Mr. Hulot’s Holiday

It is the last day of February, and the snow is flying. I think I will go home and watch one of my favorite movies, just to cheer me up. It always works.

M. Hulot’s Holiday is a charming movie. The charm lies, I think, in the tendency of the movie to portray our attempts to impose routine behavior on the holiday experience. In the end we carry our stories with us, as turtles carry their shells. Upstairs the beautiful young girl opens her windows. She has just arrived. She looks out from her rented room onto the beach. The regulars notice as they promenade. Everything is new and full of promise. The sky is blue and the air is fresh. But the holiday resort is populated by types. There is the bratty child, the upright colonel, the indignant waiter, and then there is M. Hulot, agent of anarchy. The dramatic interest in the story arises out of the encounter between the imposed routine of the boarding house and the liberating possibilities of the holiday experiences.

Who wouldn’t want to be at the seaside on a day like this? It’s just therapy, much needed on this, the last snowy day of February.

City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish, by Peter Parsons

“Pythagoras the philosopher, having disembarked and teaching letters, advised his pupils to abstain from beans.” This nonsensical little tongue twister is a schoolboy translation exercise, discovered among huge trash heaps of papyrus in Oxyrhynchos (literally “City of the Sharp -Nosed Fish”), an ancient site 100 miles south of Cairo. It is a slice of life that proves that even in the 2nd century AD, language learning involved pointless sentences that nobody ever used - sort of a Graeco-Roman Egyptian version of “La plume de ma tante est jaune,” or (one that has stuck in my mind all these many years after first learning German), “Das aufschnieden des Stieffels ist zu vermeiden.” (“The cutting off of boots is to be avoided.) Good to know that some things never change.

Quaking aspens

Picture from here.  I can’t stop looking at it.  Jackson Pollack would have been  proud to lay claim to this .

Up North

You know how I hate that phrase. “Up North.” North in relationship to what, specifically? Up? So basically we are up (not down) and north (not south). So… we are not Detroit, but we still define ourselves in terms of it.

But, geez… maybe those tourists are right!

These pictures were taken this morning, at sunrise, on my way into work. This is pretty much what’s so good about “Up North”.

Tree of Smoke

“Dietrich Fest of Department Five of West Germany’s Bundesnachrichtendienst boarded a night flight at the National Airport near Washington, DC, and for eighteen hours had nothing to do but read and nap and nothing to think about other than his father’s medical crises. Seven, eight months since the old man had seen the outside of a hospital. Gallbladder; liver; heart; a series of small strokes; hemorrhaging in the bowels with massive blood loss and transfusions; a feeding tube in his stomach; latest of all pneumonia. The old man refused to die. But he would. Perhaps already. Perhaps earlier while I dozed with a sagging head. Perhaps now while I look at a stupid mystery book. “Claude,” the old man had called him when he’d visited in October - wires and tubes exiting from him everywhere, blue eyes shining into space. “Look, it’s Claude,” he’d told the urine-smelling, otherwise empty room, and Fest had said, “No, it’s Dirk,” and his father’s eyes had closed.” (p.398)

“Tree of Smoke”, by Denis Johnson, is a book which deserves more space than I am about to give it here. Having recently finished it, however, I at least want to give it a mention. The above extended quote is symptomatic both of the book’s greatness, and of its difficulty (and resultant negative reviews by some critics). What’s it about? It’s about Vietnam. It’s about covert operations. It’s about the role of intelligence and myth, stories and false stories, and the way channels of intelligence go up the chain of command, and then come back down again as policy, and how that policy can be influenced if the right sort of information goes up in the first place. The “right sort of information” is always that which resonates with the dominant myth/delusion of the times we find ourselves in.

“Tree of Smoke” is a bit like Syrania, where everything is relative and you’re not sure who to trust or who is in charge. It’s like Don DeLillo teaming up with Ernest Hemingway. Despite its difficulty, it would be easy to teach: there are numerous markers throughout the book which clue the reader in, such as here, early on, in a series of quotes which underlie the theme of illusions, ideals, and lies:

_ Sooner or later the mind grasps at a thought and follows it into the labyrinth, one thought branching into another. Then the labyrinth caves in on itself and you find yourself outside. You were never inside - it was a dream. p. 32

The colonel said, “We’ve got to keep hold of our ideals while steering them through the maze.” p. 60

“Oh, well,” Sands said, thinking that when passion stirred Major Eddie’s heart, he tended to speak in a kind of poetry - you wouldn’t do it justice to call it lying. p.58

“Eddie Aguinaldo,” the colonel said, “is the Filipino equivalent of a goddamn liar. Any other questions?” p. 59

Mazes, labyrinths, stories, misunderstandings, and deception form the backbone of the book. What troubles many readers is the interior nature of the narrative, and the apparent formlessness of the plot line. There is no consistent protagonist, and third person blends into first person narration quite seamlessly, as in the above extended quote where the hired assassin Dietrich Fest moves from observed (third person) to observing (first person). Dietrich Fest appears here, on p. 398, apparently for the first time, but in fact the reader is eventually able to see that he is the unnamed assassin from earlier in the book, this time seen from a different angle. In fact, not even Dietrich’s father recognizes him, mistaking him for his war hero brother, Claude, and further underlining the ways we fail to recognize those closest to us.

Johnson’s ability to seamlessly shift his point of view can be confusing at first, but the technique is effective in dispelling the notion that there IS an objective story line in war, or in life. It’s a mess. It’s confusing. But it’s an amazing read, well worth the effort. The descriptions of place are rich with immediacy, and the dialog is flawless, but the main appeal of the book is its attempt to chronicle “the line between disinformation and delusion.” And, not to overstate the bloody obvious, but that line has been pretty much obliterated in the last eight years.

The Tourist

Dipping into Dean MacCannell’s “The Tourist, a New Theory of the Leisure Class” this afternoon, I came across this passage, marked by me these many moons ago, a thin blue vertical ink line in the left hand margin:

‘Experience’ is the basic term in the rhetoric of modernity. That touristic experiences fall short of ‘understanding’ (in the Weberian sense) is well-known. We do not, however, know the reasons why touristic experiences turn out to be so shallow. Common sense places the blame on the tourist mentality, but this is not technically correct. The tourist’s inability to understand what he sees is the product of the structural arrangement that sets him into a touristic relationship with a social object, in this case, work.

Upon reading this passage again, many years having passed under the bridge, I think of the amazing George Saunders, whose short stories are essentially about people whose jobs require them to fake authenticity, people who work in vast theme parks and government bureaucracies and pretend for tourists and/or customers, because that is their job.

How many of us work in the same line, really, pretending to be friendly beyond the bounds of normal reality, to keep the customer satisfied, because the customer is always right? Undergoing weekly, monthly, yearly evaluations to measure our efficacy? Going above and beyond to keep the customer satisfied, not just in a business sort of way, but also in a phony host/guest touristic sort of way, so that when you go in your bank they have cookies and cake and ice cream and pumpkins in the fall for you because, you see, you are just like family to us, or at least guests, so this is a small token of our appreciation for your business, because I guarantee you, at the other bank it’s the same, but there’s just balloons for the kids. So we see, really, that Saunders writes for us, and Saunders understands the touristic relationship to have extended into all of American work culture.

But read MacCannell.

Chabon teams up with Coen Brothers

This should be good! The Coen brothers will teaming up with Michael Chabon for the movie version of “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union”, an alternative-reality, hard-boiled detective noir thriller set in Alaska. Chabon’s book is the best thing I read all year. Of course, the Coen brothers know how to do film noir, as they demonstrated with their very first movie, Blood Simple, another of my all time favorites. So, despite the fact that winter is doing a serious number on my overall mood, this is something to be cheerful about!

two below zero

..tends to focus the mind wonderfully, when you are out in it. Good for killing off ambient germs. Yes, this is what a real winter looks like, finally. Did I mention the 30 mph winds?

Jackie Broyles 08

Jackie Broyles, from the hilarious Travis and Jonathan team, has announced his presidency. Here’s a snippet from his site, which is well worth a visit:

“My fellow americans:

Aren’t you sick of candidates who actually WANT to be president? Let’s face facts- anyone who honestly wants to be president is a conniving corporate shill who is only in it for the babes, or the quick bucks.

We deserve better- we deserve Jackie Broyles….

Despite Jackie’s insistence on having nothing to do with his own bid for the presidency, it is clear that no other candidate has as much to offer the american people.

Jackie is a businessman, an entrepreneur, and a pillar of his community. He’s unable to get a driver’s license, but he owns half a dozen legal shotguns, and has used them on an almost daily basis for the last forty years.”

I think he deserves a look! You could do worse than Jackie Broyles.

Little rebellions

I was rummaging around through my stuff today at work, trying to find a long lost item,  but turning up only outdated memos and such.  One such memo was a directive from months ago which I apparently ignored … and nobody seems to have noticed!!!  It is on salmon colored paper ( bad for a start) and has to do with Blood Borne Pathogens.  Everybody in our organization is supposed to have logged on months ago and taken the online training, only.. I haven’t.

The instructions tell us to go to the Global Compliance Network (it’s really a site, but I’m not linking to it because it scares me) and log on for the training.  It’s mandatory.  Thing is, it seems nobody is keeping track of whether we complete the online training or not.  Nobody’s making a list and checking it twice in order to find out who’s naughty or nice.  God, Santa, or somebody in the upper echelons of power seems to have dropped the ball.  This is the most liberating thing that’s happened to me in a long time.   I don’t do the busywork, and nobody even seems to care.  And now that I think of it, I don’t even intend to do it!