Steve Reads

I watched Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep last night. It’s a standard 40s- and 50s-era private-detective movie, featuring the intrepid P.D. Philip Marlowe (played by Humphrey Bogart). The plot is frankly absurd, and really easy to mock. Yet there’s something really captivating about the movie. Maybe it’s the rapid-fire dialogue. Or maybe it’s the cinematography — which, while it’s not astonishing and in-your-face, does seem to fit the part really well. Maybe it’s just really fun. Maybe it’s that it’s sort of a thriller, but with almost no gunfights at all; Marlowe puts more guns in his pockets than he takes out. Maybe it’s that the relationships between men and women in the movie are classical (the blonde bombshell whose name spells trouble), and yet there’s more respect between Bacall and Bogart than you’d ever see in a movie today. There’s sexuality, but no sex. It’s just refreshing.

After The Big Sleep comes The Big Heat, the latter directed by Fritz Lang. I love Lang. I think The Big Heat will be on my doorstep when I get home, having been delivered there by Netflix. I guess I’ll have to follow up The Big Sleep and The Big Heat with The Big Chill. It only seems fair.

1. The French New Wave fascinates me. First of all, they were some of the first people to really explore – and challenge — all the conventions of film. Second, they revered American noir films (indeed, I believe the New Wave people coined “film noir”) for reasons that I need to explore. Third and most important, they’re just passionate about film: they filled the pages of Cahiers de Cinéma with page upon page of thought and feeling on film. I just don’t see anyone with the same degree of heartfelt commitment to film that they had.
2. It’s disheartening to discover that you’re a better match for a girl than is her current boyfriend.
3. Does anything reveal the essential irrationality of the market better than a recession or depression? There is nothing essentially different about the American economy during this recession than there was a year ago, yet people can’t find jobs. It’s because of a spiraling fear: companies start laying people off, so people get frightened about their own jobs and spend less, so more companies lay people off, and so on. And why did the economy start failing in the first place? More irrationality: years ago, people started dumping money into tech stocks. It was a good idea at the time; money was going toward the most productive parts of the economy. But then, because people sometimes follow stupid herds, bad money followed good, and eventually someone realized he was funding Pets.com. From start to finish, this economic downturn has been a good example of market failure.

Nice. I got the day off work after we got about two feet of snow dumped on us. I woke up at 5:45 as usual and spent a while making phone calls to see whether I had to come in. The process wasn’t difficult — it mostly involved calling my company’s main number repeatedly and leaving my boss a message. Then I went through my ordinary morning routine and got a call from my officemate, telling me that he was at work and could pick me up from the train station if I wanted him to. I sighed and prepared to go in, meantime finishing my coffee slowly. By the time I was done, my officemate had called me back to report that work was, indeed, closed — he had driven an hour for nothing.

Hence I spent the day having a movie fest, and discovered a few things:

1. Not only am I a movie snob; now I am, apparently, a movie obsessive. I spent a good portion of the day watching Citizen Kane and a movie about the making of Citizen Kane (and Orson Welles’s fight with William Randolph Hearst, who was the none-too-subtle prototype for Charles Foster Kane), then read a few essays related to the movie and did some research online. Find me a good enough movie, and I will dig very far into it. The next task is to read Pauline Kael’s book Raising Kane, which supposedly did a lot to resurrect respect for Welles’s masterpiece. What’s remarkable, though, is that it won very few Oscars, given how highly people praise it now.
2. The sort of praise that Kane got is nothing less than poisonous to those of us who are trying to watch it. If you see a movie that people call “the greatest film of all time,” and you don’t understand what all the fuss is about, you feel like something of a dolt; on the other hand, if you find it genuinely beautiful, it’s hard not to have some of the spontaneity sapped from your beliefs — maybe it’s not you who believes it’s a beautiful movie, but the press. I just wish I could come into a film blindfolded to all the praise and blame it gets.
3. You’re allowed to leave. This is a lesson I picked up from a collection of essays by Nick Hornby that I read over the weekend: you’re allowed to go away from something awful. No one will stop you. Hence my having stopped my viewing of Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon with half an hour or so to go. It’s a pretentious, empty, affected piece of trash, and it reminds me that Kubrick couldn’t create a character if his life depended on it. When he’s designing films in which the characters are more or less a mouthpiece for certain ironic viewpoints — like Dr. Strangelove, which I adore — then he’s fine, because we can ignore the characters altogether. But when he tries his hand at something like Barry Lyndon or Eyes Wide Shut, then he might as well shut off the camera and take a nice nap.

   People revere Kubrick as one of our most talented directors, so I apologize if I just don’t get it. Normally his films take eight hours to say what anyone else could say in a few minutes, and he says it in the most leaden way possible. Is there any doubting that 2001 is the work of a callous technocrat? This isn’t a man who could deal with people, which you can see in his character-centered films. And the more I try to get my head around a director with no eye for character, the less I respect Kubrick as an artist.

Having browsed the list of Oscar nominees, I’d like to make a few comments:

1. Unfortunately, I have seen none of the movies whose male leads have been nominated for best actor.
2. I don’t understand why Talk To Her wasn’t nominated for best foreign-language film. Then again, I haven’t seen any of those that were nominated, so I guess I’m in no position to complain. But Talk To Her was really amazing; I can’t imagine five better foreign-language films were released in the U.S. this year, but I could be wrong.
3. If I had to bet, I’d say that Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers will win Best Picture, though I really disliked it. Other than LotR:TTT, I’ve seen Chicago and The Hours. Both were great, though Chicago was pretty extraordinary. I haven’t seen The Pianist, but I have no desire to; it looks like another stereotyped “Human dignity in the midst of the Holocaust” film. Been there, done that. I feel the same way about Gangs of New York, which looks like Braveheart with a different set. I could be wrong, but I’m not that pumped about either. And my desire to see all the Best Picture nominees doesn’t offset the lack of pumpage.
4. I really hope Spirited Away wins Best Animated Feature Film. It’s really incredible. Though last year, Shrek won it, and I don’t believe Waking Life was even nominated. Probably it was too intelligent for the Academy. In any case, I don’t have much respect for them.
5. Wait  . . .  how is it possible that Talk To Her was nominated for Best Director, and yet the film itself wasn’t nominated for either Best Picture or Best Foreign-Language Film?
6. Both LotR:TTT and Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones were nominated for Best Visual Effects. My problem with their effects was that they weren’t integrated well enough into the body of the film. A film like The Matrix uses effects as a basis for the plot, whereas the two that were nominated this year use effects for visual gloss. The latter only holds the audience until a prettier effect comes along; the former lasts as long as people bother to watch movies.

Such are my thoughts. I think it would be fun to place some bets on who will win.

I’m nearing the end of Upton Sinclair’s book The Jungle, about the meatpacking industry in Chicago during the first decade of the 20th century. It’s about more than that, though; it’s really a long argument in favor of Socialism.

Indeed, my biggest problem with the novel is that it shouldn’t be a novel at all, for two reasons: first, it’s structured as a lecture with a thin lacquer of dialogue atop; this works better as non-fiction than as fiction. Second, it needs an editor, and I think it would have been better edited had it been released as a series of muckracking journalism pieces. I’m tiring of a book which says something akin to “fear gripped his soul like the icy hand of an icy ice-monster” about 500 times.

Let’s move beyond the style, though, into what the book is saying. It views 20th-century Chicago through the eyes of Jurgis Rudkus, a Lithuanian immigrant who has dreams of making it big in the U.S. He proceeds through a stream of jobs at Chicago meatpacking plants, is homeless at points, descends into the criminal life, turns into a low-level political operator for a bit, and basically explores all the nooks and crannies of Chicago. He is Sinclair’s Everyman.

After living a horrible life, always one step away from starvation, Rudkus discovers Socialism. This is where I’ve left off. As I read, I wonder whether Sinclair’s points would resonate at all in early-21st-century America. I’m inclined to say that they wouldn’t, for perhaps the same reason why Karl Marx sounds dated: the conditions he was responding to were far more bestial than the world we live in today. Marx and Sinclair lived in a world without a minimum wage, child-labor laws, food-safety laws, or even a modicum of workplace safety. We live in a capitalist society that has quite a lot of government regulation — less than some people want, more than others want, but still some. This is properly called a “mixed economy”: neither socialist nor pure capitalist.

Now, this mixed economy is either a clever bit of spoiled meat tossed to the masses, or a genuine bit of hope, depending upon whom you ask. Read Karl Popper’s The Open Society And Its Enemies, and you’ll find a mixed economy used as one argument of many against Marx. Read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History Of The United States, and these political changes become tiny compromises meant to assuage the public’s rage without actually fixing the underlying system.

Under either view, the point is that I think it would be hard to convince the public nowadays that Socialist revolution is the answer. Without knowing the context around Sinclair’s time, it sounds as though hoboes, immigrants and the unemployed formed a virtual army of the disenfranchised. It doesn’t seem so today. Tell the public that the wealthy are robber barons, intent on stealing from the masses, and you’ll get a yawn. Most Americans consider themselves part of the middle class, not the lower class; how do you convince these people that they need to throw off shackles, when they don’t think they have shackles to begin with? And at least a couple years ago, how would you have told .com millionaires that their bosses were trying to screw them?

I’m not arguing either for or against the claim that we need a Socialist revolution. It certainly seems that there are a great many problems which call for a more general solution: the “free market” is not free at all, and nations like the U.S. dictate the terms of that freedom; our food supply still seems unsafe (see Fast Food Nation); most Americans view the political process as owned by large corporations and lobbyists; people can die in this country from lack of health care in the midst of plenty; the .com bust suggests that the market encourages certain reckless behaviors, and that the Gold Rush mentality is the market’s habit. Clearly there are a lot of problems whose root is the underlying economic system.

But I fundamentally distrust the world’s system-builders, be they political or philosophical. In this, I admit I have been heavily influenced by Karl Popper. At least in part, he traced the origins of modern totalitarian dictatorships to the system-builders — those who would rather see a perfect abstract system put in place, on the way to their particular heaven (“the free market” or “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” say) rather than fixing the world piece by piece. He gives a very convincing argument that the system-builders are more likely to come out dictators than those who are, in his words, “piecemeal social engineers.” So I tend to lean toward piecemeal social engineering, and away from anyone’s vision of heaven.

Such is what I think when I read The Jungle, which is essentially a 300-page argument for Socialism. I might buy it, but I’d need some evidence first. If Popper has taught me anything, it’s not to buy systems that only exist as someone’s dream.

I had this idea a while ago that the flat Unix email format is played out. This format is the one which most email clients use, with consequent inconvenience for everyone who uses it. For instance, often you’ll get forwarded emails in which the chain of forwarders has forgotten to remove the “> “s at the beginning of every line. There’s no good way to get around this, because your email client isn’t smart enough to know where the actual content of the message began, and where all the extraneous forwarding information started – all it knows is that there’s this big hunk of text called a “message.”

When your client does recognize the beginning of a particular chunk, it’s by convention. For instance, often people mark the beginning of their email signature with two dashes and a space at the beginning of an otherwise blank line. That’s not a format; that’s a loosely followed convention.

Wouldn’t it be better if your client knew the logical separation of the email? Shouldn’t your client know the beginning of the “Thing I’m responding to” section, and the beginning of the “my response” section, and the signature block, and so forth? If your client doesn’t recognize those sections — and there’s no way it could, using the flat-file format — then there’s no way that you could, for instance, hide all the “stuff I’m responding to.” A really intelligent format would allow you to tell your client, “Display only this message and one layer of enclosures below it.” The flat-file format doesn’t allow that.

And what are we doing with flat text files when today’s email users have thousands of messages in individual email boxes? What are we doing with a flat text file when that format arose before MIME attachments did? The format makes sense for small blocks of text sent over 2400-baud modems, but not for MP3s sent over corporate networks. The format is totally bankrupt. We’ve had relational databases for years; why haven’t they yet made their way into emails? And why aren’t we using XML to separate the logical parts of our messages? For instance, why don’t we have messages that look like

 <message ID="211515" inReplyToID="211514"> <myBody> This is the text of the message I'm writing. </myBody> <includedMessage ID="211514"> This is the text I'm responding to. </includedMessage> </message> 

That is a self-aware email message. Intelligent clients could move the included message to the top of your response if they wanted — or to the bottom, depending on the whim of the viewer.

We have Web pages now that can use stylesheets from anywhere on the Web. Why can’t our email be similarly dynamic? That is, why can’t we point the style-sheet line of our emails to a file anywhere in the world? In this way, the format of your email might change over time depending on how your tastes — or those of your viewer – change.

I think the format that most people use for their email could go in for an overhaul, using all that we’ve learned over the last 30 years.

I tend to get really pissed off at the annoying, vacuous clichés that show up all the time in public discourse. I’ll mention them as they pass by me, but one jumped out at me today: “remains to be seen” is one of the most useless journalistic clichés there is. It’s always used in some context such as “With three months left until the presidential election, it remains to be seen who will win.” Well sure it remains to be seen — because it hasn’t happened yet. Or the term “forever,” used as in “Watergate changed the political landscape forever.” I think that’s a little premature.

I’m a devotee of William Zinsser’s book On Writing Well, which taught me to cut out everything that was meaningless in my writing, to avoid clichés whenever possible, to avoid Latin words whenever an Anglo-Saxon root was available, to avoid a long word when a short one would do, and to avoid jargon when possible. George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language” is an always-relevant reminder of what damage unclear language can cause. John Ashcroft and George Bush are only the most recent leaves on a family tree that includes Al Haig, Richard Nixon and Bill “That depends on what the definition of `is’ is” Clinton. Orwell taught us that “Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” In my own little way, I’m fighting that.