When it comes to narratives and the art of making them bustle and boogey—whether we’re talking about a barroom joke told to a woodpecker, a short story, a novel, or a major motion picture from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer—the main thing a person ought to know about plot and story is that story is the entire planet and all of time stretching back to the Big Bang and the void of no yesterdays that precedes it, whereas plot is Google Maps. One of the fun things the marvellous and drunken detective fiction writer Dashiell Hammett likes to do with plot is to employ it in the opening chapter in such a way that the reader starts off with a bit of a mistaken idea of what the story is and where we’re physically supposed to be atop its surface. In Russian Formalism, “fabula” is the earth’s crust and crudeness and wanton babbling brooks—its timequakes and spaceways—and “syuzhet” is the plot, a grocer’s itemized inventory as scrolling banner advert. There is a special feature behind-the-scenes documentary on the Arrow Blu-ray for Terry Gilliam’s classic 12 Monkeys where we see the director arriving on set early in the morning looking like he got his ass kicked by a kangaroo and complaining, as he no doubt searches for the script supervisor, that he never remembers what he’s supposed to be doing on any given day of production anymore. That is a man who is swamped in story and has lost the plot. The secret truth behind how you build suspense that’s used by all the top professionals is that you have the story everywhere all around you at all times and then the plot moves like a slow, rickety sled through the, uh, permafrost. Things are materializing in front of you and you’re impatient because you can’t see them clearly yet. If there are trapdoors in the plot you can play snakes and ladders with the story. Actors who ask their directors for backstory should be ashamed of themselves. The whole fucking cosmos is backstory, thespian.
When Winifred got home from work I had already started dinner and it reeked of garlic throughout the apartment. I asked her how her day went and she said: ugh, I’m afraid it’s going to remain something of a hostage situation for so long as I remain alive. Winnifred spent some time with her meddlesome aunt Gladys yesterday evening and her tongue has been a little sharper than normal since. I guess the question of children and when we’re going to have some came up again…but the answer remained: we are absolutely not having any children ever. Winifred told Gladys that it’s immoral to bring children into this putrescent and mouldering world. Why?!, exclaimed Gladys. Well it was certainly immoral to bring you here, snarled Winifred. To her credit, she didn’t feel great about it by sundown.
Neither Winifred nor I drink alcohol anymore. You could say we developed an allergy. For a time she experimented with mocktails, but it really was all very frou-frou and saturated in silly ritual, especially since I would probably prefer a glass of tap water anyway. We always keep coffee, tea, Coca-Cola, and Pellegrino. I like sugary breakfast cereals and Winifred doesn’t really approve. She was born in Medicine Hat and comes by that small town toughness real natural. A few years ago we went to see Guillermo del Toro’s remake of Nightmare Alley at Country Hills, and when Rooney Mara came on the screen for the first time in her period sideshow finery, I turned to Winifred and said that she and Rooney Mara betray a bit of a physical resemblance. I thought it flattering and gentlemanly. Her lip curled slightly. Yeah, she said with mild disdain, because we’re both so farmy.
Winifred and I each consider ourselves specialized connoisseurs of Cold War-era Eastern European science fiction, and following the dinner I basically botched but which we finished off most of, we decided to throw on the new Blu-ray of Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel that Amazon delivered earlier. It’s adapted from a Strugatsky brothers novel that I read a long time ago but distinctly recall to this day being by far the zaniest and most odd thing I’d ever read from those august filial noble notables. The movie is like Twin Peaks, Tarkovsky’s Stalker, and Dario Argento’s version of Fawlty Towers all rolled into one tight little motherfucker of a blunt. It made me delirious and I couldn’t really follow it…but it was fun. Crazy purples and blues and reds. When the weather is nice, we usually like to sit out on the deck during all or part of sunset, Winifred dutifully making sure she’s got on the proper viscosity coat of sunscreen, which is not something I’d be inclined to fret over myself. I don’t take a lot of precautions and never did. I was the touring bassist with a popular rock ensemble for awhile and one time a significantly younger musician came up to me before the set and asked if I’d forgotten to put in ear plugs. I never use them, I told him. The music doesn’t sound as good. The little brat looked at me with absolute terror and nausea. He looked like he’d just sucked a lemon.
Believe it or not, there was a time where I had made such a great big mess of things that there was almost no coming back. I was a pariah and I stood out like Big Bird. As I watched Winifred sleeping, almost tranquil and not yet snoring, I quickly realized how grateful I was to have had her to cushion my landing and recalibrate my settings. There was the sound of a branch lightly slapping against the bedroom window and the commencement of steady rain. I was reading in a science magazine that was lying around about synchronistic movement and mirroring between creatures. In interrelating, creatures develop an “automatic imitation bias.” It helps build trust, empathy, and collaborative spirit. Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel isn’t really a science fiction story. It has the kind of comedy and magic you find in classical antiquity, but it’s really a story about people snowbound at a very remote and very absurd hotel in the middle of nowhere that is also a madcap museum, and then Agatha Christie stuff starts to go down with the bodies piling up and the suspects shape-shifting. Well, I guess it is science fiction after all, isn’t it? It’s openly suspected that many of these chameleonic hotel guests and suspects manqué are actually extraterrestrials.
- Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.
Le joli mai (Pierre Lhomme, Chris Marker, 1963)
Haut bas fragile (Jacques Rivette, 1995)
When Vittorio sat down at the table on the terrace at Le Hibou in Paris’s six arrondissement for our annual tête-à-tête, the first thing he wanted to get into as he worked on that first shimmering, golden cognac was actor, comedian, and needy populist Adam Sandler and how everybody knows he’s only given two really remarkable, superlative performances, first in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love from 2002 and then Uncut Gems by the Safdie brothers from 2019. Looking thinner, more wiry, and more unkempt than I remember him being this time last year, Vittorio commenced to arguing in his winding way that anybody of sense would rather be Sandler in Uncut Gems as opposed to Sandler in Punch-Drunk Love. I don’t want to wear that idiotic blue suit every single day, bow and scrape for tepid laughs, break the glass door with my fist in an impotent rage, or do semi-cannibalistic kink stuff with Emily Watson in Hawaii, says Vittorio. I told him he only likes Uncut Gems because he fences stollen jewelry. Touché, he said amiably, a young green-haired gal at the same moment setting down another cognac. I can see Vittorio slump down into a thoughtful meditative stupor.The scene near the beginning of the final act of Uncut Gems where Adam Sandler and Julia Fox make that hand-off window-to-window, says Vittorio with gravity, is the most romantic thing I have seen in my entire life.
My hotel is a block-and-a-half from Chanel and as I weaved through the human traffic, trying to keep a reasonable, steady pace, I contemplated the obscurity of language and the clarity of things. Whenever they send me in to do a cleanup job on some expensive, incoherent screenplay intended to go into production in a fortnight with an untested neophyte director and a cokehead production manager, I read the screenplay over and over for twelve days and twelve nights and then I slaughter a lamb in the bathtub with sage burning. Not in Paris. You can’t do that here. But they’re cool with it in the provinces, and they were cool with it back in Southern Ontario pig shit country. Solitude, malaise, creativity…the beast with two backs. I am not a self. I am not a name. I am to an extent what I survived. Roger that. Weary chronicler, where is your walking stick? I went looking in the vents and light fixtures for strange high-frequency sounds I was hearing and all I discovered was this fistful of sinewy wildebeest hairs. The hotel has an elderly lady with a wide grin in a proper French maid’s get-up who serves me coffee and breakfast while I watch Al Jazeera or the BBC. As soon as she comes around the corner my day brightens and I think of it as one of those “good indicators” the Scientologists in the yoga workshops talk about. Paris is my favourite city, but only for twelve days and twelve nights. I watched some porn on the hotel TV but wasn’t feeling it. All the formality and staging make me itchy. Some of these ladies are wearing far too much foundation. Pornography is just endless stimulation and release for today’s busy on-the-go consumer, but obscenity can be art.
After I got back from a quick, solitary lunch and extended gambol along the Seine, I received a text from my eldest daughter Mirilia: “Did you know that consciousness is extensive of physical brain structure?” I’ll have to sit with that one, I thought. Within the hour, Solange from the production department, the only steady and capable person around, or so it would appear, came up to the room and I pored us each some wine. The first time I met her, Solange told me that she’d had a film professor who when he lectured on the poetic realist strain in French cinema of the 1930s for three consecutive Fridays, kept a large map of Montmartre pinned over the blackboard and referred to it regularly in reference to scenes in important films that had been shot out on the streets. The film we’re supposed to be working on is an adaptation of James M. Cain’s lesser-known Galatea. It is set with distinct purpose in Southern Maryland. Holly Valenty is wife to farmer-restauranteur Val Valenty and the daughter of a prominent family, using “prowtocowl” for protocol and “hawndshake” for handshake. “You git, and git quick,” demands one character of another. The narrator is Duke Webster, a washed-up boxer and itinerant labourer who only really had any fight in him when he was seriously pissed off. We’re going to keep the voice-over or we’re fried. Holly’s husband would appear intent on feeding his wife to death, fattening her to an early grave. Foie gras metaphors are utilized. When Duke first lays eyes on Holly, what he sees instinctively horrifies and disgusts him. However, in short order Duke and Holly discover that they are able to be tender to one another as nobody has ever previously been to either party. The moral of the story is: tenderness and devotion will not save you. Love. Desire. Insanity. As Holly gets larger and larger and Duke more and more pissed off…somebody in Wisconsin is bound to die. Solange and I actually both like this story a lot. On paper. How are we supposed to put this up on the screen? How are we to credibly make the lead actress appear to grow fatter and fatter? Twice now producers have tried to explain this to me, but nothing I heard satisfied even remotely. Alas, I’m comfortable knowing I’ll receive my modest stipend before all the larceny and backstabbing starts to set in. As Solange left for her pilates class, I opened the Dalkey Archive edition of Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point on the bedside table and read her the following pair of sentences aloud: “If you’ve never had a religious experience, it’s folly to believe in God. You might as well believe in the excellence of oysters, when you can’t eat them without being sick.” Yum, said Solange.
Is consciousness the electrical expression of physical, organic brain structure? Probably. I spent part of the morning Googling and surfing. There was a video about consciousness and birds. Vittorio, Brother Blunderbuss himself, sent a text and suggested we go catch a screening of John Sturges’s brilliant ‘50s Technicolor pressure-cooker Bad Day at Black Rock at the little repertory cinema on Rue Christine on account of he’s leaving for Johannesburg early in the A.M. Having sat dutifully until the maroon curtains closed, we retired to a minuscule tiki bar with Polynesian music that Vittorio said he likes and where extremely attractive young women from the Sorbonne apprised us with open contempt. I always look at them hard and cold like I’m Shylock here to turn in my pound of flesh. My wife told me she’s expecting a baby, confessed Vittorio. And I asked her: at what time is this baby expected to land? I was drinking a strange teal cocktail with orange peels floating in it, thinking that today was finally the day Gilles de Rais and the Latinate Primitives all finally shit the bed in revolting anticlimax.
"Give me your hand," entreats Clarice Lispector, or at least her looming and fastidious narrator G. H., addressing a reader who is no doubt lazy and bored, hurt ‘cause ignored. This morning I got up quite early, walked in the direction of Montmartre, and found myself at Sacré-Cœur before there were any more than three or four tourists milling about up there. It was foggy and slightly chilly but I wore my windbreaker. Sacré-Cœur was built as a supposed beacon on a hill in what was essentially a working class red light district immediately following France’s profound demoralization in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War and the brutally suppressed Paris Commune. Somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 were executed in the streets beneath that church during the suppression of the 1871 Commune. Sacré-Cœur is a paternalistic building. It was not meant to mourn or honour the dead. It was intended as a vehicle with which to restore decorum and good order to working class streets. And yet we splay ourselves out in the gutter—arms akimbo—like Oscar Wilde whether you Siamese please or Siamese don’t please. All I’m after is Clarice Lispector’s “opaque piece of thing.” Pardon me if I’m hunched over outside Sacré-Cœur like a tall pigeon with harsh angles and techno-semiotic backdrop. There’s some Scandinavian jazz luminaries playing at the the jazz bar from Rivette’s Haut bas fragile tonight. I’m going to see if Solange wants to go check that out.
The old watchmaker knew he’d never see her again. (Can a liver “break” like a heart?)
- Mark Leyner, Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit
The Blackout (Abel Ferrara, 1997)
eXistenZ (David Cronenberg, 1999)
Alcoholics are like snowflakes: all very similar but no two are deformed and mangled in quite the same way. The character defects emerge way before the drinking actually commences, and my main one is toxic pride. Ask just about anybody. It can get ugly, but I’m usually a drunk who implodes instead of exploding. I’m the kind of drunk who camps out on the floor for eternity and a day. An unpleasant curse attached to my lived delusion-formation—we all have them—is that my dominating and most impregnable triggers to relapse, consistently, are the heartache and romantic disappointments I bring on myself. I’m a bad enough and old enough low bottom alcoholic to know at this point that when I pick up a bottle I am summoning all the infernal, flaying resources of hell to go to work for me and devour me comprehensively in so doing. I usually hit the pavement below at least as fast as a jumper would. Recovering alcoholic Charles Jackson’s 1944 novel The Lost Weekend is almost certainly the most brutal and accurate depiction of late stage alcoholism found anywhere in literature, though the popular Billy Wilder film adaptation is not generally taken very serious by actual alcoholics on account of its being so sanitized. If you don’t believe me, Nick Tosches says so too in his excellent but unsettling Me and the Devil. Charles Jackson goes in like an ace surgeon in front of a cohort of medical students, showing everybody around the affected body. Resentment, self-pity, inward loathing ballooning, the soul pocked with tailings ponds, another sack of meat leaning against another sack of meat in the meat packing district and no way back to dear old Omaha. Mania, torment, obsession, visions of the dead. Asked by the extremely skeezy doctor he’s chatting with on a large oceanic passenger vessel if he knows what the expression “running amok” means, the narrator of Stefan Zweig’s 1922 novella Amok thinks it perhaps has something to do with “a kind of intoxication affecting the Malays…” Doc: “It’s more than intoxication…it’s madness, a sort of human rabies, an attack of murderous, pointless monomania that bears no comparison with ordinary alcohol poisoning.” Buddy, you’re spilling all my secrets! The villagers in Malaysia get it. They’re able to ascertain that no accessible power can halt a man running amok, so they shout warnings ahead when they see him coming—‘Amok! Amok!’—and everyone beats it for the trees. Yes, the doctor and his story are tragic, but they are also manipulative and cruel, evidence of a compromised spirit intent on taking hostages. A legitimate spiritual guru once told me: stop telling your story. Sometimes the plague passes itself on through stories. Storytelling that unburdens? No, it is poison and it knows it and it does what it does anyway. There is no absolution. There can be no absolution for anybody who didn’thave the time or the vantage point to have their heart break for every last living creature. You cannot undo the damage done by the alcoholic in active addiction, but you can work with the alcoholic as you find them today…even if it’s only working at making a ham sandwich or sorting through bills. Alcoholism is in large part a spiritual disorder and spirituality is about connections to both worlded and otherworldly things. Try not to leave the sick person in isolated disconnection. If you can help it. I understand perfectly well how frustrating it can be. I worked in a homeless shelter and a treatment centre. It’s no better with normal people, actually. As soon as you have approximately five people you’re basically herding cats. I have ingrained bodily memory of my own traumas along with all the ones I missed out on, too. The database of the whole history of our pain is in the part of your spine where there used to be a tail sticking out. Go ahead…rub it.
Artists who know enough about what they’re doing to actually do it often talk about the central role of happy accidents in producing work that’s satisfying to all concerned. A happy accident is when something happens that you didn’t foresee and then it works good or even better than good. I think writers mostly have happy accidents at the neurochemical and submolecular levels. Or maybe, like, with housing, romance, and what have you. If you are an abstract expressionist painter like hellbent boozehound Jackson Pollock, then you can have your happy scandalous accidents all over the goddamn place until you lose consciousness or the cows come home, but if you’re in Buckingham Palace with an hour left to complete your portrait of King Charles…you probably can’t afford to have any. The Philharmonic cannot afford to have more than one or two very small happy accidents. (Happy accidents with the tympany are my personal favourite.) I’m a retired film scholar, and I can tell you with basis in measurable fact that moving pictures have all the best happy accidents going.So what if some spectral hobo comes drifitng into frame while the camera’s rolling? Consider it production values! Do you know the story of how hard-drinking one-man-demolition-derby Buster Keaton broke his neck? Buster discovered that he had broken his neck and fractured his skull about a decade after the incident initially occurred. Pondering briefly, he was able to trace the injury back to a stunt from Sherlock Jr.—included in the complete film!—where all the water in a water tower comes down on him hard. Ah, Buster. Harry Houdini sure did call it. And whether your stomach can take it or not: yup, that was actually a happy accident. The way I see it, if Jean-Luc Godard and Hong Sang-soo write their dialogue in the cab on the way to the set then you should be able to do any damn thing you choose when they call action. Alas, the greatest miracle of all is rolling out of your mother like a little soccer ball. When I grow up I want to be a bowling ball. In honour of Marcel Carné and his pivotal 1933 essay “When Will the Cinema Go Down onto the Street?,” shouldn’t it be ‘round 'bout that time we found ourselves collectively asking: when will a thousand cinemas finally go down into the street and trip all over each other to much public merriment and boisterous laughter?
The writers who've most influenced the mundane minutiae of my personal pocket literary style and prosecraft over the course of the past tumultuous-but-worthy decade are Paul West, Alexander Theroux, Stanley Elkin, Javier Marías, and Lydia Davis. It shouldn't appear surprising this late in the development of the central dramatic complications, all the rising action having all but risen, that the way Lydia Davis compresses things down into unfussy palatable miniatures—only to accentuate their confounding complexity!—continues to influence, direct, and excite me very much. Both Lydia Davis and Javier Marías work with narrators who analyze their situation (analysis paralysis), their past, and things that are going on around them. The centralized nervous system of the human being is fielded within the greater systems we still only faintly apprehend. The self as escape room is the mad and finicky machine that obsesses, arranges, returns, mulls over, eddies, walks the perimeter over and over, ultimately seeking to make an elusive world somehow intelligible. Though it probably isn't one of his very best novels—and the man really ought to have received the Nobel Prize for Literature—Javier Marías's excellent 1994 novel Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me has one of the great opening set-ups in the history of literary fiction. The narrator, a ghostwriter and television screenwriter named Víctor, has been invited to dinner at the Madrid apartment of a married woman named Marta, whose husband is felicitously out of town. After they finally get Marta’s two-year-old to sleep, the two retreat to the bedroom, where, right as they begin to undress, Marta suddenly feels inexplicably ill, very rapidly and quite surprisingly dying right in the arms of the mortified Víctor. What happens next? The real question is: how are you going to think your way out of this one? And in praising Paul West as a “vital writer and man of irrepressible spirit” who is “able to analyze his every last dilemma,” Alexander Theroux could just as easily have been talking about himself...or it could have been Paul West talking about Alexander Theroux. God, I love those guys.
The Nomadic Warrior Prince does not require answers to the Great Questions. The Nomadic Warrior Prince requires a way.
