Some Speculations about Post-Secondary Education

Public post-secondary education has been much in the news lately in California. Budget shortfalls at the state level have been pinching the allocations to state university and state college systems, causing steep rises in tuition and fees to students, and cut-backs in maintenance and faculty salaries.

Over the last several decades, both the university and state systems have been rapidly expanding, to accommodate growing numbers of applicants. Private institutional tuition has been moving up rapidly too.

The original intent of public post-secondary public educational institutions has been to make undergraduate and advanced degree programs in the arts and sciences available to greater numbers of citizens, under the assumption that a broadening of the educational base has a favorable effect on the quality of society generally, with additional economic benefits, such as pure research, and vocational applications. A healthy society is an educated one, and offering a cheap alternative to expensive private institutional programs has historically been regarded as a self-evidently good investment by government.

Without going too deeply into theories of education, can we ask whether the assumptions about the advantages of a public education are as true as most people seem to have believed them to be? In other words, is it always in society's interest to devote a significant part of its resources in supporting post-secondary institutions, and if so, to what degree?

Most people accept the idea that society has a duty to provide primary and secondary school education to all of its citizens. Though the quality and value of public education differs widely across demographics, there is little doubt that requiring citizens to learn to read and write, to practice rudimentary mathematical skills, and to understand how our government works, are universally good goals. If a society is successful in providing a basic "high school" level of instruction, to achieve a level of competency for all its citizens, for free, does that suffice as a baseline responsibility or obligation, to provide post-secondary programs, on the public's behalf?

Some would argue that it is. As a beneficiary of public post-secondary education, I admit to enjoying the fruits of the broader definition of public education. I graduated from UC Berkeley in the late 1960's, then went on to graduate study elsewhere, eventually receiving two advanced degrees. It's doubtful that I would have been able to attend college at that time, without a publicly supported system, since my parents had made no provision for my anticipated college expenses, and would not have been able (had they been so inclined [alas, they were not]) to assist me in doing so, when the time arrived. Despite the fact that college tuition at that time was comparatively low, I would not have been able to attend without the scholarships and loans that I was granted.

For the first time in its history, this year's student tuition will exceed the amount of public funding to the UC budget. In effect, from a funding point of view, the state system is becoming increasingly "privatized"--with regard to the amount the users of the system are paying for their education. Students are "buying" an education, instead of being "given" one. Is this a bad thing?

As tuition has increased dramatically both in private and public institutions over the last several decades, the burden has shifted increasingly to the "users." Undergraduate and graduate program "clients" have had to take out progressively larger student "loans"--in many cases, so large that it may take decades to pay them off, once they graduate. A whole new loan industry has grown up around rapid college tuition increases, shifting the burden of support away from the government, which has had the effect of driving the increases even more.

This tuition "bubble" is now reaching a crescendo. The UC system announced a 16% annual tuition increase for the coming five year period, through 2016. Under the proposed plan, the less the state gave to the system, the more tuition would rise (to a 16% level). Because of the state's present budgetary quandaries, the 16% level would inevitably apply. Undergraduate in-state tuition at UC presently stands at $12,192/annum. Given the stagnant condition of American middle-class income over the last 40 years, it's difficult to imagine any family--even single-child units--being able to afford that kind of expense. Given the level of deferred obligation this creates, through extensive loan programs, the value of a so-called "public" post-secondary education comes into serious question.

The other side of the equation is a college degree's value to society. As the American economy declines, steadily losing manufacturing production employment to overseas venues, the importance of possessing an advanced degree has been touted as an alternative strategy to financial success in the job market. We hear continually about the value of a college degree in the new age of technology and expertise. But at no time in American history have the numbers of technocratic individuals accounted for more than a small percentage of the total work-force. The economic engine which drove American prosperity in the post-War period was not advanced technology, but assembly-line mass production. America had moved from an agrarian-based economy to a medium- and large-scale factory system in the 20th Century. By the end of the 20th, it was clear that so-called "globalization" would spell the end of that domestic paradigm. And it was clear that it would not only not be competitive in the old factory job model, but it would also not compete in the quasi-technical arena either; China and India have already seized that initiative, making most American-trained and domiciled college-degreed job-seekers irrelevant.

This does not, of course, mean that the inherent value of a college education is less. It does suggest that the value to society of offering free degree programs to the general public has been changed. If graduating seniors and advanced degree programs are turning out numbers which the general economy cannot absorb, those degrees will increasingly be seen as luxuries. There are only so many doctors, lawyers, engineers, MBA-holders, and scientists in the economy as it now exists. The percentage of "professional" class employees is a relative constant. This is true despite the supposed expansion of technical positions created by the information age revolution. It's obvious that the millions of jobs in automobile manufacturing, for instance, aren't going to be converted willy-nilly into high-level technology jobs, especially given the growing automatization of most medium- and large-scale manufacturing positions.

Government's decreasing investment in publicly run post-secondary educational programs may be seen, in the context of the decline in value of most degree-tracks, as an acknowledgement that turning out larger and larger numbers of highly-educated graduates is no longer necessary from a purely utilitarian point of view. We have become accustomed to thinking of college and university programs as de-facto systems of social initiative, in which economic imbalances can be rectified through the entitlement of needy but deserving candidates, pulling poor or disadvantaged students up through quotas and set-asides. But as the system is now becoming squeezed, the ultimate purpose of a college education seems to be more about retaining routes to social mobility, than it is about pursuing knowledge, research and economic prosperity. In other words, if the purpose of a public educational system is the transformation of society from one in which a presumed "elite" derives privileged access to the higher levels of achievement and prosperity, to one in which government facilitates a transfer of its wealth from the society at large, to identified "deserving" classes, then the question of the value to society comes directly into play. If a college degree is, in the context of the decreasing pragmatic utility, becoming a kind of luxury, then the ability to access that luxury should thrive within the private realm, not the public one. Why should society support a system which has become a luxury?

There will always be those whose talent and mastery entitle them to special consideration. Scholarships and grants in aid are usually sufficient to address that class. But the idea that the number of "qualified" applicants should be continually expanded, without limit, to include larger and larger numbers of aspirants, begs the question. What is it for? We've gotten into the habit of thinking that more and more people should be educated for more and more advanced kinds of thinking and performance. But why?

Is a good high school education insufficient to prepare a citizen for participation in a democracy? If Mexicans and Indonesians and Chinese and Indians can do the work Americans once did, for a fraction of the cost, obviously other solutions must be considered. Advanced education isn't the answer to the problem of globalization. Indeed, much of our education dollar goes to educate foreigners, and when American technology makes an innovation, the resulting formula becomes the occasion for the exploitation by foreign labor and industry.

Ultimately, as society grows, in the context of a growing automatization, the percentage of jobs for which one might need or want a college education is shrinking. Nearly every industry in America has shed jobs over the last quarter century. The notion that a new "service-oriented" "industry" is going to fill the vacuum is folly. And even if that were true, certainly the numbers of individuals needing a college education to "compete" is actually smaller in that scenario.

Unless we see a reduction in the growth of population, it seems inevitable that the need for college degree programs will decrease, as a factor of the whole population. But even with a decrease in population, the growth and sophistication of production and exchange lead inevitably to a decline in real employment opportunity.

The UC system will shrink over time. The education bubble is finally bursting, as it was bound to do. The days of cheap public post-secondary education are over, not likely to return. Those who insist that it's simply a matter of public funding priorities--of not acknowledging "the value of public education"--are deluded. The country's now full of computer science graduates but there are few jobs for them. Three generations ago, these same people would have been working in assembly lines, earning a good wage, securing a pension and possessing a premium-free health care policy. They would be dreaming of sending their kids to college to become lawyers and doctors and engineers. But that was 1955. It's now 2011. Welcome to the future.

La Boite a Joujou [1913] and The Children's Corner Suite [1908]

There is a tradition in the history of the keyboard of writing pieces designed to appeal to children, partly as a way of seducing young minds and hearts into the duties and joys of learning to play an instrument, but also as a way of exploiting the adult emulation of childhood and youth by imagining it through music. Sometimes the two overlap, and other times the compositions, designed to capture the spirit of childhood, can only be executed by an adult mind and ability. Thousands upon thousands of keyboard compositions have been created for children to play, but few of them are successful, few last. The pedagogical side of art has a distinguished history. Paul Klee, for instance, designed many of his works to be demonstrations of principles which might be apprehensible to the childhood mind. Faux naif works of art are common in painting, sculpture, theater, even architecture; and of course cartoons and children's literature comprise a significant proportion of the world's textual archive.

What makes successful "children's" art? Is it a shrewd condescension? Is it a simplification of the same aspects which make "serious" or "mature" work? Or is it a discrete dimension, all to itself, with its own laws, its own rules, its own limitations? Whatare children, anyway? Are they just small adults, or a unique kind of human identity (not yet adult), in a special estate reserved for the innocent and unspoiled? Do children feel joy and sadness and fear and exhilaration and emptiness in the same way we do as adults? If not, then in what ways do they experience life differently?

Obviously, different experiences in childhood produce different adults. Children who are read to, instead of being set in front of televisions for hours a day, probably develop a verbal imagination, instead of, or to a greater degree, than those children who have a more exclusively "visual" upbringing, with television or computer screens. As a child in the 1950's, I was among the first generation of children who grew up watching television. The earliest televisions had very small screens, were only black and white, and the picture quality, in retrospect, was incredibly poor compared to contemporary technologies. But their effect was essentially the same. For instance, my education was enhanced by having the opportunity of seeing hundreds of old movies from the 1930's and 1940's, which were routinely shown on daytime television in those years. I remember "two on the aisle" programs, which would show complete, unedited feature films, with few commercials, five days a week on local television. I saw more movies than my parents--who had grown up in the pre-war years--ever could have, going to see them in theaters. When we went as a family to the movies, which wasn't often, it was usually to the Drive-Ins (or "motor movies") with big outdoor screens in front of huge parking lots with little speakers on posts. That was a separate experience which most children growing up today will never know.

Like most middle-class children of my generation, I was put practicing piano--taking weekly or bi-weekly lessons from a teacher. I was expected to spend 30 minutes a day, working on the "exercises" and simplified versions of familiar classical pieces. Progress, as I recall, was slow, and the teacher was often bored or frustrated with me. The pieces I was given to play were usually puerile and stupid sounding, and had naive themes, such as "rowing the boat" or "jumping jack" or "toy soldiers marching"--and were illustrated in a style which would have been contemporary with book illustration circa 1905. It all felt very old-fashioned and mechanical. By the time I was about 13, I had convinced my parents I'd had enough, and these lessons stopped. Later, in my mid-teens, I got interested in jazz, and later still, original classical pieces. I'm not sure my earlier "training" actually did me any good, but I progressed much more rapidly when interested, than when I'd been forced to practice in childhood. It seemed to me at the time that the whole point of learning an instrument was based on the concept that devoting a certain amount of time in childhood, developing coordination and focusing one's attention on a task, was an inherently good thing; the music, in other words, was just a pretext for this good work--of no ultimate value in itself.

I remember my first piano teacher--who was a neighbor and friend of my parents--tried to motivate her students by giving little marble busts of famous composers for the completion of certain thresholds of progress in the teaching course(s). I think I was given my bust of Chopin as a consolation prize, even though I hadn't really earned it. I promptly managed to drop Mr. Chopin, and chipped off the end of his sharp snowy nose--and ever afterward, the little Polish genius sat atop the little spinet in our living room, a casualty of the war between me and my parents over how little I was allowed to spend at the keyboard.

Among the list of famous composers who've created works inspired by, or designed to be played by, children, isn't very long. A few, like Debussy, seem to have felt a special kinship with the childhood imagination. Debussy's oeuvre includes a lot of keyboard work, because that was his instrument. He was a revolutionary composer in his time, but he kept a special place in his heart for works inspired by childhood, prominently among which, are The Children's Corner Suite [1908], and La Boite a Joujou[1913].

The relationship between our childhood musical experiences, and how we experience music later in life, is a diverting question. Children raised by parents for whom the ultimate, exclusive expression of music is rock & roll, or hip-hop (& rap), in whose presence the predominant musical environment is that, must have a very different sense of the world. This is a question of taste, but also the dilemma of the transformation of the public sense of culture which occurred during the 20th Century. It isn't that children no longer have a sense of the history of serious music, but that their sense of history itself may be said to "begin" at about the point that American musical roots were forming, towards the end of the 19th Century. The divergent streams of musical development which occurred at about the time that Debussy was composing these works (about childhood, or "for" childhood), have channeled his music away from the public consciousness into a quiet backwater which few people (or children) are likely to experience. Consequently, these works are now regarded as rather obscure. Nothing unusual about this, of course, but worth noting when talking about them.

The positive values once associated with the teaching of instrumental proficiency--as a good in itself--apart from the inherent quality of the music--have fallen away. Who today, would suggest to a child that they take up the electric guitar as a training device, in the way that parents once were expected to encourage their children to "take up an instrument" for their own good? The tendency to emulate the playing of an instrument, as a way to express a musical interest is something that happens later, in adolescence, out of pure interest. It's also an aspect of the adolescent cultural tradition, something which simply didn't exist prior to the 20th Century (and didn't really gain momentum until after World War II). The notion of a group of kids making a band with guitars often may only be the expression of the fantasy of participating in the teenaged culture, a specific segment of the musical culture, not restricted to adolescence, but certainly concentrated inside it. The spectacle of an aging adolescent musical culture in which players perpetuate their identity into middle, even old, age is one we've just begun to see over the last quarter century. It's a peculiar phenomenon, raising issues about the long term endurance of the adolescent popular culture. Privately, I've wondered for some time about whether popular adolescent musical culture is not in fact stuck in a rut; the rapid-fire, aggressive, frequently provocative (even grimly noxious and coarse) nature of popular contemporary musical expression, has been going on so long!) Is this a sign of some sickness of our society, or just evidence of the strength of a by-now quite mature (or chronically immature or angry) style?

I have no answers for any of these questions. Dwelling on the musical styles of a century ago may just be pure nostalgia by now. Debussy's Children's Corner suite may sound entirely out of step with our hardened, armored, suspicious milieu. Children must be acculturated with the raunchy, lewd and violent realities of our time. Who would spoil them with the stale cream-puffs of yesteryear? In any case, here are, first, a suite of photographs I made from my copy of the original piano reduction (or version) of Debussy's ballet for children, La Boite a Joujou. Though originally intended to be bought for, and owned and appreciated by, children, it's become a collector's item today, its original pochoir (1) color illustrations arresting, and unusual. Like certain earlier kinds of mechanical or handcrafted illustration techniques--photogravure, for instance, or outdated photo-reproduction processes, such as platinum-palladium prints--pochoir produces intense color images which rival most common media visual display of our time.

Joujou is not a great work of art, but its main theme is quite charming (2), which I've reproduced below (#7 in sequence). The others show the original titling and scene illustration. If they seem somewhat less self-consciously "innocent" than what kids are used to today, I would suggest that this is decadence of our cultural time. Disney's cartoon movies today seem intended for very glib adults, filled with sarcasms and bitter ironies and relentless brute provocation, instead of wooden doll figures and stuffed animals. It's true that human society and "nature" are a good deal more competitive, violent and harsh than how we think of childhood. And of course, there is a body of thought which regards children (or the child world) equally as violent, scheming and selfish as the adult world undoubtedly is. Privately, I think that most children tend to imitate what they see in their immediate environment--inside the family. Children who are violent, angry or difficult in other ways, may simply be emulating tendencies they perceive in their parents.

An additional treat is to listen to the piano versions of the Children's Corner suite. YouTube has an excellent set of recordings done by a Czech classical pianist [1930- ]:

Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum

Jimbo's Lullaby

Serenade of the Doll

The Snow is Dancing

The Little Shepherd

Golliwogg's Cakewalk

The style of Moravec's playing is slightly "delicate"--especially with Golliwogg, which I'd prefer done with a bit more élan, but overall this is a wonderful interpretation, especially the first piece.

Children may respond to adult versions of childhood. There's a reflective quality to all art made for children. Children aren't simply learning to be adults. They're learning to see themselves as we seem them--quite a different thing. Thus, children discern what is expected of them, what they're supposed to want to become. They learn to imitate what they realize we want them to be, rather a different thing than desiring to be something out of original motivation. What do children want? 19th Century writers seemed to think that children delight in being spoiled, frightened and comforted, in about that order. Many religions treat nearly everyone as a child, in order that we might accept what we are told is the correct behavior, the right choices. Perhaps the deeper truth is that we are indeed alone in the world, that there are no fixed answers, and we must determine for ourselves what the best behavior is, and how we should go about building upon past knowledge--both as individuals (from childhood onward), and as a species (humankind).

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1. For Further Reading on Pochoir Books:

National Museum of History and Technology. Pochoir. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1979.

University of California, Santa Barbara. Pochoir: Flowering of the Hand-Color Process in Prints and Illustrated Books, 1910:1935: An Exhibition by Burr Wallen and Stephen Greengard. Santa Barbara, CA: UCSB Art Museum, 1977.

Valotaire, M. “The Pochoir Process of Colour Reproduction.” In The Studio, XCII, 1926, pgs. 236-240.

2. Piano reduction of La Boite a Joujou for piano in five parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

BEAT THE DEVIL [1953] - Improvisational Camp Spoof Before its Time

Movies made before World War II may seem very peculiar to contemporary audiences. Working with old style playwrights, and movie sets, with few technical sophistications at their disposal, producers and directors wishing to shake things up or inject a little frisson of surprise or the unexpected were restrained by traditional narrative concepts.

In France, the so-called New Wave film directors, inspired by the Noir tradition in America, began to experiment with plot and sequence. Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, Resnais--the "auteurs" of a new kind of movie-making. The heroes of this new approach were Jean Renoir, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, the Marx Brothers and John Huston, among others. The French emphasized a sense of free variation, spontaneity, diversion, unexpected cuts, and tangential elaboration, techniques which thwarted the dictates of plot formulae, and kept audiences off-balance.

The idea that you could make a movie which "didn't make any sense" or which played with or satirized its own genre, was a very new idea in 1953, when Beat the Devil was being made. Huston had already completed many of the films for which he would be revered [The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), Key Largo (1948), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), The Red Badge of Courage (1951), The African Queen (1951), and Moulin Rouge (1952)]. He was on a roll! For a change of pace, he decided to try his hand at a cinematic spoof, which would satirize the very mode of presentation he'd succeeded at so well during the previous decade. Beat the Devil would go through the motions of a noir picaresque adventure while poking fun at itself the while. Crucial to the idea was the casting of Bogart, and minor character-actor veterans Robert Morley and Peter Lorre (who had performed so admirably in earlier Huston efforts), to give a veneer of legitimacy to the outward stereotype. Feminine interest would be provided by a "blonde" Jennifer Jones--looking as good as ever--and on the "dark side of the force" Gina Lollabrigida.

Though it is not now much remarked, Huston's career in the movies had begun on the writing side. He'd penned several complete screenplays by the beginning of the war, and had a knowledge of literature which rivaled that of most professional movie directors. Huston could be said to have had a fairly "literary" approach to movie-making, so there would be no point in attempting to describe Beat the Devil as an "unconscious" effort, or an unintended mishap, though that appraisal has been a tempting explanation to many critics over the years.

Truman Capote's only previous screenwriting contribution had been some supplementary dialogue on De Sica's Indiscretion of an American Wife [1953]. Huston hired him at $1500 week to collaborate with him on the script, and the two stayed just ahead of the shooting schedule, at times completing the next day's action in the wee hours.* This got to be a joke among the members of the crew, that Huston and Capote were becoming "intimate." It wasn't long before the original story-line had undergone some sweeping changes. Capote had by this time published two novels, and a book of much-admired short stories, so his reputation was well-established.

I'm not familiar with the book upon which the movie is based. Written by Claud Cockburn, under the pseudonym James Helvick, the book is apparently a deliberate attempt to write a straight noir whodunit, nothing like the adaptation which would be made of it here. Cockburn was a Communist journalist of the 1930's, a distant relation of Evelyn Waugh, who was attacked by George Orwell for his Stalinist sympathies. He published his memoirs in the 1950's and '60's. When Huston acquired the rights to the story, did he already have in mind a satiric or "camp" version in mind? Was his hiring of Capote--a notoriously louche gamin--merely a convenience (he was living in Rome at the time--the film would be filmed mostly in Italy), or did he scheme to exploit the witty young novelist's archly ironic turn of mind to convert the straight narrative into a spoof? Perhaps Huston touches on this in his own autobiography.

Claud Cockburn

In any event, what we get in the movie version feels like a half-hearted attempt at serious acting, and a story so silly as to invite derisive guffaws. Was Huston trying to undercut a whole archive of pretentious movie-making history, or did he think of this as some kind of half-serious new comic trope? The movie begins in Italy, in a little seaport town. The local brass band is oompah-ing around the town square as an unlikely foursome of bedraggled looking shady characters is accompanied by the local police to jail. The movie consists of a flashback to the events leading up to this point. Bogart plays a character not unlike the one he portrayed in Casablanca, a sort of down-at-heel soldier-of-fortune-cum-businessman, an exile from ordinary life. He dons the familiar white dinner jacket and black bow-tie from the earlier incarnation, and speaks the same hard-boiled, world-weary cynical talk. As Peterson, one of the four disreputable characters on the make, Robert Morley reprises the Sydney Greenstreet role from Maltese Falcon, dispensing platitudes and scheming away through his quivering jowels, as Ivor Barnard (in his last role, he died the same year the film was made) replicates the Wilmer Cook role (played by Elisha Cook Jr.), the little hot-headed gunman of the previous film. Peter Lorre, mostly playing an older version of himself (as Joel Cairo in Falcon), rolls his eyes coyly and cuts loose with some of Capote's sharpest dialogue: "Time, time, what is time? The Swiss manufacture it. The French hoard it. The Italians squander it. The Americans say it is money. Hindus say it does not exist. You know what I say? I say time is a crook."

The story line itself is so ingeniously simple, it almost doesn't add up. A quartet of small time confidence men find themselves stranded in an Italian seaport waiting for their ship to be made ready for the trip across the Mediterranean to Africa. This gang of oddballs has entered into a partnership with a gold-digging couple--Billy Dannreuther (Bogart) and his wife Marie (Lollabrigida)--in hopes of bidding on a tract of land on the Dark Continent rumored to be rich in uranium deposits.

An English couple, played stiffly by Edward Underdown (as Harry Chelm), and Jennifer Jones (as Mrs.), seem at first to be casual, if somewhat eccentric, tourists befriending the Dannreuthers. Everyone is trying to pretend they're not after what they're really after, so the dialogue has an inherent double-entendre quality, even without the larger frame of burlesque through which the audience sees things. Everyone plays it straight, no matter how absurd everything becomes. The four "desperate characters" plot and scheme with Dannreuther, while Dannreuther and Mrs. Chelm start an open-ended affair.

In due course it is revealed that instead of being a well-heeled British Lord with a landed estate, Chelm is just another measly crook on the make for the uranium deposits. When the gang of four discover this, the plot thickens. At length, the little tramp steamer sails, and the story resumes on shipboard. The major, whom it turns out is an assassin (who's already killed one official in London whom he suspects will blow the whistle on the caper), attempts to stab Chelm while the ship is marooned from a blown engine. Dannreuther prevents this, but Mrs. Chelm betrays her husband by fingering him for attempted murder (of the Major), and the loony captain has him chained in his room. The goofy romance between Bogart (Dannreuther) and Jennifer Jones (Mrs. Chelm) seems on the point of realization, when the ship suddenly begins to sink. Chelm escapes and jumps ship, while the rest of the group makes its escape via life-boat, landing on an African beach. Accosted by Moroccan militiamen on horses, they're captured and taken for interrogation at the local police headquarters. Bribes are tendered, and the motley crew returns to Italy, presumably to reinitiate their plot. But Scotland Yard has sent a man to track down the perpetrator of a certain London case, who arrests the four after a brief interrogation. In the closing scene, Mrs. Chelm receives a cable from British East Africa, revealing that Chelm (who has not drowned as everyone had assumed) has made his way to the uranium mineral site and secured the rights. Mrs. Dannreuther faints. Mrs. Chelm is consumed in blissful tears. Dannreuther (Bogart) reads the cable, and breaks out into hysterical laughter, exclaiming with meaningful irony "this is the end. . .this is the end."

Straight Film Noir, like the hardboiled crime novel genre upon which it is based, nearly always teetered on the brink of absurdity. Artistic license required an exaggeration of the human capacity for larceny and violence, to a degree that usually seemed over the top. The purification of the style which reached its peak from the late 1930's to the late 1950's, may have occurred later, with such sophisticated reinterpretations as Chinatown [1974], Body Heat [1981] or LA Confidential [1997]. But the neo-noir tendency shares with its model an appreciation for the qualities which are endemic, specific to the genre. Conscious parodic reactions are familiar today, but those spawned in Europe, where American cinematic excess was always seen as a kind of cartoon anyway, always seem pale by comparison. But unconscious parody, or the weariness of decadent regard, might see in humor the possibility for a third rail, which Capote (and perhaps Huston himself) interpreted as a form of pop camp. Indeed, this film makes a lot more sense as a comedy--despite the off-stage violence--than any exercise in detection, exotic "intrigue," romantic melodrama, or free-floating suspense. Like most Huston films, the cinematography and pacing are straightforward and no-nonsense; filmed in Italy, it exploits the standard picturesque scenery to full advantage, creating effects which reminded some viewers of some post-War Italian avant-garde B&W movies. Improvisational movie-making (of the kind Capote and Huston must certainly have imagined, laboring away on their shooting-script in their director's tent late into the wee hours), which found its expression in later auteurs (such as Quentin Tarantino), was an approach that few would have thought interesting or fruitful in 1953--which obviously accounts for the misinterpretation(s) the film has been subject to over the decades. The underlying subtext of the overt narrative is the conflict between the minds of its progenitors, and the third-rate material they had to work with. On one level, it's simply the difference between real dramatic action, and the typical whodunit cliché which shrewd producers usually chose to cash in on. Who knows how Huston may have conned his backers into investing in this effort? Had they known, it's unlikely the movie would ever have gotten made. Many, many bad movies are the result of bad decisions based on market analysis and notoriety. In this case, a great director, a great writer, and half a dozen major box office stars conspired to make an anti-classic spoof, something which they probably had no idea would happen at the beginning. But by the end, it was surely plain for all to see. Bogart, who had a nice piece of his own change invested in the production, probably was resigned to failure by the end of production. His slightly hysterical laugh at the end is as much a gesture of surreal resignation, as it is a grateful sigh of relief that the whole affair was over and done with.

Bogart would only have three and a half years more to live, but he still had The Caine Mutiny, Sabrina, The Barefoot Contessa, The Left Hand of God, and The Desperate Hours ahead of him. Huston still had Moby Dick, The Misfits, Adrian Messenger, Fat City, The Man Who Would Be King, Wise Blood, Under the Volcano, Prizzi's Honor, and The Dead to do. Jennifer Jones, who comes off quite well in this farce, didn't have much left in the tank, and for my money, Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing was her last performance of substance.

The ragtag collection of characters almost feels like a circus troupe. As a footnote to that, one might recall that three years later, Gina Lollabrigida would play opposite Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster in Trapeze, a circus high-wire drama.

Today Beat the Devil can be viewed in its entirety on the following YouTube OpenFlix site, or here onhulu TV.

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*I read just now that Helvick had been hired to collaborate with Huston on the script, but that Helvick split during production, so Huston needed a replacement on short notice; conveniently, Capote was living nearby in Rome, hence the connection. That's an unsubstantiated account, but it could well be true. Though it certainly would be best if I had read the novel itself, I think the point of my post doesn't require it--my interest is in the use Huston/Capote make of the story, not the story basis itself. Movies aren't the books they're made from, but independent artifacts which are often altered and augmented during production. Among the films which one might consider in the improvisatory category, Beat the Devil seems an obvious choice.

Creeley's Away -- again and again then

Creeley's Away [1976] comes right at the end of his middle period, which begins with the publication of Pieces in 1968-69, continues with 1234567890 [1971], St. Martin's [1971], A Day Book [1972], Listen [1972], His Idea [1973], and Thirty Things [1974], and concludes with Hello [1976] and Presences [1976]. It was a time of convulsive change in American culture, as it was a time of change for Creeley himself, as his 20 year marriage to Bobbie Louise Hawkins ended that year. The deconstruction of his earlier style (in For Love [1962]), presaged in Words [1967], was complete, the process comprising a record of self-analysis and personal transformation, common to many artists of his generation during the period of the 1960's and '70's.

I've always been moved by a group of poems in Away, iconic works which signify for me the distillate of Creeley's thinking about consciousness, isolation, and the self-reflexive nature of the act of writing. Whereas the poems in St. Martin's, His Idea and Thirty Things seem like recreations or ironic conceptual takes, the poems in Away feel much closer to the bone, necessary invocations of perceptual disorientation and emotional dilemma. As the relationship with Bobbie wound down, there was an exhaustion, a clearing away of presumptions, of shared understandings, leaving him, for the first time perhaps, since the late 1940's, in a position of ultimate loneliness and clarity. It probably wasn't a happy time, but it produced some of his best poems.

The ones I'm thinking of--the four quoted here--share a certain directness and coherence. The emptiness of the "room" of his life now echoes with a resonant attention, allowing him to focus on that isolation as a literal fact of perception.

SOUND

Hearing a car pass--

that insistent distance

from here to there,

sitting here.

Sunlight

shines through the green leaves,

patterns of light and dark,

shimmering.

But so quiet

now the car's gone,

sounds of myself smoking,

my head writing.

The grudging, methodical pressure of the advance of incremental perception, recorded in the simplest terms, is peaceful, but alienating. The emotional desperation of the loss of the Other, a respondent to the nervous, habitual process of speaking, marking event and observation with exaggerated calm, magnifies his emptiness. The subtly private noises, sound of breathing, scratch of pencil on paper, soft swish of automobile tires passing by in street, dappling of leaf-light through window, a measure of distance ("from here to there"), mind taking what's given, nothing left of it.

HERE

No one

else in the room

except you.

.

Mind's a form

of taking

it all.

.

And the room

opens

and closes.

The divisions of the poem's progress, marking the gradual movement of thought watching thought in a contraction of attention, to a vanishing point. The mind as room, opening, closing, measuring its dimension, as of eyes what's seen, of ears what's heard, fingers what's felt, the envelope of consciousness like a definition of what is. The unavoidable. What we're in.

FUNNY

Raining here

in little pieces

of rain.

Wet, brother,

behind the ears.

I love your hands.

And you too,

rain.

You insist on rain

because you are

no less than water,

no more than wet.

The starved self spontaneously conjures sensuality, rain the symbol of a consuming baptism of immersion in a larger "community" of feeling--is wishful thinking. Who is "the brother" we crave? A common humanity? A longed-for attachment.

OUT

Let me walk to you

backwards

down a long street.

.

Here is the rain again.

I hear it

in my ear here.

.

What fun

to be done

if not already

done.

.

We were going

out.

The reversal of intention implied by walking backwards (through time and space) to a place one had been before. But to what point? Like putting a question-mark at the end of a long sentence to emphasize the upturned tone of voice. And once again the rain chills the ear-lobe and returns the mind to its familiar body consciousness, the sphere of its own knowing, consumed by segments of task, worked across a distance, dropping markers. To accomplish what? Finally flipped over into departure, the sardonic flattening of potential, pulling the rug out from under, what fun. Ha ha. To be done with something that long, memorable, finally painful, hurtful, wasted, gone, dead.

Such clarity may be gruesomely intense--but yield up amazing sequences of apprehension. Which is where we came in. Inside these poems are voids of time and space, folded up time saved in little boxes of retention. They will stay there, and be there again, someday. Then we'll read them again, in that time.

Justice's Incident in a Rose Garden

Gardener Sir, I encountered Death

Just now among the roses.

Thin as a scythe he stood there.

I knew him by his pictures.

He had his black coat on,

Black gloves, and a broad black hat.

I think he would have spoken,

Seeing his mouth stood open.

Big it was, with white teeth.

As soon as he beckoned, I ran.

I ran until I found you.

Sir, I am quitting my job.

I want to see my sons

Once more before I die.

I want to see California.

Master Sir, You must be that stranger

Who threatened my gardener.

This is my property, sir.

I welcome only friends here

Death Sir, I knew your father

And we were friends at the end.

As for your gardener,

I did not threaten him.

Old men mistake my gestures.

I only meant to ask him

To show me to his master.

I take it you are he?

--Donald Justice [1925-2004]

This poem by Donald Justice is one of the classics of 20th Century verse. It's like a Medieval mystery play, a simple dramatic action intended to demonstrate a moral lesson. It's one of my favorites. The photo above is of the Berkeley Rose Garden, a public space sited in a small steep ravine in the Berkeley hills. The terraced amphitheater was completed in 1937, under the Works Progress Administration, based on a design suggested by Bernard Maybeck. It's a beautiful place any time of year, but best in the Spring when the roses are in full bloom.