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Daniel Silliman
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| 27.7.02 |
The double murder of one movie: Gosford Park
I watched the movie last night, having missed it in the theaters and not given the film any attention until friends began to recommend it. After watching it I think the movie could have been good, but was ruined. Twice, actually.
In an interesting turn of events the movie, like the old man murdered in the film, took it more than once.
MOVIE DEATH 1: Too many people, not enough time. We know everyone it seems, without knowing anyone well. The film begins by giving us a good look at the relationship between classes, between types of people, among a community of individuals thrown together. The movie opens as a giant fascinating sociological education.
Then the thing refuses to focus. The film either needed to be a lot longer, or to focus—to give us something firm instead of throwing us into the depths and only giving us an hour or so to sort everything out.
MOVIE DEATH 2: A rich English home in the 1920s during a party, why this must be a murder mystery! The movie even played with this cliché they embraced, having the Hollywood movie director unknowingly narrate the film why talking about a murder mystery set in the rich English country side while a murder took place around him. This movie was too interesting for a murder. The first portion of the movie was not heading toward a murder but, as I said, a giant sociological lesson. Then the thing, forced to pick something and narrow, picks murder and drop sociology almost entirely.
We don’t even receive a picture of hatred leading to murder, a picture of an old man with enemies, a picture about the end of an old man’s wretched life. The interesting story fades away and we are left with a cheap story form another era. We needed more than a murder and almost got it. Who changed their mind half way through this picture and decided they needed a good killing to go with their English country house?
ATTEMPTED DEATHS:
A few questions about the movie:
Isn't it standard contract between film makers and viewers that a mystery will have all the clues embedded in the story before the conclusion? This one--unluess I was exceedingly dense--didn't. It felt damningly like deus ex machinia?
Why did the second actor pretend to be a valet (much less an experienced one from Scotland) and then change in the middle of the week? And why should I care? What does this do the story?
Would a rich English home afflicted with all known snobberies host a Jewish Hollywood producer in their home? Wasn’t there pretty standard anti-Semitism at that time?
Why did the girl—one of the few characters we actually care about—discover the murder when few others did? Wouldn’t some of the more experienced servants with this vast knowledge of the people invoilved have figured it out? Stylistically, it was important she unravel the story, for she was the only one we were following closely. But really was she the one who would have discovered this?
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I have seen the sun and it is shining
The New York Sun is now online and will be added to my newspaper links. May it prosper.
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Hunting Osama for Money
Mercenaries are flooding Afghanistan, looking to gain the monetary rewards for the death of Osama bin Laden and other Islamic terrorists.
They plan to behead him when the find him and turn his head over to the U.S. in exchange for the reward.
And the terrorists hiding in holes in Afghanistan thought they knew about terror.
Let the Rambos and the warriors-for-hire use their Vietnam, Cold War, Nicaragua (and everywhere else) experience to whack this clown. I'm waiting for the head in the mail.
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| 26.7.02 |
A Medium Without Deadlines
One of the real flaws to blogging, as opposed to reporting, may be the lack of deadlines.
Deadlines add pressure. They force the words onto the page. They separate the writers from the hacks.
How long, really, can blogging survive without deadlines?
To wit:
My post on Christians and Art is still coming. It will focus on the need to engage the culture.
A post or article on physics is still coming. Probably when I return to school on August 22.
I am planning an article—hopefully to be published on some respectable site—on the importance of Creeds in worship.
Also, in honor of College Journalists everywhere, I procrastinated this evening and wrote none of the above, instead working with the layout of my sister’s blog.
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Inspired to Insomnia and Drunk on Prose
The as yet blogless Elliot Wild, college friend and fellow journalist, writes in response to my celebration of the typewriter:
“Dan, I enjoyed your piece on the typewriter, and must admit I’ve felt the same way about the whole thing. I wish I could be like Hemingway, hurriedly pounding out a cable while flicking the ashes of my cigarette out of the window.
“I recognized, not only in the prose of the piece, but also in the time you submitted it (3:22 a.m.), a kindred spirit. My personal belief is that no great work with any real soul to it can be created before one in the morning. A man would have great difficulty writing that piece at 11 p.m., when he is sober and generally more stoic.”
Well, if I can’t be Hemingway with my fingers pounding typewriter keys, at least I can still write all night.
Eating a tomato sandwich and watching the sky turn blue at 5 a.m., when the local paper is thrown on the driveway, after a night of writing and blogging and reading, is certainly a glory of the 20-year-old student and writer.
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From the Legion of Leeches
"Some people take to numbers; some are professional atheletes. I excel at standing outside a police station in 14 degree weather, yelling, “Why did you do it?” to some rapist. That’s what I do."
Timothy McDarrah, in My First Year as a Journalist: Real-World Stories from America’s Newspaper and Magazine Journalists. Edited by Dianne Selditch.
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| 25.7.02 |
The Passing of a Good Man
Chaim Potok, author of The Chosen, died Tuesday at age 73.
He was a good writer. His first book, The Chosen, was influential in my life.
I will mourn this man's death.
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Lesson: Some people get mad at the mention of the name Picasso.
Not that I ever learn anything.
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Dubya: The Man with a Slogan
The Boston Daily Globe analyses Bush’s sloganeering.
Personally, I have mixed feelings. I understand why the administration is running these posters—it’s all about staying on message. Every other president did this too, in there own way.
For Bush, he isn’t the most adept rhetorician and could get off track. And then Reporter’s don’t want the message they want the story, so they are never guiding the President to his words to the American people. This is a way to be certain the message shows up in American homes.
So I understand it, I just don’t know if it’s working. It looks kinda dumb up there and kinda corny and kinda sloppy.
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| 23.7.02 |
Blogging live from the Seattle Art Museum, all I can say is that art is cool and Picasso was sometimes strange--though I like him and he was still cool.
More to come on the subject of Christians and Art, hopefully later tonight.
Go visit your nearest art museum. Now!
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| 22.7.02 |
The Typewriter:
A personal celebration of a machine
Clacketyclacketycklackety(ding)THUNKzzzzzzzzzzzeeeeeerrrrrrrttt—clacketyclackcklackclacketyclacketyclacketyclac…….
The newsroom is a quieter place today, but it has also lost some poetry, some soul.
The Typewriter is gone…
It sounded like machinegun fire. It sounded like an early automobile where you could still hear the individual pistons striking. It sounded like reporting.
All the President’s Men, the movie that inspired a generation to become reporters, opens and closes with the slamming keys of the typewriter typing out the story of the Watergate break-in and the Nixon cover-up. Large and black on the screen you see the letters driving into the ribbon and leaving their mark on the page—those letters with the expanding serifs and all the unique strangeness and weird “a”s and “g”s of typewriter typography.
It looked like reporting and it sounded like reporting. It was the poetry of the reporter. The typewriter was romantic.
The greatest event of modernity was, quite arguably, the development of the printing press. The typewriter put that invention into the hands of the composer. It marked a change in writing, a point where the look of the printer pages reflected the form in the mind of the writer. This is evident in the work of Ezra Pound—the first poet of any significance to write with a typewriter—in his compositional forms. The typewriter allowed the writer (what was it? 400 years later?) to work in the universal hand of the typewriter keys and to bring artistry to the form of his page in ways that hadn’t existed since monks wrote manuscripts.
I am a young reporter, a knight of the keyboard. I write on the personal computer all day and know of no other way to compose. I patch together my paragraphs and reword my sentences and spell check and do it all to the blinking beat of the electronic cursor. I couldn’t write on a typewriter, I know that and am thankful for the computer in every form I use it.
But the typewriter—what a contraption of ink and steel!
There’s a machine for a man’s fingers!
The computer keyboard makes little noise, almost white noise. The sound of man typing has lost the force it once had, the ink it once had, the explosion it once had. It is as if the newsroom has left the blue-collar world of press-passes jammed in hats hatbands and become civilized, white collar.
That thing didn’t blink away……..it exploded.
bam! BANG! badda-BOOM!
There’s some copy to read.
I don’t believe copy has changed because of technology, really. But looking at the force of the machine under our fingertips and the inky words in the morning newsprint, maybe we’ve lost something.
It had force. It had power. It had class. It had romance. It had poetry. It had soul.
We live in a better world, aesthetically, because of the typewriter.
Let men everywhere celebrate the advent of the typewriter. Let writers everywhere stop, pause for a moment at their glowing monitors and blinking cursors and hushed keyboards and remember that glorious machine.
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A Random Paragraph to Show the Style and Prove the Brilliance of Tom Wolfe:
"Out in the middle of the field of computer terminals, he stopped and, with with an air of professional scrutiny, picked up a copy of the second edition, which had just been brought upstairs. Below the logo--The City Light--the front page consisted of enormous capital letters running down the right side--
SCALP
GRANDMA,
THEN
ROB HER
--and a photograph running down the left.
[...]
Had he been feeling better Fallow would have paid a silent tribute to the extrordinary esthetique de l'abattoir that enabled these shameless devils, his employers, his compatriots, his fellow Englishmen, his fellow progeny of Shakespeare and Milton, to come up with things like this day after day. Just think of the fine sense of gutter syntax that inspired them to create a headline that was all verbs and objects, with the subject missing, the better to make you claw your way inside these smeary black pages to find out what children of evil were fiendish enough to complete the sentence! Just think of the maggot's perspreserverance that enabled
some reporter to invade chez Perez and extract a picture of Granny that made you feel the bloody act in your fingertis--in your very shoulder joints! Just think of the anticlimax of "saclp Grandma"..."then rob her." The pointless brilliant anticlimax! Christ, if they'd had more room, they would have added, "then leave all the lights on in her kitchen."
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Tom Wolfe and His Punctuation
I hate exclamation points!
At least I did. They are false sensationalism. They are crutches for people who want to endue sentences with excitement they can’t write.
And then I met Tom Wolfe.
Wolfe was a progressive artist (as all great artists are) and, as such, revisited stylistic questions that lesser writers had settled, such as the exclamation point.
When someone doesn’t like the artistry of Wolfe, they will mention the exclamation points.
Wolfe overturns other punctuation standards, like the colon. Sometimes he uses it like the ellipses points, dots in a row.
Like this: ": : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : :"
I don’t think punctuation is an a priori thing, which is why this seems problematic. We have to learn that italics mean accentuation, ellipses denote a fading out or a gap, and etc. So when you read this the question is, to sound like a lefty Professor in a Creative Writing class, how does that make me feel?
Then I have to figure out what it was supposed to make me feel and what it made Tom Wolfe feel and what it made everyone feel. The natural answer at this point is “confused,” which is the problem with this aspect of Wolfe’s progressivism and is a reason why you find this in his middle work (after he was established and could experiment more and not base everything on that experimentation) and not in his later work (I assume he realized the problem and dropped some of the more crazy and confusing styles).
This is not to depict Wolfe’s punctuation as crazy experiments that wandered and died of thirst. The colon was one experiment. Wolfe spans more than punctuation and certainly more than his failed experiments.
So now I am returning to the box where my punctuations rattle around. Today a good writer must live up to Tom Wolfe, the greatest writer of his generation and the pinnacle (I believe) of modern novelists. And Wolfe used those punctuations, the exclamation point—SHIFT 1—the ellipses and the slashes and the dots growing in rows like Nebraska cornfields and all the other punctuation we’ve not understood how to use.
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Note the expanded typography post below.
Due to further interest and study I was driven to return to this paper and expand both my study and this post.
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The Writer and the Technology
“Great writing has nothing to do with the fact that it's pounded into an Underwood #20 or carved into a stone tablet,” Anil Dash said in an argument about blogging, the short history of blogging and peoples hurt feelings.
Which is why a writer will always have a job, despite any technological developments.
This is important, at least ot me. I just wrote 80 column inches for the Sunday edition of our local newspaper. My favorite page is entirely my content and has a story about a woman charged with gun trafficking next to one about the Klallam tribe blessing a freshly carved 42-foot canoe with a photo I shot of a man and two boys ringing bells in the Shaker part of the ceremony.
I enjoy the weirdness of that page—in the stories and in the juxtaposition—and the technology didn’t really matter. It changed the process and it changed the a lot of technical things about the deliveyr but the content was, as always, dependant on the reporter.
For the technical record I used a ballpoint on a stenographers pad for notes, wrote the story on an IBM computer from the mid 1990s, took photographs with a 35 mm camera with a zoom lens and the stories was printed on A4 on broadsheet and received a circulation of a few more than 30,000.
Technology is nice but, finally, doesn't matter. You can tell because all newspapers, including the best, are behind in their technology.
Still, the Underwood #20 has to hold a special cool place in the history of writers technology. You have to admit that.
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