Today I was delighted to have lunch with the well-known photographer Harry Langdon. Go to his website and you’ll see that Harry has a long and legendary career as a celebrity photographer. He’s done sessions for people like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jamie Foxx, Ronald Reagan, Stevie Nicks, B.B. King, and so forth. But when a mutual friend told me some months ago that her photographer was Harry Langdon, I said:

“Is he related to the Harry Langdon?”

She thought he was “the” Harry Langdon. But I was thinking of the great silent-film comedian often ranked with Keaton, Chaplin, and Lloyd:  Harry Langdon, the gifted clown who had run away to join the circus as a boy, became (briefly) one of the highest-paid stars of his era, wound down his career writing jokes for Laurel and Hardy (and, once, substituted for Laurel in an “& Hardy” film), and made a total of 96 films. That Harry Langdon.

She didn’t know. She’d never heard of that Harry Langdon.

A  few days later she emailed to say that yes, he was the son of that Harry Langdon, and would I like to have lunch with Harry Langdon, Jr?  So, today, there I was in Beverly Hills pulling mussels from their shells while discussing senior with Harry Langdon, Jr.   Lunch today was on a near par with the evening 15 years ago I spent in the company of Eleanor Keaton.   I may not care about what Tiger Woods or Lady Gaga are up to, but summoning the distant celebrity past of the silent comedy era is something I can get into.

We talked for a bit and Harry Langdon, Jr. said, “You do seem very well informed about my father.” I told him how much I love silent film comedy; how it represents a specific style of comedy that cannot be done since the introduction of sound; how I grew to love it when watching it as a small boy with my own father; how thrilled I was in college to learn of the connection between silent film comedy, vaudeville, theatre of the absurd, and existentialism (Beckett, who grew up admiring vaudevillians and clowns, based Didi and Gogo on Laurel & Hardy; Keaton’s deadpan comedy of menace is purely existential; Beckett made just one film — and it was with Keaton as the star); and how wonderful and funny an actor I thought his father was. Finally I let the subject wind down because I was afraid I was starting to come across as an obsessive. But then Harry told me where he was last night:

“I was a holiday party. At Stan Lee’s.”

“You were at Stan Lee’s holiday party?” I asked.

“You know him? He made a lot of money in comic books.”

Trying not to do a spit take, and worried again about how I was going to come off, I said, “Um… the other thing you should know about me is that I’m a huge, huge comic-book fan.”

And then that topic went on for at least several minutes.

Yesterday a friend and I went to Long Beach to see the Brian Eno installation, “77 Million Paintings,”  at the University Art Museum of California State University Long Beach. The genesis of the 77 million paintings enumerated in the title — which, Eno later said during his lecture, would actually be 77 million cubed —  is described well in this piece by the LA Times’ Reed Johnson. In short, a video mosaic of 12 individual screens pulls images randomly from grouped sets contained in databases held by three different computers, generating an ongoing series of freshly executed video “paintings,” which are sonically supported by a soundtrack of  sound loops on six separate tape decks, resulting in randomized musical accompaniment. The intention is to remove deliberation and intention from the artistic process; the result is mesmerizing. As my friend and I found, it was quite easy to get lost in the neverending self-generating inventions of the computers and the tape decks. For one brief period, I felt detached from space and time. I’ve had this feeling before with some art, in various disciplines, but only rarely.

Later, we attended Eno’s lecture at the Carpenter Performing Arts Center (also part of Cal State Long Beach). After 30 years of following the man’s career in all its phases — rock star, record producer, artist, writer, thinker — this was our first chance to see him in the flesh. Eno proved to be thoughtful, puckish, droll, and concerned, in equal measures. I would characterize the first third of his lecture as an admonishment to let go. (This should be expected from an artist whose visual work is created largely from computer generation.) He started by reminding us of something we’ve known for 566 years, since Copernicus:  that not only we are not at the center of the universe, we are off in a small corner, in one of a billion billion solar systems, and we exist as only one of innumerable species just on this one planet, where only an estimated 10% of species have been cataloged. In other words,  Get over yourself. Again, this viewpoint should be expected from someone extolling the virtues of random, unemotionally generated, art.

On the way home I wondered aloud how well these theories that can work so well  in visual art and music would work in long-form narrative. Having read (or tried to read) Samuel Beckett’s novels and some of William S. Burroughs’ longer pieces, I unfortunately believe I know too well. In such cases, even a little plot can go a long way. Organic writing — which I practice and preach — benefits from pruning and shaping. Effects can engage an audience, but only for so long; the best effect is an emotional verisimilitude, however achieved, that transports people into a deep level of caring about what happens. That occurs in better productions of “Waiting for Godot” because Didi and Gogo are present and we can relate; it never happens with “The Unnameable,” which is a true chore to read. When he’s collaborating with, say, Robert Fripp, Eno is free to produce an album of electronic feedback loops, but when he’s producing records for U2 or Coldplay, he must serve the song. To his immense credit, he never claimed in this talk that he was abandoning all oversight; rather, he talked about intentional balance, moderating oneself along the continuum between surrendering all control, or controling all elements, depending upon the desired outcome. I think that’s about right.

If you’re interested in “77 Million Paintings” and cannot make it to Long Beach, where it runs through December, here’s some good news:  a beautiful software-and-DVD version exists. Here it is on Amazon.com.  I bought a copy at the museum, and at about 35 bucks, it’s a steal. The package includes the software to run these self-generating images on  your computer, with accompanying soundtrack. In addition, there’s a beautiful booklet with notes from the artist, plus an interview DVD. Get it and surrender all control to it.

Yes, today is 9/9/09, the day that a bunch of 40-year-old albums by a certain band got re-released in various CD re-packagings, to the delight of millions around the world.

For others among us, it was another day in the countdown toward the new Pere Ubu album, “Long Live Pere Ubu!” Even if it turns out I hate it, I guarantee it’ll be far more artistically provocative than any other new music coming out this month. Yes, the Beatles were provocative. Forty years ago.

The new Ubu album brings together two things I’ve been interested in for a long time:  the band Pere Ubu, and the inspiration for their name, Alfred Jarry’s “Ubu Roi.” “Ubu Roi” was an adolescent prank — a play written by a high-school kid to mock his teacher. I wrote a novel in a similar tone when I was the same age, but my novel’s still in a box somewhere while Jarry’s play radically changed its artform. (Do we get to have Ionesco, or Theatre of the Absurd as a whole, without Jarry? Probably not.)

Fittingly, Pere Ubu the band has been every  bit as influential as “Ubu Roi,” and even more doggedly uncommercial. One of the bonus features on an Ubu CD is a series of documents, including one that references an album’s sales as numbering about 6,000. This for a band with a three-decade history and a sound that influenced Nine Inch Nails, the Pixies (and, therefore, Nirvana), Joy Division, REM, Thomas Dolby, Hüsker Dü, Henry Rollins, Bauhaus, and innumerable others including the entire industrial-rock movement, a band rightfully recognized in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (albeit in an undeservedly small corner), where one of singer David Thomas’ instruments is proudly displayed:  a railroad spike with accompanying ball peen hammer. And if you listen closely enough, you can hear that very instrument on some early tracks where it is played to perfection.

This FAQ about the rationale behind the concept and recording of “Long Live Pere Ubu!” speaks to some of the many reasons I love this band. Imagine this sentiment, by David Thomas about the resurgent appearance of the monstrous Pere Ubu wherever you look, being uttered by any other recording artist this long in the game:  “Regardless of whoever or whatever it is that you personally choose to lionize, it’s more than likely that such a person or organization is Père Ubu. Every talking head that you see and admire on the tv is Père Ubu.” Thirty-four years on, 20 years past the last gasping relevance of the Rolling Stones, Pere Ubu retains the industrial crackle of original thought. That makes every new CD by them a release worthy of anticipation.

In which the film version of The Road gets an early review every bit as devastating as the apocalypse that catalyzes the novel.

Between 1907 and 1915, the photographer of Czar Nicholas II traveled his nation taking photographs of pre-Revolutionary Russia. In color. Here are 28 of them — including one of Leo Tolstoy — and they are stunning.

Last night my son Lex and I watched the film version of “The Kite Runner.” When it was over, I asked him what he thought.

“It was okay,” he said.

And he was right:  It was okay.

Except when I read the novel just six months ago, it was a gut-wrenching experience. I even cried. Twice. The tragedy of childhood betrayal and mixed-up identity against the background of poverty and lowered circumstances was breathtaking. As was the palpably new sense of how horrible it would be like to live under the Taliban.

None of that is in the movie.

Well, actually, all of it is in the movie — all of the scenes. In making the adaptation, they didn’t monkey around with the story or the characterizations. There’s only one scene I noticed missing from the book, and I have to agree that it could be cut. (Although given a later scene that’s in the movie, I suspect they shot that earlier one as well.) But what’s left out, somehow, is the impact. Some things just don’t translate to other media.

A notable example:  To get out of Afghanistan when the Russians and then the Taliban movie in, the boy and his father and several others have to be transported across the border in the belly of a fuel tanker. We have that scene in the movie, but there’s no resonance:  The boy gets into the tanker. His father tells him it will be all right. The boy says he can’t breath. To distract him and provide what comfort he can, his father has him turn on the small iridescent light on his wristwatch and recite a poem. Next scene:  They are in India.

This is pretty much the form the scene takes in the novel. Except Khaled Hosseini is able to convey the lingering, choking, searing stench of fuel, and the utter darkness of the tank. Film can’t do smell (although fiction can), and film can’t do darkness (although fiction can). When the boy looks at his watch, we see a closeup of a boy looking at his watch; there’s no context because there’s no way to see deeper in the frame. The novel isn’t limited by frames. The book, a seemingly sightless medium, offers greater vision.

Sadly, I don’t think they’ve done anything wrong in this movie. It just doesn’t make a statement the way the novel does. The impact was lost in translation.

I’ve  thought a lot about translation over the years. I remember reading “Ubu Roi” in French in college and wondering whether it just shouldn’t have been translated into English; no matter how hard one tries, a pun in French doesn’t work in English. (One of Pa Ubu’s recurring outbursts is “Merdre!” which makes a pun of “murder” and “shit.” In English, I’ve seen this translated as “Pschitt!” Which is just “shit” misspelled, and with none of the menace.) I wonder how far off the mark the translations of some of my favorite writers, Kafka and Rilke among them, must be. I remember translating “La Cancatrice Chauve” myself as part of my graduation obligations and wondering just how absurd my translation was. I remember one semester in particular raising the question of translation with several different professors, all of whom gave what amounts to the stock answer:  While a translation is not as good as the original, you usually get a fair amount.

I hope that’s true. And if I had to wait to learn German and Turkish and Spanish and Norwegian, I wouldn’t have read Kafka, Goethe, Kant, Rilke, Orhan Pamuk, Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, or Knut Hamsun, to name just a few. Still, I would think it’s harder to translate from one language to another than from one medium to another, especially from novel to film, because film exists in the universal language of sight. And yet here we have a powerful, wrenching novel, faithfully translated into a film that, finally, is just okay.

I have to admire The Second Pass. While everyone else (including me) has been compiling lists of books we believe you should read, their contributors have compiled a list of 10 highly regarded novels they want chucked from reading lists and academia.

I am particularly pleased to see “Absalom, Absalom!” on the list. (Which they misname, omitting the all-important exclamation mark from the title.) No, I still haven’t been able to read it. And I’ve been trying for more than 20 years. Similarly, still unsure why its sloppy lazy prose has been so exalted, I felt a frisson of glee at seeing “On the Road” on the list. I’ve seen the ecstasy it spins some people into, but to the rest of us it’s just a bad trip.

I don’t remember “One Hundred Years of Solitude” being as bad or as arrogant as it’s made out to be here. But I read it about 25 years ago, so who can say with authority? I can say that some of the scenes of magic realism that I so enjoyed then — when, for example, a woman simply floats away — now seem to me to be, well, cheats. (In much the same way that most of Dali’s paintings now seem.) But I’d have to reread the book to formulate an informed opinion, and I don’t see that happening.

The title that I think they’re deeply mistaken about is “The Road.” I’ve written about that novel often enough here that I’m not going to go into it again (this link sums it up, and provides links to a few other references here). I’ve read the other Cormac McCarthy books mentioned by Second Pass (“All the Pretty Horses” and “The Crossing), and they are necessarily different tales told differently. In these books, young men are experiencing the challenges and responsibilities and wonders of adulthood for the first time, and doing it in a foreign land; these books are adventures. “The Road” is told from the opposite point of view:  that of a man desperate to shepherd his eight-year-old son somewhere safe after what appears to be a nuclear holocaust. Like the terrain, like his psyche, the language is accordingly stripped bare. It’s a book with deep resonance, one that sticks deep in the subconscious and leaves readers more aware. At least, that’s how it left me:  feeling far more glad for everything I have, and far more aware of how easily it could all be lost. That’s the power of a truly good novel; complaining about the stripped-down prose seems like beside the point.

I’m sad to see “The Corrections” on this list, though the criticisms enumerated in the essay ring true. To me the novel’s core achievement is in the way the family history is gone over repeatedly from the different points of view of individual family members, until finally the father’s seemingly inexplicable behavior is revealed and with it the extent of sacrifice he has made for his children. That’s the “moving last section” that the critic mentions here. Something else merits mentioning:  Despite all the books flaws, it was tremendous good fun to read. That’s worth noting.

My friend Doug — he of Doug’s Reading List and the only modern explorer any of us will ever know — was in town last week from the lower provinces of Patagonia or wherever his latest trek has taken him. You may recall that Doug, who is a reader for the ages, ejected all his thousands of books several years ago because they couldn’t fit onto a boat or a motorcycle. Now he and his wife, fellow adventurer Stephanie, have invested in a Kindle 2. I have seen the Kindle 2 and admire its functionality. But, as with print newspapers, it has proved difficult to break my addiction. I love books — not just reading them, but holding them and turning their pages and admiring their papery feeling and their floral aroma of decaying pulp. I also like having them on shelves in bookcases throughout my house and my office where I can see them and, let’s admit it, where others can see them. I check out the books in others’ homes and I like to see them checking mine out too.

But now I’m overbooked. Either that, or under-bookcased. All of our eight bookcases at home (one in office, three in kids’ rooms, one in bedroom, three in living room) are overstuffed with books and I pledged to my wife that we were done adding bookcases. And I’ve been unable to purge myself of any of these books because of the painful memory of my senior year in college when I sold my books back to the college bookstore because I needed the money. My favorite professor caught me in the act and said sadly, “Monsieur Wochner, you are selling your books?” It was heartbreaking. And stupid — because over the years I wound up buying most of them again at full price. I now know:  When you’re a playwright, you might have further need some day of “Seven Plays” by Sam Shepard, and books like it. Since then, I’ve lived in fear that the book I part with will be the book I’ll need. Having a Kindle 2 might help with that; my purchases would be digital files on Amazon.com.

But… what if Amazon.com goes out of business in my lifetime?

And what about after my lifetime? I like to think my books will find future readers. Who will read my future digitized Amazon library? Probably no one.

Here’s something that I wonder if having clear bookcases — so I could actually see the spines of the books — might help. Last night I was reading Kafka by Robert Crumb and David Zane Mairowitz. Crumb provides wonderful illustrations to summaries of Kafka’s great works, with introductory-level biographical text by Mairowitz. Recently on this blog, a friend suggested that I get this and read it, and I almost did buy it two weeks ago at my local comics store. Then I stumbled upon it in the last stack of unread books from last summer’s San Diego Comic Con. So I had already bought it and completely forgot. I dived right into it two nights ago and was thoroughly enjoying it and was surprised, given that I’m a fan of both Kafka and Crumb, that I hadn’t already bought it when it first came out, in 2004. As it was, some of it seemed familiar, but I just figured I’d seen chapters in Weirdo or other magazines with Crumb work.

I Tweeted a tiny rave about the book today and resolved to write an appreciation here tonight. In so doing, I Googled for images and found this. First thought:  “Crumb did two books about Kafka? He must be a huge fan!” Second thought: “This is an earlier edition of the same book.”  The cover looked hauntingly familiar. As in, familiar from my bookcases. I went to the “K” section of the first living room bookcase, moved aside two stacks of books, and found “Introducing Kafka” by David Zane Mairowitz and Robert Crumb right where I now thought it would be.  The same contents, but in a 1994 First Edition from Kitchen Sink Press. So I’ve now bought and read this book twice (and almost bought it thrice). That’s the downside. The upside:  It’s been a great first read — twice. Because in the 15-year interim I’d forgotten I’d read it.

(By the way, the Introducing Kafka cover  shown here has a slightly different title layout at the top than my first edition, meaning it must be a later edition. Proving that there’s still money to be made in Crumb and Kafka, if not Mairowitz.

End note:  My Google investigations turn up yet another Kafka book illustrated by Robert Crumb and with text by David Zane Mairowitz.  This one is called R. Crumb’s Kafka, “with text by David Zane Mairowitz.” I’m thinking this is the same book. (And given the title, I’m guessing it’s Mr. Mairowitz’s least favorite edition.) The cover is different, but they’re right when they say you can’t judge a book by its cover.

I’m not falling for it again.

It’s holy writ among playwrights that a bad production can screw up even a masterpiece. (Don’t believe it? Imagine William Shatner doing Shakespeare — or just singing “Rocket Man.”) But some plays hold up better than others under all circumstances, and after seeing a production of it this past Friday in a tenement theatre in San Francisco I’m thinking that Neil LaBute’s “The Shape of Things” is one of them.

The basic premise is just so much fun:  An average college nerd given a chance with an unconventional and attractive young artiste is remade in the process and left wondering, in the end, who he is and what just happened. This particular production was the directing debut of a recent college grad, and the casting reminded me of many a production I have myself featured in somehow as director or producer or (worst) playwright:  This actor’s great, this one’s good, this one’ll do, and this one… we’ll make work somehow. One actor telegraphed the play’s finale — if you didn’t know the final twist, you could certainly guess it from every actorly indication starting with Moment One. (Note to young actors (or bad actors, or all actors):  Please don’t play the end, and please don’t play the intention; and please don’t play subtext; just be. Please.) Another was physically wrong in almost every way but brought such bonhommie to the role that I grew to appreciate him and his oddly accidental comic moments. The lead was a sensation. And despite whatever faults — including the introduction of an intermission that the playwright expressly doesn’t want — the production worked well, got laughs, and held the attention of the audience. LaBute’s play asks smart questions about the essence of identity and the nature of art and the authenticity of sexual attraction; its success stems from its ability to entertain while being provocative.

What undoubtedly added to the enjoyment for me was that my son was seeing it with me. We went to San Francisco very last minute for three days on some personal business and decided to see a play on Friday night. My heart is usually found in a smaller theatre, so that’s where we went. Thirty years in, it’s hard for me to look at these things without a critical eye (but boy, when I love it, it is a joy to behold); but for Lex, this sort of thing is still new and young. His enjoyment of the play, which he’d already read, rubbed off on me. Whatever relatively minor faults of the production, I left feeling that I wanted to see another play in another small theatre right away.

The next night, after a day full of errands and obligations all over San Francisco, we went to the movies. We both wanted to see “Taken,” but it wasn’t playing near our hotel, so we wound up seeing “Fast & Furious.” Throwing us, in one night, from the sublime to the ridiculous. Let me just say that if ever in my life I’m having the stuffing beaten out of me, if someone is to grab me, throw me against a hard wood table so hard that it breaks in half, pick me up and hit me eight times hard to the craniofacial area, I hope it’s Vin Diesel, because judging from the recovery of Paul Walker it must be like getting pummeled with soft pillows. Walker sits up, wipes an invisible dripping from his nose, and talks down Vin Diesel with soothing words:  It’s the classic misunderstanding, but it’s all for the good, and no hard feelings. You or I would be on life support, but Walker is made of movie stuff. Earlier in the picture, Diesel’s posse of roadway hoodlums south of the border power their muscle cars down twisting mountaintop expanses of secluded roadway at top speeds in reverse, dropping trailer hitches onto gasoline tankers so they can haul off the precious fuel. (I’m assuming this was conceived when oil was at $150 a barrel, not the $50 it’s hovering at now. In 2009 if you want to make off with that much money, you just get a federal bailout.) The fuel swipe goes awry and Vin Diesel and his car find themselves trapped between a rock and a hard place:  hurtling toward one truck on a dead-end mountain pass while another tractor trailer endlessly flipping and bouncing from midair to hard ground is tumbling precisely their way. His solution:  Expertly timing when the tractor trailer is in midair and driving beneath it, getting out from under by the skin of his paint job. This trick is so neat that, of course, the movie repeats it again later. In big-budget action-adventure movies, if once is good, twice (or more) must be better.

For me, the movie dies 10 minutes in with Michelle Rodriguez’s character. No, I don’t know why I care about Michelle Rodriguez. I just know I can’t take my eyes off her. It isn’t purely heat; she’s got that indecipherable screen charisma that some people have and some people don’t. In a season of “Lost” that I don’t remember much about and didn’t care much about at the time, she was magnetic. (As was Michael Emerson.) Even surrounded by nitro-fueled steroid cars and whatever has been injected into Vin Diesel’s muscles and head, she stands out. But then she dies. In retrospect. We don’t even get to see it (except later). My son, who knew of my interest in seeing this movie because of Michelle Rodriguez, whispered “Uh oh” when we learned she wasn’t going to be reappearing in this movie. Not that her disappearance was a surprise, either:  Once your action-adventure hero somewhat unwillingly parts with his leading lady but leaves her a note (or, in this case, a big whopping bundle of cash; nothing says farewell my lovely so well as stacks of dead presidents), you know she’s doomed. But then, nothing, absolutely nothing, is a surprise in this movie, up to and including the identity of the mysterious drug lord everyone is hunting, and who turns out to be precisely who everyone (except our hero) thinks it is in the first place.

Finally — and I really can’t leave this subject without a word about this — let’s discuss Vin Diesel. I know that we shouldn’t discuss anyone with the name Vin Diesel, and I realize that each of us has only a limited time on Earth and I’m now spending some of mine on Vin Diesel,  and you’re spending some of  yours reading about Vin Diesel, but I can’t resist. Somehow I didn’t mind him in “The Chronicles of Riddick.” Maybe that’s because Judi Dench was in it. Maybe it’s because it was a science fiction movie with enough distractions, including Thandie Newton. (No Michelle Rodriguez, but she’ll do.) But “Fast & Furious” had me asking myself if Vin Diesel isn’t the flattest “actor” since Charles Bronson. An actor who was in a couple of my plays in the 1990’s did a movie with Charles Bronson in that period. I asked him what Charles Bronson was like. His reply:  “Like cement.” Just an inert slab that happened to be there for you to bounce lines off. I recently watched “Death Wish” again — and no, I don’t know why — and it’s true:  the “distraught” Charles Bronson upset over his wife’s murder and daughter’s rape is indistinguishable from the “workaday” Charles Bronson doing business out in the desert is indistinguishable from the vigilante Charles Bronson shooting would-be muggers in the park is indistinguishable from the murderous Charles Bronson evading police pursuing him from the subway station. Each has the emotional consistency of drywall. I couldn’t think when I’d seen that since in a major name film actor — but then seeing Vin Diesel in his latest solved that riddle for me. Say what you will about Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, who can’t deliver a comic line to save his schwarzenegger, but at least he can crack his face into a smile.

Oddly, though, for all its obvious problems, “Fast & Furious” is every bit as unwreckable as “The Shape of Things” — probably moreso. The latter is clever enough to withstand the uneven application of artistic ability. The former is so witless, so amped up on steroids and meth, that no amount of artistic ability is needed, or even germane. “What I learned from you is to have a code,” Paul Walker’s character tells Vin Diesel; from all evidence, that character’s code is to do whatever he wants whenever he wants wherever he wants, no matter the impact on anyone else. (We call that hedonism. No, Virginia, it is not a basis for heroism.) The movie’s code is similarly easy to grasp:  maximum impact, but no repercussions. Repeat. Faster. Repeat.

I’ll never forget the first time I started to read Frank Herbert’s “Dune,” in my late teens. Or the second time. Or the third time. Without finishing it. There had to be something to this book, its advocates were so legion, but whatever it was, I wasn’t finding it. Each time, I experienced the first 100 pages  as a cascade of names and items I couldn’t place or keep straight:  the Kwisatz Haderach, the Bene Gesserit, Feyd Rautha, various Atreides and Harkonnens, stillsuits, weirding modules, heighliners, and on and on. Now there’s a Wikipedia page covering just the technology. At the time, there was no such resource. There was just the lonely labor of trying again and again until something started to make sense. Three times, I bailed on this book, until finally one night, pruning in the tub, I made it past page 100 and actually got interested.

The other night my wife saw me hunkered down in front of the bookcase on my side of the bed, looking for the next novel to read. In general, I read two or three books (and multiple magazines) at the same time. I’m looking forward to finishing the history of Germany  under the Nazis (especially delightful because I know how it ends) and then returning to the account of Roman Empires, as well as finishing Julian Barnes’ meditation on death and that account of how censorship ended so many comic artists’ careers. But in the meantime, I was looking for a novel, having recently finished T.C. Boyle’s “A Friend of the Earth,” as noted here previously. My eye landed upon Cormac McCarthy’s border trilogy:  a one-volume compendium of “All the Pretty Horses,” “The Crossing,” and “Cities of the Plain.”

However overstylized his writing may be (or perhaps because of its trickery) I find McCarthy to be a wonderful writer. No matter his overuse of polysyndeton, he has a grasp of vocabulary and flow and scenic description that at times beggars belief. I get caught up and keep reading. In addition to “All the Pretty Horses,” I’ve read “No Country for Old Men” and “The Road,” and enjoyed them all immensely. But I got stopped cold about 160 pages into “The Crossing” by an endless monologue given by an old man unmoored from this life. This old man goes on about… something… for so long I felt trapped in purgatory with him. And finally freed myself by putting the book down. A quick check-in with my son revealed that, unprompted, he had stopped at precisely the same waystation. Neither of us knew what the old man was talking about, endlessly and with seemingly no purpose, and both of us had ditched.

But now I picked it back up and climbed into bed. Even if the plot didn’t advance — and clearly, that’s what I was missing, some action, some sense of forward movement, something that would pick me up and carry me along in the way that made “No Country for Old Men” utterly unputdownable — I figured I would find myself entranced again by some of the prose before quietly slipping off to sleep. Without the aid of a bookmark, I found where I had left off probably six months ago, near the terminus of the old man’s interminable monologue, and started up again. And then found myself reading for hours. Here’s what happens:  The existential treatise ends a mere page or so after I had quit, with the old man bidding our protagonist, 17-year-old Billy Parham, farewell. Billy rather speedily crosses the border from Mexico back into the U.S. (New Mexico; nice touch) and returns to his family’s ranch to discover that the ranch has been cleaned out and his parents murdered. He heads into town and gleans what information he can from the sheriff, then picks up his younger brother, who somehow escaped the onslaught, and returns with him to Mexico, where they seek their horses and, no doubt, the men responsible for the murders.

In other words, now the book is a page turner.

I related this to my son, getting up to the point of Billy’s return and what he finds, when my son called out, “Stop. Maybe now I want to finish reading it.” He’ll have to wait for me to finish it first.

Is all this a very long way of saying that story is important? Perhaps. Is it the most important element? Maybe not. I loved “The Incredibles” because I got so caught up in Mr. Incredible’s personal crisis (a hero forced to reject his heroism, and so subject to the predations of bureaucracy and the 9 to 5); by contrast I in no way care about Ginormica’s problem in “Monsters vs. Aliens” (a young woman supported in marrying the wrong man by her friends and family discovers her true family when she is imprisoned with friendly monsters, of which she now is one). (More about this later.) The key difference is not in the story elements, but in the thematic and character elements. But story is important, and it seems oddly irritating in 2009 to have to say this. It is especially irritating to have to say this with regard to the theatre, where somehow it has become laughable to suggest that we should care what happens, and that actions should have consequences, but here is Theresa Rebeck, in today’s LA Times, having to defend these notions for us. I have stood in her shoes too many times. It’s especially galling to have cut one’s teeth on Ionesco and Beckett and to have one’s view of theatre derided as “nostalgic.”

Audiences aren’t stupid and they don’t lie. With drama we can more easily fool ourselves, but comedy is the truest form because it exposes all falsehoods:  Either it is funny or it isn’t, and either the audience laughed or it didn’t.  It’s that simple. No, not all experiences are universal.  There were many who loved “Laughter on the 23rd Floor,” but if I never see another newish Neil Simon play it will be far too soon. (Seeing “The Dinner Party” was for me a singular event; it was the very evening in which I swore I would forever after more cautiously guard my time. This after two hours of feeling my life drain away.)  Every play is not for every body; but many new plays are for nobody — nobody except the people who make them. If the language poets killed poetry, I’m afraid their ilk have now turned their sights onto the stage. Twenty-five years ago, an undergrad professor told me that if poetry lost the educated, the enlightened, the readers, the people it already had and should have, then the fault lay with the poets. I think about that every time I come across a new poem utterly inflated with its own word play and cleverness but resolutely impregnable of meaning. But where I feel worst about this is in the theatre, when audiences are left cold by something obtuse that the playwright and the director are so unjustly proud of. The underlying purpose of all theatre must remain catharsis — that frisson of fellow-feeling, when the emotional brutality of the event whether comic or dramatic is brought upon us. When language is made pre-eminent over feeling, all we’re left with is puns.