Geoff Godfrey

Passings

The reverse of this tiny sepia-toned photograph reads “Paul Godfrey Easter 1949 Stewartstown, PA.” It was originally written in pencil but was later partially fleshed out in ink. The handwriting I immediately recognize as that of Mary Godfrey, my paternal grandmother. I’ve no recollection of how I came into possession of this photograph, but after moving to France it fell out of a book as I was unboxing and shelving stuff we’d had shipped from the USA. It’s possible Paul himself sent it. He used to mail me strange messages including Garfield or Far Side clippings from the newspaper and hand-scrawled notes on old receipts. Once he sent me a Polaroid of a woman he was then involved with–she was nude and far younger than he. He’d scrawled “daily vitamin pill” on the photo. I don’t know the name of the young woman but I heard later that she took Paul’s ATM card and emptied his bank account. A bit later Paul became unhoused.

On June 1st at 8:45 pm Paul Godfrey died in hospice care in Gettysburg PA, the town where I was born in 1969. He’d had a stroke a few weeks earlier which left him a bit weak on the left side. He was institutionalized to undergo rehab but refused to participate, refused food and water, and went into a rapid decline. Eventually staff gave up trying to engage him and instead medicated him against the pain of starvation. He was 80.

Paul Benjamin Godfrey was my biological father. Your inclination might be to offer sympathy in this circumstance; that’s kind and considerate but wholly unnecessary. We weren’t close, and were in fact estranged from one another for decades. I think we spoke a half-dozen times in 35 years. My younger sister heroically assisted him his last few years and had visited him in hospice without getting much response. I, on the other hand, had almost entirely excised him from my life quite some time ago. Due to the staid dictum don’t speak ill of the dead, I’ll refrain from cataloging the reasons here. I’ll simply state that my mother gathered our belongings into a few trash bags and left his house after calling the police one night in the 1970s, my sister and I in tow. She wanted the police there as she fled in case Paul showed up. He worked night shift and we escaped to shelter in a good samaritan’s house for a couple weeks before moving into the home of my maternal grandparents. Later, there was a brief attempt at reconciliation which failed and divorce procedings were engaged. I was 7 years old, my sister 5.

My sister asked if I’d write an obituary. I could barely come up with 500 words. It says something that a man of 56 years could know so little about his father’s life that minimal details were tough to scrape together into a brief narrative. But such was our relationship, or lack of.

There will come a time when I have more to write about Paul Godfrey. For now, however I’ll remain silent and allow that photo from 1949 to be my memory of him. It was taken 20 years before my birth, and it’s a very cute and charming photo of a presumably loveable little chap. May the conditions and torments which caused that young child to become the man I knew be laid to rest.

Exit Music

John Rebus is close to retirement. In fact, only days away from turning in his warrant card. A dissident Russian poet is found bludgeoned to death and Rebus and his partner Siobhan Clarke are off to find the killer. As a result they explore the underworld of early 21st century global politics. Big banks are in collusion with Labor and Nationalist politicians and local gangsters to milk Russian oligarchs of their cash. Scotland is aching for independence and the oligarchs find it an attractive place to avoid possibly drinking radioactive tea or falling mysteriously from a high window onto a Moscow street.

Rebus wonders what counts as corruption and illegality when the entire economic and political system is shady. As he tries to unravel the case he ponders his own ethically questionable past doings and wonders if he’ll simply spend retirement in the pub gradually softening himself with malt.

Another murder complicates things. Rebus and Clarke are now no longer detectives in a local precinct police squad; they are George Smileys working in the shadows to uncover an international conspiracy.

Or perhaps not? Maybe there is less there there than appearances suggest. As they work the case Rebus begins the process of handing the reins over to Siobhan as much as possible. She is at once frustrated by his tactics and deeply saddened to be losing his wisdom and experience, but finds herself ready to take over the team.

I jumped into this 17-novel series at book 15 and only read that one and the final volume, but enjoyed them thoroughly. Good pop lit with a cracking plot and sufficient depth and complexity to keep me intrigued. The characters are not one-dimensional types but are fully fleshed out. And Mr. Rankin can indeed write a good sentence. If detective novels and police procedurals are your thing you might want to read these.

Fleshmarket Close

We were sitting at the local watering hole a few weeks back and mentioned to friends from the UK that we were going to visit Edinburgh this summer for the first time. Immediately one said “Oh, you must read Ian Rankin before you go. I’ll lend you a couple!” Sure enough a day or two later her significant other dropped off two novels at our front door on his way home from work. Fast service!

I’ve not read many detective novels or police procedurals or mysteries–I’ve dabbled in noir now and again, and did read the first Simenon Maigret novel in French last year. But I figured it would be an interesting way to get a taste of Edinburgh in advance without relying on Rick Steves for once, so I dived right into Fleshmarket Close.

I was a bit concerned to begin reading a series at about volume 23 or 24, but the novel stands alone quite well. The detective central to the story is John Rebus, who is being pushed aside by his superiors and sent off to pasture in a shoddy department in a squalid neighborhood. Rebus is an attractive type, familiar from the genre–a gutsy guy, tough-minded, unsophisticated in his tastes and not academically inclined, but eclectic. He likes an enormous variety of niche music from jazz and folk to punk and techno. He likes a pint and a malt perhaps too much, and has an ex-wife and estranged daughter who probably featured prominently in earlier volumes. He’s read Dostoevsky. He tends to intuit things other detectives miss, and instead of thinking linearly about a crime he builds up a huge amount of context and finds all sorts of intricate leads to trace. This frustrates his superiors but he gets results.

In Fleshmarket Close the murder of an immigrant leads to a thriving underworld of criminality involving drugs, Irish milita, human trafficking, slumlords, racism, salacious and carnivalesque right-wing media, celebrity lawyers, and pornography. Rebus and his younger partner Siobhan Clark eventually piece together a vast conspiracy. It’s quite satisfying, and Edinbugh is a character in the story just as much as Baltimore is a character in The Wire. In fact, this novel has some substantial similarities to The Wire Season 2. And, I’d note, Edinburgh as portrayed in this novel has some similarities to Baltimore.

It’s fun to see Detective Rebus struggling with “woke” culture as it began to accelerate, and to note his adapting to “new” tech like laptops and mobile phones and DNA tests. And of course it’s interesting to read a pre-Brexit UK novel which shows a lot of the media agitation which led to anti-immigrant and anti-EU sentiment. Rebus comes from Polish immigrant stock himself and he is not pleased by where he sees Scotland and the UK headed. I’d certainly recommend this to fans of the genre, who might perhaps prefer to start with the first novel instead of one of the last? But also to those who don’t really read this sort of novel as an interesting look at the dark underbelly of a famous tourist destination.

The Information by Martin Amis

It’s been two years since Martin Amis died at age 73, so I figured it was about time I read something of his. He was, after all, one of those writers I was supposed to read back in the ’80s and ’90s, as the conventional wisdom droned on about him capturing the zeitgeist of that time. Somehow I just never got around to reading his novels, though I did see the film version of The Zone of Interest last year.

I had on my shelves The Information, l which I’d received in 1995 when I was running the Literature section of the long-defunct Borders Books & Music just north of Baltimore City. It was a signed first US edition, distributed to promote the work and encourage those of us hand-selling novels to read it and recommend it, and apparently I can get about $50 for it on Abebooks. When we had Christopher Hitchens for an in-store event and discussion of The Missionary Position, I should have asked Hitch about this novel and whether it was worth holding onto and eventually reading. Hitch, like Amis, smoked himself to death, and Martin did his eulogy.

The Information is a seething spite-filled cess pit of self-loathing. The main character Richard Tull is a thinly disguised caricature of Amis himself, and is a most unpleasant bloke to be around for 500 pages. Tull is a pretentious novelist and writes unreadable overly complex books no one cares to understand which pile up unpublished in his study. Meanwhile his best friend Gwyn Barry writes noxious and silly tripe which becomes globally successful and makes him a mint and a celebrity. While Richard is a complete failure who drinks and smokes himself to annhilation, Gwyn is continuously interviewed and photographed and consulted about his opinions. Because Richard regards himself as superior intellectually and artistically to his far more successful friend, he decides to get revenge on Gwyn through a series of demented schemes involving shady underworld stereotypes. All of the schemes however fail and end up bouncing back on their initiator.

All of the characters in this novel are hateful and despicable. Women mostly exist in the book to serve the needs of men and don’t have much depth. The plot is a complete farce and this writer whose works so tapped into the zeitgeist of his time seems now to be as dated as his father Kingsley.

But the prose is gorgeous, scintillatingly so. There are passages of the most delicious and sparkling disdain gloriously served up with malevolent humor. This entire novel encapsulates what it’s like to be an upper-crust twit who feels superior to everyone. It lags in parts and in others is uproariously hilarious and brilliant. As a failure, it’s a rather good one. I might be inclined 20 years from now to pick up another of his books.

Recent Reads

Art: A Sex Book by John Waters and Bruce Hainley

I bought a few copies of this when we had one of several book signings with John Waters at the old Borders Books & Music 043 in Towson. I gave three of them as gifts over the years and still have two signed copies. Probably have a box full of other stuff signed by John as well–DVDs, VHS tapes, other books.

It’s funny to think of an edgy and completely trashy Baltimore film-maker forging a side identity as a collector and modern art sophisticate well-regarded in New York and Paris. But nothing is surprising in John Waters’ career. A few years ago when we were home in the USA it was great fun to browse his substantial and surprising personal collection donated to the Baltimore Museum of Art. Shortly thereafter the museum dedicated a new public restroom in his honor.

After having Art: A Sex Book for more than two decades I finally got around to reading it. I’d looked at the art before but had never tackled the text. The conversations between Waters and his co-exhibitor Bruce Hainley are astute and clever and often as filthy as anything overheard in a high school cafeteria. I laughed out loud several times.

At the end of the book are 20-some artist responses to a list of provocative questions. These range from the silly to the sublime.

The Enchanter by Vladimir Nabokov

When I was first in grad school in Philadelphia in the early 90s we had a list of novels we were required to read outside of our coursework to ensure we had sufficiently deep knowledge of literature and its icons. On the list were two or three Nabokovs. I read at the time either Pale Fire or Ada, or Ardor–can’t remember which. All I recall from the book is a childhood with lots of butterflies and glimmering grass and trees and lazy summer days. And a sexy sibling or cousin? But the prose was dope. And, of course, I read Lolita.

When I found a stack of Nabokov on my bookshelf I took down The Enchanter knowing nothing about it. A quick read of the prologue and I discovered it was not really a novel at all but rather a novella and that the book was mostly prologue and afterward. The prologue discussed the history of the story and the afterward, by Vladimir’s son and translator, was about the challenges of translating some surreal and salacious images from Russian to English.

The Enchanter turns out to be Nabokov’s first examination and expression of the idea which later became Lolita. His son in the afterward explains the experience of reading The Enchanter as being trapped inside the mind of a sick criminal for 70-odd pages. The entire story is about a man who lusts after a 12-year-old girl and who marries her repulsive mother simply in order to rape the child. So, basically the same idea as Lolita, but without the polish. Humbert Humbert is a disgusting pervert but he’s got style and pinache, and discusses his quarry like a sophisticate who knows cheeses and fine wines. Lolita, despite its criminal main character and dark situation, has a sense of humor. The Enchanter has Nabokov’s delicious prose and characterization but I found the experience of reading it less than enchanting–mostly interesting as a curious sort of literary archaeology rather than as an actual good story. BUT the narrator gets his comeuppance in a satisfying way.

The Thanatos Syndrome by Walker Percy

Way back in the late 1980s I took a course called Psychology and Literature. It was taught by the miraculously brilliant and completely weird Dr. Benjamin McKulik (who I discussed on Gayle Danley’s Classy Podcast a few years back). One of the novels we read in that course was The Second Coming by Walker Percy. I recall being fascinated by a female character in that book who had schizophrenic episodes and who spoke in punning sentences full of double-entendres and layered with multiple potential meanings. I have no recollection of buying Percy’s The Thanatos Syndrome but figure at some point I saw it cheap in a used bookshop and bought it on the strength of the other.

There’s a lot to detest in this book. The narrator’s terrible Louisianna genteel racism and anti-semitism, his painfully neanderthal politics, the absolutely retrograde and bafflingly naive conservative sexuality (doggy-style sex is apparently evidence of a psychological problem and/or brain syndrome, and so is oral sex?). Vivid descriptions of pedophilia uncovered by the hero make stretches of the book truly troubling to get through. But I found myself pulled along nonetheless by the narrative, which is like a Robert Ludlum or Tom Clancy thriller written by a much more literary prose stylist.

The plot is completely ridiculous but at the same time believable–a bunch of hacks funded by the Federal government decide to dump chemicals in the water supply which revert people to “lower” primate behaviors because they hope the local crime rate will go down and math scores will go up due to savant capacities developed by those who drink from the tainted taps. Success! Just like flouride in the water saves teeth, their chemical brew from a local nuclear reactor coolant tower works as intended. A psychiatrist recently released from prison for hawking prescription drugs to truck drivers has about five interactions with people in his town and immediately suspects something is up from their speech patterns and changes in their sexual behavior. His wife suddenly becomes good at bridge and wants doggy-style and oral sex for the first time ever, so there must be a neurological syndrome in town! What is the cause? Well, our intrepid doctor finds out with the help of a weird cast of Southern Gothic characters including a kissing cousin, a mentally ill Catholic priest and wanna-be Nazi who lives in a fire spotting tower, and an uncle who wins duck-call competitions.

Nearly a decade ago the first season of True Detective aired on HBO. I thought it was an absolute hoot and a great example of prestige TV with compelling acting in a gritty setting and a peculiar Lovecraftian underbelly. There are several interesting plot and setting overlaps between that season’s arc and this weird AF novel. I wonder if the show’s writers knew Walker Percy’s last book?

The Sundial

https://bookshop.org/widgets.js

Shirley Jackson has the distinction of having written the novel I’ve re-read the most. As of last January I’ve read The Haunting of Hill House seven times. I’ve also read many of her short stories and the lovely and mysterious novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle as well. But for some reason my 1990s paperback re-issue of The Sundial sat on several shelves in several houses for a few decades before I got around to it this week.

I suppose I needed to wait until the collapse of civilization in order to fully appreciate the book. We’ve had several near collapses since I purchased The Sundial–Y2K, the end of the Mayan Calendar, various planetary alignments, wars, pestilences, George W. Bush elected twice–but something about recent events conjures more serious reflection on the End Times than all those others.

The Sundial is focused on the coming End of the World–or, more exactly, how people respond when they genuinely believe the End is nigh. The setting is a genteel massive manse in a New England town, built a generation previously by some fabulously wealthy businessman and currently inhabited by his two children and his grandson’s widow and daughter. The children are Mr. Halloran, confined to a wheelchair and in evident decline, and his sister Aunt Fanny. Mr. Halloran’s wife is still around as well, and is suspected by the grandson’s widow and granddaughter of having murdered his son by pushing him down the stairs in order to secure her own inheritance of the house.

Aunt Fanny one early morning takes a walk around the gardens she’s known since childhood, becoming somehow lost and suffering a potent vision of her father telling her the end is nigh, but that those inside his house will be saved to repopulate the Earth. What ensues is pure hilarity. Fanny shares her vision and somehow it becomes doctrine with all those trapped inside. They will be Robinson Crusoes and Noahs and Adams and Eves, left stranded to rebuild and repopulate.

As in every Jackson novel the characters are all delightfully awful and are skewered by her sharp sensibilities. The dialogue is funnier and better and more sophisticated than anything in Dorothy Parker, the wit makes Evelyn Waugh seem amateurish, and Dickens himself would have been awed by Jackson’s ability to lampoon class differences so efficiently. What took him 5 or 6 hundred pages takes her much less than 3.

I note that as we pass from Pisces and into Aquarius that the old gods have all lined up to watch our current collapse. The Planet Parade of late February/early March this year showed them all coming back to witness our decline once again into rebirth and renewal, just as the change from Aries to Pisces saw the cratering of all the great Mediterranean civilizations and the birth of new orders. In Jackson’s novel the end doesn’t matter so much as the way people behave anticipating it. And just as she predicted, they behave shamelessly and hilariously so–Buckle up, folks!

Dancer in the Dark

I’ve seen a few films by Lars von Trier, so had an idea what to expect. But Dancer in the Dark nonetheless snuck up on me.

It’s at the beginning a very sweet and melancholy story. Selma is an immigrant from the Eastern Block living in small-town 1950s America. She works full time in a factory and does other odd jobs to scrape by. She lives with her son in a trailer which she rents from a local police officer. The cop and his wife help her with her son while she is at work. Other people in town also care for and help Selma, including Catherine Deneuve.

Selma is dreamy and ethereal and is perfectly embodied by Björk who of course has some experience with those qualities. At the factory Selma gets in trouble because she gets distracted running an expensive and dangerous machine. Her distraction? Sounds in the factory result in a musical dance sequence in her head. Dancer in the Dark is a musical, and we see several of these sequences as the plot unfolds.

But this is a Lars von Trier film, so when the twisted and horrible occurs I was not surprised, but I had been lulled into a sort of fuzzy torpor by Björk’s magic. The turn at the core of the film took me unawares.

I’ll say no more lest I ruin it for you. I found the film wrenching and beautiful. My wife seemed mostly annoyed by it. It certainly differs in tone and mood from most musicals and sets out to subvert the genre. Selma, who is a huge fan of musicals, even says at one point something about musicals neve allowing terrible things to happen. But this is von Trier…if you like his stuff or if you are a fan of Björk this might be for you.

The Fly

Back when television was beamed on signals through the air we could only receive perhaps five or six channels in my hometown of Stewartstown, Pennsylvania. The clearest channels were those from Baltimore 30 miles away and were nearly all VHF stations. The UHF dial had a few grainy and fuzzy and far-off stations, the clearest of which was channel 17, WPHL-TV out of Philadelphia. I had many opportunities as a very small child to watch Dr. Shock’s Mad Theater.

The movies shown were mostly terrible 1950s drive-in horror fare, with nuclear monsters attacking towns, guys in rubber suits menacing bikini-clad young women, skulls floating along on visible wires and screaming. But they were a pleasant diversion from the more actual horrors of small-town life in the 1970s. And some of the films actually had merit and stuck with me. A few examples: The Incredible Shrinking Man and his awful battle with a spider, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and The Fly with Vincent Price.

I remember going to see David Cronenberg’s remake of The Fly in a theater when it was first released. I enjoyed it so much that I rented other Cronenberg films on VHS at the local video stores. Interestingly at the dawning of my interest in cinema David Cronenberg was perhaps the genesis of my understanding that there were auteurs, visionary and stylistically interesting directors who made challenging, beautiful, disturbing, and instantly recognizable works of art.

I recently rewatched The Fly on a whim for the first time in 40 years. Of course I’ve seen many more movies and films since 1986, including those rated as the height of the art form. My tastes have tended to drift away from the horror genre, with a few exceptions. But The Fly holds up as entertainment. I think most 80s films are terrible, and people only continue to love them because of nostalgia, and when they revisit them they can’t help but reinhabit their 14 or 15 year old selves experiencing them for the first time. But The Fly has merit in the genre of prophetic sci-fi horror–be careful about your ambitions to unlock knowledge or create new technologies!

Jeff Goldblum is exceptional in his role as a sexy nerd, and still manages to charm after his transformation into a guy in a rubber suit menacing a beautiful lady. Geena Davis is great also, and the chemistry between these two actors really propels the film. John Getz is perfect as the sleazy ex-boyfriend who can’t take a hint. The look of the film remains crisp and slick, and is a precursor to the stylistic flair Cronenberg will develop in later gorgeously shot films like Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch, A Dangerous Method, Existenz, Eastern Promises, etc.

The Fly of course references many previous classic films, primarily Frankenstein, but also The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Invisible Man, Dr. Jeckyl and Mr.
Hyde, etc. Films where the heroes are monsters but are also all-too-human. One detail I’d missed previously occurs when the protagonists have their first overnight dalliance after Goldblum’s initial transformation. Geena Davis is asleep with her hair on the pillow and it is piled up in a column exactly like the hairdo on the Bride of Frankenstein. Made me chuckle.

Surprisingly the special effects hold up well. The computer used to power the teleportation device is likely a Commodore 64 encased in a giant metal box, but it still somehow looks futuristic, and the voice recognition to unlock its programs is a nice prophetic touch.

I’d recommend it if this is anywhere near your field of interest, and would recommend Cronenberg’s stuff to anyone interested in cinema as an art form. He’s worth exploring but the body horror is of course not always easy to endure. The Fly is perhaps my second favorite 80s horror remake–the premier example is of course is John Carpenter’s truly astonishing and completely nihilistic remake of The Thing, which is 1000 times better than E.T. the Extraterrestrial, which totally annhilated it at the box office, but which I now find unwatchable.

Zona

When David Lynch passed away recently I thought “How do I choose which of his films to re-watch?” It felt important to re-watch something and acknowledge the importance of his work in my life. But instead of selecting a Lynch film I watched Tarkovsky’s The Mirror for the first time. I’d seen Solaris, Adrei Rubilev, and The Sacrifice before and thought instead of re-watching something I’d challenge myself with something new.

I’m not sure what brought The Mirror to mind after Lynch died, but I couldn’t help but see the film through Lynch’s cinematic vocabulary. The nonlinear dreamy narrative structure, the inconsistent and often suspicious point of view, the beautifully mysterious and evocative imagery, the masterful painterly touches. As in Lynch’s films, one can’t be sure if what is on screen is real reality, or an internal reality-a dream, a memory, a delusion of one of the characters. Are those really ghosts which tell the young boy left alone to read a certain passage in a certain book? Is the room filled with cascading water an actual memory or event or symbolic or a dream? I’d often heard about The Mirror as an all-time masterpiece, and it proved true. It’s astounding and perturbing like most of Tarkovsky’s films. And, as with Lynch, not ‘getting it’ is part of the pleasure.

Back when I was gainfully employed with a steady income I would buy books willy-nilly. At some point along the way (perhaps after reading a couple Geoff Dyers in my early 40s) I purchased and downloaded Dyer’s Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room. After seeing The Mirror I thought why not read this at last?

Of course Zona is about Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, not about The Mirror. But it’s also a long meditation on Tarkovsky and his style and his work, so the time was right.

Dyer re-watches Stalker while writing and goes through the film scene-by-scene, riffing on each sequence and making connections and interpretations and tying everything to his personal experience and to the various times he’s seen the film. He creates a sort of Talmud of the film. And of course this book has two prerequisites: an interest in Geoff Dyer and his riffing essays and some knowledge of and interest in the films of Tarkovsky, in particular Stalker. Though it had been some time since I’d seen Stalker I found it interesting how pwerfully the film came back to me through Dyer’s discussions. I learned a lot about Tarkovsky along the way, and about Geoff Dyer. And that’s what essays are for of course.

By the way, if you are interested in Tarkovsky, Mosfilms has made his works available on YouTube in pristine digital transfers and subtitled in English. In fact, all of Mosfilms catalogue is available and most certainly worth exploring.

Everyman

I’ve been going back through the physical library and pulling down unread volumes lately. In the last six months four of those have been novels by Philip Roth.

Roth wrote Everyman shortly before killing off his alter-ego Nathan Zuckerman in Exit Ghost. I think Everyman is a superior novel and a more beautiful meditation on mortality and death than Exit Ghost.

The novel opens with the death of the main character, who remains unnamed throughout the story. We attend his funeral with some family and some former lovers, and then we are inside the mind of the dead man as he projects backward in time. I believe this is only the second novel I’ve read where the entire story is told from the point of view of a dead dude, the other being The Living End by the delightful Stanley Elkin.

The narrator worked in the ad biz but always wanted to be a painter. We see his triumphs and failures and his major regrets. We meet his children and his three wives and some of his lovers. We encounter his parents and siblings, and the theme which ties everything together is decay and death and their inevitability. Hence the title Everyman, because no one escapes death, and as a result the book is basically about all of us. Perhaps we get to buzz back through and revisit our time here after we go to our final rest? It’s a comforting thought.

There is a beautiful scene where the narrator visits his parents’ graves in a dilapidated cemetery in an unsafe part of New Jersey before going in for a surgery he does not survive. He meets the gravedigger and there is a beautiful moment between the two men, one whose living is digging holes for the dead, and one who is about to die. The scene’s got “Alas, poor Yorick” chops.

Roth was a substantial artist and a chronicler of the USA in the decades leading up to its decline into irrelevance and buffoonery. He confronted his end with dignity and continued to work until his final moments. I am grateful to have his novels as a roadmap to my own final decades.