Hyde Park Blvd

For TC (and others) who didn’t understand ‘A Serious Man.’  They are not always detectives, but the main characters in Coen Brothers movies resemble Raymond Chandler’s remark about his own main character:

Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honour – by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.

Thoroughly enjoyed Sophie Barthes’ Cold Souls.  I bought the whole package,  Appreciating the concept and the execution, the Russian literature overlay, the wintry objective correlative, the Brighton/Beach and Gogol/Allen connections, the symbolism, the conflation of Dead Souls and Sleeper, the angst that eventually goes down the drain of one person’s life.  Even the un-movielike connections of three women and their linkages across time and space and the final theme of empathy and solitude on the Brighton Beach as we rearrive at Gogol.

If you couldn’t tell, I liked it.  A lot.

I wake up this morning to find that NYT writers provide two glosses on the movie.  A.O. Scott uses the Coen’s A Serious Man and its Gopnik (as opposed to the New Yorker writer Adam) to write about Jews; though Giammatti isn’t MOT, he’s a fellow-traveler; his tweed jackets and shoulder-forward walk harkens back beyond the Coens and Happy Gilmore to the primordial schlump who was old when Bellow resuscitated him from the Yiddish (probably with a piece flanken).

Then there’s Understanding the Anxious Mind, Robin Henig’s summary of Jerome Kagan’s forty years of research into people like the character played by Paul Giamatti, whose character in Cold Souls is yclept Paul Giamatti.  There are lovely moments in the movie that describe that moment when anesthesia kicks in and the amygdala loosens its stranglehold, that moment of curiosity, empathy, openness that belies the character beneath.  It’s at the heart of the movie’s deeper understanding, and at the heart of the struggles of productivity — and creativity.  From Henig:

In the modern world, the anxious temperament does offer certain benefits: caution, introspection, the capacity to work alone. These can be adaptive qualities…

People with a high-reactive temperament — as long as it doesn’t show itself as a clinical disorder — are generally conscientious and almost obsessively well-prepared. Worriers are likely to be the most thorough workers and the most attentive friends. Someone who worries about being late will plan to get to places early. Someone anxious about giving a public lecture will work harder to prepare for it. Test-taking anxiety can lead to better studying; fear of traveling can lead to careful mapping of transit routes.

Kagan told me that in the 40 years he worked at Harvard, he hired at least 200 research assistants, “and I always looked for high-reactives. They’re compulsive, they don’t make errors, they’re careful when they’re coding data.”

An anxious temperament might serve a more exalted function too. “Our culture has this illusion that anxiety is toxic,” Kagan said. But without inner-directed people who prefer solitude, where would we get the writers and artists and scientists and computer programmers who make society hum? Kagan likes to point out that T. S. Eliot suffered from anxiety, and that biographies indicate that he was a typical high-reactive baby. “That line ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust’ — he couldn’t have written that without feeling the tension and dysphoria he did,” Kagan said.

It all talks to the same issues, why we (at post-20th century lit/crit types) feel so familiar with the New York anxious Paul — and so moved by his links to not only to the Russian poet, but to Dina (Nina Korzun), the responsible ‘mule,’ and it raises questions about the pursuit of art, why it’s easy (and, perhaps, wrong)  to reject the glittery Sveta (Katheryn Winnick), who desires the soul of De Niro.  She wants to be a great actor, as does Paul, but we somehow rationalize Paul’s decision (and the Jewish stereotype) because of the legitimacy conferred by its familiarity, and the pain that Paul claims as the decision’s source, as opposed to the superficial, illegitimate nouveau-Russian stereotype and Sveta’s ambition.

The schlump has become part of the cultural mainstream?   Now we’re clucking about the recent arrivals?  Now we’re answering questions with questions?  Hmmmm.

Talk amongst yourselves.

An earlier poem, but especially appreciated:

The Bar Mitzvah

King for the night! the rabbi cried.
My pockets heavy with savings bonds, I stole kisses
from every woman old enough to recognize what was starting.
Oh we bunny-hopped round mountains of chopped liver
& sliced cakes big as Buffalo.  Uncle Hy explained success:
Mexican Hat Dance with the best!  Uncle Lou showed
his war wounds & Aunt Becky pulled me close:  “A word
to the near-wise.  Responsibility’s the road to happiness.
Life’s not all corn on the cob, darlink!”  Later I pulled
Susan into a back room.  But she turned away.  “We’d only
hate ourselves in the morning,” she sighed.  So I went
up to the roof & tightroped the ledge & threw up
my first whisky eight floors down onto Uncle Herb’s new Buick.
Downstairs my father counted our loot in the empty hall
while my mother stared at her emerald gown as I whirled
an eighty-four year-old girl betwen tables, her braids bouncing!
Round & round we went, the room swaying without stop.
Suddenly it was Russia in her eyes & everything about to begin.
Myself a man for the rest of my life!
–  Philip Schultz, from Like Wings

A wonderful Chicago-based writer whose new book, Behind My Eyes, I can recommend without hesitation.  I’m a big fan; this poem provides ample reason why:

Flowers

Regarding the insides of flowers:
this is something about which I have meant
to write you for a long time.

How awkwardly, but to a bee
fascinating it must seem, going in
to their sticky centers, half-

repellent, touching
their furry genitalia; horrible
to love and seek so, being dependent:

flowers’ perfectly formed
hemispheres, the pretend insistence
on privacy

like the hidden ladyslipper, modest,
shocking, sudden labia
blushing,

bifurcated, veined and
obvious: it is so soft,
slipping in,

is it not, and out?
I too am always
obsessed with the insides of flowers,
Yearning to plunge
a finger into them
or a metaphor:

the “hermaphroditic artist”
invading the subject;
shivering at anemones,

at their dark secret
centers, or the double wheel
within a poppy, spoked

mouth slit and laughing.
The “Language of Flowers,”
spoken, translates “Sex.”

If a daylily bends in the vase
it means: she is waiting.
If straight: trouble ahead.

If the flowers persist
in their drooping
throw them out

but refurbish
for it is good to have fresh
flowers beside one, breathing

their bodily secrets
by night, cleverly accessible
and bedded, moist.

- Kathleen Spivack (1977)

Photo Credit: Jamie Tanaka for Time

He’s criticized for being cold and unsympathetic, for not loving his characters enough.  My view:  he sees to the root of both sides of even the most challenged relationship (an extraordinary talent), and there’s sympathy and insight (and, yes, humor) in the ability to parse the tangles that compose life in these parts.

Bottom line:  I’m a huge fan (if you haven’t, read The Corrections, whatever Oprah says).  He writes extraordinarily well and he gets my generation in ways that Updike got our parents.  Latest example is his story “Good Neighbors” in the June 8 New Yorker.  A snippet:

There were people with whom her style of self-deprecation didn’t sit well—who detected a kind of condescension in it, as if Patty, in exaggerating her own minor defects, were too obviously trying to spare the feelings of less accomplished homemakers. But most people found her humility sincere or at least amusing, and it was, in any case, hard to resist a woman whom your own children liked so much and who remembered not only their birthdays but yours, too, and came to your back door with a plate of cookies or a card or some lilies of the valley in a little thrift-store vase that she told you not to bother returning.

Milo O’Shea as Bloom in Joseph Strick’s underappreciated 1967 film, Ulysses.

I know, I know, a day late.  But never remembered without great affection and a desire to open it and begin walking through Dublin and across the consciousness of Leo, Molly and Stephen.

Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.

David Brooks has been vivified.  No matter the cause — Obama’s election or the economic downturn or a visit to GNC — fun has replace the funk of recent years.  This morning’s example, a brief review of historian Simon Schama’s book The Future America in the NYT Book Review, is a stone-cold delight.   He uses Schama’s (for whom he has respect) book as an opportunity to describe the descendant of de Toqueville who saunters out, determined to capture and condense the soul of the Unites States like a tin of frozen orange juice:

Along the way, his writing will outstrip his reportage. And as his inability to come up with anything new to say about this country builds, his prose will grow more complex, emotive, gothic, desperate, overheated and nebulous until finally, about two-thirds of the way through, there will be a prose-poem of pure meaninglessness as his brilliance finally breaks loose from the tethers of observation and oozes across the page in a great, gopping goo of pure pretension.