Charles Portis: True Grit

Image from Amazon.com

I saw the first movie made from this Portis novel way back when it came out, or a little thereafter. It starred John Wayne and Glenn Campbell, who were well-known, and Kim Darby, who wasn't. The film was okay, but it was a John Wayne vehicle to an Oscar and was marred by Campbell's 'acting'. I think that I liked it because it was sort of about Arkansas, my home state. I was just a kid of 13 or 14, I reckon.

Well, I finally read the book over the weekend past because I was taking some time off and had the thing handy since I'd gotten it for my daughter as a Christmas gift. I bought it for her because it's sort of about Arkansas and because Charles Portis and LeRoy Tucker are friends, and I thought that I ought to get to know the friend of a friend.

Also, a new movie has been made based on the book, a Coen Brothers film, said to be far superior to the first one, so I thought that I'd prepare myself for seeing it.

Anyway, I liked the book. "A good story, well-told," as I wrote to Mr. Tucker upon finishing it. I wondered, though, why the book has stayed on my mind -- not that much time has passed since the weekend, of course. I think that it's stuck with me because it brings together several things that give the story tension. One thing is the distinctive narrative voice of the girl Mattie Ross, who sets out to avenge her father's death by hunting down and killing his murderer, Tom Chaney, in spite of being a good 'Christian'. Indeed, despite being even a very strict Calvinist with a deep attachment to the doctrine of predestination, she nevertheless hooks up with an obvious reprobate, the one-eyed U. S. Marshall, Rooster Cogburn, for him to help her do the dirty work. Another thing, naturally, is Rooster Cogburn himself, who might not be a saint, but who turns out to be a chivalrous knight on a horse -- in less-than-shining armor, but a knight nonetheless -- for even when he knows that Mattie is safe (or seems to be), he performs for her by 'jousting' against four dark knights:

Rooster said, "Fill your hands, you son of a bitch!" and he took the reins in his teeth and pulled the other saddle revolver and drove his spurs into the flanks of his strong horse Bo and charged directly at the bandits. It was a sight to see. He held the revolvers wide on either side of the head of his plunging steed. The four bandits accepted the challenge and they likewise pulled their arms and charged their ponies ahead.

It was some daring move on the part of the deputy marshall whose manliness and grit I had doubted. No grit? Rooster Cogburn? Not much!

. . .

I believe the bandits began firing their weapons first, although the din and smoke was of such a sudden, general nature that I cannot be sure. I do know that the marshall rode for them in so determined and unwavering a course that the bandits broke their "line" ere he reached them and raced through them, his revolvers blazing, and he not aiming with the sights but only pointing the barrels and snapping his head from side to side to bring his good eye into play.

Harold Permalee was the first to go down. He flung his shotgun in the air and clutched at his neck and was thrown backward over the rump of his horse. The Original Greaser Bob rode wider than the others and he lay flat on his horse and escaped clear with his winnings. Farrell Permalee was hit and a moment later his horse went down with a broken leg and Farrell was dashed violently forward to his death.

We thought that Rooster had come through the ordeal with no injury, but in fact he had caught several shotgun pellets in his face and shoulders . . .

One dark knight remains to be dealt with, the bandit chief Ned Pepper, but that's part of the story.

Also, Mattie's own ordeal isn't quite over, for she must face down her father's killer one last time, but in firing at him with her father's heavy pistol, she's thrown backward from the recoil and falls deep into a sinkhole that threatens to swallow her ever more deeply as she finds herself loosely wedged into a narrow neck of the hole and hard by the bones of a dead man, whose ribcage is filled with a ball of serpents. Rooster descends to harrow this hellish scene, stomp the serpents that threaten, and save her from falling entirely into the pit of utter darkness below.

All this is told with a lighter touch than I've used here, but I wanted to make explicit what's going on at a deeper level.

I think that there are even echoes of Don Quixote in the protagonist Rooster Cogburn, partly from the picaresque aspect to his character, partly from the ridiculous figure that he cuts, and partly from his exaggerated sense of self, but we shouldn't be too surprised to find the Knight, the Christ, and the Man of La Mancha all put into one character, for the chivalrous cowboy is commonly portrayed as the last incarnation of the Medieval knight, of which Quixote was a Renaissance example, and the virtuous night was ever a Christ figure. It all fits, somehow, even if Rooster isn't exactly a cowboy.

No wonder Mattie Ross falls so deeply in love with Rooster, without ever quite realizing that she does.

And that makes her story a tragic one . . .

Anahit Vart: Artist

Anahit Vart, Green Knight

(Image from Anahit Vart Homepage)

In my post of November 10th, I noted that I had been looking for an image of a painting by Guillermo Pérez Villalta showing "a naked green man astride a green horse" -- for I was wondering if the artist were depicting the antagonist in the Pearl Poet's strange poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight -- and I learned of a different 'knight', the Moor Alfatami, who also had a green horse (but was himself not green), and while looking for a possible depiction of this Moor and his green horse, I Googled onto the above image of a green knight on a green 'horse' painted by Anahit Vart.

A commercial website that also shows an image of this painting suggests that the scene is connected to the "Arthurian legend," but the site offers no substantiation. Taking a slight risk, I emailed the artist to inquire:

I am curious about your painting Green Knight (2001?). Is it inspired by the Pearl Poet's 14th-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight? I hope that you don't mind that I posted an image of your painting on my blog . . . . There, I speculate that there might be a source other than the Pearl Poet's poem, for the imagery in your painting looks different than what is found in the poem. Are you drawing upon Armenian legends? Or possibly Russian ones?

Today, Ms. Vart replied:

Your email was nice surprise for me and I'm very happy see my painting on your blog. My painting is my interpretation of a story about "Sleepy Beauty", but I painted some elements from Armenia like [the] mountain Ararat (on a left bottom corner). You have very interesting site, I think I will get a lot new information from there. I'm sending to you my late artwork image inspired by Spain where I traveled last year.

I wonder if Sleepy Beauty is the same story as Sleeping Beauty. Anyway, the painting seems to come from a different cycle of Romance fiction than the Arthurian legends. For yet another image of 'romance', I'm posting the artwork inspired by Ms. Vart's trip through Spain:

Anahit Vart

Scene from Spain

(Image sent from Anahit Vart)

I don't know if this depicts a scene from Carnival or one from a masked ball. Perhaps if Ms. Vart visits again, she can inform us. Whether the painting is of Carnival or a ball, the verdant branch borne by the lady leads me to wonder about possible symbolism. From what I've seen at Ms. Vart's website, many of her paintings have a mysterious quality that suggests to me larger meanings drawn from stories. Possibly, she might tell us about this as well.

Or perhaps all will remain a mystery.

"a naked green man astride a green horse"

Guillermo Pérez Villalta

"The Symbols of Love"

(Image from International Herald Tribune)

Dale Fuchs has published an article, "For Spanish tapestries, a 21st-century makeover," in the International Herald Tribune on Spain's Real Fábrica de Tapices (Royal Tapestry Factory), which was founded in 1721 by King Philip V and which sounds like a fascinating institution.

What caught my attention was a reference to an image from a painting by Guillermo Pérez Villalta that one of the tapestry makers is weaving into a tapestry:

Consider, for instance, the tapestry in progress by the veteran craftsman José Antonio Carbajal. He is weaving a Pérez Villalta composition depicting a naked green man astride a green horse, which trots into a flat horizon of multicolored Delaunay-style circles.

The "green man astride a green horse" could perhaps be a pictoral allusion to the the Green Knight in the Pearl Poet's story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but the IHT article offers no information on that possibility. I'm guessing that the scene depicted above is a detail from a larger painting by Villalta that would reveal the green man mentioned by Fuchs.

Unfortunately, I don't know anything about Villalta. For those who read Spanish, that edition of Wikipedia provides some information, but the English Wikipedia has no entry on him. I did find via BNET a short review by Kim Bradley for Art in America, "Guillermo Perez Villalta at Soledad Lorenzo, Madrid, Spain" (1997):

Nowhere is the artist's fondness for the Byzantine more apparent than in Faz (The Holy Face). Set against a primarily golden background, this sinewy Pantocrator with veined, marblelike flesh sports a halo of zigzaggy hair and an elaborately linear mustache and beard. His elongated face and thin lips and nose are offset by large amber-colored eyes which fix their piercing gaze on the viewer. Perez Villalta often freely intermingles Christian subjects and symbols, such as the Crucifixion, with pagan themes, gods and monsters. In Creacion (Creation), which takes both Dionysus and the Good Shepherd as its main topics, a host of satyrlike creatures and winged angels with fish tails cavort in a peculiar wilderness. Flawlessly executed, the work evidences Perez Villalta's increasingly refined technical skills as well as his highly developed personal mythology.

The free intermingling of "Christian subjects and symbols . . . with pagan themes, gods and monsters" recalls Medieval art and literature and might therefore suggest that Villalta has turned to artistic and literary sources from the Middle Ages. This intermingling is certainly consistent with the Arthurian story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Perhaps some reader happening upon this blog entry would also happen to know the answer -- or would at least be able to supply a link to Villalta's image of the "green man astride a green horse."

"Two Hearts"

"Two Hearts"

(Image from Wikipedia)

Damn! Sometimes, only a simple expletive undeleted makes sense of the serendipity.

For years now, I've been calling to mind a story that I read back in 1975 in The Last Whole Earth Catalog, an odd, hippie-type book-length mishmash of ecology, philosophy, and hucksterism inspired, in part, by the 'thought' of Buckminster Fuller as refracted through the psychedelic sixties.

When I say "calling to mind," I mean without recalling, precisely, the author of that story.

The story was Divine Right's Trip, and I read it because my high school friend Pete Hale showed me the catalog, which was the strangest thing that I'd ever seen, but also strangely compelling. I even read Plato's allegory of "The Cave" in that weird, motley book.

Anway, I couldn't recall the author, but I do have trouble with names, always have had, so I'd long ago given up trying to dredge that from the dregs of my memory, but then what happens? I pick up a book that my mother gave my daughter Sa-Rah for Christmas -- Peter S. Beagle's Last Unicorn, the deluxe edition with "Two Hearts" and also an interview conducted by Connor Cochran -- and read it through over the course of a week or so while exercising on our stationary bicycle, and what do I discover in the 2007 interview, "A Conversation with Peter S. Beagle"? This reminiscence by Beagle about the gaggle of writers whom he met during a year at Stanford on a Stegner Fellowship in 1960:

An amazing gang. I admit that at times I felt completely overwhelmed. There was Larry McMurtry, the first friend I made there, known now for Lonesome Dove and The Last Picture Show and the screenplay to Brokeback Mountain. He was only a couple of years older than I was, and really talented. He wrote most of Leaving Cheyenne during our session. There was a 25 year-old Ken Kesey, at that point working on One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. There was Judith Rascoe, who was the niece or great niece of a very influential critic named Burton Rascoe; Judith went on to write stories and some very good screenplays. There was a Scottish guy named Robin MacDonald, whose wife, Joanna Ostrow, was Bronx Jewish like me. Robin was the one with the fellowship, but Joanna turned out to be the real writer. She would sit in on the class and years later, after the class was long over, she published an excellent novel called In the Highlands Since Time Immemorial. There was Chris Koch, an Australian writer whose best-known work over here is probably The Year of Living Dangerously. He started that one while he was at Stanford. But my closest friend in the class was Gurney Norman, from Hazard, Kentucky. Gurney and I took to each other immediately. As we've often said, he was my first redneck and I was his first City Jew. We used to sit up nights comparing childhoods. We're still in touch today. In fact, I visited him in Kentucky a few years ago and wrote all about it in the forward to The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche, my first collection from Tachyon Publication.

"'Gurney Norman' . . . now there's an echo of some name in my memory," I thought but couldn't place him. Other names were immediately recognizable. Larry McMurtry? Yeah, I read Lonesome Dove when I was living in Tübingen. Ken Kesey? Yeah, I read One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest when I was in high school and later even shook hands with him when I was in Berkeley. Chris Koch? Well, I've not read his work, but I saw the film version of The Year of Living Dangerously while I was living near Stanford. But Gurney Norman? Something struck me as familiar about this unplaceable name. So, I looked him up . . . and there he was, the man who had written Divine Right's Trip!

What do I think of that story? I don't know anymore. At the time, I liked it because its story of a hillbilly hippie from the Appalachians made sense to me, a hillbilly 'hippie' in the Ozarks. But I might be as disappointed with it now as I was upon my second viewing of Bootleggers, a movie that I had greatly enjoyed upon first seeing it in high school, probably because it was filmed partly in Calico Rock, Arkansas and showed those high White River bluffs that you can also see in some of the photos from my Ozark photoblog.

But to get back to Peter Beagle and his friend Gurney Norman among the Stegner fellows . . . that must have been a fascinating bunch of writers to have had as a cohort! I suppose that they didn't know that they'd all find success, of course, and maybe only the reminiscence makes it sound so great.

But it nevertheless says something touching about the potential for unexpected connections forged between two hearts across profound differences . . . and I know a bit about that.

Small World...

The Small World of Academia

'Coincidence City' . . . a bit like Jung's Synchroni-City

(Image from Fantastic Fiction)

Some readers may have noticed the blogroll links to several of my papers and may have even clicked on a few. Eventually, I'll post copies of these papers at my academic homepage, but only when I've figured out all of the quirks there.

A couple of papers that I'd really like to post there are currently online at the Catholic Resources website of Felix Just, a Jesuit and scholar of Johannine studies who was a student of beginning Greek with me at the Graduate Theological Union back during my Berkeley days.

That website is where Professor Barzilai of Hebrew University recently stumbled across a paper, "'Ethical' Dualism of Food in The Gospel of John," that I presented at the 1999 SBL Conference, back when I still had high hopes of a career in religious studies.

Anyway, I received an email from Professor Barzilai inquiring about this paper:

I have just read your interesting paper on "'Ethical' Dualism of Food in the Gospel of John" as it appears on the Internet. Your research on the uses of vinegar in early Judaic and Christian sources is highly relevant to my current work, and I would very much like to mention it. Has the paper appeared elsewhere in print form? If so, I would appreciate information about where I could locate it.

Receiving such requests is always profoundly gratifying to obscure gypsy scholars such as myself because we also receive at least fleeting confirmation that our writings are not completely in vain and that better scholars than ourselves sometimes even read the stuff.

I responded with alacrity, of course:

What a surprise that someone would be interested in that paper. And a coincidence, too, for I'm presenting an updated version this coming Saturday at a historians' seminar here in Seoul, where I live and teach. I haven't yet published that article, mainly because just as I was getting started on reworking it, I had to relocate to Korea -- where I could at least teach English -- because I couldn't get anyone interested in offering me a position in religious studies.

I've been reworking it slowly, and presenting it at conferences (e.g., St. Andrews in Scotland, the SBL international conference in Singapore, now here in Seoul). I even presented an early version of it in Jerusalem when I was a Golda Meir Fellow (1998/9).

I can send you the updated version -- and the AAR paper as well [i.e., "Gift-Giving Across the Sacred-Profane Divide: A Maussian Analysis of Heavenly Versus Earthly Food in Gnosticism and John's Gospel,"] from that same year, 1999 -- but the exotic fonts won't come through, I fear, for I've got some technical difficulties related to being here in Korea. But you'll easily overcome that limitation by checking sources that Hebrew University will have. The papers aren't much different, but I believe that I've reworked them a bit in a more theoretical direction.

I see that you are in the English Literature Department at Hebrew University. That's the sort of thing that I'm doing these days, but mostly with Medieval and Renaissance literature. I've worked on Beowulf, the Gawain Poet, and Langland, but I do a lot of my work on Milton because I can use my religious studies background to great effect on his epic poem, Paradise Lost, and actually have an advantage over many other scholars.

I happen to know Sanford Budick, by the way, but only by email. He did send me a signed copy of his book The Dividing Muse several years ago when I was at Hanshin University (outskirts of Seoul) and just getting started in Milton studies. I was trying to look into the rabbinical tradition as background to Paradise Lost and was attempting to track down the dove as Holy Spirit present at creation but found that Golda Werman had gotten there before I did.

Anyway, if my two papers are of any use, you may cite them as unpublished articles, works in progress, or as variants of my online versions at Felix Just's website.

I'd be very interested in your own work. If you'd like to have a reader of it at some point, I'd be happy to help out.

Incidentally, I see that you've done a lot of work on Lacan. One of my colleagues here is working on a book manuscript on Lacan and Taoism, Lao Tzu, and similar material. I don't know that this sort of approach would interest you, but just in case...

Professor Barzilai -- struck by some of the intriguing coincidences -- sent a friendly reply entitled "Small World!" (possibly an allusion to the David Lodge novel of the same title):

What an amazing series of coincidences you describe . . . . Of course, I stumbled on your paper quite accidently while looking for something else. If I had searched deliberately, I doubt I would have ever found it.

I'll be glad to cite your updated version if it suits my parochial interests as well as your 1999 version because -- odd as this may sound -- I was fascinated by your discussion of vinegar due to my work on the Bluebeard story and some of its ancient variants. So I truly learned a lot from your discussion.

But to imagine that you actually presented it here in Jerusalem several years ago -- to top the unlikelihood of our mutual interest in . . . vinegar, it just seems altogether too implausible. I'm still in the process of writing and so my essay is not yet presentable or digestible.

As for my interests in Lacan, although I've inevitably internalized many of his psychoanalytic theories, I'm not working in that direction any longer. My book on Lacan seems to have exhausted what I had to say. One of my colleagues at Tel Aviv University recently completed a dissertation (400 pp. or so) in Hebrew on Lacan and Christian theology. He's planning to have it translated into English with a view to publication.

And a last coincidence for the day: my daughter is currently writing her Ph.D. dissertation in Comparative Literature at Berkeley.

Fascinating stuff . . . for the likes of me, anyway. For all I know, Dear Reader, you may be bored stiff, but why -- in that case -- are you still reading? Instead, go read something more interesting, like the David Lodge novel mentioned above: Small World: An Academic Romance.

Here's a 1989 Raymond Thompson interview with Lodge about Small World and its links to Medieval romance.

Paradise Lost: "Danger in Good Sex"

Jan Brueghel the Younger

Paradise (c. 1620)

"Behold that great, astonished prude,

the lion proud with little pride..."

(Image from Wikipedia)

Despite being a 'Puritan', Milton was hardly what one might call 'puritanical' -- although he did praise above "all Temples th' upright heart and pure" (PL 1.18) -- and I promised yesterday some evidence today on how explicit and titillating Milton can get.

I had broken off yesterday's entry almost immediately after noting James Grantham Turner's remark about Milton despising the "open flaunting of illicit sexuality" (Turner 153), so one might imagine Milton as one of those puritanical prigs who patch over every explicit thing with fig leaves. Milton does not describe everything in explicit detail, of course, for he's better than that. What he does is cover just enough to let the sensuous rhythms of his words and the amorous workings of our own imaginations do the rest:

Milton is no prude, and he expresses Adam and Eve's sexual intercourse and climax in a veiled manner that intimately yet unexpectedly involves the reader in their private erotic play, which implies Eve's:

Subjection, but requir'd with gentle sway,
And by her yielded, by him best receivd,
Yielded with coy submission, modest pride,
And sweet reluctant amorous delay. (PL 4.308-11)

That "sweet reluctant amorous delay" takes us to the very brink of their climax, which is then again delayed for us as Milton conceals from us those "mysterious parts" (4.312) that were only for Adam and Eve unconcealed.

Yet, paradise does pose its challenges to the happy couple in their "mutable perfection" (PL 5.524), for:

Hidden from that first pair was the fact that Eve's game of amorous delay, both prior to and during lovemaking, left Adam vulnerable to an unfortunate consequence:

Because sweet reluctant amorous delay will provide a daily reaffirmation of "the conscience of her worth," Adam will inevitably be vulnerable to the opposite of object-debasement. The game that preserves Eve's value from the fate of debasement works all too well, and the consequence is a tendency in the first husband to abase himself before the idol of his mate. It is no surprise when he falls "Fondly overcome with female charm" (9.999). The sexual fantasy Milton embedded at the origins of human love simply has to, by its very meaning, buck against the ordained hierarchy that sets the man over the woman. It makes the Fall explicable. (Kerrigan and Braden 45)

As Kerrigan and Braden go on to note, "Courtly love was charged early on with idolatry, and Adam's Fall is in this sense a medieval one," in the sense that Milton places himself, if ironically, within the Medieval Romance tradition (William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden. "Milton's Coy Eve: Paradise Lost and Renaissance Love Poetry," English Literary History. Volume 53, Number 1 (Spring, 1986), page 48).

On the other hand, my faithful commentor who goes by the pen name "Eshuneutics" has pointed out Milton's more positive debt to the tradition of courtly love, so I will need to work a bit more nuance into this paper.

And some say that blogging is a distraction from serious scholarly work! Not that my own work is very serious...