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Kingfisher Dedicated to
the appreciation of poetry, fiction,
painting,
Visit Our Art Gallery at Lake Ketchum And Please Take a Look At Our Blog Spring
2004, Volume
Three,
Number Two
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NEW STUFF
Open Range
Just another oater, despite They both are in the “old star” tradition of playing themselves, their mannerisms. In spite of good movies in the past (Costner in Field of Dreams, say, or Duval in Apocalypse Now) they prove themselves in this cliché-ridden cowboy story to be most ordinary. If I told you that a tiny band of free-range grazing cow boys mosey near to a town where rangeland owners control everything and take them on in a series of beatings and gunfights, and there is a big High Noon climax outside the saloon at the end, with handguns fired continuously without reloading, bad guys falling from second-story windows, and the good guys (the free-rangers) winning the exchange bloody but not bowed in the end, would you watch it? No? So don’t.
House of Sand and Fog
Now here is a great movie, excellent from every perspective you can think of. Jennifer Connelly—a long time favorite and, yes, I am in love with her, ever since she was cast as a pubescent self-absorbed ballerina in that great, great fantasy, Once Upon a Time in America—shows she has depth and talent, besides great classic beauty. The same cannot be said of Sir Ben Kingsley. He simply becomes his complex character and portrays him with great emotional and artistic depth. Remember him in Gandhi? Masterful. And masterful again as the emigrated ex-colonel from royalist Iran, who wants to become a successful American entrepreneur, and is tragically thwarted in obtaining his version of the American dream, sacrificing his family in a confused clash of value systems in which America resembles (perhaps correctly) a corrupt and violent conflict of self-interests and gangsterism. He is totally convincing in the part.
If you want a tasteful summary of the plot, go to Roger Ebert. But the film views beautifully without help:
http://www.suntimes.com/ebert/ebert I had thought that Ebert hadn’t liked the film or properly assessed it, so I went to his website, intending to prove him rarely wrong, only to find that he had rated it as high as his ratings come. And the Internet Film Base gave it a full accolade of stars—ten of them. Don’t miss it!
THE SECRET LIVES OF DENTISTS IMDb gives it six stars out of ten possible; this is most generous. Roger Ebert wisely avoided reviewing it, or else walked out on it early. Boy, what a disappointment. Some movies, during their early production stages, send unmistakable clues to their producers and directors: “Abandon hope, all ye who within sound and sight. This one is a loser. Let’s scrap it and all go home.” Unfortunately no one in charge heeded the message, which must have been obvious, especially the talented actors. Unfortunately, they had nothing of substance to work with. In the first place, and in spite of the title, none of the dentists here have secret lives. (Wish that they did!) They are a husband-and-wife pair, of which I’ve know a couple of dental couples, and their lives are expectedly hum-drum. She doesn’t fantasize, so far as we can observe (only wander around with a dyspeptic look, saying not much of anything. And he needs an invisible companion, a dental phobic, to clue him as to what might be waiting in a broader life: ditch the wife and kids and take to the road as a jazz player. Once, in the movie, he was seen at the piano, looking Listless. The doppelganger play pretty wild trumpet. But this is not enough to make a movie worth watching.
Neither is watching a family of five go through a similarly numbered
days of stomach flu. Barf, barf, over and over again. This is what
family life evidently is like to the misogynist who wrote the book and
screen play. Hey, there’s got to be something more, both to life and in going to the movies. Avoid, and if you don’t, don’t tell me about it. You’ve been warned.
Gwyneth Is Sylvia! This is a fine movie, and one that seems to fit into a new genre, one of a skilled contemporary actress playing the part of a famous female writer who died a suicide. First we had luscious Nichole Kidman doing a chilling, staid version of Virginia Woolf in which she was totally unrecognizable, but brilliantly so. Now we have Gwyneth Paltrow doing Sylvia Plath so effectively in this beautifully filmed biography. There are some remarkable physical similarities; there are even more real-life resemblances. Paltrow's father, a well-known film director, died early (as did Plath's beekeeper father), not long ago, and her mother, Actress Blythe Danner, corresponds nicely to Plath's own domineering mother, and plays her role with delicacy and steely restraint. Roger Ebert faintly praises Paltrow and gives the picture a modest three stars. He might have been not so stingy, even though his review is admirably detailed and thorough. (Rog knows his Plath.) He read most of her and Husband Ted Hughes poetry and biographical material necessary to an informed judgment. It must be that a movie today, to rate an extra star or half-star, must be exceedingly brilliant, or else the critic's award loses significance. The movie, as was Kidman's, is virtually flawless. Depressing as its foreshadowed outcome is, in both instances, it is a joy to watch a movie so carefully detailed and executed, shot by shot, move towards its conclusion. Not quite tragedy in the classical sense of the word, the two films are a joy and a pleasure to watch and, probably, to return to.
More Finger- Food for a Sund Banquet Each year, around the time of his death from cancer in 2002, the people of La Conner and Anacortes come together for food, conversation, and a reading of the poems of Robert Sund--a local poet, mendicant, and in my less than humble opinion a holy man. He was a difficult person, but most people of talent are. Considering how lonely he told his friends he was, begging for visits or (better yet) a home cooked meal, he had an astonishing number of dedicated friends. In the Zen manner, he would often leave behind a poem from his visit, and the astonished friend and host would be overwhelmed. A friend of his from the Old Days,
c. 1966, was gifted three poems by Robert, and kindly contacted me and
offered them for reading and possible publication, telling me she
suspected they had been already published, but she couldn't get to her
copies of Sund's books to check because they were tightly packed away and she was
in temporary mode herself. Those interested in this sort of thing (and there are not many) might take my editing notes--italic for what's new, square brackets for what got deleted before publication--and see what had happened in the interval. His friend Anna Dewart writes about them: The first two poems from The Harvest Poems are beautifully handwritten by Robert on a nice sheet of brown rice paper I had lying about. The poem following, was typed on Robert’s aged typewriter, then given to me with the handwritten inscription, as noted. I have typed “There Is No Exile Where The Heart Is Pure” exactly as he has it, with all words of title capitalized and without usual capitalization at beginnings of each new line for poems—he also did not use capped letters for each new line in two handwritten poems from "The Harvest Poems," so I followed his lead in typing them, as well. I believe all three of these poems reached print. 53 [from Bunch Grass 1969] Sharp
lines Coming
from somewhere 31 [from Bunch Grass again] Now, as
the sun sets, cricket songs from Ish River, p. 16] [A poem
from There Is
No Exile Where The Heart Is Pure Behind
the barn, the first week of March, on a bright A winter
horse Little
pieces of cedar glide down where the ants are On the
barn wall, Inside, Between
its floorboards, A dry
dusty odor mingles with festering dampness; My
grandmother comes to swing open wide the huge
MOVIE REVIEWS BOOK
REVIEWS
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How We Got Our Name And who is the poet who named us? It is (ready for this?) . . . David Wagoner. (He's probably sorry and didn't mean to do it.)
Here is the poem about kingfishers he wrote and published in his Traveling Light, Collected and New Poems, U. Illinois Press,1999, p. 156. KINGFISHER The blunt big slate-blue dashing cockaded head Cocked and the tapering thick of the bill Sidelong for a black eye staring down From the elm branch over the pool now poised Exactly for this immediate movement diving In a single wingflap wingfold plunging Slapwash not quite all the way under The swirling water and upward instantly In a swerving spiral back to the good branch With a fingerling catfish before the ripples Have reached me sitting nearby to follow it With a flip of a shake from crestfeathers to white Bibcoker down the crawhatch suddenly Seeing me and swooping away cackling From the belt streaked rusty over the full belly. Exactly. It was just like that, I swear! We heartily recommend the book and others by this very fine poet. We will be looking into him and his work over the next couple of months. There is an interesting website whose current edition is devoted to the poems of Wagoner. It is In a Dark Time (the name I believe is from Roethke) and it can be located here: Just click on the hyperlink. Loren Webster, the editor/publisher, is a sensitive, acute reader who once studied with Wagoner, and admits that, if he could write poetry, it would be much like Wagoner's. Any maybe that is why many of us respond to books like his collected poems. To read more Wagoner, click here POETRY
SECTION
Poems by the Three Ms: Merwin, Heather McHugh [pictured], and Paul Muldoon
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Fine Arts
Section
Toby Does Another Book Tobias Wolff has done it again, and it's nothing to be ashamed of. Quite the contrary!
Old School (Knopf, 2003, 195 pages, $22) might well have been titled, Private School, for that is what it is and what it is about. It is the kind of book I might have imagined myself writing when I was sixteen, and deep into Dostoyevsky's short novels and the "romances" of F. Scott Fitzgerald. But I was doomed to public schools and the pedestrian life that went with them. (Magnolia Grade, Queen Anne High, U. of Washington and U. of California, Berkeley; nothing there to build such an exclusive career out of.) And I did not have Wolff's considerable talent or dedication. He is able to form a trope, coin an effective phrase, and pin down an image so deftly that I emit a whistle when coming across one of them, often several in a row, sometimes five at a time (the fifth round being a tracer bullet). Wolff and I are "Old Army." He and a few other writers (James Salter is one) who can write so well. They bring us pleasure that is not entirely intellectual. And the novel (Wolff's books appear to be longish short stories, all seemingly highly autobiographical, perhaps deceptively so, joined together with a string of connections that don't become clear until the very end, when they connect like an uppercut) is full of all those terrible snobbish things that annoyed us in Brideshead Revisited, only, of course, those were monied Britishers, nothing like us. Or are they? How do you like a book whose attitude you hate? This is the problem I often have with reading Wolff. He is not only from the world of private schools (now he teaches creative writing at . . . Stanford, of all places) but he seems not ashamed of it all. As any good American would be. But what's a good American? And what do we others have to put in its place? The story is an English major's dream. (As is the flick, Sylvia, reviewed the next column over.) A boys' school, with headmasters and deans, it is visited by first Robert Frost, who selects from submitted student poems one that is "best" and serves as an entrée for a private meeting with the great poet. this is highly enviable. There is no greater honor. Our narrator is not chosen. But there is hope for him. Ayn Rand is the next literary visitor. She is a didactic and controversial character and a commanding presence. She strongly influences our narrator and is value system. But he soon breaks away. Rand is to be followed by Ernest Hemingway. Wow. The teachers and students look forward to this with great nervous anticipation. This is where the novel has been pointed all the while and leads to a brilliant climax. I won't give the plot away, but only say that the novel all comes together neatly. If there is a moral point, and I think there is, it is that everyone proves a fraud, only everyone is infinitely redeemable. Wolff's world is complex and ironic. No one at the Old School is safe from Fate and the reversals of fortune that seem to occur as though there were Someone Who Cares about us, one and all. Of course we know there isn't any such Someone. But sometimes it's fun to pretend there is. Well worth reading. Also recommended: Charles D'Ambrosio, The Point and Other Stories, Little Brown, 1995 George Saunders, Pastoralia, RiverHead Books, 2000 Note: All three of these writers regularly appear in the New Yorker. BACK
ISSUES Kingfisher
Journal, Vol. 2, No Kingfisher Journal, Vol.2, No. 4, Fishtown Issue Robert C. Arnold
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