Certain recent events (outlined below, trust me, I’m going somewhere with this) have conspired to remind me of Sarah Vowell’s wonderful Assassination Vacation, a book I read last year about the murders of Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. Specifically, I can’t stop thinking about John Wilkes Booth.
Most people know the man who killed Lincoln was an actor, but what I didn’t realize is he was kind of a famous actor, from a family of really famous actors. It would be like if Casey Affleck shot the president. “Really?” people would say. “That guy?”
John’s brother Edwin Booth (Ben Affleck) is considered by many to be the greatest Shakespearean actor of the 19th century (so not exactly Ben Affleck), and is the man who, incidentally, years before the assassination, while waiting for a train, saved the life of Lincoln’s son who had fallen onto the track. This is the kind of thing historians call “a spooky coincidence.”
The night of the assassination, Lincoln and his wife were accompanied to the theater by Henry Rathbone and his stepsister-turned-fiancée (eat your heart out, Marcia Brady). Henry Rathbone was right there when Lincoln was shot. He saw it happen. In fact, many blamed him for not stopping the murder. Years later, Henry went crazy and killed his wife. Historians call this sort of thing “probably not a coincidence.”
Booth was totally blindsided by the fact that killing the president didn’t make him a national hero. He expected parades. He expected stirring ballads written in his honor. But noooooo, everyone made out Booth to be the bad guy! Lincoln was a divisive figure who many wanted to see dead, but if anything, his assassination, on Good Friday no less, made him more beloved, made him a martyr. While hiding out in Virginia (state motto: sic semper tyrannis), Booth wrote in his journal:
After being hunted like a dog through swamps, woods, and last night being chased by gun boats till I was forced to return wet cold and starving, with every mans hand against me, I am here in despair. And why; For doing what Brutus was honored for, what made Tell a Hero. And yet I for striking down a greater tyrant than they ever knew am looked upon as a common cutthroat… I struck for my country and that alone. A country groaned beneath this tyranny and prayed for this end. Yet now behold the cold hand they extend me.
Two weeks earlier the Civil War was happening and everybody was killing everybody. Two weeks earlier, Lincoln was the bad guy, the commander-in-chief of the enemy’s army. Two weeks earlier, Lincoln would have been a casualty of war. But now, it was a murder, because the war was over and suddenly killing was bad again. I imagine Casey Affleck holed up in a barn, smacking a newspaper: “What’s the deal here? I mean, is this whole country crazy? Or is it me?”
For many, the Civil War died hard. When Charles Guiteau murdered Garfield, he left a note for the retired General Sherman telling him to “order out [his] troops, and take possession of the jail” in which Guiteau was kept, in the name of the Union, which Guiteau believed to be at risk, a full sixteen years after the Confederacy surrendered. Guiteau, it should be noted, was crazy.
Meanwhile, here in the 21st century, Abu Ghraib’s Lynndie England says in an interview that she still isn’t sorry. A few months back, we got a video of soldiers pissing on corpses. Last week, an American soldier in Afghanistan went “crazy” and slaughtered sixteen civilians. And every time, the country acts shocked, as if every witness to horror who then lashes out is some sort of spooky coincidence.
Also last week, the Obama campaign released a video touting the president’s political accomplishments, including the killing of Osama Bin Laden (which is good because we’re in a war right now so killing people is okay). As if none of these things are related. As if violence has ever resulted in the end of violence. As if in killing a Bin Laden, we didn’t give a whole new group of people a Lincoln.
2012 will be labeled by the history books (if books themselves don’t become history) as the end of the war in Iraq, but for so many people, the war is still happening. For so many families, here and abroad, the war is just beginning. The emotional and political fallout will crawl across generations—the casualties can never be fully counted.
Every war, no matter how brutal, is built on the premise that one day, when all is said and done, the ends will justify the means. But over and over again we learn that in real life, there is no ends. There’s just the means. All there is is means.
is to one day be famous enough for being a brilliant writer that all my brilliant writer friends will ask me to write blurbs to put on the backs of their novels or memoirs or humorous essay collections. Some people practice Oscar speeches in front of the mirror. I practice writing glib tongue-in-cheek endorsements for my friends’ books.* In case you are thinking of publishing a book and are looking for droll semi-ironic huzzahs, these are the kinds of things I would write:
“This book is so good it made me angry, then hungry, then sleepy. Then angry again, then proud, then profoundly moved, weirdly horny, and finally, angry. A roller-coaster of emotions, this book.”
“Every once in a while you come across a book that you just can’t put down, either because it’s so good or because your friend keeps bugging you with text messages asking if you’ve read his book yet. This is such a book.”
“This book — brilliant, and hilarious, and surprisingly moving — is the kind of book I wish I could write, but alas, I am too busy writing blurbs my friends can put on the backs of their books.”
“This is the best kind of book, but the worst kind of hat. I tried wearing it on my head and it kept falling off. If the author was trying to write a brilliant book, full of rich, deeply felt characters and nimble laugh-out-loud prose, mission accomplished. If she was trying to design a hat, F.”
“There need to be more books like this— beautiful, immediate, and heartbreakingly honest. Why aren’t there more books like this? The fact that there aren’t more books like this is why people hate books. And frankly, those people are right.”
“It’s weird being asked to write a blurb for my friend’s book, because what am I going to say, it sucks? That said, this book doesn’t suck, mostly.”
“This book makes me want to be a better writer. Or quit writing altogether and go do something practical. But what? I’m not really qualified for any kind of real job. Maybe I should go back to school? Or would that just be throwing good money after bad? I don’t know, man. I’m sorry, I got way off track there. The point is, read this book.”
“This is the book everyone’s going to be talking about for years to come, so you should definitely read it now so that later, when everyone’s going on about how brilliant it is, you can roll your eyes and say, ‘Tchhh, I liked that book BEFORE it was cool.’ Then everyone will go, ‘oooooh,’ and you will be Queen of the Schoolyard!”
“Book’ em, Danno! (By ‘Danno,’ I mean, ‘you, the person reading the back of this book,’ and by ‘Book ‘em,’ I mean, ‘Read this book.’)”
“As a famous successful writer, I’m often asked to write blurbs for other people’s books, and usually I just get my assistant to do it and sign my name, but this book was so brilliant, so earth-shatteringly creative, I had TWO assistants write this blurb!”
* (Oh, also, in case it wasn’t clear, I definitely also practice Oscar speeches, so don’t think I’m acting like I’m better than you.)
If I had to pick one Bible verse that students of American history should know, it is Acts 16:9: ‘And a vision appeared to Paul in the night; There stood a man of Macedonia, and prayed him, saying, Come over into Macedonia and help us.’ In the middle of his second missionary journey, the apostle Paul had a dream or a hallucination in which a Macedonian stranger pleaded for his preaching. Paul dropped what he was doing in Asia Minor and ‘immediately’ sailed across the Aegean.
Theologians refer to this as the ‘Macedonian call.’ For example, in his ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail,’ Martin Luther King, Jr., writes: ‘Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid.’
For Americans, Acts 16:9 is the high-fructose corn syrup of Bible verses — an all-purpose ingredient we’ll stir into everything from the ink on the Marshall Plan to canisters of Agent Orange. Our greatest goodness and our worst impulses come out of this missionary zeal, contributing to our overbearing (yet not entirely unwarranted) sense of our country as an inherently helpful force in the world. And, as with the apostle Paul, the notion that strangers want our help is sometimes a delusion.
— Sarah Vowell, Unfamiliar Fishes — I’m reading this now, and loving it.
“KFC insists it is ‘committed to the well-being and humane treatment of chickens.’ How trustworthy are these words? At a slaughterhouse in West Virginia that supplies KFC, workers were documented tearing the heads off live birds, spitting tobacco into their eyes, spray-painting their faces, and violently stomping on them. These acts were witnessed dozens of times. This slaughterhouse was not a ‘bad apple,’ but a ‘Supplier of the Year.’
—
-Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals
I’m reading this book right now and almost every page has a paragraph I want to excerpt in my tumblr. I chose the above quote because I thought it served as a nice metaphor for the entire book. Rather than being an outlier, the way KFC treats its chickens actually represents how the vast vast vast majority of farmed animals are treated in this country.
I want everybody to read this brilliant, compassionate, incredibly readable book. I think it should be taught in high school health classes. I think it should be excerpted on the backs of egg cartons like surgeon general warnings on cigarette packs.
If you are a person who eats food, I implore you to read this book.
You don’t have to be a vegetarian to care about where your food comes from. I believe that literally every meat-eater I know, if given the choice between eating an animal that was tortured and mistreated and one that was treated with dignity and slaughtered humanely, would pick the latter every time. And yet we as a country are moving in the opposite direction, consuming more and more factory farm animals and animal products, animals that have been mangled and abused and pumped full of hormones and diseases, and paying huge corporations for the privilege of doing so.
I think most of us have a vague sense that animals are being mistreated, but I found Eating Animals to be an eye-opening account of the duplicity of factory farms (Picture a free-range chicken; you imagining it? Okay, surprise, that’s not actually what “free-range” means) and the power the food industry has on national nutrition policy (FUN FACT: Did you know that the highest rates of osteoporosis occur in the countries that consume the most dairy? BECAUSE I DIDN’T — I literally used to think milk commercials were P.S.A.s).
I know there’s a hesitancy in many people to learn more about this stuff, because, in truth, we’d rather not feel guilty. I get that, honestly I do, but the fact is the world gains nothing from you pleading ignorance.
This excerpt from Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation makes for a nice pull-quote, but if we’re being honest, I’m not sure the phrase “Gradually and then suddenly” quite does justice to the onset of depression and mental illness, at least as far as I’ve witnessed it. However, I believe the following exchange, from the same Hemingway novel, establishes a more accurate parallel:
“How did you go bankrupt?” the stranger asked.
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
“What brought it on?”
“Wait, I wasn’t finished. Gradually and then suddenly. Then gradually again. Then suddenly, then gradually, then incredibly suddenly, then so gradually it was kind of boring actually, and then all of a sudden, suddenly. Then gradually, gradually, gradually, SUDDENLY, gradually, SUDDENLY! This was followed by three more suddenlys in rapid succession. Then something that was kind of like halfway between gradually and suddenly that I like to call graddenly. Then suddenly things got real gradual, real real gradual. But then when I least expected it, suddenly happened again, this time even more suddenly than before! “
“Is that it?” the man asked.
“Oh God no,” Mike said. “There are so many more graduallys and suddenlys and suddenlys inside of graduallys I didn’t even get to yet, but you get the idea.”
I have never read Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, but I feel like it’s been read to me after watching Mark Romanek’s perfunctory film adaptation, a pretty Cliff’s Notes of a movie with all the brightness and vivacity of dutifully checking items off a to-do list.
Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield, and Keira Knightley are all great as mopey teenagers who wistfully look out windows, and they deserve more than a two hour commercial for a book which I’m sure is much much better.
Also, a few people have asked me this, and yes, I am aware it is no longer 2010, but I have about four or five more movies to go through before I officially put a bow on the year that was. I’ve already started watching 2011 movies (No Strings Attached is— no joke— surprisingly charming and I highly recommend it if you like good romantic comedies) but, outside of an occasional update, I’ve decided not to blog about movies again this year, because: a) there are other things I can blog about, and more importantly b) as I live in LA and take meetings with studios and production companies, I am less and less enthused by the knowledge that the people I am meeting with are a short google search away from discovering that I thought their last film was “the platonic ideal of a just okay movie,” or “thoroughly unpleasant,” or “a pretty Cliff’s Notes of a movie with all the brightness and vivacity of dutifully checking items off a to-do list.”
…
Every year I keep a running tally and ranking of how much I like every movie I see because apparently I can’t just enjoy anything anymore:
“It was the best of times; it was the worst of times. It was the age of wisdom; it was the age of foolishness. It was the epoch of belief; it was the epoch of incredulity. It was daytime; it was nighttime. It was hot; it was cold. It was England; it was France. Things were so bad they were good; things were so good they were bad. People wore hats; nobody wore a hat. There were fantastic restaurants opening all over the place; it was impossible to get a reservation. There was this amazing new invention called the guillotine; actually in retrospect maybe the guillotine wasn’t that great. Everyone was friendly all the time; everyone was jerks. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky; if I were you I’d take an umbrella. It was actually kind of funny; I guess you had to be there. There were a lot of great bands doing shows if you knew where to find them; those bands were overrated. It was an era of understanding; it was an era of wacky Fawlty-Towers-like mix-ups. Everything was something; nothing was anything. It was good for the goose; it was good for the gander. The following statement is true; the previous statement is a lie. In short, it was a time of extreme contradiction; no it wasn’t.
BAD NEWS: Last night someone smashed my car window and stole my GPS.
GOOD NEWS: The cute barista at this cafe I go to asked me what my name is. I guess we’re in love now!
BAD NEWS: The guy (OR GIRL! Look how not sexist I am!) who stole my GPS could have at least taken my parking tickets as well, but alas, they remain unpaid.
GOOD NEWS: The other day I read Alison Bechdel’s fantastic graphic memoir Fun Home (p.s. Becky, I stole your copy of Fun Home). Near the beginning of the book, Bechdel quotes Camus’s A Happy Death:
He discovered the cruel paradox by which we always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love— first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage
The quote feels particularly appropriate to Blue Valentine, an exquisite document of how we fall in love and how we fall out of it, often for the same reasons.
BAD NEWS: It made me sad. (The book, and also the movie.)
By cross-cutting between the last days of Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling’s marriage and their early courtship, the movie lets the audience connect the dots of how you get from one to the other. The acting is fantastic (frankly I expect no less out of these two) and the storytelling is specific and well-observed. My one complaint was that the film was a little one-sided— it was too easy to sympathize with one character and despise the other— but afterward I discovered that Emily had come out of it with the exact opposite impression, so, touché, Blue Valentine.
The movie also reminded me of a monologue I loved when I was in high school. It’s from Steve Martin’s short play The Zig-Zag Woman, and as an adult it strikes me as a little cute and smug and late-career Steve Martin, but the central thesis still holds:
In the beginning of something, its ending is foretold, and we met in an elevator going down. After she left, in my travels I would sit in hotel lobbies expecting her to appear, telling me what a mistake she’d made. I would land at airports, thinking that she got my flight number and would be waiting for me. When I went to a show, I would buy two tickets in case she found out where I was and quietly joined me, nothing having to be said. I never figured out why she went away, but I did figure out this: love is a promise delivered already broken.
Love is a promise delivered already broken? That is heady stuff, Steve Martin.
GOOD NEWS: The cute barista and I are going to get maaaaarrieeeeeeeed!!!!!
…
Every year I keep a running tally and ranking of how much I like every movie I see because apparently I can’t just enjoy anything anymore:
“But why do only unimportant things?” asked Milo, who suddenly remembered how much time he spent each day doing them.
“Think of all the trouble it saves,” the man explained, and his face looked as if he’d be grinning an evil grin— if he could grin at all. “If you only do the easy and useless jobs, you’ll never have to worry about the important ones which are so difficult.You just won’t have the time. For there’s always something to do to keep you from what you really should be doing, and if it weren’t for that dreadful magic staff, you’d never know how much time you were wasting.”
As he spoke, he tiptoed slowly toward them with his arms outstretched and continued to whisper in a soft, deceitful voice, “Now do come and stay with me. We’ll have so much fun together. There are things to fill and things to empty, things to take away and things to bring back, things to pick up and things to put down, and besides all that we have pencils to sharpen, holes to dig, nails to straighten, stamps to lick, and ever so much more. Why, if you stay here, you’ll never have to think again— and with a little practice you can become a monster of habit, too.”
Fake commercial created in 1998 for ABC by Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller. Originally created as part of a series of educational shorts about action figures based on historical figures, it’s educational value was somewhat suspect. It was never aired. (via)
Sometimes I daydream that I’m a high school English teacher and I put together hypothetical lesson plans. This video would go in my 1984 lesson plan. Or my Brave New World lesson plan, if I had to teach Brave New World. Fuck it, I’d show this video in conjunction with A Separate Peace, if it meant less time spent discussing A Separate Fucking Peace.
