Author: allen0997

Call Me by Your Name ~ A Capsule Book Review

Call Me by Your Name ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

Call Me by Your Name, a novel by a writer named Andre Aciman, is set on the Italian Riviera during a summer in the mid-1980s. Elio is seventeen, very astute and with more depth than most people have at three times his age. He plays the piano, knows several languages, and his work for the summer is transcribing Haydn’s The Seven Last Words of Christ. When was the last time you knew a seventeen-year-old boy who could boast of such splendid accomplishments?

Elio’s father is an American college professor and his mother Italian. They are what are called “ex-pats.” They live on the beautiful Italian Riviera near the spot where Percy Shelley drowned in 1822 at the age of twenty-nine. Every summer Elio’s family hosts an academic to stay with them for about six weeks or so. During the summer in which the story takes place, a twenty-four-year-old man named Oliver is chosen from among other applicants. Despite his young age, Oliver is also an academic and is busy working on a book on an esoteric, scholarly subject. That doesn’t mean, however, that during his summer with Elio’s family he doesn’t have plenty of time for nightlife, tennis, swimming and lying around naked, or practically naked, in the sun. Oh, and he’s also very good looking with a fabulous body. And, when it comes to sex, he is absolutely freewheeling, not bound up in rigidity and Puritanism the way most American men are.

So, the story of this summer in the mid-1980s is being told to us in the first-person voice of Elio, about thirty years or so after it occurred. In a way, it is a coming-of-age story, but with a twist. Most adolescent boys living on the Italian Riviera with their well-to-do and sophisticated parents are going to become infatuated and obsessed with a dark-eyed Italian woman with large breasts. In Elio’s case, however, the object of his lust and affection is Oliver, the young American man who came for the summer and changed Elio’s emotional landscape and the way he would forever view the world.

The words “homosexual” or “gay” are never used in Call Me by Your Name, but that’s what we’re talking about here. There is absolutely a blasé attitude toward sex and gender identity that is very European and that most Americans would find offensive. Americans separate “gay” and “straight” like they separate cars and motorcycles. The European attitude toward sex is that it is more of a continuum. If today you are with a woman and tomorrow a man, who cares? It’s just different branches of the same tree.

Copyright © 2017 by Allen Kopp  

by allen0997

Monster

I always loved the monster movies from the golden age of Hollywood filmmaking, and I always had a lot of sympathy for the monster. So what if he carries off the glamorous female lead! Let him have her! As soon as he finds out what a harridan she is, he’ll send her home in a cab.

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by allen0997

Intolerance (1916)

Intolerance (1916)

Movie pioneer D. W. Griffith directed the epic silent film Intolerance in 1916. It was noted for its length (3 hours, 17 minutes) and for its lavish sets. The picture below from Intolerance is of Babylon during the reign of Belshazzar.

Intolerance Babylon setintolerance

by allen0997

The Heavenly Table ~ A Capsule Book Review

the-heavenly-table-cover

The Heavenly Table ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

The Heavenly Table by Donald Ray Pollock is set in the year 1917. Three brothers—Cane, Cob and Chimney Jewett—are dirt poor. They live in a shack with a dirt floor and barely have enough food to eat to go on living. Cane, at twenty-one is the oldest, the most sensible of the three and the only one who might be considered handsome (if he could get himself clean). The middle brother is Cob, who is fat and a simpleton. The youngest brother, Chimney, is only seventeen. He’s reckless, impulsive, foul-mouthed and obsessed with sex. When the Jewett brothers’ father, Pearl, dies suddenly one day during his labors, the three boys decide their life is going to be different from that moment on. They kill Mr. Tardweller, the landowner for whom they work for pennies, and after they’ve done that, they go on a spree robbing banks.

Of course, a life of crime requires keeping on the move. As the Jewetts move around, being pursued, of course, by law enforcement officials, they develop a reputation that is bigger than they are. Crimes that they never dreamed of committing are attributed to them. They become, in a way, folk heroes among a downtrodden people who believe the little man will never get a break in life. And, as bad as the Jewett boys are, they really aren’t all that bad. As they immerse themselves in a life of crime, we begin to see little pieces of their decency, even from Chimney, the roughest of the three. They want to make it to Canada, where they believe they can live a peaceful life and eventually partake of the Heavenly Table with the money they have stolen. You and I know, though, that criminals, after committing violent crimes, rarely have their fondest wishes realized.

There is a host of secondary characters in The Heavenly Table. Ellsworth and Eula Fiddler are a poor farm couple whose no-account son, Eddie, causes them plenty of heartache. They believe that Eddie has gone off to fight in the Great War, until they learn what really happened to him. Lieutenant Bovard is an officer in an Ohio army camp where men are being prepared to fight. He is self-loathing because he is secretly a homosexual. He longs to die on the front in the war with a handsome young recruit by his side named Frank Waller. Jasper Cone is a much-maligned outhouse inspector in the little town of Meade, Ohio. His job is to go around the town checking the level in outhouses to make sure they are not in danger of overflowing. A young black man named Sugar lives off a woman in Detroit until she takes up with a younger man and kicks Sugar out of the house. Homeless, Sugar is penniless and mean. He begins rambling to find his way in the world (another woman to support him?). Eventually the paths of all these characters intersect.

The Heavenly Table is full of dark humor and violence. Despite its gothic tone, it is breezy, one might almost say, light, reading. It’s full of folksy anecdotes about things that happened in people’s lives to make them what they are. It’s set in a much quainter, simpler time (1917), and its evocation of that time makes us feel we’re there. Imagine every house in town having an outhouse, while the city council is putting out calls for indoor plumbing. Imagine having a “Whore Barn” on the edge of your town that caters mostly to young soldiers at the nearby training camp, while the “clap doctor” is railing at them about the dangers of venereal disease. Imagine trying to get a 1917 car going and running while you tool around the countryside. The next thing you know, they’ll be converting the livery stable into an auto repair shop.

Copyright © 2017 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

The Boys on the Rock ~ A Capsule Book Review

the-boys-on-the-rock-cover

The Boys on the Rock ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

The Boys on the Rock by John Fox is similar in theme, tone and style to J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. Both are coming-of-age stories with the protagonist/antihero as first-person narrator. In The Boys on the Rock, we have Bill “Billy” Connors as the Holden Caulfield-like narrator. In 1968, we find Billy as a high school sophomore. He’s an only child and his parents are off on their own planet. His mother is an attractive thirty-four-year-old housewife, and his father is ten years older than she is and getting old before his time. Billy is on the swim team at school and, except for swimming, he isn’t much interested in school. He experiments with dating girls, following the lead of all the other boys, but that isn’t really where his interests lie. He smokes, drinks, swears, hangs out with his friends, and lives a private, inner life.

During the arduous and drawn-out process of selecting a presidential candidate in 1968, Billy volunteers in the campaign office of his congressional district in New York for Eugene McCarthy. Billy is for Eugene McCarthy, he says, because McCarthy is against the war and against the draft. Like all the other boys his age, Billy is afraid of having to fight in the Vietnam war. He believes that a liberal candidate like Eugene McCarthy, if elected to the White House, will end the war before Billy has to face the possibility of being drafted into the army.

While working on the McCarthy campaign, Billy meets Al DiCiccio, a college student four years older than Billy to whom Billy is immediately attracted. That’s why Billy was never much of the hit with the gals. He prefers his own gender. He isn’t surprised by his feelings for Al DiCiccio, but he has to keep it a secret. He knows how he will be treated if the truth comes out. When he wants to tell somebody what he is feeling and to ask for advice about “what to do,” he decides to tell a young swim coach at his school, believing the coach will be, if not understanding, at least sympathetic. The coach advises Billy to seek counseling to become “cured” of what the coach sees as a sickness. This is exactly the kind of advice that Billy doesn’t want to hear.

When Billy discovers that his feelings for Al DiCiccio are reciprocated, the two meet in secret a few times, but they are essentially incompatible and the relationship is doomed to failure. Al is interested in a political career, he says, and he believes that a politician must have a wife and children. He is willing to end his volatile relationship with Billy on those terms. We know, though, that with Al out of the picture, there will be others for Billy to turn to. He is, after all, only seventeen years old. He’s just getting started.

The Boys on the Rock is a small, gem-like novel (146 pages) incorporating themes of family, friendship, alienation, and finding one’s way in the world. It’s almost effortless reading and reminds us how effective simple, uncluttered, first-person narration can be.

Copyright © 2017 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

The Young Pope ~ A Capsule Review

the-young-pope

The Young Pope ~ A Capsule Review by Allen Kopp

His name is Lenny Belardo. When he is about ten years old, his ridiculous-looking hippie parents drop him off at a Catholic orphanage, where a kind nun named Sister Mary becomes a surrogate mother to him. Fast-forward about thirty-seven years. Lenny Belardo is the first American Pope, Pope Pius XIII, Holy Father to a billion Catholics around the globe. In HBO’s ten-part series, The Young Pope, English actor Jude Law plays Lenny Belardo/Pope Pius XIII with an American accent and a sleek hairpiece.

With his youth and good looks, Pope Pius XIII could be the flashiest Pope ever, but he is just the opposite. He doesn’t care about being famous or about inspiring adoration in the masses. He is not the traditional Pope; he is many things; he is a contradiction. He smokes cigarettes. Some think he is a saint, while others fear him. In his first homily to the public, delivered at nighttime in St. Peter’s Square, he appears in very dim light so people cannot see his face. He won’t allow himself to be photographed or for his likeness to be used on Vatican souvenirs to sell to tourists. When someone asks, “What is his sexual orientation?,” the answer is, “He doesn’t have one.” He wants to flush out homosexuals and pedophiles from the priesthood. “Homosexuality and pedophilia are two very different things,” a fellow priest points out to him. “Yes,” he says, “but there is no room in the priesthood for either of them.” In his searing address to the Conclave of Cardinals, he tells them he wants complete obedience to himself and absolute devotion to God. From now he, he tells them, they will isolate themselves from the world so they might worship God in the appropriate manner. This means they must give up their worldly lives and return to the original notion of what it means to be a priest.

As we see in American politics, the Pope’s rivals will attempt to destroy him by any means at their disposal. When they try to manufacture a clandestine love affair for him with the wife of one of the Vatican Swiss Guards, it backfires. The Cardinal Secretary of State, who orchestrated the invented affair, ends up apologizing to the Pope and kissing his foot in the Vatican garden. The Pope refuses to play into the hands of the entrenched, old-guard priests who have been in the Vatican for decades and have outlived their usefulness. He refuses to resort to the old tricks that have been used for centuries. Rivalries and jealousies among the cardinals mean nothing to him. He is supremely confident. If he isn’t a saint, he seems like one at times. Someone asks him, “Just who are you?” They can’t figure him out. This makes for very interesting TV for the discriminating viewer who is looking for something a little more challenging to watch and think about than the usual TV fare.

Copyright © 2017 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997