Paul Vitols's Blog, page 18

It Happened One Night: love as fun

Last night we viewed movie #2 in my new Paul’s Crème de la Crème Festival: It Happened One Night, released in 1934 and starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert. As of now, 50,424 people have rated it on IMDb to give it a weighted rating of 8.3 out of 10. As for me, on this sober re-viewing for the 4th or 5th time, I confirmed my own rating of 10 out of 10. I found it a great pleasure to watch, end to end.

Claudette Colbert showing Clark Gable how to hitchhike for results in It Happened One Night.

The underlying property for the movie was a short story, “Night Bus,” written by Samuel Hopkins Adams and published in the August 1933 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine (in its incarnation as a literary and investigative journal). Adams, born in 1871, was a versatile writer, perhaps best known as a muckraking journalist: a series of his investigative pieces in Collier’s Weekly about false advertising in medicine helped bring about the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. But he also put out many novels and short stories, including this lighthearted romance.

The story was adapted for the screen by Robert Riskin, Frank Capra’s longtime collaborator. Riskin, who, while growing up on New York’s Lower East Side, would sneak into vaudeville shows to write down comedians’ jokes, no doubt added much of the snappy, cheeky dialogue. (In one scene, when Gable’s character finds that Colbert’s character has taken his seat on the bus, he says, “Excuse me, miss, but what you’re sitting on belongs to me.” Dialogue like that would become a thing of the past as the Motion Picture Production Code guidelines started to be enforced in that same year, 1934.) But the story that the writers delivered (and I have to assume that the director, Frank Capra, had no small hand in this, since he had done film writing himself and in any case relied heavily on improvisation while filming), while whimsical, light, and fun, was also brimming with genuine, tender emotion.

The story is about how Ellie Andrews (Colbert), the headstrong daughter of a wealthy industrialist (Walter Connolly), has impulsively married a glamorous aviator named “King” Westley (Jameson Thomas). Imprisoned in her stateroom on her father’s yacht in St. Petersburg, Florida, until she agrees to have the marriage annulled, she manages to dive overboard and escape. Now she seeks to flee north, eluding the long arm of her father in order to be with her husband in New York. Among the passengers on the bus she climbs aboard is irreverent reporter Peter Warne (Gable), freshly fired from his last job. When he discover’s Ellie’s true identity, he sees an opportunity for a great news story, and offers to help get her to her beloved Westley in exchange for an exclusive. But their work is cut out for them, for it turns out that they’ve only got about $6 between them. And, their penury forcing them into greater privation and intimacy than either of them would choose, they get to know and appreciate each other.

I believe that this movie is a landmark in the genre of romantic comedy. The film has also been classed as a “screwball comedy,” and I think that the joining together of these elements, the romantic and the screwball, makes for a story in which we see the man and the woman, this unlikely but likable couple, having fun together. In a sense, the story is about the two of them coming to realize just how much fun they’re having.

The world around them helps them along, for, true to the style that would become his hallmark, Capra depicts all his characters as basically affectionate and mutually supportive. Even the real conflicts between them tend to be moments of comedy rather than anything tense or threatening. It’s as though the pulse under all is saying, “Fear not: the things you think are a big deal are no big deal. The moments of sweetness that can exist between all people—that’s the big deal.”

In such a world, when an attractive and deserving couple are thrown together, it’s easy to root for nature to take her course, no matter how improbable that course might seem.

Counsellor at Law: more than King Kong up that Empire State Building

Last night I launched Paul’s Crème de la Crème Festival—a series of the best movies discovered in my 6-year-long chronological History of Cinema Festival. These were the movies that I rated either 9 or 10 out of 10 on IMDb. The first in my new festival was the 1933 social drama Counsellor at Law starring John Barrymore.

When I first saw the movie in 2009, I was so impressed that I rated it 10/10. On re-viewing last night, the film still impressed me, but considering it against the whole sweep of shows produced since then, I adjusted my rating down to a 9. If I were rating it out of 100, I think I would give it an 88. In any case, even at this rating it stays in my Crème de la Crème Festival.

The film was written by Elmer Rice, based on his 1931 stage play, which had been most successful. Rice, who had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1929, was one of America’s most prominent playwrights, and, according to Wikipedia, Universal Pictures producer Carl Laemmle Jr. payed $150,000 for the screen rights, a high figure for the Depression.

Writer Elmer Rice looks on while Universal Pictures producer Carl Laemmle Jr. inks a contract with theatrical producer Joseph P. Bickerton Jr. for Counsellor at Law.

Rice, who had been born in New York City in 1892 as Elmer Leopold Reizenstein, grew up in the tenements of East 90th Street and was forced to quit high school in order to help support his family. Nonetheless, in time he applied to New York Law School, was accepted, and graduated in 1912 to practice law for only two years before taking up writing full time. This was made possible by the tremendous success of his first play, a courtroom murder mystery entitled On Trial, which, again according to Wikipedia, ultimately earned him $100,000.

Counsellor at Law is not a courtroom drama but a law office drama: it pictures a day of crisis in the life of prominent litigator George Simon (John Barrymore) of Simon & Tedesco, a top Manhattan firm with sumptuous offices high in the Empire State Building. Simon, like Rice (and like director William Wyler, born Willy Wyler in Germany), is Jewish and has climbed up from the tenements of New York. Along the way he has further secured his social position by marrying a gentile divorcee named Cora (Doris Kenyon), who has two children by her first marriage. In his work he is assisted by his attractive and very able secretary Rexy Gordon (Bebe Daniels), who struggles not to show that she’s in love with her boss. On this day, just as Simon is about to head off on a European vacation with his wife, bad news arrives: some investigator has dug up evidence that Simon, years ago, helped to falsify evidence to secure the acquittal of a young client who, like himself, was a poor immigrant. Suddenly George Simon is facing the prospect of disbarment and the end of his career. At the same time, even as Simon prepares for the romantic getaway with his wife, he perceives a new coolness in her toward him, and a troubling closeness between her and one of his clients, a certain Roy Darwin.

The author Rice’s authority with regard to the workings of a New York law office permeates the story: an assortment of unique, often comic characters float through the scene like tropical fish in an aquarium. Several little subplots and running gags help to cinch together the goings-on, such as the gossipy banter of Bessie the switchboard girl, Rexy’s frosty rebuffs of the unwanted attentions of junior lawyer Weinberg, and repeated visits by Simon’s mother as she tries to get her “good boy” son to help his ne’er-do-well brother. People criss-cross the scene attending to their own business, commenting on each other and exchanging repartee. A more ominous development is when Bessie is made ill by seeing a man jumping from a high-rise window.

George Simon himself is an engaging character, on the one hand a type-A personality barking orders at his secretaries and other subordinates and playing hardball in various concurrent negotiations, on the other a soft touch for people who need help, especially people who, like himself, come from the wrong side of the tracks. John Barrymore makes an unlikely ghetto Jew (Paul Muni had turned the part down because he didn’t want to be typecast as a Jew), but he does a great job of portraying George Simon as a tough, nervous, and conflicted character. (He made life difficult for Wyler though, not just because of his heavy drinking, but because his memory was already starting to go. Wyler eventually resorted to planting cue cards around the set for Barrymore to read while playing the scenes.) My own feeling about him was that he was really a softie who had acquired a hard persona in order to succeed; I really liked how his fingers would nervously drum sometimes while he was talking.

My dominant impression, both when I first saw the film and again when I watched it last night, is that this is an adult film in the true sense: it portrays adult concerns in a mature way. The way Simon relates with his stepchildren, who have no use for him, is painful to watch—and all too real. Already, in his first serious film, William Wyler’s gift for eliciting deep, nuanced performances from actors is on display. This quality of adult handling of adult material is what I would say characterizes Wyler’s style as a director.

Because the story is authentic, because the writer knew whereof he wrote, this film feels modern today. Except for the difference in fashions, slang, and city, this is much like the 1980s TV hit L.A. Law. But Counsellor at Law digs deeper: it shows a conflict of cultures between entitled patricians and upstart immigrants trying to live the American dream. It shows the seat-of-the-pants deal-making that often passes for justice in the real world. It shows human hearts squeezed between the art deco glass panes of the Empire State Building—people stuffing their tender feelings in order to survive in a hard environment.

In all, it was an auspicious kickoff to Paul’s Crème de la Crème Festival. I’ve downgraded it, but it remains on my list of the best 100 movies of all time.

what makes a movie good?

Before I start talking about individual films, I wanted to say more about my recently concluded History of Cinema Festival. In my last post I raised the question, What do I think makes a movie good? I’m going to try to answer that.

Cinephiles often talk about how much they enjoy a film’s cinematography or editing, or maybe its special effects or the acting or directing; but to me all of these things, while important, are secondary. For all of them are means to an end, and that end is telling a story. Film is a storytelling medium, a powerful one. There are documentary films and experimental films that do not tell stories, but if filmmakers had never thought of the idea of telling a story with film, there would be no movie industry. Filmmaking would have remained a marginal, niche activity with an audience no bigger than the class of people who go to public galleries to watch art videos.

True, I’m a writer, and therefore I have a special connection with and responsibility for story. I remember, when working on my TV show The Odyssey, I reminded the producer Michael Chechik of the importance of the story, he smiled and said, “Everyone on the show thinks his job is the most important.” I would have responded with something like, “Yes—but not everyone is right!” I might even have offered to handle the hairstyles for an episode  if the hair stylist would write the script. Of course, that never happened, because everyone wants to make a good show. But I was not wrong.

Indeed, the director of photography for The Odyssey, Rob McLachlan, in an interview I saw him give when he was signed on to film Game of Thrones, said that in making a successful film or TV project, story is all and everything. If the story’s not there, then the efforts of the most talented people are to no avail. Likewise, Robert McKee in his book Story notes that top directors and actors are acutely conscious that their best work is possible only with excellent writing, and hence they are always on the lookout for superior scripts. So I return to my assertion: film is a storytelling medium.

And accordingly I judge a film as work of storytelling. The best films are great stories, well told. When a film is mediocre or bad, usually what is wrong with it is its story. Some movies are technically inept, but they never make it into wide release. No, the typical bad movie that shows up in a theater is a well-made production of an inferior script.

So the films that get my top rating succeed first of all as stories. The flow of narrative captives me right at the opening, and doesn’t let go. Its progress is logical but unexpected; it is filled with surprises, big and small, as life is; its characters seem human to me, and I feel what they’re feeling. If the storytelling is very good I don’t feel the passage of time. I remember when Kimmie and I watched The Godfather in the 1970s leg of our festival the time whizzed by, even though the movie is 175 minutes long. Heck, I managed to note that the wedding scene near the beginning was the better part of an hour! I never would have suspected it; I was engrossed in the action.

Now storytelling is an art; that is, while it does require creative talent, its execution and refinement depends on techniques that can be—and must be—learned. I’ve been making a study of these techniques since 1990, when a bootleg copy of notes to one of Robert McKee’s seminars came into my hands, and it is this knowledge that I have applied in assessing the movies of my festival.

In short, I’m prepared to defend my choices and my ratings. I would like to affirm, with whatever humility is possible in the circumstances, that my choices reflect the mature, refined judgment of an audience member who is himself a writer and sometime filmmaker. And in that spirit I intend to offer my further thoughts on the films of Paul’s History of Cinema Festival.

Paul’s History of Cinema Festival: R.I.P.

I now pronounce Paul’s History of Cinema Festival closed. It has been a wonderful trip, involving the viewing (or partial viewing) of 536 films, and has brought some surprises.

It began in November 2008, when my wife Kimmie and I decided to make a project of seeing the best movies in history, all in chronological order. I think we were both elated at the prospect before us; we were finally turning one of those “someday” projects into something that we were actually doing. Starting with a viewing of D. W. Griffith’s 1915 classic The Birth of a Nation, we ended on Sunday night with a screening of Martin Scorsese’s 2013 movie The Wolf of Wall Street starring Leo DiCaprio—so a span of 98 years of filmmaking.

Trying to find the “best” movies took some experimenting. At first I tried relying on the Leonard Maltin guides, but I found that my own taste diverged from his too often. Then I recalled that when I used to rent videos from a store, certain titles in the store’s backlist—shelves devoted to movies other than current releases—would be persistently rented, leaving empty spots among the shelves full of videos that mostly were not rented. When I rented these frequently rented movies myself, I found that I usually thought they were very good. It seemed that the general public, voting with their feet and dollars, were better at predicting my own tastes than were the professional film reviewers.

In choosing the movies for my festival (and it was my festival to curate; Kimmie was along for the ride), I thought I might be able to replicate my video-store experience by relying on an online version of the public taste: the movie website IMDb.com. Each movie there has a rating out of 10 based on the input of individual viewers, who often number in the hundreds of thousands. Could they provide my video-store popular vote?

I gave it a try. I arbitrarily made my cutoff an IMDb rating of 8.0 out of 10: if a movie was rated at least that high, I would put it in the festival. The only exceptions were certain movies that I had seen before and had decided I did not want to see again, and some other movies that I included simply because I wanted to see them (or see them again), regardless of how IMDb rated them. On viewing each movie, I would give it my own rating out of 10, and post that to IMDb to have my ratings tallied with those of other viewers, and would also give it my own custom rating of either A, B, or C. The meanings of these ratings were as follows:

A: top-notch, superb. Thoroughly enjoyable end to end.
B: good. Enjoyable and worth seeing again.
C: everything else. This is a movie I don’t want to see again.

Out of the 536 movies we watched, how many did I rate 10 out of 10, you’re wondering? The answer is 17. The first movie in the festival that I gave that top rating was the 1933 drama Counsellor at Law starring John Barrymore and directed by William Wyler, a sophisticated social drama about a New York lawyer with offices in the Empire State Building. You probably have not seen it; the movie as of now has only 730 ratings on IMDb. The last movie I gave 10 out of 10 was Pixar’s 2010 release Toy Story 3, which shares this further double honor in my festival: it’s the only sequel that I’ve given the top rating; and it’s the only time in cinematic history, that I’ve found, when a sequel has been not only as good as, but actually better than, the original movie (1995’s Toy Story I gave 9 out of 10).

Which reminds me: the movies I’ve rated 9 out of 10 are also mighty good—they just didn’t quite elicit the enthusiastic response that led me to give them a 10. But possibly, on re-viewing, I might change my mind. I might also change my mind about some of my 10s and downgrade them. To sift these possibilities, my next venture is Paul’s 9 and 10 Festival: a re-viewing of all those movies I’ve rated either 9 or 10, to find the ones I truly think best. (The total number of these, I’m pleased to say, is 91.)

I intend to write more about my festival. One thought that might spring to mind is: what do I think makes a movie good? And should my opinion matter to anyone else? I want to address these questions, among others. I intend also to publish my list of movies here on my site (and—note to self—please let me follow through with this intention!).

For Kimmie and me, the pleasure that lies before us is this: for the next 40-odd weeks, we’ll be watching only excellent movies. Sweet!

The Paideia Proposal by Mortimer J. Adler: learning to be citizens

The Paideia Proposal: An Educational Manifesto by Mortimer J. Adler

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This short manifesto gives a cogent overview of what public schooling should be setting out to achieve, the rationale for doing so, and how to get started.

In doing some research on education in the ancient world, I made a search of the word paideia on Amazon, and this was one of the books that came up. I’ve been a fan of Mortimer J. Adler for a few years now, and I was reminded of how I’d already intended to read this book sometime. So I bought a copy.

I’m glad I did. This crisp little print-on-demand paperback makes a powerful and impassioned case for the urgent need of reform in the American public-school system (the book was published in 1982). The argument is presented in four parts:

the role of education in a democracy
what form public schooling should take
what are the best ways to learn and to teach
what form postsecondary education should take

First of all: why paideia? What is it? This definition appears on the book’s dedication page:

PAIDEIA, from the Greek pais, paidos: the upbringing of a child. In an extended sense, the equivalent of the Latin humanitas (from which “the humanities”), signifying the general learning that should be the possession of all human beings.

Yes, this book argues for a return to providing young people with the beginnings of a liberal education (the book distinguishes between education and schooling: the former is a lifelong activity that doesn’t begin in earnest until maturity, while the latter is preparation for the former). The school system should dispense with all electives, vocational courses, and other kinds of “multi-track” schooling in favor of a unified program that provides exactly the same—high-quality—schooling to all. And the reason it should be the same is because it is teaching children who are equals, and who will grow up to be equal citizens of a democracy.

This point is key. As Adler says near the top of chapter 1:

Not until this century have we undertaken to give twelve years of schooling to all our children. Not until this century have we conferred the high office of enfranchised citizenship on all our people, regardless of sex, race, or ethnic origin.

The two—universal suffrage and universal schooling—are inextricably bound together. The one without the other is a perilous delusion. Suffrage without schooling produces mobocracy, not democracy—not rule of law, not constitutional government by the people as well as for them.

But what about the great differences between children—the differences in their circumstances, backgrounds, and inborn abilities? Mustn’t schooling take account of these? Yes: but only in the sense of providing help to those who need it in order to get through the curriculum. The author is emphatic that no child is to be written off as unsuitable to have a life of learning. If the United States takes Thomas Jefferson’s assertion that “all men are created equal” seriously, then it is bound to set up its schools accordingly. As Adler puts it:

Here then are the three common callings to which all our children are destined: to earn a living in an intelligent and responsible fashion, to function as intelligent and responsible citizens, and to make both of these things serve the purpose of leading intelligent and responsible lives—to enjoy as fully as possible all the goods that make a human life as good as it can be.

As parents, do we not want these things for our children? Do we not want them for ourselves?

The book goes on to provide an overview of how this is to be achieved. The 12-year course of public schooling should be arranged in a sequence of three phases, each devoted to a different goal:

the acquisition of organized knowledge
the development of the skills of learning
an enlarged understanding of ideas and values

The boundaries between these are not hard and fast; there is more a shift of emphasis from the first through to the third goal as the student progresses.

These things are all discussed in more detail in the book—but not too much detail, for it is short. It is a manifesto, a call to action.

And will that action require a wholesale revolution of the education system? An endless battle in Congress with some compromised, watered-down version resulting after 10 years of wrangling? No. In 2 pages at the end of the book, the author provides 10 steps that can be taken by any school or any school district at any time to start walking the walk of liberal education. It can be achieved incrementally. But first of all it requires a change of attitude, a change of motivation.

As a (North American–I’m writing in Canada) society, we’ve become obsessed with wealth and celebrity as the only measures of success and achievement; they’ve become our proxies for happiness and fulfillment. Our political involvement as citizens has degenerated to culture wars; the life of the mind is taken over by reality TV and video games. In some sense, this is what we have schooled ourselves for. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Those who care enough about this will start taking action, and this book provides both a vision statement and a mission statement for revolution, as well as some practical steps.

The author and his Paideia Group care about whether we fully realize our human nature. The question is: do we care?

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I, Claudius by Robert Graves: authority + literary power

I, Claudius by Robert Graves

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This undeniably brilliant book may leave one or two small things to be desired as a story.

My first exposure to the writing of Robert Graves was indirect, via the BBC TV adaptation of I, Claudius, written by Jack Pulman, in the late 1970s. I had also seen imposing copies of The White Goddess on the nonfiction shelves of bookstores, and wondered what it could possibly be about. But I never actually read Graves until I got myself a copy of the of the 2-volume Penguin set of The Greek Myths in April 1985. I read them cover to cover, impressed—nay, amazed. For not only was his thinking bold and original, and his erudition vast; he was also a superb stylist of English prose. In July that same year I bought myself a yellow-bound paperback of The White Goddess and read it, and in January 1986 I picked up a Penguin copy of I, Claudius and read that.

I was delighted, riveted. Here was a historical novel that truly felt like it was written by someone from the period—in this case, early imperial Rome in the 1st century BC. I knew from reading The Greek Myths that Graves was conversant in both ancient Latin and Greek, and had seemingly read every surviving text written in those languages, indeed had also translated some of them. His authority with the period was as great as could be.

But Graves was not even an academic, in the sense of being a university researcher and lecturer. Apart from a single year spent as a professor of English literature at Cairo University in 1926, his career was only in writing; his primary vocation was as a poet. This meant that his writing chops were extraordinarily strong. In all, it would be difficult to conceive of anyone better placed to write the fictional memoir of the emperor Claudius.

And he did a fantastic job. The conceit of the book (and its sequel, Claudius the God) is that it is an expose of the machinations of the royal family of Rome from the reign of Augustus to the reign of the author, Claudius. The action in the first book takes place between 41 BC and AD 41, but focuses mainly on the late years of Augustus’s reign, and the complete reigns of Tiberius and Caligula. In the opening chapter Claudius, who was in fact a professional historian, confides that he wants to tell all, and that his intended audience is not his contemporaries, but posterity. Indeed, a prophetess has informed him that his book will not see the light of day again for 1,900 years. . . .

Claudius is born into the royal family in 10 BC (Augustus is his great uncle and Livia, Augustus’s third wife, is his grandmother). Handicapped with a limp, a stammer, and facial tics, Claudius is written off as an idiot by almost everyone, and is left mostly to his own devices. In the decadent and murderous environment of court life, these liabilities will prove to be his greatest assets. For Claudius is no fool, but a perceptive, intelligent, and independent-thinking young man. He is also a decent person—and a republican. He is one of the shrinking number of romantics who would like to see the monarchy abolished (again—Rome had already done it once, and had long been proud of the fact) and power returned to the people. From this point of view, his life takes the path of maximum irony.

The novel reads very like an actual memoir. The narrator, writing in his late 50s as emperor, has the worldly, knowledgeable, matter-of-fact tone that goes with his position. He expresses judgments of people and events with the settled conviction of an experienced and powerful man of the world. But throughout his life he has been humble—he could hardly be otherwise, growing up vilified, neglected, and abused—and never ambitious, except perhaps to distinguish himself as a scholar of history.

And as a historian, he could not resist taking pen in hand again, having come into possession of all the secret documents and records of his predecessors. In addition, he has other special sources, such as the deathbed confessions of his grandmother Livia, who, according to Claudius, was in most ways the true power behind the throne of Augustus, and remained a force even through the reign of her decadent son Tiberius. It turns out that in order to steer a powerful state on a peaceful and true course, many people have to be liquidated, including close relatives, and usually secretly via poison and other contrived accidents.

The story is filled with incident and is rich with colorful period detail (Claudius justifies his explanation of Roman ways by the fact that he expects his book to be read so far in the future, when Rome may be long gone). I have every reason to think that most of the events described are historically accurate, or at least are well-informed conjectures. To a far greater extent than with most historical novels, this is a history book.

And for me, on this my 3rd reading of the novel, I found the latter fact to be a slight liability. In a certain way I found the story to be too lifelike, in the sense that it seemed to be a stream of events that lacked a tight dramatic structure, which is what I really appreciate in a work of fiction. In some ways it is more a chronicle than a story. There are certainly subplots within it, and plenty of action and intrigue. But sometimes I felt I was just reading one event after another.

The result was that despite all the action, despite the treacherous, mad, and horrific acts of many of the characters, especially the emperors Tiberius and Caligula, the dramatic effect was muted. Part of the reason for this is Claudius’s own attitude, which, while still sane and basically ethical, has long since become desensitized to atrocities, over and above his Roman acceptance of much cruelty and suffering that we in our era would find shocking. He’s casual about the torture of slaves and the slaughter of prisoners in the arena.

In sum: I still enjoyed this novel, but now that the “tour de force” effects are wearing off on me, I find myself wishing for a more dramatic, emotionally charged story. So I’ve downgraded it from 5 stars to 4. Probably it’s at 4.4 stars for me. Next reading—who knows.

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Poor Economics by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo: think small, and feel good

Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty by Abhijit V. Banerjee

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A lively account of the application of the methods of science to a field where politics, philosophy, and ideology usually reign.

I was put onto this book by an ecologist friend who really liked it, but who laughed as he said, “The economists think that they’ve just discovered the scientific method!” He was referring not to the authors, but to those who have been going ga-ga over this book.

He’s got a point. At the same time, I can see why economists and others concerned with elevating the world’s poorest people from their poverty might go ga-ga over this book and its implications. This is one time when I think that a book’s extravagant subtitle—”a radical rethinking of the way to fight global poverty”—is not overblown.

The authors, two high-achieving young economists, set out to test a number of poverty-alleviation policies and programs, using the scientific technique of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) across many poor communities in 18 countries (as I recall). For example, asking why it was that more people in malarial regions of Africa did not acquire and use treated bed-nets for their children, the authors set up a number of experiments in which these bed-nets were made available to different villages in different ways and at different prices, from free to full market price. In doing this they came to discover what gets more bed-nets over more beds, and thereby saves more people from malaria. They performed many other such tests across a range of issues affecting poor people, such as education, health care, insurance, and banking. In setting up these RCTs they worked closely with local aid organizations, and they also talked with many people in the poor world. Their book is replete with fascinating case studies of poor people living their lives.

What makes the book “radical” is that the economics of development has been hitherto guided by high-level theories in economics, philosophy, and politics. Economists like Jeffrey Sachs believe that there is such a thing as a pervasive “poverty trap,” one or more self-perpetuating mechanisms that have the effect of keeping poor people poor, despite their best efforts. From this point of view, the solution to systemic poverty is to inject massive, targeted economic stimuli into poor areas to push people over the threshold of the trap, so that they can prosper as middle-class and affluent people prosper. Other economists hold that, on the contrary, governments and aid agencies should keep their hands off trying to “help” poor people; instead, efforts should be made to improve markets and institutions in poverty-racked places, so that the natural productivity of people can be allowed to operate. These and other high-level philosophies have dominated the world’s efforts to help the poor, and the results, according to Banerjee and Duflo, have been underwhelming.

The authors’ view, after years of making these tests and sifting the data, is that it’s time to stop thinking big and start thinking small. For it turns out that small adjustments in the way a program is conceived or run can make big differences in the outcome—and this is not a matter of opinion, but a matter now of documented fact. And it seems possible, or maybe more than possible, that such small, incremental changes could add up to a big change in the quality of life for the world’s poorest people.

The book’s prose is lively, intelligent, and filled with good humor. They’ve been deeply invested in this work for years, and they know whereof they speak. These are not angry, finger-pointing crusaders; these are good-natured people who look at the poorest people on Earth, and see themselves. They are optimists about world poverty, and by reading their book you might become one too.

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Calliope? Is that you?

Rage—Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,

murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,

hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,

great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion,

feasts for the dogs and birds,

and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end.

Begin, Muse, when the two first broke and clashed,

Agamemnon lord of men and brilliant Achilles.

So begins Robert Fagles’s translation of the Iliad of Homer. The poet begins his mighty work by calling on Calliope, the Muse of epic poetry. He asks the Muse to sing, making himself, in effect, her amanuensis and first audience. The words will come through him, but they are from her. This connection between poet and Muse was no mere fancy or polite fiction; the Muse gave his work not only its musical power but also its authority, for the Muse, being divine, knew all. So for centuries the Iliad was read not only for pleasure but also for historical information, it being thought that a poet of Homer’s stature was a direct channel of unerring truth.

His second epic, the Odyssey, also begins with an invocation:

Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns

driven time and again off course, once he had plundered

the hallowed heights of Troy.

(Also Fagles’s translation.)

This standard having been established for serious epics, Virgil followed suit with his own poem of the founding of Rome, the Aeneid (again, translation by Fagles)—but this time he places the invocation in the second sentence:

Wars and a man I sing—an exile driven on by Fate,

he was the first to flee the coast of Troy,

destined to reach Lavinian shores and Italian soil,

yet many blows he took on land and sea from the gods above—

thanks to cruel Juno’s relentless rage—and many losses

he bore in battle too, before he could found a city,

bring his gods to Latium, source of the Latin race,

the Alban lords and the high walls of Rome.

                     Tell me,

Muse, how it all began.

John Milton carried on this poetic tradition in his opening to Paradise Lost:

Of Man’s First disobedience, and the Fruit

Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste

Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,

With loss of Eden, till one greater Man

Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,

Sing Heav’nly Muse, that on the secret top

Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire

That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed,

In the Beginning how the Heav’ns and Earth

Rose out of Chaos: Or if Sion Hill

Delight thee more, and Siloa’s Brook that flow’d

Fast by the Oracle of God; I thence

Invoke thy aid to my advent’rous Song,

That with no middle flight intends to soar

Above th’Aonian Mount, while it pursues

Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhyme.

Milton’s Muse is now “Heav’nly”—envisioned as an angel (I assume) of God rather than as an attendant of pagan Apollo—but is still the bestower of divine aid in the poetic task. For, as the rest of that opening sentence makes clear, the epic poet’s aim is necessarily ambitious. Indeed he might be the most ambitious of artists.

I bring all this up because I feel it is highly relevant to my own work in progress. Does that mean I dare to compare myself to Homer, Virgil, and Milton? Well, yes. To the extent that I am writing an epic, I am their colleague, howsoever junior and perhaps epigonous.

And do I have my own channel to the Muse? I’ve given this some thought over the years. How did the ancient poets know when they were channeling the Muse? Did they hear some kind of confident, definite voice from within? I can’t say I’ve had that very much—although sometimes, yes. I have learned some techniques of “channeling” in this sense, but I’m still in the early stages of experimenting with them.

But not long ago it dawned on me that I do have a connection with the Muse. And the evidence of it is this: that I continue to have the energy to keep going on this years-long project. For creative work cannot happen without a certain energy being present for it. You need to be in the mood for it—I do, anyway. And being in the mood to work on a single project over the course of years is a rare thing. I have started and abandoned many projects in my life, and this to me is a sign that I lacked inspiration—I lacked connection with the Muse.

But this project, my epic, continues to inspire me. Or the Muse continues to inspire me to create it. In fact, I’ve become convinced that the continuation and completion of this project, The Age of Pisces, is entirely at her discretion. If she pulls the plug, then that’s it, the project dies, and years of my life will sink beneath the waves. But if she does not pull the plug, as so far she has not, then I take it as a sign of her approval. And that encourages me further.

So there it is: I can report that the Muse of epic is alive and well. Whether she resides on Mount Helicon or in one of Yahweh’s heavens or somewhere else, she sends the stipend of creative energy that allows this work to unfold. I’m her remittance man, and very pleased to be so.

I believe there are other signs of the support of the Muse, but I’ll leave those for a future post. Right now I’m glad to have found the inspiration again to write a blog post; it seems that a different Muse watches over blogs. Erato? Is that you?

The Physician by Noah Gordon: the art of lifelike surprises

The Physician by Noah Gordon

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A wide-ranging and surprising tale of the 11th century.

This was a book I’d never heard of until it was presented to me by the Goodreads recommendation engine. Attracted by its high ratings and its apparently simple premise—the career of a medieval physician—I downloaded the sample to my Kindle. When I’d finished that, I had to keep reading, so I bought the book.

From the start I felt that I was in good narrative hands. The author’s storytelling style is simple, direct, vivid, and perceptive. It opens with a young boy, Rob J. Cole, shelling peas on the sunstruck stoop of his family’s house in London, being approached by a prostitute bearing a message. From this unusual but real-feeling interchange the story starts on its long and unexpected course: it is the story of Rob J.’s career.

In the case of The Physician, more than with most books, I think that to talk about what happens in the story would be to spoil it for the reader, for the element of surprise is strong in it. Again and again I was reminded of a definition of story that I devised myself a few years ago:

the art of creating lifelike surprises

If my definition is valid, then I would offer up The Physician as a textbook example, for the story of Rob’s life proceeds with twists, turns, barriers, and quick escapes, like the course of a stream in high mountains, finding its way to the sea. It’s driven by an inner necessity, but its way can be surprising as it switches back on itself, falls over bluffs, and is dammed for a time in deep hollows. But, as though with a sense of mission, it keeps going forward.

In brief, Rob J., a carpenter’s son, through a series of early calamities in his life, discovers that he has a passion and a talent for healing. And there are healers in the world around him, from the lowly barber to the higher-status doctor to the pinnacle of the profession, the educated physician; but Rob has no apparent path to that career ladder. So, eventually, he creates his own path. And it is long and filled with wonders.

Along the way are many incidents, and many characters flow past like fish in a coral reef. One of the author’s great strengths is his ability to create vivid, real-seeming characters one after another, entering the protagonist’s world, tarrying for hours, days, or years, and then disappearing again. Like life. Barbers, merchants, carpenters, priests, doctors, farmers, publicans pass through, each a real person with touches of dark and light.

Indeed, I found the narrative to be so lifelike that it actually lacked the standard dramatic structure of an artfully designed story. Even though the book is long, it is simple, in the sense that it does not have much in the way of subplots. The vicissitudes of Rob J.’s life are its full focus. For the most part I didn’t miss the complexity, but this lifelike quality meant that there is not a strong, definite climax to the story. The ending is appropriate and satisfying, but I also felt that the story had simply come to a stop rather than fully resolving all of its issues.

Sometimes I wondered whether the story also felt a bit too modern in places. Even the protagonist’s name, Rob J. Cole, felt modern to me, and the attitudes and speech of the characters seemed modern-ish, considering that these people are living 300 years before the time of Chaucer. This is not a serious issue for me, since every age feels modern at the time when it is happening; and I think that historical fiction-writers should feel free to err on the side of modernity in dealing with their periods, while steering clear of outright anachronisms. In this case it was a niggling thought that recurred to me as I read.

But the author’s knowledge is impressive, and Rob’s passion for medicine is exciting and real-feeling. Historical fiction—maybe all fiction—tends to be about sex, violence, and politics, but here we have a tale of the human hunger for knowledge, and this reader found that refreshing and most welcome. And because it is about life, sex, violence, and politics do make their way in, but in supporting roles.

In sum, I read the whole thing, and I read it with enthusiasm and pleasure—something I can’t say about all the books I pick up. The Physician deserves its high ratings.

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Russia by Philip Longworth: a story of repeated expansion and collapse

Russia: The Once and Future Empire From Pre-History to Putin by Philip Longworth

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A knowledgeable survey of the gyrations of the Russian empire.

I got this book in 2007 as a research text for a project I had in mind. But that project never got off the pad (the story of my life!), so the book remained unread. Then, with the recent unrest in Ukraine and Russia’s annexation of Crimea, I realized that I knew very little about Russia and I wanted to know more. Luckily, I already had some books in my library.

Longworth’s book has given me a good overview of Russian history. I found the pace to be good, neither too hurried nor too detailed, but offering relatively more coverage of recent history, as seems fitting for a contemporary reader. And the author’s basic thesis was one I found surprising: that Russia has almost always been an imperial state, and it is unique among empires in having undergone a cycle of expansion and collapse four separate times since AD 850. Russia’s heraldic emblem should be the phoenix.

The first of the four was the Kievan Empire, centered on Kiev, lasted from 850 to 1250, and was a commercial arrangement. Next came the Muscovite Empire from 1400 to 1605, centered on Moscow and arising partly in response to the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453. Internal rebellions and external pressures combined to topple this empire as well. The third empire was that of the Romanovs, from 1613 to 1917. This was a true empire in the standard sense: there was an active effort to expand and annex territory in all directions, which was, in the main, successful for a long time, eventually reaching as far east as Alaska in North America. But again, internal social problems and lack of economic development, combined with external threats, culminating in World War I, brought about the collapse of the empire.

The fourth empire was the Soviet one, arising from the ashes of World War and reconstituting the country on a wholly new ideological basis. The state was, as ever, harsh and authoritarian with its subjects, but was nonetheless able to rouse great patriotic fervor for a long time and make great strides in development, even as millions of people died or were liquidated in the process. But the Soviet empire too collapsed in 1991. The author, looking for the causes of the collapse, comes up with a selection of minor causes that did not satisfy this reader.

As of 2005, when the book was published, the empire was starting to show signs of life again under the new premiership of Vladimir Putin. It would be interesting to hear Longworth’s view of events since then, especially recent ones concerning Ukraine. As of now (May 20014), the revival of empire is explicitly on Putin’s agenda, and Russians are enthusiastically behind him.

My understanding, based on reading this book, is that Russia’s unique imperial personality is ultimately due to geography: the vast spaces and harsh climate of the country have shaped a people that is used to toiling hard for a modest return, and has accustomed them to both cooperation and authoritarian rule. Having many other states pushing on it from all sides has also shaped its political psychology. Russia has experienced near-death experiences at least three times from foreign invasion: Sweden, France, and Germany have all tried to conquer Russia, and all found that they had bitten off more than they could chew.

The author is open-minded about the Soviet state, and seems to think that it might have been able to work for much longer if certain aspects of it had been tweaked. He notes, for example, that a large opinion survey taken in the USSR in, I think, the 1970s, showed that people were generally happy–as happy as, say, people in the United States. I’m skeptical, not only because free expression of one’s opinions could be dangerous in the USSR, but because people were ignorant of just how great a gulf existed between their own quality of life and that of people living in the West. I’m much more persuaded by the argument of Acemoglu and Robinson in their book Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty: that the tendencies in all societies is for elites to appropriate ever more power and wealth to themselves at the expense of the great majority of their fellow citizens and of the prosperity of the country as a whole. For them, the USSR was a case in point of this process.

Longworth is also guardedly optimistic about Vladimir Putin, finding him to be a cautious, shrewd operator who is keen on the rule of law. I wonder whether he still holds that opinion.

Whatever the case, I think that the author has got something with his theory of the expansion/collapse cycle of Russian history. Whatever one thinks of current events, it appears that Russia has turned the corner from its latest collapse and is starting down the road to empire once again. Will they ever get the memo that empires just don’t work?

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