Recent(ish) Used-Bookstore Acquisitions

The Complete Plays of Charles Ludlam.

Tony Kushner, in an introduction to a volume of five selected Ludlam plays, writes:

The Complete Plays of Charles Ludlam was published by Harper & Row in 1989. It’s now out of print, one further bit of proof, if you needed any, that we’re slipping into barbarism. The book was over nine hundred pages long and it contained twenty-nine plays. Ludlam’s is a dazzling and significant body of work, and it should be accorded a place of greatest regard and honor in the American dramatic literary canon. The plays are funny, erudite, poetic, transgressive, erotic, anarchic, moving, and so theatrical they seem the Platonic ideal of everything we mean when we use that word. His vocabulary! What other American playwright has ever used so many different words? The endless references, the quotes, the great arias of perversion, the Great Silliness […] Any serious lover of the theater [should] read everything Ludlam wrote.

Well, where Kushner commands, I aim to obey--and the words he used to describe Ludlam's plays made them sound right up my alley. So when I saw this volume at Moe's Books in Berkeley for $12, I snapped it up.

It was a good day, the day I got it, last November. My housemate had driven me into Berkeley and taken me to a football party and a sorority house, which I observed with the inquisitive detachment of the anthropologist. I had just extricated myself from that crowd and walked several blocks down Telegraph Avenue in the rain (it rained like mad that whole day), when I wandered into Moe's to dry off, and spotted the Ludlam book. Then I had a slice of chocolate cake while reading American Theater magazine. Then I went to see the inaugural performance by my friend Mo's fledgling ensemble, the Strangefellowes. Then we all went out for drinks at Beckett's Pub, watched over by portraits of Samuel B. and Oscar W. A good day.

I've barely made a dent in it, since it's not the kind of book you carry around on MUNI; but I am glad to have it on my shelf and be able to savor it at my leisure. I started out by reading Ludlam's famous travesty of La Dame aux Camelias, since you know I have a thing about that story. He borrowed Dumas' plot, Verdi's three-act structure, Garbo's demeanor and costumes, laid a lot of very silly jokes over top, and... well, I suppose it's rather like Moulin Rouge, what with the seesawing between earnestness and parody, wanting the audience to cry but knowing that that cannot happen without also winking at the 100+ years of pop culture that have gone by since Dumas first wrote his tale.

Also, there is something that appeals to me immensely (I guess it's my obsessive side?) about having a playwright's Complete Plays in one volume. This one joins the complete works of Shakespeare, Shaw, Aristophanes and Chekhov on my shelf. (Or rather, it metaphorically joins them, since the others are still in Oregon...)

Hallie Flanagan: A Life in the American Theatre, by Joanne Bentley.

Wow! What a discovery! When I was writing my play about Hallie Flanagan over a year ago, I got to go into the Vassar College archives and read many of the interviews that Bentley conducted while doing research for this book. (Bentley was also Hallie Flanagan's stepdaughter, and ex-wife of drama critic Eric Bentley--who divorced her when he realized he was gay.) I never read the finished biography, though; and I certanly didn't expect I'd come across a copy of the book in a used bookstore in the Inner Sunset of San Francisco!

"There are books we find, and there are books that find us," said the bookseller when I told him this story. Because, really, if I hadn't moved to the Inner Sunset, who else would have bought this book from him? It might have languished on his shelf for years... And while I don't think I'm going to read it right away, it is an invaluable addition to my library. I think of what's on my bookshelves as an extension of what's in my brain, after all.

There's a bookplate in the front of this book, and just for a lark, I Googled the name: "Toby Cole." Turns out that Ms. Cole was an amazing woman in her own right: theater agent, radio broadcaster, Federal Theater Project actress, progressive activist. She died less than a year ago and I guess someone must have donated her books to this store. Next time I go there, I'm going to see if I can find anything else good from her collection...

Haroun and the Sea of Stories, by Salman Rushdie.

Less obscure than the other two books, but no less valuable to me. When I was a preteen/young teenager, my family had a tradition of going to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and staying at the Mount Ashland Inn. We always stayed in the same room, which always had a dozen or so books in it, including Haroun. It's a quick read, and the only one of the books that was really suited to a girl my age, so for three or four years, I had a tradition of reading it every summer, perched in my little log-cabin nook on Mount Ashland. So I've never owned a copy, but since I'm no longer going to the Mount Ashland Inn, I obviously need one now.

Also, it's an enormously likable fantasy-adventure on the surface, but moving, too, when you note that it's the first thing that Rushdie wrote after the fatwa was declared, and it is a fairy tale about the freedom of expression and the need for art and storytelling, and he wrote it for his young son, whom he could not see in person...

March Updates

**Salman Rushdie has written the piece on Slumdog Millionaire that I longed to read as soon as I saw the movie. He attacks it both from a narrative/literary standpoint and from an Indian/postcolonial standpoint, but always with a good dose of sardonic Rushdie wit:

"It used to be the case that western movies about India were about blonde women arriving there to find, almost at once, a maharajah to fall in love with, the supply of such maharajahs being apparently endless and specially provided for English or American blondes; or they were about European women accusing non-maharajah Indians of rape, perhaps because they were so indignant at having being approached by a non-maharajah; or they were about dashing white men galloping about the colonies firing pistols and unsheathing sabres, to varying effect. Now that sort of exoticism has lost its appeal; people want, instead, enough grit and violence to convince themselves that what they are seeing is authentic; but it's still tourism. If the earlier films were raj tourism, maharajah-tourism, then we, today, have slum tourism instead."

The piece discusses a whole lot more than Slumdog Millionaire--its general subject is the art of film (and other) adaptation. A lot to digest, and highly recommended. (Incidentally, this article is just one more proof that The Guardian has the best Books section in the English-speaking world, bar none.)

**Maybe I'm a bit too hard on Slumdog Millionaire, though. My main objection to it is its theme of "destiny"--I believe that characters' free will is the essence of drama, and resorting to destiny as deux ex machina is just lazy and lowbrow. Yet at the same time, I have a pervasive habit of seeking external signs and hints from destiny in my own life. Can something cosmic happen to give me a clue that I'm in the right place at the right time? Is there some deeper meaning behind coincidental encounters? Is this all, somehow, being orchestrated?

**Speaking of adaptation, a month or so ago I planned to do a big ambitious blog post that involved comparing Fitzgerald's Benjamin Button short story, the recent film based on it, and the novel The Confessions of Max Tivoli, which also uses the conceit of a man who ages backwards. But I haven't been able to work up the enthusiasm to go see the movie, and I wasn't all that jazzed about Max Tivoli when I read it, so it's probably not going to happen. I think perhaps I am just wishing I were back at college--I mean, why else would I get an urge to write a big compare-and-contrast essay?

**I also have, from long ago, the beginnings of a blog post about works of art that use reverse-chronology in general... not just the obvious ones like Memento and Betrayal either...but now we are talking about a huge can of worms.

**It's not the Baptistry Doors, but I'm pretty pleased with how this turned out...

I found colored paper at a crafts store pre-cut to the 12" by 12" size I needed, and the photographs come from a book of platinum prints titled Dana Buckley: Fifty. (I don't know if you can see them that well, but they are all black-and-white images of flowers.) I got the book on sale at Stacey's and, though I am usually against mutilating books, decided that it was worth it in this instance.

**Because I'm the kind of girl who gets upset over the closing of bookstores that I've never even been to, you can imagine how torn up I am that Stacey's Books is going out of business. It became my go-to bookstore when I started working in the financial district...and now it's shutting down after more than eighty years?! I have gotten some very good deals as they clear out their stock, which makes me feel like a war profiteer, but really, what else do you expect me to do?

Slumdog Salman UPDATE

I can't believe my eyes: my crazy pipe-dream came true!

http://carpetbagger.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/06/salman-rushdie-oscar-prognosticator/

Read it and laugh, my friends...

Slumdog Salman

I spent a very low-key New Year's Eve at a movie theater watching Slumdog Millionaire, which had come highly recommended to me. Sadly, I think I may have gotten myself a little too excited to see it: while I did appreciate it as a colorful and propulsive cinematic achievement, I wasn't as emotionally affected by it as other people have been.

One of my new housemates (I mean, new-new--I just moved in yesterday) is Indian-American and I found myself discussing Slumdog Millionaire with her. "I just don't see why people say that this movie is inspiring when the happy ending is only because fortune randomly chose to favor this guy!" I said.

"Oh, but that's so India," said my housemate. She switched into an Apu-from-The-Simpsons voice (something that a lot of my Indian friends seem to relish doing in order to mock people from the old country): "Don't you see, Marissa, everything ees karma. Good theengs are coming to you eef you have thee good karma."

"I guess I'm more inspired by stories about people who get out and do things, rather than people who have good karma or luck or whatever." (I was thinking of Milk, specifically.)

"Yeah," said my housemate. "Trust me, I get sick of that whole karma thing too. But try telling that to my relatives."

I wrote a review for the IMDB in which I discuss this point at greater length, and you can read it if you like, but you know whose opinion of Slumdog Millionaire I would really like to hear? Salman Rushdie's!

So far as I know, Rushdie isn't in the habit of reviewing movies--but if I edited a magazine (and it wasn't bleeding money in this economy) I'd ask him to write an article about Slumdog Millionaire. I think it could be a very valuable pairing. Rushdie wrote one of the first Indian novels to hit it big in the West (Midnight's Children) and Slumdog Millionaire seems poised to do the same for Indian cinema.

Furthermore, Rushdie's books often feature magical realism and Slumdog Millionaire is a fairy tale. Both Midnight's Children and Slumdog Millionaire use some contrivances in order to make the protagonist's life match up with important historical events (in the case of Rushdie) or key trends and features of modern-day India (in the case of the movie). Indeed, both protagonists metaphorically represent India. Saleem Sinai was born at the moment of Indian independence, his nose is shaped like the Indian subcontinent, he is Hindu-born but Muslim-raised, etc. Jamal Malik, meanwhile, represents the way that contemporary Indians would like to see themselves: a good-hearted underdog whose street smarts and innate virtues, combined with Fortune's favor, will lead to success. The movie even takes care to point out that India's motto is "Truth alone triumphs," and that's exactly what happens in Jamal's story. Rushdie wrote his novel when India was at a low ebb, so Saleem goes from riches to rags; the opposite happens to Jamal.

Salman Rushdie is a very smart and witty man (and I speak from experience--he lectured at Vassar while I was there) who could provide a unique perspective on the movie that'll probably win Best Picture this year. So somebody get him to write about it, please! When publications like The New York Times Book Review hire famous authors to review the works of other authors, why is there nothing comparable for movie reviews?

Addendum: I just discovered that Rushdie, Umberto Eco, and Mario Vargas Llosa jokingly call each other "The Three Musketeers." If you have seen Slumdog Millionaire, you know that this is just TOO apt. This convinces me: Salman, IT IS WRITTEN that you must review this film!