First, let’s get this one out of the way: my take on The Odyssey movie. It was brilliant, and I especially like how they handled the gods. It was clear that the gods were real—that storm after they kill the cattle (ummm, spoiler alert, sorry!)—but I liked how the gods manifested themselves indirectly. It seems to me that, in that universe, that’s how it would work: the gods would be involved everywhere, and as entities with their own free will (not merely labels for different aspects of the natural world), but they would affect us through nature. The natural world would be the medium through which the gods act. To me, that makes much more sense than gods being some sort of supernatural add-on to nature in the manner of 1940s superheroes.

Come to think of it, that’s kind of what bothers me about those silly studies of ESP, faith healing, intercessory prayer (see section 9.7.3 of this book), etc. The proponents of these ideas present these elusive phenomena as supplements to the usual laws of nature, anomalies that can be isolated using randomized experiments. To the extent these things really exist, I would expect them to work through, rather than on top of, nature. I’m an unbeliever myself, so I’m not saying I’m right on this; it’s just how I feel. I could imagine a god or gods intervening in the world; I would just picture that happening as it does in the Odyssey, in a way that’s clear in the context if you believe in it, but with a sort of plausible deniability for unbelievers, or for believers in a competing deity.

I also thought the scenes with the Trojan horse and the sack of Troy were just amazing. I’d never before thought of that wooden horse (oh, spoiler again!) as being such a corporal object. Seeing them laboriously drag the horse, the scenes with the men inside, and then the horrifying scenes after the gates of Troy are opened . . . the movie opened this up to me in a way that movie adaptations of literature rarely do. The recent Dune movie, for example, was brilliantly executed and made its world seem very real, but I feel like I’d already had that from reading the book. In contrast, the movie of the Odyssey took my understanding to a new level, which surprised me, given how familiar the story is of the Trojan horse.

The other scenes in the movie worked well too, in the same way of mixing myth and physicality. For example, the cyclops and the giant knights were not realistic, but you remember that it’s Odysseus telling the story and exaggerating all the way. The scenes were filmed in a way that looked real but at the same time featured impossible beings, which to me was a perfect way to convey the way that tales would be told in that era. So, yeah, the movie was a revelation.

OK, now on to Coyote vs. Acme.

I’m pretty much the exact target audience for this one, having grown up with the cartoons on endless reruns on TV and also being an Ian Frazier fan from way way back. No surprise we went to see it the weekend it came out.

The movie was excellent: great cinematography, wonderful visual gags, great use of the Warner Bros cartoons in major roles and cameos. The mix of live action and animation was entirely convincing. And they came up with excellent new Road Runner gags. Well done, and very satisfying. The theater wasn’t completely full, but it was mostly full, and the audience got into it, laughing hard at the jokes, cheering when Bugs Bunny came on screen, and so forth.

Just three things bothered me.

1. Road Runner says Meep Meep. They got this right in most of the film, but in the scene where Road Runner shows up to testify, he doesn’t say Meep Meep, he says Beep Beep. I can only assume the people who made the movies were superfans, so I’m surprised that they got this wrong. Sure, you could construct a within-universe explanation—Road Runner’s speech is always written as Beep Beep, and on the stand he’s careful to enunciate—but that seems like a stretch to me. This was no big deal; it just took me out of the movie while it was happening, and it surprised me because they seemed to get just about everything else right.

2. The scenes with the humans were pretty much a direct ripoff of Better Call Saul. I get it: given the physical location of the Road Runner, it makes sense for the action to take place in Arizona or New Mexico, and Bugs Bunny had that line about making a wrong turn at Albequerque, there’s the legal theme, and presumably any lawyer who’d take that case would have to be unusual in some way . . . put that all together and you get Better Call Saul. But the movie really leaned into it. The main human character looked a lot like Bob Odenkirk, and the human sidekicks could’ve fit right into that show too. It all made sense in the context of the movie, but I think they would’ve been better off either explicitly linking up with the Vince Gilligan universe—casting Odenkirk and the gang, etc.—or else doing it differently.

That said, Looney Tunes has a long and glorious history of ripping off pop-culture tropes, from What’s Opera, Doc to that saloon piano, so, in that sense, using a recent TV show to structure a Road Runner movie is canonical and fair.

3. The other thing is . . . it’s hard for me to explain this exactly, but the movie didn’t have the spark of life that makes a work of art special. Part of this may be that it was aimed at kids, so its plot and characters were simplified and kid-friendly, but it’s not quite that. After all, Charlotte’s Web is aimed at kids too, and it’s inspired and brilliant. I hate to even say this because I liked the movie a lot; it was so well done and I appreciate all the care that went into it. I feel that the world is a better place because this movie has been released. But still.

Here, let me take a shot at explaining. Remember that 1970s classic, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, with Walter Matthau foiling a team of robbers who hijack a subway train? That movie had a lot of flaws, various dead spots, uninspired dialogue, weak characterization, all sorts of things. But it had that spark of life.

Or consider Who Framed Roger Rabbit? I loved that movie (even though it had a weak ending), and one thing I appreciated was that they invented an entirely new character, and he was convincing and appealing (“P-p-p-please”): at first he was annoying but then you get to love him for who he was. Jessica Rabbit was an inspired creation too. In contrast, Coyote vs. Acme play out the string but they don’t create anything new in that way.

Or maybe I’m being a bit too vitalistic here. One specific thing that Coyote vs. Acme lacked was good dialogue. It had wonderful gags, including excellent references to past Looney Tunes classics, but it didn’t have snappy lines or interesting speeches or anything like that. It was well plotted but the speaking roles were under-written. Maybe if the dialogue had been more memorable, that would’ve been enough to take it over the hump. I don’t know.

There’s a larger question here: To what extent is originality required to create a great work of art? I think I’m mostly arguing that Coyote vs. Acme, for all its excellent characteristics, falls short of greatness because its creators did not go to the trouble of creating anything new.

And I’m not saying this from some sort of theoretical perspective on aesthetics. It’s the opposite. I went to this movie and liked it—I was pleasantly surprised at how good it was—but, partway through and continuing to the end, I felt that the whole was less than the sum of its parts. I think I first realized this when I noticed that I was appreciating the gags but not laughing out loud at them.

That all said, I did like the movie and I recommend you see it, at least if, like me, you’re an old-time Looney Tunes fan. I would see The Odyssey first, however.

Marty Supreme was excellent. Similar to Good Time, including in its intense throbbing soundtrack and bright lighting. I’d say that Good Time was more of a tour de force, but Marty Supreme was just as good in its own way. The only thing I didn’t get was why the soundtrack was loaded with songs from the 80s. Was this supposed to represent that the events were being interpreted from the perspective of their child, looking back from that later decade? Also, near the very beginning there was a jarring anachronism when Marty describes something as being in somebody’s DNA. They wouldn’t have said that in 1952. At first I thought this was just a slip-up in the script that didn’t get caught by anyone, but now I’m wondering if it was on purpose, a hint that the entire movie is an imaginative reconstruction from thirty years later.

Palko points to the above xkcd cartoon, which is absolutely wonderful. My first thought was a desire to share this with the world; my second thought is that xkcd cartoons are reliably wonderful–indeed, the above example is excellent but I wouldn’t put it in the top 10% of xkcd’s efforts–and if I start blogging these, that way lies madness.

And this let me to my Borgesian thought.

How about a blog that does nothing but post the latest xkcd? Yes, I know about this xkcd explainer fan site, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m thinking about something much more pure: a page with the current cartoon and its title, maybe also links to the very first and most recent cartoons, also the previous and next cartoons. Also a mouseover and permalinks, and we could fill out the page with some xkcd promotional material and some of Randall Munroe’s favorite links, and just to be transparent we could finish it up with some copyright information. The page would look something like this.

In the bathroom we keep books of short stories or nonfiction that you can read a bit of at a time. For example, The Book of Other People, edited by Zadie Smith–that one’s pretty good, lots of fun stories, an excellent bathroom book. And various others, one of which is a collection of Paris Review interviews, including one of poet and culture hero Philip Larkin.

The Larkin interview is worth reading, full of insights. He does his cranky-old-man shtick, but he answers the questions seriously and with what seems like sincerity. I appreciate the effort he put into it. I guess the interviewer, Robert Phillips, deserves some credit, also the Paris Review’s management, as they have a long history of thoughtful reviews–here’s another example.

But then I came across this bit, which absolutely stunned me, and not in a good way. Here’s Larkin, in response to the question, “Why do you distrust the new?”:

It seems to me undeniable that up to this century literature used language in the way we all use it, painting represented what anyone with normal vision sees, and music was an affair of nice noises rather than nasty ones. The innovation of modernism in the arts consisted of doing the opposite.

Whaaaaa?

OK, I get it. Larkin’s trying to be provocative; “taking the piss” is how the English put it, I think. Still, he must be trying to make some sense, no?

I’ll skip the bit about paintings and music–I disagree with Larkin on this, in that lots of old paintings in museums aren’t so realistic and lots of old classical music isn’t so listenable, but let’s focus on literature.

It’s my impression that one of the big innovations of the modernist movement in literature is to have characters who speak like ordinary people rather than like characters in a Walter Scott novel or whatever. Nothing against Walter Scott–he’s great–but read something by him or Tennyson, and it’s not as clean as Hemingway or Fitzgerald or Frost. It took the modernists a lot of work to clean out the cobwebs and write in a direct way. Nonfiction too: compare Orwell to Hobbes, for example. Hobbes had a lot to say, but it’s not so easy to read. Lots of this is changes in style and fashion over the centuries–but Larkin’s also said that he’s not interested in any period but the present. He should be thanking the modernists! I’m not saying that the only modern writing that’s readable is “modernistic”–Shaw and Twain’s characters, for example, have readable, naturalistic speech, and I don’t think either of them would usually be characterized as part of the modernist movement–; it just seems like a central aspect of modern writing in English is that it more closely approximates “language in the way we all use it,” so Larkin’s statement seems exactly backward.

Cultural conservatism has a lot to offer–I’m a big fan of Tom Wolfe’s classic rants, The Painted Word and From Bauhaus to Our House–but, like all criticism, it works through its specifics, and in this case Larkin’s remark makes no sense at all. I guess it could be that he just messed up, speaking off the cuff, and his interviewer didn’t catch the problem and do didn’t follow up, but there’s something about Larkin’s phrasing that gives me the impression that he’d actually thought about the issue, which makes it even more puzzling that he’d say something that was so wrong when it came to literature, which was his own field. At some level he must have realized that clear writing and realistic dialogue were two of the key aspects of modernism in literature.

So . . . whassup? Can any Larkin scholars enlighten us?

The funny thing is, elsewhere he writes that he admires T. S. Eliot’s play, Murder in the Cathedral. Larkin writes, “I read it from time to time for pleasure, which is the highest compliment I can pay.” Fair enough, if that’s his taste. But here’s the thing. Murder in the Cathedral is written in what might be called the high T. S. Eliot style (“Since golden October declined into sombre November / And the apples were gathered and stored, and the land became brown sharp points of death in a waste of water and mud, / The New Year waits, breathes, waits, whispers in darkness. / While the labourer kicks off a muddy boot and stretches his hand to the fire, / The New Year waits, destiny waits for the coming,” etc.) which I wouldn’t say is anything like naturalistic speech! That’s fine–naturalistic speech is not the only game in town–but it seems to contradict Larkin’s earlier claim to prefer literature “used language in the way we all use it.” It seems that what he really liked is flowery writing (“destiny waits for the coming”) but for some reason he didn’t want to admit it.

How many languages can a writer have?

In that interview, he also says, “A writer can have only one language, if language is going to mean anything to him.” But . . . Nabokov!

It seems here that Larkin is taking his own limitation of monolingualism and trying to make it universal. That ain’t cool. Just cos you can’t do it, Phil, that don’t mean that Vlad shouldn’t.

The above is a line from It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track, by Ian Penman.

I don’t have anything more to say; it’s just a good line. I think that what really makes it work is the attribution to Burroughs. If Penman were to just write, “You should never trust anyone who looked the same from photo to photo,” that would just come off as pretentious. The connection to Burroughs adds a twist and a sort of implicit disclaimer.

Penman is next to Penn and Teller on my bookshelf and just one book away from being next to George Pelecanos.

In the same genre as Ian Penman is Paul Morley, whose A Sound Mind contains this wonderful line: “Herrmann said that Hitchcock only made 60 per cent of the film and his music then had to finish it. (In a wider sense, it might be that reality itself, the reality that film explores, only goes so far and does so much, and music, in all its variety, finishes it.)”

I like the main quote and I like the parenthetical too. Some might find the latter to be overkill, destroying the beauty of the first line by making its implications explicit, but I enjoy it, partly because I wouldn’t have actually considered that extension myself and partly because it gives a sense of Morley’s questing, open persona.