by Edward Champion

RIP Sydney Pollack

I have long been baffled by the suggestion put forth by hip film folk that Tootsie is an “overrated” picture. The film may not be on the level of Some Like It Hot, but it is nonetheless the kind of elaborate comedic farce, a natural descendant of Lubitsch, that nobody makes anymore. It is funny, immensely subtle, and full of wonderful performances (well, save Jessica Lange, a one-note performance that arose from a one-note character). It is a rare film in which the side characters are just as essential as the protagonist. It offers fascinating takes on gender through physical gesture. (Just watch Dustin Hoffman’s movement as he begins inhabiting Dorothy Michaels’s mannerisms over the course of the film.) The screenplay was infamously put together at the last minute, and it could not have happened without Sydney Pollack at the helm (and Elaine May on the revisions).

Pollack is now dead. And I will forgive him somewhat for the many turkeys he helmed over the past fifteen years. He didn’t always succeed. (Random Hearts is a mangy dog, Out of Africa is an overlong bore, and the less said about his atrocious remake of Sabrina, the better.) But the man gave us Tootsie, Jeremiah Johnson, and The Electric Horseman — all intelligent and well-crafted films directed at popular audiences. He always cast a major leading man in his films, whether it was Harrison Ford, Dustin Hoffmann, or Robert Redford, who could be counted upon to deliver some modest human insight for mass consumption. Today, this seems like almost a quaint notion.

He was also a fascinating, if limited actor. In addition to the agent in Tootsie, I cannot forget Pollack’s fine performance as Jack in Husbands and Wives. The scene in which Pollack tries to leave a party with Lysette Anthony is one of the most harrowing depictions of a seemingly confident middle-aged man seeing his world crumble right in front of him. We realize at that moment just how much Jack relies on others to feed his being. Pollack was the only person who could have played that scene.

I’ll miss Pollack, because I can’t think of anyone who will replace him. He wasn’t the greatest filmmaker in the world. But he stood out in large part because today’s emerging filmmakers seem more interested in spectacle over substance. I suppose this is what sells tickets. But Pollack understood that the true spectacle lies in fascinating human moments. He may have focused mostly on lighter fare. He may have made mainstream movies. But when his films delivered, it was the natural spectacle that commanded your attention.

by Edward Champion

Literary Skeleton Crew

There remain four books in the old apartment: Iain M. Banks’s Excession (which I am currently reading), Steven Gillis’s Temporary People (which I hope to get around to reading quite soon!), a galley of The Letters of Allen Ginsberg (which I hope to read after all the other books I have to read, which are now sitting in the new apartment), and my trusted Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary. There are a handful of oversized volumes now in boxes, but I choose to leave these contents alone. Cardboard bottles for makeshift vintners, ready for an odor tendered by topography and not by time.

The dictionary, being a dutiful and invaluable companion, will most certainly be the last volume transported. You never know when an impulse to flip through the seven crevices might kick in. I’ll feel sufficiently settled in once dictionary and desk have migrated. They remain attached not so much at the hip, but certainly with an invisible tether. I now find myself pondering this old apartment denuded of books and remain preternaturally excited about these preternatural limitations: a veritable jig and tonic! A mere four books sitting in for a cast of thousands! A skeleton crew! I’ve opened up the Ginsberg book and located this one-paragraph letter that Ginsberg wrote to Eisenhower:

Rosenbergs are pathetic, government will sordid, execution obscene. America caught in crucifixion machine, only barbarians want them burned I say stop it before we fill our souls with death-house horror.

This was 1953. It didn’t do any good. No doubt a present Ginsberg type scribing a current message to the President along similar lines might become a “No Fly” list candidate. Unless, of course, the President has received a remarkable spate of hate mail. This remains unknown. He’s certainly not sharing with us.

Did Ginsberg have only four books to work from? Probably not. Did he consult the books he had to write this letter? Probably not. But he did read newspapers.

There remains, for the present time, an Internet connection. But Bartleby is no substitute for a good book. Control-F makes everything too easy. Better to plunge into textual anarchy and unferret some strange passage, such as the one above.

And what does Mr. Gillis give us? A random flip to page 102:

The machine was an old ink wheel mimeograph, silver-grey with a smooth metal cartridge and a round plastic bottle of blue ink loaded into the underside.

I approve of the E over the A in “grey.” I was terrified of reading beyond the word “blue,” for I had hoped that the “round plastic bottle of blue” might connote bottled water, some eccentrically designed machine. But with “ink,” this ambiguity was sullied!

The unabridged points out that the word “mimeograph” was “formerly a trademark.” One of Edison’s lost patents, now liberated into the lingua franca. Even though nobody really uses a mimeograph machine anymore. Will LaserJet suffer such a fate? Will there come a point in which nobody will really remember HP and the word “laserjet” will become released from corporate avarice? A hundred years from now, some amateur etymologist will flip through the unabridged dictionary and see “formerly a trademark” for “laserjet” (with the crude caps humbled), with the meaning somewhat transmuted and no mention of the parent company. But today, we must tread carefully. LaserJet is a registered trademark.

If America remains “caught in crucifixion machine,” then certainly there is hope within the native tongue. And would such a line of inquiry have been pursued had I been surrounded by all of my books? Perhaps there is something to be said for Spartan literary studies.

by Edward Champion

Life is an Occupation

Roger Ebert on Studs Turkel: “The lesson Studs has taught me is that your life is over when you stop living it. If you can truly ‘retire,’ you had a job, but not an occupation. Observing people like Studs and the author Paul Theroux, and the great sports writer William Nack, and directors like Robert Altman and Sidney Lumet, I have seen those whose lifelong occupations absorb them, and who are not merely maintaining, but growing. How astonishing it was to learn that Altman made great films after having a heart transplant!”

by Edward Champion

Roundup

  • I’ve been reading a lot of Iain Banks of late. And I haven’t had this much fun reading in a while. Anyone who can write the sentence, “What the crushingly powerful four-limbed hug would have done to a human unprotected by a suit designed to withstand pressures comparable to those found at the bottom of an ocean probably did not bear thinking about, but then a human exposed without protection to the conditions required to support Affronter life would be dying in at least three excitingly different and painful ways anyway without having to worry about being crushed by a cage of leg-thick tentacles,” is a man after my own heart. And I’m kicking myself for not having read the Culture novels earlier, particularly after Player of Games and Excession. Lengthy ruminations on Banks will eventually follow. But in the meantime, this YouTube video of Banks showing off his study reveals him to be quite a funny man. For those who didn’t know this already.
  • The hatred towards overweight people in this post is outright sociopathic. I am appalled. What cretin could find such slurs and cheap shots funny? What atavistic mind could take pleasure in this exercise? People come together to a convention to meet others and discuss topics that they’re interested in. Images with Photoshopped frowns and hateful captions are the thanks they get? I am further appalled to discover that not a single comment has lodged a protest against these calumnies. Well, since “Zathlazip” cannot be bothered to provide her real name, I should note that investigation reveals the coward’s name to be Rachel Moss. She lives in Wisconsin, having moved out there after a stint at John Hopkins. Let that name live in infamy. (UPDATE: For those who missed out on this, I think The Angry Black Woman sums up the incident quite well. I share her explanation for why I will not remove Rachel Moss’s name and why I have little sympathy for what Rachel Moss did.)
  • Mark Sarvas scores a Seattle Times profile, which is fine and all. But where’s the talk of Harry, Revised? Where are the necessary queries into literary erections? Where are the pivotal questions about how many funerals Mr. Sarvas has been to? How frequently he has had sartorial mishaps? The spinning debacles he keeps from the public at large? This is journalism, dammit! The questions must be deployed!
  • So the insufferable Joe Queenan praises Scandinavian mystery writers. And you think to yourself that Queenan has, after a relentless torrent of grumpy and remarkably unfunny articles bemoaning everything under the sun, finally found something he likes! But then, at the end, the article drifts into an anticlimactic cynicism that cancels out the praise, leaving one to wonder what exactly Queenan’s purpose is in life. But I think I have a solution to the Queenan problem. To my knowledge, Queenan hasn’t written anything about Uwe Boll. But if someone were to whisper something into Boll’s ear about how Queenan savaged Boll in one of his pieces, Boll could then challenge Queenan to a boxing match, and Queenan could then get thoroughly trounced, and he might learn a bit of humility. Yes, it’s an unlikely scenario. Queenan learning humility, that is. But one can certainly dream.
  • Is The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction washed up?
  • Shameless Words, we hardly knew ye!
  • Old news, but blogs don’t necessarily mean bestselling books.
  • Will Self has won the 2008 Wodehouse Prize for his latest novel, The Butt, which is out in the UK and hits the States on September 16. The judges showed especially good sense in having Self triumph over Garrison Keillor, a man who may be categorized as “funny” but who cannot provide sufficient evidence. In fact, social scientists have been searching for years for a sufficient exemplar — a mass audience that actually finds Keillor funny. Unfortunately, the last recorded audience who found Keillor funny (at a minimum of 60%) was in 1988.
  • Toles rips off Jaffee!