1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 90: Green fish

Tagging Green Fish (1997) as a “gangster” flick is like calling Badlands a “spree killer” flick: it ignores the poetry. Beautiful little scenes are interspersed with violent ones. The little scenes carry the movie.

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Ilsan, which lies within commuting distance of Seoul, was once farmland. Now, high-rises stand next to the fields. Mak-dong’s family still lives in a hut. The patriarch has died. Mak-dong’s oldest brother is mentally disabled; another brother, a policeman, is a drunkard; another barely gets by, delivering eggs; their mother cleans houses; their sister does sex work.

Mak-dong has just completed his military service. Riding the train home, he confronts ruffians who are molesting a stylish young woman. The ruffians beat him. He loses his belongings; the woman retrieves them and tries to contact him. He tracks her to Seoul, where he lands himself in another fight, this time with the gangsters whose boss the young woman, Mi-ae, is mistress to. The boss, “Older Brother,” brings Mak-dong into the gang.

Mak-dong’s talent is for taking beatings. His first assignment is to bait a councilman into beating him up after karaoke. The councilman thus acquires a debt to “Older Brother.” Such is the labor to which Mak-dong is put.

I’ll support the family, Mak-dong tells his brothers. He works for their sake – and for Mi-ae’s.

And, paradoxically, he is motivated by genuine loyalty to his exploiter, “Older Brother.” Not just by need or fear.

You might believe such loyalty to arise from a misguided, idiosyncratic compulsion. But “Older Brother” is just as loyal to the older head of a rival gang. Although these men are adversaries, they uphold the same seniority code.

Mak-dong’s fellow junior gangsters are ineffectual louts. The parallel with Mak-dong’s biological family is unmissable: the gangsters also are called “brothers.” Mak-dong outperforms his fellows, as “Older Brother” recognizes. Yet he remains at the bottom of the pecking order. The gang is hardly a meritocracy. Only the boss’s intercession saves Mak-dong from suffering more abuse than he does.

And Mi-ae? Behave how she will – whether she obeys or throws tantrums – she’ll always be the “kept” woman. That’s her fixed place.

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As a genre specimen, Green Fish exhibits the common tropes: police corruption; assassinations; the “kept” woman’s daliance with a subordinate member of the gang.

But these are just pegs from which to suspend the individual scenes. And these, often, are glorious.

(1) Mak-dong’s early encounter with the ruffians has a surprising, satisfying logic of reversal and counter-reversal.

(2) Mi-ae lets go of a scarf. It flutters from her train window and lands on Mak-dong’s adoring face.

(3) Restaurant patrons discuss whether to order the dog soup or the chicken soup. They agree on the chicken and then join the cooks in chasing the condemned bird around the yard.

(4) The egg vendor is pulled over, bribes the police, is cheated, and chases the police in turn.

(A persistent theme is contempt for official authority. All of the police are corrupt or weak. Mak-dong’s policeman brother prefers to describe himself as a public servant; thrown out of a restaurant, he makes no appeal to his badge. Mak-dong, as a soldier, receives no respect from civilians. Is this because every man must take his turn in the armed forces? Or must every man take a turn because soldiering is disdained?)

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I was hooked from the opening credits, which are set against lovely old photographs of Mak-dong and his family in the countryside.

An early scene (below): Mak-dong the ex-soldier comes home. See how indifferently he walks past another fight. (Fights seem very common.) You can get a sense of the movie’s soapish/​noirish music. The mood is of a defeat.

Which, for many rural citizens, was what Korea’s new industrial prosperity was.

Chicken tikka masala

Samuel’s options for school lunch:

• chicken tikka masala
or
• hot dog

He eats the hot dog.

It’s years away, but … should he ever wish to enroll in the high school’s International Baccalaureate program, he’ll have to start choosing the chicken tikka masala. (Surely, its presence on the menu is a sorting device.)

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His teacher has given him a daily homework assignment: twenty minutes’ reading.

We let him choose what to read the first day. During the allotted time, he rapidly flipped through the pages of book after randomly chosen book.

Since then, I’ve been forcing him to read the Babar series. In order. After twenty minutes, he puts his bookmark in the omnibus and goes off to play, and we all sigh with relief.

Do you like Babar, I ask him.

No, he says.

Well, stick with it.

He usually reads out loud. Karin, who wasn’t raised on Babar, casts funny glances whenever she hears references to cannibals (for instance).

I give Samuel his Sundays off.

Sexy beast

R.I.P. Terence Stamp, of The Limey (1999). In his honor – more or less – I’m watching another fine movie about aging, expatriated, English gangsters: Jonathan Glazer’s Sexy Beast (2000), starring Ray Winstone and Ben Kingsley (not Terence Stamp). I don’t know why it’s called “Sexy Beast.” This is my third viewing. Once each decade is about right. Winstone is Gal, a genial gangster who has retired with his woman to a villa in Spain. He stretches out beside his pool, drinks his beer, and roasts. Or he potters around the countryside with another retiree and an errand-boy, shooting at rabbits. It’s a good life. There’s the occasional hiccup. A boulder rolls down a hill, almost kills Gal, and wrecks the bottom of his pool. Worse, Don – Kingsley – arrives from England to browbeat Gal into going back for a final robbery. (Gal is a safecracker or some such technician – I don’t quite remember; I haven’t reached the “heist” scene yet; I watch in installments, late at night.) Don is a honey badger. Or a demon. Gal dreams about Satan the night he finds out that Don is coming to Spain. The longest section of the movie shows Gal enduring Don’s relentless abuse. You’d think this would make for lousy viewing, but it doesn’t. Everything about this movie is entertaining. It wouldn’t be so much fun set in a dark den in East London, but this is Spain, specifically the sunlit, garish, hallucinatory, Mediterranean coast: the backdrop for such varied screen oddities as Morvern Callar and Benidorm: a place where pasty Britons flock to party or lie low or simply turn beet-red. That Gal has opted for the good life is an affront to Don’s frenetic code. It’s amusing that someone as nasty as Don should follow a code; but, does he ever.

More mini-books

School goes smoothly enough for Samuel, who puts on a brave face but still has misgivings (as shown in the third photograph below).

To catch up on my reading, I continue to choose mini-books.

• Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Life Together. For the reading group. I’m also attempting the Ethics (delivered on my porch in an imperfectly sealed package, during a rainstorm).
• Maggie Nelson: Jane: A Murder. Poetry. An earlier treatment of the subject matter of The Red Parts (a memoir).
• Ditto: The Argonauts. A memoir of modern love. Scavanged at Goodwill with Jane: A Murder.
• Alexandra Elizabeth Sheedy (yes, that Ally Sheedy, aged approx. twelve): She Was Nice to Mice. Good Queen Bess’s private moments, as reported by eyewitnesses (palace vermin).
• Arthur Miller: The Crucible. Scavanged at Goodwill. I missed this high school staple when I was younger (I did read Death of a Salesman).

I’m also reading Wilder’s Our Town; later, I’ll read The Skin of Our Teeth and re-read The Matchmaker. These are collected in a single ordinary-sized volume and so don’t count as separate books, mini- or otherwise. But using plays for catching up is one of my better recent brainwaves.

“A monument of misplaced scholarship”

… is how a Guardian reviewer describes a new edition of the diaries of Cambridge don and “Pomp and Circumstance”/​“Land of Hope and Glory” lyricist A. C. Benson (1862–1925).

Having previewed the book on Amazon, I concur.

See, for instance, p. 267, n. 4 (the font is Fournier).

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Samuel will return to school this week. Tonight, he realized that he’ll go to school from August until June every year for the foreseeable future.

I told him I went to school for twenty-four years.

He can count much higher than twenty-four, and he can do other mathematical operations – he and Daniel made extraordinary progress this summer (his teacher will be shocked) – but, clearly, the concept of twenty-four years is beyond his reach.

The concept of an hour is barely within it.

He has the concept of living forever. He’s all for it. Like Wilbur the pig, he doesn’t want to die.

Body-text fonts, pt. 42: Monotype Garamond (or something close)

At the ripe old age of about sixty, Evelyn Waugh published A Little Learning, the first volume of his autobiography. It was his last book. Two years later, he died.

A Little Learning begins like this:

How’s that for eloquent weariness?

(There are Garamonds and Garamonds. I don’t know all of their histories. This is Monotype’s metal-type version or something close enough; the digitization is what everyone recognizes from Microsoft Word.)

Waugh’d be a challenge for me to read chronologically because I’ve gone through his early novels many times and his late works hardly at all. I’d have to make it past Brideshead and The Loved One to get to the really unfamiliar stuff. In the mid-1940s, Waugh began tackling a steeper grade than I’ve been able to climb at the breakneck pace he set in his comical works.

It’s better, perhaps, to try going backwards, to begin with sluggish, morbid despair and retrace the author’s path from initial breakneck hilarity (in its way, just as despairing).

Despair usually is a sin, but in Waugh’s case it may actually be a virtue.

Mansfield Park

This novel is more savage than its predecessors. Its matrons and widows are at least as pharisaical as those of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice; its young gentlemen, at least as dissolute. In addition, the family’s fortune depends on volatile West Indian holdings. Will the slaves generate enough income to make up for the profligacy of the eldest son? And what will befall poor little Fanny Price, the household’s live-in cousin?

I don’t know how this story will turn out. For once, I’m in suspense.

The movie didn’t appear until 1999. I won’t be reviewing it for my “1996” series – at least, not for many years. (Recall that I’ve been casting a wider net, reviewing material that appeared from 1995 to 1997.)

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I’m nine or so books behind my hoped-for reading pace. So, recently, I read two celebrated mini-books: Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, about Ireland’s Magdalene laundries; and Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny, about Nazi Germany, the USSR, and Donald Trump.

You could argue that they’re basically the same book. To use jargon from my old job as a tutor in IUSB’s first-year writing program: the second book is a “theory” text, and the first is an “example” text; and a student who read both books could write a paper making plenty of connections between them (one connection per body paragraph, of course).

(I wonder how teachers of first-year English at IU are coping with A.I. Not too badly, I expect. The in-house rules for papers are so detailed and peculiar, the bots probably still haven’t learned how to follow them.)

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This is Disney’s best song.

Abel has been standing up next to the furniture.

August’s poem

A favorite poem of Simone Weil’s: George Herbert’s “Love” (III).

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,

Guiltie of lust and sinne.

But quick-eye’d Love, observing me grow slack

From my first entrance in,

Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,

If I lack’d any thing.

A guest, I answer’d, worthy to be here:

Love said, You shall be he.

I the unkinde, ungratefull? Ah my deare,

I cannot look on thee.

Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,

Who made the eyes but I?

Truth Lord, but I have marr’d them: let my shame

Go where it doth deserve.

And know you not, sayes Love, who bore the blame?

My deare, then I will serve.

You must sit down, sayes Love, and taste my meat:

So I did sit and eat.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Abel has learned to crawl; the tops of his toes have calluses.

Auden’s syllabus

My Uncle John shared a syllabus for a course that W. H. Auden taught at the University of Michigan in the early 1940s. Auden assigned 6,000 pp. of reading, according to The Paris Review.

(I’m not sure if the estimate is for recommended and required reading, or just for the latter.)

The way to complete so much reading on time is to begin before the term. Like, in grammar school. I imagine Auden telling his students: “I’m sure you’ve already read two-thirds of this material.”

I try to read a lot, and not only fluff. But there are just three items on this syllabus that I’ve read from beginning to end. I’ll let you guess which they are. Two of them, I first read in grammar school.

What on earth have I been doing since then?

The Philadelphian writer Joe Queenan has a nice memoir of his reading life called One for the Books. He gets through plenty of books and speaks candidly of their lousiness. You can get an idea from this passage. (Read to the end for a tidbit about Winston Churchill.)

The font is Caslon no. 540, which I’ve discussed.

Later in the book, Queenan makes a disparaging remark about South Bend.

P.S. It seems that Alan Jacobs was the first person to blog about Auden’s syllabus. Today, Jacobs posted another good entry, about early cinema.

P.P.S. When I took A.P. English in high school, students were expected to read 700 pp. every 2 weeks to earn an “A”: not quite Auden’s pace, but not so, so far off it, either. I wouldn’t have come close if we hadn’t been allowed to accumulate pages during the summer and Christmas holidays. Even so, I resorted to dubious measures like counting blank pages and skipping ahead to pages with three or four lines of text – at the end of a chapter, for instance. (I found dozens of virtually text-free pages in my parents’ edition of Walden. I also used a very generously spaced edition of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner that contained hundreds of pages. That book was a godsend because we were allowed to count each poetry page as three pages.)

Darkness and stars at noon

The group is reading Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940), “a book known to the world only in translation” for most of its existence (the German manuscript, which went missing in wartime, resurfaced in 2015). I’m reading the supposedly flawed translation by Daphne Hardy that everyone used for decades. Does the novel deserve its lofty Modern Library ranking? Probably not, but it’s engrossing enough; and it’s not difficult to read, which is lucky because my household has been ill. (I should read more “secret agent” lit. Nothing is so glamorous-gloomy as sad-sacks slinking around European capitals.)

Probably a red herring: Denis Johnson wrote a 1986 novel called Stars at Noon about espionage/​political dissent in Nicaragua. It was moviefied in 2022 by Claire Denis, with a Tindersticks soundtrack and with Margaret Qualley and Joe Alwyn in disagreeable but involving lead roles (I’ve seen the movie, not read the book). Apart from (a) similar titles and (b) the themes of spying and revolution, there’s little to connect this story with Koestler’s. (Well, the movie and Koestler’s book do both feature a mephistophelean interrogator. He’s a Communist in Darkness and a CIA operative in Stars.)

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Martin’s Super Market sent this postcard to gloat about the demise of our local Kroger.

About eight years ago, Martin’s began shrinking its Portage Ave./​Elwood St. store, which served an even poorer neighborhood than our Kroger. It converted a grocery store into a mere meat market; then, in 2020, it closed the store altogether.