Matt Cahill's blog
You cannot write anything about yourself that is more truthful than you yourself are. That is the difference between writing about yourself and writing about external objects. You write about yourself from your own height. You don’t stand on stilts or on a ladder but on your bare feet.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein (manuscript note, 1937)
I recently made the acquaintance of someone who works as a literary agent for TV and films. I didn’t know this when we’d been first introduced, just as she was unaware that I wrote fiction. In these sorts of situations I tend to play it cool, because the last thing I want to do is come across as a “desperate unpublished writer” (insert images from Dawn of the Dead) and thus endanger the non-professional relationship. Still, she nonetheless asked if I’d be interested in sending her some work to read. I obliged and, happily, she liked it very much.
We got to talking about writers and influences, and she asked whether I’d ever read Raymond Carver. I hadn’t (insert sound of audience hissing), though I’d heard of him. [It occurred to me later that I’d seen Robert Altman’s Short Cuts – which (very loosely) strung together several of Carver’s short stories into one long, dark ensemble piece.] It was when she mentioned that one of my stories reminded her of Carver that I figured I might as well find out for myself.
So, I picked up Cathedral, a collection of short stories at Babel Books & Music, a local second-hand bookstore and immediately proceeded to satisfy my curiosity.
Firstly, I was thankful. Yes, there was a similarity, but I found that the “world” Carver inhabited as a writer (I use the past tense because he passed away in 1988) differs from mine. This may sound selfish, but I still sometimes suffer from an irrational fear that everything I’m writing has been done by someone else, and that it’s only a question of time before I find out, like some sick Twilight Zone episode. But I digress…
And what, pray tell, is Carver’s world? It’s a sparsely urban, godless place, inhabited with people who find ways to ignore the mounting problems facing them. This doesn’t speak for all the stories, but it certainly summarizes the atmosphere. He paints as a writer what Edward Hopper writes as a painter (though I would argue that Carver’s characters probably aren’t as well-dressed, and if you’re wondering why I’ve switched from past-tense to present-tense, it’s that I’m trying to wittily suggest that the product of an artist can survive its creator’s demise). And yet, this world isn’t one that has gone to hell. There is love, though it is often tempered by the cool water of circumstance. There is even a sense of magic lurking in the shadows, albeit a neutral magic; one that can spell enlightenment or tragedy at the slightest moment.
Since this is a collection of short stories, providing a synopsis for each (or any) would probably spoil the pleasure of reading them – and despite the picture I paint of Carver’s literary universe (or at least that contained in Cathedral), it is a unique pleasure to read them. Carver is a model of tight writing – he takes the “why say in 30 words what you can say in 10?” mantra and says it in five. Most recently, an article in the New York Times highlights an ongoing controversy about the editorial authority of some of Carver’s published work, with speculation that some of this tightness may have been the work of an over-zealous editor.
In short, I clearly understand why Raymond Carver is praised as one of the great American writers: his vision is clear, even when the lives of his characters are muddied, and his writing style is immediate and bracing.
Cathedral, by Raymond Carver (ISBN: 978-0679723691) is available at an independent bookstore near you, new or second-hand. You can also purchase it at any number of online vendors.
This is the second book I’ve read (and reviewed) from Hesse. Admittedly, after first reading Steppenwolf early this year, I was in no rush to go further just yet – that book was enough for my mind to deal with and left an indelible impression. However, hey, Siddhartha is only 122 pages…how much of a hassle could that be?
Thankfully, this svelte novella bares little resemblance to Steppenwolf‘s hallucinogenic soul-churning. It’s a simple, spiritual tale, reminiscent in style of works I read in my late-teens and early twenties (in particular: Khalil Gibran and Jiddu Krishnamurti).
The book begins with Siddhartha, the handsome and talented son of a Brahmin family, bidding farewell to his people and homeland. Driven to plumb the depths of spiritual knowledge, he and his best friend, Govinda, decide to join a group of Samanas – ascetic nomads who drift through towns and desert alike, denouncing all possessions. At first, Siddhartha takes to the group and spends a long time mastering their philosophy until he eventually finds himself dissatisfied and conflicted by the limits of their teaching.
Breaking away with Govinda in tow, Siddhartha journeys to find a group of monks attending an open lecture by the Gotama Buddha, their spiritual leader. Hearing Gotama speak, Siddhartha begins to finally understand his path. Given an opportunity to speak privately with him, Siddhartha extols the virtue of what Gotama has stated, but tells him that the path he sees for himself cannot be found following Gotama. The Buddha is surprised and asks him to explain, to which Siddhartha reveals his revelation: that the Gotama learned everything not by following others, but by making his own path, and if need be his own mistakes.
It is at this point that he and his friend break from one another – Siddhartha decides to go into a nearby town to find his way, and Govinda, equally taken by the words of Gotama, decides to follow him as one of his faithful monks. When he reaches the town, Siddhartha finds himself indulging in the flesh and physical manifestations of the world: he falls in love with a beautiful courtesan and finds a job with a wealthy trader. Years pass, and while Siddhartha accumulates fortunes and lavish tastes, his soul begins to buckle, his demeanour sours, as he longs for the path he thought he’d found. He eventually breaks away from the town and finds himself at the doorstep of a poor ferryman – it is there that he forms his understanding of the spirit, nourished with the help of the ferryman and the voice of the river.
In the end, Siddhartha’s path is one of profound simplicity – a result of his spiritual maturity aided by the fateful intervention of those in his past. In circumstances both tragic and sublime, he attains the peacefulness he was searching for, though in ways he was unable to perceive beyond his youthful revolt.
This book is oft-described as one of the more compelling European perspectives on Indian spirituality. I found myself, for the first quarter of the book, feeling as if I was going over familiar territory – concisely written, but hardly ground-breaking stuff. It was only at the point of Siddhartha’s revelation in the face of Gotama, that the Buddha himself never followed the teachings of others save for the lessons of personal experience – thus, why should Siddhartha be a follower? – that the book grabbed me. There is something Nietzschian in this; superimposing the perceptive defiance of an individual onto a “meeting by the river” of two minds, one old and wise, the other young and daring. To see what happens to Siddhartha, in many ways symbolic of those precious few who attempt to live by their learned convictions, is what drives the reader to finish the book. I don’t think anyone will be disappointed in Siddhartha, though to what extent they are inspired is another question – one which truly depends on the mind and soul of the reader.
Siddhartha, by Hermann Hesse (ISBN: 978-0811200684) is available at a friendly independent bookstore near you. Or online at any number of vendors.
I’m alive and well, ladies and gentlemen. After finishing the theatrical release of a major motion picture, I’m slowly finding time to blog – I hope you understand that, faced with a choice between having a life and blogging (because, these days I cannot do both and be happy), I will pick the former every time.
That said, I have two book reviews coming down the pipe: the first is Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, and the second is Cathedral, a collection of short stories by Raymond Carver.
I also have a nice batch of photos I’ve taken, so feel comfortable that the future of this blog is not solely text-based.
Regards,
mc
So far this year, I’ve worked on two productions (one TV series and one feature film) which involve people playing cops (detectives, in particular). One thing I’ve noticed on both projects (and in general) is that when actors plays cops they usually take one of two approaches:
1) 60-70% of actors will, well, act. They will play the part, for better or worse.
2) The remaining 40-30% of actors will dredge up some ridiculous “cop” pantomime, based loosely upon what they’ve seen (or remembered) from such seminal TV shows as Streets of San Francisco and films like Serpico. You can identify these actors by their insistence on swaggering up and down hallways, chewing up the scenery, and making any weaknesses in the dialogue that much worse with their ham-fisted delivery, as if they were channelling some sort of Bad Cop Actor deity.
It’s hilarious.
Quite often, there are two cops in any given TV show or film – partners, of course – and chances are, each of them will don one of the two examples listed above. Predictably, as follows the format of scripts these days, the “good cop” will be an actor trying to play a cop. The “bad cop” will be the person constantly slamming binders closed, and yelling things like: “Look, pal – we’re running out of time! There’s a killer still out there!“.
Okay, at least I find it amusing…
i·ro·ny
n.1. The use of words to express something different from and often opposite to their literal meaning.
2. An expression or utterance marked by a deliberate contrast between apparent and intended meaning.
3. A literary style employing such contrasts for humorous or rhetorical effect.
4. Incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs: “Hyde noted the irony of Ireland’s copying the nation she most hated” (Richard Kain).
5. An occurrence, result, or circumstance notable for such incongruity.
I’m not a language fascist, however if there is one word which has been cataclysmically abused to the point where the government should step in with tasers, it is the misuse of the word “irony”.
In case your eyes glazed over the definition posted above, allow me to further define the word by demonstrating what irony is not. First, let’s start with the most common misperception. Irony is not coincidence – no, not even a sad coincidence, as boldly defined by Alanis Morissette in her song, “Ironic”:
An old man turned ninety-eight
He won the lottery and died the next day
It’s a black fly in your Chardonnay
It’s a death row pardon two minutes too late
And isn’t it ironic… don’t you think
Actually, I don’t think that’s ironic. Because it isn’t. What she’s describing is a series of unfortunate circumstances. Mind you, renaming the song “Unfortunate Circumstances” wouldn’t work – doesn’t have much of a ring to it.
The thing is, I can excuse Alanis for this. I can do this because she’s a musician and not someone whom I should, by her profession, necessarily hold in high regard as regards the use of English language (lest I use the same linguistic measuring stick against Led Zeppelin and Muddy Waters).
Not, say, like a nationally broadcast television journalist. Say, like the anchor of CBS Evening News, Katie Couric:
[September 13th, 2007]
COURIC: And now this sad footnote from Iraq. Two Army paratroopers who recently wrote an article that was critical of the war effort were killed this week. Staff Sergeant Yance Gray and Sergeant Omar Mora were part of a group of seven who authored a piece entitled “The War as We Saw It,” published in The New York Times last month. The group wrote that for Iraqis, quote, “engaging in the banalities of life has become a death-defying act.” Now, ironically, Gray and Mora were killed along with five other soldiers not in combat, but when their cargo truck overturned during a routine trip in western Baghdad.
It goes without saying that this is tragic, but it’s not irony, unless Ms. Couric believes being stationed for combat in Iraq was not foreseen as being dangerous in the first place. I’ll let the folks at Media Matters question this last point.
Speaking of Iraq and bad communication, after 9/11/01, we were told – and I don’t know who was the first to coin this, not that it matters, because like so much that has happened since then, everyone just bent over and agreed to it like submissive pets – that it was “the end of irony”. And while I hope this daft phrase will be preserved as an example of world-class naivety, it seems we’ve never gotten a handle on this word, which is sad. It’s sad because I feel that this proclamation, made just over seven years ago is yet another example of the phrase, “the first casualty of war is truth”. To pronounce that any word or behaviour is no longer valid abdicates a necessary freedom of communication.
Conspiratorially, I wonder sometimes if irony, a formidable weapon when used knowledgeably, hasn’t had it’s meaning and usage watered down intentionally. Why? Well, we seem to be very prolific at being ironic and affecting irony in our popular discourse without ever troubling ourselves to actually identify it (or for that matter question our dependence upon it when it comes to things we care about). Indeed, sometimes it seems we are incapable of showing reverence for anything without irony poisoning the well. Don’t get me wrong – I’m a big fan of irreverence when it is used to desaturate those things in life we take too seriously – but if everything portrayed on television, in films, in our books, becomes increasingly ironic (without the audience bothering to know what irony is, or worse still, without an opinion – reverent or not – to begin with) then does that not somehow conjure the image of a society that is becoming more wilfully deluded?
I hate ending things with a question, so I’ll just say that I try to hope for the best, knowing that – in the long run – when it comes to understanding the great frustrations of humanity, you are often left on your own to figure out the truth. And even then, sometimes there’s nothing that can be done for anyone other than yourself.
Work. It is the great blog-killer.
Sorry for the lack of updates. In lieu of something original and scintillating, I bring you two quotes from Max Born, Nobel Prize-winning atomic physicist:
“There are two objectionable types of believers: those who believe the incredible and those who believe that ‘belief’ must be discarded and replaced by ‘the scientific method’.”
“The belief that there is only one truth and that oneself is in possession of it seems to me the deepest root of all evil that is in the world.”
I’ve spent a lot of time lately reading Introducing Quantum Theory by J.P. McEvoy. I find it fascinating in many ways (least of which being the mathematical formulae). I’m finally beginning to understand not only what “quantum theory” truly refers to, but how it was discovered/unearthed, and how it relates/differs to classical physics.
Art & Science, I’m convinced, are the same – to avoid one is to live a life of wilful ignorance.
There’s nothing sadder than to have contributed your soul to the world, and as a writer this contribution is more like a communion of flesh, only to find that, at the end of your life, everyone has forgotten about you.
Considered one of the greatest American humourists of his day, on par with the likes of James Thurber and Mark Twain, Peter De Vries was a prolific novelist who wrote over 20 books over the span of his life, most notably Tunnel of Love, The Blood of the Lamb, and Slouching Towards Kalamazoo. There is a fascinating, heartbreaking story about American society’s collective memory loss as it regards De Vries’ work here.
Humourist. The word feels like an anachronism. It conjures the image of an old man in suspenders, sitting on some honeysuckle scented Midwestern porch spinning tales of the County Fair of ’36 when Old Man Smucker’s pig got loose and… but this is all presumption. In other words, we’ve equated “humourist” with “rustic”. It’s wrong. We need humourists, whether they be satirists, parodists, or even the most groan-inducing vaudevillian showmen. We need to laugh – not just with grotesque cruelty, which is our current fixation, but thoughtfully.
Slouching Towards Kalamazoo is classic American humour: an extremely well written (De Vries was an accomplished linguist as well as an editor) portrait of a boy’s disoriented steps toward adulthood and independence in small-town society. It’s also terribly funny in places. His narrative style is never creaky or mannered; he tells the story, adds some window dressing, but always gets back to the point. The point: Anthony Thrasher, an intelligent yet under-achieving Grade 8 student falls for his teacher and winds up getting her pregnant. Compounding this is the fact that, due to his age and immaturity in the realm of the hands-on world, he doesn’t even fully understand the implications of what’s happened, having only the mythology of a boy’s speculation to cope with the problem. Meanwhile, his father, a devout church minister with a passion for reading literary classics aloud at the dinner table, is driving Anthony’s mother toward infidelity…with an equally devout atheist.
Combining a witty parallel retort to The Scarlet Letter – required reading in Anthony’s Grade 8 class – with a prescient view of the theist/atheist debates currently raging around us, De Vries manages to portray vivid characters that, aside from being given satirical names such as Bubbles Breedlove (a friend whom Anthony becomes smitten with later in the book), are touchingly real.
Profundity…? Perhaps. I’m not sure that would be the chief reason for reading Slouching Towards Kalamazoo. It’s delightful, character-driven storytelling with some killer dialogue. What more do you need?
Of all De Vries books, only two are currently in print – out-of-print editions are available via eBay and AbeBooks. Other than Slouching, there is his “dark book” as it’s been referred to, The Blood of the Lamb. I encourage people to give preference to independently-owned bookstores, but in this regard, given the scarcity of De Vries work, I’ll simply say that you owe it to yourself to check him out.
But don’t forget him.
