Primo Levi's book, "The Reawakening"

I read a self-interview that Levi wrote, and in it he described the physical exhaustion and fear that oppressed the inmates of Auschwitz. That was a primary reason, he said, that they did not fight back, never organized a collective resistance, and never undertook the slightest aggressive measures in their own defense. There were other reasons, of course.

In my last message, I described my interpretation of what I read as the inmates' desperate grip on the camp routine -- it was their only grip on existence, on life. I think that's a valid interpretation, but I see that Levi emphasizes the more practical barrier of starvation. The slaves were just too exhausted to struggle. Those who did organize acts of resistance and rebellion, he writes, were paradoxically the better fed, the well-treated camp trustees among the prisoners. They alone were strong enough. A very few of them had hung on to some moral conscience, energy, and courage.

After finishing "Survival in Auschwitz," I couldn't wait to read Levi's followup memoir, "The Reawakening," the story of his release from the camp by the Russian army, and of the tortuous journey over many months to return to Italy. Some of the worst scenes of either book are in the interim period, when the Germans fled, leaving the eight hundred freezing, starving inmates in the infirmary, Levi among them. Hard to imagine scenes. The freezing bunks filled with dying men writhing in pain, lying in their own dysentery, begging endlessly for help until one by one they died. Levi describes them not without compassion, but with the detachment of a reporter, as if he recognizes that his most important job is to record what happened.

It's not actually a "release" from the camp -- there was still a war going on, and the Russians didn't simply permit the pitiful survivors to start walking back to their home countries.

He loves the Russians. He describes their faults -- their slovenliness, their chaos, their capricious brutality -- but he loves them. At times the Russians lose their identity, and they become a kind of beloved soulful Russian nation, a warm all-embracing, tolerant and generous thing. They are almost cartoonlike, and Levi's language becomes almost propagandistic.

I'm halfway through it now. More later.

Primo Levi's book, "Survival in Auschwitz"

Because we've heard and read and seen so much about it, we think we know about the Holocaust. I felt grateful to Levi for teaching the mechanics of the camp, its routines, its ploys, its organization.

It seems like it's organization that the men cling to. In their minute by minute fear and terror, they follow the strictly enforced and brutal routines. They cheat, but they don't deviate. There's one scene, in the middle of the narrative, in which a courageous prisoner is hanged before the entire camp. He and a group of others managed to blow up one of the crematoriums. Levi and the rest are in awe of him. They don't say a word. They aren't inspired to emulate him. They don't know what to feel, other than shame. Then they go back to their bunks and carry on. Knowing and expecting their own deaths, they still head back to their bunks and their stratagems for hustling more bread, more soup, a useful rag.

(More tomorrow. It's late.)

Charles Burnett's film, "Killer of Sheep"

If there's a narrative in Killer of Sheep, you have to make it up for yourself. There are vignettes of Stan, his wife, his children, and the others in their crumbling black Los Angeles neighborhood. Maybe it's in Stan's despairing attempts at making something, anything, work. His face and eyes look befuddled by everything he touches. Fixing the plumbing. Getting a check cashed. Hauling a car engine into his truck (but leaving it untethered, so that it falls and breaks as soon as he puts the truck in gear). He's always on the verge of stopping and crying. He seems to be unable to do anything well -- except for his horrible work at the slaughterhouse. There he looks sharp. He looks adept.

Like classic Italian films, the camera loves the people: the thugs stealing a TV, the stern old man who watches them over the fence, the fat prostitute, the boy that gets hit by a rock and cries while the others keep throwing.

I don't see the film as being about "black people." It's about Stan. Stan and his wife. His wife's attempts to break through his morose demeanor. It's terrible in some ways. A film without a driving narrative feels bleak. The last scene if of the sheep Stan is driving through a gate, a bottleneck, where they struggle, jump and fight over each other to go through the gate, to get inside to what's waiting for them.

We saw the film at the MFA on Saturday. There weren't many black faces in the sparse crowd. Maybe a couple. I had expected many more. The MFA doesn't attract many black faces, in general.

About "Born on a Blue Day," by Daniel Tammet

I finished Daniel Tammet's story two weeks ago. He is an autistic savant. His account of how he pictures numbers as shapes and colors, forming complex landscapes is beautiful and touching. At one point, he explains (with the help of drawings) how he sees the multiplication of two numbers, even large numbers, as the joining of two shapes -- the resulting shape is the final number. He says that he doesn't actually have to think about it, he simply sees the shapes, and they combine, and he then sees the resulting shape. It seems like a miracle, as if this isn't humanly possible. He recounted his famous memorization and recapitulation of thousands of places of pi -- all of them accurate.

Yet, his ability strikes me not as un-human or peculiar, but as a human faculty that each of us must have -- highly developed in him. He described the epileptic seizure he had when he was young, perhaps the event that triggered and promoted his abilities. No one would want such a terrifying thing to happen to them. But Daniel's trauma seems to have been translated into his peculiar skills.

How fortunate he was to have such loving and compassionate parents. I felt a lump in my throat reading about what a difficult boy he was, and the patience and devotion his parents showed. This, with six other siblings! He does a nice job of narrating his growth and emotional life, and the interplay between his emotions and his intellectual powers.

Present Laughter, at The Huntington Theater

I'd never seen a Noel Coward play before. It was very funny, and very entertaining. Loved the fast comic repartee, Gary's comic self-obsessed preening, and the gentle, humane whipping everybody gets on stage. Drew a big crowd at the Huntington.

It is a bit odd that the main character, Gary Essendine, as played by Victor Garber, postures and expresses himself in a way that I think most theater-goers would regard as the mannerisms of a comic gay character. Yet, in the script, women find him seductive and are enthralled by him. Or rather, they appear to try to seduce him -- what actually happens we aren't sure. What happens in the bedrooms off-stage is ambiguous and remote.

It doesn't make sense. Not that we care. The ambiguity makes the play darker.

Finished "Middlesex"

I've been very busy (family travel, work), so I'm a bit late making this entry. This is from my April 15 paper journal.

Finished "Middlesex". Loved reading it, but I have a couple of deep misgivings.

The omniscient first person narrator. How can Callie write about her parents as if she were a third person narrator? It implies an aloofness and detachment from her subject that belies the actual narrator and character we come to know. Plus -- it's impossible. She writes about her parents and grandparents from a first person perspective -- we have to accept that Callie's inventing the stories, yet she doesn't acknowledge or own up to them as inventions. Instead, she splices the stories into the reel, as if they had the same weight as lived recollections. But this is impossible. If Callie invents stories about her parents and grandparents, and implies that these are true recollections, then she undercuts the narrative of her own life -- how do we know she isn't inventing those stories as well?

I know, even autobiography is invention. And I'm not saying the narrator can't invent stories about her relatives before she was born. But the reader trusts the narrator in autobiography (or at least, in successful autobiography). Here, I like Callie, but I'm confused.

It's a tribute to Eugenides that he can make us forget this impossibility while we read him.

There are a few clunky oddities in the book, such as the ludicrous idea that Father Nick, the shlumpy brother-in-law priest, turns extortionist (he makes sadistic phone calls to Milton while the liturgy is going on in the background -- give us a break). This ridiculous part nearly sank the last part of the book.

But overall, how can you not love Callie and the book, flaws and all? Eugenides describes what happens when impossible characteristics are united. The union, man and woman in one being, forever divided. Where does this soul find a home, a lover, peace?

There's an interesting Salon interview with Eugenides at this link: http://archive.salon.com/books/int/2002/10/08/eugenides/index.html

Now hooked on Middlesex

I've gotten hooked on Middlesex, despite my misgivings. Two thirds of the way through. Now that I've gotten into the narrator's more recent history -- describing events and people the narrator actually knew -- it's becomes a readable, interesting family history. And Greeks almost have to be described this way -- through their family lives.

About Lisa Kron's play "Well"

We saw Lisa Kron’s play “Well” last Saturday at the Huntington. Left with mixed feelings. This is a situation for a play that never quite coalesces into a play. There are plenty of good elements, and the expected themes of “wellness”, “integration”, and the mother-daughter tensions are sporadically kicked around the stage. There are a few poignant and mildly funny moments, mostly dealing with characters from Lisa’s childhood and the allergy clinic she was checked into while she was in college. For a few moments the characters are flesh and blood.

Otherwise, I found the characters to be stock and cartoonlike – each character says and does just what we’d expect them to say and do throughout. From the instant we see Lisa’s mother sleeping onstage, we know we’re going to find her loveable and wise with a few old fogey annoyances (which serve, of course, to make her more lovable). From the moment we see Lisa herself, we know she’s going to be appealing, self-deprecating, self-absorbed in a self-aware way, and ultimately she’ll tell us What It’s All About. And yes, she’ll tell us – rather than showing us.

The young black girl who inserts herself into the scenes is the single character who stands out. She occasionally saved us from Lisa’s monologues. Her aggressive behavior and speech was detailed and concise as a punch -- none of the other characters got close to her. Kron finally undermines her by showing how lovable she is, in fact, when Lisa’s mother, Ann, reduces her to a meek puppy when she tells her to “scoot”. I didn’t believe that, and any of Ann’s other bland nostrums, for a second.

I didn’t mind Kron’s moving about and touching erratically on different scenes from her life. I did sense that she was trying to fit the scenes into a dramatic picture. But the different scenes didn’t necessarily give us any new information about the characters and their situations. We statically moved from one to another. After Lisa’s introductory remarks, we could have jumped to any point in the play. We could have finished the play twenty minutes sooner – would it have mattered? The creaky play within a play concept only served to highlight a kind of tiredness in the playwright, that she couldn’t quite piece the elements together and breathe life into them.

I’m interested in why the NY Times and Boston Globe critics praised the play so much. Louise Kennedy, in the Globe, way overpraised it, I thought. Maybe I was in a cranky mood and didn’t see all the wit and joys in the play. Or maybe I’ve become basically a crank. I was surprised by the laughter and hooting from the audience – the lines just didn’t strike me as funny. Occasionally they were mildly amusing (again, with Lisa’s re-enacted scenes from teenage years), but the outright laughing mystified me. I wondered if Kron appealed to a particular audience that understood her better than I did, or with whom she shared a common language.

Have been reading Jeffrey Eugenides's book, "Middlesex". It's a passable read. He's got a nice, light touch, and the pages go by quickly. Can't help but feel that the characters are sort of wooden, spokespeople for different qualities or characteristics of the narrator. I don't buy the depiction of brother-sister incest. The two group up in a village house, in intimate quarters as brother and sister. I don't see the romantic, erotic connection between them at all, aside from the normal sexual curiosity of young people.

The other thing that bothers me is that the story of their departure from Asia Minor, and their decision to marry sounds familiar. I can't help but feel that I've read it before. I wondered if Kazan's "America, America" didn't have some of those same elements.

First entries

Hello, my name is John Melithoniotes. My wife Marilyn and I live in Watertown, Massachusetts. I'm not yet sure how I'll use this blog, but I thought I'd give it a try.