The Unsaid by Phil Hall

  I feel a little guilty for this review. I picked up The Unsaid by Phil Hall at a used book sale last year and just got around to reading it. In a few hours, I was able to read the entire collection. Structurally, there are basically three major sections: “The Unsaid,” “All Mouth,” and “The Stone Vote Translated.” Each is a long poem, comprising a series of other poems, making the distinction between pieces difficult; they blend into one another, sometimes in interesting ways. For instance, “All Mouth” presents a series of poems where a footnote poem seems to span across several pages, both related and not.

I admit this book did not get my full attention, and I feel badly about that. It did not get the attention and care poetry demands, so I am able to offer, really, only broad strokes of commentary.

The first section, “The Unsaid,” appears to be a family saga that explores the dynamics between parents and their children. My favourite piece in the collection is “16.” It’s a piece that explores a disconnect in interests and values between the two generations, recollecting to an extent Seamus Heaney’s poem “Digging”, which has the fabulous conceit that instead of digging like his father, he will dig with his pen. In Phil Hall’s version, he writes of “Father sawing skylights / for me to write of you under.” There’s then a parenthetical comment: “(your love not much for words / Mine not much for hardware)”. There’s a beautiful reciprocity despite a clear disconnect. There’s a quietness to the poem I quite appreciate, with both of them “bowed heads [as they] concentrate.” Hall identifies that they are not paying attention to each other, “but upon skills / seemingly so different?” As the poem progresses, there’s a nice materiality to the work. There are “sawdust motes” that make it onto the speaker’s page and the speaker says, “I stop look up & tell you // what I have just written / prodigal wood meets prodigal wood.” It’s a great image for two forms of the same material. Sawdust and paper like the father and son’s skills: two forms of the same species. Then, “both of us wondering / what we did to interrupt the other,” the poem continues. Hall returns to the idea of light that starts off the poem: “Your bare trunk is framed / by more bad weather // Deeper & beneath you / I am lit & darkened by you // & look down pointedly again / to write as your saw resumes.” The notion of existing in a shadow which simultaneously darkens and lightens the experience is a delightful paradox. The final line of the poem does a great job of adding an irresolvable twist, giving a tenuous sense of connection. There’s an italicized outside (the storm cloud?) that states, as if from beyond: “& they do not recognize each other” (29). The poem is a simple moment that just works as being emblematic of so much more to the characters’ interior worlds.

In fact, several of the poems in the collection are imagistic. In the poem “Shoot,” Hall explores the idea of form and content. I am often engaged by discussion of the relationship between form and content and here Hall attempts to separate the two. The poem begins with a question: “Language, not content?” How do we say something without something to say? He then provides a concrete image to make that philosophical problem more material: “What’s left / after you separate the current / of the rapids from its water & stones? // Not current / not rapids, not fish / not even sound // Only a concept of rapids / a canoe theory.” I really like how that metaphor exists in an aphoristic register. The final part of the poem asks, “Why should we enjoy / watching you shoot the concepts / in your theory?” (48). I appreciate Hall’s sentiment here for two reasons. First, I like that it grounds the abstract; if concepts are too abstract, they cannot possibly be engaging. Second, I appreciate that it is geared towards an appreciatory tone. The idea of “shoot[ing] the concepts”—that is, destroying them—is here spoken of derisively in favour of something more productive.

In another section of “The Unsaid,” Hall once again refers to some naturalistic imagery to help create the experience. He writes, “When I press my thumbs into my eyes / I see uproots in frantic leaf shadow / & rocks full of tiny bones holding sway. // I am entering a fossilization of waiting / & can taste petrified resin” (39). When people say they “don’t get poetry,” I’m empathetic. Sometimes it is unclear unless you find a way onto the same wavelength. I think I’ve done it here. I’m picturing the designs that transpire when you press your eyes—the way you see light shining around your veins; alternatively, Hall offers “uproots in frantic leaf shadow / and rocks full of tiny bones holding sway.” That image feels so appropriate and creates a nice affinity with nature that seems to be supported in the lines that follow. As to the following lines: “I am entering a fossilization of waiting / & can taste the petrified resin,” I can only imagine someone considering the next stage of their life, but your guess is as good as mine (that’s the beauty of poetry).

There are, admittedly, some more surrealist passages in the text, some of which I found really engaging. The poem “Inner Handles” is a standout for the more surreal reflections in the book. It begins with the premise of having a recurring dream “of swallowing the dagger that figures / in one of Borges’ stories” (53). It then describes the blade coming out through the stomach with the handle inside, “opposite of how a blade lodges in combat.” In the next stanza, the speaker falls, “stabbing [his] shadow and its earth” (53). The reflection discusses how “this is a poetic dream of process and intent,” which gives the poem mysterious quality. The following passage explains:

    Each of my poems is a fortress built for a party. How

    entrancing the melodics of opposition to self can be! How

    useful the poems that leave all their handles inside!

It’s a bizarre comparison. I really like it, even if I can’t quite conceptualize it. He continues, “Useful: the lathe inside grinding out hopefully elegant tools.” It then becomes a discussion of the real and the other-worldly. He explains how “Having a grip on the handle inside me allows me to love / the details of this world, each gimcrack/talis-shard” (53). Returning to a motif of “the unsaid,” he follows up that groundedness in the world with the notion of “our enemies lay[ing] their eggs in what we cannot say to each other, or / in what we take too long to say” (54). The penultimate stanza of the poem references the “potentially sexual imagery” of the poem, which might have been left out, but it ends on the idea of how “my poems are a / sifting of tumors from conditioning” and I quite like that. Ultimately, Phil Hall (or at least his speaker) characterize his work as “a scab-picker from way-back” who has “always found power-nodes / Under crusts and camouflage” (53). The disruptiveness of that image is just excellent.

“The Stone Vote Translated” section of the book is a series of shorter poems that are provided with accompanying illustrations, like bpNichol or Leonard Cohen. One small poem in this section offers intriguing metaphors, as well. The poem starts off with some imagery: “From these resolute hills / —their dry knuckles / cracking in flames / ‘til the groves are blue // sand’s sarcastic whisper / shoreward / sweat’s grimacing / thin silver trail” (57). What I like most, though, are the final two lines, which offer a whimsical and deep metaphor: “tenuous little suction-cups / of memory” (57). It’s cute and meaningful all at once.

Ultimately, I appreciate Hall’s tone and approach. While I didn’t feel consistently gripped by the poems, the moments that I found myself on the same wavelength were really striking. To keep my review simple, I would say: I have a generally favourable opinion of The Unsaid.

Happy reading!

Terrorist by John Updike

        I’m embarrassed to have read Terrorist by John Updike, and I’m more embarrassed for him having written it. It’s an unfortunate mess of a novel with an inconsistent style, an awkwardly-pace plot, and such clumsily written self-important characters, which, taken together, hardly warrant commentary. However, in an effort to spare others from reading this book, I’m going to take a lot of words to say a few simple things—in other words, I’m taking a page out of Updike’s book, since I can’t an actual 120 pages out of it.

From a plot standpoint, Terrorist is as simple as its title implies. It’s about Ahmad, a teenage boy attending high school in New Jersey in the years following the terror attacks on September 11th. At the climax of the book, it’s the five year anniversary of the attack on the Twin Towers. The actual terrorism only actually happens in the last, let’s say, forty pages of this 310 sprawl. The first third of the book is about Ahmad in high school and going to see his guidance counsellor and going to watch his friend sing in Church, which itself rings so false it’s unfathomable. Ahmad speaks like a robot and hates all things fun, vocally judges all non-Muslims, and is generally unpleasant; how Joryleen remains friends with him is completely incomprehensible. 

The book then spends a lengthy period of time focused on equally implausible guidance counsellor, Jack Levy, who meets with Ahmad once right before graduation to see what his life plans are. Ahmad wants to drive a truck and Jack thinks there is something more for him out there. Ahmad says that if God wanted him to have more education he would have put him on that path. So, Jack goes to Ahmad’s house to give his mom college pamphlets—and then starts cheating on his wife with Ahmad’s mom. Now is probably a good time to mention that Updike’s treatment of Ahmad’s fundamentalism is embarrassingly simplistic: his Egyptian dad left his Irish mom, leaving him fatherless, so he turns to God as his father, whom he wants to impress. It’s a dumb Freudian piece that completely ignores the political motivations of terror movements.

Anyway, the book goes on unnecessarily long, masturbatory tangents, presumably to show how great he is at imagery. For instance, Ahmad and Joryleen are walking together, Updike give the following description of how they walk:

along the northern edge of the empty acres waiting to be developed. A painted big sign shows a four-story parking garage that will bring shoppers back to the inner city, but for two years nothing has been built, there is only the picture, more and more scribbled over. When the sun, slanting from the south above the new glass buildings downtown, comes through the clouds, a fine dust can be seen lifting from the rubble, and when the clouds return the sun becomes a white circle like a perfect hole burned through, exactly the size of the moon. Feeling the sun on one side of him makes him conscious of the warmth on the other, the warmth of Joryleen’s body moving along, a system of overlapping circles and soft parts. The bead above her nostril-wing gleams a hot pinpoint; sunlight sticks a glistening tongue into the cavity at the center of her scoop-necked blouse. He tells her, “I am a good Muslim, in a world that mocks faith.” (69)

The whole passage serves to extend the story, but not enrich it. The supposed sensuality of the passage that is meant to contrast Ahmad’s rigidity is still presented in a nearly mathematical register, so the contrast is less impactful than Updike may have thought. Also, you may have noticed the laughable dialogue of Ahmad’s explicit statement about his intentions.

The conversation between he and his friend continues in an equally laughable way. Joryleen asks, “Instead of being good, don’t you ever want to feel good?” She suggests that maybe she could go to mosque with him and he replies robotically, “That would not do. We could not sit together, and you could not attend without a course of instruction, and a demonstration of sincerity” (69). Joryleen responds, “Wow. That may be more than I have time for”—lol, first of all—”Tell me, Ahmad, what do you do for fun?” (69). Ahmad then explains how his job at the corner store can be ‘fun’ (yes he uses quotation marks) due to “observing the customers and the varieties of costume and personal craziness that American permissiveness invites. There is nothing in Islam to forbid watching television and attending the cinema, though in fact it is all so saturated in despair and unbelief as to repel my interest” (70). Elsewhere, Ahmad argues with his mother about not having a life and says, “I have money, and I just saw a couple movies, one with Tom Cruise and one with Matt Damon. They were both about professional assassins. Shaikh Rashid is right—movies are sinful and stupid. They are foretastes of Hell” (144). His mom then accuses him of being gay, because why not? Everyone loves gay panic. Returning to the conversation between Ahmad and Joryleen, he says, “Nor does Islam forbid consorting with the opposite sex, if strict prohibitions are observed [...] They exist, the prohibitions, for the benefit less of the male than of the female. Her virginity and purity are central to her value” (70). I know that Terrorist was published in 2006, with the context of the war on terror in full force, but I can guarantee that even at the time nobody ever spoke this way and Updike’s Islamophobia is presented under the guise of having researched its tenets with all the smugness of a Fox News reporter.

The critique of Islam’s treatment of women is completely undercut by Updike’s persistent misogyny throughout the text. No woman escapes his scorn. Ahmad’s friend Joryleen, for instance, is transformed from a Church girl into a sex worker, pimped out by her boyfriend Tylenol (yes, really, that’s his name, and I can’t explain why it feels like antiblack racism, to boot). I don’t know if I wrote this in my notes, but Joryleen is eighteen and Updike discusses how her breasts are already beginning to sag, almost imperceptibly. Why mention this at all? Because Updike hates women’s bodies. Jack’s wife Beth is a particular object of Updike’s scorn. The number of references to her being fat, smelly, vapid, and lazy are truly revolting—and to be clear, it’s not she that is revolting, but Updike’s attitude towards her. Updike’s lingering in misogyny contributes to the excess that makes the plot such a slog. For instance, there’s a scene that goes on for, roughly, ten pages, maybe, of Beth trying to pick up the remote control she dropped. Let’s take a look at a passage from that scene:

She rises in stages, first pulling the lever to lower the foot-rest and, fighting the rocker motion, transferring her feet to the floor and gripping the left arm of the chair with both hands to tug herself almost up, and finally, with an audible exclamation, heaving her weight onto her braced knees, which slowly, excruciatingly straighten, while she catches her breath. At the start of the process, she thought to place the empty plate on the chair arm safely onto the side table, but she forgot the television remote in her lap, and it falls to the floor. She sees it there, the numbered buttons of its little rectangular panel down with the spots of coffee and spilled food that have accumulated over time on the pale-green carpet. Jack warned her that the carpet would show dirt, but pale wall-to-wall was in that year, the carpet salesman said. “It gives a cool, contemporary look,” he assured her. “It expands the space.” Everybody knows Orientals are best for spots blending in, but when could she and Jack ever afford an Oriental? There’s a place on Reagan Boulevard where you can get them secondhand at a bargain price, but she and Jack never go that way together, it’s where mostly blacks shop. Anyway, used, you don’t know what the previous people have spilled that’s hidden in the fibers, and the idea is distasteful, like carpets in hotel rooms. Beth can’t bear to think of turning her body around and bending over to pick up the remote—her sense of balance is getting worse with age—and there must be some urgent reason why the person on the phone doesn’t hang up. (127)

What a waste of my time. Proust can get away with taking a long time to say something short; Updike is just a dope about it. She struggled to stand up. That’s enough. All the stuff about the carpet is also so unnecessary that I can’t fathom any reason to include it—plus, again, there’s the casual antiblack racism thrown in (just for funsies, I guess?).

Beth answers the phone and her sister tells her to turn off the loud TV (Beth, of course, watches her daily soaps, with Updike’s demeaning scowl hovering over her from space). So, “Beth puts the receiver down without answering. She sounds like Mother, she thinks, plodding over to where the remote—curiously similar to the telephone in look and feel, matte black and packed with circuitry: a pair of mismatched sisters—lies on its back on the pale-green wall-to-wall” (129). The phrase “mismatched sisters” is curiously obvious, like Updike can’t stand the thought of his cleverness going unacknowledged. The passage continues to emphasize Beth’s fatness:

With a groan of effort, gripping the chair arm with one hand and reaching down with the other in an exertion that reawakens in her little-used muscles the sensation of an exercise, an arabesque penchee, learned in ballet lessons when she was eight or nine, at Miss Dimitrova’s Studio, above a cafeteria downtown on Broad Street, she retrieves the thing and points it at the television screen, where As the World Turns is winding up on Channel Seven, under a cloud of tingling, ominous music. Beth recognizes Craig and Jennifer, in heated conference, and wonders what they are saying even as she clicks them off (129). 

Again, it’s disgusting to watch Updike revel in his hatred of Beth, giving her nothing redeeming. Her entire role in the plot, incidentally, is to pass the phone over to her husband when the moment comes. Also—what’s with these tangents into where Updike delves into where she had ballet lessons? It’s irrelevant. The maximalism found in the works of Pynchon or DeLillo has no place here, in what is supposed to be a crime thriller.

I wish I could say that Beth looking for the remote ends there. But it goes on! She returns to the phone and is told that she is “panting” before she “drops her body with a grunt onto the little hard chair that came in from the kitchen table when Mark was no longer around to eat with his parents” (130). I’ll spare you the backstory of the chair that follows, but I will note that it involves a scene where she tried to sit down, missed, and fell to the floor. Jack told her she would have broken her hip if she wasn’t “so well-upholstered” (130).

It’s bad enough that Updike himself, as narrator, is so critical of his creation, but the fact that other characters are in on his misogyny is even worse. When Beth’s husband Jack is having his affair, he tells Terry that he needs to leave and she says, “Jack, you’re always rushing off. Do I have body odor or something?” and then the narrator hops in: “This is cruel, because Beth indeed does; it fills up the bed at night, a caustic exhalation from her deep creases, and adds to his nocturnal unease and dread” (159). Even Beth’s sister “has taken the place of her mother in not letting her forget how much is wrong with her. Beth has let herself, as they say, ‘go.’ A scent rises to her nostrils from the deep creases between rolls of fat, where dark pellets of sweat accumulate; in the bathtub her flesh floats around her like a set of giant bubbles, semi-liquid in their sway and sluggish buoyancy” (135). In a post-coital moment, Jack and Terry are talking about their future. Terry suggests Jack thinks her painting hobby is a crock. He replies, “Oh no. I love your painting. I love it that you have this extra dimension. Now, if Beth—” and Terry cuts in, “If Beth had any extra dimension, she’d break through the floor” (207).

Even when Updike is being positive about women (i.e. when they are sexy and giving men sex), it comes across as disgusting and fetishistic. Terry sits up in bed “so her breasts bounce free of the sheet, their top half freckled, the half with the nipple untouched by the sun no matter how many other men have put their lips and fingers there. // The Irish in her, he thinks. That’s what he loves, that’s what he can’t do without. The moxie, the defiant spark of craziness people get if they’re sat on long enough—the Irish have it, the blacks and Jews have it, but it’s died in him” (207). Elsewhere, Updike writes that she has “loveable bohemian immodesty, has pulled her side of the sheet no higher, so her breasts, white as soap where the sun never touches them, jut free for him to admire and to feel the heft of again if he desires. He loves plump, though it can get to be too much [...] When in fucking she sits on his lap, impaling herself on his erection, he feels the colors reflected from her walls flow down her sides along with his hands, her elongating, rib-filled, preening, Irish-white sides” (158). First of all: gross already (“impaled”? barf!). Then, he can’t help but, again, contrast her with Beth’s fat. He “can’t imagine her weight on his pelvis, or her legs spread far enough apart; they have run out of positions, except for the spoon, and even there her huge ass pushes him away like a jealous child in their bed” (159).---oh, and then Terry says that her breasts are “starting to droop. You should have seen them when I was eighteen. Bigger, even, and stuck straight out” (159)---this is a woman as only a man could write. And no, that’s not a compliment to Updike. He’s insulting and he’s weird, immediately after describing Beth’s breasts (when she was young) as “inverted bowls, the size for breakfast cereal, with nipples hard as a single blueberry in his mouth (159). Good god.

If I have spent an excess of time documenting Updike’s hatred of Beth and other women in the story, it is because he himself has spent more time than necessary (arguably, the necessity of any of it is zero). Why, in this book about a budding terrorist, do we spend so much time dwelling on how undesirable all of the women are? It created such a sense of disgust for me towards the author that it’s hard to take anything he has to say seriously.

And that’s a serious problem, since Updike’s characters are constantly proseletyzing. They have long monologues about their beliefs, which quickly become indistinguishable. If I had any faith in Updike as a writer or thinker. I would suggest that the similarity in the characters’ beliefs is a commentary on the precarity of classifying particular people and not others as terrorists. Since I don’t, it becomes just another way for the characters to be flat and inconsistent. Jack Levy is a miserable grump that hates how times have changed and how movies are no good anymore; we’ve already seen Ahmad’s hatred of films. The flat critique of Western culture is perhaps best met with the response, “OK Boomer.”

Let’s come back to the notion of terrorism. Ahmad is on “the straight path.” He is so pure that he makes his entire identity his faith, even expressing more certainty than his imam at the mosque. There are a few moments of symbolism that focus on his desire for purity, which again are over-the-head and on-the-nose. Ahmad wants to be a truck driver, and as he studies for his exam there is a passage that provides a lengthy (boring) description of how to ship cargo and how the cargo has to be maintained. I won’t quote the passage at length here, but it’s all about sanitation regulations and safety: “Transportation is full of dangers that Ahmad has never before contemplated. It excites him, however, to see himself—like the pilot of a 727 or the captain of a supertanker or the tiny brain of a brontosaurus—steering a great vehicle through the maze of dire possibilities to safety” (75). It’s essentially him navigating the challenges of Western society to remain safe. But, Updike botches the landing. The last sentence of the paragraph lays all the cards on the table: “He is pleased to find in the trucking regulations a concern with purity almost religious in quality” (75). The same is true later, when Ahmad is working for a furniture company and we get excessive description of ottomans that are “Wrapped in a thick transparent plastic to protect its delicate skin of tinted leather patches sewn together in an abstract six-sided pattern, the item, preowned but well preserved, is a stuffed cylinder solid enough to take a sitting man’s weight but not soft enough to support pleasantly the slippered feet of one stretched at his ease in an armchair” (192). It’s fine.

So, the book is full of disgusting and purposeless misogyny, inconsistent and illogical behaviours from characters, and interchangeable anti-American sentiments from curmudgeons both old and young. The only engaging part of the book, really, is the final thirty pages or so, and again Updike drops logic and it results in a flop.

Here’s a summary of the ending of the book. Ahmad has been recruited by his boss’ son into a terrorist plot with the blessing of his imam. The plan is that Ahmad will drive a truck rigged with an explosive into a New Jersey tunnel in the middle of traffic. There’s some weak point in the structure that will bring the tunnel down and kill a bunch of people. Meanwhile, Beth’s sister, who works for some Homeland Security dude, calls Beth and asks to talk to Jack. Remember, Jack has only met with Ahmad a couple of times. There’s no reason to believe that he would be of any help. On the day of the attack, Ahmad is driving in traffic and Jack sees him and waves and Ahmad lets him into the truck. He fears that not acknowledging him will result in Jack making a scene and then he will be intercepted before completing his mission. Why, if Homeland Security knows about this plot, they would send a burnt out high school guidance counsellor to stop it is completely implausible. You’re telling me they wouldn’t just have snipers take him out? Come on.

That being said, the last thirty pages or so is kind of interesting and suspenseful. You have these two characters trapped together in a truck, debating whether it should be blown up. Even then, the pacing is messed up. Jack reveals what happened behind the scenes: turns out that the guy who recruited Ahmad to conduct the terror plot was a CIA agent arranging a sting operation to get to some of the bigger terror players. Ahmad is just a pawn. Incidentally, the man who recruited him has been discovered by the jihadists and beheaded so the plot is supposed to be off, but they’re happy to pin the blame on Ahmad. The gambits Jack throws at Ahmad are pretty bland—when he reveals to Ahmad “I fucked your mother” it doesn’t quite have the gravitas that would really seem to impact Ahmad, who has already lost faith in his mother anyway. Jack is just full of himself. It’s only when Ahmad waves to some black children in the car in front of him and when Jack says that he wants to die that Ahmad decides he will not detonate the bomb. I appreciate dialogue-driven scenes of confinement, but by the end I was too entrenched in the implausibility of the situation to really care when Ahmad notes that he had given up his god.

Incidentally, there’s no resolution for Joryleen. When the CIA agent hires a sex worker to deflower Ahmad (against his wishes), it turns out to be Joryleen. They have an encounter where she is trying to push herself on him and he is trying to remain virginal. He asks why she is doing this work and it turns out that her boyfriend Tylenol (again: insert eyes rolling) promises her it’s only temporary. On the eve of the suicide-bombing, Ahmad is asked where his reward money should be sent for his mother. He then says he wants his money to go to Joryleen so that she can get out of the line of work she’s in. It’s really framed as a selfless Jesus moment, where he’s dying for her sins. But, because he never actually dies, the question of what happens to Joryleen is left lingering in the air.

If it isn’t clear, I don’t recommend this book. It’s garbage. It’s a real bomb. Read Hanif Kureishi or The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid instead. I’ll probably never read Updike ever again.

Stanley Kubrick: American Filmmaker by David Mikics

        Better start by ripping off the band-aid: I love Stanley Kubrick’s films. I know that that sometimes sparks controversy because of his association with mansplaining and his reportedly demanding behaviour on set, driving actors into utter exhaustion (cf. The Shining and Shelley Duvall or Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut). The fact is, though, I find his films fascinating, unnerving, and visually compelling. Okay, Band-aid ripped off. Let’s talk about David Mikics’ Stanley Kubrick: American Filmmaker. It’s a biopic but made of words on a page (is there some kind of word for that?).

        Anyway, Mikics provides an overview of Kubrick’s life as a filmmaker, with each chapter grounding its narration alongside a film or set of films, going in chronological order throughout Kubrick’s filmography. It’s quite a nice overview of the genesis of each film, often supplemented by comments from actors or other crew members and sometimes populated with amusing anecdotes. One in particular that stood out to me was when they were filming with dozens of extras, Kubrick retreated to his place overlooking the field to imagine (?) what to do next. The waiting game went on and on and when extras spoke, Kubric came down to confront them. Mikics paints an intimidating picture of Kubrick, but then an extra makes a joke and Kubrick burst into laughter and the tension dissipated.

Mikics’ book has a similarly breezy tone. The book is informative, but casual. It’s a very accessible text that avoids technical language. Mikics does touch on some of the common motifs in the films (the bond between a child and parent, the ambitiousness of central characters, and so on), but a deeper analysis of the films is somewhat lacking. I suppose that’s not the purpose of this book. This book is meant to give you an overview of Kubrick’s career, not a full theoretical approach to his filmography.

I will say, though, that I appreciated Mikics’ characterization of the films. I’ve seen most of them, but discussion of the ones I haven’t was still engaging. Even some of the films I appreciate less were given their due and elevated by the commentary. Barry Lyndon has never been my favourite, but Mikics highlights why the film was important to Kubrick, how it went against the grain, and why it’s worth a rewatch.

On the topic of Barry Lyndon, I really appreciate Kubrick’s subversiveness. He had always wanted to do a period piece and was told that nobody wanted to watch films where people wrote with feathers. Then, after the sci-fi epic 2001: A Space Odyssey gained a huge following and A Clockwork Orange was essentially a cult classic, Kubrick just drops Barry Lyndon out there as the most different film imaginable (in some ways). I also like the subversiveness that arose in Spartacus. Reportedly, it was supposed to have the saccharine heroism of Hollywood that Kubrick hated and he tried to undermine it at every turn.

Having read all of Vladimir Nabokov’s novels, I was interested in the origin of Lolita as a film. It’s a pretty wild story that involved backroom deals, dropped agreements, and bringing in Nabokov himself to write the screenplay, a type of writing he had never done before and which he returned as an (essentially) reworked version of the novel three hundred pages long. I was also interested to know that at one time Kubrick had wanted to make a film adaptation of Nabokov’s novel Laughter in the Dark, which would have been perfect. It’s the perfect novel for a dark, noir-influenced film. I looked it up years ago (and just now) and a film version of Laughter in the Dark is still in pre-production with Anya Taylor Joy set to star (she will be perfect, mark my words), but it’s a shame Kubrick’s vision for it won’t ever see the light of day.

Actually, learning about Kubrick’s dropped projects is almost as interesting as the ones he completed. I imagine many people are familiar with AI: Artificial Intelligence, ultimately handed over to Spielberg by Kubrick after some time of working on it and leading to a happier ending than Kubrick would have done, although Mikics suggests that Kubrick proposed the uplifting ending. The other project Kubrick dropped was a Holocaust film, The Aryan Papers. He worked on it for decades before abandoning it in favour of Eyes WIde Shut. He heard about Schindler’s List, figured the movies would come out around the same time, and left the project behind.

As an aside, I feel like I should note that Stanley Kubrick: American Filmmaker is part of a series called Jewish Lives. Throughout the chapters, Mikics makes at least one reference to Judaism in some capacity. In my opinion, these references are somewhat shoehorned in, especially since the first reference to Kubrick’s Judaism underplays it, suggesting he would not have characterized himself along those lines.

If we think through the filmography of Kubrick, all of the “big hits” are here. Shall I attempt my own personal ranking of the filmography?

1. Eyes Wide Shut

2. A Clockwork Orange

3. The Shining

4. Full Metal Jacket

5. Lolita

6. 2001: A Space Odyssey

7. Spartacus

8. Dr. Strangelove

9. Barry Lyndon

10. Four-way tie between all the ones I haven’t seen.

As a result, I found the chapters on those films the most interesting and engaging. But even barring that, I was interested in the anecdotes of Kubrick’s life. For instance, I had no idea he would phone people to talk for hours about Hollywood gossip, or that he essentially third wheeled with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman for months, or that he would make actors do multiple takes, over-and-over-and-over again, without giving them any instruction. That last one is a weird power move and, though I’m sure it was terrible for the actors, it’s very entertaining to me in the abstract.

In any case, Stanley Kubrick: American Filmmaker is a good little book to get an outline of Kubrick’s life and work. It’s not particularly deep. It’s not particularly challenging. It’s just a fun, interesting book for fans of Kubrick’s films. Go for it.

…Also, maybe it’s time to rewatch the filmography…

Escape Into Meaning by Evan Puschak

  You’ll be forgiven for not knowing Evan Puschak’s name, even if you might be familiar with his work. On YouTube, Puschak has posted almost three hundred videos under the moniker NerdWriter: video essays ranging from “How Donald Trump Answers a Question” to “The Bear’s Secret Ingredient Is Tenderness” to “Will AI Images Change Our Memories?”. His videos are often between five and ten minutes, skewing largely toward analysis of film, poetry, and visual art. Escape Into Meaning is Puschak’s first print work and is, similarly, a collection of essays and, similarly, covers a range of topics.

Briefly, the main topics of the essays are as follows: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Internet culture, cyberpunk, the trustability of experts, Lord of the Rings, public benches, Tarantino’s oeuvre, Superman, Seinfeld, friendship, and writing a book. Each of the essays is a blend, like Puschak’s videos, of his own thoughts and a curated selection of quotations, research, and referents to help establish his central claims. The conversational tone Puschak has mastered as NerdWriter carries through in his writing, which is consistently personable and clear, if lacking a little in terms of outward flourishes of style.

While the sentences themselves aren’t exactly”‘literary,” the composition of the collection as a whole is pretty creative. There are some obvious through-lines in the work and essays will echo one another, as if conversation. The essay on cyberpunk preempts the essay on Lord of the Rings. The essay “Write a Book” calls back to the essay on Emmerson, forming an effective set of bookends for the collection. 

What I find to be Puschak’s most interesting affectation as an essayist, though, is that each essay is a kind of nesting doll. One subject gets smuggled in through another. In “I Think the Internet Wants to Be My Mind”, Puschak discusses the effect of scrolling Twitter on brains, but smuggles in a discussion of Cats. The key epistemological question of “When Experts Disagree”---namely, how do you decide?---is also a vehicle that allows Puschak to discuss climate change and economic policy. The essay on “Friendship” is a disguise for an essay on Virginia Woolf’s best book (The Waves)...or is it the other way around? The most surprising essay in this respect is “Thinking in Oeuvres”, which begins as an essay on Quentin Tarantino’s films, then transmutes into an essay on the poems of William Butler Yeats before returning to the meditation on Tarantino. Never would I have partnered those two in an essay; they have such a different style, operate in such a different medium, that it’s an unlikely connection, which led to a surprisingly delightful exploration of oeuvres as a concept.

To back up a little bit, I’ll give a brief overview of some of the highlights in a more sequential order.

In “Emerson’s Magic,” Puschak provides an extended ode to finding yourself through reading. The essay heavily relies on passages from Ralph Waldo Emerson, which are inspiring in their own right, and there’s a nice autobiographical touch where Puschak outlines his admittedly lacklustre experience of school and coming to the joys of reading. LIke with other essays, though, this one isn’t just about Emerson. It’s also about individuality and its limits, another theme that carries throughout the collection.

For instance, the very next essay, “I Think the Internet Wants to Be My Mind,” explores the idea of conforming to a certain way of thought. The internet shapes our means of processing information; we scroll and scroll, the limitations of a Tweet give shape to our thoughts, and so on. Puschak explains how seeing internet consensus on any number of issues then guides our thinking towards a preemptive understanding of art (and, in particular, matters of taste). As I mentioned, Puschak couches a discussion of Cats film into the essay, serving as a representative example of how when he saw the trailer he already imagined how the internet would respond. The observations are at times a little surface level, but it’s still a worthwhile read, especially for young people, I think. It’s yet another plea to unplug and experience the world unmediated by others.

The essay “The Comforts of Cyberpunk” captures the particular joy of Cyberpunk narratives, ranging from William Gibson’s Neuromancer to Bladerunner. It’s a little funny that the book praises Cyberpunk 2077 but adds a footnote acknowledging its disastrous release. The essay talks about the limitless freedom of Cyberpunk and the anonymity that goes along with these worlds (again, the topic of individuality runs through). Cyberpunk is a genre I really like in theory, but in practice—at least in terms of literature—have a hard time engaging with. Puschak gives a great justification for the genre’s appeal.

To skip ahead a little, “Escape Into Meaning” serves as an effective companion piece to the essay on Cyberpunk. It operates as an opposite of sorts; Puschak acknowledges that his appreciation of the freedom in Cyberpunk does not mean he’d want to stay in those worlds for long, given its meaninglessness. “Escape Into Meaning” explores another genre—fantasy—and more specifically The Lord of the Rings. He explores why he finds so much joy in watching the entire trilogy more than 50 times. Quoting from some of Tolkien’s work on “Fairy Stories,” Puschak gives a critical summary of the perception that everything in Tolkien has a purpose, which is its own comfort. In the absence of any kind of other faith, the constructed world Tolkien has provided offers a sense that everything has significance. Fair enough, even though it’s not to my taste. I do appreciate that Puschak focuses on the way that the world evolves from Tolkien’s imagined languages.

But I skipped over an essay: “When Experts Disagree.” The central question is a compelling one: when experts disagree, how do we make a decision? I have to praise Puschak’s approach in the essay to probe facts for deeper truth. For instance, he breaks down a claim from John Oliver’s show about the consensus around climate science. Even though the conclusion is the same, Puschak provides a more nuanced analysis of the research methodology. He then attempts to do the same for economics, clearly advocating for things like a higher minimum wage, but tempered by the ambiguity of experts in disagreement. It is a nice appeal to temperance and is a very human attempt to reconcile the challenges of never being able to be enough of an expert in every field. 

When delving into social issues, Puschak offers some observations that are a little pedestrian—-specifically when commenting about benches. The “Ode to Public Benches” essay discusses the benefits of public seating as creating opportunities for connection. It delves into hostile architecture, which is a topic I find interesting, but the essay as a whole was one of the weaker components of the book.

One of the highlights, though, as I touched on earlier, is the essay “Thinking in Oeuvres.” The discussion begins with Quentin Tarantino’s oeuvre. Namely, that he claims to only have one more movie left in him. There’s some discussion of the limitations of an oeuvre and of knowing you have limited space. There is some analysis of the way Tarantino has threaded certain themes through his works, but then there’s a wild change to discussing the poems of W. B. Yeats. It’s an amazing shift and an unlikely juxtaposition. It’s fully justified, though, and Puschak explains how Yeats revised his oeuvre, condensed it, reimagined themes, creating layers of symbols and deeper meaning. Essentially, it’s an essay about the coherence of a body of work and how the idea of an oeuvre is an artwork in and of itself. I loved that essay for its insight, surprise, and possibilities.

A good critic, as I’ve said ad nausuem, is someone who can make you appreciate their subjects in a new way. I suppose that is true here for Superman and Seinfeld. There’s an essay on each, and I have to say that generally Superman is of no interest to me. Puschak explains why that is and what the writers have done wrong for trying to make Superman more relatable. He highlights some of the better story-driven media that discuss the human layer of Superman and Clark Kent to refute the argument that Clark Kent is the disguise and Superman the real identity. Similarly, I don’t have much interest in Seinfeld anymore, but there’s a good argument to be made for his satire as a more generalized satire, getting at the core of an idea. The commentary on Seinfeld criticizing the advertising industry offers some good insight under Puschak’s care.

The essay on friendship once again refers to the permeability of individuality and collectivity as is found in so many of the essays here. The central premise is that our identities are intrinsically linked to our friends. It’s a bittersweet essay, since Puschuk is grappling with friendships falling apart as we age and it’s an elevation of our formative friendships,. Puschak relies on and cites from The Waves by Virginia Woolf as an exploration of the interconnectedness of our identities with those of our friends. For what it’s worth, I’ll fight to the death that The Waves is Woolf’s best book at every level. My main complaint about this essay is that it doesn’t quite go far enough to discuss the implications of our intersubjectivity (which again could link to the implications of Cyberpunk worlds).

The final chapter of the book is a more personal one in nature. It’s about Puschak’s attempts to write novels in his early twenties. Overall, it’s an encouraging piece to keep writing, to keep your routines and word counts. It’s a short piece that consolidates the text; it almost feels like a victory lap for Escape Into Meaning itself. The journey was hard, but the book is here. He pushed through.

Escape Into Meaning is like having a conversation with a good friend in a cafe. It’s relatable and sometimes deep. It’s thoughtful and appreciatory towards the texts, media, and phenomena in which Puschak finds meaning. It’s a nice collection, which I would readily sample for students or friends. I think if nothing else, it inspires a disposition of observation toward the world around you. One that requires attention and takes you out of yourself—into something bigger, as if you ever weren’t a part of it.

If you read just one essay in the piece, read the essay on oeuvres. And if you read more than one piece, I’d also encourage you to check out Nerdwriter’s videos on YouTube. I’m a little behind myself, but there is a huge backlog of what looks to be great content.

May you find meaning in all that you do. Happy reading; happy viewing!