The Ryder Magazine & Film Series

Peter Jackson brings The Hobbit to a theater near you ■ by Rick Nagy

Like many other fans of JRR Tolkien, and Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films, I breathed a sigh of relief upon hearing that Jackson had taken the helm of The Hobbit from Guillermo Del Toro. Don’t get me wrong – I like Del Toro’s Movies, but it was evident he just didn’t get the world of Tolkien. I feel confident that when I walk into the theater at midnight on December 14th to see An Unexpected Journey, the first installment of The Hobbit, Jackson’s long-awaited “prequel” to Lord of the Rings, it will have been worth the wait.

Bilbo Baggins Hosts An Unexpected Party In “The Hobbit”

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It wasn’t just that Del Toro wanted to inject a post-modern artiness into the project; he simply didn’t understand what lay at the heart of Tolkien’s world: language.

In an interview with The New Yorker last year, Del Toro showed off some of the movie’s production drawings. What really caught my attention was his description of Thorin Oakenshield, the dwarf chieftain whom hobbit Bilbo Baggins follows in the essential quest at the heart of The Hobbit. Apparently, Thorin’s helmet should be shaped like a crown of thorns, because, “after all,” according to Del Toro, “his name is Thorin.”

This, of course, elicited from me a loud “NO, NO, NO” in my best Simpsons “comic book guy” voice. Never mind the hackneyed, unnecessary Jesus reference (There’s nothing particularly Christ-like about Thorin Oakenshield), but the name Thorin is not related to the English word for Thorn. Let me nerd-out a little here: Thorin comes from the Norse, and means “bold.” But more than that, the name is related to his lineage in Middle Earth, and shows the relation to his forbears Thror and Thrain.  This is evident to even casual readers of The Hobbit. Names carry a lot of weight in Middle Earth, and nobody possessed of more than a passing familiarity with Tolkien would have made such a fundamental mistake. Del Toro had shown he was not worthy of the undertaking.

And while it’s true I still have a problem with Peter Jackson’s Thorin Oakenshield, it is a much less serious, and primarily aesthetic, problem: Jackson doesn’t casually brush aside Tolkien’s understanding of how language works. Jackson’s Thorin is a young, handsome swashbuckler – entirely different than the grey-bearded ancient of Tolkien’s book. I have, however, decided to withhold judgment because I trust Jackson’s understanding of Tolkien’s world.
Professor Tolkien was very particular about the language in his books. He was a professional philologist, an Oxford Don, a professor of Anglo Saxon, and one of the editors of The Oxford English Dictionary. Here we have a man who cost his publishers a considerable amount of money because his plural word “dwarves” was reproduced as “dwarfs” in one of the first editions of The Hobbit, and this would just not do.

Tolkien thought his works unfilmable, and many of his fans speculate that he would have been livid about all the changes Peter Jackson made to the story in his epic adaptation of “Lord of the Rings,” Tolkien’s most famous book, and one of the most widely read of the twentieth century. But I think Peter Jackson’s adaptation is one of the great films, and a fitting tribute to Tolkien. (I consider Jackson’s “trilogy”one long film in three installments, just as the three parts of LOTR really constitute one novel. For those LOTR fans with the stamina, Showplace West in Bloomington will host a one-day marathon on December 8th.) And while I have some misgivings about The Hobbit, which I’ll discuss below, my hopes are still high that Jackson has produced another masterpiece.
I like to imagine the young JRR Tolkien, standing on a battlefield in WWI, surveying the smoke, the trenches, the death. While doing so, he creates another world, based on his own, but imagined in a far distant, different past – a world called Middle Earth.

Gandalf, In “The Hobbit”

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Those initial stories he created as a young man would not be published until after his death; his son Christopher would complete what the professor considered the great work of his life: “The Silmarillion,” the mythology of Middle Earth. “The Silmarillion” is one of the world’s great mythologies, complete with its own creation and hero stories that rival the Greek myths. It is mostly concerned with The Eldar, or as we would say, Elves. Tolkien the philologist had invented two languages, and needed to create the world in which these languages would be spoken, a world where those who spoke those languages would dwell. “The Silmarillion” is the bible of that world.

This love and deep knowledge of language is what sets Tolkien and his world apart from every other fantasy writer. Every word, every phrase, every bit of verse, is only the entrance to a new rabbit hole which leads to Middle Earth, and that makes it an utterly convincing alternate world. The farther down that linguistic rabbit-hole one goes, the more meaning Tolkien’s works have. Tolkien did not simply make up words that have a foreign, mythical sound about them (very noticeable in most fantasy works); his languages are steeped in our own history, and draw upon several sources for their depth and their beauty.

Professor Tolkien’s world, his Middle Earth, is so detail-laden, so exacting in its geography, geology, flora and fauna, that nothing seems false. He gave his whole life to creating this world, and as many have observed, his works sometimes read like history rather than fiction. Middle Earth may be based on our own world, or specifically Great Britain, but is different enough to transport readers out of our own. And it all started with language.

One of the languages so beloved by Tolkien was Welsh, and local author Mark T. Hooker’s collection of essays, Tolkien and Welsh, is a fine explication of just how Tolkien drew upon that language to help create such a convincing world. Again, it wasn’t enough to just make up words and names – those words and names had to have history.

I hope he’ll pardon my description of his life’s work, but his bibliography bears me out: Hooker is a Tolkienologist. Hooker shows how Tolkien uses linguistic devices like mutation, and picks out specific examples from throughout Tolkien’s books to describe this process.

Okay. Despite the blurb on the back cover that Hooker “writes primarily for the lay person,” meaning people who are not professional linguists, presumably, you still have to be pretty far down that Tolkien rabbit hole to appreciate the book. My point is, again, that understanding how Tolkien used language to create Middle Earth is important in understanding his works as more than just great stories. You simply don’t go around saying, “Well, ‘Thorin’ sounds like ‘thorn,’ so well give him a helmet that looks like thorns.”

It’s a long-standing dictum about many adapted films that “the book is better,” a sentiment I’ve never entirely understood. Certainly, there have been terrible movies adapted from books, but they are terrible not because of the changes necessary in filmic storytelling, but because they are just bad movies.

But think of all the great movies that tell an essentially different story than the book on which they are based. L.A. Confidential comes to mind. There was no way to include all the labyrinthine details from James Ellroy’s novel, but director Curtis Hanson kept the feel of the book’s intrigue and dark underbelly by telling a story that works on film.

Peter Jackson certainly has his detractors – “word-for-word” types who wouldn’t be happy with films that  don’t show every detail from the book. But that was never an option. Not only would the films be commercial disasters – a real consideration given the budget – but frankly, boring. Film adaptation is an art unto itself; for anybody who thinks Jackson missed the mark, I highly recommend watching the “Appendices” sections of the LOTR extended-edition DVDs, especially as they pertain to why Jackson and his fellow screenwriters made the changes they did to the story.

Phillipa Boyens, the primary screenwriter of Jackson’s LOTR, and a very obvious Tolkien geek, is quite clear in the “appendices” about why certain additions, deletions and changes were made, meeting the criticisms of the “word-for-word” advocates head on. Her explanation of the changes in Faramir from book to film, one of the many sticking points to Tolkien purists, is particularly convincing. More than anything, the appendices to the DVDs show just how much Jackson understands Tolkien, and called the right shots to make what may be the most involved film project in history.

One minor change that makes me so confident in Jackson as an interpreter of Tolkien takes place in the “Council of Elrond” scene in Fellowship of the Rings. In the movie, when Boromir asks what “a ranger of the north” would know of (the matters discussed at the council), Legolas tells him the ranger is, in fact, Aragorn, son of Arathorn. With only that much information, the Boromir of the film knows that Aragorn is Isildur’s heir. I would argue that this shows Jackson’s understanding of the importance of names and language in Tolkien, and so, stands in stark contrast to Del Toro’s ignorance.

My initial concerns about The Hobbit have nothing to do with language, but with more technical aspects, particularly Jackson’s decision to film at 48 frames per second and in 3D. Jackson may very well be right when he says that 48 fps will be the future standard (it has been 24 fps for most of film history), but I disagree that adopting the technology first will “future proof” The Hobbit. Early test audiences said the film had a cold sterile look, and the first trailers I saw seemed to bear that impression out. The first adoptions of any new technology inevitably become dated and quaint, especially in comparison to later uses of the same technology. And, since most theaters won’t be showing the film in the 48 fps format, it seems like a waste of the technology.

As far as 3D: I don’t want to sound like one of those people who thought air travel was a fad, but….

A director has to make choices for 3D that he otherwise might not have made. Given the scope of the project, I trust to hope that Jackson will not fill The Hobbit with objects flying at the audience, but will create a world that audience feels a part of, creating depth, not simply surprise.

But I have to say, the most recent trailer for the film is amazing. While the images are certainly crisp, like Blu-ray, there is a warmth and a light very similar to LOTR. Jackson’s Weta Digital is the most advanced special effects house in the world, and he has pulled out all the stops. Advances in CG animation technology have improved exponentially since the already impressive Return of the King was released in 2004; the Gollum in the trailer, for example, is lifelike in ways the LOTR Gollum, which at the time seemed impossibly real, was not.

Jackson recently announced that, like Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit will have three installments. Given that The Hobbit as a novel is one third the length of LOTR, perhaps Jackson has decided to make a very close adaptation of the book. The trailers suggest scenes which are either not in the book, or to which the book only alludes. Either way, the same legion of fans that made LOTR a blockbuster  will no doubt return, even if they return with doubts. For my part, Peter Jackson is exactly the right person to bring Tolkien’s first book to life on film, and on December fourteenth at midnight, I’ll know for sure.

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The Ryder, December 2012

Our Town’s Top Music Mavens Take On The Year In Sounds

■ Jim Manion‘s Best Albums of the Year     

As Music Director of WFHB, I listen to music pretty much all day, every day. My favorites of 2012 had to be records I listened to many times over by choice and will continue to listen to for the rest of my years.

◗ KID KOALA “12 BIT BLUES”

New music created with roots music samples can be brilliant, or it can be stinky cheese. Kid Koala scores brilliance with this electronic tribute to the blues. The Kid’s secret: hitting the dusty blues samples in real-time (on a vintage E-mu sampler) to capture that elusive blues feel. After my first listen (in a rental car), I listened another five times in a row.

◗ NEIL YOUNG & CRAZY HORSE “PSYCHEDELIC PILL”

Uncle Neil got mixed reviews for this epic, sprawling journey into the Crazy Horse zone. To my ears, this is as fresh as 1970’s Everybody Knows This is Nowhere but ten times as exploratory in the sonic realm. Neil and The Horse are definitely driftin’ back and waving their freak flag. In the process they create spaces of aural imagination that are truly psychedelic.

Psychedelic Pill

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◗ GALACTIC “CARNIVALE ELECTRICOS”

Mardi Gras Indians + Stanton Moore + edgy funk electronics + New Orleans music samples = one wildass Mardi Gras album for the ages. My neighbors will hear this a lot again in January and February. Hey Na Na!

◗ SHANNON HAYDEN “SOLID STATE CELLO”

Still in her early 20s, this classical cello/guitar virtuoso composes and performs a visionary fusion of classical and electronic that is stunning and mind-expanding. Shannon records off-the-grid with wind and solar power at her family’s organic farm in central Illinois. If you get a chance to see her live, go!

◗ LERA LYNN “HAVE YOU MET LERA LYNN?”

Southern belle Lera Lynn sings with a big, clear, timeless voice that evokes shivers when it rings. Her lyrics are full of spooky Southern Goth, while her song forms open up to release the tense but resigned anxiety those lines create. A modern day Bobbie (Ode to Billy Joe) Gentry, Lera’s music is heavy-duty whether she plays solo or with her scorching electric band.

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R&B Mojo and Rasp-Rap Rushes ■ Jason Fickel‘s Best Albums of the Year     

◗ FIONA APPLE “THE IDLER WHEEL…”

Raw, dark songs with some R&B mojo. Catchy, but it shouldn’t be.

◗ RAY ANDERSON POCKET BRASS BAND “SWEET CHICAGO SUITE”

A blast of horn and percussion exuberance with pieces that begin vaguely familiar, but end up someplace you never expect.

◗ GOTYE “SOMEBODY THAT I USED TO KNOW”

This monster truck of Aussie pop instantly invited covers and parodies (is there a difference?); there was no way to separate it from the year 2012.

◗ DRAKE “TAKE CARE”

When Bobby “Blue” Bland’s words come out of Rihanna’s mouth and Gil-Scott Heron’s rasp-rap rushes out of pop radio all in one jam, you know something has happened.

BOB DYLAN “TEMPEST”

Another awesome collection that yet again brings it all back home and then hurls it right back out.  The title cut is a 13-plus minute titanic ballad, because, really, why not?

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■ Abe Morris‘s Best Albums of the Year

◗ MADONNA & BLUNDERBUSS “MDNA”

Madge has been much maligned in the press this year, still this is my pop record of the year. Madonna seethes in post-divorce purgatory, but she ain’t sittin’ still. Girl can still get her groove on putting together her best record this millennium by far.

◗ BEAR IN HEAVEN “I LOVE YOU, IT’S COOL”

I actually heard this for the first time last year while I was in New York, so I bring a bias of this album being my soundtrack for that trip. But 13 months later, I don’t think there’s any album I’ve listened to more. The acid-trip version of Pretty Woman featured in the video for “Sinful Nature” is an added bonus.

◗ MATTHEW DEAR “BEAMS”

Matthew Dear sounds like he records himself singing backwards and then grabs the final audio track by playing back the record at half speed. This voice set a top an utterly lush and gorgeous bed of beats makes for an album that keeps pulling your ear back into the mix.

◗ FRANK OCEAN “CHANNEL ORANGE”

Toeing the line between rap and R&B, Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange is the most complete record of the year. Often times hip hop albums tend to load the back end with lots of filler, but not this one. The surprising observational and confessional tones of this record make it a stand out in a hip hop world often over-saturated with braggadocio.

◗ JACK WHITE “BLUNDERBUSS”

The mad music wizard from Nashville is probably the best in the biz at finding new and inventive ways of delivering music and keeping fans on their toes. And it goes without saying that Mr. White and his perennially be-suited entourage is one of the most stylish men in America. But on Blunderbuss, Jack White shows us just how cool he is, bringing 13 songs relatively simple in form, and slathering them in layers of swagger. No other person on the planet can make these songs shine like Jack does.

Honorable Mentions:

◗ Tindersticks “The Something Rain”

◗ Grizzly Bear “Shields”

◗ Here We Go Magic “A Different Ship”

◗ Tame Impala “Lonerism”

◗ Die Antwoord “Ten$ion”

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Chris Swanson‘s Best Albums of the Year

◗ Father John Misty “Fear Fun”

Finally a new chapter in the great American bathrobed SoCal beautiful loser songbook, and it’s a great one.

◗ Grimes “Vision”

Along with Frank Ocean, Claire Boucher’s Grimes is one of 2012’s great emergent musical personas. A truly gifted songwriter/producer/performer.

◗ Killer Mike “R.A.P. Music”

The best hip hop record of 2012. It is wizened (but not jaded) and has the most politically urgent song of the year in “Reagan”.

◗ Merchandise “Children of Desire”

This is what happens when three hard core kids from Tampa let their guard down and let their Anglophilia take hold.

◗ Tomas Barfod “Salton Sea”

The debut solo album by this Danish producer mixes vocal-driven hook-heavy pop songs with gorgeous Kraut-inspired instrumentals.

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Best in Blues ■ by Cathi Norton

◗ PHANTOM BLUES BAND “INSIDE OUT”

Taj Mahal’s road band, heavy-weight musicians bristling with chops. This CD features horn backup, lots of keyboard/organ, soulful vocals and urban blues/rock—loaded with style and maturity.

◗ MANNISH BOYS “DOUBLE DYNAMIT”

Fourteen great players from Delta Groove stable of musicians with a double disk release of blues that is solidly based on the roots of the masters while building new branches on that tree. GREAT players like Jimi Bott, Frank Goldwasser and Kirk Fletcher, along with fine vocalists like Sugar Ray Rayford and Finis Tasby.

◗ NATHAN JAMES & THE RHYTHM SCRATCHERS “WHAT YOU MAKE OF IT”

Authentic blues dawg, James built a guitar in high school, played on the road as a one-man band in the blues for 15 years and here puts together a trio to round out his rollin’ blues—live in one take. Solid playing, original attack.  Smokin’.

◗ SMOKIN’ JOE KUBEK & BNOIS KING “UNPLUGGED—CLOSE TO THE BONE”

Ex-Freddie King guitarist Joe Kubek  and Louisiana guitarist Bnois King have had a hard-rockin’ blues career for 20 years. Here they take a wicked left turn and put out an acoustic disc, featuring fine, fine blues players from the West Coast. Great players, and without the loudness as distraction, it’s clear these are fine blues artists.

◗ EDDIE TAYLOR JR. “SO CALLED FRIEND”

Son of famed guitarist Eddie Taylor, Sr., Junior has picked up his traditional blues guitar style and unlike Eddie senior, sings most tunes. His guitar work (like Eddie Sr.’s) features a beautiful old traditional blues attack. Saweeeet guitar work.

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Best in Electronic ■ by Markus Lowe

◗ BASSNECTAR “VAVA VOOM”

Electronic pioneer of self-described “bass music” culture returns with more brilliant bass anthems sure to keep your head rumbling and your body moving.

◗ HOT CHIP “IN OUR HEADS”

Indie-dance favorites dive deep into love, taking the quirky, idiosyncratic experimentations of their early career and distilling it into groovy, heartfelt dance songs.

◗ KID KOALA “12 BIT BLUES”

After 3 days with an E-mu SP-1200 sampler, Koala takes the blues on a journey back to hiphop’s electronic sampling roots to produce a really raw, immediate and strangely beautiful album.

◗ SHAWN LEE “SYNTHESIZERS IN SPACE”

The one-man music machine slings psyched funk-soul from the far side of the moon; 1970 has arrived at 2001.

◗ BOYS NOIZE “OUT OF THE BLACK”

Berlin-based Alex Ridha delivers his requisite style of in-your-face electro-bang with choice elements of early influences of old school house tracks, B-Boy cuts, and acid records.

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Best in World Music ■ by Michael McDowell

◗ VARIOUS ARTISTS “THE COLOMBIAN MELTING POT: DIABLOS DEL RITMO 1960-1985”

This two-disc compilation is the result of a five-years hunt in Barranquilla, a sprawling city in the middle of the Colombian Caribbean Coast, one of the planet’s musical hotspots. It’s irresistible, incredible, and immoral, even, to have music this good.

◗ JIMMY CLIFF “REBIRTH”

He’s still got it! Cliff is the rare talent whose voice ages beautiful. This one goes back to his roots a la The Harder They Come, but exudes the fresh energy of real rejuvenation and rebirth.

◗ VARIOUS ARTISTS “FUTURE SOUNDS OF BUENOS AIRES”

Traditional Andean cumbia and folklorico roots + electronic soundscapes and street beats = cumbia digital. The best of the best from the contemporary dance scene in Buenos Aires, perfect for the next time you turn your residence into a nightclub.

◗ NIYAZ “SUMUD”

Seamless fusion of ancient Persian poetry, traditional folk from Iran, and sumptuous electronic grooves; Niyaz delivers thick music.

◗ SIERRA LEONE’S REFUGEE ALL STARS “RADIO SALONE”

Remember Lotus Festival 2010? Lanky and magnificent West African roots reggae as per usual, here the All Stars take on Congolese soukous as well, and there is no doubt they are some of the best afropop players on the planet.

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Best in metal ■ by David J. Smith

◗ DRAGGED INTO SUNLIGHT “WIDOWMAKER”

Reverb-drenched guitars, violins, and disturbing spoken-word samples lead the listener on a beautiful, exhilarating journey into darkness.

◗ GAZA “NO ABSOLUTES IN HUMAN SUFFERING”

Controversial political and religious views aside, Gaza plays a brutal, supremely creative, and thoroughly enjoyable brand of blackened crust.

◗ EAGLE TWIN “THE FEATHER TIPPED THE SERPENT’S SCALE”

This Utah band’s perfectly-produced sophomore release is a ferocious, complex, and sublime amalgam of doom and drone.

◗ DEATHSPELL OMEGA “DROUGHT”

Another avant-garde black metal masterpiece of meticulous chaos.

◗ KRALLICE “YEARS PAST MATTER”

Harsh, dense, and precise melodic black metal mark this band’s finest release.

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Best Traditional Roots, Bluegrass & Celtic ■ by Jamie Gans

◗ TIM O’BRIEN & DARRELL SCOTT “LIVE”

Originally recorded live in 2005 and 2006 at The Grey Eagle in Asheville, NC but only now released in 2012, multi-instrumentalist and singer, Tim O’Brien with singer-songwriter, Darrell Scott harmonize in power and passion a full palette of inspired songs.

◗ THE KATHY KALLICK BAND “TIME”

Kathy is in great company blending heartfelt vocals and dazzling musicianship with her band mates as she treats us to one of the sweetest albums in her 40 year musical career.

◗ THE OUTSIDE TRACK “FLASH COMPANY”

From Ireland, Scotland, the US, and Canada The Outside Track provides traditional lush vocals and driving Celtic tunes with rich complex arrangements on fiddle, harp, accordion, flute, and guitar.

◗ THE HILLBENDERS “CAN YOU HEAR ME?”

They are part of a new generation in a stylistic break from the traditional and commercial bluegrass world along with groups like The Infamous Stringdusters and Town Mountain.  The Hillbenders have their own stamp of originality and instrumental virtuosity. Great pickers, great singers performing all their own material.

◗ BREABACH “BANN”

Bann simply means band in Scots Gaelic. Breabach hails from the Highlands and they weave together an amazing tweed of pipe tunes, fiddle tunes and Gaelic songs with youthful finesse and fury that is finer than the best of an aged single malt.

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The Ryder, January 2013

■ by Dan Melnick

2012 was a year of antiheroes and villains; single mothers and scientists.  While there is no shortage of dark, morally ambiguous worlds to choose from, there are also the twinkling lights of literal fairy tales and family-friendly shenanigans to save viewers from an otherwise ominous netherworld. If anything, 2012 has provided a wide spectrum to choose from. Perhaps the trend then, is in its diversity. Cable television has never been better. Many shows now offer film-like quality with the longevity and luxury to delve deeper into their characters than any movie ever could, to create a truly immersive experience for the viewer.

If nothing else, the following list below is a perfect example of this. Each show is unique in its own right and there’s no emergent pattern to find, except darn good programming.

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◗ ONCE UPON A TIME (ABC)

Taking a page out of Lost’s playbook, OUAT pairs flashback stories with a current one, but unlike Lost, these fairy tale flashbacks actually advance a plot, and a plot that makes sense at that.

◗ SOUTH PARK (CC)

It’s easy to dismiss the show as silly, but 16 seasons later and delving into topics from recurrent Apple “User Agreements” to the train wreck that is Honey Boo Boo, South Park’s social commentary is just as poignant as ever.

◗ THE BIG BANG THEORY (CBS)

Its one of the most watched shows on television, so can millions of viewers be wrong? Discussions of astrophysics may fly over most of our heads, but heart of the show is simple enough that anyone can understand.

◗ ARCHER (FX)

This show doesn’t get the credit it deserves. It’s not only a cartoon, but it’s a cartoon with lousy animation. Sound like anything else you know? But the humor is sharp, the comebacks are witty, and the dialogue is impeccable.

◗ BEN AND KATE (FOX)

Dakota Johnson is perfectly cast as Kate, a believable, quirky single mom who’s the grounding rod for the lightning storm of side characters around her. Johnson’s sense of realism makes everything else funnier.

◗ BREAKING BAD (AMC)

For most shows a season is essentially meaningless, just a bunch of episodes, but BB grows. Each season is another perfectly crafted arc, continuing the story of a conflicted chemistry teacher and transforming him into a ruthless villain.

◗ MODERN FAMILY (ABC)

Like a house of cards, Modern Family stands on the shoulders of the entire cast. It wouldn’t be the comic powerhouse that it is without the delicate interplay between each of their unique voices and styles. Put them all in a white room with nothing to do and even that would be entertaining.

◗ SONS OF ANARCHY (FX)

The Sopranos on motorcycles. Each episode is shocking, the characters are engaging, and underneath it all, there’s still a moral code keeping it all together. Everyone’s favorite bad boys have never been better.

Sons Of Anarchy

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◗ THE WALKING DEAD (AMC)

Zombies and an apocalyptic Earth are just the backdrop to tell true tales of humanity at its best and at its worse. Now that they’ve left Hershel’s farm, each episode gets better and better as the actual zombies for which the show is named, become the least of their problems.

◗ GAME OF THRONES (HBO)

Proof that strong characters are the most important aspect of a show. At a glance, it may appear to be a show about swords and sorcery, but that idea couldn’t be further from the truth. GoT is rife with intrigue, turmoil, courage, and fear delivered by an amazing cast and can hold an audience’s attention like nothing else on television.

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The Ryder, January 2013

Leading by Example: Lincoln’s Rhetorical Strategies ■ by Tom Prasch

After recounting of an ominous dream to his wife in Steven Spielberg’s magisterial unbiopic Lincoln, the President reaches for a handy quotation: “I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.” His wife Mary, while complaining “I’m your soothsayer, that’s all I am anymore,” nevertheless dutifully tries to interpret the dream’s portent: perhaps the campaign against Wilmington, or no, it’s the struggle for the amendment.  But her interpretive work would have been speedier had she heeded the quotation. The lines Lincoln quotes are from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a conversation between the Danish prince and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and the theme is ambition. As Guildenstern notes in the lines that immediately follow, “dreams indeed are ambition,” and at this point in the film’s condensed chronology Lincoln’s own ambition is being made abundantly clear: to secure the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery.

But beyond the explication of the dreamwork, the quotation also highlights Lincoln’s central, time-honored rhetorical strategy, which becomes a centerpiece of Tony Kushner’s screenplay for Lincoln: when commenting or seeking to sway, Lincoln’s constant recourse is to exempla, stories or quotations that illustrate his point. He opens with a joke (even if his dark-edged humor sometimes falls flat, like the apocalyptic pigeon tale he tells to a couple of clearly baffled constituents). He offers up stories about past heroes, like the jocular tale he tells of revolutionary-era hero Ethan Allen, with its crude punchline: “nothing’ll make an Englishman shit quicker than the sight of George Washington.” He shares a personal anecdote, tending to favor humorous tales from his law career, but recalling his own epiphany on slavery to convince one wavering congressman. He reaches for an analogy, as when he draws on Euclid’s First Theorem (using an older translation, he calls it a “common notion”) to convince a telegraph operator about the principles of equality, or when he compares his cabinet to whalers with their “harpoon in the monster’s back.” (Senator Wade complains after Lincoln’s exit: “The man’s never been near a whale ship in his life!”)

Lincoln

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And he quotes (or nearly quotes) from sages past. When Lincoln intones, as the naval bombardment of Wilmington commences, “Old Neptune, shake thy hoary locks,” it recalls the deluge scene in Ovid’s Metamorphosis (in Dryden’s translation); in the same scene, his “Thunder forth, God of War” echoes Milton, unless it’s Horace; shadows of the Bible, in the poetry of the King James version, are everywhere, most directly in the Second Inaugural Address that closes the film. And then there’s Shakespeare: Hamlet for that dream scene; Macbeth as he argues with Seward about the timing of the push for the amendment (Banquo’s address to the witches: “If you can look into the seeds of time/ And say which grain will grow and which will not,/ Speak then to me”); and when he meets with Bilbo and his crew late at night, he quotes from Falstaff (“We have heard the chimes of midnight, Master Swallow”), appropriately enough for that boozy crew.

Lincoln never footnotes his references; the quotations presume a common (now largely lost) cultural legacy, and a common strategy of lessons through exempla. He is not, after all, the only one given to quotation in the film. The soldiers he encounters in the film’s second scene conclude their exchange with him by reciting his own Gettysburg Address (and it is indicative that the uppity black in the scene—the same one who complains that black troops do not get equal pay and cannot attain officer’s stripes—knows it all the way to the “of the people, by the people” closing). Senator Sumner drags out a fragment of Washington Allston’s period poem “On the State of an Angel” (1842) when he praises Mary Lincoln’s “celestial face.” But in Lincoln’s case, the constant recourse to quotation and example illuminate both his own tactics and those of the filmmakers.

Constructing History

Lincoln is not, despite its title, a biopic. The stories Lincoln tells may illuminate his past (we can tell he was a lawyer; he confesses his self-education and its gaps when talking Euclid; the tale about his epiphany on slavery also notes his difficult relations with his father), but that’s not the point here. This is Lincoln without logsplitting (even if, when the fire gets low, he puts a fresh log on himself), Lincoln without log-cabin backstory, Lincoln without that “Honest Abe” epithet mentioned even once.  Brief scenes do convey the personal beneath the political—Lincoln’s struggles with his moody wife, his own grief over their dead son—but they constitute mere asides. Daniel Day Lewis wonderfully conveys the burdened character of the President (Grant notes at the surrender: “By outward appearance, you’re ten years older than you were a year ago”), but the burdens, like the rest of the backstory, are incidental to the business at hand.

Other figures are even less fully filled in; we never even hear the stirring story that gives Thaddeus Stevens his limp and his cane. Nor is this a broad portrait of America in the last year of the Civil War. A bloody opening scene captures the dire, personal dynamics of hand-to-hand combat, and a visit to a military hospital (with a trench filled with amputated body parts), a brief view of the bombardment of Wilmington, and a post-battle landscape of the dead near the film’s end re-anchors the “war is hell” point, but battles occur mostly offstage here. Only the magic-lantern slides young Tad Lincoln obsesses over (drawn from Alexander Gardner’s portfolio) suggest the actual horrors of slavery in the United States. But these allusions to the wider picture all figure as mere asides.  Rather, Lincoln focuses in on a single year—and really a single month—of a politician’s life, and it centrally depicts the complex struggle to pass that amendment.

In this sense, the only odd thing about the range of Shakespearean quotes is the relative absence here: except for jolly Falstaff, no echoes of the history plays through which Shakespeare constructed an argument about ideal kingship (as well as largely less than ideal kings). In those plays (and perhaps especially in the Second Tetralogy that takes us from Richard II’s failures to Henry V’s triumphs), Shakespeare excerpted and twisted his history to meet his ends, compressing chronologies, dropping out inconvenient facts, reworking historical events and figures in the interest of an argument. Nothing in Tony Kushner’s screenplay comes close to Shakespeare’s willingness to bend historical fact; indeed, the film showcases a care with its construction of a historical past unusual for Hollywood, and, aside from quibbles (how many stars are there on that flag?), historians critical of the film have complained less about distortions of record than about less focused and more debatable issues of interpretation (how important was this amendment?).

But still: Kushner’s tactics are strikingly Shakespearean in at least one respect: in the use of careful selection to construct from the material of history a clear argument. Taking from Lincoln’s career the single year (his last, the war’s last), just as Shakespeare ignored a couple decades of Richard II’s rule to focus on his deposition, and further detailing a day-by-day account of the few weeks between his second inauguration and the passage of the amendment, allows Kushner to make an argument about the mechanics of power brought to serve a greater end.

That end is the abolition of slavery. And no, the Emancipation Proclamation did not finish that work. Kushner’s Lincoln carefully lays out the issue in a meeting with his cabinet; it’s a long speech, but one worth lingering over, for the care with which the key issues are elucidated. After a story, of course, Lincoln plunges in: “I decided that the Constitution gives me war power, but no one knows just exactly what those powers are…. I decided I needed them to exist to uphold my oath to protect the Constitution, which I decided meant that I could take the rebels’ slaves from ‘em as property confiscated in war. That might recommend to suspicion that I agree with the rebs that their slaves are property in the first place. Of course I don’t … [but] if calling a man property, or war contraband, does the trick, why I caught at the opportunity. Now here’s where it gets truly slippery. I use the law allowing for the seizure of property in a war knowing it applies only to the property of governments and citizens of belligerent nations. But the South ain’t a nation, that’s why I can’t negotiate with ‘em. … And slipperier still: I maintain it ain’t our actual Southern states in rebellion, but only the rebels in those states, the laws of which states remain in force. The laws of which states remain in force. That means, that since it’s states’ laws that determine whether Negroes can be sold as slaves, as property—the Federal government doesn’t have a say in that, least not yet…. I felt the war demanded it; my oath demanded it; I felt right with myself; and I hoped it was legal to do it, I’m hoping still. Two years ago I proclaimed these people emancipated—then, thenceforward and forever free.” But let’s say the courts decide I had no authority to do it. They might well do it. Say there’s no amendment abolishing slavery. Say it’s after the war, and I can no longer use my war powers to just ignore the courts’ decisions, like I sometimes felt I had to do. Might those people I freed be ordered back into slavery? That’s why I’d like to get the Thirteenth Amendment through the House.”  In other words, the executive power seized in wartime to proclaim emancipation could not be sustained when the war (as it soon would) ended. Thus the push for passage.

And two other notes, implicit in Lincoln’s argument, should be clear as well. Abolishing slavery through constitutional amendment would place abolition above judicial review; it could not be overturned, Marbury v. Madison style. And passing the amendment by the mandated two-thirds vote could only be accomplished if the war was ongoing: if the House held no Southerners.

Making Sausage: The Political Process

If you want to enjoy your sausage, the old saying goes, don’t look too carefully at how it got made.  Politics, when it comes right down to it, looks a lot like sausage-making. As Thaddeus Stevens, Lincoln’s reluctant ally, puts it, after the amendment abolishing slavery has finally passed: “The greatest measure of the Nineteenth Century. Passed by corruption, aided and abetted by the purest man in America.” Complicated stuff .

Lincoln’s instructions to his cabinet make the political problem clear. He needs two thirds of the House to approve his amendment, which requires keeping all his own party in line (both the conservative and radical wings of the Republicans, each with their own rather different agendas) and pulling in a handful (or, well, a few handfuls) of additional Democratic votes (looking especially to those Democrats who, in the congressional lame-duck session, had already lost re-election votes).  To appease the conservative wing of his own party, he has to seem to be making efforts to end the war, but he also has to ensure that those efforts do not bear fruit too soon. He has to have the support of the radical wing, but he simultaneously has to depend on them to “temper,” as he puts it to Stevens, their own message. The centerpiece of that project is Stevens’s floor-debate insistence that the amendment is only about “equality before the law,” not equality of condition (that is, not racial equality). Meanwhile, through a combination of patronage quasi-bribery (with recourse to the skulky Bilbo to do the convincing) and personal appeals (lots more stories told), he has to bring around (or to abstention) enough Democrats to secure the needed numbers. And he has to keep the peace delegation at bay in the meantime, and almost (but not quite) lie about doing that, to keep the timetable.

The great body of the film—broadly everything between the two opening scenes of battle and interaction with soldiers on the one hand and the quickly limned post-vote surrender, assassination, and Inaugural Address gracenote—center on the struggle to get the votes. Against the major task at hand, everything else is mere aside. And the film’s climax comes with the vote, not with Appotomax or Ford’s Theatre after that. This is a film, less about Lincoln, than about Lincoln’s crowning political achievement, and the complex coordination of multiple strategies it took to accomplish that.

Lincoln’s Moment

Spielberg, it has been reported, deliberately held back the release of Lincoln until after the election because he did not want the film to become “political fodder” during the campaigning season. Was it concern over all that talk about enfranchising blacks, or perhaps worry over what people might make of the very different Democrats (and even more different Republicans) of the 1860s? Spielberg didn’t say. The film was released, instead, in the election’s immediate wake: as petitions urging secession circulated, and as the fiscal cliff loomed.

For this moment, the film constitutes a different sort of political fodder. It offers up a closely conceived argument over the combination of strategies—from the compromising to the coercive—that the mechanics of capitol politics sometimes require to accomplish change. The question it leaves us with is whether we have a Lincoln, or even a Thaddeus Stevens, with us today.

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The Ryder, January 2013

■ by Ryan Dawes

◗ Father John Misty with Magic Trick
Friday, January 10 / The Bluebird / 9pm / $15
A former member of the Seattle-based Fleet Foxes, Father John Misty performs a warmly oaken folk-rock with swaggered bits of C&W.  Like so many beloved artists from the Northwestern US, Misty was guided by “immobilizing” depression in creating his first solo album Fear Fun.  However, rather than licking his wounds through song, Father John emerged with a new narrative, more mischievous, independent, horny, and weird.  Warming up the stage will be the pet project of Tim Cohen, Magic Trick, which combines 60’s psychedelic rock and 70’s folk.

Father John Misty

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◗ Jeff Mangum (of Neutral Milk Hotel) with Tall Firs, The Briars
Tuesday, January 15 / The Buskirk-Chumley Theater / 7:00 pm / $33.50
While Neutral Milk Hotel released only two full-length albums, the band’s success and influence was expansive throughout the late 90’s and continues to be heard in bands like Arcade Fire and the Decemberists.  Mangum himself has largely avoided fame and only very sporadically tours, making this appearance in Bloomington a rare treat.  The evening will also include sets by cousins Jeremy Thal and Gideon Crevoshay of The Briars of North America and the Brooklyn-based Tall Firs, who plays mellow, guitar-centric indie rock.

Jeff Mangum

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◗ Percussive Dance Extravaganza
Thursday, January 17 / Rhino’s / 7:30 pm / $15
This particular extravaganza features the fiery feet of local dancers specializing in flatfooting, clogging, tap, French Canadian and English wooden shoe, and Long sword dancing, which originates in early 20th century England and uses “rapper swords.”  Traditional folk/old-time dance music will be supplied by a makeshift band of all-stars, led by fiddle master Brad Leftwich.  Featured dancers include Annie Bartlett, Suzannah Edgar, Mary Beth Roska, Allana Radecki, and Tamara Loewenthal (that lady from the farmer’s market). Tickets are available at Bloomingfoods, who will also supply the evening with refreshments.

◗ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Friday, January 25; Saturday, January 26; Wednesday, February 6 & Thursday, February 7 / Ivy Tech Waldon Arts Center / 7:30 / $15-$25
Set within a high-brow university after-party, this US American play by Edward Albee was first performed in 1962 and won several Tonys, including Best Play in 1963.  Considered Albee’s best production, this emotional work confronts and exposes domestic abuse, alcoholism, and embarrassment within two relationships.  This particular production is cast by, among others, Bill Simmons and Diane Kondrat, who have acted together in several productions and have both worked under local acting teacher Martha Jacobs.  This will be Kondrat’s final performance in south central Indiana before moving to Portland, OR.

◗ Old Blue Eyes: Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack
Saturday, January 26 / Brown County Playhouse / 7:30 pm / $22.50
Summoning the showmanship of Frank, Sam, and Dino, this performance will feature many hits by the Rat Pack, with choreography by Cynthia Pratt and David Hochoy.  The evening will also serve as a memorial to the late Brown County-based philanthropist and entrepreneur, Howard Hughes, who passed away just over a year ago.  The services supported by Hughes includes a venerable list of who’s who in the NPO realm of south central Indiana, including Dance Kaleidoscope, who is co-producing Old Blue Eyes with the BCPH.  Tickets are available online.

◗ Dark Star Orchestra
Wednesday, February 6 / The Buskirk-Chumley Theater / 8 pm / $27.50
Come all ye Wookiees, Wharf Rats, and Spinners to behold the transformation of Kirkwood Avenue into Shakedown Street, albeit a more wholesome version. This Grateful Dead cover band places as much focus on precise historic accuracy as it does on jamming out.  Each DSO set is based on a particular concert from the Dead’s extensive touring history.  During each concert, they announce the venue and date of the Dead show to be replicated and strictly abide by that night’s set list and stage setup.  Tickets to this living rock-history lesson are available one door east of the Buskirk, at the Sunrise Box Office during normal business hours.

Dark Star Orchestra

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Menomena
Thursday, February 14 / The Bishop / 8:30 / $12-14
Incorporating sax, brass, piano, synth, and abundantly intricate percussion, this Portland, OR-based experimental pop group might remind you of outfits like Islands or tUnE-yArDs.  Recently reshaped into a duo, Menomena’s latest and fifth album ‘Moms’ contains five songs by each member, one whose mother passed away and the other raised by a single mother.  This diversely orchestrated set will be preceded by the New York City band Guards, whose most recent album included contributions from members of Cults and MGMT.

Menomena

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The Ryder, January 2013

■ by Andrew Behringer

As 2012 finishes its run, my annual craving for Best of the Year lists and awards starts to kick in.  This year however, the films that have affected me the most aren’t getting the recognition that they should.  So instead of trying to make a list of the year’s best all-around films, I will talk briefly about the three films that have most moved me.  They each have elements that make them must-see movies for any filmgoer who appreciates filmmakers who do not play it safe.

◗ Killing Them Softly

Andrew Dominik’s follow up to The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford continues the director’s pattern of subverting genre conventions. Dominik has put a new spin on the gangster movie.  The movie is deliberately slow-paced and filled with conversations that don’t further the plot, but instead focus on developing characters and establishing mood.  Sharp social commentary adds an element of intellect absent from most mob movies.

◗ Amour

Michael Haneke’s latest left me greatly appreciating a European approach to an oft-tackled topic of American cinema. Both the characters and the universe they live in are devoid of the clichés that often accompany movies that explore love. Rather than distract the audience with busy camera work, Haneke frequently lets the camera sit motionless for an entire scene. This encourages the viewer to focus on the subtlety in the acting, which is the driving force behind Amour’s success.

◗ The Perks of Being a Wallflower

The Perks Of Being A Wallflower

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Without a doubt this is my favorite movie of the year.  I was surprised by the level of maturity found in the film’s tone, as well as the tremendous performances from the gifted ensemble cast.  Originally a novel, author Stephen Chbosky not only wrote the screenplay, but also directed the film.  One gauge of the success of a novel-to-film adaption is the extent to which the film is able to make the viewer forget the book.  Movie adaptations are often characterized by uneven pacing and rushed character development; these are difficult-to-avoid pitfalls when adapting a long-form novel into a two hour movie. Chbosky has risen to the challenge.  Chbosky does not attempt to clone his novel; he understands the constraints of storytelling in film form, and gives the film a heart of its own. After watching Perks, I feel more authors should learn the art of filmmaking so they can ensure the success of their work across all mediums.

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The Ryder, January 2013

A New Biography of an Old Master ■ by Brandon Cook

The publication of Gordon Bowker’s new biography of James Joyce, last year in Great Britain and this year in the United States, did not occur on a particularly auspicious date — a fact that might very well have set the famed Irish writer quivering in the fear of bad juju.

In 2011, the most renowned literary figure of the 20th century celebrated his 129th birthday. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the work that gave Joyce his definitive claims as a modern literary icon, turned 95 while Ulysses, the perennial “greatest novel ever written” but more commonly known as a bane to book clubs, required reading lists, and ambitious readers, marked its scorching debut 89 years ago .

Seventeen years went by after that, through which Joyce suffered the treatment of his schizophrenic daughter, a milieu of crippling debts, and the outbreak of the Second World War, not to mention years of 16-20 hour workdays. At the end of these travails came Finnegans Wake, a volume so dense with linguistic erudition (there are a purported 60 languages at work) and cultural polytonality that even the writer’s closest disciples abandoned him. Ezra Pound, that quintessential mad genius with Lucifer beard and manic eyes who first serialized Ulysses in his magazine, promptly abandoned the writer with the claim that he was wasting his genius. Joyce, spurned by readers and critics alike, mentally flushed and physically exhausted, died less than a year after its publication.

Sylvia Beach, Who Published Ulysses, And James Joyce

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Faced with these ostensibly random dates, it’s curious that Bowker believes that now is the time that we need a new perspective on Joyce to merit an all-inclusive biography. Any serious devotee of the Irish writer, when asked about biographical material, will point immediately to the 1959 work by Richard Ellmann (revised in 1982) as the source from which the purest Joyce flows. Novelist Anthony Burgess even dubbed it the “greatest literary biography of the century,” and all those who have read it are inclined to agree.

Ellmann foregoes the listing of dry fact and spurns the tired, pedantic diction that dispels so many readers away from biography. Equipped with the unequivocal mastery of language, his subjects yearn to speak for themselves and unlike most writers Ellmann is able to let them do so. The numerous letters, journal entries, and corresponsive limericks that Joyce shared with his acquaintances and that Ellmann picked, painstakingly, like grapes from the vine, provide a portrait of the artist in three crystal clear dimensions.

But Ellmann is a rare case, with a passion centralized on Irish modernism and little else. The biographer, sensing Ireland’s literary revolution when he produced his first two volumes on Yeats, ended up serving all four of the nation’s masters: Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, and Wilde, for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

By no means does Bowker’s biography attempt to outdo Ellmann’s and this is a good thing. There are obvious nods to the master text when he borrows from it, liberally quoting the same anecdotes, exclamations, and even textual interpretations (his rendering of young Joyce’s Et Tu Healy reads almost verbatim). His portraits of the Joyces owe much to Ellmann’s conception as well. Father John Joyce begins the text highlighted as a witty Parnellite while adoring Stanislaus fervidly dog tails and copycats every action of his older brother James, from his precocious interests in literature to his dramatic sundering with the Church (Stanislaus, in typical little-brother fashion, took the action too far and abandoned God whereas James merely abandoned man’s corrupted perception).

Bowker’s eye for detail serves him well in many of his corresponding episodes with Ellmann. One such episode takes place with Joyce’s former medical peer, literary admirer, and one-time roommate Oliver St. John Gogarty, forever immobilized to readers of Ulysses as the doggedly cynical, “stately plump Buck Mulligan.” Each biographer  lets the reader know that this literary eternity was a fate the young Buck had coming to him. Following recent quarrels in their already strained relationship, in 1904 the destitute Joyce nevertheless allowed himself to be housed in Gogarty’s ridiculous, militaristic Martello Tower along with one of his lackeys, Samuel Trench (Haines in Ulysses). Trench, prone to horrible nightmares and screaming fits, kept a loaded gun by his side. It was during one such terror that he awoke and, in hysterics, fired his gun several times against the back wall, narrowly missing the startled Joyce. Bowker, preferring a continuation of this scene, asserts that Gogarty later awoke and repeated the gesture as a ruse so that the brooding, disdaining Joyce would move out of the tower.

Joyce

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Unfortunately, many of the relationships become increasingly dense with Bowker’s chunks of fact-driven prose. When John Joyce begins to decline from amiable jokester to failed father and hapless drunk, the tragic loss of his verbal wit to the consumption of spirits (which so hauntingly foreshadows James’s future struggles) can easily pass the reader unregarded. Ellmann, who quotes from John’s brilliant pub chat and ample limericks that he shared with James, presents a far more life-loving spirit than Bowker.

So it goes for many of the dynamics that exist in the relationship between Stanislaus and James. Bowker’s description of the brothers’ intermittent stay in Trieste between the years 1904 through 1920, fails to capture Stanislaus’s complex and contradictory emotions. Summoned in order to provide company to James’s beloved Nora while he completed Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist, Stanislaus arrived enthusiastic, only to become one of the countless many from whom Joyce would siphon money to pay for lavish meals, tips, and shopping sprees. Readers will wonder why he suffered his pockets to be picked for as long as he did, to which Bowker meekly posits filial duty and admiration for James’s talents. What’s missing is Stanislaus’s fascinating diary, wherein the brother records how his duties to the capricious James reflect a greater duty to literature itself. James’s lauding as ‘literary genius’ did not spring from the Pound/Yeats/Eliot brigade, but from wholesome, second-best Stanislaus.

James fairs better under this at times toilsome prose, but not by much. In the midst of the controversy surrounding the Ulysses publication, Bowker writes that Joyce was “becoming [more] famous for being spoken and written about than for being read.”

One is tempted to think that the biographer might take note and allow more of the authentic Irishman to be heard, instead of reining  him in and paring his statements down to increments seldom exceeding three or four sentences. Joyce, in several documents, provides the best interpretation and criticism of his work anyway, showing that once freed from the words of intellectuals and pedagogues, the text is actually much simpler and accessible to the reader than before. Such is true of the Nausicaa episode, in which the resting Bloom pleasures himself to the exposed stockings of the simple-minded soubrette Gerty McDowell. Joyce writes the chapter in what he calls “namby-pamby jammy marmalady drawersy (alto là!) style.”

A part of the author seems to want to keep its figure shrouded in mystery. How does the man who guffawed boomingly at farts and funny-sounding words become the century’s literary mastermind? Why did this man, who once scooped up dirt and declared it in a hushed reverence to be “wonderful,” continually empty his pockets for a life of inflated decadence? How did a mind whose contents more often resemble the residue found in a vacuum cleaner bag grapple with man’s most sprawling questions? Bowker may have the answers but he won’t say so, just as he won’t allow Joyce out of the lenses of his scope.

Even so, there is at least one moment when this tactic is beneficial to the reader. Finnegans Wake is treated by Bowker with bold hypotheses and then tidily explored: something for which more readers are likely to clamor than the confusing textual excerpts that Ellmann offers or the expansive Finnegans Wake Skeleton’s Key by Joseph Campbell

Contrary to the belief that the unconscious ‘dreamscape’ of Finnegans Wake, (Work in Progress as it was known until publication) was the natural point of development from the monologue intérieur of Ulysses, Bowker asserts that Eliot’s The Waste Land is the true inspiration, providing the “fractured” and “unstable” form while encouraging the necessity of the various portmanteaus. It’s a valid argument that one may push further, contrasting even the drought and dearth of Eliot’s parched, dead ground with Joyce’s cyclical “riverrun” of life, the river Anna Livia Plurabelle.

There are other such strong scenes upon which Bowker lingers that other biographers have passed by. This is the outbreak of World War II. Ellmann dismissed it as Joyce did: unrelated to and disturbing the production of art, and therefore unworthy of much consideration. Bowker’s war blazes across the book’s last thirty pages, reminding the reader that Joyce’s singular artistic obsessions, admirable in their way, were nevertheless far from realistic. Lucia, his schizophrenic daughter, was being treated in a French mental hospital during Nazi occupation of the country and could not be brought out despite the family’s frantic efforts. Joyce could forget about the war, but the war never forgot about Joyce.

One of the most poignant scenes in the biography occurs in the beginning of the now-famous treatment of Lucie in the early 1930’s, when Joyce’s obsessive work on Finnegans Wake had to be halted so that his daughter could receive treatment for a condition the doctors would only say was baffling (and still is; perhaps the most accurate diagnosis came from Joyce himself, who believed she was suffering a combination of megalomania and an inability to transform artistic vision into reality). Years of doctor-hopping and expensive bills had got the couple nowhere and only after much pressuring did Joyce reluctantly agree to treat his daughter with the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, an admirer of Joyce’s genius who ambiguously declared that Ulysses “could be read the same backwards as forwards.” The meeting of these two mental geniuses reads as two wolves sizing the other up; for the palpable tension Bowker quotes Jung: ‘ “it was impossible not to see and feel his resistance.” ‘

“There is nothing your hand wants to reach for except a volume of Joyce,” reads Chris Proctor’s endorsement on the biography’s dust jacket. This rings truer than one might expect. Bowker’s book still manages to provide small insights that one will not find elsewhere. Less so than Ellmann, the book is effectual. One will look to Joyce afterwards and see that nowhere else in the English language can such humor be drawn from words, and such powerful life as from Molly Bloom’s final, affirmative “Yes.” Bowker’s biography breathes no new life into Joyce but the reader cannot expect this. The 20th century’s greatest literary innovator needs no new life–he resonates with as much vitality today as ever.

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The Ryder, January 2013

Photo caps (Joyce in bookstore)

Sylvia Beach (who published Ulysses) and Joyce in the Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris.

Photo cap (Beach and Joyce standing)

James Joyce and Sylvia Beach (who published Ulysses) outside the door of Shakespeare and Company on the Rue de l’Odeon in Paris in 1920

Use one of these bookstore pictures and or/one of the posed headshots.

I’ve also attached two versions of the bookcover. I don’t think the bookcover or the headshots require photo caps. And I’m not sure it’s necessary to reproduce the book cover – neither image does much for me, although I’m certainly not opposed to using one of them as space permits.