Goethe, "Künstlers Abendlied"

A work ("The artist's evensong") by this German man of letters.  You can read the original here.

If only pure creative strength           
Could echo like quick sense's storm! 
If only sweet and pulpy form
Could flow from my cold fingers' length!

In trembling sputters I proceed,
Yet cannot leave these thoughts alone.
You feel, O Nature, to me known,
And thus must I your essence seize.

For many years in wayward tribes 
Has my poor mind your peace bethought; 
A pagan fool that values aught,
And now joy's spring will soon imbibe.

How I, O Nature, for you yearn,   
How I so wish you dear and true! 
O playful fountain all in blue,
A thousand organ pipes you'll churn! 

And all my forces you'll accrete,
And fill with mirth my weary mind.  
My narrow realm's plain words you'll bind,
And broaden to eternity. 

Our Man in Havana

There are many countries in our blood ... but only one person. 

One may assume that the title of this novel has some affinity with a famous palindrome involving this U.S. president, but that impression may be owing to the uncommon marriage of politics and poetry.  What can be said of Greene's novel is that it is at once frantic and unconcerned, loquacious and far too presumptuous regarding our comprehension of its details.  But the details are delicious and therein lies its charm.

Our protagonist is James Wormold, a single father of a precocious seventeen-year-old girl, a vacuum cleaner salesman, and, for the last fifteen years or so, a British expatriate in Batista's Cuba.  Wormold possesses even in surname many of the sad-sack qualities that might endear him to tender hearts, most of all because he has a lovely, almost saintly daughter and not much else to care about in the world.  His daily routine, which occasionally does involve the sale of a vacuum, varies only in what his daughter Milly comes to know of the world (prayers, horses and strange men, as it were, although Milly is almost all talk). One day a curious-looking fellow, ostensibly one of his countrymen, enters Wormold's store and begins asking questions that have little to do with cleaning appurtenances.  A rat is smelled, and it is generally clear of what breed:

Wormold had the impression that the man had chosen his tone because he felt it matched the store – a protective coloring in Lamparilla Street; the breeziness certainly didn't match his clothes.  One can't successfully follow St. Paul's technique of being all things to all men without a change of suit.

As has been said of this author, Wormold may have lost his religion but not his categories.  The man's name turns out to be Hawthorne and his profession turns out to be, well, what we might euphemistically term "patriotic information technology."  Hawthorne knows a hard-up, bourgeois coward when he sees one, and that is precisely the image of himself that Wormold allows everyone to have.  These tired souls are often viewed as the losers of the world and cast aside as useless (at one point Wormold "felt himself to be part of the slow erosion of Havana").  And perhaps for this very reason does Hawthorne suggest that Wormold – who bitterly enjoins the quote that begins this review – participate in the cause of Englishmen and women around the world and compose some insider reports for the Home Office.

And women, English or otherwise, pose another problem.  Wormold is but forty-five yet already resigned to the flabby loneliness of middle age ("the period of sad caution," he says).  He disapproves of Milly's courtship by an older widower but can do nothing about it.  Especially since this same widower happens to be Captain Segura, "The Red Vulture," head of the Vedado police and a renowned torturer.  "Catholics are more torturable than Protestants, just as they are more criminal," claims Segura while rubbing an étui made, as Milly proudly announces, out of human skin.  Wormold may be powerless against the devil, but he is not without creative diversions.  Using per Hawthorne's instructions this dreadful book as his cipher, Wormold begins transmitting some rather ludicrous cables in which he rounds up agents and sends them scurrying about for information on the looming revolt.  These include Dr. Hasselbecher, an old German doctor, Cifuentes the engineer, Teresa the nude dancer, Professor Sanchez, a lascivious academic, and Raul, a disgraced airline pilot now tasked with aerial surveillance of "rebel platforms" in the mountains.  Reporting through the British Embassy goes so well ("They are pleased with you in London," says one associate, "I can tell by the way they cable you") that Wormold is assigned a wordless accountant named Rudy, a keen move as the vacuum salesman is prone to errors in calculation ("a decimal point got shifted and had to be chased up and down a dozen columns").  He is also assigned someone he could never have expected, a secretary with the devastating name of Beatrice.

Greene always protested the label "Catholic novelist," because in his case these are two separate labels; Beatrice then is hardly of coincidental usage.  While Milly is completely implausible as one of those amazingly eloquent and mature teenagers that modern screenwriters for some reason deem profound, Beatrice is emotionally absent in a very familiar way.  She is half-French, young and divorced from a UNESCO drone, and more than a tad suspicious of Wormold's capabilities.  She is also full of proverbial wisdom: "the way to become really conspicuous [i]s to try to escape notice"; "it almost seems worthwhile being blind in this sun"; "I can't believe in anything bigger than a home, or anything vaguer than a human being"; "in murdering anyone you have to avoid scandal"; "I suppose we do look a bit the same naked, like the Japanese."  She is kind to a local woman whose poor English belies her claim to be Beatrice's compatriot; whether she owes this kindness to pity or a highly-developed tolerance for mendacity remains unclear.  So we should not be surprised when, exactly halfway through Our Man in Havana, Beatrice seems to know Wormold's game, a game that needn't be revealed here.  Well, perhaps we can drop a faint hint:

The story was not yet complete. Just as in real life, accidents could happen; a character might take control.  Perhaps Raul would be intercepted before embarking, perhaps he would be stopped by a police car on his way.  He might disappear into the torture chambers of Captain Segura.  No reference would appear in the press.  Wormold would warn London that he was going off the air in case Raul was forced to talk.  The radio-set would be dismantled and hidden after the last message had been sent, the celluloid sheets would be kept ready for a final conflagration .... Or perhaps Raul would take off in safety and they would never know what exactly happened to him over the Oriente mountains.  Only one thing in the story was certain: he would not arrive in Jamaica and there would be no photographs.

And the blueprints of those platforms or bases or whatever on earth they're supposed to be?  They remind both Beatrice and Hawthorne of something they cannot immediately identify.  But the Home Office is enamored with these magnificent documents and Beatrice and Hawthorne are nothing if not docile hounds to the HO's whims.  And as our narrator informs us, in a mad world it always seems simpler to obey.  

Opera (Ópera)

An unmistakable tone is set by this film's opening scene: a young woman (Marina Magro Soto), no more than twenty and almost completely naked wakes up in a hotel room.  Her surroundings do not surprise her.  But once she sits up and puts on her bra and jeans, she looks over to the night table and stares at a glass of water.  To her the water is like her skin-tight clothing, an obligation to her beauty and to the much older man whom she calls in from the shower to get the phone.  This man is Pablo (Arturo Ríos), at one point a "great writer" but not a great father or husband.  They leave the room and enter the streets of a large Latin American city amidst demonstrations against a weak democracy, a lack of women's rights and other injustices that still pervade most of our world.  The camera follows them as they move against the grain and continue their selfish escapade in a restaurant safely above the hordes.  Their talk is barely audible; he tastes her food and fills the awkward moments with gestures and words that could be used in any situation.  Once outside again, she asks in much louder tones whether he is married.  Yes he is.  For how long?  An eternity, he sighs, and they walk across a narrow metal bridge, bumping into each other in newly found comfort.  Smiles are exchanged: hers is sincere, because Pablo is an adventure; his is also sincere, although it is obvious that he hasn't smiled at a young woman with this much confidence in a very long time. 

Her name is Marina, and while she calls her mother often but briefly, Pablo has the same conversation with his wife again and again.  She's just a friend and I'm working on a guidebook, he lies so shamelessly that we begin to doubt everything about him.  He is apparently a respected professor at a university in Mexico City, and she, of course, is a student at the same institution.  We think of another story of a middle-aged scholar who absconds in a large American car for a cross-country trip with a young girl, moving from hotel to hotel as if hiding the truth.  They arrive and check into a new room, and he retreats to his desk while she sits on the bed waiting for attention, a blue fuzzy mat not very different from the "pink cozy" of the Haze residence keeping them apart like an ocean.  When they talk, we can barely hear them; they mutter and whisper as if embarrassed of their crime.  But Pablo's conversations with his wife are crystal clear, as are Marina's daily updates to her mother, perhaps because these are both legitimate relationships.  An old friend and lonely bachelor obsessed with art welcomes the pair into his home thinking, as would any logical person, that Marina is Pablo's daughter.  Animated discussions ensue about this playwright and his world-renowned acting method; the coffee table features a book on this conqueror; and Marina explores the house like a child unsure of what is valuable and what is just bourgeois decoration.  On the road to their next hideout she asks about his children, his two daughters.  The elder one is Paula, seventeen, almost her coeval.  But he won't tell her about his other daughter, instead saying that he wants her to stay a few more days with him.  She says no; but self-respecting women are supposed to say no the vast majority of the time. 

In typical operatic convention, the film detours in its middle, or third part.  They arrive at a roadside stop staffed by an elderly woman who has obviously lived her life for others.  A quick evaluation of the relationship of her two visitors leads her to befriend Marina and tell her about all the good decisions she has made that resulted in fourteen healthy, happy grandchildren.  For that Marina, who ordered beer, gets tequila, while Pablo is left with the beer he asked for without even looking at who might be serving him.  It is here that we first taste Marina's regrets, her vehement claim to not having a boyfriend, her turning away from Pablo's affection, her childish urge to drive his 1966 Mustang (which probably was, in typical midlife crisis convention, the year he was born).  Little by little, she is separating herself from him because they have no past or future only a lustful, impulsive present that cannot yield any sustainable happiness.  In perhaps the film's best scene until the magnificent closing sequence Marina, now naked, tired and disastrously contrite, curls herself into a ball at the bottom of the shower of yet another hotel room.  Pablo finds her – almost breaking in the door in the process – and tries in vain to make her hold him, to spread her limbs around his fully dressed, mature body.  She is not in love and the best years of his life are behind him, so how, how, how could this possibly work out?  Not that such words would ever be expressed in such a laconic masterpiece, but the implication is more than clear.                

Their names are also not coincidental.  Pablo is ultimately derived from paulus, the small; whereas Marina signifies the endlessness of the ocean.  Pablo embodies the dwindling days of our mortality; Marina is eternity and the restoration of life through youth.  They travel through the Mexican countryside and see nothing that catches their eye, although we are overwhelmed by the beauty of the backdrop, of the uniformity of the desert and scant verdure that peppers their horizons. Pablo is afraid to stop because then Marina would see the gray-templed, grizzled man who greets him in every mirror.  They must persist by moving, by instability (at one point Marina wears a tank top that says "get lost with me"), by visiting friend after friend and town after town.  No one ever comes to them, as if they didn't exist outside of those hotel rooms and his Mustang.  Finally they reach a moneyed couple on one of the most breathtaking beaches you will ever see in life or film, and there Marina slinks away and tells her mother that "she really lacks nothing at all."  That is another lie, but one that we understand much better than Pablo's.    

Mr. Brooks

There is an old chestnut among film reviewers, even those of excellent taste, that a movie's subject does not really matter as much as how that film is about that subject.  Now I am all for keeping our minds open to the new and weird – those two adjectives tend to stick together – but some genres possess such moronic conventions as to be hopelessly uninteresting until proven otherwise (generally, we are still waiting for such proof).  Westerns; tales of drug addicts and addiction; hookers with golden hearts; gangsters and their macabre system of laws that dissolve into one hideous law; society balls and debutantes taking two hours' worth of footage to conclude that their servants might in fact be human beings – all these plots, with an exception here and there, remain dull ponds inhabited by the simplest cyanobacteria.  Their audiences know exactly what they're getting and wish themselves nothing more or less, which is a bit like enjoying your movies like you enjoy your gobstoppers.  And while I have several times criticized the conceit of the serial killer, this movie does something refreshingly different.

Our film begins with this prayer and the portentous declaration that, "the hunger has returned to Mr. Brooks's brain.  It never really left."  The prayer is apparently in common use in Alcoholics Anonymous and other such groups, whereas the warning reinforces the notion of uncontrolled mania – and here things derail ever so slightly.  The Mr. Brooks in question is Earl Brooks (Kevin Costner), an esteemed businessman and philanthropist, the Portland Chamber of Commerce's man of year, and the husband of the dishy Emma (Marg Helgenberger).  Brooks seems humbled by the honor and, before beginning his rehearsed thank-yous, blows a kiss to Emma that would make most women quiver.  That kiss is but the first of numerous minutia that separate Mr. Brooks from a conventional film.  While most works of this genre would hint at evil as early as possible, it is only during the drive home that we see how unstimulated our Mr. Brooks really is.  Emma starts prattling on about some female guest's unsuccessful cosmetic strategy, and the Man of the Year's mind drifts in that eerie way so commonly incident to bored husbands.  Suddenly in the back seat appears a chalky Mephistophelean character whom Brooks calls Marshall (William Hurt). 

We understand that Marshall exists solely in Brooks's head – as a confederate and, as events reveal, his accountant for precise data retrieval since Marshall seems to have an acute case of total recall.  The only outward manifestation we get of Marshall is Brooks's suddenly wrinkled brow, a detail that does not escape Mrs. Brooks.  Why is his brow wrinkled?  "I was thinking of what I didn't say in my speech."  Such magnanimity cools Emma's worries, and as Marshall and Brooks talk, Emma seems terribly irrelevant, even as she accepts Brooks's excuse that, on the very night of his award, he is going to blow glass in his workshop instead of sleep with her.  Emma tells him to wake her up when he gets back, they embrace tenderly like a middle-aged couple very much in love, and Brooks goes off to pursue his hobby.  Ah yes, his hobby.  Without investing much time in pre-viewing research, it is evident from the official poster that blowing glass is not really what makes Brooks's toes curl up in ecstasy.  No, that would something altogether different and altogether atrocious.  How he finds the apartment of the two dancers he plans on murdering is not ours to ponder – Mr. Brooks is a very resourceful man.  Hence we should not be surprised by his closet full of identical outfits that allow him to handle his task with ease and speed (even though he vacuums the scene of the crime).  In a wonderful moment, Brooks relives the killings as if in orgasm and waltzes in place, assuring us that we are dealing with a psychopath of the first disorder; his polaroids of the corpses posed in a variety of erotic positions suggest an even more abominable mind at work.  Brooks is delighted; Marshall, who is the embodiment of devilry, is even more delighted; and the "Thumbprint Killer," a moniker derived from a technique that I will not spoil, has officially returned to action after a two-year hiatus.  Alas, the layoff has damaged his surveillance skills because it is only after the slayings are complete that Marshall, well, Brooks, notices the wide-open bedroom drapes.

Commendably, the normal complications do not arise.  Blackmail does occur in the sleazy form of Mr. Smith (Dane Cook), a neighboring voyeur, but the conditions proposed do not involve money.  There is also the rather diverting matter of the two other female leads in the film, Brooks's college freshman daughter Jane (Danielle Panabaker), and the police officer investigating the Thumbprint Killer, Tracy Atwood (Demi Moore).  A reviewer much more computerized than I would aver that each of these women suffers from some kind of father-daughter complex – and I think we need to leave the matter at that.  What can be stated is that Jane takes all too much after dear old dad and Tracy, somehow both a cop and an heiress to a fortune, has spent her entire adult life spiting her father and his doubts.  Jane's gesticulations and body language, quite explicit for a young actress, make it clear that she's hiding something (a tactic Marshall intuits, but the truth is squeezed out slowly and not completely) apart from her pregnancy with "a married man with two kids who wants to have nothing to do with me."  This bad, bad, bad situation unravels in Palo Alto where, mind you, a college student has just been axed to death.  Atwood's vignettes are pleasingly distinct from our main thread as she simultaneously battles a divorce from a much younger husband (Jason Lewis, a former model who in some ways may remind the viewer of Moore's real spouse).  She also tries not to get whacked by Thornton Meeks (Matt Schulze), an escaped felon that she imprisoned and perhaps the most improbable name for a serial killer we have ever encountered.

But our film does not only welcome improbability, it revels in every deliciously absurd moment.  Mr. Brooks towers over similar films through a combination of well-timed humor (the best being an exchange between Brooks and Marshall as Smith crosses a rainy intersection) and casting against type.  Having Moore play a brainy yet socially naïve heiress is ridiculous enough, but it is Costner that makes the film.  We are not sure, however, how he pulls it off.  His character is assiduously controlled yet neither despotic nor effete.  Some critics have bought into his attendance of AA meetings and murmured prayers as signs that he loathes himself, and, indeed, occasionally one catches glimpses of his humanity beneath the panels of the robotic death machine.  "Killing people," says Brooks at one philosophical moment, "is kind of like falling in love.  You get to know people and they're nice.  But they're not the right ones."  Somehow, that horrible simile is the truest thing that Brooks says throughout his well-chosen verbal jabs with Marshall, Jane, and Mr. Smith.  And what about his admission to Smith in that graveyard?  I guess promiscuity is not limited to those golden-hearted harlots.

Blok, "Вчера я слышал песни с моря"

To Alexandra on her birthday, a poem ("Last night I caught a sea-borne song") by this Russian poet.  You can read the original here.

Last night I caught a sea-borne song, 
As waves the southern strand confined; 
My troubled soul would sing along,
A morning race of its design.

Impossible was what it sought;
And only by the distant eve,
Would my soul hasten to retrieve  
The choral joust of foam and rock.

Anew beneath the evening lights
My soul, by deepest woe enslaved, 
Sensed still the warmth of twilit night, 
The mystery of song and wave.