This is a brief overview of a few things that absorbed my attention in October. If you enjoy this, please share it on your favorite social media platform so others can discover my work.
Auster the Oracle:
I’ve read a few novels by the late Paul Auster and found them fascinating. This month I read Oracle Night, published in 2003. Widely regarded as a “postmodernist,” Auster apparently rejected the label. He often explored issues of identity and memory, demonstrating how easily our “real” lives can be muddled with fiction or imagination. (With some deeper context about living in the present rather than the past or future.) One of the characters in Oracle Night is named Trause, which is an anagram of Auster. The protagonist Sydney Orr, also a writer, is recovering from a long illness and is so insubstantial that he seems to disappear when he writes, making him an oracle between reality and the imagination. Multiple layers of fiction intermingle, and are all influenced by elements from Auster’s real life. Like life, the various narratives are not always resolved, because life doesn’t offer the convenient end-point of written stories. Even after death, the various documents with which we’ve recorded our lives (also a theme in Oracle Night) will influence the memories of those we leave behind. Stories are essential to our understanding of the world, yet we should have empathy for the storytellers, for they risk being consumed by their own words.
Brotherhood of All the Genres:
A passing recommendation in an online film group sent me in search of 2001’s Brotherhood of the Wolf, directed by Christophe Gans, probably best known for two films based on the Silent Hill video games. Brotherhood of the Wolf is loosely inspired by events in the French province of Gévaudan (which today is the department of Lozère), in which a wolf-like “beast” was believed to have killed over one hundred people during a three-year period in the 1760s. Even King Louis XV seemed powerless to stop the violence. The film version of these events is a genre hybrid, incorporating elements of horror, political drama, martial arts, action/thriller, romance, and period melodrama. The Village Voice called it a “neo-kung-fu-adventure-conspiracy-fantasy-monster-movie-aristo-farce.” The acting and production values are first rate. The presentation is appropriately epic in scope while allowing the characters to express a sense of humor. As the title implies, the movie is somewhat a tale of brotherhoods – among social elites, within the Catholic church, and between the radically independent hunting duo of Fronsac (Samuel Le Bihan) and Mani (Mark Dacascos). (It’s not strictly a brotherhood – strong female characters are performed by Émilie Dequenne and Monica Bellucci.) And, as is so often the case, those who cry wolf the loudest may, in fact, be wearing sheep’s clothing. Brotherhood of the Wolf is currently available in English-dubbed form on multiple free streaming platforms, but Kanopy offers it in the original French.
No Slacker:
I recently learned that Jim Knipfel passed away October 7 of cancer, only 61 years old. He was known primarily as a columnist for many years but also wrote three novels and three memoirs. The first two memoirs were particularly moving: Slackjaw described growing up with multiple health conditions, notably retinitis pigmentosa, which gradually left him almost entirely blind; Quitting the Nairobi Trio depicted his experience in a psychiatric ward after multiple suicide attempts. Knipfel seemed like an ordinary person – a highly acerbic ordinary person, to be sure – yet I marveled at his ability to persevere under extreme circumstances. And I think he did this partly by finding both the humor and the pathos in everyday life.
"Even in the worst of lives, lives in which it seems nothing has gone as planned, when everything's become a shambles, there are moments, bright and lucid moments, which for some reason that is never clear at the time, remain with us forever. Good moments when, for only an instant in the Big Mess, everything seems right. I'm not talking about the big things - birth, marriage, moving to a new home, making a money deal. I'm talking about the most infinitesimal of moments - tiny facets in the diamond of larger experience, things nobody else would notice or remember five minutes after they passed. Instants. Secular epiphanies, barren of precedent or result."
--Jim Knipfel, Slackjaw
He Didn’t Interfere:
In addition to losing Jim Knipfel, all of us who are s-f fans are in mourning this week over the death of Walter Koenig. He was the son of actual Russian immigrants – making his role as Russian officer Pavel Chekov not such a stretch, after all – and had a number of TV credits before he signed on for Star Trek‘s second season. One of Chekov’s trademarks was claiming credit for nearly everything on behalf of Mother Russia, right up through Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, when he referred to Cinderella as a “Russian epic,” though the myth really goes back to at least Ancient Greece. As a supremely watchable villain on Babylon 5, he offered homage to both The Prisoner (“Be seeing you!”) and genre heritage, playing a character named after s-f writer Alfred Bester. Koenig pulled it all off with good cheer, taking the material seriously while always appreciating the humor in these scenarios. I keep going back to Koenig’s classic line during V’Ger’s attack in Star Trek: The Motion Picture (during which the actor’s arm was actually burned): “Absolutely I will not interfere!” Whatever hard feelings he had from the way he and the other supporting Star Trek cast were treated, he didn’t interfere with the Star Trek mythos. (Though he did propose a story for Star Trek VI that would have killed off most of the original crew!) Despite internalizing his stress to the point of needing a quadruple bypass in 1993, Koenig kept showing up, writing a script for The Animated Series after he was wrongly rejected for the cast. He kept coming back for the Star Trek movies, and he showed up for conventions and fan events. And he went on to embrace post-Trek life, with additional acting roles and writing scripts and graphic novels. I’m not inclined toward belief in an afterlife, but if there’s any justice in the universe, Walter Koenig’s spirit is out there in the cosmos, gathering new stories, and patiently waiting for the rest of us to show up and listen: “Be seeing you!”
Have a good November and, as always, be safe.
I have only just learned of the death of Patrick Stewart on 28 October. It’s hard to know what to do with all this loss. I encourage you to read Wil Wheaton’s moving tribute at Wil Wheaton dot Net.
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