"I’m on a crusade to prove that entertainment has value in itself, not just as a dose of sugar to help audiences swallow more important themes. Entertainment allows us to temporarily shut down our brains and waken later with emotions refreshed." - Hannah Sternberg
The Help, a comedy-drama film set in the South during the turbulent mid-1960s, finished at the top of the U.S. movie box office for the second weekend in a row. Although the film received largely positive reviews, a critic from the Boston Globe predictably lambasted the film for insufficient hatred of the American South: It’s possible both to like this movie – to let it crack you up, then make you cry – and to wonder why we need a broad, if sincere dramatic comedy about black maids in Jackson, Miss., in 1962 and ’63 and the high-strung white housewives they work for. The movie is too pious for farce and too eager to please to comment persuasively on the racial horrors of the Deep South at that time. But the critic, Wesley Morris, didn’t stop there. His biggest complaint is that the The Help shows black women of the era as needing help in order to reach their full potential in the Jim Crow South. The central character, a white female known as Skeeter (Emma Stone), he notes, “changes the lives of a couple of dozen black women whose change is refracted primarily through her.” Not good, Morris complains:
File this one under “Easier Said Than Done”: A skillful artist has constructed a tale. He has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents, but having deliberately conceived a certain single effect to be wrought, he then invents such incidents, he then combines such events, and discusses them in such tone as may best serve him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his very first sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then in his very first step has he committed a blunder. In the whole composition there should be no word written of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design. And by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction. The idea of the tale, its thesis, has been presented unblemished, because undisturbed — an end absolutely demanded, yet, in the novel altogether unattainable. — Edgar Allan Poe, “Tale-Writing — Nathaniel Hawthorne”, Godey’s Lady’s Book, November 1847
CNN reports that Thursday will mark the 75th anniversary of the publication of Gone With the Wind, and love for the novel and the movie based on it still seems to be going strong. Fans dubbed “Windies” (because as one notes, it sounds better than “Goners”) have get togethers and visit Margaret Mitchell’s grave while dressed in period garb. Meanwhile, back at my college, I taught Kipling to my Brit survey class yesterday — we read “Man Who Would Be King“, “White Man’s Burden“, and “Recessional.” In a full semester class, I’d follow that with a week on Heart of Darkness, but it’s a 5-week term, so there’s really no time for novels. I don’t think you can teach the survey without discussing the Empire, and Kipling works as well for that as anyone. But GWtW and Kipling’s works are problematic today, and in the CNN piece, film critic Molly Haskell notes that in the case of the Mitchell novel, “the politics make us uncomfortable.” And the same could be (and has been) said for Kipling — a former classmate of mine once dismissed the Nobel winner as a troglodyte while admitting she had never actually studied his work, or
By Mike Gray Arnold Bennett’s lifespan straddled the divide between the 19th and 20th centuries. A prolific novelist, at one time he was as well-known—and almost as popular—as Charles Dickens. His wit was apt to swerve in unexpected directions, as for example in the following dispraise of Edgar Allan Poe which Bennett published fast on the heels of the Poe Centenary of 1909: The great Edgar Allan Poe celebration has passed off, and no one has been seriously hurt by the terrific display of fireworks. Some of the set pieces were pretty fair; for example, Mr. G. B. Shaw’s in the Nation and Prof. C. H. Herford’s in the Manchester Guardian. On the whole, however, the enthusiasm was too much in the nature of mere good form. If only we could have a celebration of Omar Khayyam, Tennyson, Gilbert White, or the inventor of Bridge, the difference between new and manufactured enthusiasm would be apparent. We have spent several happy weeks in conceitedly explaining to that barbaric race, the Americans, that in Poe they have never appreciated their luck. Yet we ourselves have never understood Poe. And we never shall understand Poe. It is immensely to our credit that, owing
Enjoy a bevy of literary links including Andrew Klavan, Rudyard Kipling, Evelyn Waugh, John Buchan, George Washington’s Beer, and a love poem by Pablo Neruda. But first some quotes from great literature concerning justice, war and liberty. “There are times, young fellah, when every one of us must make a stand for human right and justice, or you never feel clean again.” – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World “The Almighty gave us our lives, and I suppose He meant us to defend them, at least I have always acted on that, and I hope it will not be brought up against me when my clock strikes.” – H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines “Peril, loneliness, an uncertain future, are not oppressive evils, so long as the frame is healthy and the faculties are employed; so long, especially, as Liberty lends us her wings, and Hope guides us by her star.” – Charlotte Bronte, Villette “You know, there are two good things in life, freedom of thought and freedom of action.” – W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage Short Fiction A Creed, A Word and a Blade of Grass by Peter Orullian “The familiar glow of candlelight was the
By Mike Gray After spending four depressing days this month at a meeting of 3,000 writing teachers in Atlanta, I can tell you that their parent group, the Conference on College Composition and Communication, is not really interested in teaching students to write and communicate clearly. The group’s agenda, clear to me after sampling as many of the meeting’s 500 panels as I could, is devoted to disparaging grammar, logic, reason, evidence and fairness as instruments of white oppression. They believe rules of grammar discriminate against “marginalized” groups and restrict self-expression. Even noted composition scholar Peter Elbow, in his address, claimed that the grammar that we internalize at the age of four is “good enough.” The Internet, thankfully, has freed us from our previous duties as “grammar police,” and Elbow heralded the day when the white spoken English that has now become the acceptable standard, will be joined by other forms, like those of non-native and ghetto speakers. Freed from standards of truth claims and grammatical construction, rhetoric is now redefined as “performance,” as in street protests, often by students demonstrating their “agency.” Expressions are made through “the body,” images, and song—sometimes a burst of spontaneous reflection on the Internet.
By Lars Walker One of the most interesting tricks of the mystery writer is “the unreliable narrator.” When you aren’t sure if you can believe what the storyteller tells you, it adds a whole level to the puzzle. Author Mark Goldblatt has added a further level of complexity. Not only does the narrator of Sloth (released last year by Greenpoint Press) sometimes deceive the reader, he may in fact not even exist. He never tells us his name. The only name he ever uses in the story (one chosen in order to deceive the woman he loves) is Mark Goldblatt, the name of the actual author of the book. But he didn’t borrow it from his author. He borrows it from his friend Zezel, who is an author and uses it as a pseudonym. (Or is he and does he?) You see the kind of book we’re dealing with here? Mark Goldblatt (the real one, I mean. S. T. Karnick assures me he actually exists, and that’s good enough for me) has written a parody of postmodern novels in which he out-deconstructs the deconstructors. Layers of meaning and misdirection are everywhere (as well as a lot of word play and
Review of The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction, edited by Catherine Ross Nickerson By Curt Evans On the back cover of The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction (2010), the blurb tells us that the fourteen essays contained therein represent the “very best in contemporary scholarship.” If so, this should be a matter of grave concern to people interested in the history of the American mystery genre before World War II, or in the preservation of what is best in the culture and fostering of good works in the future. As the Companion is a skimpy book of less than 200 pages and it has fourteen essays, potential readers should be immediately clued in to the fact that the essays tend to be rather cursory. A listing of the topics further reveals that the book’s coverage is esoteric, leaving noticeable gaps: Introduction (4 pages) Early American Crime Writing (10 pages, excluding footnotes) Poe and the Origins of Detective Fiction (8 pages) Women Writers Before 1960 (12 pages) The Hard-Boiled Novel (15 pages) American Roman Noir (12 pages) Teenage Detective and Teenage Delinquents (13 pages) American Spy Fiction (9 pages) The Police Procedural on Literature and on Television (13 pages)
Critics and publishers have dumbed down our understanding of classic mystery fiction in service of a political agenda. By Curt Evans American author Anna Katharine Green’s 1878 mystery tale, The Leavenworth Case (the first of more than thirty mystery works Green penned through 1923), made quite a splash in its day, supposedly selling over 750,000 copies in the decade and a half after its publication. Yet by the beginning of the Golden Age of the detective novel (roughly 1920 to 1939) it had become one of those great, old landmarks on the literary landscape that people dutifully glance at briefly before passing on to something more modern and interesting. Perusing a reprinted edition of Green’s first mystery novel in 1929 (nearly thirty years after he had originally read it), T. S. Eliot, an avid consumer of detective fiction, was moved to wonder why Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tales “reread so much better than The Leavenworth Case?” He noted disparagingly of Leavenworth that it “is simply popping over with sentiment” and “the sentimentality throws a spotlight upon every technical flaw in the plot.” At about the same time T. S. Eliot was looking back over Leavenworth, the esteemed novelist and critic Arnold Bennett was taking a similar literary stroll down memory lane, with the
The long-running UK mystery-crime series Midsomer Murders (shown on U.S. TV for several years and still available on DVD) was immensely popular and widely admired by fans and critics alike. The show’s producer got in a good deal of trouble recently, however, for saying that MM’s avoidance of race- and sexual-behavior-based characters and story lines was part of its appeal. As MM producer Brian True-May noted, the show’s refusal to shoehorn such elements into its stories made sense because
“In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent business man; and I, for one, am only too glad that the man who has the rare skill to season his message with interesting reading matter and who shows both purpose and pep in handling his literary wares has a chance to drag down his fifty thousand bucks a year, to mingle with the biggest executives on terms of perfect equality, and to show as big a house and as swell a car as any Captain of Industry!” - Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt Short Fiction A Call to Prayer by Joy Wambeke ” ‘For the poor souls in purgatory,’ I heard my father mutter through clenched teeth. Through the shadows of the upstairs hallway, I could often see my father in my parents’ darkened room, his hands wound around his foot or grasping his knee. He always got ready for work at Sydney harbor in the dark so as not to wake mum. It was his habit to offer the inevitable bumps into furniture
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