What Talking Walls Told a Teacher

[Photo: Approaching Powers' cabin, July 2014]

All those years I bused students to Savannah for tours of historical sites, I could have put them in touch with living roots of their own community.  Teachers drawn to the Talking Walls program in July 2014 saw wonders hidden in plain sight among the developments and retail spaces of Cobb County. 

For example, nestled in woods behind upscale shopping and homes around Powers Ferry Road, there’s a little cabin lived in and cared for by a lady named Morning Washburn. We got some sense of Morning’s life there when she ladled into our cupped palms cool water freshly drawn from the well; when we stood in the shade of the vast cedar tree behind the cabin; when we walked half a mile on a grassy trail to see the fields and barns of her late neighbors, a place now preserved as Hyde’s Farm.

With Talking Walls, I found so much that I’d overlooked in my own back yard.  A long-time member of St. James’ Church, I’d never explored east of Marietta Square, nor visited Root House, home of one of the church’s founders.  Cutting through Kennesaw to the interstate, I’d driven a segment of the storied Old Dixie Highway without knowing it.  For me, Acworth had been just a spot on my way to other places, so I felt acute regret at what I’d dismissed when Talking Walls took us through sites on both sides of the railroad tracks, including an elegant turn-of-the-twentieth century home and Bethel Church, lovingly constructed by its original members (now preserved with help from Cobb Landmarks and Historical Society). 

I connect to all this through my own memories of grandparents; but what can these Talking Walls say to children now generations away from the world of small farms and sepia-toned memories?  Looking into everyday life in earlier times, my students typically dwell on deprivation: no “technology,” no showers, no air-conditioning.  They assume that time was tedious without the screens and wheels that take us to our entertainments today.

Talking Walls can teach students how time itself felt different.  From Morning Washburn, they’ll get a sense of time as a resource, one which must be used in season and tended.  Morning often mentioned "stewardship,” how she spent her days caring for the land and the cabin.   She described some repairs she made to the roof, the limbs sawed off the cedar, the time she climbed down the well, her competition with numerous deer for the fruits of her garden, and the process of washing clothes and hanging them in the sunlight. In her telling, stewardship of this place is a responsibility both solemn and joyful.  

Talking Walls can give our kids perspective on the lives we lead now.  I don’t suppose Morning Washburn gets to listen to Ravel while she sips a cold cocktail at the end of a hard day.  Still, when my smart phone dings in traffic to inform me of new meetings added to my agenda, it’s refreshing to think: it doesn't have to be this way.

(This article was written for the October newsletter of Cobb Landmarks, co-sponsor of the program "Talking Walls."  It is an expanded version of an article I wrote for this blog while still involved in the program, Georgia Landmarks Take Me Back.)

She Knows her Place: Ann Cleeves' Shetland Island Thrillers

Place always preceded plot for the late novelist P. D. James, remembered this week with thanksgiving by crime fiction afficionados.  Her legacy lives on in a series by Ann Cleeves.

Cleeves makes the Shetland Islands (northwest of Great Britain) more than a backdrop for novels Raven Black (2006), White Nights (2008), Red Bones (2009) and Blue Lightning (2010 - I've just begun to read it).  Certainly the starkness of life that clings to the rocky edges of these remote islands provides striking scenery: black ravens swarm a corpse on the snow, waves higher than a house crash against the craggy coastline, fog approaches a ferry boat and swallows the horizon, a farmhouse on a spur of land overlooks the sea on three sides, a row of homes and little shops comprise an entire village, eerie never-ending twilight casts shadows on an incongruously remodeled art gallery, relentless storm winds buffet a repurposed lighthouse while rain hits the trembling window panes "like bullets." 

But the location shapes the action, too.  First, where communities are so small and routinely immobilized by rough winds, everyone's into everyone else's business.  Old rumors define life for the developmentally challenged Magnus (Raven Black), for the artist who once hosted a sort of artsy-hippie-commune (White Nights), and for the relatives of a scandalous widow (Red Bones).  Cleeves folds layers of culture into her setting:  a clash of the ancient and the contemporary in a touristy pagan festival, a pop star who trades on his quaint background, and an archaeological excavation of violent deaths from the 16th and 20th centuries.  Then, as islanders are infiltrated by contemporary commerce and by visitors from "down South" in London, opportunism and class resentments provide motives for characters to behave badly, a plus for any mystery series.

Ambivalence to the islands gives detective Jimmy Perez something to care about besides the crime at hand.  Dark-skinned descendant of a Spanish sailor shipwrecked from the doomed attack of the Armada  in 1588, he's both native and outsider, taciturn and curious, diffident and intuitive.  He falls in love with the divorced mother who discovers the corpse in Raven Black, and ever after wonders what his life has to offer her, a sophisticated artist transplanted from London.  He is nagged by the thought that he has disappointed his parents by choosing not to ride the fishing boats with his father and the rest of "the boys" on Fair Isle. 

The most exotic location of all, in my favorite pages of the series so far, turns out to be the one most familiar to readers: a city street.  It's strange only to deputy Sandy Wilson, lowbrow island native. On impulse, Perez has sent him to interview a victim's mother in London. "[Sandy] was still astonished that his boss had trusted him to do the interview, felt extreme pride and extreme fear in the space of a minute" (217).  Afraid of the underground because it's "unnatural being shut in a tunnel" and "too complicated," Sandy boards a bus where he can't get help from any sympathetic fellow-passenger because their eyes are closed or they don't speak English.  More closed off from the horizon than at any time in his island life, he feels claustrophobia and "a feeling that the city was endless; there would be no escape from it" (218).  Afraid of being flattened on the sidewalk if he doesn't keep pace, struggling to make the receptionist understand his thick accent, lost in the grandeur of his room at the Travel Inn, he feels even more out of his depth when confronted by the witness, a wealthy member of Parliament who suppresses her own emotions when she mentions her late daughter's many letters to her:

       Sandy wondered fleetingly if he should try writing to his mother.  'I don't suppose you kept her letters?'
       'I did actually.  Isn't that sad?  I have them all in a folder.  When I feel especially lonely I re-read them.  And do you know, she probably thought I just glanced at them then threw them away.'
       Sandy didn't know what to say so he kept quiet.  That was what Perez did.  'Just give her time and sense that you're really listening to her.' (221)

Silence works for Sandy.  Within moments, the mother trusts him, and he has the presence of mind to request the SIM card containing the daughter's distraught voice in a final phone message.  Then the mother explains how she'd been so relieved of constant worry when her mentally-troubled daughter had moved to the remote Shetlands:

...She paused, breathed in a sob.  'Now I'd give anything to have the worry back.'
       Sandy held his glass and sipped the wine.  He wished he could say something to make it easier for the woman.  Perez should have come.  He would have known what to say.
       "Do you think Hattie killed herself?'  Gwen's question came at him so hard and fast that it made him blink.
       'No,' he said without thinking.  Then, blushing, realizing what he'd done, 'But you mustn't take any notice of me.  That's just my opinion and I get things wrong all the time.'
       She looked at him.  'I'm grateful that you've come all this way.'  (225)

Following this great personage's benediction for his arrival at a new maturity, Sandy contemplates taking the Underground back to his hotel, but chooses instead to walk through "the mild city night all the way back to his hotel" (226). 

Sandy's more fun, and more appealing, than the snippy London-based detective Taylor who intrudes on Perez's earlier investigations. Sandy's rise from comic bit player to a role of trust and responsibility makes Red Bones the most emotionally rewarding of the series, so far as I've read.

So place may define the story, but character fills it.  Plot comes in distant third.  When all was revealed at the end of any one of these novels, I have to admit that I only half-understood the motives and means, content to have lived awhile among these islands and their people.

See some of my other posts about Cleeves's works:

• Ann Cleeves and Mary Higgins Clark are contrasted for a "lesson" in mystery writing 9k Words into Raven Black.   
• There's more about the first four books of Ann Cleeves' series in She Knows Her Place:  Ann Cleeves' Shetland Thrillers. 
• My post about Cleeves' fourth book in the Shetland series compares it to Agatha Christie in one important respect: Blue Lightning.   
• Dead Water put me in mind of how crime novelists are like sports commentators: they focus on character and texture, because there isn't a lot of latitude in the way the game is played. 
• Thin Air: Thick Atmosphere. 
• My introduction to Cleeves' "Vera Stanhope" series comes through the novels Silent Voices and Harbour Street.
  

"Music from the Heart": Georgia Festival Chorus' Carols by Candlelight, November 23



[Photo: Frank Boggs with GFC, April 2014]

The kind lady who made room for me in the second row at McEachern UMC Sunday night volunteered that she hadn't seen "that man," pointing at the director of the Georgia Festival Chorus, since 1972.  That happens to have been the year when that man, Frank Boggs, teaching chorus at the Westminster Schools in Atlanta, first took care of me.  I needed a costume for the middle school musical; an accident in my family had my parents visiting intensive care at all hours; so Frank brought me in to his house where his wife Doris took measurements and created my costume.  Through four years in Chorale, he led me through a vast repertoire from Vivaldi and Brahms to Gershwin and Ives, singing around Atlanta, South Carolina, Poland and the Soviet Union.


From the looks on faces of the Georgia Festival Chorus singers as they boomed, whispered or floated their notes at their 24th annual Christmas program, Frank Boggs figures prominently in many of our best memories. Both tone and feeling are warm.


In his 80s now, his 71st year as professional musician, Frank sat magisterially center stage while his associate director David Scott and assistant directors Ken Terrell and Michael Cromwell led the group.  After pianist Cathy Adams and Organist Phillip Allen played a virtuosic organ / piano arrangement of "The Nutcracker," the program opened with "For Unto Us A Child Is Born" sung by a small ensemble that stood in the middle of the choir, sounding joyful while they contended with Handel's sixteenth-note melismas.  Suddenly, the whole choir stood to raise the roof on the words "Wonderful!  Counselor!  The Mighty God!"  I noticed Frank was singing, too.


After breaking us in this way, Frank paired Beethoven's grand "Hallelujah" fanfare with the contrasting lovely "God So Loved the World."  In the latter song, on the phrase, "should not perish," Frank punched the air on "perish" and got a sharp, cutting sound in return.  The group's musicality has learned a few things from Frank's love of theatre!


The music of John Rutter, Frank's longtime mentor, figures prominently in the program, along with the work of composer/arranger Mark Wilberg.  David Scott directed Rutter's "Carol of the Magi," a sensitive piece of choral storytelling that touches a deep place in the heart when the Kings, finding the baby Jesus, reflect, "It seemed we'd known Him from long before."  Ken Terrell directed the chorus in Rutter/Wilberg's "Child in a Manger," a tune I've known as "Morning has Broken," with a four-hand piano arrangement that dances and sparkles.  Other Wilberg pieces included "In the  Bleak Midwinter" arranged with "bleak" dissonance in the accompaniment, and a Calypso carol "The Virgin Mary Had A Baby Boy" which had everyone swaying and smiling.


Michael Cromwell conducted the Ensemble in "The Work of Christmas," the music of Dan Forrest sensitively interpreting a thoughtful text by Howard Thurman about the work that begins when the angels, kings, and shepherds have gone on with their lives.  The text tells us that it is our work "to find the lost, to heal the broken, to feed the hungry" and "to make music from the heart." 


Frank introduced Barlow Bradford's arrangement of "Angels We Have Heard on High" by recalling Ken Terrell's first reaction to the score: "It has 14 keys and 14 different tempos!"  Every time the familiar "Glo-o-o-ria" came along, voices launched into a higher-than-expected key. It kept the song fresh.


Frank always looks for contrast and variety, this time including flutes, bass, and percussion. Some songs came close to "pop" (I heard "Close to You" in the vamp to one number), while others borrowed from mid-20th century avant garde.  But it was all informed by faith and love for the whole enterprise of communal singing.


As Frank Boggs himself is wont to say, "Bravo," and, "Ay-men, Brother!"

See earlier blog posts about the Georgia Festival Chorus:  Carols by Candlelight (2008) and Total Praise (2009).

Crime Drama Reset: 8th Graders Find their Story

[design by D.Alfi]

If you discover that one of your friends has killed the professor, do you still have to complete your class project? That's the premise of Reset. When eight college students show up at their professor's mountain lodge on a snowy weekend to play his famous international simulation game "Global Crisis," they find his car, but no sign of him.

Through October and early November, the students and I improvised the scenes first, finalizing the dialogue on a shared document after class. Because the actors seriously bought into their characters' feelings and dilemmas, they performed with intensity.

As their teacher, I was especially pleased at the tight construction of the play. Lessons that emerge from the simulation game early in the play become the template for choices made in the end: Respect is more important than money; Don't act before you have all the information; Coalitions are good; and If one player wins, everyone loses.

Collaborating with eighth graders on Reset,  I once again felt that we didn't so much build our play as find it. This is often my experience in creative work, and yet it's always a surprise.

They found the outline early, once they decided on some kind of crime drama.  They would all play college students because the nine young actors didn't want to play anyone "old," nor anyone their own age, explaining, "we have no personality, Mr. Smoot."  Grabbing the opportunity to improvise on the Upper School's unfinished set for another play, the actors "arrived" at their professor's mountain lodge for a class "retreat."  As they arrived, other elements of the story emerged:  Snow was coming, the professor was missing, but his car was parked outside; the rich kid's dad and fortune were both in legal jeopardy; the students discovered video cameras hidden around the lodge.  They came up with their reason for being there, to play an international relations simulation game.  When one girl proclaimed, "I wannabe Vladimir Putin!" I knew we had a good premise.

We put some time into creating that game because, unless its elements could somehow inform the rest of the story,  playing the game would detract from the action. The kids took this to heart, and found ways to connect their characters and dialogue to themes of "respect" being most important, and "coalitions" being good, and knowing all the facts before taking action.

For example, three different characters point guns at others over disrespect.  The play's climactic moment comes when all but one of the college students join a coalition to protect the guilty.  Our title first surfaced when our improvised game ended in simulated global destruction: "Reset!" said the young Teaching Assistant, handing us a theme that ran through other scenes.

Then we hit a wall:  None of the characters had a goal.  When I asked the actor/writers, "What is your character hiding?"  I love that they were such nice kids that they could not bear to have their characters be guilty of anything worse than cheating on a test.  I talked them into committing felonies, from use of performance-enhancing drugs to parricide.

We still couldn't answer, what was the crime?  And where was the professor?   Just asking the questions gave us both the answer and the professor's name: Dr. Boyd, anagram of "body."  To find out who he was, and why someone might kill him, the T.A. and I improvised a scene at the professor's home prior to the retreat.  Egged on by the class, we escalated tension by adding detail to each "take": the professor's wealth,  the papers discovered by the T.A., blackmail, Boyd's attempt to burn the evidence that his fame and fortune are based on plagiarism, and what happens when he pulls a gun. 

One of the students loved that scene, and said that we should put it first in the play.  That would not have occurred to me.  I thought we would "discover" all those facts through investigation, and might have a "flashback." But if the audience knew all the details of the crime from the first, then  the play wouldn't be about the audience finding out "who dunnit," but the friends of the killer finding out -- and then deciding what to do about their own "crisis."  Suddenly, we had a situation that would mirror the game, and we saw our way to the end of the play! 

The kids and I relished the melodrama of it.  One of the actors, an upbeat and energetic young man, bounded over to me after a rehearsal to tell me, "I just got really mad at him!  And I never get mad at anyone!  It felt great!"   Here's a sampling of lines that they wrote for themselves:

• "Reacting" is screaming at someone. Shooting them in the head is murder!
• Professor Boyd's car smells of old tacos, and disappointment.
• This isn't a game anymore.  And I'm tired of waiting.  If you don't do something about him, I will!
• You think you're so smart! You think you've found a way to make your future out of my past!  [That's my own melodramatic line; the young T.A. couldn't keep a straight face when I growled it at him!]

As we worked, I remembered how my number one ambition at their age was to act in a script that would allow me to aim a gun and say, as I do in this play, "I can't let you leave here alive.  Will you please stand over there -- away from the carpet?" 

We performed Reset for an audience of parents at the end of six hours' rehearsal.  The kids were proud, the parents, impressed.  We played it one last time for their classmates during school the next Tuesday.   


I've been involved in other crime dramas, reflecting on them in this blog.  With members of the parish, I wrote "Curse of the Waffling Bishop" for St. James' Episcopal church and wrote a Post-Mortem  on the process; another essay, "From Zero to Murder Mystery under 21 Hours" tells how 8th graders and I created a successful play over nine weeks.

Tom Magliozzi's 4 Million Friends on NPR

[Photo: Tom and Ray at play, at work (IdeaConnector.com)]

"With that laugh, he was able to make everyone around him feel better about everything," said radio producer Doug Berman earlier this month.  He was remembering Tom Magliozzi, who co-hosted NPR's program Car Talk from 1987 to 2012 with his younger brother Ray.  The day before, NPR had announced Magliozzi's death from complications ensuing from Alzheimer's. "Car Talk was a way to sort of mass-produce that feeling.  You put him and his brother [Ray] in front of a microphone and suddenly four million people a week feel better." 

The many tributes to Tom Magliazzi on NPR media made me wonder if there's a mass-produced intimacy here that's different in quality from other media "communities?"

Tributes from fans at the site of NPR program Fresh Air thanked Tom and Ray for years of shared laughter.  A recovering alcoholic got a morale boost from Car Talk; the brothers' banter kept a long-distance driver company; others (myself included) had the show on during years of routine Saturday chores.  Listener Sarah Pinho said a lot of what I would like to say with her posting:

Click and Clack the Tappet Brothers have probably been in my life since birth. Just hearing the words "Car Talk" makes me think of the taste of sawdust, Saturday mornings, and Dad in the workshop, saws and sanders buzzing away. They were just part of life, part of weekends, part of Dad.  I'm being reminded this week, even more than usual, that public radio is a national treasure. Thanks to these two brothers for loving each other and for adding so richly to American culture.

Since the age of Mass Media began -- sometime between the serialized blockbusters of Charles Dickens and the mourners lined up around the block to view the body of film star Rudolf Valentino -- we consumers have shared emotional connections to distant celebrities.  We've also had connections to each other through events shared live: JFK, Watergate hearings, the Challenger, 9/11.  We've connected through fictional characters, too, tuning in at the same time across the country to see season finales and series finales from M*A*S*H and Dallas to Breaking Bad.  It's cliché how a recorded song can conjure up a time, full-force.

But NPR is more than a single program or personality; it's almost a parallel society, defined by curiosity, appreciation, and civility.   "All things considered" is more than the name of its flagship program; it's the creed.   Co-hosts on the national and local programs are convivial, and never antagonize their interviewees, though they do press a question if they receive an evasive answer.  Just recently, in stories about the President's deportation relief plan, they interviewed an attorney of Latino descent who has defended immigrants from deportation -- who is now a Republican congressman.  He was asked open-ended questions to expound his views, and follow-up questions about a range of responses by opponents.  It ended with a cordial sign-off, and news that a Latina congresswoman on the other side would be interviewed the following day -- and more reporting about the ins and outs of the new policy.   News stories and investigative stories all get a 360-degree treatment, more than "left/right" or "pro/con." 

This parallel society is funded by listeners, and most of us have common memories and share this ethos.

In emergencies, I go to NPR for perspective and some comfort.  Some weeks, I feel that I need to hear the weeks' bad news turned into comedy for Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me.    I remember the shock of the exceptions, as Tom and Ray said in sober voices that they didn't feel like laughing on the Saturday following 9/11.  There was a shocking silence in October 2008 when the Morning Edition host asked an economist, "Wow!  Is there any silver lining to Lehman Brothers' collapse?"  There was a long pause before the expert replied, "I don't want to think about what's ahead.  This will be the worst financial crisis in our lifetime."  Long pause. "Well," said the host, "all right then.  Thanks.  This is Morning Edition."

In a way, NPR's like the Episcopal Church, complete with traditions, familiar old tunes, openness to new things, refusal to get too riled up about things.  It's ritual, too:  voices in the car, the Saturday bike ride to Stone Mountain with Car Talk and Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me! on my radio app, Saturday night with a martini and Prairie Home Companion, evenings with Fresh Air and classical concerts.

So, Tom lives on in memory and "the Best of" Car Talk; and NPR continues to amuse, engage, and enlarge my view of the world.   

Evening Prayer with Pastan's Poetry: A Liturgy for Reflection

We Episcopalians love our Book of Common Prayer.  In fact, we love several Books of Common Prayer.  While we mix the language with special flavorings (Gender Neutrality, U2-charistic Hip, Ye Goode Olde English...), the basic outline for any worship goes back to the days of Cranmer and Queen Elizabeth I, and it's both steady and flexible, able to withstand innovation.  

For our latest class meeting of Education for Ministry (EfM), I brought out a liturgy for evening worship based entirely on poetry by Linda Pastan.  Why?  She often works with figures from the Hebrew scriptures, and some of the class had read Exodus this week.  Also, she reflects deeply on ordinary things. Last, I expected her many images to stimulate memories and tangential thoughts in members of the class, which we would in turn use for a theological reflection.  

It worked!

Here is the short service, with just enough of each poem to give a reader its flavor.  I am a fan, and wouldn't want to make Ms. Pastan have to call her lawyer.  I post the service here just as an idea for others.  As my 7th graders would say, "If you want to know what happens in the rest of the poem, go buy her book yourself."   My interpolations are in italics.

_____________________________________________________

Liturgy for Reflection

Using poems by Linda Pastan
From C arnival Evening: Collected Poems 1968-1998 and The Last Uncle, 2002,
edited for collective recitation

Opening song of praise  to be read responsively, by verse, after each asterisk

Wearing their formal clothes,
their serious, funereal expressions*

The last things of our lives prepare
their final speeches.

While they are busy, let me praise
penultimate things: *

the bent branch
outside my window,

due to be kindling
next fall;*

the car I taught my next to last
child to drive on...

ALL:  Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit; as it was in the beginning, is now and will be forever. Amen.

(“Penultimate Things” from The Last Uncle, p. 33)

A  Reading that reflects on the Hebrew Scriptures , a different reader after each space break

“Passover” 

I set my table with metaphor:

the curling parsley – green sign nailed to the doors

of God’s underground; salt of desert and eyes;

the roasted shank bone of a Paschal Lamb,

relic of sacrifice and bleating spring.

Down the long table, past fresh shoots of a root

they have been hacking at for centuries,

you hold up the unleavened bread – a baked scroll

whose  wavy lines are indecipherable.

The wise son and the wicked, the simple son

And the son who doesn’t ask, are all my son

Leaning tonight as it is written,

Slouching his father calls it.  ...

excerpt from “Passover,” from Carnival Evening, p50-51.

A Homily – “The Vanity of Names”

When the house of flesh disappears

in an earthquake of its own making,

this house of wood and glass

will stay fixed in its landscape.

Rooms will be swept clean

of all memories.  Doors will close.

...

I know all this.  But to acquiesce

is never easy. ...

from The Last Uncle, p. 38

Prayer - “Grace” responses added.

When the young professor folded

his hands at dinner and spoke to God

about my safe arrival

through the snow, thanking Him also

for the food we were about to eat,

                        We thank Thee, O God

it was in the tone of voice I use

to speak to friends when I call...

 

                        We thank Thee, O God...

 

from The Last Uncle, p. 13

Disabled Athletes on Video: What's in it for Us?

Message for middle school assembly.


On the YouTube screen of your mind, imagine photos of a smiling child.  Words flash on the screen against a dark background, and tell us about some disability or accident.  Next we see images of the child learning to overcome the disability. 


We've all seen these kinds of videos.  If we'd been meeting today where we could use a screen, Omar wanted to show us the one of the disabled team manager who shot three three-pointers in the last seconds of his last game.  Some of my students have written plays and stories based on the story of Bethany Hamilton, the professional surfer who lost an arm in a shark encounter. 


When all the friends who supported the athletes are cheering and hugging them, these films make us say "awww."  They may even bring tears to our eyes.


But most of us watching those videos aren't disabled.  None of us wants to be.

So why are these videos so popular?  What do they have to show students who aren't disabled?

I asked Brad Brown, long-time athlete and coach who heads our school's admissions department. He guesses that we love the videos because they display in a physical way, the qualities of grit and determination.


Watching these, each of us thinks privately, "If I were disabled, I hope I'd have that same kind of attitude and will power."


But every day presents us with the chance to show that same kind of grit and determination, only not in a way that would look very exciting on screen.  In Mrs. Whitehead's math class, you show it by not giving up on a problem after the first try.  In my class, it's unfolding the paper you crumpled up to try one more way to express your idea.  Mr. Brown reminded me of our volleyball team last week, digging in when they were down in the score and opposed by a home-team crowd to win.


You don't have to be disabled to feel unable; and you have a chance every day to show how you won't give up -- or to encourage someone else to keep going -- even if it doesn't make it onto YouTube.

What Mr. Suchet Saw: Christ in Agatha Christie

Reflections on Murder on the Orient Express, produced for the series Agatha Christie: Poirot, in 2010, starring David Suchet, directed by Philip Martin, screenplay adaptation of Agatha Christie's novel by Stewart Harcourt. Other sources consulted include The Daily Mail and Nick Baldock's essay "The Christian World of Agatha Christie," First Things, www.firsthings.com August 2009.

[First Photo: Poirot confronts the passengers, 1974]

[Second Photo: Poirot's confrontation, 2010]

I owe Agatha Christie an apology. After my devotion to her murder-mysteries during my early teens, I threw her over for writers more textured and more intentional about showing their world view. Though I delighted in the film Murder on the Orient Express (1974) and the BBC's Poirot series, I gave all the credit to actors who, I said, supplied reality that her two-dimensional imagination did not. But the latest screen adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express co-produced for the Poirot series by its leading actor David Suchet, strips her story down to its bare elements to show a dark, consistent, and religious, world view. 


In Christie's story, while the trans-continental railroad is blocked overnight by a snow drift, someone stabs to death an odious American millionaire.  Seeking to avoid bad publicity, an official of the train prevails upon passenger Hercule Poirot to identify the culprit.  Early in his investigation, Poirot discovers that the dead man was a notorious kidnapper who had killed his young victim even before the distraught parents paid the ransom. (Christie wrote the novel shortly after the sensational real-life kidnapping and killing of Charles Lindbergh's little girl).  Repercussions of the kidnapping spread throughout the girl's household and beyond.   In gross miscarriage of justice, the kidnapper had bribed a corrupt D.A. and absconded with his loot. 


When the justice system has failed, is it not justice for the murderer to be murdered?  The question arises naturally from the situation;  twelve stab wounds on the man suggest a verdict.


Suchet and his creative team highlight the problem by framing the story with images of justice, punishment, and confession.  In the first scene of the movie, taking place in Istanbul, Poirot confronts a soldier who has lied about his whereabouts in a certain case, bringing "dishonor" to his regiment. The soldier shoots himself on the spot, leaving Poirot defensive when challenged for badgering the man so.  Outside Istanbul's train station, Poirot witnesses a mob stoning a woman for adultery. In each case, Poirot maintains belief in abstract justice, strict and impartial. 


Suchet's Orient Express illustrates an observation about God's justice from a character in another Christie novel, The Moving Finger Writes, "God doesn’t really need to punish us.... We’re so very busy punishing ourselves" (Baldock). In Suchet's Orient Express, we see both Poirot and the kidnapper in their separate compartments kneeling at prayers, each praying for forgiveness.  We already knew that the fugitive is fearful of retribution; now we see him tearful with self-loathing.   


Portraying Poirot since the late 1980s, Suchet feels deep sympathy with the character, whom he initially dismissed as a stereotype, as I did.  In his memoir Poirot and Me, Suchet writes how he feared that identification with the character would make it impossible for audiences ever to see him again in more serious roles.  Then he gave Agatha Christie a second look."The Poirot in the books was nothing like the character I’d seen on screen," Suchet tells us. "[H]e was more elusive, more pedantic, and most of all, more human. But I still wasn’t sure whether I should play him" (excerpt in The Daily Mail).


At the same time, Suchet found he was in sympathy with Dame Agatha when he accepted the Christian world view and joined the Anglican Communion.  Her biographer Gillian Gill asserts that religion, though "rarely discussed in Christie's mystery novels" yet "provides the framework for all her writing" (Gill, cited in Baldock).  Historian Nick Baldock, writing in the Christian journal First Things, explains:

From a theological perspective, the detective genre is inclined towards a Catholic interpretation in contrast to the more Protestant thriller; the former deals with the community, the latter the individual protagonist. ...Everybody [in the detective genre] is guilty of something; it may offer hope that the problem has a solution, but evil will not be expunged as a result. It is one  problem with  one  solution; it is a small victory in a much larger, indeed an eternal, war. The detective novel is the world’s most Augustinian genre and not, in consequence, especially reassuring. (Baldock)

In her autobiography, Christie told of the lasting impact on young Agatha when her math teacher got off-subject to say:

To be a Christian you must face and accept the life that Christ faced and lived; you must enjoy things as he enjoyed things; be as happy as he was at the marriage at Cana, know the peace and happiness that it means to be at harmony with God and with God’s will. But you must also know, as he did, what it means to be alone in the Garden of Gethsemane, to feel that all your friends have forsaken you, that those you love and trust have turned away from you, and that  God Himself  has forsaken you. Hold on then to the belief that that is  not  the end. (Christie, in Baldock)

While Suchet's Orient Express is what he called "serious fun" in interviews before its release, the delightful Hollywood version also conjured joy, spirit, and the same meditation on justice.  Director Sidney Lumet emphasized the style of the era, while assembling a cast of stars who brought auras of public personas with them.  The evocative score by Richard Rodney Bennett played with the tension between two distinct themes.  The first, a romantic minor-key piano showpiece that Bennett based on the syllables of the title "Murder on the Orient Express," veers towards tango; the second is a grand, golden waltz to accompany images of the massive train itself.  When the solution is found, the mood is sunny and celebratory.  


Suchet's version, without big stars but acted with conviction, with a tension-building ostinato but no characteristic theme, leaves us with a very different feeling. Justice has been done; all is not right with the world; and Poirot, clutched by self-doubt, clutches his rosary.  It's powerful, and wonderful, and it's all there for the sensitive to see in the original Agatha Christie.

"Those Crazy Episcopalians," continued: Blessing of the Animals

[Photo: L-R: Lou B.&friend; Luis & me; Riva &Suzanne; the Whites & friend.

So what's the meaning of parishioners' gathering at the church on a Saturday with their dogs?  Passers-by on Marietta's Church Street may have wondered at our Rector in robes, leading us in prayers and in readings from scripture, sprinkling us all with consecrated water, and placing a hand on each furry head to pronounce a blessing.  What good does it do?  Is this "blessing" some superstitious ritual to ensure good luck?   

We have lots of answers.  We honored the memory of St. Francis, who preached to animals, "using words, when necessary."  

For what good it does the animals, well, it was a treat for the dogs to mill about making friends; little Riva (Boston Terrier of my friend Suzanne) spent so much energy wagging and panting that she slept all the way home. 

We took this time to review Scriptures that show that God intended for us to care for animals, from Eden and Ark to the Sabbath provision of rest even for our beasts of burden.  

To some who asked about dogs' souls "going to heaven," Father Allen explained that the popular notion of Heaven as a lofty antiseptic place misses the point made  throughout Scripture that God plans a new creation, as we say each Sunday, "We believe in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting."  A new world surely won't be devoid of animal life. 

We Episcopalians begin our theological reflections with the statement repeated seven times on the first page of the Bible, that creation is "good, very good."  Any Thing in our lives can be a sacrament, "an outward and visible sign of an inner and spiritual reality."  Blessing bread and wine, blessing a marriage, blessing our dogs -- these are all "sacrifices," in the original sense of "making sacred" the elements of our daily lives. 

But most of all, I look forward to this annual event for its effect on me, when I remember that little old Luis, and, before him, Bo, Cleo, Churchill, Colonel and Missy -- have been blessings to me, and I to them.  The ceremony is a public statement of gratitude and intention, the true meaning of "celebration."  

We Episcopalians are crazy about celebrating every thing that gives life meaning.  

PS - I did not bring my two-year-old rescue dog Mia to the service.  She doesn't "mix" well.  As Father Allen said, "The Bishop doesn't allow me to perform exorcisms."

See my earlier reflection on "Those Crazy Episcopalians."  I'm sure there's enough material to produce a series!   Another article, Dogs are Poetry, reflected on spiritual connections to our animal companions.

Boyhood: From Baby Fat to Goatee in Just Moments

[Photo: Starcasm.net]

"Which 'Mason' was your favorite?" asked my friend Suzanne after we'd seen Richard Linklater's Boyhood.  Because Linklater filmed for a few days each year between 2002 and 2014, we had just watched the young actor Ellar Coltrane grow in the role of the boy "Mason" from baby fat to goatee, developing sharper edges and shading like the photo that Mason develops in a darkroom.

I can choose no "favorite," anymore than a parent can, for Linklater has given us something of the parent's experience.  We feel delight at each new Mason, but we're as eager as he is to see him grow into independence.  I laughed a lot, and I teared up, too, always when our young hero gets a break, or discovers something about himself.  He gets his father to see that there's some give and take in their relationship.  He doesn't flinch when bullies try to intimidate him.  He just watches when a smaller boy has the courage to resist pressure from friends, but he later stands up to a much bigger man.  He's forthright with a girl. I'm pleased to report that teachers come across as understanding and helpful (if a little gruff one time) all the way through.

Boyhood's not all about Mason.  His older sister Sam (Lorelei Linklater) takes advantage of her brother in myriad humiliating ways, but at the core of their relationship is a moment early in the movie, when the two take turns with binoculars to watch their estranged parents from an upstairs window for signs of reconciliation.

The parents grow up, too:

When the movie begins, the father (Ethan Hawk) has been off in Alaska, the mother (Patricia Arquette) has already started to make a series of "poor life decisions" that will subject the children to wrenching relocations and to her relationships with men that the mature Mason will call "a parade of drunken a------s."  She does her best when things go wrong, and she does good, too:   A minor character reappears to thank her for her impact on his life, while the kids look on.

Some weekends the father sweeps the kids up in his old GTO for bowling, baseball, and camping, trying hard to involve himself in their lives.  To his credit, he listens when Mason asks from the backseat, "Why don't you answer our questions?  How was your week?  Do you have a girl friend?"  He's inspired when young Mason (a Harry Potter fan) asks him if there really isn't any magic in the world.  The father rises to this occasion, doing everything he can to keep "magic" alive for Mason:  he wonders what's more magical than a whale, an ocean mammal that sings and has a heart big enough to contain a bus?

In the end, we have three scenes, back-to-back, considering what it all means - where "it" is the span of 12 years, as close to "life" as a movie can get.  In one, the father, in secular terms, blesses his son.  In a second scene, the mother cries because the "big moments" of her life are going by too fast.  Teaching her son to ride a bike, moving and marrying , sending him off to college -- too fast, it's here and gone.  That's our experience, too, watching the whole boyhood go by under three hours.

It's fitting that the young man finds himself in photography, the art of capturing moments.  While most movies are "about" their stories, this one gives us the experience of time itself.

The third concluding scene brings us to a picture-perfect moment at the end of Mason's first day at college. One of Mason's new friends wonders if, instead of seizing the moment, we should let the moment seize us.

Honor the moments and move on:  for a film about watching years go by too fast, for a story about growth, and for life, it's a good perspective.
Reflection on the movie Boyhood,written and directed by Richard Linklater.  Starring Patricia Arquette, Ellar Coltrane, Lorelei Linklater, and Ethan Hawk.

Dementia and Comedy: "Live in their World"

As a drama teacher, I know the cardinal rule of improvisation, "Never say 'no.'"  Another way of saying it is, "Live in their world."   That is, if you walk on stage and your partner says, "Doctor, we must operate immediately on this orangutan," then you must immediately become a surgeon in an unusual situation.


According to tonight's broadcast of This American Life (Public Radio International, heard on WABE Atlanta) this trick of comedy improv is an effective way to keep a loved one happy in spite of dementia.   So, the mother-in-law doesn't remember who her daughter is, and she thinks monkeys are overrunning the yard?  The son-in-law, an actor, says, "It sure is late in the season for monkeys.  Can you catch one so we can have it in the house?"


We hear tape from the actual interaction.  The mother-in-law keeps the conversation going, clearly enjoying the playfulness of it.  She started serious, but she now knows she's playing a game.


It's not a panacea.  The daughter is upset that her mother doesn't recognize her.  But it's better than constantly saying, "No, you're wrong." 


Here's a link to the site mentioned in the piece: http://www.in-themoment.com/

See other entries in my "Dementia Diary."

Frost/Nixon: You Never Get Over It

We're forty years after the day Nixon resigned.  I was a kid working for Dad's chemical company.  When Nixon flew away from DC in that helicopter, we paused to listen on the office radio.  For the previous two years, Watergate had been a steady drip drip drip of news stories that made no sense to me -- Haldeman?  Ehrlichman?  Dean?  Colson? G. Gordon Liddy?    Then Nixon was gone, Ford pardoned him, and we moved on to disco and Star Wars.

Tonight, enjoying director Ron Howard's film adaptation of the stage play by Peter Morgan, I found myself weeping more than once.  Why?

It's largely a comedy.   Part of the fun is that it's a boxing movie disguised as a series of dry news interviews.  In one corner, we have little celebrity-besotted Frost (Michael Sheen) who often looks startled even while he smiles and mouths positive thoughts. In the other corner, we have jovial, wily Nixon (Frank Langella).  As in any boxing movie, each of the combatants goes back to an entourage for support.   Kevin Bacon is especially strong as Nixon's most ardent defender; Sam Rockwell is the outraged Nixon-hater who berates Frost.  There are running gags, about Frost's "effeminate" shoes (real men wear laces),  and how Nixon disarms Frost with some personal observation in the thirty seconds before an interview begins.

So, why cry?  Thirty years ago, a ten-year anniversary documentary called "Summer of Judgment" got the same reaction from me, even while it told us how Senators who voted for impeachment reacted the same way!  Senator after Senator, interviewed about that day, said, "Then, funny thing, after the vote, I went back to my office and cried."  Another said, "I cried.  Not for Nixon, God knows -- for the country, that it had come to this." Another Senator said, "Then I went back into my office and --"  he swallowed hard, "it was pretty tough.."

But now?  I think it's the feelings of connection and betrayal.  Nixon's voice and image were part of my childhood.  I'd waited up late to hear whether George Wallace might cause Nixon to lose the close race in 1968.   I remember watching his inauguration on a black-and-white TV in Mrs. Finkle's 4th grade, and his daughter's wedding.  When Nixon was under attack for Watergate, I didn't get the details, but I got the narrative:   "I'm a serious patriot trying to do the best I can to save the world, and these profane, childish, outlandish, insinuating left wing enemies are all over me. Trust me."  I did.  But he had been lying the whole time.  I'm still not over it.

In the movie,  Frost uses pages of notes to confront Nixon with quotes from some unpublished transcripts.  Nixon, as always, implies that he's being treated unfairly:  "I'm not using any notes." It's a great detail that Frost drops the notes and leans in to insist on three specific confessions. 

An earlier scene, probably the author's invention, has tipsy Nixon phoning anxious Frost late at night to chat.  Nixon is lonely, drunk, and, for once, candid.   He wants to connect to Frost, someone who, like him, has been scorned by those born to privilege.  It's a strong scene, allowing Langella to let loose, and requiring Sheen to sit still, reacting to the phone.

In the end, the movie is about something religion teaches us about:  the need for confession, the need for absolution, and the hell when it's denied. 

Read "Nixon's Voice," my reflection on Nixon in works of opera and fiction. 

Mystery Writing Lesson: 9K Words into Raven Black

Reflections on Daddy's Gone A Hunting by Mary Higgins Clark (New York: Pocket Books, 2014) and Raven Black by Ann Cleeves (New York, Thomas Dunne books, 2006).


Just 30 pages, 9000 words into Raven Black, I feel like I've been somewhere I've not been before, and I've already been drawn into the emotional lives and memories of a handful of characters.  I hope I'm not giving away too much when I report how delighted I was to realize that chapter two comes at the same event as chapter one from a different perspective.  We feel some sympathy for the lonely old man in the first chapter before we see him through the girls' eyes as both pathetic and repulsive. 


Speaking to one of the girls, he recognizes her as daughter of a schoolteacher in town.  In just these thirty pages, we get different perspectives on that schoolteacher - too strict?  wise? sympathetic?  in need of a makeover?  -- and we also get to see the town itself as picturesque enough to draw tourists, not picturesque enough to satisfy them, small enough for our characters to know each other by reputation, but lately filling with strangers. 


We do have a body, and the details, gruesome as they are, have been foreshadowed already in some ruminations on the ravens that flock on this island in the Shetlands. 


So I'm not only drawn along in the story, but I feel the lines of its world drawn tightly around my imagination.  


I compare this to the rapid-fire exposition in Daddy's Gone A Hunting.  I completed reading it yesterday, having turned page after page to see what happened next, second-guessing characters' secrets.  Still, this reader skipped along the surfaces of the story, noting plot points and feeling a bit overwhelmed by shifts of perspective every couple of pages. I was also amused and a bit irritated at how specific numerals cropped up as we were told the ages of characters, and exactly how many years ago this or that event happened. 


Clark is a descendant of Dickens, by way of soap opera.  Like Dickens, she keeps things fresh by keeping scenes brief, shifting sites frequently;  like producers of a soap opera, she also makes sure that everyone but a couple of outliers is well-built, well-groomed, on the youngish side, and she keeps introducing fresh faces well into the second half of the story.  She hit emotions hard a couple of times, giving us the simple detail that the parent turns off the porch light for the first time in years -- now that she knows her daughter will never be coming home. 


Cleeves, so far at least, is pulling me deeper into her created world.   I find in comparison how much I missed the texture of Raven Black when I was turning pages in Daddy's Gone A Hunting.