Curley Qs
Book Archive - June to Sept 2022
Just down Main Street from Mystic Pizza above the Yellow Brick Mall, I wrote ads and catalogs to sell books. The Ed(Curley)itor kept an index card for every book he read for pleasure: Title, Author, Synopsis, Publisher on the front; why he liked it on the back. In memory of Ed, here's some Curley Qs.
for your consideration
My Work
Cross Bronx Expressway
Exit Interview
September has an intriguing novel
and two of my short stories for your consideration of an important social topic.
Exit Interview
Cross Bronx Expressway
Exit Interview
I wrote this after working in the publishing industry for several years.
It's a hard place to work and a challenge to a person's sense of self-worth and dignity.
Cross Bronx Expressway
Cross Bronx Expressway
Cross Bronx Expressway
My commute for several years involved this major artery in
New York City.
As with many other projects by planner/builder Robert Moses, this road deeply affected the lives of residents and travelers alike.
His Work
East of the Mountains by David Guterson
Cross Bronx Expressway
East of the Mountains by David Guterson
East of the Mountains by David Guterson
East of the Mountains by David Guterson
We are all familiar with the expression, “My whole life passed in front of my eyes.” It is typically spoken at times of great stress, especially at a moment when death appears imminent.
So, it seems fair to expect that a retired cardiac surgeon with a terminal cancer prognosis, and methodically planning to end his own existence, might experience flashbacks to key moments in his life. These include Dr. Ben Givens’ wartime experience in Italy, his courtship and marriage, and his family reminiscences. Guterson’s narrative fills in the interim moments of his earlier life in an apple farming family. The backstory fleshes out his current odyssey and renders Ben a sympathetic protagonist.
Guterson’s love of the Washington landscapes comes through in his descriptions of Ben’s travels from Seattle into and over the mountains and beyond, back to the land of his boyhood home. If we attribute novelist Guterson’s narrative details to his protagonist’s viewpoint, we discover in this suicide a man with a hypersensitivity to details in his journey for the sake of seeing things with a new appreciation—maybe for the first time, or perhaps for the last time.
East of the Mountains by David Guterson
East of the Mountains by David Guterson
The doctor’s car crash puts him on foot for the middle part of his journey and the details of the trek include good samaritans who offer him rides, an attack on his hunting dogs, and help from a vet, and a long-ago neighbor who remembers Ben’s family. All these unplanned events—and more—upend Ben’s carefully laid plans to end his life in a manner suggesting a hunting accident.
You’ll have to read the end of the book to see whether he gets back on track with his planned demise at his own hand or not.
(c) 1999 Bloomsbury
film version
The Story as a Movie
On Film - More or Less ?
One favored killing method of the wolfhound in Guterson’s book is to bite into its victim’s jugular and then shake the prey senseless into the shock of exsanguination. I can’t help but feel that’s what this film does to the novel.
And it’s really too bad, too, because I always look forward to seeing a role played by Tom Skerritt.
There is little dialog in the novel to express Ben Givens’ inner turmoil about his decision to commit suicide and his angst as his plans unravel. This leaves the film without a conventional way to convey his struggle. Sadly, the film does not discover a faithful path to that end. Instead, it wanders astray, changing the story line many times and desecrating a fraternal relationship essential to the novel—gutting the story in the process, like the doctor eviscerates the birds he hunts.
It is inaccurate for me to say I think the cinematic treatment is an adaptation of the novel, suggesting only the transference from one media to another. I find it is difficult even to say the film is based on an idea suggested by the book.
With the novel, Guterson crafts an odyssey with Dr Givens evoking empathy. With the film, the scriptwriter and director never seem to give Skerritt a chance to do the same, no matter how ably he tries.
These are two different stories in much the same way that twins separated at birth are often lost to each other and only vaguely resemble an intimate gestation they never rediscover.
A NEW TAKE
My Work
Pastor Emeritus
Pastor Emeritus
August's WHAT I'M READING NOW serves to introduce and link to an Item I've written that I'd like to share
Pastor Emeritus
Pastor Emeritus
Pastor Emeritus
This short story set in 1975 pits an aging New York City detective, sent to investigate
the sudden and unexplained death of a retired Monsignor, against the younger pastor
and pastoral assistant who care little for the old priest. Can the detective overcome his colleagues’ opinion of his irrelevance, with the help of the elderly Irish parish sacristan and solve the mystery? Are the pastor and assistant involved someway in his death?
Pastor Emeritus
His Work
His Work
The Power and The Glory by Graham Greene
His Work
The Power and The Glory by Graham Greene
The Power and The Glory by Graham Greene
The Power and The Glory by Graham Greene
Greene’s anti-heroic protagonist is a nameless Catholic “whisky-priest” who has fathered an illegitimate daughter. He has managed to stay hidden for many years from the revolutionary government that outlawed religion and churches and has decreed all priests be put to death.
The story begins as he is on the run from an ardent Lieutenant who has upped the ante.
He rides from settlement-to-settlement taking a hostage if the villagers don’t turn in the fugitive priest. The hostages are killed if the priest is found to have been hidden by the villagers and eluded capture.
The novel weaves a broad tapestry of themes into an amazing literary work. This month’s focus is how the priest’s thoughts and deeds shed light on Greene’s vision of a good man and a good priest. On the surface, most people he encounters judge the priest as bad because he is an alcoholic and he failed to keep his vow of chastity. That judgment is he’s a bad priest and therefore a bad man. But Greene doesn’t seem to think that way, mostly because he doesn’t show us the priest seeing others that way. The priest allows that his betrayer and the Lieutenant do bad things, but that they still mean to be good men. He does the same for many other men and women he meets along the way. Tragically, he just isn’t able to see himself in the same light.
What is most attractive about this flawed man is his effort to maintain what he feels is his priestly duty, as the last living priest in the state. He is the only priest who can perform the necessary ministry—to bring the faithful God’s forgiveness and, as he says, to put God into another man’s mouth.
The Power and The Glory by Graham Greene
The Power and The Glory by Graham Greene
He is so unable to give up on these ideas that he sees himself as damned, since he will die in mortal sin because another priest has not heard his confession and given him absolution. Even the man who betrays him knows this, and uses the lure of hearing a dying person’s confession to trap him. More than once the priest puts himself in danger trying to obtain outlawed wine to use in saying an illegal Mass.
His self-assessment is that his choice not to flee the persecution is a matter of pride, not because he is a good priest.
He tortures himself in the self-examination that he can’t regret his fatherhood as a sin, because he looks on his daughter as a result that he loves.
It haunts him to know that by fulfilling his duty to escape, innocent hostages have been executed.
Greene has the priest meet or confront good and bad people who serve as foils for readers to understand, and who shed light on the inner turmoil of the “whiskey priest.”
All in all, Greene delivers a thrilling story of the pursuit of this priest whose guilt and angst are palpable on every page, in every encounter, and which drive each plot twist.
© 1040 Viking
© 1990 Viking/Penguin –
I read this 50th anniversary edition copy, with an introduction by John Updike
film version
Media Transfer - Novel to TV Movie
Watching The Power and the Glory TV Movie. -- A sixty-year-old film of an eighty-year-old novel is bound to be a time capsule—for better or for worse.
I’ll choose to let the worse be absolved—portraying Mexicans with Anglo actors. Actors, however, who deeply understood and projected the entire story and personality struggles Greene created, even as the film sacrificed some of the novel’s story line and characters to fit its two-hour TV time limits.
The purposeful use of black-and-white film creates the right ambiance for the story, much to the filmmakers’ credit—even as the TV industry was bursting forth with full-color shows to be seductive enough to sell next-gen TV sets into US homes.
Entrusting the protagonist and antagonist roles to accomplished stage actors, Laurence Olivier and George C Scott respectively, virtually ensures the riveting internal and external conflicts on screen that Greene imagined at the core of his critically and popularly acclaimed novel.
It is not easy to present a case for relevancy of either the film or the novel in a twenty-first century US culture that has significantly given up on Catholicism and typically castigates all priests for the horrendous sins of the predatory pedophiles in their ranks or the authorities who enabled them to destroy the innocence and beauty of so many lives.
But Greene’s work and its movie adaptation are more than up to the task, largely because they are not about that abuse, and they make us look at flawed men and priests individually and not as caricatures or stereotypes—and witness them examine their own lives as honestly as their strengths and weaknesses allow.
A NEW TAKE
My Work
My Work
My Work
July's WHAT I'M READING NOW serves to introduce and link to an Item I've written that I'd like to share
Earth
My Work
My Work
A short story about an honest man caught between two warring gang factions in Los Angeles.
His Mayan ancestry influences his strategy for survival -
in his present day or in his past.
My Work
Her Work
Her Work
The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
Her Work
The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
Ms. Allende entices us to witness the birth, growth and passing of four generations of a fictional family, grounded in her personal experience. I say “passing” because the spirits, of those who have gone before, continue to be present to the spiritually gifted members of the family. These girls and women have developed their gifts—what some feel the need to label paranormal or psychic—and nurture them in their daughters and grand-daughters. They have a heightened awareness of family members whose lives are in peril, and they can sense and communicate with those whose spirits have transitioned, in death, to some further existence.
This ambivalence of life and death creates an ambience that is at once haunting and redemptive. It is the source of the atmosphere of the novel that transforms the limits of the every-day to a realm that is timeless and limitless. It is the aura that sanctifies a space or room, such as the basement of the “house on the corner.” It is the catalyst that reveals the essence of an object or its significance in a moment, such as the hide of a beloved pet dog rendered taxidermically into a rug.
Ms. Allende moves her story, her characters, and we readers seamlessly within these realms of existence in a fully credible experience. This genre of art—applied also to painting as well as writing—is often identified as “magical realism.” Over time, art and literature criticism detail characteristics of such creations. But I find it’s important for me to be mindful of a version of the “chicken-or-the-egg motif.” These artists and writers move creatively to fashion their work as a faithful representation of their vision, of what they have to say, of how they feel. Critics observe patterns or similar pathways of expression and categorize them for understanding and appreciation; to bear witness to relationships of comparison or contrast to other creators or schools or movements in art and literature. I think it unlikely that, even when influenced by another creator, that the best artists and writers are checking off boxes to make sure elements of those patterns are included in a particular book or on a specific canvas; unless as an intentional homage or dedication.
The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
For her own part, Ms. Allende says this about it, in the end matter of the version of the book I e-read,
“I believe the world is a very mysterious place. The fact that we cannot explain something doesn’t mean that it is impossible. In my life there is space for the unknown. I believe there are many dimensions of reality and, as my grandmother would say, we are surrounded by presences. This possibility enriches my life and my writing. Magic realism is present in most literature all over the world, not just in Latin America. Think of Toni Morrison, for example.”
All this magical quality notwithstanding, there still is the realism it exists within that Ms. Allende crafts so marvelously. As she herself says in the same interview, “Although Chile is never mentioned by name in the novel, any attentive reader can guess where the action takes place.” The historical backdrop of politics and governance is a fabric throughout the book. As Patron Trueba would identify, the social strata of rich and poor, the enfranchised and disenfranchised, the Spanish and Indian all influence the personalities and their deeds (aka characters and plot) that move the story of The House of the Spirits forward, whether in the urban capital or out on the rural hacienda of Las Tres Marias.
There are many internet-based sources to investigate to review the plot and characters. Repeating or summarizing their observations here serves no purpose. I do hope you can treat yourself to meet them page-by-page (or screen-by-screen) if possible. Later, you can go back to get things refreshed or organize the players in the piece, or do it as you go along if you need to, in order to keep apace.
© 1982
The version of the book I read for this month was the
©2015 Atria Paperback New York (on KindleTM) translated from Spanish by Magda Bogin
Film Version
Media Transfer - Print to Film
Watching The House of the Spirits film As I had hoped would be possible this month, just an hour after I finished reading The House of the Spirits I watched the 1993 movie “based on” the book. It was very early in the morning, until about one a.m. Before I watched, I recalled seeing the movie when it was first released in theaters. I had a few images still in my mind—especially the “long shots” of the main house of Las Tres Marias. I watched this June on Pluto TV and presume the version I saw was not edited.
The film does not serve the book well. Selecting highlights of the book and editing them into a new presentation is unsatisfying. It is like taking the train from the capital to the hacienda, and only seeing the stations where the train stopped and not the intervening countryside. Most tellingly, the film seems not to know how to deal emotionally with the entire sensation of the spirits and their centrality to the main characters. Many scenes and “set pieces” are crafted without a production value to mirror the atmosphere of the book, such as the mansion’s basement that is so critical to the story and its characters.
The film’s time constraints collapse the book’s denouement and disembowel the entire adult life of the last Trueba, Alba, and her relationship with her aging grandfather, Estaban. Ironically, this necessitates a narrator identity shift more upsetting than the earthquake featured in both the paper and celluloid versions of the story.
These observations and comments are not made to fault the film, or the actors, or the director—but only to bear witness to the novel’s brilliance and what media transference omits only at its peril.
Relative to the transference from one media to another, I think it is essential to be mindful of how filmmaking has changed over the intervening thirty years. It is also not lost on me that consumption of content has altered the development of that content in the last decade, especially allowing for CoVid-related appetites for home viewing.
So, when I saw a 2021 entry in Wikipedia that Eva Longoria may star in a Hulu-2018-announced television series adaptation of the novel, I was quite intrigued. Hopefully current day methods and format length will give a 21st century media vehicle the space it needs to serve Ms. Allende’s novel’s vision more suitably.
A new take
My Work
Windows on the World
A Cook's Tale
June's WHAT I'M READING NOW
serves to introduce and link to items
I've written and I'd like to share.
A Cook's Tale
Windows on the World
A Cook's Tale
Long ago my undergraduate Chaucer course paper was written in Middle English. It was a completion of The Cook's Tale. The current short story is built around that assignment.
Windows on the World
Windows on the World
Windows on the World
The short story portion of Under Vesuvius is all about making stained glass in medieval times.
Their Work
The Glassblower of Murano by Marina Fiorato
Windows on the World
The Good Wife of Bath by Karen Brooks
The Glassblower of Murano by Marina Fiorato
The Glassblower of Murano by Marina Fiorato
Tasmanian author Karen Brooks has created a world worthy of Chaucer.
Historical fiction is difficult enough to write—being faithful to a whole body of knowledge of customs, time, place, and personalities. And Dr. Brooks has certainly done that exquisitely. But to take a famous fictional historical character and embody her with an entire lifetime is a stupendous feat of imagination, matched only by Dr. Brooks’ expertise at her craft. Not only that, as if it weren’t enough; but all the while Dr. Brooks stays true to the glimpses of that character’s first life imparted in the verses of Mr. Chaucer.
Brooks’ Wife (Alyson/Eleanor) turns out to be a lifelong friend and distant cousin of Chaucer himself. In The Good Wife of Bath, as in real life, Chaucer passes away before being able to finish his entire Canterbury Tales, as envisioned. I was curious about and motivated to read this novel because I had tried my hand at chest compressions and exhaling some additional breath into a so-called “unfinished” chaucerian tale during my college studies. Mine took the form of completing "The Cook’s Tale" in Middle English for a Chaucer course. It was nowhere as ambitious as Dr. Brooks’ wonderful book. I later fashioned it into the centerpiece of a short story by the same name, which is introduced this month elsewhere on this website, in a newly edited story, "A Cook's Tale."
Brooks’ The Good Wife of Bath smoothly integrates the practice of making pilgrimages in the fourteenth century. In another writer’s hand, the Wife’s reporting on her journeys in letters back to Geoffrey would be a clever literary device. But in Dr. Brooks’ novel their correspondence is soundly organic, solidifying for the reader the depth of their friendship and faithfully portraying that form of communication in their era. The same is true of how unobtrusively and systemically we readers are made aware of contemporary household customs, food and drink, and daily struggles for what sometimes seems the luxury of personal integrity or the harsh necessities of mere survival. And in the spirit of major and minor characters in the medieval poet’s verse, this modern-day novel is replete with personalities whose various levels of intensity and presence impact and help shape the life of Brooks’ Wife, and she theirs. Whether quickly cameoed, multiply recurring, or constantly in view—all have memorable personalities because the novelist is so skilled at drawing them in multi-sensory portraits.
(c) 2022 William Morrow / Harper Collins - USA (c) 2021 Harlequin - Australia
AND THEN SOME ...
You can certainly benefit from first taking an hour and reading Chaucer’s "The Wife of Bath’s Tale" and its "Prologue," though it isn’t essential before reading Brooks’ novel. But you’ll most definitely want to treat yourself to both—and to the "General Prologue" to the Tales—after enjoying the novel. Dr. Brooks suggests you choose the translation from the Middle English fashioned by Neville Coghill.
If you’re really interested in a little treat, you can search the internet for readings from The Canterbury Tales. Some recordings purport to be read in Middle English. But contrasting versions demonstrate the lack of full academic agreement on which source to read and what pronunciations are preferred.
On Vimeo, Murray McGillivray has several videos to help with pronunciation and reading Middle English.
But I found another presentation that became my favorite this Springtime preparing this June website installment. For a hugely engaging and relaxed academic activity, I’d recommend finding Professor David Crystal on the internet. His June 18, 2020 presentation is terrific. He’s in his study in Wales—academia in a pandemic—traveling the journey of Old, Middle and Modern English. From Beowulf through Chaucer to Shakespeare—emphasizing Chaucer. He uses the Middle English text edited by F. N. Robinson. (That’s the one I used as a college student). Crystal values the same Middle English glossary at the back of the volume I found so helpful in completing "A Cook’s Tale." (At the time, I was unable to find an ME grammar to help with declensions and conjugations).
Other versions of Chaucer read aloud on the internet do not try to reflect the Middle English, but rather a translation from centuries later than the original.
For fun, look for Scott Howard reading the Neville Coghill translation. Howard acts out the voices and adds commentary. His narration sounds very much like I imagine Chaucer had in mind as he picked his words and meters. I can imagine rowdy Tabard patrons being regaled—elbowing each other’s laughing ribs and spilling wine out of mazers they’re banging down in hilarity on wooden tables. For a small taste of hearing a pilgrim’s story, try "The Cook’s Tale," as it is short and not completed.
Then I invite you to find my completion entwined within a short story by the same name on this website. If that whets your appetite, and you have read the novel, take a pilgrimage on the web to discover yourself listening to "The Wife of Bath’s Tale" in Middle English. Her tale is easier to find than that of the cook. Enjoy. `
The Glassblower of Murano by Marina Fiorato
The Glassblower of Murano by Marina Fiorato
The Glassblower of Murano by Marina Fiorato
At first, I found this one hard going. It helped me to make a chart of the characters through time and their relationships and alternate names, almost a dramatis personae listing.
As some of the books I’ve read in earlier months, such as February’s The Lost Diary of Venice, this story parallels contemporary characters and those from the past in an intertwined tale.
Personally, I am more intrigued when a historical novel delves into real historical figures as DeRoux did in Diary, not fictional composites of persons left unnamed and unattributed as Fiorato does in this work. This personal preference is not a critique of this author, nor or her book. For some reason I also found the contemporary characters from DeRoux’s imagination more appealing than Fiorato’s Leonora and Alessandro. Again, a personal preference unassigned to anything specific in Glassblower, it’s writing style or vision.
My principal reason for selecting this book had to do with seeing its treatment of the art of glassblowing. In my story of the monks who made the windows of the chapel in their central Italian forest further south than Venice, I focused on the mining and chemistry of the elements for glassmaking for stained glass windows. My toxic was lead, whereas Fiorato rightfully reflected on the mercury used in mirror backings.
I was interested in seeing how another author captured glassblowing on Murano a century later than my story’s setting. As a short story I needed to create composite fictional characters to develop and only reference actual historical figures of the time. I was looking forward, as I found in DeRoux, how much more room a full-fledged novel would give to develop historical personages.
I found this was simply not a goal of Ms. Fiorato’s with this book.
I do look forward to seeing if she does such an exposition in her other related novels involving Botticelli, the Medicis, and historical Venetian powerbrokers.
© 2008 St Martin’s Griffin / 2007 Beautiful Books