The Boothby Review Vol. 2, Spring 2023

The Boothby Review

Spring

A Journal of the Faculty of Metairie Park Country Day School

Ship of Theseus

of The Boothby Review The Staff

Editor-in-Chief

G. Howard Hunter

Copy Editor

Erin Walker

Layout Design

Shay Steckler

Jack-Of-All-Trades

Sean Patterson

Production Assistant

Jennifer Marsiglia

In This Issue

RevisionasResurrection:Director'sCutsandtheSearchforthePerfect Form,Mike Miley

If These Sidewalks Could Talk, L. A. Reno

AmItheSameGirl?:PrettyinPinkandthePaternalismofJohnHughes, Robin Heindselman

HowtoReadHistory(andfeelgoodaboutit),Howard Hunter

HowWeGoOn:ATripthroughtheMississippiHillCountryBlues, Justin Gricus

Austen’sEmmaGetsSchooled,Betsy Kern

BiteThreshold,Pam Skehan

SmallTalk,BiggerProblems,Erin Walker

WatchingtheDetectives,Sean Patterson

ThePersistenceofPlace:AnEconomicHitman,theFar-reachingTentacles ofAgribusiness,andaSolutiontoFoodDeserts,William Beachy

ThePleasureofExceptions:PatriciaLockwood’sNo One Is Talking About This, Sam Ferguson

AGentlemaninMoscow,Shay Steckler

TheFreeWorld:ArtandThoughtintheColdWarbyLouisMenand, Howard Hunter

The Crossword Puzzle, Sean Patterson

The Proust Questionnaire: Susan Gisleson

From the Editor’s Desk

After Theseus slayed the Minotaur in the labyrinth under the palace at Knossos, he returned to Athens with the youth who were to be sacrificed for the creature’s repast. Theseus became a beloved king of Athens, so much so that the ship that carried him and the young men and women back from Crete was preserved for posterity. As the planks of the ship rotted, they were replaced, and over time, all the original planks had been discarded. According to the ancient Greek historian Plutarch, “this became a standing example among philosophers, of the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.” The “Ship of Theseus” has been a thought experiment of philosophers for 2,000 years.

Yet the question is far more significant than any facile solution because interplay between continuity and change defines people, communities, and institutions. As the young patriot Tancredi tells his uncle Don Fabrizio in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel of Italian unification TheLeopard, “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” Both continuity and change are contingent on the other.

In this issue of TheBoothbyReview, we explore the nature of continuities and changes in film, music, and human nature. We also have book reviews, art, photography, a bit of whimsy, and of course, a crossword. We hope you enjoy.

G. Howard Hunter, Editor-in-Chief

Revision as Resurrection: Director's Cuts and the Search for the Perfect Form

Mike Miley

INT. VIDEO STORE -- NIGHT

A LONELY YOUNG MAN, 16, gazes at a shelf of DVDs. Whatever he picks is going to be his only company for the night. Stakes are high.

His eyes linger over a title. He reaches for it, then hesitates.

CLOSE-UP: three copies of Blade Runner: Theatrical Cut. Director’s Cut. Final Cut.

REVERSE: Lonely Teen looks at the copies. He is confused. His hand hovers over the cases, indecisive.

TITLE CARD

COMPLETE AND UNCUT! WITH OVER AN HOUR OF NEVER-BEFORE-SEEN FOOTAGE! THE WAY THE FILMMAKER INTENDED! LIKE YOU’VE NEVER SEEN IT BEFORE!

There are lots of different decisions that go into selecting a movie to watch. Genre, length, story, and stars all play a role, as does the streaming service or the device to watch it on. Even after all of these choices have been made, and one thinks they have finally arrived at that magical moment when they can dim the lights and settle into a film, sometimes another, more nebulous choice presents itself: Which version? The theatrical cut? The director’s cut? The extended edition? The special edition? The special theatrical re-released extended director’s cut? What do these terms even mean?

CUT TO:

INT. STUDIO SCREENING ROOM -- 1924 – DAY

Onscreen we see a vast and blazing hot desert, barren except for TWO MEN in a struggle beside a dead horse.

A MAN, 40s, stands triumphantly over his vanquished foe. He starts to walk away, but his hand jerks back.

He looks down: he’s handcuffed to the dead man.

TITLE CARD

The end.

The notion of the director’s cut is almost as old as cinema itself, dating back at least to 1924 when Erich von Stroheim screened his eight-hour cut of Greed. This film represented his vision of the ultimate adaptation of Frank Norris’s novel McTeague … but try telling that to a roomful of suits looking at a film that would have to screen in two parts over two consecutive nights. von Stroheim cut his version down to 4 hours and 20 minutes, but that was still not enough to appease the suits. By the time MGM was finished trimming the film, it ran 140 minutes. The excised six hours of footage was destroyed, melted down for the silver. Even at its incredibly truncated length, Greed is still regarded as not only one of the greatest films of the silent era, but of all time. However, those missing six hours constitute one of the biggest “whatifs” in film history. CUT TO:

INT. RKO EDITING ROOM -- 1942 – DAY

TWO STUDIO EXECUTIVES, 30s, humorless and dim, stand behind ROBERT WISE, 28, who sits behind a Moviola.

The executives point to the film splicer. Reluctant, despondent, Wise places a strip of film over the splicer. He takes a deep breath.

He brings the blade on the splicer down. The cut ECHOES like a guillotine.

While it’s far less than six hours of footage, the missing 40 minutes of Orson Welles’s 1942 film TheMagnificentAmbersons rivals the full cut of Greed in its mythos

among cineastes. RKO took control of the editing of Welles’s follow up to Citizen Kane while he was filming a documentary in Brazil. And they didn’t stop there: they also reshot the ending to Ambersons, destroyed the excised footage, and cut off funding to the documentary, which was never completed (a reconstructed version did come out in 1993). Ambersons flopped, though some believe it to be an even greater achievement than Citizen Kane, even in its compromised form.

The story of Ambersonsbecame the story of Welles’s career as a filmmaker: nearly every film he made afterwards was either dramatically recut by the producers or never completed, making him the leading man in the saga of the Artist vs. the Suits. Welles played this part well, always presenting himself as the Misunderstood Genius too creative for an industry run by bean-counters. Like von Stroheim before him (and many filmmakers after him), he would claim that his version of Ambersons was the best film he’d ever made. And for decades, no one could dispute these directors because there was no way to see their cut.

INT. VIDEO STORE – NIGHT

The Lonely Teen is still trying to make up his mind.

This is where we came in. Home video and cable television changed everything for the director’s cut. First, the Los Angeles pay-cable network the Z Channel began broadcasting director’s cuts such as Michael Cimino’s four-hour Heaven’s Gate (cut down to 140 minutes theatrically). Then, some film vault workers discovered an alternate cut of Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner that ran a few minutes longer and—more importantly—omitted Harrison Ford’s dreadful, world-weary PI voiceover and the studio’s ridiculous happy ending. This cut, which had originally bombed with test audiences in Denver and Dallas, now screened in theaters in Los Angeles and San Francisco to big crowds and positive reviews. When he learned of the screenings, Ridley Scott asked Warner Brothers to let him back into the editing room to create a true director’s cut, which was released on home video in 1992 for the film’s tenth anniversary. It was met with universal acclaim, and since then it’s been listed in every one of SightandSound magazine’s decennial critic’s poll of the 100 greatest films ever made.

The success of Blade Runner on home video invented the notion of the director’s cut as we know it. Films such as Welles’s Touch of Evil and Mr. Arkadin, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, or the aforementioned Heaven’s Gate saw their reputations resurrected. Other cuts of Coppola’s ApocalypseNow or Peter Jackson’s LordoftheRings series gave devotees more territory to explore, while still other cuts spiced up tamer films by offering “unrated” cuts that included material deemed too graphic for an R rating, to the extent that by the mid-2000s it seemed like every movie had a director’s cut in release somewhere.

Given the fact that many of these director’s cuts did not perform well theatrically, studios were more than willing to tap into this new revenue stream by offering audiences the same film they’d seen, only now with “never-before-seen” material, whether that material needed to be seen or not. Filmmakers also welcomed it because it gave them an opportunity to present “their” version to audiences, reinforcing the image of the director as the author and primary creative force of a motion picture.

For all of the good it does, this situation presents a difficult question: with all these multiple versions of a film available to watch, which is the “real” version of the movie? Or, put a bit differently, are these different versions even the same movie? In changing the edit of a movie, is an entirely different movie being made? And if so, should they have little subtitles, parentheticals, asterisks, etc.? Or should they go by different names entirely? Should one cut be completely disregarded and cast out?

CUT TO:

EXT. MOVIE THEATER –- NIGHT

The marquee floods the block with light as the crowd files in, expectant.

In letters the size of people, the title reads: MICHAEL CIMINO’S HEAVEN’S GATE: COMPLETE AND UNCUT.

Not to weasel out of a definitive answer—I do have one—but, well, it depends. Not all director’s cuts are the same. They have different origin stories and serve different purposes, but broadly speaking, most of them seek to recoup, revise, or restore.

These purposes can determine how we evaluate each cut and whether it is merely an ancillary or adjunct to a definitive work or whether it constitutes a separate work in its own right.

Director’s cuts that seek to recoup represent the greedy of the bunch. It’s not about art here; it’s often about wringing every last dime out of a title. There are exceptions here, such as the far superior extended editions of the LordoftheRings films, but these cuts frequently amount to a handful of extra frames of gore or skin that often add even less to the film than they do to its runtime. While directors may tacitly approve of these cuts, they’re less representative of their intentions than an opportunity for them to resurrect some of the darlings they had to kill for a tighter (and better) theatrical cut. The director’s cuts of Alien and Aliens both fit this bill—and both directors openly admit as much. The director’s cuts of Almost Famous and That ThingYouDo! add some intriguing texture and scope, but they pale in comparison to the tightly constructed pop perfection of their theatrical versions. These editions, while nice for fans to watch on occasion, seldom illuminate something in the film that wasn’t already there. If anything, they detract from the film’s overall impact by virtue of their bagginess.

The true spirit of the director’s cut can be found in those that seek to restore. These cuts resolve the age-old debate between the artist and the suits strongly in the artist’s favor and affirm the authority of the director as the auteur nobly battling against a greedy system run by philistines. These restorations do the very important work of reclaiming films from decades of misunderstanding. Pat Garrett and BillytheKid,BladeRunner,Heaven’sGate,Once UponaTimeinAmerica,Brazil, and Touch of Evil are the classics they are thanks to the release of their director’s cuts.

Such cuts may not always represent an improvement (Oliver Stone’s JFK) or do much to move the needle on the film’s reputation significantly (Ridley Scott’s KingdomofHeaven), but on the whole, their intentions are to more fully achieve the aims and purposes of the film and present audiences with a fuller artistic statement, even if it is arriving somewhat belatedly.

The works that seek to revise may be the rarest and most puzzling of all, but they seem to be the most prominent among most recent director’s cuts. With these, we see directors returning to the same work multiple times, adding more footage, taking some out, trying to find the version of the film that captures everything they want it to. For instance, Oliver Stone has recut his 2004 film Alexander three times—he even released a version in 2014 after the so-called Final Unrated Cut in 2007. (It’s called The Ultimate Cut.) But one filmmaker stands out as the greatest user (or perhaps abuser) of the director’s cut.

EXT. COPPOLA WINERY VINEYARD -- NAPA VALLEY -- DAY

FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA, 83, seated, raises a glass of Coppola Diamond Label Claret toward the sun. As he inspects the color of the wine, his face resembles Michael Corleone’s at the end of The Godfather Part III: heavy with the weight of a lifetime.

More than any filmmaker since Orson Welles, Francis Ford Coppola seems to be drawn back to the well that is the director’s cut the most. He's returned to The Godfather multiple times: there’s 1977’s TheCompleteSaga, which puts the first two films in chronological order and adds some scenes to the Young Vito storyline, the 1991 home video director’s cut of The Godfather Part III (adds seven minutes), and 2020’s The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone (removes twelve minutes from the theatrical cut). He’s also reworked ApocalypseNow more than once, first with 2001’s ApocalypseNow:Redux (adds 49 minutes) and again with ApocalypseNow:FinalCut (removes 20 minutes from Redux). And then there’s The Outsiders:TheCompleteNovel (adds 22 minutes), The Cotton Club: Encore (adds 25 minutes), and the 2023 Blu-Ray release of B’Twixt Now and Sunrise, which adds 50 minutes to his 2011 feature, Twixt.

With director’s cuts of nearly half the films in his filmography, it would seem Coppola is an obsessive who just can’t stop tinkering with his old work. Or maybe he’s becoming concerned with his legacy in his old age. Less charitable people would say Coppola keeps going back to his old work because he is past his prime and looking to coast on his past achievements. But I think there’s something far more complex at

play here, something that gets at the heart of what director’s cuts can do when they seek to revise.

Director’s cuts that revise may seem to be the most frivolous of the lot, but the more I think about it, the more I think they may also be the most interesting and the most vital of them all. CUT TO:

INT. SCREENING ROOM – NIGHT

Black. The iconic horn of Nino Rota’s Godfather theme fills the room.

TITLE CARD

Paramount Pictures Presents.

Mario Puzo’s The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone

In some ways, The Godfather Coda is the strangest example because it’s a director’s cut of a film the director didn’t want to make in the first place. Coppola took on a third Godfather film to get out of the dire financial situation he was in after the failure of his daring 1982 musical One from the Heart. After a production troubled by casting issues, he had to rush The Godfather Part III through postproduction to meet Paramount’s Christmas 1990 release date. This is the real battle between Art and Commerce: films have release dates, and these release dates can affect the process of art, forcing a film to come out before the filmmakers have found its ideal form. This is certainly the case with a film such as The Godfather Part III, which, even though it received seven Academy Award nominations, was received as a failure at best, a stain on a beloved film series at worst, with most of the blame (unfairly) falling on Coppola’s daughter Sofia for her performance as Mary Corleone, and on Coppola himself for casting her. With such a bad reception, why would Coppola return to a work that he didn’t want to make to begin with, especially when he no longer needs a big payday?

But rationality is not what anyone wants from one of cinema’s most gifted madmen. (Also, to be fair, Coppola didn’t want to make the first Godfather film either.)

This film is a perfect example of what makes director’s cuts that revise so compelling and vital to our understanding of the artistic process. The Death of Michael Corleone gets at what The Godfather Part III, and, to some extent, the entire Godfather saga, is all about, both for Michael Corleone and for Coppola: the impossibility of escape. DISSOLVE TO:

FLASHBACK -- EXT. CORLEONE FAMILY COMPOUND -- DAY

MICHAEL CORLEONE sits with KAY ADAMS as Connie Corleone’s wedding reception swirls around them. Kay stares at Michael, shocked by the violent story he has just told her.

That’s my family, Kay. That’s not me.

Michael Corleone spends the rest of the three Godfather films trying—and failing—to make that statement true. Michael’s statement encapsulates his tragic fate: he becomes the exact opposite of what he wants to be. In The Godfather III, we see him confronting this fate, realizing he can repent and run from his mistakes all he wants, but he will never get very far. Life will always refuse him redemption. Circumstances will always suck him back into the criminal world. The film ends in an act of mob violence in Sicily, far from the American Dream the family has been chasing. That dream has only led them back to the violence and vengeance of the Old Country. As Michael laments in the film’s most iconic line, “Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in.” The film proves just how naïve this statement is: he was never out because “out” does not exist. The differences between the old world and the new are mere illusions.

MICHAEL

One difference that is not mere illusion is the difference between The Godfather Part III and The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone, for they are indeed different films that deserve different titles. The new cut moves briskly from the jump, tightening slack scenes to restore their punch, reorganizing others to fit the film’s theme rather than narrative chronology, and jettisoning many of the moments early on that play the same notes as the previous two films. These moves are marked steps toward making The Death of Michael Corleone more of its own film, less subservient to the original film. In breaking from The Godfather Part III’s rigid adherence to the tempo and structure of the other Godfather films, The Death of Michael Corleone serves as a corrective to their sense of grandeur and elegance that reveals the emptiness and delusion at the core of it all. It’s a film as tired of pretending as its characters are, and, unlike The Godfather III, it is ahead of them in releasing itself from these illusions. With a more critical distance, the film shifts the tragedy from us lamenting the Corleones not getting what they want to us pitying that they ever thought they could.

“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”

Michael’s line may as well be Coppola’s too, first for The Godfather III and again for The Death of Michael Corleone. Read one way, Paramount is the mob pulling him back in and preventing him from achieving total independence as a filmmaker. Or perhaps it’s Coppola who pulls himself back in: like Michael, when he finds himself in dire straits, he returns to what he knows, no matter how much he loathes it. But I think the truth is really something different, and it’s also what director’s cuts that seek to revise are all about: it’s the work and the mysteries it still has to share that keep pulling the filmmaker back in.

Which version of The Godfather Part III is definitive? That’s kind of for the work to tell us and for us to find. As a character in Wim Wenders’s criminally underseen 1982 film about filmmaking, TheStateofThings, remarks, “a film isn’t a prefab house. It has a life of its own.” After watching both cuts over two days, it seems to me that there is a stronger version of this story out there, one Coppola may yet find a

way to tell. Even though it may be called TheDeathofMichaelCorleone, this story is still very much alive and growing toward its fullest expression. Coppola may think he’s out, but there is still a chance the work will pull him back in. It’s happened before.

INT. EDITING ROOM -- DAY

WALTER MURCH, 79, fires up Avid Media Composer and begins clicking buttons.

The door opens.

Francis Ford Coppola, 83, enters and takes a seat on the leather couch. He looks at the large monitor as Murch presses play.

The notion that we may need yet another cut of the third Godfather movie is not the answer that anyone wants to hear, but each work of art has a form it’s seeking to achieve, an ideal version that is dictated by the work itself, not its creators. Director’s cuts at their best are the continued search for that ideal form, and when we watch them, we join in that search.

The hardest part of all is being open to that search. In the case of so many director’s cuts, we see the filmmaker ignoring what the work is telling them. They keep fighting against that ideal form, in the hope they will impose their will on material that will always be indifferent to their wishes and intentions. Coppola himself has fallen prey to this with ApocalypseNow, a film he already found the greatest expression of in 1979. Coppola can’t let go of some sequences in that film even though they detract from the monomaniacal descent into madness the story clearly wants to be. But he keeps searching for another version, one that will meet halfway the film he wants ApocalypseNow to be with the film ApocalypseNow is, even though such a quest is bound to fail.

But perhaps that situation is in fact a wonderful thing. Our understanding of what we make changes, and we have the chance to see new things in it. They say the editing of a film is the final draft of the script. But that’s not really true: it’s just the next draft. Another one may come along. And we have to keep listening to what the work has to tell us about itself, watching it for what it still has to reveal.

In a director’s cut that revises such as The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone, we see an artist engaging in revision and critique with the work, still searching for its ideal form. Although this means that the artist—and the audience—keeps going back to the same well, it means the work is still being built. The new form illuminates something new about the essence of the work that went unnoticed before. It never ends, and I think that’s beautiful.

INT. VIDEO STORE – NIGHT

The lonely teen stares at the three versions of Blade Runner.

He grabs all three and walks to the counter. It is going to be a long night. FADE

In 2007, staggering 170,000 African-retentive culture of a 10-20 image portfolio of replaced and rotated offering a quick snapshot itself distinct, when is my

2007, I began photographing Secondlines and have amassed a body of work that has grown to a images. The collection is titled "If These Sidewalks Could Talk If Talk" and documents the uniquely the New Orleans Secondline community for the last 15 years. I have consistently maintained the best of the images of that body of work at any given point in time. The images have been rotated often throughout the years, and yet, the portfolio itself is always a portfolio of images, snapshot of the Secondline culture and my documentation of said culture. While each image is culled from the larger body of work and grouped with the other current select 10-20 images, my current portfolio a part of the original portfolio? Or has it become something else entirely?

L.A. Reno

Am I the Same Girl?:

Pretty in Pink and the Paternalism of John Hughes Robin

Heindselman

The fatal error of PrettyinPink isn’t, as some people have insisted, that Andie (Molly Ringwald) ends up with the bland “richie” Blaine (Andrew McCarthy) instead of the dynamic Duckie (Jon Cryer). A lot of hay was made about the fact that the pro-Duckie ending—the one originally conceived by screenwriter John Hughes—was ditched for one that market-tested more favorably, and for a minute in the ’80s, the movie exemplified the sacrifice of good cinematic storytelling to the lowest common denominator.

But the truth is, both Duckie and Blaine are all wrong for Andie, and this is a casting problem, and by the time the filmmakers realized there was a casting problem, it was too late. The choice between McCarthy’s blank-faced boringness and Cryer’s kid-brother neediness was pretty much unnavigable. McCarthy may have failed to produce many sparks with Ringwald, but the chemistry Cryer generated was deadly for being so fraternal. Those horrified focus groups no doubt responded to the original ending the same way you or I would’ve responded to Marsha Brady giving Peter the eye.

To my mind, the most glaring flaw—the unforgivable flaw—of PrettyinPink is John Hughes’s mistreatment of Iona (Annie Potts), Andie’s older coworker at the record store and one of the most lovable, magnetic, mercurial, and fun-to-look-at characters of any romantic comedy. In scene after scene, Iona gloriously reinvents herself, exploring female archetypes with exquisite playfulness and a Cindy Sherman-esque attention to detail.

She looks like this.

And this.

And this.

And this.

Dazzling, right? But if we’re to believe this movie, Iona spends night after night alone, flopped out on her bed, listening to old records and mooning over her glory days. Because evidently there are zero men in the entire Chicago metropolitan area who might be interested in a thirty-something woman who’s beautiful, fun, effervescent, and a genius of self-invention.

It’s the self-invention part that’s the problem. The whole self-invention thing has to go—it’s messing up Iona’s chances of finding a husband! And in Hughes’s world, being unmarried, childless, of modest means, and nearing middle age is just about the worst fate imaginable. So he decides it’s time for Iona to getnormal. He presents her with a Flock of Seagulls haircut, a yuppie wardrobe, and—ta-DA!—a boyfriend. A divorced doctor with kids.

If you don’t remember how bad her makeover is, words alone can’t do it justice.

I was 14 when this movie came out, and I remember thinking: No. And: Why?

That oversized, body-effacing jacket? The popped collar? Those weirdpearls? And what kind of monster would give the goddess Iona a perm?

But her boldly suburban new style wins Andie’s unqualified praise, to which Iona self-deprecates, “Aw, I look like a mother.” Andie replies, “Well, a little. But that’s okay.”

It’s really not okay, though. Leaving aside the aesthetic wrongness of her look—after all, who didn’t go astray in the ’80s?—it seems clear there’s no going back for Iona. She has accepted this mainstreaming of her persona as the cost of finding love. John Hughes has turned her into a high-functioning Stepford wife, and we’re supposed to be happy about it.

This wasn’t the first time John Hughes decided that one of his ladies needed an overhaul. Iona is reminiscent of his previous makeover victim, The Breakfast Club’s Allison (Ally Sheedy), an artistic social misfit who—under the tutelage of the prom queen Claire (Ringwald)—wipes away her (entirely appropriate) goth eyeliner, tames her Chrissie Hynde bangs under a prim headband, and submits herself to the approving gaze of the Jock. The Jock! Who has precisely nothing in common with her. But oddball chicks need a stabilizing masculine influence, you see, someone like a doctor or a high school football star who can confer a bit of civilizing status and bring them into the fold (On the other hand, if the rich, popular Claire finds herself attracted to the penniless, darkly brooding John Bender—well, she can give him her diamond stud to remember her by, but that’s as far as it goes. A boy can pluck a girl out of the gutter but not the other way around).

After the early-’80s reign of raunchy teen comedies—with plots that leaned heavily on voyeurism and other forms of humiliation—John Hughes was incalculably important to us girl viewers coming of age in the mid-’80s. He virtually invented the teen rom-com for us, and we were grateful. But his paternalistic streak was undeniable. He created genuinely interesting female characters and then couldn’t stop himself from overcorrecting them. Like a dad, he couldn’t brook their autonomy, couldn’t let them pursue a path he thought unwholesome, couldn’t permit them to seriously explore another, perhaps darker side of themselves. Like a dad, he just wanted them to turn out normal. He just wanted to protect them. And like a dad, he disappointed us all the more for how much we needed him.

AllphotographsinthisarticlearecourtesyofParamountPictures,1986.

How to Read History (and feel good Howard Hunter

good about it)

In my Cold War youth, cleaning one’s plate at dinner was a moral imperative since it was somehow linked to starving children in India or China. Even if the connection eluded me, it did reinforce the notion—grounded in the belief of our Puritan forebears—that tasks were to be completed, and one must proceed in life avoiding half-assed, slipshod work. After all, a job, we were reminded, is only worth doing if done well.

For the well-intentioned reader, bent on self-improvement, there is a similar Puritan ethos at work, a guilt over books unread, but worse is a book abandoned midstream. Not only does it suggest moral laxity, but it confirms any doubts people have regarding their own intellectual prowess. The French word poseur comes to mind along with lightweight. Self-loathing ensues. It would have been better to leave the fat tome under the tree and regift it, although there is a reasonable chance the book in question was regifted from the start.

But I am offering absolution, the only absolution I can grant after serving History’s muse Clio for forty-two years. And it’s this — youdon’thave to finish the book. History books are the most common to be put down

because they tend to be long, and prolixity poses a challenge to one’s resolve. So, this is my suggestion: try reading a chapter and then proceed or not. History has so much to give that reading that one chapter is vastly better than not reading at all. For starters, it makes life worthwhile by contextualizing our existence in a seemingly unforgiving universe. Even if only a little bit.

Victrola before taking on Moby Dick. Likewise with history. If the subject is European exploration, listen to the baroque folias of 16th century Spain; if your interest is the Civil War, a marvelous collection of Civil War songs interpreted by contemporary artists came out in 2015 entitled Divided and United; if your interest is ancient and medieval World History, check out Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road series. Also, reserve a comfortable seat and pour your favorite beverage. If a family member insists on playing a noisy podcast, tell that person to use earphones—you have reading to do!

In a magazine ad for the International Paper Company, American wit Steve Allen wrote a short piece on “How to Read the Classics” (in 1980, there was still a healthy respect in popular culture for intellectual engagement). Allen thought reading required a proper frame of mind before embarking on a text. For example, he suggests queuing up sea shanties on the

We can trace the origin of historical writing to ancient Greece in the fifth century BCE Herodotus (484 BCE—425 BCE) wrote his histories so “that human achievement may be spared the ravages of time.” It’s strangely random—a history of the Greek-Persian war along with a travelogue of the ancient world from Egypt through the Persian Empire to Scythia. Some of the sources and exotic stories make parts of the Histories suspect. Nevertheless, it’s the first (and one of the best) examples of narrative history, the notion of history as story. Thucydides (460 BCE—400 BCE), the counterpart of Herodotus, is considered the father of scientific

Reserve a comfortable seatandpouryour favoritebeverage.Ifa familymemberinsistson playinganoisypodcast, tellthatpersontouse earphones—youhave readingtodo!

or analytical history, which through rigorous research and varied sources, attempts to answer the question of why events occurred. In his The HistoryofthePeloponnesianWar, Thucydides (who had served as an Athenian general) argues, “What made the war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.” Historians often get lost in their own minutiae, but Thucydides gets to the essence of the problem in one of the most poignant observations in historical letters.

History books tend to comprise both narrative and analysis. It’s fair to say that books written by professional historians for academic publishing houses reside more on the analytical end of the spectrum while popular histories published by trade presses have a more narrative bent. Yet, the best history transcends categorization. Barbara Tuchman was not an academic historian, yet her work on the start of World War I, TheGunsofAugust, won a Pulitzer Prize for both riveting narrative and trenchant analysis. The biographies of Antonia Fraser (MaryQueenof Scots), Ron Chernow (Hamilton), and Walter Isaacson (Benjamin Franklin) were all written for a public audience but are not wanting in rigorous analysis. Two books

on the surface that seem esoteric, and perhaps too clever — Modris Ekstein’s RitesofSpring (a cultural history of WWI and its aftermath) and TheMetaphysicalClub by Louis Menand (a story of ideas in America) are so beautifully written that one can withstand the complexity of the content. Some books concentrate on a singular event like Eric Larson’s chronicle of Winston Churchill and the Battle of Britain, TheSplendid and the Vile. But don’t be put off by sweeping narratives like Mary Beard’s SPQRAHistoryofAncient Rome that provide that sense of continuity amidst change over time.

Yetindividualsofevery generationexperiencethe wholerangeofhuman emotion from love and losstohopeand disappointment,which setsuptheparadoxof lookingbacktoanother eraandsayingof humanity,Iamandam notthatpersonatthe same time.

Which is what history does—it reminds us that human nature, even in centuries of great strife, changes very little. No doubt attitudes evolve, the Victorian world of my grandparents, for example, was very different from the 1960s America that shaped my own worldview. Yet individuals of every generation experience the whole range of human emotion from love and loss to hope and disappointment, which sets up the paradox of looking back to another era and saying of humanity, I am and am not that person at the same time. As a species, we have suffered war, pestilence, and disaster after disaster, yet have somehow prevailed. Perhaps that makes reading history, one chapter or many, worth our time. Even if only a little bit.

ClioLiftsCanvasforImagesof HistoricalEvents, 1784 and Clio, 16011652 are courtesy of Rijksmuseum.

How We Go On: A Trip Through the Mississippi Hill Country Blues Justin Gricus

The Mississippi hill country blues can trace its roots back to the polyrhythmic styles of West Africa brought to the United States by slaves prior to the Civil War. The emphasis on these percussive elements combined with fingerpicked guitar grooves; hypnotic, trance-inducing basslines; and vocals that merge both speech and song characterize the music of this region. The blues of the Mississippi Delta was the blues that traveled north to Chicago and became known through famous artists such as Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, and B.B. King. While these musicians brought their Delta roots to the rest of the country and world, the hill country blues was the music that remained in Mississippi, the music that stayed home.

During the 1930s and '40s, the hill country blues thrived at picnics

and barbecues and in the early juke joints around towns such as Holly Springs and Como, but it remained largely obscure to the outside world. That changed in 1959 when folklorist Alan Lomax returned to northern Mississippi to record local fife and drum musicians, and in the process, discovered a middle-aged cotton farmer and guitar picker named Fred McDowell. Intrigued by McDowell’s groove-based blues, Lomax recorded McDowell and helped expose this genre to a larger audience beyond the confines of hill country. Mississippi Fred McDowell would eventually influence a variety of musicians of the 1960s and '70s, including The Rolling Stones who covered his song “You Got to Move” on their 1971 album, StickyFingers. In Mark Bego’s biography of Bonnie Raitt, Justinthe Nick of Time, Raitt describes how McDowell helped teach her guitar and served musicians who embraced

Luther Dickinson

photo by Justin Gricus

the roots of this music while infusing it with their own styles and interpretations, contributing to the evolution of the hill country sound.

R.L. Burnside (1926—2005) and Junior Kimbrough (1930—1998) are perhaps the two names most associated with this next generation of hill country blues musicians. Like McDowell, their early recordings were done by field researchers, musicologists, and folklorists traveling the dirt roads of the Mississippi backcountry on pilgrimages to discover the next blues icons. Though Burnside did perform at various festivals both in the United States and abroad, he was still primarily a farmer and later a truck driver who was a regular in the local bars and juke joints and backyard cookouts that continued to define and shape the area’s musical culture.

Kimbrough remained even less well known outside of the hill country until the musical critic Robert Palmer and documentary filmmaker Robert Mugge released the documentary DeepBlues:A MusicalPilgrimagetotheCrossroads in 1992. Palmer would later produce Kimbrough’s debut album AllNight Long for the Oxford-based Fat Possum record label, a label

primarily started in the early 1990s for the purpose of recording this aging generation of hill country blues musicians who up until that time had only been sparsely recorded. Kimbrough’s AllNightLong received praise from a variety of critics, including a four-star review in RollingStone magazine and would bring national attention to Kimbrough’s hypnotic blues stylings. In the liner notes of the album, Palmer describes Kimbrough’s vocals as “something that sounds like a pre-blues field holler” with a “guitar rhythm like Memphis soul music.” Palmer later writes that “when the bass and drums come in on one of Junior’s riffs, the music might sound like some kind of hillbilly-metalfunk that hasn’t been heard yet.”

Junior was known for his various juke joints in the region, the last one being an abandoned church that burned down prior to Kimbrough’s death. Kimbrough would record two more albums for Fat Possum records before he died of a heart attack in Holly Springs, MS, in 1998, but it was Kimbrough’s relative obscurity and lack of existing recordings that inspired Palmer to say in the Deep Blues documentary, “If you want to hear his music, you have to go out jukin’.”

* * *

It was with the intent of keeping these blues traditions alive that inspired Mississippi blues guitarist Kenny Brown to build a stage on the

flatbed of a tractor trailer and haul it out to a pasture in his home town of Potts Camp in the hills of northern Mississippi. He invited some of his local friends and descendents of these aforementioned blues musicians to play a one-day festival celebrating the musical heritage unique to this part of the state. The first Mississippi Hill Country Picnic launched in 2006 and attracted around 1,000 people, hailing from seventeen states and a number of different countries. Brown, who began performing with R.L. Burnside in the early 1970s, wanted to recreate the mood and atmosphere of the blues picnics he recalled from his youth. Growing up, Brown was neighbors with the late Othar Turner, the legendary fife player and bluesman, and recalls attending Turner’s field parties and blues picnics that Turner began hosting in the early 1950s. These were a continuation of the blues picnic traditions from the first half of the century that involved sharecroppers and laborers gathering and communing in backyards and fields before another week of toil.

The North Mississippi Hill Country Picnic has now expanded to a twoday event and has moved a few miles west to Waterford, but it still remains sincere to Brown’s original vision,

Luther Dickinson with Sharde Thomas

photo by Justin Gricus

bringing music fans together to an isolated area in North Mississippi to hear the current generation of musicians reinvent and redefine this style of blues. My first experience with it occurred last summer during a heat wave in June. It was 95 degrees and not yet noon when my Uber driver exited Highway 7 and turned left onto the dirt road that led to the entrance. The driver had never heard of the picnic and was one of many locals I had met while staying in Oxford who were unaware of the concert happening fewer than thirty miles to the north. This remote location combined with the blazing hot temperatures and a musical lineup featuring musicians who could trace their lineage back to the roots of this genre gave this festival a flavor of intimacy that differentiated it from the myriad of music festivals that dot the American musical landscape each summer.

On that first Friday of the picnic, I watched Duwayne Burnside, the eldest son of R.L., play an hour-long set that combined songs of his father with his own original compositions. Duwayne was just one of the many descendents of R.L in a lineup that also featured Kent Burnside (R.L. 's oldest grandson) and Garry Burnside (R.L. 's youngest son), both paying homage to the blues of their forebear.

As darkness settled onto the grounds, cooling the evening air, it was Robert Kimbrough Sr. the son of Junior Kimbrough, who played his own interpretation of his father’s “cotton patch soul blues.” This sound once characterized by Kimbrough’s dense rhythmic layers now continued with his son’s soulful, plaintive vocals that drifted through the grounds all the way past Highway 7 and fanned out over the land where it originated.

While these musicians

Saturday brought more Burnsides and Kimbroughs, including Junior’s grandson, Cameron, a drummer in the band The Memphissippi Sounds.

Otha Turner’s granddaughter Sharde Thomas performed with the Rising Stars Fife and Drum Band,

roots to the rest of the countryandworld,the hillcountryblueswas the music that remained in Mississippi,themusic

celebrating her grandfather’s legacy and continuing a vanishing American folk tradition that has been a part of North Mississippi since the Civil War. The final night closed with the North Mississippi All-Stars featuring Luther and Cody Dickinson, sons of famed record producer and session musician Luther Dickinson, and an extended jam session with the Hill Country Kings, an all-star collection of many of the performers from the past two days on stage together for one final set to conclude the 2022 edition of the Hill Country Picnic.

with an axe/ the model is indeed near at hand.” As I continued thinking about this picnic and reading more about these artists, Synder’s musings on the cultural transmission of heritage from one generation to the next became even more vivid and relevant. The poem concludes with Snyder suddenly understanding that his teachers were axes, and now he too is an axe and his son an axe handle “soon to be shaping again, model and tool, craft of culture, how we go on.”

One of the more well-known poems by the poet Gary Synder entitled “Axe Handles” tells the story of a father teaching his son how to throw a hatchet so that it will consistently lodge into a stump. His son, wanting to make his own hatchet, remembers an old hatchet head stored in his father’s shop. The dad tells his son to retrieve it so they can use it to “shape the [new] handle/by checking the handle/of the axe we cut with.”

In the process of constructing this new hatchet, his father recalls lines from the Chinese poet Lu Ji from the fourth century in his preface to his “Essay on Literature”: “In making the handle/of the ax/by cutting wood

The hill country blues is no longer hidden away in an isolated region of Mississippi known only to the generations of families who have nurtured these traditions for decades. The music is now widely recorded, played, and distributed. You no longer have to go out jukin’ to hear the hill country sound, but it’s still worth the trip to its source during the heat of the summer to listen to the offspring of some of the early pioneers playing guitars and fifes, drums and harps, hill country blues, cotton patch soul, craft of culture, how we go on.

“Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich.” Wouldn’t that be nice? The opening line of Jane Austen’s Emma presents the title character as a genteel young woman who has floated through life with few hardships. Emma and her charming but delicate father control the social dealings of the village of Highbury like puppet masters from the manor house on Hartfield estate: the Woodhouses “had been settled

Austen’s Emma Betsy Kern

for several generations [there], the younger branch of a very ancient family.” When the novel starts, Emma, twenty years old, has stepped into the role of town matchmaker. In the absence of her late mother, Emma is the principal female. But beyond her cachet as a young woman of nobility, Emma’s authority rests on her uniquely self-assured vision of herself. She will be the one to arrange marriages by virtue of just being… Emma. She believes she has enjoyed “the best blessings of existence” simply because she crafts that ideal for herself. It does not occur to Emma that others might perceive her any other way.

When readers meet Emma, she lacks any inkling of the discomfort that is central to the human condition. Emma Woodhouse never ponders that private but familiar question: “Do they like me?” Emma believes that she is received the way she would like to be received. But in Austen’s world, this cannot hold.

As the novel unfolds, Austen shows us what happens when a carefully crafted version of one’s self is at

Emmahungabouthimaffectionately.Illustrationfor EmmabyJaneAusten(Macmillan,1896).

Emma Gets Schooled

complete odds with how others receive that version in reality. Austen bends the rules of narration and uses free indirect discourse, a narrative technique in which the third person ceases to be omniscient and is invaded by the thoughts and feelings of individuals. We see this from the jump. Returning to that famously flattering opening line, it is not merely Austen telling us that Emma is “handsome, clever, and rich.” Emma herself is speaking to readers here. As Austen works out this middle voice throughout the novel, Emma’s façade unravels, revealing that one’s desire to control selfpresentation is simply an illusion.

Emma cannot see that even a carefully crafted presentation of herself does not guarantee that others will readily accept her as she wishes. Austen illustrates this gap in understanding in the Box Hill episode. Box Hill, a real park just outside of London, was a destination for daytrippers to escape the city rush and enjoy views of the countryside. Moreover, the wooded areas provided opportunities for

wandering young couples to escape the gaze of chaperones. Emma and her party of eligible friends and older adult companions go on a highly anticipated outing to Box Hill for a picnic. In the early 1800s, picnicking was a relatively new phenomenon. Bringing a meal outdoors was a fashionable and almost scandalous pleasure party. The act of eating outside without the fineries and constraints of a table setting was a thrilling proposition. As a site of social disorder, Austen uses the picnic gone awry to reveal to readers, and Emma herself, that even a sterling self-presentation fails.

Ahead of the outing, Emma has carefully plotted and schemed how she would like the picnic to play out, but when the group arrives, characters splinter off in different groups than Emma had engineered in her mind. She is confronted with a reality that is different from her imagination. Emma is left with the homely and poor Harriet Smith, a pawn in many of Emma’s games, and Frank Churchill, the attractive but vain suitor. Annoyed, Emma rebuffs

Frank’s flirtations as an overly aggressive show of courting. When the larger group eventually comes back together, unprompted, Frank tells the party that Emma wants to know what everyone else has been thinking. Publicly attributing ideas to Emma that she does not actually have not only goes against her careful self-presentation, but offends social

shan’t I? … Do you not all think I shall?” Miss Bates’s seemingly casual response actually demonstrates a significant amount of vulnerability and selflessness in her desire to save Emma from further humiliation. Keen readers will notice her wit, too; she has said exactly three rather dull things, offering herself up for ridicule.

sensibilities. This is a shocking remark that is deeply embarrassing for Emma. Frank quickly tries to save the moment by saying Emma actually wants to play a game: everyone needs to go around and say “one thing very clever, or two things moderately clever; or three things very dull indeed.” Miss Bates, a middle aged spinster with nothing to her name but good nature, jumps right in to save the moment: “‘Oh! Very well… That will just do for me, you know. I shall be sure to say three dull things as soon as ever I open my mouth,

Emma should be relieved to fade off into the background of the conversation after the spotlight shifts to Miss Bates’s silly remark. But, teetering on the precipice: “Emma could not resist.” Here again, Emma’s impulse slips into Austen’s narration: short but forthright, this simple observation is full of high drama. Emma cannot resist showing off and clapping back to re-establish dominance. She jumps in and berates Miss Bates: “‘Ah! Ma’am, but there may be a difficulty. Pardon me—but you will be limited as to number— only three at once.” Emma one-ups Miss Bates in a show of power and control, desperately clinging to her ideal vision of herself.

The picnic ends awkwardly. On the way back to Highbury, Emma gets a dose of reality from the landowner and bachelor Mr. Knightley: “Emma…How could you be so unfeeling to Miss Bates? How could

She is confronted with a reality that is different from her imagination.

you be so insolent in your wit to a woman of her character, age, and situation?--Emma, I had not thought it possible.” Emma blushes and tries to laugh it off, but Mr. Knightley continues: “She is poor; she has sunk from the comforts she was born to…Her situation should secure your compassion. It was badly done, indeed! …[to] in thoughtless spirits, and [in] the pride of the moment, laugh at her, humble her–This is not pleasant, Emma.” Mr. Knightley’s admonishment underpins how Emma could operate for good. He points out that Emma’s desire to display herself as superior does not only insult Miss Bates, but actually counters the good effects that Emma could have, given her social position. Emma is for once forced to come to terms with the shallow nature of her desires: “Never had she felt so agitated, mortified, grieved, at any circumstance in her life. She was most forcibly struck. The truth of his representation there was no denying.”

Austen makes it clear that Emma’s sterling self-presentation lacks a vital component: empathy. Even after Mr. Knightley expressly instructs her to think about Miss Bates, Emma is “agitated, mortified, grieved” for herself, not for poor Miss Bates. Emma visits Miss Bates the next morning to smooth things over, but

never attempts an outright apology. Emma believes her mere presence is enough to repent for her misgivings at Box Hill. She leaves without mentioning the faux pas and as she walks home, thinks, “[she] could not regret having gone to Miss Bates, but she wished she had left ten minutes earlier.” As the novel progresses, Emma’s marriage plots and schemes for her friends and herself fail spectacularly, undermining her position as the puppeteer of Highgrove snob-ciety.

Austen’s critique, then, is that selfimage crafted upon the perceived authority of social status—merely because that is the way things have been—renders Emma heartless and cruel. Without the capacity to understand others or act in a way that would benefit others at no expense, Emma has no authority, real or imagined. By allowing Emma’s thoughts and impulses to invade the narration, Austen’s critique becomes personal. Readers have an intimate view of Emma while also having the ability to see the entire tableau of Highbury. Providing this dual view gives readers a wider scope, which in turn creates an opportunity for reflection: how does the desire to hold tight to our own idea of selfimage stand up against the reality of human nature?

Bite Threshold

Pam Skehan

I. Murphy or Monster?

I adopted Murphy, an eight-month-old chocolate Lab mix with bright green eyes and brindle feet, from Jefferson Parish Animal Shelter in the summer of 2012. “Owner surrender” was the only thing written on his chart. The shelter was full, so Murphy was discounted to the price of a cat: twelve dollars. He made no sound and had to be carried up stairs. This shyness faded, and, within weeks, he was jumping over couches and howling at full volume. He explored his new world by chewing everything in sight and did about a thousand dollars worth of damage in his first month with us, quickly exceeding the twelve-dollar tab we had bargained for.

On walks, he picked fights with neighborhood stray cats, squirrels, swans, mail carriers, and other dogs. We got weekly reports from doggy daycare that he wasn’t playing well with others. What had become of this innocent animal I had claimed as my own? Did I have a…bad dog? My beautiful, gentle creature had turned into a monster!

We enrolled in every training class available. I read Cesar Millan, watched Pitbullsand Parolees , and bought every product on the market to entertain, soothe, and redirect Murphy, most of which he destroyed. We even consulted a canine psychologist. I learned that every dog has a bite threshold. Dogs experience something called trigger stacking. Here’s how it works: A dog is on a walk and smells a cat hiding under a car. Then it hears a dog bark from behind a fence. Finally, it turns a corner, and BAM, the mailman. One of these events alone may be tolerable, but encountering all three can push dogs over the edge.

There are no bad dogs, nor are there bad breeds; there are just different thresholds and triggers. Murphy reacts with violence when he is afraid. As we offered unconditional love and reassurance to Murphy, over time, he gained trust in his environment, and his responses softened.

BiteThreshold, by Pam Skehan

Bite Threshold II by Pam Skehan

II. Hostile Haymakers

As I grew to understand my dog and his worldview, I saw some parallels to human psychology. Leading up to the 2016 election, the political rift grew unlike anything I had ever seen before. Growing up with people on both sides of the aisle, there were always playful jabs, but the discourse was mostly civil. Somewhere along the line, playful jabs became hostile haymakers. People became more deeply entrenched in their worldviews, and extremist groups gained traction. A high-school classmate, once a dreadlocked vegan skateboarder, started a neo-nazi website that became the most visited hate site in the world.

The pandemic and the protests of 2020 deepened the chasm. New labels entered the lexicon, such as anti-maskers, anti-vaxxers, social justice warriors, woke police, fake news, and cancel culture. A battle formed over Black and blue lives. Issues began to feel increasingly black or white, life or death. The anger I saw stemmed from fear: fear of losing lives, liberty, power, privilege. Any of these threats alone are disturbing, but, stacked up over time, they drive people past their thresholds.

III. Dumpster Gator

In 2021, Hurricane Ida hit Louisiana—another trigger to add to the stack. Citizens were displaced for weeks or longer, returning home to ripped-off roofs and debris-lined streets. In the wreckage, a bizarrely unifying symbol emerged. An alligator somehow landed in a hot pink dumpster covered with a bright blue tarp adorned with a vibrant red hibiscus flower. The image resonated with citizens and became affectionately known as Dumpster Gator. The mysterious tableau quickly filled headlines and social media feeds. Dumpster Gator became an icon of order in chaos, resilience in the face of adversity, a makeshift unifying memorial, and a moment of beautiful absurdity in an ugly chapter, and the image nestled into my subconscious.

DumpsterGator by Pam Skehan

IV. A Morbid Bouquet

After returning to New Orleans after Hurricane Ida, Murphy killed a possum in the backyard. He left it sprawled out on the grass, a proud display of his efforts to protect our home. The sight was horrifying, but mesmerizing. It flashed a wide, toothy grin, long rows of jagged teeth, and yellow claws furled at its sides. I monitored its claws for any twitches of life, hoping it was playing possum. A morbid bouquet formed in my mind, and I decided to memorialize the battle between Murphy and this possum in my piece, BiteThreshold . Gaping jaws lined with brindle fur were intertwined with lush tropical foliage, bright hibiscus, and prismatic birds of paradise. Suspended in a lavender plane, this scene exists only in a dream world or on a macabre wallpaper. I becan duplicating the image and tessellating the snouts and claws. I played with this imagery using other imagined backyard brawls.

In BiteThresholdII , two Doberman snouts appear in a Rorschach formation, mirroring out from the center, surrounded with acorns, squirrel feet and tails, blue thistles, and white anemones. Iridescent glitter beams from the dog's teeth and strings of saliva. Dobermans were bred to be working guard dogs, known for their attack and defense. They are often stereotyped as an aggressive breed though they are loyal and affectionate. Squirrels are one of the more celebrated backyard critters, and it if weren't for their fluffy tails, their reputation might be closer to that of a rat.

In Pitbulls&Peonies , a black glitter Rorschach blot splashes across the canvas. A pitbull's gaping grin weaves through the center, and a raccoon peers from behind it. The pitbull is an endearing breed that suffers a bad rap due to the strenght of its jowls. Shelters are dominated by these gentle giants, some euthanized on intake. They are often banned in housing contracts. Pitbulls have a dark history of bloodsports before they were spared by animal cruelty legislation, but their legacy as fighting dogs follows them. Raccoons, affiliated with garbage and disease, are resourceful scavengers with a violent fear response. The animals are encircled with symbols of purity and innocence: delicate blush flowers, eucalyptus, and baby's breath.

V. Raccoons, Possums, and People

Just like Murphy, humans are capable of immense damage. We all have triggers and thresholds. Sometimes there are catastrophic consequences to crossing those thresholds. My time with Murphy has taught me that dogs are inherenty good, gentle, loyal, emotionally complex creatures. Can the same be said for raccoons, possums, or even people? Humanity's capacity for evil is a tough pill to swallow, but I remain optimistc that more unites us than divides us. In Murphy's case, I have found love to be a more powerful force than fear.

Pitbulls&Peonies by Pam Skehan

Small Talk, Bigger Problems

Erin Walker

I am terrible at small talk. Don’t invite me to your barbeque. This isn’t to say that I can’t carry on a conversation. In fact, I’ve been accused of being a bonne vivante and even, when a few drinks have been imbibed, a flirt. But those are in social situations where I have some friends milling about. The ability to keep conversation light and airy and casual with strangers or acquaintances eludes me. It could be that I don’t care about sports and find discussions about the weather miserable. (I hate warm, humid weather and live in Louisiana, so I’m really not set up for success here.)

It could be that I hate the artificial concern embedded in the greeting “How are you?” No one really wants to know how you are. They want the perfunctory “fine” followed by “How about this humidity?” or “You see the game last night?” The answer is always “it’s terrible” or “no.”

In the past, I rejected the entire premise. I don’t need small talk, I thought. It’s a banal, bourgeois attempt to make people feel comfortable, but guess what? Life isn’t comfortable! Let’s not pretend anymore; let’s get right to the meat of things. Let’s strip away the bullshit. As the voice-over of the reality

TV show The Real World suggests, let’s stop getting polite and start getting real.

It was 2015 when I tried something different. I was at a Krewe de Vieux party, standing awkwardly by a bowl of Zapps and king cake. After a few haphazard attempts at conversation, I took a risk and introduced my new ice-breaker. Instead of “What’s up?” or “How are you?”, I asked, “What’s your ailment?”. I got a surprised laugh and then an honest response from a bespectacled woman with flowers tattoos crawling up her bare arms.

“I had a herniated disc last year, and it’s still wonky.”

“Really? How’d you herniate your disc?”

“Trapeze.”

“What?!” Already this was more interesting than a conversation about how difficult it was to find parking. And then a few other strangers walked up to the table. They had to answer the same question, “What’s your ailment?”.

“Psoriasis,” said a surprisingly young man. A woman in a pink bob and a copious amount of glitter on her decolletage gleefully shared her strange ailment:

“I have a weird thing where my blood produces too much iron. It’s called hemochromatosis, and I have to give blood once a month so it doesn’t build up in my system.”

“It’s like modern-day bloodletting,” the lanky asthmatic commented.

“Maybe the whole leeches thing worked for some people back in the day?” an anesthesiologist without a gallbladder surmised. Aucafé,ditl'Absinthe, Béraud, 1909

And it snowballed from there. My husband, Mike, who had been watching the parade while I tested out my anti-small-talk-question, came in to get a snack and was greeted by me and a gaggle of new friends and conditions, bonded by our shared vulnerabilities. I introduced him to the crew,

“This is Sheena, she has Type I Diabetes, check out her cool pump. And her partner, Christy, who has TMJ; she wears a mouth guard to keep from clenching at night…”

Mike laughed, shook his head a bit, and then told them all about the Cajun ailment, Guillain-Barré syndrome, in which the body produces too much bilirubin. Someone Googled bilirubin on their phone, and we all briefly fell down the jaundice rabbit hole, as you do.

This may seem strange and a bit morbid, but it worked. I connected with strangers at a party. Really connected. Begone, trite, insincere greetings! “What’s your ailment?” is the new black. Problem solved.

Except it didn’t always work out so brilliantly. I employed this opening salvo multiple times with great success, but soon discovered, unsurprisingly, that it can go dark fast. To me, ailment connotes something lighter, an annoyance, not a debilitating horrific condition. A weird mole, but you know, not a malignant one.

After a few conversations that were too personal and even worse, boring, I decided that “What’s your ailment?” was not the panacea I had hoped for. And there’s a fine line between authentic connection and over-sharing.

I needed help, so I consulted a variety of sources about how to talk small when you

only ever want to talk big. The advice was essentially the same across the board from the Landers Sisters to Reddit to Harvard Business Review. I’ve distilled it to three simple recommendations, so you don’t have to sift through business jargon and clichéd truisms.

1. Keep it light. Commiserate about how the copier/coffee/A/C sucks. The topics should be safe, and probably humdrum, but it’s not about wowing anyone with your inimitable eccentricity or shocking them with a quirky malady.

2. Ask questions and actually listen. Turns out people like it when you show interest in them. We’re social creatures with a penchant for talking about ourselves (e.g., this article).

3. Remember that we’re all awkward. 99% of people appreciate any small gesture to connect. Occasionally, we should be brave enough to build a bridge, even if it’s as simple as “how’s it going?”

And the crux of it all is this: I need to get over myself. Small talk allows communities to build trust. Small talk is an opportunity to briefly acknowledge we’re all in this existential soup together without zapping each other of emotional energy like batshit psychic vampires. We’re also not characters in an Aaron Sorkin drama or partygoers in Oscar Wilde’s salon, lobbing wellcrafted witticisms at one another or revealing deeply-wrought truths about the current state of affairs at every opportunity.

So, what do you think? This [insert type of inclement weather] gonna affect the big [insert sporting event] tonight?

WATCHING THE DETECTIVES

ASubjective Ranking of Screen ofAgatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot

Sean Patterson

When I was about eight or nine years old, shortly after we got cable (probably sometime a rainy Sunday afternoon watching the 1974 film adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Murder on HBO, which meant that it had no commercials, which was virtually unheard-of at the time; through in a single sitting without pausing it, which is virtually unheard-of today.

It was my first introduction to the works of Agatha Christie; and I was captivated by indomitable, idiosyncratic detective. It wouldn’t be an understatement to say that I wanted would happen upon a dead body under suspicious circumstances and have to figure out whodunnit. and without on-demand access to any other films featuring him, I turned to the novels, of Christie introduced Poirot in her first novel, 1920’s TheMysteriousAffairatStyles. She detectives of the day, including Sherlock Holmes. Poirot, however, disdains Holmes’s method to rely on his so-called “little grey cells,” his intellect, to solve his cases. Christie introduces

Poirot was an extraordinary looking little man. He was hardly more than five feet, four with great dignity. His head was exactly the shape of an egg, and he always perched it moustache was very stiff and military. The neatness of his attire was almost incredible. have caused him more pain than a bullet wound. Yet this quaint dandified little man limped badly, had been in his time one of the most celebrated members of the Belgian had been extraordinary, and he had achieved triumphs by unravelling some of the most (Christie, TheMysteriousAffairatStyles)

Portrayals Poirot

sometime in the early-to-mid ‘80s), I spent MurderontheOrientExpress. It was time; and I had to watch it straight

the character of Hercule Poirot, Christie’s wanted to be like him. I just knew that someday I, too, whodunnit. Poirot was that kind of character; of which there are, blessedly, many.

She drew her inspiration from other popular method of sniffing about for clues, preferring instead introduces him this way: four inches, but carried himself it a little on one side. His incredible. I believe a speck of dust would man who, I was sorry to see, now Belgian police. As a detective, his flair most baffling cases of the day.

Poirot would go on to appear in a total of thirty-three novels, over fifty short stories, and even two plays. His literary presence spans fifty-five years, and he is to date the only literary character to receive an obituary on the front page of the New York Times (below the fold, but front page, nonetheless). While Christie was known for her fiendishly clever plots, the quality of her novels varies widely. Her later novels, particularly those featuring Poirot, often show only glimmers of the brilliance of her early years, although we know now that these novels offer compelling evidence that Christie may have been in cognitive decline, possibly due to Alzheimer’s disease.

The portrayals of Poirot in film and television also vary widely in quality, but not for such poignant reasons. Some Poirots are brilliant, and some...well, not so much. The essence of the character always manages to come through, though, whether shining brightly through the right actor in the role or glowing faintly through the clouds of strange choices and miscasting.

What follows is an incredibly subjective, yet wholly correct, ranking of some of these portrayals. I say “some,” because a truly exhaustive ranking is next to impossible. Christie has been adapted in countries all over the world and for the odd film or television episode that has been lost to the ages. So this is essentially a ranking of the UK or US portrayals of Poirot that I’ve actually seen. If you don’t care for it, write your own list.

Alfred Molina

MurderontheOrientExpress, 2001* (made-for-TV)

Watch it here:

This adaptation of MurderontheOrientExpress is one of three we’ll see in this list; and the biggest problem with it is that it pales in comparison with every other adaptation of MurderontheOrientExpress, and in every conceivable way. Everything just feels off, even the frequently great Alfred Molina as Hercule Poirot. One misstep is that the action is set in the 2000s, rather than the 1930s; and it’s full of such specific oh-so-contemporary references that it feels instantly dated. (In fact, one significant clue is the dropped stylus from a Blackberry. Remember those?)

The star power, so often a highlight of a Christie film, is also suspiciously low here, with only Leslie Caron, Meredith Baxter-Birney, and Peter Strauss around to liven up a cast of unknowns. And in the middle of it all is Alfred Molina’s Poirot, with floppy hair and a tone-on-tone shirt-tie combo, looking about as imposing as some guy trying to find a nice wine in a grocery store. It’s only in the interrogations that you see fleeting glimpses of the “little grey cells” at work, and you wonder what Molina could have done in a better version of this story.

*Triggerwarning:It's2001,sothereisaLOTofbeige.

Austin Trevor

Alibi, 1931, now believed lost

LordEdgwareDies, 1934 9.

Black Coffee, 1931, also believed lost

Watch it here:

Trevor’s Poirot is clean-shaven and looks nothing like Christie’s description. Trevor himself believed he got the role merely because he could do a decent French accent, which may be true. But Poirot’s essence comes through, if only in brief flashes. Granted, those flashes are mainly due to Christie’s characterization and plot construction, and not so much to Trevor’s performance. Nevertheless, the existing film is stylish and set in the right time period; and it’s diverting in the way that cheapies of the 1930s often are. You could do worse. (See #10.)

Watch a clip:

In this case, Coco doesn’t play Poirot, exactly. MurderbyDeath, written by Neil Simon and directed by Robert Benton, parodies the tropes of classic murder mysteries. A group of famous detectives are summoned to a secluded mansion to solve an impossible crime. None of it makes any sense, and much of it is wildly inappropriate by today’s standards; but if you know the sources being spoofed and take it for what it is, it’s fun stuff, kind of like Clue before there was Clue.

Coco plays Milo Perrier, a thinly veiled send-up of Poirot who’s depicted as a closeted fop constantly gorging himself on chocolate. Not very Poirot-like, but in his dapper formal wear, with his vain little mustache, Coco does look the part. You know at an instant who he’s meant to be. It’s broadly comic turn full of brilliant moments, such as Perrier’s refutation that the dinner wine has been poisoned. The whole thing is a goof; but here and there, Coco, who was a much-lauded character actor in his own right, shows us what an interesting Poirot he might have been, had he been given the chance.

*Triggerwarning:Ifyoudon’twanttoseePeterSellersinyellowfacelampooning CharlieChanandDr.FuManchu,youmightwanttoskipthisone.

Tony Randall

Watch it here:

The original 1936 novel The A.B.C. Murders features another one of Christie’s more ingenious plots, and this wacky flick sets it in the swinging ‘60s. This is a peculiar time-capsule of a movie, very much in the vein of the successful Pink Panther films which had come a couple of years before. Tony Randall, famous at the time as a comedic character actor and later known as Felix Ungar of TV’s The Odd Couple, plays Poirot more like Peter Sellers’s Inspector Clouseau; but some of the hallmark qualities we expect are evident. Of course, there’s the extravagant mustache and the fussy sartorial style, but there’s also a keen sense of detection amid all the buffoonery. Like Coco, Randall gives us a ridiculous Poirot, but he’s still recognizable as Poirot, even if the world he inhabits isn’t always recognizable as that of Agatha Christie.

*Triggerwarning:Ifyoudon’twanttoseeHerculePoirot(orTonyRandall) cavortingaroundinatowelinaLondonbathhouse,youmightwanttoskipahead to12:15onthetimecode.Ontheotherhand,ifyoudowanttoseeHerculePoirot (orTonyRandall)cavortingaroundinatowelinaLondonbathhouse,thatlong sequencestartsaroundthe7:00mark.

Ian Holm

MurderbytheBook, 1965 (made-for-TV) 6.

Watch it here:

A one-off curiosity based in fact, MurderbytheBook imagines a face-off between Hercule Poirot and his creator Dame Agatha. The true part of the story involves two manuscripts that Christie had written during World War II: one a Poirot novel, and the other a novel featuring her elderly spinster detective Miss Jane Marple. Each was meant to serve as a farewell to its main character, and Christie stored them in a vault with the intention of having them released in the event of her death. Some thirty-five years later, in 1975, Christie’s literary output had dwindled; and her publishers encouraged her to release the secret Poirot novel, entitled Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case. The catch? Christie had grown to hate Poirot in his heyday, and the manuscript she wrote ends with his death.

The rest of MurderbytheBook is clever invention. The publishers leave the manuscript with Christie for her to review, and that night she is visited by none other than Hercule Poirot himself. He states that he’s there to prevent a murder: his own. What happens next is an existential battle of wits between creation and creator. Ian Holm, the aging Bilbo Baggins in Peter Jackson’s Tolkien adaptations, is Poirot here; and despite a slightly cartoonish appearance, he is every bit as priggish and punctilious as you might expect Poirot to be. At times, you can see why Christie, played by Academy Award winner Peggy Ashcroft, would want to kill him. You can also see why he’s her most enduring creation.

5.

John Malkovich

The ABC Murders, 2018 (television miniseries)

Watch the trailer:

This is the second adaptation of The A.B.C. Murders on this list, and it’s a dark, twisted take on the tale, much the antithesis of its comic predecessor. Writer Sarah Phelps did several Christie adaptations for the BBC, and each one is grim and thrilling. (Her And Then There Were None, in particular, is like a gut punch.) This version is no exception. At the heart of it all, though, is the curious casting and even curiouser performance of John Malkovich. Malkovich is the kind of performer who doesn’t so much bend himself to fit a role as he does bend the role to fit him. His Poirot is one we’ve never seen before. Here is a man whose glory days are behind him, whose loneliness haunts him, and whose future looks bleak. He’s noticeably older than we expect, with an almost ordinary white mustache and goatee, and clothes that have perhaps seen better days. But his mind is sharp and flinty, his eyes sparkle with fascination at each new move the villain makes. He’s like a Poirot from the multiverse, a version we didn’t know was in there but who is nevertheless a living iteration of the character. It’s a weird take, but it works.

4.

Kenneth Branagh

MurderontheOrientExpress, 2017*

DeathontheNile, 2022*

AHauntinginVenice, late 2023

Watch the trailers:

I’m grateful to Kenneth Branagh for bringing all-star Christie adaptations back to the big screen. I’m frustrated with Kenneth Branagh for starting off with remakes of MurderontheOrientExpress and Death on the Nile, two of my all-time favorite films that were done perfectly the first time. I’m intrigued by Kenneth Branagh for making such bold changes in his adaptations, like conflating characters or rewriting major plot points; but I’m also disappointed in Kenneth Branagh for his failure to trust the source material. And I’m confused by Kenneth Branagh for anchoring these adaptations with a Poirot that is so deliberately, willfully, distractingly different from any we’ve seen before.

If you think I’m referring to Kenneth Branagh a little too much, it’s because Kenneth Branagh’s adaptations are all about Kenneth Branagh, as is his Poirot. On first watch, I found his take laborious, too much of a muchness, with choices made just for the sake of being able to make them: Oh,look!Hismustacheisbig andgray!That’sdifferent!We’veneverseenthatbefore! (Actually, Peter Ustinov did gray first. But, seriously, Branagh’s mustache looks like a scrub brush. It’s ludicrous. AND HE HAS A SOUL PATCH!) Anyway, Branagh’s Poirot does the job; he unmasks deception, and he solves the case. But the accent is a little too studied, the fastidiousness almost clinical. I almost don’t believe him as Poirot. He seems fabricated, but I’ll be damned if he doesn’t begin to grow on you. In Death on the Nile, we get an invented World War I-era backstory for the man and his mustache. And suddenly, there’s a hint that maybe the man we see isn’t really the man at all, but rather a façade for him to hide behind. The next installment in Branagh’s series is AHauntinginVenice, ostensibly an adaptation of Christie’s Hallowe'enParty, but undoubtedly filled with another mix of bold changes, odd choices, and more clues to understanding a man who is fundamentally a mystery. I don’t love everything about Branagh’s Poirot, but I also can’t wait to see what he does next.

*Triggerwarning: Did I mention that HE HAS A SOUL PATCH?!

3.

Peter Ustinov

DeathontheNile, 1978

EvilUndertheSun, 1982

ThirteenatDinner, 1985 (TV)*

DeadMan’sFolly, 1986 (TV)*

Murder in Three Acts, 1986 (TV)*

AppointmentwithDeath, 1988

Watch Death on the Nile...

...and the trailer for Evil Under the Sun

I’ll be upfront about this one: I love Ustinov as Poirot. He was tapped to assume the role in 1978’s Death on the Nile, after Albert Finney, who played Poirot in 1974’s critical and commercial hit MurderontheOrientExpress, declined to go through the same costume and makeup challenges in the Egyptian heat for a sequel. Ustinov stepped in and made the role his own, although he wasn’t to everyone’s taste. Christie’s daughter Rosalind Hicks supposedly saw him on set and protested, “But that’s not Poirot! He’s not like that!” To which Ustinov replied, “He is now.” How do you not love that?

Ustinov clearly has fun with the role, and he is a delight to watch. His Poirot has a musicality to his speech, a way of lilting his way through a line, only to draw out the last syllable as though he were setting a trap, which makes his interrogations and denouements particularly entertaining. Ustinov’s Poirot eats, and it’s always a comic bit. He’s also forced to deal with nature in ways that clearly make him uncomfortable, such as a tour of the pyramids in the hot Egyptian sun, or a swim in the cold Adriatic Sea. He’s comic, but never excessively so.

Ustinov’s Death on the Nile and Evil Under the Sun are arguably classics. Both are gorgeous films, filled with terrific performances from the rest of the cast. Death on the Nile gives us an imperiously bitchy Bette Davis, a waspish Maggie Smith, a positively unhinged Mia Farrow, and a gloriously, elaborately drunk Angela Lansbury. Evil Under the Sun counters with an even bitchier Diana Rigg, an even more waspish Maggie Smith, a viciously snippy Roddy McDowall, and a broadly brassy Sylvia Miles. And Ustinov’s Poirot keeps it all in balance. Everyone’s having the time of their lives, and you will, too.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the TV movies. Updated to the 1980s and clearly done on the cheap, they’re a pale imitation of the big-screen films, despite star power from the likes of Faye Dunaway and Tony Curtis. As with the other anachronistic adaptations mentioned earlier, everything feels wrong in them. Ustinov made one last big-screen foray as Poirot in 1988’s AppointmentWithDeath. But it’s shot like a TV movie, and no one looks like they’re having any fun. It’s not terrible; it’s just dull. Fortunately, these weaker entries in Ustinov’s Poirot resume do nothing to dim the grandeur of Death on the Nile and Evil Under the Sun. They’re fantastic movies, and he’s a fantastic Poirot.

...and the trailer for AppointmentwithDeath

*Triggerwarning:I’llspareyouclipsfromthesubparTVmovies,butifyouseek themoutyourself,don’tsayIdidn’twarnyou.Stickwith Death on the Nile and Evil

Under the Sun.Thoseareablast.Butskiptherest.Themid-1980swereanugly,ugly time.Bingesome Murder, She Wrote,instead.

David Suchet

AgathaChristie’sPoirot, 1989-2013, 70 episodes 2.

Watch the first episode:

Here’s where I commit heresy. David Suchet is not my number-one pick. Practically every other ranking of Poirot performances enshrines Suchet at the top of the heap, the portrayal by which all others should be measured. And Suchet’s Poirot is an impressive feat, no doubt about it. In preparation for the role, Suchet read everything Christie wrote about the character; and he built his performance bit by bit from her descriptions, with a commitment that is nothing short of exacting. Visually, he captures the look of Poirot so well that it’s become definitive. In fact, many find Branagh’s subsequent take on Poirot disappointing because he doesn’t come as close as Suchet in approximating Poirot’s appearance and attitude.

But Suchet’s is an excessively mannered performance, particularly in early seasons. There’s a delicacy about it all, a sterility, a preciousness that makes Poirot feel like something of a museum piece. You feel the weight of all that research, and it takes a few seasons for it all to click, or at least it does for me. The plots in the early seasons also feel somewhat slight because they’re dominated by adaptations of the short stories rather than the novels. It’s a top-notch production, but I don’t so much love it as admire it.

What’s extraordinary about the series, and about Suchet’s performance, is the sheer breadth of it all. In twenty-four years, the series and Suchet take us through the entirety of the Poirot canon, save for a handful of short stories that Christie developed into other, more prominent works. We see Poirot (and Suchet) grow and change over time, especially in the later seasons when he can be quite fiery and passionate. And while twenty-four years is only about half of Poirot’s fifty-fiveyear literary presence, Suchet’s Poirot stands as an incredible journey for actor and audience. He’s magnificent. He’s just not my absolute favorite.

Albert Finney

MurderontheOrientExpress, 1974

Watch the trailer:

My favorite Poirot performance is the one that captivated me on that rainy afternoon so many years ago and still does today. MurderontheOrientExpress is a largely faithful adaptation of Christie’s original, painstakingly rendered. I remember being struck by the look of it, even as a kid. Directed by Sidney Lumet, with production and costume design by Tony Walton, it’s a sumptuous film; and it feels breathtakingly authentic. The attention to detail is meticulous. You can really feel those claustrophobic train compartments with their glossy lacquered woodwork; and it was easy for the 8-year-old me to imagine what it was like being stuck on that train, even if I hadn’t yet been on any train myself. Even the opening credits are lush: gold and black Art Deco letters superimposed over pink satin arranged and lit so beautifully that it looks almost like marble. And those letters spell out a true all-star cast, many of whom can be effectively identified by one name only: Bacall! Bergman! Connery! Gielgud! Redgrave! But first among equals, and the only one to appear out of alphabetical order, is the one who plays Poirot himself, the great Albert Finney.

Finney’s performance as Poirot is specific and unique. It not only suits the character; it brings him to vivid life. Finney’s Poirot holds his head precisely as Christie described, perpetually perched a little to one side, a position which makes his neck disappear almost entirely. His skin has an almost ghostly pallor, as though he has assiduously avoided the sun at all costs. His hair and mustache are a deep, inky, unnatural black, as glossy as the lacquered paneling of the train car; and both are brilliantined into ruthless submission. (Dame Agatha’s only quibble with Finney’s performance was that his mustache was insufficiently magnificent.) Finney’s Poirot is fastidious and fussy about his appearance almost to the point of absurdity. There’s even a fascinating sequence in which he goes through an elaborate bedtime ritual involving a hairnet, a mustache protector, lotions, a pair of gloves, and an imaginary violin.

Finney’s is not a comic turn, but it’s not devoid of humor. There’s a droll wit at the heart of his performance, which is consistent with the character Christie wrote. Take, for example, the moment when Poirot inspects the murder scene with Signior Bianchi (an Italianized version of the novel’s Monsieur Bouc, played by Martin Balsam) and Dr. Constantine (George Coulouris) and asks in singsong, “Bianchi, Doctor, have you noticed that there are too many clu-ues in this roo-oom?” He also has some obvious fun playing cat-and-mouse (and occasionally the straight man) with his suspects, such as in his interrogation with the Princess Dragomiroff (a fascinating Wendy Hiller), when he asks, “You never smile, Madame la Princesse?” Her reply: “My doctor has advised against it.”

With a train car of larger-than-life characters played to the hilt by largerthan-life celebrities, you could forgive Finney if he’d simply chosen to be the calm, neutral center of it all; but he does a good deal more than that. Only thirty-seven years old at the time of filming, Finney was far younger than Poirot, who had already retired from an illustrious policing career by the time of his first appearance in TheMysteriousAffairatStyles, some fourteen or fifteen years before Murder on theOrientExpress. Finney successfully inhabits the old-age makeup and bodycontouring padding, and he imbues the character with vitality and drive. His Poirot is on the hunt for a killer. He commands the screen and holds your interest, especially during the denouement in which he sums up the case in a monologue that lasts nearly 25 minutes.

Finney earned a Best Actor Academy Award nomination for his performance, and the film earned a total of six nominations, including Best Picture. Agatha Christie herself, who would die a little over a year after it was released, deemed the film one of the two best adaptations of her works (the other being Billy Wilder’s terrific Witness for the Prosecution from 1957, which has nothing to do with Poirot).

My initial idea in developing this piece was to align all these performances as a kind of Ship of Theseus, showing how the character of Poirot always endures despite the peculiarities and peccadilloes of individual performances. But what I discovered, in stringing together all these performances and the films that feature them, is that the truer example of the Ship of Theseus is not Poirot, but me. Because no matter how much I change over the years, whenever I revisit these movies and performances that I love so dearly, I am again and will forever be that eight-yearold curled up on the couch on a rainy afternoon, hoping one day he’ll solve a great mystery of his own.

The Persistence of Place: An Economic Hitman, the Far-reaching Agribusiness, and a Solution to A Book Review

William Beachy

Far-reaching Tentacles of to Food Deserts

The world has been consistently connected by trade since the Europeans chanced upon the Americas around 1500. The consequences of this interconnectedness have had transformative effects upon what we eat, what we build, what we believe, and whom we count as fellow citizens on a global scale. After World War II, this pattern of change has accelerated. Three books which document aspects of this acceleration also present an alarming portrait of unwanted consequences.

John Perkins decries the destructive effects of multinational companies' development projects often funded by the World Bank. He bases this viewpoint upon his firsthand experience in the business, which he recounts in New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (Berrett-Koehler, 2016). In EatingtoExtinction (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), Dan Saladino describes the farreaching tentacles of agribusiness on almost every continent upon local food cultures and traditional farming. Many place-specific subspecies of plants and animals have been almost wiped out, which may endanger the global food supply.

Country Day alumnus and Furman Sociology Professor Kenneth Kolb

writing in his new book Retail Inequality (University of California Press, 1922) adds to the level of concern. Using an impressive assembly of his personal interviews with residents of Southernside and West Greenville, Kolb describes the effects of migration to suburbs and urban renewal in his hometown of Greenville, South Carolina. He proposes that the "food desert" concept is part of a much larger story about how "good retail" options have left these neighborhoods during the past half century. This has been an unwanted consequence of the explosion of big-box stores in the suburbs that has driven smaller locally-owned enterprises out of business.

What is most interesting is that all three authors do not sound a note of despair despite the disconcerting evidence compiled in their work. Each has a positive focus on how solutions can and are being attempted by people around the world today. A common aspect of these solutions is the role played by individuals who have decided to preserve traditional and often more sustainable economies in their unique localities.

As an economist for a multinational corporation that built power grids

for developing nations, it was John Perkins's job to create projections for a nation's economic potential that qualified it for generous loans from the World Bank and other international lending institutions. These loans usually caused long-term indebtedness in those nations and dependence on further development

of natural resources and the supporting infrastructure. Benefits went mostly to the corporations building the facilities and extracting the resources rather than the overall populations in the nations involved. Perkins's work took him to a number of these nations where he took an interest in the local customs and culture as well as performed his job as an economist. His interactions with local people gave him unusual firsthand insight into the resentment which people in these nations harbored toward the United States.

One of his earliest experiences was in Indonesia during the Vietnam War years. He was invited to attend a dalang, or traditional puppet show, where the United States was portrayed by a Nixon puppet. This puppet grabbed fruit off trees bearing the names of Vietnam and a number of nations in the Middle East. After taking a bite, the Nixon puppet would toss the fruit away with distaste. When the Nixon puppet grabbed a fruit bearing the name of Indonesia, an Indonesian puppet protested and was promptly run through by the Nixon puppet's henchman with the pole of an American flag. The henchman was dressed in a business suit and carried a bucket with a dollar sign on it as well as the American flag. Perkins

What is most interestingisthat all three authors do not sound a note ofdespairdespite thedisconcerting evidencecompiled in their work. Each hasapositivefocus on how solutions canandarebeing attemptedbypeople around the world today.

was horrified and asked, "What can we do to change this?" The response from one of his Indonesian companions was:

Stop being so greedy, and so selfish. Realize that there is more to the world than your big houses and fancy stores. People are dying, and you worry about oil for your cars. Babies are dying of thirst and you search the fashion magazines for the latest styles....

Perkins was invited to speak in person with Panamanian President Omar Torrijos in 1972. Torrijos was interested in Perkins's company building facilities in Panama, but he wished the benefits of the development to go to his people. He indicated he was well aware how companies like United Fruit had exploited Latin American nations in the past, and he knew that most of the "corporatocracy" would be opposed to his new approach. He also understood that opposing these powerful forces could put him in personal danger. Nevertheless, Torrijos boldly proposed, "Give me what's best for my people, and I'll give you all the work that you want." Later, Torrijos also successfully negotiated the Panama Canal Zone Treaty with the Carter administration. He died mysteriously in 1981 when a small plane crashed

while taking him to a house he owned in the mountains of Panama.

Once again, in 1977, Perkins was invited to a private interview, this time with Iranian dissidents who were bitterly opposed to the Shah and his promotion of development by Western companies in Iran. When they warned him that a large number of Iranians opposed the Shah, whose days in power were numbered, Perkins asked why they were warning him about this. He received this reply, "We'd be happy to see your company go bankrupt. However, we'd rather see you leave Iran. Just one company like yours, walking away, could start a trend. That's what we're hoping…." The Shah was overthrown and had fled to Egypt by January of 1979.

The vignettes in Dan Saladino's book about recent trends in food production are not so grim as John Perkins's accounts of his experiences as an "economic hitman." Even though they point out the potential catastrophes which may result from growing dependence on single genetic varieties of plants and animals, they also tell of many individuals around the world who are preserving plants, animals, and foods that are unique to their particular locale.

Maize or corn production has become increasingly streamlined so that most farmers grow hybrid varieties of "dent" corn, which is very productive with regard to yields but not as nutritious. Uniformity even cost Midwestern farmers $6 billion during the early 1970s when a rapidly spreading fungus destroyed 100 billion bushels of their crop. However, many in Mexico have been fighting to preserve their traditional maize crops which are less likely to cause the obesity that has been on the rise with the recent introduction of processed corn from the United States. One chef in Mexico City pays a premium to farmers who grow ancient indigenous varieties. He likens maize to wine where the grapes grown in particular regions of the world produce wines with unique desirable qualities. As for Midwestern dent corn, he says, "That's maize we don't cook with. It belongs in a bag of corn chips."

Saladino also describes how chickens have become similarly homogenized through genetic engineering, so much so that 70% of chickens slaughtered today are genetically related to the winners of a mid-twentieth century breeding competition to create the "Chicken of Tomorrow." In the same chapter, he interweaves the story of a South

Korean farmer whose family has preserved the Black Ogye chicken for generations: "This chicken has lived with our ancestors on this land for at least 700 years. If Yeonsan Ogye were to disappear, we would lose a piece of our souls."

A final story of preserving a traditional variety of plant comes from Venezuela. A chef in Caracas initiated a movement to produce high-quality chocolate bars from Venezuelan Criollo cacao. Before the oil boom, this sought after cacao had been Venezuela's main export, but production has declined since the oil boom and the hardships of the

Remarkably,allthree authors conclude thattherearemany signsthatsolutionsto these dire conditions arealreadybeing practicedby individuals around the world.

Maduro regime. Historically, the cacao was exported to Europe to be made into fine chocolate. Chef Di Giacobbe has not only succeeded in making and marketing her own fine chocolate bars from Criollo cacao, but she has also recruited 8,000 other chocolate makers throughout Venezuela. She received the Basque Culinary Prize in 2017 for the social impact of her work as a chef. Her work has given hope to those struggling in the Venezuelan economy and may revive the production of Venezuela's treasured Criollo cacao.

Although Kenneth Kolb's work does not share the international scope of Perkins's and Saladino's books, his RetailInequality does reveal the effects of the same global trends toward "economic efficiency" on his community in Greenville, South Carolina. His interviews caused him to reevaluate the "food desert" concept and perceive it as part of a larger socio-economic dilemma.

The Kash and Karry store, which served residents of West Greenville and Southernside from the 1950s through the 1970s, was one casualty of migration to the suburbs and the development of big-box stores. Kash and Karry was a very large supermarket that old-time residents

remembered fondly as a place to get everything one needed right there in the neighborhood. It had 25 checkout stations and employed 225 people. Men in the neighborhood knew they could get work there. People could also pay their bills there. As textile mills closed and people who could afford it moved to the suburbs, the Kash and Karry went out of business because the population that remained could not support it.

Kolb points out how well-meaning reformers, and he includes himself in that number, have missed the point with their efforts to address the "food desert" problem. This is evident in his description of farm-totable efforts to bring healthier food options closer to residents of poor neighborhoods. Kolb volunteered to work for a month at the local Greenbrier Farms, which operated a popular stall at the city market. What he discovered was that they needed to focus on the quality of their steaks and tomatoes in order to compete with supermarket chains. This put their notably healthy products out of the price range for residents in West Greenville and Southernside. Going so far as to make and can his own tomato sauce from fresh tomatoes, Kolb discovered that his product was still three times more expensive

than the cheapest generic brand in supermarkets. He also discovered that eating healthier food was not necessarily what residents of these neighborhoods wanted most. At the beginning of my research, I presumed to know what they wanted---grocery stores---and why---to change their diets. But that wasn't it. They wanted a grocery store, to be sure. But a new store wouldn't change the way they ate, it would just make it easier, quicker and cheaper to buy things they always buy.

Residents of West Greenville and Southernside experience many limitations, which are common side effects of the mass movement of people to the suburbs and the growth of national big-box store chains along with agribusiness. But Professor Kolb discovered, during his interviews with eighty-five residents, that they are creative and resourceful when devising solutions to overcome these limitations. This involves what Kolb describes as "social capital," making use of personal relationships and helping each other to get things done. A specific example is ride sharing. Kolb describes an elaborate system where residents who don’t have cars arrange with those who do for rides to the grocery store. In

return, they may pay them or return a different sort of favor. At the end of his book, Kolb proposes that the most effective way of helping residents in "food deserts" would be to subsidize these informal ride sharing networks. He suggests that it would be less expensive than building infrastructure, paying taxi drivers, or establishing new economically viable brick and mortar retail establishments in these neighborhoods.

All three authors describe alarming effects of the type of economic growth that has taken place the past 70 years. Both Kolb and Saladino identify a further challenge: the adaptation of human palates to prefer the new more processed and less nutritious foods. Perkins goes so far as to describe the current global economy as a “death economy." Remarkably, all three authors conclude that there are many signs that solutions to these dire conditions are already being practiced by individuals around the world. Perkins proposes replacing the death economy with a life economy and devotes the last chapters in his book to suggestions about how individuals of all ages can make contributions right where they are. Saladino’s book is a collection of stories about individuals around the

world who have devoted their lives to preserving local and sustainable varieties of crops and domesticated animals, which are indispensable ingredients of their traditional food cultures. Kolb is inspired by the resiliency of the people he interviewed and their capacity to rely upon each other to survive their circumstances.

One of the most hopeful stories was Saladino's description of the creation of a seed bank on the arctic Svalbard islands. It is an ideal location for preserving the genetic diversity of the world's crops, and due to the efforts of American botanist Cary Fowler, a facility has been established there during the past 40 years. Not everyone is going to achieve something as dramatic as the Svalbard seed bank, but human agency and the ability of the individual to have a positive impact upon the direction of the world's economy is alive and well. This will usually happen with small acts like giving someone in the neighborhood a ride to the grocery store or getting involved in a community garden project. It will often happen when individuals in their own communities around the world get involved, preserving the sustainable economic traditions of their own cultures. It could be the result of

inviting an outsider to a local cultural event as when the dalang performance made an indelible impression on John Perkins. The persistence of place is an important counterweight to what may seem the irresistible tidal wave of recent global economic trends.

The Pleasure of Exceptions: Patricia

Lockwood’s

No One Is TalkingAbout This A Book Review

Sam Ferguson

Like most men and women of my age and general nerdiness, I am drawn towards online comment sections, those cesspools of opinion in which the learned and the ignorant alike are free to spew, in unsolicited gusts, their most pressing and revealing thoughts and feelings. It was in just such a comment section, in a recent New York Times piece on the closure of some lit mag, that I read the following comment, made by one “ed strong”:

The [novel] form should have been laid to rest around the time of Finnegans Wake. Unfortunately it’s continued to stalk the corridors of our minds for close to a century. Many fine novels have been written during this period, but most of these were, taking the long view, zombie novels, instances of refusing to lie down and abandon the art form.

Mr. strong no doubt resides in the encampment of the learned, but there is something so ignorant, so offensive, so wrongly conceived in his gloating little missive that I had to pen a comment of my own: “You’re kidding, right? I like FinnegansWake as much as the next pretentious show-off, but it’s an aberration of the novel form, not that form’s apotheosis. Aberrations cannot kill or prevent further use of the forms from which they wander!” (My rejoinder then concluded with a just, but unprintable insult, which likely explains why the Gray Lady’s mods, gentle drudges that they are, decided not to publish it).

But why did I feel I had to answer in the first place? And what compelled me to insult this learned stranger? Defensiveness, of course. The sense that I, a youngish writer, had been denied my invitation to a long-disbanded party, like some Cinderella trapped—not by cruel relations, but by Time (that crueler step-mom)— within the scullery of a future without novels, without literature.

The problem, of course, is that “ed strong” is right, at least in part. The literary culture in this country is dispiriting. The tried-but-true cliché is that we have too many writers, nowhere near enough readers. There are as many MFA programs as stars within the firmament, as many unread books as grains of sand in the Sahara. Gone is the humanist questing of the canon, replaced by the airing of grievances and smartphones.

All of which raises that original cliché, the bugbear of the writing class, the nightmare of the scribblers: Is the novel truly dead, as Mr. strong claims? Or is it, like the Thesean ship, different in its planks yet still itself?

I’m inclined, for all my doubts, toward the latter.

Novels are a form of entertainment, simply put. In the bawdy eighteenth century, the patriarchs of Europe feared their daughters read too much. They were wary both of laziness and overheated passions—the indulgence of the mind, the careless stirrings of the heart. Today, of course, this attitude seems quaint, even evil. It is one of the great paradoxes of literary history that we have, in three brief centuries, come to see all reading as a pure and total good: instructive, mindexpanding, intellectually worthwhile, a trick that boosts our empathy and test scores all at once.

The only problem with this shift from panic to approval (explained, in part, by the birth of the English department) is that it leads us to elide the pleasure principle. We read, first and foremost, for delight. Literature, in other words, is neither a series of bland, instructive tomes nor a survey of huge and inscrutable monuments—a tour of the ruins that starts with TheOdyssey, ends with a whimper at FinnegansWake. It is, instead, a means of communicating pleasure: the pleasures of language, of character, of style. But in a time of Peak Content, of relentless screen seductions and the pressure to “connect,” can such delicate pleasures survive? And why should they?

The novelist and poet Patricia Lockwood has an answer. The response is implicit (as all artistic answers must be), and it comes in the form of No One Is TalkingAboutThis, a novel-in-fragments that seeks to distill, then transcend, the strange collective solitude that haunts our screen-stuck age. I write about it now (two years having passed since its first publication) because it mounts a great defense of the so-called zombie form, using the dazzling faults of the internet—meme culture, loudness, metastasizing irony—to Trojan-horse the virtues of the novel, those pleasures unique to the old written word.

The novel’s unnamed protagonist is a woman in her thirties who’s achieved some small celebrity by posting on “the portal” (our heroine’s term for the internet, a word that goes unused throughout the book). Lockwood herself is a semi-famous Tweeter, and her novel teems with insights on the-way-we-doomscroll-now. Her protagonist exists within a solipsistic paradox, familiar, by now, to all real users of the internet: she is resoundingly alone and yet immersed in others’ thoughts, others’ foibles, others’ jokes. Never before has the hive-mind alienation of Twitter, for example, been so perfectly expressed: It was in this place where we were on the verge of losing our bodies that bodies became the most important, it was in the place of the great melting that it became important whether you called it pop or soda growing up, or whether your mother cooked with garlic salt or the real chopped cloves, or whether you had actual art on your walls or posed pictures of your family sitting on logs in front of fake backdrops, or whether you had the one Tupperware stained completely orange. You were zoomed in on the grain, you were out in space, it was the brotherhood of man, and in some ways you had never been flung further from each other. You zoomed in and zoomed in on that warm grain until it looked like the coldness of the moon. This passage contains, in stirring microcosm, the whole of Lockwood’s style: the mounting climax of anaphora, the subtle musicality, the vertiginous containment of the huge within the small. Each element combines into the richness of a voice, at once pathetic and dispassionate, quotidian and epic. It is the presence of this voice, this style, that elevates this novel from the object of its satire, the allures of which seem paltry in comparison.

The book is structured in such passages, each about this length, set off from each other by three dots. These fragments, shored against the protagonist’s ruins, impersonate the brevity of social-media content while concealing a deeper, more

nourishing wholeness. In this way, Lockwood places her work within the wider formal tradition—largely female, decidedly brainy, accessibly avant-garde—of the novel-in-fragments, a tradition begun with Renata Adler’s Speedboat and continued, in the new millennium, by the works of Jenny Offill. The form is classically postmodern, a response to the splinter and sprawl of all narrative. In these fragmented novels, a heroine (usually lashed with ennui) tells of herself in revealing little snippets, seeking desperately for meaning in the chaos of her life. In the process, she inevitably tells on herself, disclosing some infirmity, some failure of the spine or mind or heart.

In the case of Lockwood’s protagonist, the infirmity is irony. She has earned her dubious portal-fame because she once posted, presumably on Twitter, the nonsensical query, “Can a dog be twins?” The post has gone viral, and she spends her days scrolling and posting, scrolling and posting, struggling to recreate that first rush of virality. She is inundated, drowning, in the pointlessly ironic, a problem she’s aware of but is powerless to change. She is powerless, in fact, to change almost anything around her, not least the political nightmares of her day, which are our political nightmares, and which are rarely made less frightening by our jokes or by our earnestness. But irony, our heroine feels, is much more fun than earnestness, and so she cleaves to it in hopeless shame, like a drowning woman clinging to a punctured life preserver. A typical admission, told in close third person, reads as follows:

One hundred years ago, her cat might have been called Mittens or Pussywillow. Now her cat was called Dr. Butthole. There was no way out of it. “Dr. Butthole,” she called at night, almost in despair, until he trotted to the door with the bright feathers of her dignity clinging to his lips and disappeared in his alternating stripes over the threshold. There are those of us who find this stuff hilarious. But a life of such jokes will be empty and parched, and the second half of Lockwood’s book is aimed at the dismantling of pointlessness and irony, the embracing of a new and true sincerity.

In accordance with this turn, the book contains two sections, the first of which concerns the protagonist’s malaise. The second, much more powerful, observes her niece’s infancy. This niece is stricken with an illness (terminal, unnamed) which renders her disfigured and yet strangely beatific—an angel cast down into a broken, blameless body. The Dadaist fart jokes of the novel’s early chapters thus give way to lyric yearning as our heroine connects with something bigger than the internet: the

miracle of human touch, the problems of mortality, the boundaries which separate and bind us. It is here that the novel’s considerable pleasures—the warm, prosodic prose; the surreal use of metaphor; the fluency with culture from its zenith to its depths—are replaced by pleasures greater and more difficult to name. As I read the novel’s second half, I was reminded of Nabokov’s famous comments praising Dickens: “Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. The little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle. Let us be proud… for we are vertebrates tipped at the head with a divine flame.”

The chief effect of NoOneIsTalkingAboutThis, beyond its inducements to laughter (and, on occasion, to the shame-faced recognition of the self), is this tingle of the spine, the stoking of that flame with which we’re tipped. To quote from this section is to risk mere diminishment, to separate a fragment from its whole and thus expose it, undefended, to the leer of the ironic—though of course it must be done, if only to prove Lockwood’s brilliance. In the novel’s final chapter, to offer one example, the protagonist’s niece is deteriorating rapidly, all while she experiences, like any healthy baby, new sensations. Lockwood captures this impossible situation—the passage toward death at the start of a life—with an earnestness that burns away all readerly defenses:

The Enlightenment went on, pouring itself perpetually into the cup of coffee she drank as she watched the baby in those boiled-clear mornings. One day they had the idea to hold a toy piano up to her bare feet, and at the first note she struck she uttered a sound of wild outrage—that they had been letting her kick against air and nothingness when she could have been kicking against music this whole time.

The novel is filled with such devastating moments, and though they call us toward empathy, toward connection and sincerity, their primary effect is that of pleasure, a higher-order pleasure at once human and divine.

All of which returns me to “ed strong,” and his clichéd remarks on the death of the novel. If Mr. strong has a point, it’s in his concession that “many fine novels have been written” since the Wake. He regards such books as exceptions, rare living works among a horde of dreadful “zombie” novels.

I am willing, in the end, to concede to his concession. Lockwood’s novel is exceptional. It is unusually pleasurable, unusually rich in intellectual, aesthetic, and even (dare I say it?) moral power. Lockwood herself is a rare and gifted novelist—a survivor in the gaudy, glowing wreckage of our culture. She deserves our attention, and we, for our part, deserve the great pleasure of reading her.

A Gentleman in Moscow A Book Review

Shay Steckler

I read JaneEyre on the train from Tours to Paris, and Paris to Nice, and back again. I had visited the Tours FNAC before I left on holiday and picked the classic Brontë tale out of the limited selection of English-language books. Perhaps it was months of missing my native language, but perhaps it was indeed the eloquence of the English and the story itself that made me fall in love with JaneEyre. Placed high on the pedestal, it was my rapid-fire answer for the old adage, “What’s your favorite book?” Then along came Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, and he began to topple the likes of Mr. Rochester.

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor

Towles tells the story of a Russian aristocrat who is sentenced to lifelong house arrest in the Metropol Hotel in Moscow. While the Count is fictitious, the luxury hotel on Theatre Square is not, nor are the historical events that unfold during his 30-year tenure as an imprisoned fixture of his residence. As he is banished to an attic room, he thinks of jumping and ending it all,

for who could imagine a life trapped inside the walls of a hotel, grand as it may be. He overcomes this fear by living the message at the heart of the novel: “A man must master his circumstances or otherwise be mastered by them.”

With his limited possessions—his late sister’s scissors, a copy of Anna Karenina, and a grandfather clock— the Count is determined to be the cause and not the effect of his own life. He compares himself to other heroes whose lives were sentenced to confinement: Dantès, Cervantes, and Napoleon. He opts not for revenge but instead to embrace the path of Crusoe and “maintain his resolve by committing to the business of practicalities.” Towles masterfully crafts the Count’s ability to be the master of his own circumstances, to spend equal time contemplating the wine served with dinner as the opening passage of Anna Karenina as the syntax of his correspondence. We see the Count lay witness to the Russian Revolution, befriend the hotel staff, play hide-and-seek with a

young guest, expertly wait tables, be seduced by an actress, correspond with emissaries, and share nightcaps with spies. He lives a life full of meaning.

To watch someone make so much of the life he is sentenced to gives the reader a glimmer of hope for his own circumstances. One’s only wish is that his life would be written as eloquently as Towles writes of the Count’s. Passages such as “They spoke of the once and the was, of the wishful and the wonderful,” roll off the page as effortlessly as more comic passages like the Count's musings on jazz (a fistful of notes crammed higgledypiggledy into thirty measures) or amusing explanations of Russian literary characters: “Our greatest authors, due to some deep-rooted sense of tradition or a complete lack of imagination, constrained themselves to the use of thirty given names.”

I suggest reading my new favorite book like the Count himself, listening to Tchaikovsky leaned back in a chair in a cozy attic room, or at the very least on a train from Paris to Nice and back again.

The Free World:Art and Thought

by Louis Menand

A Book Review

Howard Hunter

A death knell for the Humanities has sounded for some time. Roughly four percent of college students major in literature, history, philosophy, or foreign language. For those who see this as a concern (and there aren’t many who do), there is always a society to blame that values technology and STEM. But if the truth be told, we can look to universities themselves, home to arcane literary theory and research driven by ideology and academic self-interest rather than disinterested inquiry. Nevertheless, there is a disconnect here because there is no shortage of good books written for the public by members of the vaunted academy—a veritable “substance of things hoped for” offered to those who think ideas matter.

One of the more prolific of the public scholars is Louis Menand, Harvard English professor and regular columnist for The New Yorker. Referred to by one critic as “The Great Explainer,” Menand articulates complex ideas with economy and lucidity without dumbing down. His Pulitzer-winning work TheMetaphysicalClub traces the development of American Pragmatism after the Civil War, the only original and coherent philosophical movement in the history of the United States. It fostered a whole new way of thinking at the dawn of the 20th century and fueled significant changes in the social sciences, jurisprudence, and education. Ideas bounce off the pages through notable interconnected figures as John Dewey, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Chauncey Wright, Charles Peirce, Jane Addams, and Alaine Locke.

Menand’s latest tome, TheFreeWorld:ArtandThoughtintheColdWar, attempts to once again explain ideas through 30 personages loosely connected across generations from World War II to the debacle in Vietnam thirty years later. The Free World may be a bridge too far in that it lacks the focus of TheMetaphysicalClub, and 727 pages minus the notes can be a bit daunting. But it’s worth it, even in parts (see the earlier essay “Reading History”). Art, literature, music, philosophy, and

Thought in the Cold War

politics change places taking center stage, but all revolve around an underlying theme of cultural and social liberation.

Menand begins with George Kennan, architect of American Cold War policy. Kennan’s “Long Telegram,” which he cabled from Berlin in 1946 (and later turned into a shorter article in ForeignAffairs magazine), advocated a doctrine of containment regarding the Soviet Union. Soviet incursion into Eastern Europe along with a common knowledge of Stalin’s atrocities galvanized an American international liberalism. Hannah Arendt’s TheOriginsofTotalitarianism, published in 1951, solidified the tough-on-communism position abroad and pro-civil rights position at home. The CIA, unlike the FBI, embodied that liberal idealism, at least for a time. With Eastern Europe in Soviet control and Western Europe teetering on the edge by wellfunded communist parties, the CIA mounted a propaganda campaign, creating phony foundations to support traveling exhibits of American abstract expressionist artists to showcase the works of an open society. The CIA also funded journals like The Paris Review, founded by young writers Peter Matthiessen (CIA connected) and George Plimpton (unclear).

A fount of American culture in the 1940s and '50s was the obscure, small Black Mountain College in North Carolina. The talent was prodigious: Josef and Anni Albers taught painting and textiles before he became chair of the Department of Design at Yale; artist power couple William and Elaine de Kooning also taught painting; John Cage of 4’33” fame served as an instructor of composition, and his partner Merce Cunningham taught dance. Poet and literature professor M.C. Richards participated in artistic happenings with pianist David Tutor and artist Robert Rauschenberg, along with Cunningham and Cage. The Black Mountain scene moved to Greenwich Village where artistic happenings took off in the 1950s.

American culture was also heavily influenced by post-war Europe. With so many Americans in Paris, existentialist writers Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus became household names to Americans by the 1950s. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex had a major impact on the American feminist movement that had suffered setbacks due to a contrived 1950s mythology of the ideal family. French philosopher Jacques Derrida and Belgian-born Yale professor Paul De Man (with a sketchy past) transformed American literary criticism, which erstwhile had been dominated by Lionel Trilling of Columbia.

Ex-pat James Baldwin completed his first major work in Paris, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), as well as a collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son (1955). Menand connects Baldwin’s ideas on Black identity to the anti-colonial Black intellectuals at the time from Africa and the Caribbean, like the psychiatrist and author Frantz Fanon. This proved to be formative for Baldwin’s thinking, as he assumed a leadership role in the 1960s Civil Rights movement.

There was also the British contribution to American popular culture. American rock and roll was in danger of being a temporary fad by the early sixties—Buddy Holly,

Richie Valens and the Big Bopper died in a plane crash; Chuck Berry was in jail; Jerry Lee Lewis had been discredited; and Elvis was drafted. It was the British invasion with a Delta-blues component that educated Americans on what American music really came from. And it was this movement along with electrified folk music that saved rock music. (Menand’s take on the Beatles is so trenchant that it’s worth the price of the book, and I can’t do it justice.)

Menand, as he is wont to do, puts to rest some cherished myths of Americana. For example, Jack Kerouac did not create On the Road in three weeks on a roll of teletype paper. The manuscript was based on previous journals and drafts of chapters. Nevertheless, he did hammer out a copy to work with, and by the time Onthe Road came out in 1957, it had gone through six years of revisions. The sainted Neal Cassidy (Dean Moriarty in On the Road) in Menand’s rendering is nothing but a conman and a sexual exploiter of both women and men. Jackson Pollock's painting, Mural, one of the most famous works of abstract expressionism, was not painted in a creative one-night binge but took a whole summer (nor did Pollack urinate in Peggy Guggenheim’s fireplace, a cherished myth of Pollock as drunken wildman). There are also surprises that Menand uncovers — Andy Warhol in all his weirdness had a work ethic unsurpassed by other artists of the day.

There is also a quotidian piece that Menand brings to bear, which is money. The booming post-war economy made it possible for people other than the very wealthy to afford art as well as to open galleries to support artists. After the Marshall Plan and European economic recovery, American artists of both the abstract and pop variety found an international following, and New York replaced Paris as the art capital of the world. Money found its way into the pockets of teenagers, a new development of a plentiful society called the allowance. Teenagers could now afford to buy records played on an

increasing number of radio stations engaged in fierce competition.

American culture did not die with the failure of Vietnam—in fact, a cultural infrastructure had been laid for successive flourishing in arts and letters. But confidence in America waned, and with it, a question as to whether Western Civilization was worth defending. Menand also leaves us with the question of liberation as aperçu—a nice summation of the era, but what did this entail? The conservative revolt of 1964 and the counterculture constituted two sides of the same coin, a quest for self-fulfillment (or actualization in the parlance of the day). Is there a slippery slope between personal gratification and a rejection of the commonweal? Is there a right not to be offended or put others at risk to their personal health? Questions abound indeed. Good books do that.

The Crossword Puzzle

Click anywhere on the crossword to print. Enjoy over a favorite beverage or dessert. Solution (should you need it) on p. 113.

The Proust Questionnaire with Susan Gisleson

This now-legendary questionnaire was inspired by French writer Marcel Proust, and for our second volume TheBoothbyReview sat down with Susan Gisleson. Susan is the Country Day Creative Arts Director and an artist who is inspired by the Muses.

What is your idea of perfect happiness? Loving where I am at the moment. Noticing the light through the elm tree coming through the back window while the wind blows, casting shadows like goldfish swimming on the heart of pine floor.

What is the trait you most deplore in others? Selfishness

Which living person do you most admire? Jimmy Carter

What is your greatest extravagance? Wigs

What is your current state of mind? Bliss

On what occasion do you lie? My driver's license

What do you most dislike about your appearance? I've grown into my insecurities.

What is the quality you most like in a man? Kindness

What is the quality you most like in a woman? Kindness

What or who is the greatest love of your life? Art - embodied by my husband - how he makes things, experiences, and places

When and where were you happiest? Immersed in thinking, making, or looking at art.

Which talent would you most like to have? I'd love to be able to sing - really belt out a song.

What do you consider your greatest achievement? That I can still be a happy person after witnessing so many tragedies.

If you were to die and come back as a person or thing, what would it be? A cloud. NOT The Cloud.

What is your most treasured possession? I use tools for storytelling. In my studio I have rooms of treasures - like Smaug. They are things that most people would think are worthless, but each one is important in its own way - a talisman. But the thing I treasure the most is on my left hand.

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery? Addiction

What is your favorite occupation? Artist

What is your most marked characteristic? Optimism

What do you most value in your friends? Trust

Who are your favorite writers? Homer - but he was a storyteller not writer - but so much comes from there - he is the wellspring.

Who is your hero of fiction? Scout

Who are your heroes in real life? Women

What are your favorite names? Geronimo and Jedediah

What is it that you most dislike? Greed

How would you like to die? I wouldn't.

What is your motto? I make therefore I am.

Contributors and Staff

William Beachy is a retired History teacher who spent his entire career at Country Day and continues to live in the New Orleans ares with his wife, Kathryn. Originally from Kansas City, Bill earned his AB from Kenyon College where his classes included one about Athens during the fifth century BCE. During his first year at Country Day, Bill taught Ancient History, which focused for a semester on classical Greece and Rome.

Sam Ferguson loves Greek literature. While he thinks Euripides totally rips, and he appreciates the lucidity of Thucydides, his favorite Greek writer is Homer, who really knocked it out of the park with TheOdyssey.

Justin Gricus once saw the band Styx play at the Hollywood Casino at Greektown in Detroit, MI. Though he’s never completely submerged himself in Styx’s deep river of iconic anthems, he considers his taste for overproduced arena rock of the '70s and '80s to be his Achilles heel.

Robin Heindselman left the Cave at the age of 6, saw her own shadow, and promptly went back in the Cave. She enjoys reading about other people’s realities by firelight.

Howard Hunter has always wanted to be a Hoplite but in his current stage is more sybarite. His basic sophistry and continual solecisms have precluded his rise as Philosopher King of the East Bank of Orleans Parish.

Betsy Kern would not open Pandora’s Box; she follows directions. She’d sell the Golden Fleece and buy Hippolyta’s Girdle. She doesn’t need to fly near the sun; she lives in New Orleans.

Jennifer LaCorte Marsiglia's intro to Greece began in Room 8 at Country Day, where she fondly remembers learning the Greek alphabet and creating a Grecian urn. She continued her studies through her time at Country Day and into college, where Greek life was a thing, and on through law school, where the Socratic method ruled the day. Through it all, her most profound lesson came in a life-

coming-full-circle moment in Coach Hunter’s classroom when he asked the class, “what’s a Grecian urn?” and she just as quickly—and with an impish grin—replied to his rhetorical question with, “About four drachma an hour."

Mike Miley went on four feet at dawn, currently goes on two feet, and will go on three feet sooner than he would like. He lives in Thebes with his wife and children. The less said the better.

Sean Patterson was not cast in Grease his senior year at Jesuit, and he has resented it ever since. Directing Grease for Country Day in 2015 provided only modest consolation.

Linda Reno spends her days relishing in artistic inspirations among the Muses in New Orleans - Kally Ope, Mel Po Mean, and Terp C. Core.

Pam Skehan spends her days painting in her backyard studio, which is heavily guarded by her three-headed hound, Murpherus. No raccoons, possums, or people have yet to cross the gates unchecked.

Shay Steckler's face has yet to launch even one ship. While one thousand seems a lofty goal, if the sun catches the glimmer in her eye at just the right angle, she thinks she could get to six.

Erin Walker wishes to be laconic like a Spartan but is more prolix than Pliny. She longs to be peripatetic like Aristotle, but if it’s hot, she’d rather cool off in a jar like Diogenes. She loves the wine dark sea but prefers her Cab in a cup. Artemis is her favorite Greek goddess because Erin also wants to fire arrows at randos with the unmitigated temerity to look in her general direction.