Tag: Allen Kopp

A Head of Its Time


A Head of Its Time ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

(Published in Death’s Head Grin.)

Frankie Zell was not accustomed to the fast life. She grew up on a farm, where she lived plainly and simply with her mother, father and two brothers. Painfully shy and stick-thin, she was never pretty or attractive in the way other girls thought themselves and in fact she never gave much thought at all to the way she looked.

In her late teens, though, Frankie began to change. She lost her adolescent awkwardness; she became rounded in the places where she had always been angular. She developed flawless, pale skin and a head of lustrous, chestnut-colored hair. She turned into the beauty she was always meant to be, like the lowly caterpillar turning into the ravishing butterfly.

She began to attract the attention of young boys and older boys into manhood, some of them as old as forty or fifty years. When she would go into town on a shopping trip or to pay the light bill or see the dentist, people would stop what they were doing and look at her because they weren’t used to see so pretty a girl on the streets of such a dreary town. Some more astute observers said she ought to go to Hollywood and try out for the movies. She was as pretty as Rita Hayworth or Ava Gardner or any of those others.

Through a friend she became acquainted with a boy named Angus Persons who lived with his parents in the best neighborhood in town, where the finest homes were. His father was president of the bank and raised horses on a ranch he owned. Angus was the same age as Frankie and planned to be an attorney and one day go into politics. With his good looks and family connections, he would go far. He might one day be governor of the state or a senator in Washington. Frankie would be just the right kind of wife for him. They planned an elaborate June wedding to which everybody in town was invited.

Angus and Frankie indeed made a handsome couple. When they drove around town in Angus’s beautiful convertible sports car, they were like something out of a dream. People who saw them were admiring, envious, or maybe even a little bit jealous.

Frankie had never driven a car before but Angus taught her to drive. When he was busy working or at school and didn’t have time to spend with her, he let her drive his car as if it were her own. She enjoyed driving on the hilly, curvy country roads between the farm she lived on and the town where Angus lived. She liked nothing better than letting the top down on the car and driving as fast as she could and letting the wind blow her hair. She discovered that fast driving exhilarated her and made her feel free in a way that nothing else did.

On a brilliant May morning one month before Frankie and Angus were to be married, Frankie was driving in the hills and valleys she had known all her life. Bathed in the fresh morning sunlight as it was, the landscape was as beautiful as anything she had ever seen. Past fences and farms, horses and cows, and the occasional scenic barn or grain silo, she drove with abandon around curves and up hill and down dale. Her car—or rather Angus’s—was the only car on the road.

At one long downward hill with a sharp curve that wrapped around a scenic promontory of rock, signs warned prudent drivers to drive slowly and carefully. The treacherous curve could be difficult to negotiate even for the most experienced of drivers.

When Frankie Heywood came to the hill, she ignored the signs. She had driven the hill many times before and didn’t fear it. She sped up to experience once again the thrilling downward whoosh and the tension on the wheel as she struggled to keep the little car on the road.

In the middle of the curve, with her downward momentum and her accelerated speed, she lost control of the car as if an invisible hand had reached out and pulled the steering wheel sharply to the right. In the blink of an eye, the car left the road, became airborne, and sailed out over the tops of the trees. In her final seconds, Frankie had the time-stands-still sensation of being suspended above the earth—breathless and in defiance of the laws of gravity.

When she failed to appear for her luncheon date with Angus in town, he became alarmed and started calling all the places she might be, but nobody had seen her. He called her home and Frankie’s mother told him not to worry, that Frankie was probably enjoying herself too much—wherever she was—to be aware of the time. Deep down, though, Frankie’s mother believed that something bad had happened to Frankie.

The next day, when nobody still had not seen or heard from Frankie, her mother called the police and filed a missing person’s report. The police questioned Frankie’s mother and father and brothers extensively about Frankie’s habits and associations, but none of them were able to tell them anything that helped in finding her.

The police began an extensive search for Frankie between her home and the town. They theorized that she was living a secret life and had run away from home or that she had been abducted by a person or persons unknown. If they were able to find the car she had been driving, that at least might give them some clues.

Two days later a young police officer found a hubcap in the underbrush near the dangerous curve. Angus recognized the hubcap as belonging to his car. From this clue they were able to piece together what had happened to Frankie on the day she disappeared.

When they found the sports car a quarter of a mile or so from the road, concealed in the trees, Frankie’s body was in it. Her head had been sheared off at the shoulders, neatly and cleanly, as with a sharp blade.

Logic dictated that Frankie’s head would be not far from her body, but when police searched the surrounding area (and much farther away), they were never able to find any sign of the head. After a few days they gave up the search, telling Frankie’s mother and father that the head must have been carried off by wolves or some other wild animals. It was still possible, though, that the head would be found and, if so, whoever found it would be sure to report it to the police. Finding a head by itself was not that common an occurrence.

As distraught as Frankie’s mother was at having lost her only daughter, she was even more distraught at the idea of Frankie having to go to her grave without her head.

Frankie’s mother took an old china vase she had had for a long time that was roughly equivalent to the size and shape of a human head. On the front of the vase was painted a bouquet of flowers, but on the back was nothing, so on the back of this vase she painted a semblance of Frankie’s features using the watercolor paints that Frankie sometimes worked with. (Handles on the sides of the vase were a good approximation of human ears.)

When she was finished painting a fairly credible approximation of Frankie’s face on the vase, she put Frankie’s wig on it and then took it to the funeral parlor and asked the undertaker if he would put the vase where Frankie’s head should be. The undertaker was happy to comply, knowing that grief sometimes causes people to make unusual requests.

At the funeral-home visitation, people were surprised to see a painted vase in place of a real head, but most agreed the vase was less jarring than no head at all. The undertaker artfully arranged the collar of Frankie’s dress around the neck of the vase so that the vase did indeed look like a part of her body. He draped a veil across the open lid of the coffin to soften the effect, as he frequently did with the bodies of accident victims.

The entire town turned out for Frankie’s funeral, as they would have turned out for her wedding. Angus Persons, looking solemn and more handsome than ever, was impeccably dressed in a dark-blue suit and dark glasses that hid his eyes. Several young women, friends of Frankie’s who considered themselves fully capable of stepping into Frankie’s shoes, kept their eyes on Angus in the hope that he would look their way. Which one among them wouldn’t jump at the chance to marry the future governor?

Frankie’s head was never found. According to local legend, her ghost was said to walk along the highway at night near the dangerous curve, looking for her head. She wanted to find her head, the legend went, so she could stick it back on her body and go through with her wedding to Angus Persons. Every year at Halloween, different variations on the headless bride theme appeared at parties and on the streets of the town.

As for Frankie’s head, the truth was quite simple, as the truth often is. Not long after her head was separated from her body, a buzzard spotted her head lying in the brush about fifty feet from the wrecked car. It swooped down and picked up the head (by the hair) in its talons and flew away. Carrying its gruesome cargo, the buzzard was flying back to its lair (or wherever buzzards go when nobody sees them) when the weight of the head became too much and the buzzard dropped the head quite without meaning to.

The head landed in a tree, on a natural shelf formed by the convergence of several large branches thirty feet off the ground. The head was perfectly upright and lodged in such a way in the top of the tree that no amount of wind and weather would ever shake it loose. As long as the tree remained upright, the head would stay where it was and nobody would ever see it.

Crows pecked at the eyes until there was nothing left. Birds used the hair for their nests. Insects and other birds ate away at the flesh, tissue, and brain until, over time, the head was only a skull.

Several generations of chipmunks used the empty skull as their home. When the chipmunks moved on, as they inevitably do, the skull became a sanctuary for small birds, with one eye socket serving as a way into the skull and the other as a way out. As you see, nature always finds its own way to make use of things.

Copyright 2018 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

The Way West ~ A Capsule Book Review

The Way West ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

For decades now, we’ve been able to get on a jet plane and fly from the middle of the country, Missouri, all the way to Oregon in the Pacific Northwest in a few hours. In the 1850s it wasn’t so easy. Back then, people traveled the distance in the most difficult way imaginable: in wagon trains of ten, fifteen or twenty wagons, usually one family to a wagon. The trains moved about ten to twelve miles a day, so the trip lasted for months. And the way was fraught with dangers and hardships, including canyons, wild rivers, mountains, vast distances without rest or water; extremes of heat, wind and cold; illness, disease and death; hostile, sometimes murderous, Indians; wild animals including buffalo and rattlesnakes (not to mention mosquitoes and other insects); the inevitable clash of personalities and all the jealousies and ugliness engendered by a group of human beings thrown together. The train comprises a microcosm, a world in miniature, the bad along with the good.

The Way West by A.B. Guthrie Jr. is the simple story of one such wagon train that sets out from Independence, Missouri, with its sites set on the storied land of Oregon. These wagon trains always had a “pilot,” an experienced man who usually knew what most of the travelers didn’t: the way was hard and dangerous and some of them weren’t going to make it. Dick Summers is the pilot in The Way West. He’s forty-nine years old, a widower, a mountain man who has traveled over the terrain before and knows what to expect. He always knows the best route to take, how to deal with the indigents, how to ford raging rivers, etc. Without him, the travelers would be doomed. Think of John Wayne.

Lije Evans was a farmer back in Missouri. Now he’s the captain of the wagon train. He tells the train when to stop and when to get a-goin’ again, but he relies heavily on Dick Summers for practical advice in all matters. Lije is traveling with his wife, Rebecca, his son, Brownie, and his faithful old dog, Rock. Lije is the central character in the novel. We see things through his eyes. His must deal with the usual collection of misfits and egocentric individuals who think they know more than he does. Thrown into the mix is a teenage temptress named Mercy McBee who—innocently enough, it seems—falls under the spell of a handsome married man, Curtis Mack, and ends up pregnant by him. Uh-oh! The leaders already said at the outset that they wouldn’t countenance adultery and fornication and would horsewhip any offenders.

The Way West is a solid, readable classic that won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1950. It’s an American story about westward expansion and the search for a better life in the nineteenth century when the country just wasn’t big enough and people wanted to make it bigger. Now people are much softer. When I’m with a group of people and somebody is complaining about being cold in a stifling room or they want to have all the windows closed in an airless room because they’re afraid of bees getting in, I say, sarcastically, “That’s the pioneering spirit that made this country what it is today.” People today are whiny-assed crybabies who would never be able to suffer the hardship and discomfort of traveling across a continent in a covered wagon to live in an unknown place they’ve never seen before. Does everybody have their cell phones, and how on earth are we going to charge them? How about anti-anxiety pills? Does everybody have theirs? You’re certainly going to need them when an Indian tries to scalp you.

Copyright © 2018 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

The Doctor Dispenses Drugs from His Office

The Doctor Dispenses Drugs from His Office ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

Verna Shelton’s husband was long gone. The only thing she had to remember him by was a son, Cullen, and a daughter, Corinne. The three of them—Verna, Cullen and Corinne—lived in a small frame house in a seedy neighborhood on the edge of town near the railroad tracks. Verna had a job as office assistant for an osteopathic doctor, Dr. Bunch, on the upper floor of an old building across from the county courthouse. All day long she answered phones and coordinated a steady stream of people in and out of the doctor’s two examining rooms.

As a single mother, Verna did the best she could but she sometimes she felt she wasn’t equal to the task. The problems were unrelenting. One day it was a fever and a sick stomach and then the next day a chipped tooth, a new pair of shoes, a note from the teacher demanding money, or an injured ankle that needed to be x-rayed. The money she made never went far enough.

Her personal life was no more rewarding than her professional one. She was lonely, she wanted a companion, a mate, but she had an abysmal record with the unfathomable (to her) male of the species. To make it through her difficult days, she took handfuls of tranquilizers that kindly old Dr. Bunch provided to her free of charge and without a prescription. She frequently augmented the pills with wine, beer or whiskey straight out of the bottle.

And then Cary Mulvihill drifted into town from parts unknown. He was thirty-one years old, trim-waisted, dark-haired, blue-eyed, angel-faced. As soon as Verna saw him, her heart skipped a beat and she knew she was gone. He seemed equally taken with her. He asked her out on a date and, when that went well, he asked her out again and again.

All at once she developed a new outlook on life. She woke up in the morning with a smile on her face that lasted all day long, even through the most difficult days of car troubles, payments in arrears, and three-day measles. The number-one thought in her mind was when she was going to see him again. She was—dare she even speak the words?—in love.

He had a room in a hotel outside of town, causing her to think he wouldn’t be around long. When she asked him what his business was and what he did for a living, he told her he was a writer, traveling around gathering research for a book. When she asked him what the book was about, he told her she’d find out but not until it was published and sold in bookstores everywhere.

Unlike other men of her acquaintance, Cary was always a gentlemen. He held doors for her, helped her with her wrap, lighted her cigarettes. When they were alone, he never behaved inappropriately. Not only was he good-looking, he was smart and cultured; he knew about good food, good music, foreign films, books and paintings. He was a good dancer, fond of animals and children, and spoke lovingly of his mother. He was all the things she might have hoped for in a man and never expected to find.

One Friday at the end of October, he picked her up at Dr. Bunch’s office at the end of the day. With a headache, cough and sore throat, she was out of sorts and not feeling at all well.  How can you work in a doctor’s office with people coming and going all the time and not catch whatever is going around?

Cary was sympathetic. He smiled at her and put his arm around her and drew her close in the car. “I have just the thing that will make you feel better,” he said.

He reached into the back seat and brought forth a little leather case. He opened it and took out a syringe and a little bottle of liquid.

“What is that?” she asked.

“Trust me,” he said. “It’s just the thing you need for what ails you.”

She didn’t think to resist but rolled up her sleeve dutifully. He found her vein easily enough. It was over in a few seconds.

“You surprise me,” she said. “Are you a doctor?”

“Of course not,” he said, “but I’ve done this a lot.”

They went on to dinner and the injection, whatever it was, made her feel wonderful. She reveled in the food, the music, the dancing and the wine. The feeling of well-being lasted all through the evening. When Cary took her home at two in the morning, she believed she had just passed the most best evening of her life. She awoke in the morning happy, certain the happiness would last forever.

There were other injections, of course, any time motherhood was getting her down, a tooth was bothering her, it was her time of the month, or Dr. Bunch put extra work on her. And the injections always cast their magic spell. Whenever she asked him what the injections were that made her feel so good, he smiled and told her she asked too many questions. She came to see the injections as part of the wonderment of Cary Mulvihill, unexpected and delightful.

She had every reason to believe that Cary would ask her to become his wife. She invited him for a special dinner that she cooked herself so that he might see her domestic side. Cullen and Corinne loved him, as she knew they would, and he had a special way with them. He brought Corinne a stuffed elephant and Cullen a telescope.

It was all too wonderful! She had met the man of her dreams and he was going to rescue her from her dreary life. Cullen and Corinne would at last have the father they deserved and advantages in life they wouldn’t ordinarily have: travel, good schools, a promising future. Their names would appear in the society columns.

Finally Cary asked Verna to spend the night with him in his hotel room. She knew it was coming and was thrilled beyond measure. She saw it as the prelude to marriage. She arranged for a teenage sitter to stay overnight with Cullen and Corinne, packed an overnight bag, and waited out front for Cary to pick her up. She had bought all new underwear and sleepwear so he wouldn’t see her shabby stuff.

First they had a wonderful dinner, where they laughed and danced and relaxed. When she thought about what was to come later in his hotel room, her heart pounded with excitement. It was all so romantic!

After dinner, they went for a drive through town. Cary stopped his car on the street in front of Dr. Bunch’s office.

“I though it’d be fun to see where you spend your days,” he said.

“It’s not very exciting, I’m afraid.”

“Please.”

She took the keys out of her purse and unlocked the downstairs door and they went up the stairs in the dark, laughing and holding hands.

“Better not turn on too many lights,” she said, slurring her words.

When they were in the doctor’s office, he grabbed her and kissed her in the dark. She giggled, pushed away from him and turned on the lights.

“This is it,” she said.

He looked around admiringly. “I like being in a daytime place at night after everybody has gone home, don’t you?”

He wanted to see the examining rooms where the doctor saw patients. She took him into one and then the other. There was the table, cabinets, a sink, two chairs, a small, heavily curtained window.

“I’m impressed,” he said.

“We should go,” she said. “If the night watchman sees the lights, he’ll wonder what’s going on.”

“I want to see where the drugs are kept,” Cary said.

“What?”

“Didn’t you say the doctor dispenses drugs from a large closet.”

“Oh, yes. It isn’t much to see. Just shelves of stuff.”

She opened the door to the drug closet and turned on the light. Cary whistled. “That is a lot of drugs,” he said.

“Three-quarters of a million dollars worth,” she said. “That’s why we keep the door locked at all times.”

“I like it,” he said. “I like the whole layout. I’d like anyplace where you worked.”

When at last they were in his hotel room, he ordered a bottle of champagne in a bucket of ice, just like in the movies. They sat on the couch, drinking the champagne, talking in throaty voices. She nestled closer to him, took his arm and draped it around her shoulders. He kissed her and she purred like a kitten.

“Would you like an injection?” he asked after a while.

“Everything is perfect already,” she said. “I don’t know how it could be any better.”

“It will release you from your inhibitions.”

He gave her the injection and, as she was starting to feel it, he picked her up in his strong arms and carried her over to the bed and laid her on it.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I just want you to be comfortable,” he said.

“What about you?”

“Just rest. Everything will be fine.”

When she awoke, it was daylight. Fully clothed, she lay in the same position on the bed where Cary Mulvihill had placed her. She gasped and sat up, not at all sure of what had happened.

He left her a note that read: Please be out of the room by noon. I’m leaving you money for cab fare.

When she saw a hundred-dollar bill sticking out of the top of her purse, she knew he was gone. Gone and not coming back. She ran into the bathroom and heaved up the contents of her stomach.

Cary Mulvihill—with help from compatriots, of course—took Verna’s keys and cleaned out the drug closet in Dr. Bunch’s office in the early hours of the morning while the night watchman was napping. Three-quarters of a million dollars worth of drugs.

When Dr. Bunch arrived to open the office, he saw what had happened. Verna’s not showing up for work at the usual hour aroused his suspicions. He called her at home and when he didn’t get her he called the police. They were waiting for her as she got out of the cab in front of her house.

Copyright © 2018 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Herman Melville ~ A Capsule Book Review

Herman Melville ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

Herman Melville, by brainy Melville scholar Elizabeth Hardwick, is a short (158 pages) biography in the “Penguin Lives” series. It is an overview of Melville’s life and a dissection of each of his major works, beginning with Redburn, Omoo, Mardi, Typee, and on to Moby Dick and later works such as the short story “Bartleby the Scrivener” and the short novel Billy Budd.    

In a nineteenth century American novel class in college, they had us read Herman Melville’s massive and difficult novel Moby Dick. We had a week to read it, study it, and uncover its secrets. The next week we were to move on to Henry James’ The Ambassadors, which is also a very difficult novel to read. (What is wrong with these people?)

While Moby Dick is notoriously difficult to read, most people in the know agree that it is the greatest American novel ever written. Its central character, Captain Ahab, is a driven megalomaniac. In an earlier encounter with the monster white whale, Captain Ahab lost a leg. Now, spurred onward by vengeance, he will risk his ship, The Pequod, and all the men on it for another chance to bring down the whale that has come to be known as Moby Dick. The whale is a symbol for something. Just what it is a symbol for has never quite been established. Of course, the question has sparked endless speculation.

By all accounts, Herman Melville (1819- 1891) did not have a happy life. When he was young, he worked on a whaling ship, abandoning ship once in Liverpool. This shipboard experience gave him the experience he needed for his books. He lived with his family in New York in shabby gentility. He always had money worries and was frequently on the verge of bankruptcy. He met the by-then established writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was fifteen years older than Melville; the two of them became acquaintances, if not the best of friends. He was unhappily married, while his sexual interests seemed to lie elsewhere. (His writing is full of “homoerotic yearnings.”) He was the prolific (and fast) writer of many books, but he was never commercially successful during his lifetime. Of his four children (two boys and two girls), one of his sons committed suicide at age eighteen and the other died in faraway California at age thirty-five. Of his two daughters, one was debilitated by rheumatoid arthritis.

When Herman Melville died at age seventy-two, he was mostly forgotten, spending the last nineteen or so years of his life working as a clerk for a meager salary. It wasn’t until the 1920s that there was a great revival of interest in him and his work, particularly the novel Moby Dick and two shorter works, “Bartleby the Scrivener” and Billy Budd.

Copyright © 2018 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Hereditary ~ A Capsule Movie Review

Hereditary ~ A Capsule Movie Review by Allen Kopp

The Grahams are a middle-aged couple who live in a big house in the woods. Annie Graham (an overwrought Toni Collette) is a sort of artist who makes dollhouses and miniatures. Her husband, Steve (Gabriel Byrne), doesn’t seem to do much of anything except stand around and be fatherly to the two Graham children: a very odd thirteen-year-old girl (inexplicably) named Charlie and Peter, a dope-smoking high-schooler.

Annie Graham’s strange (“strange” is the operative word here) mother dies. Annie speaks at her mother’s funeral, explaining how “private” her mother was in her “associations.” (We find out later the reason for this.) Annie’s mother had a special bond with the little girl Charlie. At one point Charlie says that her grandmother wanted her to be a boy, which might explain her being given a boy’s name.

Charlie is not the usual thirteen-year-old girl. She is distant and preoccupied, with a face that is mask-like. Also, she has a peanut allergy, which is an important plot point to remember later. When Peter, Charlie’s brother, is invited to a teenage party, his mother makes him take Charlie along, which she will sadly regret later. What happens to Charlie, which I will not give away here, is the most disturbing image in the movie.

Grieving, Annie meets Joan, an older woman who seems sympathetic. (Joan, as we discover later, is not what she seems to be.) Joan is also grieving; her son and grandson have both died in a drowning accident. These two women seem to have a lot in common.

At a later date, Annie meets Joan when she is out shopping. Joan feels so much better, she says, because she has met a spiritual medium who has shown her how to get in touch with her grandson in the spirit world. Annie is skeptical, of course, but eventually drawn in.

When Annie is going through some boxes of her dead mother’s possessions, she finds some pictures that she can’t explain and also a book with some of its passages highlighted that tell how a demonic spirit is looking for the body of a human boy to occupy on earth. These fleeting images help to explain what is going on. If you’re not paying attention during these few seconds, you will miss it because it won’t be explained later.

Hereditary is a better-than-average summer movie. It’s slow-moving at times, especially during the first third, and is probably a little too long at 127 minutes. It takes a long time getting to the payoff, but when it comes (to music that sounds like Wagner’s “Entrance of the Gods into Valhalla”), we find that it was well worth the wait.

Copyright © 2018 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Intruder in the Dust ~ A Capsule Book Review

Intruder in the Dust ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

In the small town of Oxford, Mississippi, a white man named Vinson Gowrie is murdered, while a black man named Lucas Beauchamp stands accused and is put in jail. The Gowries (from “Beat Four”) are sure to want revenge. They can get enough of their redneck friends together to storm the jail and remove Lucas Beauchamp and lynch him. The law is conceivably helpless against such a mob.

A sixteen-year-old boy name Charles “Chick” Mallison is convinced of Lucas’s innocence, while everybody else believes he is guilty. When he was twelve years old, out hunting in the woods, Chick fell into the river and was pulled out by Lucas Beauchamp. Lucas took him home with him, gave him dry clothes and half his dinner. Chick tried to pay him for his kindness with some coins he had, but Lucas didn’t take well to being given money by a white child. Chick never forgot Lucas’s kindness, his dignity, and how much he was unlike other black people of his acquaintance.

With little more than a hunch to go on, Chick wants to prove that Lucas is innocent. He gets his friend, Aleck Sander (a black youth his own age), to go along with him to the cemetery where Vincent Gowrie is buried, miles outside of town. But, wait a minute, there’s at least one adult who also believes Lucas is innocent. A seventy-year-old spinster named Miss Habersham grew up with Lucas’s now-deceased wife, so she has a personal interest in the matter. She goes along on the nighttime visit to the cemetery to dig up Vinson Gowrie’s body and take it back to town so it can be examined by an expert to prove that Lucas’s gun didn’t fire the fatal bullet.

Well, wouldn’t you know it? There’s a body in Vincent Gowrie’s grave all right, but it’s not Vincent Gowrie. Now it becomes a murder mystery. While everybody else is waiting around for the Gowries to lynch Lucas Beauchamp, a handful of people (Chick Mallison, his lawyer uncle, Miss Habersham) are willing to miss sleep and put themselves out to prove that something more sinister is going on that a black man murdering a white man in a small Southern town.

Intruder in the Dust was first published in 1948. It is, we are told, William Faulkner’s answer to race relations in the South. It’s written in a stream of consciousness style, making it wordy and at times difficult to read. Some of the sentences are hundreds of words long and some of the paragraphs go on for two pages or more. A thought will obtrude on a thought and then another thought will obtrude on that thought. Faulkner was the supreme literary stylist of American literature. Nobody else even comes close.

Copyright © 2018 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

The Seagull ~ A Capsule Movie Review

The Seagull ~ A Capsule Movie Review by Allen Kopp

The Seagull is based on the famous play by Anton Chekhov of the same name. It’s set in Russia in 1904, in summer, in a country house beside a lake. Irina (Annette Benning) is a Moscow stage actress in her mid-fifties come to visit her elderly brother (Brian Dennehy) and her son, Konstantin. She has her boyfriend, Boris Trigorin (Corey Stoll), with her. Boris is a famous and celebrated novelist, about fifteen years younger than Irina. He is drawn to Nina (Saoirse Ronan), an innocent country girl who wants to go on the stage. Nina is dazzled by Boris’s fame as a writer and imagines his life is much more romantic than it really is. Boris and Nina spend time away from the others, partly in a boat on the lake, much to Irina’s displeasure.

Then there is Masha (Elizabeth Moss), daughter of the housekeeper, Polina. Masha is one of the most interesting characters. She wears black all the time (“in mourning for my life”), takes snuff, drinks to excess, and looks older than her twenty-eight years. She is in love with Konstantin and, since she can’t have him, she marries the schoolteacher, Miguel, a sincere if unprepossessing fellow.

Like Boris Trigorin, Konstantin is also a writer, but an untested one. He’s jealous of Boris for his success, for the esteem with which his mother holds him, and, more importantly, for his attraction to Nina. Konstantin is in love (unhappily as we will see) with Nina. He shoots and kills a seagull and throws it at Nina’s feet for no reason other than that he feels sorry for himself. The destroyed seagull is a symbol for innocence lost.

In the final act, a kind of coda to the whole thing, we see what becomes of all these characters two years later. Nothing has really changed, as we will see. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

With the multiplex given over almost entirely to comic book movies and youth-oriented fare, it’s hard to find a movie like The Seagull. It’s a chance to see a film version of a world-famous Russian play, if that should interest you, as it does me. You may come away enriched for having had the experience and you won’t go home with a special effects headache.

Copyright © 2018 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

The Truce ~ A Capsule Book Review

The Truce ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

Mario Benedetti was a Uruguayan writer who lived from 1920 to 2009. Although not well known in the English-speaking world, he is considered one of the most important Latin American writers of the second half of the twentieth century. His novel, The Truce, was first published in 1960. The 2015 Penguin Classics edition was translated from Spanish to English by Harry Morales.

The subtitle of The Truce is The Diary of Martín Santomé. Martín Santomé is the common man protagonist of The Truce and, as such, he is subject to all the ills and foibles of being alive. He doesn’t have a lot of money and isn’t especially smart or well educated. He has spent his life toiling in a tedious accounting job (“…that sentence of being ensnared in something unimportant for eight hours, something which inflates the bank account of those useless people who sin by the mere fact of being alive…”). At forty-nine, he is a few months away from retirement, but, instead of looking forward to retirement, he doesn’t know how well he is going to take to it.

Martín’s private life is no more exemplary than his professional one. He has been a widower since age twenty-eight. (His wife, Isabel, was twenty-five when she died of complications of childbirth.) He has had perfunctory affairs with women, one-night stands, but nothing that lasts. His three grown children (Esteban, Blanca and Jaime) live with him but he is not good at understanding them or communicating with them. When his son Jaime confesses to him that he is gay, he writes: “My son is a queer. A queer…I would have preferred that he turn out to be a thief, a morphine addict or an imbecile. I would like to feel pity for him, but I can’t.”

There is a young woman half his age with whom he works in his office. Her first name is Laura, but he refers to her always by her last name, Avellaneda. He is drawn to her in a way that is new for him. When he discovers the attraction he feels for her is reciprocated, the two of them begin a tentative affair. It is this affair that forms the emotional core of the novel.

Avellaneda and Martín rent an apartment together, but their happiness seems as fragile as a helium balloon. He knows he is not the man he once was. The difference in their ages bothers him more than it does her. If they remain together for any length of time, will she end up dumping him for a younger man? Adding to his anxieties is the feeling that his own children, especially Esteban, disapprove of his seeing a woman other than their mother.

Instead of chapters, The Truce is divided into diary entries, making it very easy to read in Martín Santomé’s first-person voice. And, although set in the exotic (to us) locale of Montevideo, Uruguay, it could be anywhere. Its themes of loneliness, love and loss are universal.

Copyright © 2018 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

From the Earth to the Moon ~ A Capsule Book Review

From the Earth to the Moon ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

From the Earth to the Moon is an 1865 science fiction/fantasy novel by Jules Verne. Even though Jules Verne was a Frenchman and wrote in French, the novel is set in America because that is where people think big and accomplish the impossible.

The Civil War has ended and American military men are unhappy that there’s nobody else to fight. But, wait a minute, there’s some other way for these people to expend their excess energy. The president of the Baltimore Gun Club, one Impey Barbicane (with a name like that, we know we’re not being serious), comes up with the interesting idea of shooting a projectile all the way to the moon out of a cannon. It won’t be easy, of course, but these are Americans, and they don’t know the meaning of “impossible.”

Soon people all over the world are fascinated by the idea of sending a vessel to the moon. Most think it’s a good idea whose time has come, but there are always the naysayers who are sure it’s a disaster in the making. Donations come pouring in from every part of the globe, in the millions, to finance the expensive project.

It’s going to take a very large cannon to shoot a projectile with enough force to traverse the quarter-of-a-million miles between the earth and the moon. It is decided, after much thought and research, that the cannon will have to be nine hundred feet long, buried in the ground, and will be ignited with something known as guncotton. The place chosen for the cannon is Florida because it’s part of the United States proper and is below the twenty-eighth parallel, which is necessary to allow for the best shot at the moon. And, since the moon and the earth are constantly moving, the projectile must be launched at a certain time to be capable of reaching the moon. Many thousands of people, from all over the world, are fascinated by the prospect of a vessel traveling to the moon and converge on Florida, making a city out of a wasteland.

Many chapters are devoted to the construction of the cannon and the logistical problems that must be overcome to send a vessel to the moon. In the spirit of American adventurism, no problem is too difficult. As the date for the launch approaches, Impey Barbicane and two other of his associates decide they will make the trip more interesting by placing themselves in the projectile and riding along to the moon. After they figure out problems of food, water and air, there isn’t anything that will stop them. Are there people on the moon and, if so, how will they receive men from earth? Are there fearsome animals that might be dangerous? The intrepid trio take along firearms just in case.

From the Earth to the Moon is interesting because it’s written by a master of the fantasy/fantastic genre and is a nineteenth century Frenchman’s view of America, complete with boastful characters who love to fight and never shrink from a challenge. There’s lots of humor in the novel and a lightness to the proceedings. We never once think that Impey Barbicane and his two compatriots will die in the vessel or that they won’t be able to return safely to earth. There is no death in a book like this. Death is not part of the equation.

Copyright © 2018 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

To the Lighthouse ~ A Capsule Book Review

To the Lighthouse ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

Modernist English author Virginia Woolf was born in 1882 and died in 1941, age 59, a suicide by drowning. Her acclaimed novel To the Lighthouse (number 15 on the Modern Library’s list of the greatest novels of the twentieth century) was published in 1927. There is no plot, action or story to speak of in To the Lighthouse. The narrative consists of philosophical introspection (thoughts and observations) of the characters. This was a technique pioneered by modernist writers Marcel Proust and James Joyce.

The novel is set on the Scottish island of Skye between 1910 and 1920. (We aren’t told where the story is set, or when, but we can find out by reading background information on the Internet.) The Ramsay family is “vacationing” in a seaside house on the island. Mrs. Ramsay is fifty and we are constantly told how beautiful she is (or how beautiful people think she is). Mr. Ramsay is a stuffy, grouchy philosophical professor and writer. The Ramsays have eight children, among them James, who dislikes his father. They have several “guests” staying with them, including the young painter, Lily Briscoe, who knows that her paintings will end up in the attic; Charles Tansley, who asserts that women can’t paint or write; Augustus Carmichael, a poet who riles Mr. Ramsay by asking for a second helping of soup; Paul Rayley and Minta Doyle, two acquaintances with whom Mrs. Ramsay is practicing her matchmaking skills.

The second part of the novel takes place ten years later. The Ramsays return to the house on the Island of Skye for the summer, but there have been some changes to the dramatis personae. Mrs. Ramsay has died in the interim. Prue Ramsay, the Ramsays’ daughter, has married and died in childbirth. And then there’s that awful war, the Great War, in which Andrew Ramsay has died in France, blown up by a shell.

At the end of the book, the long-awaited trip to the Lighthouse takes place, with Mr. Ramsay, James Ramsay and Cam Ramsay in attendance. Lily Briscoe remains behind on the lawn, watching the Ramsays’ boat from a distance. She is still trying to paint without much success, possibly the same picture she was painting ten years earlier. She has never married and, as she watches the boat, she decides she will marry Mr. Ramsay, now in his seventies. Good luck with that, Lily.

What can you say about Virginia Woolf? Of twentieth century English writers, she is the most cerebral. To the Lighthouse cannot be said to be light reading. It requires concentration and a dedicated effort to make it through to the end. I’ve read it twice and the second time was no easier than the first. If you like a book where absolutely nothing happens, except what goes into inside people’s heads, you’ll love To the Lighthouse.

Copyright © 2018 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997