“She’s interested in the life that happens in the pauses.”
Laura Dern was speaking at a New York Film Festival press conference, following the screening of Kelly Reichardt’s new film Certain Women (2016), and describing what she admired about the work of that minimalist indie director. But she could just as easily have been referring to Maile Meloy, the author behind the three short stories from two of her collections, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It and Half in Love, which Reichardt brought to the screen in her Montana-set triptych film adaptation. In a New York Times review of Meloy’s collection the novelist Curtis Sittenfeld noted that what distinguished the work of the Montanan author was her restraint: “She is impressively concise, disciplined in length and scope. And she’s balanced in her approach to character, neither blinded by love for her creations, nor abusive toward them.”
The same holds true of Reichardt. As in her earlier films (all of which she co-wrote with Jonathan Raymond; this is the first she’s done solo), Certain Women is attuned to the smaller moments of life. The trio of narratives studiously observe the women they’re centered on without feeling voyeuristic, and she makes her camera (and by extension, her audience) empathize with the characters without demanding identification. Her frame is intimate yet never intrusive, catching the quietest, most telling details of the people we’re invited to meet.
Among them is Dern, who plays a small-town lawyer named Laura Wells. We meet her at first in a messy bedroom, where she has found refuge in the middle of her work day with a man now putting his clothes back on. Lingering longer than she should she finally gets dressed and heads back to the office, although, in her hurried state she only half-tucks her sweater into her skirt — a detail Reichardt’s framing encourages us to notice but without making it explicit.
Laura Dern in ‘Certain Women’ (2016)
Reichardt’s focus on these interstitial pauses functions as a visual conjuring of Meloy’s free indirect discourse, allowing moments that might otherwise be excised — because they don’t strictly advance a plotted narrative — to linger, stressing the way that our most obvious attempts at introspection happen not when staring out a window or furrowing our brow, but in the most mundane chores of everyday life. When Laura takes her client to hear a second opinion from a lawyer in a neighboring town (who repeats what Laura has already told him: there is no tort claim to file against his former employer, after the accident that’s left him physically and psychologically disabled), we can see the frustration in her face for the way her authority has yet again been undermined. We don’t need Meloy’s words — “I thought, That’s what it’s like to be a man. If I were a man I could explain the law and people would listen and say, ‘Okay.’ It would be so restful” — for Dern embodies it in the world-weary way she carries herself afterwards, as the full brunt of her client’s biased disregard for her opinion washes over her. Reichardt shows Dern driving, her eyes on the road ahead, her preoccupation with what has happened silently mingling with the need to make this turn, to mind that car, to take the next exit. And so, when we finally receive Meloy’s dialogue via a phone conversation, it feels like she is giving voice to thoughts we’ve already seen written on her face.
Later, when we’re introduced to Gina — played by Michelle Williams and based on a character from Meloy’s story “Native Sandstone” — Reichardt again gives preference to a moment of quiet meditation. Looking out of place dressed in chic athletic wear in the middle of the wintry Montana outdoors, Gina is walking back to the campsite where her daughter and husband pack up for the day. She is consumed by the landscape as she puffs on a cigarette, something clearly on her mind. As we learn later, she is intent on moving here and building a house that captures the spirit of the land around it. “Gina wants the house to be authentic,” her husband explains, to an old man whose sandstone they wish to buy — rumored as it is to have been reclaimed from the town’s old schoolhouse. Just as Meloy threads the story of a fraught marriage through her text without it taking over, Reichardt likewise relies on Williams to convey the narrative’s depth of feeling, which many other directors might have chosen to spell out.
Michelle Williams in ‘Certain Women’
In the film’s third and most striking section, adapted from Meloy’s short story “Travis, B.,” Reichardt goes a step further. The central character appears almost exclusively in near-silent scenes that ask us to inhabit her head, all but demanding we intuit for ourselves what she might be thinking. On the page “Travis, B.” follows Chet Moran, who grew up in Logan, Montana where a bout of polio left him with a limp, a physical reminder of his own inability to comfortably exist within his own body. While working at a ranch tending to horses he decides to venture into town one evening, where he stumbles onto a night class at the local high school, taught by a young lawyer. He’s taken with the lawyer, Beth, and clumsily invites her out to eat afterwards, despite the fact that she will need to drive back nine hours to where she lives. During their quick diner date, Meloy gives us access to both Chet and Beth’s inner monologues:
She studied him and seemed to wonder again if she should be afraid. But the room was bright and he tried to look harmless. He was harmless, he was pretty sure. Being with someone helped — he didn’t feel so wound up and restless.
The generous spirit of Meloy’s free indirect discourse is translated intact into Reichardt’s screen adaptation. With unfussy shots of her actors she offers us plenty of time to discern the way they measure each other’s company, before easing into a comforting routine that follows every class. While the dynamic at work is never precisely clear, the shared intimacy between them is palpable, in these late-night moments when Beth’s tiredness is buoyed by the other’s eager company. But the gendered dynamics that Meloy carefully deconstructs — Chet grows attached to Beth and proceeds to drive across state to see her one last time, a gesture as aggressive as it is romantic — are not only upended but altogether reframed in Reichardt’s retelling. Rather than a strapping, if timid, young man, Chet becomes a young woman: Lily Gladstone portrays the rancher who becomes smitten with her younger teacher, played by Kristen Stewart.
Kristen Stewart in ‘Certain Women’
What fascinates about the gender switch is that Reichardt feels little compelled to change much (or anything, really) about the rest of the piece. After offering Beth a ride on one of the horses to the cafe where they’ve met before, the rancher awkwardly stands before her, shifting her weight from foot to foot. In Meloy’s telling this is the moment when Chet “wanted to kiss her but couldn’t see any clear path to that happening.” In Certain Women — and in ways that speak to the semiotic slippage, from certainty to ambiguity, which the title sets up — Gladstone’s rancher appears to ponder those very thoughts, her musings seemingly no different than if she were a man. In turning Meloy’s characters into women who tentatively crave and pursue a same-sex attraction, Reichardt has found a simple and efficient way to deepen the central tension of this coupling. In her hands, “Travis, B.” unearths the quietly radical proposition of a connection between two women that follows and exceeds the confines of the romantic template Meloy arranged in her story. Beth and the Rancher’s hesitant relationship is both simpler and more complicated than on the page, though Certain Women is content with letting audiences fill in those pauses themselves, inciting us to reflection in the face of a straightforward narrative of longing, followed by loss.
Lily Gladstone in ‘Certain Women’
It’s the details that accumulate and remain once the credits roll, even if little has been resolved. A woman wiping her mouth with a napkin still wrapped around diner cutlery, another absentmindedly playing with a sandstone pebble, a man slurping a chocolate milkshake in prison. The images are fleeting but they speak to the unguarded moments Reichardt hones in and pauses on, bringing viewers closer to her characters even as they suggest a more expansive canvas. Reichardt, building on Meloy’s concise prose, finds depth in the elemental brushstroke, a life lived in the pregnant pause.
When I find myself wishing for some vaguely imagined nonexistent book I’d like to read, I’m almost always pining for a novel of the wild outdoors. I love urbane social comedies and absurd novels about office work and many kinds of fiction set mostly indoors and in town. But if I get snowed into a cabin with only one kind of reading at hand, I want a big stack of books that take wilderness and wildness seriously, outdoor novels a bit wild themselves. Novels set in strange forests as surprising and wondrous as real ones. Feral novels that make more of nature than a screen on which to project the emotional lives of human characters.
Lots of outdoor fiction offers straightfaced realism written as if literature hasn’t changed in a century, or the didacticism of characters each standing in for a position on some environmental issue and making sure you know it whenever they open their mouths. But what I want is fiction with a sense of play in its style, bringing into the woods things taken for granted in novels about urban lives for decades but disappointingly rare beyond city limits — unreliable narrators and unexpected narrative structures. Stories that can’t be predicted from the opening pages, and a sense of humor sorely lacking in so much nature writing. In an era of bears surprising both deep forest hikers and suburban strollers engrossed in their phones, coyotes wandering down city streets, and birds in the rafters of home improvement stores, there’s a wild possibility of surprise in modern life. And at the less pleasant extreme there’s the chaos of climate change and other modern problems demanding modern stories about them.
I try to get that wildness into my own fiction, most recently with Scratch, my attempt at a feral, strange forest novel. And I try to find it as often as possible in my reading. There don’t ever seem to be enough of those books to keep me sated, but here are a few of my favorites (though I’ve left off a couple that are better known, for the sake of sharing some overlooked blooms in the scrub).
Wild Life by Molly Gloss
The first time I read Wild Life it blew me away and it does so again each time I return. Presented as the early 1900s diary of a proto-feminist, single mother author of pulp fictions who goes into an Oregon forest in search of a missing girl, only to get lost herself and discover mysterious creatures beyond what her insistent rationalism allows for, Gloss’s novel delves into myths of the “wildman” and myths of gender and does it all with a magnificent narrative voice as wild as the forest around it.
The Hunter by Julia Leigh
M, who goes by the name Martin though it isn’t his, gets hired by a pharmaceutical company to hunt and harvest DNA from the world’s last living Tasmanian tiger, long after the species is thought extinct. Somehow, in a very short novel, Leigh weaves together the shadowy reach of modern business, the tragic colonial and ecological histories of her setting, a classic story of exploration stripped of its celebratory machismo, and a mother and children left behind broken by the blinkered desires of men. Despite the remoteness of this novel’s forest, it is enmeshed in the networks of money and power that entangle us all, wherever we live.
The Wall by Marlen Haushofer, translated by Shaun Whiteside
I have to thank novelist and translator Michelle Bailat-Jones for introducing me to The Wall, because it quickly became one of my favorites. The nameless middle-aged narrator visits friends at their remote mountain hunting lodge, only to be left alone by the inexplicable appearance of an invisible barrier at the edge of the valley it occupies. Left to fend for herself, she breaks restraints built up over years spent sublimating her individual identity into that of a mother and wife, allowing a wilder self to emerge.
Birdbrain by Johanna Sinisalo, translated by David Hackston
I could have picked any one of Sinisalo’s novels to put on this list, because it’s hard to think of a writer consistently doing more exciting things in fiction about the natural world. But Birdbrain is the most “outdoorsy” among her English translations, as it brings us along with a Finnish couple hiking in New Zealand and Australia. Alternating between their accounts of events we’re privy to the relationship’s tensions and strains as the couple are stripped of pretenses and niceties by their time in the wild, but we’re also aware of an eerier presence in the forest around them.
Wild Harbour by Ian Macpherson
This one was published in 1936, but you wouldn’t know from its prescience. It’s an account of a Scottish couple fleeing the city for a wild home in the hills ahead of the imminent threats of perpetual war, disease, and disaster. But what makes it stand out from other stories of escaping modernity “back to nature” is how unavoidably the outside world presses in, and how earnestly Wild Harbour takes on harder questions seldom asked in similar stories about the ethics and impossibilities of hiding out in the back of beyond while the world burns.
The Blue Fox by Sjon, translated by Victoria Cribb
The Blue Fox moves between a hunter, his vulpine quarry, a boy with Down’s syndrome, and other characters in mysterious tandem, woven together as any place is with threads of history and folklore and transformation. Sometimes when I read literature in translation I suspect I’m missing so much that the power of the work is lost to me, but with The Blue Fox that opacity is one of the qualities I most enjoy: I know there are allusions and echoes I’m not attuned to, but that misunderstanding feels like wandering a landscape I only half understand and just makes me want to return.
The Year of the Hare by Arto Paasilinna, translated by Herbert Lomas
I visited friends in Finland quite a few years ago, and The Year of the Hare was the book — so they told me — everyone was talking about at the time. It’s a short, simple novel about a journalist who stops by the roadside to enter the forest in aid of an injured hare. There are plenty of novels offering sentimental accounts of characters giving up their fast city lives at the inspiration of some noble animal; perhaps some of those are imitations of this. But Paasilinna’s has a depth of wit and sadness, and awareness, that for me elevates it above many others.
Into the Forest by Jean Hegland
When the world collapses in ways and for reasons they don’t quite understand, sisters Eva and Nell are left alone at the remote cabin their family retreated to in preparation. Into the Forest is as gripping as any thriller or rural horror, but there’s a thoughtfulness to the novel perfectly balanced with details of the pragmatic, often painful means by which the sisters survive. Like some others on this list it pulls us so fully into its wild bubble that even as we know we should root for rescue or the world’s recovery, we’re torn because of what would be lost.
The Man Who Spoke Snakish by Andrus Kivirähk, translated by Christopher Moseley
Hands down one of the best reading experiences I’ve had in years. The language is wild, the setting is wild, the narrator is absolutely one of a kind, and this whole account of his life as the last speaker of the language of snakes — and one of the last members of his ancient forest culture who hasn’t abandoned the trees for life in town — is full of tragedy, comedy, mystery, absurdity, and everything you could possibly want from a novel. I’ve read that Kivirähk’s novel is so popular in his native Estonia there’s a board game based on it, and I can only hope it, too, is available in English someday so I can play and return to its remarkable world.
The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz by Russell Hoban
Riddley Walker is Hoban’s best-known novel (and maybe his best), and Turtle Diary is the one most recently restored to print and public acclaim, but The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz has to go down as my favorite. I’m a sucker for any story, fictional or otherwise, of animals popping up where they aren’t expected, so this account of a cartographer who abandons his family, his son’s expedition to find him, and a lion stalking the streets of a city long after lions disappeared from the world has gripped my imagination for twenty-some years. It is like nothing else, which is the wildest way to be wild of all.
Timothy, or Notes of an Abject Reptile by Verlyn Klinkenborg
A domesticated English garden hardly seems wild, but Klinkenborg’s novel narrated by the titular Timothy, a female tortoise kept by eighteenth-century naturalist Gilbert White, makes it so. There’s no fast-paced adventure or dangerous action but by slowing the world down in a small space as described by a creature with her own sense of what’s worth looking at, Timothy is a gently disorienting read that gives us no choice but to slow down, pay attention, and see a world where the unexpected might happen — what’s more wild than that?
Power by Linda Hogan
Power is the story of a Taiga teenager pulled into a maelstrom of media and politics after she watches her aunt kill a tribally sacred and legally protected panther. It’s a deceptively straightforward novel, at least in its telling, that sneaks up to unsettle by making us take a fresh look at what may seem familiar. Wild places aren’t usually what I associate with Florida, but Power is a welcome challenge to those assumptions — as are Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach novels, which would be on this list were it longer.
Beastings by Benjamin Myers
This one’s as dark as dark gets, like Southern gothic in northern England, as it follows a teenage girl and a baby fleeing two men on her trail. But what offsets the grim cruelty of Myers’ characters is the implacable, steady presence of his landscape — yes, what’s happening is horrible, but how much does it matter in the longview of stone and hill? That’s a dual-awareness I often long for in fiction, and Myers delivers whether in the realist mode of novels like Beastings or in his novella Snorri & Frosti, a treat of absurdist minimalism about a pair of woodcutters.
Infinite Ground by Martin MacInnes
The newest book on my list, I wondered if it was too soon to count Infinite Ground among the others. But it’s just that good. MacInnes’ debut is a detective novel, following an inspector whose search for a missing man takes him deep into a strange jungle. And it’s also a story about the literal and figurative breakdown of identity, whether as a result of the daily grind of work or of sharing the landscape of our own skins with millions of microorganisms. Or in this case, both. Or possibly neither. It’s hard to pin down, like all wild things.
Up With Kids started as an unofficial offshoot of Up With People, the 1970s show choir now notorious for its ties to an evangelical cult, the Nixon administration and Halliburton. Our director Bonnie’s salad days had been spent touring with the group, which she referred to simply as People. It took a real insider to drop two prepositions. So much projecting over the years had left her vocal chords frayed and full of benign polyps. Now in her forties, an Up With Kids T-shirt plunging from her chest and a wad of nicotine gum in one cheek, she suffered from a permanent case of laryngitis, the kind only characters on Nick at Nite got with any regularity and only then for the better part of an episode.
Looking back, it was probably just the fact that she had been a smoker, but as Bonnie reenacted long-lost Super Bowl halftime shows in the Presbyterian church where we rehearsed, squeezing out notes like the debarked corgi on our block, it was like music itself had worn her out. I couldn’t imagine a better life.
Bonnie reenacted long-lost Super Bowl halftime shows in the Presbyterian church where we rehearsed, squeezing out notes like the debarked corgi on our block.
Every summer my family took a trip with Up With Kids and patiently watched me scream “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” into a microphone on the boardwalk outside Universal Studios or snap and twirl through a Beach Boys medley, a plastic lei flying around my ears. Outside a tank of honking sea lions, we beamed that Sea World (not the more traditional choice, Disneyland) was the happiest place in the U-S-A and at an America Sings Summit in Washington, D.C., my preemie sister Chelsea and I didn’t worry that we weren’t good enough for anyone else to hear we just sang, sang a song, like the Carpenters.
Dragged to all of our cheesy performances, my older brother Danny called Up With Kids the Special Olympics of acting, which was fine with me. Sparkling in a loose-fitting gold lamé shirt while my little sister was trapped in a puckering leotard of the same material, I was the actor among social rejects. Bonnie’s daughter, for one, had Down Syndrome. Most of us Kids were damaged in more minor but no less noticeable ways: chronic pinkeye, deforming acne, facial hair. One girl with the last name Wood insisted we call her Holly Wood even though her real name was something like Sarah. Another boy pushed a walker around stage.
It goes without saying I have mild cerebral palsy, though my family downplayed the condition in my childhood by telling people I had “tight tendons.”
It goes without saying I have mild cerebral palsy, though my family downplayed the condition in my childhood by telling people I had “tight tendons.” In Up With Kids I found not just a fun after-school activity but also a place where dragging my right foot and having my right arm frozen at my side were not necessarily to my detriment. It would be an overstatement to say I used my limp to get plum roles, just that, in retrospect, they all fell into a certain pattern. I sat on thrones or made pronouncements from center stage, blowing kisses and doing small claps. No one could stand quite like I could. Pelvis thrust forward, my right foot dangled off my slender ankle so that my legs, in princely tights, formed a jaunty lowercase k.
By far my best role with Up With Kids was also, fittingly, my last. In the fifth grade, Bonnie cast me as Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz. It was my best role, I should say, because I had always loved Oz. This was my excuse, with the help of the hobby shop in the basement of Cottonwood Mall, to essentially live over the rainbow. Before I’d even highlighted my lines, the merch began pouring in: an Emerald City snow globe, an accent pillow of Scarecrow’s face, a Toto stuffed animal. While my brother bought the latest Beckett in the card shop upstairs, tracking the value of his Shaq and Michael Jordan rookie cards like they were blue-chip stocks, I hauled out to the parking lot a life-sized cardboard cutout of Scarecrow, the Wizard and Tin Man and propped it at the foot of my bed to block out the sports wallpaper. Dolls of what I referred to as The Big Four danced on chunks of yellow brick on my windowsill, blotting out the sun.
For a kid with a limp, it was easy to see Dorothy’s plight as orthopedic.
For a kid with a limp, it was easy to see Dorothy’s plight as orthopedic. Skipping as best I could, I’d struck out on the replica of the Yellow Brick Road at MGM Grand in Las Vegas. Waiting in line for The Great Movie Ride in Orlando, I’d saluted Dorothy’s ruby slippers, which shimmered in a glass case, by trying to click my own battered sneakers. Through my toddler years, I’d preferred, like Dorothy, never to take off my shoes, even when I slept. It felt better to keep my feet encased in a little magic. (This magic did not extend to the ankle-foot orthosis shoved into my shoe, but with socks on I could survive the rubbing.) Following surgeries on my tight Achilles tendon and hamstrings in the third grade, I made sure my cast was as close to emerald green as fiberglass could get, like it could have been sticking up from a field of poppies or out from under a house. Even the braces on my teeth at that age were green.
Sure, I knew that if Glinda could have popped onto the pilled carpet of Cottonwood Presbyterian she would have told me, in her airheaded way, I needed look no further than my own two feet. This had never stopped me from daydreaming. Tin Man needed a heart, Cowardly Lion needed some nerve and I needed a new leg, one that wasn’t short and small in circumference around the calf and ankle; one that wasn’t zipped up the back with scars; one that didn’t need to be taught how to skip.
Tin Man needed a heart, Cowardly Lion needed some nerve and I needed a new leg, one that wasn’t short and small in circumference around the calf and ankle.
Whether in a cast or not, I never stopped thinking about my leg. Part of my brain was always sending stray signals to the tips of my toes, making me feel mildly electrocuted. What I loved about the stage was that self-consciousness was a given and it was against the rules to walk and talk at the same time, which I can’t do anyway. It wasn’t a matter of forgetting about how my knee pointed inward or my right heel floated off the ground. It was about all of us feeling awkward together.
Once we did our vocal warm ups and tongue twisters, I’d sink into my role, feeling almost ecclesiastical, a golden angel observing some sacred rite. I couldn’t walk a straight line but ask me to shoot bolts of electricity out my fingertips and my hands would tremble with the effort. At the end of each rehearsal, I’d squash Chelsea’s munchkin costume under her coat as we waited beside the glowing Jesus marquee for Mom to pick us up. Come celebrate His life, it said, or Feeling sad?
As our first show neared, Bonnie crowded the stage with as many farm hands, crows, talking trees, flying monkeys, winkies and munchkins as there were cleared checks. She threw emerald smocks over the denizens of Oz and a gold tiara on the busty blond giant playing Glinda. Our Toto had rheumatoid arthritis and, though she yelped in pain, we only thought to bring her kneepads once we also thought to make her wear a migraine-inducing headband with floppy ears and draw whiskers on her cheeks. Chelsea and the other munchkins wore ruffled sleeves and scrunchies that even I had to admit were pretty cute. Being a munchkin was perfect for my little sister. She leapt around the stage like a replaceable idiot while I carried the show with my natural stage presence.
At the end of each rehearsal, I’d squash Chelsea’s munchkin costume under her coat as we waited beside the glowing Jesus marquee for Mom to pick us up.
The same show business philosophy that led Bonnie to book our summer stock at amusement parks led her to schedule our final Oz performance in a homeless shelter in downtown Salt Lake City, Bonnie’s philosophy being that a captive audience is better than one composed exclusively of parents and relatives. Only those too sick or stoned stayed for the duration, their faces dirty and drawn, a bunch of Aunt Ems and Uncle Henrys doing their best to ignore the spectacle of Bonnie crouched in the center aisle, mouthing along to the action onstage, fleeing an invisible twister.
Sweat rolled down the back of my neck and dripped under my gold lamé as soon as the overture to “If I Only Had a Brain” blasted through the shoddy sound system and I hobbled to my mark, a masking tape X. My leg wouldn’t stop shaking as I swung it around. Nerves were a good thing, Mom said. They meant you gave a shit. I was a natural singer. I sang, naturally, all over the house. Sounding good in front of a crowd was an order of magnitude beyond me. And dancing, how to put this? Dancing was, if not my secret power, my secret joy. I wasn’t silly enough to think I was actually good at it, but it sure did get a rise out of people. I was only a little worried about what my brother would say.
Since I couldn’t hide my chicken leg, no matter how large my quilted poncho from the Costume Closet or how high I pulled my socks, I tried to turn it into part of the act, jerking around like a real-life man of straw, wincing animatedly when my jean shorts rubbed against the incision scar on my tight right hamstring. Seesawing into scenery, my clumsy right foot mashed crows’ feet and sent plastic apples spiraling into the first row mere seconds after bitchy trees lobbed them at us. There were genuine gasps when I fell and genuine applause when I got up again. Stuck for ages with a pole up my back, I was finally free to dance.
There were genuine gasps when I fell and genuine applause when I got up again. Stuck for ages with a pole up my back, I was finally free to dance.
It wasn’t until this last curtain call, when Bonnie presented me, Chelsea and every other cast member with hollow plastic Oscar statues, that she revealed the big surprise: we were going to meet one of the last surviving munchkins from TheWizard of Oz. It must have been a chore to track down Margaret Pellegrini in those dial-up days of the Internet, and I’m not sure how my acting teacher did it. In any case, this chance encounter had the ring of fate as it represented the next logical step in my progression as an actor. I was about to be discovered. Margaret would know agents and producers. All I had to do was sing for her and I’d have it made.
“But I’m a munchkin,” Chelsea said.
“No, you’re a weirdo in a gold leotard,” Danny said. “Just kidding!”
Margaret is on screen a lot if you know what to look for, a flyspecked grain of color lost in some paddy cake choreography — as gape-mouthed and adorable as Chelsea had been in the same role. There she is on a footbridge, a flowerpot tipped on her head, as Judy Garland begins to sing “It Really Was No Miracle.” Later, as the chorus cheeps, “Wake up you sleepy head,” Margaret stretches from an egg in a pink nightgown and bonnet. When I paused the tape we’d rented from Video Vern’s, Chelsea squealed and kissed the screen, flying back when a branch of static shocked her.
“You idiot,” my sister Tiffany said from the couch.
Mom came over from the kitchen, drying her hands. “Look at that little thing rub her eyes. That woman really knows how to wake up.”
She revealed the big surprise: we were going to meet one of the last surviving munchkins from The Wizard of Oz.
Mom wasn’t being sarcastic. She saw genuine talent in the Munchkin Pellegrini. Like the Pope, a munchkin didn’t have to do anything special to win Mom’s affection. She just had to be. “I bet she taught Judy a thing or two.”
“Look at what she’s wearing,” Tiffany objected. “A pink nightgown? In the afternoon? And she doesn’t even know the steps.”
Protest as my siblings might, when the time came we all piled into the Suburban to meet Margaret’s plane. Danny sang his version of “The Lollipop Guild,” a finger thrumming his small Adam’s apple, and Mom kept cackling, “I’ll get you my pretty” as I mugged in the mirror up front, practicing my toniest smile for little Margaret. “Brains? I don’t have any brains.”
“BRAINS?” Mom repeated, emoting to the nth degree. “I DON’T HAVE ANY BRAINS. ONLY STRAW.”
“ONLY STRAW,” I screamed back.
“This better be the smile I see at the airport,” Mom said, leveling a finger at me. “I’m telling you. I want you to be this obnoxious. Ham it up for her, Greg. Ham it up!”
Airport security was considerably more lax in those days and children’s musical theater companies could storm the terminal, shouting renditions of “The Munchkinland Song.” As I glided along the moving walkway, too tense to bend my spastic knee, Tiffany speed walked beside me. Even in her baggy pants she moved better than I did. “Don’t worry, Googers. You’re going to do great.”
If I was anxious about our melodic assault, trying not to scratch at the straw stuffed into my jeans, Munchkin Chelsea was downright gleeful, dancing around the terminal with a Tinker Bell wand balled in her fist. Not unlike Bonnie, she had the habit of saying the move she was doing. Leaping and then sashaying over to the gate, she sang, “Leap. Sashay.” Once there, she screeched at every stout woman lugging a suitcase. “Is that the munchkin? Is that the munchkin?” There’s nothing inherently wrong with the term “munchkin,” but like midget and dwarf, it’s the kind of word you don’t want to say too loudly in an airport.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with the term “munchkin,” but like midget and dwarf, it’s the kind of word you don’t want to say too loudly in an airport.
More than fifty years after the release of the film, a munchkin’s visit was still a big enough deal to attract local news crews and a reporter or two. Passengers began wearily filing out, picking their noses and searching for signs to baggage claim. My mom pulled Chelsea and me to the front of the crowd, beeping, “Scarecrow, coming through,” and gave me an encouraging swat on the ass. “You can out-sing these spazzes. Make her think you’re the only one in the room.”
When Margaret stepped off the plane, our ensemble devolved into a rancid cult of celebrity. “The munchkin!” Chelsea cried. “Munchkin lady!”
We gave Margaret the kind of at-the-gate welcome usually reserved for boys returning from Mormon missions. Kids shook autograph books, snapped pictures and shook cutesy posters. i don’t think you’re in kansas anymore!!! In their minds, Margaret hadn’t flown coach; she’d fallen from a star. Bonnie’s hands flew into motion and we began dinging and donging, singing high and singing low to let Margaret know the Wicked Witch was dead.
Even before our song petered out, I noticed how strange Margaret looked, like she really had come from Munchkinland. Her hands were spotted like Tostitos. Her dress was trimmed with feathers where it shouldn’t have been and so long she couldn’t walk without tripping on it. She’d given up on the war with peach fuzz and the hair on her head looked like it had been dyed with whatever they use to turn cotton candy pink. Parted in the middle, it sat in two fluffy mounds on either side of a very small hat.
“Is she wearing a costume?” I asked as we followed Margaret to the escalator.
“She probably can’t find stuff that fits,” Tiffany said.
“Not that you can, either, skater girl,” Danny said.
“Honestly, you kids,” Mom said. “I couldn’t even hear you back there and now you won’t shut up.”
At the luggage carousel, Chelsea weaseled her way to the front of the seething crowd of gold lamé and handed Margaret her Tinker Bell wand. Instead of calling security, Margaret began casting spells. The whole time we pressed around her, and at the talk she gave at a local high school later that day, striding around the apron of the auditorium stage, the microphone Paul Bunyan-sized in her spotted hands, Margaret humored requests to rub her eyes and sing “Wake up you sleepy head.” She posed for photos, signed people’s crap and told every child she was beautiful. The word star was used liberally. “Maybe you’ll be a big star one day, or a little one like me.”
She posed for photos, signed people’s crap and told every child she was beautiful.
It’s hard to say exactly when it occurred to me, like the first twinge of a developing cavity, that all this was a little sad. It could have been when Margaret told the auditorium crowd, to an uproar of delight, that Toto made twice as much as she did because the dog had a better agent. It could have been when she projected the promotional poster onstage of Henry Kramer’s Hollywood Midgets, the acting company that had given her her big break, or when my mom elbowed me in the middle of Margaret’s talk to say she sounded just like a kazoo. “Isn’t her little voice just precious?”
Most likely, though, the revelation that Margaret was being exploited for her short stature came months later, on one of those death-by-senseless-errand summer afternoons, when Bonnie called my mom to offer me the star role in the new Up With Kids musical. They were doing The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I remember pressing the phone hard into my ear, my smile stuck in place as Mom piloted the Suburban into a parking lot and slapped me high five. Chelsea, who slept whenever we drove anywhere, yawned awake from the back seat. “What’s going on?”
“Greg’s going to be the star,” Mom said.
“You don’t have to decide right now,” Bonnie growled softly. I thought I could hear her take what must have been two tasteless chomps of her nicotine gum, trying to keep things light, perhaps sensing she’d erred. “Just think about it, OK? Like I said, no one could play it like you. You were born for this.”
I didn’t want to be hired because of my disability, like Margaret had been.
I went to bed that night with a stomachache, the life-sized cardboard cutout of Scarecrow, the Wizard and Tin Man a monstrous silhouette at the foot of my bed. I didn’t want to be hired because of my disability, like Margaret had been. Duct tape a pillow to my shoulders and add a bell tower and the musical was pretty much my daily life. I wanted to be a star, not a groveling Hollywood hunchback. “They’ll find another kid to play Quasimodo it in two seconds,” Mom sighed the next morning. “But if you don’t want to have fun anymore, you don’t want to have fun anymore.”
Officially retired from Up With Kids, I got my acting kicks in school plays. I was the only seventh grader with a speaking part in Guys and Dolls. Honing my gangster accent, I played Joey Biltmore, tossing off lines like, “She ain’t a horse. She’s a doll!” The next year, my acting career once again became extracurricular as I got a callback to play a dwarf in City Rep’s production of Snow White. I didn’t get the part. After reprimanding me for having my hands in my pockets, my secret way of appearing nonchalant, the red-haired director tried to wrench my back straight and excused me as soon as she saw me struggle across the stage, saying I just wouldn’t fit into the show.
A chance for redemption came in the ninth grade, when my drama teacher announced we would be putting on The Wizard of Oz. I promptly threw my hand into the air and volunteered the use of my replica 1939 shooting script. I’d sprouted to a gangly five-ten and badly needed my hamstrings surgically lengthened once again, this time on both sides. My walk was a crouch and a persistent hammertoe on my left foot bloodied my sock, but I demanded to hold off on the operations until after the play. My school needed me.
A chance for redemption came in the ninth grade, when my drama teacher announced we would be putting on The Wizard of Oz.
At the audition, while my competitors struggled through tepid R&B songs and climbed on chairs a la Britney Spears, I crooned “If I Only Had a Brain” and trilled the scales. Leaving the auditorium that night, a goth kid in the back row slapped me high five. “Dude, you’re totally going to get it.”
I arrived late for the dancing portion of the audition the next day. A couple of girls walked me through the routine in the aisle and soon I was shambling up on stage to the tune of “Merry Old Land of OZ.” With a ha ha ha, ho ho ho and a couple of tra la la’s, I was skipping my way to the lead.
The middle-aged choreographer pulled me aside as I came off stage. This woman was not a teacher but one of the industry people my drama teacher had brought in to help with the production. I expected her to tell me I was a shoo-in for Scarecrow but instead she said, “What’s wrong with your leg? It looked like you weren’t rotating from the hip.” She clutched one of her sharp shoulders, wheeling it around to illustrate her point, as if just watching me made her sore.
“Are you talking about my shoulder?” I asked, hopeful.
“No, your leg,” she clarified.
I should have been flattered. She thought I was injured.
I expected her to tell me I was a shoo-in for Scarecrow but instead she said, “What’s wrong with your leg? It looked like you weren’t rotating from the hip.”
Ordinarily, I had an arsenal of excuses about my limp. Sometimes I told people it was knee pain from growing so fast, the kind that left Tiffany sobbing on the floor of my parents’ room, moaning about the end of her snowboarding career. Sometimes I said my legs were simply different lengths. I’d recently told a substitute tennis instructor at the country club that, yes, my tendons had been operated on but my orthopedic surgeon had screwed up and now it was a big mess. Who can say why the truth — at least the truth as I understood it — popped out of my mouth when a lie about tripping on plastic apples would have suited me better?
“I have tight tendons,” I said.
“Oh,” the choreographer said, not missing a beat. “Because it looked like your hip wasn’t working right.” Here again she worked her shoulder. The woman was as lean and elegant as a candlestick with her chignon and ballet flats, her cheekbones set at handsome angles. “Will it be getting better in time for the show?”
“No,” I admitted. “It won’t.”
The woman offered a serenely understanding smile, as if I were a golden retriever, all blond hair and bad hips. “Well, you did really great.”
Children are sad creatures, so full of hope and light and judgment. So sure of their place in the world. My first thoughts, as I waited for Mom to pick me up, were ones of anger. Who was this haughty witch to tell me what I could do? If she was so special, why was she volunteering at a junior high instead of choreographing on Broadway?
Who was this haughty witch to tell me what I could do? If she was so special, why was she volunteering at a junior high instead of choreographing on Broadway?
Of course, such thoughts denigrated the whole enterprise — the school, the play, my meager acting ability. Part of me wanted to tell her how believable I could be as Scarecrow. When I fell, the audience would gasp, and when I got up again they would cheer. It wouldn’t have mattered. I wasn’t in Up With Kids anymore. A kid with a limp didn’t have a chance at what my drama teacher had told us to call a “principal.”
In the choreographer’s gentle rejection lay a deeper truth: I would never be a professional actor. The fantasy was over. Later, I’d call this my munchkin moment: the moment I realized I was window dressing along the Yellow Brick Road, not the one skipping down it. I was one of the little people some other, more charismatic teenager would pledge not to forget. That night, I took down the glittery star that had hung on my door for years and fondled Margaret’s autograph in my replica Oz script as if she were a real celebrity. She’d signed it “Munchkin Love.”
My drama teacher was clever. Outright shafting the kid with the limp would have been poor form and so, instead, she gave me the title role. It was not lost on me that Professor Marvel prognosticated from a sitting position on a wooden crate and that the Wizard didn’t sing or dance and bellowed most of his lines in the wings, behind a curtain. Being upstaged by a dog was one thing. It took a special actor to be upstaged by a plywood head and a member of stage crew wagging the chin for comedic effect. Great and powerful I was not. Given so little to do, I overacted every scene I was in, shouting so loud the mic cut out, unleashing a low electrical drone as the house lights strobed.
It was not lost on me that Professor Marvel prognosticated from a sitting position on a wooden crate and that the Wizard didn’t sing or dance and bellowed most of his lines in the wings, behind a curtain.
If I came across as apoplectic, if my fingers flew in the face of anyone who came too close, I have my hand-dancing days at Up With Kids to thank. Because my gray tuxedo jacket was much too short, the sleeves rode up my wrists, leaving my cuffs to billow. With every herky-jerky hand motion, threads popped. I was a good man and a bad wizard, handing a diploma to Scarecrow, a medal to Cowardly Lion, and a ceramic heart to Tin Man. Like Dorothy, I knew there wasn’t anything in that leather-fringed purse for me. I wouldn’t be getting a new leg. I was stuck with the one I had.
During the curtain call of our final performance, I took my bow and retired to a wobbly rainbow platform at the back of the stage. A moment later, the chorus parted and Scarecrow, Tin Man and Lion skipped in to a standing ovation. There wasn’t enough space on the rainbow platform to do anything more than sway to the music, to bob my head and arch my eyebrows to keep the spidery tears of self-pity from crawling down my cheeks. To someone in the audience, it might have looked like nothing at all: a kid worn out with happiness after a fulfilling run, and then, confused, making a premature exit stage left as Scarecrow and Dorothy presented my drama teacher with flowers.
I wouldn’t be getting a new leg. I was stuck with the one I had.
It took a while to compose myself in the dressing room and turn in my costume. No matter how encouraging the rest of my family would be, my smart ass brother was sure to put me down for running off stage in tears. When I made it back to the auditorium, covered in flop sweat and runny makeup, they were waiting for me like always, scattered over a few otherwise empty rows. The Wizard of Oz head scowled down at us from the stage, his chin now wagging open like he’d suffered a stroke.
“You’re right. It was a nothing role. What can I say? You got totally, completely screwed,” Mom said, swinging her gold purse on her shoulder.
“I’m proud of you for toughing it out, Greggo,” Dad said.
“You certainly made the most of it,” Mom went on. “Ask anybody. You were the only one I could hear.”
I gave Tiffany a hug and tried to keep a neutral expression on my face as my brother shuffled toward me down the aisle, popping a pretzel into his mouth. To my surprise, he offered the only thing I’d ever really wanted from him: a positive review. “It was way less shitty than Up With Kids,” he said, chewing. “You had a real dog play Toto this time and Dorothy was pretty hot.” Putting a hand on my soaked head in an odd display of brotherly affection, his eyes lost that joking sparkle. “Seriously, Gregor. You were the best thing in the show.”
This, it turned out, was my final bow.
Leg surgeries the next Christmas kept me from auditioning for my high school drama department’s one-act play. I can’t remember what the play was called, but the gist of the plot was that a monstrously deformed writer was being held prisoner in a closet. As I was spread-eagle in a wheelchair at the time, encased in Ace bandages and knee immobilizers that went from my butt cheeks to my ankles, Crippled: The Greg Marshall Story would’ve been a fitting title. It’s not that I couldn’t have tried out. It’s that I didn’t have the balls.
It’s not that I couldn’t have tried out. It’s that I didn’t have the balls.
There were other things to fail at in high school: making the tennis team and convincing my friends I was straight. None of them were as fun as belting out “If I Only Had a Brain” to the homeless. Little home-video footage remains from my brief dramatic career. I suppose this is for the best as it allows me to remember my histrionics as scene stealing, my voice as blunt and captivating. If I didn’t limp, I tell myself, I might really have made it.
For the next few weeks of that semester, as I graduated from wheelchair to walker, my teachers let me out five minutes early so I wouldn’t be trampled. I think it was tipping through those empty halls that I gained a begrudging respect for Margaret Pellegrini. If the opposite of being typecast for having a disability is not being cast at all, being a Hollywood Midget didn’t sound so bad. At a time when nearly everyone who had worked on The Wizard of Oz was dead, she was still signing autographs, rubbing sleep from her eyes. Mom was right: the woman knew how to wake up. Every Oz anniversary landed Margaret a spot on the local news, where she repeated her famous line (at least it was famous to me) about Toto having a better agent.
History isn’t told by the winners. It’s told by the living. When you’re a kid, you’re taught success depends on embracing who you are. It’s actually much simpler than that: to succeed, you have to stick around. By marching around in a replica costume like the veteran of some whimsical war, Margaret recast herself as an indelible part of the story. Outlive the Coroner and you become the grand marshal of all things Over the Rainbow. Sometimes surviving is its own form of stardom.
Talk of the great American novel is an anachronistic waste of time nowadays, but for those insisting on perpetuating that discussion, Donald Ray Pollock’s The Heavenly Table should be a top contender. A brutal tale full of violence, lust, and broken lives, The Heavenly Table belongs to the darkest strain of ghostless American Gothic literature but has been filtered through the nonchalant callousness and deadpan humor of the best Westerns in a way that makes the narrative share DNA with authors as diverse as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Joe Lansdale. Ambitious and sprawling, this novel proves that Pollock is among the best novelists working today.
“Pollock is among the best novelists working today.”
The Heavenly Table takes place in 1917 and mainly revolves around the three Jewett brothers. After the death of their father due to a parasitic worm acquired by eating the flesh of a diseased hog, the three brothers decide to leave their miserable life of poverty and subordination behind and go on a crime spree with plans of robbing a bank and disappearing into Canada with the bounty. However, more than criminals, the Jewett brothers are country boys whose life experiences are mostly limited to backbreaking work done for almost nothing and listening to their father speak of the afterlife. Cane, the eldest, is their intellectual leader and the only literate brother. The middle brother, Cob, is a childish ignoramus who spends most of his time thinking about food. Lastly, Chimney, the youngest, is impulsive, cruel, and lacks Cane’s moral compass. The trio set out with a plan, and what happens to them as they try to accomplish their goal makes from a very entertaining novel that occupies the interstitial space between a ruthless Western with a healthy dose of scatological humor and the kind of literary fiction that delves into the lives of the broken, poor, and deracinated.
While the Jewett brothers are the main characters, The Heavenly Table also follows the narratives of Ellsworth Fiddler, a farmer from southern Ohio who lost his life savings to a scam artist who offered him some cheap cattle; a young classics scholar who struggles with his homosexuality at an Army camp in Meade, Ohio; a pimp running his business and the women who work for him; a hard-drinking African-American womanizing drifter trying to get back home and back on his feet; and a serial-killing bartender, among others.
“The Heavenly Table is a massive narrative in terms of scope, depth, number of characters, descriptions, and back stories.”
The multiple narratives eventually merge, or at least momentarily cross paths, but not before Pollock has given each one enough space that, if published separately, they could be considered novellas. This is one of the novel’s strengths and also its only major flaw. Pollock does too much here, following side narratives and giving every single character a rich back story even when they don’t deserve the time and attention.
Despite the length and plethora of storylines, The Heavenly Table is a quick read. Crackling dialogue and nonstop action propel the narrative forward and the relatively short, alternating chapters manage to sustain the reader’s interest. Another element that makes a statement about Pollock’s talent is the variety and richness of his characters. The Jewett brothers carry most of the novel on their shoulders, and their distinctive personalities and harsh past makes them likeable despite their decisions. Furthermore, their idea of robbing a bank and moving to Canada is the best incarnation of the Quixotic quest in contemporary dark fiction. These three individuals change the course of their lives because of something one of them repeatedly read out loud, and there’s an innate and unreasonable beauty in that:
“Inspired, at least in part, by The Life and Times of Bloody Bill, Chimney and Cob started dressing in cowboy garb, ten-gallon hats and dungarees and hand-tooled pointy-toed boots, while Cane, with the black frock coat and new white shirt, his hair greased back with pomade, took on the same look of shady refinement favored by riverboat gamblers and dissipated men of the cloth.”
The brothers also allow Pollock to explore media in the early 1900s. What the Jewett brothers do and what they get blamed for coalesce into a perennially expanding legend. Pollock uses this legend to show how media works and how narratives develop organically.
“Thus, on the same day that a Socialist weekly in Boston ran an editorial stating that the brothers were just a humble, illiterate sharecroppers who had killed their tyrannical overseer after he refused to allow them time off to bury their dead father, a staunchly right-wing daily out of New York City compare the outlaws to a band of ungodly savages who are possibly even worse than the Huns, going so far as to claim that they had robbed and left for dead a half-dozen good Christians along the highway in Arkansas who were on their way to a revival.”
Ultimately, the greatest accomplishment of The Heavenly Table is the way it mixes tragedy and violence with tenderness and humor. Pollock writes knowing that action, laughter, and brutality will keep the story flowing, but he also demonstrates he is one of the keenest observers of the human condition. This is a novel that could be called a noir in the sense that it deals with bad things happening to both good and bad people, but it is also a very smart narrative about the passage of time, about the “years passing by one after the other, the struggle to make ends meet, the burden of a passel of brats to feed and clothe, the inevitable decline.” That Pollock can dig into the deepest darkness of that reality and offer it to readers in a way that is pleasurable to read is a proof that he is one of our most talented storytellers.
Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of the world. Today I am reviewing Arrival.
There’s a new movie out called Arrival, about a bunch of aliens who arrive on Earth for mysterious reasons. For me there was no mystery, because I always arrive to the movie theater as early as possible, and this time I’d arrived so early that I caught the previous showing of Arrival. So by the time my showing started, I already knew what would happen because I’d seen it.
That’s a similar experience to what Amy Adams’ character goes through in this movie. She’s able to tell the future because she can remember it. This ability is a gift bestowed upon her by the aliens because as it turns out, learning their language causes the human brain to rewire itself, turning people psychic.
I’m assuming Jonathan Nolan wrote this screenplay, which is why I never looked at the credits to find out if he did or not. He loves to write things that sound ridiculous at first, but then lose all meaning when you really think about them. His movies are like those placemat brain teasers.
The movie ends with the implication that all of humanity will become psychic. Or at least those who are educated and have the available resources to learn the alien language will. Poor people without such resources will still be just as screwed over as usual.
The guy who plays Hawkeye from The Avengers (not from M.A.S.H.) is in this. Except for his clothes, I couldn’t tell this wasn’t Hawkeye. I kept waiting for him to shoot arrows at the aliens but he never did. That was a pretty big disappointment.
Another person who’s in this is Forest Whitaker. I love him but it’s too bad he’s been typecast to only play characters with a droopy eyelid. I’d like to see him branch out and play someone with regular eyes, or maybe a cyclops.
At the end of the movie, Amy Adams and Hawkeye fall in love and Forest Whitaker remains single. Hawkeye says that meeting aliens didn’t surprise him, but meeting Amy Adams did. This is a shocking plot twist that the director glosses over completely. Hawkeye implies he already knew all about the aliens, but upon hearing this Amy Adams doesn’t bat an eyelash. Instead, she bats both of them and starts making out with Hawkeye. Give me a break.
BEST FEATURE: The man sitting next to me walked out of the movie early and left half a box of Jujyfruits. I can’t eat them because they get stuck in my teeth but I could still enjoy the scent. WORST FEATURE: The aliens are just giant squid.
Please join me next week when I’ll be reviewing Grape Ape.
Why be great at one thing when you can be great at several things? Saul Williams is a living embodiment of that precept. He’s an acclaimed poet, musician, and actor who’s been a part of a number of artistic scenes since the mid-1990s. He has collaborated with Trent Reznor, starred in the Tupac Shakur-inspired musical Holler If Ya Hear Me, and was thinking about digital music and the wages of the independent artist long before it was the subject of lengthy think-pieces. On stage, he’s a charismatic figure and, whether poetry or essays, his writing has an immersive, crystallizing quality.
First Second Books recently announced that Williams is making a foray into comics, with a graphic novel called Martyr Loser King in collaboration with the artist Sorne. It’s due out in 2019, and will be part of a larger narrative encompassing works in several disciplines, including an album that was released earlier this year. I spoke with Williams about the making of the storyline, his own experience as a reader and a creator of comics, and the real-life issues that are fueling the book.
Tobias Carroll: From what I’ve read, Martyr Loser King deals with questions of hacking and surveillance, which are increasingly in the public consciousness. What about them first interested you as a writer? And how did you go about finding your own perspective on them?
Saul Williams: Initially, I would say that I was as interested as anyone else, yet as a witness of the Occupy movement, the Arab Spring, the Y’en A Marre movement in Senegal, and the social eruptions triggered by whistle blowers like Chelsea Manning, I began to believe that we have an opportunity to re-wire society and do away with some of the old school paternalistic ideologies that have defined much of our history. The fact that I started piecing these ideas together, specifically while living abroad and wandering the streets of places like Dakar, Senegal, watching kids devour the new tech while tightening the skin on homemade drums, it became fascinating to think of the fusion of the talking drum and handheld computer….
Carroll: This graphic novel is one of several related projects you’re working on, each of in a different medium. Was there one in particular that you began with? At what point, when starting a project, does the idea of doing something that spans several disciplines come into play?
Williams: This idea began, truly, as a graphic novel. I had just finished reading Habibi by Craig Thompson, which I must credit as the straw that broke the camel’s back, when I determined that I had to write in this format because of the freedom that it would afford me as a poet. The idea had been in the back of my mind for years, the main reason being that I found it intriguing that I could structure a story, create characters, narrative, dialogue, and then throw a poem on the wall as graffiti in the background. What I found most inspiring about the format was the possibility of tangents. Some writers play with this idea through footnotes. I loved the possibility of incorporating tangents into the story, it freed me to think in terms of a more circular narrative.
So, I have this idea which I let take shape in my head without writing much of it down. Simultaneously, I’m listening to music and become inspired enough to power on some instruments and play with some sounds. As the sounds take shape I begin thinking of lyrics and every lyrical idea was contextualized by this story buzzing around in my head. So I began writing music for the story before I actually wrote the story. The music gave a sense of atmosphere and ambiance to the world I was envisioning and I thus found myself working in two mediums at once: a graphic novel and an album.
The question of performance was the next logical step and I began to conceptualize the performance as a play, a musical. Maybe that doesn’t seem very logical from the outside, yet my background and first love is theater, and I wanted to find a way to bring my music into such a space, to deliver a once in a lifetime experience for theater goers and music lovers. I also wanted to find a way to stream all of my creative interests in the same direction and BOOM — Martyr Loser King was born.
Carroll: Where do your own tastes in comics fall? Are there any books that first sparked your interest in the medium?
Williams: I love the work of artists like Tanino, the mind of Jodorowsky, the simplicity & humor of Jason, the line work Kazuo Koike and Katushiro Otomo… cyber-punk… of course I think my interest in the medium was probably first sparked by Alan Moore.
Carroll: For Martyr Loser King, did you have any touchstones as far as graphic novels that influenced the project were concerned? Some of the artwork I’ve seen has a very science-fictional look to it, like a book that might have come out in the ’80s or ’90s on Humanoids.
Williams: My touchstones weren’t necessarily from the medium, although I really liked the writing of the Transmetropolitan series, for example, I was also inspired by the creative journalism and art in the French magazine XXI and the Pan African magazine Chimurenga, also the journals of characters like Dan Eldon (The Journey is the Destination) and Binyavanga Wainaina.
Carroll: When addressing questions of surveillance and technology, were there any particular books that you found informative or insightful?
Williams: Several. Two of my favorites were Testo-Junkie by Beatriz Preciado (read it and connect the dots) and A Theory of the Drone by Gregoire Chamayou. Aside from books there is, of course, a lot of amazing journalism taking place.
Carroll: How did your collaborative process with Sorne work for this book?
Williams: Working with Sorne has been a truly intuitive process. We met and bonded immediately. In fact, we thought we were bonding over music and poetry at our first meeting and by the end of the day he was already drawing.
Carroll: Has being involved in the creation of a graphic novel changed the way that you read comics?
Williams: Of course. But like the creative process in any medium, the deeper I go in, the more restrictive my diet becomes. Yet there’s a lot of great new work out there and I’m always dipping into comic shops and asking the weirdest worker I can find what I HAVE to read. I’m particulay interested in the growing number of women in the medium and am following the works of artists such as G, Willow Wilson, Valentine De Landro, Kelly Sue DeConnick, Jillian Tamaki…
Now that the National Book Awards have been handed out, it’s time for another great literary honor to take center stage…Nominees for the 24th Annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award are here! Since 1993, the Literary Review has been on the prowl for authors who “produce an outstandingly bad scene of sexual description in an otherwise good novel.” It seemed impossible to top last year’s winner, Morrissey, who pushed literary erotica to its limits when he detailed the “pained frenzy” of a character’s “bulbous salutation extenuating his excitement.” But this year’s contenders somehow defied the odds. 2016 just won’t quit. The nominees shortlisted for the prize are:
— A Doubter’s Almanac by Ethan Canin
— Men Like Air byTom Connolly,
— The Day Before Happiness by Erri De Luca
— The Butcher’s Hook by Janet Ellis (a former children show’s host!)
— Leave Me by Gayle Forman
— The Tobacconist by Robert Seethaler
How are the sharps handicapping this one? The Guardian, for one, considers Connolly among the frontrunners. His latest, Men Like Air, includes a kinky scene in which the protagonist shows off his well endowed … arm length?
“He watched her passport rise gradually out of the back pocket of her jeans in time with the rhythmic bobbing of her buttocks as she sucked him. He arched over her back and took hold of the passport before it landed on the pimpled floor.”
Universal Pictures
The Bad Sex in Fiction judges note how “sometimes anatomy goes a little bit wrong for a writer who’s trying to do too many things at once.” Connolly and the other shortlisted authors advanced in the 2016 competition over big names like Jonathan Safran Foer, who compared his character’s lustful urges to the steadfast resolve of a mountain climber:
“He jerked off with the determination of someone within sight of Everest’s summit, having lost all his friends and Sherpas, having run out of supplemental oxygen, but preferring death to failure.”
You know the Bad Sex in Fiction award may be the hardest in literature when lines like that aren’t enough to win the judges’ approval..
Stay tuned for more on this important literary prize. The winner will be announced on November 30th!
European Court upholds French authors right to disappear
With its ruling yesterday, the European Court of Justice has granted authors the right to have their books forgotten. The conflict started with the formation of a French governmental organization called SOFIA (la Société Française des Intérêts des Auteurs de l’écrit), an institutional body tasked with collecting works of literature that were published before January 1st 2001 and are no longer commercially distributed, published, or available online, for reproduction and marketing in a digital format. The suit’s plaintiffs, two unnamed French authors, asserted the ordinance violated the EU’s copyright directive because the collection practice did not provide writers of “forgotten” books with sufficient recourse to control their work.
To avoid an extensive diversion into the practice of European courts of last resort and civil versus common law structures: it worked. Basically, these texts cannot be repurposed without the writers’ consent. Or, as the Court of Justice put it, authors retain the rights to a book’s “resurrection.” (Very Gallic.)
For some, this might seem akin to various other “right to be forgotten” cases in Europe (and Argentina) that have been gaining momentum over the last decade. However, that burgeoning movement is about the proactive efforts of individuals to expunge themselves from privately controlled information databases (i.e. Google). This was more an issue of artistic control and the autonomy of created work within a governmental framework.
While the wider ranging implications of the case will remain unclear for some time, it’s worth remembering that the definition of “forgotten” is a constructed, and fluid, concept, open to institutional definition. Without this ruling, writers’ autonomy would be at the mercy of commercial whim and circumstance, leaving their art vulnerable to cooption and cannibalization. This is not to bemoan the French effort with SOFIA, an endeavor the European Court of Justice deemed of significant “cultural interest.” However, by securing the right for their books to be forgotten, writers are claiming the terms of their works’ remembrance.
So, in sum, if you’re an artist looking to disappear from the face of the earth, you could do worse than France. The courts will back you, anyway.
In succinct and somber prose, Oddný Eir paints the stark landscape of Iceland after the Great Recession in the autobiographical novel, Land of Love and Ruins. As Iceland is reeling after the 2008 financial crash, the narrator traverses the country, looking for artifacts that point to its Viking and Celtic heritage, as well as her own.
Drawing comparisons between the historic pillaging of Iceland by the Vikings with the modern-day Chinese businessmen who are interested in developing countryside, Eir never makes direct connections for readers, instead flitting from modern times to ancient, allowing us to come to our own conclusions and opinions.
The text veers from reading like an eloquent journal to a philosophical debate on the human condition. By discussing history, philosophy, gender relations, archaeology and literature, there is something for everyone interested in examining modernity.
The witty repartee that Eir creates between events, in some ways, takes the place of a straightforward plot. While there are plot points, they act more like signposts than offering momentum.
A conversational tone is further enforced by the book’s form, which is essentially organized as a diary, with each chapter, or entry, titled after an event that holds meaning to the narrator, oftentimes referring to Icelandic folklore or feast days. In the hands of less skilled author, this could be confusing but thanks to Eir’s strong command of language, meaning and import are rarely obfuscated.
As the story progresses, a semblance of plot does develop: the narrator’s struggle to find balance in a love triangle between herself, her brother and her beau. Similar to her quest to discover Iceland’s ancient past in order illuminate the country’s 2008 reality, she examines her life with historic truths, investigating the Romantic poet Williams Wordsworth’s very close relationship with his sister. After traveling through England’s Lake District, the narrator finds a way of balancing an intense familial relationship with her own romantic needs and interests.
In many ways, these two quests — one for Icelandic artifacts, one to balance familial and romantic interests — highlight a tactic Eir employs throughout the novel. While these two plot points seem very different, they both involve a searching for the past and an ability to find truth in the present based on that past. While she is moving physically, darting from Paris to London to Iceland’s hinterlands, the narrator is also moving through vast spaces of time, all in the search for truth and meaning.
This duality reverberates throughout the entire novel. In a way, the technique allows the text to breathe on its own, giving the reader the space to make connections and come to their own conclusions. Given the autobiographical nature of the work, this space is essential and in many ways, makes this a work that in many ways reflects the modern condition: sporadic, intense, empty.
Despite the autobiographical nature of the novel, the narrator remains removed throughout. This fictive distance works well, as we feel invited into Eir’s story, rather than bombarded with it. The only time it feels unwieldy is when Eir shares details about the recent economic crisis and the text begins to sound more journalistic than personal.
As the book progress, it is clear that Eir’s saving grace is her ability to lighten the prose and bring levity to the serious topics. In the midst of discussing important environmental issues, she will ironically point out human’s relationship with nature, saying how it is hard to see nature from the perspective of a “jacked up SUV.”
By lightening the mood and pointing out absurdities of modern life, like tourists buying so-called Icelandic tchotchkes that they will never use, the text moves forward and avoids a polemic tone.
The straightforward tone is also varied with searing descriptions of Iceland, bringing the exotic, rugged landscape to life in such a way that one that the country itself becomes a character in this meandering tale. Drawing on the theme of environmental conservation, Eir weaves in tales of pioneering forbearers, sharing stories of older generations and the harsh realities of life on the stark island. At times, her lyricism about nature borders on magical realism, which mimics the fairy tales that are so often referenced throughout this text. In the same way the tone is emulated by the structure of the work, the natural descriptions mimic the form.
An excellent book for readers interested in seeking out a modern, boundary-pushing work.
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