Wordy Old Men on Boardwalk Empire: Season Four, Episode Eight "The Old Ship of Zion"

Shit, well, shit hits the fan this week as Chalky addresses the influx of heroin to the community by way of Dunn Purnsley and Dr. Valentin Narcisse sans subtlety. Narcisse counters the public airing of dirty laundry with an attempted hit on Chalky. Tolliver/Knox moves his attentions to Eli. Nucky gets his first shipment of rum from Florida with Sally Wheet sitting shotgun when the trucks pull in.

Old Man Duggan: Normally I'd work up to this, but let's get down to brass tacks. Much as I surmised last week, Dunn wasn't long for this world. Of course, Daughter Maitland's lapside rendition of "The Old Ship of Zion" sure had me doubting myself for at least a minute or two--especially given the revelation of Chalky's relationship to the song--so bully for Cristine Chambers, Howard Korder, Timothy Van Patten, and Terence Winter for the misdirect.

Wordy Ginters: Some sweet and sour tension in that scene. Powerful. Did Daughter know that Chalky knew he was being double-crossed? Shit was complex. Chalky thinking about his own family, his father's funeral, his children, his infidelity, his problems. Daughter maybe actually loving Chalky and torn at the thought of aiding his demise. Who knows what was behind the pooling tears in those beautiful soulful eyes? Was Chalky able to put the puzzle together by the way she sang the song? I loved his line about Daughter's singing, "...that sound like you tying up a secret."

OMD: Also as predicted Daughter Maitland chose Chalky over her keeper, though the scene played out much better than I could have hoped. I loved the framing and the distance between Dunn and Chalky, pitted against each other in rooms opposite each other. As the distance between the two closed, the tension mounted spectacularly. It would have been anticlimactic for Chalky to go down this early in the season, especially at the hand of Dunn, not Narcisse, but when Dunn was choking the life out of Chalky, my heart was in my fucking throat. Luckily for Chalky, Daughter Maitland chose the potential for freedom that was behind Door Number Two and plunged that knife square into the middle of Purnsley's back. Something about his trying to reach to the knife that was just out of his grasp was humanizing in his last fateful moments. It was really quite a turn for Erik LaRay Harvey, who got to stretch his legs quite a bit more this season. In that final moment, the hope draining from his eyes was palpable.

WG: One of two centerpiece scenes in the episode. I really didn't have any idea which way it would break. For a moment, I thought Chalky was so depressed at the realization that he had been thoroughly undone by Narcisse's scheming that he preferred to let Daughter kill him softly with her song, so to speak. So satisfying to see Chalky fight back. Stabbed him in the mouth with a piece of splintered wood. Sweet revenge for Purnsley being a dick about Chalky's illiteracy way back when. He's been a shadow of his former bad-assed self for most of the season. White patrons patting him on the head. Narcisse making him look like a rube. His daughter's fiance's family thinks he's gauche. He's got everything he always wanted in the Onyx Club, but appears to have less clout than ever. With Purnsley out of the way, things get tight as a drum. What happens to Daughter?

OMD: I can't imagine she doesn't end up being collateral damage. Narcisse will likely see through her when she tries to lie about Dunn's demise.

While we'll likely have to wait until the finale before Narcisse actually dirties his own hands on Chalky White, it's safe to say at least part of him feels like maybe a re-evaluation is in order. It ultimately came down to Chalky's bond with Daughter Maitland, but he still came out on the other side, and all this while punking Narcisse out in front of his incredibly dull play. I can tell you this much: I enjoyed Harlem By Torchlight a whole helluva lot more than Ominira.



WG: I'm with you on that one. Loved watching Narcisse mouth his own dialogue with such sincere pride. "Its symbolism was beyond them." The failed playwright's lament.

OMD: By the way, the Harlem By Torchlight was standoff was fantastic. It really did a nice job of ratcheting the tension up, with Chalky's sneer driving me to maniacal laughter. It felt so good to have him one-up the Doctor.

WG: For me, the trash can lid heroin bonfire represented the best of what Boardwalk Empire can offer. TVP is the go-to guy when it comes to directing episodes that need to reel in plot pay-off. Chalky riffing on The Warriors "come out and play" bottle clinking by banging on the trash can, and then recouping his rep and tarnishing Narcisse in one monologue and a pile of burning smack was magic.

OMD: Moving to the other side of town, wouldn't you like to know what kind of arrangement Eli and Tolliver/Knox came to? Obviously Eli is pissed at Nucky for stepping over the line from uncle to father, but would Winter & Co. really go down the fraternal betrayal road again? I doubt it. My guess is Eli decided to play along with Tolliver/Knox to get a hold on what his angle is. We'll find out soon enough, and if Eli is, in fact, choosing to screw his brother over again, at least this time it will have been in an attempt to protect his son. Something tells me that maybe Tolliver/Knox ends up wrestling with the gators, coming out, well not coming out at all.

WG: It appears that Eli has chosen saving his son over protecting the family biz, but it most definitely could be a holding ploy. Maybe it does boil back down to the sibling rivalry thing. In retrospect, it's like a boil that has never been lanced.

OMD: I loved the look on Shea Whigham's face when Tolliver's compatriot tried to shove him in. Can we give him the Emmy for that? Hell, that whole scene, the intensity on his face followed by his non-verbal sussing out of his options? Fucking great. And the look on his face as Nucky and he come together, Nucky reassuring him--we're to assume that he's turned on Nucky given this expression, though again I wouldn't jump to that conclusion quite yet--and then watching his family have fun while only he knows what's to come, that look is brilliant.

WG: The acting on the show is fantastic. Buscemi may be the weak link, but he's not required to do much other than to look askance at the morons he's forced to tolerate. Shea Whigham is nails. Fucking Knox.

OMD: Perhaps the most shocking turn of events in the episode was the fact that somehow I felt bad for Mickey Doyle, if only for a moment. When Nucky cracked him in the forehead with Kessler's cane, I sort of felt bad for him. What the hell is going on here?

WG: Seeing Nucky get physical is like watching Billy Butler steal a base. Hard to believe on any level. I thought Mickey was pretty solid in the episode. Loved the mindless yammering anecdote about the twins (which may have been allegory about the prohee's, and the difference between Knox and his predecessor), and the stereotypical numbskull math that equates spending money on dates with sexual favors. His awkward reaction to literally getting caned by Nucky was pretty brilliant, too. I thought Sally Wheet was chatting up Mickey just to get Nucky jealous, but her brazen cleavage is as unpredictable as it is independent. Another great character. She was most definitely on top in that scene where the noisy sex woke up young Willie, right? Winter was involved with The Sopranos, so when I heard the heat and the clatter, I imagined Sally treating Nucky the same way Janice treated Ralph Cifaretto, i.e., femdom assplay.

OMD: Oh yeah. She was definitely in control.

We've now got three different times in which Ragged Dick has come up, if I'm not mistaken. Horatio Alger's rags-to-riches story was first used way back in Season One, when Nucky was saying that Jimmy Darmody once reminded him of Ragged Dick. Last season, Gyp took Nucky's copy of Ragged Dick from his desk after he'd run Nucky from the Ritz Carlton. Now [presumably] that same copy returns, this time with Nucky giving the book to his younger self, Willie, as Willie packs up to return home.

WG: Ooh, that's good. I had totally forgotten about the Darmody occurrence. I definitely remember when Gyp lifted it from his desk. I've never read Horatio Alger, but obviously Winter is trying to tell us something.

OMD: Lifting oneself up by the bootstraps. The American Dream (and perhaps a Pynchonian take on it). Roughly half a century after it was published, and the people trying to actualize the rags-to-riches fairy tale are dropping like flies because they're doing so on the wrong side of the law, the concern for the means by which it is achieved being less than an afterthought.

So the theme tying this episode together would certainly seem to have been betrayal by one's right hand. Dunn ends up dying on account of his attempted power play. Eli, painted into a corner by his brother and son, would seem to have been forced (again, not an entirely safe assumption, as a second betrayal would all but guarantee his death) to turn on the man whose side he has served at. Is the bond of blood thicker than the resentment that symbolic servitude breeds? I guess we'll find out soon enough.

WG: Way to put a bow on that mofo. How about some Lou Reed?

OMD: Picture that shit burning atop a garbage can for Sweet Lou.

Reading Rainbow: A Feast of Snakes by Harry Crews

There is some dark shit afoot in Harry Crews's 1976 Southern Gothic/horror novel A Feast of Snakes. Set against the harsh backdrop of the rural white-trash wasteland Mystic, Georgia as the town heads into its annual Rattlesnake Roundup, A Feast of Snakes primarily follows the troubled and psychotic protagonist Joe Lon Mackey, former High School All-American running back whose illiteracy kept him from chasing the dream of the star athlete, from following his sexpot high school sweetheart to college, and from escaping from the pit that Mystic is. Joe Lon beats his wife, sells booze illegally, helps his bastard of a father run his dog-fighting empire, and tries to stifle the rage seething within himself.

While Joe Lon is a dark and often scary character, the landscape of Mystic is littered with vividly drawn but deeply disturbed characters as they work their way through what has to be the most archaic, backwater local celebration imaginable. To get too far into describing the lay of the land, however, would be to do Crews a disservice. The world he creates is rich and fascinating and is best discovered for yourself. It should be noted, though, that A Feast of Snakes is not for those with a weak stomach.

Crews draws up the world with confidence and a natural feel for the dialectical intricacies of the region. While it certainly lends an air credibility to the proceedings, the reliance upon writing so heavily in a dialect can often work in ways equal parts complimentary and detrimental. While Crews's incorporation of the rural Southern dialect in dialogue adds an element of veracity to the novel, it also makes the book (intentional or otherwise) a much more laborious read. This is nothing new, I suppose. The same can be said for works by Joyce, Faulkner, Hemingway, and Pynchon. Some of the literary greats have employed this stylistic choice with varying degrees of success*, but it is not an unreasonable assertion to state that such a choice has its costs.

*I would argue that it is mostly distracting and ineffective in Mason & Dixon and For Whom The Bell Tolls at the very least. I'll refrain from bitching about James Joyce for the time being.

Crews's choices make for some uncomfortable reading, as a result of both subject matter and style. I feel it is my duty to reiterate that there is some dark shit within these pages. A Feast of Snakes is a fairly engaging read, but be prepared to read a book in which you may not empathize with any character.

Reading Rainbow: In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O'Brien

I think I have officially come to the conclusion that Tim O'Brien is my favorite contemporary American author. There are others in the conversation--primarily Thomas Pynchon--but none seem to possess the ability to write in extremely readable prose while having his stories carry a significant weight with them. His books evoke intense emotional reactions yet never fall into the realm of a laborious read. In the Lake of the Woods definitely meets that description.

As is often the case in O'Brien's novels, there is a fuzzy relationship with truth and reality. This leaves the reader constantly searching for stability where it likely will not be found. In the Lake of the Woods follows a disgraced Minnesota politician who takes a break from the harsh light of the real world in the isolation of the far-removed Lake of the Woods on the Minnesota/Canada border. While on this getaway, John Wade's wife, Kathy, disappears. Given the very public discovery of John's dark past, all signs inevitably point toward the husband.

If that was all that was going on here, the novel would be pretty run-of-the-mill, but O'Brien uses the locked room mystery to great effect. As he delves into John and Kathy's past, it only muddles the circumstances surrounding the disappearance. With each detail of his service in Vietnam coming into light, the perception of who John Wade is--and for that matter, who Kathy is by her relation to him--becomes more and more tenuous. As more information comes to light, it seems that the facts of what happened on that fateful 1986 night only become more obscured.

It is the deftness with which O'Brien handles the investigation into the disappearance that vaults this book into the pantheon of transcendent mystery novels. He lays out evidence, presents hypotheses, and details the past. Through all this, he pieces together a puzzle that simply leaves you asking more questions and doesn't leave the reader worse for wear.

Reading Rainbow: Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon

From what I have heard (and I can't say that I frequent book review sites and publications), the newest Thomas Pynchon book has been received with a somewhat tepid reaction. Having read everything of his but Against The Day*, I can see where the disappointment may arise from. That being said, my reaction wasn't one of disappointment, per se.

*I was about 250 pages through Against The Day when I stopped having a reason to ride the bus. As the bus ride went, so went the time to read. I was pleased with what I had read but knew the climb would be a long one, and a disservice to the reading experience. I'll probably revisit if I'm ever in white collar prison or too poor to have a television.

In Inherent Vice, we find the inimitable Thomas Pynchon stretching out in the genre of the Private Eye novel. If you told that to someone with only a vague idea as to who Thomas Pynchon* is, they would probably think it odd. Hell, a good deal of casual Pynchon readers would look askance at someone bringing them that news.

*The author, of course, not the person, as there are only a handful of people out there with that kind of information.

The thing is almost all of his books have found their protagonists on a quest to solve a mystery. In V., Herbert Stencil is searching for the answer to Who V. is. In The Crying of Lot 49, heroine Oedipa Maas is trying to get to the bottom of a centuries-old battle between rival mail distribution companies. For Tyrone Slothrop, the quasi-hero of Gravity's Rainbow, it is the quest to discover the cause of his erectile conditioning having been tuned to the dropping of V-2 rockets. I could go on, but you get the point.

There is a sense to this slight transition. Rather than have non-detectives trying to solve a labyrinthine mystery, Inherent Vice features Private Investigator Larry 'Doc' Sportello being put onto a case by his ex-girlfriend that starts out simply enough but quickly devolves into the multi-layered, multi-faceted post-modern yarn we have grown accustomed to. Present is the drug-induced paranoia, perverse corporate greed, silly character naming, and fear of authority. It is just operating (loosely) within the constructs of the noir genre--or as others have labeled it psychedelic noir.

The easiest way I can describe this book is to say the following: Imagine that Thomas Pynchon was writing an homage to The Big Lebowski but set it in 1969.

And really, by setting it in the time and place that clearly begat the mindset that has been a driving force in all of his works* no matter their setting, it allows him to finally return to the ground that has so deeply permeated all of his work, while not having actually been the setting since The Crying of Lot 49.

*Just try to tell me that the Benjamin Franklin of Mason & Dixon wasn't a Californian hippie at his core.

The elements of California in the 1960s are able to flourish in their own habitat in Inherent Vice.

Now, if I'm being totally honest, I am not a writer with enough skill, nor a reader with enough intelligence for that matter, to be able to decipher what each bit of minutae means symbolically or historically. When talking about Thomas Pynchon, few are. That being said, this was probably his most accessible book yet. I read it in a week and a half--roughly half the time it took me to read the much shorter Lot 49--and at no time did it feel like a chore. Coming from someone who read Gravity's Rainbow twice*, I know what a chore reading Thomas Pynchon can be.

*Don't worry, my comprehension was limited, too. I still feel like I need to go back and read it a third time, this time taking very detailed notes.

If you've not read Pynchon before, this actually isn't a bad starting point (of course, neither is V.). The book is good fun and is maybe the weirdest entrant into the noir genre yet.

Tragic Endings

Firstly, I feel compelled to apologize for my lackadaisical blog ethic. I was out of town (again) for the weekend. Chum Colclough got hitched, the latest in what seems to be my 475th friend to get married this year. Regardless of the never-ending nature of the train of weddings that have transpired, twas a nice wedding. Idyllic scene for the ceremony (short, sweet, and fairly secular, too--all of which are aces in my book). The reception was great, too. Kudos to Mr. and Mrs. Colclough.

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Now, on the plane on the way back, the girl sitting next to me busted out her copy of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which got me to reminiscing. Well, not so much reminiscing as fuming.

First off, I should admit the following: it's been quite a few years since I read that book. The details of the book are hazy at this point. I remember a hilarious diagram relating to sliding across the floor of Dave and Toph's pad in socks. I remember laughing out loud a few times. I was pretty pleased with the reading experience.

That is until the end. Now many of you may have read the book. Maybe you understood the ending. I'm by no means a genius (I contemplated misspelling genius, there), but I generally 'get' the things I read. I don't think anyone would include Dave Eggers in an conversation with Thomas Pynchon or James Joyce or Fyodor Dostoevsky when talking about somewhat inaccessible authors, but I've read them and had a pretty good grasp on what their books meant.

So here is an open request to any of the readers of this blog, casual or rabid, who have read Dave Eggers's book. If you were able to make sense of the ending of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (which is such an irritating name that I'm somewhat bothered by just having to type it twice), share its meaning here.

My take is that Eggers got to the point where he had nothing left to write that was pertinent to the story, didn't really know how to close things out, and decided that he'd just write an obtuse beach frisbee ramble that could then seem like it was really deep when it was really just a surrender to the difficulty of ending a book well.

And I'm not necessarily blaming him for not being able to end a book because I know it can't be easy. I'm also semi-sure that he's a great guy. I'd probably get along with him well if we were talking. I just think the ending was an attempt to mask an inability to finish, and I know I'm not alone because others have shared this sentiment with me (although more often than not lacking the emotional involvement that I feel on the matter).

In a semi-interesting addendum, my famous friend, Sean, has a habit of putting me on the phone with celebrities when he's at Live Wire tapings or book signings, which is what he did when he was in line at an Eggers signing. Knowing my feelings on the book, he decided that he was not going to ask Eggers my question himself, so he put me on the phone with him and I asked him whether or not the ending actually meant anything, to which he replied that I should re-read the book. I, of course, responded with the assertion that I had read the ending three or four times and that I could only conclude that the faux-metaphorical ending was a cop out for not knowing how to end the book and that if I read A Heartbreaking Work again it meant that I would not be buying the book he was peddling. He still insisted that I needed to re-read the book, which leads me to one of two possible conclusions: I'm just not that bright (totally possible), or he was bristling at being called out.

So, can anyone out there explain this ending?