Savannah Lee

I loved her books so intensely in my childhood; I lived in them. I came to disagree with a lot of her theology, but what matters is the love and joy in her writing.

She made her own way as a writer--no MFA, no classes. The New York Times called her work "deeply, quixotically personal."

My favorite was always "A Swiftly Tilting Planet," that long rush of desperate poetry.

She hated what she saw as the increasing depersonalization of life; she hated being assigned any kind of number. Of heaven, she said, "There, I will be known by name. Madeleine."

All of us who knew her name will miss her deeply.

I have print fiction (not online) in the current issue of Blue Earth Review
and forthcoming in the December 2007 Aoife's Kiss. I'm very excited to be part of these passionate, always-surprising journals and I hope you'll support them.

Online, I have (and do NOT click on this unless you're over 18 and explicit material is okay where you live) an erotica called "Objects of Meaning" up at Clean Sheets.

If you do read "Objects of Meaning," please also check out the Clean Sheets home page and read their other wonderful stories. I'm a huge fan of Clean Sheets and extremely proud to be included on such an inventive, thoughtful, and very hot site.

Y'know, it's funny; "Objects of Meaning" may be explicit, but it's not the one that makes me blush. That's my Blue Earth Review story, "Still Life With Wrists." It's about a quietly kinky girl who gets the courage to pursue the hottie on her floor when she finds out he had some goodnatured bondage pictures taken of himself. I feel more shy about that one than I do "Objects of Meaning," which has some, you'll pardon the expression, in-your-face activity (with a twist), but ends up as a love story.

When I sent "Still Life" to a friend of mine, I told him I was a little nervous about sharing something like that with him. To which he replied, "Please! I'm a New Yorker!" Mindful of today's tragic anniversary, I send my love to the city that Anthony Bourdain called "the heart of the world." (I think that was his wording. I'm not actually sure. But the sentiment is right.)

That's all for now.

I tried very hard not to be a writer. This may seem odd to you, but it does happen to a significant minority of us. I don't mean I didn't *write;* I wrote all the time. But as Whitney Houston put it, “Do you want to be a singer? Or do you want to be a singer in show business?” There's a difference between writing to write and writing to publish. I didn't want to reveal myself. When I lived in a dorm during college, I never put anything up on my door. I'd hear people standing in the hall: “Does anyone live there?”

I tried very hard not to be a writer, but I failed. So here I am.

Some books I love:

A SWIFTLY TILTING PLANET by the late Madeleine L'Engle. My parents had to take this away from me. I'm serious. I would sit there reading certain passages over and over, shaking. In retrospect I was maybe a little young for it, but I'm glad I read it anyway.

THE TOMBS OF ATUAN by Ursula K. LeGuin. This is the second book in what used to be the Earthsea Trilogy and has become, I think, the Earthsea Tetralogy. I have to say I don't really like the later books. Of the original three, I liked "A Wizard of Earthsea" and "The Farthest Shore" just fine, but the middle child, "Atuan," just knocked me flat with its grave and silent poetry. I remember sitting out on our screen porch with the concrete floor, cold from the shade of the trees, and reading it over and over.

OF NIGHTINGALES THAT WEEP, JACOB HAVE I LOVED, THE GREAT GILLY HOPKINS, and, of course, BRIDGE TO TERABITHIA by Katherine Paterson. (Oh, um, by the way--not to be rude, but hey Mom, what was that about me not reading again?) (Sorry, that's childhood baggage. My mom used to go around saying "You don't READ!" I think it's because I didn't like "Oliver Twist" or something. Well, "didn't like" doesn't exactly describe it...it's more like it walloped me the same way "A Swiftly Tilting Planet" did, only I resented it this time. By the way--everyone always thinks it's so great when a kid can read above their grade level, but it can actually cause problems, because they can be exposed to things that are too intense for them emotionally or psychologically. Reading can become a strangely kinky pleasure-pain experience. Speaking of which...) Regarding pain, Paterson sometimes lays on the suffering a little too thick; from an adult perspective, you can see strings jerking. But to a kid, raw and new, that really is how life feels. Paterson string-pulls her plots in order to get at that truth.

MORETA: DRAGONLADY OF PERN by Anne McCaffrey. Are you kidding me? I wanted to *be* Moreta. I loved the picture of her on the jacket of my hardcover copy. It looked like pure freedom and exhilaration, but at the same time, stone-cold professionalism. As if the two were part of each other.

THE WESTING GAME by Ellen Raskin. Pure fun. Anyone who has not read this is a poor deprived soul and needs to go get a copy of it right now.

HIS DARK MATERIALS TRILOGY by Philip Pullman. (Whoa, it's something I actually read in the last ten years!) I wonder if the movie is going to go anywhere near Teh Atheism.

LITTLE MEN by Louisa May Alcott. I never liked "Little Women," Alcott's better-known classic. I don't know why. But I *loved* "Little Men." More precisely, I loved Dan. (Alcott clearly loved him too; you can see she never intended him to become as major a character as he did, but melted before his general awesomeness.) When Jo finds him feverish and injured in the haystack, hiding from her only because of how badly he wants to be found, it's one of the best moments ever.

THE FAR SIDE OF EVIL by Sylvia Louise Engdahl. I'm so glad this book is back in print. I loved the original (the new 2003-2005 editions are apparently different; I haven't read them yet). Engdahl has a profound moral compass and a deep humanism. The grim question now is whether we've essentially become the kind of society she's arguing against here.

Those books are all my mothers. I don't think I write like them, but every kid has to individuate and all...The point is, I loved them the way you love people, ambivalently, arguingly, unguardedly and too much. What a joy.

I'm working on four new stories right now.

Currently I'm reading:

I'M COMING TO TAKE YOU TO LUNCH: A FANTASTIC TALE OF BOYS, BOOZE, AND HOW WHAM! WERE SOLD TO CHINA by Simon Napier-Bell. This is an immensely entertaining memoir which is exactly what the subtitle says. It could have benefited from an editor who would have brought out its latent odd poetry, but no harm done--it's still well worth reading. You do not have to be a fan of Wham! at all to appreciate this book; in fact, the band is almost incidental to Napier-Bell's globetrotting efforts on its behalf. Napier-Bell's anecdotes of early-80s China put me in mind of IRON AND SILK by Mark Salzman. That book is a classic, but my favorite of his is definitely...

LOST IN PLACE: GROWING UP ABSURD IN SUBURBIA. This is Salzman's chronicle of his childhood in Connecticut not too far from where I was born. The book is a gem. I'm not sure I can pick a favorite anecdote, but the one where he and his friends went to see Laserium and forgot where they parked their car is definitely up there.

THE PERSIAN BOY by Mary Renault. This is one of those books I'm just utterly in love with. It's a historical novel about Alexander the Great as told through the eyes of his (historical) eunuch concubine, Bagoas. I don't know how many times I've read it. It's not the kind of thing that would be published today; it's of a different time, but no less worth reading for that. When I first read it, I didn't know Mary Renault was a lesbian, because in this book she's so obviously in love with Alexander. Bagoas expresses her own feelings. Her desire as a writer was just to be near him as much as she could allow herself to be by pouring herself into this shadowy historical vessel. She was Alexander's belated Homer, the one he always wished for to immortalize him in a great ballad.

Back to work.

Meghan O'Rourke has a beautifully-phrased and thoughtful appraisal ofMadeleine L'Engle's work in Slate today. I like O'Rourke's point about how L'Engle's action tends to take place entirely inside the hearts and minds of her characters; this is what the New York Times meant when they called her work "quixotically personal." But it meant the world to a lot of us. And in a way, this writer of fantasy was the ultimate realist; for most people, the profound moments really do happen inside.

O'Rourke did, however, miss what I consider a crucial aspect of L'Engle's work. L'Engle wasn't just non-dogmatic an openminded. She was an implacable enemy of religious cruelty, to the point of having (it is strongly implied) God himself blast a Puritan church right off the map with a bolt of lightning in furious punishment for the church's attempt to burn a woman as a witch. Her villainous Pastor Mortmain (mortmain=dead hand, aka "the dead hand of the Law") is a memorable and all-too-rare example of a religious thinker standing up against dogmatism and religious sadism.

It's all right there in "A Swiftly Tilting Planet," imho the best of the lot.

I started writing on a manual typewriter.

Well, actually, I started by hand, on paper. But my mom had an electric typewriter, and when I was around eight years old, I taught myself how to hunt and peck on it. (I hunt and peck very well--someone once said it was like listening to a machine when I was really rolling--and I like it because my wrists stay in line. I don't have to angle them in order to use all my fingers on the keyboard, which means I've never had carpal tunnel. With the hours I've spent at the keyboard in my life, that is a major blessing.)

Anyhow, after I taught myself to use my mom's electric, she and I had to share. As I started spending more and more time writing, this became a problem. For, I think, my twelfth birthday, I got my own machine--an Adler manual typewriter. (And I sat on a little 1950s wooden clerical chair, too. It was as if the universe wanted to test my dedication.)

I loved the thing. I definitely had to get used to it--you had to hit the keys *hard*. To this day, I still do--I've destroyed a couple of candy-ass computer keyboards by stabbing the crap out of them. But nothing I do now approaches the force I had to use then. My right finger bent. My fingernails splintered and started growing in in visible layers.

Besides the work of it, the power it demanded from you, the fact that you had to MEAN EVERY WORD, I loved the cloth ribbons that went with my Adler. I can still smell them. New, they were so black it was like a cut of night. The letters they put on the page were a shock. Then you'd stop noticing--the clarity just a little less. In a few weeks the letters would grow--not so much fainter--but *thinner*. That was the key. On the ribbon you could see a trail of wear just *below* the middle.

That was the neat thing: when the letters got too thin, you could take the ribbon out, *turn it over*, and start creating a new track just above the old one. The letters wouldn't be good as new, but they'd be strong enough, and your ribbon would last for a long time.

I don't know when I inherited my mom's old electric. Some time later in high school. I brought it to college with me, where I used it in open defiance of the campus computing system. I probably never would have started using computers at all, except I met this guy. And that always changes the story.

As I continue to describe myself through my loves...

THE MILL ON THE FLOSS by George Eliot, which I read in eighth grade English. The cataclysmic final image is burned on my brain. (Or at least I think it was the final image. Certainly the only one that mattered.)

VILLETTE by Charlotte Bronte. I'm one of those who feel this is her best work. No question. The steeliest, the clearest-eyed, the most moving. "But: he is coming." Beautiful.

LAUGHING BOY by Oliver LaFarge. While we're in that tragic victorian mood. Defines bittersweet.

Speaking of westerns, how about THE VIRGINIAN by Owen Wister. I don't think there's ever been a better definition of love: "You feel about it the way I do. I could not have dreamed there'd be two of us to care so much." What sticks in my mind is not the central love story, though, but the bitter side-tragedy of Shorty and Pedro. The lesson here is, if you love something in a harsh land, do *not* set it free.

THE OUTLAW BIBLE OF AMERICAN POETRY, ed. Alan Kaufman and S.A. Griffin. Dirty-faced American antiheroes who get there any way they can.

REBEL ANGELS: 25 POETS OF THE NEW FORMALISM, ed. Mark Jarman and David Mason. And this would be the crowd that gets to the exact same place in the opposite way--giving the 'rules' a whole new meaning in the process.

STRAIGHT HEARTS' DELIGHT: LOVE POEMS AND SELECTED LETTERS, 1947-1980 by Allen Ginsberg. The erotic poems here are second to none in my opinion, and the story of Ginsberg's relationship with Peter Orlovsky is ambivalent and gripping.

NUREYEV: HIS LIFE by Diane Solway. From a poet of words to a poet of the body. Solway is part of the "everything and the kitchen sink" trend of biography, but in this case, it's more than welcome. Besides being a great artist, Nureyev lived a quintessential 20th century life--vast, riven, and strange. Ultimately lonely but never less than defiant.

Which makes me think of J.G. Ballard's EMPIRE OF THE SUN. In a very different way, it tells the same story--the complete fracturing of anyone and everyone who got too close to the heart of the last century.

There are so many books and so little time.

Who in their right mind would turn down the chance to see Russell Crowe and Christian Bale face off onscreen?

Actually, however, this film is not about them. It's all about Ben Foster's pale leather coat. Like the character who wears it, you're not supposed to notice yourself noticing it...because it's too important for that.

Foster plays the second-in-command to bad-guy Russell Crowe, and in the grand tradition of secondary villains--Goebbels, for example--he is WAY meaner, crazier and more sadistic than his boss, with whom--and Goebbels will continue to serve as an excellent example here--he is clearly in love. (Foster and Crowe are great in the reveal on this, as Crowe fixes his eyes past Foster at a woman he Has To Have Right Now Ohmigod, and Foster quietly despairs. Crowe is sufficiently awesome an actor to suggest that he's well aware of this and either doesn't care or is doing it deliberately to keep Foster in his place. Foster in turn is sufficiently awesome to suggest that he's well aware of *that*, and willing to put up with it if he can just stay by Crowe's side.)

Christian Bale, meanwhile, deserves a medal for not looking around and saying "You idiots, I can be *way* more psycho on film than any of you." It must have been somebody's idea of a funny to have Christian Bale play the straight man, the down-at-heel rancher who's too good for his own good. Russell Crowe has no problem at all suggesting coldness and cruelty and mocking aloofness when he wants to, but Bale can take us all the way into inhumanly disturbed and alien territory. He can be *other.* That's what made him such a great Batman--he *gets*, and can convey, that this guy is far, far more dangerous and sick than the predators who created him. It was a shame not to see (more than a few brief flickers of) that side of him here; it could have brought an interesting subversion to the story.

But Russell Crowe. His role starts out almost totally reactive, with other actors getting showy moments off of and around him. He has very little action, very little room to move (and that's literal once the handcuffs go on). Few actors could go so long like that. They'd wash out of the film. Not Crowe. It's a thing of beauty to see him hold on and come through. They should show this to screen acting students.

If you like movies where actors get a chance to *act*, go see this one. Then, if due to some kind of oversight you don't already own the Christian Bale movie "Empire of the Sun," go buy it on DVD. The film itself has some issues (although if you pretend it's a European arthouse project, they all disappear), but the 13-year-old Bale gives a performance for which we should slit our wrists and give our blood as tribute. (Read the book too. The movie opens with the image on which the book *ends*--coffins being washed back towards the shores of Shanghai. The book is more about Shanghai than anything else, in an oblique, indirect, and therefore deeply Chinese way, while the movie is about seeing.)

But then I guess in some way *all* movies are about seeing.

Louis Menand has a thought-provoking piece about Jack Kerouac, "On the Road," and the true nature of the Beats here.

David L. Ulin has a similarly revisionist take on the subject here.

Menand says, "They weren't rebels, they were misfits." Which is interesting, because I think that's a generationally-bound distinction. I was a teenager in the 1980s, and if faced with that concept back then, I think we'd have been totally, like, "There's a *difference*?" In that decade, our misfits *were* our rebels. Menand is coming from a somewhat sterner perspective; he's basically arguing that the Beats were *losers*--quasi-closet cases who lived on government checks and drove fast in order to put disappointment and troubling questions behind them.

Ulin takes the view that the Beats were trying "to sustain [themselves] in the face of eternity" by "making [their] friends into mythic figures, turning [their] adventures into heroic legends, creating a cosmology around the essence of the self." Which is basically a friendlier way of saying they were losers who drove fast to outrun disappointment and the question of why none of them could quite make their relationships with women work. But the difference in attitude between Ulin and Menand amounts to a difference in meaning.

Of course, there's another way to look at all this. Much as Menand thinks Kerouac is bourgeois because he lived off of his GI benefits and the largesse of a friendly aunt, that was the precise definition of being an *anti*-bourgeois, a bohemian, in the 19th century. Many of the original bohemians had modest fixed incomes. There were some, like the little-known Tassaert brothers, who didn't--but better-off friends helped the Tassaerts when they could. Private income wasn't an impediment to their ongoing campaign to stick it to the Man. (My favorite bohemian anecdote is about the artist Petrus Borel, who served ice cream in human skulls.)

But the original bohemian creed was not necessarily about failure. They wanted to succeed--eventually--though only on their own terms. And they were willing to pay whatever price they had to pay as a result of that either-or attitude. "The path of the bohemian leads to the Academy or to the morgue," went a contemporary quote. And for many of them, it did. What's confusing to people about Kerouac, I think, is that his path led *both* to the Academy--kind of (Menand observes that "On the Road" is "sub-canonical")--*and* to the morgue. This is a tough one for Americans to get their heads around. He succeeded and failed at the same time?? I can haz cheezburger??

Or as Ulin puts it, "It is precisely [Kerouac's] contradictions (the road warrior who lived with his mother, the 'happy, sheepish imbecile' who became an alcoholic) that make him so compelling after all."

Happy 50th to "On the Road."

It must have been 1983. I abstractified the window to a big slam of heat and went straight for the book right below it.

I remember the book as being hardcover with a pale blue jacket meant to represent the sky. I don't remember the title. I don't remember the author. I do remember the store, a ridiculously tiny incense-scented singularity within the Omega Institute of Rhinebeck, New York. This was in the days before they air-conditioned Main Hall. It was a somewhat more raw place back then, with actual hippies rather than the well-spoken and well-meaning professionals whose numbers were increasing by the time I stopped going. In 1983, there was still the sense that anything could happen.

People around me say I don't read, but what they mean is that I don't obey. I don't dutifully turn to page 1 and go from there. Nope. I look at the middle, I look at the end, and then I start hopping around in between. There's actually a word for this, it's called "poaching." To me, it makes a text infinitely bigger. Joss Whedon once said that his idea of the perfect movie was to assemble random cuts of interstitial video from Final Fantasy VIII with music from Evanescence. When you poach on a book, that's what it turns into--immediate cataclysms with thunder in the background.

So I poached on that sky-blue book under that big face of heat in that place where anything could happen. In those pages, anything did. Christa was a runaway and she found Luke, who was kind. A dangerous fantasy, which, as long as you can tell the difference, makes it the only kind worth having. To be so vulnerable, to go from such pain to one single point of acceptance and decency--my heart raced.

At the end she stops the car and goes to a pay phone. When her mother answers, she says, "It's Christa. Yeah, Christa Perretti, that's who I am now."

I closed the book, put it back, and left the tiny store.

I've never been able to find it again. Sometimes I almost wonder if I dreamed it. Omega was a place for dreaming, after all--a place, at that time, which was made of dreams. Not the typical kind, but the odd, waking kind you get from tofu-eating hippies who move from tentground to tentground. I wonder where they are now.

There's a famous essay by Richard Hofstadter called "The Paranoid Style in American Politics."

Key points (most of them found under the subheading "Emulating the Enemy"):

1.) The paranoid's thinking is apocalyptic ("he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values").

2.) His thinking is millenarian ("he is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point").

3.) He thinks he's one of the few who can see the real threat and its real magnitude.

4.) His worldview is black and white ("what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil...the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable [and] must be totally eliminated").

5.) He is "obsessed with inerrable prophecies."

Folks, this is fantasy literature. This is the boilerplate fantasy narrative. It's the first "Star Wars." It's "Lord of the Rings." It's Susan Cooper's "The Dark is Rising." You bet it's "Harry Potter."

Many fantasy authors, in other words, have created paranoid scenarios. They've created worlds in which everything really *is* at stake, the enemy really *is* "totally evil and totally unappeasable," the battle really *is* a battle "between absolute good and absolute evil," and the enemy really *must* be "totally eliminated--if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention." No one but the small band of heroes can see the real danger. Either they operate in isolation, or the masses have willfully blinded themselves, and their leaders would rather destroy the heroes than have the fragile illusion of safety be shattered. Inerrable (if sometimes hard-to-decipher) prophecies are at the heart.

Fiction is, famously, "the lie that tells the truth." But why does so much fantasy literature use this lie? Especially when this lie is responsible for 90% of the suffering in the world? Is our fantasy literature *wrestling* with this lie, trying to make it come out all right somehow, trying to find terms under which this lie will heal rather than harm? Or is it actively giving in to the lie and indulging a wish that the lie would be true?

A lot of people who read Tolkien appear to love the paranoid lie and to read Tolkien as validation of it. This essay by Gene Wolfe, for example, truly scares me with its romanticization of what I consider to be the worst aspects of the Dark Ages ("they were times of defined and definite duties and freedoms," aka everybody knew their place). For contrast, read this pro-modern, pro-enlightenment objection to Tolkien's worldview by the British journalist Johann Hari.

Where does that leave people who love fantasy but don't love paranoia? Ursula K. LeGuin, an enlightened and anti-paranoid thinker, put an entire tortured Jungian interpretation onto Tolkien (the bad guys are the "shadows" of the good, so the good aren't really that simplistic after all) in order to rescue Tolkien from having written what she instinctively understood to be a paranoid narrative.

Other solutions are more direct. Aragorn and Legolas are a favorite pair among people who write and read slash fiction online. Somebody somewhere is imagining those two getting up to no good, which gives me immense hope for the future. (I'm serious.)

And then there are the texts themselves, which can surprise us if we let them. Tolkien may be beloved by a lot of incipient fascists, but in *some* ways, they're reading him wrong--Frodo's story is actually pretty subversive. Hobbits should be a fascist's worst nightmare, being plump, cheery, nonaggressive, and deeply attached to creature comforts. And Frodo is diminished rather than exalted by his triumph--which, of course, isn't a triumph at all. Frodo actually fails. It's important to remember that. (I had an essay in Aoife's Kiss about Frodo called "Frodo and Achilles.")

But at the end of the day, the Problem of Sauron (and Voldemort and on and on) remains. The inhuman enemy. The absolute danger. The necessity of total war. What entertains us is literally what kills us. Is that actually healthy? Is it sad? I don't know. I really don't.

I studied French for six and a half years and loved every minute of it. Out of all the wonderful things which I was privileged to read in that beautiful language--novels, plays and poems by Zola, Sartre, Malraux, Sarraute, Moliere, Voltaire, Beckett, Ionesco, Rimbaud, de Musset, Baudelaire, Duras--my favorite is the last poem of Robert Desnos.

That page is in French. This is my own translation:

"I have dreamed so much of you,
I have so walked with, so talked to,
so loved your shadow,
that nothing remains to me of you.

All that remains for me is to be the shadow among shadows
To be a hundred times more shadow than shadow
To be the shadow which shall come and come again into your life of sun."

Robert Desnos died in a concentration camp in 1945.

One night when I was in high school, my mom and I were flipping channels together on TV (which is actually a lot more fun than just watching something). We came to a live performance by Depeche Mode. They were doing their classic paean to sadomasochism, “Strangelove.” Lead singer Dave Gahan, heavily leathered-up, was droning his way through the song's monster hook: “Pain/Will you return it/I'll say it again/Pain...”

I, a child of the 80s raised on Prince, Boy George, and Eurythmics, found this to be entirely normal for a bunch of pop stars. But my mom—uncharacteristically, actually—snapped. She answered "NO, I will not, thank you" and changed the channel.

I was having a Depeche Mode thing a little while ago; “Strangelove,” with its glamorous yet grim and portentous sound, was in particularly heavy rotation. It was in that context that I watched the movie “The Horse Whisperer.”

After I picked my jaw up off the floor, I said “I hate it when sadomasochism puts on a cowboy hat and tries to play without asking permission,” and went upstairs to write an essay.
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There's a lot you can say about Depeche Mode. Right off the bat you can say they represent the tragedy of the Reagan-Thatcher era, in which the liberation movements of the previous generation were foreclosed and all discourse was reduced to one of power. Depeche Mode epitomize their time in a way almost no other band does; they get to the awful heart of what happened in those years. Furious, irresistible dance beats are melded to a sound darker and heavier than most metal bands—and fronted with some of the most dysphoric singing and dystopian lyrics ever recorded. In other words, they take the two main musical trends of the decade, merge them, and turn them into a dirge of limited possibilities. Almost all of Depeche Mode's songs are about power. Pure and simple. In this way, they expose the curdled possibilities of the Thatcher era.

Yet theirs is a fascism that slaps the face of the Thatcher-Reagan-Bush kind. Why? Because theirs is a fascism that announces itself for what it is. Dave Gahan never tries to justify himself. Above all, he never tries to trick or bully anyone. He asks first. He marches right up and says “Hi. Pain! Will you return it?” You can say, as my mom did, “No thanks, Dave. Peace out.”

What infuriated me about “Horse Whisperer” is that it did not ask first. It didn't admit what it wanted. That goddamn Robert Redford character was the cruelest, most dominating son of a bitch I have possibly ever seen onscreen outside of Matt Damon's baby-faced Will Hunting and David Duchovny's hangdog Agent Mulder, and (like them) he never copped to it. The movie spent the whole time secretly getting off on this righteous cowboy** ordering these two women around, pretending he was “helping” and “healing” them, when all the while he was pushing their buttons and, particularly in the case of the careerist New York mother, tearing them down. (“Do you ever sit still?” he asks her—a telling question. Plus, her hat's not good enough for him.) I wanted to kill him. I wanted to kill the director. I wanted to kill the screenwriter. I wanted to kill Nicholas Evans. I wanted to kill everybody. I wanted to become Scarlett Johansson, shoot the horse, tell Robert Redford off, take my mother, and go home. And then at the end, the stupid husband (Sam Neill) piles on! “You see, Annie [the mom], I know you don't know how you feel about me, and I don't want you to come home until you decide.” Bad girl, bad girl, he's saying, and I'm going to have to lay down the law. “Okay,” Annie tearfully says. No! Ridiculous! Enough! Send her to the Dysfunctional Relationship Recovery Program with Scully!

I...was...furious. I cannot remember when a movie made me that mad. Something was really, seriously, deeply wrong with it; it was profoundly dishonest. This movie was Ionesco's “La lecon” in disguise. That “horse whisperer” character DID NOT represent what the movie pretended he represented. He was not who the movie said he was. He pretended to be so straightforward and honest but he wasn't. It was all a game.

First, Scarlett Johansson says “I don't want any part of this [fixing the horse].” “Fair enough,” says Redford. Then the mom and Redford prepare to go look at the horse. The mother asks Johansson to come along—and Redford casually says “Probably best that she doesn't.” The manipulation starts right there. Johansson is frosted, and soon decides to pick up her cane and hobble out to join them anyway. Then Redford tells Johansson that she has to agree to help him with Pilgrim. When she says “Well, there's nothin' else to do around here,” he firmly says “That's not good enough.” You'll have to do better, won't you, missy. Yes you will.

It got worse from there. I hated that man. I'm serious—I hated him. I wanted that girl to take off her prosthetic leg and club him with it. There was a “graduation” scene where she's supposed to ride her rehabilitated horse—I so, so wanted her to sabotage it. I wanted her to give everybody the finger, hobble away, and never ride again. A little bit of personal development is a very small sacrifice under the circumstances, especially since she *wasn't* being developed, she was being controlled and manipulated. Not only that, but she was being prevented from correctly understanding what was happening to her. You can't play a game you don't know you're in. Her ignorance gave the gamemaster just that much more power.

In “Strangelove,” Dave Gahan says, “Strange love...that's how my love goes...Will you give it to me...I'll make it all worthwhile/I'll make your heart smile.” It may seem freaky, but it's actually as vanilla as it gets: it's an honest declaration, a fair question and an honorable promise. The women in “Horse Whisperer” never got that. They were the objects, not the subjects. Which pisses me off.

**Let's talk about men and horses in the movies. When a man is good with horses in the movies, you got yourself your basic metaphor there. “Legends of the Fall” has a minor little sub-arc where Susannah watches Tristan take off after a wild horse; later, she goes to the window and watches him break it. “Whoah,” we are meant to think. (What we mostly think is, "That's not Brad Pitt's butt on that stuntman.") A similar moment happens in the Australian movie “Hammers Over the Anvil,” where the vastly superior horseman Russell Crowe does his own stunt work on a wildly bucking horse while a thirteen-year-old girl watches him with degree of excitement far beyond anything Julia Ormond was able to muster. And then of course we've got “The Horse Whisperer,” where the metaphor is the whole damn story. In “Legends,” the moment is very brief, but it's meant to indicate that Tristan has the physical skill and daring which his brother lacks. In “Hammers” it's frankly and totally about sex. In “Horse Whisperer” it's supposed to be all of those things, plus stern frontier healing as well. But if I want a horseman, I'll take William Shatner (remember his riding in GENERATIONS?) or Viggo Mortensen (whose empathy with TJ in HIDALGO was palpable and touching).

Junior year of college, my dorm room was barely wider than the window at its end.

The moon liked that window; it appeared right in front of it every night, turning for me in slow motion through its cycles.

I had a pasteboard bedtable that I still own today. On it sat, and still sits, a clock radio I'd had since I was thirteen. I listened to it on my bed while I did my reading for class.

One day, a song I'd never heard before came on, and anyone familiar with early-90s Top 40 radio knows that that's pretty much an earthshaking event. So was the song. I actually stopped what I was doing and stared at the radio. “You are born into this world/Looking down the barrel of a gun/And those who hold the gun/Want you to work fast and die young/And if you don't work/If you don't obey/They'll make you live in fear till your dying day.”

Toto, I don't think we're listening to Gloppy Love/Generic Fist-Pumping/Sassy Come-On Song #3,948,652,341 anymore.

The chorus said “Whether it's God or the bomb, it's just the same, and it's only fear under another name.”

At that time, I was listening to a lot of *Justice*-era Metallica, Queensryche (“Walk in the Shadows”!!), Megadeth, st, Testament, King's X, Death Angel, Warrior Soul, GNR, Danzig, Faith No More. You would expect to, and did, hear that kind of sentiment pretty often with them.

But not in a pop song, and not snarled with such absolute rage. I was in love.

The radio said it was Max Q, a project with Michael Hutchence.

But I couldn't find it anywhere.

As with the lost book,\ I almost started wondering if I'd hallucinated the damn thing.

Yesterday, my husband and I were browsing the CDs in a used bookstore. I wasn't looking for anything at all, I was just noticing that their alphabetizing was a little lax (George Michael popping up in four separate places)...when I saw a CD that said Max Q.

I never did know the title of the song, but the booklet had lyrics, and sure enough: “You are born into this world...” It was called “Way of the World.”

So there you go. Seventeen years later, un-asked for, un-looked for, there it was.