Marginalia ~ Dickensian tricks and cinematic gimmicks

Hi everyone,

While the political world continues to act out a perpetual state of emergency, my own life has been unremarkable. I'm tempted to write that it has been remarkably unremarkable, given that the mere fact of existing is a wondrous thing. We who exist are (in Richard Dawkins' wonderful paragraph on the topic) "the privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds".

"The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here."

(Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow)

So, before I go saying that things have been unremarkable, I should reconsider that every breath taken is a scoff in the face of statistical odds. I'll make gratitude, in lieu of interesting events to relate to you, the theme of this newsletter.

Right now, I am grateful for all of you who support Art Of Conversation. I am beyond grateful for the fact that you believe the work I do has importance, either to your own life or to the culture more broadly, or perhaps even to both. I am grateful that you show your support by giving so generously, which allows me to afford to continue this project, to keep me doing what I most love doing every day.

I am grateful that you are reading these words right now, that you have taken time and continually take time out of your no doubt busy days to slow down, even if for only a brief window, to read my essays and consider with me some of the things our present culture is not set up to appreciate.

Things like what we value and why, how books speak to us beyond time, what films can reveal about our nature, how science, art, cinema, music, even goddamned politics can reacquaint us with forgotten parts of ourselves. Parts that make us feel whole again in the midst of fractured lives in atomised societies. Things like gratitude itself, a topic (for those of you who may have missed it) I wrote about here:

https://www.artofconversation.net/post/on-gratitude

So – as always, my friends – thank you for your support, and thank you for reading.

Matthew

---

What I've been reading:

I'm about two-thirds of the way through the maddening, challenging, occasionally very gratifying Purity by Jonathan Franzen. I started the year with the book deemed by most critics to be Franzen's best, The Corrections, and I'm on track to have read his entire oeuvre by the end of the year. (This wasn't planned, he's just such a damned good writer that each book leads to reading another.)

So far, Freedom is the novel that I've been most impressed with, contrary to the critics' consensus, though my take on Purity follows the accepted wisdom: the book depends (as Colm Toibin put it) "on story over style" and is something of a "sprawling mess". But Franzen is such a great writer that even his sprawling mess is worth reading, and is much more engaging than a basically decent novel by most other contemporary writers.

Even without the giveaway of naming his central character Pip, it's clear that Franzen is riffing on Dickens in Purity, in the book's scope, scale, and credulity-stretching eccentricities of his characters. At this point in my reading, it's still possible he'll stick the landing by writing an ending so good it'll justify the Dickensian stuff that so far hasn't totally convinced me.

What I've been listening to:

It's not what I've been listening to lately but how I've been listening to it. I was visiting a friend who's one of those die-hard advocates of vinyl records, and while I haven't yet been sold on the turntable, I was charmed by the physicality of the medium. It brought me back to the days of CD with its manual aspect of selecting an album, physically placing it into the drawer of a sound system, and playing it in a quality unmatched by the digital library on my phone. So I bought a CD player, a thing I haven't owned in more than a decade, and have been swapping my digital albums for CDs.

Beyond the aforementioned joy of physically holding a tangible manifestation of the music, I've been rediscovering album art, the hidden nuggets of personality in the band thank-you's, pieces of trivia about which musicians performed what instruments on which tracks, and relearning the ways that reading the lyrics – on paper, not on a screen – deepens the listening experience by adding that visual component; all of this means that with CD we have the physical, visual, aural, emotional and intellectual fields engaged. I'm not saying everyone ought to return to CD specifically, but I definitely encourage you to find ways to bring other dimensions of experience into your listening.

What I've been watching:

There are two fantastic films I've seen recently that I'd hate to let slip under your radar (clogged as all our cultural radars are with the incessant and growing noise of superhero movies). They are The Humans, directed by Stephen Karam, and Boiling Point, directed by Philip Barantini. Both films are tight, compelling stories about humans under pressure – the pressures of family, duty, and oppressive mundanity in The Humans, and the pressures of the extraordinary demands on physical, emotional, and mental endurance made by working in a restaurant.

Both films also happen to make use of elements that in other movies could be called "gimmicks" but here are brilliantly utilised and fully realised conceits that elevate both films to greatness. In The Humans, it is the use of the cinematic language of the horror genre to tell an otherwise ordinary family story; with Boiling Point, it is the fact that the entire film was shot in a single take. Not several shots cleverly stitched together, as in 1917, an actual one-shot. What's so brilliant, however, is that a one-shot here deftly lends itself to the story of a single, stress-laden evening in the heat of a high-cuisine restaurant. These two films are far more than these particular hooks, and I recommend them to everyone.