Heroes Never Rust #74: Knowing Yourself

31 Wednesday Dec 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Comic Books, Heroes Never Rust, Memoir

Tags

Carol Danvers, Kamala Khan, Ms. Marvel, sean ironman

Heroes Never Rust #74 by Sean Ironman

Knowing Yourself

Ms. Marvel finishes out its first story arc with the fifth issue. Kamala Khan finally gains confidence and control over her superpowers and no longer shifts her body to look like Carol Danvers. She becomes her own superhero and storms back into the villain’s lair and kicks ass. It took five issues, but Kamala learned that she’s perfect just the way she is. Her father tells her, “You don’t have to be someone else to impress anybody.” At first, I was disappointed in the ending. Kamala coming into her own. It seemed too simple. Yah! Kamala figured out who she was. Yah! But, I was also comforted by the ending. It may have been a bit simple and straightforward, but I felt happy and at peace with seeing Kamala learn who she is. I was torn between wanting something that was more complicated, more real, and getting something that made me feel good.

And, I thought, Who am I?

Sean Ironman. A New Yorker, who grew up in Florida and lives in central Arkansas. A reader. A writer. An artist. A man who says he hates people, and yet spends his time working in a field communicating with others and works on putting on community events. A man who says he loves dogs but has none. A college professor who tells his students to drop out of college and that academics suck. An essayist who wants to be a fiction writer and screenwriter, but in his spare time, only works on essays. A non-religious man who fears God. A man who came to Starbucks to write on Christmas Eve to escape family and who can’t keep his eyes off the beautiful barista.

It’s the end of the year now, and I feel like I am lesser that what I was at the beginning of the year, even though I have accomplished so much more. Perhaps the holiday season has depressed me. Perhaps. But, as I grow older, I believe that I have no idea who I am, who I was, or what I want (other than the barista).

The other day, I went drinking with my brother and sister. We are not close, but we get along well enough to make me wonder why we are not close. My brother hates Christmas, and my sister and I have searched for new traditions since our parents divorced, and we discovered this year that my brother is more than happy to make a holiday trip to a bar our new tradition. They said that I was an angry child, that our parents were afraid I would go to jail. For what, I do not know. Assault, perhaps. This revelation shocked me. When I think of my childhood, I am alone, or with my boxer, Jade. I am playing with G.I. Joes or reading comics. I preferred solitary activities. Even when friends wanted to play, I would decline to be by myself. My family remembers me as an agitator, someone who could not be controlled, someone who would not listen to reason. A couple years ago, my father said that among his children, I was the one he could not bribe. If I didn’t want to do something, I just wouldn’t. I was also the one to be spanked the most, punished the most. I remember so little of this that it scares me as a memoirist that I may be lying without realizing it. I think of myself as an easy-going man, a man who helps his family and friends, but perhaps that is only the dream version of me and I am something else entirely. Are we who we think we are or are we what others think of us?

Yesterday, I sat in the wrestling room at my old high school as the team practiced. My father, uncle, and brother are wrestling coaches. I wrestled for seven years and quit my junior year of high school. A couple of people who were around back when I was on the team spoke about what they considered to be my greatest match. It was against our rival, St. Thomas, and with the stands filled with screaming spectators, I went out onto the mat first and pinned my opponent and changed the feel of the night for the crowd.

No one seems to remember what I consider to be my greatest match. It was my first as varsity and I was knocked unconscious for a few seconds—something the ref didn’t notice—and I woke and came back and won in the final seconds of the match. That is the match worth remembering, but only I view it that way.

After practice, I went to Target with my dad and we ran into two of my friends from high school, Joe and Meryn. I haven’t seem them in over a decade. They started dating in the final weeks of high school—I had a crush on Meryn at the time—and now they are married with three children. Joe looked tired and beaten, like a horrifying ghost of what I could have been. Perhaps it was just Christmas shopping with three kids (one of whom ran off down the store, which ended our brief reunion) that made him resemble an extra from The Walking Dead, but perhaps that’s just his look now. Before his daughter escaped towards the toys, Joe patted my arm and said I looked twice as big as when he last saw me. I said nothing, not knowing what to say, and it probably came off as if I had no interest in catching up with my old friend.

In high school, I wrestled in the 103 weight class. If I wrestled today, I would be in the heavyweight class. Although I could afford to lose a few pounds (or thirty), I’m taller and more muscular than I once was. My father was surprised anyone could recognize me from high school. But, I don’t think of myself as being a big man. Never. I grew up small and I still think of myself as a small person. A woman recently texted me (as part of a longer conversation) that I was a big, strong man, and at first, I thought she was making fun of me, but I realized I am a big guy and she was most likely just pointing out the obvious.

As I get older, I find that I have none of the values that I had as a child, or a teenager, or even from my early twenties. Hell, even from January. In the fifth grade, I remember sitting in class, staring at a cute girl, and not understanding how men could be mean to women. I heard how men mistreated their girlfriends and wives, and I just didn’t get it. I decided that I would never be like that. I set values for dating, for women. Yet, now I look back on my relationships as an adult and I’ve been deliberately cruel to each girlfriend. I knew at the time I was treating them wrong and I still did it. I became the asshole that I never thought I could become.

I don’t say that to be hard on myself or out of some kind of penance for a regret. I say that because I understand that I was and that anyone could be. We tend to think of ourselves as better that we truly are, I think. Even the beliefs I once held that weren’t really about being a good person have long been forgotten. For example, sex. I always figured I would have sex before marriage, but I always believed I would have sex only with women who I would be dating at the time. A week ago, I made out with a woman at a strip club (not a stripper). I never thought I’d be the type of guy who’d go to a strip club, much less make out with a woman at one. After the club, I spent the night with the woman, and in the morning, she woke sober and regretted what she had done. And although my self-confidence was damaged, I just kind of shrugged and went about my day.

I believe I have finally given up on trying to hold onto a view of myself. I find that I am a man of contradictions. A man who is seen differently than he feels. And I think that’s normal. I think that’s what is going on with everyone. The beliefs I have today will change or just be forgotten. I don’t regret losing the values and beliefs that I once had. It’s a natural part of life.

I don’t think it’s change, though. I don’t think I’ve changed. Can we ever really change, meaningfully change? I used to view myself as one man, and I discovered I was a different one. Every year, that’s what I go through. I don’t change. I just discover new things about myself, about the world. I no longer think of myself as a fully realized individual. Instead, I believe I am just this mass, this body of water in which things flow into and out of.

I no longer think it’s possible to ever truly know ourselves. Countless times throughout my life, I’ve done things that shocked me. And I’m not just talking about bad things. A month ago, I won my first writing contest, but in the sixth grade I got a D in English. I wasn’t a writer when I was growing up, but I am now. Will I be in ten years? Maybe, maybe not. I think of myself as a funny, goofy person, but many of my friends make comments about me saying that I’m depressed or dark or angry.

Maybe I write nonfiction to discover myself. Maybe that’s why I’ll always write nonfiction—I’ll never know myself. Maybe that’s why I like comics like Ms. Marvel, why I find comfort in the fifth issue even though I find the issue too simplistic. Maybe that’s why we all get attached to these origin stories of superheroes coming into their own. Spider-Man. Superman. Batman. Ms. Marvel. It’s a kind of wish fulfillment. Life is too complicated—we are too complicated—to ever truly understand completely. We’ll never know our friends, our lovers, ourselves. But, I can be placed in Ms. Marvel’s shoes and see the world as she sees it. I can feel her self-confidence in who she is. Knowing what she is capable of and what she will never do. Perhaps that accomplishment is the most fictional aspect of the superhero tale. These fictional characters can have a set identity. Writers can change them, to an extent, but Peter Parker will remain Peter Parker. Kamala Khan will forever be Kamala Khan. And readers can find some peace from the confusion of their lives and identities in these fictions.

_______

Photo by John King

Sean Ironman (Episode 102) earned his MFA at the University of Central Florida. Currently, he teaches creative nonfiction and digital media at the University of Central Arkansas as a visiting professor. His work can be read in The Writer’s Chronicle, Redivider, and Breakers: A Comics Anthology, among others.

Episode 132: Joanna Rakoff and Tony Hoagland!

28 Sunday Dec 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Episode, Memoir, Poetry

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Brittany McIntyre, Joanna Rakoff, My Salinger Year, Sharon Olds, Tony Hoagland, Twenty Poems That Could Save America, Twilight

Episode 132 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

In this week’s episode, I interview novelist and memoirsit Joanna Rakoff,

Photo by David Ignaszewski

and then talk once again with the poet Tony Hoagland,

Photo by Ann Staveley

plus Brittany McIntyre writes bravely about how a book I never expected to learn more about changed her life.

TEXTS DISCUSSED

NOTES

Carlton Melton‘s “Country Ways” accompanied Brittany McIntyre’s essay.

In Orlando, come hear me, Kimberly Lojewski, Robert Metcalf, and Tiffany Razzano read at There Will Be Words on January 13th.

Learn more about J. Bradley’s love poem workshop at the Orlando Public Library here.

Check out the dreamy surf rock of The Bambi Molesters.

_______

Episode 132 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

Shakespearing #23.1: Four Observations About Hamlet

28 Sunday Dec 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Film, Shakespearing, Theater

≈ 1 Comment

Shakespearing #23.1 by John King

Four Observations About Hamlet

Wow, a whole five weeks have passed since I borrowed David Foley’s Shakespearing.

I promised I wouldn’t do this again.

But then, again: Hamlet.

Hamlet is my play. Don’t even try to argue that with me.

Observation #1

C. S. Lewis is not the only twentieth-century writer who deemed Hamlet a failure. In his essay “Hamlet and His Problems,” T. S. Eliot thought it failed because it lacked what he called an objective correlative.

He famously opined,

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.

This was, if you ask me, Eliot’s way of turning Joyce’s penchant for epiphanies into a craft rule, since Joyce never published an essay for the dramatic fulcrum of his fiction. What is hysterical about this whole essay is the fact that Eliot overlooks what is probably the most famous objective correlative in the history of Western literature: Yorick’s skull.

Don’t get me wrong. I love the term “objective correlative,” because it steers students away from indiscriminately slugging the shit out of every literary text with symbolism like some sort of hammer. But Yorick’s skull.

Observation #2

Mel Gibson is not only my Mad Max, but he is also my Hamlet.

Kenneth Branagh sounds as wonderful as Brahms, but dramatically in Hamlet? Meh. As a director of Shakespearean films, his quality has consistently declined with each movie since his triumphant Henry V.

Ethan Hawke: when you wear a goofy knit cap, that accessory shouldn’t be a better actor than you are.

Olivier: solid, but not my Hamlet.

Of course, Mel looks so good because the cast and the director had a clear vision, too. Franco Zeffirelli is a wonder. All three of his Shakespeare films (Shrew, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet) are glorious. As a director of operas, Zeffirelli knows the difference between cinematic art and the bombastic opulence appropriate for the opera house. (I am looking at you, Branagh.)

Hamlet is introspective, to the degree that such introspection seems like the point of the play, thus alarmingly separating action and character, as David noted in Shakespearing #23. Hamlet even gets introspective about his introspection:

Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave,
That I, the son of a dear father murder’d,
Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,
Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words[.]

What is wonderful about Mel Gibson’s performance is the real sense of menace.

If we don’t believe Hamlet might kill his uncle, then Shakespeare seems to have created the first emo character, followed hotly 142 years later by Goethe whose young Werther would sublimely and ineffectually whine about the unobtainable woman of his dreams. Mel Gibson’s body language mixed with his intelligence and, perhaps, a tint of madness, make his Hamlet so memorable, and was part of my turning towards Shakespeare back in 1990.

Observation #3

My senior year English teacher, Cheryl Musgrave, raised an eyebrow as she inflected a single syllable in Hamlet’s pre-Mousetrap banter, letting me know that Shakespeare was not G-rated, and thus might be my kind of guy:

HAMLET
Lady, shall I lie in your lap?

OPHELIA
No, my lord.

HAMLET
I mean, my head upon your lap?

OPHELIA
Ay, my lord.

HAMLET
Do you think I meant country matters?

Such encouragement helped prime me for the film the next year.

Observation #4

Once in the oughts, I encouraged a gaggle of friends to see what turned out to be the worst performance of Hamlet in all of history, held at the theater at Florida Atlantic University.

The actor playing Hamlet (charisma score: -50) seemed to be channeling early William Shatner if William Shatner thought he was Marlon Brando. Listening to the Danish prince lecture the players on how to act was excruciating.

The only great actor in the troupe played Polonius as a dandy with a cockney accent and a lisp. After the third act, there was nothing to root for in the play.

And then: the actress playing Ophelia, because of the idiotic set design, had to actually walk at Ophelia’s funeral.

A month later, I attended a one-woman show by RSC-alum Estelle Kohler in that very same theater. In the row behind me, the boob who played Hamlet chuckled as if knowingly at Kohler’s observations, for the both of them, you know, have heard the chimes at midnight.

All I can say is (to quote Paul from Barefoot in the Park) that it was harder to watch him doing what he was doing than it was for him to do what I was watching.

My friend Chris Robé stayed after intermission, wanting to see the bitter end. “This is so punk rock in its awfulness,” he said. “I don’t know when I’ll see anything this bad again.”

_______

John King (Episode, well, all of them) is a podcaster, writer, and ferret wrangler.

The Curator of Schlock #70: The Muppet Christmas Carol (Redux)

26 Friday Dec 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Christmas literature, The Curator of Schlock

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The Curator of Schlock #70 by Jeff Shuster

The Muppet Christmas Carol (Redux)

Yeah, I’m revisiting the movie!

Okay. I’ll admit I can be a bit of an ogre when it comes to my own personal taste. We all have our Christmas Carols. I grew up with Scrooge the Musical, the one with Albert Finney. Other people swear by the 1951 adaptation starring Alastair Sim. I had a delayed reaction after viewing The Muppet Christmas Carol last week. That delayed reaction was revulsion. I had known about The Muppet Christmas Carol for several years, but had avoided it like the plague. Several friends suggested I review it for the blog, and I decided to give it a go.

I knew in the first five minutes that I would have nothing insightful to say about this chestnut so I decided to record my real time reactions. A few days later the film had finally sunk in, and I let it known over social media how terrible I thought the movie was by stating, “The Muppet Christmas Carol was terrible!” You’d think I had kicked someone’s dog by friends’ reaction. Still, I regret my word choice. It’s Christmas Day, and in the spirit of the season, I will give The Muppet Christmas Carol a fair shake. Oh wait. It’s Boxing Day. I think I’ll tear The Muppet Christmas Carol apart. I’m like Pinhead in that respect.

I want to make it clear that I don’t hate Muppets or Muppet movies. The Muppet Movie is childhood favorite of mine. I’m sure The Muppet Christmas Carol is a childhood favorite of other people, and that just makes me depressed. This isn’t a proper adaptation of A Christmas Carol. You can’t just slap a bunch of Muppets on a piece of classic literature and declare “Voila!” This is like a bad community theatre production of A Christmas Carol starring Muppets. The Muppets slip in and out of character on a whim.

Gonzo states that he’s Charles Dickens only for Rizzo the Rat to blow his cover immediately. So for the rest of the movie I’m trying to figure out whether it’s Charles Dickens providing the narration or Gonzo. It’s never cleared up. Frankly, Gonzo interrupts the story too much.

My favorite Muppet, Animal, is on screen for all of five seconds. He probably read the script and negotiated his part down to a cameo.

Sam Eagle shows up as Scrooge’s headmaster ready to teach the young man the “American Way of Business” only to have Gonzo correct him into saying the British Way. Sam Eagle would never abandon an American tradition in favor of a British one.

Not even as a joke.

Have you seen Sam Eagle? He doesn’t exist in this world to make you laugh!

I think the only one who stays in character throughout the whole movie is Michael Caine’s Scrooge. Since the movie spends so much time on canned Muppet jokes, we get a kind of abridged version of A Christmas Carol. We see a young Scrooge making googly eyes at Belle at Fozziwig’s annual Christmas party only to them break up in the very next scene. There’s no courtship. We don’t get to see Scrooge, the hard man, falling in love only to see him eventually prioritizing money above all else. There’s no tragedy in this movie. All we get are Michael Caine’s crocodile tears to a creepy puppet of an English girl.

There are songs in this movie, but I’d be hard pressed to remember any of them. We see the Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come, but there’s no Grim Reaper reveal. Scrooge’s redemption comes from the doling out of plastic cheese to some Muppet mice. I’m not seeing a changed man here. If the movie can’t make believe that a miser can turn into a philanthropist, the battle is lost.

I know. I know. That’s just my opinion. Well, you know what? I’m a curator.

Here’s a clip of a missing song between Belle and Scrooge that didn’t make it into the final movie.

Perhaps this song could have made all the difference…Nah!

_______

Photo by Leslie Salas

Jeffrey Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, and episode 131) is an MFA candidate at the University of Central Florida.

Heroes Never Rust #73: Adjusting to the Story’s Needs

24 Wednesday Dec 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Craft of Fiction Writing, Heroes Never Rust, Memoir

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Tags

Charles D’Ambrosio, Ms. Marvel

Heroes Never Rust #73 by Sean Ironman

Adjusting to the Story’s Needs

In a graduate-level fiction workshop a couple of years ago, a student used footnotes in a few places in a manuscript. The story was somewhere around fifteen pages, and footnotes were used three or four times, mostly toward the beginning of the piece. The professor and a few students remarked that if the writer is going to use footnotes, then they must use them, really use them. Basically, a handful of footnotes is not enough. On a separate occasion, a friend was kind enough to read an essay I wrote and offer a critique. I had used two parentheses in the essay, and he said that if I am going to be a person who uses parentheses, then I must use them consistently. To be honest, and no offense to my friend, I could not understand that reasoning.

There seems to be this rule with some writers that I have met (fiction writers, now that I think about it) that once a writer uses a certain technique, whether it be parentheses or footnotes or whatever else, that writer must use it throughout the entire story. I disagree. Perhaps it is because of my focus on memoir and the essay, with all their meanderings, but I fail to understand why a writer must use a tool in the second scene solely because that tool worked well in the first scene.

Take Ms. Marvel #4, for example. In a comic book, readers are given dialogue, the action through visuals, and, at times, narration captions that usually serve as a character’s thoughts. On the opening page, readers get narration captions for Ms. Marvel as she lies on the floor clutching her stomach after being shot at the end of the last issue. “So I’m pretty sure I just got shot.” Her friend, Bruno, faces the reader, who is given Ms. Marvel’s perspective—We view the world through her eyes on this page. But, once the reader moves onto the second page, narration captions disappear and the viewpoint changes so that the reader can see Ms. Marvel on the floor bleeding out.

It is not until page twelve that the narration captions return. And, only then, do they return briefly. Out of twenty pages, narration captions appear on four pages across three scenes. On page one, Kamala Khan (the new Ms. Marvel) has no action or dialogue. On page two, she moves and speaks to Bruno. When the narration captions return later in the comic, Kamala is picking through her closet looking for a costume. The next scene in which they return is when she goes out to the bad guy’s lair in her new costume. She is finally her own superhero and does not transform into Carol Danvers.

During these scenes, narration serves a clear purpose. In the first scene, the reader is placed not only in Kamala’s thoughts but in her viewpoint. The reader becomes Kamala. In the second scene, the narration lets readers know that Kamala is searching for a costume. Sure, through dialogue, the same idea could have been communicated, but then Kamala would be speaking to herself out loud. Finally, in the third scene, Kamala transforms into her own superhero. She is filled with confidence, and the scene serves as one of the most important ones in her origin story.

In memoir, writers use reflection to comment on the past events. But it is unnecessary to comment on every little action. Memoirists weave scene, summary, and reflection to create a memorable experience for the reader. Some sections may be heavy in reflection, while others are heavy in scene. The writer is given the room to judge what each section needs and act accordingly. I feel that Ms. Marvel is taking a similar approach. What could Kamala possibly narrate as she’s on the floor bleeding out and begging Bruno to not call an ambulance? Readers can understand her mental state through the visuals and the dialogue. Narration would not only be redundant, but it may ruin the surprise on page three when Kamala reveals herself to Bruno and tells him about her superpowers. The reveal is shocking, but if readers were given her thought process as she thinks about what to do, there would be no shock. Readers would see her considering the reveal, decide, and then act. The scene would bore readers and lack a strong impact. The same could be said later in the issue when she breaks into the bad guy’s lair. A robot shoots a laser and she ducks before smashing the enemy. There is no narration. Whatever would not serve a purpose.

Now, while I do think writers could use whatever tool they need for any scene, Ms. Marvel’s narration captions work because they appear on the first page. Once the reader begins, he or she knows that narration captions may be used throughout the comic. I agree that it may cause some confusion if the captions were saved until the end of the comic. Does a writer always have to use the tool right away? Is it possible to have captions come in at the end and not cause confusion? That’s up to the individual reader to decide, I think. Some readers may just hate the use of that tool, regardless of how much or how little it was used. To me, I believe that there are no rules to storytelling. Each story works off of its own set of rules, and when writers try have every story follow the same rules, they stifle their creativity and hurt the story. There are too many stories in the world. Every rule has been broken.[1]

_______

Photo by John King

[1] Hey, in Charles D’Ambrosio’s Loitering, some of the essays contain the random footnote, and those essays are wonderful.

In Boozo Veritas #71: MEMO from the In Boozo Veritas Offices

22 Monday Dec 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Film, In Boozo Veritas

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Eyes Wide Shit, In Boozo Veritas, John King, Stanley Kubrick, Teege Braune

In Boozo Veritas #71 by Teege Braune

MEMO from the In Boozo Veritas Offices

To: John King, Host of The Drunken Odyssey

From: Teege Braune, Author of In Boozo Veritas

Subject: The Greatest Film Every Made or An Average Tuesday for John King?

Date: December 22, 2014

You’ve called me out! It’s true that I have been hallucinating more and more regularly. Why, early this very week I had the strangest dream that you and I were being serenaded by an adorably sad, seven foot tall clown with a golden voice. What a strange but delightful vision. My pharmacologist warned me not to eat those mushrooms growing around the back of my house, but damn it, they just taste so good on pizza.

That being said, I feel certain that at least some of the details of my last letter took place in reality. For example: your neighbor Mrs. Thorndike had asked me not to use her real name so that the world would not be privy to her libertine activities, and while it’s true that her parties are not exactly orgies, but more akin to friendly afternoon games of bridge, most of us in attendance wear masks and a few of us (no names) do get naked. I used Nuala Windsor as a convenient alias, but alas, I chose too obvious a ruse. Nevertheless, it is you who has exposed a kind, if eccentric, elderly woman. Let that be on your own conscience.

The fact is, that as I read the details of your attack on Eyes Wide Shut, I kept thinking, John’s right! But where you groan and shake your head in agonized disbelief, I find myself filled with delight. Rainbow motif symbolizing adultery and sexual excess? Yes, I’ll take it! Proliferation of characters passing through thresholds and dreamy, drawn-out dialogue? Please, give me more! A highly stylized and antiseptic orgy that, despite the outrageous amount of nudity, is completely lacking in anything that could be considered erotic? I can’t get enough of the stuff!

It isn’t necessarily easy for me to say exactly what I love about EWS, but no matter how many times I watch it, whenever I hear Shostakovich’s Jazz Suite, Waltz No. 2, my analytic and aesthetic mind begins whirring with the possibility of making new connections, of reentering this strange universe that is both exotic and present. I never ever grow tired of viewing this bizarre and mysterious cinematic objet d’art. Watching the film after reading your critique, I’ve come to the conclusion that trying to convince another person that this film is a masterpiece, especially someone as intellectually gifted and adept at analysis as yourself, is simply a foolish endeavor. Which is not say EWS is a guilty pleasure. Far from it. You simply appreciate the oddball genius of Stanley Kubrick or you do not.

One place in which I must disagree with you, however, is your assertion that EWS is a projection of a “repressive Puritanical libido.” Tom Cruise’s Dr. Bill Hartford’s never-realized sexual misadventure is more complicated than an attempted escape from inhibition. After all, he and his wife Alice seem to share an active sex life.

What sends Dr. Hartford down the rabbit hole is not Alice’s confession about the naval officer, but rather the realization that his wife is a sexually autonomous person and not merely an ornament reflective of his social status and object of male sexual desire. His emasculation is not so much a result of learning that his wife once wanted another man, but that women are tempted by sex at all.

Instead of handling this emotional trauma the way one might in the real world, either by seeking marital counseling or engaging in some kind of midlife crisis, Bill enters a psychological labyrinth inside a dreamscape version of New York City that begins with an oddly inverted version of his own situation. A deceased patient’s daughter, who looks remarkably like his own wife Alice, spontaneously and without warning professes her love to Bill despite her engagement to a man who looks remarkably like Bill himself, the bright opulent rooms juxtaposed with the same dull blue light seeping in from the windows.

Bill attempts to redeem his masculinity throughout a series of increasingly odder scenarios that culminate in a masked orgy, a place where women are reduced to literally faceless objects of pleasure, but just as his near temptation by the models at Ziegler’s party was interrupted before he was able to go where the rainbow ends, every encounter fails to culminate in sexual union or restore the shattered order to his world. He returns from this journey to discover another man’s face beside his wife in his bed. Of course, it is own face, his mask from the orgy, his own illusion occupying the place of his real self.

All boundaries have been subverted, the lines between dream and wakefulness, fantasy and reality, and representation and that which is being represented.

But it’s like I said: you either dig that sort of thing or you don’t. I doubt I’ve convinced you that you enjoy a movie you’ve previously called “a pretentious waste of time.” I can offer one last detail, however, that I think you might appreciate. This theme of representation even seeped into the actual production of EWS. You mentioned you recognized the location of Rainbow Rentals as a cross street between Sixth Avenue and Washington Square Park when, in fact, Kubrick’s phobia of flying meant that none of the movie is filmed on location.

Instead a reconstruction of New York City was built in a sound studio in London. Kubrick’s eye for detail was as unquestionably sharp late in life as it had ever been before.

While my defense may have fallen on deaf ears, I will say, if nothing else, I take pride in the fact that I was able to force you to endure a second viewing of EWS and that the wonderful music of Jocelyn Pook was redeemed in your eyes.

Only now as I reach my conclusion does it occur to me that maybe I have missed your point altogether, and perhaps your frustrations with EWS are much more basic: simply put that a film climaxing in a bizarre orgy will never impress you, a man for whom masked orgies have simply become a routine detail of any humdrum Tuesday evening. Enjoy your orgies, my friend. I hope to see you soon.

_______

Teege Braune (episode 72, episode 75, episode 77, episode 90, episode 102, episode 122, episode 129) is a writer of literary fiction, horror, essays, and poetry. Recently he has discovered the joys of drinking responsibly. He may or may not be a werewolf.

Episode 131: A Christmas Radio Play

21 Sunday Dec 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Episode

≈ 178 Comments

Tags

A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens, Christopher Booth, Jared Silvia, Jeffrey Shuster, Krampus, Melissa Crandall, Santa Claus, Teege Braune

Episode 131 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

This week’s episode got a bit out of hand. Jared Silvia tells me that, for legal reasons, this needs to be called a radio play.

Anyway, I talk to Santa, have an interview you have to hear to believe–maybe you still won’t believe it–plus

I replay Melissa Crandall’s personal essay about A Christmas Carol.

NOTES

Pre-order Nathan Holic’s new novel, The Things I Don’t See, here for only $6.

Episode 131 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.

Shakespearing #23: Hamlet

21 Sunday Dec 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Shakespearing, Theater

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

David Foley, Hamlet, Shakespeare, Shakespearing, Stephen Greenblatt, The Ghost

Shakespearing #23 by David Foley

Hamlet

For a certain kind of theatre/English lit nerd, Hamlet was our Catcher in the Rye. Hamlet not Holden was the disaffected hero who awakened our sense that we were surrounded by phonies in a messed-up world. I remember being puzzled to learn that scholars argued back and forth about Hamlet. Is he mad or just pretending? To me Hamlet was viscerally real. His world had been turned upside down. How else should he behave?

But Hamlet isn’t an adolescent. He’s thirty, a few years younger than Shakespeare when he wrote the play. This, too, is part of the play’s allure: the perhaps illusory sense that we’re getting close to Shakespeare himself, as close as Shakespeare got to self-portraiture. We can note the deep-dyed sense of personal anguish, Hamlet’s savvy as a playwright, and (less appealingly) his revulsion against female sexuality, a revulsion that bubbles up from time to time in Shakespeare’s plays.

John Austen, Illustration for Hamlet (1922).

Still, on re-reading the play, the problem jumps out at you, the problem that, according to C.S. Lewis, caused some critics to call the play “an artistic failure” (though he added, “[I]f this is failure, then failure is better than success.”). And the problem is this: plot becomes divorced from action so that character becomes opaque. The problem is not whether Hamlet is mad or only pretending. The problem is that he says he’s going to “put an antic disposition on,” but everything he does seems only the acting out of a soul in anguish. His maddest acts—killing Polonius, hiding the body, arranging for the murder of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—are way past role-playing. We can’t draw a line between the plot development—“I must play mad in order to revenge my father’s murder”—and the action.

And it’s not just Hamlet. By the end of the Closet Scene, we think we should be able to say whether Gertrude has genuinely repented or if she’s humoring her crazy son, but we can’t, and nothing afterwards enlightens us. We can’t see what effect the scene produced on her. She’s also the first person who can’t see the Ghost, throwing another mystery into the mix. The Ghost is driving the plot. Has he now become a figment?

Stephen Greenblatt calls this “strategic opacity,” “[taking] out a key explanatory element” and thus “occluding the rationale, motivation, or ethical principle that account[s] for the action.” Greenblatt claims that this was Shakespeare’s “crucial breakthrough” in Hamlet, a new approach to character. Hamlet affects us so powerfully because he can’t be explained. We experience him as real because, like us, he’s fragmented.

It’s not just the removal of motivation, but the unlinking of motivation and action that makes Hamlet so disorienting. Our inability to say what effect the Closet Scene has had on Gertrude begins to strike us as eerie. We’re approaching Joan Didion’s “world of people moved by strange, conflicted, poorly comprehended and, above all, devious motivations.”

The other day I picked up Shakespeare’s Montaigne, which has an introduction by Greenblatt. Greenblatt says that Montaigne “experienced existence as a succession of inconsistent and disjointed thoughts and impulses,” with the result that, in the essays, “he is constantly in motion.” Montaigne himself says, “I describe not the essence but the passage.”

This seems to be Shakespeare’s method in Hamlet, to get not the plot but the passage, the motion of a soul. The irony of the play may be that Hamlet, done in by plot in the end, nevertheless escapes plot’s prison. He eludes those who would, in his own words, “pluck out the heart of my mystery.”

_______

David Foley is a playwright and fiction writer living in Brooklyn. His plays include Cressida Among the Greeks, Paradise, Nance O’Neil, The Murders at Argos, A Hole in the Fence, and Sad Hotel, among others. His novel The Traveler’s Companion is available on Amazon. He teaches at New York University.

The Curator of Schlock #69: The Muppet Christmas Carol

19 Friday Dec 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Christmas literature, Film, The Curator of Schlock

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Michael Caine, The Muppets

The Curator of Schlock #69 by Jeffrey Shuster

The Muppet Christmas Carol

Michael Caine Returns to The Museum of Schlock

We’ve gone a whole year without a Michael Caine movie present in The Museum of Schlock. He plays Ebenezer Scrooge in 1992’s The Muppet Christmas Carol from director Brian Henson. So yeah, it’s Muppets and Michael Caine this week on The Curator of Schlock. Now, I had never seen this movie before so I decided to do something a bit different. Instead of a review, here are 22 live observations of The Muppet Christmas Carol as I watched it.

1. Gonzo and Rizzo the Rat are talking to me through my TV screen. Gonzo insists that he’s Charles Dickens.

2. Michael Caine is playing an extra evil Ebenezer Scrooge. Random Muppets and vegetables start singing about how mean he is.

3. Muppets fall behind on their mortgages just like the rest of us.

4. Kermit is Bob Cratchit. Big surprise there.

5. Same Christmas Carol crap! His nephew is too nice! Steven Seagal would have lit Michael Kane on fire by now!

6. Kermit was able to get Christmas Day off. Which is more than I can say for myself all those years toiling at the paper! Claude Thornhill’s Snowfall plays in my head.

7. There are way too many rats in this motion picture.

8. Are these Muppets playing human characters or is this an alternate Victorian London where humans and Muppets coexist peacefully?

9. Scrooge is eating moldy cheese. Ewwwwwwww!!!

10. Jacob and Robert Marley? There was no Robert Marley in the novel!

11. The Muppet of the Ghost of Christmas Past is creeping me out big time!

12. Young Scrooge says, “Who cares about stupid old Christmas?” I care!

13. The Muppet of the Ghost of Christmas Past is still creeping me out big time!

14. Animal!

15. If the Ghost of Christmas Present welcomes Scrooge to Christmas morning then he’s the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, not the Ghost of Christmas Present!

16. Michael Caine is dancing with a giant Muppet!

17. I used to have a crush on Miss Piggy. On second thought, don’t print that.

18. Tiny Tim needs to hurry up and die already!

19. No more singing! Please!

20. Ghost of Christmas Future is scary even in Muppet form!

21. Money-grubbing pigs!

22. Please! Please! No more singing!

_______

Jeffrey Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, and episode 124) is an MFA candidate at the University of Central Florida.

The Lists #12: Literature Questions for Further Discussion (e.e. cummings “anyone lived in a pretty how town”)

18 Thursday Dec 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Poetry, The Lists

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anyone lived in a pretty how town, e.e. cummings

The Lists #12 by John King

Literature Questions for Further Discussion (e.e. cummings’ “anyone lived in a pretty how town”)

If e.e. cummings’s “anyone lived in a pretty how town” is an allegory for obscure figures from The Holy Bible, who would anyone and who would noone be?
Recite the poem naked. Doesn’t that sound better? What changes in the timbre of your voice?
Why do you think “Women” is the only word cummings capitalizes in the poem? Speculate about when cummings stopped suckling upon his mother’s throbbing breast.
Pinpoint the nearest pretty how town to where you live on Google Earth. Now read the poem again. Notice anything different?
What do you think cummings’s neighbors were like? Did they slurp tea in the afternoon, and squint through Venetian blinds at the snowy yard?
How is a pretty what town different than a pretty how town? What does that difference do to the psyche? How would you feel shaving in such a difference?
How long can you hold your breath?

_______

John King (Episode, well, all of them) is a podcaster, writer, and ferret wrangler.