I need to decompress from an enormously fraught couple of weeks, not to mention teh cough that hangs on, because I am getting deeply depressed. Also this coming week is going to be a killer. The course begins, right after the teach-in for Haitian history and culture.
So I shall stop reading Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones. This massive novel is brilliantly written. But I have no idea how he was able to write it without needing to stop periodically and throw up, or maybe kill himself. This novel is an inconceivable achievement -- getting inside the mind of a high nazi officer who is involved with the ever-escalating scope and number of nazi atrocities in WWII. Its structure, like the methodology of the nazi evils, is methodical, organized and carefully bureaucratized, with all the details punctilliously recorded, to ensure no one got blamed for doing or not doing what they were told. There must be some good reason for this award-winning literary novel. But I can't continue reading it. Why must this central consciousness be a homosexual? Would Dr. Maximilien Aue be less evil if he wan't a homosexual? I can't read this before going to bed.
I've finished Bliss Broyard's One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life -- A Story of Race and Family Secrets, which is a memoir of NY and NO we're using for the course. Her father was Anatole Broyard, long time book critic for the NY Times and Book Review.
I've begun Daniel Boone: An American Life.
I read several Mario Puzo novels last year. Without redeeming literary value of any kind they take no time at all; in paperback they are just right for the subway.* Though Puzo never finished The Family himself, he and a collaborator worked on it before he died. This novel of the Borgias reads as if it were being written a screen play. This would make a most terrific historical movie. This winter I'm watching the films that were made from the Puzo novels. I suppose this is like what I used to do back in the 80's and 90's when things just got to be too much. I headed out to Brooklyn, to the heavy metal club, L'Amour, just to make my ears bleed. Sometimes your nerves need that. But I'm frailer now, so I resort to dvds instead.
Like the entire world, I have indeed seen The Godfather before, though a long time ago. Though it seems unlikely, Vaquero and I went together to see Godfather III when it came out. I've watched The Godfather II (1974) for the first time in which Robert de Niro plays the young Vito Corleone; the old man version in The Godfather, as the world knows, was played by Marlon Brando. So much of Viggo Mortenson as Aragorn in Jackson's LOTR reprises de Niro's in body and head stance as Vito Corleone, a perfectly still body that contains infinite capacity for effective violent action, that one wonders about actorly influence. What is different though, is the deadness of Vito Corleone's eyes when he goes for the needed kill, as are Al Pacino's eyes, playing Vito's son and successor, Michael Corleone. Aragorn's eyes are always filled with a warm light. However, in his later roles of violence, that deadness is nearly there, as in A History of Violence. So far though, Mortenson's eyes still possess soul when his characters kill.
I've also watched one and half seasons of The Sopranos this winter. It is inferior to both the Godfather films and The Wire, by so much. But it does distract one. The Sopranos also flatly states several times in several ways -- at least so far -- that it owes its very existence to the Godfather films. It so much lacks the heft, the weight, the seriousness of the old days. The difference between the stone, wood, gold and marble of the old ways, the old faith, of Italy and New York, and the prefab materials of contemporary New Jersey and movie-mad priests. In other words Coppola, with Puzo, created a mythos and legend for Italians in the New World.** The population of The Sopranos' characters, er writers, are acutely aware this is so. So are our other brands of U.S. gangsters, but that's another story -- and a whole bunch of other films and lots of music.
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* Unlike The Kindly Ones, which has a great deal of literary value -- at least many people believe this to be so, The Puzo novels make put a great deal of emphasis on honor and loyalty and family love, so there is comfort and less despair -- at least if one can forget that organized crime depends on a state and populaton that is mostly law-abiding, with non-corrupt institutions. When the state, people and the institutions become as ruthless, brutal and corrupt as the criminal organization the entire ediface defaults to warlordism. Or fascism, which wasn't very friendly to the Sicilian Our Thing, supposedly. In any case corruption breeds corruption -- see Our Own Nation.
** This is something I hadn't thought about much prior to living in New Orleans, a purely mobbed up city run out of the same southern Italian migrant waves that brought NYC the Godfather.
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6 comments:
The Sopranos, to me, is more about satire than seriousness. That inherently limits it vis-a-vis The Wire and The Godfather trilogy, so comparing it to them is like, say, comparing The Big Lebowski to Hamlet. Take it on its own terms and it's awfully good.
The Godfather III. Talk about problematic. Pacino is fine throughout, but as Pauline Kael (?) wrote, anytime a movie has a helicopter attacking a casino, you know it has problems. Sophia Coppola is execrable; the saving grace of her performance is that she makes Andy Garcia look like Laurence Olivier. The final shot is terrific, though.
No doubt there satire is part of The Sopranos.
But the Godfather novels are fiction and mores so are the films! They're still heftier.
The final shot in III echos the final shot of II.
But I haven't yet re-watched III at this point.
It's probably of more interest to me than anyone else, or most, seeing how the films diverge in characterization and motivation and action, etc. from Puzo's novels, speculating on the choices Coppola made and why. Two different storytelling approaches.
Love, C.
I also really dislike AThe Big Lebowski, meaning, specifically the Jeff Bridges character and all the others too. Gives me the creeps that guys all over this country think his dudeness to be the height of coolness. Eeeeek.
But the national entertainment media adores the ever more infantilized male.
This bodes badly.
Love, C.
As literature, The Godfather is wanting. It's a terrific potboiler, though. Part of Coppola's great achievement with the movies is that he could take a pulp source and turn it into art. Incidentally, pre-Godfather, Puzo wrote a good children's book called The Runaway Summer of Davie Shaw.
Re The Big Lebowski, we'll have to agree to disagree on that one. Personally, I find the Dude more dumb than cool; he just happens to be dealing with people who are even dumber. I'd say it was a guy thing except that my late wife loved it. But that's just my opinion, man.
You make me laugh, connecting 'literature,' to Puzo's writing! :) Your comment is putting it mildly.
But the color of Puzo's writing is splendid, and it seems to me that more 'literature' could benefit from more of that. But that's me. :)
As for the dude, indeed we do agree to disagree. :)
Love, C.
On another topic, The Age of Wonder, the Richard Holmes book, is really good. I'm reading the chapter about Mary Shelley, Vitalism, and the pursuit of a tangible soul in science and art. What's fascinating is how much absolute quackery some of these incredible minds bought into at the same time that they made true scientific breakthroughs. A rigorous scientific method of inquiry had yet to be developed which led to the introduction of all kinds of speculative metaphysics into the scientific debates. For example, many scientists (though not all) did believe that a physical soul existed and was discoverable.
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