FROM ARTHUR


The willing suspension of disbelief is a fragile yet resilient thing, able to accomodate inconsistencies and illogic entirely according to one's mood at the time. For that reason, I can still go along with a story if a white man plays an Indian, but not if a bandit woman lives in a cave for months but looks smashing and wears clean clothes the entire time. Truth or the real world is not an issue. There are two books I disliked in my 20s because a) I didn't think a person could earn money by writing term papers for lazy students, and b) there are such things as sinkholes in Florida.
I mention that because Lydia and I recently watched Midnight Mass on Netflix, a nihilistic vampire story that last for around 7 hours, and could have been told in 2 in a movie starring Josh Hartnett. Basically it's the story of a preacher who, thinking a vampire is an angel, brings the creature home to a struggling isolated island where the people make their living, such as it is, fishing.
Throughout, the major characters try to sift out what's going on as people look and act younger, ailments disappear, and flesh and blood burst into flame when exposed to sunlight.
Not one of the 20 or 30 characters with lines seem to have ever heard of vampires. Not one. No mention of Bela Lugosi, the Twilight books, or Anne Rice. None of the boys, and not the girl in the wheelchair. None of the men who presumably have a copy of Agents of Fortune by Blue Oyster Cult which has a vampire song. Not even when it will take only one word – "Vampires!" – to explain what's going on. (But this show always uses a paragraph when a sentence would do).
So I could suspend my disbelief in the vampire. I could be content with my waste of time. But it annoyed me to no end that the characters have never heard of vampires.
That said, I did appreciate the nod to The Scarlet Letter and, of all media content, The Sopranos. Because when the characters in Midnight Mass talk about what happens to you when you die, that's exactly what happens to them, just like it it did in the Sopranos, only here it takes a lot longer.


FROM ARTHUR

 



During one of those periods when we were speaking to one another – I think maybe Ford was President – Gus Hasford and I tottled off to UCLA to see a talk by Jerzy Kosinski, author of The Painted Bird. As fans of capracious existential doom, Gus and I agreed the novel was the bee's knees, mainly because it was so Bleak.
The only thing I remember from the talk was Kosiniski claiming he would have been at Sharon Tate's house THAT night had he not missed a plane flight. I can guess, though, he talked about an incident he described in an introduction to a new edition of The Painted Bird, which he must have written around then.
That incident being the tale of two of countrymen, upset that his portrait of ignorant superstitious peasants could be construed as a critque of their country, muscled into his apartment looking for Kosinski so they could kill him. Kosinski played it cool, pretended to be a guest and that the man they were looking for wasn't in. Would they like to wait? He got them to relax with a few drinks, then casually withdrew a pistol from a hiding place. The men caved immediately, and claimed they didn't want to hurt Kosinski, they just wanted to talk to him.
When I read this, the picture of the intruders and their furious backpedalling brought to mind the morons who murdered Ahmaud Arbery, and the depressing idea that the human species contains a lot of insipid dolts susceptible to acting at the behest of simplistic propaganda, especially if what passes for patriotism is involved.
And that was before I reread the novel. It's the whole bee, not just the knees. The nameless narrator is orhpaned by World War II and wanders, or escapes to, one harrowing plight after another. An antisepctic way of putting it would be to say he undergoes a series of a trials, from being repeatedly beaten by one "foster parent" after another, being thrown in a sewer because he looks "dark", and witnessing a savage horde unleashed by the Nazis rape and pillage a village with gay abandon.
The child is so traumatized that he loses the capacity to speak. Only when the Soviet army has "liberated" the village does he encounter any human kindness, as the soldiers feed him, care for his wounds, and a few become fond of him.
One of the selling points of the book, and one Kosinski apparently took a great deal of stock in, was the Truth of the events described. My copy has a quote from Arthur Miller saying the book "is so carefully kept within the margins of probability and fact". Well....
I can accept that Jewish families on trains on their way to concentration camps would, in desperation, throw their children from a window or push them through an opening in the floor, so that they might have a chance at life, just as a I can accept that a Russian sniper would extract revenge on the peasants for killing his friends, even if they probably deserved it.
But the Lovecraftian pit of rats that devour a man alive in moments? The inability of a man to, ahem, disengage after raping a young girl? He doesn't get out for over a week. Those sort of things strike as the stuff of a Polish version of magic realism, just a few steps beyond the veil of possibility.
By the time the soliders are telling him what sort of life they are working to build in their homeland (the narrator thinks Stalin is a saint), one wonders if a life where men are judged by their merits and there is no capricious cruelty isn't just another sideshow.
Like many a work striving to be great literature, the story doesn't end so much as it stops, when the kid is able to talk again. What does it all mean, and why is Art writing this? I have no idea, and Kosinski sure doesn't, because like many a hero of great books striving to be literature, he committed suicide, and this train of thought is over.
During one of those periods when we were speaking to one another – I think maybe Ford was President – Gus Hasford and I tottled off to UCLA to see a talk by Jerzy Kosinski, author of The Painted Bird. As fans of capracious existential doom, Gus and I agreed the novel was the bee's knees, mainly because it was so Bleak.
The only thing I remember from the talk was Kosiniski claiming he would have been at Sharon Tate's house THAT night had he not missed a plane flight. I can guess, though, he talked about an incident he described in an introduction to a new edition of The Painted Bird, which he must have written around then.
That incident being the tale of two of countrymen, upset that his portrait of ignorant superstitious peasants could be construed as a critque of their country, muscled into his apartment looking for Kosinski so they could kill him. Kosinski played it cool, pretended to be a guest and that the man they were looking for wasn't in. Would they like to wait? He got them to relax with a few drinks, then casually withdrew a pistol from a hiding place. The men caved immediately, and claimed they didn't want to hurt Kosinski, they just wanted to talk to him.
When I read this, the picture of the intruders and their furious backpedalling brought to mind the morons who murdered Ahmaud Arbery, and the depressing idea that the human species contains a lot of insipid dolts susceptible to acting at the behest of simplistic propaganda, especially if what passes for patriotism is involved.
And that was before I reread the novel. It's the whole bee, not just the knees. The nameless narrator is orhpaned by World War II and wanders, or escapes to, one harrowing plight after another. An antisepctic way of putting it would be to say he undergoes a series of a trials, from being repeatedly beaten by one "foster parent" after another, being thrown in a sewer because he looks "dark", and witnessing a savage horde unleashed by the Nazis rape and pillage a village with gay abandon.
The child is so traumatized that he loses the capacity to speak. Only when the Soviet army has "liberated" the village does he encounter any human kindness, as the soldiers feed him, care for his wounds, and a few become fond of him.
One of the selling points of the book, and one Kosinski apparently took a great deal of stock in, was the Truth of the events described. My copy has a quote from Arthur Miller saying the book "is so carefully kept within the margins of probability and fact". Well....
I can accept that Jewish families on trains on their way to concentration camps would, in desperation, throw their children from a window or push them through an opening in the floor, so that they might have a chance at life, just as a I can accept that a Russian sniper would extract revenge on the peasants for killing his friends, even if they probably deserved it.
But the Lovecraftian pit of rats that devour a man alive in moments? The inability of a man to, ahem, disengage after raping a young girl? He doesn't get out for over a week. Those sort of things strike as the stuff of a Polish version of magic realism, just a few steps beyond the veil of possibility.
By the time the soliders are telling him what sort of life they are working to build in their homeland (the narrator thinks Stalin is a saint), one wonders if a life where men are judged by their merits and there is no capricious cruelty isn't just another sideshow.
Like many a work striving to be great literature, the story doesn't end so much as it stops, when the kid is able to talk again. What does it all mean, and why is Art writing this? I have no idea, and Kosinski sure doesn't, because like many a hero of great books striving to be literature, he committed suicide, and this train of thought is over.
During one of those periods when we were speaking to one another – I think maybe Ford was President – Gus Hasford and I tottled off to UCLA to see a talk by Jerzy Kosinski, author of The Painted Bird. As fans of capracious existential doom, Gus and I agreed the novel was the bee's knees, mainly because it was so Bleak.
The only thing I remember from the talk was Kosiniski claiming he would have been at Sharon Tate's house THAT night had he not missed a plane flight. I can guess, though, he talked about an incident he described in an introduction to a new edition of The Painted Bird, which he must have written around then.
That incident being the tale of two of countrymen, upset that his portrait of ignorant superstitious peasants could be construed as a critque of their country, muscled into his apartment looking for Kosinski so they could kill him. Kosinski played it cool, pretended to be a guest and that the man they were looking for wasn't in. Would they like to wait? He got them to relax with a few drinks, then casually withdrew a pistol from a hiding place. The men caved immediately, and claimed they didn't want to hurt Kosinski, they just wanted to talk to him.
When I read this, the picture of the intruders and their furious backpedalling brought to mind the morons who murdered Ahmaud Arbery, and the depressing idea that the human species contains a lot of insipid dolts susceptible to acting at the behest of simplistic propaganda, especially if what passes for patriotism is involved.
And that was before I reread the novel. It's the whole bee, not just the knees. The nameless narrator is orhpaned by World War II and wanders, or escapes to, one harrowing plight after another. An antisepctic way of putting it would be to say he undergoes a series of a trials, from being repeatedly beaten by one "foster parent" after another, being thrown in a sewer because he looks "dark", and witnessing a savage horde unleashed by the Nazis rape and pillage a village with gay abandon.
The child is so traumatized that he loses the capacity to speak. Only when the Soviet army has "liberated" the village does he encounter any human kindness, as the soldiers feed him, care for his wounds, and a few become fond of him.
One of the selling points of the book, and one Kosinski apparently took a great deal of stock in, was the Truth of the events described. My copy has a quote from Arthur Miller saying the book "is so carefully kept within the margins of probability and fact". Well....
I can accept that Jewish families on trains on their way to concentration camps would, in desperation, throw their children from a window or push them through an opening in the floor, so that they might have a chance at life, just as a I can accept that a Russian sniper would extract revenge on the peasants for killing his friends, even if they probably deserved it.
But the Lovecraftian pit of rats that devour a man alive in moments? The inability of a man to, ahem, disengage after raping a young girl? He doesn't get out for over a week. Those sort of things strike as the stuff of a Polish version of magic realism, just a few steps beyond the veil of possibility.
By the time the soliders are telling him what sort of life they are working to build in their homeland (the narrator thinks Stalin is a saint), one wonders if a life where men are judged by their merits and there is no capricious cruelty isn't just another sideshow.
Like many a work striving to be great literature, the story doesn't end so much as it stops, when the kid is able to talk again. What does it all mean, and why is Art writing this? I have no idea, and Kosinski sure doesn't, because like many a hero of great books striving to be literature, he committed suicide, and this train of thought is over.