My first year of law school was an emotional roller coaster ride. One year ago today, I was seriously debating dropping out, taking my $10,000 in debt, and walking away from it all. It clearly was not worth it. Yet something told me I would be too afraid, thinking that all of my friends and family and colleagues would judge me for wasting so many years studying for the LSAT, applying to schools, and getting this "higher degree" of education on track. Here I am halfway through. The second year has been better (so far - and we do not yet know our grades), but the anxiety will never end until we find our job and support ourselves like normal people are supposed to do.
I digress. I often told my older sister about this strange phenomenon which I had been experiencing since 2008 or so. I called it a "rapid rapid cycle of manic depression" - a term I had gleaned from wikipedia. Basically, it involved a cycle from a manic to depressed state every 24 to 48 hours. For me, it was every other day. Sunday I would go to bed hating life inordinately. I would pray that I would have a heart attack in my sleep and never wake up, never have to grow older and get lonelier, never have to go on welfare, never have to live sober and try to attain happiness. A little part of me would say, it's okay, tomorrow, you'll have your rocket fuel. Monday I would wake up and feel this sense of empowerment, like I could do anything. I could sit down to study and be enormously productive. I could talk to everyone without feeling self-conscious. However, I would have trouble falling asleep Monday night. Tuesday would be depression. Wednesday would be mania. Thursday would be depression. Friday would be mania. And so on. The only way to subtly affect this pattern was to self-medicate. My sister told me I should read Manic so I did.
Manic is the story of a woman who clearly suffers from manic-depression. Anybody who reads this book will inevitably think of James Frey and his famous fake memoir A Million Little Pieces. I have not read that book, but this memoir presents scenes that are so over-the-top that a reader cannot help but think that Cheney, a lawyer, is using a little bit of hyperbole for emotional heft. However, Cheney comes off as sincere, and her goal in writing the memoir wholly admirable. Who knows what Frey's intent was - warn against the dangers of drug addiction? I do not know. I do not want to particularly read that book as it seems a waste of time.
Many people may consider this book a waste of time but it is relatively short. It took me a while to read because of other obligations. However, the main audience for this book is manic-depressive attorneys or law students. There is little to no legal jargon in this book so non-attorneys will probably enjoy it more and the myth that a professional career in law is a surefire way to a lavish lifestyle will be propagated just a tad bit more. To be fair, Cheney leaves her job in the legal world behind in the end to write, and explains it in this pithy aside:
"It took me sixteen years to realize this. Sixteen years of reassuring myself on the way to work every morning that there's no such thing as a happy lawyer. It was just this particular case I was working on, this client, this judge, the latest Supreme Court ruling, the airborne viruses in my corner office. Perhaps if I tried another firm. So I tried another firm, several other firms in fact, each one bigger and better and more prestigious than the last. I landed higher-profile clients and took long, exotic vacations, and made a considerable amount of money. And I went to parties, a whole lot of parties, for every cause imaginable, or no cause at all. I billed the time regardless.....
If you nurture it long enough, a lie can become a life. Bad nights don't surprise you much after sixteen years. You come to expect them. You just don't expect them to go on forever. I should have known that the bout of depression that finally ended my career was the worst one yet, when I ran out of business cards and didn't have the energy to order new ones. Nothing mattered to me at that point except the pain, and the pain was everywhere." (234-235)
Cheney was an entertainment lawyer, arguably the dream job of many a law student (myself included, though I don't pursue it relentlessly as I go to school in New York, not L.A. - Cheney went to UCLA Law). To repeat, she does not write so much about her daily practice as much as her "pharmaceutical cornucopia." Perhaps it was reading this book that finally led me to see a psychiatrist and obtain prescriptions for Celexa, Ambien, Klonopin, Ritalin, and Adderall. The combination has worked well for me over the last few months but the concerns about chemical dependence remain. I do not recall many passages parlaying this particular concern, but I do believe Cheney mentions that she will probably be on medication for the rest of her life. She does, at the end, point to the need for sobriety, as many non-diagnosed depressives tend to self-medicate.
There are many memorable episodes in this memoir--chief amongst them a few suicide attempts, and stays in psychiatric wards. There is also a whiff of the bizarre, when Cheney describes her relationship with food, when going through depressive episodes where she would sleep 20-22 hours a day, and eat for the time she was awake:
"My mother went grocery shopping one day a week, usually on Sunday, so by Friday we'd be almost completely out of food. I clearly remember those endless Friday nights when there was nothing left in the cupboard and depression was gnawing a hole in my stomach. I had to eat something, anything. Toward the end of my depression, I ate whatever was there: iced coffee packets, bags of flour, spices ranging from anise to fennel to marjoram to thyme. Of course my body eventually rebelled and I wound up throwing up half of what I frantically shoved down my throat. I didn't stop until I finally fell asleep, exhausted, with my hand still clutching whatever I was eating." (191)
There is not much more I can say about the book that will not spoil any possible readings of it. In short, there is nothing offensive about it to me. I do not complain about people being "whiners" because I am a whiner myself. People that don't understand depression will probably still write it off and erroneously infer that Cheney is exaggerating. While I may not be as depressed as her, I can certainly relate to certain portions, where, for example, she describes in a rather profound way, hypomania as an idyllic state where everything seems (and perhaps is) possible:
"I've looked in the mirror when I'm hypomanic and even I can see it: my eyes are an open invitation, a bottomless well of empathy. 'Trust me, tell me everything,' they say, and people do. Not just men sitting across from me at a candlelight dinner, either; and not just men, for that matter. Men and women everywhere seem compelled to talk to me, touch me, give me their confidence. It happens in the oddest of places: in the aisles of the supermarket, waiting in a movie line, sitting at a coffehouse, and especially in elevators. Hypomania breaks down that invisible wall that exists between well-mannered strangers. There are no strangers anymore, only unknown friends, waiting to tell me their stories." (208)
In summation, I am not jealous of Cheney for writing a memoir that became a New York Times Bestseller. I usually am jealous of such authors. While the book may not be a pleasure to read, it is a book that has something to say, and will probably help a lot of people. It also may create a small and unnoticeable increase in business to the pharmaceutical industry. But that is probably just a sign of the times.
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
Monday, October 17, 2011
S/M: Chapter 25
I was recently writing a journal entry today and noted that it was my half birthday--28 1/2. It reminded me of something--28 1/2 Cuts--which is the name of the student film a character in my second novel creates. The event is the subject of the 25th chapter. I figured it was time to publish an excerpt from this novel. It is too rare of an opportunity. I hope you enjoy it.
Self-mutilation starts to seem tedious when you force yourself to follow a structure, and you find yourself simply filling in the blanks, finishing something just to finish it, as if it were a paper in college that you really didn’t know how to write, so you faked your way through it as best as you could, and you handed it in, and were content getting back a C, because you could be sure that next time, you would focus in the appropriate manner and get an A. Is that the way I feel about this confession, reader? It’s average, not excellent? I wonder what separates the average book from the excellent book. Is it an economy of style or God-like knowledge of all things? Is it a page-turner of a story, or is it something that could only affect the most isolated reader in a highly personal way in their heart? I don’t know—book reviewers confound me. What do they hope to get out of a book—something that makes their critical assignment more fun? Is it more fun to write a positive review that everyone will agree with, or a negative review which displays a higher taste for art than the masses would understand? Most book reviewers are authors themselves—so is it only that they know how hard the publishing process is and all of their reviews basically attack the notion of whether or not the book should have ever been published? No—that’s outside the scope. Their reviews describe whether or not the book is a successful work of art.
I say a successful work of art is something that unites rather than divides. Of course, what unification is possible amongst the isolated spectacles of printed words? The unification is dependent upon a reader’s fine memory, a reader’s articulation, and a reader’s professed enthusiasm for a text. Who among us can remember printed words verbatim as they are read silently to ourselves in our mind, and who among us can quote films or television shows with the utmost veracity and imitation of the actors annunciating the words for us? I feel very hopeless working in this medium. And all I wanted to talk about in the 25th chapter of this confession was how nobody had the same idea of fun as me.
Am I to recount the specific experience for you? It started with Robby calling me in February or March. I had seen him over Thanksgiving and Christmas, but now he was calling to tell me he was going to take a road trip out to California as his graduation gift. His mom said he could do it so long as he devised a budget for the trip and allowed her to approve it, seeing how much money he had to his name and how responsible he could be in an independent arrangement. I told him this was great, as I would be living in L.A. for the 1st half of the summer between my freshman and sophomore year. I would continue to live in Dykstra Hall at a rent significantly lower than typical L.A. housing and I would take my first filmmaking course where our final project would be our first black & white film without sound. Robby told me he was going to leave from Highland Park on June 10 and he hoped to be in L.A. by the afternoon of the 16th. He said he would stay for only a few days—he had to be back by the 26th because his budget would not allow for any more loafing than that. I would be leaving L.A. by the end of June, and flying home, and going to Martha’s Vineyard after a day or two for the rest of the summer. My parents had no interest in staying in Northbrook, and they were not going to let me stay by myself there. Better for them to keep a close eye on my expenses.
So Robby would be there either as I was shooting my film, or immediately after. I would be busy working on it, but it was also the only class I had to worry about. I figured that Robby would be happy to see my work and help me to improve upon it. Maybe he could even be used as an extra in the film, and divert my notions of what the film would be about. Whatever the case, he was still my closest friend from whom I could never keep any secrets, and I looked forward to his company in California. Under these very different circumstances, who knew what we might accomplish?
By the way, the rest of my freshman year was decent. All in all, I was happy I had made some good friends and I was happy people were treating me normally. It was the first time in my life nobody was putting up obstacles to my success. (Only now do I realize, the problem with that was, the success I could accomplish there meant nothing to anyone). Nick and I got along alright, and he went back to the O.C. for the summer, and I stayed in our room by myself. Jake also stayed in the dorms over the summer, and we were the only two people on our floor to stay past graduation ceremonies. A few other students came in for the summer and occupied a few other rooms on the floor. I looked forward to my first filmmaking class immensely.
Samantha and I had signed up at the same time for the class. She was the only person I knew in it from before. On the first day, our new instructor Professor Wazir, who insisted we call her Jackie, explained the way the class would unfold:
“All of your equipment will be rented out from our film department, and all of the expenses for your film usage have already been included in the additional fee for the course. The first week we will learn all of the mechanics of operating the camera with real film. We will not be using digital film in this course. You will learn the basics here, and you will probably never use the basics again. For the last ten years or so, digital has become more and more popular. First there were digital camcorders and then there were DV camcorders and people started saying, the hell with film, this camera costs $700 and you can tape over and over a digital file infinitely and save it on your computer. Celluloid is for purists, and if you are going to be filmmakers, you must at least grasp the foundations of filmmaking, the history, and the techniques of all those that came before you.”
“We will not be using sound in these films because that adds a level of complication to the scenario that I do not want you to worry about. Your films will be silent, and whatever stories you decide to tell must be communicated by wordless gestures, or, if you so choose (though I must admit many find it eccentric and unseemly) by way of letter cards. Your films will have a cap set at seven minutes, so you will have to be very precise about how long each shot is held for, and exactly what image you want to capture in order to tell your story. Some of you may be saying, ‘That’s so limiting, I want to use dialogue, I want to tell an amazing story!’ and to that I am just going to say two things. Number one, seven minutes is a lot longer than it seems for a silent film. Number two, I say you go write that amazing story, with dialogue, with a long-running-time, with everything, and then you figure out a way to tell it without sound, and in seven minutes.”
“By week eight, we will begin showcasing your films. And, while silent shorts are generally ignored by the ‘industry’ at large, if any of your films turn out to be, shall we say, revelatory, I will use my connections to submit it for consideration at next year’s Sundance film festival. And regardless, all of your films will be showcased in one sitting at the end of the course, which everyone in the UCLA community this summer will be invited to attend.”
We went around the room, saying our names, where we were from, and what our favorite movie was. When they got to me I said, “My name’s Oscar, I’m from Chicago, and my favorite movie is Secretary,” which wasn’t true, but which I just wanted to say. A few people in the class who had seen it laughed appreciably. When it got to Samantha she said, “My name’s Samantha, I’m from Las Vegas, and my favorite movie is Annie Hall,” which nobody found very funny. We left class and she asked what I thought my film might be about and I told her I had already been planning it for a year and I knew exactly what its story would be. I found it amazing that I had only thought of one idea for a movie and it was going to be highly appropriate to make that idea a reality.
That night I saw Jake and asked him if he would be my lead actor for the film. He said he would love to do it and then he asked me what the film was about. Of course, I knew what the film was going to be about—the kid who ran away from home to L.A. after the SATs, before college. But, in that moment when Jake asked me, I had a brief vision of saying, “It’s about a kid who cuts himself.”
So you see, reader, the seeds of this document date back to my first significant creative exercise. I knew it was the only story worth telling, the only story not to exist in a conventional framework. It could go anywhere and it could do anything. It could be like the movie Waking Life or Slacker—not in its subject matter, but in its redefinition of what a film could be. So what if this kid just keeps cutting himself? So what if that’s not an exciting enough plot—it’s reality, man! And art, art must mimic reality if we are to find it revelatory, if we are to feel it deeply in our hearts and minds. All the other boys and girls that cut themselves would seek it out and idolize it, the same way I idolized Secretary, because no other movie could be so bold as to take up such abnormal concerns—except that film had focused on it from the female perspective, which just seems like its easier for a mass audience to swallow, for some reason. No, I couldn’t make a movie out of it—it was too dark and uncomfortable for actors. Also, I didn’t yet know how the story would end. Reader! People complain about despairing circumstances being clichéd, but despairing circumstances can often reveal the artist’s consciousness in its totality.
But I told Jake about the runaway story and he said it sounded good. We started work on it immediately the next week. I recruited Professor Diminico to play Jake’s father, and his wife agreed to play the part of the mother. We could not use dialogue, so I had to show Diminico speaking vociferously at a dinner table, Jake looking down at his plate, and Mrs. Diminico regarding the scene with a look of extreme concern. The actions were exaggerated so the meaning could not be missed. I decided not to use word cards—I wanted there to be a greater challenge.
The dinner table scene was the first, and the second was a short shot of Jake with his head in an SAT Test Prep book. The third was a short scene meant to communicate a meeting with a guidance counselor—I also recruited Professor Lang to play this part. Jake was handed a sheet of paper with a list of unimpressive schools. This was the hardest part of the film for me. I didn’t want to offend anyone by saying they were bad schools. There was a key on the sheet that said 1 = reach, 2 = 50/50, 3 = safety. Northwestern University was at the top of the list with an unprecedented 1+, Beloit College had a 1, DePaul had a 1, UIC had a 1, Loyola had a 1, Northern Illinois University had a 2, Columbia College had a 2, and Oakton Community College had a 3. There was a long shot of this sheet of paper as if it were in an old Looney Tunes cartoon and the viewer was meant to process all the information therein contained.
The next scene showed Jake at a desk in the library, taking a standardized test meant to represent the SAT. I could not recreate test-like conditions, so I did my best to gain the support of everyone in the section of the library where we were filming to re-arrange themselves four to a desk and to appear to be focusing on a test. I had roughly sixteen people in the shot and it succeeded in creating the illusion.
Next I showed Jake receiving a letter of acceptance from Northern Illinois University. Then, laying on his bed, looking up at the ceiling, pondering. Then, packing a large backpack, slipping out of the house at night (Diminico was kind enough to let me use his house as well), walking down the street, sticking out his thumb, getting picked up.
It was difficult to create the illusion that Jake was traveling from Chicago to L.A. when we were filming it in L.A. in the middle of June. Luckily, the script had him leaving in May, so the weather was not the problem. It was the rolling hills of California and the flat plains of Illinois. We went beyond the valley, up and around the most distant suburbs of L.A. County, finding roads far from the freeway, far from the insane crowds, giving the illusion that we were in the desolate Middle West. We did not worry about showing the different rides Jake found while hitchhiking—a few different shots of him in the passenger side with changing scenery in the window was more than enough to suffice.
Finally we showed him arriving in Hollywood, of course utilizing that famous sign, and shot a couple L.A. landmarks, which our tour (documented in the “24” chapter) had inspired in us. He had to get a room at the YMCA, so we showed one of those facilities, which the owners were very kind in letting us film. We showed him going into the Cold Stone Creamery with a Help Wanted sign on the front—the one in the mall on Hollywood Blvd, right by the Chinese theaters. We showed him in uniform, scooping out the cake batter flavor into a cup. Finally, we had to intimate that he moved out of the YMCA and into an apartment, so we showed him moving his stuff into an apartment with one of his co-workers as a new roommate. Then, to complete the film, we used the unifying shot of him collapsing onto the bed, looking up at the ceiling, pondering.
I was so happy with this movie! Jake also found my vision very precise—he was very impressed that I had such a clear notion for my first film. How economically we had told such an epic story. The only thing left was to come up with a good title.
Robby had arrived in L.A. the day we were filming the final scene in Jake’s new apartment. He had driven the same teal Toyota Camry he always drove the two thousand miles to California. It occurred to me that I should have asked him to take some footage, which I could have spliced into the film—but I was using real film, not digital, and Robby did not have a camcorder that I knew of anyways. After the last shot, we went back to Dykstra Hall, and Robby put his stuff down in Nick’s old place. I told him I had to go into the editing room tonight to work on the film, and Robby asked if he could come along. I said of course, but it would be boring. He said he didn’t care because he was really interested to see my movie.
We ordered Domino’s after we had been holed up in the editing room for two hours. Robby was assisting me with artistic decisions. It was a very epic story that had to be told in a very short time, and some three or four minutes had to be cut to make the seven-minute restriction. Robby said to cut back on the L.A. landmarks montage—Jake was only going to be working at Cold Stone Creamery—he was not going to be living the stereotypical L.A. lifestyle as traditionally depicted in American cinema. Just that section of Hollywood Blvd. should have been emphasized, Robby said, because that was Jake’s world.
Sometime around 1 AM, we left the editing room and went back to the dorm. Robby said he had a surprise for me. I could guess what it was. The drug box. He took it out of his suitcase. It had been transferred to a shoe box. Inside were twenty-five pills of ecstasy, twenty-five tabs of LSD, five grams of coke, a half ounce of shrooms, an ounce of weed, and two grams of heroin. Robby had kept it almost perfectly halved. To be honest, I felt it was something of a burden, but I also knew I could make a lot of money off it. I thanked Robby at least ten times, showed him the bong I had bought in Venice Beach, we smoked some of the weed from the ounce bag, and we played XBOX 360 until we couldn’t keep our eyes opened. We went to bed sometime after 4:30, because it was one of those rare occasions that we were able to smoke at 4:20 AM.
Robby was going to be in town for the UCLA screening of all the student shorts, which was going to be happening in just a couple days. My film had been finished, and all that was left was to publicize its screening. And title it.
I thought about it for a while, and decided 28½ Cuts would be the best possible title. There were many different variations on why this worked. It had manifold associations. Namely:
-It was in many ways an updated version of Les Quatre Cents Coups, only with Jake being a few years older than Antoine Doinel, and in him never ending up in a detention center, and in it being in English, not French, and translated more appropriately by the word for the purposes of its creator.
-At 7 minutes, it was roughly 1/14th the length of that aforementioned film. Thus, if the number four hundred were to be divided by that total in order to concentrate the essence of the film into a more action-packed short, it would be twenty-eight and a half cuts.
-I edited the film to exactly twenty-eight and a half cuts after I decided on the title. It was not very hard. That was pretty much what I had. How did I accomplish the ½ cut—isn’t, isn’t that impossible? Perhaps, but I freeze-framed the final shot as an homage, to make it even more apparent if anybody couldn’t have caught the more obvious references. The freeze frame may actually be a full shot, but its finality contains an abruptness that gives the illusion of an abbreviated cut (not unlike the final image in Fight Club).
-It ended on 8 ½ which probably made people think it was going to be a Fellini homage. Actually there was really nothing reminiscent of that masterpiece. It was merely a mathematical truth that coincidentally leant itself to multiple film homage interpretations.
And the night before the premiere, when Robby was playing XBOX 360 in my dorm room and I was taking a shower, I cut a film canister right below the surfboard, using the pocket knife. It was a circular shape with three circular triangular shapes cut out. Rather intricate compared to many previously, but this cut had meaning. My first film had inadvertently become named after a number not far from how many times I had marked down a blade upon my skin. I wanted to get closer to that number. 28½. Could I devise an homage to myself when I reached that point, a la my “golden” cut? I didn’t want to think too much about it. The natural course of events often led to the basic conditions necessary for complicated psychic gestures. The film canister was an easy one, like a photograph or journal entry, to remember a time when I was very excited because I had created something that was now going to be let forth into the public, for everyone to dismiss or praise. The film was an integral part of my life—all I had claimed to be studying for had led up to it, and I had finally proven that all was not a waste. So this was actually more of a “tattoo” cut, not necessarily done in a time of great stress or depression or sadness, but when I was actually feeling good (was really high, actually), and I thought it would be cool to see what it felt like then.
Self-mutilation starts to seem tedious when you force yourself to follow a structure, and you find yourself simply filling in the blanks, finishing something just to finish it, as if it were a paper in college that you really didn’t know how to write, so you faked your way through it as best as you could, and you handed it in, and were content getting back a C, because you could be sure that next time, you would focus in the appropriate manner and get an A. Is that the way I feel about this confession, reader? It’s average, not excellent? I wonder what separates the average book from the excellent book. Is it an economy of style or God-like knowledge of all things? Is it a page-turner of a story, or is it something that could only affect the most isolated reader in a highly personal way in their heart? I don’t know—book reviewers confound me. What do they hope to get out of a book—something that makes their critical assignment more fun? Is it more fun to write a positive review that everyone will agree with, or a negative review which displays a higher taste for art than the masses would understand? Most book reviewers are authors themselves—so is it only that they know how hard the publishing process is and all of their reviews basically attack the notion of whether or not the book should have ever been published? No—that’s outside the scope. Their reviews describe whether or not the book is a successful work of art.
I say a successful work of art is something that unites rather than divides. Of course, what unification is possible amongst the isolated spectacles of printed words? The unification is dependent upon a reader’s fine memory, a reader’s articulation, and a reader’s professed enthusiasm for a text. Who among us can remember printed words verbatim as they are read silently to ourselves in our mind, and who among us can quote films or television shows with the utmost veracity and imitation of the actors annunciating the words for us? I feel very hopeless working in this medium. And all I wanted to talk about in the 25th chapter of this confession was how nobody had the same idea of fun as me.
Am I to recount the specific experience for you? It started with Robby calling me in February or March. I had seen him over Thanksgiving and Christmas, but now he was calling to tell me he was going to take a road trip out to California as his graduation gift. His mom said he could do it so long as he devised a budget for the trip and allowed her to approve it, seeing how much money he had to his name and how responsible he could be in an independent arrangement. I told him this was great, as I would be living in L.A. for the 1st half of the summer between my freshman and sophomore year. I would continue to live in Dykstra Hall at a rent significantly lower than typical L.A. housing and I would take my first filmmaking course where our final project would be our first black & white film without sound. Robby told me he was going to leave from Highland Park on June 10 and he hoped to be in L.A. by the afternoon of the 16th. He said he would stay for only a few days—he had to be back by the 26th because his budget would not allow for any more loafing than that. I would be leaving L.A. by the end of June, and flying home, and going to Martha’s Vineyard after a day or two for the rest of the summer. My parents had no interest in staying in Northbrook, and they were not going to let me stay by myself there. Better for them to keep a close eye on my expenses.
So Robby would be there either as I was shooting my film, or immediately after. I would be busy working on it, but it was also the only class I had to worry about. I figured that Robby would be happy to see my work and help me to improve upon it. Maybe he could even be used as an extra in the film, and divert my notions of what the film would be about. Whatever the case, he was still my closest friend from whom I could never keep any secrets, and I looked forward to his company in California. Under these very different circumstances, who knew what we might accomplish?
By the way, the rest of my freshman year was decent. All in all, I was happy I had made some good friends and I was happy people were treating me normally. It was the first time in my life nobody was putting up obstacles to my success. (Only now do I realize, the problem with that was, the success I could accomplish there meant nothing to anyone). Nick and I got along alright, and he went back to the O.C. for the summer, and I stayed in our room by myself. Jake also stayed in the dorms over the summer, and we were the only two people on our floor to stay past graduation ceremonies. A few other students came in for the summer and occupied a few other rooms on the floor. I looked forward to my first filmmaking class immensely.
Samantha and I had signed up at the same time for the class. She was the only person I knew in it from before. On the first day, our new instructor Professor Wazir, who insisted we call her Jackie, explained the way the class would unfold:
“All of your equipment will be rented out from our film department, and all of the expenses for your film usage have already been included in the additional fee for the course. The first week we will learn all of the mechanics of operating the camera with real film. We will not be using digital film in this course. You will learn the basics here, and you will probably never use the basics again. For the last ten years or so, digital has become more and more popular. First there were digital camcorders and then there were DV camcorders and people started saying, the hell with film, this camera costs $700 and you can tape over and over a digital file infinitely and save it on your computer. Celluloid is for purists, and if you are going to be filmmakers, you must at least grasp the foundations of filmmaking, the history, and the techniques of all those that came before you.”
“We will not be using sound in these films because that adds a level of complication to the scenario that I do not want you to worry about. Your films will be silent, and whatever stories you decide to tell must be communicated by wordless gestures, or, if you so choose (though I must admit many find it eccentric and unseemly) by way of letter cards. Your films will have a cap set at seven minutes, so you will have to be very precise about how long each shot is held for, and exactly what image you want to capture in order to tell your story. Some of you may be saying, ‘That’s so limiting, I want to use dialogue, I want to tell an amazing story!’ and to that I am just going to say two things. Number one, seven minutes is a lot longer than it seems for a silent film. Number two, I say you go write that amazing story, with dialogue, with a long-running-time, with everything, and then you figure out a way to tell it without sound, and in seven minutes.”
“By week eight, we will begin showcasing your films. And, while silent shorts are generally ignored by the ‘industry’ at large, if any of your films turn out to be, shall we say, revelatory, I will use my connections to submit it for consideration at next year’s Sundance film festival. And regardless, all of your films will be showcased in one sitting at the end of the course, which everyone in the UCLA community this summer will be invited to attend.”
We went around the room, saying our names, where we were from, and what our favorite movie was. When they got to me I said, “My name’s Oscar, I’m from Chicago, and my favorite movie is Secretary,” which wasn’t true, but which I just wanted to say. A few people in the class who had seen it laughed appreciably. When it got to Samantha she said, “My name’s Samantha, I’m from Las Vegas, and my favorite movie is Annie Hall,” which nobody found very funny. We left class and she asked what I thought my film might be about and I told her I had already been planning it for a year and I knew exactly what its story would be. I found it amazing that I had only thought of one idea for a movie and it was going to be highly appropriate to make that idea a reality.
That night I saw Jake and asked him if he would be my lead actor for the film. He said he would love to do it and then he asked me what the film was about. Of course, I knew what the film was going to be about—the kid who ran away from home to L.A. after the SATs, before college. But, in that moment when Jake asked me, I had a brief vision of saying, “It’s about a kid who cuts himself.”
So you see, reader, the seeds of this document date back to my first significant creative exercise. I knew it was the only story worth telling, the only story not to exist in a conventional framework. It could go anywhere and it could do anything. It could be like the movie Waking Life or Slacker—not in its subject matter, but in its redefinition of what a film could be. So what if this kid just keeps cutting himself? So what if that’s not an exciting enough plot—it’s reality, man! And art, art must mimic reality if we are to find it revelatory, if we are to feel it deeply in our hearts and minds. All the other boys and girls that cut themselves would seek it out and idolize it, the same way I idolized Secretary, because no other movie could be so bold as to take up such abnormal concerns—except that film had focused on it from the female perspective, which just seems like its easier for a mass audience to swallow, for some reason. No, I couldn’t make a movie out of it—it was too dark and uncomfortable for actors. Also, I didn’t yet know how the story would end. Reader! People complain about despairing circumstances being clichéd, but despairing circumstances can often reveal the artist’s consciousness in its totality.
But I told Jake about the runaway story and he said it sounded good. We started work on it immediately the next week. I recruited Professor Diminico to play Jake’s father, and his wife agreed to play the part of the mother. We could not use dialogue, so I had to show Diminico speaking vociferously at a dinner table, Jake looking down at his plate, and Mrs. Diminico regarding the scene with a look of extreme concern. The actions were exaggerated so the meaning could not be missed. I decided not to use word cards—I wanted there to be a greater challenge.
The dinner table scene was the first, and the second was a short shot of Jake with his head in an SAT Test Prep book. The third was a short scene meant to communicate a meeting with a guidance counselor—I also recruited Professor Lang to play this part. Jake was handed a sheet of paper with a list of unimpressive schools. This was the hardest part of the film for me. I didn’t want to offend anyone by saying they were bad schools. There was a key on the sheet that said 1 = reach, 2 = 50/50, 3 = safety. Northwestern University was at the top of the list with an unprecedented 1+, Beloit College had a 1, DePaul had a 1, UIC had a 1, Loyola had a 1, Northern Illinois University had a 2, Columbia College had a 2, and Oakton Community College had a 3. There was a long shot of this sheet of paper as if it were in an old Looney Tunes cartoon and the viewer was meant to process all the information therein contained.
The next scene showed Jake at a desk in the library, taking a standardized test meant to represent the SAT. I could not recreate test-like conditions, so I did my best to gain the support of everyone in the section of the library where we were filming to re-arrange themselves four to a desk and to appear to be focusing on a test. I had roughly sixteen people in the shot and it succeeded in creating the illusion.
Next I showed Jake receiving a letter of acceptance from Northern Illinois University. Then, laying on his bed, looking up at the ceiling, pondering. Then, packing a large backpack, slipping out of the house at night (Diminico was kind enough to let me use his house as well), walking down the street, sticking out his thumb, getting picked up.
It was difficult to create the illusion that Jake was traveling from Chicago to L.A. when we were filming it in L.A. in the middle of June. Luckily, the script had him leaving in May, so the weather was not the problem. It was the rolling hills of California and the flat plains of Illinois. We went beyond the valley, up and around the most distant suburbs of L.A. County, finding roads far from the freeway, far from the insane crowds, giving the illusion that we were in the desolate Middle West. We did not worry about showing the different rides Jake found while hitchhiking—a few different shots of him in the passenger side with changing scenery in the window was more than enough to suffice.
Finally we showed him arriving in Hollywood, of course utilizing that famous sign, and shot a couple L.A. landmarks, which our tour (documented in the “24” chapter) had inspired in us. He had to get a room at the YMCA, so we showed one of those facilities, which the owners were very kind in letting us film. We showed him going into the Cold Stone Creamery with a Help Wanted sign on the front—the one in the mall on Hollywood Blvd, right by the Chinese theaters. We showed him in uniform, scooping out the cake batter flavor into a cup. Finally, we had to intimate that he moved out of the YMCA and into an apartment, so we showed him moving his stuff into an apartment with one of his co-workers as a new roommate. Then, to complete the film, we used the unifying shot of him collapsing onto the bed, looking up at the ceiling, pondering.
I was so happy with this movie! Jake also found my vision very precise—he was very impressed that I had such a clear notion for my first film. How economically we had told such an epic story. The only thing left was to come up with a good title.
Robby had arrived in L.A. the day we were filming the final scene in Jake’s new apartment. He had driven the same teal Toyota Camry he always drove the two thousand miles to California. It occurred to me that I should have asked him to take some footage, which I could have spliced into the film—but I was using real film, not digital, and Robby did not have a camcorder that I knew of anyways. After the last shot, we went back to Dykstra Hall, and Robby put his stuff down in Nick’s old place. I told him I had to go into the editing room tonight to work on the film, and Robby asked if he could come along. I said of course, but it would be boring. He said he didn’t care because he was really interested to see my movie.
We ordered Domino’s after we had been holed up in the editing room for two hours. Robby was assisting me with artistic decisions. It was a very epic story that had to be told in a very short time, and some three or four minutes had to be cut to make the seven-minute restriction. Robby said to cut back on the L.A. landmarks montage—Jake was only going to be working at Cold Stone Creamery—he was not going to be living the stereotypical L.A. lifestyle as traditionally depicted in American cinema. Just that section of Hollywood Blvd. should have been emphasized, Robby said, because that was Jake’s world.
Sometime around 1 AM, we left the editing room and went back to the dorm. Robby said he had a surprise for me. I could guess what it was. The drug box. He took it out of his suitcase. It had been transferred to a shoe box. Inside were twenty-five pills of ecstasy, twenty-five tabs of LSD, five grams of coke, a half ounce of shrooms, an ounce of weed, and two grams of heroin. Robby had kept it almost perfectly halved. To be honest, I felt it was something of a burden, but I also knew I could make a lot of money off it. I thanked Robby at least ten times, showed him the bong I had bought in Venice Beach, we smoked some of the weed from the ounce bag, and we played XBOX 360 until we couldn’t keep our eyes opened. We went to bed sometime after 4:30, because it was one of those rare occasions that we were able to smoke at 4:20 AM.
Robby was going to be in town for the UCLA screening of all the student shorts, which was going to be happening in just a couple days. My film had been finished, and all that was left was to publicize its screening. And title it.
I thought about it for a while, and decided 28½ Cuts would be the best possible title. There were many different variations on why this worked. It had manifold associations. Namely:
-It was in many ways an updated version of Les Quatre Cents Coups, only with Jake being a few years older than Antoine Doinel, and in him never ending up in a detention center, and in it being in English, not French, and translated more appropriately by the word for the purposes of its creator.
-At 7 minutes, it was roughly 1/14th the length of that aforementioned film. Thus, if the number four hundred were to be divided by that total in order to concentrate the essence of the film into a more action-packed short, it would be twenty-eight and a half cuts.
-I edited the film to exactly twenty-eight and a half cuts after I decided on the title. It was not very hard. That was pretty much what I had. How did I accomplish the ½ cut—isn’t, isn’t that impossible? Perhaps, but I freeze-framed the final shot as an homage, to make it even more apparent if anybody couldn’t have caught the more obvious references. The freeze frame may actually be a full shot, but its finality contains an abruptness that gives the illusion of an abbreviated cut (not unlike the final image in Fight Club).
-It ended on 8 ½ which probably made people think it was going to be a Fellini homage. Actually there was really nothing reminiscent of that masterpiece. It was merely a mathematical truth that coincidentally leant itself to multiple film homage interpretations.
And the night before the premiere, when Robby was playing XBOX 360 in my dorm room and I was taking a shower, I cut a film canister right below the surfboard, using the pocket knife. It was a circular shape with three circular triangular shapes cut out. Rather intricate compared to many previously, but this cut had meaning. My first film had inadvertently become named after a number not far from how many times I had marked down a blade upon my skin. I wanted to get closer to that number. 28½. Could I devise an homage to myself when I reached that point, a la my “golden” cut? I didn’t want to think too much about it. The natural course of events often led to the basic conditions necessary for complicated psychic gestures. The film canister was an easy one, like a photograph or journal entry, to remember a time when I was very excited because I had created something that was now going to be let forth into the public, for everyone to dismiss or praise. The film was an integral part of my life—all I had claimed to be studying for had led up to it, and I had finally proven that all was not a waste. So this was actually more of a “tattoo” cut, not necessarily done in a time of great stress or depression or sadness, but when I was actually feeling good (was really high, actually), and I thought it would be cool to see what it felt like then.
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Blindness - Jose Saramago; Blindness - Dir. Fernando Meirelles; Contagion - Dir. Steven Soderbergh
This review is primarily about Blindness, the novel, but I watched the film adaptation as my final Netflick before it became known as a Qwikflick (and sadly cannot afford this new service--though I admit it is dumb, as much business sense as it makes--another perfect example of the world going to hell), and then the night after went to see Contagion in the movie theater. Because of the close proximity of experiencing all three, and because of the similarities between them, this will be the first ever triple-review on Flying Houses.
Blindness provided me with two personal epiphanies--two philosophical insights, slight as they may be, unworthy of a full essay devoted to exploring them, but appropriate here: #1 relates to imagination and ideation. It can be explained by this simple illustration. Let us suppose I am reading a book. Let us suppose it takes place at a time not in the distant past nor the distant future (in other words, anytime between the 19th and 21st centuries). Let us suppose one of the primary settings in this book is a farm. I know one farm in my life better than any other. It was my grandmother's house, the farm my mother grew up on, which we would visit every single Sunday of my childhood, a one hour drive from our house. If there is ever a farm in a book I read, absent some incredibly long and detailed description, I will automatically associate the farm imagined by the writer with the farm I recall in my mind. This could have been an interesting discussion in the class I took called "Borders of the Western Imagination." Our imagination stretches only so far as our experience. Thus the writer forges a connection with the reader through an abstract measure--a single word, a noun. It is impossible for us to imagine the same object in our minds (unless it is a familiar object that everyone can recall, like an Egyptian pyramid), and this is where my literary epiphany comes in. It has always been clear to me that long, descriptive writing is boring, and that I will slog through it thinking, what a waste of my time, anyone can describe what a house looks like from the outside, but who can describe what it feels like to live in that house. Houses are different from farms. They are a far more common object, you can imagine hundreds of different variations, whereas I have not been to many farms, and primarily remember one. Ultimately, description makes little difference. We are all human, and we all have our imaginations to supplement the words that the writer provides. The story is what matters, the dialogue is what matters, and the reader's ability to identify with the characters and their actions is what matters. Blindness is perhaps the ultimate illustration of this concept.
Oeuvre rule: I have not read anything else by Saramago, but apparently all of his books contain the same style of dialogue, which is like this, I'm not going to use any quotations, Why would you do that, Because I am original, because I don't care what rules I'm supposed to follow, Don't you think people will get confused and stop reading, I don't care if they stop reading, they won't because as I said in my previous post, dialogue is like candy for the reader, and even if we include a two-page-long paragraph dialogue between two characters where you begin to lose track of who is who, readers will go to the end because each dialogue is almost like something you'd find in Plato.
That's a tall compliment, but Blindness has the unmistakable flavor of a myth or a parable, and while published in 1996, it can sit alongside Apology or Phaedo or The Oedipus Cycle as well as any other book released over the past century. For one, it is relatively short. It is not an all-consuming, deeply-nuanced study of a family in decline, but the presentation of a philosophical situation, and a reasonable prediction of all the events that could follow.
Blindness provided me with two personal epiphanies--two philosophical insights, slight as they may be, unworthy of a full essay devoted to exploring them, but appropriate here: #1 relates to imagination and ideation. It can be explained by this simple illustration. Let us suppose I am reading a book. Let us suppose it takes place at a time not in the distant past nor the distant future (in other words, anytime between the 19th and 21st centuries). Let us suppose one of the primary settings in this book is a farm. I know one farm in my life better than any other. It was my grandmother's house, the farm my mother grew up on, which we would visit every single Sunday of my childhood, a one hour drive from our house. If there is ever a farm in a book I read, absent some incredibly long and detailed description, I will automatically associate the farm imagined by the writer with the farm I recall in my mind. This could have been an interesting discussion in the class I took called "Borders of the Western Imagination." Our imagination stretches only so far as our experience. Thus the writer forges a connection with the reader through an abstract measure--a single word, a noun. It is impossible for us to imagine the same object in our minds (unless it is a familiar object that everyone can recall, like an Egyptian pyramid), and this is where my literary epiphany comes in. It has always been clear to me that long, descriptive writing is boring, and that I will slog through it thinking, what a waste of my time, anyone can describe what a house looks like from the outside, but who can describe what it feels like to live in that house. Houses are different from farms. They are a far more common object, you can imagine hundreds of different variations, whereas I have not been to many farms, and primarily remember one. Ultimately, description makes little difference. We are all human, and we all have our imaginations to supplement the words that the writer provides. The story is what matters, the dialogue is what matters, and the reader's ability to identify with the characters and their actions is what matters. Blindness is perhaps the ultimate illustration of this concept.
Oeuvre rule: I have not read anything else by Saramago, but apparently all of his books contain the same style of dialogue, which is like this, I'm not going to use any quotations, Why would you do that, Because I am original, because I don't care what rules I'm supposed to follow, Don't you think people will get confused and stop reading, I don't care if they stop reading, they won't because as I said in my previous post, dialogue is like candy for the reader, and even if we include a two-page-long paragraph dialogue between two characters where you begin to lose track of who is who, readers will go to the end because each dialogue is almost like something you'd find in Plato.
That's a tall compliment, but Blindness has the unmistakable flavor of a myth or a parable, and while published in 1996, it can sit alongside Apology or Phaedo or The Oedipus Cycle as well as any other book released over the past century. For one, it is relatively short. It is not an all-consuming, deeply-nuanced study of a family in decline, but the presentation of a philosophical situation, and a reasonable prediction of all the events that could follow.
Here is the plot, shorn of spoilers (and indeed, if you read the back of the paperback copy, it provides spoilers up until the final third of the book--this is a book that won't really be spoiled, except for a few key events--indeed if you watch the movie and look at its R-rating, the description of why it is Rated-R, that is an even bigger spoiler): a man is in his car. He is waiting for the light to turn green. It does, but he goes blind, and he starts freaking out. Another man comes up to his car and asks if he can help him. He walks him back to his home, which happens to be nearby. The first blind man tells his wife, and they go to see the ophthalmologist (I will just use "doctor" from now on because it's hard to spell ophthalmologist). At his office is a girl with dark glasses (a lady of the night, pun intended), a boy with a squint, and an old man with an eyepatch. Later, the scene shoots back to the man who helped the first blind man. He has gone back to the car, and he steals it. He is actually a thief. However, before he can enjoy his new prize, he goes blind. The scene shoots back to the doctor's office. Doctor sees the first blind man and says, I don't know what's wrong with you, there's no medical explanation for this sort of thing. Later that night he goes home and sees his wife and tells her about this unusual case of blindness. He goes to study from his books, and he goes blind.
Soon, the Government begins to notice that people are going blind, and they set up quarantine facilities. Our basic group of characters are all placed in the same mental hospital. They are given food rations, but little direction from the military personnel guarding the facility, because they too are afraid of contracting the "white sickness," called such because the person does not see "blackness" but rather a "sea of milky white." The scenes in the mental hospital comprise the second act of the book. Several key episodes occur, but I will not discuss what happens. Let us just say that the primary allegorical element of the novel is introduced--that is, when civilization and society cease to exist, de facto representatives and leaders emerge in some form or another, either by tyranny or some democratic agreement. What happens to the mental hospital is disgusting. Saramago devotes a good deal of description to the filth.
The third part of the book is probably the strongest section. The last twenty or thirty pages are quite good, too. However, I borrowed this book on a recommendation from a girl who graduated from Fordham Law School. We were talking about Hemingway (as my previous post indicated, back in June 2011, I would soon finish that endless behemoth of a biography on him) and how the ending to The Sun Also Rises is just one of the most beautiful things ever, and how The Old Man and the Sea was a book that you could read anytime, in one day if you had the time, that could just sort of refresh your conscience and remind you of what it is to live and to be alive. She spoke beautifully about literature, and so when I saw Blindness on her shelf and remarked that I had heard great things, and when she said that the ending, also, was worth the total experience, I was convinced. Now, the ending is something of a "twist," and the last section of this book is certainly, to my mind, the strongest part, and the final paragraph can be both mesmerizing and confusing, but still, to a certain extent, I was underwhelmed. That said, I think Blindness is worth reading.
It is something of a long literary experiment, in the vein of Italo Calvino or Haruki Murukami. (I always say those two are experimental because I have only read "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler" and "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World"--the latter of which is the only book I have read since April of 2008 that is not reviewed on Flying Houses, probably because I just don't know how I feel about it). The characters do not have proper names. The book is dialogue-heavy, but I don't believe there is a single quotation mark in it. The characters are blind and they struggle to complete the most mundane tasks. And there are not many portions that I find easy to quote:
"We came out of internment only three days ago, Ah, you were in quarantine, Yes, Was it Hard, Worse than that, How horrible, You are a writer, you have, as you said a moment ago, an obligation to know words, therefore you know that adjectives are of no use to us, if a person kills another, for example, it would be better to state this fact openly, directly, and to trust that the horror of the act, in itself, is so shocking that there is no need for us to say it was horrible, Do you mean that we have more words than we need, I mean that we have too few feelings, Or that we have them but have ceased to use the words they express, And so we lose them, I'd like you to tell me how you lived during quarantine, Why, I am a writer, You would have to have been there, A writer is just like anyone else, he cannot know everything, nor can he experience everything, he must ask and imagine, One day I may tell you what it was like, then you can write a book, Yes, I am writing it, How, if you are blind, The blind too can write, You mean that you had time to learn the braille alphabet, I do not know know braille, How can you write, then, asked the first blind man, Let me show you." (292, quotations mine)
Here, Saramago seems to be inserting himself as a character. The "writer" becomes an archetypal figure, as do the other characters, but this time as an even more transparent philosophical mouthpiece. And while the pleasures the book contains primarily relate to larger issues of the comprehensibility of the different facets of human existence, there are a couple traditional "novelistic" episodes that may bring tears:
"Men are all the same, they think because they came out of the belly of a woman they know all there is to know about women, I know very little about women, and about you I know nothing, as for men, in my opinion, by modern criteria I am now an old man and one-eyed as well as being blind, Have you nothing else to say against yourself, A lot more, you can't imagine how the list of self-recriminations grows with advancing age, I am young and have my fair share already, You haven't done anything really bad yet, How do you know, if you've never lived with me, You're right, I have never lived with you, Why do you repeat my words in that tone of voice, What tone of voice, That one, All I said was that I have never lived with you, Come on, come on, don't pretend that you don't understand, Don't insist, I beg you, I do insist, I want to know, Let's return to hopes, All right, The other example of hope which I refused to give was this, What, The last self-accusation on my list, Please, explain yourself, I never understand riddles, The monstrous wish of never regaining our sight, Why, So that we can go on living as we are, Do you mean all together, or just you and me, Don't make me answer, If you were only a man you could avoid answering, like all others, but you yourself said that you are an old man, and old men, if longevity has any sense at all, should not avert their face from the truth, answer me, With you, And why do you want to live with me, Do you want me to tell in front of everybody, We have done the dirtiest, ugliest, most repulsive things together, what you can tell me cannot possibly be worse, All right, if you insist, let it be, because the man I still am loves the woman you are, Was it so very difficult to make a declaration of love, At my age, people fear ridicule, You were not ridiculous, Let's forget it, please, I have no intention of forgetting it or letting you forget it either, It's nonsense, you forced it out of me and now, And now it's my turn, Don't say anything you may regret later, remember the black list, If I'm sincere today, what does it matter if I regret it tomorrow, Please stop, You want to live with me and I want to live with you, You are mad, We'll start living together here, like a couple, and we shall continue living together if we have to separate from our friends, two blind people must be able to see more than one, It's madness, you don't love me, What's this about loving, I never loved anyone, I just went to bed with men. So you agree with me then, Not really, You spoke of sincerity, tell me then if it's true that you really love me, I love you enough to want to be with you, and that is the first time I've ever said that to anyone, You would not have said it to me either if you had met me somewhere before, an elderly man, half bald with white hair, with a patch over one eye and a cataract in the other, The woman I was then wouldn't have said it, I agree, the person who said it was the woman I am today, Let's see then what the woman you will be tomorrow will have to say, Are you testing me, What an idea, who am I to put you to the test, it's life that decides these things, It's already made one decision." (306-307, quotations mine)
So, let's just take a moment here to point out that, yes, Blindness, is worth reading, and Saramago may have justifiably won the Nobel prize--and indeed, reading it in its original language (which translates directly to Essay on Blindness) might shed even more light on how great a triumph of clarity it is. But seriously--writing a book like this is much easier than writing a book like Buddenbrooks or The Magic Mountain. Those take years, and maybe we have to be much more fast-paced in 1995 than we do in 1915, but if you look at the total oeuvre, Mann's probably outweighs Saramago's by 100%. This in terms of page numbers. And it may be interesting to compare how much money each made from his books (this information in the publishing industry in general seems to be kept secret, and should be addressed more directly so people don't throw away years of their lives writing books no one will ever read), or how much time they spent writing their specific novels, compared to whatever "side-projects" they did for money. But they do have one thing in common: their depiction of reality, and of people acting as they really act, rings true. This is another literary epiphany that I have emphasized greatly over the last several years: REALISM IS ALL THAT MATTERS.
Before we enter into film, philosphical epiphany #2 came to me at some point during my high school years. I had a roommate my sophomore year. High school, is, I think, a cliquey time (law school is too but save that discussion for later). People band together in their own little groups. And it caused me to reflect, how, as the group of participants grows, so also does the group you as an individual are willing to ally yourself with. This is the simple illustration: you are in your dorm room with your roommate, and you are having an argument, or playing a computer game against one another on a local-area-network (Command and Conquer, for example). You hate each other. You want to kill the other person. You want to beat the hell out of them. The next day, you and your roommate play on a team, against two other roommates who live down the hall. Now you are friends and you have to work together, and the other roommates are your enemy. The next day, your dorm has organized a basketball tournament, and every floor has to form their own team to play against the others. The day after that, your dorm has to play in a tournament against every other dorm. The day after that, your school has to play against another school in a big football game. The day after that, an All-American team is selected from the group of 15 schools of which your school is a part. The day after that, All-Americans are chosen from every high school in the country. And so on, until Earth is itself the ultimate community, but it does not seem likely that there will be intergalactic warfare anytime soon. The point is this: we are all part of communities, as tiny as an apartment and as huge as the planet. Our concerns shift and we are more likely to be agreeable the larger the community that we function within, because there will be many other people on your same side that will denounce you, or question your beliefs, not out of some personal animus, but out of the altruistic motive of discovering what is best for one and what is best for all. That is, there is a search for reason, not some kind of search for dominance over the other side. This is the basic problem with the adversarial system of law, personal relationships, a free enterprise society, everything.
After that incomprehensible thought pattern, let's move on to Fernando Meirelles. First of all, if you have not seen City of God, please watch it next weekend. I only saw it once, like 5 years ago, but it stands out to me as one of the best films of the decade of the 2000s. Second, I thought The Constant Gardener was real boring. Sorry, but I don't remember anything about it. Finally, Blindness is ultimately a poor adaptation of the book, but its heart is in the right place. This is meant to be an absolutely faithful adaptation. And it is. No characters are named--except "The King of the Ward 3" who is played by Gael Garcia Bernal. Now, he is one of my favorite actors--I really liked Y Tu Mama Tambien and The Science of Sleep and those movies show that he has kind of an incredible energy. His character is definitely in the book, but he is also given an auxiliary role so that his character could also be named "the bartender," which is not in the book. Also, Sandra Oh plays the "Minister of Health" which is not in the book, really, or if she is, in disembodied form. Either of these actors would have been good to play one of the major characters, but to me they are basically wasted in the roles they are given. Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo do fine with the material they are given, but everyone else seems rushed to develop their character, or they just come through less clearly than in the book. Many key moments are transported directly from the text of the book (like when the Doctor asks for a show of hands when voting on something, and then realizes the absurdity of such a directive), but many are left out (like the second long quotation from above). The book's third act in particular seems cut down sharply. There are several key scenes there that would have made the movie much better.
Basically, there are several problems with the film. #1: Blindness is meant to be read, not viewed. It all has to do with the comprehension of our senses. Reading is, in a sense, a blind activity. We are not looking at objects--we are looking at words and imagining objects. When you watch a movie, you are looking at the objects. The director and cinematographer make an effort to portray the "white sickness" through combinations of visual trickery, but it feels like an empty exercise. #2: Blindness the book is much funnier. The book is hilarious, whether or not always intentional, and the movie is pretty serious all the way through--excepting the one joke about raising hands. #3: The movie is marketed as a "thriller." And it is made like that, with an emphasis on plot--what's going to happen to these people? A more dreamlike, detached, philosophical approach might have made for a better adaptation. It appears as if the producers were shooting for the moon--they wanted a big-budget blockbuster with an uber-art house director adapted from a Nobel-prize winning author that millions of people all over the world would see. But Harry Potter Blindness is not. That said, I still believe that an adaptation of White Noise would be a huge success. BUT IT HAS TO BE DONE RIGHT!
Of special note in Blindness is the final shot. It gave me a different interpretation than what I had of the text, and upon re-reading, it is the correct one.
If one was reading Blindness in September 2011, one could not help but think of its similarities to Contagion when the posters started showing up in New York. Here is a movie that everybody knows. It is the follow-up to Outbreak in a sense, fifteen years later, with a bit more sophisticated technology, and a slightly amped-up cast. Many elements from Blindness and Contagion coalesce. In particular, the quarantines that are implemented. However, the key difference is that society does not crumble in Contagion quite the way it does in Blindness. It's less philosophical and more realistic, though plenty of readers will admit that what happens in Blindness is totally plausible--if such a "white sickness" were to actually happen. Contagion is very scary. The first thirty minutes scared me. I really liked it for a while towards the middle. Then towards the end, (I won't spoil anything, though it seems this film is incredibly popular, and has already made more money and attracted a bigger audience than either Blindness ever will) I started to get bored.
But yeah, a depiction of a disease that is visceral rather than invisible will generally be more engaging on film. The converse will generally be more engaging on page.
Thursday, July 7, 2011
Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story - Carlos Baker
Few people in this world will spend a full year reading a single book. It happened to me, who happens to run a blog primarily devoted to literature. It will never happen again.
To be sure, there were extenuating circumstances. But I recall that bright day in June of 2010 when I chanced upon this volume in a basket of books in my parent’s bedroom. It stood out to me like a beacon. It was a long book, but I had just finished Ada, which ran about 600 pages and made for extremely difficult reading. Soon I would be starting law school, and I would not be able to read anything besides my casebooks (so I thought). I thought I could finish it before I left for school, roughly two months away. I read the back, and the first line from the introduction: “He used to say that he wanted no biography written while he was alive, and preferably for a hundred years after he was dead.” (vii) It was immediately apparent that it must be my final book before law school. I had read many books which I thought might teach me how to write a stunning first novel (Less Than Zero, The Sun Also Rises, This Side of Paradise, The Catcher in the Rye) and I had read books by John Gardner or Stephen King or Anne Lamott or James Wood or Francine Prose on how to write good books and I had read a book of letters between Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald but I had never read a biography on a writer I admired that might indicate a manner in which to live to best accomplish the task that I had set as my life’s purpose and mission: to write books that would outlast my own life, that would be a record of the life I had lived, that would elucidate my stance on the bits of human existence that were most worth remembering.
I took the book and went outside into my backyard. No one else was home, or would be for days, so I stripped to my underwear and sunbathed and read the first 50 pages. No one saw me, or if they did they said nothing, and I did not care. Here for a brief instant life was good. I had the day off work. I could fill my body with intoxicating chemicals and no one would know. I had settled down to learn from the example of a master.
The months rolled by and Friday, August 13th came, and I moved into my new apartment in Brooklyn. I had made it 250 pages through the book. I was obliged to put it down and read The Buffalo Creek Disaster. I did not read any more for a long time. Over Christmas Break, I began reading Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. That was a very good book, and I was flying through it, and was preparing to write a review for Flying Houses when it was unfortunately stolen along with my messenger bag and iPod and digital camera and D & G glasses from a bar in Chelsea, on or around January 8, 2011.
I returned to this volume at points nearing the end of Spring Semester. My life between August 2010 and May 2011 was extremely painful and has been written about on this blog before, and will likely be written about again. I was finally able to return to this book in earnest near the end of May, before borrowing what will be the next review on this blog, Blindness. Still, I rarely read in Brooklyn, consumed by an internship and feelings of anxiety and hopelessness, time always slipping away without a thing to show for it. I have finally finished today, July 6, 2011, on Nantucket island, and will now state that this book is difficult reading.
One would not expect a biography to be a difficult read, but this is a very minutely detailed book. There are not many reviews of this book on Amazon but the few there admit it to be great. And true, one cannot complain that Baker leaves any stone unturned. This is a remarkably comprehensive account of Hemingway’s life. However, for me, it was too comprehensive, and those looking to tackle it should be forewarned of several distinguishing features.
First, there is almost no dialogue. Now, true, any biography attempting to portray a life realistically should not include much dialogue. A person’s words, spoken aloud in daily life, often go unrecorded and it is dangerous to try to imitate the way the subject may have spoken. Of the 564 pages in this book perhaps three or four pages (or less) consist of dialogue in quotations.
At first this may seem a petty complaint, but I do not think I have ever read a book with such little dialogue. And it leads to me reflect upon a comment a writing teacher of mine once said: “Dialogue is a reward for the reader.” Dialogue is like candy. Dialogue may be difficult to write, but is almost always easy to read. Pages consisting of dialogue in quotations will be flipped through noticeably faster than those of thick, dense, descriptive paragraphs. Law students reading casebooks may experience a similar feeling when reading cases that quote extensively from the record. These are often a relief. A little break. A reward. Here is the main dialogue I remember from the book:
“Buck, I just called to tell you I got that thing.”
“That thing? What thing?”
“That Swedish thing. You know.”
“You mean the Nobel Prize?”
“Yeah,” said Ernest. “You’re the first one I called.”
“God-damned wonderful,” Lanham said. “Congratulations.”
“I should have had the damn thing long ago,” said Ernest. “I’m thinking of telling them to shove it.”
“Don’t be a jackass. You can’t do that.”
“Well, maybe not,” said Ernest. “There’s thirty-five thousand dollars. You and I can have a hell of a lot of fun with thirty-five thousand dollars. The big thing I called about, Buck, is I want you to come down here and handle me. Everybody’s going to be banging on the door of the Finca. Buck, how about it?” (527)
“Buck” is Buck Lanham, a general in the U.S. Army stationed in France, Belgium, and Germany during World War II. He figures prominently in this book. The biography is actually dedicated to Buck Lanham and Dorothy Baker (the author’s wife). Buck Lanham becomes a close friend to Ernest, and later to Carlos Baker. Lanham must have provided the majority of first-person accounting on Ernest over the last seventeen years of his life or so. They met when Ernest was a war correspondent in Europe between 1943 and 1944.
My earlier point about dialogue should not be misconstrued. My comment referred to “blocked” dialogue. And that excerpt above may be the only such example in the book. But there is plenty of dialogue contained within the dense, descriptive paragraphs of the book. However, they are mostly phrases, or single sentences. Like one line of Ernest’s that he liked to say after his experiences in World War II: “How do you like it now, gentlemen?” This he said to his mother after threatening to cut her off when she was a poor old woman living in River Forest, IL in the late 1940’s. He had a very bad relationship with his mother because he believed she drove his father to suicide.
If the lack of “blocked” dialogue is a complaint, then my other complaint involves the subject matter of this book. True, there is plenty about Ernest’s writing, and his love and disdain for other writers, but the book is decidedly focused on the events in his life that inspired his writing. Consequently, there is an incredible amount of material of his time serving as a correspondent for the Spanish Civil War and World War II. The sections of the book about his time served as an ambulance driver during World War I are, for some reason, less tedious, perhaps if (or because) one has read A Farewell to Arms. There is almost nothing I remember about the Spanish Civil War from this book. But the stories from World War II are frankly ridiculous. Notably, there is one part where he sees a general crouched down behind a rock with his men, and he tells Buck Lanham, who is worried he will have to replace him, that the man is going to die because he has a stink of death about him. A day or two later the general does die, and Lanham asks how he could possibly know that was going to happen. Ernest replies that it is something one picks up while serving in a war.
There are other episodes where he narrowly escapes death about a dozen or so times, and it is incredible to observe such behavior where there does not seem to be any real hope of gain except for the thrill of being in a dangerous situation. Later he is questioned by the Inspector General when they suspect him of acting outside the scope of his duties as a war correspondent, in violation of the Geneva Convention. He lies, he commits perjury, and he is ashamed, because he actually does command troops. It is sort of hilarious that yes, he does have war experience, but he is basically just this writer that loves danger, and he is a big man with a big beard, and people automatically assume he is some kind of general, and he speaks with authority, and they listen to him.
There is much about his life near Havana, Cuba, and his fishing boat, the Pilar. In another hilarious episode, he learns about German submarines surfacing and demanding provisions from fishing boats in the area. He decides to assemble a ragtag group of eight individuals and calls the scheme Friendless, after the name of one of his cats. They get a bunch of grenades and plan to throw them into a German submarine when the enemy party might emerge on deck in an attempt to raid their fishing boat. They patrol the area, but they never get the opportunity to actually attack the Nazis.
There is much about hunting, and fishing. And there is much about the friendships he makes along the way, but few of the names will be previously familiar to readers of this book. If one wanted to make a movie of Hemingway’s life, this would be the place to start. However, it is clear from this book that he would absolutely hate the prospect of such a film. There are episodes involving all of the films that are adapted from his works, and it is only the film of his short story “The Killers” that he finds comes close to his written product.
The above material, if one is very interested in hunting, or fishing, or first-person accounts of wartime adventures, will be quite enjoyable. However, I must take issue with Baker’s writing style during these sections. True, he does seem to write with authority on the subject matter, but it can often be confusing for the lay reader without such experience—or worse yet, boring. But this is how Hemingway really lived: he wrote, he travelled, he admired the courage of those on the front lines of war and spent as much time with them as he could, he hunted and fished extensively, and he liked to surround himself with friends to drink and carry out such activities.
While he may come off as egotistical at times, what comes across more is his ability to listen to others and his thirst for hearing their real experiences. I have often marveled at Nabokov’s linguistic capabilities, and while Hemingway did not write in his second language, he also spoke French, Spanish, and some Italian. Rather than college at Oberlin or the University of Illinois, he immediately starts as a journalist in Kansas City, and readers in 2011 with too much money spent on education and too few practical skills actually learned will bemoan their existence. His knowledge of the arts and sciences is not diminished by lack of such education. He does not learn by studying (except when it comes to literature), but by doing.
Baker is at his best when discussing the literary aspects of Hemingway’s life. And I do not think it is just because I am so partial to him, but any paragraph that mentions F. Scott Fitzgerald is instantly quotable. It is true that there are too many quotations I could include here, but there are few other subjects I would want my review to contain. Here, after Baker mentions that Hemingway had been reading Thomas Mann (Buddenbrooks) and Turgenev (Fathers and Children) near the end of 1925, is one of the many episodes in which he holds court with visitors from a sickbed:
“From the fastness of his featherbed, Ernest discoursed at length to Fitzgerald on the importance of subject in fiction. War, said he, was the best subject of all. It offered maximum material combined with maximum action. Everything was speeded up and the writer who had participated in a war gained such a mass of experience as he would normally have to wait a lifetime to get. Dos Passos, for one, had been made by the Kaiser’s War, having gone to it twice and grown up in between. This was one reason why his Three Soldiers was such a swell book. Other good subjects, according to Ernest, were love, money, avarice, murder, and impotence. The Sun Also Rises, which he must now work all winter to revise, engaged none of these except the second and the last, but his hopes for the book were high. As soon as he recovered from his respiratory infection, he would take up the task of revision and typing.” (161)
Several of these episodes would be contained in A Moveable Feast, which is the last book that Hemingway works on, besides a lengthy article on bullfights that he observed on his last trip to Spain around 1959 or 1960. A Moveable Feast is treated as a series of “sketches” but if one has not read it, and would like to read about Hemingway, it is the real place to start. Much of their friendship took place after the writing of The Great Gatsby and before the publication of Tender is the Night:
“In spite of his own writing difficulties, Ernest played Dutch uncle to Fitzgerald, repeatedly urging him to get forward with Tender is the Night. The only thing to do with a novel, said he, was to finish it. Scott’s mood of depression was nothing but the Artist’s Reward. Summer was anyhow a discouraging time to work: only in the fall, when the feeling of death came on, did you find ‘the boys’ putting pen to paper. The good parts of a novel might be something a writer was lucky enough to overhear or they might be the wreckage of his whole damned life. The artist should not worry over the loss of his early bloom. People were not peaches. Like guns and saddles, they were all the better for becoming slightly worn. When a bloomless writer got his flashes of the old juice, he knew enough to get results with them. As always with Fitzgerald, Ernest managed to sound like a grizzled veteran of fifty rather than a comparative youngster of thirty whose second novel was not yet published.” (204)
Their friendship, however, is not always nice and friendly. In fact they have something of a falling out:
“As for Scott, he felt that only two events could possibly redeem him: either Zelda must die or Scott must develop a stomach disorder severe enough to make him stop drinking. Why did he refuse to grow up? Why was he drunk whenever Ernest saw him? His ‘damned bloody romanticism’ and his ‘cheap Irish love of defeat’ were becoming tiresome. Ernest, on the other hand, said that he had a damned good time all the time. When he was able to work, he never felt low. He took great pleasure in living for 340 days out of every 365. He was always conscious, he said, of living not one life but two. One was that of a writer who got his reward after his death, and to hell with what he got now. The other was that of a man who got everything now, and to hell with what came to him after death. Fame was anyway a strange phenomenon. A man might become immortal with ten lines of poetry or a hundred pages of prose. Or not, no matter how much he wrote, if he never had what it took. In his lifetime, a writer was judged by the sum total and average of his work. After he died, only the best mattered. He was convinced that human beings were probably ‘intended’ to suffer. But his experience had shown him that a man could get used to anything as long as he refused to worry about bad luck before it happened.” (238-239)
When Tender is the Night is published, Hemingway first rejects it, finding that it is basically a portrait of Fitzgerald’s life on the French Riviera, without any understanding of the psychological complexities of the characters he had picked out from real life. But his opinion would change:
“At first he had understated the book’s virtues and overemphasized its shortcomings. Scott obviously had talent to burn, said Ernest, but he had ‘cheated too damned much in this one.’ His problem was that he had stopped listening long ago, except to answers to his own questions. This was what dried a writer up. The minute he started listening again, he would sprout like dry grass after a sozzling rain. He must also learn to forget his personal tragedy. Everyone was bitched from the start, anyhow, and it was clear enough that Scott had to be hurt like hell before he could write seriously. It was his obligation to use the damned hurt in his writing, not to cheat with it. Neither he nor Ernest was a tragic character: they were only writers who must write. Most good writers, including James Joyce, were rummies. But good writers could always make comebacks. Scott was twice as good right this minute as he had been at the time of The Great Gatsby. ‘Go on and write,’ said Ernest.” (262) Fitzgerald then replies with an enthusiastic letter about how much he looks up to Hemingway and even needs to stop reading his books for fear that he will influence him too much.
Their friendship continues along pleasantly enough until Fitzgerald published “The Crack-Up” in Esquire in 1936. “Ernest was shocked. Scott, he felt, seemed almost to be taking pride in the shamelessness of his defeat. Why in God’s name couldn’t he understand that writers went through that kind of emptiness many times?” (283) Then there comes a decisive moment. Both Fitzgerald and Hemingway made a practice out of carving their characters from real life, but one story goes too far, and is worth a long excerpt:
“The story [“The Snows of Kilimanjaro”] also reached out to involve Fitzgerald. The dying writer was made to remember ‘poor Scott Fitzgerald’ and ‘his romantic awe’ of that ‘special glamorous race’ who had money. When Scott had discovered that they were not so glamorous as he had supposed, the realization ‘wrecked him just as much as any other thing that wrecked him.’ Ernest was determined not to follow Fitzgerald into the wreckage of a crack-up. As he had long ago told him, wreckage was made to be used by writers, even if it was the wreckage of one’s whole damned life. If the rich were indeed the enemy, Ernest would use them as such in his fiction.
“Ill and depressed among the green mountains of North Carolina, Fitzgerald was angered to see his name used in Ernest’s story. He got off a curt note on the stationery of the Grove Park Inn in Asheville.
Dear Ernest: Please lay off me in print. If I choose to write de profundis sometimes it doesn’t mean I want friends praying aloud over my corpse. No doubt you meant it kindly, but it cost me a night’s sleep. And when you incorporate it [the story] in a book would you mind cutting my name? It’s a fine story—one of your best—even though ‘Poor Scott Fitzgerald, etc.’ rather spoiled it for me. Ever your friend, Scott.
[P.S.] Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.
“Ernest presently wrote Perkins that Scott’s reaction was damned curious coming from a man who had spent all winter writing ‘those awful things about himself’ in Esquire. His reply to Scott himself said ominously that for five years now he had not written a line about anyone he knew because he had felt so sorry for them. But all that was past. He was going to stop being a gentleman and go back to being a novelist, using whatever material he damned well chose.” (290)
They correspond a couple other times with less rancor, but this is pretty much the extent of “gossip” contained in this book. Hemingway later reflects that Tender is the Night is probably Fitzgerald’s masterpiece around the time of the publication of For Whom the Bell Tolls and Fitzgerald’s death. Other literary figures, such as Ezra Pound, Sinclair Lewis, William Faulkner, J.D. Salinger, and Tennessee Williams appear in varying degrees, usually treading lightly so as not to upset Hemingway, who may justifiably be deemed a prickly personality—that is, if the slightest hint of a criticism emerged in an article or lecture. The exception is for Italian historian and art critic Bernard Berenson, who was in his 80s when he befriended Hemingway—Berenson never does wrong in his eyes. Famous movie stars such as Gary Cooper and Marlene Dietrich become close friends of his, as does Ingrid Bergman (but not her husband) and his attitude towards Spencer Tracy, who would play Santiago in the film adaptation of The Old Man and the Sea, is ambivalent.
In general the book is long and slow, but it is detailed. And it has always been something of a hobby of mine to stop by the same places where Hemingway has been in the past. While in Paris in 2003, I went to the Closerie des Lilas in Montparnasse and wrote a paper about how it had changed over the last seventy-five years. I have only been to Oak Park, IL proper a few times but have not driven by the house of his youth. He did not have very strong feelings for New York: “The homeward voyage was both stormy and dull. He gazed with surly distaste at the skyline of New York—the damned ‘chickenshit cement canyon town’ which he had left so exuberantly four months earlier.” (482) But he stayed at a friend’s house at 116 E. 64th St. in 1956 and at 1 E. 62nd St. in 1959. Notably for my present circumstances, he stayed at 45 Pearl Street in Nantucket in 1910 and sang at the First Congregational Church in a choir with his mother. I ran by the First Congregational Church yesterday en route to Cliff Rd. and hope to pass by 45 Pearl Street before I leave here the day after tomorrow.
His influence continues unabated fifty years after his death. While on vacation here, one of my sisters brought a biography of J.D. Salinger which came out this year. I found the coincidence remarkable. Here we are, both English majors (to a certain extent), both on vacation, one in law school and one considering going, one with an Ernest Hemingway biography and the other with a J.D. Salinger biography. I pointed out the one paragraph (on page 420, which only passes “the test” previously described here if one considers Salinger’s prose a narcotic) that describes their meeting in Paris in 1944 and asked whether she would show me the corresponding section in her book, which she did not. I wanted to have a debate about which writer would better stand the test of time as an American literary hero. It is tough, but I think Hemingway wins out. Another sister brought The Paris Wife, which my mother then read, which is a fictionalized account of his years in Paris, the title a reference to his first wife (out of four) Hadley, with her as the novel’s protagonist. So many coincidences show that he has permeated a great many fashions underlying the fabric of daily American life, down to the men in their middle-to-old age who have white hair and full beards, who bear an unmistakable resemblance. There are not many others who can be said to inhabit a state of appearance.
This book took me a very long time to read, and perhaps I found it slow and disappointing because it does not read like one of Hemingway’s books, where the prose has a tendency to fly off the page in often beautiful and original ways. Like Salinger after him, his literary style became the status quo, and remains a serious influence to this day. The final section of the book, the last fifty pages or so, went a good deal faster for me. His mind begins to deteriorate, and his weight drops to 175 pounds. The ending is somewhat sad, and also darkly funny when on the last night of his life he acts like everything is totally fine, and he wakes up early, and though his wife Mary has locked away the guns, he knows where the keys are kept. He goes about his death in a very matter-of-fact way. Of course he died too young and he might have produced several more great books yet, but he lived more than twenty years longer than Fitzgerald and surely left his mark on the world. If suicide is universally regarded as an immoral act, he at least may have had the excuse that it ran in his family, and that he could not help it if it were in his genes. He had two stays at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN during the last couple years of his life to tend to his psychiatric condition with shock treatments and other medication, which seemed to have a positive short-term effect, but obviously not long-term.
I have surprisingly never reviewed one of Hemingway’s books on Flying Houses but The Sun Also Rises is a masterpiece. I read The Old Man and the Sea as an 8th grader, required for school, and probably did not appreciate it enough at the time. It deserves a second look. I read A Farewell to Arms in high school as another required book, but I enjoyed it very much. It also deserves a second look. I have read A Moveable Feast two or three times and it is highly entertaining, oftentimes hilarious. I have not read For Whom the Bell Tolls and this will hopefully be reviewed sometime here in the not too distant future. But for now, I have been consumed deeply enough by Hemingway and will move onto a new book with renewed vigor and a goal to never take this long to read a book again.
To be sure, there were extenuating circumstances. But I recall that bright day in June of 2010 when I chanced upon this volume in a basket of books in my parent’s bedroom. It stood out to me like a beacon. It was a long book, but I had just finished Ada, which ran about 600 pages and made for extremely difficult reading. Soon I would be starting law school, and I would not be able to read anything besides my casebooks (so I thought). I thought I could finish it before I left for school, roughly two months away. I read the back, and the first line from the introduction: “He used to say that he wanted no biography written while he was alive, and preferably for a hundred years after he was dead.” (vii) It was immediately apparent that it must be my final book before law school. I had read many books which I thought might teach me how to write a stunning first novel (Less Than Zero, The Sun Also Rises, This Side of Paradise, The Catcher in the Rye) and I had read books by John Gardner or Stephen King or Anne Lamott or James Wood or Francine Prose on how to write good books and I had read a book of letters between Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald but I had never read a biography on a writer I admired that might indicate a manner in which to live to best accomplish the task that I had set as my life’s purpose and mission: to write books that would outlast my own life, that would be a record of the life I had lived, that would elucidate my stance on the bits of human existence that were most worth remembering.
I took the book and went outside into my backyard. No one else was home, or would be for days, so I stripped to my underwear and sunbathed and read the first 50 pages. No one saw me, or if they did they said nothing, and I did not care. Here for a brief instant life was good. I had the day off work. I could fill my body with intoxicating chemicals and no one would know. I had settled down to learn from the example of a master.
The months rolled by and Friday, August 13th came, and I moved into my new apartment in Brooklyn. I had made it 250 pages through the book. I was obliged to put it down and read The Buffalo Creek Disaster. I did not read any more for a long time. Over Christmas Break, I began reading Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. That was a very good book, and I was flying through it, and was preparing to write a review for Flying Houses when it was unfortunately stolen along with my messenger bag and iPod and digital camera and D & G glasses from a bar in Chelsea, on or around January 8, 2011.
I returned to this volume at points nearing the end of Spring Semester. My life between August 2010 and May 2011 was extremely painful and has been written about on this blog before, and will likely be written about again. I was finally able to return to this book in earnest near the end of May, before borrowing what will be the next review on this blog, Blindness. Still, I rarely read in Brooklyn, consumed by an internship and feelings of anxiety and hopelessness, time always slipping away without a thing to show for it. I have finally finished today, July 6, 2011, on Nantucket island, and will now state that this book is difficult reading.
One would not expect a biography to be a difficult read, but this is a very minutely detailed book. There are not many reviews of this book on Amazon but the few there admit it to be great. And true, one cannot complain that Baker leaves any stone unturned. This is a remarkably comprehensive account of Hemingway’s life. However, for me, it was too comprehensive, and those looking to tackle it should be forewarned of several distinguishing features.
First, there is almost no dialogue. Now, true, any biography attempting to portray a life realistically should not include much dialogue. A person’s words, spoken aloud in daily life, often go unrecorded and it is dangerous to try to imitate the way the subject may have spoken. Of the 564 pages in this book perhaps three or four pages (or less) consist of dialogue in quotations.
At first this may seem a petty complaint, but I do not think I have ever read a book with such little dialogue. And it leads to me reflect upon a comment a writing teacher of mine once said: “Dialogue is a reward for the reader.” Dialogue is like candy. Dialogue may be difficult to write, but is almost always easy to read. Pages consisting of dialogue in quotations will be flipped through noticeably faster than those of thick, dense, descriptive paragraphs. Law students reading casebooks may experience a similar feeling when reading cases that quote extensively from the record. These are often a relief. A little break. A reward. Here is the main dialogue I remember from the book:
“Buck, I just called to tell you I got that thing.”
“That thing? What thing?”
“That Swedish thing. You know.”
“You mean the Nobel Prize?”
“Yeah,” said Ernest. “You’re the first one I called.”
“God-damned wonderful,” Lanham said. “Congratulations.”
“I should have had the damn thing long ago,” said Ernest. “I’m thinking of telling them to shove it.”
“Don’t be a jackass. You can’t do that.”
“Well, maybe not,” said Ernest. “There’s thirty-five thousand dollars. You and I can have a hell of a lot of fun with thirty-five thousand dollars. The big thing I called about, Buck, is I want you to come down here and handle me. Everybody’s going to be banging on the door of the Finca. Buck, how about it?” (527)
“Buck” is Buck Lanham, a general in the U.S. Army stationed in France, Belgium, and Germany during World War II. He figures prominently in this book. The biography is actually dedicated to Buck Lanham and Dorothy Baker (the author’s wife). Buck Lanham becomes a close friend to Ernest, and later to Carlos Baker. Lanham must have provided the majority of first-person accounting on Ernest over the last seventeen years of his life or so. They met when Ernest was a war correspondent in Europe between 1943 and 1944.
My earlier point about dialogue should not be misconstrued. My comment referred to “blocked” dialogue. And that excerpt above may be the only such example in the book. But there is plenty of dialogue contained within the dense, descriptive paragraphs of the book. However, they are mostly phrases, or single sentences. Like one line of Ernest’s that he liked to say after his experiences in World War II: “How do you like it now, gentlemen?” This he said to his mother after threatening to cut her off when she was a poor old woman living in River Forest, IL in the late 1940’s. He had a very bad relationship with his mother because he believed she drove his father to suicide.
If the lack of “blocked” dialogue is a complaint, then my other complaint involves the subject matter of this book. True, there is plenty about Ernest’s writing, and his love and disdain for other writers, but the book is decidedly focused on the events in his life that inspired his writing. Consequently, there is an incredible amount of material of his time serving as a correspondent for the Spanish Civil War and World War II. The sections of the book about his time served as an ambulance driver during World War I are, for some reason, less tedious, perhaps if (or because) one has read A Farewell to Arms. There is almost nothing I remember about the Spanish Civil War from this book. But the stories from World War II are frankly ridiculous. Notably, there is one part where he sees a general crouched down behind a rock with his men, and he tells Buck Lanham, who is worried he will have to replace him, that the man is going to die because he has a stink of death about him. A day or two later the general does die, and Lanham asks how he could possibly know that was going to happen. Ernest replies that it is something one picks up while serving in a war.
There are other episodes where he narrowly escapes death about a dozen or so times, and it is incredible to observe such behavior where there does not seem to be any real hope of gain except for the thrill of being in a dangerous situation. Later he is questioned by the Inspector General when they suspect him of acting outside the scope of his duties as a war correspondent, in violation of the Geneva Convention. He lies, he commits perjury, and he is ashamed, because he actually does command troops. It is sort of hilarious that yes, he does have war experience, but he is basically just this writer that loves danger, and he is a big man with a big beard, and people automatically assume he is some kind of general, and he speaks with authority, and they listen to him.
There is much about his life near Havana, Cuba, and his fishing boat, the Pilar. In another hilarious episode, he learns about German submarines surfacing and demanding provisions from fishing boats in the area. He decides to assemble a ragtag group of eight individuals and calls the scheme Friendless, after the name of one of his cats. They get a bunch of grenades and plan to throw them into a German submarine when the enemy party might emerge on deck in an attempt to raid their fishing boat. They patrol the area, but they never get the opportunity to actually attack the Nazis.
There is much about hunting, and fishing. And there is much about the friendships he makes along the way, but few of the names will be previously familiar to readers of this book. If one wanted to make a movie of Hemingway’s life, this would be the place to start. However, it is clear from this book that he would absolutely hate the prospect of such a film. There are episodes involving all of the films that are adapted from his works, and it is only the film of his short story “The Killers” that he finds comes close to his written product.
The above material, if one is very interested in hunting, or fishing, or first-person accounts of wartime adventures, will be quite enjoyable. However, I must take issue with Baker’s writing style during these sections. True, he does seem to write with authority on the subject matter, but it can often be confusing for the lay reader without such experience—or worse yet, boring. But this is how Hemingway really lived: he wrote, he travelled, he admired the courage of those on the front lines of war and spent as much time with them as he could, he hunted and fished extensively, and he liked to surround himself with friends to drink and carry out such activities.
While he may come off as egotistical at times, what comes across more is his ability to listen to others and his thirst for hearing their real experiences. I have often marveled at Nabokov’s linguistic capabilities, and while Hemingway did not write in his second language, he also spoke French, Spanish, and some Italian. Rather than college at Oberlin or the University of Illinois, he immediately starts as a journalist in Kansas City, and readers in 2011 with too much money spent on education and too few practical skills actually learned will bemoan their existence. His knowledge of the arts and sciences is not diminished by lack of such education. He does not learn by studying (except when it comes to literature), but by doing.
Baker is at his best when discussing the literary aspects of Hemingway’s life. And I do not think it is just because I am so partial to him, but any paragraph that mentions F. Scott Fitzgerald is instantly quotable. It is true that there are too many quotations I could include here, but there are few other subjects I would want my review to contain. Here, after Baker mentions that Hemingway had been reading Thomas Mann (Buddenbrooks) and Turgenev (Fathers and Children) near the end of 1925, is one of the many episodes in which he holds court with visitors from a sickbed:
“From the fastness of his featherbed, Ernest discoursed at length to Fitzgerald on the importance of subject in fiction. War, said he, was the best subject of all. It offered maximum material combined with maximum action. Everything was speeded up and the writer who had participated in a war gained such a mass of experience as he would normally have to wait a lifetime to get. Dos Passos, for one, had been made by the Kaiser’s War, having gone to it twice and grown up in between. This was one reason why his Three Soldiers was such a swell book. Other good subjects, according to Ernest, were love, money, avarice, murder, and impotence. The Sun Also Rises, which he must now work all winter to revise, engaged none of these except the second and the last, but his hopes for the book were high. As soon as he recovered from his respiratory infection, he would take up the task of revision and typing.” (161)
Several of these episodes would be contained in A Moveable Feast, which is the last book that Hemingway works on, besides a lengthy article on bullfights that he observed on his last trip to Spain around 1959 or 1960. A Moveable Feast is treated as a series of “sketches” but if one has not read it, and would like to read about Hemingway, it is the real place to start. Much of their friendship took place after the writing of The Great Gatsby and before the publication of Tender is the Night:
“In spite of his own writing difficulties, Ernest played Dutch uncle to Fitzgerald, repeatedly urging him to get forward with Tender is the Night. The only thing to do with a novel, said he, was to finish it. Scott’s mood of depression was nothing but the Artist’s Reward. Summer was anyhow a discouraging time to work: only in the fall, when the feeling of death came on, did you find ‘the boys’ putting pen to paper. The good parts of a novel might be something a writer was lucky enough to overhear or they might be the wreckage of his whole damned life. The artist should not worry over the loss of his early bloom. People were not peaches. Like guns and saddles, they were all the better for becoming slightly worn. When a bloomless writer got his flashes of the old juice, he knew enough to get results with them. As always with Fitzgerald, Ernest managed to sound like a grizzled veteran of fifty rather than a comparative youngster of thirty whose second novel was not yet published.” (204)
Their friendship, however, is not always nice and friendly. In fact they have something of a falling out:
“As for Scott, he felt that only two events could possibly redeem him: either Zelda must die or Scott must develop a stomach disorder severe enough to make him stop drinking. Why did he refuse to grow up? Why was he drunk whenever Ernest saw him? His ‘damned bloody romanticism’ and his ‘cheap Irish love of defeat’ were becoming tiresome. Ernest, on the other hand, said that he had a damned good time all the time. When he was able to work, he never felt low. He took great pleasure in living for 340 days out of every 365. He was always conscious, he said, of living not one life but two. One was that of a writer who got his reward after his death, and to hell with what he got now. The other was that of a man who got everything now, and to hell with what came to him after death. Fame was anyway a strange phenomenon. A man might become immortal with ten lines of poetry or a hundred pages of prose. Or not, no matter how much he wrote, if he never had what it took. In his lifetime, a writer was judged by the sum total and average of his work. After he died, only the best mattered. He was convinced that human beings were probably ‘intended’ to suffer. But his experience had shown him that a man could get used to anything as long as he refused to worry about bad luck before it happened.” (238-239)
When Tender is the Night is published, Hemingway first rejects it, finding that it is basically a portrait of Fitzgerald’s life on the French Riviera, without any understanding of the psychological complexities of the characters he had picked out from real life. But his opinion would change:
“At first he had understated the book’s virtues and overemphasized its shortcomings. Scott obviously had talent to burn, said Ernest, but he had ‘cheated too damned much in this one.’ His problem was that he had stopped listening long ago, except to answers to his own questions. This was what dried a writer up. The minute he started listening again, he would sprout like dry grass after a sozzling rain. He must also learn to forget his personal tragedy. Everyone was bitched from the start, anyhow, and it was clear enough that Scott had to be hurt like hell before he could write seriously. It was his obligation to use the damned hurt in his writing, not to cheat with it. Neither he nor Ernest was a tragic character: they were only writers who must write. Most good writers, including James Joyce, were rummies. But good writers could always make comebacks. Scott was twice as good right this minute as he had been at the time of The Great Gatsby. ‘Go on and write,’ said Ernest.” (262) Fitzgerald then replies with an enthusiastic letter about how much he looks up to Hemingway and even needs to stop reading his books for fear that he will influence him too much.
Their friendship continues along pleasantly enough until Fitzgerald published “The Crack-Up” in Esquire in 1936. “Ernest was shocked. Scott, he felt, seemed almost to be taking pride in the shamelessness of his defeat. Why in God’s name couldn’t he understand that writers went through that kind of emptiness many times?” (283) Then there comes a decisive moment. Both Fitzgerald and Hemingway made a practice out of carving their characters from real life, but one story goes too far, and is worth a long excerpt:
“The story [“The Snows of Kilimanjaro”] also reached out to involve Fitzgerald. The dying writer was made to remember ‘poor Scott Fitzgerald’ and ‘his romantic awe’ of that ‘special glamorous race’ who had money. When Scott had discovered that they were not so glamorous as he had supposed, the realization ‘wrecked him just as much as any other thing that wrecked him.’ Ernest was determined not to follow Fitzgerald into the wreckage of a crack-up. As he had long ago told him, wreckage was made to be used by writers, even if it was the wreckage of one’s whole damned life. If the rich were indeed the enemy, Ernest would use them as such in his fiction.
“Ill and depressed among the green mountains of North Carolina, Fitzgerald was angered to see his name used in Ernest’s story. He got off a curt note on the stationery of the Grove Park Inn in Asheville.
Dear Ernest: Please lay off me in print. If I choose to write de profundis sometimes it doesn’t mean I want friends praying aloud over my corpse. No doubt you meant it kindly, but it cost me a night’s sleep. And when you incorporate it [the story] in a book would you mind cutting my name? It’s a fine story—one of your best—even though ‘Poor Scott Fitzgerald, etc.’ rather spoiled it for me. Ever your friend, Scott.
[P.S.] Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.
“Ernest presently wrote Perkins that Scott’s reaction was damned curious coming from a man who had spent all winter writing ‘those awful things about himself’ in Esquire. His reply to Scott himself said ominously that for five years now he had not written a line about anyone he knew because he had felt so sorry for them. But all that was past. He was going to stop being a gentleman and go back to being a novelist, using whatever material he damned well chose.” (290)
They correspond a couple other times with less rancor, but this is pretty much the extent of “gossip” contained in this book. Hemingway later reflects that Tender is the Night is probably Fitzgerald’s masterpiece around the time of the publication of For Whom the Bell Tolls and Fitzgerald’s death. Other literary figures, such as Ezra Pound, Sinclair Lewis, William Faulkner, J.D. Salinger, and Tennessee Williams appear in varying degrees, usually treading lightly so as not to upset Hemingway, who may justifiably be deemed a prickly personality—that is, if the slightest hint of a criticism emerged in an article or lecture. The exception is for Italian historian and art critic Bernard Berenson, who was in his 80s when he befriended Hemingway—Berenson never does wrong in his eyes. Famous movie stars such as Gary Cooper and Marlene Dietrich become close friends of his, as does Ingrid Bergman (but not her husband) and his attitude towards Spencer Tracy, who would play Santiago in the film adaptation of The Old Man and the Sea, is ambivalent.
In general the book is long and slow, but it is detailed. And it has always been something of a hobby of mine to stop by the same places where Hemingway has been in the past. While in Paris in 2003, I went to the Closerie des Lilas in Montparnasse and wrote a paper about how it had changed over the last seventy-five years. I have only been to Oak Park, IL proper a few times but have not driven by the house of his youth. He did not have very strong feelings for New York: “The homeward voyage was both stormy and dull. He gazed with surly distaste at the skyline of New York—the damned ‘chickenshit cement canyon town’ which he had left so exuberantly four months earlier.” (482) But he stayed at a friend’s house at 116 E. 64th St. in 1956 and at 1 E. 62nd St. in 1959. Notably for my present circumstances, he stayed at 45 Pearl Street in Nantucket in 1910 and sang at the First Congregational Church in a choir with his mother. I ran by the First Congregational Church yesterday en route to Cliff Rd. and hope to pass by 45 Pearl Street before I leave here the day after tomorrow.
His influence continues unabated fifty years after his death. While on vacation here, one of my sisters brought a biography of J.D. Salinger which came out this year. I found the coincidence remarkable. Here we are, both English majors (to a certain extent), both on vacation, one in law school and one considering going, one with an Ernest Hemingway biography and the other with a J.D. Salinger biography. I pointed out the one paragraph (on page 420, which only passes “the test” previously described here if one considers Salinger’s prose a narcotic) that describes their meeting in Paris in 1944 and asked whether she would show me the corresponding section in her book, which she did not. I wanted to have a debate about which writer would better stand the test of time as an American literary hero. It is tough, but I think Hemingway wins out. Another sister brought The Paris Wife, which my mother then read, which is a fictionalized account of his years in Paris, the title a reference to his first wife (out of four) Hadley, with her as the novel’s protagonist. So many coincidences show that he has permeated a great many fashions underlying the fabric of daily American life, down to the men in their middle-to-old age who have white hair and full beards, who bear an unmistakable resemblance. There are not many others who can be said to inhabit a state of appearance.
This book took me a very long time to read, and perhaps I found it slow and disappointing because it does not read like one of Hemingway’s books, where the prose has a tendency to fly off the page in often beautiful and original ways. Like Salinger after him, his literary style became the status quo, and remains a serious influence to this day. The final section of the book, the last fifty pages or so, went a good deal faster for me. His mind begins to deteriorate, and his weight drops to 175 pounds. The ending is somewhat sad, and also darkly funny when on the last night of his life he acts like everything is totally fine, and he wakes up early, and though his wife Mary has locked away the guns, he knows where the keys are kept. He goes about his death in a very matter-of-fact way. Of course he died too young and he might have produced several more great books yet, but he lived more than twenty years longer than Fitzgerald and surely left his mark on the world. If suicide is universally regarded as an immoral act, he at least may have had the excuse that it ran in his family, and that he could not help it if it were in his genes. He had two stays at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN during the last couple years of his life to tend to his psychiatric condition with shock treatments and other medication, which seemed to have a positive short-term effect, but obviously not long-term.
I have surprisingly never reviewed one of Hemingway’s books on Flying Houses but The Sun Also Rises is a masterpiece. I read The Old Man and the Sea as an 8th grader, required for school, and probably did not appreciate it enough at the time. It deserves a second look. I read A Farewell to Arms in high school as another required book, but I enjoyed it very much. It also deserves a second look. I have read A Moveable Feast two or three times and it is highly entertaining, oftentimes hilarious. I have not read For Whom the Bell Tolls and this will hopefully be reviewed sometime here in the not too distant future. But for now, I have been consumed deeply enough by Hemingway and will move onto a new book with renewed vigor and a goal to never take this long to read a book again.
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
Special Comment - Scamblogs
This post required a large amount of painful research. One could ignore it, or take it with a grain of salt. One could also take it seriously and induce a nervous breakdown. It depends on whether one sees themselves in their posts.
I am talking about scamblogs, of course. These are blogs that focus on law school. One wishes there were more blogs like Flying Houses that can help you with 10 different case briefs written in a creative way. However, most blogs about law school focus on the detriment it is causing to individuals. These blogs are united in a common cause for law schools to be more transparent in the information they present to prospective students. They focus intensely on the employment rate of the class 9 months after graduation. They suggest that it does not show what percentage of that number (which is almost always between 90-99%) is employed outside the legal profession. They suggest that it is a voluntary survey that does not take into account the students that don't respond. They suggest that there are too many law schools and too many law school students and not enough legal positions to go around. And also that law school is too expensive and not worth going into debt over unless maybe you are going to one of the top 15 schools in the nation. Sometimes debt goes from $100,000 - $200,000. Mine is $60,000, plus whatever interest accrues by then. This is assuming my parents are able to support me for the next two years (and time to study for the Bar, and $3,000 for the Barbri course, and however long it takes me to find a job in NYC, plus rent). What happens when I go broke and I need to start paying off my loans? The only positive thing I have heard about loans is that you can defer their payment because of "hardship" (i.e. lack of employment). No matter what, I do not want to go into any greater debt than $60,000--that scares me enough as it is. And here I may not qualify for my merit scholarship renewal (grades are released in a week...perhaps grades will be released before this post is actually posted) and I could lose all of my funding, or at least a significant amount. If my grades aren't that great, and if I'm not at a top 15 school (or not even a top 50 school), and it's getting expensive for everyone involved, is it really worth it to go on? Will I ever get a job? Who knows. Impossible to know until you are faced with the situation. But it appears the odds are against us.
If I were to write a letter seeking advice from someone writing or posting on one of these sites, it is clear they would tell me to drop out. Who knows if I will get the same response from a person affiliated with my institution--a career counselor, a faculty member--if I reveal the same facts. My guess is that they will say, "Do what you really want to do--if your heart is set on being an attorney, then don't give up because eventually things will work out." I know that if I try to bring it up to my Dad, he will say, "There are so many other jobs you can get with your degree if you finish it out." Or if I tell him I want to quit he says, "What are you going to do then--work at a restaurant for the rest of your life?" And I say, "I don't know, I'll figure something out."
It appears to me this post might be most powerful if written entirely as a hypothetical dialogue--one of the few skills I have developed as a creative writer, the ability to present two sides to an issue--but no, this is a statement about scamblogs, and as such, it must go into an analysis of several websites, and attempt to answer the question, "How bad is it out there, really?"
We begin with the most popular of all sites, previously mentioned here in a couple posts, but most prominently back in my first post since Flying Houses went on "academic hiatus"--here is a link: http://flyinghouses.blogspot.com/2010/11/special-comment-on-using-movie.html
This website is of course ABOVE THE LAW.com (hereinafter "ATL"). It is worth noting that I read this blog somewhat frequently--every couple of days, whenever I become sufficiently bored, or run out of other interesting websites/blogs/news to read. I will admit that this blog is sometimes entertaining. It has made me laugh on more than one occasion. Its information is presented in a very reader-friendly way. The articles are never absurdly long (though I will argue that the longer the article, the closer it gets to truth) and are often about sex, or drugs, or lawyers behaving badly, or judges "benchslapping" them, or celebrities' legal affairs, or gossip about all of the nearly 200 law schools accredited by the ABA. It seems written by people who went to Harvard or Yale and are basically elitist, and proud of it (or at least exhibiting shades of ironic shame for blogging about law rather than practicing it). I will admit: this site has tons of ads, and is probably a very successful blog in the monetary sense, which seems like an oxymoron. It has many readers--but many of the readers are repeat visitors who leave stupid comments after every article. Still, it can be exciting to know your school has been written about--that everyone in the country/world who goes to this site (because I do think it is the most popular website for people seeking legal gossip) will know that yes, your school invites clothing companies to hold photo shoots of people in their underwear simulating sex in the cellar portion of the library (my "office," as it were, that I perhaps adopted in the hopes of living out such fantasies). Fortunately, we did not report our public service grant situation, as had been suggested at a couple meetings of students fighting it--that was one of my proudest moments as a member of this student body this year. I told people to fight the administration, and they all said no, it's hopeless, nothing will change, and guess what, it did change. Of course, next summer it will not be the same, and one wonders whether we will fight again. But I digress. ATL loves to make fun of our school because it is ranked #67. ATL loves to make fun of law school in general though, and it is leading the charge of the scamblogs, since it is the most visible online presence of this movement. Note the recent article on the lawsuit undertaken against Thomas Jefferson School of Law. Yeah, I wish there were a way for me to sue my school for punitive damages. I'm sure that's going to work out for them.
Scamblogs basically aver that students will not get jobs when they graduate, and who knows when this pattern will end. I know that people graduating right now (Class of 2011) have told me they have basically been ignored. I do not know many graduating 3Ls, but I did not know any who were "living the dream" of a law student--that is, working as a summer associate after 2L, being offered a position to start in the August or September after graduating, with a stipend for June and July to study for the Bar, and all BarBri tuition paid for--perhaps that is the norm at the higher-ranked schools, but that is not the norm where I go, and you need to be at the top of your class. So if you do well--maybe the 1 in 4 students who will graduate in the top 25%--it really doesn't seem so bad. Yet if you do that well, and can't find work, it's certainly frustrating. People in this position have the greatest cause for complaint. And our class is over 400 students. So 300 people in our class will not be in such an ideal position. We have to get creative.
Scamblogs do not talk about this issue very much. They focus on the "average" student at whatever school they are mentioning. ATL is the "super-scamblog" because it has adopted the philosophy that law school is basically a bad idea. There was a recent article about how prospective students will not be swayed by scamblogs, and this is also an intelligent observation. Am I the only one who, in the years (yes, from 2008 - 2010 I studied for the LSAT and took it twice, and could not get the 170+ necessary to become an "elite" future member of the legal profession) leading up to application, acceptance, and enrollment heard the all-too frequent rallying cry, "Don't go to law school?" I remember sitting in on a class at Loyola Law School, with a professor whose greatness was impressed upon me in those 90 minutes (Laurie Levenson), who called on the five or six of us who were visiting to ask about various points of Criminal Procedure, and then at one point said, "Well class, do you think they should do it?" And they all said aloud, in unison, "Don't go to law school!" Those five words have become such a buzz phrase. It was a remarkable experience that I could not take to heart, because I had spent all this money applying, and flying down to L.A. and renting a convertible, and this was my plan. One cannot shelf their plan before they have even started, particularly when they spent so much time getting ready for it. Prospective students think the hiring patterns will turn around by the time they finish, and they also think they will do well enough that they will not have to worry.
One could write much more about ATL, but there are more egregious websites for comment. One of the problems with scamblogs is that they are tasteless. They use foul language, and whatever intelligence they display is marred by the slip-shod nature of their writing, which leads to the direct inference that, if they are hosting a scamblog, they went to law school, and did not get a job, and want to take it out on the world. The inference is that they may not have been one of the best students--they may have been exactly the type of sucker they write about--doesn't know what they want to do with their lives, not necessarily sure they want to be an attorney from birth on, see that a J.D. is a relatively quick degree to get that doesn't require mathematical/scientific/technical college major background, think that law school is a ticket on the gravy train. They're not crazy--really, they're not--there are too many unemployed law students out there for them to be crazy--but their quest for transparency is, shall we say, compromised by their presentation.
But there is one blog that ATL frequently links to, and it is generally of a higher literary quality than the others that will be mentioned later. It is called THE PEOPLE'S THERAPIST (hereinafter "TPT") and it is written by a guy who went to a top law school, then worked at a large private law firm for several years then went to med school to become a psychiatrist because he hated the legal profession so much. This is a very personal blog--and in a certain sense I appreciate the brute force honesty and personal history that is offered by its author--but man does it hit you over the head! Many people will frequently mention that many attorneys have drinking and drug problems, and that it is a miserable profession. TPT is specifically dedicated to spreading this idea. Most of the posts that ATL links to are about why students should drop out. TPT's author seems to think that his ideas hold true for everyone. In a sense, this is how great writers become successful. They forge a connection with their readers by showing that they share the same feelings and have felt the same way when faced with a particular situation. But there is a difference between persuasive, enjoyable writing, and the rhetoric of brainwashing. This author may be happy now, but he is not a great writer. He is a better writer than most bloggers out there, but he does not affect me. He does not say every potential lawyer should become a psychiatrist (and there are obvious similarities between these two "counseling" professions) but he does say that law school can be a huge waste of time and money and that you should be focusing on doing what you love. (I will reserve my personal comment on this issue until the end of this post.) Basically, if you want to be a lawyer then you should not read this blog because he will try to convince you that you are making a big mistake because he didn't like working in the atmosphere that most law students dream about (where you are worked to death and make enough money to subsidize a fairly lavish lifestyle). Most law students don't have a reasonable shot at this kind of work, and this blog seems to stand for the idea that, if they did have a 3.9, journal, and top 15 school, and they could work at Skadden, etc., they would hate it anyways, so they should just quit. If you don't want this kind of work the blog is basically inapplicable and does not comment on the poverty aspect that other scamblogs are so effective at presenting. Reading all of these blogs makes me hate my life, but reading this one in particular upsets me because the author needs to point out how great his credentials are in order to appear persuasive. I do not advertise my academic credentials on Flying Houses (but you can probably figure out my history if you read the posts). My hope is that my writing speaks for itself.
But now unfortunately, we must move into darker territory. Our first stop on this tour of Hell is "Temporary Attorney." I first became aware of this site when trying to figure out who our President was, and what she did, and why there was so much antipathy for her. This is what I found:
http://temporaryattorney.blogspot.com/2010/07/joan-wexler-of-crooklyn-law-school.html
I think some of my fellow students used this information when we fought for the public service grant. This is a really upsetting story in no small part because of the picture. Why not use a real picture? The writing is flanked with urban dictionary prose, and may justifiably be deemed "alarmist," but is not totally devoid of persuasive qualities. Yeah, I totally agree she should take a paycut--but many of these sites just point to a salary and never say what should be a reasonable one. Of course, any compensation over $500k is too much, but people in this world dream of "big money" and for some 500k is not enough. Once you are used to making it, a pay cut is painful. I used to make $36,000/year + bonuses. That was straight out of college. Now six years later I am making $12/hour through a public service grant, and I hope that I can get more than that once I pass the Bar. There is no way for me to support myself (in NYC) on these wages. One can support oneself on $500,000/year, but if one has expensive mortgages, and all of the other accoutrements to a high-class lifestyle (if you go out for every meal, and they all cost $300-$1,000), it is difficult to go back to that previous life. But this does not mean I am sympathetic. Our President's salary is unconscionable, and should be scaled back by at least 50%. If she makes more than the President of the U.S., it does not seem fair. Our school is not as complicated a venture as our country.
Mainly, Temporary Attorney focuses on the jobs available for unemployed/underemployed J.D.'s, i.e. Robert Half, which was responsible for supporting and killing my L.A. dream. I am scared that I will have to resort to their services five years after my last position worked through them, but I digress. Temporary Attorney also focuses on people like our President, who make too much money, and who lead to the further inference that law school is indeed a scam where professors and administrators get paid very well to delude students into thinking they are making a brilliant life decision, when in fact they are basically killing themselves in a much less fun way than going on a Chris Farley-esque bender (which has always been my personal plan). It is not the most offensive of scamblogs. But it has been useful as a link for me to find the more egregious ones.
There are too many scamblogs out there to try and review so I will focus on the links that have been updated most recently. One of the blogs, "The Jobless Juris Doctor," has stopped writing about the issue after 18 months. I agree that is long enough to run one of these blogs. You can only repeat variations on the same theme so many times. "Esquire Painting" is an affecting blog written by a person who was 300K in student debt. It is a very creative blog, one of which I would usually approve. But as personal as Flying Houses gets, I do not venture into such sheer autobiography--that is reserved for literature--and am not sure what I can get out of reading such a blog as that. "First Tier Toilet!" boasts a well-placed exclamation point, but seems to want to post many pictures of roaches and other bugs. There was one post decrying ATL, which was nice, and in general this site sometimes puts together an intelligent argument. It is not unpleasant to look at, except for the bugs. "Legal Nihilist"'s last post talks about how scamblogging and surfing these different blogs is unhealthy and a waste of time and how it is time to get over the injustice of what was done to them. This is perhaps the most uplifting thing I have read on the topic. "Tales of a Fourth-Tier Nothing" gets my vote for best blog name and is not all that offensive. There are many others that are in this category--fairly well-written, not offensive to the senses--but in general, reading these blogs will make you depressed.
There are two more I want to focus on: the first is the worst--"Third Tier Reality." This is an extremely offensive blog because it posts a picture of fecal matter with each new article. It is noteworthy for its narrow focus--it only profiles schools, and individuals, who are supposedly contributing to this scam. I must admit, I am impressed by the number of posts--but I am not impressed by the writing quality. Of special note is the profile on our school: http://thirdtierreality.blogspot.com/2010/07/deconstructing-crooklyn-aka-brooklyn.html
This post will make you sick if you go here. The entering class profile is right on the money. We have too many students. They should cut it down to about 200. But I don't think they can without majorly re-organizing the infrastructure of the school. It is designed to be this big. I have mentioned before the claustrophobia at this school, the feeling that sometimes you cannot breathe because you are surrounded by too many other students in the halls. But I am not here to criticize, I am here to point out the unoriginality. The Jessica Alba line under "intangibles" is similarly repeated in other school profiles. Our tuition is ridiculous, but this blog will point to any school's tuition, even if it is $10,000 less (like DePaul's is), and say it is too high. The blog also does not take scholarships into account. Neither do most scamblogs. The semi-recent article in the NY TIMES about this issue points out this is other "scam-like" behavior, but in general, when your load is $28,000 less, it at least appears that the school is not out to get you and actually doesn't want their school to put you into a lifetime of debt servitude. This fact is frequently glossed over. The comments on this site (like many others I presume) are where the real zingers fly. Over and over again it is just terribly depressing. At least one person in the comments says they are an intern and it can't be so hard to get a job as everyone says it is--nervous energy and overanalysis.
"Shilling Me Softly" also has an impressive number of posts but appears to be similar to a few other blogs in that they are basically a Jr. version of ATL (the same goes for "But I Did Everything Right!"). The last one I want to mention is "S*** Law Jobs" which posts ads from craigslist from across the country that pay terrible wages. This site is mainly good for a perverse version of comic relief. But I really can't write anymore about this. I envisioned this post as something great, but I see now it is futile to take these actual bloggers to task about specific things they have written, and it is more important to present my personal feelings on the matter as a person who has just finished their first year at a much-maligned institution:
My feelings change on a day-to-day basis. There is no consistency to my internal sense of happiness. To work with an impending sense of doom is nearly impossible, but I have done it all year long. People tell me I worry too much. Maybe I am just too gullible a person. Maybe I would be better off if I had never discovered any of this information. As a person who has complained about their life all along, and who has joked about suicide for approximately 18 years, and who has already gone broke once, I still have never been in debt until now, and the feeling is a bit overwhelming, even when it is only 20K at this point and I would be able to pay off at least a little bit of it pretty soon. But I would go back to that life I had before, where my market value was $13/hour. Cynical scambloggers will say, "$13 is better than the $10 you'll be making in s*** law!" Plus there's no extra debt. However, most will make more than $10. Actually, it seems not totally unlikely that I would be qualified with this degree to receive a salary in the 50-60K range. And I know it is hard to find a job now, but I want to ask everyone--have you ever tried to be published?
Which is worse--the legal industry or the publishing industry? You tell me. I'd love to be a literary agent. I won't stop writing. I came into this school knowing that. Some people say that work as an attorney is too time-consuming and you will never find the time to write. Whatever. All the jobs I could find were boring, and legal work may be boring at times, but at least it deals with semi-interesting subject matter and real issues that figure imporantly in other people's lives. It is a profession where you can "make a difference." The difficult thing to do is balance the terrible financial situation it may end in with the possible benefits of personal fulfillment and more lucrative job opportunities. If I said I hated it, I hated it because of all of this bad news flying around. It was yet another time in my life when I made a decision that seemed like my destiny but I was slapped into the reality that I am indeed a superfluous human being.
I don't give up on writing because it is a form of therapy. Law school is not a form of therapy. But I do think it is harder to make it as a "writer" than it is to make it as a "lawyer" and that is pretty much the last reason I have for not feeling totally demoralized. So thanks for all the great information. I have really appreciated becoming depressed. At least I am not wearing horse-blinders (unless the information has actually been blown out of proportion, in which case I was brainwashed--but I felt uneasy enough about my personal finances 10 months ago to know otherwise). Mission accomplished, law schools know they need to be more transparent and maybe they will actually be regulated more closely. I come to no thesis in this post. I cannot ascertain veracity until I am in the situation myself. Apparently, it is a hopeless one.
I am talking about scamblogs, of course. These are blogs that focus on law school. One wishes there were more blogs like Flying Houses that can help you with 10 different case briefs written in a creative way. However, most blogs about law school focus on the detriment it is causing to individuals. These blogs are united in a common cause for law schools to be more transparent in the information they present to prospective students. They focus intensely on the employment rate of the class 9 months after graduation. They suggest that it does not show what percentage of that number (which is almost always between 90-99%) is employed outside the legal profession. They suggest that it is a voluntary survey that does not take into account the students that don't respond. They suggest that there are too many law schools and too many law school students and not enough legal positions to go around. And also that law school is too expensive and not worth going into debt over unless maybe you are going to one of the top 15 schools in the nation. Sometimes debt goes from $100,000 - $200,000. Mine is $60,000, plus whatever interest accrues by then. This is assuming my parents are able to support me for the next two years (and time to study for the Bar, and $3,000 for the Barbri course, and however long it takes me to find a job in NYC, plus rent). What happens when I go broke and I need to start paying off my loans? The only positive thing I have heard about loans is that you can defer their payment because of "hardship" (i.e. lack of employment). No matter what, I do not want to go into any greater debt than $60,000--that scares me enough as it is. And here I may not qualify for my merit scholarship renewal (grades are released in a week...perhaps grades will be released before this post is actually posted) and I could lose all of my funding, or at least a significant amount. If my grades aren't that great, and if I'm not at a top 15 school (or not even a top 50 school), and it's getting expensive for everyone involved, is it really worth it to go on? Will I ever get a job? Who knows. Impossible to know until you are faced with the situation. But it appears the odds are against us.
If I were to write a letter seeking advice from someone writing or posting on one of these sites, it is clear they would tell me to drop out. Who knows if I will get the same response from a person affiliated with my institution--a career counselor, a faculty member--if I reveal the same facts. My guess is that they will say, "Do what you really want to do--if your heart is set on being an attorney, then don't give up because eventually things will work out." I know that if I try to bring it up to my Dad, he will say, "There are so many other jobs you can get with your degree if you finish it out." Or if I tell him I want to quit he says, "What are you going to do then--work at a restaurant for the rest of your life?" And I say, "I don't know, I'll figure something out."
It appears to me this post might be most powerful if written entirely as a hypothetical dialogue--one of the few skills I have developed as a creative writer, the ability to present two sides to an issue--but no, this is a statement about scamblogs, and as such, it must go into an analysis of several websites, and attempt to answer the question, "How bad is it out there, really?"
We begin with the most popular of all sites, previously mentioned here in a couple posts, but most prominently back in my first post since Flying Houses went on "academic hiatus"--here is a link: http://flyinghouses.blogspot.com/2010/11/special-comment-on-using-movie.html
This website is of course ABOVE THE LAW.com (hereinafter "ATL"). It is worth noting that I read this blog somewhat frequently--every couple of days, whenever I become sufficiently bored, or run out of other interesting websites/blogs/news to read. I will admit that this blog is sometimes entertaining. It has made me laugh on more than one occasion. Its information is presented in a very reader-friendly way. The articles are never absurdly long (though I will argue that the longer the article, the closer it gets to truth) and are often about sex, or drugs, or lawyers behaving badly, or judges "benchslapping" them, or celebrities' legal affairs, or gossip about all of the nearly 200 law schools accredited by the ABA. It seems written by people who went to Harvard or Yale and are basically elitist, and proud of it (or at least exhibiting shades of ironic shame for blogging about law rather than practicing it). I will admit: this site has tons of ads, and is probably a very successful blog in the monetary sense, which seems like an oxymoron. It has many readers--but many of the readers are repeat visitors who leave stupid comments after every article. Still, it can be exciting to know your school has been written about--that everyone in the country/world who goes to this site (because I do think it is the most popular website for people seeking legal gossip) will know that yes, your school invites clothing companies to hold photo shoots of people in their underwear simulating sex in the cellar portion of the library (my "office," as it were, that I perhaps adopted in the hopes of living out such fantasies). Fortunately, we did not report our public service grant situation, as had been suggested at a couple meetings of students fighting it--that was one of my proudest moments as a member of this student body this year. I told people to fight the administration, and they all said no, it's hopeless, nothing will change, and guess what, it did change. Of course, next summer it will not be the same, and one wonders whether we will fight again. But I digress. ATL loves to make fun of our school because it is ranked #67. ATL loves to make fun of law school in general though, and it is leading the charge of the scamblogs, since it is the most visible online presence of this movement. Note the recent article on the lawsuit undertaken against Thomas Jefferson School of Law. Yeah, I wish there were a way for me to sue my school for punitive damages. I'm sure that's going to work out for them.
Scamblogs basically aver that students will not get jobs when they graduate, and who knows when this pattern will end. I know that people graduating right now (Class of 2011) have told me they have basically been ignored. I do not know many graduating 3Ls, but I did not know any who were "living the dream" of a law student--that is, working as a summer associate after 2L, being offered a position to start in the August or September after graduating, with a stipend for June and July to study for the Bar, and all BarBri tuition paid for--perhaps that is the norm at the higher-ranked schools, but that is not the norm where I go, and you need to be at the top of your class. So if you do well--maybe the 1 in 4 students who will graduate in the top 25%--it really doesn't seem so bad. Yet if you do that well, and can't find work, it's certainly frustrating. People in this position have the greatest cause for complaint. And our class is over 400 students. So 300 people in our class will not be in such an ideal position. We have to get creative.
Scamblogs do not talk about this issue very much. They focus on the "average" student at whatever school they are mentioning. ATL is the "super-scamblog" because it has adopted the philosophy that law school is basically a bad idea. There was a recent article about how prospective students will not be swayed by scamblogs, and this is also an intelligent observation. Am I the only one who, in the years (yes, from 2008 - 2010 I studied for the LSAT and took it twice, and could not get the 170+ necessary to become an "elite" future member of the legal profession) leading up to application, acceptance, and enrollment heard the all-too frequent rallying cry, "Don't go to law school?" I remember sitting in on a class at Loyola Law School, with a professor whose greatness was impressed upon me in those 90 minutes (Laurie Levenson), who called on the five or six of us who were visiting to ask about various points of Criminal Procedure, and then at one point said, "Well class, do you think they should do it?" And they all said aloud, in unison, "Don't go to law school!" Those five words have become such a buzz phrase. It was a remarkable experience that I could not take to heart, because I had spent all this money applying, and flying down to L.A. and renting a convertible, and this was my plan. One cannot shelf their plan before they have even started, particularly when they spent so much time getting ready for it. Prospective students think the hiring patterns will turn around by the time they finish, and they also think they will do well enough that they will not have to worry.
One could write much more about ATL, but there are more egregious websites for comment. One of the problems with scamblogs is that they are tasteless. They use foul language, and whatever intelligence they display is marred by the slip-shod nature of their writing, which leads to the direct inference that, if they are hosting a scamblog, they went to law school, and did not get a job, and want to take it out on the world. The inference is that they may not have been one of the best students--they may have been exactly the type of sucker they write about--doesn't know what they want to do with their lives, not necessarily sure they want to be an attorney from birth on, see that a J.D. is a relatively quick degree to get that doesn't require mathematical/scientific/technical college major background, think that law school is a ticket on the gravy train. They're not crazy--really, they're not--there are too many unemployed law students out there for them to be crazy--but their quest for transparency is, shall we say, compromised by their presentation.
But there is one blog that ATL frequently links to, and it is generally of a higher literary quality than the others that will be mentioned later. It is called THE PEOPLE'S THERAPIST (hereinafter "TPT") and it is written by a guy who went to a top law school, then worked at a large private law firm for several years then went to med school to become a psychiatrist because he hated the legal profession so much. This is a very personal blog--and in a certain sense I appreciate the brute force honesty and personal history that is offered by its author--but man does it hit you over the head! Many people will frequently mention that many attorneys have drinking and drug problems, and that it is a miserable profession. TPT is specifically dedicated to spreading this idea. Most of the posts that ATL links to are about why students should drop out. TPT's author seems to think that his ideas hold true for everyone. In a sense, this is how great writers become successful. They forge a connection with their readers by showing that they share the same feelings and have felt the same way when faced with a particular situation. But there is a difference between persuasive, enjoyable writing, and the rhetoric of brainwashing. This author may be happy now, but he is not a great writer. He is a better writer than most bloggers out there, but he does not affect me. He does not say every potential lawyer should become a psychiatrist (and there are obvious similarities between these two "counseling" professions) but he does say that law school can be a huge waste of time and money and that you should be focusing on doing what you love. (I will reserve my personal comment on this issue until the end of this post.) Basically, if you want to be a lawyer then you should not read this blog because he will try to convince you that you are making a big mistake because he didn't like working in the atmosphere that most law students dream about (where you are worked to death and make enough money to subsidize a fairly lavish lifestyle). Most law students don't have a reasonable shot at this kind of work, and this blog seems to stand for the idea that, if they did have a 3.9, journal, and top 15 school, and they could work at Skadden, etc., they would hate it anyways, so they should just quit. If you don't want this kind of work the blog is basically inapplicable and does not comment on the poverty aspect that other scamblogs are so effective at presenting. Reading all of these blogs makes me hate my life, but reading this one in particular upsets me because the author needs to point out how great his credentials are in order to appear persuasive. I do not advertise my academic credentials on Flying Houses (but you can probably figure out my history if you read the posts). My hope is that my writing speaks for itself.
But now unfortunately, we must move into darker territory. Our first stop on this tour of Hell is "Temporary Attorney." I first became aware of this site when trying to figure out who our President was, and what she did, and why there was so much antipathy for her. This is what I found:
http://temporaryattorney.blogspot.com/2010/07/joan-wexler-of-crooklyn-law-school.html
I think some of my fellow students used this information when we fought for the public service grant. This is a really upsetting story in no small part because of the picture. Why not use a real picture? The writing is flanked with urban dictionary prose, and may justifiably be deemed "alarmist," but is not totally devoid of persuasive qualities. Yeah, I totally agree she should take a paycut--but many of these sites just point to a salary and never say what should be a reasonable one. Of course, any compensation over $500k is too much, but people in this world dream of "big money" and for some 500k is not enough. Once you are used to making it, a pay cut is painful. I used to make $36,000/year + bonuses. That was straight out of college. Now six years later I am making $12/hour through a public service grant, and I hope that I can get more than that once I pass the Bar. There is no way for me to support myself (in NYC) on these wages. One can support oneself on $500,000/year, but if one has expensive mortgages, and all of the other accoutrements to a high-class lifestyle (if you go out for every meal, and they all cost $300-$1,000), it is difficult to go back to that previous life. But this does not mean I am sympathetic. Our President's salary is unconscionable, and should be scaled back by at least 50%. If she makes more than the President of the U.S., it does not seem fair. Our school is not as complicated a venture as our country.
Mainly, Temporary Attorney focuses on the jobs available for unemployed/underemployed J.D.'s, i.e. Robert Half, which was responsible for supporting and killing my L.A. dream. I am scared that I will have to resort to their services five years after my last position worked through them, but I digress. Temporary Attorney also focuses on people like our President, who make too much money, and who lead to the further inference that law school is indeed a scam where professors and administrators get paid very well to delude students into thinking they are making a brilliant life decision, when in fact they are basically killing themselves in a much less fun way than going on a Chris Farley-esque bender (which has always been my personal plan). It is not the most offensive of scamblogs. But it has been useful as a link for me to find the more egregious ones.
There are too many scamblogs out there to try and review so I will focus on the links that have been updated most recently. One of the blogs, "The Jobless Juris Doctor," has stopped writing about the issue after 18 months. I agree that is long enough to run one of these blogs. You can only repeat variations on the same theme so many times. "Esquire Painting" is an affecting blog written by a person who was 300K in student debt. It is a very creative blog, one of which I would usually approve. But as personal as Flying Houses gets, I do not venture into such sheer autobiography--that is reserved for literature--and am not sure what I can get out of reading such a blog as that. "First Tier Toilet!" boasts a well-placed exclamation point, but seems to want to post many pictures of roaches and other bugs. There was one post decrying ATL, which was nice, and in general this site sometimes puts together an intelligent argument. It is not unpleasant to look at, except for the bugs. "Legal Nihilist"'s last post talks about how scamblogging and surfing these different blogs is unhealthy and a waste of time and how it is time to get over the injustice of what was done to them. This is perhaps the most uplifting thing I have read on the topic. "Tales of a Fourth-Tier Nothing" gets my vote for best blog name and is not all that offensive. There are many others that are in this category--fairly well-written, not offensive to the senses--but in general, reading these blogs will make you depressed.
There are two more I want to focus on: the first is the worst--"Third Tier Reality." This is an extremely offensive blog because it posts a picture of fecal matter with each new article. It is noteworthy for its narrow focus--it only profiles schools, and individuals, who are supposedly contributing to this scam. I must admit, I am impressed by the number of posts--but I am not impressed by the writing quality. Of special note is the profile on our school: http://thirdtierreality.blogspot.com/2010/07/deconstructing-crooklyn-aka-brooklyn.html
This post will make you sick if you go here. The entering class profile is right on the money. We have too many students. They should cut it down to about 200. But I don't think they can without majorly re-organizing the infrastructure of the school. It is designed to be this big. I have mentioned before the claustrophobia at this school, the feeling that sometimes you cannot breathe because you are surrounded by too many other students in the halls. But I am not here to criticize, I am here to point out the unoriginality. The Jessica Alba line under "intangibles" is similarly repeated in other school profiles. Our tuition is ridiculous, but this blog will point to any school's tuition, even if it is $10,000 less (like DePaul's is), and say it is too high. The blog also does not take scholarships into account. Neither do most scamblogs. The semi-recent article in the NY TIMES about this issue points out this is other "scam-like" behavior, but in general, when your load is $28,000 less, it at least appears that the school is not out to get you and actually doesn't want their school to put you into a lifetime of debt servitude. This fact is frequently glossed over. The comments on this site (like many others I presume) are where the real zingers fly. Over and over again it is just terribly depressing. At least one person in the comments says they are an intern and it can't be so hard to get a job as everyone says it is--nervous energy and overanalysis.
"Shilling Me Softly" also has an impressive number of posts but appears to be similar to a few other blogs in that they are basically a Jr. version of ATL (the same goes for "But I Did Everything Right!"). The last one I want to mention is "S*** Law Jobs" which posts ads from craigslist from across the country that pay terrible wages. This site is mainly good for a perverse version of comic relief. But I really can't write anymore about this. I envisioned this post as something great, but I see now it is futile to take these actual bloggers to task about specific things they have written, and it is more important to present my personal feelings on the matter as a person who has just finished their first year at a much-maligned institution:
My feelings change on a day-to-day basis. There is no consistency to my internal sense of happiness. To work with an impending sense of doom is nearly impossible, but I have done it all year long. People tell me I worry too much. Maybe I am just too gullible a person. Maybe I would be better off if I had never discovered any of this information. As a person who has complained about their life all along, and who has joked about suicide for approximately 18 years, and who has already gone broke once, I still have never been in debt until now, and the feeling is a bit overwhelming, even when it is only 20K at this point and I would be able to pay off at least a little bit of it pretty soon. But I would go back to that life I had before, where my market value was $13/hour. Cynical scambloggers will say, "$13 is better than the $10 you'll be making in s*** law!" Plus there's no extra debt. However, most will make more than $10. Actually, it seems not totally unlikely that I would be qualified with this degree to receive a salary in the 50-60K range. And I know it is hard to find a job now, but I want to ask everyone--have you ever tried to be published?
Which is worse--the legal industry or the publishing industry? You tell me. I'd love to be a literary agent. I won't stop writing. I came into this school knowing that. Some people say that work as an attorney is too time-consuming and you will never find the time to write. Whatever. All the jobs I could find were boring, and legal work may be boring at times, but at least it deals with semi-interesting subject matter and real issues that figure imporantly in other people's lives. It is a profession where you can "make a difference." The difficult thing to do is balance the terrible financial situation it may end in with the possible benefits of personal fulfillment and more lucrative job opportunities. If I said I hated it, I hated it because of all of this bad news flying around. It was yet another time in my life when I made a decision that seemed like my destiny but I was slapped into the reality that I am indeed a superfluous human being.
I don't give up on writing because it is a form of therapy. Law school is not a form of therapy. But I do think it is harder to make it as a "writer" than it is to make it as a "lawyer" and that is pretty much the last reason I have for not feeling totally demoralized. So thanks for all the great information. I have really appreciated becoming depressed. At least I am not wearing horse-blinders (unless the information has actually been blown out of proportion, in which case I was brainwashed--but I felt uneasy enough about my personal finances 10 months ago to know otherwise). Mission accomplished, law schools know they need to be more transparent and maybe they will actually be regulated more closely. I come to no thesis in this post. I cannot ascertain veracity until I am in the situation myself. Apparently, it is a hopeless one.
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