Atlantic.) I’d also found Bernard Malamud in its pages. I was introduced to the work of Tillie Olsen. I knew the name Flannery O’Connor, but still thought she was a man. But we were learning; I was learning. I read One Hundred Years of Solitude and felt like I'd travelled to another planet. When we enthusiasts found a writer we loved, or a quote from a writer we loved, we shared it with each other loudly, excitedly. The first person I ever saw rolling their own cigarettes took that class; the first person I ever knew who killed himself did too.
Carol Abate once brought in a poem called “The Death of Marilyn Monroe” by Sharon Olds. Through her books Satan Says, The Dead and The Living, and The Gold Cell, Olds quickly became a powerful source of inspiration for much of the work I wrote in those early years. As mentioned in a previous post, I also made my first encounters with Robert Hass and Robert Pinsky at a local writing conference around that time. I’m more familiar with Hass and Pinsky now than I was then, but haven’t kept up with Olds’ work lately; I’ve been making other discoveries. And among the discoveries or rediscoveries I made recently was my work from back then. After 9/11, I saved all my writing to some of the old hard floppy disks where I’d saved everything I’d written until then; the documents were Word for Macintosh files, and around the same time I switched to an IBM ThinkPad, so I wasn’t able to access them. I just figured I’d get access somehow, someday, but the years passed and the files remained where they were. The floppies traveled with me, however, and I finally got around to having them converted. I was gratified to get the files back after all this time, and happy to see how much of the work holds up. Though I never succeeded in finding a place for its publication, and am not giving up on it, here is the first real poem I ever wrote:
Marathon
dead on arrival
you come
exhaust
-ed defeat
-ed you come
you have pound
-ed to bone
your limbs forward
thrust
unerr
-ing unfail
-ing placed feet
in the dust
with the tight
in your muscle
your face set in steel
going on
-going on
going on
do you feel
how the news
when it breaks
it will
break me in
-stead arch your
back toss your
head with the
rhythm the
tread
the end a
-head break the
ribbons and
ribbons and
ribbons and
yes
Those twenty-five years began a long time ago in a class at West Valley College in Saratoga, California. I was living with my parents then, and was taking classes at the local community college. Although my awareness of my interest in writing goes back to fourth and fifth grade, it was at West Valley, in English 70, Creative Writing, with Carol Abate, that I really began writing—and reading. I remember many of the students from those first classes. Sometimes the writers’ group I belong to here takes me back through some basic discussion of terms and such; sometimes I sense a lack of authenticity in writing and it reminds me of those who were just dabbling in writing in that class. We have a tradition in my writer’s group of beginning our sessions with a timed writing based on a quote; someone is designated to bring the quote each week, and then we write in response to it for seven-and-a-half minutes. Back at West Valley, those of us who were most enthusiastic about writing were just discovering literature—not the classics, but contemporary writing. I’d recently discovered a writer named Breece D’J Pancake who had been published in The Atlantic (I’d also only recently discovered The Atlantic.) I’d also found Bernard Malamud in its pages. I was introduced to the work of Tillie Olsen. I knew the name Flannery O’Connor, but still thought she was a man. But we were learning; I was learning. I read One Hundred Years of Solitude and felt like I'd travelled to another planet. When we enthusiasts found a writer we loved, or a quote from a writer we loved, we shared it with each other loudly, excitedly. The first person I ever saw rolling their own cigarettes took that class; the first person I ever knew who killed himself did too.
Carol Abate once brought in a poem called “The Death of Marilyn Monroe” by Sharon Olds. Through her books Satan Says, The Dead and The Living, and The Gold Cell, Olds quickly became a powerful source of inspiration for much of the work I wrote in those early years. As mentioned in a previous post, I also made my first encounters with Robert Hass and Robert Pinsky at a local writing conference around that time. I’m more familiar with Hass and Pinsky now than I was then, but haven’t kept up with Olds’ work lately; I’ve been making other discoveries. And among the discoveries or rediscoveries I made recently was my work from back then. After 9/11, I saved all my writing to some of the old hard floppy disks where I’d saved everything I’d written until then; the documents were Word for Macintosh files, and around the same time I switched to an IBM ThinkPad, so I wasn’t able to access them. I just figured I’d get access somehow, someday, but the years passed and the files remained where they were. The floppies traveled with me, however, and I finally got around to having them converted. I was gratified to get the files back after all this time, and happy to see how much of the work holds up. Though I never succeeded in finding a place for its publication, and am not giving up on it, here is the first real poem I ever wrote:
Marathon
dead on arrival
you come
exhaust
-ed defeat
-ed you come
you have pound
-ed to bone
your limbs forward
thrust
unerr
-ing unfail
-ing placed feet
in the dust
with the tight
in your muscle
your face set in steel
going on
-going on
going on
do you feel
how the news
when it breaks
it will
break me in
-stead arch your
back toss your
head with the
rhythm the
tread
the end a
-head break the
ribbons and
ribbons and
ribbons and
yes
Sunday, February 10, 2008
In Seventh Grade, Again
I got a little out-of-touch with my regular postings to this blog, but blame can be assigned to other work and not laziness or procrastination. Last week I was the resident Teaching Artist at Dr. Lydia T. Wright School PS 89 here in Buffalo, and the week prior was assembling a major grant application, then I received two assignments from a magazine I write for. So the last two weeks here in Buffalo have in fact been incredibly busy and productive, and now I’m trying to get back on track.
What can I say about my first residency? The school was right around the corner from Erie County Medical Center, in a neighborhood called Delavan-Grider. It is just east of NY State Highway 33, which links downtown Buffalo with the airport. The 33, as it’s called, divides parts of the city from and prevents them from interacting with each other the way urban highways tend to do—like the BQE in New York City, the old Embarcadero Freeway in San Francisco, and all the freeways in Los Angeles.
From the get-go, the seventh graders were a challenge. I’m lucky in that I’m a strong presence—which simply means I don’t wear my insecurities on my sleeve—so I wasn’t about to let the kids walk all over me. And those who kept trying to act out I refused to give up on; I don’t know…maybe kids who act out need something besides discipline. We read five poems in five days, and I used the work of Nikki Giovanni and Frank O’Hara and Joy Harjo and Cathy Song. It is both familiar and unfamiliar for me to be so immersed in poetry again, to talk—or try to talk—about rhyme and meter and form and detail and imagery again on such a constant basis. I discovered poetry a long, long time ago—writing Robert Frost imitations in fourth and fifth grade, but that’s also when I realized I wanted to be a writer. For much of my life I have struggled with what that meant—it often seemed something external, an identity, like a mantle, that I would find someday in a store, off-the-rack, discounted, yes, but inarguably designed for me. I didn’t realize that I had to work at being a writer; I didn’t realize that although I had a gift, I still had a lot of weaknesses, a lot of work to do to repair them or to make them seem like strengths or to concentrate on forms of writing that worked with my strengths. It has only been in the last few years that this has finally happened at all, so perhaps it is no surprise that I did not find this kind of work as a teaching artist until now. And honestly, I could not have done it a few years ago; I would have been terrible and egotistical about it. Instead, I was humbled by these kids and their lives. I came away grateful for the fact that I don’t have to go to seventh grade now, or ever again. There was one boy whose uniform shirt was filthy dirty, and I thought, My God…my mother was able to send me to school each day looking not just clean but sharp. My parents were able to do that for all of us kids.
I wondered about the disproportionate number of girls to boys. Is this a simple statistic? Or does it reflect, as I fear it may, the fact that boys of twelve, thirteen, and fourteen in parts of our society are no longer part of our society? That we consider them lost causes, might as well, they aren’t going to make it anyway? What do they turn to, these boys? Those who were in the class were in the throes of puberty—and yet they were still children. And many of the girls were the same. But when they wrote—when they got down to brass tacks and wrote about themselves—and what adolescent doesn’t want a stage to himself or herself?—they wrote deeply and honestly and openly, and at times I was moved as no poetry has moved me before. I wasn’t writing honestly at thirteen—I was trying, but I couldn’t—how could I express what I needed to? I want to look to these children for strength and courage to become the kind of writer many of them allowed themselves to be, at last.
What can I say about my first residency? The school was right around the corner from Erie County Medical Center, in a neighborhood called Delavan-Grider. It is just east of NY State Highway 33, which links downtown Buffalo with the airport. The 33, as it’s called, divides parts of the city from and prevents them from interacting with each other the way urban highways tend to do—like the BQE in New York City, the old Embarcadero Freeway in San Francisco, and all the freeways in Los Angeles.
From the get-go, the seventh graders were a challenge. I’m lucky in that I’m a strong presence—which simply means I don’t wear my insecurities on my sleeve—so I wasn’t about to let the kids walk all over me. And those who kept trying to act out I refused to give up on; I don’t know…maybe kids who act out need something besides discipline. We read five poems in five days, and I used the work of Nikki Giovanni and Frank O’Hara and Joy Harjo and Cathy Song. It is both familiar and unfamiliar for me to be so immersed in poetry again, to talk—or try to talk—about rhyme and meter and form and detail and imagery again on such a constant basis. I discovered poetry a long, long time ago—writing Robert Frost imitations in fourth and fifth grade, but that’s also when I realized I wanted to be a writer. For much of my life I have struggled with what that meant—it often seemed something external, an identity, like a mantle, that I would find someday in a store, off-the-rack, discounted, yes, but inarguably designed for me. I didn’t realize that I had to work at being a writer; I didn’t realize that although I had a gift, I still had a lot of weaknesses, a lot of work to do to repair them or to make them seem like strengths or to concentrate on forms of writing that worked with my strengths. It has only been in the last few years that this has finally happened at all, so perhaps it is no surprise that I did not find this kind of work as a teaching artist until now. And honestly, I could not have done it a few years ago; I would have been terrible and egotistical about it. Instead, I was humbled by these kids and their lives. I came away grateful for the fact that I don’t have to go to seventh grade now, or ever again. There was one boy whose uniform shirt was filthy dirty, and I thought, My God…my mother was able to send me to school each day looking not just clean but sharp. My parents were able to do that for all of us kids.
I wondered about the disproportionate number of girls to boys. Is this a simple statistic? Or does it reflect, as I fear it may, the fact that boys of twelve, thirteen, and fourteen in parts of our society are no longer part of our society? That we consider them lost causes, might as well, they aren’t going to make it anyway? What do they turn to, these boys? Those who were in the class were in the throes of puberty—and yet they were still children. And many of the girls were the same. But when they wrote—when they got down to brass tacks and wrote about themselves—and what adolescent doesn’t want a stage to himself or herself?—they wrote deeply and honestly and openly, and at times I was moved as no poetry has moved me before. I wasn’t writing honestly at thirteen—I was trying, but I couldn’t—how could I express what I needed to? I want to look to these children for strength and courage to become the kind of writer many of them allowed themselves to be, at last.
Monday, February 4, 2008
The Plunge
I’m sitting here at the ballet studio in Orchard Park, and my hip joints ache. Not because of dancing. Because of teaching. This morning I had my first Teaching Artist Residency and it was a full-frontal plunge into the icy cold waters of the profession.
The school where I’m teaching is near the Erie County Medical Center. It’s a well-appointed public school; I’m teaching Grade 7, three classes, in Poetry. The first class was a rowdy group, mostly girls, few boys. The profile of the class (and the school as a whole) is largely African-American. The teachers I’m working with are mostly Caucasian.
I really don’t know how teachers manage these days. The kids in the first class didn’t know how to focus as a group. Individual, they could focus, but not as a group. I heard time and time again that seventh grade would be the hardest grade to teach; I figured I might as well start where it’s hardest. We read a poem by Nikki Giovanni called “The Reason I Like Chocolate” then we talked about it. Does it feel like a poem? Why? Or why not? What are some of things we expect to find in a poem that we don’t find here? What about punctuation? What about patterns? What about feelings? The boys in the back of the class were a bit sullen, but they joined in. I’d be curious to know how they felt having a man in the class for a change.
The second class was the complete opposite from the first: the students were polite and attentive, and they participated with, if not enthusiasm, then at least a sense of willingness. Also, I had that first 45 minute class under my belt and a sense of what I could do better and what I should let go of. I felt more confident as the day went on. And there were five adults in the class, which may have made a big difference.
Feeling like I owned my lesson plan, I went to my third class but as the minutes ticked by, the students failed to appear. After about ten minutes the teachers said they had to go down to the vice principal’s office: apparently the entire class was being held for misbehavior during the previous period. They finally arrived in class with twenty minutes to go, which left us time only to read the poem and discuss it. It went well, considering. Maybe in the office they’d worked out whatever was going on with them as a group.
I’m going to read over the poems they wrote now. I’ve selected my exemplar for tomorrow and am going to talk about rhyme and rhythm. I’d really like to bring in my nieces’ keyboard to have some bass or something to sample underneath. Maybe that'll grab and hold their attention...
The school where I’m teaching is near the Erie County Medical Center. It’s a well-appointed public school; I’m teaching Grade 7, three classes, in Poetry. The first class was a rowdy group, mostly girls, few boys. The profile of the class (and the school as a whole) is largely African-American. The teachers I’m working with are mostly Caucasian.
I really don’t know how teachers manage these days. The kids in the first class didn’t know how to focus as a group. Individual, they could focus, but not as a group. I heard time and time again that seventh grade would be the hardest grade to teach; I figured I might as well start where it’s hardest. We read a poem by Nikki Giovanni called “The Reason I Like Chocolate” then we talked about it. Does it feel like a poem? Why? Or why not? What are some of things we expect to find in a poem that we don’t find here? What about punctuation? What about patterns? What about feelings? The boys in the back of the class were a bit sullen, but they joined in. I’d be curious to know how they felt having a man in the class for a change.
The second class was the complete opposite from the first: the students were polite and attentive, and they participated with, if not enthusiasm, then at least a sense of willingness. Also, I had that first 45 minute class under my belt and a sense of what I could do better and what I should let go of. I felt more confident as the day went on. And there were five adults in the class, which may have made a big difference.
Feeling like I owned my lesson plan, I went to my third class but as the minutes ticked by, the students failed to appear. After about ten minutes the teachers said they had to go down to the vice principal’s office: apparently the entire class was being held for misbehavior during the previous period. They finally arrived in class with twenty minutes to go, which left us time only to read the poem and discuss it. It went well, considering. Maybe in the office they’d worked out whatever was going on with them as a group.
I’m going to read over the poems they wrote now. I’ve selected my exemplar for tomorrow and am going to talk about rhyme and rhythm. I’d really like to bring in my nieces’ keyboard to have some bass or something to sample underneath. Maybe that'll grab and hold their attention...
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