Death

farewell to sue grafton

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ 1 Comment

I first learned about Sue Grafton from an article I read a long time ago, way back when the Kinsey Millhone books (“the alphabet mysteries”) were around “C” or “D” somewhere. She said that she started writing because she was going through a bad divorce and found herself thinking of different ways to kill her ex. Having come up with a good method, she figured it would be better to write a book than to carry out her plan in real life.

I started reading the books with “A” Is for Alibi and kept going — I think I lost momentum around “M” or “N.”

The mysteries were good, very reminiscent of Ross Macdonald — families and generations of secrets and trouble which only gradually come to the surface. (Grafton was not shy about Macdonald’s influence — her books were set in the same fictional California city where Macdonald’s Lew Archer stories took place: Santa Teresa.)

A couple of the endings I remember particularly well — one where Millhone made an uncharacteristic choice (for believable reasons), which she immediately regretted but was unable to take back, and somebody died; and another where on the final page she realized that she might have misjudged who the villain had been all along, and that she would never be completely sure of the answer. Both were handled very well.

The books weren’t perfect. Millhone’s friends were a singularly uninteresting crew, and in later books she acquired a family she didn’t know she had and didn’t really want, and that was tedious, too. I used to like to listen to them as books on tape — the audio versions were edited to remove most of the friends and family stuff and focus in on the mysteries.

I also liked the fact that the books had a slow time-scale, so that, for example, if a book came out every year, each book would account for three or four months of Millhone’s life (I forget the exact ratio). So, Millhone aged, but not at the same rate as the rest of us, and she never had to deal with the internet and cell phones and so on.

Another thing I remember from that magazine article is that Grafton was asked what she would do when she got all the way through the alphabet. Would she stop? (As I say, she was still near the beginning at that point, so the question was pretty lighthearted.) Her answer was that she wasn’t going to stop — the “Z” book would be “Z” is for Zero, and then she would do numbers.

Well, she made it through the alphabet all the way from “A” to “Y” before she died and the series will end there (her family has confirmed this). That’s good — series should end when the author dies. And there are no movies — Grafton was against that, too, which is also admirable.

There’s another “farewell” post coming soon, but I couldn’t put them together, for reasons which will become obvious.

snow was general all over ireland

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ Leave a comment

I’ve had this post half-written for a while now, but the death of David Bowie brought it to the front of my thinking, because I’m listening to David Bowie’s final album Blackstar, which many people are now listening to anew since we now know that when he made it he was dying of cancer. Death is very present in the album.

Not every artist has a chance to deliberately make a “final work.” It’s a rare thing, really, and obviously some who could have created one probably had no interest in doing so.

But I was thinking about how some movie directors have gone at this.

1. The Dead

I’ve read that director John Huston had always planned to make The Dead as his last picture.

The source novella, the best thing James Joyce ever wrote (yeah, it is) is wonderful (go read it if you never have), and Huston does it justice, though he directed parts of it from a wheelchair and parts from a hospital bed, with his son Tony, who wrote the screenplay, acting as his surrogate on set.

I won’t describe it — no telling of the “plot” will explain what it’s like to see it — but I will say one thing that I like particularly about it.

In the original story, there’s a character named Freddy Malins. He’s a drunk, and there’s a good deal of conversation at the holiday party of whether he’ll be sober when he arrives (he apparently took the pledge a day or two before) or whether he’s fallen off the wagon (again) already.

Well he shows up drunk and remains so, and in the story that’s pretty much the end of it.

In the movie, though, he rallies in the end. He rebukes another guest who makes a rude comment in front of his (Freddy’s) mother, and when a novice cab driver doesn’t know where to go, it’s Freddy who gives him the directions.

I always feel that this is because The Dead was a young man’s story, written when Joyce was in his thirties, but this is an old man’s movie. A little more forgiving, a little more willing to see complexity in everybody.

(I stole the name “Malins” and used it — I lost the “s” somewhere — for my character Christy Malin, who’s also Irish, and an alcoholic, and many more things as well.)

 
2. A Prairie Home Companion

Robert Altman did not intend A Prairie Home Companion to be his last picture — but he must have known it might be. He’d had a heart transplant a decade earlier, and the only way he could get insured for this picture was to have another director on set at all times in case he couldn’t complete the picture.

(By the way, imagine, for a moment, the terrible torment of Paul Thomas Anderson, the backup director, forced to spend weeks watching his friend and mentor direct a film. Talk about a master class. Did he take notes or just watch and learn?)

One character in the movie is called “the Dangerous Woman” in the credits, but she’s actually the angel of death and there is a question throughout most of the movie about who she’s come for.

At the end, several of the characters are so sitting in a diner, and they see Asphodel, the dangerous woman, come in and slowly approach the table. Who is she coming for this time? We never find out — appropriately, because in real life you don’t know.

Lola Johnson: This isn’t really going to be your last show, is it?

Garrison Keillor: Every show is your last show. That’s my philosophy.

Rhonda Johnson: Thank you, Plato.

 
3. Family Plot

Hitchcock was not planning for Family Plot to be his last film, but apparently he knew he was slowing down and couldn’t do a lot of things he’d done before.

But, intentionally or not, he ended his final movie perfectly.

[Mild spoiler]

A fake psychic and con artist goes into a “trance” and convinces her accomplice that she’s had a real revelation for the first time, and then, as he scurries off to retrieve the treasure she has just “located,” she turns to face the camera, smiles, and winks.

Credits.

Perfect.

A great film? No, not even close. Definitely not in the top ten Hitchcock films. But a perfect ending, and there’s one other great moment, too.

an old rock and roll alien angel in a perfect grey suit

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ Leave a comment

I have only seen a tiny sliver of a fraction of the various reactions people have had to the death of David Bowie (which is fine), but there have been a few which have really caught my attention

 
St. Vincent gave the perfect tweet:

NO.

 
From an A.V. Club commenter:

He kept a lot of weird kids alive through a lot of shitty years.

 
From Lorde, who met Bowie when she was 16:

“I realized everything I’d ever done, or would do from then on, would be done like maybe he was watching,” she wrote. “I realized I was proud of my spiky strangeness because he had been proud of his. And I know I’m never going to stop learning dances, brand new dances. It’s not going to change, how we feel about him. For the rest of our lives, we’ll always be crashing in that same car. Thank you, David Bowie.”

 
From The Guardian:

“Almost from the start, Bowie’s career raised questions to which a definitive answer seemed elusive. If he was, as he loudly claimed in 1971, gay, then what was the deal with the very visible wife and the son he’d just written a touching little song about? If he was, as he dramatically announced from the stage of the Hammersmith Odeon in July 1973, retiring – either from music, or from live performance, or from the character of Ziggy Stardust – then what was he doing back onstage in London three months later, belting out The Jean Genie in full Ziggy drag? How does anyone in the state Bowie was, by all accounts, in by 1975 – ravaged by cocaine to the point where he seemed to have genuinely gone insane; paranoid and hallucinating – make an album like Station to Station: not a messily compelling document of a mind unravelling, like the solo albums of his great idol Syd Barrett, but a work of precision and focus and exquisitely controlled power that’s arguably his best? In a world of cameraphones and social media, how could anyone as famous as Bowie disappear from public view as completely as he seemed to between 2008 and 2013: moreover, how could anyone as famous as Bowie record a comeback album in the middle of Manhattan without anyone noticing or leaking details to the media? How does anyone stage-manage their own death as dramatically as Bowie appears to have done: releasing their most acclaimed album in decades, filled with strange, enigmatic songs whose meaning suddenly became apparent when their author dies two days later?”

 
And from Slate:

“‘Under Pressure’ Is a Reminder That David Bowie Could Also Be Wonderfully, Powerfully Human“

There’s a lot of snark around these days, but, just so we don’t forget, this is how you write about great music.

David Bowie (1947-2016)

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ 2 Comments

I remember a few days after 9/11, I read something he wrote (he lived in New York, and was here when it happened) that was just so caring and thoughtful and appropriate. I haven’t been able to find it since, but it was one of the first things I heard that actually made sense at that time. 

Damn.

Thanks, David. My deepest condolences to Iman, Duncan, and Alexandria Zahra.

Oh, and this:

links: creativity, and a funeral

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ 2 Comments

Two links today.

One is from The New Yorker: “Creativity Creep” (It’s not a great title, but the article makes interesting points about how “creativity” is increasingly valued by what it produces — and these days in terms of what it can produce that people will want to buy. As a writer who writes but doesn’t seek to make money from it, this is always an interesting topic to me.)

The other link is from my novel, U-town. I’ve been thinking about funerals, and I wanted to link to the funeral that I wrote about, a long scene that still pleases me. This is smack in the middle of a very long novel, and there are a ton of characters, so it will probably be pretty thick going, but I wanted to post the link in case anybody would want to peek in.

To set the scene, Marshall (assistant to Jan Sleet, who was not invited — she’s about the only significant character who won’t be there) is going to pick up his friend Vicki, who is going to the funeral with him. Vicki works in a club called The Quarter, so he’s going to meet her there. The funeral is at midnight, so the club is closing at 11:30pm, because all the regular clientele will be at the funeral anyway.

The funeral is for Carl, who was the drummer in a band called Kingdom Come, and Jenny, who was the girlfriend of the guitarist in the band. The funeral is being put on by a local motorcycle gang called The Jinx.

condolences, cremation, and in medias res

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ 3 Comments

This will probably meander a bit. In addition to recent events, I was sick last weekend and part of last week.

An interesting thought came to me after the last post, and it’s reflected in the comments there. Does coming into the middle of a story actually help to get us hooked on it?

  1. The first comic book I ever bought was the second half of a two-part story (Fantastic Four #26 – “The Avengers Take Over”). I remember at the time thinking that comic books, which I’d been told were very childish, were more difficult to follow than I’d expected.
  2. As I said in the comments to the previous post, I got hooked on Dark Shadows despite coming into the middle of the series and into the middle of a story.
  3. I saw the movie Serenity before I ever saw the TV show Firefly, and I was eager to go back and catch up on all the characters and history.
  4. The first Resident Evil movie I saw was #3 (Extinction), and I was intrigued by the fact that the characters obviously had some history that I wasn’t aware of.

Hmmm.

 
I’ve also been thinking about condolences, for obvious reasons, which made me think of a book called This Immortal, by Roger Zelazny, which I’ve started reading again.

There’s scene in there where Conrad, the protagonist, has just heard that his wife has died. He’s conducting a tour of post-apocalyptic Earth, for an alien visitor who he dislikes and who someone is, apparently, trying to kill. The suspects are his traveling companions, many of whom he knows very well, and he wonders if, as they come one by one to offer him their condolences, one of them will reveal something.

He’s making an effort to be a detective to help take his mind off his grief, but it doesn’t work. How people offer condolences doesn’t have much to do with what’s happening at that moment — it comes pretty deep from who they are and the culture they come from.

I’ve read the book many times, over decades, and it’s all very familiar territory — one of my favorite of his books if perhaps not one of the greatest.

And it’s always fun to be reminded of how playful Zelazny was with language. (His book Lord of Light has an absolutely terrible pun in it, and I’ve heard that he wrote the whole book to get to that pun — which is unlikely but not impossible.)

For example, Conrad is at a diplomatic function, and he’s stepped out onto a balcony with a woman who was his lover the previous summer and who is, and was, married to one of his best friends.

As they talk, discussing the fact that he is now married also, he notes that:

…she had lots and lots of orangebrown hair, woven into a Gordian knot of a coiff that frustrated me as I worked at untying it, mentally…

I love the placement of “mentally” there, but then I’m a connoisseur of scenes with palpable sexual attraction which is not, for whatever reason, being turned into action.

The book is steeped in mythology (for example, Conrad’s wife is named Cassandra, and, yes, she periodically makes predictions which he disregards, and which always turn out to be right), but it’s very down to earth. This was pretty much Zelazny’s favorite mode, and he wrote a lot of books which balanced these elements in different ways.

For example, like Alien and The Fifth Element, this is the future where everybody smokes (also a Zelazny trademark).

It also has the riddle of the kallikanzaros.

“So feathers or lead?” I asked him.
“Pardon?”
“It is the riddle of the kallikanzaros. Pick one.”
“Feathers?”
“You’re wrong.”
“If I had said lead’ . . .?”
“Uh-uh. You only have one chance. The correct answer is whatever the kallikanzaros wants it to be.”
“That sounds a bit arbitrary.”

Conrad, who is Greek, explains that this is an example of Greek subtlety, which is not actually very subtle.

The riddle gives us the great scene much later, when Conrad has been tortured and is about to be killed, and, at the final moment, he starts to laugh and asks, “Feathers or lead?”

His would-be killer is a cultural anthropologist and knows the legend, so he turns around, quickly, just in time to be squashed by the sudden arrival of Conrad’s (giant, armored, mutant) pet dog.

There’s another, even better, last-second rescue later (Conrad is a tough individual, but he does require rescuing from time to time), but that’s a huge spoiler, so I won’t.

Anyway, it’s been nice to revisit such familiar territory. Maybe it’s been comfort fiction — the literary equivalent of comfort food.

 
Over at the blog Pages of Julia, Julia just reviewed a book called “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes (and Other Lessons of the Crematory),” which is another subject that’s been on my mind recently.

The books sounds interesting and entertaining, though I’m not sure I’m ready to read an entire book on the subject. I did leave a rather extensive comment on the blog post, though.