Harlequin Romance and NASCAR are teaming up to create a new line of chick lit for the toothless set. This sounds like a marriage made in hell:

[from USA Today] The first offspring of this new union, a racetrack romance entitled In the Groove by Pamela Britton, goes on sale Tuesday — just a few weeks before the Daytona 500....

"NASCAR very much portrays themselves as a family-oriented sport, and most romance fiction is about commitment and about the promise of happily-ever-after"...

In the Groove features down-on-his-luck NASCAR driver Lance Cooper and ex-kindergarten teacher Sarah Tingle. They meet when his car hits her. She gets a bump on the head. He's driven to distraction. When he looks at Sarah, Cooper "feels like he has been shocked by a loose spark plug wire."

Okay, we admit it.... after reading that quote, we REALLY want to read this book. The possibilities for car-related double entendres are endless. We bet Lance Copper goes on to check Sarah Tingle's oil. Or at least take a look under her hood. Just thinking about it revs our engine. And you just know they are going to do it on the hood of the car.

If there's a market for books about women who love thugs, we suppose there will be a market for books about women who love NASCAR dads.

Posted by freewilliamsburg at 10:03 AM | Comments (1)

The new novel by Ned Vizzini
A non-review by J. Stefan-Cole

I read page one of Ned Vizzini's, It's Kind of a Funny Story, and took a downbeat turn at the thought of reading another kid-on-the-ropes novel. I’d just finished Jonathan Safran Foer’s, Extremely Close and Incredibly Loud, which I’d found extremely irritating and loudly unbelievable. That kid got on my nerves, a know it all whose grief over his Dad, lost in the World Trade attack, left me unconvinced. And what's with all the graphic aids? This comes right out of the Dave Eggers School of Staggering Genius; punching up the words with gimmicks, like words don’t have strength anymore to carry meaning on their own. When I saw the little doodad diagrams at the chapter heads in Vizzini’s teenage novel, I was ready to revolt: I didn't think I could take another pubescent view on life and death.

I was wrong.

Vizzini’s Craig Gilner is not another Oskar Schell. He’s closer to Holden Caulfield, and the dialogue is kid snappy without being nihilistically dark. Craig spends a full year of his barely begun life cramming to get into an elite Manhattan school, Executive Pre-Professional High. "That first semester, in addition to the book list, I had this class called Intro to Wall Street that required me to pick up the New York Times and Wall Street Journal everyday...to create a portfolio of current events articles and show how they related to stock prices..." Phew, that would send me into a Republican-inspired corporate-ruled panic attack. We don’t quite learn why Craig wants to join ranks with the powerbrokers except for a vague idea of becoming president some day. Yes, of the United States.

The story opens with him coming undone from the strain. He somehow failed to grasp that the superhuman effort required to get into an elite school would only amplify once there. At fifteen, he’s on Zoloft, getting lousy grades—in the low nineties (?!)—not studying or doing his homework but growing steadily more internally paralyzed instead. His mind loops on what he calls cycling; thoughts that spin on themselves until he’s flung, mentally inert, into a corner. He can’t eat, can’t sleep and can’t think of himself as anything but a failure. I’d crack too, and it turns out a good percentage of the kids at Pre-professional are only coping with the aid of chemical interference (like Paxil and Prozac).

It’s a ferocious society that turns its kids into brain trusts instead of people. Craig’s suicidal thoughts and subsequent call for help come poignantly, and funnily, home in the face of pressures that have robbed the kid-ness out of being a kid. Who wants to be elected king of the most powerful nation in the world anyway? What’s life got to do with it? Craig’s story is populated by characters reeled in from the chaotic sea of so-called civilization; from loving, clueless parents to obliviously cruel friends, shrinks that try, and the sadly comic cast of patients in the psyche ward where he spends five enlightening days. Not so original maybe, the inmates being more in tune than the mad, mad world outside, but Craig is so vulnerable in his hour of need that we sign into the ward right behind him.

He wasn’t always a mess. Before Pre-professional Craig was a little quirky, not popular or hip, but a kid with confidence and discipline who ate and slept and got acquainted with his sexuality, alone, but, hey, he was thirteen. When he figures out he’s only average in a pool of geniuses, he snaps. This is right about the time he takes up with Aaron, a hipper kid whose bedroom in a downtown Manhattan apartment has its own entry and ventilation system. I don’t know how Aaron manages a steady supply of pot (it’s expensive—not to leave out illegal—and none of these kids is rich). Aaron has a new girlfriend, Nia, a Jewish Chinese beauty (who knows it) and Pre-professional coed. Craig inwardly yearns for Nia and turns to pot and internet sex (the parental control is where here, never mind) to soothe the ache. It’s too much, he can’t cope. His life’s been taken over, he’s not up to Pre-professional, or the other kids, or girls, or anything.

A little man moves into his gut and pulls a rope inside whenever he tries to eat, resulting in frequent trips to darkened bathrooms to throw up. All he can do is wait, hope for a mental “shift”, to turn a corner that will bring back the days before Pre-professional. “The Tentacles are the evil tasks that invade my life...the opposite of the tentacles are the Anchors...things that occupy my mind and make me feel good temporarily.” Riding his bike is a rare anchor, school an expanding, strangulating monster until finally one long sleepless Saturday night he figures a jump off the Brooklyn Bridge is his only way out.

“So why am I depressed? That’s the million-dollar question, baby, the Tootsie Roll question; not even the owl knows the answer to that one. I don’t know either. All I know is the chronology.” He’s ready to peddle to the bridge in the wee hours of the morning. He decides against leaving a note (too melodramatic) figuring his bike will tell the tale, but then worries, what if the bike is stolen and his family won’t know for sure that he jumped? This is a black moment.

Straddling the brink, Craig’s conversation with the hotline guy is very funny, even as the tension of that hopeless morning mounts.

Fortunately, Ned Vizzini is not afraid to charm. He balances angst with humor and warmth and pathos and, best of all, humanity. Craig is put in with the adults at the mental hospital because the children’s psyche wing is under renovation, and he finds himself in the right company. The other patients are off the wall, lost, seriously messed up, but truthful and they hold up just the right size mirror for Craig to get a glimpse of his tangled up brain. There is a danger here of things turning pat, a little too smooth, but Vizzini’s character has captured us and we can’t help it, we don’t want this budding kid to be chewed alive and spit back out as a tool of the power elite. Or worse, a hollow man.

What the psyche ward offers, besides desperately needed time out, is constancy. If not an anchor, being on the inside offers a simple movement through and clear conclusion to each day. Craig gets a chance to sort through his head. He mentally answers a nurse who asks about hobbies:

“I work, Monica, and I think about work, and I freak out about work, and I think about how much I think about work, and I freak out about how much I think about how much I think about work, and I think about how freaked out I get about how much I think about how much I think about work. Does that count as a hobby?”

One of the things Ned Vizzini does really well is catch the absurdities of normal life. Inane hobbies meant to tame the beast, blind ambition meant to cobble a power personality out of raw stuff—succeeding in order to sell insurance (like Craig’s nice, inept Dad), using fashion to define a self (Nia’s hot-outfitted beauty). All this works without skipping a narrative beat, without ever drifting outside Craig’s fifteen year old head, written on the cusp of child into adulthood with all the hurting, hardness of growing up middle American hanging out.

Craig Gilner’s is kind of a funny journey. One made it over the cuckoo’s nest. Vizzini makes you wonder about all the other kids growing up thinking they need to rule the world; civilization creating its discontents. He's asking if they can be sprung to explore more worthy ways to spend their lives.

Posted by freewilliamsburg at 10:08 AM | Comments (1)

Here's something to do while we wait for the Plamegate indictments, ponder Time's 100 Best Novels List. Add your own suggestions and criticisms in comments. We're just glad to see Eggers omitted. Too bad Murakami didn't qualify. (Thanks to catch.com for pointing this out)

Posted by freewilliamsburg at 03:16 PM | Comments (8)

A non-review by J. Stefan-Cole

At the top of Thaddeus Rutkowski's novel is the definition of Tetched: adj (1921) somewhat unbalanced mentally; touched [Alteration (influenced by obsolete tached, of a given disposition) of touched]. You know, those kids in school you'd make a rotating sign around your temple at, behind their back, to your laughing friends; touched, whacked, weird, odd, different. Those kids who wore punk or goth before punk and goth hit the mainstream, and before the Columbine High School massacres made headlines out of outsider kids who took their pain to deadly extremes.

Told in the first person, the book spans from a boy's rural childhood in a dysfunctional, biracial family (he's a "Twinkie," yellow and white, Chinese American) to a more functional if not entirely convincingly resolved adulthood in the big city. Everything in between borders on the insane. My take on the kid is that he's the sane one, reacting to the world he found himself born to, bending out of shape in the home soil. Underneath, he's perfectly tuned, it's the others that strike the sick notes, and the craziness of it leads to experiments in self-mutilation, like tying a string tourniquet-style over his penis, toying along the edge, "I found if I stood on a chair I could hang myself. I didn't want to hang myself by my neck, because that would have been too dangerous. So I hung myself by my wrists." It's a tortured form of taking control.

Self-immolation evolves into a desire to hurt others (though this is largely kinky S&M rather than outright, hardcore violence against women) and he confesses later, when he is older and has escaped the home hearth, the need to hurt results from having had no control as a child. This is breakthrough awareness and a turning point in what looked predestined to be a disastrous life. He had no control because his parents had none and they, mostly his artist father, kept changing the rules. Arbitrary is about as good as his father's behavior gets, and its all down hill from there until we start to share the kid's dread. His Asian mother is better adjusted but not by much as she hangs on to her own composure in the face of a husband who insults her pretty much non-stop. She works as a lab technician in a hospital, supporting the family, and is therefore not at home much, and when she is, her Chinese aphorisms and strange wisdom don't do much to clarify the world for her three bewildered children.

Dad had been in the army and he has a thing for guns and discipline, though his own discipline has been compromised by booze, disappointment and radical lefty thinking gone awry. He wants to be sure to have enough ammo on hand for when the revolution finally comes. He can rant about Che, but he's pretty much a bitter drunk who blames his three kids for his failed artistic ambitions. It's not even clear from the boy's perspective that the father has talent. It's mostly mental cruelty of the sort that comes from a battered ego, oblivious to the harm it perpetrates, though there are hints the father may be sexually abusing the boy's sister. Pretty much, Dad is a big child and a sad bully who robs his son of his childhood. He takes him to bars, gets drunk, shouts crazy stuff, "He waved the broom in the air. 'I've got a Mauser,' he shouted, 'and three hollow-point rounds: one for the president, one for the vice president, and one for myself.'" The boy makes a New Year's resolution that if he can't keep Dad from assassinating, he'll turn him in to the FBI.

Under this familial regime the boy could easily have turned into a Jim Shepard charcter, a Project X nightmare kid gone murderously wrong. That is not the book's intent and there is something, thankfully, more acute and less doomed about the tetched kid in Rutkowski's tale. His startled inner voice comes through with a kind of light in spite of the dark all around. This is especially vivid in the scenes where he walks the woods with his hunting rifle, never very serious about killing anything. He is so alone, and in the solitary woods his glimmering awareness of things being off, coupled with an awkward sense of himself, work to salvage something from the wreck of his home life. His father tells him to get a van, go out on the road, become a hippie. He doesn't want to support a college kid, and advises automotive school so he can fix the van when it breaks down. His mother, though, made sure her kids studied and the boy decides on college. If he can make it there with wits intact. Mom tests her husband's blood and tells her son his dad has syphilis. The boy reacts by wanting to hit himself and he borrows his sister's riding crop: "Guessing I was kinky, knowing I was different, and resolving to keep my deviance very quiet, I kept going with the riding crop until I got bored." Whatever gets you through the night?

The writing is raw with an honesty that cuts and is at the same time funny in an absurdist's take on the world. College is the time for smoking pot and dropping acid, to try to find girls to tie up, to hitchhike and go to concerts and see the world. There are plenty of types in college and the kid is instantly less of an isolated oddity. Socially, he's in a bigger pond. Away from home, a sweetness slips into the narrative voice, a vulnerability. Girls don't let him tie them up as he'd hoped, and he is otherwise sexually not up to the game, it's the torture, the desire to humiliate that arouses him. He can't communicate in any other way, could he possibly know how to? This is sincere; it's the only way he can connect, and Rutkowski brings that out with comedic pathos. One or two girls go along, up to a point, and are surprised when he's not that interested in penetration. He steals socks from the public laundry to rub when semen builds to a pitch that demands release. He walks around abashed, yet not dully unaware of what he is, and for all his angst and weirdness is never a victim of himself. That's the ironic sweetness that comes into the voice. He is not his father. He's a mess for sure, but is, mercifully, not his father.

Studies over, he moves to the big city, gets an apartment, a string of lousy apartments in fact, a batch of lousy jobs until things begin to improve. The boy has grown up. Finding bondage partners must be easier in the city, he figures, but isn't, as it turns out. The sense is if he ever did meet up with the perfect victim he'd probably be bored.

This is Rutkowski's second novel and is an amplification of the first, Roughhouse. He writes in vignettes, close to the bone with zero waste. There is greater depth in Tetched, bigger chances taken, more exposed. Here the S&M search becomes almost heroic, a search for the self—or the self that got twisted out of shape—and real emotional release. The further the tetched guy gets from the home front the freer he is to be something other than a wandering bundle of damaged goods. It's a genuine journey, genuinely worth the trip.

©2005 J. Stefan-Cole

Posted by freewilliamsburg at 09:15 AM | Comments (2)

Rob Walker knows New Orleans. His travelogue and memoir, Letters From New Orleanss, breathes life into this history-rich city, transporting readers to the dive bars, gospel churches, and back alleys you won't find in Fodor's or The Lonely Planet. Walker, who pens the New York Times Magazine column "Consumed", lived in New Orleans from 2000 to 2003. His book is the culmination of his impressions of the city collected from journal entries and letters to friends. Walker's first person vignettes are marvelously crafted and richly conceived. But its Walker's humor that makes Letters From New Orleans truly unique. Musing on topics ranging from celebratory gunfire, to the St. James Infirmary, to used car dealers, Walker will leave you in stitches. We strongly recommend this enlightening, eccentric, and most importantly highly entertaining book. It has temporarily changed our opinion about memoirs. Pick up a copy here.

Posted by freewilliamsburg at 01:29 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

From AP
Author Saul Bellow dies

Saul Bellow, the Nobel Prize-winning author of "Herzog," "Humboldt's Gift" and other essential tales of memory, chaos and the sensitive soul in 20th century America, died Tuesday. He was 89.

Bellow's close friend and attorney, Walter Pozen, said the writer had been in declining health. Pozen said Bellow's wife, Janis, and daughter, Naomi, were at his side when he died at his home in Brookline, Mass.

Few writers have been so honored in their time. He won three National Book Awards: in 1954 for "The Adventures of Augie March,'' in 1965 for "Herzog" and in 1971 for "Mr. Sammler's Planet." In 1976, he won the Pulitzer Prize for "Humboldt's Gift." That same year Bellow was awarded the Nobel Prize, cited for his "human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture."

In 2003, the Library of America paid the rare tribute of releasing work by a living writer, issuing a volume of Bellow's early novels.

"The backbone of 20th-century American literature has been provided by two novelists -- William Faulkner and Saul Bellow,'' Philip Roth said in a statement Tuesday. "Together they are the Melville, Hawthorne, and Twain of the 20th century."

Bellow was the most acclaimed of a generation of Jewish writers who emerged after World War II, among them Roth and Bernard Malamud, leading Bellow to joke that he and his two peers were the "Hart, Schaffner & Marx" of literature. To American letters, he brought the immigrant's hustle, the bookworm's brains and the high-minded notions of the born romantic.

Posted by freewilliamsburg at 10:28 AM | Comments (1)

THE GREAT GAME
The Myth and Reality of Espionage
Frederick P. Hitz
A non-review by J. Stefan-Cole

In, The Great Game: The Myth and Reality of Espionage; Knopf, 2004, which compares the literature of spies with the real thing, Frederick P. Hitz writes, "In the world of espionage, as elsewhere, absolute secrecy corrupts absolutely." Daniel Patrick Moynihan might concur. In his 1998 book, Secrecy: an American Experience, he says secrecy is not only inefficient, it is bad for democracy. An example, the Venona Project broke the Soviet signal code toward the end of World War II, revealing the names of American agents at work for Uncle Joe; Alger Hiss, and the Rosenbergs among them. Both Hitz and Moynihan suggest the McCarthy witch hunt wouldn't have occurred had the secrets of the Venona code been revealed and debated. The military decided Venona was so sensitive even President Truman was kept in dark about the code with the result that Truman correctly doubted a huge internal Red threat, while J. Edgar Hoover and the McCarthy conservatives were convinced a Commie lay hidden beneath every D.C. bush.

Much has changed since the Cold War and the fiction it spawned. There was a bit of premature mission-accomplished zeal when the Soviet Union fell, leaving America the sole superpower. The Soviets were out, but the mind set did not readily shift from a Cold War attitude as stateless rogues with fundamentalist grudges against the infidel were gearing up. Just when it began to look as if the spies could come in from the cold, the game went low-tech with too few agents on the ground speaking Farsi, Urdu and Arabic. What happened to the INTELL that might have prevented 9.11? Was it there, but kept too secret to do any good? Where are the George Smiley and Alec Leamas fictional spy types, writer John le Carré's dogged, single-minded operatives when you need them?

If former CIA head, George Tenet really did give the go-ahead to preemptively invade Iraq, at least so far as a rational-the missing WMD's-we have a problem. Tenet's name is glaringly absent from Hitz's book, and the omission is probably CIA censorship. Agents can't seek employment utilizing their talents for three years after their careers end, nor can they write a book without prior approval of the Agency. While reading, I began to get why Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld wants a clandestine takeover of HUMINT gathering for the Pentagon, his own special forces snooping without so much as a whisper of Congressional oversight. You didn't know? Mr. Rumsfeld is right at home with superpower, and allergic, apparently, to trivialities like accountability. But no matter who runs the game, spying is a shady business and reliability of information hard to verify. That is part of Moynihan's point; a culture of secrecy can easily lead to critical policy mistakes. Hitz would site the failed Bay of Pigs adventure under President Kennedy as an example. Moynihan suggested, even more radically, the Cold War might have been avoided altogether if another bit of post World War INTELL had been made public: that Stalin's Russia was doomed to fail, which it did under the weight of its own collapsed economy. Vladamir Putin, himself a hard-nosed KGB man, has said the Cold War was a huge waste of money.

Espionage novelists haven't had to bother with cumbersome chores like Congressional oversight and the weight of history. Congress got involved with oversight after the 1976 Church hearings when the CIA was found out to be abetting, if not committing, assassinations, among other unsavory activities, like spying on us. It all came out in a New York Times article written by Seymour Hersh in 1974, exposing abuses; Hitz: "The guardians of U.S. liberty against the stealthy and all-out assault mounted on them by Stalin and the monolithic Communism were shown to be law-breakers themselves. The consensus which had existed from the earliest days of the Cold War to fight the spread of godless Communism had been shattered by the petering out of the direct Soviet threat, the tragedy of the Vietnam War, and the criminal behavior of an American president in the Watergate break-in. Now Hersh and the Times had revealed that Americans were being victimized by the forces they had unleashed to counter the Communist threat." CIA has had a black mark ever since. There was a recent piece in the Times about a criminal investigation (now dropped) against anti-drug CIA agents in Peru who were partly responsible for friendly fire shooting down a plane full of American missionaries mistaken for drug runners. The "tradecraft" in this case had grown sloppy; an eyeball check was required to confirm before shooting a plane out of the sky, that step, apparently, was skipped. One may not care for missionaries, but what are the "good guys" up to? What exactly is the role of the CIA in prisoner interrogations? Abu Graib comes to mind, and what of the reported extrajudicial policy of rendition, whereby the CIA turns suspects over for questioning to countries with no scruples against torture. This is not fiction.

The problem with Congressional oversight, of course, is how many people can keep a top secret? On the other hand, what's to keep a spy, or a defense secretary, honest? Secrecy breeds secrecy. Where was the internal oversight to interdict a traitor like Aldrich Ames, or Anthony Blunt, and most recently, Richard P. Hanssen, who sold FBI secrets to the Russians? What prevents a rogue agent? The answer is, not much. Periodic lie detector tests and lifestyle checks are supposed to keep agents clean. The literature is filled with counterintelligence genius, George Smiley again in le Carré's, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, worming out a British SIS mole. In the real world it took nine years catch Aldrich Ames, with much damage done in between as he got rich selling out fellow spies, who were usually executed. Hanssen, Hitz reports, asked the FBI agents who finally nabbed him, "What took you so long?"

What happens to retired spies who know too much? It seems a thankless job, spying; shadowy, double and triple lives, often a bottle of scotch for a best friend. If an agent dies in the field it's all hush hush. Eventually the name will be carved into the tribute wall at CIA headquarters in Langley, but there won't be a nice obit about dying for one's country, not if friends and even your wife and kids think you were something else, a diplomat or a foreign vacuum cleaner salesman, say. Case in point, not a mention in the book of outed spy Valerie Plame. CIA censorship again? While I'm guessing, I think at least part of the reason Hitz quotes so extensively from the spy literature is because real spies can't kiss and tell. The best retired spy, Hitz suggests, is one who sails out to sea, to an out of sight afterlife. Maybe there really is an island somewhere for retired spooks, like Patrick McGoohan's No.6, "The Prisoner" in the Cold War TV series that upset the whole spy-as-hero genre.

The Great Game (Hitz calls it the second oldest profession) left me with the feeling that stuff was being withheld. Hitz is now a teacher at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton, but for twenty years was in government service, most of that in the CIA where for eight years he was inspector general. Is he trying to wink as he tells? As for the much quoted literature, Graham Greene looks more at human nature in books like, The Quiet American, and, The Human Factor, than truth in spying. Le Carré asks, in, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, what happens when the good guys employ the same dark methods as the enemy? Le Carré's attempt at an answer is that the West is not the aggressor, is benevolent even if it regretfully fights fire with fire. Is that still true? The real value of Hitz's book, beyond a voyeuristic look at spies, may lie in the brief chapter on espionage and terrorism which suggests improvements in our approach: "Many thoughtful observers believe it is high time now for the U.S. and its principal allies to take the religious terrorist threat for what it is: a wide ranging assault on the cultural and economic assumptions of the West and the globalization that is its manifestation." If the writer means what I think he means, we have an even bigger problem; the current White House, with its extreme secrecy and "us or them" stance, is not about to take a look at any of its own assumptions. We are probably due for a spate of new spy novels; maybe one of them will shed some light on the festering dangers of secrecy.

(c)2005 J. Stefan-Cole

Posted by freewilliamsburg at 11:40 AM | Comments (0)

Normally, we'd find it self-indulgent to run a story about our new book, Food Court Druids, Cherohonkees, and other Creatures Unique to the Republic, but this article from a Presbyterian gazette in VA is bizarre and priceless:

Resolving to Reach Out in '05

Asphalt Rangers. Have you every bumped into one? These are people who live in the city, but wear backpacking gear and hiking shoes every day. And how about Stretchibitionists? They are those peculiar gym patrons who never seem to actually work out; instead, they claim a visible spot to do a stretch routine with no apparent aim or reason.

If these descriptions ring a bell, you can thank Robert Lanham, author of the book Food Court Druids, Cherohonkees, and Other Creatures Unique to the Republic. He's "the Margaret Mead of the North American weirdo," according to writer Neal Pollack—able to identify dozens of species of humans who may not even know that they are part of a distinctive social group. (Hank Stuever, "Your Life: Highly Classified, By Robert Lanham," The Washington Post, November 7, 2004, D1)

The mission of our church is to reach out to Asphalt Rangers and Stretchibitionists, as well as every other social group in our community. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus goes out into all the cities and villages, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God, and curing every disease and every sickness (Matthew 9:35). He reaches out to the first-century versions of Asphalt Rangers and Stretchibitionists — members of every idiosyncratic social group that existed in all the cities and villages of Galilee. The point of this passage is that Jesus ventures beyond his own circle of family members and friends and reaches out — he embraces the great crowds of people who are "harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd" (v. 36). Although these crowds of Galileans may have been as odd and amusing as Stretchibitionists, Jesus doesn't laugh at them. Instead, he has compassion for them.

Then Jesus commands his disciples to do the same. "The harvest is plentiful," he says, "but the laborers are few" (v. 37). In other words, "Go on, get going. There are a lot of Asphalt Rangers we need to reach." We can make a New Year’s resolution to reach out in 2005.

The place to begin is always to identify a hunger — to figure out what is missing, what needs to be filled, what is aching for satisfaction. Then, and only then, our job is to take steps to satisfy that hunger with solid spiritual food.

So, how can we reach the Asphalt Rangers? These people who live in backpacking gear and hiking shoes have a hunger for opportunities that are adventurous, challenging, and results-oriented. We can offer overseas mission trips for Rangers who like to work with their hands, local mission projects for men and women who want to improve their communities, and intensive spiritual retreats for people who are willing to be challenged by the rigors of faithful living. Another trip to Honduras will be offered this year by the Midlife Men on a Mission, local mission projects are always being organized by the Mission Outreach Ministry, and the Great Banquet spiritual renewal weekend will return to FPC this spring and fall.

But what about Stretchibitionists? These idiosyncratic gym patrons might appear to be uninterested in religion, but in fact they have a spiritual need that the church is uniquely qualified to meet. As disciples of Christ, we can help them to put body and soul together. The Christian Education Ministry is sponsoring a program on faith and fitness in late January (see details on page 10), and participants in this program may decide to organize some exercise groups. The key to reaching Stretchibitionists is to create new programs that help them to put body and soul together. It's a spiritual need that we can meet, and as we do so we'll be acting as faithful laborers in Christ's harvest.

Meeting people where they are is the key to being a faithful healer and harvester. By finding and meeting their needs, we'll find ways to reach the many idiosyncratic groups all around us that are so in need of the gospel. So let's resolve to reach out in 2005.

Posted by freewilliamsburg at 10:53 AM | Comments (2)

What is a Food Court Druid?

Where can I get my free Dr. Phil Wallpaper?

All of these questions are answered by the new book FOOD COURT DRUIDS, CHEROHONKEES and other creatures unique to the republic.

Plus, FREE DR. PHIL WALLPAPER!
WWW.FOODCOURTDRUIDS.COM

Posted by freewilliamsburg at 10:19 AM | Comments (24)

An Unfinished Life
A novel by Mark Spragg
A non-review by J. Stefan-Cole

The question that bugged me as I read Mark Spragg's novel, AN UNFINISHED LIFE; Alfred A. Knopf, 2004, was which came first, the screenplay or the novel? The novel's publish date was September 5th, the film version of the story, as written on the back of my reviewer's copy is billed as, "Soon to be a major motion picture (Miramax, December, 2004)". For a movie to be released in December it would have to be in the can by June, and quickly in the editing room for the weeks or months post-production takes. But before production there would have to have been pre-production; location scouts, costume people put in place, a director of cinematography and so on, and before that a director and talent had to be brought on board, and, with some back and forth, producers to produce the money. But way back even before any of that there had to be a screenplay. Okay, maybe someone got their hands on the manuscript and ran with the idea of pushing a film project before a screenplay was written, but you see where I am going.

Where exactly am I going? Partly, I'm going to the point that the book felt like a movie when I read it. The obvious scene by scene-ness of it, the way characters were gone into just enough to make me keep turning pages, but not enough to complicate the situation so if, say, the characters were going to show up in a movie, the transition wouldn't be all that hard to make. It turns out Lasse Hallstrom directed the movie, "An Unfinished Life". Hallstrom has made at least one great film, "My Life as a Dog"; he also made "Chocolat," which I cannot comment on having not seen it. I did see the movie Hallstrom made of E. Annie Proulx's novel, THE SHIPPING NEWS, which was a fine book, but an inferior movie in my estimation, though the visuals were astonishing, and, like the book, made me want to go to Newfoundland to see the blue icebergs. Kevin Spacey was miscast as Quoyle and the novel was butchered; it almost had to be butchered to make a movie out of it at all. Annie Proulx is on record as having been satisfied that the spirit of her book was kept reasonably in tact in the film version, but I have the cheek to disagree. Leaving aside Proulx's occasional drop dead incredible prose, I disagree precisely because the characters were written to be read. They are human and their progress toward a greater version of themselves takes time and more than just dialogue, and the shorthand characters that are usually written for films ("major motion pictures", anyway) are robbed of half their blood. Movies, for one, are hard pressed to present an internal life. If a book is all about plot or sentiment, no problem, but if a book involves complex characters in complex situations, where some sort of personal denouement occurs that is dramatic on a level further along than the obvious or superficial, which good books tend to be, the action cannot break down into a simple situation of conflict, resolution and tidy climax in the space of ninety minutes; the bread and butter time frame of most movies. I mean, we are not talking about John Cassavetes' idea of film characters here.

So, reading the character Einar Gilkyson (played by Robert Redford in the film) in Spragg's novel, I felt I was mostly getting the surface of the old guy, a Wyoming rancher who lost his only son in a car crash and who blames the death on his sexy daughter-in-law Jean (played by Jennifer Lopez). There is a kid in the book (I don't know who is playing her) that Einar doesn't know exists until she and her mom show up one day, ten years after the car crash, fleeing the clutches of a violent loser mom had taken up with. The kid is named Griff, after her dad, and we are told that her mother has been with a string of abuser boyfriends and that she hates her for it, and the poor girl sounds wise beyond her years. The book gives each major character a shot at their own POV in a sort of over the shoulder third person narrative, which means less likelihood of an omniscient voice probing too deeply into their unconscious motivations, which translates into things being conveniently spelled out. Morgan Freeman plays another old guy, Mitch, who has worked at Einar's ranch since they served together in the Korean War. Mitch hadn't much of a life before he and Einar became battle buddies and he is reasonably content living in the bunkhouse except that the ranch is not functioning anymore because Einar's too old, his son is dead, and Mitch was mauled by a bear and is seriously mangled as a result, plus he's hooked on daily shots of morphine, administered by Einar, to manage the pain. I don't know who is playing the louse, the nasty boyfriend Roy, in the movie, but he gets a shot at a voice too. The inside of Roy's head is actually pretty funny, if one-dimensional, bigoted and predictable. "...Roy blinks against the flash of headlights. He knows damn well there isn't a woman in the world who can keep her mouth shut long enough, not through a man's whole lifetime, where she won't need to get smacked at least once. And he knows you wouldn't have to if you didn't love them. That's just a law of nature." There is an old dog in the book too, Karl, who is also predictable as a device.

All the elements are in place for a big feature film: A date night; popcorn, Kleenex for the Kleenex moments (there are at least two), and the Wyoming landscape will doubtless be spectacular to watch. The lights go down, Robert Redford surveys his once glorious ranch, he'll milk his one remaining cow and feed his old horse, then he'll go give Mitch his dope and we will leave the landscape and enter into the brisk, pithy dialogue of two long time friends, one of whom is dying, and the other who feels already dead. Or does he feel dead inside? That would be Einar, the hard bitten, decent guy who lost first the mother of his child, then the grown up child. Einar is off the bottle and Mitch is on the opiates. Cut to Griff waking up in a ratty, tin trailer home somewhere in Iowa. Every morning she packs her bag in case she and her mother have to hit the road. Her mother's been smacked around again (picture J. Lo with a shiner and a make believe sock on the jaw), and Roy feels so bad that she made him do it, again. Mom works in a dry cleaners (now picture J. LO in her synthetic dry cleaner uniform, never mind), it's just another dead end job in a nowhere town, another trailer park and another low life boyfriend. A problem for me was the abuse. Roy comes right out of a case study, but Jean had a real lover in her husband, Griffin, and there is no suggestion in the book about prior abuse, yet Jean is a serial victim. But she's not a victim. Oh, make up my mind. She struck me as self-indulgent, confusing sexual appetite with a sedative (okay, there is that sedative element to sex), but she's independent minded and fairly feisty, too. While I'm at it, Einar never bothered to check out the accident, never even knew his daughter-in-law was pregnant at the funeral. Mitch knew. No, he knew Jean was not to blame, not about the unborn kid. The dramatic tension mounts when Einar and Jean confront, and then there is the bear who shows up again, and there's Roy, and the race card even gets a little play and the book is entertaining as hell and so full of holes as literature that I pretty much concluded the screenplay (written by Spragg and his wife, Virginia) came before the novel.

What I can't understand, given the abysmal state of fiction literacy today, why would Knopf bother to publish a book with the movie coming out two months later? Maybe there was a publishing deal in place before either was penned. The book is alright. I read it in record time; it's a perfectly serviceable read. The human condition isn't intensified or made clearer, I don't think I learned anything and there are no turns of sentence or nuanced language that really soar. Spragg's book is like reading Cormack McCarthy without the big descriptions or quite the high flown melodrama. The writing is direct, clean. Here's Jean when she first sees the mangled Mitch (she'd known him before his meet up with the bear), "She steps in smiling without even breaking her stride. She stares at the mutilated side of his face as she sets the plate on the workbench. Her eyes don't flicker and her smile doesn't wilt." And here is nine year old Griff when she first sees Mitch (also delivering a tray of food), "She walks out of the glare and stops, wincing at the sight of him as though she's been slapped. She stares down at the tray, and he leans back in his chair. He saw the flash of panic in her eyes and imagines her counting the objects on the tray, the glasses, plates, the paper napkins, counting them twice, wishing there were more things to count. He asks, 'Are you feeling dizzy?'" Simple, direct, as I said, entertaining.

I'm seriously guessing the screenplay came first. Mark Spragg wrote at least one other, "Everything That Rises," for TNT, with Dennis Quaid, who also directed. I don't suppose it matters much either way which came first. I wonder about anyone attempting to make movies out of literature, though. THE ENGLISH PATIENT, for example, a good book, not Ondaatje's best writing, not his most brilliant (for that see, COMING THROUGH SLAUGHTER, or, IN THE SKIN OF A LION). The movie version is fine, there was enough to extrapolate from the book to make an interesting film, but most of the novel is lost in the adventure/love story that the movie became. All the stuff Michael Ondaatje has to say, the thoughts and ideas are not in the movie, and they couldn't be. The genres are not at all alike. They tell stories completely differently. One uses actors/dialogue and visuals and sound (music usually), the other uses the imagination of the reader to see what is described, and dialogue is almost extra icing on top of the characters and ideas and the internals of a book. Maybe short stories better lend themselves movies, or lighter weight novels like, AN UNFINISHED LIFE.

-- Copyright J. Stefan Cole

Posted by freewilliamsburg at 05:58 PM | Comments (3)