I have taken down the paywall for some of my earliest posts on Patrick O’Brian’s Aubreyad: “The Bow-Chaser,” the introduction to the series, “Master and Commander,” “Post Captain,” and “HMS Surprise” are now free for anyone to read. Yesterday I put all of my posts on Patrick O’Brian into a Word document to see if there might be a book there, part literary criticism and part memoir, a la Olivia Laing’s The Trip to Echo Springs or even some of Maggie Nelson’s work. The answer is a qualified yes, but there’s a fair bit of editing and revising to do. Anyway, while I ponder that possible project, I thought I’d make those other posts available again to you, my loyal readers, and anyone else with a yen to read about what are probably my favorite books in the world.
For an academic, summers present peril and promise. The promise is time—time to write, above all, but also time to read widely and indiscriminately, ideally while sitting by the Evanston lakefront. The peril is that sinking feeling I get every moment that the days are slipping away from me and will I have anything to show for them before I have to start teaching again? (A feeling amplified by the fact that I’m going to be chair of my department this fall!) When I was a kid I was supremely lazy: I liked nothing better than lying in a hammock and wasting my life reading Piers Anthony’s Xanth novels. Sometime in my twenties a switch got thrown and I became impossibly, dreadfully driven. It’s like I glanced over my shoulder and saw Milton’s “great Task-Master’s eye” staring down at me, and I’ve been hustling ever since to write and publish as much as possible before I drop dead. In middle age, I try to prioritize more the simple pleasures of living, but it’s hard not to feel that a day without writing is a wasted day.
A couple of weeks ago I took my daughter and some of her friends to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show at the Music Box; more precisely, I dropped them off before midnight and then went to hang out at the Golden Apple, a diner made semi-famous by a 2000 episode of This American Life, “24 Hours at the Golden Apple.” Oddly enough, a reporter and a photographer from the Chicago Tribune were there to do a follow-up story, though it only covered twelve hours rather than the full twenty-four. (As good an indicator as any of the decline of journalism.) She ended up interviewing me, and though she got one or two facts wrong, it was nonetheless a flattering portrait. Here’s what’s behind the paywall:
The diner is busiest past midnight, with customers spilling in from nearby bars. A woman laughs a little too loudly with her adult son at the counter. A couple indulges in a stack of pancakes after a house party. A 21-year-old in a bikini top scorns her newly engaged ex-girlfriend. Just another night — or rather, early morning — at the Golden Apple.
Other than the wait staff, Joshua Corey might be the only sober person here. He sits with near-perfect posture, dark tousled hair falling over the rim of his glasses.
“I love diners. I love the mugs, I love the bad coffee, it’s great,” Corey, 53, said. “I’m feeling a little nostalgic.”
Pages of intricate, cursive writing are strewn out before him. His finger traces one paragraph, over and over again. He’s attempting to finish his first novel, a work of historical fiction based loosely on the life of Chicago boxer Barney Ross during the Prohibition era.
“Three-hundred pages into the manuscript, but no end in sight,” Corey said, crinkling his nose. “I just love what language can do, you know?”
For the record, it’s not my first novel, or even my first published novel: that would be Beautiful Soul and the second would be How Long Is Now: buy ‘em and read ‘em! Other than that, no complaints. Maybe I feel a little bad that it sounds like I was complaining about the coffee. Weak coffee is just what you want after midnight. If I was there for breakfast, I might have cause to complain. Anyway, there I am, from midnight to 2 AM at a diner surrounded by drunks, trying to write. It’s a romantic image, but sometimes I wish the Task-Master would lay off once in a while.
This weekend I saw Leos Carax’s 2012 film Holy Motors at the Gene Siskel Film Center downtown. I’d seen it once before, streaming, but when I saw that it was going to be on the big screen I had to go see it again, and now that I’ve done so it’s entered my pantheon of favorite films. It falls into a special category of art for me, a category in which I’d also include Lars von Trier’s The Five Obstructions, Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty, and Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George. These are meta-works of art that comment self-consciously on artmaking—they are about artmaking—which I find intensely moving rather than self-indulgent or masturbatory. These are works that showcase the intensity of commitment required of the artist with a desire to communicate his essential strangeness—which is to say, his humanity. (Or hers: I would also put Agnes Varda’s The Gleaners and I and The Beaches of Agnès into this category. But there’s a specifically masculine loneliness that I see Carax and Von Trier and Sondheim trying to illuminate and break open in these works.)
On one level, Holy Motors is easy enough to describe: a man called Oscar is driven in a white limousine from one “appointment” to the next; for each appointment he dons makeup and a costume (sometimes quite elaborate), transforming himself successively into a crippled beggar woman, a CGI performer, a monstrous Pan-figure (“Monsieur Merde”), the cruel father of a teenage girl, an assassin (and the assassin’s victim), a dying old man, etc. He is an actor, but for no play, film, or audience that we can discern other than the audience we ourselves are and the film that we are watching. He is played by the uncanny Denis Lavant, a Chaplin-esque figure who sends his body and face into contortions of commitment. As Monsieur Oscar, his sense of self seems shaky, most notably in the sequence where he encounters a fellow performer, played by Kylie Minogue, with whom he seems to have a past. But his investment in his characters is total, and we the audience invest in them with him, not in spite but because we never forget the artifice (we see him make him up meticulously for each part in the back of the limo, which is a traveling dressing room). It’s the cinematic equivalent of Jaques’ “Seven Ages of Man” speech from As You Like It.
What makes it moving? Partly it’s what Gerard Manley Hopkins calls “the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!” But it’s also the spectacle of resistance presented by the artist’s own body: Lavant was 51 when the film was made, and though he’s obviously extremely fit the acrobatics he goes through must have been painful and exhausting (especially given how many cigarettes we see the guy smoke). We see and feel the effects of each “appointment” on Monsieur Oscar himself: as the film goes on he gets wearier and wearier (it seems to span about the same duration as the story of another beleagured everyman, Leopold Bloom—Ulysses begins at 7 AM and ends in the small hours). It doesn’t help that the man actually seems to die at several points—he gets shot, he gets stabbed, he expires of old age—but a few minutes later he’s somehow dragged or stumbles back to the limo for his next appointment. There are many closeups of Lavant’s creased, ugly-beautiful face, an unblank canvas for various scars, hairpieces, beards, etc. that transform his identity without erasing the marks of an individual life deeply lived.
Lavant is fundamentally a clown (he has circus training); like the equally astonishing Kathryn Hunter, who plays all three witches in Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth and has a memorable turn as a brothel madam in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, he finds the humanity in grotesquerie, and vice-versa. (Other actors I’d put in this category include Zero Mostel, Willem Dafoe, and Lon Chaney Jr.) Like Beckett’s clowns, he can be abject one moment and terrifying the next. He can also be quite subtle. My favorite sequence in the movie might be the one where he plays a ragged-looking father who picks up his teenage daughter from a party and becomes enraged when he discovers that she hid in the bathroom the entire time. Why is he so upset? Because she lied to him? Because she reminds him painfully of himself and his own desire to hide, to keep some essential part of himself for himself? It’s a searing portrait of the damage we do to our loved ones when they seem to assume the form of actors in our own internal dramas, externalized in this case entirely by Lavant’s face and voice as he drives his daughter home through the streets of Paris in the shittiest little car imaginable.
![Holy Motors, for the lovers of the movement | Well Lackadaddy Aaron I drink your milkshake! Holy Motors, for the lovers of the movement | Well Lackadaddy Aaron I drink your milkshake!](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd7811a6e-f218-4a3b-b15b-c7200d42d141_640x390.jpeg)
Of course now that I’ve said this is my favorite scene, I have to give a shout-out to the “entr’acte,” the now legendary accordion sequence. What is this doing in the film? What is this not doing in every film?
Ultimately what moves me most about the film, aside from its sly humor and startling beauty, is its depiction of the sheer relentlessness of the task of art-making. Or to put it more simply: Making art marks time. Before the movie I visited the Art Institute, and saw another work of art that demonstrates this fact: Nicholas Nixon’s The Brown Sisters, a series of photographs, taken at the rate of one per year for forty-seven years, of the same four sisters, one of whom happens to be his wife, Bebe. Here’s the most recent in the series, taken in 2022:
And here’s the first, taken in 1975:
After seeing Holy Motors I watched Carax and Lavant’s second collaboration, Mauvais Sang (Bad Blood) from 1986, which is highly stylized in a very 80s kind of way, reminding me more than a little of the early work of Jim Jarmusch and Hal Hartley, (themselves thoroughly influenced by the French New Wave). Less overtly than Holy Motors, the film is an assemblage of tropes (centered in this case on the heist movie) held together by the passion of the performances, or the romance of Romance, with Lavant’s famous dance-run to the beat of David Bowie’s “Modern Love” at its heart:
When authenticity is rooted in the (frail, mortal) body, and that body is then put in the service of supreme artifice, something magical happens, almost literally death-defying. I run these films in parallel in my mind, as I negotiate the strangeness of feeling 25 in my head and seeing someone twice that age in the mirror. I should like to write something along those lines, someday. The achieve of! The mastery of the thing! But mastery only matters because it breaks down, breaks open, and what emerges? “What is the self amidst this blaze?” asks Delmore Schwartz. In this case, the blaze is art itself.
What a coincidence - I saw that Golden Apple article on my phone the other day, but I didn't get far enough to read about you working on your "first [sic] novel." It's funny how journalists screw up even the most elementary things.
I like diners too and they are good places for writing. Back in the late 90s I used to hang out in the Melrose Diner, also in Lakeview.