Reclamation

Over the past couple of days, posts on other blogs have brought to mind jobs I’ve held in the past. Marc on The Valve wrote about UPS’s exploitation of students working the midnight shift, which is a part-time job I once held. And at American Stranger, Traxus described attempts to counteract the wide-scale environmental destruction wrought by coal strip mining. I was never a coal miner, though my great-grandfather and his brothers were. But I once did a mining-related job, as I outlined on Traxus’s post:

These posts bring to mind my first job after I got out of school, working for a surety company in Chicago. Surety bonds guarantee the performance of contracts. One type of suretyship is the land reclamation bond. In order to get governmental permission to strip mine a particular piece of land, the mining company has to comply with state and/or federal regulations for restoring the land. If the mining company fails to do so, the surety company has to step in and pay for the work to be done.

Mining is a speculative operation, like drilling in There Will Be Blood. Paying for the land reclamation comes out of the profits from the mining itself. If the lode turns out not to be a very rich one, then the mining company has to eat the land reclamation costs. In order to qualify for such a bond, therefore, the mining company has to be very rich.

So, I was a surety underwriting trainee in the Midwest regional office, which included Kentucky. So I got to see the financial statements of a lot of these coal companies. As I recall a lot of them were shell corporations organized around a particular mining project, so there wasn’t a lot of corporate money to be had. The real money was in the personal financial statements of the owners, who joined together in various small partnership arrangements which interlocked into a a network of maybe a couple dozen really wealthy individuals. Every year the surety VPs would fly down to KY purportedly to inspect the reclamation work, to investigate profitability of the mining operations, etc. What I think really happened was that the mining honchos would wine and dine the surety guys, fly them around in private helicopters, flash a lot of cash, visit the thoroughbred farms, probably pay a call on the high-class call girls, etc. I suspect they played the same games with the Dept. of the Interior boys, showing them what a fine job they were doing and showing them a good time along with it.

Environmentalism isn’t a new concern in this country or even in mining areas, as you point out. Still, at the time (late-70s) it was rare for a claim to be filed against one of these mining operations for defaulting on the reclamation requirements. Before they started mining a new lode they’d have to file a reclamation plan with the government regulators. Based on that plan the regulators would set the required amount of surety bond to guarantee completion of the reclamation work. My sense was that the mine-owning gentlemen, through their close personal and financial ties with local and federal authorities, were always able to negotiate pretty minimal reclamation requirements. This was probably the sort of favors Dick Cheney handed out the the mine owners of Wyoming when he was a congressman there.

So it seems to me that the issue isn’t coal company compliance with reclamation and contamination requirements; rather, it’s toughening up those requirements at the state and federal governmental level. I have no idea what’s happened in the intervening 30 years, but my bet is that the requirements have gotten ever more lenient as the government has moved further to the right especially on energy-related concerns.

Thinking back on it, I don’t recall worrying about any of this at the time. My job was to evaluate the financial strength of the mining companies relative to the amount of risk involved for my company. I was a trainee, learning how to make these sorts of judgments. I would review the files, work up an evaluation, and present it to my boss. Then we’d discuss the case’s pros and cons, issues I had failed to consider, ways of evaluating financial situations unique to the mining industry, nuances of the land reclamation specs, and so on. I never saw an actual coal mine or reclamation project while I worked on this job. It was all a matter of paper: contracts, financial statements, memos to file, correspondence. And for me personally it was about doing a good job, acquiring technical expertise and business acumen and sound financial judgment. If I considered the environmental impact of the work I was doing, I would have said that I was working on the side of good, of making sure that the mine sites were restored functionally and aesthetically.

In retrospect I see this job differently. The question that comes to mind now is this: what would it have taken to make me think more carefully about this job back then, while I was still doing it? Was the evidence of systemic malfeasance right there in front of me, staring back at me from the well-documented files? I don’t think so. The work was abstract, involving words and numbers rather than people and land. And the purpose of the work was entirely and explicitly reducible to money: risk versus return for my company. That from an early age I had frequently seen the acres of unreclaimed strip mine tailings near my grandparents’ home town, that some of my forebears had died in the mines, didn’t really concern me very much, other than to consider how much better land reclamation had gotten and how much safer my own job was compared to theirs. If someone had asked me then, I’d have said that my work contributed to cleaning up the environment.

If I was going to think more deeply about the overall environmental impact of coal mining, about the finances of the energy industry, about political enablement on behalf of owners rather than workers or citizens, I’d have had to do it on my own time. And that’s not what I felt like doing at the end of the workday. Certainly my heightened political-economic awareness wouldn’t have helped me do my job more efficiently. My boss might have listened politely for a few minutes, then moved on to the task at hand, the task we were both getting paid to do. I could have recommended not writing any more strip mining reclamation bonds, but on what grounds? The mining companies were our clients; their fees paid our salaries.

I had just graduated from college when I started doing this job, but I wasn’t too young to think about these things. Was I more morally corrupt, more self-absorbed, more money-hungry than the committed leftists and the greens? If so, what would have jarred me enough to think differently at the time? Would I have made a case internal to my company to get out of the strip mine reclamation guarantee business? That wouldn’t have worked. Would I have quit? I did that anyway, two and a half years and two transfers later, not in protest but in pursuit of other interests. Would I have used what I’d learned to take some sort of action against the coal mining companies? Maybe, as long as I could have done it on the side and with somebody else leading the charge. Would it have made any difference? It’s hard to say, but then again I doubt whether anything else I’ve done since then has made much of a difference either. Does thinking about it now, three decades later, do anything to reclaim me, or is it just another source of regret over lost opportunities?

La Fin Absolue du Monde

Film is magic and, in the right hands, a weapon.

The other day, at Dejan’s behest, I watched an episode of the TV series “Masters of Horror” directed by John Carpenter. Entitled “Cigarette Burns,” the episode focuses on the quest for a long-lost film that allegedly induces profoundly disturbing, perhaps even fatal effects in anyone who views it. The whole episode can be seen in six YouTube installments, the first of which is HERE. [UPDATE 27 May 11 — The entirety of Cigarette Burns can now be seen HERE.]

The setup would make a good assignment for screenwriters or short story writers…

* * *

The butler ushers Mr. Sweetman into the office of Mr. Ballinger. After some small talk Sweetman contemplates a movie poster hanging on the wall and says to Ballinger: “La Fin Absolue du Monde. The Absolute End of the World.”

“What do you know about it?”

“I know it played once: opening night premiere of the Festival International du Cinema Fantastique de Sitges. Violence erupted in the theater. When Hans Backovic the director tried to get the film out of the country, the government seized it and destroyed it, not realizing it was a work in progress and his only print. He quit the business, and the film’s only been seen by that one audience.”

“You’ve done your homework, but the government didn’t destroy the film.”

Sweetman observes another wall decoration. “What’s this?”

“A prop from the film. I’m a bit obsessive about La Fin Absolue du Monde. I have a collection of over eight thousand films, The most extreme images, created by some of the most obscure filmmakers from around the world. I’m not about to drag you up here in the middle of the night for something that made a school girl dizzy. I’m talking about real power.”

“Were you at the festival when this played?”

“Yes. I even had tickets for the screening, but I’d seen Backovic’s previous work and I wasn’t impressed, so I went to see the first Dr. Phibes instead, hoping to meet Vincent Price. In ’83, the Rotterdam Festival announced a screening. By the time I’d flown there they had cancelled it, saying it was an error. The fact that the venue burned down must have had something to do with it.” Ballinger opens a desk drawer and pulls out an old file filled with papers. He hands it to Sweetman. “Every mention of the film since ’71, every rumor about underground screenings, the official report from Citges. Mr. Sweetman.”

“Why are you giving me this?”

“Isn’t it obvious? I want you to find the print for me.”

“Finding a rare print can be costly, even under the best circumstances. La Fin Absolue du Monde is… it’s infamous, it’s rarer than rare. If there was a print of that out there I’d know it.”

“It is out there, believe me. My sources are unimpeachable.”

* * *

You can readily track down the other 5 installments of Carpenter’s version of this story, but here’s how I think it should turn out: Sweetman finds the film but is afraid to watch it himself. He brings it back to Ballinger. Ballinger watches it: nothing, no impact. He’s stunned, crestfallen, outraged, desperate. This isn’t La Fin Absolue Du Monde, Ballinger declares. But, Sweetman protests, I’ve been assured by the director’s wife, the projectionist at the ’71 showing, a reviewer from that showing — this is the one. No, insists Ballinger: it’s a replacement, perhaps a remake, even a copy, but it isn’t the real La Fin Absolue Du Monde. You must continue searching, Mr. Sweetman, I’ll pay anything you ask, anything…

Eminently Possible Impossibilities

When I started writing fiction I had a couple things in mind. First, I became simultaneously attracted to and frustrated by states of the world that could easily come into existence but that at the same time seem impossible to realize. Second, I believed that, by describing and animating these eminently possible impossibilities, readers would want to explore them with me. Perhaps through some kind of intersubjective synergy between writer and readers, the impossible might start to approach real possibility.

As it has turned out, not many people I’ve approached seem able to enter into the slightly-alternate realities that I’ve put forward. Is it that through poor craftsmanship I’ve not come up with the right words to usher the reader through the portal into these other realities? Is it because the alternate realities really are more alien to most people’s sensibilities than I originally thought, rendering my books unapproachable? Is it because they’re not alien enough and seem too mundane, too boring to bother with

In my rare intervals of lucidity I’d say that it’s just a matter of not having found the right readers. Even a book that sells a million copies in America leaves another couple hundred million potential readers who for one reason or another didn’t buy the book. So if even a best-seller reaches only 1/200th of the reading public, why do I expect to have an orders-of-magnitude better hit rate among the few friends I’ve asked to read my book or the few agents I’ve sent it off to?

Usually though, I alternate between obsessive rage, neurotic depression, and anhedonic passivity. The ones who don’t want to read: I want to force them to read. The ones who read but don’t like: I want to make them like. I’m frustrated when they don’t, frustrated by their unwillingness to give me satisfaction. But then I decide that what I’m offering doesn’t intrigue or stimulate them. I neither attract nor satisfy their desire. And so I think about changing the books to make them more attractive, more tantalizing, more popular. But I don’t know how to do it: this book is what I see, what I create, the product of who I am. I am unattractive, unpopular, undesirable. And so I sag into inertia, neither writing nor trying to be read.

My experience in not being read: has it created this oscillation between obsessive rage and neurotic depression, or has it merely provided an opportunity for my latent tendencies to manifest themselves? I’ve had the experience before, several times, of creating things, excellent things, that no one seemed to want. And I never arrived at any sort of personal reconciliation as to why my best works find no takers. And now, in writing, I’ve exposed myself again to this kind of situation, this kind of frustration and disappointment. Why? Is my writing itself a manifestation of my obsession and neurosis, the latest manifestation of the return of the repressed that I can’t escape or resolve and that I’m doomed/driven to repeat again and again?

It seems eminently possible that the world would be teeming with people who want to read my books, who would delight in reading them, who would join with me in bringing into existence any number of seemingly impossible but realizable alternate realities. Maybe I should write a novel about a guy who writes novels and who, after seemingly endless cycles of rage, depression, and inertia, finally passes through the portal. But I’m not sure I can be bothered. Besides, no one would want to read it: it’s too far-fetched, too mundane, too unapproachable, too boring.

External Stimulus to Create

My last extended outburst of fictional creativity came in response to a conversation I had with a friend of mine, a cinematographer by profession. “Let’s make a movie together,” he said to me one night over dinner. The next day, lying in bed, daydreaming, I came up with about a dozen ideas for short films. I wrote brief descriptions of each and emailed them to my friend. He liked one in particular, and so I wrote up a screenplay for what would have been about a 5-minute short. But I liked all the other ideas too and didn’t want to abandon them.

I’d previously written a novella that consisted mostly of a series of short isolated episodes, culminating in one extended event that brought the story to its crisis. I realized that the ideas for short films I’d come up with during my daydream might fit nicely into this novel. And so over the next month or so I wrote up several of these ideas and incorporated them into the book. Because I’d originally envisioned them as movies, these new stories had a more physical and visual feel to them than had many of the other episodes in the novella, most of which took place largely in the main character’s imagination. This move toward physicality propelled me to think about extending the momentum ever farther, adapting a couple other things I’d written previously that had no other home, adding some transitional interludes, writing a new extended section that hadn’t been there before but that now suggested itself to me based on these other additions. Eventually the book grew to twice its original length and turned into a more complete work of long fiction. Most importantly, it became a significantly better book.

The movie never got made. We had one brief conversation about scouting locations for filming, but nothing ever came of it. The novel remains unpublished and unread by anyone other than my wife. So do I regret having been tricked into creating by external stimulus and false hope? I know what I’m supposed to say…

In the Mood for Love by Wong, 2000

It is a restless moment. She has kept her head lowered, to give him a chance to come closer. But he could not, for lack of courage. She turns, and walks away.

He remembers those vanished years as though looking through a dusty window pane. The past is something he could see, but not touch, and everything he sees is blurred and indistinct.

King of Hearts by White-Patarino, 2008

Last night we attended the world premiere of The King of Hearts. Shown at the local high school, this noir thriller delighted the audience of maybe 150 enthusiastic attendees. It’s the first (and probably the last) feature-length production of Reel Films, a film company comprised of three high-school buddies. Filmed and acted entirely by students over the past year and a half, The King of Hearts was finished just in time for the scheduled showing on the last day of their last year in school.

The movie begins: It’s the dead of night, and a smartly-dressed young man carrying a violin case walks alone. We see another man standing outside a building which we, the locals in the audience, immediately recognize as the high school. A single shot rings out, and the second man slumps to the sidewalk at the front door to the school. Someone stands above the corpse. Casually he flips a playing card onto the lifeless body: the king of hearts. It’s going to be another tough case to crack for Jack Hunter, private eye. Here’s the trailer:

The creative force behind this movie, the writer, director and lead actor, is Benjamin White-Patarino. It was in the wee hours two Halloweens ago when the three moviemaking partners-to-be started goofing on the noir genre. The next day Benjamin got to work on a script. It’s easy to make a movie, he says: every day countless kids shoot a snippet of video and put it up on YouTube. It’s not so easy to make a feature film, with actors, editing, sound effects, city permits for firing guns in public outdoor locations. It’s even harder when everyone involved is going to high school. This wasn’t a school project, so it was a work of love and personal commitment from start to finish. And the kids (or their parents) had to eat the production costs — $500 total. After collecting $3 per head from the audience they must have broken even, or just about.

My daughter showed me a photo in her high school yearbook: it’s Benjamin, sporting coat, tie and fedora. “Born in the wrong decade,” reads the caption. Throughout his senior year Benjamin White-Patarino WAS Jack Hunter, private eye.

The closing credits scrolled up the screen and the audience broke into applause. A tuxedo-clad Benjamin called on stage everyone who acted a role in the movie and introduced them one by one. There was one notable absence: the girl who played femme fatale Claire LaRouge. At the end of the movie Jack stands heartbroken as Claire boards a train back to Chicago. Maybe that’s really where she went. As the cast basked in the accolades of an adoring public we headed out the door — the same door where the murder was filmed — and into the mild and harmless Boulder night.

In the fall Benjamin starts film school in New York. I wish him well.

Bestiary by Christopher, 2007

The first beast I laid eyes on was my father.

Rarely do I come across a contemporary American novel that I want to read or, after having read it, that I like. My tastes run toward the fictions of foreign writers or dead Americans. Maybe I don’t look hard enough; maybe I don’t give some of these American books enough of a chance; maybe my tastes are too quirky or old-fashioned. But I think a lot of it has to do with conservatism in the publishing industry, which produces plenty of variations on only a relatively few themes. As with other areas of the economy, it’s hard to know whether the industry shapes popular tastes or responds to them — probably it’s both. Either way, you don’t realize the lack of variety until you start looking for a particular kind of book and realize there aren’t any on the shelves.

When I saw The Bestiary by Nicholas Christopher at the library I thought I’d found something. “Borges with emotional weight,” a reviewer is quoted as saying about the author on the inside front flap. To a degree it’s Borges’s precise resistance to emotion that distinguishes his stories, but then again he’d never written a novel. The flap goes on to say that the book concerns “the quest for a long-lost book detailing the animals left off Noah’s Ark.” The rest of the description assured me that this wasn’t going to be either a fundamentalist screed or a DaVinci Code knockoff. “A story of panoramic scope and intellectual suspense,” promises the flap — good. “Ultimately a tale of heartbreak and redemption” — not so good, but worth a try.

Like the hero of The Bestiary, I’m on a quest for a long-lost book too — a book written by an American, similar enough to one of my two novels that I’d entertain some hope of either the agent or the editor for that book wanting to take a look at my stuff. So far I’ve had only one actual agent go beyond form-letter dismissal or no reply to an actual response: “intriguing, but too experimental,” was the gist of the one-sentence reason he gave me for rejecting my manuscripts. I don’t regard what I do as particularly experimental. While writing my first novel I was aware of certain influences on what and how I wrote: Graham Greene, Cormac McCarthy, a little Henry Miller, Elie Wiesel for one chapter in particular, Borges certainly — these aren’t experimentalists; they’re canonical. I don’t deny experimenting with characters and situations and ideas, but that’s what fiction is about, isn’t it? I also wrote one letter to an editor at a publishing house, who said merely that she didn’t think she was the right person to work on my book. That’s probably the case, since shortly after I sent my inquiry I noticed that she’d paid big bucks to woo Jhumpa Lahiri away from a competing publisher, and based on her one attempt so far I don’t think Lahiri is capable of writing long fiction. But hey, her novel was a hit, Hollywood made a movie out of it, and her newest book (short stories, which is probably what she should be doing) is a best-seller.

Like The Bestiary, my first novel is a quest during which the narrator finds out about a mysterious manuscript that points back to the Biblical creation narrative. “Borges with emotional weight” — I’m prepared to see what that looks like. Though I’d never read anything by Nicholas Christopher before, he’s got several published novels and books of poetry under his belt, so somebody in the publishing industry must think this guy’s stuff is worth the time of day.

As I got close to the end of The Bestiary I encountered a scene that’s uncannily similar to one at the end of my book. The pilgrimage trail leads the hero through Europe to an isolated spot near the eastern Mediterranean coast, populated mostly by goats. There’s an ancient church, seldom visited by tourists, unimpressive both outside and in. Once inside he finds a stairway leading down to a grotto… At first I was dismayed by these parallels — I wrote mine first, but Chirstopher got his published first. But what struck me more forcefully was that, to the extent that I’m a passable judge of writing, my descriptions of this place at the end of the quest are more evocative and mysterious than Christopher’s. Maybe he consciously tries to distinguish his prose style from his poetry, but in comparing these two books I think mine is more poetic without being too precious.

Christopher has the reach for writing full-length fiction without losing coherence or momentum. A reviewer said that this is Christopher’s “most ambitious” to date. On page 229 he pretty much tells us straight out what he’s up to here:

I was reminded of my grandmother’s most important gift to me: her belief that we must pursue the beasts of this life, rather than allowing them to pursue us. If they consumed us in the end… at least we could confront them first on their own terms. This knowledge enabled me to survive my childhood without embracing the corrosive elements — cruelty, dishonesty, envy — that ate away at so many people I knew. Eventually it translated into my quest for the bestiary, which I had come to realize was all about seeking the beasts outside myself in order to understand those within.

It’s at this level that my book, despite certain similarities in the plot and setting, deviates significantly from The Bestiary. Maybe Christopher delivers the sort of personal redemption that betokens emotional weight in literary fiction, the sort of thing that readers are looking for when they pull a book randomly off the shelf, the thing that agents want to represent and that publishers want to buy. It’s a pretty good book, as good as the last couple by Paul Auster that I read in hopes of finding another contemporary American author to like. And I’ll write a letter to Christopher’s editor, maybe even telling her what I think: my book is better than this one, more worth your while. But I doubt my letter will set in motion the sorts of events that would bring to a satisfactory end my personal quest for authorial redemption.

There Will Be Blood, 2007

I remember some of the blog discussions about this movie when it came out. Now, seeing it for the first time, as the DVD ended, my first comment was, “that was a silly movie.” It wouldn’t take much to turn this overraught melodrama into a comedy. You wouldn’t even have to change very much of the story. If it wasn’t for Daniel Day Lewis’s intense seriousness and the oppressive ominousness of the score, the film could easily have played as a parody of itself, maybe call it There Will Be Gas.

The very beginning of the movie is my favorite part. We see a figure delving in the dark like some protean Titan, his pickaxe striking sparks against the solid rock as if he’s chiseling himself out of the stony womb that bore him. He climbs toward the surface, toward the sun. Night falls, and he sits alone beside a fire of his own making.

Strangely, Lewis’s performance reminds me of Johnny Depp as Captain Jack in the Pirates movies. It’s not that the actor inhabits the role, or that the role possesses him, or that he’s called up something deep in himself that could become this role. Rather, the character is a work of artistic creation. Johnny Depp may have borrowed Keith Richard for his construction; some people think Lewis did the same with John Huston. It’s also evident that Lewis started working on this character in Gangs of New York. The result is worth it I believe: a distinct and compelling cinematic persona that I’ll remember long after the movie itself fades from memory.

It is a beautiful film. A lot of it was filmed in Marfa, Texas, where Giant (James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor) was made in the fifties and, oddly enough, where No Country for Old Men was also filmed. No Country is one of Cormac McCarthy’s less accomplished works, and though I’ve not read Sinclair Lewis’s Oil! I understand it’s not a major novel either. Still, in terms of cinematic adaptation, the Coen movie succeeds where, in my view, Paul Anderson’s does not.

Thin Red Line by Malick, 1998

What’s this war in the heart of nature? Why does nature vie with itself? The land contend with the sea? Is there an avenging power in nature? Not one power, but two? l remember my mother when she was dying. Looked all shrunk up and gray. l asked her if she was afraid. She just shook her head. l was afraid to touch the death l seen in her. I heard people talk about immortality, but I ain’t seen it. l wondered how it’d be when l died. What it’d be like to know that this breath now was the last one you was ever gonna draw. l just hope l can meet it the same way she did. With the same… calm. Cos that’s where it’s hidden — the immortality l hadn’t seen.

Who were you that I lived with? Walked with? The brother. The friend. Darkness from light. Strife from love. Are they the workings of one mind? The features of the same face? Oh, my soul, let me be in you now. Look out through my eyes. Look out at the things you made. All things shining.

Inside Out, 2005

Inside Out seems to be a popular film title. I’m not sure how this one got in my Netflix queue — maybe it was a different Inside Out I’d read something about and I picked this one by mistake. Maybe this was the one after all.

By strategically selecting screen shots it’s possible not only to convey the tone but also the gist and even the audience appeal of a movie. I’ve not seen a trailer for this particular Inside Out, but I think one could be assembled that would bring people into the theaters.


The screen shots in this particular montage were gathered from about a 5-minute sequence near the end of the movie. They show the characteristic Cronenberg- DiPalma themes and surprise turnaround ending, the “inside-out” inversion of subject and object. One might be led to believe that this is a good movie, both entertaining and insightful, a portal as well as a mirror — the kind of trashy genre movie that becomes a cult classic among cinephiles possessed of a certain postmodern sensibility.