The Oncoming Hope

News of wondrosity!

Anne Hathaway has been cast as Catwoman.

Anyone who knows me, or follows this blog, knows the high regard in which I hold her, which is doubly astonishing given that I used to hate her.

But some question whether she has the requisite darkness and/or sultriness for the role, to which I will answer you with two homework assignments:

-If you don't think she's dark, watch Rachel Getting Married
-If you think she can't play terrifying, I refer you to Brokeback Mountain.

I can't wait!

It's been one of those days, the kind of day that happens once a year - we reminisce about high school.

This poem has nothing to do with high school, but for whatever reason, the reminiscences that I have with my high school friends always seem to come back to one influential English teacher. Influential how? It's hard to explain.

She made us read Heart of Darkness, and we all hated it, but after six months of discussing it, we fucking loved it. We understand every word choice, every emotion, every intent written within the text. We will never see the words "little sticks" again without imagining ourselves under assault by a team of people who have the unfortunate bad sense to fight guns with bows and arrows. We are still personally offended when someone writes it off as literature that supports empire, when we know that it is the ultimate anti-colonialist text, if you would only let it oxidise for a moment.

I've been struggling with this Poem of the Day column. On the one hand, it has been one of the most popular series here on The Oncoming Hope. On the other hand, I worry that I've just been showcasing poetry that's already popular, and not giving a voice to other writers. I love a lot of poetry. Some of it (a lot of it) you would have already read, so am I adding anything by putting a soft-beam lens on it?

But then, I think to myself, how many of us bother to read any poetry after high school? We were forced to do it then, so we forced ourselves to find styles we liked, just to make the study tolerable. But I've been finding that with poetry, as with music, I actually continue to enjoy some of what I convinced myself to like when I was sixteen. When you think about how much time we devoted to working hard in high school (for many of us Americans, I still wonder if it might be the hardest we worked in our lives) -- then for god's sake shouldn't we enjoy it when we're older?

 

Guest Post by: Lumos_Aeternum, otherwise known as "Most Honorable, Venerable, and otherwise Deplorable Peter"

My friend, the owner of this most excellent blog, has given me a chance to post about things of interest on here - whether my access will be removed quickly remains to be seen. I figured I would start somewhere close to my heart, a tool I've used for the last year in my writing, Scrivener.

In the past, I've primarily used OpenOffice Documents to write. It isn't as pretty as Word, but has most of the functionality, plus...it's free! (open source). For writing fiction, though, you only really need space to put down your thoughts. At least, that's how I once thought about it.

Enter Scrivener. This was once a Mac only product, but no longer! I'll get to that near the end. It has many features I probably won't use much, at least not at this stage in my writing. It is a product designed simply for the process of writing in an organized fashion. As such, it doesn't kill itself to provide a million different formatting options like Word would (although the export tools are remarkable). Instead, this beast is packed with tools to help you plan and organize your thoughts, ideas, chapters. It has index cards on virtual corkboards that you can move about if you need to reorder something.

It was this aspect that had me wary of trying it out. I was a bit more of an off-the-cuff writer, at least until I neared the end of a story. When I first heard about Scrivener, I had reached a part in my work-in-progress where I found it difficult to keep things straight (location names, random characters, themes I began in chapter one that I forgot to carry forward). I wondered if these tools could help with that, and I was happy to discover that It really has.

My latest novel attempt (begun during National Novel Writing Month) was pre-planned within the application. I had a map of my fictional world scanned in and added character descriptions and information about the political situation in the different nations my characters would visit. When you're in the trenches, seeking to tell your story, wasting time and momentum trying to figure out what color hair your main character's cousin had is counterproductive.

Another nice feature, for me, is the ability to go into Full Screen Mode. I can escape from my desktop and all of its marvelous distractions. It even lets you determine how strong the fade is on the background. So, if you want to see your wallpaper in the background, you can. This is something I've wished for for ages with Word, but they took their own sweet time. So if, like theoncominghope, you find concept art for Tron: Legacy a useful point of reference for the scene you're working on? You can literally make it surround your words.

Of course, it costs money. Not something to laugh at in these times. I bit the bullet and bought a copy last year, because the free trial made it clear that this was a program I would and could use to my advantage. Also, having won National Novel Writing Month, I got 50% off. I think that's a pretty sweet deal.

Recently, they have come out with a new version for Mac. I haven't used it, but they have added some interesting features that might entice me to upgrade. Also, for you non-Mac users, there is good news, finally! The creators of Scrivener have developed a Windows version (sorry Linux gurus, I feel your pain). The Windows version is in Beta at the moment (free to try out), and will be available for sale early this year.

There are other, and free, applications out there, some of which they mention at the bottom of this page http://www.literatureandlatte.com/links.php.

And here's a final thought: no matter what tool you use to write, just get out there and write. That is the key. Write, write, write!

"Maxine"
Part 1

No party is
complete
without you.

Everybody
knows that.

The party
starts when
you arrive.

"Robot"
Part 2

Robot likes to sleep
through long lazy summer afternoons.
So do his friends
with the sun reflecting
off them like tin cans.

"Fred Bought a Pair of Ice Skates"
Part 3

Fred bought a pair of ice skates.
That was twenty years ago.
He still has them but he doesn't
skate any more.

"Calvin Listens to Starfish"
Part 4

Calvin listens to starfish.
He listens to them very carefully,
lying in the tide pools,
soaking wet
with his clothes on,
but is he really listening to them?

"Liz Looks at Herself in the Mirror"
Part 5

She's very depressed.
Nothing went right today,
so she doesn't believe that
shes there.
"Doris"
Part 6

This morning there
was a knock at the
door. You answered it.
The mailman was standing
there. He slapped your
face.

"Ginger"
Part 7

She’s glad
that Bill
likes her.

"Vicky Sleeps with Dead People"
Part 8

Vicky sleeps out in the woods
with dead people but she always
combs her hair in the morning.
Her parents don't understand her.
And she doesn't understand them.
They try. She tries. The dead
people try. They will all work
it out someday.

"Betty Makes Wonderful Waffles"
Part 9

Everybody agrees to
that.

"Claudia/1923-1970"
Part 10

Her mother still living
is 65.

Her grandmother still living
is 86.

"People in my family
live for a long time!"
—Claudia always used to say,
laughing.

What a surprise
she had.

"Walter"
Part 11

Every night: just before he falls asleep
Walter coughs. Having never slept
in a room with another person, he thinks
that everybody coughs just before they fall
asleep. That's his world.

"Morgan"
Part 12

Morgan finished second in his high school
presidential election in 1931.
He never recovered from it.
After that he wasn't interested in people
any more. They couldn't be counted on.
He has been working as a night watchman
at the same factory for over thirty years now.
At midnight he walks among the silent equipment.
He pretends they are his friends and they like
him very much. They would have voted
for him.

"Molly"
Part 13

Molly is afraid to go into the attic.
She's afraid if she went up there
and saw the box of clothes that she
used to wear twenty years ago,
she would start crying.


"'Ah, Great Expectations!'"
Part 14

Sam likes to say, "Ah, great expectations!"
at least three or four times in every
conversation. He is twelve years old.
Nobody knows what he is talking about when
he says it. Sometimes it makes people
feel uncomfortable.

"It is trying being a liberal in Dalton," begins "The Barber," the second story from O'Connor's masters thesis.  It's all too easy to relate to this story; the story of the educated Southern integrationist faced with all the ingrown racism and insensitivity of the ignorant. Naturally the topic of politics comes up when he's least able to escape - trapped in his tormenter's chair, half lathered and half shaven.

The protagonist gets angrier and angrier as he fails to find the right words or the perfect cutting phrase to disarm his mob of opponents. He then makes the ludicrous decision to go home and write a speech to convince the barber and other patrons of their ignorance and stupidity in matters of race and politics. And naturally, the whole episode ends in complete and utter humiliation.

While one of the great pleasures of reading O'Connor is the fun she makes of ignorant rednecks, there is equally an element of frustration reading such stories (or perhaps that's just my own frustration coloring my reading of the story). Maybe it's because race seems to have re-entered the national conversation in such heinous ways (There's no KKK in Barbour land!). But at least this story is quite funny, in the sense that you want to laugh even while you grit your teeth.

Mark Twain on Huck Finn:

"A book of mine where a sound heart and a deformed conscience come into collision and conscience suffers defeat." - Notebook #35 (reprinted in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Univ. of California Press, 2003)

An Alabama publisher will be releasing an altered version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, where certain objectionable words will be replaced with placeholders. We'll get to the others in the postscript, but lets start with the most egregious. The 215 (!) uses of the word 'nigger,' are to be replaced by the word 'slave.'

Just think about the two words. 'Nigger' is specific. When a white person says it, it hits like a crack of the whip. We all know what that word means, who it refers to, and what its implications are about American society and racial attitudes past and present. But slave? 'Nigger' reveals of its user a powerful, institutionalized hatred and a complicity with the evils of Southern society. Slave does not. 'Slave' certainly implies dehumanization, but the word doesn't refer to one specific type, era, or object of chattelry. In today's modern culture, 'slave' just as equally calls to mind indentured servitude in the Roman Empire as it does contemporary sex trafficking in Eastern Europe and Russia.

So what you're doing is taking a specific and awful human experience and subsuming it into a still evil but more broadly drawn human condition. And to do that, you have to minimize the impact of history.

When you change the word 'nigger' to 'slave,' it's not just political correctness run amok. It's second guessing the aesthetic choice of the original author. Changing that word does not in any way change the theme, the meaning, the overall point of the novel. But it does harm its authenticity. Changing that word would have us believe that somehow Huck is a magical being in Mississippi who managed not to be raised with the same values and patterns of speech that everyone else in his social class was. Changing that word undermines the aesthetic authority of the author. Changing that word fundamentally undermines the poignance of Huck's journey and eventual enlightenment.

You are taking a story about how one boy learns that love and friendship are more important than the expectations of society, no matter how much cultural and legal pressure that particular society places on him. These internal conflicts make Huck Finn who he is; they make him complex, dynamic, and eternally memorable. But to do that, you have to show that he is part of the society. The transformation is hollow if he is already born somehow 'better' than everyone else; enlightened without any experience to justify that knowledge.

POSTSCRIPT

1. As for correcting "injun" to "Indian." Again an aesthetic voice. The author chose to depict the dialectic form of the word. It's the way they pronounce it, for godssakes. And still do, in the South. Correcting this is like correcting all usage of the word 'ain't.'

2. And as for changing "half-breed" to "half-blood." Are you kidding me? That word is plastered through all seven books of that other beloved children's series: Harry Potter. Who says it? The racist Malfoys and their flunkies. These words are intended to shock us. We are meant to feel the full impact of their use. It gives us context for a world in which hatred and intolerance were ingrained into the very psyche, and to pretend that didn't trickle down into language is a fallacy.

3. At the end of the day, it is not the word that offends us. It's the entire sensibility of dehumanization. If you are offended by the word, you are missing the point.

No Fringe for a couple of weeks yet! So naturally I had to rewatch the Marionette episode to rev up. And I found yet another thing to love about Fringe - despite being a genre show, it's so honest about humanity. I've always admired how it doesn't dwell on melodrama, because in reality, most people don't, at least not after a certain amount of wallowing. So when this episode came out, the drama was fully earned.


Prior to Marionette, all the facts were set up; there was a rush against time. No time to be overcome by emotion. Lesser shows would skip this part of the narrative (the emotional fallout), or would consign it to a throwaway line in the next episode. But as Fringe never addressed the emotional toll on their characters in an in-depth way before (at least not Olivia), it was earned. And it was handled brilliantly.

I didn't notice the first time around, but just as Peter doesn't conceal the harsh truth about Faux-livia being in some way...better than Olivia, Olivia doesn't hide to Broyles that Broyles that his now-dead  doppelganger led a more fulfilled life with a wife and son. At first I may have cried, "oh the insensitivity!" but now I realize that it's probably for the best. It's better to give the whole truth when they're receptive to the whole truth, than to have a stray detail snap back hit them in the back of the neck when they least expect it.

Also? This is what humans do, I think. They either lie sociopathically (it's a word, damnit, and if not, then don't tell me), or they tell the whole truth because they can't help it. White lies are a form of cowardice. There's an urgency, in some cases, to provide as much information as possible. Like when a man feels guilty about an affair and that guilt compels him to confess. It's not just enough to confess, he has to confess every last awful detail; to him it's just a matter of twisting the knife a couple of centimeters further when it's already 2 inches in.

Yes, this is an act of self-preservation on his part, but for the recipient? It means you get one big, bad wound, all in one go, and let it heal. Otherwise you risk reopening the wound again and again, or God forbid, create new ones.

It's been a great year for me and the classics. It's frankly ludicrous that I haven't seen some of these before, but hey, now I have lots of material for the dormant Filling the Gaps series. In every case, it's been easy to see why they're in the canon; they still seem to provide points of reference for many modern films (generally because they're better crafted).

I went through a phase in 2005 when I tried to watch all the movies on AFI's top 100 movies list (released back in 2001 if I recall correctly. And no, there's no such thing as Google). I made it to On the Waterfront and quit. Not because it wasn't terrific, which it was (That song lyric from "Rattlesnakes" finally made sense: "She looked like Eve Marie Saint, in On the Waterfront.") But the real issue was, 2005 was my last year at the good old University of Texas. And probably the year I had the most fun, and also the least time. Which basically meant that blocks of stationary hours for films were not given much priority in my schedule (much being relative - I think I still managed about 20 movies that year).

THE SUPERB

Chinatown was the first movie I saw after questioning the internet gods: "Hey [insert google/imdb/cinematical.com/davidbordwell.net] what movie do critics and movie fans seem to refer to all the time that I've somehow been deprived of seeing?" I saw it six months ago, and even now, certain images from the film seem to manifest in my head when I least expect it. It's not difficult to draw a line between Chinatown and this year's Somewhere: both Roman Polanski and Sophia Coppola managed to uncover the contradictions and the ugliness of California, that shining state universally considered a kingdom of glamour.

Most of the time, when there's a particular 'classic' that I haven't seen, there's a reason. Not necessarily a good reason, but reason sufficient to create mental blocks. There wasn't one for The Godfather. To this day, I'm still not sure why I'd never seen it before. But I finally did, and was treated to a healthy combination of warmth, humor and violence (this seems to be the magical troika that Hollywood has been searching for ever since, and achieved only rarely).

THE NECESSARY

This category of 'necessary' was created purely for one movie: Sunset Boulevard. You know when people talk about movies being 'important,' and you wonder what the hell they mean by that? Watch this movie. It's a touchstone for so much that has come since, which is especially striking since it's a tale of transition about what came before, when silents were thrown out in favor of talkies.

If the world ends tomorrow, and alien archaelogists want to understand what the 20th century (and probably 21st century) obsession with movies was all about, they just need to see this movie. It has everything: the conflict between art and money, the fear of getting old, bizarre and total subservience to celebrity, the banality of eccentric obsessions, and the cruelty that comes from delusion.

The real reasons I'm glad to see this movie? One, 2010 was the 50th anniversary of All About Eve, and apparently a favorite critical pastime is to compare the two (I think it's apples and oranges, but whatever).  Two, it reveals Black Swan for being the superficial and incoherent b-movie that it is.

THE GUILTY PLEASURES

I saw Notorious well after I started this blog, but for some reason I couldn't write about it. I think I loved it too viscerally, even though there were problems with the narrative. So I employed a childish solution to this intellectual conflict - I covered my eyes and went "It's not real if I can't see it! It's not real if I can't see it!" And if I think about it enough to write about, then I'll see the flaws and cracks. And I don't want to. Because I loved it. A lot. I think it has my favorite ending of any movie ever.

It may seem counter-intuitive to put Annie Hall under the heading of "Guilty Pleasures," but it seems that in my generation, you do feel like you have to justify why you would watch (let alone enjoy) a Woody Allen movie. But I maintain that so many movie tropes were actually created in this movie, and were effective at the time (albeit overused now). Also it's hilarious. See it now.

MODERN CLASSICS

I finally saw Shawshank Redemption, after rejecting it with every fiber of my being. You can read the original review to find out why. It was one of the less essential films I saw this year, except to check it off a list (and it is on many lists, for some reason I don't understand). But I wasn't bored by it, and Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman kept things rolling along in an eminently watchable fashion. I also liked that there weren't easy answers in it, and that when this movie came out, that was still acceptable. (The counterpoint to this is The Kids Are All Right, where many are turned off by the ambiguity, but I tend to think ambiguity makes drama more honest.)

The other modern classic 2010 gifted me was Wall Street. Watching this became necessary, as I realized that it may be another few years before this particular version of douchebaggery becomes relevant again (and oh, how relevant it is to the past year). Wall Street provides strong insight into the mentality of a certain type of financial professional - the ones that pursue money, more money, at any  cost. While a lot of the chicanery used in this film died when the internet came along, it's not difficult to imagine this sort of manipulation is still bubbling along under the surface, harder to trace.

LOOKING FORWARD

It's great, I feel like I've crossed some longstanding obstacles, and now I can get into the real oddities that dot the history of film (to be honest, I think I skipped straight to the oddities and passed the canon by. See, for example, my unending love for Belle de Jour and other Luis Bunuel exotica. Actually, Belle de Jour is another example of what Black Swan tried to be and yet failed miserably. It seems that trashing Black Swan may have become my new I Hate Garden State. But to be fair, this time it's not Natalie Portman's fault.) 

I've already got a long list of classic films to look forward to: just over the next couple of weeks, I'm planning to get through The Leopard, Meet John Doe, Lady Eve, and many Bette Davis films. I've also got sequels to look forward to. But I think 2011 is going to be a great year for me and classic film.