The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene

This slim volume was wrenched from the agitated mind of Mr. Greene.  Or so it seems upon finishing it that Greene was deeply moved by the conditions in Mexico during the Revolution.  Greene’s depression, which is tantamount to implied and actual pain and agony, compounded by his deep channel of faith, spirituality and sense of religious duty combine to give us a haunted view of the last vestiges of religion in a mutating world. 

The whisky priest is  ”…the only priest the children could remember: it was from him they would take their ideas of the faith.  But it was from him too they took God-in their mouths.  When he was gone it would be as if God in all this space between the sea and the mountains ceased to exist.  Wasn’t it his duty to stay, even if they despised him, even if they were murdered for his sake? even if they were corrupted by his example? He was shaken with the enormity of the problem.  He lay with his hands over his eyes: nowhere, in all the wide flat marshy land, was there a single person he could consult. He raised the brandy to his mouth.”  The priest is so conflicted by his duty and his self-preservation instinct that throughout the novel we are privy to his skewed thought patterns. But as one can see, in reading the novel, it is from his environment and being hunted that he forced to alter his trains of thought.  The Judas of the story “…had an immense self-importance; he was unablt to picture a world of which he was only a typical part – a world of treachery, violence, and lust in which his shame was altogether insignificant.  How often the priest had heard the same confession – Man was so limited he hadn’t even the ingenuity to invent a new vice: the animals knew as much.  It was for this world that Christ had died; the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater glory lay around the death.  It was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or a civilization – it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt. He said, ‘Why do you tell me all this?’”  From this passage we can see Greene’s deep well of faith rising like the tide to justify the existence of both men.  Damned and Saviour, the priest and the half-caste with the two yellow fangs populate a damnable world in Greene’s estimation.  Greene’s faith would seem to be the horse and his depression the cart puliing him along a world he so deeply hates. 

The idealistic, zealous, but in the end almost pathetic, lieutenant’s reflection on the little children in the plaze speaks volumes about Greene’s condition.   “…and the lieutenant became aware in his own heart of a sad and unsatisfiable love.” Which would bring up the question of authorship, meaning that can we see Greene experiencing these hardships in life? Does he empathize in order to convey the reality of pain and faith?  Or is he that good of an author that he is able to survey a situation and sketch a story just from his obervations? I will have to consult the 3-volume work by Norman Sherry to get a fuller understanding of Greene’s demeanor and psyche at the time of writing the novel.

Archaic Word of the Day

Jeroboam-size/type of wine bottle.

I came across this word when reading George Saintsbury’s excellent Notes on a Cellar-Book. 

WikiPedia lists at this page here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_bottle

 

If you are further interested in wine please check out this list of wine personalities: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wine_personalities

Everyone from a Rothschild to Saintsbury is listed.

Pierre Grassou by Honore de Balzac

This small piece contains a nice little twist ending and delights the reader in its’ comedy. Here is what the eminent George Saintsbury had to say in the Introduction:

Pierre Grassou is much slighter and smaller; it is not even on a level with Honorine or Le Colonel Chabert. But it is good in itself; it is very characteristic of its time, and it is specially happy as giving the volume a touch of comedy, which is grateful, and which makes it as a whole rather superior to most of Balzac’s volumes,— volumes apt to be ‘ fagoted’ rather than composed. The figure of the artist-bourgeois, neither Bohemian nor buveur d’eau, is excellently hit off, and the thing leaves us with all the sense of a pleasant afterpiece.

The fact that Grassou is used and ends up winning in the end is a thing that should be considered by contemporary psychologists.  For you see Grassou is portrayed, to reiterate Saintsbury, as the bourgeois artist ordinaire.  Grassou can’t paint and is told to quit but he quietly goes about his business and ends up an old master. Ha! One should read the thing to get the general effect of the twist ending.  Here is the link to it on Google Books:

http://books.google.com/books?id=UdMTAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA267&dq=pierre+grassou#PPP1,M1

The Paris of Delacroix and Ingres comes to life in the course of this short story and if I am not mistaken I believe the Louvre was still used to house artists during this period.  With the omnipresent Salon culture permeating the art world of the Bourbon Restoration, there was little room for untalented men such as Pierre Grassou.  Balzac has no couth for such men as Grassou but he plays a forgiving god and lets Monsieur Grassou make dividends on his hard work and miniscule luck.

Please read and enjoy.

A Mercy by Toni Morrison, reviewed by B. R. Myers in the Atlantic Monthly

In his merciless review of Toni Morrison’s historical novel A Mercy B.R. Myers does not hold back.  His review articulates my feelings on Morrison, that is why I am so enamoured with it.  From her purposely incorrect grammar to her inability to do the thing and go a little deeper.  Myers even compares her work with Zola and Steinbeck, which kind of makes me throw up in my mouth a little bit that she could even be considered with those two.  Yeah sure she has won the Nobel Prize you say.  But who cares when her writing is so insipid.

I am so gung-ho over his review that I would like to pull up another from the NY Times.  Though I have not read A Reader’s Manifesto by Myers I can almost gauge its’ effectiveness by Judith Shulevitz’s review of the thing from September 9, 2001. Shulevitz concedes that Paul Auster and Cormac McCarthy are terrible authors. No I’m just kidding but she does admit their faults and that their sentences sometimes lack a little spiked punch, which I blame the publishers for wholeheartedly.  B ut then she makes the corny statement that because they have their faults, which makes them truly human I might add, we get to love them more when we actually come across a good sentence.  Oh and then she mentions Don DeLillo’s high comedy White Noise but I was so bored after reading all of the two pages of the review that I was half way into a coma.

Here’s hoping B.R. Myers comes out with some more Literary reviews in the future.

Honky Tonk in Cleveland, Ohio

It’s a jazz affair, drum crashes and cornet razzes.
The trombone pony neighs and the tuba jackass snorts.
The banjo tickles and titters too awful.
The chippies talk about the funnies in the papers.
     The cartoonists weep in their beer.
     Ship riveters talk with their feet
     To the feet of floozies under the tables.
A quartet of white hopes mourn with interspersed snickers:
        “I got the blues.
        I got the blues.
        I got the blues.”
And . . . as we said earlier:
     The cartoonists weep in their beer

 

Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)

Poor Ellen Smith

This is a new favorite of mine, while I prefer the Hobart Smith version the Mac Wiseman edition is tres sweet.

 

Here are the lyrics:

Come all kind people, my story to hear,
What happen’d to me in June of last year.
It’s of poor Ellen Smith and how she was found,
A ball in her heart, lyin’ cold on the ground.

It’s true I’m in jail, a prisoner now,
But God is here with me and hears every vow.
Before Him I promise the truth to relate
And tell all I know of poor Ellen’s sad fate.

The world of my story’s no longer a part,
But knows I was Ellen’s own lovin’ sweetheart.
They knew my intention to make her my wife,
I loved her too dearly to take her sweet life.

I saw her on Monday, before that sad day
They found her poor body and took her away;
That she had been killed never entered my mind
Till a ball through her heart they happened to find.

Oh who was so cruel, so heartless, so base
As to murder poor Ellen in such a lonesome place?
I saw her that morning so still and so cold
And heerd the wild stories the witnesses told.

I choked back my tears, for the people all said
That Peter Degraph had shot Ellen Smith dead!
My love is in her grave with her hand on her breast
The bloodhound and sheriff won’t give me no rest.

They got their Winchesters and hunted me down,
But I was away in ole Mount Airy town.
I stayed off a year and I prayed all the time
That the man might be found whut committed the crime.

So I could come back in my character safe (and my character
save?)
Ere the flowers had faded on poor Ellen’s grave.
So I come back to Winston my trial to stand
To live or to die as the law might command.

Ellen sleeps calm in the lonely church yard
While I look trough the bars — God knows it is hard!
I know they will hang me — at least, if they can,
But I know I will die as an innocent man.

My soul will be free when I stand at the bar
Where God tries his cross, then, there, like a star,
That shines in the night, will an innocent shine
Oh, I do appeal to the Justice of Time!

If this version doesn’t seem right to you remember there are always variants of songs.

This excerpt comes from Ethel Park Richardson’s book American Mountain Songs:  “Peter Degraph really did shoot and kill Ellen Smith
(according to the verdict) near Mt. Airy, NC. He was executed for
the crime, and while he waited for them to take him to the chair
he called for a guitar, and this song was composed and sung by
him. So great was the feeling, for and against Degraph, that it
had to be declared a misdemeanour for the song to be sung in a
gathering of any size for the reason that it always fomented a
riot.”

Here is the search at Youtube for Poor Ellen Smith:

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=&search_query=poor+ellen+smith

 

Hope you enjoy

Gaiman does Batman

Neil Gaiman is doing a Batman 2-part issue for D.C. Comics. Here is the link to the page on D.C.’s hompage:

http://www.dccomics.com/dcu/comics/?cm=11108

 

Check it out. While I can’t say for certain that I have finshed anything of Gaiman’s I will definitely be checking this one out.

A letter from Keats at the Rosenbach Museum

I dearly wanted to go see this over Valentine’s Day weekend but being the lazy bum I am didn’t I didn’t make it over there.  Here is the link to their website where you can find more about the exhibit and other exhibits such as the Maurice Sendak one.

http://www.rosenbach.org

Brunch with Basquiat and Burns

Sprung from the earth! That is how one would like to characterize these two artists.  They reached the stage fully formed and ready to produce. A venerable Dickensian moment we have from Jean Michel Basquiat and Robert Burns. Hardly congruous they are when first appearances are taken into account. Firstly we have a Caribbean-American who was the Vanity of the New York Scene. Lastly we have the Ultimate Bard of Scots (English too),  Mr. Robert Burns come on down.

So what this is all about is one part canonization and the rest is how a nepophyte to certain sets becomes immortalized through certain supposed innate abilities.  On the Artchive there is an excerpt from Robert Hughes’ American Visions that goes like this:

His career, both actual and posthumous, appealed to a cluster of toxic vulgarities. First, the racist idea of the black as naif or rhythmic innocent, and of the black artist as “instinctual,” someone outside “mainstream” culture and therefore not to be rated in its terms: a wild pet for the recently cultivated collector. Second, a fetish about the freshness of youth, blooming among the discos of the East Side scene. Third, guilt and political correctness, which made curators and collectors nervous about judging the work of any black artist who could be presented as a “victim.” Fourth, art-investment mania. And last, the audience’s goggling appetite for self-destructive talent: Pollock, Montgomery Clift. All this gunk rolled into a sticky ball around Basquiat’s tiny talent and produced a reputation.

Hughes isn’t really a champion of  the work of Basquiat but he does bring up the topic of being the naive innocent who is positively instinctual in his ouevre. Comparatively Robert Burns was the farmboy turned poet who rose with the lillies and spun gobs of poetry from his teeming, instinctively ripe brain.  The introduction to him in the Norton Anthology begins thus:

A favorite myth of later 18th-century primitivists was that there existed natural poets who warbled their native woodnotes wild, independent of art or literary tradition.  These artless poets were sought among peasants and proletarians, whose caste or rural habitation, it was thought, protected them from contamination by the artificialities of civilized life and culture. When Robert Burns published his first volum of Poems, in 1786, he was at once hailed by the literati of Edinburgh as an instance of the natural genius, a “Heaven-taught plowman” whose poems were the spontaneous overflow of his native feelings.  Burns himself sometimes fostered this belief, and rather enjoyed playing the role of the poet by instinct.  But in fact he was a well-read (although largely self-educated) man, whose quick intelligence and sensibility enabled him to make the most of limited opportunities.  And although he broke clear of the contemporary conventions of decayed English neoclassicism, he did so not by instinct but as a deliberate craftsman who turned to two earlier traditions for his models — the Scottish oral tradition of folklore and folk song, and the highly developed Scottish literary tradition, which goes back to the late Middle Ages.

So with these two quotes we can see a formation of a calculated reaction to the phenom of the NATURAL.  There needn’t be any studying nor appreciation of all things passed because some way somehow this person already knows it all.  It is as though they are a perpetual teenager and forever cutting class to get high or have illegitimate children.  To further highlight my point about the way these two artists are perceived, well at least Burns, the American Folklife Center, of all places, is observing the 250th anniversary of his birth.  More information can be found here: http://www.loc.gov/folklife/Symposia/Burns/

I don’t know where this native genius concept came from nor do I pretend to know the importance of such a thing but it is an interesting happening in Western Culture.

My favorite male actor under 40

As you’ve all heard by now Christian Bale beats his mother and unravels balls of obscenities at directors and grips. Oh well, is he the hardest working man in show business? I’m gonna guess Yeah he the hell is.

You’ve seen his movies and you may know he deals with depression but we are here to discuss the work ethic of this master of dialect.  Not the blockbusters but have you seen Metroland? Quite a swell movie. What a short post!  I will report on Killing Pablo and Public Enemies when they come out.