Fiction, Essays, and Other Things

  Popular writers and advocacy have a long history dating back to Jonathan Swift’s incendiary modest proposal. Since then, writers ranging from Mary Shelley to Upton Sinclair used the pen as a clarion. The tradition continues but the turn of the 20 th century, perhaps inspired by Sinclair’s The Jungle (weak literature but potent muckraking), saw a rise in literary activism and one cause that seemed to unite an assortment of writers was a horror that was hidden from most of the world by a powerful imperial force. But the literary world was almost unanimously aghast at the terror King Leopold II was reigning on the Congo in the name of Belgium. It is evidence of the King’s acknowledgment of the inhumanity of his crimes that he allowed few foreign correspondents into the Congo Free State since taking over in 1885 and the punishment for those caught enlightening the outside world of the human butchery was often deadly. A few missionaries and reporters did manage to alert the worl...

  I strive to be a completionist in regard to the artists I admire and writers are no exception. Of course, this almost always leads us through a variable quality of work, even for those we hold in high regard. However, to understand the evolution of an artist it is important to study at least the bulk of their work including, maybe even especially, the failures. In this vein, any one at all interested in the career of F. Scott Fitzgerald should read his first short story, published in  St. Paul Academy Now and Then  in October of 1909 when Fitzgerald was only thirteen. The truth is “The Mystery of the Raymond Mortgage” is not a very good detective story filled with lapses of narrative clarity, jerky plot turns and an abrupt resolution. It reads at best like a summation, or a draft, of the writers that inspired it, Doyle and Poe. It looks, indeed, like it was written by a thirteen-year-old. But what a thirteen-year-old! What astounds about “The Mystery of the Raymond Mort...

  Henry James could have written “The Jolly Corner”, one of his last short stories, only at the time of life he did and I had the fortune to find it at just the right time in my life. It is, however, a story that could speak to all of us for, no matter our lives in later years, who does not have their own jolly corner deep back in their memory from what often are or at least ought to be the best years of our lives? No matter where or how we spent our childhood there was a place we called home where our wonders and dreams were formed, where we spent our years of innocence and optimism and made it our own jolly corner.   In the 1900s, his last full decade alive, James was reflecting on a life that to most would seem like a life exceptionally well spent. And yet, in 1903 came his most revealing tale, “The Beast in the Jungle”, about a blue-blooded American ex-pat who at old age and at the death of the woman who stood by him for decades reflects on a life wasted awaiting a grand...

  Anthology films have long been a rare though not unheard-of presence in the industry dating as far back to at least the early 30s. There have been stylistic variations but generally the plot is held together by a common thread. The novelty was often though not always seeing different directors adding their own style to their own portion of the narrative. Unsurprisingly, results varied from film to film but from segment to segment. Perhaps D.W. Griffith succeeded best of all in what is likely the first of its kind, Intolerance from 1916.     If I Had a Million , from 1932, attracted such contemporary masters as Ernst Lubitsch, William A. Seiter and Norman Z. McLeod, each to direct the tale of a different hopeful awaiting their share of an inheritance.   The process was altered in 1942 with Tales of Manhattan in which one director, Julien Duvivier, traced the story of a tailcoat as it changed hands from patron to patron. The mood changes here were derived from a ca...

  The Wizard of Oz remains more than eighty years later one of the greatest films ever made but its very enduring popularity has obscured the fact that forty years earlier, long before Tolkien and Pratchett, L. Frank Baum created an elaborate fantasy world with its own history, laws and customs. For those who explore them beyond the first, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz , from 1900, the Oz books are a reminder of the wonder, the frights and the joys timeless fantasy can bring. Baum who, at the time had a minor career as a newspaper head and the author of assorted poetry books for children conceived of the first book as an all-American counterpart to the traditional European fairytale. It is not much of an overstatement that the symbols, the phrases and the characters from the first (and subsequent) Oz book have become embedded in the fabric of American folklore. He strove away from the grim darkness of the bohemian fairytales but still thrilled his readers and the enchantment has pr...

  After nearly thirty years the murder of Andrés Escobar still raises ire and defensiveness in Colombia. It is not just about Escobar’s status as a soccer legend for Atlético Nacional but also for the timing and circumstances of his death and what it meant not only for Colombia but the global perception of Colombia. Hearing that their country qualified for the 1994 Fifa World Cup was the best news Colombians had received in years. It had been less than a year since the death of Pablo Escobar (no relation)   and his brutal legacy was a stain the country was fighting hard and gallantly to erase. Escobar had tarnished the image of Colombia internationally and the fallout of this was hurting Colombians both financially and emotionally. But the national love for soccer proved to be Colombia’s saving grace. The twenty-seven-year-old Andrés Escobar, who was not only a soccer icon since 1986, but something of a national hero for his philanthropy (creating opportunities for impover...

  In the hundred and twenty-five years since two male lions terrorized workers on the Kenya-Uganda Railway, as humans have encroached wild habitats at the accelerating pace of technology and habitat demands, more carnivores have had to resort to becoming man-eaters. And yet, the tale of the two maneless big cats that together were responsible for as many as 135 railway workers continues to haunt us in ways that few true tales of terror seldom do. Strangely, The Man-eaters of Tsavo , the account of the case written by Col. John Henry Patterson, the engineer sent to supervise the construction, nearly a decade after the incident offers a worthy summarization of the reign of terror but little insight into the strange behavior of the beasts. Patterson was, after all, a military and construction man first and his interest in zoology motivated by a passion for big game hunting. Indeed, only the first half of the book covers the lion attacks, the rest is a medley of memories of the con...