Hi everyone,
Happy Christmas! And happy whatever else you might celebrate. And no festive greeting at all to those mythical creatures we read about every year who (according to the tabloids) fly into spittle-flecked tirades against people wishing them a merry Christmas. I've yet to spot one of these beasts in the wild, but I know a guy who has a friend of a friend who's sure he met a guy who literally turned to ash when he heard someone whistling Jingle Bells.
As for me, I'm no grinch but nor am I a Christmas-sweater-wearing, eggnog-drinking, up-at-dawn-on-Christmas fan of the holiday. I do, however, enjoy napping on the sofa in front of the TV, drinking brandy with my wife and her family, and I appreciate (and need) the break from work. Speaking of which, I thought I'd give myself more than just the single day off this year. I’m going to attempt an end-of-year restorative period of reading for pleasure (instead of pleasure and work). So there won't be an essay this month, but we will hit the ground running in the new year with an essay on the film Whiplash and the novel The Remains of the Day. There is also a good chance that starting next year, you'll be getting two essays a month.
I thought we'd do something a little different for the last Newsletter of 2022, so here are some highlights from my favourite books and films of the past year. Note: these aren't all products of 2022, but things I've watched or read for the first time this year.
Everything, Everywhere, All At Once, written & dir. Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert (2022)
As you'll know if you've read my essay on Everything, Everywhere, All At Once (if not, you can read it here) I think it's an imperfect film, but gloriously, joyfully imperfect. I wrote the following in an early draft of that essay (then I cut it for concision, and because I prefer my essays to examine the contents of films and books, rather than judging them in the style of a film review):
“This will not be a popular opinion for many reasons, not the least of which will be the ‘elitism’ some will condemn it for, but here goes nothing: Everything, Everywhere, All At Once is a popcorn flick for thinking people. In an ideal world with a healthy cinematic ecosystem, a world not saturated with remakes, sequels, and Marvel movies, this would be the sort of thing you'd see purely for the fun of it, without having to turn your off your brain, dull your wits, or numb the more sensitive, complex parts of your soul.”
To describe EEAAO this way is not to diminish its value at all; the balancing act of telling a thoughtful narrative populated by characters we care about while making us laugh, cry, and gasp is the very height of craft when it comes to storytelling. I am only unconvinced about the film's overall "greatness" as a piece of art because there is a superficiality across the whole thing, a shorthand used to hint at thematic depth that keeps the film on a leash, unable to soar too high or roam too far. The best example I can think of at short notice is the way that one universe in the film nods to the visual style of Wong Kar-wai – it looks a lot like it, yes, and it's neat to see those scenes and "get it", but that's as far as it goes. It doesn't say anything about intertextuality or comment on the great filmmaker's work. It's the cinephile's equivalent to a Marvel movie easter egg.
Why, then, is EEAAO on this list? Because I still laugh almost to tears when I remember certain moments in the film; because I can't remember being as viscerally thrilled, the way I felt as a child when I saw a magic trick that stunned me, as I was at many of the fight scenes; because rarely does a film make me as giddy with joy as this one did.
Whiplash, written & dir. Damien Chazelle (2014)
Whiplash is a fantastic, frenzied film that literally left me sweating by the time its final, soaring scene came to an abrupt end. It also made me profoundly uncomfortable to watch. Once upon a time, I was a drummer like the main character, Andrew Neiman. Not as intense about it, and I never played so hard that my fingers bled, but I lived and breathed music. But drumming is barely visible now in the rear-view mirror of my life; I haven't touched a drum in more than a decade, and my identity has long since been defined by writing rather than music. In spite of that distance, I was moved to movement throughout the entire film, from the drumroll that opens it to the drum solo that ends it. It's a good thing I saw it at home and not a cinema, as I was hopping to the drumbeats and nodding my head and tapping my leg manically without meaning to.
This is a painful watch, in many ways, as it looks unblinkingly at Neiman's bloody-minded, myopic pursuit of Greatness. What's so wonderfully, wickedly clever about this film is how we see the pain his obsession causes others (his break-up with a girlfriend for standing in his way is awful) and himself (he bloodies himself up in more than one scene), and yet the film never denies that this behaviour can lead to success. The film almost dares us to sympathise with its villain, the maniacal music teacher who pushes his students through tears, blood, and worse towards greatness.
There is so much more I could say about this film, and my only reason for not saying it here is that, as mentioned above, the first essay of 2023 will be looking at Whiplash and comparing it with Kazuo Ishiguro's novel The Remains of the Day.
Living, written Kazuo Ishiguro, dir. Oliver Hermanus (2022)
It is, of course, a mistake to demand a film be whatever you expect it to be. You can complain that a film is not good, but not that it's not the film you wanted it to be. But it is such a treat to go into a film hoping for a mildly pleasant if twee movie (as I expected of Living) and be given the truly moving experience of a beautifully crafted story with a unique personality. (A note on that uniqueness: I haven't seen the Kurosawa film Ikiru on which it is based, so let that fact influence your reading of my opinions here however it will.)
One of the many joys of this film is looking out for the many subtle ways the director guides us to information, subtext, and themes, how he gives space to a shot held for a moment "too long", or a minuscule twitch on the face of one of his actors. Early in the film, there is a shot that lingers a moment longer than you’d expect before the actor comes on-screen, and the shot lets us see a plaque on which we read the names of men who gave their lives in WW1. This seems, at first, intended to establish the period and cultural context; by the final act of the film, we see how it foreshadows the major theme of Living: that a life of service is a life well lived.
The Unquiet Grave, Cyril Connolly (pseud. Palinurus) (1944)
This was one of those serendipitous discoveries only possible in a bookshop of the slightly shabby, well-loved kind. In places like this, you find a certain chaos that is otherwise eradicated in chain stores by the corporate mandate of homogeneity, and this chaos allows for finding something totally unexpected, or out of print, or encased in a rare binding that doesn't match the Penguin Classics or Vintage schema. I picked up The Unquiet Grave by Palinurus in one of the many wonderful independent bookstores in the literary capital of England, Hay on Wye.
Palinurus was – I discovered online after consuming the offline delights of this book – the pseudonym of the literary critic Cyril Connolly. The Unquiet Grave is that rarest of thing, an unabashedly intellectual literary experiment that isn't dull nor six feet up its own ass. Perhaps what sets The Unquiet Grave apart is that it focuses less on the minutiae of the inner life and more on – through, granted, a first-person lens – the higher values of poetry, religion, what makes for a good marriage, and the approach of mid-life.
Emily Wilkinson wrote a piece for The Millions on the ways in which Connolly transcends the "unendurably dull, the defeatingly self-obsessed, the clumsy, sloppy, and rough" lesser books by writers who document the tedium of their inner lives; she writes that the "strange beauty" of The Unquiet Grave "lies in its elevation of notebook style – that quirky yet potentially enchanting melange of squib, meditation, quotation, anecdote, and philosophical monologue – to high art". A selection of passages that charmed me:
“Those of us who were brought up as Christians and have lost our faith have retained the sense of sin without the saving belief in redemption.”
“How many people drop in on us? That is a criterion of friendship. Or may tell us our faults? To how many do we give unexpected presents? With whom we can remain silent?”
“The particular charm of marriage … is the duologue, the permanent conversation between two people who talk over everything and everyone till death breaks the record.”
“The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication …”
A Heart That Works, Rob Delaney (2022) & The Madness of Grief, Reverend Richard Coles (2021)
A Heart That Works is not the kind of book I would normally read, because I'm turned off by the two modes that are inevitable in memoirs written by comedians: the imperative to crack wise on every page, and writing in a register I can only describe as "banter". For intensely personal reasons I won't reveal here, the subject matter of A Heart That Works interested me, so I picked up a copy in my local bookstore and read the entire first chapter without looking up as I wandered among the bookcases.
I had no idea, prior to reading the book, who Rob Delaney was nor what he was famous for; by the time I'd read his wonderful, life-shaking book about the death of his son Henry at the age of 2, I wanted to find and hug this man and thank him for what I can only describe as this gift. His book is a gift of love and warmth – for Henry, for people, whom he loves in spite of what he's been through – as well as a glimpse of the kind of hell we all fear and which no one is exempt from the possibility of suffering through.
The Madness of Grief followed soon after my reading of Delaney's book. In 2019, Rev Richard Cole's partner died suddenly in mid-life, leaving Coles to experience the "user side" of his vocation; having led so many funerals and guided parishioners through their grief, he was forced to attend his partner's funeral and navigate his own grief.
What's remarkable about both books (and is highlighted by reading them together) is how much humour – gallows humour and the banal absurdity of the everyday – is present in them, giving a certain vitality to stories about death. There is a wonderful passage in The Madness of Grief that effortlessly runs the gamut from the highest, most genuine pathos to the ordinary bathos that punctuates real life; Coles is lying in the hospital bed with his beloved, who is moments away from death, singing in his ear and stroking his hair, when his brother walks in and comments on Coles' weight gain, leading him to suddenly think he ought to try a diet. The delivery of this moment is brutal and hilarious.
There are interesting cultural differences between the dominant registers of each book, which tempt a reader to take them as illustrative of differences between the Americans and the British. Delaney is naked in his grief, prone to expressing his pain as a bellow or writing things like "Yes, scream it from the rooftops. My beautiful baby boy is going to die," while Coles is always understated and self-effacing, as if slightly anxious not to burden anyone with his own suffering. But, in the end, both men are insightful, honest, and painfully funny.
As always, thank you for your support and for being part of what we're doing here at Art Of Conversation. Here's to the lessons learned of the worst of the past year, the memories of the best of it, and a hope for the new year.
Matthew