War is a perfectly starched white apron

The greatest tracking shot I've ever seen is the one that concludes the Battle of Agincourt in Kenneth Branagh's Henry V, the quintessential war-is-mud film. Carrying Falstaff's boy (young Christian Bale), Henry (who else but Branagh) travels the length of the field, finally getting to the slight rise at the end to gently deposit the boy's dead body and bow his weary head in victory. There are longer ones, and more technically advanced ones, but to me there are no more moving ones than this. [YouTube it here.]

Part of its effect is due to the fact that all sound is completely blanked out by the music, which begins with a single singer singing Non Nobis and merges into an orchestral chorus that climaxes with Henry's stand on the hill.

I've just summed up the little something extra that Atonement, the film of Ian McEwan's great novel, is lacking. Sadly -- as in it makes me sad, not that the film is sad and pathetic. As a matter of fact, it's quite good, but Joe Wright, the young director, doesn't seem to quite know yet how to give things their maximum punch. The much-buzzed-about tracking shot is technically superb, but it has no point; it doesn't focus tightly enough on Robbie to be about him, and the chaos of Dunkirk could just as well be shown in a series of shots. Similarly, Atonement's score is damn annoying, with its oh-so-clever-and-ominous repetitive typewriter key sounds and plinking piano. It's also too loud, like Merchant Ivory to the max. Give the film its epic sweep and its epic score. Nobody's asking you to John Williams it; Gustavo Santaolalla has shown what you can do with a simple score.

Which brings me to the other odd filmic comparison I want to make, Brokeback Mountain. Without giving away too much, Cecilia and Robbie's star- and war-crossed love doesn't have the dramatic forbidden quality of Jack and Ennis', nor does it have the beautiful symbolic quality of Ang Lee's art direction. Were the color tones off here? Did James MacAvoy just need to be in a shirt that matched his pretty blue eyes? Well... maybe. The stark simplicity of Brokeback, with its black and white hats and clean shirts, does a lot to monumentalize their love and make its loss worth regretting.

Interestingly, Wright tries some of the same things; Cecilia looks absolutely gorgeous even in a bomb shelter (and not at all unhealthily thin, so I take back what I said about the trailer), and Briony's hospital apron remains impossibly white through hundreds of incoming wounded. But instead of Brokeback's bright quality, it comes across more like Cold Mountain where you wonder how Nicole Kidman is getting her eyebrows waxed in the middle of plowing time.

'Tis a pity. The script is not bad, though I don't love all the choices they made, and the acting is very good all around. It may not be coming across, but I liked and enjoyed the film. It just didn't quite reach the top of the mountain.

Academe's expo, then?

Several objections were raised to my Woodstock comparison, on the grounds that MLA is not at all about free love, or any kind of love at all for that matter, or fun, or music... OK, I happen to find MLA to be a fun crossroads, but have it your own way. Perhaps a better comparison would be the Columbian Exposition of 1893, in which a utopian city was built for the purpose of showing off Chicago and the United States, with exhibits, some living, from every civilization but a heavy stress on the technology and superiority of the West.

This just happens to be in my mind because I half-read Devil in the White City, which is about the expo. I liked the architecture part but not the murder mystery part. I should also note that by calling MLA the Expo, I am not in the least implying that a murderer was stalking the Hyatt's sacred halls, unless you count the deadly fears that plague the job candidates.

However, MLA is a huge exhibition and parade, and it shares the political foibles of the exhibits of the Columbian Exposition -- a large topic that I will address another time. Some decisions certainly get made that will help shape the future of literary studies and pedagogy in the U.S., but for the most part it's a chance to see what others are working on, show off your own work, get a job, network, etc. Highlights for me included watching W. J. T. Mitchell smack down N. Katherine Hayles' proposal that we phase out departments in universities and turn to "problem" studies instead (i.e., topical organization like urban studies or, one she suggested, poverty studies). This is particularly interesting, because I've been watching Northwestern's graduate school phase in clusters that supplement departments, but they are not all problem-based; some are area-based instead (e.g., Latin American studies). Useful as supplement; as replacement, just as subject to stodginess and territorialization.

Returning to the general conference experience, I met with many friends, new and old, and was delighted to unexpectedly re-meet Michael Berube, formerly of Le Blogue Berube, which was a model of what public academic blogging should be -- much as Michael himself is a model of what a public academic can be. I have kept this blog more to my personal arts consumption, which I'm happy with at the moment. But the range and sheer volume of Michael's four-year blog was something else; the archives are still on his website, and worth a look.

Academe's Woodstock

I am running back and forth to MLA, the Modern Language Association's conference, for a few days; this year it's in downtown Chicago on the river, too near to get a hotel but far enough to bemoan that fact when it's snowing.
This conference is the biggest thing in literary studies, and most of the job market opens fire here. I lack time and energy to blog if I want to make myself look presentable, so instead, I point you towards the Chronicle of Higher Education's blog. MLA is a big crazy show, and I am actually very fond of it because you can see so many out-of-town acquaintances and friends. It occasionally draws sardonic fire from newspapers with some pretensions to intellectualism; I recall a piece a few years ago when it was in New York that attempted to make my old professor Stephen Greenblatt sound like some kind of playboy Hollywood mogul equivalent.

Merry Christmas!

Traditional Christmas media at the Kim homestead:

1) The Ben-Hur chariot race. Sometimes we actually start from the beginning of the film, but as far as I'm concerned, the film dies with Messala. The chariot race is every horse-lover's dream; MGM just used it to show off their stables and stuntment.

2) Rudoph the Red-Nosed Raindeer. I love that animatronics.

3) Kiri Te Kanawa singing "The Twelve Days of Christmas." We've phased this one out.

4) Julie Andrews singing Christmas songs. This one is intermittent.

5) We often catch It's a Wonderful Life on TV, or as Phoebe on "Friends" called it, It's a Sucky, Horrible Life and Then You Die. The two highlights for me are Mary using the phonograph to power the turning spit with the chicken over the fire, and George's reaction when Clarence calmly announces that he's an angel. "Well, you look about the kind of guardian angel I'd get."

A highlight of years past was the televised concert with Kathleen Battle and Frederica von Stade singing carols. I love Flicka (von Stade); she was born in NJ and sang in a La Scala Cenerentola that I loved when I was a kid. I got to see her concert at Symphony Hall here recently, which was obviously just a kick to see her live. She still has a lovely voice.

Merry Christmas, everyone! Enjoy whatever your food traditions are. We'll be doing our usual hodgepodge of Korean.

That's an expensive wastebasket

As I mentioned, the Milwaukee art museum has a fantastic Chihuly installation (and a mammoth Calder mobile, with circles the size of auto tires, but I don't really go crazy for those.) Apparently, these museum pieces are the most famous Chihulys, but I'm more familiar with the wavy plate sculptures that mimic natural forms. The museum has one of those as well.

I like glasswork, and Washington state is definitely the hub of American glass artisans right now, partly because of the available sand variety, but also, I'm told, because of tax breaks and so forth that have driven many artists north from Arizona. Everyone's other favorite hub is Venice, of course. My uninformed perception is that the Washington work tends to be more sculptures and Venice is more towards houseware and crafts, but no doubt there's plenty of both in either side.

Dale Chihuly hit it big in the '70s, and his work is astronomically priced by now. Ironically, he can no longer blow glass himself, because he lost an eye in a car accident and the lack of depth perception is dangerous. However, he has a large and thriving studio in Tacoma.

I don't mind admitting that I first heard of him by name on Frasier, which after all is set in Seattle. Frasier has a big Chihuly bowl on his mantel. There's an episode where he juggles it for some reason (they used a replica, since the real thing was valued at about $30,000) and another where Daphne, who is compulsively eating, hides half a Twinkie in it. Frasier finds it and hands it to Martin, saying, "Dad, how many times do I have to tell you that my Chihuly is not a wastebasket?"

Beautiful stuff, anyway, even if unaffordable.

On the second day...

...no turtledoves, but a fun trip to Appleton, WI, hometown of one of my favorite middle-brow American authors, Edna Ferber. Who, you may ask? Well, Edna won a Pulitzer Prize and was very popular in her own time, hanging out with the glitterati and theatre folks of NYC, but now it's the movies made from her books that are remembered, chiefly Showboat and James Dean's Giant. That's her with Jimmy to the left, apparently either demonstrating or learning how to twirl a lasso.

The beautiful Appleton historical museum, which looks oddly like a castle (former Masonic temple) had a small but informative and well-chosen cabinet on Ferber, including two of her typewriters (she hated hand-writing) and lots of her first editions. (Houdini, the other famous Appletonian, had a whole floor.) The gift shop also was selling a novel of hers that I had never encountered before, a tale of a logging family called Come and Get It.

Afterwards, we drove around town looking at Edna's old stomping grounds, including two houses that she lived in, the former site of her father's dry-goods store (on Main Street), and the temple she attended, the best-preserved of them all. All of these spots are immortalized in her most autobiographical novel, Fanny Herself. It doesn't paint a very flattering portrait of the temple's congregation, though; Ferber seems to have resented them for looking down on her mother for working after her father's death, rather than starving to death genteelly.

On the way out of town towards Neenah, I even got to see the paper mills mentioned as destroying the environment in Fanny. To be sure, they're still belching out a tremendous amount of smoke, and I'm sure the land around them is no prettier than when Ferber took a swing at them.

On the first day...

...of my visit to Wisconsin, we went to the Milwaukee Art museum, which is architecturally spectacular. Well, at least the new section is, with its "sailboat" sunscreen panels; the museum looks like it's going to sail off into Lake Michigan. You walk into a huge atrium with sky-high windows (currently framing a large Christmas tree) and a crazy, colorful, twenty-foot Chihuly sculpture.

The collection itself is small but very nice, with the highlights being several Georgia O'Keefes, lots of Flemish/German painting, a fair amount of medieval articles, and one sarcophagus. I appreciated their attempt to arrange things in the new section chronologically, which is a great teaching tool. In the older section, it's more by exhibit; there was another, more normal-sized Chihuly in the glass section and a wonderful collection of Arctic photographs/art, including a beautiful and informative composite drawing/satellite photo of caribou migration. Also some really interesting modern art.

Not to be sordid, but the gift shop was also unbelievably beautifully designed. The Met could take a lesson from them. The basement restaurant also lovely, with huge windows on the lake (which radiated cold, of course, but were well worth it). All in all, a well-crafted smaller museum, and definitely worth the visit if you're ever in Milwaukee.