My son Ben told the rest of our family that we had to watch An Inconvenient Truth. We did. The next morning we went out to buy compact fluorescent bulbs. We're also walking whenever possible. My hope is that people everywhere are making the same sorts of changes.
The above image is from a .pdf available from the film's website. I'd urge everyone within the sound of my voice to watch An Inconvenient Truth.
An Inconvenient Truth (climatecrisis.org)
Boing Boing, the website that identifies itself as "a directory of wonderful things," has a link today to something to wonder at -- something so misconceived that it bewilders, and then it bewilders some more. It's a short animated movie from 2004, made by the Department of Veterans Affairs, entitled The Epic of Gilgamesh: Clinical Practice Guidelines for Post-Deployment Health Evaluation and Management (hereafter, GVA). This three-part movie recasts the story of Gilgamesh and his comrade Enkidu (the oldest written story, from ancient Mesopotamia) as a story of war and its sorrowful aftermath. I suspect that Jonathan Shay's work linking Homer's epics and the suffering of Vietnam veterans -- Achilles in Vietnam and Odysseus in America -- prompted this rethinking of the Gilgamesh story. It's indeed plausible to find in Gilgamesh an allegory of the experience of a combat veteran. But this adaptation fails in several ways.
In the original story, Gilgamesh (king of the city of Uruk) and Enkidu journey to the mysterious forest to kill the giant Humbaba and bring back cedar. They behead Humbaba (who, like Homer's much-later Cyclops, turns out to be a rather plaintive character) and cut down every tree in sight. The story seems to combine admiration for human daring with the recognition that it's possible for human beings to go too far (the god Enlil, like the God of Genesis 3, a later story, is outraged by what these creatures have done). Gilgamesh's overarching purpose in going to the forest is to make a claim to fame, to do something magnificent, or die trying, and thereby leave a name that will endure, a name stamped on brick. The hero and his sidekick undertake this journey alone.
In GVA, the journey to the cedar forest becomes a "a great military deployment," the work of an army, a war, an adventure in slaying a demon and acquiring loot in the form of cedar trees (we see one such tree turn into a dollar sign). In the original story Gilgamesh is indeed intent on destroying "evil" and bringing back loot. But in a story about treatment options for American veterans of the present war, these motives look unmistakably like an allegory of the American presence in Iraq. And there's more: early on, we see Gilgamesh reading a to-do list that includes the item "Conquer world." What does such a scene say to American veterans, or to American allies and enemies? What were the makers of this film thinking?
A severe irony-deficiency might explain these problems. Other problems in this movie can be explained in terms of an unwillingness to acknowledge the full truth of the Gilgamesh story, a story that is ultimately about death and the human awareness of death. For slaying Humbaba and for another transgression back in Uruk, Gilgamesh and Enkidu are punished by the gods. Enkidu must die, and Gilgamesh's punishment is to live without his friend, with the knowledge that he too will die. Unable to reconcile himself to the loss of his comrade and to his own mortality, Gilgamesh undertakes a second journey in search of a way out of time. He travels to wise old Utnapishtim, the only survivor (along with an unnamed wife) of a catastrophic, divinely-sent flood (again, the story pre-dates Genesis). Utnapishtim, the great witness to universal destruction, tells Gilgamesh that there is no permanence, that he will never find what he is seeking. After some further complications, Gilgamesh returns to his city and dies.
GVA gives us a war story that shies away from acknowledging loss and grief. In this recasting, Enkidu is inexplicably paralyzed (a vague metaphor for paraplegia? quadriplegia? Gulf War syndrome?) and suffers another unexplained illness before dying. Gilgamesh, wandering, depressed, sleepless, experiencing intrusive thoughts of Humbaba's beheading and his friend's death, suffers from what unmistakably seems to be post-traumatic stress disorder. The profound loss without consolation that we see in the original story (and which, of course, marks the human condition that we share with ancient Sumerians and Babylonians) here becomes the occasion for a grotesquely comic encounter between Gilgamesh and "Dr. Utnapishtim," aka "Dr. U.," a vaguely Einstein-like figure whose name generates lame jokes about me and you. Dr. U. offers no explanation of Gilgamesh's problems, saying only that the diagnosis remains "in doubt," "unexplained," and "unresolved." The acronym PTSD appears on Dr. U's computer screen but is never spoken in the movie. The following image suggests some of the ways in which Gilgamesh can help himself recover:
Or as Dr. U. says while snatching a donut from Gilgamesh's hand, "A few less lattes in the morning." This is the suggestion of a doctor whose patient is tormented by memories of a beheading?
In the final scene, Gilgamesh, now dressed in a track suit and sneakers, goes for a run. The narrator then states that in the original story, Gilgamesh never recovered from his "war-related illnesses," adding that "Perhaps the outcome would have been better if his health-care providers had had access to the new VA/DoD Post-Deployment Health Clinical Practice Guidelines." Perhaps the outcome would be even better if those whose work is to help heal were willing to acknowledge loss and grief as directly as the Sumerians and Babylonians whose story has been turned (with our tax dollars) into a travesty.
Department of Defense remakes Gilgamesh online (Boing Boing)Update, January 19, 2007: The three-part animation and an accompanying transcript have been taken offline. They are still available (at least for now) from the Internet Archive:
The Epic of Gilgamesh: Clinical Practice Guidelines for Post-Deployment Health Evaluation and Management (U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs)
The Epic of Gilgamesh: 1, 2, 3
The Epic of Gilgamesh: Transcript
Butane James
The Funky President
The Godfather of Soul
The Hardest-Working Man in Show Business
The Man Who Never Left
Minister of the New, New, Super-Heavy Funk
Mr. Dynamite
Mr. Please, Please, Please
Soul Brother Number One
Universal James
"Where I grew up there was no way out, no avenue of escape, so you had to make a way. Mine was to create JAMES BROWN."
James Brown
May 3, 1933 - December 25, 2006
[Photographs by Howard Bingham, 1965]
We now join The Honeymooners, already in progress:
"You know something, sweetheart? Christmas is -- well, it's about the best time of the whole year. You walk down the streets, even for weeks before Christmas comes, and there's lights hanging up, green ones and red ones. Sometimes there's snow. And everybody's hustling some place. But they don't hustle around Christmastime like they usually do. You know, they're a little more friendly -- if they bump into you, they laugh, and they say 'Pardon me' and 'Merry Christmas.' Especially when it gets real close to Christmas night. Everybody's walking home; you can hardly hear a sound. Bells are ringing; kids are singing; snow is coming down. And boy, what a pleasure it is to think that you've got someplace to go to. And the place that you're going to has somebody in it that you really love. Someone you're nuts about. Merry Christmas."From "'Twas the Night Before Christmas," written by Marvin Marx and Walter Stone, broadcast December 24, 1955
My dad again. Thanks, Dad. (Note the spelling, as in John Deere.)
[Ink, watercolor, and colored paper, by James Leddy.]
More by James Leddy
Boo!
Hardy mums
I switched to the "new" Blogger (no longer in beta) this afternoon. Alas, the tools that Blogger touts as making blog design easier aren't available to me without a new template, something I have no interest in creating right now. But there's one feature of the new Blogger that's surprising and useful: the search box in the upper-left-hand corner, which in the past offered hit-and-miss results, now seems to turn up all posts containing the searched-for text. And the search returns not headers, but the posts themselves, arranged into a blog page. It's exciting to see posts that have been separated by lengthy (or not so lengthy) gaps in time reappear as parts of a rambling chronology. (Type, for instance, brooklyn, and see what you find here.)
Update, December 22: Things will look strange for a while, and many links are now gone while I figure out a new template.
*
Later that night . . .
I've gone back to my previous template (which, to my surprise, came back with all its links and tweaks). My limited experience suggests that the "new" Blogger, while making some changes very easy, gives the user less freedom in designing the page. I could not, for instance, devise a way to put my name above my photograph without having it also appear below (as part of the text of my "profile").
“Rule No. 1 is to avoid Route 17 in either direction.”A taste of what it's like to live in Paramus, New Jersey, a town of 27,000 with four malls and 2,700 stores.
In This Town, Even a Mall Rat Can Get Rattled (New York Times)
Related post
Record stores
The inspirational value Rorty claims for literature lies in its capacity to "make people think there is more to this life than they ever imagined." He's writing in opposition to what he calls "knowingness," "a state of soul which prevents shudders of awe," that substitutes "theorization for awe."
The following excerpt echoes a passage, quoted earlier in the essay, from Frederic Jameson, who dismissively refers to "prophets, Great Writers, and demiurges," "the distinctive individual brush stroke," and "quaint romantic values such as that of the 'genius'":
Inspirational value is typically not produced by the operations of a method, a science, a discipline, or a profession. It is produced by the individual brush strokes of unprofessional prophets and demiurges. You cannot, for example, find inspirational value in a text at the same time that you are viewing it as the product of a mechanism of cultural production. To view a work in this way gives understanding but not hope, knowledge but not self-transformation. For knowledge is a matter of putting a work in a familiar context -- relating it to things already known.Richard Rorty, "The Inspirational Value of Great Works," in Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Harvard University Press, 1998)
If it is to have inspirational value, a work must be allowed to recontextualize much of what you previously thought you knew; it cannot, at least at first, be itself recontextualized by what you already believe. Just as you cannot be swept off your feet by another human being at the same time that you recognize him or her as a good specimen of a certain type, so you cannot be simultaneously inspired by a work and be knowing about it. Later on -- when first love has been replaced by marriage -- you may acquire the ability to be both at once. But the really good marriages, the inspired marriages, are those which began in wild, unreflective infatuation.
Related posts
George Steiner on reading
Mark Edmundson tells it like it is
Rorty on Proust
Words, mere words
Zadie Smith on reading
In the 1944 film Laura, Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney) tries to persuade writer and radio personality Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb) to endorse a fountain pen. But Lydecker is keeping it old school:
LH: Here's what I wanted to show you. It's for the Wallace Flow-Rite pen. I know my company would be glad to pay you $5000 if you'll endorse the ad.In fact, when we first see Waldo Lydecker, he's working at a typewriter, which sits on a swing-away platform over his bathtub.
WL: I don't use a pen. I write with a goose quill dipped in venom.
I was watching an episode of Ralph J. Gleason's television series Jazz Casual (1962) featuring the singer and pianist Jimmy Rushing, who was remembering his first encounter with Count Basie:
Rushing: Basie was an actor on the stage when I first saw him. And they used to ballyhoo. You know what that is? That's about fifteen minutes prior to the show, they would take a band -- the band would go out from the show. They'd play a number. And a fella singing. People would gather round. He would explain the show.I've always thought of ballyhoo as a close relation of such nouns as hoopla and hype. But Rushing was using the word as both noun and verb, and the word seemed, in his use, to denote the act of performance itself, not mere promotion. I was curious enough to look up the word in the Oxford English Dictionary.
Gleason: Oh, out on the street?
Rushing: Yes. . . . See, in those days, Ralph, they did a lot of ballyhoo. Whatever place you worked for, you had to advertise it yourself.
Come on along and listen toJimmy Rushing (remember him, a few paragraphs ago?) recorded that song in 1956 for The Jazz Odyssey of James Rushing Esq., a great LP now available on CD.
The lullaby of Broadway,
The hip hooray and ballyhoo,
The lullaby of Broadway.
Ralph J. Gleason's Jazz Casual (All About Jazz)
The Jazz Odyssey of James Rushing Esq. (Amazon.com)
