OF A GOLDEN AGE

I love Stephen King.

While reading about him on Wikipedia just now, I came across this wonderful little tidbit about “critic S.T. Joshi” (never heard of him):

Joshi cites two early non-supernatural novels—Rage (1977) and The Running Man (1982)—as King’s best, suggesting both are riveting and well-constructed suspense thrillers, with believable characters.

Rage is one of my favorite books, absolutely beloved to me and influential in my adolescence. The same collection also includes The Long Walk, another hands-down favorite. By a quick count, I’ve read 31 of King’s books, most of them during quiet summer-vacation days in the public library. Some I’ve read a second time, and some I’ve read repeatedly because I love them. King may be the contemporary male author with whom I feel the strongest connection and loyalty, beating out the likes of Neil Gaiman or Pat Conroy.

I picked up The Green Mile in one volume at a booksale, part of an entire totebag full for $20 or something. Picking it up after my long slog through A Thousand Acres and King Lear, I felt the fresh air of King’s prose sweeping the dust out of my head and found The Green Mile to be one of his best books.

King adheres to a continuum of the supernatural that really cuts a broad swath, from almost no supernatural activity to so much it chokes the story. The Green Mile finds King’s equilibrium spot, which I think of as magical realism: He takes grounded, interesting characters and sics the bright lights on a small supernatural quality. That quality enhances the story but doesn’t explain the whole thing. It’s an assist.

In this book, the real story is the Depression and these decent, hardworking Death Row prison guards. They make compromises in order to avoid drawing attention from their bosses, and they acknowledge how the tough economic times make those compromises more palatable. The death penalty itself is also called into question, presented in contrast to a remarkable inmate with hidden talents of restoring life, health, and vigor.

It is religious, kind of, but at the same time not — life is stolen back from the jaws of death or extinguished by the government. The too-pure healer character bucks expectations near the end of the book with a revengeful surprise, while his watchers show their better natures more and more. They all oscillate toward a good, everyday decency we’d be lucky to experience as a society.

I liked the first-person narration by the head guard, Paul; he tells the story from his nursing-home room in a galaxy far, far away, including details about his new life as an old man. He repeatedly touches on themes of mercy and compassion, but never in, you know, a Nicholas Sparksy way — there’s no couple in love clutching unto death here, nothing so cut and dried. And from the beginning you know that Paul has complex feelings about the path his life took after his stint as a guard on Death Row, the unanswered question of whether or not he was glad to learn what he learned.

Cannonball logo font: Sketch Rockwell. For more on the Cannonball Read, see Pajiba.

(Part 1 was my review of Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, a dissembled and reknitted telling of King Lear.)

The story of Lear digs way back, way way back, centuries before the version brought forth by Shakespeare. Back then he was Leir, one of the legendary ancient kings of Britain. In Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, Leir’s father Bladud was an adventuresome king who pursued magic and necromancy. He built a pair of wings which, Geoffrey explains, simply did not work. The king plummeted to an ugly death on ancient London’s temple to the god Apollo.

In contrast, Leir had sixty years of good times as King but his problems began when he decided to step aside, divide the kingdom betwixt his daughters, and travel among them in his retirement. Why someone with sixty years of absolute monarching under his belt was so subject to empty flattery, I can’t say — it speaks to the privileged relationship between fathers and daughters, or perhaps to the communication gap and mutual lack of understanding that can color the same relationship.

Shakespeare begins with the same framework: youngest Cordelia resists her older sisters’ examples of empty flattery, pragmatically assuring her father she feels exactly the appropriate levels of love, respect, and loyalty. He drives her out of the family and lets the older two inherit Britannia in halves. When the Earl of Kent supports Cordelia’s doubts and asks Lear to reconsider, the good king throws Kent out. Kent goes undercover and comes back to defend Lear from what he views as the inevitable attacks of the two oldest daughters.

In the meantime, another family drama plays out with the Earl of Gloucester and his sons Edgar and Edmund, one legitimate and one illegitimate. Edmund double-agents his way into Gloucester’s favor and gets his well-meaning brother Edgar thrown out. After that, Edmund turns on his father and has him arrested and effectively exiled. In the process, Gloucester is blinded and left to wander. Then people start to get killed.

Edgar is my favorite character in the play. When Gloucester turns him out as a traitor, Edgar smears mud on his face and in his hair, dresses up in rags, and plays a madman. This, Richard Hornby explains in the summer 2007 Hudson Review (PDF), adds to the play’s visceral engagement:

Yes, the play is sad — it is a tragedy, after all — and it presents a view of life as ultimately meaningless, but when I first read the ravings of Edgar as the pretend madman, I did not feel I was getting a philosophical message. [The ravings are] a shock wave to be experienced.

In fact, the vivid descriptions of Edgar’s faux madness and Lear’s incubating, very real madness stand side by side and intensify the impact of each. As Lear’s daughters treat him more and more badly, you can see it confusing him to the point that it breaks his mind: The oldest daughters belittle and mock his retirement plan into oblivion. They kill Lear from the brain outward by instantly becoming people he never expected to find where his family once had been.

In contrast, Edgar’s manufactured crazy helps him to pass invisibly through a world in which he’s no longer welcome and monitor the behaviors of the people he still cares about, including his father. After exiling Edgar himself, Gloucester is also ousted. Blind Gloucester is left to wander the countryside and Edgar finds him, saves him, in the play’s most serious and eloquent moment. Edgar is a decent, empathetic, and sincere human being. I felt satisfied at the end of the play because he was rewarded, in a way, for his quiet but critical acts of kindness.

For the eponymous exiled king, we find a champion in the form of youngest daughter Cordelia along with her husband, the king of France. But of course, it being a tragedy and all, very few characters emerge unscathed. In fact, there is mild to moderate scathing for even those left less dead at the end.

I love the following passage from Roger Ebert’s review of the 1971 movie version of Lear because it explains how I felt about Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres and the original Lear:

He omits or rearranges dialogue and scenes in order to make the evil daughters, Regan and Goneril, ambiguous in their villainy. He gives us a Cordelia who is not as perfect as she should be. He gives us a Lear who is only a figure of pity, not (as he was in Shakespeare) also sometimes a figure of greatness. He gives us a world so grim we might as well be dead.

Ebert criticizes the movie’s (male) maker for his choices, but I don’t hold any ill will for Smiley’s creative license. Her rewrites don’t bear out badly in the updated version of the story; they wantonly alter its tone to unrecognizability. This is testament both to the power of Shakespeare’s play and Smiley’s place as a profoundly gifted contemporary writer. I also give her major credit for using her source material graciously and simply: to frame her own story, tell a side she felt was not represented, satisfy her own creative itch by building on Shakespeare without presumption or pretension.

Cannonball logo font: Sketch Rockwell. For more on the Cannonball Read, see Pajiba.

Yuck:

“You can’t get that at the Second Avenue Deli,” he said, pointing out thick spears of chicken, celery and carrot, and sprigs of dill that were barely contained by the bowl.

I’ve reread this a few times and can’t figure out the list of ingredients. Maybe it’s the awful term “thick spears,” which I could imagine referring to potatoes or something but not celery, not carrots, and certainly not chicken. With the extra comma after carrot, the sentence tells us only the dill was barely contained by the bowl, which sounds like a LOT of dill. Bad show, Julia Moskin.

On the other hand, the article from which I drew the sentence is interesting and worth reading: Can the Jewish Deli Be Reformed?

P.S. Take a moment and reflect on the irony of my earlier post on anti-swearing language elitists combined with this persnickety language dissection. But clear language isn’t an issue of education or elitism — trying to be artificially descriptive or clever muddies the writer’s message.

It’s that time again. Time for the same old tired, nonsensical debate over swearing in the public eye . . .

OMG, SWEARING SHOWS NO VOCABULARY! SMART PEOPLE TOTALLY DON’T SWEAR! LANGUAGE IS DUMBER BECAUSE OF SWEARS!

. . . Brought out again by the New York Times in an article I desperately hope has an ironic title: Why Do Educated People Use Bad Words?

This debate is stupid, illogicked to say the least, and full of dweebs. Try to find an issue where there’s more overlap between conservative religious people and well-to-do liberals. At least people who object to swearing because it offends them religiously have some argumentative ground to stand on — they believe that poor language offends the deity or takes the deity’s name in vain. But to suggest that swearing is some shameful cesspool of the idiocracy is short-sighted and elitist.

Yes, I went there: Elitist. It is a word I use sparely because as a college-educated avid reader, student of language, and allaround nerd, I am vulnerable to it myself. But read the comments on the post, especially those with a high number of reader recommendations — they’re absurd. Of particular note are the comments stating explicitly that smart people do not swear. I’m sorry, internet stranger, have you met any of the smartest people I know? Because almost all of them swear regularly and, more importantly, that has nothing to do with anything. Equating intelligence with lack of swearing opens up a giant logical gap.

Don’t mistake my message here: To not swear is fine also. In the last six months or so I made a decision to clean up my language, if only to increase the impact when I do pull out a swear to make a point. There’s no way anyone who drives in the city of Chicago could ever fall out of practice in the art of fine profanity.

Yesterday Pajiba ran a column on Elijah Wood by contributor Michael Murray. He tries to put a finger on what’s so fascinating about Wood, and describes what I agree is the most memorable scene in Deep Impact:

As a tsunami is about to wash over the world, Wood — mobile and courageous on a zippy dirt bike — dekes in and out of the doomed motorists jammed on the highway.

My dad hates Elijah Wood and has since Wood starred as the kid in the updated Flipper movie. But I loved that movie (and still do: the statute of limitations on childhood taste has not run out), and countless others he made in the ’90s starting with Radio Flyer.

Deep Impact continued a fundamental shift in my taste. 1997 had come and gone with Titanic, which my friends and I liked a lot . . . then some of those friends saw it twenty times, while others decided a month later that they hated it. The combination of schizo obsession and backlash seemed even more ridiculous after the release of Armageddon, one of the biggest waste-of-time pieces of tripe I’ve ever endured, but for some reason people LOVED it and hated Deep Impact. I began to think about how this quieter, box-office-failing movie was better regardless of its level of commercial success. That’s not to say I didn’t continue to see questionable things and often do now.* But I started to understand the relationship between good movies and entertaining movies and their overlap.

It’s hard to explain the place Wood holds in my pop-culture memory because you just had to be there. In a way, our whole generation grew up on the same trajectory, and I’d seen him in movies from childhood to adolescence and onward, playing various parts that felt really truthful even though they spanned different historical periods, different backgrounds. I flipped through the December/January issue of Teen People — a teen magazine so honestly good I asked to get a subscription — and saw this spread on Elijah Wood:

For some reason, this magazine spread is one of my strongest sense memories to this day: I remembered this exact photo (and spent a lot of mental energy finding it online), the colors of the title font, how the shirt he’s wearing is blue because you see it on the next page. I was listening to a CD I’d just received for my birthday — 1996′s Yourself or Someone Like You by Matchbox 20, one of my first favorite CDs and one I still love for its importance to me then — and one of those songs is embedded in the memory too. The CD rode a continuous wave of successful singles and sold millions and millions of copies. I can’t listen to this album without thinking of this story on Elijah Wood in this magazine, and I can’t think of Elijah Wood without thinking of this album.

There’s some mental coin flip where this particular moment on this particular day won the memory game: An actor I like but don’t love, in a fairly typical photo spread, for an embarrassing movie (The Faculty!), sitting in my room, looking out the window into town, listening to a fairly typical mid 90s pop rock group. I feel a connection to Elijah Wood because of it, and I still think he’s great even though I fell asleep during each installment of Lord of the Rings.

* Here’s a clause to strike fear in your heart: Journey to the Center of the Earth in 3D.

The latest This American Life details the seemingly nefarious dealings of one investment firm before and during the bursting housing bubble and subsequent recession. Most of the way in, the show guts you with a complex capitalist issue that does not bear out an easy answer.

I love moral gray areas as a general rule, which is almost a statement not worth making: Almost all moral issues are gray in our real everyday lives. (I also love air, whiling away the hours, weather, and waking up every morning.) In this case we are asked to decide: If you are in the business of making money for your investors, and you do that by exploiting a legal weakness of the accepted system, is it wrong?

Moreover: If exploiting that weakness breaks the bubble’s back and throws our country into turmoil that will last for years, is it any more or less wrong?

I realized what this episode reminded me of while texting with my dad about the Chicago Cubs. As a White Sox family, we dislike the Cubs; as a north sider dealing with Cubs traffic and the Cubs’ awful, awful fan base, I am not sympathetic. One night last year, drunken Cubs fans crowded around the Clark bus I was riding home, like shambling zombies in a Stephen King-ocalypse. They start drinking at 9 a.m. and finish at the end of the baseball season.

But fan base aside, because I’m not here to get all argumentum ad hominem.

According to Forbes, the Cubs are the fifth-most valuable franchise in Major League Baseball at $726m — about 45% of the formula-busting New York Yankees at $1.6b.

Yet the Cubs have the most expensive average ticket price in baseball, despite last year’s sub-.500 season. The Yankees are only the third-most expensive average even with their $1.6b franchise value.

As the experts on This American Life pointed out about the investment firm, can you fault an organization for making money for its investors? In the case of the Cubs, when people will lay down absurd money to attend the games, buy merchandise, and carouse at the local restaurants and bars, can anyone blame the higher-ups for charging as much as possible?

Baseball is a business like any other, and if the goal is to put butts in the seats, the Cubs are a succes fou regardless of the team they put out in any given season. Foolhardily signing long-term deals with players who self-destruct as soon as the cap is back on the pen is a symptom of really, really poor judgment in the management. It also shows that the Cubs don’t value return-on-investment for fans who pay more than any other fans nationwide do to see their team.

First a disclaimer: I love Excedrin, rely on it frequently to kill my headaches dead, and recommend it to people.

That said, a few months ago I started to notice something. Extra Strength Excedrin was on sale two for one while my favorite Excedrin Migraine wasn’t, and I thought, you know, if they’re close enough I can buy Extra Strength. Let’s compare some of the Excedrin family of products:

I’m sure other pain reliever brands do the same thing, but for Excedrin it’s particularly funny since their model includes three separate ingredients: the acetaminophen, aspirin, and caffeine in a particular combination.

(Part 1 is my review of Jane Smiley’s novel A Thousand Acres, a reimagining of Shakespeare’s King Lear. Part 2 will be my thoughts on King Lear.)

“If you remember the story, Lear decided to divvy up the family business — in his case the kingdom of England — so he could retire and take it easy. His succession plan was an abysmal failure.” (Ronald F. Duska in the May 2008 Journal of Financial Service Professionals)

I remembered the story in a vague way, misted over by years of Shakespeare overwrites: I’m sorry, friend William, the royals and their dramas and all the deaths grow distant in the rearview mirror.

Instead, it reentered my consciousness through Jane Smiley’s striking and personal novel A Thousand Acres. When Hollywood turned this book into a movie, they filmed it in Rochelle, Illinois, twenty minutes from my hometown. We self-inflated over the movie as though the whole county were ours, in an inadvertent reflection of the story and its tale of land ownership, property, and belonging.

Virginia (Ginny, the main character), Ruth, and Caroline are daughters of Larry, an Iowa farmer with a thousand acres of his own. Because of this he is the rural-Midwestern equivalent of royalty, with family roots just as deep and far-reaching, an honorable name forged over generations of swamp alchemy: from sumpy mosquito habitat to the purest fruits of the earth. The grimy, fragrant patina of farm life suits these characters, transposed from centuries ago into a modern monarchy. The beginning sets up the action as Smiley describes the process by which Larry’s ancestors acquired an entire thousand acres; how the family earned respect and a mild, sidelong envy.

When Larry tells his daughters he intends to divide ownership of the farm among them and retire, youngest daughter Caroline — a new attorney suggested to be a traitor for moving to Des Moines — is the only one to voice her alarm: Why is he doing this, what will he do with his time, where will he fit into the new order? Ruth and Ginny, both married and living on the farm with their husbands, hesitantly accept the change. For speaking her mind, Caroline is cast out of the family, and it’s clear she believes her sisters to be accessories to a crime.

Over the course of the book, Larry loses his mind, begins to act in a way I can inadequately summarize as reckless, and turns on his daughters. He bands together with a small group of allies and looks to Caroline — or is he rescued by her? — for the energy he needs to fight back against his own earlier decision. In the process, terrible things begin to happen, terrible secrets emerge, people trade motives and blamefulness, everything clouds over. And really, from what I’ve read about the book, that’s exactly what Smiley had in mind: To turn the shocking, emotional, but ultimately clear-cut King Lear of Shakespeare, dip it in turpentine, and watch the colors run.

“King Lear’s troubles, after all, begin when he sets his daughters to compete with each other in expressing their love for him. Comparing a child to his sibling, Samuel Johnson advised, is worse than physical punishment: ‘A child is afraid of being whipped, and gets his task, and there’s an end . . . whereas, by exciting emulation and comparisons of superiority, you lay the foundation of lasting mischief; you make brothers and sisters hate each other.’” (from the NYT Motherlode blog)

Smiley twists the story in some small and some large ways, all interesting and fresh. As Johnson is quoted above, competition can “make brothers and sisters hate each other” — Smiley introduces this dynamic among the older daughters, their husbands, and the adult sons of old family friends. She brings in the gossipy, take-sides nature many small towns have and the tendency of people to group up and question one another. She also manages to isolate the characters in a way that feels natural, allowing the introduction of one new person, or even the homecoming of a long-traveling former neighbor, to kill the bucolic balance.

Her characters are relatable in a way that makes you feel less secure in your convictions, because you are a person, a human being, and you resemble them, and who wants to resemble them? How can everything seem right, and seem wrong, and be both right and wrong? Smiley’s ending, though, is a complete 180 from that of Shakespeare. It is conclusive. It includes Big Lessons spelled out in language a little too neat, even if the decency or resolve of the main character herself is not so clear. But to attempt to speak to Lear, to fill in gaps, is a bold and successful move on Smiley’s part. She brings her A-game to this book to, as Donne would say, “breathe, shine, and seek to mend.”

Cannonball logo font: Sketch Rockwell. For more on the Cannonball Read, see Pajiba.

Pfft, that’s actually not news at all.

A prime number is only divisible by itself and one, with no other factors. For instance, 4 is not a prime number because it’s divisible by 2. Many people intuit that past a certain point there are no more prime numbers, because big numbers MUST be divisible by something, right? Stupid lying intuition.

Here are some giant prime numbers. They’re not even close to the largest ones, which we aren’t sure are even close to the largest ones we don’t know about yet.

18,926,659
4,572,487
914,873
98,686,867
296,041
42,974,627
35,864,177
1,817,707

I am enrolled in a test-review class where we talk about math a lot. A couple of weeks ago I asked the instructor to help me with a specific question, to which she responded, “Let’s do a factor tree.” YESSSS!

The NYT’s “The Caucus” blog ran a post on Sarah Palin’s discomfort-inspiring endorsement of John McCain in a state primary where he is being brutalized from the right. I hate John McCain for bringing Palin to anyone’s attention in the first place and can never forgive him, but the photo of him standing beside (yet several feet away from) Palin is painful. She is, of course, wearing her scary structured black leather jacket that seems to come from the Dominatrix Lair line of Chanel. He looks as though he has been holding his breath for the last hour, or year and a half.

Anyway, this doesn’t draw out more than the typical level of outrage for me, but one of the reader comments explained my thoughts better than I’ve managed to before now:

Maybe as Republicans keep moving further and further into the past we’ll finally return to a time when the currency of argument was reason rather than emotion and symbolism.

Yesterday on Speaking of Faith, Krista Tippett hosted two Jesuit priests who are celebrated scientists: Brother Guy Consolmagno and Father George Coyne. They discussed extensively the gaps in our understanding of the universe, and how those gaps are something to celebrate, to pursue without ceasing.

They also quoted the Anne Lamott line that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. The certainty of today’s most abusive and relentless right-wingers is their most offensive trait among many.