MEET THE BAISERS

Cavemen did not say “ugh.” Neither did cavewomen. Physical evidence of early hominids points to the position of jaw and musculature and shows that cavefolk were incapable of creating a noise so far back in the throat. This is the same kind of engineering that encourages babies to make their first sounds in the front of their mouths, the da-da-da. Sting never evolved much beyond this point. In any case, baby’s first word is da-da, and shortly after that, culture comes into play, the culture of women. The endearing mother, hoping to endear a man to support her and her baby, she tells a man that he is the father and, most importantly, that the baby is calling his name. What man hasn’t fallen for this yet? The trick is as old as Eve! Oh well, you get the point: hardwired human linguistic capabilities.

I like to read two stories at the same time from a single book. I love innuendo and the mileage you can get from of a single phrase with more than one meaning. However, linguist, Noam Chomsky, views language strictly from the hardwired perspective, and does not see language as organically linked to culture. I say he must not laugh at very many jokes. Poor Numb Chumpsky. Double entendre would not exist without a link between language and culture. The link underlines the double lives that people lead, the one they recognize and the other one that perhaps is only seen in de ja vu. Count how many French terms I use in this paragraph and consider Franco influence on duality theory.

Consider Franco influence on American movies.

MEET THE FOCKERS and THE BIRDCAGE are really one in the same movie. Here is an inverse case, where two expressions run through identical territory. They’re both about families coming together over a wedding, each movie with one side of the family being more openly sexual than the other. Double entendre is alive and well in both films, as is double misunderstanding, which drives humor in duplicate.



Note on the title of this post: Never mind. It’s too dirty to explain in English.

MOONSPINNERS

My father taught me to say two things in Greek. The first one is poe-say-ka-nee. You use it in the marketplace: poe-say-ka-nee! Then you say: poe-leh-ah-kra-voh and you shake your head a little bit. These are the only two things you have to know in Greek, my father told me. The first one means “How much?” You’re talking to the vendor in the marketplace. He picks up the object you’ve pointed to in his booth. It doesn’t matter what he says in response. You don’t have to understand him. Then you use the second phrase, poe-leh-ah-kra-voh, which means “Too much.” You keep saying it, “Too much, too much,” and he’ll keep bidding and you keep saying “Too much,” until he puts the object down, which means he’s given his final bid, at which point you hold out your hand with your palm full of money. You don’t have to understand the money. He’ll only take from you the last bid that he offered. He doesn’t want to rip you off; he just wants you to haggle properly to show mutual respect.

My father spent time on the Island of Crete. He said the people there are completely honest. They do not know about stealing. Maybe it is different in big cities, my father says, but in the remote parts on the island, he used to throw his wallet and his watch on the dashboard of his car and go down to the beach for a swim. Why would we take your things, his Greek friends would ask; they do not belong to us. I think times have changed for the Island of Crete since my father’s time there. Disney’s movie, THE MOONSPINNERS, would not exist without the turmoil caused by a jewel thief and a fugitive.

THE MOONSPINNERS is a Disney non-classic girl movie. The lady librarian where I borrowed the tape said it was her favorite movie when she was growing up. I had a feeling that maybe it still is her favorite movie. It has action, adventure, and daring of an adolescent who puts herself in harm’s way so she can grow up. She spends a night out among the ancient ruins with a dashing young man who’s running from the law and for his life. He’s a wanted man, but it’s all very innocent, Disneyesque. Not even naked photographs are exchanged.

The thing I find curious is the old custom of looking up a fellow countryman in a foreign land. A British girl and her Aunt arrive in this little far away village and immediately they try to make contact with a fellow native-English speaker. (Don’t you travel to get away from what you know?) Okay, maybe in the old days when people didn’t travel so much, maybe that was part of common courteousy, like saying hello…but today? Today if you find another American with whom you were not previously acquainted—stay away from that guy! Franz Boas is dead. Traveling has turned to empirical science with an agenda of expectation, not surprise or exploration for the sake of exploration.

“This is Bay Street. You will shop here,” the surrey driver kept repeating in the Bahamas. I didn’t obey him. I had the notion to walk to Fort Fin Castle. It was just up the hill; I could see it. Why not walk there? Well, for one thing, the sidewalks don’t connect. You can’t take a simple pedestrian stance from the cruise ship port to the fortress in any kind of straight path. Furthermore, as you start walking, you lose sight of the water tower, which is adjacent to your goal. Down on street level, you can’t see what you’re aiming for. And you have to keep crossing and recrossing streets to find one that doesn’t look like you’re going to be mugged to walk up it. I couldn’t hide the fact that I’m American; what I could do was affect the look that I’d already lost my American Express card. A little disheveled, a little disheartened, sweating, hair frazzled. This aspect is not difficult to accomplish. I encountered one man walking down the street randomly begging, but he was begging to everyone and to no one, sort of mumbling off in the air while his hand was extended, palm up. I witnessed a drug transaction, but that was very quick. Other than that, I made it to the base of the Queen’s steps and found the first three of them buried under trash. The walk back was much easier because I could see my ship all the way down the hill, and plus from the Fort vantage, I was able to plot a better course. It was a little off of a direct route, but it went straight to Bay Street, and from there I knew I’d be okay.

But then I recall a time in Germany, in not a tourist town in Germany. I knew someone; we went to his friend’s place. She wasn’t American, she was Canadian, so maybe this doesn’t count. Mostly her apartment was filled with Germans. She was having a party. Her parents, I guess, were concerned about her in another country and so far away from them. She had made these appetizers and stuck little Canadian flags on toothpicks all in the little bites, then when everyone had a miniature maple leaf flag in hand, she took a picture to send to her mom, like everyone there was Canadian! Hi Mom. She was the only Canadian. I was one of three Americans. The rest were Germans. Okay, so maybe this custom does happen in remote areas today, but not in tourist areas. Okay, so maybe that does work. I talked myself into it.

The thing that kills THE MOONSPINNERS is too much monologuing, too much. THE MOONSPINNERS is made from a book of the same title, and there’s too much of the book in the movie. While static shots and paragraphs of single character lines may have been common practice of older films, I cite the lack of these elements as an improvement to modern movie making. This movie is slow in a no passing zone. Even the chase scene is slow. It may have enough love interest to sustain an audience of pre-teen girls, but I doubt it would hold the attention of boys in this day or the past. Poe-leh-ah-kra-voh.

REALITY LEAKS

If you can get past a penis stalking through the first scene of RIDICULE, you may appreciate the dark side of humor portrayed in this French film.

The power of insult prevails in the high court of Louis XVI. A landowner from rural France comes to compete in this powder wig world in order to gain favor for his people. He campaigns for a drainage project that will save his serfs. Despite his country background, he is a keen man—he knows to play the part and how to play it—but alas, he is inexperienced, and he is kind, the flaws that bring about his downfall in his initial campaign. The end of the movie is the beginning: he takes his most base revenge on the man who did subdue him: he pisses on him.

That may not be a real, human penis, penises being fickle things. This is not pornography where bodily fluids are more easily exchanged than dialogue; this is high art of film. This is French. This is cinéma! This is a prosthetic phallus, is my guess. I don’t know what is the French word for “Fluffer,” but I’m thinking I didn’t see it in the credits.

Furthermore, that’s not real urine. Unless hepatitis and HIV are less communicable in translation, I doubt that’s more than yellow-tinted water, eau de nothing. Do you realize the biohazard suggested in this scene? Human primates, just like any primates, are extremely contagious to each other, even in France.

A theater company was preparing to do Sam Shepard’s CURSE OF THE STARVING CLASS, a play that involves blood, pee, a live lamb, and a bushel of artichokes among its properties. They made the blood out of peanut butter, diluted and dyed red. It smeared well and stayed on the wall to give a coagulated effect. Of course they used creamy not crunchy. As for the pee, well, it’s one thing to pee in a cup; it’s another thing to pee in front of an entire audience. Besides, who wants to clean up real urine between scenes? They rigged the actor with a false bladder and a tube and had to make sure he didn’t leak. The lamb and the artichokes were not so difficult.

Blood, sweat, urine, saliva, tears, semen, and vaginal secretions are substances you should avoid unless they are your own. Share them carefully. And microwavable plastic wrap in an ineffective disease prevention because of its perforations. I just thought that you should know too. Reality leaks can be just as dangerous as illusion.

ANIL'S HAUNTING

Disclaimer: I didn’t read THE ENGLISH PATIENT, or see the movie. I heard they both were very good, maybe too good to be true, so I read ANIL’S GHOST. Thus this is my virginal take on one book of one man’s work.


“A writer. They have time to get into trouble…. ” Michael Ondaatje writes toward the end of ANIL’S GHOST. Really anyone has time to get into trouble, but it’s the writer who thinks of it. Ondaatje thinks of it more that most in my opinion of this book.

In school, they have you read these stories with the smallest possible details, which are only mentioned once and are irrelevant to the story as a whole, and then you’re tested on them to see if you were paying attention. It’s a little ah-ha, gotcha! that teachers use to snap your brain awake. Then you grow up thinking wow that’s clever, and clever is good, clever is power. You learn to write clever, not realizing that clever is not interesting. No one likes a clever prick.

Michael Ondaatje, MO we shall call him because I’m not sure how to say his last name, so MO does not write clever. He is interesting. Through fact and tone and philosophy he draws the reader in, makes you want to learn more. MO’s an educator without being a prick about it. He spends his time to set the scene, bring it about in the context of history, religion, politics, medicine, and art, which gives his writing a heavy tonal value. The characters seem to move through the work like notes in a chord. It’s a beautiful piece to listen to, to lie back in, and enjoy….

Aside from tone, red herring is the most prominent literary device of ANIL’S GHOST. In that way, it does come off like a schoolbook, with parts you will be tested on later, but which do not relate to the characters or plot. We learn at the beginning that Anil is a swimmer, or she was when she was young. We invest some depth into knowing this. I keep waiting for her to escape peril via swimming the swiftness set up in her youth, but MO never cashes in on the investment. Indeed the setting, Sri Lanka, the island, surrounded by water on all sides, yet there is no escape from it, not through Anil or the mystery skeleton who is her duty to investigate. She nicknames him “Sailor,” an epitaph of aquatic escape, yet it turns out that was not his occupation at all. He is tied to the ground, deep in the ground. All the characters are tied to the ground, through mining, or archaeology, or death. This is the central conflict of civil unrest for the country, because all citizens are tied to the ground, their allegiance to earth, their sense of place. While swimming is Anil’s history and brings her to her homeland, it is not where she is going. Okay, a fine introduction, but…and? Behind the back cover, it seems like an unrealistic detail because it is useless. It is like describing a table as indescribable. If the table is indescribable, then why mention it?

Despite Anil’s travel and work in other worlds, like the American Southwest, she feels her place is eating bean curd. She leaves a friend in Arizona, a friendship that seems to be the closest relationship of her life, yet she leaves this friend behind. The friend prematurely gets Alzheimer’s and is forgotten. Without closure, that string of narrative is abandoned. Why?

Perhaps it is a cultural difference. I am an American. I expect the female lead to sleep with the male lead, or at least sleep with another character they are both close to create a sexual element that plays into the external conflicts and experiences and endurances. I am granted atmosphere and isolation, spirituality and beauty, but never carnal knowledge, except between Anil and her brother. Her brother! The phrase comes in passing that she has to grant him a sexual favor. What? I had to read that again and out loud to make sure I read it correctly. It’s mentioned at the end of a paragraph without details and nothing more is said about it. Clearly this is a cultural difference, I thought, that an author can pass off sex between siblings as casual nature.

So we have this lovely tone, but how do I get from the spa of words into meaning that I can slap down on the streets in the face of my opponents? No, that is an unfair question. It is cheap and external. Anyone could ask it of any story and sound superior to the story. This is treating the story as specimen, not as a person.

Stories are people, in a metaphoric sense, of course, but otherwise we wouldn’t care about them so much. They live, they breathe, they work or are lazy, and they die. Methods of literary analysis, or story construction or deconstruction, are mechanical devices by which to measure the pulse, the respiration, and the blood-sugar levels of a story. What we have with MO’s story seems to be a hospital patient in a happy coma. The ending is organic in that the story remains a vegetable! We have life and health and pulse, but the brain capacity to make ends meet with the investment of clues is flat line.

I am not a proponent of happy endings. I am a proponent of natural endings. The end of this book seems to come as an unnatural demise to its details. This is partly the scandal that reintroduces Anil to her homeland, but what now? I have no sense of how she will carry on, or why or what, or if she will carry on at all.

ANIL’S GHOST is not the last MO book I will ever read. I am supporting the idea that because of its strong tonality, ANIL’S GHOST has symbols and allusions and illusions that haven’t caught up with me yet. I’m not willing to diagnose it brain dead until I can declare myself with full mental capacities functioning. I suspect ANIL’S GHOST needs time to sink in, needs time to haunt me. The tone resides easily in my head. It is so subtle that it easily entered and now will be difficult to dismiss. It is like cologne on a person you nearly almost just met, but you still think you can know him better.