Books: The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins

paper cover for U.S. edition,
published in 1860 by Harper's

This book, along with Collins' other famous novel, The Moonstone, has been recommended to me at times by reader friends and teachers who know how much I love English literature and mystery novels. It's  a seminal classic, one of the first mystery-romance-Gothic, if not the first, a prototype for the Sensation Novel genre. It was wildly popular when it was published in 1860.

Thackeray is said to have missed the theatre to read it. Gladstone and Prince Albert read it avidly. The story was based on an actual kidnapping and imprisonment in an insane asylum that happened in 1809, recounted in Recuil de Causes Célèbres. 

Hollywood movie, 1948

The book was probably one of the first to model the possibility of marketing spin-offs.  Perfumes, dresses, cloaks, bonnets, all labeled after the title were for sale. About 11 film/TV versions have been made, the latest in 2017.

  Andrew Lloyd Weber set a musical on the narrative in 1997.

So when my mystery book club chose read it I did. Gentle reader, it's very very long, so be prepared. A young drawing teacher is stopped for directions as he travels to London on a dark night by a woman in white who places a hand on his shoulder, evidently coming up behind him.  What woman would do this in 1860? A woman who has escaped from an insane asylum, we learn later.

Onward. A long and convoluted narrative begins, involving two mysterious women (Catherine and Laura) in white, mistaken identity,insanity, their mother, a fabulous cemetery scene, Walter, the handsome drawing instructor, a swindled fortune, an evil, crafty friend, and a dead father. 

The father of our rich heroine insists she marry a friend of his, which she doesn't want to do but does because she feels she has a moral obligation. Lots of back and forth about class structure, the place of women, what's proper, temptation resisted.

Illustration from Harper's Weekly, 185

I was reminded of Clarissa, written in 1748 by Samuel Richardson. It too, was scandalous and wildly popular. It’s discussed in Leslie Fiedler's famous book of literary criticism, Love and Death in the American Novel, a must read in 1960. (Clarissa Harlowe is seduced by the evil Lovelace, somehow against her will, and ruined.) I got really exasperated with both Clarissa and the characters in TWIW because of their endless sensitivities, worries, mulling over and over about what to do. But that's my failing; it's like the audience screaming "don't walk down that dark street at midnight alone, you twit!"

   "...Margaret Oliphant hailed it as "a new beginning in fiction", while at the same time Edward Bulwer-Lytton dismissed it as "great trash". And while Henry James disliked the "ponderosity" of The Woman in White (calling it "a kind of 19th-century version of Clarissa Harlowe"), he acknowledged that the book had "introduced into fiction those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors". (The Manchester Guardian review).

Sometimes it seems to me that the English novel really has but one theme, the problem of patriarchy, and the plight of women and the evil sins committed against them. Think of Thomas Hardy. Think of the insane women in English literature (Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot's wife), Rebecca, Jane Eyre.  

“Above all, perhaps, “The Woman in White” shows how unusually attuned Collins was to the vulnerability of women in Victorian society and the ease with which they could be tumbled from their place. Only a couple of years earlier, Bulwer-Lytton had had his own fractious wife committed to an asylum.”  - The New Yorker

So, I think I've made my case that The Woman in White deserves to be read, and needs to be on any serious reader's completed list. It's elegantly and beautifully written, filled with sensuous and vivid imagery.  

"The easy elegance of every movement of her limbs and body as soon as she began to advance from the far end of the room, set me in a flutter of expectation to see her face clearly. She left the window—and I said to myself, The lady is dark. She moved forward a few steps—and I said to myself, The lady is young. She moved forward a few steps—and I said to myself (with a sense of surprise which words fail me to express), The lady is ugly!"

 I gave myself over to the languid pace, but still was sustained by suspense as I read on and on. I hope you will, too. Just settle in for a long delicious read.

Color of the Year: According to...

Pantone's color of the year...

ultra violet

Sherwin Williams gets on the

bandwagon...

Fires in LA - grieving

Morning commute on the 405 - still gotta work.

"All the pretty little horses...dapples and grays, pintos and bays, all the pretty little horses..." dead in the fire near Sylmar.  This event is summoning a sadness in me that is as encompassing as the smoke that covers the skies.  Even after we clean up all the black ash, I will feel it.


P.S.
So look at this: recent flooding in the South - fire, flood, disaster.

Bladerunner 2049

I was so clueless in 1968. Still stunned by a personal debacle, I went to work, a very young 20, in a grownup world with a closely drawn reality.   I bypassed most of Hippies, New Ageism, and all its fantastic possibilities. I had to admit defeat, strap on reality real fast, get out of my parent's house forever, get a job that took me far away, and just keep running.  

So I missed much of the scathing political and social turmoil that was the turmoil, at the same time in a kind of denial as I worked with American soldiers traveling to Vietnam as a flight attendant for a major airline.

Pregnancies and the all-consuming attention to my children blurred most of the 70's too.
I barely remember Nixon resigning, preparing for a new baby's arrival, struggling with a marriage that was always a disaster.

It's been a project, now that I'm old, like patients who try to recover memories, to seek historical zeitgeists and attempt to relive their their seminal power.  Maybe the phantom limbs I feel can be reattached somehow.


I do know historical roots grow with inexorable energy in every direction, seeking me daily.    

For us all,instead of strangling history, that energy continues to open the social conflicts and divides, perhaps to exorcise the gross social injustices that exist.  

At the same time, it's fascinating to see the artists' predictive capacity of the future, and how true, or not, have become their dystopian visions.  

I watched the Final Cut of Bladerunner courtesy of 

Netflix a few weeks ago, enjoying the narrative created from Philip K. Dick's novel, "Do Androds Dream of Electric Sheep?" on which the film was based.

In the novel, only a few sentient creatures of nature remain, collected the way great art is.  The greatest consumer desire is to own a live animal, but Rick can only afford electric an electric one.  When an unexpected bonus gives him expanded purchasing power, he buys a live creature on the installment plan, exhausting his savings, and his wife tells him he did the right thing.  It's absurd, funny, and that tunnel light - it's the life force, once present, that tenaciously wills to remain, even in these darkest night of end times.

I loved the scene in "Bladerunner 2049" when K finds the body of Rachel.  A small golden flower on the brown dry ground marks the place - where could it possibly have come from?  (one of the many unanswered questions we wish to answer in the film, but can't).

It reminds me of the scene in "Noah" (2014) in which Russell Crowe prevents his daughter from picking a flower they've stumbled upon. What's left of nature is so precious that all must be left in place after the environmental disaster they've endured.  

I am always drawn to film for depictions of godly encounters and Last Days.  It's the contemporary substitute for Michelangelo's "Last Judgement".  I hear the angel voices, telling me "..fall on your knees", as  cinematography provides the visions that once only saints were granted, like St. Paul on the road to Damascus. 

Finally, the issue of consciousness and its inalienable rights that is the heart of conflict in the Bladerunner films is actually and also the question of the "other".  The other is denied as inferior, and so power is retained, the judgement rationalizing the crimes committed, the lives taken, in the taking of that position.  It doesn't matter if it's the life of a flower, an animal, or a person.  All have a singularity of sentience, they have being.    

As Rutger Hauer dies in the first Bladerunner, it's evident that the question of his status in immaterial. He bleeds, therefore he lives.  

Blade Runner 2049, the sequel

“…the film gently expands and extends its predecessor’s inquiries into the nature of identity, personhood, and slavery” 

“….a future world breathtaking in its decrepitude, a gorgeous ruin.”

Christopher Orr- The Atlantic

“…Legendary cinematographer Roger Deakins takes full advantage of its settings, highlighting the neon-lit grime and sleeker surface with texture and detail that’s begging for a more thoughtful narrative to match its considerations. The film is remarkably ambitious in all it tries to accomplish, but never quite meets its aims.” 

“…When the narrative offers one of its few novel additions — a somewhat clever subversion of the Chosen One narrative…”

“…Blade Runner 2049 has the mind of science fiction, but it has the heart of a neo-noir…Like Ford, he’s a bit too humorless to fully capture the qualities that men in noir often have, but he pays homage to a genre of aching men who put on a performance of grizzled masculinity to survive the hard world they navigate”

 - New York Mag, Angela Jade Bastien

“…“Blade Runner 2049” is heavy with portentous and pretentious hoo-ha. Like so many filmmakers, and not just sci-fi filmmakers, Villeneuve seems to think that “visionary” is synonymous with very slow and very monotonous. Poor Ryan Gosling, who is required to intone his lines with extreme soddenness, has to shoulder the brunt of the monotony.  Peter Rainier, Christian Science Monitor

“…with a score, by Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch that feels at times like an onslaught of monumental thuds…

Anthony Lane, New Yorker

“… electronic musical score by Benjamin Wallfisch and Hans Zimmer provides a kind of aural neon: gaunt, harsh, angular, like the noise of machinery…images are there to trigger awe or even a kind of ecstatic despair at the idea of a post-human future…It alludes to films the first Blade Runner helped inspire, such as Cameron’s The Terminator, Spielberg’s AI Artificial Intelligence, Nolan’s The Dark Knight, Andrew Stanton’s WALL-E and Spike Jonze’s Her. The references reach further back also, to the Kubrickian hotel-bar and spaceship, and to the desolate final moments of Planet of the Apes…Ridley Scott’s massively controlled andante tempo…”

Bladerunner main themes:

Poioumenon  -  a narrative that deals with the process of

creation and the limits of narrative truth (of memory’s truth)  the post-event tests K undergoes are actually quotes  (cell, interlinked) from Vladimir Nabokov’s “Pale Fire”, a short book of meta-fiction which deals with the process of creation - in one scene K comments, “I thought you hated that book”…an example of how densely the writers tried to pack the script with ideas (or overburden it?)

Poioumenon (plural: poioumena; from Ancient Greek: ποιούμενον, "product") is a term coined by Alastair Fowler to refer to a specific type of metafiction in which the story is about the process of creation.  "...the poioumenon is calculated to offer opportunities to explore the boundaries of fiction and reality—the limits of narrative truth.”

Memory - reliability, importance to sense of being a whole self - of identity and connectedness 

In Nabokov’s “Speak, Memory”, he reclaims and possesses his past, lost in the Russian Revolution.  “… suggests that "reality" cannot be "possessed" by the reader, the "esteemed visitor”…” (Wikipedia)

The Chosen One - K believes himself to be the first ever replicant-born child of Rachel and Rick Deckard, but he discovers he is not, then sacrifices himself to re-unite Rick with his daughter - he isn’t related to anyone, his heroism is a product of his agency, his choices, the realization that human beings can choose to sacrifice themselves

robotics, slavery, IA  -  In Marcuse’s world, only a few individuals transcend post-industrial capitalism to become authentic creative persons - most satisfy themselves with consumption, genres, escapist philosophies (zen, running, motorcycles, collections)  

heroic death -  K’s death 

Plot clarifications 

• Ryan Gosling dies - music playing at end is from “A Time to Die” scene at end of “Bladerunner” - Rutger Hauer's poignant anguished death as Ford bends over him
• why does Wallace kill the female replicant that we see born?

•  What happens to Deckard after he meets his daughter?

Why does K have a carved horse made by Rick when he wasn’t the surviving child of Rachel and Rick?

• Is Rick a replicant? RS says yes, but he’s a Nexus 7, which havenatural aging lifespans  

In the final cut, the version that director Ridley Scott prefers after decades of behind-the-scenes turmoil, Deckard is about to run away with his replicant paramour Rachael (Sean Young) when he sees that his LAPD partner Gaff (Edward James Olmos) has left behind an origami unicorn. That little paper figure, seemingly representative of a unicorn that Deckard dreamt about earlier in the film, could signify that Deckard was never human.

• Is K the brother of Dr. Stelline?  Is he a clone?
•  Do all replicants have the same implanted memories of childhood that Dr. STelline created?  Fresa/Freya helped take care of Dr. Stelline when she was born after Rachel died 
• Who performed her the C-section? Sapper Morton?

  What happened to Wallace’s eyes?

• What caused the Blackout?

the black out was triggered by a group of rebel Replicants who wanted to destroy the Replicant Registration database, which human supremacy groups were using to hunt them down and kill them

Why does Luv leave K behind when she captures Deckard?

Thanksgiving Walk in Franklin Canyon

Thanksgiving 2017.  I am thankful. My body can take me rambling, bird-watching.  I have medicines to control my diabetes.  I am in satori.  It is an effort, but I also float as part of the effort.

web screenshot photo 

Today, I took a new path on the other side of the small reservoir.  An acorn woodpecker offered me a wonderful view, perching for so many minutes on his high branch I had to lower my arms in fatigue from holding the binoculars on him.  What a handsome bird, with an amazing social structure.

I also saw several wood ducks, perhaps my favorite bird of all time - an exquisite design of complexity, elegance, and attenuation.  

(courtesy Wikipedia)

Oak titmice again, too - they learn to hang at picnic grounds, and are fun for kids to spot, with their perky crests.

Beth Van Hoesen

What a lovely artist!  I used to give my students stuffed animal drawing assignments, because they were excellent simple structural drawing studies.  I also hoped to remind them of their child selves, as they moved so reluctantly and quickly into adulthood.

I thought they were always a great sucess. Sometimes they drew their own toys, or their little brother’s or sister’s, which was especially sweet.

I’ve done some cat, rabbit, dog and other animal  drawings myself, and just love doing them.

"The Midnight Line ", by Lee Child - Jack Reacher's 22nd novel

Jack Reacher's deep backstory, like Harry Bosch's, is no longer referenced in the twenty-second novel in this series about an ex-military cop, now a drifter, who lives an eccentric Zen-monk-existential life. He somehow becomes involved in righting wrongs without the aid of weapons, cell phones, computer, automobile, credit cards, home, family.

Hitchhikers stop and pick him up, even though he's six-five and mighty threatening, with hands as big as dinner plates. He's smoothly included by law enforcement or others with institutional standing who need his flinty strategic intelligence and physical might to help them; data banks and institutional depth and recency are still not enough.  I imagine Rutger Hauer, with intimations of replicant status,  instead of Tom Cruise here.

But I always miss the early novels' accruing narrative of haunting loss that has created my reader loyalty to a series, even as the quality of them becomes sere, repetitive, and over-compressed.

One of those accommodating drivers suggests early on that he feels guilty about a woman; perhaps its the woman who dumps him at the novel's beginning, because she decides he's not marriage material, much as she loves him.

Jack seems to be descending into compulsive, compensatory behavior, signified by hypnotic and repetitive descriptions of long drives on gravel roads following or creating rising clouds of lingering dust kicked up by fast moving pickup trucks. (This caused me to recall my childhood's plaintive cries during vacation, "Are we there yet?") Between showers,

he seeks the dark reason behind a pawned West Point ring he finds in yet another nowhere town on the high plains.

That reason is a heart-breaker, and Jack doesn't hesitate to take care of the fix required, questionable as that may be.

He still hasn't slept with anyone as the novel winds down, and this is about the only suspense left. We aren't to be disappointed. He makes love to the war veteran he has saved, telling her that his sole criterion for his choice in women is the expression in their eyes. (For me, the deal breaker is a sense of humor.)  It's really quite lovely, reminiscent of the scene in "Coming Home", when Jane Fonda sleeps with the paraplegic with whom she's fallen in love. 

As for the question of lingering guilt, and the possibility of this act's compensatory nature...nah. It's Jack Reacher, righteous, gentle, steely loner, and we still believe.

Carlos Almarez at LACMA

As part of PST/LA/LA, The Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art (LACMA) shows a survey of painting from the prolific and prodigiously gifted Carlos Almaraz, who died too young of AIDS in 1989. From 1973-83, Almaraz was part of a Chicano (though that term was new) Collective, called Los Four, which included Frank Romero, Gilbert Magu Lujan, and Roberto de la Rocha. They worked together, painted and sculpted many of the same images (cars, cacti, dogs, chairs, flames) as they developed a Chicano lexicon of imagery. They are all being recognized anew. Frank Romero just had an outstanding retrospective at MOLAA last spring and Gilbert Magu Lujan will have a huge retrospective (over 200 works) at UCI this fall. The fourth member, Roberto de la Rocha, unfortunately destroyed all his works, went into seclusion for 20 years and is just now rejoining the Los Angeles artistic community.  - from Nancy Kay Turner, blog on RIOT.

These artworks are glorious, lurid, joyful, riotous portrayals in which Almarez takes Los Angeles as a prism for his vision of life. They are fearless, brash, overwhelming, and yet poignant, expressing an appetite and a celebration of it that seems gargantuan.   

Growing City, 1988, pastel

 This is one of my favorites, a drawing that 
can instruct animators.  The action pulls at cross directions across the paper. As buildings sway to the right behind aqueducts that appear Roman, cars, a figure on horseback, and runners stream off the left corner, creating tension and stasis at once. In the sky, debris like large confetti flakes down. They swoop and glide like night spirits. I think of air raids, earthquakes, all lit with more neon-powered saturated color than the Vegas strip. It's a nightmare a Futurist painter could wish he'd thought of.  

School Days, 1988  

"School Days" is boxy, bursting with references - beloved Echo Park, the arched bridge, bunnies, student artwork, explosive abstract marks that suggest flames and explosions, faces.  The black background reminds us of chalkboards and velvet paintings, as electric vibrations rock the surface and a loose grid struggled to contain the turmoil.

Echo Park Bridge at Night, 1988

 I really can't think of another artist who has used color this ferociously. Yes, we can talk about the Fauves, Futurists, Van Gogh, Munch, Miro, Ensor, and should. They reverb like guitars in his work.  But the intensity!  This comes from molaas, Peruvian costumes, swirling Mexican dancing, and hallucinogenic visions described by peyote and acid users.

Echo Park, 4 panels

My, this is such a treasure to me.  I hope it's always on display, to carry in my heart and mind - what it means to live here, to be present to this singular city.  

detail, Panel 1

The Echo Park panels depict key life moments - in the first, a flower-covered car, reminding me of a hearse, is parked in front of a tomb-like dome.  In the second, a bride and groom stand  apart on the shore while the palms bleed into the lake, the reflections creating a lake of fire.   

Echo Park, second panel

Echo Park, third panel

Boats afloat on a small lake usually suggest serenity and calm.  Here they pass through and cross the flaming waters at risk of great harm, fragile, the form struggling to emerge from the frenzied brushstrokes. 

Sunset Crash, 1982

Of all his work, I admire the car crash series. This was the world before seatbelts, when over 50,000 people died every year in auto accidents, more than the entire number of the Vietnam War. Death by freeway is the eponymous Angeleno passage, freeway flyers who lose control in LALAand.

The palette, still vibrant and pulsing, is yet controlled, and the beauty of color,form, and composition have a formal feeling, as Emily Dickinson once wrote in her famous poem about death.   

detail, Crash

I am also fascinated and compelled by the deeply integral relation of narrative figuration and formal style.  They are inseparable, meant to be, breathtaking painterly unity accomplished with brio and confident balance.

Suburban Nightmare, 1983

This painting has a blocky unsatisfying neo-primitive quality, like a child's drawing, yet with that distinctive saturated color.  The emerald grass/hedge is so warm yet cold against the destructive power of the flames that consume the family home.  

Two other groups of paintings aren't discussed here, mostly because I haven't finished viewing the exhibit.  Several of them, mostly larger, are less satisfying to me, because of the use of thick tinted impasto shapes which clotted and interrupted image and composition.  It's not darkly muddy but chalky muddy. An impression of unresolved forms remains.

BIOGRAPHY

Carlos Almarez, 1941 - 1989

As part of PST/LA/LA, The Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art (LACMA) shows a survey of painting from the prolific and prodigiously gifted Carlos Almaraz, who died too young of AIDS in 1989. From 1973-83, Almaraz was part of a Chicano (though that term was new) Collective, called Los Four, which included Frank Romero, Gilbert Magu Lujan, and Roberto de la Rocha. They worked together, painted and sculpted many of the same images (cars, cacti, dogs, chairs, flames) as they developed a Chicano lexicon of imagery. They are all being recognized anew. Frank Romero just had an outstanding retrospective at MOLAA last spring and Gilbert Magu Lujan will have a huge retrospective (over 200 works) at UCI this fall. The fourth member, Roberto de la Rocha, unfortunately destroyed all his works, went into seclusion for 20 years and is just now rejoining the Los Angeles artistic community.  - from Nancy Kay Turner, blog on RIOT AWARE.   

Carlos Almarez was born in Mexico City, but grew up in Chicago, where his father worked in steel mills, returning to Mexico City for visits. He was introduced to art there in the city museums and streets. 

The family moved to Los Angeles, and Carlos lived in various parts of LA, graduating from Garfield High School. He knocked about sampling art programs at LACC, CSULA, Loyola Marymount, UCLA, in New York City, and earned a degree at Otis Art Institute.

As a child he was molested by an uncle and a Catholic priest. When offered a scholarship from LMU, he declined it because the school supported the Vietnam war. He involved himself with Cesar Chavez and the struggle for agricultural workers' rights, leaving it because he felt stifled by the need to be political when he wanted to be personally expressive.

He repudiated his Catholic upbringing as an adult, and lived bi-sexually, during the time when gender and sexual experience were surfacing socially as lived realities. In 1971 he nearly died of pancreatitis and experienced God during the convalescence. 

His life is marked by every scar the conflicted turbulent times could make upon a life.  

At 48 he died of AIDS complications, leaving a wife and child.  We are left bemused to to think what a second half's visions would have been, haunted by the specter of early artistic death and empty wondering.