There is this one wince-inducing moment in the Hamlet screenplay that occurs at the beginning of the the graveyard scene — a scene in which Branagh frankly goes a little overboard with the directorial notes, inserting a cheeky little interpretive comment after pretty much every spoken line between the two comic gravediggers. (For instance: “So shut up”, “Abso-bloody-lutely”, “Nudge, nudge”, “Get on with it then, Einstein”.) It’s all eye-rollingly hammy stuff — in fact you could arguably describe a lot of Branagh’s acting in the film that way as well — but the wince-inducer I refer to is when, after the First Gravedigger’s line “How can that be unless she drowned herself in her own defense?”, Branagh writes: “Says Judge Ito.”

Judge Ito. Judge Ito. Kenneth, thou gorbellied bat-fowling malt-worm. Of all the random, trite, hopelessly dated pop-culture references to immortalize in a Shakespeare screenplay. That dude was a dated reference even in 1997. I winced when I read it then, and I wince when I read it now.

Still, it gives me occasion to bring up a Judge Ito joke that for some reason has stuck in my memory for twelve years. Circa 1995, number nine from Letterman’s Top Ten Ways to Annoy Judge Ito: Point out that in Spanish “Judge Ito” means “Little Judge”.

Branagh’s Hamlet, the great big four-hour unabridged cinematic beast, finally comes out on DVD in August. After I hear about this last week, I recall reading Branagh’s then-new Hamlet screenplay book while I was at UVA, shortly after seeing the movie in 1997. Hamilton’s library has the book, so I check it out again to revisit it.

This screenplay makes for an unusual and interesting reading experience — the dialogue is of course entirely Shakespeare’s, nothing is cut or rewritten, but Branagh has taken advantage of Shakespeare’s famous absence of stage directions and has essentially written his own play around the dialogue, inserting detailed directions, shot compositions, acting notes, character thoughts, subtexts, gestures, wordless interactions, and other interpretive jottings into the text. I guess actors and directors must see this sort of thing all the time when preparing a Shakespeare performance, but for us non-thespian readers who are accustomed to the bare-bones text and directorial silence of the plays, the screenplay kind of makes for a fine (if sometimes exasperatingly interruptive) stand-alone Shakespeare text in and of itself.

Here’s a bit of Branagh’s text for Act III Scene 1, just after the To be or not to be speech, when Ophelia is sent out to intercept Hamlet as Claudius and Polonius eavesdrop. Shakespeare’s text is in indented italics; Branagh’s is in roman.

OPHELIA   Good my lord,
How does your honour for this many a day?

It’s a huge relief to see her. But this is a very formal greeting. Strange, even despite recent events.

HAMLET   I humbly thank you; well, well, well.

He moves to her and they embrace and kiss, a moment of bliss but then she breaks away. She is still cool, trying to hold herself together.

OPHELIA   My lord, I have remembrances of yours
That I have longèd long to redeliver.

She hands him a package of his love letters and poems.

OPHELIA (continuing)    I pray you now receive them.

This is not like her. Or if it is, he won’t play this adolescent game. He is petulant.

HAMLET   No, not I, I never gave you aught.

Starting to have more of a conversation with him now, instead of worrying about the listeners. She lowers her voice, she is annoyed and hurt by him in her own right. She wants him to know the truth of her feelings. Not what she’s been told to do.

OPHELIA   My honoured lord, you know right well you did,
And with them words of so sweet breath compos’d
As made the things more rich.

She tries to be hard.

OPHELIA (continuing)    Their perfume lost,
Take these again; for to the noble mind
Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.
There, my lord.

He lashes out at the letters, sending them flying from her hand across the hall.

HAMLET   Ha, ha? Are you honest?

OPHELIA   My lord.

Come on.

HAMLET   Are you fair?

OPHELIA   What means your lordship?

Oh, really.

HAMLET   That if you be honest and fair, your honesty should admit no discourse to your beauty.

She tries to give as good as she gets but she is still brittle, on her dignity, and never unaware of being watched.

OPHELIA   Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with honesty?

He replies fiercely and with a heart-rending disillusion.

HAMLET   Ay, truly, for the power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can translate beauty into his likeness. This was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof.

Don’t you realize what was between us?

HAMLET (continuing)    I did love you once.

I don’t know any more. I hoped so. I hope so.

OPHELIA   Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.

He seems to understand her confusion and berates himself. She is right. He is unworthy. He ought to end it now.

HAMLET   You should not have believed me, for virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock but we shall relish of it. I loved you not.

Ah, the truth at last.

OPHELIA   I was the more deceived.

But of course it isn’t the truth. It’s much more complex than that. He can’t tell her why it has ended, of his terrible personal situation, but he can warn someone he loves to beware of Claudius, Polonius, and even him, a man unworthy of her love. He wants her to be safe. To escape.

HAMLET   Get thee to a nunnery. Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners? …

And so on.

Strange thing: As I’m writing my post about To Have and Have Not, a small spider drops down from the ceiling on a web line, right in front of me, and alights on my desk, where it pauses for a moment and then climbs quickly back up to the ceiling. I think of an entirely other Hawks-directed Faulkner-screenwritten Bogart-and-Bacall classic, The Big Sleep: “I seem to exist largely on heat, like a newborn spider.”

I finish To Have and Have Not and am left sort of scratching my head over it — it’s kind of a meandering mess, even at only 262 pages — and then the internet informs me that it is apparently considered Hemingway’s worst novel. Now you tell me.

This worst novel consensus seems to have jelled over the years thanks partly to the hail of bad reviews the book received upon release in 1937, and largely to apocryphal but oft-quoted accounts of how 1) Hemingway said he only wrote it for the money and/or to get out of a contract, and 2) Howard Hawks claimed he’d made his classic 1944 Bogart/Bacall film of To Have and Have Not after betting Hemingway he could make a great movie out of his worst book. (The film, of course, has a vastly different plot than the book. Not to mention Faulkner on the screenwriting credits.)

Still, the book isn’t really bad, page for page. I never think to abandon it, even after it becomes clear to me that the book is pretty much going to pieces in the second half. What it is is a series of vivid, engaging, brilliantly-written story sketches that don’t go anywhere, working drafts of a better novel that never came together, laying bare an array of false starts and half-developed scenes and runaway digressions and ham-handed social commentary that might ordinarily be refined or reined in or edited out. A train wreck of a novel, but an enlightening authorial outtake reel.

Also, in my library copy of the book, I appreciate the fact that, on the page where the line “F— his revolution” appears, some previous library patron has carefully applied White-Out to the em-dash and then handwritten in the missing “uck” in blue ballpoint pen. (Perhaps this reader shares my confusion over why fuck is spelled with an em-dash on this page but is left uncensored later in the book.)

Love this chapter-ender from chapter one of Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not, which I’ve been reading this week:

“Don’t worry,” he said. “Me Frankie; much politics. Much business. Much drinking. No money. But big friend. Don’t worry.”

“So long, Frankie,” I said. “Don’t you worry either, boy.”

I now learn that The Dark Is Rising is one of two fantasy films Ian McShane is in this year. The other one is The Golden Compass, the forthcoming film based on book one of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Unfortunately McShane won’t actually be on screen, as he’s been cast as the voice of — at the risk of sounding reductive (I’m not too familiar with the source material) — the evil polar bear king. Wasn’t expecting that one. Still, if anyone can do the voice of an evil polar bear, he can.

Late last year, we drive out to Guelph to hit this one used bookstore we like. The place is a fire hazard. A tiny little shop shoehorned into a crummy shopping plaza, filled with row upon cramped row of full floor-to-ceiling bookcases, the overflow books stacked precariously on the aisles’ floors, dozens high, in front of each shelf. The interior air is an oppressive atmosphere of dust and decaying paper. I’m crouched down looking through some of these stacks on the floor when I overhear some guy in the next aisle talking to a lady who runs the store. He’s asking her if she can tell him who wrote The Dark is Rising, in a tone of voice that suggests that he’s read it but just can’t recall the author’s name. The lady says she doesn’t know.

Hey, wait, The Dark is Rising…? Instantly the name Susan Cooper pops into my head. “Susan Cooper,” I call out, loud enough for them to hear me over in the next aisle. The guy swings around into my aisle and says “YES! Thank you! Susan Cooper!” — this last part he shouts into his cellphone at someone. He thanks me effusively a couple more times. No problem. My good literary deed for the day.

I am bewildered that I am able to come up with the name, and no less surprised to hear The Dark is Rising mentioned at all. I haven’t thought about those books since I was probably eleven or twelve or so, and I have only a very murky recollection of having read them back then. I think I may have gotten through at least two of the books in the larger Dark is Rising series but then gave up on it. And I can’t recall a thing about the actual storylines or characters — only generalities, i.e. something about English children and magic and myth and a pervasive whiff of highfalutin spookiness. (I suspect I really only remember the name Susan Cooper because of its sound, at once catchy and bland — the trochaic rhythm, the assonant oo.)

Anyway, I later start hearing about the forthcoming Dark is Rising movie. Then today I learn that Deadwood’s Ian McShane has a leading role and an excellent beard in it. Awesome! I would pay to watch him read the phone book.* I may see this.

* Within reason. I have no intention of sitting through Shrek the Third just for his bit part as the voice of Captain Hook.

This weekend we watch Back to the Future. I haven’t seen it in over a decade, and Laura hasn’t ever seen it. Afterward, she says That movie could never be made today. Really? Why not? She points out that you couldn’t get away with an ending like that today — at least not in the sort of PG-rated family fare that Back to the Future is.

That is, after Marty McFly goes back to 1955 and interferes with his parents’ first date, and then returns to 1985 to find his adult parents much more attractive, confident, and successful (i.e. in every way improved, compared to the ineffectual losers they are at the beginning of the movie) — then, instead of having this be the big dream-come-true happy ending that we all know, a contemporary version of the movie would inevitably make Marty stop short and undergo some melodramatic heartwarming realization that in fact he loves his parents the way they were originally, sans improvement, ineffectual losers though they may be. And he would hop back in the time machine and zip back to 1955 to revert things back to normal.

Indeed, that sounds just like what a modern movie would do. It’s just that fucking sappy. A nice wholesome moral for today’s sensitive, enlightened moviegoing family. By comparison, Back to the Future’s ending as it stands now strikes me as hilariously harsh and selfish, like something out of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, or a Roald Dahl story, the sort of thing in which endearingly mischievous children exact some sort of revenge on their hapless/stupid/wicked parents.

I mean, Marty’s happy ending is essentially that his parents have been discarded and replaced with new, “better” parents. (Not to mention smarter siblings with good jobs, well on the path to appropriate yuppiedom; and an “improved” Biff Tannen — improved in the sense that he’s now a toadying lapdog instead of a bully.) What kills me is that Marty himself remains unchanged. He still has a memory of his parents and siblings as they used to be. Doesn’t he retain even a shred of affection for his loser parents or his loser siblings? Of course not. He doesn’t mind in the slightest that he’ll never see them again, the poor bastards, even though they made him who he is. Why did I never notice the ingenious dark comedy of the fact that he’s so pleased that his whole family as he knows it is gone forever, and he now gets to live with what amounts to a family of strangers, albeit strangers who love him and happen to have the same names and faces as the family he knew. Creepy!

Obviously the ending involves a ton of surface implausibility, which did occur to me as a kid (it always seemed howlingly wrong that the “new” McFlys would still have the same children and live in the same house). But that aside, the ending now seems brilliant to me as a funny-yet-cruel sign of the times, a revealing artifact of 80s culture. Was the movie such a hit because it tapped into a materialistic dissatisfaction with our parents, and an accompanying selfish desire to trade them in for ones that suited us better — while we ourselves stayed the same? (That’s heavy, Doc.)

Interested to note that midway through The Last Novel, Markson’s narrator, Novelist, refers to his book as a seminonfictional semifiction.

Twenty pages later, I’m both amused and slightly stung by this:

Reviewers who protest that Novelist has lately appeared to be writing the same book over and over.

Like their grandly perspicacious uncles — who groused that Monet had done those damnable water lilies nine dozen times already also.

I’m no reviewer (am I?), and Markson ain’t Monet (is he?), but point taken.

Speaking of Markson: Yesterday his new book The Last Novel arrives in the mail. The fourth book in the de facto series he began with Reader’s Block, and followed with This is Not a Novel, then Vanishing Point, and now this new one. They are quote-unquote “experimental novels”, in that you might say they attempt to build a work of fiction out of nonfiction parts. Each book is basically a list of literary/cultural/historical factoids, quotations, allusions, fragments of works both famous and obscure, and dark details of the frailties and sufferings and deaths of authors and artists and other cultural figures, interspersed with comments from the narrator who is wearily recalling all these things he’s read. It all adds up to kind of tragicomic monument to the perpetual co-existence of human endeavor and human folly, and in so doing sketches us a portrait of the narrator, who may or may not be Markson himself.

All four are more or less the same book, or they at least follow the same formula, which I find both satisfying and annoying. I also find it increasingly suspect that Markson’s able to get away with calling this stuff fiction, for any reason other than as exercises in winkingly testing the limits of what fiction even is — a test he did perfectly well the first time, with Reader’s Block. Repeating the same test three more times, albeit with a host of new factoids and quotes, is great fun and all, but it strikes me somehow as comfort food. Phoned in, even. At this point the four novels could easily be combined into one book, relabeled nonfiction, and shelved alongside Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations and Schott’s Miscellany and the Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes and the like — in fact they’d probably make more money that way. Markson’s Treasury of Depressing Literary Detritus, volumes I through IV.

I should note that I personally love the books, though I often feel I’m enjoying them for the wrong reasons — for the sustained pithy humor, or as a litmus test of my own cultural literacy. (How many of the references do I catch? How many fly over my head? How many previously missed ones do I catch upon reread a few years later?)

David Markson’s narrator, known only as Writer, from This is Not a Novel:

Harold Bloom’s claim to the New York Times that he could read at a rate of five hundred pages per hour.

Writer’s arse.

Spectacular exhibition! Right this way, ladies and gentlemen! See Professor Bloom read the 1961 corrected and reset Random House edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses in one hour and thirty-three minutes. Not one page stinted. Unforgettable!

Yesterday I finally finish Ulysses, a month and a day shy of Bloomsday 2007, as hoped for. Eighteen chapters in all, averaging a chapter per month — a new record for book-slowness for me. (Though perhaps not so bad if one considers each chapter to be a different book in and of itself, which seems fair.) Also notable in that this one read of the book spans three apartments, and two different editions: the Penguin Modern Classics paperback for most of it, and an oldish overstock Random House hardcover for the Circe/Nighttown chapter, the one in drama form. (The Random House sets the text in a screenplay-style format, a bit easier to read than the Penguin, which uses an unindented single-spaced play layout. One needs all the help one can get when trying to get through that chapter.) I am not terribly proud of spending that long on the book, and letting it slumber unread on coffee tables and nightstands for weeks or months or seasons at a time. (Didn’t pick it up much during the winter.) Still, there is something to be said for living with a book for that length of time, having an ongoing read thread its way through a year of your life.

Did I enjoy the book? Yes and no. Some of the chapters are absolutely homework. Vast stretches of joyless tedium, where I feel like I’m just turning pages to lay eyes on fields of meaningless black marks in succession, rather than anything resembling reading. Other chapters are the greatest stuff I’ve ever read. The fact that such extremes of good and bad all came from one mind makes me deeply doubt my own ability to even judge what I like and don’t like in what I read. All of it makes me want to go back and reread the whole thing — in fact to always be reading it.

Banville and Dave have gone back to the library, abandoned early. In their place I finish Naomi Novik’s Throne of Jade, book two of her Temeraire series. (Book one being the aforementioned His Majesty’s Muppet.) Yes, I throw over two novels by award-winning literary authors to read a naval/historical/fantasy paperback involving dragons and ninjas. (Though not, unfortunately, both at the same time. Perhaps Peter Jackson will remedy this oversight when adapting it for the screen.) The book is all right, I think, but, in contrast to my experience with book one, something about Novik’s conspicuous overuse of colons and semicolons is really starting to get under my skin — they show up in pretty much every other sentence, even in dialogue, always stitching together clauses that would make perfectly good stand-alone sentences. It’s not incorrect or anything, it just seems somehow unhealthy. Holdovers from her previous career in computer programming, possibly?

I have insomnia envy. I am attracted to the romantic image of insomnia — a probably highly contrived notion of finding oneself not only unable to sleep, but compelled to remain awake in order to pass the nighttime hours in some restless private pursuit of the mind, reading or writing or wandering the house deep in thought or some such thing. (Not to be confused with voluntary sleeplessness — e.g. caffeine-powered night-owl types, or hot-blooded young urbanites who stay up all night partying or drinking or being out on the town or otherwise having fun. These are mere displays of stamina.) The thought is an absurd fantasy but I have it anyway. I gather the attraction isn’t uncommon. I think of Lisa Russ Spaar’s anthology Acquainted with the Night, a selection of insomnia poems, which I’d wager is largely perused by people like me who sort of wish we could pay ourselves the compliment of being so afflicted, but who sadly remain stuck with boring, normal, reasonably healthy sleep habits.