Most young dealers of the Silicon Chip Era regard a reference library as merely a waste of space. Old Timers on the West Coast seem to retain a fondness for reference books that goes beyond the practical. Everything there is to know about a given volume may be only a click away, but there are still a few of us who'd rather have the book than the click. A bookman's love of books is a love of books, not merely of the information in them. —Larry McMurtry
Larry McMurtry (1936–2021) stepped on a rainbow on March 25. McMurtry was a fine writer, a favorite well before Lonesome Dove became a miniseries. He first slipped onto my radar in college when a friend recommended All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers. I found it passable at the time. A decade or two later I was more taken with it. By that time I had read McMurtry's first three novels, Horseman, Pass By (1961), made into the film Hud with Paul Newman, Leaving Cheyenne (1963), made into the film Lovin' Molly, and The Last Picture Show (1966), made into a film with a young Cybill Shepherd and Jeff Bridges long before he was The Dude. A pretty impressive start to a distinguished career.
McMurtry wrote or co-authored more than thirty novels, a number of nonfiction works of history, memoirs, and essays, and a boatload of screenplays and television scripts, including the screenplay for Brokeback Mountain, co-authored with longtime collaborator Diana Ossana. And he owned a bookstore, Booked Up, in Archer City, Texas. As might be expected from so prolific a writer, he penned a clunker here and there. I seem to have repressed memory of the clunker titles, but I know I read one or two. At his best he was a gifted storyteller, a raconteur of the first order, who gave us a memorable array of strong characters, female and male, of diverse backgrounds and heritages, about whom a reader could care deeply.
In an essay in the collection In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas, he writes about the fashionable nostalgia for small town and rural life that ignores how stultifying and suffocating that environment can be, saying that there were times growing up in a small Texas town when he would gladly have traded every beautiful sunset in the world for a single good book to read. In another essay he remarks that in isolated rural environs with little opportunity for social life sexual relationships with livestock are not as uncommon as we might suppose.
Somewhere else, an interview maybe, he speaks of teaching creative writing when he was getting started as young novelist. He felt the only advice he had to offer his writing students was to turn them on to some good books to read. McMurtry himself was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University's creative writing program where he rubbed shoulders with Ken Kesey and Wendell Berry and may have known Robert Stone. According to Stone's biographer Madison Smartt Bell, McMurtry had been a fellow the year before Stone and was still living in the area. An impressive bunch.
Jean-Luc Godard's 1983 film Prénom Carmen (First Name: Carmen) is a playful, subversive little romp, slight, an amusing diversion for part of an afternoon. It opens with Carmen arranging to use her uncle's beach house for a documentary film she and her friends want to make. The uncle is Jean-Luc Godard, a famous filmmaker who is washed up. Uncle Jean lives in a hospital where he is checked in as Mr. Jeannot. The doctors threaten to throw him out if he cannot at least run a fever. On a typewriter beside his bed he writes down his ideas, as much as two words on a good day.
Carmen and her friends rob a bank to finance their film project. The heist turns into a wild shootout filmed in highly stylized manner. People fire away at point-blank range. Cartoon violence. Corpses everywhere. A cleaning woman methodically maneuvers her bucket around the bodies as she mops up cartoon blood. Joseph the bank guard falls in love with Carmen as the two of them roll about on the floor wrestling for his gun. The amour may be somewhat mutual.
It turns out that the film is a front for a plot to kidnap a wealthy industrialist or maybe his daughter at a nearby casino where he likes to gamble. Joseph is left on the outside looking in when Carmen's accomplice won't take him into the gang because he does not have a college education. Numerous scenes feature Joseph and Carmen gratuitously naked at the beach house and assorted hotel rooms. There is a bizarre shower sex scene.
Godard flits in and out accompanied by his nurse who takes notes when an idea comes to him. He quotes Mao and misquotes Rilke. At times it appears that he is shooting a film. The final shot indicates that Prénom Carmen is intended to be something of an homage to small movies. Ah, they don't make films like this anymore.
Here are two brief clips that give a taste:
Mes provinciales (2018) is about a young man who leaves his girlfriend and his parents in Lyon to study film in Paris. There he experiences romance, loss, betrayal, and friendship with other young people who share his passion for filmmaking. This one hit all the right notes for me. I was transported.
How sweet it would be to walk out of a theater drunk with beauty, stroll to a nearby café, coffee, a companion.
Quick takes:
- Derrick Chauvin trial. I have seen nothing in the opening days to lead me to doubt he is guilty of at least one of the charges against him.
- Filibuster. Defenders of the filibuster argue that it protects the rights of the minority and promotes bipartisanship. Balderdash. When is the last time it really went that way on anything major? The filibuster's requirement for a supermajority in order to take up legislation makes it a tool for minority rule. James Madison, for one, was a firm opponent of such requirements: "To establish a positive and permanent rule giving such a power, to such a minority, over such a majority would overturn the first principle of free government, and in practice necessarily overturn the government itself." (quoted by Michael Tomasky, Can the Senate Restore Majority Rule, The New York Review of Books, April 8, 2021)
- Voting. The only thing new about the current Republican assault on voting rights is the sheer brazenness of it. "Democrats flipped a swing state, and the Republican Party in that state has responded by enacting a law designed to make it harder for Democratic-leaning voters to cast ballots and have them counted" (Perry Bacon Jr, Why Georgia's New Voting Law Is Such a Big Deal, FiveThirtyEight, March 28, 2021)
One new blog post: A Spirit of Inquisition where I take up what I have come to think of as the puritan left. Glenn Loury and John McWhorter touch on related themes in a discussion of critical race theory during a February 2 episode of The Glenn Show (Critical race theory's rising hegemony), which I came across after publishing my essay. Sometimes they rant. On the whole it is a good discussion with which I am in substantive agreement on many points.
Keep the faith.
yr obdt svt
Pictured below: afternoon wandering took me past this scene from a SE Portland neighborhood a few blocks west of Mt. Tabor
