The great novelist and engineer Gene Wolfe died today aged 87. 

I had only really learned of his writings last year and had dug into the first book of his masterwork, the 1980 novel “The Shadow of the Torturer,” hailed by many as the “Ulysses of science fiction,” an understandable though not altogether accurate statement. Having nearly finished the second book of the larger work, I can say it is the most ingenious and delightfully challenging work of fiction I’ve ever read. I can only imagine what the final three parts hold in store. 

There exists a cottage industry of scholarship regarding attempts to break down and parse and simply fully appreciate the density and brilliance of the ideas contained in Wolfe’s novels. His writing is thrilling and terrifying and deeply wise and poetic in ways mirrored only by the finest writers. 

Some authors considered him one of the greatest in English, if not THE best modern writer, with comparisons to Proust and Borges and Vance and Melville a commonplace. He was not wildly popular in his lifetime, and perhaps the difficulty of the works drove people away, although I’d wager the reputation of difficulty was the actual culprit. With some attention and interest and a small investment in light research, one would find an author that rewarded at least as much as the reader invested. 

I sent him a letter of thanks a month or so ago after finding what I think was his address online. I’m not sure if he got it, but I hope he knew that one more reader had found his work and found it a treasure indeed.

–

By SEAN H. CAMPBELL | January 4, 2016

Today, I saw a link to an article (actually a “listicle,” apparently, because language is dead, and nothing matters) at USA Today contending that – were one to click on said article – one would be greeted with “101 Incredible Sports Facts That Will Blow Your Mind.”

I saw run-of-the-mill data like how Michael Jordan continued to receive his $4 million salary while futzing around with baseball or how Michael Phelps ranks #35 as a gold winning COUNTRY all his own ahead of 97 other entire nations, although this is out of date now since the listicle dates back to the halcyon days of 2014. They even had one that pointed out golf balls have 336 dimples, which is actually two fewer than Mario Lopez.

But then I saw this:

“FEDERER” can be typed entirely with the left hand.

I sat for a moment, wondering if my mind was being blown right then and there.  Perhaps a feeling of – almost literally nothing – was a sign of one’s mind having been completely and utterly blown. My mind was now locked in an all white room with no discernible corners and everything was completely silent and nothing existed.

More likely, I guess, is that after the writer had been sitting at his desk, head in hands, trying desperately to get to Incredible Sports Fact That Will Blow Your Mind #101 at his editor’s moronic request, he looked up at his Roger Federer poster, back down at his keyboard, back to the poster, back to the keyboard, realization began to dawn, the music swelled, and BAM! he had his “Jehovah starts with an ‘I’!”-moment, and he was allowed to move to the next trial on the way to the internet’s Holy Grail of viral fame, which was probably something like, “The Six Herbal Supplements Your Doctor Doesn’t Want You To Know About!” or “You Won’t Believe How Broke You’ll Always Be!” or “Seven Things Gary Johnson Is Still Wondering About.” (Editor’s Note: This paragraph-sentence is stupid and way too long.)

Speaking of golf balls: the seventeenth “incredible sports fact” pertained to those that Alan Shepard (whose name the writer misspelled) hit while on the Moon in 1971 (no doubt in a Hollywood backlot, according to the same website about how vaccines are poison and debilitating but largely quelled diseases are a rite of passage for children to be celebrated with Chicken Pox Parties and Polio Galas).

Again, I questioned what lies beneath the surface of these facts when the writer decided not to emphasize or mention the fact that it’s really cool Shepard had, you know, smuggled a bespoke golf club onto a rocket or that he is the only person to ever play golf off-world or that at least one of his drives was measured in miles, but instead that (get this!) the golf balls are… STILL ON THE MOON.

A few questions:

1) Why did the writer have any expectation that the golf balls wouldn’t still be on the Moon?

2) Is there a theory that golf balls only exist if you’re observing them? I mean, that would explain a lot about golf.  After all, we already know that completely gonzo bonkers things like this might happen at the subatomic level with electrons, and textbooks usually depict electrons as being round, and golf balls are round, so… [FOR MORE “SUPER FUN” INFORMATION ABOUT THIS CLICK HERE.]

3) What’s this writer hiding?  He knows something.

One thing is certain in my mind: I won’t be playing golf again to put any of this to the test.  Golf is evil, and I am terrible at golf.*

Finally, his last Fact:

As any child of the late '70s can tell you, the writer yet again missed the most important aspect of an Incredible Sports Fact That Will Blow Your Mind.  We all know that hands touching is the #1 way of getting Full Blown AIDS, so how Michael Jordan has kept this secret all these years is beyond me.

In closing, here’s your incredible and mind-blowing fact about this article: I typed the entire thing with my left hand.

—————————————————-

*also at all other sports

Sean H. Campbell

[Note: This breaks a long-standing rule I’ve had to never again talk about anything political or religious on social media, but so it goes.  I’ve sat on this for days because I didn’t want to “stir the pot,” but if standing up and saying what is morally correct and absolutely good makes someone angry, I honestly couldn’t care less.  I would like my Muslim friends to know, publicly, that I love and support them however self-aggrandizing or self-righteous this may sound.]

To all my Muslim (American or otherwise) friends, who are incredible, wonderful, loving, beautiful people, I am deeply, deeply, eternally ashamed at what the disgusting, evil, pandering, despicable, racist, horrifying, former cartoon Donald Trump (along with many, MANY others) isn’t just implying about you but saying aloud.  He’s saying we can’t trust you.  He’s saying you aren’t working with “us” to stop terrorism.  He’s saying you aren’t one of “us.”  

You are one of us.

You are terrified and angry at the extremism that follows ancient, primitive views, just as Christians were terrified and angry when their radicalized members like the Ku Klux Klan did the same thing to African Americans and homosexuals, for instance, and continue to do to this day, any chance they get.

You are terrified because Donald Trump wants to silence the press when he doesn’t like what they say.

You are terrified because Donald Trump wants – in the most un-American way imaginable – to ban an entire religion’s followers (1/6 of the entire Earth’s population) from entering this country, which blatantly implies that anyone of that religion already in this country cannot be trusted and should be treated with suspicion.

You’ve seen this before in history, and you hoped that it would never happen again.  It is happening again, and I will stand with you no matter how many broken, brainwashed, mentally disturbed, homophobic, indoctrinated psychopaths attempt to destroy the world we share one AR-15 at a time, whether they are Trump or ISIS.

The iProdigal Son Returns

by Sean H. Campbell

I hadn’t seen my iPod Touch in nearly two years. I put it somewhere that made perfect sense at the time, and a while later my house was burglarized for a second time in four years during which most of my electronics and other super cool items (like this big telescope I used to have to keep my Total Dork[TM] membership active) were removed for a few days to the apartment of the charming and thoughtful Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Clay and Kayla Clower’s apartment or dropped off at a handful of pawn shops for very convenient storage for the last year and a half and wrapped up in litigation and other helpful things.

I slowly became more and more positive that the iPod was among the number of items stolen and simply wrote it off.  Over the past few months, I began thinking it would be nice to just get a cheap MP3 player that could contain all my CDs (that stands for “compact discs,” which is just an ancient delivery mechanism for music that people used to pay for).  This would serve two purposes:

1) It would keep me from getting a new iPhone for a while longer now that I’m out of contract and save me a small fortune since iPhones have no memory unless you spend thousands of dollars.

2) It would be appropriately cantankerous and eccentric and maybe a little pretentious.

So, after a couple months of thinking about it and looking around on Amazon, I found a pretty cool-looking, well-reviewed player from some random Chinese company called “AGPtEK” (that stands for “A Great Product to Entertainment Kids”).  It was a lossless player with 16GB of storage and an SD slot that allowed another 64GB, more than enough to contain all the music I’ve ever bought in my life.  Cool!

I placed the order two days ago, and this morning, the nice mail-lady drove right up, gave a polite tap on her car horn, and handed it over with a smile.  I got a new toy, so I was levitating across the ground, but I might’ve just been skipping.

I unboxed it.  The box looked playfully demonic and was like the dark antithesis of Apple’s packaging.  A coal-black box with a shiny, serif-frivolous font emblazoned within that read aphoristic and anarchic things like, “Life is short!” and “Hate your job? QUIT!”

Oh yes.  This is some savvy sweat-shopping right here, folks.

I plug in the device, and it’s pleasantly clunky but has a very responsive static touch panel and a bright, old-school dot-matrix screen of white graphics on a black screen.  Simple.  Fast.  Works great.  Sounds great.

Then I wanted to play this tiny, rock-solid device through my stereo in the living room to blast some tunes to really encourage (and not annoy at all) Sharalynn while she was knee-deep in some kind of terrifying German file.

Where’s my RCA Y-cable?

I looked in a total of two places.  When I got to the second place, I picked up a pile of papers and saw a small, black, zippered case that read “BOSE” on the cover.

OH YEAH!  That’s the case for the Bose headphones mom gave me!  Maybe the alternate earbuds are still in there.

[Ziiiiiiip.  Open.]

“NO. WAY.”

I run over to Sharalynn, who is probably pasting a digital signature on a document, which is the only thing I understand about her job, place the case down, and say, “Open that.”

“WHAT IS IT?  IS IT SCARY!?”

I imagine she thinks I found a Bose case filled with scorpion babies.  That’s the look on her face.  I’m not sure why she thinks I would ask her to open something like that, but I’m realizing that I clearly need to be a nicer person if she thinks that’s possible.

“Just open it.”She opens the case and there’s a USB cable.

And my iPod.

After a lot of dancing around and celebration, I plug it into my computer as it’s completely dead.

“Your iPod has not been backed up for 101 weeks.”

Directed by Christian Petzold

Written by Petzold and Harun Farocki

Based on the novel Le Retour des Cendres (Return from the Ashes) by Hubert Monteilhet

Starring Nina Hoss, Ronald Zehrfeld, Nina Kunzendorf, Michael Maertens

Runtime of 98 minutes

by SEAN H. CAMPBELL

The main conceit of Christian Petzold’s new film “Phoenix” is, as the movie itself makes clear, one of reconstruction and re-creation. Nina Hoss plays Nelly Lenz, a cabaret singer who narrowly survives a Nazi death camp after a failed execution left her face mangled and ostensibly unrecognizable even after wildly successful plastic surgery.

“I am dead again,” Nelly tells her friend Lene on the trip back to her apartment. Nelly, long separated from her pianist husband Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld) during her capture, has found him working as a janitor at a local cabaret filled with American troops. He doesn’t recognize her.  Nelly, devastated that her greatest fear has been realized, does not reveal her identity even after her husband decides she could be useful to him.  Johnny explains that she will play the part of his wife so he might receive her inheritance now that next of kin – Nelly’s entire family – has been murdered by the Nazis, an inheritance he intends to split with her.

This idea, of Nelly regarding herself as dying a second death, along with the desperate belief that her husband is loyal, drives what would otherwise have been a much less credible plot line.  Nelly is desperate to be recognized, and when her husband does not recognize her, her subsequent secrecy regarding her identity serves a dual purpose: it allows her to test the limits of her husband’s loyalty and underscores the importance of identity throughout the film.  

The themes of identity and rebirth set during the Holocaust, referenced by the film’s title alluding to the mythical bird that died in flames and rose again from the ashes eternally, is an effective addition to the source material by the filmmakers, especially since loss of identity was part and parcel of the Nazi agenda: strip the Jews of their names and erase them from history.  But does the phoenix recognize itself upon resurrection?  Nelly returns to her home, now destroyed, and flees from her reflection. Her husband sees only a potential resemblance that can be exploited for financial gain, which is even worse than not recognizing her.  “I am dead again” resounds throughout the film.

“Phoenix” is in large part a clever riff on Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” but brimming with reversals.  In that film, a good man (Jimmy Stewart) is duped into unwittingly providing an explanation of suicide for the murder of an old friend’s wife only to find he has fallen in love with the woman (played by Kim Novak) who impersonated the ill-fated wife.  Novak goes on about life as her true self while Stewart slips into a heartbroken catatonia.  When he snaps out of it and chances to meet Novak, who reminds him of the woman who drove him to love and madness (but I repeat myself), he cannot help but to make her into the very woman she impersonated.  The fictional history she and the murderous husband fabricated eventually plays out in actuality as Stewart obsessively recreates their time together and, finally, discovers the deception.

In “Phoenix,” a bad man is duped into his own undoing thanks to his greed and total confidence that his wife is dead after having secretly divorced her and given her over to the German secret police.  Nelly gives her husband every opportunity to explain away his actions even at the expense of her closest friend’s advice, a friend who is informed by the knowledge that Johnny not only divorced her but is the main reason she was taken to the death camps after being hidden away.

The film supplies what at first glance might seem like a satisfying end.  Upon reflection, however, the riveting and quiet finale could hardly be more bittersweet.  For most of the movie, as Nelly is coached on how to be Johnny’s wife, as Nina Hoss brilliantly conveys both the bewilderment and devastation of the farcical unreality in which Nelly finds herself, as she slowly transforms into what Johnny could hardly have seen as anything but the wife he betrayed, Nelly hides the two things that would have unequivocally betrayed who she really was.

The first is Nelly’s prodigious and unmistakable singing voice.  The second is the identity-robbing numerical tattoo emblazoned on her forearm by the Nazis (which Johnny had demanded she cut out, which he assumed had been done).  Not since Kubrick’s “Paths of Glory” has a woman’s singing (in a wartime setting, no less) been so cathartic.  In the case of “Phoenix,” though Nelly had gained so much against impossible odds, what she had lost had never been laid so bare.

This playlist consists of just over an hour of music from various beard-rock gods from Jim James to Midlake to even Thom Yorke.  It’s the perfect companion to a Spring drive with the windows down. Please enjoy.

We Gathered In Spring - March 2015 by Sean H. Campbell on Mixcloud

“The Homesman”

Directed by Tommy Lee Jones

Written by Tommy Lee Jones, Kieran Fitzgerald, Wesley Oliver

Based on the novel “The Homesman” by Glendon Swarthout

Starring Hilary Swank, Tommy Lee Jones, Miranda Otto, John Lithgow, Meryl Streep

Runtime of 122 minutes

by SEAN H. CAMPBELL

“People like to talk about death and taxes, but when it comes to crazy, they stay hushed up.”

Tommy Lee Jones’s new film “The Homesman,” feels at times too theatrical, too tonally and morally askew to identify very closely with it, but that may be the point.  In the almost mythical world of the American frontier, atrocities and hardships stand in high relief against the gorgeous vistas.  The effect is one of alienation shot through with awe.

The film’s plot, a rare feminist perspective for the genre, revolves around a set of circumstances nearly too painful to describe: three women have lost their minds after the unforgiving landscape – or the base cruelties of their own husbands – has left them lifeless as statues, and they are soon to be sent away.  The way Jones reveals the source of their madness shows impressive restraint; the scenes arrive throughout the first act with no warning except a shift in color palette to the cool blue haze of dream.  The brutality, mostly involving the women’s children, lacks all sensationalism and manipulation and more than explains the women’s mental states however impossible it may be to face the screen in the meantime.

When no one else is willing to carry these troubled women away from the land and men that broke them, Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank) accepts the responsibility, a move that shocks the local folk as much as it reveals just how unwilling anyone else is to make the grueling journey from the Nebraska Territory to a willing caretaker (Meryl Streep in a glorified cameo) in Iowa. Cuddy is a spinster in the making, but she is industrious and fastidious, qualities she wields against her oppressive workload as well as her loneliness.  

One man who helps her on her farm from time to time in return for the comforts of a meal is proposed to by Cuddy.  He flatly rejects her on the basis that she is too “plain” and “bossy.”  He is so much against their partnership that he is immediately inspired to head east to find a wife, thus ending their utilitarian partnership in the process.

Not long after the arduous journey has begun, the three mad women bound inside a donated jail wagon, Cuddy comes across a man who has been left atop his horse, a noose around his neck, his execution agonizingly inevitable, his wrinkled and lined face soot-darkened as a meteorite’s impact crater.  After a humorous exchange and a promise from the man, Cuddy accepts him into her party.  The man, one George Briggs (a scene-stealing Tommy Lee Jones), is a claim jumper who, in classic Looney Tunes fashion, is dynamited off another man’s land by locals and sent scurrying like a live-action Yosemite Sam, captured, and left for dead where Cuddy finds him.

From there, the movie becomes more and more unpredictable, and your mileage may vary given Jones’s proclivity towards sudden shifts in tone and story direction, presumably as much a nod to the source material as it is a stylistic choice.  For all that, Jones’s willingness to let the film feel cobbled together and unforeseeable gives what could have been a painfully generic journey an artfulness that is further belied by the unassuming but gorgeous cinematography.

The film asks or inspires many questions regarding the lives of women on the frontier.  Mary Bee Cuddy stands in contrast to the other women.  Or does she?  Hers is a slow destruction as well, formidable as she seems throughout the film.  And what to make of Cuddy seeking an almost desperate partnership with a man she deems merely useful not once but twice in the film, both of whom reject her outright with an almost verbatim refusal?  Perhaps the writers (including Jones) were simply highlighting how essential the bonds of partnership were in that region, that a man would of course seek out a strong woman for such a life as well.  Or perhaps the skeletal view of the story never occurred to them.

At times it feels like a Cormac McCarthy screenplay had he dropped the explicit, heavy-handed philosophizing and embraced pop entertainment’s proclivity towards humor in the face of devastation (McCarthy’s screenplay for “The Counselor” was fascinating but seemed to imply he wasn’t too interested in such a thing).

In one instance of McCarthian plotting (less akin to his screenplay work and instead his unsettling novels), Cuddy and company arrive at a child’s grave that has been violated.  Cuddy insists that she will bury the child again to restore her dignity, but Briggs resolves to continue on, leaving her a horse with which to regroup.  Cuddy’s decency in such a land is not rewarded, and she is brought to the brink of death when a day’s journey circles her back to the very same grave.

In another, Briggs seeks respite for the party at a newly founded inn replete with all manner of amenities and victuals, another stark contrast to the absurdly uninviting land around it.  The innkeeper, a slimy and reprehensible James Spader, denies them any refreshments or hospitality for reasons left intentionally vague.  Briggs leaves enraged.  Later that night, he returns to address the men at the inn one last time.

Heroism is in short supply in “The Homesman.”  What heroism exists is mostly thankless, but Cuddy and Briggs complement each other well, one rubbing off on the other in subtle ways.  In this world, the heroes succumb to the frailties of their hearts and the scoundrels steel themselves to continue on, leaving behind them their own form of muddled and tenuous justice.

Directed by James Marsh

Written by Anthony McCarten

Starring Eddie Redmayne, Felicity Jones, David Thewlis, Emily Watson, Charlie Cox

Runtime of 123 minutes

by Sean H. Campbell

A fountain pen rolls over the edge of a student’s desk in a giant lecture hall, and Professor Stephen Hawking, now bent and crooked in his famous talking wheelchair, finds his attention drawn to it.  His instinct is to stand up on the stage, perhaps while still talking, walk down a few steps, bend down, grasp the pen, and return it casually to the student.  He can perform all of these actions, but only in the confines of his own mind.

Stephen Hawking, a Briton with an electronic American accent, is the most famous physicist since Einstein, and his theories have arguably had nearly as profound an effect on the world of physics as Einstein’s General Relativity.  In 1963, Hawking was brought low by a motor neuron disease known colloquially as “Lou Gehrig’s Disease.”  His brain and involuntary functions continue to work apace, but his body was long ago immobilized by the disease.  Against the odds, Hawking survives to this day, long after he was predicted to be dead by the mid-1960s.  When a doctor delivers the bleak diagnosis, Hawking’s first question is, “What about the brain?”

All of this and more is documented in James Marsh’s new film “The Theory of Everything.”  Hawking is played with what feels like total authenticity by Eddie Redmayne (“Les Misérables,” “My Week With Marilyn”) and his portrayal of a man who lives so deeply within his own mind that he fails to notice his own body’s gradual deterioration is unforgettable and genuinely moving even as the movie itself is a straightforward (but very handsome) adaptation in the style of the similarly affecting Richard Attenborough film “Shadowlands.”

The film portrays Stephen Hawking as a young genius whose facility with monumentally complex maths is as natural as his proclivity for boisterousness and the pursuit of the opposite sex.  When Hawking’s professor gives his very exclusive group of students a list of ten questions to choose from, Hawking haphazardly procrastinates until the eleventh hour and solves nine, almost lamenting not having time to finish the tenth.  His professor and his peers are gobsmacked.  If Hawking isn’t necessarily socially awkward, he is at least quirky and unexpected, and it is with his own brand of quirk that he introduces himself to Jane (Felicity Jones), a woman who has caught his eye as much as he has caught hers.  

Jane is a poet and intellectual, and perhaps Hawking impresses her with his inclination towards associating mundane phenomena with their scientific causes, in the now classic tradition of our great science popularizers (Sagan, deGrasse Tyson, etc.).  One such example explains how a popular detergent increases the glow of a gentleman’s dress shirt under a blacklight, which must be the nerdiest “meet-cute” since Michael Cera explained Pac-Man’s original name to Mary Elizabeth Winstead in “Scott Pilgrim vs. The World.”

A “night at the carnival” romance ensues, and soon Hawking and Jane are not only in love, but Hawking’s dark news binds them even closer together as Jane unflinchingly resolves to see Hawking through his predicted two years.  “You don’t realize what lies ahead.  This is going to be a very heavy defeat,” Hawking’s father tells Jane, but Jane is determined to fight alongside Hawking while she can.  Two years turns into perhaps much more than Jane could manage alone.

From there, the movie becomes much less a study of Hawking’s accomplishments while increasingly wheelchair-bound and much more about the strain of the sort of lonely and inexorable caretaking demanded for a situation like Hawking’s.  Jane’s mother (Emily Watson) encourages her to return to choral singing, a sort of side-project that might allow her to decompress.  There she meets the dashing Jonathan (Charlie Cox) who becomes not only a family friend with a genuine interest in lending a hand but also, predictably, a love interest to Jane.  There are predictable beats here regarding the negative social response to this arrangement and hints of jealousy and resentment among the major players, but the film doesn’t dwell on this for too long before Hawking seems to present a tacit understanding that Jane should be allowed to tend to her own physical and emotional needs.  Meanwhile, Hawking may be finding solace in his new therapist Elaine.  And so on.

Director Marsh doesn’t seem too concerned with making profound statements and simply lets the story of Hawking and his contributions in the face of every possible obstacle speak for itself.  Perhaps it would have been interesting to see what a stylist like Joe Wright would have done with this material, but art is to be found in Marsh’s unfussy approach as well.

The final sequence is a somewhat typical “rewinding” of all the major beats of the entire film back to the earliest moments, but a sort of profundity does reveal itself here.  Hawking earned his doctorate well after his body had begun to rebel, as evidenced by his long, methodical, and even agonizing walks across campus with a cane in each shaky hand.  He wrote the landmark book A Brief History of Time by painstakingly searching the alphabet at a mind-numbing four words per minute.  This isn’t to say a correlation exists between Hawking’s mental confinement and his ever-burgeoning brilliance, but it is a statement on the triumph of the human mind somewhere on the order of a blind Milton dictating all of Paradise Lost to his daughters after his eyesight had gone.  In this case, however, Hawking had set his sights on answering the greatest question of all, one that he continues to ask to this day.