Greeting from Planet Earth!The weekend has blessedly arrived (I'm starting to write this over coffee on Saturday morning), after my first full week back at work following my bout with COVID.I often get weird looks from my co-workers when I say this, but I really generally dislike taking entire weeks off from work. This is not out of any great devotion to work, but just that I find the week leading up to a week-long vacation increasingly long and difficult (though the unplanned nature of this particular week off made that a non-factor), and I find dropping right back into a full five-day work week after a nice long break deeply hellish. There is nothing so long and soul-killing, no period when the minutes feel like they have been extended to 197 seconds each and the hours to 197 minutes, like the Tuesday and Wednesday of that first full week back from work.This attitude of mine dates back to my years in restaurant management, when getting that many days off in a row was damned near impossible, but to this day I try to schedule my vacations to take up parts of consecutive work weeks, so instead of "work a week, take a week off, work a week", I instead do "work a week, have a weekend, work a short week, have a really long weekend, work another short week, then have another weekend, and then and only then work a full week." This makes sense to me. (It also helps me spread my allotted vacation time throughout the year.) But again, I describe my attitude on this to coworkers and I invariably get looked at as if I've just sprouted a second head that is spouting Flat Earth stuff in Aramaic.But anyway, I digress. (From what, I'm not sure.)One really heartening recent development has been the progress I've been making on Forgotten Stars V. As I've noted frequently, this book has been a struggle that has taken me twice as long as I originally planned, but lately, I've been piling up the words at a nice rate, hitting my Word Count Quotas every single day for almost two weeks now. That's great. (Yes, I try to use quotas when I'm actually drafting. More on why another time, but my quotas are: 500 words on work days, and 1000 words on non-work days.) In the last eight days I have written 6,194 words. I have high hopes this will continue because I have finally reached Act III of this book, which is generally when I've finally nailed down the plot and am just racing toward the action-packed conclusion. (And, a teaser here: this one really has an action-packed conclusion.):: This is almost certainly the final issue of this newsletter in August, so here's some stuff I've posted to my site, if you've missed it:August, my favorite summer monthObserving the birthday of Alfred, Lord TennysonThe rainbows of the 716Farewell, Olivia Newton-JohnOn the attack on Salman RushdieThe Erie County Fair, 2022On linen shirtsOur allotted summers (in which I quote a friend)There's more over on ForgottenStars.net, so bookmark it and keep an eye on it! I try to post something every day.:: Now, switching gears, I want to talk about a movie: 1993's The Man Without a Face.The "Beloved Teacher and Their Troubled Student" genre has been around forever, and this is one of my favorites. It's an adaptation of a novel that I have not read, so I can't speak to its fidelity to the source material, but I rewatched it last week while on my COVID break, and I was struck anew by the complexity and truth of its characters and relationships.The Man Without a Face was Mel Gibson's directorial debut, and it also came along when Gibson was transitioning from his 80s comedic-action star reputation to more serious dramatic work. It also came a decade before Gibson famously went off the deep-end, exposing a huge amount of wild bigotry and anti-Semitism that honestly colors in retrospect everything he ever did, including this film. There's just no getting around that, particular a scene where Gibson quite wonderfully delivers Shylock's famous "Hath not a Jew eyes?" speech from The Merchant of Venice.) There's just no getting around the incongruity of Gibson having this work of art inside him, alongside some spectacular ugliness. It reminds me of author David Dubal's observation whilst discussing Richard Wagner's Siegfried Idyll, one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever composed: "That this man, capable of such emotion, was enraged at Bismarck for not burning Paris to the ground will always tantalize and disturb."But going back to the actual film, it still stands as one of the finest depictions I know of the complexity of the student-teacher relationship. It's a relationship that can shade into friendship, and even into a kind of parenthood...and, as the film suggests, it can shade into something darker.Nick Stahl plays Chuck Norstadt, a young boy who is the middle child of a single mother, each of whose children has a different father, none of whom are in the picture anymore. His mother is not a bad person, really, but neither is she cut out to be a particularly good mother, and she seems to take a laissez-faire approach to her children, even as she demonstrates a bit of favoritism toward Gloria, her firstborn and eldest. The relationship between the siblings is then very complex: Gloria seems to hate Chuck intensely (though the film does allow her a few moments of genuine tenderness along the way). Chuck asks his mother once, "Why does Gloria hate me?" and the response is a frank, "Because you were born."As The Man Without a Face opens, Chuck and family are on their way to their summer vacation home on the Maine coast, and Chuck wants to retake the entry exam for a military prep school that he has already failed once. This leads Chuck to a local hermit named Justin McLeod, who is a former teacher who now lives a quiet and rather secretive life in his house on the ocean. McLeod is disfigured--half his face was destroyed, somehow--and rumors abound about the kind of man he is and the life he leads by himself.Chuck, in need of a tutor and oddly fascinated by Mr. McLeod, manages to figure out that McLeod is a former teacher and somehow works his way into McLeod's favor enough that McLeod agrees to tutor Chuck for his exam. But McLeod teaches Chuck far more than he really needs just to pass the exam, and their relationship deepens into something far beyond Mr. McLeod's original rule: "Learn, or leave. Because it's of no consequence to me."I don't want to describe how all of this unfolds, because while the film isn't exactly full of surprises, there is a great deal of pleasure in the organic way the relationship begins and unfolds. By the time the dark nature of Mr. McLeod's disfigurement and the reason for his reclusive nature is revealed, we've come to know both of these characters well enough that the inevitable question--Did he do it?--can only have one answer, which the film doesn't spell out:CHUCK: Just tell me you didn't do it, and I'll believe you!McLEOD: No! No, sir! I didn't spend all summer so you could cheat on THIS question.No one in The Man Without a Face is evil, no one is malevolent, beyond the familiar forces of small-town rumor and innuendo and back-room whispers that eventually take their toll. But in the end, this film earns the final moments between Chuck Norstadt and Mr. McLeod in a way that other, more popular teacher movies (that would be you, Dead Poets Society) do not.The Man Without a Face also creates a little world of its own, this small summer resort town where the population suddenly explodes and last summer's friendships and romances resume. It's also a place where a single mother with a history of ended marriages can be on the lookout for the next one, in this case a very shaggy Yale professor (Richard Masur) who introduces himself to Carl in the best pretentious-ass-trying-to-not-sound-pretentious line I've ever heard: "Just call me Carl. I don't need any of that imperialistic post-Hegelian authoritarian crap for MY ego!" (Later on, when Professor Carl is babbling drunkenly during a dinner party about the horrors of Viet Nam and how Chuck will abandon his military school designs once he learns what's going on there, Chuck gets another of the movie's best lines: "Well, I actually can't think of anything I'd rather do more than drop napalm for a living.")Nobody is perfect in this movie, either. McLeod is bristly and imperfect, and so is Chuck, who vandalizes his own mother's car in a fit of sibling rage and whose first instinct when instructed by Mr. Mcleod to write an essay is to plagiarize something he finds at the local library. The Man Without a Face is filled with flawed and interesting people.As a bookish person, I have to make special note of Mr. McLeod's house in this movie. It's the kind of house I'd dream of living in: perched on the rocky Maine seashore, McLeod has filled it with books and the ephemera of his life (including his beautiful dog). The house in this movie is high on my list of Fictional Houses I Want To Live In. (Note to self: Make that list.)I'm particularly drawn to these kinds of stories, of the relationship between a young student and an older teacher. Perhaps it goes back to all the John Bellairs novels I read as a kid; this trope was present in all of them. In the end, it falls to Mr. McLeod to sum it all up for Chuck, who probably still doesn't entirely understand what has happened, via a letter which we hear read by voiceover:"You gave me what I never expected to find again. A gift of your trust and love. And nothing can take that grace away. The best is yet to be, Norstadt. So do it well..."I guess what I'm saying is, I really love The Man Without a Face, both for the film it is and the direction it pointed out as a possibility for a man who is a great filmmaker and also...something deeply regrettable.And now, as I write this, it's Sunday morning and it's time to help with laundry and empty the dishwasher and get the day's writing done. Later on, we're grilling burgers. As Bill Watterson noted in Calvin and Hobbes, "the days are just packed."Thank you for reading!-K
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Dispatches from the Forgotten Stars: theā¦
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Greeting from Planet Earth!The weekend has blessedly arrived (I'm starting to write this over coffee on Saturday morning), after my first full week back at work following my bout with COVID.I often get weird looks from my co-workers when I say this, but I really generally dislike taking entire weeks off from work. This is not out of any great devotion to work, but just that I find the week leading up to a week-long vacation increasingly long and difficult (though the unplanned nature of this particular week off made that a non-factor), and I find dropping right back into a full five-day work week after a nice long break deeply hellish. There is nothing so long and soul-killing, no period when the minutes feel like they have been extended to 197 seconds each and the hours to 197 minutes, like the Tuesday and Wednesday of that first full week back from work.This attitude of mine dates back to my years in restaurant management, when getting that many days off in a row was damned near impossible, but to this day I try to schedule my vacations to take up parts of consecutive work weeks, so instead of "work a week, take a week off, work a week", I instead do "work a week, have a weekend, work a short week, have a really long weekend, work another short week, then have another weekend, and then and only then work a full week." This makes sense to me. (It also helps me spread my allotted vacation time throughout the year.) But again, I describe my attitude on this to coworkers and I invariably get looked at as if I've just sprouted a second head that is spouting Flat Earth stuff in Aramaic.But anyway, I digress. (From what, I'm not sure.)One really heartening recent development has been the progress I've been making on Forgotten Stars V. As I've noted frequently, this book has been a struggle that has taken me twice as long as I originally planned, but lately, I've been piling up the words at a nice rate, hitting my Word Count Quotas every single day for almost two weeks now. That's great. (Yes, I try to use quotas when I'm actually drafting. More on why another time, but my quotas are: 500 words on work days, and 1000 words on non-work days.) In the last eight days I have written 6,194 words. I have high hopes this will continue because I have finally reached Act III of this book, which is generally when I've finally nailed down the plot and am just racing toward the action-packed conclusion. (And, a teaser here: this one really has an action-packed conclusion.):: This is almost certainly the final issue of this newsletter in August, so here's some stuff I've posted to my site, if you've missed it:August, my favorite summer monthObserving the birthday of Alfred, Lord TennysonThe rainbows of the 716Farewell, Olivia Newton-JohnOn the attack on Salman RushdieThe Erie County Fair, 2022On linen shirtsOur allotted summers (in which I quote a friend)There's more over on ForgottenStars.net, so bookmark it and keep an eye on it! I try to post something every day.:: Now, switching gears, I want to talk about a movie: 1993's The Man Without a Face.The "Beloved Teacher and Their Troubled Student" genre has been around forever, and this is one of my favorites. It's an adaptation of a novel that I have not read, so I can't speak to its fidelity to the source material, but I rewatched it last week while on my COVID break, and I was struck anew by the complexity and truth of its characters and relationships.The Man Without a Face was Mel Gibson's directorial debut, and it also came along when Gibson was transitioning from his 80s comedic-action star reputation to more serious dramatic work. It also came a decade before Gibson famously went off the deep-end, exposing a huge amount of wild bigotry and anti-Semitism that honestly colors in retrospect everything he ever did, including this film. There's just no getting around that, particular a scene where Gibson quite wonderfully delivers Shylock's famous "Hath not a Jew eyes?" speech from The Merchant of Venice.) There's just no getting around the incongruity of Gibson having this work of art inside him, alongside some spectacular ugliness. It reminds me of author David Dubal's observation whilst discussing Richard Wagner's Siegfried Idyll, one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever composed: "That this man, capable of such emotion, was enraged at Bismarck for not burning Paris to the ground will always tantalize and disturb."But going back to the actual film, it still stands as one of the finest depictions I know of the complexity of the student-teacher relationship. It's a relationship that can shade into friendship, and even into a kind of parenthood...and, as the film suggests, it can shade into something darker.Nick Stahl plays Chuck Norstadt, a young boy who is the middle child of a single mother, each of whose children has a different father, none of whom are in the picture anymore. His mother is not a bad person, really, but neither is she cut out to be a particularly good mother, and she seems to take a laissez-faire approach to her children, even as she demonstrates a bit of favoritism toward Gloria, her firstborn and eldest. The relationship between the siblings is then very complex: Gloria seems to hate Chuck intensely (though the film does allow her a few moments of genuine tenderness along the way). Chuck asks his mother once, "Why does Gloria hate me?" and the response is a frank, "Because you were born."As The Man Without a Face opens, Chuck and family are on their way to their summer vacation home on the Maine coast, and Chuck wants to retake the entry exam for a military prep school that he has already failed once. This leads Chuck to a local hermit named Justin McLeod, who is a former teacher who now lives a quiet and rather secretive life in his house on the ocean. McLeod is disfigured--half his face was destroyed, somehow--and rumors abound about the kind of man he is and the life he leads by himself.Chuck, in need of a tutor and oddly fascinated by Mr. McLeod, manages to figure out that McLeod is a former teacher and somehow works his way into McLeod's favor enough that McLeod agrees to tutor Chuck for his exam. But McLeod teaches Chuck far more than he really needs just to pass the exam, and their relationship deepens into something far beyond Mr. McLeod's original rule: "Learn, or leave. Because it's of no consequence to me."I don't want to describe how all of this unfolds, because while the film isn't exactly full of surprises, there is a great deal of pleasure in the organic way the relationship begins and unfolds. By the time the dark nature of Mr. McLeod's disfigurement and the reason for his reclusive nature is revealed, we've come to know both of these characters well enough that the inevitable question--Did he do it?--can only have one answer, which the film doesn't spell out:CHUCK: Just tell me you didn't do it, and I'll believe you!McLEOD: No! No, sir! I didn't spend all summer so you could cheat on THIS question.No one in The Man Without a Face is evil, no one is malevolent, beyond the familiar forces of small-town rumor and innuendo and back-room whispers that eventually take their toll. But in the end, this film earns the final moments between Chuck Norstadt and Mr. McLeod in a way that other, more popular teacher movies (that would be you, Dead Poets Society) do not.The Man Without a Face also creates a little world of its own, this small summer resort town where the population suddenly explodes and last summer's friendships and romances resume. It's also a place where a single mother with a history of ended marriages can be on the lookout for the next one, in this case a very shaggy Yale professor (Richard Masur) who introduces himself to Carl in the best pretentious-ass-trying-to-not-sound-pretentious line I've ever heard: "Just call me Carl. I don't need any of that imperialistic post-Hegelian authoritarian crap for MY ego!" (Later on, when Professor Carl is babbling drunkenly during a dinner party about the horrors of Viet Nam and how Chuck will abandon his military school designs once he learns what's going on there, Chuck gets another of the movie's best lines: "Well, I actually can't think of anything I'd rather do more than drop napalm for a living.")Nobody is perfect in this movie, either. McLeod is bristly and imperfect, and so is Chuck, who vandalizes his own mother's car in a fit of sibling rage and whose first instinct when instructed by Mr. Mcleod to write an essay is to plagiarize something he finds at the local library. The Man Without a Face is filled with flawed and interesting people.As a bookish person, I have to make special note of Mr. McLeod's house in this movie. It's the kind of house I'd dream of living in: perched on the rocky Maine seashore, McLeod has filled it with books and the ephemera of his life (including his beautiful dog). The house in this movie is high on my list of Fictional Houses I Want To Live In. (Note to self: Make that list.)I'm particularly drawn to these kinds of stories, of the relationship between a young student and an older teacher. Perhaps it goes back to all the John Bellairs novels I read as a kid; this trope was present in all of them. In the end, it falls to Mr. McLeod to sum it all up for Chuck, who probably still doesn't entirely understand what has happened, via a letter which we hear read by voiceover:"You gave me what I never expected to find again. A gift of your trust and love. And nothing can take that grace away. The best is yet to be, Norstadt. So do it well..."I guess what I'm saying is, I really love The Man Without a Face, both for the film it is and the direction it pointed out as a possibility for a man who is a great filmmaker and also...something deeply regrettable.And now, as I write this, it's Sunday morning and it's time to help with laundry and empty the dishwasher and get the day's writing done. Later on, we're grilling burgers. As Bill Watterson noted in Calvin and Hobbes, "the days are just packed."Thank you for reading!-K