Tag: Allen Kopp

First Man ~ A Capsule Movie Review

First Man ~ A Capsule Movie Review by Allen Kopp 

It’s hard to believe it’s been forty-nine years since the first manned space flight to the moon. In July 1969, America bested the Soviet Union in the space race by overcoming the immense dangers and technological challenges of putting a living, breathing human man on the face of the moon and safely returning him to earth. It was the culmination of all the manned space flights of the sixties. The moon was always the ultimate goal. As John F. Kennedy said in 1961, “We do it not because it’s easy but because it’s hard.”

First Man is about the first manned space flight to the moon but, more than that, it’s a personal story about the man, Neil Armstrong, who first stepped out of the “lunar module” onto the surface of the moon—the first-ever human being from earth to set foot on another world outside his own. First Man chronicles the difficulties involved in getting a man on the moon and the personal toll to those involved.

Neil Armstrong was a regular-guy family man. He was quiet, modest, self-effacing and not given to displays of ego or emotion, even with his family. When his small daughter, Karen, dies of cancer, he carries his grief alone. He works in one of the most dangerous professions known to man, but he never shows his fear or lets it get the best of him, even when some of his colleagues die in horrific “accidents.” And when he becomes, for a time, the most famous man on earth for being the first man on the moon, he doesn’t care about adoration or fame. During a press conference when a reporter asks him how he felt when he was chosen to be the head of the first manned mission to the moon, he says, “I was pleased.” When called upon to expound upon these feelings, he says, “I was pleased.” This simple phrase encapsulates his demeanor perfectly.

Current movie star Ryan Gosling (La La Land, Blade Runner 2049) plays Neil Armstrong with humility and sincerity. We never feel like we’re watching a movie star justifying his twelve-million dollar paycheck so he can line up his next twelve-million-dollar project. An actress named Claire Foy, whom I had never seen before, is impressive as Neil Armstrong’s wife, Janet. She also seems simple and sincere. We see what she’s going through, knowing that her husband might never come home again from his latest mission. She has to corral the kids and deal with obstreperous reporters on her front lawn. At one point she stands up to the fellows at NASA when they try to assure her that everything is all right and she tells them they’re like a bunch of little boys playing with balsawood airplanes and they don’t know what they’re doing.

First Man is an impressive October movie (with a knock-out music score and special effects) that might disappear without being seen amid all the youth-oriented fluff and crap that floods multiplex movie screens. It’s a serious movie for the serious moviegoer. There are no women in lingerie, no risqué jokes, no bad language (one use of the “F” word that I noticed), no car chases, no explosions, no boudoir scenes, and no reason not to see it.

Copyright © 2018 by Allen Kopp

 

by allen0997

The Ox-Bow Incident ~ A Capsule Book Review

The Ox-Bow Incident ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp 

Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s 1940 novel, The Ox-Bow Incident, is set in the American West in 1895. While ostensibly a “western,” it’s about something more than ridin’ and shootin’ and shootin’ and ridin’. It’s about a group of mostly decent men who, following their “leader,” with nothing more to go on than hearsay,  take the law into their own hands and perform an act that is reprehensible and inexcusable.

Art Croft and Gil Carter are cowboys and best friends (not the kind in Brokeback Mountain). While the story is not about Art Croft, he is narrating; he is the “voice” of the story. Cattlemen in 1895 fear nothing more than rustlers. Word has reached town that a well-liked man named Kincaid has been murdered and his cattle stolen by three desperadoes. The cowpokes drinking in the saloon are easily riled when it comes to stealing cattle. They immediately want to set off and find the perpetrators, and they don’t intend to be gentlemen about it, either.

Calling themselves a “posse,” twenty-eight men set out from town to track down the thievin’ scum who killed one of their own and stole his cattle. A snowstorm is threatening, but these men are not to be deterred by a little inclement weather. A man named Tetley is the de facto leader—he is the unfeeling “brain” of the group. We see how decent men with a forceful, commanding leader will follow that leader and not think for themselves because they are afraid to be seen as different.

An old man named Davies has gone along with the posse, not because he has the customary “blood lust” that the others have, but because he believes he might prevail upon the more sensible of the men to desist and not do anything they’ll regret later. He is the “heart” of the group, its conscience.

The posse rides and rides through the winter night until they do, in fact, come upon three men sleeping around a campfire. This is exactly what they have been looking for. They begin bullying the three and asking them questions, with no attempt at uncovering the real truth. They have found three men who fit the description of the rustlers (any evidence against this is circumstantial), and they intend to take matters into their own hands in the only way they know how. Davies tries to get the men to take the three back to town, where they might be investigated properly, but the men ridicule him and call him names. A couple of the other men are also in favor of turning the three over to the “real” law, but that is not the will of the “mob,” so they are shouted down.

From the time the posse comes upon the three men accidentally, the outcome is inevitable. Spurred on by the leader Tetley, the mob wants a hanging and they won’t be satisfied with anything less. Of the three supposed rustlers, the young man Martin tries to argue his case and the case of the other two men with him (a Mexican and an old man named Hardwick), but it’s no use, no matter what he says.

The hanging of the three innocent men takes place at sunrise. Ironically, after the men are dead, it becomes glaringly apparent that the mob has made a mistake and, as might be expected, they need someone to blame.

The Ox-Bow Incident is scrupulously detailed, beautifully written, sometimes slow-moving (patience is required), with lots of dialogue and lots of character touches. It is a story about mob rule, the strange phenomenon known as “groupthink” that, under certain circumstances, can bring about disastrous results. When people are not willing to think for themselves and when they know that what they are being told to think is immoral or unfair, they are relinquishing their humanity to the bully or the tyrant. Only afterwards will they become aware of the little thing they have inside them known as conscience.

Copyright © 2018 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Darkness at Noon ~ A Capsule Book Review

Darkness at Noon ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp 

Arthur Koestler was a Hungarian-born British writer who lived from 1909 to 1983. He was a Communist who quit the Communist party when he became disillusioned with Stalinism. This personal experience forms the basis for his most famous novel, Darkness at Noon, published in 1940.

Nicholas Rubashov is the fictional protagonist of Darkness of Noon, the “one against many.” He is a man in his fifties, once an important party figure, one of the men who built the Party (Communist) up. When he objects to the direction the Party is taking, however, he engages in “counter-revolutionary” activities. He ends up in prison to await his fate, which is certain from the outset.

In his tiny prison cell, Rubashov has plenty of time for reflection. He recounts his past life, the experiences that has brought him to his present state, and the people he betrayed along the way, including a loyal secretary named Arlova with whom he was romantically involved. He did all the things a Party member was supposed to do, until he had a change of heart and came to believe the Party was ruining the country with its philosophy of “the end justifies the means” and “the individual doesn’t matter—only the state matters.” In other words, he believed the Party was sacrificing the present for the future.

While in prison, Rubashov has many interrogations, which become increasingly brutal. At first his interrogator is Ivanov, an old friend. Ivanov doesn’t take a hard enough line with people like Rubashov, so he is killed and replaced by Gletkin, a young, ruthless, heartless, not-very-bright Party man who doesn’t believe in sentiment or in the importance of old friendships. Gletkin has only one goal in mind with people like Rubashov: to seal his fate and hasten his inevitable conclusion.

Darkness at Noon is bleak reading but only moderately difficult to read, despite its heavy subject matter. It’s not for everybody, of course, but is considered one of the great novels of the twentieth century, a story about an “individual” in a system in which the individual doesn’t matter. It is not light reading, but it moves along at a fairly rapid pace and is under 300 pages long; in the hands of another writer, I can see how it might easily have been twice as long.

Copyright © 2018 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

The Nun ~ A Capsule Movie Review

The Nun ~ A Capsule Movie Review by Allen Kopp 

The Nun is set in 1952 in a spooky castle/convent in a remote part of Romania. The castle has a history of its own; it was built in the Middle Ages by a duke who was a practitioner of black magic and who wrote books on demonology and witchcraft. After the castle became a nunnery, the nuns engaged in perpetual prayer (adoration) to keep the evil spirits away. (Why didn’t they just leave?)

A young nun has apparently committed suicide in a disturbing manner at the Romanian convent. The Vatican has sent a middle-aged priest, Father Burke (Demian Bichir) to investigate. Father Burke has a history of dealing with cases that involve or seem to involve demonic possession. With him is a young novitiate (a nun who hasn’t taken her final vows) named Sister Irene (Taissa Farmiga).  Sister Irene has a history of “visions,” so that apparently is what qualifies her to help with the investigation of the nun’s suicide. Father Burke and Sister Irene are guided by a young man who calls himself Frenchie, a French-Canadian living near the convent; he’s the one who found the body of the nun who apparently committed suicide. He has put the body in the ice house to help preserve it, but when he takes Father Burke and Sister Irene to see it, it (the dead body) has moved from a lying to a sitting position.

Well, as might be expected, an evil spirit, a demon, is at work in the convent. This spirit takes the form of a grotesque nun named Valak, whom we saw briefly in the earlier movie The Conjuring 2. Valak doesn’t take kindly to people from the church trying to exorcise her. She will fight back with everything she has. Will she prevail over Father Burke and Sister Irene? I wouldn’t count on it, since they have the force of “good” on their side. They also have an ancient holy relic containing the blood of Christ. Now, that I would like to see!

If you’ve seen The Conjuring and The Conjuring 2 and enjoy horror movies of this kind, you will probably find The Nun worth your time, even though there isn’t much new here that we haven’t already seen in other movies. Ever since movies like Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, hellish demons are a staple of American movies. They’re going to be around for a long time until people stop paying money to see them. Isn’t it better to see demonic possession on the movie screen than to experience it yourself? From what I’ve heard, I think it’s an experience that none of us want to know firsthand.

Copyright © 2018 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

The 42nd Parallel ~ A Capsule Book Review

The 42nd Parallel ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp 

With the trilogy U.S.A., John Dos Passos (1896-1970) took a stab at writing the great American novel of the twentieth century. The first book in the trilogy, The 42nd Parallel, is a panorama of American life from 1900 to the First World War, told through its fictional characters. All the characters are striving, desiring, climbing, grappling with the world in one way or another, trying to overcome the circumstances of their birth and attempting to rise in the world.

The 42nd Parallel is written in an “experimental” style (but still very accessible to the reader), meaning that there is no continuous narrative, but the story moves from character to character (some of whose paths eventually converge). All the characters are fascinating American types (the handsome business tycoon with an eye for the ladies and a difficult wife; the young working man who believes in workers’ rights and the coming socialist revolution; the young woman struggling to make a place for herself in a business world dominated by men; the young auto mechanic who doesn’t have much luck with the women or with keeping a job). The characters are swept along on the wave of history, whether it’s revolution in Mexico or Russia, war, labor unrest, the loosening of nineteenth century moral standards, or the changing political landscape which seems to be tending toward socialism.

Another thing that makes The 42nd Parallel unique is that the narrative is interspersed with brief:

  • “The Camera Eye” sections, autobiographical vignettes in the stream of consciousness style, which means they don’t always make much sense.
  • “Newsreels” sections, consisting of (sometimes) relevant front-page headlines.
  • “Biography” sections, short accounts of the some of the notable people of the first two decades of the twentieth century, such as Thomas Edison, Eugene Debs and Henry Ford.

“The Camera Eye,” “Newsreels,” and “Biography” sections are not as annoying and intrusive to the story as you might think. They are thankfully short and easy to read. They serve more as a brief respite (like a scene change) to the story.

If you are an avid reader (like me) or a student of American literature, you will love The 42nd Parallel. It’s a real piece of Americana and one of the greatest and most unique literary creations of the twentieth century. I haven’t yet read the other two parts of the trilogy (1919 and The Big Money), but I intend to read them very soon.

Copyright © 2018 by Allen Kopp  

by allen0997

White Boy Rick ~ A Capsule Movie Review

White Boy Rick ~ A Capsule Movie Review by Allen Kopp 

White Boy Rick is set in dismal Detroit, where it seems always to be winter, in the 1980s. Middle-aged dad Rick Wershe senior (Matthew McConaughey) is, by all accounts, a “lowlife” and a “loser” (his wife ran off and left him). He seems, however, to be well-intentioned when it comes to his two kids, Rick junior and Dawn, but they are also lowlifes and losers. Dawn has a haunted, vacant look because she is a drug addict. Scruffy-looking Rick junior at age fifteen is interested in firearms (he stopped going to school) while Rick senior has a workshop in the basement where he modifies guns to make them more deadly. Rick junior takes up with a gang of black hoodlums—he even adopts their patterns of speech—and becomes a gun dealer.

After Rick junior is shot in the abdomen and almost dies because his associates think he knows too much, the police begin using him as an informant. To expand his repertoire, the police encourage him to sell drugs, telling him he can keep any money he makes. (Soon he has a boxful of cash under his bed containing almost a million dollars.) What they fail to emphasize is that he can go to jail for life for dealing drugs. They half-heartedly promise to protect him if he should happen to get caught, but they refuse to put it in writing so we know they don’t really mean it. In the meantime, Rick junior impregnates a black girl (he’s still only sixteen) and doesn’t know about the baby until after it’s born. Rick senior and Rick junior rescue Dawn from a drug house and take her home and lock her up to help her get over her terrible addiction.

White Boy Rick is based, we are told, on a true story. It’s a portrait of a family and is a story of wasted, hopeless lives. It’s bleak from start to finish with nothing pretty about it; there’s no redemption and no Hollywood ending. To top it off, most of the accents are almost incomprehensible; I rarely understood an entire sentence that was spoken. If nothing else, it’s a movie that makes you thankful if your life has some kind of order and morality to it.

Copyright © 2018 by Allen Kopp     

by allen0997

The Last Picture Show ~ A Capsule Book Review

The Last Picture Show ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp 

Larry McMurtry’s 1966 novel, The Last Picture Show, is set in the fictional town of Thalia, Texas, in the 1950s. Thalia sits on the edge of the prairie where it’s windy and dusty and hot. There’s a Main Street with a picture show, a café, a poolhall, and not much else. In the way of small towns everywhere, the people of Thalia don’t have much to do, but there’s always gossip—everybody knows everything about everybody else—and if you happen to be different in some way from the other people in the town, you’d better watch out because they’re coming to get you.

Sonny and Duane are high schoolers and best friends. Sonny is sensitive and Duane is a brawler. They both like to drink and carouse and they don’t have to worry about what their parents think because they are both living on their own, free of family. Even though they’re both still in high school, they don’t let it bother them much. They aren’t much interested in education.

Sonny has an unattractive girlfriend named Charlene Duggs. She’s overweight and already possesses the bitchy qualities of a middle-aged shrew. Everybody who knows Sonny believes he could do better. Sonny secretly envies Duane, who dates the prettiest, most-stylish girl in school, Jacy Farrow. Jacy is self-centered, vain, manipulative, and she doesn’t care who she hurts as long as she gets what she wants. (We’ve all known people like this.)

When the good-ol’-boy football coach enlists Sonny to drive his wife, Ruth, to the clinic, Sonny sees that Ruth seems awfully lonely and unhappy. They begin a sexual affair—she’s forty and he’s seventeen—meeting afternoons in her bedroom while the coach is at school. Ruth experiences a sexual reawakening with Sonny. With the age difference, though, you know someone younger is bound to turn Sonny’s head and when it happens it’s none other than Jacy Farrow, who has broken up with Duane. Forty-year-old Ruth is easy for Sonny to put out of his mind when he can have Jacy.

There are other interesting characters in the novel, including Sam the Lion, a sort of father figure to everybody—he owns the poolhall, picture show and café; Genevieve, the world-weary waitress at the café whom the boys secretly lust after; Lois Farrow, Jacy’s smart-mouthed mother, who gave her husband so much hell he just had to go out and make a million dollars just to please her.

The Last Picture Show is a slice of small-town life and also a growing-up, coming-of-age story. It’s about change, the good kind and the bad kind that throws you for a loop and makes you wish you had never been born. It’s a breezy 245 pages that you can read without taxing your brain too much. And who can forget the 1971 movie version (two acting Oscars) of the novel, a good example of how to make a movie from a book and do it right.

Copyright © 2018 by Allen Kopp    

by allen0997

Memoirs of Hadrian ~ A Capsule Book Review

Memoirs of Hadrian ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp 

Hadrian was born in 76 A.D. and became emperor of the Roman Empire in the year 117, at age 41. His reign lasted until his death in 138, at age 62. Hadrian was known as one of the five “good emperors,” meaning he was known for his peaceful reign, rather than for cruelty or for the extravagant vices that some of his predecessors were known for. Hadrian is known mainly today for three things: his love for Antinous, a Bithynian youth (Bithynia is today part of Turkey), who died at age 19 by drowning in the Nile River; for having built the famous Pantheon in Rome (or at least having it finished); and for a wall he had built in Britain (parts of which still remain) known as “Hadrian’s Wall,” which was supposed to keep the “barbarian hordes” out of territory belonging to the Roman Empire.

Memoirs of Hadrian, by Marguerite Yourcenar, is a historical novel, a fictional account of Hadrian’s life and times. Although fiction, it is based on extensive historical research, which the Bibliographical Note at the end of the novel explains. It is told in Hadrian’s voice, from his point of view, as if he, from across the centuries, was writing it himself. It is an extended letter to 17-year-old Marcus Aurelius, future emperor-to-be.

Of course, as emperor of one-third of the earth’s population at the time, Hadrian had many problems, many ups and downs. The emperor was essentially a warrior, a general holding together the military factions of his empire and, as such, was often in peril of his life. There were always the greedy, the ambitious, the selfish who wanted to destroy the emperor in an effort to attain their own ends. Hadrian was by all accounts a modest man, not interested so much in being loved or admired. He believed that true love and admiration from the people must be earned, rather than automatically given just because one has fallen heir to a powerful position.

The most dramatic event in Hadrian’s life was his love for Antinous, the beautiful youth whom he watched grow into manhood. Antinous was Hadrian’s better self, his constant companion, the emotional axis of Hadrian’s life during the years they were together. Their love was a love for the ages, like that of Achilles and Patroclus centuries earlier. When Antinous committed suicide (apparently) by drowning himself in the Nile River at age 19, Hadrian was never the same again, living for about eight more years. He “deified” Antinous, building a city (Antinoopolis) in Egypt to his memory. Many statues, coins, and other works of art bore Antinous’s image. A cult was built up around his name and memory. When Hadrian died of a “dropsical” heart in 138 A.D., one can’t help but believe that the two of them were reunited in death.

Memoirs of Hadrian was first published in 1951, in French, and later translated into English. It is a glimpse into another time and place into the mind of a man who lived so long ago that it’s difficult for us to imagine. Despite its historical subject matter and its moderately dense prose, it is never very difficult reading, especially after the first fifty pages or so. Not for everybody, but if you make it through to the end, you will find it immensely rewarding and memorable.

Copyright © 2018 by Allen Kopp 

by allen0997

Night Train

Night Train ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

(Published in a slightly different form in Bartleby-Snopes.) 

Martin Haythorne disliked riding trains at night. They moved too slow and made too many stops. At one of the stops a woman boarded the train carrying a sleeping child. Martin was facing the door and as he saw her coming toward him, he hoped she wouldn’t sit in the seat facing him, but she did. He uncrossed his legs and sighed and pulled himself up straighter, thinking it’s going to be a long night.

The woman fussed with getting the child fixed just right in her lap and, after she was settled in the seat across from him, she looked searchingly at Martin until he looked back and gave her a wan smile.

“It’s so crowded tonight,” she said.

He could see all the way down to the other end of the coach and it was more than half empty.

“I think traveling at night is so lonely,” she said. “I like to find somebody I can talk to. It helps to pass the time.”

He looked away and picked up and began reading a newspaper that somebody had left behind, but that didn’t deter the woman.

“This is my little girl,” she said, looking down at the child draped across her lap. “She’s three. Her name is Ivette. She always gets sick to her stomach on a train, so before we left home I gave her a little pill to make her got to sleep. She doesn’t have any idea she’s on the train just now. Don’t you think that was the smart thing for me to do?”

He shook his head and looked at the child, who barely seemed to be breathing. She was tiny and pale, with scraggly blond hair and a throbbing blue vein in her temple. She was wearing a cowboy shirt with a horse embroidered on the yoke, blue jeans and cowboy boots.

“What about you?” the woman asked him. “You have any children?”

“Not me,” Martin said. “I don’t have time.”

“I always thought I would have three or four children, but Ivette is my only one so far. I guess there’s always a chance for more.”

Martin looked longingly at the empty seats, wanting to move but not wanting to appear overly rude. Instead he picked up the newspaper again, turned the pages and, not finding anything of interest, began studying a sofa ad.

“You’re probably wondering where my husband is,” the woman said. “You’re probably asking yourself  why I’m traveling at night by myself with a small child.”

“You need a book or a magazine,” Martin said. “Reading is what really helps to pass the time at night.”

“Oh, I don’t read much and, anyway, reading on a moving train would only make me sick to my stomach.”

He kept looking at the sofa ad with feigned interest, wondering how he might make the woman stop talking. After a while he refolded the paper and set it on the seat beside him. Remembering the pack of cigarettes he had in his pocket, he took one out, lit it and blew out a big cloud of smoke. That would surely make the woman want to take the child and move to a different seat.

She didn’t seem to notice. She moved the child off her lap onto the seat beside her until the child’s head was resting against her thigh and the cowboy books were sticking out in the aisle.

“Aren’t children just the most precious things?” she said. “God’s greatest gift.” She smoothed the child’s hair back from its face.

“Look,” he said, “if you don’t mind, it’s late and I would really like to just sit quietly. When I’m riding on a train at night, I like to just sit and think about things.”

“Oh, no!” she said. “I don’t want to bother you. Just pretend as if I wasn’t even here.”

He leaned his head back, turned his face toward the window and closed his eyes. He could go to sleep if only he was alone.

“You know,” the woman said, “when I’m riding on a train I love to watch the scenery, but at night all you can see is the darkness, unless you pass through a little town where there are lights. The towns always seem kind of lonely and sad, somehow, at night, don’t you think?”

He reopened his eyes and sighed. He was ready to move now to another seat, no matter how rude it seemed. When he started to stand up he saw the woman was crying.

She saw he was looking at her and said, “Oh, don’t mind me! I try not to cry in public but sometimes I just can’t help it.”

She took a handkerchief out of her purse and wiped her eyes.

“Are you sick or something?” he asked. “Do you need to get off the train?”

“No. Why would I want to get off the train all the way out here?”

“I just thought…”

“Look, would you mind getting me a cup of water? I need to take some pills.”

He went to the men’s restroom and filled a tiny, cone-shaped paper cup with water at the wash basin and took it back to her.

“Thanks,” she said. “I sometimes get hysterical, but I have these little pills that help.”

“Look, I’ll move to another seat and you can put your baby here and I’ll just get out of your way.”

“Oh, no, no, no! I want you to stay with me!”

“But I thought…”

“No, I feel better if you’re here.”

He looked at his watch, calculating how much longer the trip would take, and sat back down. The woman put the handkerchief over her face and let loose with a torrent of sobs, causing a throbbing in his head. A crying woman always brought unwelcome associations; his mother used to cry for no reason at all.

When he saw the conductor standing at the front of the car, he stood up and approached him. “I’d like to move to another car,” he said. “There’s a woman who keeps saying things.”

“What kind of things?” the conductor asked. “Indecent things?”

“Oh, no, nothing like that.”

“Well, what is she saying?”

“She’s just bothering me. I want to rest.”

“Well, you can’t move to another car because this is the only car carrying passengers tonight.”

“I see.”

“Why don’t you just move to another seat?”

“I think she would move, too.”

“Well, tell her to stop annoying you. Tell her to shut up. Sometimes that’s what it takes.”

“I will. Thanks.”

He went back to his seat and sat back down. If only he could sleep the rest of the way, blot everything out, he’d feel much better. The time would go by so fast that before he knew it the trip would be over. He wasn’t going to let the woman bother him anymore.

He tried closing his eyes again, leaning his head against the window and folding his arms across his chest. He could feel himself starting to drift off when another train passed by going in the other direction, letting  off a shrill blast.

The blond-haired girl woke up and began screaming. The woman picked her up and set her across her lap.

“My goodness!” she said. “That frightened little baby, didn’t it? Bad old train woke little girl up!”

She jiggled her up and down, but the girl kept screaming. After a while, the screams tapered away to subdued sobbing. “We make quite a pair, don’t we?” the woman said with a laugh. “I don’t know what they’re going to do with us, I swear I don’t!”

When the girl continued crying, the woman took a candy bar out of her purse, unwrapped it and gave it to her. She instantly settled down, making little cooing noises as she ate the candy, looking at the ceiling.

“Sometimes with children things are so simple,” the woman said.

“Look,” he said, “I’ve tried to be patient with you, but you don’t seem to be getting the message. I want to just sit quietly and not be bothered and not talk! Is that so hard to understand?”

“We’ve just been so upset because my husband ran off and left us.”

“I can’t say I blame him.”

“Of course, Ivette is too young to understand, but children know things instinctively.”

“Okay, I’m going to move to another seat now.”

“I wish you wouldn’t. I like talking to you.”

“Well, I don’t like talking to you!”

“He has a kind of recurring amnesia, my husband does. He’s fine for a while and then he has these spells come over him where he forgets things. He forgets he has a wife and a child, and he goes away on the train or the bus, and I have to go get him and bring him back home. He seems to have it in his head that he’s escaping from something.”

“I think I know what he’s escaping.”

“The doctor believes he has a kind of a growth thing on the brain that makes him act the way he does. If we could just get him to agree to have an operation, that might make him just as normal as anybody.”

“Maybe he doesn’t want to be normal.”

“Of course he does. Everybody wants to be normal and live a normal life.”

“I don’t!”

“I love my husband very much and little Ivette loves him too, and I believe that in his own peculiar way he loves us just as much. I’ll go to the ends of the earth to bring him back home as many times as it takes.”

“You don’t seem to be getting the message, lady, so I’ll put it to you in very plain language: I don’t care about your troubles and I don’t want to hear about them!”

He stood up, picked up his coat, hat and suitcase and moved all the way to the front of the car next to the window. He was so relieved to get away from the woman and the little girl that he felt close to tears and his hands were shaking. He put his suitcase on the seat beside him so she wouldn’t get it into her head to come and sit there.

Sleep at last came to him and he awoke to the sounds of the train pulling into the station. The sun was just coming up. The interminable night was over.

He got off the train as quickly as he could to avoid another encounter, but he didn’t see the woman and the little girl again. He took a cab to the hotel, checked into his room, changed his clothes and went downstairs in the elevator.

The hotel restaurant was crowded, but he didn’t mind it because he got a little table at a remove from the others. After placing his order for breakfast, he lit a cigarette and closed his eyes, feeling pleasantly fatigued. He was looking forward to a day of solitude and relaxation—visiting a museum or two and possibly seeing a movie, and then returning to his hotel room for a nap before dinner.

While eating his ham and eggs, he noticed a woman come into the restaurant. He wouldn’t have noticed her at all if she hadn’t been carrying a small, blond-haired child. She sat down facing him at a table about thirty feet away. She held the child on her lap for a while and then pulled a chair up close on her right side and set the child on the chair.

The woman looked closely at him and when he looked back she smiled at him and he saw then that it was the woman from the train, although she looked much different, dressed in finer clothes and wearing a hat. She reached over and said something to the child and then she pointed her finger at him to indicate to the child that he was there. He wanted to move around to the other side of the table facing away from her, but he knew it was no use. There would be no getting away from her.

I’ve seen her before, he thought, and not just on the train. I’ve seen her many times in many places. I forget about her, and then I see her again, in the least-expected places at the least-expected times. She is everything to me that I abhor in the world, everything I hate and fear, and she will not relent until she has overpowered me and forced me to her will.

He closed his eyes and wished the woman and the blond-haired child gone. He would kill them if he had to, to save himself. He’d buy a small gun that he could conceal easily in his pocket and lure them away from the hotel and kill them. Nobody would ever know, as long as he planned things out carefully. Yes, he could kill a child because this child wasn’t just any child—it was her child.

When he opened his eyes again, the woman and child, to his great relief, were gone. He finished his breakfast, paid for it, and went up to his room on the tenth floor of the hotel and locked himself in. He didn’t want to be disturbed.

The room was quiet and cool. The faraway sounds of the traffic on the street below were comforting. He kicked off his shoes and lay on the bed and put his arm over his eyes.

He fell into a deep sleep, losing track of the passage of time. He woke to the sound of a faint stirring, as of someone in the room with him. He opened his eyes and when he saw the woman from the train standing beside the bed, he jerked himself to a sitting position.

“What the…what the hell is this?” he said, not sure of what he was seeing.

“We’re here,” she said. “We’re both here.”

She touched the head of the blond child standing beside her and then reached down and picked her up in her arms. The child, seeing him lying on the bed, stuck her finger in her mouth and then pointed it at him and leaned far over toward him from her mother’s arms.

“She certainly has missed her daddy!” the woman said.

She placed the child on the bed beside him in a sitting position. It was the same cowboy shirt with a horse embroidered on the yoke, the same blue jeans and cowboy boots.

“Who is this?” he said to the woman.

The child looked at him knowingly. She had the same face, the same upturned nose, the same washed-out blue eyes. When she opened her dribbling mouth and smiled at him, he could see her tiny, animal-like teeth. He was sure he had never seen a more despicable child. He wanted nothing more than to put his hands around her throat and strangle the life out of her and then do the same to the mother.

Copyright © 2018 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

A Clockwork Orange ~ A Capsule Book Review

A Clockwork Orange ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp 

Besides classical music (especially Ludwig van Beethoven and Johann Sebastian Bach), Alex loves ultra-violence. He is only fifteen, but every evening he meets his three “droogs” (Pete, Georgie and Dim) to go out and terrorize anybody unfortunate enough to fall into their clutches on the streets. They especially target the elderly and those incapable of defending themselves. The “millicents” (police) are not very effective against these roving bands of predatory thugs, so most people, if they are able to reason things out, do not go out at night.

Alex lives with his “pee and em” (parents) on the tenth floor of a building of flats. The pee and em think Alex is a good boy who has an evening job that brings in a little money. He is good at making them think whatever he wants them to think. They don’t know that he gets his money from stealing and from robbing innocent victims. (When his father asks him just exactly what his evening job is, he politely sidesteps the issue.)

After a while things start to go bad for Alex, oh my brothers! His droogs turn on him and challenge his authority as their leader. What’s even worse, a “baboochka” (old woman) he beats up during a home burglary dies of her injuries and the millicents, finally, catch him and sentence him to twenty years behind bars. Well, conditions are terrible in prison, with six to a cell, and after a few months Alex kills another prisoner. Because he is young, authorities believe he is worth reclaiming, so they put him in a special treatment program (the Ludovico technique), whereby he will be “cured” of his violent criminal tendencies and released back into society in a fortnight. He doesn’t know, of course, that the treatment is the worst thing he will ever experience in his life.

The treatment consists of, besides drugs, “associative conditioning” in which Alex is forced (strapped to a table, eyes forcibly kept open) to watch films set to music of tortures, rapes, stabbings, murders and assorted acts of violence. The violence he is forced to witness in the films makes Alex so ill that, presumably, he will never be able to commit such acts again himself. But, wait a minute, isn’t the government going too far with this treatment? By taking away Alex’s free will to decide for himself, aren’t they turning him into a “clockwork orange,” a being that is organic and mechanical at the same time? After Alex is cured, maybe he will need a “cure” for the cure.

A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess, was first published in 1963. It is set in Britain, in a frightening distant future. It is Alex’s story, told in his voice, so it’s what he thinks and what he feels. The slang the characters in the novel use is called “nadsat” (teenage) language. If you are a new reader, approaching A Clockwork Orange for the first time, don’t be put off by the slang. You can almost always tell, by word association, what the word is supposed to be. In the paperback edition I read (two times now), there’s a glossary in the back of the book to translate the slang into recognizable English words.

Copyright © 2018 by Allen Kopp 

by allen0997