Sorkinalia

I don’t have television service, yet I watch television, sometimes a great deal of it.  How, you ask?  On Hulu and Netflix Instant Watch.  On demand, as much as I want, pretty much whatever I want, except for anything live, like sports or political speeches or news.  I watch series, and the best way to watch series, I’ve found, is serially, after the show has been scrapped, or at least the current season wrapped.  Watching episodes one right after another gives television a cinematic sweep, a continuity it loses  when you’re waiting that lonely week between eps—sometimes two weeks or more, if the networks are pulling their ratings shenanigans.

A couple of years ago, Laura and I watched every episode of The West Wing in succession.  Yes, we took breaks, and yes, it took weeks, but by the end we had a firm grasp of what was going on on the show, and a fair amount of attachment to the characters, so that we were torn between relief that the series was finally ending and sorrow that it had to end.  Shows also wear out their welcome faster, unfortunately, when you saturate your consciousness with them.

Another of Aaron Sorkin’s brainchildren, one I could have stood to watch a few more seasons of, is Sports Night.  I just finished retracing its two-season run, and I have to say I came away somewhat more attached to its characters than I had been to The West Wing‘s.  How could this be, given that TWW had the gravitas, the heavy-hitter stars, the high stakes of America’s role as leader of the free world?

Because politics sucks, and sports doesn’t.

I’m actually quite mad at Sorkin for choosing TWW over Sports Night when offers came in from other networks to continue SN after ABC cancelled it.  I think he made the wrong call.  This despite a few misgivings about what I will call the Sorkinization of television.  Here are the elements of Sorkin’s brilliant formula:

1. The dramatic focus of each episode is an event with great emotional significance for mankind in general, one that makes us feel alive, reaffirms our shared values, and instructs us to not sweat the small stuff and to be better people.
2. Everybody on the show talks with kinda the same voice.
3. The voice everybody talks with is preternaturally sharp-witted and sardonic, yet cooperative with everyone else’s so as to foster fluid, witty repartee.

The first element is not unique to Sorkin.  Everybody in television does it.  The phenomenon is more pronounced in a Sorkin joint, however, more transparently manipulative of the viewer’s emotions.  It can be effective when not noticed, and indeed the infuriating thing about Sorkinization is that, once we are numbed to its ham-handedness, we allow it to wash over us and have its effect.

The second element, the One True Voice, is not unique to Sorkin either.  Another show that debuted in 1998, Dawson’s Creek, is perhaps the ultimate monovocal (yes, pronounced muh-NAH-vo-cuhl) show of all time.  Yet with a Sorkin joint, I know whom to blame, and it’s hard to imagine that the One True Voice belongs to anyone but Sorkin himself.

Here’s the kind of repartee I’m talking about, taken from the SN pilot ep:

They’re gonna cut Santori.

The place-kicker?

He’s made eight field goal attempts in three games and has connected on a grand total of none of them.

He’s a good guy.

He can’t kick.

He is a good guy.

He can’t kick.

He’ll get picked up by another team.

No, he won’t, and you want to know why?

Why?

‘Cause he can’t kick.

Hahahahaha!  Good stuff.  And yet, when I provide the sympathetic attention Aaron Sorkin knows I’ll provide, when I imagine those lines being said by real people who really mean them, it works.

It just works.  I never said it didn’t work.  I know you thought I wouldn’t think that it works, but I’m here to tell you, it works.  Why, you ask?  Why does it work, are you asking, or why am I here to tell you it works?  I’m here to tell you it works, because it works.  And lemme tell you why it works:  It just works.

See what I’m saying?

Nobody talks like that, of course, unless they find themselves Sorkinizing their own speech.  That malady is known as sorkinosis, and I’m pretty sure no one suffered from it till the late ’90s.  But the objection that nobody talks like that can’t be used to malign Sorkin’s oeuvre, because the same could be said of much of Shakespeare.  I ask you, who goes around saying, “The quality of mercy is not strained”?

Nobody.  Nobody goes around saying that.

So, even though I hate to admit it, I find myself driven to an inescapable conclusion:  Aaron Sorkin is the greatest literary figure since William Shakespeare.

(Harold Bloom was right.  The greatest poets are the ones that force us to overhear our own speech.)

Curriculum Vito

Just watched The Godfather, Part II, having watched the first part some weeks ago.  Having been told my whole adult life what “important films” these are, I realize I’ve been sloppy in viewing them over the years.  I saw both in their entirety, long ago, but since then, I’ve been sucked into random screenings, in progress on TV.  It is true that whenever I tune in to the saga, I’m hooked and must watch the broadcast to the end.  But until tonight I had never gotten a clear impression of how the two movies fit together, of how the second part completes the first.  This failing is doubly strange, because I read Puzo’s novel before I saw either movie.  I’m coming to the conclusion that my memory just has never been very good.

This time, both installments were fresh in my mind.  As the final reel played out with Michael Corleone sitting on his Lake Tahoe piazza, thinking back on innocent times, to a birthday party for his father, Vito, at which he would announce his enlistment in the Marines, I saw in the ghostly figures of his siblings the conundrum of the whole epic:  One can hold the family to be all, only at the cost of the family.  Everyone in the flashback, with the exception of Connie and Tom Hagen, has been brutally murdered.  Several of them have been killed on orders from Michael himself.

One analysis I read made a lot of the American-ness of the story.  Old-world family bonds get turned to poison by capitalism, said the critic, who also pointed out that Francis Ford Coppola himself had embraced the metaphor of Michael as America.  To my mind, that reading is unnecessarily narrow, pace Mr. Coppola, since the cycle of family business, competition, and vendetta that Vito Corleone carries into the New World had been going on for eons in Mother Sicily.

Isn’t a larger theme (not the only one, by any means) the toxicity of tribalism in all its forms?  Political, which is to say power-seeking, institutions ranging from Vito’s nuclear family to the cosa nostra to the governments of Cuba and the United States breed a self-destructive blindness in which loyalty becomes paranoia.  Michael reminds Frank Pentangeli of Vito’s dictum to keep one’s friends close and one’s enemies closer.  By this time, we must remember, Michael has left behind every trace of the idealistic young man who once defied the plans his father had for him.  In his skewed vision as the hardened capo after his father’s heart, those closest to him, his own family members, must by definition be his enemies.  And, to quote The Shining’s Jack Torrance, “They must be severely chastised.”

The paradox of tribal loyalty is in this way made explicit regarding the Corleone family, but it is left implicit for broader social and political contexts.  There are hints.  After the flashback in which the landlord bumbles back to visit the burgeoning Don Vito, scared witless and falling over himself, Charlie Chaplin-fashion, to apologize for his earlier arrogance, the very next scene features a similarly obsequious, if slicker, Nevada senator paying lip service to the Corleones and to Italian Americans, whom he has formerly reviled as loathesome and un-American to Michael’s face.  The sequence suggests that Americans who see the melting-pot as having congealed into a bona fide nation come to view America as “their thing,” and to see outsiders (Italians, if you’re a WASP; Sicilian tenants, if you’re a Calabrese landlord) as unclean interlopers.

Cutting across these levels of filial piety is the power of individual fear and greed, which divide mankind into two types:  the coward, who forsakes his loyalty for profit or to save his own skin, and the soldier, who follows his chosen code to the bitter end.  Frankie Pentangeli has turned coat against the Corleones, but he falls on his own sword to protect the Pentangelis back in Sicily.  Michael is ostensibly protecting Corleone business interests, but this pragmatic program gets mixed up with the metaphysical sanctity of the family, which he dutifully tries to preserve by exterminating anyone he considers an enemy.  Michael’s sanitizing compulsion destroys even Fredo, who practically speaking cannot be considered a serious threat—Fredo, the pure fool, who alone among the Corleone brothers has (correctly) defied his father’s authority to the end.

Equally troubling for me was the treatment of women in both movies.  Not troubling as a false representation of how things are in certain cultures—it’s right on the mark there—but in the way it shifts attention from the women’s stories to those of the men.  This is unfortunate, because the women, Kay especially, have a great deal to say, in their plight and in their reaction or obliviousness to what their husbands are involved in.  Hyman Roth’s wife is oblivious to what her husband does for a living.  If she were not, she would not have turned down the volume on the television while Hyman and Michael were talking, although one still wonders whether she suspects something and is playing dumb.

Kay, on the other hand, comes to understand exactly what the Corleone way is all about, and it obliterates her tenaciously held belief that she and Michael and their children form a family.  Kay, I want to say, represents a different sort of American, the ecumenical sort, or the original American, for whom the melting-pot never “sets,” this being the point of America.  (This is perhaps going too far, although as I admit, this is what I want to say.)  Kay won’t put up with the menfolk’s nasty habit of settling differences between “us’n and them’n” with gunplay.  That would actually be un-American, on an enlightened interpretation of “American.”  Families are by choice.  They are not entities in their own right, which take on lives of their own.  People are created equal—these are the sorts of ideas I want to put into Kay’s head.  I hesitate to reduce all this to a blunt feminist reading, even though it comes across strongly that women are second-class citizens.  As in the leap from families to ethnicities to governments, I think, the picture must be bigger than patriarchalism versus matriarchalism.  I will say instead that the Godfather saga, read generously, cautions against “–archalism,” and leave it at that.

My*WriMo

I’m enamored of the idea of National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo.  People sign up on a web site, pledging to do their darnedest to write a novel in the month of November.  Many have succeeded; many more not.  Writing a 60,000-word book in 30 days is such an improbable task (2000 words a day?), assuming a standard of quality that a writer would set for himself or herself, that the failures are unsurprising.  I signed up this year, hoping I might finish a certain prerequisite task in time.  I did not finish the task, and my NaNoWriMo ended before it began.

But I like the concept so much!  If only it weren’t so restrictive in the interest of standardizing the experience and hawking it.  True, you’ve got to have focus if you want to sell an ambitious project to a lot of people, but some of us will always be excluded by a format, no matter how carefully designed.

Why a novel?  Indeed, several of my friends are using NaNoWriMo this year to do projects that are not novels:  a non-fiction book, a documentary, a cookbook.  This shows that the month-long-death-march gimmick defines NaNoWriMo, not the novel genre.  I personally wouldn’t feel quite right participating in the official NaNoWriMo unless I wrote a novel.  That’s just me being a nerd.

And why a month?  Why not two?  Why not a fortnight?  A week?  Admittedly, a novel becomes less likely the shorter the writing time.  Why not a short story in two weeks?  Or better yet, just keep it at a month.  That way you’d have time to do for a short story all the things you wouldn’t for a novel:  revising, copy editing, cooling off, even rewriting.

Finally, why November?  That’s maybe the biggest concession to solidarity that NaNoWriMo makes.  I’ll admit it does imbue November with a sacred luster, but I’m supposed to wait another year, until November is once again a bad time for me to participate?  I say, not “NaNoWriMo” but “My*WriMo,” where the * stands for whatever you want to write.  So MyCoBoWriMo is My Cookbook Writing Month, and MyShoStoWriMo is My Short Story Writing Month.  There are no restrictions, so if the spirit moves you, declare April to be MyToEiToBuiMo (“My Toothpick Eiffel Tower Building Month”).  Go for it.

Of course, if you go your own way on this, no one will be doing it “with” you.  No one will keep after you to do it.  No one will care.  But this is already the way it is with NaNoWriMo.  No one can share your novel-writing experience.  In the end, they say, each of us dies alone, and we also write alone (don’t believe the malarkey about collaborative novels!).  Although the folks behind the web site have set up some instructional materials and automated tools to help you stay on track, really no one else cares what you do—unless you successfully complete a novel, of course, in which case your name gets moved from the wannabes list to the finishers.  Well, that means something, I guess.  However, as in the real world, no one will read your novel unless it gets published.  So essentially NaNoWriMo recognizes you for having typed about half a million characters on a keyboard, and you languish in obscurity with a piece of crappy fiction on a hard drive somewhere.

At least if you schedule the ordeal yourself, no one can share the credit for getting you to withstand it.

I’m glad to be getting this off my chest, and it’s only taken me a month.

Fid for a day

This review assumes you know things about Neal Stephenson’s science fiction novel Anathem that have already been widely discussed in announcements and reviews:  the monastic “maths” peopled by monkish “avout,” the separation between the mathic and “extramuros” worlds, the discussions of familiar philosophical issues, the plot-significance of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory, the parallels between the planet Arbre and earth and between the Arbreans and earthlings, and so on.  What many reviews only mention in passing is that the Arbreans’ humanoid physiology is, not coincidentally, like ours; indeed, we (or our descendants) make an appearance late in the book.  Since the role of humans as polycosmic counterparts of Arbreans and other humanoid races is only a provocative sidelight, not a Planet of the Apes-style revelation (when Chuck Heston murmurs, “Oh, my God!” as he espies the Statue of Liberty poking up through the sand) that defines the work, I don’t feel I’ve spoiled too much.

Let me get down to brass tacks:  Anathem does some things very well as a sci-fi entertainment, even though I can’t hail it as the paragon of literary sci-fi art I was hoping to discover as I began my 10-book reading project.

Foremost among Stephenson’s gifts as a writer is his ability to construct a big plot (Anathem is about a thousand pages long—a “thousander,” to misappropriate one of the book’s myriad terms) with an even more massive backstory, and to keep the behemoth moving along at a steady pace.  He uses the first-person perspective of Erasmas, a young avout, as a channel through which to trickle background information about the novel’s world, from the architecture of the concents (monasteries) to the habits and beliefs of the avout to the ways of the outside world to the political and intellectual history of Arbre.  Stephenson’s writing applies an engineer’s precision and economy, page count notwithstanding, to the crafting of a novel.  Nothing wrong with this, although to some tastes it produces a monster less loose and baggy than is called for in a novel.

The Erasmas character is a kind of perfect-fool-everyman who excels at reporting facts and drawing just as many clever conclusions as Stephenson wants to let us in on.  One of my few difficulties in reading this book was the age group of its narrator and how his milieu is handled.  Erasmas is perhaps the equivalent of a college sophomore.  Owing to his contemplative mathic upbringing, he’s probably a few years ahead of a 19-year-old earth lad when it comes to book-learning, but emotionally he’s right on track, maybe even a little behind the curve from lack of hang time at the mall.  He spends time with other dweebs, such as Jesry, the alpha nerd.  The young “suurs” in Erasmas’s peer group are of course the developmental superiors of the “fraas.”  Erasmas learns this when he falls like a ton of bricks for one of his lady-friends, who has been planning their union for months.

Although developments like this are amusing and simply wrought, the level of social interaction is about that of an after-school special.  And this is my main reservation about Anathem:  It doesn’t give adult humanoids much to dwell on and learn from, so it’s not literature that rewards the reader, except as light, entertaining spec-fi (“speculative fiction,” Stephenson’s and others’ preferred expansion of “sf”).

The plot goes all over the Arbrean map, and then some.  Erasmas is drawn out of his concent (“evoked”) and into a sprawling quest across Arbre and into outer space, where he meets aliens from nearby possible worlds who are like himself and us (some of them is us).  Along the way, philosophical conversations (“dialogues”) and musings in Erasmas’s head reveal that the history of ideas and physical theory on Arbre essentially tracks our own.  The book has an extensive glossary, much of which is devoted to mathic equivalents of familiar philosophical and scientific concepts—”Gardan’s Steelyard” for “Occam’s razor,” “Protas” for “Plato,” “Adrakhonian” for “Pythagorean.”  I can’t deny the considerable delight for the nerdish reader in discovering these equivalences, and another of Stephenson’s talents is an ear for le mot juste when it comes to alien-spoofing neologisms.  In fact none of the Arbrean terms is supposed to be a verbatim re-creation of their language; in the introduction to the book, Stephenson spells out that the special words used in the narrative are meant to capture the flavor of Arbrean thought in terms resonant to the terrestrial reader.

It might seem as though the philosophical themes bandied about in Anathem would be of special interest to a philosophy student.  But since controversies such as nominalism vs. Platonism and the catastrophe that is postmodernism are introduced without being plumbed, much less advanced, I can’t say I experienced more than a feeling of solidarity with these aliens from our shared intellectual predicament.

My bottom line on this book is that I don’t regret reading it, yet I wonder whether reading another NS epic will be worth the time spent.  I’m also interested in computers, so I may at least begin Cryptonomicon, which I already own.