The Tree of Life by Hugh Nissenson

 This unusual short novel (159 pages) is all the journal entries from 1811-1812 of Tom Keane a white man settler in northeastern Ohio. He chronicles in brief what is going on in his community. He tells us that Ohio has been a state since 1803. That’s fine for the white people, but there are still a lot of indigenous people there, where they belong.

He makes note of his business, his trade, most of these involving things he trades the whiskey from his still for (80 proof). He also relates his sex life, when he masturbates and what he thinks about when doing so. He also uses Lattiece, a freed black woman trying to get to Canada, as a whore. She has developed a taste for whiskey and he gives her a pint now and then and “fucks” her. 

He is a bit of a drunk himself. Tom is also an artist. He draws and some of his images are included in the book. Including the cover image of one of the Indians. 

He is courting a widow who is twenty years younger than him. 

John Chapman, now known as Johnny Appleseed is a friend of Tom’s and a member of their little community. Chapman is a quirky man who prostlitzes the work of Emanuel Swedenborg. He also is vegetarian and doesn’t drink. But many of the others do. Tom tells us about drunken militiamen who slaughter the Indians. 

A war begins, The War of 1812, in which the British and the Indians are in some sort of alliance. Much of the action in the book is about the brutality on both sides. The torture and the scalpings.

The reader is left with the hardship and struggle of these new state settlers and which presents a horrifying picture of the type of people, often drunk, who killed off the indigenous “savages”, took over the land, and in a very brief time made the overpopulation country that is the USA, the horrifying global military power hungry country that it is. 

The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson

 The first person nature of this book makes it and destroys it.

It is a pulp fiction entertainment from 1952. A novel written to sell. 

It is sensational and lurid, no doubt just right for reading boys back in the 1950s and beyond. It is the subjective story of a serial killer, so presumably an early article of pop culture’s exploitation of and fascination with serial killers which has become big business in mainstream corporate moving picture entertainments, Netflix, etc. 

Lou, the first person narrator, is a deputy in the sheriffs department of an oil boom town in west Texas. He is the son of the town doctor who is referred to but dead for a while. Lou still lives in doc daddy’s house which has the old man’s doctor’s office attached to it. 

Since it is first person and the entire story is told from his perspective. All we know is what he is able or willing to tell us. Therefore being a psycho killer and all, he is an unreliable witness and perpetrator of events. Since he is all we have the tendency is to take his story at face value. Judging by that, the story and events don’t entirely make sense. He seems to be getting away with much more bad behavior than is actually possible in a smallish city of 48,000 people. This could be off putting to a reader who wants to trust what is being told. One might judge the novel as not so good because of that. 

Ultimately it’s not a real pleasant experience reading this book. 

Hell of a Woman is a good deal better. It is first person as well, that guy is somewhat more a victim of circumstances and easier to go inside with. Both that guy and Lou are somewhat smarter, more educated or well read than the other characters. They contain a bit of arrogance and superiority because of that. 

What does the reader expect from fiction?
Entertainment, using up boring old time?
Potentially this book provides some of that.

Insight about the human condition and how to live and grow?
Maybe the reader should look elsewhere for that.

The King of Marvin Gardens (1972)

 The King of Marvin Gardens (1972)

Directed & story by Bob Rafelson
Screenplay by Jacob Brackman

Atlantic City, NJ was a resort long past it’s most prosperous days in the early 1970s. In desperation of renewal casino gambling was legalized there in 1977, following that another sort of big buildup of new casino hotels, then Trump, then another downturn to present times.

One of the most interesting things about The King of Marvin Gardens is that it was shot in Atlantic City in 1972. That location shooting was quite extensive.

The cast is all star new Holywood of the day: Jack Nicholson, Bruce Dern, Ellen Burstyn, with young and doomed Julia Anne Robinson, who died in an apartment fire in 1975 at age 24.

  It is the story of a couple of brothers. David (Nicholson) is a wannabe novelist who is a late night Philadelphia radio storyteller, sort of like Jean Shepherd. He has a dreamer older brother Jason (Dern). Jason is the kind of guy who is always looking for a big score. He thinks he’s a potential big business man, but actually is a small-time, petty operator with low level organized crime connections.
So Jason summons David to AC to get in on the big deal he has going on. He thinks he is going to buy an island in Hawaii and build a resort there.
He is living with two women. 40 year old Sally (Burstyn) and the younger Jessica (Robinson).
  Through the course of the story they run around and play in the off season AC while Jason tries to put together the big deal.

  The movie is mostly character study with fine performances and a lot of good old American hopefulness and dreaming in the dark.

  This is a classic New Hollywood movie, post Easy Rider. Actually it has a good deal in common with Easy Rider; a couple of young men trying to get out of the rat race by winning grandly at the American Dream. These guys don’t make out a lot better than the biker guys in Easy Rider do, but their characters are much more developed which makes it a more interesting movie to watch than Easy Rider and without all the counterculture youth music exploitation.

Nomadland by Jessica Bruder

 This is about the book, not the movie. 

It’s a rather sad tale of USA hopelessness in a situation in which the rich are getting a lot richer, and fast, while people are losing the jobs and homes/houses they invested in while buying into The American Dream. The dream is over but the dreamers carry on fantasizing of an unencumbered life free of mortgages, rent, taxes, and debts. The problem is that most of the people in the book are quite old and still have to make some kind of a living by bringing in some income. Although they are out of “sticks & bricks'' stationary housing they have shifted to some form of mobile housing. These, just like the old housing, vary widely. Some with more money have big RVs with the motor and all in one unit. Others have tiny trailers that they pull with a car. Some have converted standard vans, or built something onto the back of a pick up truck. Many have solar collectors to generate electricity which puts them off the grid to a degree, but not off the tit of the gasoline companies. Worse than that is the type of exploitative jobs they have to take, mostly as Amazon warehouse workers. Some owe money on their mobile homes.

   The book goes into detail describing these hellish jobs in which the workers are forced to become part of the Amazon machine in these partly automated vast facilities. The company has a structure for recruiting these transient workers. It’s called CamperForce. The company has them drive in from all over the country to work during the holiday shopping season push. They don’t even have to supply old style company town housing, just lots where these workers can park. But the people have to put up with it being one of the few income options to augment inadequate Social Security monthly checks. 

   Other such jobs are beet crop harvesting and workers who take care of US Forest Service campsites. These campsites, of course, are not managed by the USFS, but contracted out to some outfit that needs to make a profit by overworking the people they hire. Making something that could be a pleasant job in nature into another exploitive trap. It’s the good old American Dream of profit out of the sweat and toil of slaves or virtual slaves. We like to make the masses miserable to protect the interests of “investors”. It doesn’t matter that in the process workers who have no investments, other than their bodies, break down. That doesn't matter because after all humans multiply so there is another sucker, worker, soldier, born every minute.
  

   The author does a CampForce Amazon job herself. Having the option to bail out of it she soon does. She also does some sugar beet harvesting in North Dakota. Both of these gigs are hellish and dangerous and mostly performed by workers in their 60s. Jessica Bruder was in her 30s when she wrote this and she could last at them.

   The main character she follows is Linda May. Linda has a sad story that has driven her to this mobile life but she wants to get out of it. She buys land out in the middle of nowhere desert and wants to build an Earthship house. Something made out of tires packed with dirt/earth. We leave her at age 66 dreaming a never very practical variation of The American Dream.
(Well, she’s even older now and in the movie. Maybe the movie money helped her build her house. Getting over by being pulled out of obscurity, A Star is Born, well, there is alway some hope in fame and fortune.)

Island

 Island

A novel by Aldous Huxley

  This is Huxley’s final novel, so in that way his final word on the human condition in which he found himself in his lifetime.
  It is said to be a utopian novel. In a way it is that.
  We have an outsider, Will Farnaby, from our world shipwrecked on the island nation of Pala. He is a journalist who is looking for a big score to take a year off the grind of the work he has to do for his boss, the industrialist who owns the paper he works for. There are unexplored oil reserves on Pala. That puts Will in a position of manipulating the situation in favor of his boss who is bidding on drilling rights. Except Pala does not want this. They are protective of the culture that they have nurtured over the past 100 years. It is naturally based and protective of that by not permitting the machines of civilization into their island. They have, limited industry, very few cars, no TV, safe from these outside capitalistic corrupting influences. They are passively protective which adds to their vulnerability, but would they be what they are if they fought back?  

  Will is given a book written by one of the long dead influencers of the island. The Notes on What’s What

“Dualism. . .Without it there can hardly be good literature. With it, there most certainly can be no good life.” -Notes on What’s What

    The novel is thin on plot. It is mostly a tour of Pala’s culture and modes of operation as we travel with Will and his local guides. Through this we get the idea of what a mostly equitable, non-dualistic, social structure would look like and how it could be maintained if left alone.
    During Will’s tour his heart is opened to the place so that he rethinks his position of betraying it for his own financial betterment. They use psychedelic mushrooms as a tool toward enlightenment.
Will ultimately takes the mushrooms and we are shown what he sees and feels in the long trip at the end of the book.

  Although the book is somewhat utopian, it is a fragile utopia that is headed for ultimate destruction. The outside threat is far worse than Brave New World, it is militaristic fascism. Pala is only a utopia for the moment. This could be taken as the major theme of the novel. Modern capitalism is on an unstoppable march across the earth. This was clear to Huxley in 1962, the year of the book's publication. What then is the point to the tour through the utopian structure? Perhaps it is that if we can find a space out of the range of interest of modern civilization, then THIS is how it could be structured and maintained. This is how children should be educated and nurtured for connection, non-dualism. But it is very unlikely that we could find that space to live, grow, and play out of the line of fire. In the meantime, which is basically forever in the human condition, we can have another connection to utopia through non-attachment to anything other than THE MOMENT.
  Utopia is in the breath of the HEAR & NOW. All the rest, important as it is on its own level, is a matrix of nostalgia or regret for the past, and dreams, or fear, of the future.
------
Mild spoiler:
  It is interesting that the coup occurs during the mushroom trip, complete with assassination. It is a fact that Aldous Huxley was injected with LSD on the day he died of cancer. That was November 22, 1963, and like the book a day of an assassination and what could be seen as a coup d’etat.
He was tripping during the assassination as in the novel.

The Card Counter

 The Card Counter (2021)

Written and directed by Paul Schrader

  This movie channels collective guilt and rage at what we have been made to do. How, in our name, our pain, shock, and grief was twisted and exploited by people in power to make us monsters worse by far than the act that hurt us, that caused us this pain and horror
. 

  Will Tell (Oscar Isaac) the character in the movie, has been made into a monster, a sadistic automaton, manipulated into performing horrifying acts against other humans. He is going to have to pay for this, for what he was made to do by people in the highest positions of power. He has to pay, to take the fall, for what they made him do, as his “superiors'” retain their lofty, lucuratice, respected, and honored positions. 

He tries to just go on with his life after. He likes to play cards and is good at it. He has clamped down the justifiable feelings of vengeance and guilt he has to carry with him always. He can never forget, but plays cards.
 

  He meets another damaged, traumatized man (Tye Sheridan) and this sets the story in motion.

  Yes we were told to never forget after the collective trauma. Then asked to support people in power who used our trauma for further a separate and horrifying agenda. We put millions of others, those who managed to survive, through trauma, to a position where they can never forget which will cycle into more violence, horror, trauma, and more never forgetting that has not yet ended and likely never will. 

  The Card Counter is a very disturbing, deeply moving artwork that channels our collective guilt, rage, vengefulness, and yearning for justice, reconciliation, or to somehow get it all to STOP. 

An important movie and a masterpiece from a broken heart. A message from that broken heart to ours, if we still have one.

Strangers When We Meet (1960)

 I watched this movie on YouTube because I’m a fan of the novelist Evan Hunter. 

The movie is an adaptation of his novel by the same name. Hunter wrote the screenplay. 

This is a really good movie. The two leading actors are Kim Novak, as Margaret (Maggie) and Kirk Douglas, as Larry. Both of them are at the peak of their careers and they, particularly Novak, deliver very effective performances. 

The story is set in middle class suburbia. There are nice homes, lawns, newish cars, sidewalks, and shade trees. This projects everything that we have come to be seen as The American Dream. It’s an early sunny morning. Elementary age children are assembling on the sidewalk. They are being seen off to school by their youthful parents. A man drives up. His son jumps out of the passenger side and we see his father, Larry (Kirk Douglas). Something catches his eye and he stops to look out the passenger side window leaning from the driver’s seat. Reverse angle reveals a beautiful blond young mother in the final moment of delivering her son. She glances at the driver looking at her. He drives off to his day. It’s that “first sight” moment very nicely shown to us. 

 We follow him into his life. He is a successful architect. He drives to the apartment of a successful young novelist played by Ernie Kovaks. He is going to build a home for him. It’s one of the fruits of his first two novels being commercial hits. He is also a footloose playboy.
They talk about the house Larry is to design for him. Along the way they discuss artistic freedom. Larry tells him not to write for the commercial crowd, but what he really feels inside.This is an indicator of what is to come. A breath of Do What thou Wilt no matter what the others think as the path to real success and personal fulfillment in life.
  This 1960 movie represents a departure from the Motion Picture Production Code (1929-1968) in that it deal directly with love and sex and infedelity outside of the institution of marrige and shows it in an unjudgemental way. It is treated for what it is simply a matter of fact and what a certain number of people do.
This is not a free love romp, but a clearer view inside the Ozzie and Harriet, Leave it to Beaver world that the entertainment of the 1950s presented. Larry and Maggie get together and have a caring love affair out of the view of the spouses of each. There is guilt, but there is also clear justification particularly in Maggie’s character. Her husband is distantly doing what he has been trained to do, job number one for a man. He is caught up in business, working, and excuses himself when Maggie indicates being lonely and wanting to get together. “Not tonight dear”, as he sits in the living room after work, busy with pressing matters in his work papers.

Kim Novak is so great in this. In a very reserved close in performance she clearly shows Maggie’s demure nature that is shaken up by her desire for love, for life. Although the modern viewer might cringe a bit at certain aspects of the mutual physical approach scenes of these two which skirt the edge of the cliche “no means yes” familiar in so many movies as the man makes his move. But in this instance there is some reality. Maggie is really in that edge of the high dive position of wanting but governed and held in check by the culture she is willingly a part of but is not fully serving her. 

   There is a critical scene at a house neighborhood cocktail party that Larry’s wife, Barbara Rush, has. She invites all the neighbors including Maggie and her husband who in fact show up. Late in the evening Maggie and Larry have a moment away from the others in his home studio. They quietly talk and Larry writes I LOVE YOU on a big yellow legal pad. At that moment an obnoxious neighbor, Walter Matthau, enters and sees Larry tear off the sheet, crumple and toss it in the trash. This sets up the climax of the story. 

   A rare honest movie in which many will find it easy to see themselves in one of the roles or feel like they are spying on a couple of friends. One can feel an uneasy compassion toward them even if not directly involved, maybe even left out of their passion. There could even be a sense of relief in not having to go through it all again.