Blum weaves the lives and personalities of three famous American men at the beginning of the Twentieth Century: Clarence Darrow, noted defense attorney; D. W. Griffith, father of modern cinema; and William J. Burns, founder of a detective agency and predecessor to J. Edgar Hoover before the FBI was the FBI. Their lives come together over the 1910 bombing of the Los Angeles Times building. Burns, then known as America's Sherlock Holmes, is engaged by the City to track down the bombers. Darrow eventually comes to defend the men who are affiliated with the Iron Workers Union. And Griffith's cinematic inspiration feeds off the themes of labor versus capital, as being the Second Civil War. They all converge sooner or later in LA, a town whose officials are profiting not only from keeping it a closed shop but also from their speculative irrigation projects ... think Chinatown.
Driving to work with my son this morning, I described the book to him using buzz words and names from high school history: Gompers, AFL, CIO. But then told him that this book was much more interesting because of the interconnecting stories. Because this period of history was taught so dryly to me, it took me over 275 pages to get familiar with the players and their parts.
No one's motives are 100% "pure." Money, ego and "cause" run rife on both the side of wealth and that of want, but are reported with equal objectivity by Blum. Burns is out of Chicago like Morris Fishbein, the AMA investigator in Charlatan; but his motivation goes beyond wanting the success of his business/industry. He wants to solve the crime and punish the perpetrators to conclude a period of violence by Socialist terrorists, to move the Nation past an outmoded political philosophy and propel it into the complexity of modern industrial production.
Darrow, portrayed as a reluctant defense attorney, recognizes the guilt of the McNamara brothers. While he plans to argue their case within the larger context of class warfare, he knows they would be found guilty of this explosion as their association with a nationwide network of dynamiters is made public. But the more interesting, contrasting conspiracy related in the book is that of a series of events that lead to them pleading guilty rather than going to trial: a bomb is discovered just in time before the President's train crosses a bridge on its way to California; a primary for Mayor of Los Angeles where the Socialist candidate makes it to the run-off election, scheduled within a week of the start of the trial; and the bribe of a potential juror by the defense team, itself an act that eventually leads to Darrow being accused and brought to trial. Serving as his own attorney, his defense arguments, like those of the McNamaras, are that he is captive of his time and place, acting in a rational, if illegal manner. Blum uses actual testimony; Darrow is surely a moving orator.
Griffith, the last in this triumvirate, is the first to recognize the propagandist potential of film. His early work often focused on the plight of the exploited working man and the underlying poverty that compelled certain actions, sometimes violent, often ennobling. Griffith films many of his works in Queens, but is drawn west, at a time when LA smells of oranges and everyone coming to town stays at the same first class hotel, where eventually the three characters meet in passing. When Birth of a Nation is shown at the White House, the first movie ever shown there, Woodrow Wilson compares it to writing history with lightning, a nice quote that pulls together the sound and fury from the storm of explosions of the young labor movement.
Finally, the context of American Lightning within the blog list of books: There are similar story lines with crime and corruption found in turn of the century ruckus towns like Los Angeles and Chicago and the more modern Atlantic City. There are recurring heroes who fight for the American way. But it was Blum's insight as he describes researching and writing the book that best connects it to my last review of Falling Man. He hints at this through Darrow's summary statement to the jurors: "... you may hang these men from the highest tree ... send me to the penitentiary .. but until you go down to the fundamental causes, these things will happen over and over again ... as lightning comes to destroy the poisonous miasmas that fill the air." He concludes, placing an image of the burning LA Times building against that of the World Trade Center, drawing parallels with the underlying motivations of the terrorists and the reaction across the country.
But where were the contemporary American giants to interpret the New Age of Terror and to inspire average citizens to move beyond ideological bloodshed?
Monday, April 20, 2009
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Displacement: Falling Man by Don DeLillo
This is the second time I've read this book this year, once for each Tower. Read it first for this 50 States blog, but decided to hold off on a review until it was up for my regular "face-to-face" book club this month. Sad to say, I have not found it any more engaging this time.
Anyone who witnessed the planes crashing into the World Trade Center buildings has to be looking for a catharsis. I know I am. That's why I selected this book to represent New York.
I guess no review of Falling Man is complete without divulging what I was doing on 9/11. I was undergoing radiation for my first go-round with cancer. I was bald. Wearing one of my husband's old soft golfing hats to work every day and hiding in a back office building so none of my fellow workers would see me in a weakened state. Several of us, all women, congregated into a conference room to watch the WTC on TV. I called my husband, my sons, to let them know what was happening. I had worked in the Tower, taken my oldest son to Windows on the World for his first visit to NYC. It was my building. It made me think my illness was dwarfed by all this suffering. Later in the days and weeks that followed, the deaths crept north: a brother-in-law of a woman in the Capitol had died; executives from several State agencies were there for work and also perished.
I still need interpretation and closure and I had hoped DeLillo would have given another perspective. Alas, he does not. If you research his books on the Internet, you discover that one of his major themes is the effect of terrorism on daily living. This does not come across forcefully, however, to me in Falling Man. His major characters are contrived, even as they cluster conveniently alphabetically: Jack/Justin, Keith, Lianne, Martin and Nina. They are Woody Allen stock New Yorkers without the wit or distance, only the angst.
Their lives are self-centered, interpreted by parents foibles and compulsive habits that pass on from one generation to the next. Are these people really the quintessently New York? And should the culture and the characters in the City represent the State? Keith and Lianne move through the novel as though 9/11 could have been a bad subway accident or a City debilitating snowstorm. The event does not demark their lives. She still obsesses about getting Alzheimer's from her father and he loses himself in endless poker tournaments, both compulsions that predate 9/11. Keith's returning to Lianne's apartment after the fall of the Towers is undecipherable. Things that happen to him are lacking in passion. Although Lianne seems to have more feelings, they are misdirected and ineffectual, except to be omphalosceptic.
I must give credit to DeLillo for the style of the book. It is completely disjointed and choppy, intentionally so, to convey the displacement of 9/11. But there is no respect to the victims, no national interpretation, no sense that this was a seminal event in the lives of his characters. As well as having no segue between paragraphs as a device to emphasis the disjointedness of thought and plot, DeLillo alternates the New Yorkers' stories with those of the terrorists. He has one of the say "Others exist only to the degree that they fill the role we have designed for them." This is DeLillo's theme: it not only applies to the zealotry of the Muslims, but also to the four main characters.
Maybe I should have selected Drums Along the Mohawk.
Anyone who witnessed the planes crashing into the World Trade Center buildings has to be looking for a catharsis. I know I am. That's why I selected this book to represent New York.
I guess no review of Falling Man is complete without divulging what I was doing on 9/11. I was undergoing radiation for my first go-round with cancer. I was bald. Wearing one of my husband's old soft golfing hats to work every day and hiding in a back office building so none of my fellow workers would see me in a weakened state. Several of us, all women, congregated into a conference room to watch the WTC on TV. I called my husband, my sons, to let them know what was happening. I had worked in the Tower, taken my oldest son to Windows on the World for his first visit to NYC. It was my building. It made me think my illness was dwarfed by all this suffering. Later in the days and weeks that followed, the deaths crept north: a brother-in-law of a woman in the Capitol had died; executives from several State agencies were there for work and also perished.
I still need interpretation and closure and I had hoped DeLillo would have given another perspective. Alas, he does not. If you research his books on the Internet, you discover that one of his major themes is the effect of terrorism on daily living. This does not come across forcefully, however, to me in Falling Man. His major characters are contrived, even as they cluster conveniently alphabetically: Jack/Justin, Keith, Lianne, Martin and Nina. They are Woody Allen stock New Yorkers without the wit or distance, only the angst.
Their lives are self-centered, interpreted by parents foibles and compulsive habits that pass on from one generation to the next. Are these people really the quintessently New York? And should the culture and the characters in the City represent the State? Keith and Lianne move through the novel as though 9/11 could have been a bad subway accident or a City debilitating snowstorm. The event does not demark their lives. She still obsesses about getting Alzheimer's from her father and he loses himself in endless poker tournaments, both compulsions that predate 9/11. Keith's returning to Lianne's apartment after the fall of the Towers is undecipherable. Things that happen to him are lacking in passion. Although Lianne seems to have more feelings, they are misdirected and ineffectual, except to be omphalosceptic.
I must give credit to DeLillo for the style of the book. It is completely disjointed and choppy, intentionally so, to convey the displacement of 9/11. But there is no respect to the victims, no national interpretation, no sense that this was a seminal event in the lives of his characters. As well as having no segue between paragraphs as a device to emphasis the disjointedness of thought and plot, DeLillo alternates the New Yorkers' stories with those of the terrorists. He has one of the say "Others exist only to the degree that they fill the role we have designed for them." This is DeLillo's theme: it not only applies to the zealotry of the Muslims, but also to the four main characters.
Maybe I should have selected Drums Along the Mohawk.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Caught in the Rosary Beads Dream Catcher: Reservation Blues by Sherman Alexie
If it wasn't in the mid-30s and snowing today, I'd go outside, walk to Capitol Park, measure General Philip Sheridan's short legs and then try to figure out some way to make it look like I shot his horse between the eyes -- as reparations.
Yes, like Sheridan, I was born in Albany, but our schools certainly did not stress his scorched earth tactics in the Shenandoah Valley or his post-Civil War involvement in the Indian Wars, particularly his slaughter of the buffalo. Sherman Alexie introduces his readers to Sheridan under the reincarnated guise of a talent scout at Cavalry Records. Sheridan's partner is George Wright, and Alexie hints at his similar atrocities, making them more and more clear to a reader unfamiliar with his part in the Yakima War as the story evolves, with him ultimately hailing a cab outside the recording studio in NYC and being driven to his 1865 grave on the west coast.
But I'm focusing exclusively on only one of the many intricately interwoven subplots in Reservation Blues. Alexie begins with Southern blues legend Robert Johnson at the crossroads of Wellpinit on the Spokane reservation, giving away his devil-possessed guitar to Thomas Builds-the-Fire. Thomas, passing it along to Victor Joseph, and, who, with Junior Polatkin, forms the band Coyote Spring. Johnson moves up the mountain to Big Mom, the woman he has sought for years, who is not only a larger than life earth mother figure, but also with her own guitar made out of a '65 Malibu and the blood of a child killed in 1890 at Wounded Knee, taught music to everyone from Benny Goodman to Jimi Hendrix.
While touring bars and finding their voice, the band switches between two back-up vocal groups, sisters Chess and Checkers Warm Water of the Flat Head tribe, and white groupies Betty and Veronica. While these women illustrate the allure and repulsion between the sexes and the races, they are portrayed with much more complexity and reality than their names would imply.
Alexie also brings into the story the effect of missionaries on the beliefs and customs of the tribe. But unlike Louise Erdrich's The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, Alexie has the Catholic believers sincere, the doubters respectful, and the conflicted priest responsible for winning the first basketball game in tribal history against the Assembly of God team.
As these examples suggest, the story sparkles with wit and beautiful turn of phrase. The insult of TEFAP surplus commodity food, cheap HUD building construction, and the benign neglect of the Bureau of Indian Affairs are all depicted with a satiric distance that better engages the reader than the heavy-handed mockery in The Last Report.
The plot builds not only on Thomas' stories but on the dreams and nightmares of the band members. Alexie is a poet first, and he uses Coyote Spring song lyrics to introduce each chapter. He builds in cultural refrains throughout the novel, pitting an existential "the horses screamed" against the pop inquiry "who's the lead singer."
Reservation Blues hits all the high points the Slackers are looking for in our tour of the States. The reservation in Washington is described using the word "gone" ... but it still has an in the blood attraction. National, family, and tribal history makes Wellpinit infinite: a reader sees it, but even more so, hears it's siren song.
Yes, like Sheridan, I was born in Albany, but our schools certainly did not stress his scorched earth tactics in the Shenandoah Valley or his post-Civil War involvement in the Indian Wars, particularly his slaughter of the buffalo. Sherman Alexie introduces his readers to Sheridan under the reincarnated guise of a talent scout at Cavalry Records. Sheridan's partner is George Wright, and Alexie hints at his similar atrocities, making them more and more clear to a reader unfamiliar with his part in the Yakima War as the story evolves, with him ultimately hailing a cab outside the recording studio in NYC and being driven to his 1865 grave on the west coast.
But I'm focusing exclusively on only one of the many intricately interwoven subplots in Reservation Blues. Alexie begins with Southern blues legend Robert Johnson at the crossroads of Wellpinit on the Spokane reservation, giving away his devil-possessed guitar to Thomas Builds-the-Fire. Thomas, passing it along to Victor Joseph, and, who, with Junior Polatkin, forms the band Coyote Spring. Johnson moves up the mountain to Big Mom, the woman he has sought for years, who is not only a larger than life earth mother figure, but also with her own guitar made out of a '65 Malibu and the blood of a child killed in 1890 at Wounded Knee, taught music to everyone from Benny Goodman to Jimi Hendrix.
While touring bars and finding their voice, the band switches between two back-up vocal groups, sisters Chess and Checkers Warm Water of the Flat Head tribe, and white groupies Betty and Veronica. While these women illustrate the allure and repulsion between the sexes and the races, they are portrayed with much more complexity and reality than their names would imply.
Alexie also brings into the story the effect of missionaries on the beliefs and customs of the tribe. But unlike Louise Erdrich's The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, Alexie has the Catholic believers sincere, the doubters respectful, and the conflicted priest responsible for winning the first basketball game in tribal history against the Assembly of God team.
As these examples suggest, the story sparkles with wit and beautiful turn of phrase. The insult of TEFAP surplus commodity food, cheap HUD building construction, and the benign neglect of the Bureau of Indian Affairs are all depicted with a satiric distance that better engages the reader than the heavy-handed mockery in The Last Report.
The plot builds not only on Thomas' stories but on the dreams and nightmares of the band members. Alexie is a poet first, and he uses Coyote Spring song lyrics to introduce each chapter. He builds in cultural refrains throughout the novel, pitting an existential "the horses screamed" against the pop inquiry "who's the lead singer."
Reservation Blues hits all the high points the Slackers are looking for in our tour of the States. The reservation in Washington is described using the word "gone" ... but it still has an in the blood attraction. National, family, and tribal history makes Wellpinit infinite: a reader sees it, but even more so, hears it's siren song.
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