The Writer's Life: Film & Book Reviews, Observations, and Stories

Impossibly gaunt
The old woman cuts me off
Fanning her red nails.

I’ve always had a weakness for spy thrillers. Three Days of the Condor was and is one of my favorite films and The Third Man I consider one of best films ever produced. It is a difficult genre. Most spy films and novels, except for John le Carré’s, degenerate into farce rather quickly. I suppose this is why there are so many spoofs of spy movies.

AMC’s new series, Rubicon, attempts to bring the genre into the present day and does so with a fair amount of panache. It is about an intelligence analyst who stumbles upon a deadly secret that would be better left unpursued, but curiosity drives him forward. In the compartmentalized world in which he works, where everyone spies on everyone else, it is like playing cat-and-mouse with his own death.

It is an apt metaphor for our times. We live on an overcrowded, overheated planet with dwindling resources, increasingly incapable of supporting life. Fully cognizant of this fact and determined to be the last people on earth to succumb, our government has become paranoid, dysfunctional, and a purveyor of intelligence of a granularity so fine that we can strike at anyone anywhere in the world with relative precision. For example, imagine being in Julian Assange’s shoes. He eats raw fear for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and still pursues his dangerous game with a government infinitely more powerful than he.

Although many of us do not know it (though we dimly feel it), we are all in Assange’s shoes. It is this fact that makes Rubicon so interesting.

Footballers now decorate their arms from wrist to shoulder with tattoos. Some are better than others. In the match yesterday between Fulham and United, I noticed that Clint Dempsey now sports a tattoo of the state of Texas on his left arm (click the image and see for yourself). It reminded me of the bumper stickers I used to see as a kid glorifying the Lone Star State. You know, “Everything’s bigger in Texas,” and “Don’t mess with Texas.”

Though not surprised, I was disappointed.

With wings aflutter,
The flies copulate, heedless
Of the matron’s heel.

I’m reading The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham by Selina Hastings. In a way, it is a less literary biography than A Great Unrecorded History, though Hastings makes up for it with a very fluid writing style that is as captivating as Moffat’s. Both Maugham and Forster were gay (though I suppose Maugham was technically bisexual) and both were writers. There the similarities end. Aside from their fame, the two men could not have been more different. Somerset Maugham decided to become a writer as an act of will, whereas Forster, a genius, was born one. It doesn’t make Maugham any less interesting, however. In many ways, his life was an adventure of a much grander scale than Forster’s. Not because he was larger than life, but because he was intensely curious about the roots of human depravity and explored it vicariously in his writing. His weakness as a writer was that he couldn’t help telling us why.

I happen to like Maugham and have since I read everything I could get my hands on in the summer between high school and college. My summer instructor saw a similarity in writing styles and suggested I read him. In a way, Maugham was perfect for a teen about to enter college.

The really wonderful thing about Hastings is that like Moffat, she likes her subject and understands him in a way that, perhaps, a man cannot. He has a keen understanding of women and responds to men in a way that a woman might. Of course, we didn’t know this until recently when his secret life became known. I find that it makes Maugham’s writing more understandable, not less, whereas understanding Forster’s homosexuality made his most perfect fiction a kind of abberation. Odd how these things go.

Roger Clemons, the famous baseball pitcher, is now on the verge of being prosecuted for making false statements under oath (perjury) regarding the use of drugs in baseball. The penalty for this ranges from house arrest to a few years in prison (unless you’re Dick Cheney, of course, and then it’s considered normal behavior). This is how Jeff Novitzky can compel former and present cyclists to testify against Lance Armstrong. The persons under subpoena must decide whether the truth will out (as Shakepeare said) and what story to tell. If the truth does come out and it’s proven that you lied under oath, you’ll wind up like Clemons. I would suggest that most of Armstrong’s associates will give fairly honest testimonies in exchange for immunity. Novitzky wants Armstrong and no one else, and will stop at nothing to see him ruined.

Why we are pursuing drug use in baseball and cycling rather than the high crimes and misdeamors committed by Cheney, Bush, and company, or going after those who tortured and abetted torture is anyone’s guess. Naturally, this is the United States and our priorities are upside down. Most of us have no idea what is important to life on this planet, and those who do don’t care. The remainder are powerless. So we make a show of “cleaning up” our national sport and going after the world’s most famous cyclist as a way of distracting ourselves from seeing who and what we really are.

A cardinal’s call
Before the sun has risen:
Waves of ecstasy.

She has now become
A still, small stain
Of infinite blackness
Excluding even me.

The blind cat beats out
The universe’s rhythm
With his thumping tail.

Children of Invention is a film about two young children living in the suburbs who must fend for themselves when their mother gets entangled in a pyramid scheme and is snared by the police. Really, though, it’s about greed in America and the problem of immigration. In this case, Chinese.

While watching the film I considered again the attempts of Arizona and other states to crack down on illegal immigrants. On the surface, it seems like a reasonable thing to do. After all, if you’re in a country illegally, you have no right to be there. The problem with the Arizona law—before it was amended—was that it allowed civil authorities to stop anyone suspected of being an alien, demand papers, and incarcerate them. This is what a police state does. It is what happened in Nazi Germany and in East Germany after the war.

The ironic thing—and this is what I find most fascinating—is that those conservatives who demand the authorities deport illegal immigrants are the very persons who are terrified of living in a police state. It is ironic because through the draconian laws they sponsor they actively usher in the very thing they fear the most. It is mindless hysteria with no clear idea of the damage it creates.

By the way, Children of Invention is well worth seeing. The acting is superb and lessons it offers are visceral.