Read, Listen, Watch

I’m going to cut down on the length for this one, as I realize I have this tendency to write Finnegan’s Wake in blog format. This is simply a list of good Christmas books and Movies that I think every one should check out. I have purposefully made it more obscure than most Christmas lists, which have all the usual books and movies listed on them that you’ve already seen a million times. In terms of books and stories: A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens: Enough has already been said about this one. I included it because, although not very unknown, I feel not many people read the original. A Child’s Christmas in Wales, Dylan Thomas: Great short story from a guy who was known primarily as a poet; autobiographical sketch is a more accurate word. The Ledge, Lawrence Sargent Hall: This is a very unheardof story that can be found in the massive collection The Best American Short Stories of The Century, edited by John Updike. This is a tragic piece of work, so don’t expect holiday cheer, exactly. The Nutcracker, E.T.A. Hoffman: The original story is fairly interesting. You can see the temptation to make it in to some kind of spectacle like a ballet, for example. Lastly, for the books, is one that I wrote a post about earlier this semester: Sir Gawain and The Green Knight: Only debatably a Christmas story, I suppose. But I consider it one. It’s story is framed by the holiday season, and it’s intense Christianity (okay, Paganism) is the focal reason I would call it ‘christmas-y’ In terms of Movies: Fanny and Alexander, dir: Ingmar Bergman: You may not have heard of this film, and if you have, it’s probably been in a context other than “Christmas Story.” But I do see this as, broadly, a holiday movie, albeit a very unusual one. It’s also very long. Santa Claus Conquers the Martians: I am something of a fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000. I’ll admit it here, but nowhere else. That show’s outrageous send-up of this obscure, horrible movie from the red-scare days of the 50’s is the most lighthearted fun I can think of. Okay everybody, happy holidays.  

In 1984, poets Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes put together a collection of poetry called The Rattle Bag. While not widely known, probably even among poets (what’s left of them), this is one of the more wide-ranging, enthusiastic and purely neat books of poetry to my mind. I don’t claim to be the foremost authority on poetry: I wrote a lot of it in High School, when I studied Creative Writing at Walnut Hill school in Suburban Massachusetts. That is when I was introduced to the book, by way of my teacher, Daniel Bosch. Since High school, I have moved on to other poetic forms and barely written any actual poetry. But I still have The Rattle Bag. I still frequently read it, too, as creased and wrinkled and brown as it’s beginning to look. The main reason for this is that anything can be found inside. This means any sort of poem– anything from ‘As I came in by Fiddich-Side,’ a Scottish medieval ballad, to ‘Mushrooms’ by Hughes’ former wife, Sylvia Plath. It also means any type of sense, and all extremes of emotions. There is the necrophobia of the anonymous Welsh poem “Death.” There is the the childish surrealism of Lewis Carrol’s “The Mad Garnder’s Song.” There is the formal excellence– or chilliness– of Philip Larkin’s poems, such as “Cut Grass.” There is the narcissistic joy of “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island,” by Frank O’ Hara. And there are the standard poets: Frost, Blake, Thomas. The guys you have to read. Yet with the guys you have to read, you won’t find any of the typical poems that come to mind with them; no “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Frost, or “The Tiger” by Blake. It doesn’t even matter whether or not the poem is written by a master or not. Heaney and Hughes have adopted the unusual but completely just form of organizing the poems alphabetically,  not by author. Due to this organization, the poems have to be read on their own terms, and not on the terms of the poet that wrote them. As a result, a poem called “Legend” by an obscure Australian poet Judith Wright is at least as interesting as Dylan Thomas’ “Fern Hill.” Interest is precisely what Daniel used to get at in his classes, in terms of what writing should ultimately do. This is the view shared by Heaney and Hughes, I am sure, and the driving force behind the selections in The Rattle Bag. As a closing afterthought, Seamus Heaney has had a relationship to the Boston area for a long time now, ever since he started teaching classes at Harvard part time. I am not sure if he teaches there anymore, but when he did, self-promotion aside, I can only hope that he assigned this weird, sprawling, unceasingly interesting book to his students.

  The opening of Paul Schrader’s screenplay to Taxi Driver is a powerful one, an unabashedly visual character study. It starts with: “Travis Bickle, aged twenty-six, the consummate loner. On the surface he appears good looking, even handsome; he has a quiet steady look and a disarming smile which flashes from nowhere, lighting up his whole face. But behind that smile, around his dark eyes, in his gaunt cheeks, one can see the ominous strains caused by a life of private fear, emptiness and loneliness. He seems to have wandered in from a land where it is always cold, a country where the inhabitants seldom speak. The head moves, the expression changes, but the eyes remain ever-fixed, unblinking, piercing empty space. This is a combination of adjectives, similes and facial description that has been used time and time again, not just in screenplays. But the techniques natural home seems to be screenwriting; screenplays need to be both concrete and suggestive, and not much else. The actor needs material to extrapolate on and the director needs a picture to form in his head. In the following paragraph, Travis is described in greater detail: “He wears rider jeans, cowboy boots, a plaid western shirt and a worn beige Army jacket with a patch reading ‘King Kong Company, 1968-70.‘” All of this makes for great reading in itself and the finished product, the film Taxi Driver(1976), consequently makes for fascinating viewing. But that is just the issue; a screenplay is only a part of a sum. In the end, it is the director who brings the actual film to life. The director and screenwriter may be the same person (in the case of Taxi Driver, they are not), but the screenplay remains only part of the advancement. It is a mean, and not an end. Snell Library has a good collection of diverse and interesting screenplays: Mike Leigh’s Topsy Turvy, Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Last Year at Marienbad, Ingmar Bergman’s Persona. Yet as a movie-goer and screenwriter myself, I sometimes question how necessary they are for the general public. Ideally, a screenplay is just for the director, the actors and the film crews. It is not literature; it is not meant to expand knowledge or ‘open minds,’ it is meant to provide a framework for moving imagery. This should be the first task on a screenwriter’s mind, rather than providing entertainment, or food for thought, for the general readership. Thus the notion of publishing screenplays has led to the intention of having them published even prior to the making of the film. This in turn has led to screenwriter arrogance and overzealousness. The Coen Brothers publish anthologies of their screenplays; Werner Herzog has boasted of his screenplays, which he publishes himself, as being “new forms of literature.” Charlie Kaufman, the newest, hippest screenwriter to get name recognition, is hailed as a screenwriter with a distinctive style that shines through in each film he makes. As a result, he has the inclination to write the same film again and again, with different elements of genre-bending, and louder levels of zaniness being shook up in a jar and spilled on to a page. There may be a value to reading screenplays. They are interesting insofar as they give a glimpse in to a film’s development. It is interesting, for instance, to read scenes that were left out of the film, or details that did not come to pass. A writer named David Kipen has written a book called The Schreiber Theory, posing the idea that it is screenwriter, not directors, who are more accurately the author’s of their films. Whether or not this theory holds true does not excuse the fact that screenplays are parts and not sums. I would encourage readers to be cautious when reading screenplays. One must at least realize that screenplays are, as Ingmar Bergman put it, “skeletons” through which images should flow. Taxi Driver is one pretty skeleton. Perhaps we should keep it in it’s closet.