In his first Inaugural Address, Thomas Jefferson said,
"Others... may condemn what they would not if seen in all its parts."
I've been reading William T. Vollmann's 750-plus page novel,
The Royal Family, which means I'm at least two novels in the weeds trying to keep current on his fiction (although I have started
Rising Up and Rising Down : Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means) . So it surprised me, a couple of Sundays ago to be perusing the
NYT Book Review and to notice that there is a new biography of the sanguinary former Khmer Rouge leader Saloth Sar, known as
Pol Pot, written by Phillip Short, reviewed by none other than the über-prolific Mr. Vollmann. In fact, I was drawn to the title,
Pol Pot, Anatomy of a Nightmare because I was actually watching the 1984 film,
The Killing Fields, while I was reading the Sunday newspapers, and had recently been thinking about the amazing story of the expatriate Cambodian actor,
Dr. Haing S. Ngor and his tragic life, his amazing performance, and his violent death in Los Angeles in 1996, whose own experiences are as compelling as the "real life" character he portrays in the film,
Dith Pran. Aside from the unfathomable fact that W.T. has time to read a 537 page biography at all, moreover to intelligently and uniquely deconstruct, illuminate, eviscerate where necessary, and justly ascribe validation to the author's attempt to controversially expose certain truths, the book, the review, and the film coinciding on a Sunday afternoon, unfortunately, expose the desultory observation of my own that Sam Waterston, who portrays the
New York Times journalist Sydney Schanberg in the film, has his hair parted on the right side.
The reason I made this very less than perspicacious observation at all was the fact that I had only a few days earlier rented the 1973 teleplay version of Tennessee Williams', The Glass Menagerie, starring Katherine Hepburn as Amanda Wingfield, and Sam Waterston as her son, Tom Wingfield. Clearly in this instance, Mr. Waterston's hair is parted on the left. And, anyone who has happened to watch the very successful NBC drama Law and Orde in the last 10 years will have seen the character of Jack McCoy, brilliantly portrayed by Sam Waterston, parting his luxuriant head of increasingly salty salt-n-pepper hair on the left. Sadly to admit, this got me wondering how often the ambi-partitioning Mr. Waterston has changed his hair part, and what has been the process of determining which side to select as the diminutive, or is it dominant, parting side.
My immediate intuition led me to conclude that the part may reflect a political proclivity.
Executive A.D.A., Jack McCoy is an Irish Catholic, anti-death penalty, tough but liberal advocate for justice. However, Sydney Schanberg has always been seen, although his actual written opinions seem to obfuscate this point, as leftist. So why the right side part? Pictures of Mr. Schanberg from that time show that he was a right-parter (he has since lost enough hair to make the actual parting moot), thus historical accuracy may have been Mr. Waterston's sole determinant. What then has been the deciding factor of part choice in all of the fictional characters he has portrayed? He has acted in four of Woody Allen's films, for example, and chose the right side part but once (Interiors). However, a quick sampling of other roles reveals a certain fetishist inclination for this attributively "feminine" right side characteristic. A short listing of right side parts includes:
Heaven's Gate
Serial Mom
Mindwalk
Capricorn One
Shadow Conspiracy
The Visionaries
Games Mother Never Taught You
In the Hands of the Enemy
A brief list of flip (left) side examples is thus:
Interiors
The Great Gatsby
Savages
The Glass Menagerie
Law and Order
Abe Lincoln in Illinois
(Mr. Waterston has some renown for his portrayals of Abraham Lincoln, some parting on the left, as here, and some parting on the right. Evidence here
shows that Mr. Lincoln was also a part-shifter.)
Fitzwilly and
The Man in the Moon (highly recommended if you dig Elvis and great cinematography)
The more I examine this dichotomy of left-side brain, right-side brain randomness, if it is indeed random and not insidious, the more confounded and angry I become. The audacity of this hirsute pedant to thumb his nose at the millions of men afflicted with male pattern baldness, depilation, alopecia, and widow's peaks. What is he, some kind of psycho or schizoid bi-partisan? This guy is a loaded gun, comb, whatever. William T. Vollmann has written volumes on whores, Cambodian and otherwise, drug addicts, and other transitory individuals living beautiful lives of pathos on the fringes. And, he hasn't changed his slightly left of center part in tens of thousands of pages. Sam Waterston is mocking not only the looking glass, but those of us trying to get a handle on reality. How are we supposed to know if we are looking at something real or a reflection of reality? Now, after ten years of left parting on Law and Order (although I have seen publicity shots for this same series with a right part; the gall) the cocksure Waterston states with impunity here, "I'm the D.A.; I can do It.", (says Executive Assistant District Attorney Jonathon James "Jack" McCoy). Somebody, please, get this guy off the streets.
Incredulity
In the past few days, the current events in my Weekly Reader are like a set of Zen koans, intended to free the mind from logical thinking: The New York Times is reporting that the FBI wants to go through Jack Anderson's files. This should alarm not just writers, reporters, bloggers, and other "scribblers", but every American who has grown accustomed to the rights and protections guaranteed under the First Amendment. By now we have become used to a perpetual assault on the Constitution by the Bush Administration - it is doubtful that the FBI would be acting unilaterally in such an overt act of overreaching - with the few abominations that we know about, such as the illegal, warrantless wiretapping of American citizens by the NSA and lying to the American citizenry to take the nation to war for starters. However, going after a dead journalist's papers reaches for the stars in audacity and blatant disregard for constitutionality. The ACLU is already defending two former employees of Aipac (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) in the leaking of classified NSA documents on the grounds that the Administration is attempting to criminalize the routine exchange of inside information (presumably for the public good).
And
BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 20 - In a sudden reversal, embattled Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari said today that he was willing to relinquish his job, a move that was hailed by some other political leaders as a potential breakthrough in the stalemate has fueled the country's bitter sectarian violence. Well, I went back and read this piece from less than one year ago; the loyalties of this Administration shift like antediluvian Persian sands.
And
...a little insight into TomKat.
Fragments:
Roland Barthes said, "...writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing."
1980, Roland Barthes met his death on a Parisian street, run over by a laundry van.
Chekhov wrote, "It is time for writers to admit that nothing in this world makes sense. Only fools and charlatans think they know and understand everything. The stupider they are, the wider they conceive their horizons to be. And if an artist decides to declare that he understands nothing of what he sees -- this in itself constitutes a considerable clarity in the realm of thought, and a great step forward." (To Alexei Suvorin, May 30, 1888)
After his death, Chekhov's remains were locked up in a refrigerated train car marked, "For Oysters" and shipped back to Russia from Germany for burial.
Honore de Balzac wrote in The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee,
"Coffee roasts your insides. Many people claim coffee inspires them, but, as everybody knows, coffee only makes boring people even more boring."
Balzac's addiction to caffeine drove him to eat coffee, as some schizophrenic patients are observed to do today, and may have killed him.
Two highly recommended pieces, and somewhat related, for their relevance today:
John Cage's last long mesostic poem, Overpopulation and Art
and Buckminster Fuller's, GRUNCH of Giants
"We have a world of pleasures to win, and nothing to lose but boredom.......You want to fuck around with us? Not for long."
-Raoul Vaneigem