Anniversaire

Here are twenty three things that happened while I was twenty three:

1) I broke up a fight involving scissors.

2) I saw the film version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and then recapped the film, the novel, and my entire senior thesis for my confused viewing companions.

3) It took me two and a half hours to drive home from work in the only serious snow of the winter.

4) Cousin The Street came to visit and we rediscovered the fact that we operate at exactly the same pace.

5) I saw a bunch of plays at the Steppenwolf. After one of them, I carried on a multi-layered text message conversation with friends back home that left me feeling as if I had been right there with them.

6) After getting up at 5:00 AM to take the GRE, driving to Aurora to meet up with friends, following them to Batavia to watch The Hunger Games on the big, big screen, and finally carpooling to a pub in Geneva, I stole my first beer glass, finally coming into my genetic inheritance.

7) I met Sir U von L when Subcontinent came to visit Chicago and the three of us took an architecture tour on a green river.

8) With three months left in my fellowship, I was asked to apply for a job at the Center. My first reaction was a resounding, "I'm outta here." Upon reflection, I upgraded that response to, "Hey, why not." Later, I was happy and excited to accept.

9) I decided to renew my lease.

10) I went to visit Subcontinent in New York and ate and walked my way across Manhattan.

11) I went to visit Roommate J in Baltimore. We can still live harmoniously in a very small space. This bodes well for our marriage at age 65.

12) I made profiteroles in honor of my mother and drank bourbon in memory of my grandfather.

13) I explained to my parents what a BAMF was. We all took comfort in Martin Freeman's wise words.

14) My parents moved away from my childhood home and I was so good at making the best of a painful situation that I am still patting myself on the back.

15) I broke down cardboard boxes and broke out in mysterious rashes in a 108 degree Kansas July.

16) I channeled a year of a despised job and beloved students and coworkers into my art and started writing again.

17) I went on a quest for the best pain au chocolat in Chicago.

18) I recorded classic family stories with StoryCorps.

19) I started volunteering with Big Brothers Big Sisters and recognized that I'll probably have to get back on the Spanish-learning wagon sooner rather than later.

20) I voted in Chicago--once--and celebrated until the early hours. I called my dad the Marylander and we got excited about progress.

21) I took a storytelling class and decided it was time to stop self-censoring and fly free.

22) I travelled to Ann Arbor. I tagged along to vegan restaurants. I listened as my history as a writer was recounted to third parties. I realized that, as self evident as it is, my friends care about me as much as I care about them.

23) I read Cloud Atlas, and got excited to do it all over again.

Now, a day into 24:
1) I'm doing it right.

Merci à tous!

my coworkers who saw straight through me; the unexpected and welcome return of Friday night pizza, albeit in a slightly different form; David Mitchell; those kids who brought my writing back; the University of Kansas; escape to Colorado; Marylanders; Subcontinent, and my introduction to Sir U von L; StoryCorps, for planting the performance seed; Detective Sergeant Hathaway; voters; The Four Feathers; all the girls who worked with me on the play at the Center, whose deep-thinking ways really lightened my load; Lake Shore Drive, for providing the perfect backdrop to cathartic music blaring, sightseeing, and (once, memorably) hysterical breaking down; ZooLights at the Lincoln Park Zoo; Owen & Engine; "It is what it is."; a hard-won East Coast trip; Skype; "I feel like a character in an after-school special" and unexpected safety everywhere I went; "Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?"; those people I keep mentioning here; those characters I keep mentioning here; family and friends for whom distance and time is no barrier; Iowa City; Peppermint Joe Joe's; tea; introspection, supervised and unsupervised; growing up; my version of adulthood; BAMFs

Would(n't) Rather be Music

December 18th, 2011. A red letter day. One of many days when it became obvious that sometimes the answers lie outside yourself. My dad, on that day, on any writing I might do on the film I had just seen: "You have to get it into your soul first." The film was Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, whose many other versions were already firmly embedded. He knows how I work.

To no one's surprise, I am still obsessed with Cloud Atlas. It definitely got in my soul, and it didn't even take repeat readings (pending, but first I have to read the entire oeuvre of David Mitchell), or repeat viewings (accomplished). All it took was one good go-through and, if I'm honest, listening to the Lion King orchestral suite on repeat. Everything else was just reinforcement.

It's not a new concept for me, and it wasn't in December 2011 either. What Dad did was articulate a lifelong manner of relating to material--fiction, film, social causes, anything--that had me drawing "dream pictures" of my favorite Wolves Chronicles characters at age ten, taping them to my wall in my bedroom in Paris, and lulling myself to sleep with a heady mixture of art contemplation and a Zouk soundtrack gently emitting from my old boom box.

It worked, too. I had more dreams that year of interacting with fictional characters than I had ever had before or have had since.

On the other hand, there were the visions of Lewis & Clark west of the Mississippi, the quest for Musketeer leavings in the Loire valley, the prowling after spies in London, the discovery of political theater courtesy of my first and best loved social justice obsession.

There was the time I read Anthony Blunt's memoir. There was the time my parents and I went to the gay pride parade in Paris. There was time I wrote to Joan Aiken and she wrote back.

Those are the moments that got into my soul because something else had gotten in there first and made room. The other moments in my life that have been just as meaningful (often more powerful, more emotional), like returning from France, being backstage, graduating from high school, from college, my parents' moving away from Champaign, uproarious moments with my roommates, hot tub talks with Subcontinent, laughter with P, literary analysis with M or K, standing platonic dates with R, standing platonic dates with T (occasionally combined)...those moments hit me with significance from somewhere else. Anything arriving in or emerging from the depths of my soul comes pre-wrapped with its own significance, and I can enjoy it for what it is. Those associated moments stand out in my memory as unreservedly happy.

Yes, there is only room for so much in there. There were songs I listened to last year, driving to and from work on tough days, or driving up and down I-57, that really hurt from way down deep. I listen to them now and they're good songs and they'll always have associations, but they don't so much match who and where I am anymore.

Cloud Atlas is humanistic, realistically optimistic, and it contains multitudes. It's not squeaky clean, (and it's not simple), but I wonder whether it could have slipped so effortlessly into my soul last year. Maybe I would have read it differently, as one of its own characters does, albeit with far less drastic results. Maybe I would have liked it fine, put it down, and forgotten about it in a few days.

Maybe it was always meant to be.

Four More Years

Here's my suggestion. Whether you're happy--I'm thrilled--with Obama's victory or not, how about you take whatever you felt most passionate about in this election and pursue it, on any level. The world could always use more voices.

The Fault (Dear Brutus)

It's something I've talked about often, implicitly or explicitly, on this blog: the debt we owe to fictional characters. Over the next few weeks, I'll be talking about it more.

-----

Last week I went to see two films at the Chicago International Film Festival. Both movies were filmed on location in prison, both movies had at least a 90% incarcerated cast, and both movies concerned the life of Julius Caesar.

There the similarities ended. String Caesar was highly experimental, raw, and not at all Shakespearean. Seated in the fourth row, I had to keep my eyes closed for the last fifteen minutes of the movie because (for the first time ever) the extreme close-ups and motions of the camera were making me ill and I knew I wanted to stay for the director's Q&A afterwards. Filmed in three prisons internationally, String Caesar draws parallels between the early life of Julius Caesar in Rome and the lives led by inmates in prisons largely ruled by gangs. Some of the more successful moments of the movie came about when the line between Rome and the prison blurred. Julius Caesar is sent to talk with a powerful general and essentially warned not to "drop the soap." In another scene, (the best, in my opinion), Caesar stands on the sole working toilet and refuses to budge, deaf to Cicero's pleas to let others have a turn.

By contrast, Caesar Must Die, an Italian Golden Bear Winner at the Berlin Film Festival, did not make me want to vomit. Nor did it leave me with as many questions. Here, rather than real life bleeding over into the script, the script (Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in Italian) bled over into real life. Sprinkled throughout Brutus and Cassius' plotting, Caesar's worries, and Mark Anthony's verbal maneuvering, there were supposedly-authentic documentary moments with the cast. These moments were highly stylized and obviously far from impromptu. They were also, quite possibly, scripted, and felt far less genuine than the camaraderie and antipathy (demanded by the script but maybe also genuine) on display in String Caesar.

Julius Caesar is a favorite for prison theater instructors. They assume, possibly quite rightly, that inmates will identify with its themes and ambiguities. I like Julius Caesar for the same reason. Indeed, it is the only Shakespeare play that I feel I enjoy of my own free will. Why? Well, for one, it's a tragedy possessed of a truly tragic hero. Welcome to a new favorite quote from a new favorite author: "Stumbling heroes linger longer." Edmund Pevensie, to whom Mitchell refers, owes a lot to Brutus, and characters like him. Brutus, like String Caesar's young Caesar, stumbles on an incredible scale and is all the more relatable and--dare I say it?--likable because of it. Of course, a tragic hero takes his or her stumbling one step further in their inability to survive said stumble.

So far, the actors in String Caesar and Caesar Must Die are doing it right, unlike another of my favorite characters, Francis Crawford of Lymond, who at one point alludes to his inability to "suffer reversals." They've survived their stumbles and may prove hardier than Brutus, more discriminating than Caesar. Each actor is benefits from the bleed between fact and fiction in that they are being granted a chance to examine their own life through the lens of another's.

Hope and the Ugly Places

I had two tabs open in my browser the other day. One was a Chicago Tribune article ennumerating overnight shootings, several of which had taken place in Englewood. The other was a Wikipedia page on H. H. Holmes, the Devil in the White City himself, who built a murder castle in Englewood where he systematically killed and disposed of his victims. I have no solid explanation for how both tabs came to be open at 2 PM on a workday. Chalk it up to my daily Tribune perusal coupled with the impending arrival of Halloween. At any rate, a stray thought flitted across my mind, soon chased away by my dominant, rational side: if anywhere on this planet is haunted, Englewood is surely haunted, and maybe the awful things one man did over a decade ago are somehow echoing across time. Stop being ridiculous, I told myself. You know what's haunting Englewood: poverty, racism, and violence.

Still, I couldn't quite shake H. H. Holmes and his horrific crimes, and as I drove home a couple days later I came up with a tentative explanation as to why. You would assume that the world's ugliness would come as less of a shock to an adult. You'd think that the unintentional information-gathering that is anyone's life would provide you with a strong enough foundation for contextualization. Maybe there are some people for whom this is true, but I'm not one of them. I think the more people I meet--complex, not 100% sympathetic people who have had more than their fair share of misfortunes--the more shocked I become that anyone, anyone, would do what Holmes did. I know a lot of imperfect people. I may even know dangerous people. I don't know anyone who would do what he did.

Intellectually, I know that anyone is capable of anything. I'm constantly being sold this message by books, movies, the news, historians, logic. Nonetheless, knowing something is very different from believing it, and the more I come to know myself, the more I come to realize that I am only shockable when one of my beliefs has been overturned or called into question. I'm not a blind optimist--there is evil in the world--but I find it hard to conceive of a world without hope, and everything about H. H. Holmes is hopeless. There are no easy fixes for Englewood, either, but I can feel a little better about a story that is still playing out.

Around the time I was sucked into the H. H. Holmes Wikipedia vortex, I started reading David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. Although it contains a handy helping of tragedy and more than its share of villains, Cloud Atlas is a humanist novel with an optimistic ending. It carries us from the Industrial Revolution (albeit without much industry) to self-inflicted ruin and back again via six loosely connected narratives occurring in different times and places but eerily echoing each other. As the New York Times put it:

[The novel's central narrative is] a postapocalyptic future on an Earth where stories of our storied civilizations past are all that remain of works and days, and then only as fragments, like those we’ve been reading. This is where the human race and its predatory nature will lead us, the novella would seem to suggest, while at the same time the novel is arguing otherwise. For that postapocalyptic fate is not the end of “Cloud Atlas,” merely its middle. The second half of the novel is the mirror image of the first, offering, in reverse order, conclusions to each of the novellas that turn out not to be unfinished but interrupted. By the time we reach the novel’s final page, we have traveled back to the journey that began in 1850, that of a man following footsteps into the unknown, a future that might lead to our end but that, just as possibly, the novel’s fluid form suggests, could lead anywhere, even to that most unlikely destination: salvation from ourselves.

 The forces at work in the novel are all-powerful and all-consuming. It seems ludicrous the one man could influence an all but inevitable trajectory. Life, as (only) one of the novels six narrators concludes, could be hopeless after all. Or...

Upon my return to San Francisco, I shall pledge myself to the Abolitionist cause, because I owe my life to a self-freed slave & because I must begin somewhere.

I hear my father-in-law's response: "[...] He who would do battle with the many-headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain & his family must pay it along with him! & only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!"

Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?

You haven't heard the last of Cloud Atlas here. For one thing, I've been suffering from book-lag, unable to get it out of my head since finishing it three days ago. For another, I can already tell that this is going to be one of those books that I reflect on throughout my life. Like Dido Twite in Joan Aiken's Wolves Chronicles, or the characters in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, or The Wire, or Tales of the City, or The History Boys, I feel that Cloud Atlas and its characters will be touchstones, and that through examining those fictional lives I will better understand my own.

At the very least, it's something to think about on a rainy day. And if a droplet is one day motivated by this book to take on a thing like Englewood, so much the better.

Feeling Your Age (And When Not To)

I just got back from the cool movie theater near my apartment, where I saw the film adaptation of The Perks of Being a Wallflower. This is a young adult novel that I read for the first time last fall at age 22. I got it out of the library in Lincoln Park and read it on the train downtown, finishing it on a riverside bench I found by chance that day. I loved it. It was worth the wait.

The bench became my go-to outdoor reading and relaxation bench; the book, although I didn't know it at the time, became one of the catalysts for the writing I'm doing now.

But forget the bench and forget my writing. The Perks of Being a Wallflower is a book many of my friends deeply connected with in their teenage years. I put off reading it because...well, the reasons have escaped me. Suffice it to say that I have never really read books at the age at which I was expected to read them.

I really, really liked the movie. Was it a Great Movie? Who knows? Who cares? This was not one of my childhood novels, so I was perhaps less invested than some. (Also, knowing the author adapted and directed the film left me with no worries about fidelity.) It left me giddy, mostly. I felt like I felt after reading the Hunger Games trilogy: like a teenager, like I was experiencing emotion like a teenager. At certain points during the movie I had contorted myself into shapes in my seat that I don't think I've found myself in since I watched Pride & Prejudice for the first time. (I was thirteen or thereabouts when I watched Pride & Prejudice for the first time.)

While I was watching the movie, I experienced two overwhelming emotions that had passed me by while reading the book: vivid, happy nostalgia and gut-churning discomfort. I really felt for Charlie, the main character, who struggles to "participate." Watching him struggle to give word to his feelings, watching him inch closer to the people he wants to befriend, watching him understand more than he can express: it all reminded me of moments in my own life--few and far between, but still present--when I feel uncomfortable and unable to connect. Those parts of the film were uncomfortable for the same reasons watching J. Edgar was so uncomfortable last year. I am far, far better off than Charlie (and light years better off than anyone in J. Edgar), but no one ever said that a character has to be overwhelmingly like you for you to identify with them, and when a film or a novel is successful and your connection with the character is strong, it can feel as if that character is forcing you to amplify your feelings to match theirs. (What is tragically hilarious about this phenomenon in the case of Charlie is that this is exactly his problem. He feels too much of what others are feeling and takes it all in, letting too little out in return.)

A beautiful this about identifying with Charlie: his high school friends. This part of the film was pure joy for me (and, if the noises the rest of the audience made were anything to go by, a sizable portion of the theater felt the same way). What a collection of crazy, imperfect people who talk over each other and know all the same stories and have all the same inside jokes. Their circumstances are very different, but they remind me of people I know very well. Watching the movie reminded me of spending time with my high school friends: how effortless it is, how when we're together it's as if we've simultaneously changed and stayed just as we were senior year. My high school was small, and leaving it made me realize which people exactly were worth keeping in touch with. Some people I could have predicted; other crept up on me. When you find a group of people like that, it's worth writing about, as Charlie discovers. It's worth writing about again and again, in different forms, in different genres, across age and time.

Charlie made me think of another boy, younger, and from a different country, in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Little Bill Roach is stuck in a boarding school whose customs he doesn't fully understand, struggling to fit in to a culture that doesn't come naturally to him. In John Le Carré's book, and in the BBC miniseries adaptation, Bill Roach is buoyed along by his friendship with Jim Prideaux, a former spy now teaching French at the school. Jim draws Bill Roach out, making him aware of his natural talents--observation and empathy--and celebrating those talents. Bill Roach feels as if he has become part of something through this friendship, and he realizes for the first time that his character traits may in fact be abilities.

I love this relationship between Bill Roach and Jim Prideaux, natural "singles" and "watchers" both, so when, last winter, I saw the (otherwise great) film adaptation of the novel, I felt let down when Jim, overwhelmed with his own problems and tiring of the ever-hovering Bill Roach, lashes out with, "Go and join the others. Just bloody join in. Go and play, damn you.” This is their final interaction.

In The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Charlie makes his own efforts to join in, but he makes it his aim to participate not because someone has told him he should, but because he knows what happiness it can bring him. His friends accept him because the  qualities that make him struggle to break away from the wall at a school dance are the same qualities that enable him to say to one of his friends, "I know who you are." Knowing that someone is watching--and watching out for--you is a powerful feeling. Charlie made the effort once, to participate, and it won him these wonderful friends. By the end of the novel, he knows he can do it again, and he can do it without trying to be someone else. It's easier to admit to your own good qualities when you surround yourself with people who can see those qualities in you, people who know that some things about you will change but that there are fixed points about you too.

Ultimately, I think what I like so much about The Perks of Being a Wallflower is that it's a celebration of all the things I like most: literature, conversation, observation, introspection, close friendships, loyalty. "Only connect," said E.M. Forster. Charlie connects, and he connects in his own way: "I know who you are." "And all the books you've read have been read by other people."