Adaptation

Michael Chabon wrote The Mysteries of Pittsburgh when he was a young man and it has many of the flaws of a young man's novel. I loved it when I first read it, even more on the second reading, but have since come to find it irritatingly precious and occasionaly mawkish. But its narrator is a sentimentalist, and though it's a bit of a scam to drape authorial sentiment on a sentimental character precisely in order to avoid the charge, it can be done well, and so forgiven. (That Chabon is in cahoots with the McSweeney's gang and is the mate-consort of the truly execrable Ayelet Waldman are likewise traits that talent alone excuses, if just barely.) In any case, Mysteries is a very good first novel, assured of its voice and certain of its intentions, although it rushes headlong into a too-brief epilogic coda at the very end and engages in some too-neat writerly tricks on the way.

The opening paragraphs take a virtuoso turn:

AT the beginning of the summer, I had lunch with my father, the gangster, who was in town for the wekeend to transact some of his vague business. We'd just come to the end of a period of silence and ill will--a year I'd spent in love with and in the same apartment as an odd, fagile girl whom he had loathed, on sight, with a frankness and a fury that were not at all like him. But Claire had moved out the month before. Neither my father nor I knew what to do with our new freedom.

"I saw Lenny Stern this morning," he said. "He asked after you. You remember your Uncle Lenny."

"Sure," I said, and I thought for a second about Uncle Lenny, juggling three sandwich halves in the back room of his five-and-dime in the Hill District a million years ago.

I was nervous and drank more than I ate; my father carefully dispatched his steak. Then he asked me what my plans were for the summer, and in the flush of some strong emotion or other I said, more or less: It's the beginning of the summer and I'm standing in the lobby of a thousand-story grand hotel, where a bank of elevators a mile long and an endless red row of monkey attendants in gold braid wait to carry me up, up, up through the suites of moguls, of spies, and of starlets, to rush me straight to the zeppelin mooring at the art deco summit, where they keep the huge dirigible of August tied up and bobbing in the high winds. On the way to the shining needle at the top I will wear a lot of neckties, I will buy five or six works of genius on 45 rpm, and perhaps too many times I will find myself looking at the snapped spine of a lemon wedge at the bottom of a drink. I said, "I anticipate a coming season of dilated time and of women all in disarray."

My father told me that I was overwrought and that Claire had had an unfortunate influence on my speech, but something in his face said that he understood. That night he flew back to Washington, and the next day, for the first time in years, I looked in the newspaper for some lurid record of the effect of his visit, but of course there was none. He wasn't that kind of gangster.

Now that is a fine opening, and of all the many, many flaws in Rawson Marshall Thurber's lousy adaptation, the greatest wasn't his elimination of characters, his butchering of others, his clumsy condensations, his inexplicable changes of scenery, his tin ear for dialogue, nor even his casting of Sienna Miller, who is as stiff as a cum rag on the morning after; it is, rather, that he didn't pay attention to what these paragraphs are saying about Art Bechstein and his father. In particular, Thurber never quite gets that Art, Sr. is right when he calls his son overwrought, nor does he allow that Art, Jr. is right to think that in some small way, his father does understand.

Of course, he engages all those other errors as well. Fans of the book especially hated Thurber's elimination of one of the most central characters, Arthur Lecomte, the catalyst which brings all the main characters together and the man who becomes Art Bechstein's lover for a spell. They felt it needlessly toned down the novel's gayness in order to avoid the deadly gay genre in filmmaking. This scarcely needed any effort. The film succeeded at failing quite well on its own, and it barely found a distributor. I didn't find the movie any less gay, exactly--well, perhaps a little, but muddle-headed bisexuality marks Bechstein in book and movie alike, so whatevs--but I did find the decision inexplicable except as an exercise in pure laziness. What is interesting about Art Bechstein and Arthur Lecomte is not that they are romantically coupled, but that they are a couple of liars, both liars by omission. Art is slumming it, and Arthur is pretending to be a rich kid, and it is the reciprocal foil of their paired dishonesty that lends a tragic undertone to the . . . well, slightly overwrought proceedings.

The failure to speak honestly is the tragic flaw of all the book's characters, and while Thurber doesn't make his characters any more truthful than Chabon, he pitches it wrong. His Art is just a dissipated loser chafing under his gruff father's dominion. His Art, Sr. is just . . . gruff, without a hint of understanding or camaraderie with his son. His Cleveland, the apprentice cryptogangster whose hijinks drive the plots of both the movie and the book, is merely a wild-child. His Phlox, one of Art's love interests, is a mere cipher (although, to be fair, she is the book's least successful character, a sort of collage of quirks and affectations with no flesh to her). "The beautiful Jane," as the novel had it is . . . Sienna Miller. (Note to Rawson Thurber: do not allow Sienna Miller to pretend to play the violin. Ever. Again.)

Interesting, Curtis Hanson winningly adapted Chabon's other and better Pittsburgh novel, Wonderboys, which required much more condensing, as it is a modest whale of a book. This suggests to me not only that everything is better with Robert Downey, Jr., nor simply that Michael Douglas, for his faults, beats Nick Nolte nine times out of ten, but that adaptation is better accomplished by someone who appreciates a work than someone who loves it so much that he wants to improve it.

Foodie Friday Vegetables

Brussels sprouts are easily cooked and even more easily ruined, but there is no more perfect vegetable to accompany roasted meats eaten in the garden on a cool night at the leading edge of autumn. They require careful attention. Take them off the heat too soon and they will be tough and overly vegetal. Leave them on too long and they will burn and turn soft. The extra attention is most worth it.

1 lb. brussels sprouts, stems trimmed, halved
1-2 medium shallots, finely diced
2 yellow or orange bell peppers (or 1 of each), finely diced
2 cloves garlic, finely diced
2 cups fresh basil, chiffonade
medium sea salt
clarified butter (about 1 1/2 tbspns)
1/4 cup dry white wine

Over a low heat, melt the clarified butter in a heavy sauté pan. When it is liquid, increase the heat to medium high and add the shallots, peppers, and garlic. Salt lightly, toss together, and cook until soft--several minutes. Now raise the heat until it is very high and the butter is really crackling. Add the brussels sprouts. Salt generously.

Toss regularly, but not too often (tossing too often prevents effective heat transfer for cooking). After five minutes or so, the the sprouts will start to brown around the edges. Add half the basil and toss together thoroughly. After another five minutes or so, the sprouts will have begun to well and thoroughly caremalize, their edges browned and with some black spots (don't worry!) forming where they've been most exposted to the pan. They will have absorbed most of the butter at this point, and there will be brown residue from the caremalization process on the pan. At this point, add the wine to degalze the pan, carefully scraping up all the brown bits.

The liquid will quickly boil off. Add the rest of the basil. Toss once or twice more. Remove from the heat and serve immediately.

Miniver Loved a Medici

Unclear what exactly George Will is talking about in a truly incoherent column, but, you know, the idea that the historical guiding principle of the fine arts has been to take an adversarial nature to authority, let alone to "epater le bourgeois" [sic], which does not mean what George Will thinks it means, is pure kookery. It is true that there are many famous stories of misanthropic artists, of artistic lotharios, of art teasing the boundaries of acceptable, uh, discourse, but really. For most of recorded human history artists and performers and musicians were at best craftsmen, more often servants, and almost always worked in the service of some state or church or local nobleman. The Elgin Marbles were not created by a self-funded artistic collective to protest the, like, oppression by the priestly class, man. Nor yet was the Sistine Chapel ceiling done by Mike Angelo and his crew and a sixer of Pabst. And even as ages of discovery and enlightenment freed the individual artist to pursue his private aesthetic passions, still, "the arts" remained a state enterprise, heavily subsidized. Now this is not to say that I do not fervently hope to see a future of self-supporting artist communes making sculpture from the dried fecal matter of their own husbanded animals, but until then . . . Maybe George Will has been listening to his original cast recording of Rent a little too fervently, although I do find it a little hard to imagine him exchanging his bowtie for a stamp bag and a tranny hooker.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

GEN BUCK TURGIDSON: Doctor, you mentioned the ratio of ten women to each man. Now, wouldn't that necessitate the abandonment of the so-called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?

DR. STRANGELOVE: Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious... service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.

AMBASSADOR ALEXI DE SADESKI: I must confess, you have an astonishingly good idea there, Doctor.

Haha do it for the children. Hawt!

Well, Mr. President, we must not allow

a hormone-filled gap -- a decade and more of likely sexual activity before marriage. And for those in that gap, there is little helpful guidance from the broader culture. Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, argues that the "courtship narrative" in the past was clear: dating, engagement, marriage, children. This narrative has been disrupted without being replaced, leaving many 20-somethings in a "relational wasteland."

You hear this sort of thing from time to time, but of course, the "courtship narrative" is an artifact of mostly Western cultures that lasted for, what, a hundred years? If that? And only among certain classes and within certain social orders. For most of human history marriages have been arranged affairs, although what constituted arrangement varied widely from culture to culture, era to decade. Indeed, the manner of making marriages is and was like so many other cultural practices an artifact of the social economy, since the family is not principally a moral, but an economic unit. Our current period of long sexual adolescence and later life-pairing reflect the times we live in. You know what else most people don't have until their late 20s thse days, Little Mikey Gerson? Real jobs!

Hey Greaser

Though Jews do not make resolutions for the new year, I have in preparation for the days of awe and season of atonement and repentence and whatnot decided that I will not say anything mean about Digby until I am safely written in the book of life for the coming year. Having so recently lost a brother, I do not wish to tempt the notoriously capricious and insane Yaweh with any pissant nonesense until I get the notarized seal, such as it is, nor cause my dear parents any more pain and grief. Instead, in the interests of charity, I shall simply say, via Digby, I discovered this insanity, in which it is postulated that the most powerful single human being in the history of all human beings--literally, Joe Biden!--at whose whims and fingertips and eyeblinks are the vast and demihemigodlike apparati of the American hegemon, that this person is being bullied by a pasty Mormon with a show on yon tee-vee.

This thesis is expounded in what I think is supposed to be an arch and humorous tone, and yet it appears that the author holds in good faith the belief that The Obama is being rolled for his lunch money. Oh, if only he knew that he was ruhhly one of the popular kids!

Won't Hurt a Bit

I think that when liberals say that the various conservatives teatimers and birthbaggers and nineeleveners and so on would be more convincing in their stand against the coming totalitarianism if they'd managed to evince skepticism during the Bush years is well taken, and I think that the liberal conviction that much of the current madness is driven by displaced anger at their own precarious economic circumstances, catalyzed by racial animus is mostly true. That doesn't mean I think any more highly of liberals, who are water carriers for a president who has willfully and vocally continued the supposedly aberrant, abhorent policies of the Bush administration, from sops to Wall Street to the black-site global gulag--that is to say that liberals would be more convincing in their stand against the conservative stand against the coming totalitarianism if they weren't defending a president who is tempermentally but not substantively different from his predecessor.

Here, for instance, is Yglesias, in typical form:

Probably the weirdest thing about the Glenn Beck / Tea Party nexus to me is that it tends to rely so heavily on libertarian rhetoric and fear of incipient authoritarianism. These kind of sentiments would be a lot easier to take seriously if not for the fact that we didn’t see these people marching out in the streets when George W. Bush used the threat of terrorism to justify secret, illegal warrantless surveillance, detention without trial, torture, etc. Indeed, the very same people who spend Monday, Wednesday, and Friday complaining that Barack Obama’s “czars” are a threat to liberty not only weren’t worried about czars in the Bush years, they spend Tuesday and Thursday worrying that Obama’s not doing enough to ensure that intelligence operatives can break the law with impunity.

Now that is all true as far as it goes, but it is also true, it is to me more true, that Yglesias' broadly held sentiment would be easier to take seriously were it not for the fact that Barack Obama has repeatedly ratified, extended, supported, embraced, and continued "secret, illegal warrantless surveillance, detention without trial, torture, etc." Yes, he has made speeches saying "we don't torture." So did George W. Bush. Yes, agencies within his administration have launched or proposed to launch investigations into low-level violations of human rights. So did agencies within the Bush administration. He has made noises about closing Guantanmo, like Bush, without doing so, like Bush, and he is expanding and making permanent the concentration camp at Bagram, even farther in the shadows, out of the public eye. He has forcefully embraced formerly illegal (if nevertheless widely practiced) electronic surveillance. He has, like Bush, talked about Iraqis taking over their own country, or, like, whatver, while preparing the transition from open occupation to the more typical form of American hegemony as practiced through the creation of "enduring" military bases. He has one-upped his predecessor in escalating war with Afghanistan and ordering incursions into Pakistan. He's given billions and billions to failed, abusive business to reward their subterfuge and failure, made secret policy in cahoots with various industry goons, etc. etc. etc.

So while it is true that your average Joe Teabagger suffers from hilarious white-trash racial myopia, and that is something that we can all laugh about, for there is nothing more hilarious and mockable on this good green earth than the incoherent whiteguy rage that has for so long propagated within our unacknowledged middling orders, the notion that these people are uniquely blinkered and hypocritical in their protest is perfectly false.

John Hughes Diplomacy

Thomas Friedman, America's most popular maoist, returns to inform us that Iraq and Afghanistan are battered children. But they are not our children! They are, like, Russia's and Saddam Hussein's children. They are Osama bin Laden's children. And we, America, we are the sassy black nun who is a social worker who is their drama teacher who helps them to believe in themselves through the power of music and algebra and gettin jiggy wit it, because they are the future, and then they get the scholarship and Iraq realizes that even though Afghanistan is the nerd they are really in love and in an extended musical montage we all get together and make the best prom ever.