by Michael Buozis

In Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2012 film The Master, Freddie Quell, a drunken World War II Navy veteran played by Joaquin Phoenix, secretly boards a ship commanded by Lancaster Dodd, the Master of the film’s title played by Philip Seymour Hoffman.  In the immediate postwar period, Quell worked as a department store photographer before nearly strangling a customer with his own tie and then as a harvester living in a camp with migrants before being accused of poisoning a fellow worker with a strange, homebrewed hooch of lemons and gin and household chemicals.  Quell crashes a party on Dodd’s ship and wakes up the following morning in a sagging bunk.  Dodd asks Quell to join the crew and shows a peculiar interest in Quell’s psychological damage.

Quell asks, “What do you do?”

Dodd replies, “I am many things.  I am a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist, a theoretical philosopher.  Above all, I am a man, a hopelessly inquisitive man, just like you.”

But beyond this, Dodd is a man in need of Quell’s hooch.  Quell obliges and brews more in the ship’s engine room.  This batch contains turpentine and both men drink it with relish.

These scenes, and indeed the rest of the film, work in a haze of credulousness, a sour-headed moonshine funk of washed-out color and numbness.  Quell, emotionally lost but never gullible, resists the Master’s powers of persuasion.  Dodd processes Quell, performing a perverted version of a familiar form of psychotherapy.  By forcing Quell to repeat, again and again, phrases that reveal his most hidden secrets, Dodd offers to help his subject move beyond his psychological hang-ups, to go clear and gain the Master’s own undeniable social powers.

Quell’s disciple-hood leads him to follow Dodd into the desert, to a grand estate in England, to posh parlors in big cities, and a suburban home in Philadelphia.  In Philadelphia, Dodd dictates a course of therapy for Quell in which Quell runs back and forth, for hours day after day, between a wood-paneled wall and a window.  Quell must do this with his eyes closed and he must describe the surfaces he touches each he time he touches them.

Dodd’s followers include, almost solely, beautiful well-educated middle class white people.  They thirst for Book 2, a promised revelation of Dodd’s dictates to his followers.

Whatever the film’s merits – and they are many and great – and however liberally Anderson used compression and fictionalization to create his vivid characters and setting, the source material is obvious.  It’s discomfiting, though, that Anderson’s thoroughly disturbing film does not exaggerate the strangeness of the events that inspired it.

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Of course there are many cults that, as the cult of The Master does, manipulate some anxiety in the American zeitgeist of their particular period to attract adherents.  The spread of Mormonism, in great part, rose from the promise of the American West, of new territories where the inhuman conditions of the industrial cities of the Northeast and Europe could be escaped.  The Manson Family and Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple took different tacks, both with horrific ends, in dealing with heightened anxieties about multiculturalism, civil rights and social revolutions in America.  There are countless lesser known American cults – the Millerites, the Church of Bible Understanding, Heaven’s Gate, the Branch Davidians among them – not to mention cults founded in other countries, with similar origins in the societal conflicts of their ages.  These cults, and the mainstream panic they engender, have a particularly important place in American culture. The American myth, even if history doesn’t fully bear this myth out, is of a country founded by religious dissenters.  What greater affirmation of one’s righteous dissent than being chastened as illegitimate and dangerous?

The older cults – we call them religions – may derive their legitimacy less from their ancientness, the distance in time and place of their foundations, and more from their generality.  The old religions offer solace from everything, for all time, and cults often offer the same, but for the very specific here and now.  In 1919, the Reverend W.F. Cobb, writing in The Living Age, compared the difference between new cults and old religions to that between American and European secular philosophical thought of the era.  “Whereas your orthodox philosopher is concerned only with asking of any proposition he encounters whether it is true, this new and callow professor (the American pragmatist) proclaims that all that matters is whether it works.  Truth, he affirms, is secondary….”  Though Cobb had an obvious vested interest in the argument, he might have been on to something.  The American cult is pragmatic in a way that European religious traditions of Judeo-Christianity are not.  Cults function like a mystical form of psychotherapy, the practice much maligned by L. Ron Hubbard, Paul Thomas Anderson’s inspiration for Lancaster Dodd.

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Tony Ortega of The Village Voice drew early attention to the parallels between Dodd and Hubbard, and Paul Thomas Anderson has admitted that Hubbard has fascinated him for many years and served as the inspiration for his screenplay for The Master.  However, many participants in the film, such as Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams, who plays Dodd’s wife, as well as the film’s producers, have denied the connection.  Scientology, the pseudo-religious self-help institution Hubbard founded in the 1950s, is well-known for attacking its detractors in the media.  Recent events, more than 50 years after the fictionalized events in The Master, bear this out.  In July 2012, Alexander Jentzsch, the son of Scientology president Heber Jentzsch, died of an overdose of methadone while battling pneumonia.  Jentzsch’s mother, years before, went public with the Church’s treatment of her husband, who was confined for years to “The Hole,” a torturous boot camp for failing Scientologists.  The Church required Alexander to cut off all ties with his parents and may have prevented him from receiving proper medical care for his condition. Then in September, Marc and Claire Headley, former members of Scientology’s clergy, the Sea Org, revealed that Scientology officials attempted to bribe the couple by promising to forgive court costs in a recent lawsuit if the Headleys would provide information about vocal ex-Scientologists and their media contacts.  Later that month, Mike Rinder, a former Church official, commented on the dedication of the Scientology National Affairs Office in Washington, DC:

I have no idea who or what they are going to put in that building. Maybe some animatronic Miscaviges that will spout puffery when you push a button “Fastest growing religion on earth with more than 10,000 churches and 10 million members. Being led into the future under the brilliant, benevolent guidance of the ecclesiastical leader of the religion, Mr. David Miscavige, a man who cares deeply for the well-being of mankind and demonstrates it every day by personally keeping a large number of people employed hand-making his clothes, washing his cars, recording and typing his every word and keeping him tanned and manicured….

The Church’s membership numbers are contested.  Some estimates are as low as 25,000 members.

In February of this year, Jenna Miscavige Hill, the niece of David Miscavige, published an account of the abuse and slave labor she witnessed in the Sea Org.  In March, Elspeth Reeve wrote on The Atlantic’s website that she had been contacted by a writer from the Church’s mouthpiece publication, trying to get dirt on Ortega, who left The Village Voice to write a book about Scientology.

But these are only some of the recent controversies surrounding Scientology.  Lawrence Wright, in his new book Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief reveals the origins of the Church, its early troubles and the way its current leadership has attempted to control its image and defeat the individual will of its most ardent adherents.  Nicole Kidman’s response when asked about the book’s claim that the Church of Scientology forced Tom Cruise to divorce her is emblematic of the paranoia and fear created by a belief system structured to remove its members from any skeptical influence.  “I’ve chosen not to speak publicly about Scientology. I have two children who are Scientologists–Connor and Isabella–and I utterly respect their beliefs.”

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Going Clear is, in large part, a biography of L. Ron Hubbard.  In the first section of the book, dealing with Hubbard’s formative years and his founding of Scientology, Wright’s aim is similar to Anderson’s in The Master – to place his subjects and their marginal beliefs in a broader cultural context.  Hubbard’s charisma and ability to conjure a flock began early.  In his twenties, he took fifty young people on a seafaring expedition to the Caribbean, all funded by the participants, in the hopes of starting a stock footage business.  As with his later exploits in Scientology, Hubbard knew little about what he was doing or where he was going, but he was able to convince intelligent, responsible people to fund and follow him, if only for a short while, into oblivion.  However, Hubbard’s early adulthood also exhibits evidence of psychopathology and abusive tendencies.  He neglected his first wife and their children, exploited the Veterans Administration’s largesse and beat his second wife.  In the 1940s he dabbled in the occult, wrote a ton of pulp science fiction and pursued a career in the Navy, failing to act on any of his heroic dreams.  He left the Navy, much as Freddie Quell does in The Master, as a broken man and developed his own method of self-hypnosis which he claimed had remarkable results.  He wrote Dianetics not long after and the early self-help text was a best seller, spawning clubs across the country that practiced Hubbard’s unique form of therapy.  In the meantime, Hubbard’s ambitions grew and he turned the fad of Dianetics into the cult of Scientology, producing further revelations which could only be accessed by invested members of the Church.

Like the Catholic Church – and many smaller religious institutions – Scientology operates as a spiritual pyramid scheme in which the average practitioner pays for guidance and access to higher powers, supporting a hierarchal structure that does little more than guard that access to salvation or self-realization.  The laughable, and sometimes evil, attitudes of Scientology toward humanity, call into question many of the assumptions of not only other organized religions, but also psychotherapy.  What value can there be in any system of belief that is so weak that outside influences must be questioned at every turn?  Don’t the defined terms of psychology, in particular psychotherapy – the id, the ego, the superego, the psyche, mindfulness – which we often learn as science, sound remarkably like Hubbard’s terms in his own system of therapeutic exercise?  This is not to discount the usefulness of either of the systems, but only to question the privileged status of religion and psychotherapy compared with other methods of dealing with emotional or mental trauma.  Hubbard’s denial of the benefits of psychiatric medication is another thing entirely.  These beliefs, which prohibit Scientologist from using medication to treat mental illness, endanger not only Scientology’s adherents but also reduce the quality of public discourse about mental health.  To deny the chemical component of our thoughts and behaviors is to deny science in a way that denying the existence of an id is not.

It’s unapparent however, even in Wright’s thorough examination, whether Scientology’s appeal arose from Hubbard’s significant charisma or from some internal self-reinforcing tenet.  Hubbard was certainly driven to create something immense.  In many ways, he succeeded at that.  Though the Church’s membership figures are disputed, the press coverage and popular fascination with the cult, encouraged by vocal celebrity Scientologists, has established Scientology as a serious presence in the dialogue about freedom of religion in the United States and abroad.  The Church of Scientology deftly plays the public relations game, turning any criticism of its practices into a matter of religious discrimination.  The German government’s anti-Scientology measures did little to affect the organization as a whole, and, ironically, added credence to the image of the Church as persecuted and misunderstood.  And the pyramid scheme, which funds all of this expensive PR, works brilliantly.  Hubbard died a rich man, and the wealth of the Church only grows, even as more critics and former members speak out against some of its more questionable practices and beliefs.

One of the most controversial practices is the isolation and abuse, at the hands of the Church’s top leaders like David Miscavige, of the Sea Org, the most devoted members of the Church, Scientology’s version of a sacred order.  The isolation of the Sea Org, in places like Gold Base – Miscavige’s remote palatial estate, which is being maintained for Hubbard’s return from the dead – facilitates a brainwashing similar to that in the insular and tightly controlled societies of small communist countries like North Korea.  Sea Org members sign away their lives for – and I’m not making this up – a billion years.  No information gets in and little gets out.  The collective reality is controlled by the few in power.  The severity of this cloistering increased after Hubbard’s death, when Miscavige took over the Church.  Miscavige’s abuse of his followers makes L. Ron Hubbard’s lunacy seem quaint and innocent in comparison.  Wright’s most important achievement in Going Clear is to reveal, to a wide audience, the sinister aspects of a group that could easily be laughed off as a bunch of nut-ball narcissists playing games with electronics and self-hypnosis.  But the very lunacy of Hubbard’s teachings is fascinating and makes the story of Scientology one of the strangest ever told.

One of the faith’s most bizarre beliefs was a much guarded secret until a judge ruled, during a lawsuit in the 1980s, that some of the Church’s confidential documents be admitted as evidence and thus published in the public record.  Though the Church does not comment on the most basic structure of its belief system, it’s now well-known that a Scientologist, having invested tens of thousands or perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars on auditing sessions and the written works of L. Ron Hubbard, reaches a level of spiritual awareness called OT (for Operating Thetan) III.  When the Scientologist reaches this level, he or she is given access, for a brief period of time and only in a locked room on Scientology property, to a document, written by Hubbard, stating, in so many words, that an evil alien warlord named Xenu enslaved his people, brought them to earth, placed them in volcanoes and dropped hydrogen bombs on them.  This traumatic, apocalyptic event is the source of all of humanity’s social ills and of each and every human being’s each and every personal problem.  Remarkably, Hubbard’s real life and the Church of Scientology as it exists in the world – plotting takeovers of small countries, evading authorities, torturing and enslaving its most devoted adherents – rivals, in sheer bizarreness and unlikelihood, Hubbard’s science fiction revelations in OT III.  Operation Snow White, the largest infiltration of government agencies in history, exhibits how powerful and paranoid the early Church of Scientology was.

The following celebrities are members of the Church of Scientology and believe, it must follow, in the existence of Xenu:  Kirstie Alley, Nancy Cartwright (the voice of Bart Simpson), Chick Corea, Jenna Elfman, Doug E. Fresh, Beck, Jason Lee, Priscilla Presley, Kelly Preston, John Travolta, Greta Van Susteren and, of course, Tom Cruise.  They have every right to believe in Xenu, and when you get down to it, I don’t question the validity of that particular belief more than I question belief in God or Zeus or Apollo or Krishna or Vishnu or Superman.  But these celebrities do not have a right to turn a blind eye to the human rights abuses committed by their leaders, just as Catholics have no right to ignore the pedophilia rampant among their priesthood or the corruption evidenced by the Vatican bank scandal.  No member of a system that self-perpetuates abuse, slavery, or hidden usury is above reproach.

This is to say nothing of the Church’s insistence that members must sever contact with Suppressive Personalities, or anyone, no matter how close a relation, who pisses off the Church in some way.  Lawrence Wright’s Going Clear sheds light on all these beliefs and practices with very little judgment about the believers and even the founder of the religion.  Wright is fair enough to let the reader make up his or her own mind, though he never shies away from the visceral and alarming nature of David Miscavige’s treatment of the Sea Org and the prison of belief that Scientologists willing admit themselves into, investing their money in an organization which exists only to support itself.  He is brave in doing this, as the Church of Scientology holds grudges and knows how to persecute its enemines.

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Discussed in this essay:

Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright. Knopf. 2013. 448 pages. $29.

The Master, directed and written by Paul Thomas Anderson. 2012. 144 minutes.

Michael Buozis’s work has appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer, The Adirondack Review, Down & Out and other journals and websites.  He is the editor of The Philadelphia Review of Books.

Photo: L. Ron Hubbard conducting Dianetics seminar in Los Angeles, Calif., 1950. Los Angeles Daily News.

by Ben Nadler

When I worked at the Museum of the International Center of Photography my favorite shows were always those that included salvaged photographs. One such show featured 35mm negatives that a group of photographers shot during the Spanish Civil War. The loyalist-friendly photographers fled quickly when the fascists took Barcelona, and entrusted their negatives to a friend at the Mexican embassy, who was able to get the negatives out of the country thanks to his diplomatic immunity. An anonymous filmmaker found the negatives sixty years later, in a cardboard box in his grandmother’s Mexico City attic. Another show featured photographs that the United States Strategic Bombing Survey took to document the damage to Hiroshima in 1945. The classified 4×5 contact prints were taken home by an engineer from the team, survived a house fire, and decades later reappeared in a trash can in Watertown, Massachusetts. What attracted me to these exhibitions was the feeling that the photos had been snatched from another time. ­They were not just images, but physical artifacts. They had survived war and flame, and reemerged to connect us to viewers of a largely forgotten moment.

I had a similar sensation when I encountered the photography book, Hard Art DC 1979.  To be fair, the images in the book – which document four shows in the early days of the Washington, DC punk scene – were never truly lost. For sixteen years, though, the negatives remained buried in the archives of the photographer, Lucian Perkins. Perkins had taken the photos during his days as an intern with the Washington Post. He later went on to become a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist, and aside from a few images published in the Post, the punk show photographs were forgotten. Most of them were never seen by the people they really mattered to – the punks.

In 1995, Lely Constantinople was hired to organize Perkins’ career-spanning archive. She came across the punk show negatives, and was surprised to spot her boyfriend (now husband), Alec MacKaye. MacKaye is known for playing in early hardcore bands such as The Untouchables and The Faith. He is also known for appearing on the iconic cover of the self-titled EP by a more famous band, Minor Threat, which was fronted by his older brother, Ian MacKaye. In 1979, Alec was just a fourteen year old kid, tagging along to shows to see Ian play in his first band, The Teen Idles.

Constantinople made contact prints of the negatives, and showed them to Alec and Ian. “They were amazed by the discovery,” she writes. “…the brothers had always wondered whether more shots existed from these pivotal shows.” Perkins allowed Constantinople to retain control of the photographs from the shows, but nothing was done with them until 2007, when Constantinople was approached by the curator Jayme McLellan about mounting a show. By the time the project fully came to fruition, 1979 had receded twice as far into the past.

Hard Art is divided into four sections, each one featuring a different show. Each section is introduced with a reproduction of the actual flyer from the show, which serves both to reinforce the idea of the book as an artifact of the time, and to help draw the viewer into the experience of attending the shows.

The book takes its name from the venue of one of the shows, The Hard Art gallery. The gallery was apparently not a usual punk venue, but it served for the Bad Brains, who were not welcome at many other venues. As the song says, they were essentially “Banned in DC,” due to the intensity and violence of their shows. Not many hardcore shows are held in art galleries these days, but it’s important to remember that in its early days, punk was much closer to the worlds of art and bohemianism. The Hard Art show was the last Bad Brains gig before the band first left for New York City (they would make the move permanent in 1981), and they gave it their all. Considering that H.R. is so closely associated with the Rastafarian look he later adopted, the images of him doing his full punk show, in Sid Vicious ’77 style, are unique sights.

Two of the shows featured in the book took place at Madam’s Organ Artists’ Cooperative, an art studio turned squat house that provided a hangout for everyone from Corcoran students, to hippies, to members of the Pagans motorcycle gang. The first of the two Madam’s Organ shows featured a non-DC band – the legendary DOA from Vancouver, Canada – and Trenchmouth, a band that is as much a part of the book as its more famous contemporaries.  Trenchmouth’s lack of enduring reputation is due to the fact that they never managed to make a record. Though their sound was never captured, singer Charlie Danbury’s writhing movements are captured beautifully by Perkins in a four-photo spread. The second Madam’s Organ series features The Teen Idles, looking like the awkward high school kids that they were. Both series contain lots of images of kids hanging out, just being punks.

The most interesting series of photos is from Valley Green Housing Complex, a public housing project populated by low-income African Americans. As Alec MacKaye explains, the show was conceived of by Bad Brains front man H.R. as a Rock Against Racism action to break down social barriers: “Part of HR’s plan was to get punk rockers to step out of the embrace of the downtown art scene and take it to the streets.” It’s not clear that H.R. had any lasting success in this mission, but he accomplished his goal for at least this one night. MacKaye writes, “the very fact that these shows happened at all changed the memories, and in some small and large ways the lives, of some of the people who witnessed them.” The Valley Green series elevates, and in a sense justifies the premise of, the book. The subtitle is, after all, DC 1979. In the Valley Green series, we go beyond the small, cerebral DC punk scene, and enter into interaction with the greater city of Washington, DC.

Perkins would later become known for going into warzones – in places like Afghanistan, Kosovo, and Iraq – and creating empathetic portraits of individuals caught up in the conflicts. I would venture that for Perkins, the DC punk scene was an early conflict zone. Unlike other photographers who captured the first days of hardcore – such as Glen E. Friedman and Edward Colver – Perkins was not there to develop or mythologize the punk scene. He was not a participant in the scene. He was a photojournalist-in-training, and attended the shows in that capacity.

One of Perkins’s most famous photos is of a young Chechen boy looking out the rear window of a bus, as he is evacuated from the fighting during The First Chechen War in 1995. The boy’s hands are pressed against the glass, and he looks back at the place he is leaving with a hard stare. Ostensibly, there are many other refugees on the bus, but by framing the shot in such a way that one small boy’s despair is isolated, Perkins enables the viewer to relate directly and emotionally to the situation.

This signature technique of focusing on individuals amidst broader situations is on display throughout Hard Art.  Though many of the images in the book are crowd shots, none of the photographs depict crowds as monolithic groups. It is always possible to focus on individual faces. Images of Bad Brains sets – of which there are many in the book – often focus on the exchange between H.R. and a single audience member. These are simple and human, though highly pressurized, interactions. The Valley Green series, in particular, makes effective use of the drawing out of individual experiences. While Bad Brains and Trenchmouth are playing, children from the community respond with expressions ranging from confusion, to open mouthed amazement, to genuine excitement. In one shot, a child is seen crying, while two punks enthusiastically embrace a few feet away.

Many punk fans will purchase Hard Art for the novelty of seeing H.R. as he was before Bad Brains moved to New York and became legends, or Ian MacKaye as he was before he shaved his head, and formed Dischord Records, Minor Threat, and Fugazi. The book deserves a wider readership than that. Perkins’s skill as a portraitist is such that you can see the energy and potential in these young men’s faces even without the context of their future roles as icons. Equally worthwhile are the portraits of those who did not become icons, but participated in the shows.

In a way, though, this is not truly Perkins’s book. Generally, monographs represent the photographer’s vision. Hard Art, on the other hand, largely represents the vision of the subjects. The book was edited by Constantinople. The project is contextualized with introductions by Constantinople and McLellan (who served as project manager), but not by Perkins. Mackaye is credited with “Narrative,” and it is indeed Mackaye’s story that makes the book.

We are in the era of hardcore reunion tours, and I am as wary as anybody of packaged punk nostalgia. Punk was always about destroying the past, and there is an absurdity about overly glorifying a punk past. The strength of MacKaye’s narrative, however, is that he speaks largely from the perspective of the excited kid that he was in 1979. He inhabits the moment, and allows the reader/viewer to inhabit it with him. Partly, this is achieved through a sort of ekphrasis; MacKaye is experiencing the moments through the photographs, not dredging purely from memory. “Shirtless and burly,” writes MacKaye, in the present tense, of Danbury:

his body is slicked with beer and sweat. His left arm is draped over my shoulder, my right arm around his waist, in a mutually ensured embrace. He has just lifted me from the audience and onto the stage, which it turns out was exactly what I wanted him to do.

MacKaye’s words are interspersed amongst Perkins’s work, guiding us through the images. His excitement carries the viewer inside the photographs, many of which are printed full-bleed, and some of which sprawl across two pages.

The book closes with a short essay by Henry Rollins. In 2013, Rollins has become something of a cartoon character. In fact, a comic book featuring Rollins as a character, Henry & Glenn Forever, is currently probably more popular than any of Rollins’s own work. Rollins was an intense and brilliant, but severely damaged, kid, and rather than getting the help he needed, he retreated deeper into his constructed tough-guy character. This process of calcification began when Rollins was in Black Flag during the Damaged era, and is documented in the most recent issue of Erik Lyle’s zine, Scam. “The cover shot of Damaged is the ground zero of Rollins’s heavy public persona,” writes Lyle, referencing a violent image staged by Colver.

The shows in Hard Art took place took place two years before, and 2,000 miles away from, the recording of Damaged. As he writes of those early DC days, Rollins is not a neckless cartoon, but an excited teenager. In his essay, Rollins describes a photograph of The Teen Idles, another example of Perkins’s ability to pull out distinct individual experience: “Check out Lucian’s portrait of the band. The way Nathan is staring off into the distance and Ian is looking right into the lens. There’s so much in that shot.”

Most important, perhaps, is Rollins’s own placement: he is not in the frame at all, but rather, he tells us, standing next to Perkins, watching. He has not stepped in front of the lens yet. In what is perhaps the most earnest thing Rollins has published in decades, he describes the excitement of watching his friends: “They were the first band I ever saw record in a studio. I saw them do their first demo. I was amazed.”

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Discussed in this essay:

Hard Art: DC 1979 by Lucian Perkins. Edited by Lely Constantinople. Narrative by Alec MacKaye. Akashic. 2013. 100 pages. $24.

Scam #9 – Damaged: The Story of Black Flag’s Classic First Album by Erik Lyle. Fall, 2012.

Ben Nadler is the author of the novel, Harvitz, As To War (Iron Diesel Press, 2011) and the poetry chapbook, The Men Who Work Under The Ground (Keep This Bag Away From Children Press, 2012). He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches at The City College of New York.

by Tom McAllister

One of the hardest things to do these days is to convince people that what they’re seeing and consuming is actually a real and true thing. Plastic surgery, photoshop, autotune, genetically modified foods, easy access to video editing software, and news organizations that don’t even pretend to report the facts anymore have all fostered a culture in which authenticity is a prized commodity but is almost impossible to claim. Every new technology first promises a chance to better know one another (and ourselves), and then people find ways to use it to obfuscate. Social media gives you the opportunity to present a carefully constructed version of yourself to the world, to only share the photos of you in the perfect lighting, the ones where you look thin and healthy and self-actualized. You edit yourself to look more real.

It’s all a show, and everyone knows it.

So one of the central paradoxes of 21^st century American life is that while we’re claiming to be so much more connected than ever before, we’re further alienated than ever. We’re too jaded to celebrate something until we’ve watched fifteen instant replays. We need to see documentation to prove the President is from the same country as us, and then we need to see documentation to prove the documents are real.

These two threads – authenticity and the changing role of technology—overlap and become obsessions for the narrator of Ron Currie Junior’s novel Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles. Before you even get to the first sentence—which promises “everything I’m about to tell you is capital-T True”— the book’s mission is made clear. The cover claims it is “a true story” but on the title page the word “true” is asterisked and footnoted. The footnote, four paragraphs long, details Currie’s uneasiness with the term “a true story” and tries to explain how this commonly accepted phrase is more complicated than it sounds, noting: “I’d even venture to suggest that your life, or at least the narrative you have of it in your head, is ‘based on real events,’ rather than objectively true.” It’s an interesting, if oddly defensive, strategy to begin a book by challenging the reader’s notions of reality before they’ve even read the full title. Next, we get a full page of explanation from Currie about his discomfort with using epigraphs because it feels too much like “high-lit posturing” to quote someone like Seneca, for example, when he hasn’t read Seneca, and so “the whole enterprise sort of stinks.” He also takes a moment to beat himself up over the “juvenile metafictional stunt” that he is nonetheless in the process of pulling, which means he is actually briefly engaged in meta-metafiction, until then he does conclude with an epigraph from the movie Rocky, which choice is begging to be read as self-consciously non-literary, an attempt to distance himself from what he views as intellectual vanity.

All of this preliminary stuff may strike you as some light postmodern gimmickry, distracting gamesmanship, and the truth is, if I were reading this review right now, I would have already written off the book as being a little too in love with itself, too much like Dave Eggers at his worst, the kind of writing that is clever but for which I admit I have little patience. The text itself opens with ten uneasy pages marked by hemming and hawing about the nature of truth and other gear-spinning that seems like it’s trying too hard to establish a unique voice rather than tell a story.

But here’s the thing: Currie quickly dispenses with the games and once the story gets itself rolling, it is anything but gimmicky, quickly settling into an intense, testosterone-fueled depiction of a youngish man in the depths of an existential crisis.

Aside from the preliminary materials, this novel is a pretty traditional linear 1^st person narrative about a dangerously self-absorbed man who is drinking himself to death because he can’t have the woman he loves. The narrator is named Ron Currie Jr. and he’s a writer, which, yes, is an invitation to draw comparisons between author and narrator, and it’s impossible to tell where one’s personality begins and the other ends. But I don’t particularly care whether any of the narrator’s characteristics are shared with the author, because his primary job is to be an engine to drive the narrative. The voice alternates between fierce machismo and unabashed vulnerability; Ron is essentially an open wound, ugly and festering and daring you not to look away, even as he falls apart.

The reason for his crack-up is simple: he’s in love with Emma, always has been, and Emma doesn’t want to be with him. Emma’s failed marriage still trails her, “like a rusty muffler dragging behind a car” and she needs time alone to sort herself out. He has a book to write—a follow-up to his middling debut novel—and so he decides the best course of action is to exile himself until Emma chooses to come to him. He flies to a Caribbean island, rents a small house, and hits the self-destruct button.

Ron’s life in the Caribbean is hardly glamorous. It’s one cheap drunk after another. It’s bar fights and nights spent on the floor of a windowless prison that even the cockroaches are trying to escape. It’s a group of malevolent caballeros itching to pound him into the dirt as revenge for having injured one of their friends. It’s loneliness and dead space and general misery. Ron is bruised and filthy for most of this time; one gets the sense that he smells terribly. He’s living a grittier version of the familiar Hemingway fantasy: a writer who drinks and fucks and fights except with actual consequences that we see and feel viscerally and relentlessly.

At some point, a college girl on spring break decides to shack up with Ron, and he treats her with cruel indifference, dragging her down into his alcoholic stupor. He condescends to her and loses patience with her efforts to cater to him and hates her for not being Emma. When Emma calls to say she’s going to visit, he kicks the girl out without regret.

Ron would be a difficult person to tolerate over the course of a novel if not for the fact that his worst acts are frequently buffered by unflinchingly honest introspection and an acknowledgment of his own culpability. In discussing an emotional distance he felt the first time he dated Emma, he says,

But might that distance also be my fault, in part? Did I lie by omission to avoid her displeasure? Did I censor and groom myself out of desperation to have her, and did she intuit that the me I presented was an ill-fitting flesh suit, a character from one of my books who defied the laws of both his own nature and nature at large?

A book that wants to investigate issues of authenticity, by necessity, has to have a voice that seems deeply self-aware, and so it serves the book well to allow us to see every ugly detail of Ron’s consciousness. Late in the book, when his life is beginning to turn around, he laments—in a way that seems a mixture of profundity and teenage myopia—that he can’t be sad anymore, says he would give everything up to feel that sadness again, because it feels more real to him to endure the world unhappily than to be blithely content.

Ron’s desperation to feel genuine emotions is often at the root of his problematic behaviors. Nearly everything he does, at least for the first two-thirds of the book, can be read as an attempt to achieve authenticity through the physical: fighting, drinking, sex. The love story with Emma is preoccupied with violent, consensual sex, beginning with the scene when Ron demands that Emma punch him in the face while she climaxes. Later, he writes:

With Emma and me our problems started, or at least were made most manifest, in the bedroom. We punched and clawed at each other, fought like animals… I took beatings from her that rivaled anything the caballeros did to me. The sheets were almost always spotted with blood…  Neither of us seemed to know why we did it. We couldn’t stop hurting each other, and we couldn’t leave one another alone.          

Sex with other women is limited in its utility and intimacy for Ron because they’re not free to express themselves as clearly and primally as he and Emma are.

Every time the world becomes too much for him to manage, Ron indulges in his other obsession: The Singularity, which he describes as “the moment when a computer (or more likely, computers, plural)… wakes up, becomes self-aware, gains consciousness.” He has convinced himself that someday, sooner than later, the machines will rise up and assert themselves as the superior race. Confident that The Singularity will not resemble sci-fi horror stories like I, Robot, he believes the machines will be benevolent rulers who will simplify our lives, streamline our relationships, and eliminate all the messy emotional baggage from the world. The machines will render humans useless, but will still be “indulgent toward us, as a gifted child toward a beloved, enfeebled grandfather.” He anticipates The Singularity like a Pentecostal does the apocalypse, because although it may lead to the end of humanity as we know it, it will be a salvation from this world with all its uncertainty, dishonesty, and anxiety. The humans may fuse with the machines, but they may also simply “die by increments, as does anything that finds itself completely bereft of purpose. We will die slowly, of shame.” This vision perfectly illustrates the tone of cautious pessimism that permeates this book: the circumstances are bleak, but they’re described with a wry smile and the offer of a slim hope that someday, when the machines take over, they’ll fix everything for us and let us get back to the business of trying to get by.

Not much of true consequence happens while Ron is in the Caribbean, so for all the pleasures of the voice, the narrative does occasionally meander. The book is reinvigorated first when Emma arrives in the Caribbean and then again when she leaves him, to which Ron responds by driving his Jeep off a pier.

The suicide doesn’t take; he washes up on a shore somewhere, but is presumed dead. Authorities searching his island home find a novel manuscript, and through a long chain of good fortune, his story goes viral and his book is soon the biggest literary phenomenon since Harry Potter.

But he doesn’t know any of it. Because he chooses to stay dead and goes into hiding in a lonely outpost on the Sinai Peninsula, working simple jobs and forsaking his past. The voice here changes, loses much of its energy and the verve that drove the book to this point. It makes sense that as Ron finds some measure of inner peace, his life will slow down and be less violent, less wild, but the gritty, bone-on-bone action of his Caribbean exile helped to counterbalance the book’s frequent abstractions and digressions.

Four years later, he finds out that he’s famous. Even in the remotest desert, one cannot outrun celebrity or the internet. And so he reclaims his life. As one might expect, his return enrages those who have fallen in love with the legend of his lovelorn suicide, and so, even though his book was marketed as a novel and even though he had nothing to do with any of it, he finds himself under attack for having defrauded readers. Essentially, he’s playing the role of James Frey, whose fall from grace is best described by David Shields in Reality Hunger:

In the aftermath of the Million Little Pieces outrage, Random House reached a tentative settlement with readers who felt defrauded by Frey. To receive a refund, hoodwinked customers had to mail in a piece of the book… Also, readers had to sign a sworn statement confirming that they had bought the book with the belief that it was a real memoir or, in other words, that they felt bad having accidentally read a novel.

Author and narrator seem to merge at this point, as Ron is called upon to defend his choices and the nature of art itself, questioning this societal desire to have stories be true in some pedantic, fact-checking way as opposed to adhering to an emotional truth. Currie’s argument for the sanctity and value of capital-T Truth is a popular one among literary types these days, but not in the culture at large, as any fiction writer has learned when talking to strangers who “only read real stories.” We live in a culture that claims to value authenticity but that works constantly to subvert it, to redefine it in confusing ways. Scripted reality TV shows, wildly popular yet more artificial than the wildest fictions, perhaps illustrate this duality better than any other medium. The insistence of referring to them as “reality shows” despite all evidence to the contrary is an insult to the nature of reality itself.

Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles is ultimately a compelling reflection on an issue of increasing importance: how does one distinguish between fact and fiction, and is there even a need to distinguish anymore? In a time when something is only as real as we want it to be, how does one establish something fundamental like authenticity?

*

Discussed in this essay:

Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles, by Ron Currie Jr. Viking, 2013. 352 pages. $27.

Tom McAllister is the author of the memoir Bury Me in My Jersey, and his short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Black Warrior Review, Unstuck, FiveChapters, and some other places. He is the co-host of the Book Fight podcast, and is on twitter @t_mcallister.

Photo: Mount Horeb – Sinai by Francis F. Frith

by Brittany Harmon

When I first learned that Ken Kalfus’s newest novel Equilateral is about contacting intelligent extraterrestrials, many associations came to mind, from Vonnegut’s Tralfamadorians to NASA’s lonely Curiosity rover currently investigating the habitability of Mars. However, fifty or so pages in I realized that aliens were not the core of this book, nor was it probable that they’d be discussed very much at all. And I breathed a sigh of relief. Although fascinating, Martians and their potential thoughts on humanity (e.g. our lack thereof) is hardly an original story. Though mentioned now and again out of necessity and speculation regarding their roles of capitol, labor, and social hierarchies, Kalfus uses the contrast to critique not only 19^th century society, but the human race at large, and how we in our selfishness fail to sometimes see what is right in front of us.

The most visible thing in the novel is the Equilateral. The triangle, both as shape and concept, is central, so much so that the reader is surprised that there isn’t more numerical significance, that the total number of chapters isn’t, say, divisible by three, or that the book itself does not rebel against its own rectangular nature. The triangle is held in reverence, and for many reasons, the first and most obvious from which the book’s title takes its name. The three hundred-mile wide Equilateral that is being dug in Egypt’s Western Desert is the consistent setting and the site of all action. Whether Sanford Thayer, a British astronomer and our protagonist, is overseeing the excavation from one of its three points labeled only as A, B, and C, or an Arab is being thrown from a hot air balloon to his death in its depths; whether the fellahin (peasant workers) are taking shortcuts, or the area is being pumped with tanks of petroleum that will prematurely catch fire, the Equilateral is the centerpiece of the plot. This triangle, according to Thayer, will be enough to signal Mars’s civilization and prove Earth’s scientific competency in order to enter into a friendly and informative dialogue with them. On explaining his choice of shape, Thayer asserts that the equilateral is “the basis for all human art and construction.” (127) Immediately though, one can sense his doubts. He conjectures about other shapes that perhaps would have held greater significance, like the basic composition of the circle, or the spiritual implications of the cross. Already the triangle seems a bit contrived and unclear – man’s attempt at imposing meaning on something that very well may not equate to Mars’s species, the Other.

Otherness, both as a sociopolitical and philosophical theme, runs heavy throughout Equilateral. Just as Thayer’s confidence in his triangle seems at times ridiculous and unfounded, the same cultural ignorance is also happening on a more immediate level. The fellahin are being forced into manual labor, digging without understanding the purpose. Not only is their land being invaded, but the goal of the project does not translate. Thayer’s lack of attention to this matter and his choice to ignore warning signs disrupts progress and almost ruins years of work, though these oversights are common in our world’s history of empire and colonization. It is ironic, in Thayer’s case because his intentions are well-meaning:

The Equilateral was conceived to benefit the whole of humanity. It’s meant to promote the global commonweal and prefigure the other great projects – waterworks, dams, the outlawing of war, industrialization, universal public education – that will eventually draw on the talents and energies of men regardless of nation. (89)

However, advancements at all costs (e.g. slave labor, Marxist idealism) will only result in turmoil, which is exactly what happens as the Mahdist fellahin become a different type of Other, an excluded subordinate, and eventually attack.

The second triangle is one of romance among Thayer, his trusted secretary Miss Keaton, and his Arab servant who is known only as Bint (Arabic for ‘girl’). It is evident that Thayer and Miss Keaton have an involved past, as they sometimes call each other pet names, Pho and Dee, respectively, after Mars’s larger moon Phobos and its companion moon Deimos. Their passion for the project and the concentration necessary for work prevent any outward affection, though something deeper in Thayer’s personality – his wandering eye, an inflated ego – prevent him from seeing clearly. As the novel moves forward this becomes increasingly apparent. Thayer, seemingly oblivious to Miss Keaton’s feelings, Miss Keaton ignoring her own as a form of self-defense perhaps, and Bint in her ignorant innocence all intermingle with subtle flirtations until these tensions literally erupt in the climax as Thayer tackles Bint to the ground and they are engulfed in flames.

Here a third triangle comes into play – Freytag’s. Unlike other postmodern novels that shy away from this structure and revel in the anti-climax, Equilateral has a clear rising action, turning point, and falling action. The first part consists entirely of excavation and planning. Thayer struggles with illness, and his fever is another contributing factor to his shortsightedness. Although there are stirrings on the periphery and betrayals from within, Thayer presses forward with his plan. This results in a night-time raid that sets the Equilateral on fire before it is time. Measurements and precision are of utmost importance throughout the novel, so this premature flare is devastating because it has gone unseen by the inhabitants of Mars, not to mention the thousands of deaths and near total destruction of the camp resulting from the incident.

But this human error allows Thayer to act impulsively. In the aftermath of the slightly melodramatic rescue of Bint, the two lay singed by the fire, bald and naked. Because of this event, changes in perception arise. Miss Keaton has now taken a back seat to Bint. Where she was once able to see everything that Thayer observed, both through a telescope and otherwise, she can no longer. News that Mars has indeed seen the Equilateral via their far superior technological tools and that they are responding by excavating their own triangle precisely three times the size has been reported from Thayer. However, when Miss Keaton looks up at the sky she cannot see the shape. She suspects that her “inability to distinguish the Mars Equilateral lies within herself, and that this failure reflects a weakness more profound than a defect in her eyesight.” (182)

The dichotomy of seeing and blindness is important because it is directly proportional to our own selfish needs. Thayer could not foresee the premature flare of the Equilateral because he refused to acknowledge the warning signs. Although the fellahin insurrections made it apparent that there was going to be more trouble, Thayer did not see it because it was inconvenient to his plan. Similarly, Miss Keaton cannot properly analyze the surface of Mars because her role in Thayer’s life has been replaced by Bint. No longer will the two of them retire in England and have the life she always wanted, and this realization has caused a disconnect between her and Thayer’s vision. Thayer too cannot see the hurt he’s caused to both Miss Keaton and Bint, who is now pregnant and will never again be taken in by her people. Humans as a species act selfishly, and it prevents us from properly seeing reality. This may be the reason that Thayer clings to the celestial bodies, to science, and to the possibility of a greater race. Mars is the ideal because they are not us, and that in itself is promising and hopeful:

Mars may well be the force that makes us truly civilized, truly kind to each other, wise, prudent, responsible to the natural world, courageous in facing our global challenges, and, paradoxically, truly human. (73)

In the process of reading Equilateral, I came across many Arabic words and terms I did not understand even with context clues, so I contacted an old friend who’s fluent in the language, but with whom relations have often been rocky. The first thing he said was, “You only contact me when you need something, but sure, I’d love to discuss the history of Arab peasant farmers.” I had to laugh to myself a little after this response because it seemed that one of the book’s major themes was encapsulated by his response. As living creatures, we can’t help but assert our knowledge, even if it’s undeserved, because our Darwinian instincts tell us to. In the novel, Earth contacts Mars out of curiosity and a want of  information, and Mars doesn’t respond equally, but with an unnecessary, greater force by making their Equilateral three times bigger. A need for victory is built into our genes, that survival-of-the-fittest mentality. We are often unaware of its presence, but it does exhibit itself in many forms, as in the cases of Thayer’s ruthless determination, Miss Keaton’s fear of replacement, and Ballard’s quest to conquer not only the desert, but the smallness of man’s ambitions.

Like Thayer simultaneously depends on and ignores his advisors, so too do people all too often take only what they want. We are limited by our own perception, unable to truly know how our actions affect others. Thayer rarely considers the consequences of his actions throughout the course of the novel, and during that entire time he is, not un-purposefully, sick, suffering from Kharga Fever. It isn’t until the very end when the fever breaks and leaves him blind, that he can see. The scene recalls a line spoken to Bint in an early chapter, “Everything worth seeing lies at the edge of visibility.” (63) Except now he is speaking to Miss Keaton, who he finally realizes is his true partner, as poor Bint screams in childbearing pain and the Martians finally arrive. The book ends in uncertainty, contrasting science’s precision with man’s flaws. A Graham Greene quote comes to mind: “When we are not sure, we are alive.” The arrival of Mars’s people may hold positive or negative outcomes, but it is encouraging nonetheless.

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Discussed in this essay:

Equilateral by Ken Kalfus. Bloomsbury, 2013. 224 pages. $24.

Brittany Harmon is a writer living in Bucks County. Her work has appeared in Monkeybicycle and Dogzplot, and is forthcoming in Sundog Lit.

Photo: Alyssa Alarcon

by Susan Scutti

Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation begins with a scene in a chaotic city square and then ever so casually brings into focus Harry Caul, a surveillance expert working in San Francisco. Harry keeps his mistress in a carefully-locked studio apartment and his phone in a closed desk drawer; privacy is all important to Harry and it is nearly halfway through the movie that we learn why. After Harry completed a particularly difficult surveillance job years ago in New York City, three men were killed. Having since disappeared to the west coast, Harry continues his profession submerged in remorse; if not directly guilty, he understands that in some indefinable way he — or at the very least, his work – contributed to these murders.

Released in 1974, The Conversation won that year’s Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. The part of Harry Caul is played by Gene Hackman more or less on the heels of his hugely popular performance as Popeye Doyle in The French Connection, a box office hit. Hackman is a cinematic everyman who exists somewhere along the continuum between Jimmy Stewart and Tom Hanks. Less sharply handsome than Stewart, less energetically dapper than Hanks, Hackman’s face registers mute, often inscrutable emotion throughout The Conversation — his non-descript Caucasian features behind Malcolm X eyeglasses could not be a more resonant image of powerful-powerlessness for that era. In one scene he sits on a bus and all the lights go out; Hackman, who is wearing a cheap, see-through plastic trench coat, reacts to this seeming threat, twisting awkwardly in his seat, his face a mask of nervousness. His performance is both humble and exhilarating, quite possibly first among the many reasons this movie succeeds in its exalted aims.

When his character later attends a wire-tapping conference, we are given to understand Harry Caul ranks among the best and brightest in the surveillance business. Famous within this industry of macabre little men, he is received with awe at every turn. One vendor even asks him to endorse a new product; Harry modestly yet disdainfully refuses. During the convention, Bernie Moran, an East Coast rival (played to sleazy perfection by Allen Garfield), proudly gives a demonstration of his newest bug. To set off a planted device, he dials the subject’s phone number and before the call is complete, he blows a harmonic whistle into the receiver. With this signal, the phone on the other end of the line has been transformed into a microphone and, to the amazement of those who watch, it now records a supposedly private conversation within the subject’s home.

Amazement undoubtedly would have also been the reaction of the movie’s audience seated in the theater, since, according to Phil Lapsley in Exploding the Phone, only a small number of people at that time understood how the phone system could be manipulated by the use of simple tones. Lapsley’s book, which is compiled from detailed research including declassified government documents and intensive interviews, reconstructs the overarching history and individual stories of the “phone phreaks” who hacked into the telephone system beginning in the 1960s. A curious range of phone-philes – from Harvard undergraduates to blind high school students to mafia bookies – all discovered and then exploited a singular flaw in the communication network. Though I am the farthest thing from an engineer – and though I could never explain it so well myself – I found Lapsley’s extensive explication of the build-out of the phone network and its imperfection relatively easy to understand. Loosely put, the original telephone system used both single-frequency and multi-frequency tones to guide calls (and to collect information for billing) through the network to their destination; yet, the functional network of lines along which these signals traveled was not distinct from the commercial network of lines over which telephone callers talked. Because of this lack of separation, anyone who, while placing a call, could mimic the functional sounds of the telephone could also effectively hijack the entire system.

For more than a few phone phreaks, the naivete of ‘Ma Bell’ itself, as the telephone company was fondly referred to in its heyday, aided and abetted their ability to understand the full extent of the network’s flaws. Because the company had more or less established itself as a monopoly and did not fear competitors, it published the steps of what it proudly believed to be – and in fact was – its history-making progress as an international network in The Bell System Technical Journal. This journal, distributed to libraries and engineering schools throughout the country, “laid bare the technical inner workings of AT&T’s long-distance telephone network with clarity, completeness, and detail.” Pride, then, as is so often the case, led to the company’s eventual fall.

But not so fast. Ma Bell, as one might suspect, had more than a few plays in her book. Having discovered and scared off (with a simple talking to in the presence of a police officer) a few of the earliest phone phreaks – mostly college kids and even younger ‘geeks’ whose interest in the phone network was primarily intellectual – engineers at the company speculated on the exact astronomical dollar figure it would cost to fix this flaw and also began to wonder, Exactly how many fraudulent phone calls were being made?  Lapsley writes:

Bell Labs, filled to the brim with engineers, proposed a crash program to build an electronic toll fraud surveillance system and deploy it throughout the network. It would keep a watchful eye over the traffic flowing from coast to coast, ever vigilant for suspicious calls — not every call, mind you, but a random sampling of a subset of them, enough to gather statistics. For the first time Bell Labs — and AT&T’s senior management – would have useful data about the extent of the electronic toll fraud problem. Then they’d be in a position to make billion-dollar decisions.

Thus Project Greenstar was born. “With no warrant and no warning to the people on the line, suspicious calls were silently preserved on spinning multitrack reel-to-reel magnetic tapes.” Years later, after Justice Department officials had learned of Greenstar, the Congressional Research Service would admit its uncertainty as to whether the telephone company violated federal law because, essentially, the legal system had not yet clearly explained “the permissible scope of monitoring by the company.” Legalities aside, the secret recording of phone calls went on for five and half years; “between the end of 1964 and May 1970, Greenstar randomly monitored some 33 million U.S. long-distance phone calls….”

Not so bad and yet awful all at once, the echo down through the decades to this current moment of private information flowing through networks ‘tapped’ by who knows who comes across loud and clear. Yet here is where Lapsley proves his narrative chops; by refraining from righteousness, he makes the entire story understandable, utterly human… and possibly even forgivable. Lapsley’s skillful narrative is like the soft breath that accompanies a whisper. He is murmuring his fable of progress directly into his reader’s ear: Here you have this great invention and there you see the curious children discovering a new toy and then add to that some truly nefarious criminals… so the company of anonymous men decide to protect what they have made by committing heinous violations of privacy and never do they hesitate because Law, my dear reader, does not precede it only follows innovation, it is always a step behind…

Following the trail of his phone phreak protagonists, Lapsley effortlessly transports his readers from the past to the contemporary age where he reveals one more surprise. At the end of Exploding the Phone, we learn how some of these phone phreaks, most notably Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, fearlessly followed their curiosity and their passion to more complex networks and systems and in so doing gave the world the personal computer (on which, right now, you are most likely reading this review). In Lapsley’s own words: “…the phone phreaks taught us that there is a societal benefit to tolerating, perhaps even nurturing (in the words of Apple) the crazy ones – the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes.” Perhaps that is true, but it undoubtedly cuts both ways, as Francis Ford Coppola might argue. For every misfit Steve Wozniak there is also a misfit Harry Caul.

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Discussed in this essay:

Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell, by Phil Lapsley. Grove Press. 2013. 416 pages. $26.

The Conversation, directed and written by Francis Ford Coppola. 1974. 113 minutes.

Susan Scutti writes poems, stories and novels. Her full-length collection of poems, The Commute, and her most recent novel, The Deceptive Smiles of Bredmeyer Deed, were published in 2011.

Photo: R. Sull

by Rob Jagiela

From Felix the Cat, who first appeared in 1919 to Tom and Jerry in the 1950s to Garfield in the 1980s to DreamWorks Animation’s recent adaption of Puss in Boots, it is clear that our society has a long-standing love affair with the animated feline.  Whether we like it or not, cats have completely conquered our culture.  We’ve even adapted our technology to include the cat, with apps on our smart phones depicting talking cats, to games on both consoles and handheld devices, enabling us to care for cats that don’t even exist outside the realm of the game.  Alongside all of this is the phenomenon of the viral cat video, in which Mittens or Fluffy or some other similarly-named feline commits an act of complete and utter adorableness, garnering millions of views.

The question then, is “How?”  Or perhaps, “Why?”  What causes us in an age of utter technological overload, to be so enamored with something as ancient and organic as the cat?  Why is it that a video of the President of the United States’s inaugural address has less than one million views on Youtube, while a video of a cat playing a keyboard has upwards of 27 million?  Is there an end to our feline obsession in sight, or is what has been witnessed thus far just the tip of the playful, fur-covered iceberg?

As with any cultural phenomenon worth questioning, the answer traces back to the fallacies contained within the human psyche.  That is to say, there are any number of reasons why a video of the President’s inaugural address should garner more views than a video of a kitten who finds himself in a cute bit of peril.  For one, there are approximately 300 million American citizens.  It could be reasonably expected that half of them are politically active members of society, with access to the internet.  It could also reasonably be expected that over half of those 150 million citizens viewed the inaugural address live, and do not feel the need to see it again.  Even with these very generous assumptions, it would follow that at least around 50 million responsible, politically active citizens would have viewed the president’s inaugural address by this point in time, significantly more than the keyboard playing cat.

The problem with these viral cat videos, and the point being made, is that logic has no place in an explanation of their popularity.  The key word in the above illustration is “expected.”  The daily life of every person in America largely consists of things they “expect” to happen.  This expectation has led to clichés like “the daily grind” and “same shit, different day,” and is also why videos of things we expect, like an inaugural address, do not go viral.  At this point, many people expect to be bored by daily life and the monotonous and repetitive series of events that occur on a daily basis.

Thankfully, there are certain things which may help break us out of such monotonous cycles.  Just as one part of our mind perpetuates such monotony, another seeks to break it.  This is the part of our mind responsible for pulling us away from boring political videos and into the world of cats performing acts usually reserved for humans.

The cat is, of course, not the only example of this, but it is by far the most widespread and popular.  While the feline viral video may be regarded as vapid, mindless entertainment, that is exactly what so many Americans want.  There is no larger, overarching political agenda or philosophical meaning behind a video of a kitten enamored with the interior of a paper bag, and that is exactly what allows such a video to gain the ludicrous popularity it inevitably will.  The opportunity to be taken out of the aforementioned expected mundanity of daily life and be taken back to a state of child-like wonder vicariously through a cat or kitten is one that can hardly be resisted.            Further, such a video or cartoon has no consequence.  Even the simplest cartoon starring humans cannot escape the web of connections and corollaries that has been spun over the course of man’s existence on earth, while one starring a cat would have to work to make such symbolism or larger meanings evident.  Such a lack of connections in turn allows us, as viewers, to do just that and nothing more – view the video.  We do not walk away with a feeling of guilt weighing down our conscience for acts committed by people we have no connection to; we do not feel lifted to a higher consciousness by the lofty ideals just presented to us; we leave with nothing but a smile on our face and perhaps a warm feeling in our hearts.  In this way, the viral cat video works similarly to a glass of water between courses in a meal.  The water itself has no substance, and contributes nothing to the larger concept of the meal, but remains essential in that it provides a break, a refreshment of the palate before continuing on into the complex textures and flavors that are to come.

Simon Tofield recognized this necessity for mental palate cleansing about five years ago, and has achieved almost unrivaled success.  What began as a simple animation depicting his “hungry cat” has turned into a still-growing collection of over 25 videos, spawned an almost cult following, led to the publication of now three books, and allowed for the creation of merchandise ranging from Christmas cards to aprons.

Technically speaking, Tofield’s videos are nothing special.  He uses Adobe Flash software, which is commercially available to anyone with enough cash.  He animates frame by frame, at 12 to 24 frames per second, an industry standard.  Like any animator, it takes him awhile to turn out a new video.  But the technicality of Tofield’s videos are not what make them so remarkably popular.  In fact, it is the exact opposite.  Tofield’s videos have a distinctly organic, natural feel to them.  His lines, thanks in part to Adobe Flash’s auto-smoothing software, are often curvy and soft.  The same can be said for the actions and motions of his characters on screen.  One of the largest challenges in animation is creating believable motions that effectively mimic those in real life.  Creating these motions is difficult enough when animating human characters, when one has first-hand experience with the actions they are charged with recreating.  When animals enter the picture, however, the entire game changes.  The animator must represent motions he has only been able to observe in nature, often fleetingly.  However, this is where Tofield succeeds, in that he has been able to credibly translate the fluid motions of the cat and his other animal companions onto the screen.

Although Simon Tofield’s latest book, Simon’s Cat in Kitten Chaos is filled with still images as opposed to the animated works he is known for, his expertise is still evident.  Simon’s Cat in Kitten Chaos depicts the typically mischievous misadventures of Simon’s Cat, but this time with the added twist of another feline in the mix.  Simon brings home the kitten, which had been abandoned in a cardboard box by the roadside.  After introducing Simon’s Cat and the Kitten, customary power struggles ensue.  As illustrated by Tofield’s simple, well placed lines, Simon’s Cat is not happy to have another feline in the house.  Regardless, the Kitten quickly makes himself at home – in Simon’s Cat’s home.  Their rivalry recalls those of previous cartoon pets; the two are almost always at each other’s throats, but there is an underlying feeling that without the other, one would be lost.

Children will enjoy the book as an extension of the heart-warming online animation series, reveling in the detailed yet simple illustrations and charming characters, not to mention the alluring sticker page and bonus how-to section at the back of the book, teaching fans how to draw their own versions of the characters in Simon’s Cat in Kitten Chaos.

The ideas and emotions Tofield is able to express though the pair’s interaction with one another and the various other creatures that wander in and out of the story are what really make the book accessible to everyone.  The book helps recall the simple pleasures in life, like wearing your favorite sweater for the first cool fall day, or being able to leave your jacket home for the first time in spring.  Paging through the black and white illustrations and observing the playful antics of the pair feels almost therapeutic in this way.  Sure, there are themes of companionship to be observed, as well as those of friendship, and even the value of animals in our lives.  But the real joy in Simon’s Cat in Kitten Chaos comes from its innate ability to take the reader out of the monotonous expectations of daily life, and into, even if just for a moment, the much more simple, playful world of Simon’s Cat and his new Kitten friend.

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Discussed in this essay:

Simon’s Cat in Kitten Chaos, by Simon Tofield.  Akashic Books. 2013. 240 pages. $16.

Rob Jagiela is a freelance animator and casual photographer living in Philadelphia.

by Rod Jackman

“Recovery takes time; it is the story of the still emerging Caribbean.”  The words belong to Gavin, the narrator of Monique Roffey’s Archipelago.  Unchecked real-estate development endangers his gated community.  With the hills stripped of vegetation, low-lying property becomes vulnerable.  A flood devastates his home, killing his baby son, Alexander.  The disaster also traumatizes the living: his wife, Claire; his daughter, Ocean; and Gavin Weald himself.  Claire slips into catatonia; she refuses to attend Alexander’s funeral.

A year later, in his rebuilt home painted “Pepto-Bismol-pink”, rainfall still drives Ocean into hysterics.  Not an easy state in a country which has only two seasons — one rainy.  No longer communicating with her husband, Claire is at her mother’s home “sitting there all day, still, knitting and staring at the TV, growing whiter and thinner …”  Gavin can no longer focus on his job.  He falls asleep standing at the urinal.  Impulsively, he decides to do what he’s dreamt of: sail to the Galapagos.  He abandons his job, gathers his six-year old daughter, and takes off on a mad cruise aboard his Romany.  It is shortly before Christmas, and a year after the flood.

Roffey has fun with names.  A weald is a forested or uncultivated area, but reckless development has denuded the land around Gavin.  Claire ignores her husband and daughter and enters a fog.  Ocean, named after the big sea, carries the mariners.  Like gypsies afloat, dad and daughter wander across the Caribbean and into the Pacific on the Romany.  The flood shatters Weald’s family, turning it into a chain of islands — an archipelago.  A sailing companion, Phoebe, flies in and out of their lives like a mythical bird.  The family reconciliation takes place from an island in the Galapagos called Indefatigable.

This novel could have been little more than a travelogue of exotic locales, lush flora, and pliable natives.  Roffey avoids that.  Water (the Caribbean and the Pacific) is a main character, as is the landscape of Trinidad itself, in The White Woman on a Green Bicycle, her earlier Orange short listed novel.  Nature impels itself into Gavin’s consciousness.  The sea has “qualities he knows humans to possess.  It is shifting, and prone to moods.”

The narrator is not blind to injustice.  He’s ambivalent about Hugo Chavez: “Hard to know who to care about; hard to know if anyone gets it right.  Good man, bad man, who cares?”  He is uneasy with tourism: “These cruise liners invade Port of Spain and Scarborough too.  They carry thousands of white people, spreading dollars in their wake which are seized greedily by the contemptuous Trinidadians and Tobagonians.”  It’s an interesting comment from Gavin, a white creole.  However, we remember that Roffey’s fierce critique of Trinidad’s ruling class was launched by an expatriate: the eponymous white woman on the green bicycle.  Not even Earl Lovelace, the 2012 OCM Bocas winner for Is Just a Movie, is as withering in his condemnation.

Gavin is also “locked in a battle” with himself over dueling forms of imperialism.  “Why does he accept the earlier invasion of the Dutch” yet oppose Taco Bell, Dunkins Donuts and Subway?  “America has colonized invisibly via cable and satellite TV” he concludes.  Archipelago eschews picturesque gloss.  Gavin is “shocked” by the racist name of the town where blacks live in Aruba: Chocolate City.  He reflects on the “open racism he’s come across in Trinidad; it is a way of being. … Trinidadians, weirdly can be both racist and tolerant.”  On the Caribbean coast of Colombia, he recalls that the Spanish Inquisition was “here in Cartagena de Indias, and they brought contraptions to squash skulls, disfigure genitals; they tortured the native people into Christianity…”

At home, he was conscious of his rank in that “he, a white man from a gated neighborhood, made national television because he’d lost his son, the only death.”  His sister, Paula, berates a Minister of Parliament: “She was from England where democracy is better … and MPs are held accountable.”  Clutching the reins of dual privilege, white and emigrant, she fears no consequences of living in a small country.

Gavin is focused inward, reflective about his state and preoccupied with restoring his family’s health.  Though running away, he phones the mother-in-law he hates, to inquire about the wife he misses.  Shortly after the flood, he touched his wife “and felt her body stiffen.”  We don’t fault him for then feeling that “his old life ended.”  Further is tattooed on Phoebe’s arm; for Gavin it’s a one-word poem.  He has to “keep going, even when things have broken down.”  In that sense, Archipelago is a psychological odyssey; one Gavin undertakes to reassemble his family.  His motivation is clear: “He was afraid of his wife, of her remoteness.  … they couldn’t abandon Ocean to their separate depressions.  And so he let Claire disappear; they separated.”  He’s in a state of crisis, but not on a spurious mid-life jaunt.  The voyage is therapeutic.

It is useful to evaluate Roffey’s work through the critical lens of novelist and theorist Wilson Harris.  He proposes the limbo gateway as the “renascence of a new corpus of sensibility that could translate and accommodate African and other legacies within a new architecture of other cultures.”  The limbo construct addresses people who have been violated by history.  Archipelago extends Harris’ gateway through Panama’s Canal and into the Pacific, as it confronts how the Old World still disrupts the New.  Roffey’s capacious prose accommodates multiple cultural legacies — indigenous and transplanted.

We empathize with Gavin because he’s no superman.  He cries when his only lover besides his wife, dumps him by telephone.  If not for his dog, Suzy, he’s unable to fend off the armed criminal at Los Roques.  When Ocean falls, as the boat nears Panama, he faints on seeing her gaping wound.  By the time they reach the ABC islands, he longs for an adult conversation.  Failing that, three Colombian whores in a brothel will do.  We feel the heartbreak at a synagogue in Curacao, where he and Ocean don kippahs and pray for Alexander.  At key points Gavin offers trenchant insights.  Aruba’s Sephardic Jews, “unlike those of African descent, they came of their own accord.”  Instead of supporting Ocean, “he has underestimated her too, and how he still has a sense that she is supporting him.”  Gavin sizes himself up, assesses his failures and thereby endears himself to readers.

There are no false notes in Archipelago.  The dialogue between father and daughter is credible.  Roffey renders the details of seamanship with authority.  We feel the alternating ennui, splendor, terror and constriction of life on a small craft: “They cower below deck, in their home, now so pungent with child and dog and sea and maccy cheese that it is a carnival of stinks.”

In some ways, voyaging is not as terrifying as it once was.  Hand-held VHF devices ease radio communications.  Diesel engines, satellite navigation (GPS) and auto-steering simplify sailing.  Nonetheless, a month of island-hopping is different than a trip from Aruba to the Panama Canal: “Romany needs constant attention and care; it’s impossible not to be aware of the precarious dynamic of small boat and big sea.”  Peripatetic Phoebe Wolf solves that problem.  Graduate of a Swedish nautical college, her father owned a Great Dane like the Romany.  She helps Gavin and Ocean sail in exchange for a ride to Panama.  She’s done that before.

Archipelago is a deft meditation on pain, loss, love, nature, and the demands of family.  Roffey blends these themes into the supple storytelling that previously put her on the Orange short list.  It’s wrenching when Phoebe leaves; the severed attachment drives Ocean to hysteria.  But Phoebe is a Wolf; they look after themselves.  Archipelago is a more subtle work than Green Bicycle, and less introspective than Roffey’s memoir: With the Kisses of his Mouth.  A political seam gives her writing both heft and edge.  We wait, expectantly, for her next book.

The Orange prize has a new sponsor and a new name: the Women’s Prize for Literature.  Much has been made of whether a prize for women writers is needed.  That question assumes an even playing field.  Some opponents fear stigmatizing based on gender, a valid concern when chick lit is a pejorative.  But short-listing has a salutary impact on sales, and can lift a writer from obscurity.  Plus, the Orange’s £30,000 ($45,000) is not inconsequential.

The OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature avoids any perceived stigma by not restricting itself to women.  The three-year old prize, and the literary festival surrounding it, is sponsored by One Caribbean Media — a media conglomerate.  In The Pleasures of Exile, George Lamming states that Caribbean writers “will never be required in the West Indies until their meaning and their contribution have been established in national and political terms.”  The OCM Bocas Prize — which expressly celebrates the region’s writing and helps sustain the book industry — rectifies the problem which Lamming identified in 1960.

Archipelago has been shortlisted for the 2013 OCM Bocas fiction category; it now vies for the overall $10,000 prize.  Along with Oonya Kempadoo, Shani Mootoo, Andrea Levy, Olive Senior, Tiphanie Yanique and Elizabeth Nunez, the Anglophone Caribbean has produced an embarrassment of riches.  For these writers there simply aren’t enough prizes to go around.

*

“When you leave Trinidad you go reach Barbados, Grenada, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Antigua until you reach Atlantic Ocean, then no land till you reach Falmouth.  I can still hear her voice.  I remember learning to spell archipelago.”  But in Light Falling on Bamboo, Michel Jean Cazabon’s mother traces an archipelago that’s fundamentally different from Gavin Weald’s — and not only because it veers to the Atlantic.

Lawrence Scott’s novel pairs remarkably with Roffey’s White Woman of the Green Bicycle.  Both grapple with complicated times: Roffey with a post-independent Trinidad, and Scott with the pre-independent colony almost exactly a century earlier.  Roffey’s narrator joins the political rallies in Woodford Square; Scott situates that square, named after Governor Woodford, in a contemporaneous social context.  As with Roffey, Scott is a story teller first.  That he grounds his tale in the real-life artist Michel Jean Cazabon, is no less daring than Roffey’s narrator having a love-hate relationship with the historic Eric Williams: the country’s first Prime Minister who renamed the site of his political rallies, the University of Woodford Square.  Reimagining Cazabon’s life furnishes Scott with a similar historical canvas, one that he uses ably.

Scott vivifies Cazabon — Trinidad’s first painter of international prominence, and a member of the proto-realist Barbizon school.  Cazabon chooses to be an artist in a place where, in slavery’s shadow, art is not considered a serious endeavor for a man making his way in the world.  We enter the story in 1848, when Cazabon is 35.  The island’s French planter class, rocked by the republican turmoil in Paris and fleeing recent revolution in Haiti, is obsessed with a different kind of liberation: getting the English overlords to dribble some autonomy.

Cazabon’s hands are full.  There’s a wife, Louise, in France.  There are two children, and later a third; his son is autistic.  There’s the matter of making a living to support his new family.  There’s the comesse with Josie; the ex-slave with whom he grew up.  She’s the daughter of Ernestine, who was given as a wedding present to Cazabon’s mother.

He’s in the middle of affairs large and small.  His mother takes him when she separates from a philandering father.  He’s squeezed by a wife and lovers old and new in the colony.  He is apolitical, but his family wants to leverage his influence for their interests.  “The old pain of being caught between worlds, between the black and the white, between the white French creoles and the free-coloured and their distance form those formerly enslaved returned to plague him.”

Light is almost a novel of manners.  Cazabon navigates an incestuous relationship with Josie: the chabine he couldn’t marry.  His father is Josie’s godfather but “People who know, know what that mean.”  How does Rose, Cazabon’s mother, feel about her husband’s betrayal?  Ernestine says, “She understand.  Like a woman does understand.”  Hardin Burnley, the colony’s wealthiest planter, manages a wife and multiple lovers connected to his plantations.  Every struggling artist needs a patron.  However, Cazabon is uneasy with working with Lord Harris, the progressive governor, then with Burnley, a philistine and bully.  He tutors Elizabeth Prowder, who is ignorant of the pitfalls of class and color.  Cazabon asks himself, “Where else would he find other patrons among the whites and coloureds in these islands who had not made their money from the trade?”  That would be the trade in African and East Indian flesh.

The major challenge of re-inscribing the life of the painter is to capture his luminous oils and watercolors in prose.  Scott is up to the task: “Light, which was not yet real, but a gradual visibility, rolled in with the gently moving sea hardly breaking on the beach, leaving a ruffle of lace skirting the shore that was gathered in by an embroidering hand.”  Cazabon is smitten by Augusta who “supped on every word like a colibri sucks the nectar from a flower.  She hovered in her taffeta like that hummingbird, sharing the iridescence of the fluttering jewel.”

Light is the leit motif of this novel.  Upon the death of his mother, Cazabon “pilgrimages into the interior of the island, into the bush where the light would be falling on the bamboos.”  While rendering the many textures of light, Scott depicts the blindness of his characters.  Planters don’t see that East Indians contracted in 1845 are as poor a substitute for labor as the Chinese immigrants who follow them in 1853.  Mrs. Prowder doesn’t see why her Portuguese maid opts for a small business.  Governor Harris doesn’t see the empire crumbling around him.  His expatriate English secretary, Wildman, doesn’t see that an affair with Augusta — a free coloured daughter of a shopkeeper — is perilous.  Neither does Cazabon, who beds her.  Wildman doesn’t see that Augusta is “offered up as the mistress” to Burnley by her own mother.  Half his age, Augusta tells Cazabon “You should paint darkness, then maybe you go understand darkness.”  Years pass before Louise sees the sexual bond between her husband and Josie.

Scott explores a period of intense darkness: indentured labor; slavery; forced apprenticeship to delay manumission; jockeying for social and economic suzerainty among the British, French whites and French coloureds; and fractured personal relationships.  Cazabon doesn’t resolve the tension between serving and subverting his patrons.  His father says, “You paint the colony as they want to see it, a settled place.  They can boast how they civilized the niggers and pacified the coloureds.”  Through beauty and dignity, says the son, “My paintings will infiltrate their drawing rooms and their minds with a subtlety that is about quiet revolution. …  A landscape and a people in servitude has not completely passed.  We must make it pass.  My art in a subtle way can do that.”  Not an easy goal to achieve when his wife wants to relocate the family to Martinique and Augusta has a daughter that may be his.

Irrespective of their race or social standing, the women suffer.  The archdeacon’s daughter, her teens hardly behind her, finds Harris her best prospects for marriage, a man twice her age.  Cazabon’s expatriate student, Elizabeth Prowder, understands it well; she is in a similar situation with her husband, an engineer.  Augusta and her mother, privileged concubines of Burnley, are ejected from his mansion — with its one hundred and one windows — when he dies.  Cazabon’s wife, after fending for herself in France, accompanies her husband home only to encounter Josie and her mother “en famille” as she puts it.  Nonetheless, Louise teaches Josie something Cazabon merely toyed with: how to read — an act of “true emancipation.”

A particular vocabulary is needed to reconstruct the story on an island established by Spain, heavily populated by French immigrants, governed by the British, and worked by Africans and East Indians, with Chinese and Portuguese compradors.  Scott conveys the right blend of formal and informal speech.  Whether it’s the British upper class of Harris, the working class governess Lavinton, the French creoles, or the ex-slaves Pompey and Ernestine, Scott’s nuanced dialogue finds the right registers.  Therefore, when the astute Josie tells Cazabon: “The boys, you confuse them too.  You done with that I sure” the reader is sure of his bisexuality.

In an afterword, Scott makes clear that it’s a fictional recreation.  But by centering his narrative on the historic Cazabon, Scott evaluates from a distance issues that pervade contemporary society: social status, race, color, power, liberty and a vulgar approach to the arts.  Therefore, he probes the emerging consciousness of the people of Trinidad as they form a nation.  Burnley, for instance, “needed to own things.  This millionaire planter was not interested in his [Cazabon’s] painting but in owning his paintings.”  Cazabon ponders “where the new republic would come from.  How would his art write its story?”  By ending the novel with a scene of Cazabon’s son — Louis Michel, himself a painter — Scott suggests that art liberates: it binds a people and remains triumphant.  Cazabon put it best: “What fictions paintings were, Michel Jean thought.  But also, what a record they were if one knew how to read them as an imagined life.”

In one of his more acerbic moods – or perhaps just a mischievous one – V.S. Naipaul asserts in The Middle Passage, “History is built around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies.”  Ironically, in Beyond Boundaries, Selwyn Cudjoe informs us that Naipaul owns East Indian Group, a Cazabon work which was exhibited in London in 1886.  With consummate ease Lawrence Scott disproves Naipaul.  Despite the forces arrayed against Cazabon, he dignifies “a people mangled by history.”  He’s aware, however, that he may never “be allowed to forget the full weight of the past.”  In rehabilitating him from the dustbins of history with lapidary prose, Scott shows that in the colony’s darkest hour enduring art was born.

*

The winner of the 2013 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature will be announced at the NGC Bocas Lit Fest, which will be held in Port of Spain from April 25 through 28.  Monique Raffey’s Archipelago was short-listed and Lawrence Scott’s Light Falling on Bamboo was long-listed for the prize.

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Discussed in this essay:

Archipelago, by Monique Roffey. Penguin Books. 2013. 384 pages. $16.

Light Falling on Bamboo, by Lawrence Scott. Tindal Street Press. 2012. 442 pages.

Rod Jackman has taught English at several colleges in New York City.  Presently, he’s an adjunct lecturer at Hostos Community College in the Bronx.

Painting by Michel Jean Cazabon

by Suzanne Uzzilia

Not enough attention is paid to the Caribbean. Those who are lucky enough to travel see its white sand beaches and not much else; once every four years, a bunch of tiny nations dominate in Olympic sprinting events, and we wonder offhand where all these very fast men and women have come from.

This is when we care about the Caribbean.

Not enough attention is paid to Caribbean literature, and this is a shame. The Caribbean haunts many canonical works, locked in the attic like Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre or Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea, or sourcing the wealth of Mansfield Park, but literary works that come out of this region are given little consideration. In our American arrogance, we think that what happens outside our borders is unimportant, and we neglect works from this tiny area. What we fail to realize is that the Caribbean, with its rich mixture of cultures and long history of conflicts, is a source of great literature.

It seems, then, that what we need to force our attention is a special event, like a holiday approaching on a calendar or a quadrennial sporting event, and the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature will work just as well as any.

A relatively new award, started in 2011, this contest is sponsored by One Caribbean Media and connected with the NGC Bocas Lit Fest in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. Its two-tiered system awards winners in individual categories for poetry, fiction, and literary non-fiction, and the winners in each category go on to compete for an overall prize of $10,000. The fact that previous individual category winners include both the established – Derek Walcott, Earl Lovelace, and Edwidge Danticat – and the less-well known – Tiphanie Yanique, Godfrey P. Smith, and Loretta Collins Klobah – means that this may be a good vehicle for highlighting a variety of talented authors.

Monique Roffey is the 2013 short list winner in the fiction category for her novel Archipelago.  Archipelago, along with the long-listed Light Falling on Bamboo by Lawrence Scott, will be considered later this week in The Philadelphia Review of Books by Rod Jackman; here, we will be looking at two other works on the long list: God Carlos by Anthony C. Winkler, representing Jamaica and living in Atlanta; and This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Díaz, representing the Dominican Republic and the United States. Why look at the long list? Roffey will get coverage for her win, but we should take advantage of the long list to see the other contenders. After all, previous overall winners (Walcott and Lovelace) were among the established authors, so taking the long view might assure that some worthwhile works and writers do not fall through the cracks.

Winkler needs this attention. (If we return to Caribbean sprinters for a moment, he is our Asafa Powell. You’ve never heard of him either? Exactly my point.) Díaz does not. He is already well known due to the success of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao from 2008. (He is the Usain Bolt of Caribbean writers; if you know about a single Caribbean sprinter in the world, you know about Bolt.)

Both these authors deal with looking back. Winkler goes all the way back to the Age of Exploration of Europeans in the Americas. Díaz reviews the relationships of Yunior in a post-mortem of modern-day romance gone wrong.

God Carlos is Carlos Antonio Maria Eduardo Garcia de la Cal Fernandez, an illiterate sailor who desires to escape the filth and decay of 16th-century Cádiz and dreams of being a god. He joins the crew of the Santa Inez under the command of Captain de la Serena, who seeks immortality by giving his name to some little slice of the still-evolving New World. We see early on that God Carlos is an ugly man, debating whether he should demand a partial refund from a whore for her mediocre services, and he kills de Morales, the sailor who taunts him with this mocking nickname. His atheistic captain has planted the suggestion in his head, “You might as well be God since there is no other,” so we quickly see the potential damage that a European man with delusions of grandeur can wreak upon a people without sufficient weaponry or skepticism.

They are met in Jamaica by Orocobix, an Arawak Indian in a canoe who is looking for proof of god after the death of his uncle. He makes the same mistake as Caliban and Friday, supplicating before a fool, and God Carlos quickly takes advantage, teaching Orocobix to call him by his name, reclaiming it as literal, and training him to bow at the snap of his fingers. He enjoys a feast at the Arawak village, the cabin boy Pedro in tow as amateur translator and hesitant voice of reason.

The villagers are unsure as a whole whether he is truly a god; he cures one baby’s cough by shaking him by his ankles, murmuring, “Get better, you little pagan rat, or I’ll feed you to the dog,” but he can do nothing to heal another. He smokes and rapes whatever and whoever is available, and soon believes that he is unstoppable, if not truly immortal. When he spies a shining ring in one woman’s nose, he believes there may be gold to be had as well.

The Arawaks take advantage of his greed for gold to hatch a plan to test him. On the pretense of finding more, they take their European visitors hiking to the interior, and when God Carlos founders in a river, weighted by his heavy armor, they hold Pedro back and let him drown, using the opportunity to assess his immortality. He fails, but Orocobix still keeps the faith, and when the body disappears in the middle of the night, he prefers to believe it is an instance of reincarnation rather than a crocodile nabbing him for a snack.

The Santa Inez, meanwhile, has been circumnavigating the island with a mapmaker aboard, and de la Serena finally rests easy, believing that a mountain will be named after him and that his place in history is certain. Pedro rejoins the crew, lying about God Carlos’s absence, and the ship returns to Europe. Through one of those accidents of history, it is Pedro whose name is immortalized rather than the captain’s, and Orocobix lives to a ripe old age, becoming a shaman and telling his tribesmen his well-worn story of his brush with the gods.

Centuries later, another tale is told in This Is How You Lose Her, a series of interconnected stories about Yunior, a young Dominican-American man from New Jersey, and the mistakes he makes with the women in his life.

If we talk about this work strictly in terms of his romantic relationships, it quickly gets complicated. Yunior cheats on Magda with Cassandra, on Alma with Lakshmi, on Paloma with Miss Lora.  Like an after-school special, he learns it from watching his father and his older brother, Rafa. Dominican men cheat; this is what Yunior sees, so this is what Yunior learns. “I’m not a bad guy,” he tries to convince us.

This is not to say that there isn’t sweetness in these relationships. Thick or thin, these women are described lovingly, even when the romance is over, because Yunior generally recognizes that he has been in the wrong. Magda is “a Bergenline original: short with a big mouth and big hips and dark curly hair you could lose a hand in”; with La Flaca, he meditates, “I don’t know how you stood the heat of yourself, of your breasts, of your face.” The family basement becomes a safe haven for Nilda, his brother’s girlfriend, from her broken home and boracha (drunk) mother, and the apartment is overtaken by Pura, the green-card-digger, who filches furniture and money at will.

It makes sense that these women are drawn to this family, as it is this network that serves as the real heart of this work. Yunior, Rafa, and their mother are forced to create warmth between them when they are brought to New Jersey from the Dominican Republic in winter, as described in “Invierno,” the most touching section. The father, who we know will abandon them for a young lover, refuses to let them out in the snow, forcing them to marinate together and fuse into a family unit without him. Trapped in their shared room, Rafa says, “I’m going to burn you alive”; Yunior replies, “You should number your limbs…so they’ll know how to put you together for the funeral.” Still, Rafa ties Yunior’s shoes for him, terrified as he is to perform in his father’s presence. The boys share between them the English words that they learn from “Sesame Street,” but they don’t share with their mother. She tries to say these unfamiliar words, but her husband says to leave the English to him. He complains about the state of the apartment; the mother heartbreakingly replies, “You can’t complain about this apartment. All I do is clean it.” In a snowstorm, the father trapped at work, the mother and children escape into the street together, knowing they will be fine if they just move straight ahead.

Perhaps it is the fact that they don’t that causes problems later on, all of them weaving back and forth in a kind of loving denial. Rafa is by turns brutal and vulnerable, hard as nails and yet consumed by cancer. He acts out, then acquiesces, then rebels again by obtaining an unexpected part-time job at the Yarn Barn. He marries Pura (or Puta, as their mother calls her), knowing that she is using him to get her papers; his mother kicks him out but allows him to ransack her hidden savings. Yunior nonchalantly checks on him at work and later rescues him from his uncaring wife, carrying him while he can and then pushing him in a shopping cart when he can’t.

Maybe this is why Yunior messes up so spectacularly in his relationship with the would-be love of his life, as dissected in the final section, “The Cheater’s Guide to Love.” He doesn’t just cheat on her, but he cheats on her hard: fifty women over five years. In the five years after the fact, he oscillates just like his brother: putting on weight, then running it off again, getting in and out of bad relationships, his body fighting him with plantar fasciitis and stenosis. Yunior finally finds a good place to rest, throwing himself into his work and finally acknowledging that “the half-life of love is forever.”

Neither of these very different works – God Carlos and This Is How You Lose Her – shies away from that which is unsightly; both authors describe ugliness beautifully, whether it is the reality of 16th-century or modern-day corporeality. Winkler writes how the ship “dragged behind her long, stringing trails of waterlogged excrement like the tentacles of an enormous jellyfish”; Díaz describes the muscular Miss Lora “like a plastic bag full of worms.” They both, surprisingly enough, have opportunity to describe bloated white bodies by the water; for Winkler, it is God Carlos’s swollen corpse pulled from the river, and for Díaz, it is the older European gentlemen—“budget Foucaults”—in the presence of their pretty young things on the Dominican beach.

Winkler carries the additional burden of exposition necessary to bridge the knowledge gap of nearly 500 years. Most of the time, his asides are welcome reminders, putting into context for the reader the very different world in which his characters lived. To know that Orocobix marked the death of his uncle before his own civilization’s knowledge of segmented, linear time, felt heat before knowledge of temperature, gives us perspective on how such a man might mistake a grotesque Spanish sailor for a god.

There are times, though, that he should give his readers a little credit. We can make the jump from huraca’n to hurricane and recognize that bloodletting was meant to be therapeutic. Díaz tends to do better here. The code-switching and transitions between English and Spanish are seamless; context gets us through most of the time, and even a rudimentary knowledge of Spanish curse words gets us the rest of the way. There are just a few times when he’s referencing something I do not recognize: “You remember that José Chinga jam ‘Fly Tetas’?” No, I don’t, but I get the point.

My own particular research concern is with the writing of women characters, one which Díaz himself has acknowledged in earlier interviews. I won’t pretend that women figure greatly into God Carlos, nor should they, based upon his setting. His women are limited to the Spanish prostitute, the captain’s wife and daughters, and the Arawak women who are taken at will. Still, it is the women who are the source of the Arawak revenge upon their European invaders, gifting syphilis upon their rapists, and we can enjoy at least this small kernel of satisfaction.  It is Colibri, God Carlos’s last victim, who takes part in his death and gives us a lens through which to view both works. She says, “There is no truth. There is only explanation,” and this is how we can begin to understand both God Carlos’s and Yunior’s conquests.

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The winner of the 2013 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature will be announced at the NGC Bocas Lit Fest, which will be held in Port of Spain from April 25 through 28.  Anthony Winkler’s God Carlos and Junot Díaz’s This Is How You Lose Her were long-listed for the prize.

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Discussed in this essay:

God Carlos, by Anthony C. Winkler. Akashic Books. 2012. 215 pages. $16.

This Is How You Lose Her, by Junot Díaz. Riverhead Books. 2012. 213 pages. $27.

Suzanne Uzzilia is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City and an adjunct lecturer in English at LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City, New York. Her research focuses on contemporary Caribbean literature, particularly in terms of race, gender, and the body.

Map of the city and harbor of Cadiz by Samuel Thornton

by Mark R. Rinker

Two guys, middle-aged, maybe not quite forty, show up at an all-ages basement show in a punk rock house in Philadelphia.  The girl taking admission gives them a funny look: “You guys here to pick up your kids?”  The first guy, nice hair, khakis, a button-down shirt, tucked in, looks uncomfortable.  They’re just here for the show.  The second guy, balding, wearing a wife-beater and over-sized 90s-style jeans, ignores the possible insult; eyes on fire, he’s ready to party.  First glance, you’d never guess he feels at all self-conscious about his age or the fact that he’s still amped up to go to a basement show.

Both guys are surprised the cost of a house show these days is ten bucks.  It definitely isn’t 1995 anymore.

In Detonator, a new film by writing/producing/directing team Damon Maulucci and Keir Politz, two aging punks who had an almost-successful band years back deal with growing older.  Mick (Benjamin Ellis Fine) is still a raging rocker and can’t believe his buddy, Sully (Lawrence Michael Levine), can possibly be content living a suburban life with a child and a wife with whom he never discusses his past as front-man for the band Detonator.

The rambunctious Mick, who on the surface appears to embody the same DIY punk ethics near forty-years-old as he did in his twenties, may have less sincere motives regarding his music than Sully, who’d prefer to let the past remain in the past.  Mick eventually reveals his true motives for contacting Sully after years of absence, with a plan to sue a former band-mate with a current hit single that might sound similar to an old Detonator song.  If Sully previously found his one-time friend’s manic nostalgia a pitiable way to live, this newly unveiled greed does substantially more to turn him off.  Mick acts and looks like a punk, but they both must know that suing someone for easy money is not a very punk thing to do.

The contrast between the ages of the heroes of the film and the kids at the show Sully and Mick attend probably wouldn’t be seen as out of place at all if the two were on stage instead of in the crowd.  Lately it’s somewhat the norm for old punk rockers to plug their guitars back in and hit the stage once more—or many times more—or enough to encompass a tour—or multiple tours.  The number of punk bands who’ve returned in the past ten, fifteen years is quite astounding.  I saw Burn play a reunion show at the Rotunda somewhere around 1999/2000, and it was somewhat unique during that summer period of shows.  Since then I’ve caught shows featuring Adolescents, Youth of Today, various versions of the Cro-Mags, 7 Seconds, Gorilla Biscuits, Sheer Terror, DYS, Negative Approach, and Madball, either as one-off reunions, or, in some cases full-on returns.  Anymore it’s the norm for old bands to play for new crowds, and typically crowds made up of folks much younger than the bands themselves.

There are, of course, those few long-running bands, like Sick Of It All, who never stopped playing.  But they’re the exception; punk bands typically don’t last two decades without a break.  This year Black Flag’s got not one but two reunion acts with different lineups, over-fifty punks kicking out the jams they first performed thirty years before.

You can’t accuse someone like Keith Morris (who’s singing for Flag, one of the two Black Flag reincarnations) of being past his prime, though, can you?  Not when the guy rages it up like he does on stage, or on the records he’s putting out with his new band, the very 1980-sounding OFF!

But there is a question of motive.  It somehow feels more legitimate when the returning band comes back to not only play a reunion or a few shows and collect a bigger check than they would have in their original incarnation, but also to create new music.  It isn’t always very good music (i.e. the Adolescents), but now and then one of these older bands comes back and actually puts out some quality material (i.e. TSOL).  It’s hard for some people not to feel like their idols are simply cashing in, in cases like the Dead Kennedys, a band that’s returned and played, with a new lineup, for the past decade without putting out anything new.

In Detonator, Sully’s done his best to adapt to family life; interactions with his son show a caring, concerned father.  There’s some tension between him and the boy’s mother, Karen(Dawn L. Hall), some of it due to their differing backgrounds, and their mutual agreement not to talk about Sully’s punk rock past, all of which is brought front and center by an intruding Mick.  But, even without Mick, there’s a lot unsaid between Sully and Karen that suggests perhaps Sully hasn’t discarded his past as much as he says he has, that maybe he misses it more than he lets on.

Mick takes him to the house show and Sully is forced to confront what he walked away from.  He may miss being in a band and going to shows, but that doesn’t mean he wants to get back out there and do it again.  For one thing, as is painfully obvious by the way the girl at the door regards the two, this is no longer his scene.  He left fifteen years before and is noticeably changed.

In my hometown, up until recently, the punk scene was split largely between two DIY venues, one all-ages, one at an all-ages-but-twenty-one-to-drink.  I’m thirty-one now, and when I went to shows in my youth, they were generally all-ages affairs, and when I came back from college and slowly got back into going to see bands play, I was surprised at the upward-skewing ages of the crowd at the second venue.  I’d go down the street to the all-ages club and was easily among the oldest there.  Not so at the second place, where the folks there were mostly over twenty-five.

When I was eighteen, you might see a guy in the crowd who looked about fifty at an all-ages show and think, Cool, good for him.  Still goin’ to shows.  Or, you’d see a band like the Adolescents play at the Unitarian Church in Philadelphia and think, Nice, they’ve still got it.  But sometimes aging rockers don’t seem quite so cool.  I suppose it depends in part on their motives?  Or the likelihood of their snapping in half and crumbling into a pile of bones on stage?

When I was a kid it was normal for the bands my dad liked to seem old—the Who were balding, the Beatles had been broken up for years, so many others had died, and then there are rock stars like Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, who’ve looked about a hundred years old for the last few decades.  But it’s different when it’s the bands I grew up listening to, who were my age—or younger—when I was getting into their music.  It can be just as disconcerting seeing a haggard-looking old punk rocker on stage as it is watching a sixty-plus Arnold Schwarzenegger run around with a machine gun.  That’s not to say it isn’t enjoyable.

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Filmmakers Maulucci and Politz clearly know their material as evidenced by every bit of dialogue related to the 90s punk scene.  The movie looks good, utilizing an appropriate, naturalistic camera style.  The music, both the understated score by the Dead Milkmen’s Joe Jack Talcum and contributions by a half dozen punk bands, is less in-your-face than that of most rock-inspired films, and compliments the feelings of our hero, Sully, as he navigates between his past and present.

Detonator is currently screening at festivals.

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Discussed in this essay:

Detonator, directed and written by Damon Maulucci and Keir Politz. 2012.

Mark R. Rinker is the author of the YA novel Evil Ambulance.  He also plays bass guitar for the Mind Control Squids.

by Michael Buozis

Some of my fondest, least complicated childhood memories are of the times when my mother and her mother and my three aunts were all getting along and would spend endless summer days parked poolside on vinyl lounge chairs sunning themselves in contented silence.  They were young then, all of them – even my grandmother – and wore bikinis and oversized sunglasses and leather flip-flops with canvas straps.  They drank Tab diet soda from cans in rubber cozies with white straws spinning in their mouths.  My mother and one of her sisters smoked cigarettes, mentholated and recessed-filtered respectively.  They slathered themselves in tanning oil, SPF 2, and smelled like sweet coconut butter candies.  A boom-box, propped on the deck’s dried wood railing, played soft rock, the lowest common denominator of taste between the four of them.

All of them read prodigiously, and their reading material of choice on those idyllic days was gossip magazines – US Magazine, OK!, In Touch, Star, The National Enquirer.  They’d pass each issue around and by the end of the day the glossy, staple-bound pages fanned out across the deck, brittle and wrinkled with dried chlorinated water and sweat.  When they finished their magazines, they’d crack the spines on true crime books with embossed foil covers showing shiny red roses and blood splatters, silver knives and blue-black guns.

Somehow I knew, even then, these were guilty pleasures for the most important women in my life – the sun and the tanning oil, the carcinogenic sweetener in their sodas and the nicotine in their cigarettes, the lusty gossip in the glossy magazines.  And from the sound of the blurbs on the paperbacks they let slump to the wooden deck as they dozed, the violence and horror of true crime was the guiltiest pleasure of all.

I didn’t pick up many of these books, but my mother left one on the raw wooden shelves in her apartment on 3^rd Street in Easton and I swiped it as a young teenager and did not put it down from the moment I read the copy on the back cover until I’d finished it late the same night sitting on the roof of her building, listening to trucks roar past on route 22 overhead.

The back cover read, “…Aphrodite Jones reveals the shocking truth behind the most savage crime in Indiana history – a tragic story of twisted love and insane jealousy, lesbianism, brutal child abuse, and sadistic ritual killing in small-town America…and of the young innocent who paid the ultimate price.”

The book, Cruel Sacrifice, told the story of twelve-year-old Shanda Sharer’s brutal murder by four teenage girls.  Jones used disturbing, blunt details, which could only have come from the testimony of the murderers, in her description of the crime.

“Melinda took Shanda’s head and slammed it into her knee a couple of times. Shanda’s mouth started to bleed profusely. Then Melinda and Laurie each took one of Shanda’s arms and Melinda tried to cut Shanda’s throat. Melinda tried to use her foot to push the knife in to Shanda’s neck, but the knife was too dull.”

The prose is clunky and as dull as the knife in Melinda’s hand, but the book’s power, like much mass market true crime, is conjured more from its genre than its execution.  The narrative, however poorly presented, represents actual events.  The madness that inspired these events, since it existed in the world and not just in the imagination of the author, can be accessed and, perhaps, understood through the narrative.  I’ve read a bit of true crime since that night on the roof, nearly twenty years ago, and have never been fascinated, as some might be, with the gruesomeness of the crimes these books often focus on.  Instead, the conduit they provide to the Other, the criminal, the accused, the victim – the strangeness of all crime – draws me back to the genre again and again.

Cruel Sacrifice is no shining example of the power of true crime, but some of its elements, nested in the obvious sensationalism and gossip, bear out a value my mother and grandmother and aunts might not have cared to articulate but certainly appreciated in the moment of reading.

In a Contemporary Review essay, Richard Whittington-Egan writes of the remarkable power of true crime – and I think we can include older, fictionalized forms of true crime in this – to evoke the zeitgeist of a time and place in such a way that few other genres can:

There are those who believe that to read about true crime is, as they express it, ‘morbid’. They are wrong. Crime is an aspect of history, but whereas conventional history records the great events, national and mondial, the sayings and doings of kings and queens and windy statesmen, the history of crime concerns itself with the landscape of the everyday, the lives and loves and disasters of ordinary men and women under stress.  It is a study rich in the re-creation of lost worlds. It is sociologically significant in its exposure of the specific conditions surrounding the commission of each crime of which it treats. It encapsulates uniquely the ambience and the atmosphere of the period of the crime which it illumines.

Without exception, the true crime paperbacks read by the women in my mother’s family were set in times and places contemporary or at least near-contemporary to their own lives and experiences.  The crude, ritualized violence and sexual sadism of Middle America sensationalized in Cruel Sacrifice, as it turns out, does not acquire its cultural significance through its obscurity and abnormality but instead through its particular timeliness.  At no point in the 20^th century did average Americans worry more about their teenage sons and daughters dying at the hands of Satanic cults than in the late-80s and early-90s.  The moral panic of the era even produced a strange phenomenon of false recall, where innocent people remembered committing acts of ritual abuse which never occurred.  While Lawrence Wright’s masterful 1994 book, Remembering Satan, captured this period of popular paranoia with a much more direct and sophisticated approach, pulpy true crime, like Cruel Sacrifice, can do the same thing and much of the pleasure derived from its reading arises from this sense of peering into the darkest corners of our collective conscience.

In an essay in World Literature Today, J. Madison Davis writes of true crime’s most famous, and some say first, masterpiece:

The brilliance of its portrayal of murderers Perry Smith and Richard Hickock is still stunning. Despite the monstrous brutality of the murder of the Clutter family, the insights into the character of the killers allow a reader to understand them as deeply damaged human beings, creating the profoundly unsettling feeling that real crime elicits. The Clutters are slaughtered for no reason. The long process of hunting down the killers, convicting, and hanging them cannot undo the crime and provides little comfort. Fiction usually achieves a feeling of resolution. It is what allows most readers to enjoy a good crime novel despite the often hideous violence and cruelty at its core. Hanging a man is a cruel thing to do, even if what he did to deserve it is even crueler. No book has ever captured these disturbing feelings as well as In Cold Blood.

And the impossible balancing act of telling only the facts of a true story and producing a narrative recognizable as such gives great nonfiction a power that fiction can rarely attain.  Still, as Davis writes, “There is a raggedy-ness on the edges of reality that has to be straightened to make an effective story,” and true crime writers are not the only ones guilty of hiding this ambiguity too well.  For the innocent accused, a judge, jury or lawyer can tidy things up for public consumption with little regard for the evidence contradicting the chosen narrative.

A few exceptional true crime books, such as In Cold Blood and Remembering Satan and more recently Janet Malcolm’s Iphigenia in Forest Hills, Richard Lloyd Parry’s People Who Eat Darkness and Sarah Burns’s The Central Park Five, deal directly with this “raggedy-ness on the edges of reality.”  Errol Morris’s new book, A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald eclipses these other stellar examples in the depth of its reach into the complications of any crime where reasonable doubt exists.

In A Wilderness of Error, Morris reexamines a case that was already explored in Joe McGinniss’s best-selling 1983 account, Fatal Vision, which in turn was adapted into a wildly popular NBC miniseries of the same name the following year.  In 1990, Janet Malcolm published The Journalist and the Murderer, which, among other things, questioned the ethicality of the methods McGinniss used to gain access to MacDonald’s story.  Needless to say, the case of Jeffrey MacDonald, an ex-Green Beret accused of killing his wife and two young daughters in their home in Fort Bragg, North Carolina in 1970 is fraught with preconceived public notions about MacDonald’s guilt and the “facts” of the crime.

Errol Morris, an accomplished American documentary filmmaker with, among other popular films, The Thin Blue Line and The Fog of War to his credit, began his exploration of the MacDonald case as an idea for an experimental film.  His plan was to direct his own reenactments of key scenes in the case and juxtapose them with the same scenes as presented in the original 1984 TV miniseries in a linear fashion, where both sides of the story would be told concurrently.  He describes his concept as “a version of Rashomon, the film by Akira Kurosawa, with competing narrators and different points of view.”  By casting Gary Cole as MacDonald – a reprisal of his role from the Fatal Vision miniseries – Morris hoped to show how ambiguous the case really was.  He pitched this to a producer:

I stopped.  The studio executive across the table clearly wanted to say no.  She paused for a moment and said, “We can’t make that.”  I asked why.  “Because he’s guilty,” she said.  “The man killed his family.”  And I said, “But he might be innocent.”  And she said, “No.  He killed his family.”

The executive’s proof for her conclusion about MacDonald’s guilt?  Joe McGinniss’s book and the made-for-TV movie.

So instead of making an experimental film, Morris wrote an experimental true crime book in which photographs, long court and private interview transcripts, time-lines, graphics and newspaper clippings, play as large a role as the expository narrative.

Morris thus frames his book as something more than McGinniss’s clear narrative in Fatal Vision or any piece of literary nonfiction or fiction that purports to represent a simple truth.  He uses the example of Dantès from Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo to separate fact and fiction:

In a fictional narrative all of the pieces can be engineered to fit perfectly together.  But reality is different.  We have to discover what is out there – what is real and what is merely a product of our imagination.  A real Dantès could turn out to be a schemer, a rat, a traitor.  There is in principle no limit to what we might find out about him, to what we might uncover.  A real Dantès, like all real characters, is bottomless.

Morris quotes Bertand Russell, who illustrated the unfathomability of any living, breathing human being:

When you have taken account of all the feelings roused by Napoleon in writers and readers of history, you have not touched the actual man; but in the case of Hamlet you have come to the end of him.  If no one thought about Hamlet, there would be nothing left of him; if no one had thought about Napoleon, he would have soon seen to it that some one did.

Perhaps writers and readers of books like Fatal Vision and Cruel Sacrifice, or any other nonfiction narrative, too often forget this ambiguity.  It is an uncomfortable notion that we can never begin to know a man from a factual recounting of all of his actions.  In cases where the factuality of those actions is murky, the discomfort can be unbearable.

This is no place to parse all the details of the case.  That is the goal of Morris’s project and it took him nearly 500 pages to accomplish it.  But, like other good true crime books, A Wilderness of Error, provides unspoken commentary on the place and time of its action.  In telling the story of Jeffrey MacDonald, Morris also explores the slippery terrain between fact and fiction, public opinion and reality, psychology and physical evidence.  Morris allows documents and people to speak for themselves, disappearing himself behind his deft curation of the material, like the excellent documentarian he is.

Jeffrey MacDonald’s appearance on the Dick Cavett Show, not long after he was initially acquitted of the murders by a military trial, is the first small sign that this story is more about the public’s perception of MacDonald as a man than about the facts of the case.  I’ve watched the grainy footage from the show and MacDonald does come off as smug and callously funny.  But what does this have to do with his guilt?

Morris allows the evidence to unravel slowly, and behind it all stands Helena Stoeckley, spotted by a first responder just a few blocks from the MacDonald residence the night of the murder.  She wore a floppy hat and boots and a blonde stringy wig which matched a description given by MacDonald of one of the assailants he claimed broke into his home and murdered his wife and daughters in a drug-fueled Manson Family-style freak out.  Stoeckley later admitted to witnessing the murders, but was not brought to testify until MacDonald’s second trial which took place nearly ten years after the crimes.  Her shiftiness on the stand and with everyone she confessed to is really where the case hinges, and it’s beyond belief that the investigators did not pursue real evidence against her.

However, the elaborate extrapolation of the sequence of the murders using maps and typed blood splatters by investigators, even though it is not conclusive evidence by any means, creates a vivid and convincing picture of MacDonald committing the crime.  The lawyers in MacDonald’s second trial, with their expert witnesses, parse whether the holes in MacDonald’s pajama top could have been produced in a struggle, but for the jury the argument is whether they were produced by MacDonald stabbing his wife.  This, as well as many other matters of fact, is lost in the public antipathy to MacDonald himself, whose unfortunate personality seems perfectly suited to guilt.  The prosecution reads articles from an Esquire magazine found in the MacDonald home after the murders.  The issue was devoted to Satanism and hippie killers, and the idea that MacDonald pulled his story from the zeitgeist or this particular magazine is absurd, but irresistible.  Judge Dupree, who allowed this inappropriate and irrelevant testimony, is the perfect anti-Semitic stooge to protect the government’s image in a case they obviously bungled from the beginning, but his double-standard for the admissibility of evidence is troublingly unfair.  When the defense tries to bring witnesses of Stoeckley’s confessions to testify, Dupree denies the relevance of their testimony and then Stoeckley recants any admissions when she finally appears on the stand.

As if the case weren’t populated with enough strange elements, Ted Gunderson, a private investigator who worked fanatically to prove MacDonald’s innocence, injected satanic cults and conspiracy theories into the narrative of the case, harming the defense’s credibility.  Morris allows the investigators, like the ultra-paranoid Gunderson or the chain-smoking and obsessively diligent Raymond Shedlick, to become characters in his book, leading the reader as they led the writer through the convoluted story of evidence discovery.

This transparency contrasts with McGinniss’s sense of clarity and conviction about MacDonald’s guilt in Fatal Vision.  McGinniss, oddly enough, channeled his own life through the story of MacDonald.  Both had quick ascents to national celebrity.  Both betrayed their wives and children.  It’s almost as if McGinniss lived vicariously through the MacDonald story.  He recounts having nightmares – well before Fatal Vision was written – about physically hurting his two young daughters, something MacDonald himself never experienced.  While McGinniss’s approach seems almost deviant, Janet Malcolm’s treatment of the case in The Journalist and the Murderer and related stories in The New Yorker uses McGinnis’s book as an expression of how an investigation or any kind of evidence is insufficient to reveal facts in a case where the public’s mind has already been made up.  Malcolm pursues the limits of truth, but refuses to look at any evidence – even when it sits in a neatly organized pile in front of her – because she does not believe it is possible to approach it from an objective perspective.  For Malcolm the power of facts are neutered, the existence of truth is denied.

But there remains a real man’s life behind these books and arguments about truth.  Morris has made the case that MacDonald did not receive a fair trial.  Upon finishing the book I was sure of this, even if I was not sure of MacDonald’s guilt or innocence.  I was also sure that men should not be convicted for crimes because they are arrogant assholes or because the path that might lead to the truth is too fraught with uncertainty.  The fading memories of Wade Smith, one of MacDonald’s attorneys, and Jerry Leonard, Helena Stoeckley’s attorney, show how impossible it may be to ever reach a satisfying conclusion about the case.  This is ever more frustrating because at one point that conclusion may have been within reach.

The truth may never be known, but if that isn’t reasonable doubt, I don’t know what is.

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Discussed in this essay:

A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald by Errol Morris. The Penguin Press. 2012. 524 pages. $30.

Michael Buozis’s work has appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer, The Adirondack Review, Down & Out and other journals and websites.  He is the editor of The Philadelphia Review of Books.

Photos:  Screenshots from Fatal Vision miniseries, viprasys.org