Ridley Scott's Napoleon

Is Ridley Scott's Napoleon worth seeing? Yes. 

Is it a good film? Not really.

It's a blockbuster of sorts, with countless battle scenes full of shouting and explosions, but it's shot in what seems to be natural light, and most of the film has an unpleasant grayish tinge.

Interspersed amid these roaring scenes, Scott gives us extended looks at the time Napoleon spent "at home" with the Empress Josephine, but these scenes don't have much depth. Josephine found the arrangement expedient; Napoleon nurtured a sentimental affection during his time away, and wrote Josephine often. But he also wanted an heir, and it appears he overlooked no opportunity to bring such an event about when he wasn't charging across Egypt, Italy, Germany, and Russia in pursuit of an ever-shifting congeries of aristocratic opponents.

As a means of setting the scene politically, we spend the first part of the film watching brief episodes of mayhem during the early days of the Revolution, followed by the Convention, the Reign of Terror, a few back-room deals during the Directory, and the final coup d'état that brought Napoleon to power. That's a lot of ground to cover in a relatively short span of time, and beyond the inevitable Robespierre, the individuals involved will be strangers to most viewers: Sieyes, Junot, Barras. Who?

Perhaps I underestimate the educational level of the movie-going public, but I suspect most viewers will be unaware that Napoleon's enduring achievements have been omitted from the film entirely.  The Encyclopedia Brittanica summarizes his career as follow:

"Napoleon ... left durable institutions on which modern France was built up, including the Napoleonic Code, the judicial system, the central bank and the country’s financial organization, military academies, and a centralized university."      

A more detailed on-line source reminds us that the Code Napoleon "codified France’s confused jumble of laws and guaranteed property rights, equality before the law, freedom of religion, and the abolition of feudalism."

In time Napoleon's military conquests, which eventually included almost the entirety of Western Europe, obliterating numerous feudal and ecclesiastical states, and that led a generation or two later to the unification of Germany and Italy and the liberalization of legal codes throughout the region.

It would have been impossible, not to mention boring, to depict such bourgeois accomplishments in even a three-hour biopic, but without reference to these details, we're left with a feeble portrait of a strangely anemic personality, and that makes it difficult to accept the fact—though it is a fact—that Napoleon stirred the loyalty and devotion of hundreds of thousands of men, not only in France but throughout Western Europe, many of whom lost their lives as a result.

The best reason to see Napoleon, aside from the costumes and the military re-creations, is that it may kindle the desire to learn more about the real story. (When we got home, I pulled my copy of J.M. Roberts' History of the World off the shelf. I can't remember the last time I did that.)

Though Scott's Napoleon is never boring, as I watched it I was reminded of several other films on similar themes with greater depth but narrower focus. Erich Rohmer's The Lady and the Duke (2001) depicts the harrowing days of the Terror in Paris, when friends became enemies and no one could be trusted. In La Nuit de Varenne Italian director Ettore Scola dramatizes the phase of the revolution before Louis XVI was executed. And Start the Revolution Without Me, as you might guess from the title, is a spoof of the early days of the revolution starring Gene Wilder and Donald Sutherland. "I thought it was a costume ball ..."

And while we're at it, why not mention Woody Allen's early masterpiece, Love and Death, in which, amid lots of other silliness, Napoleon is outraged with his bakers because the Duke of Wellington's pastry-encrusted beef is a big hit, while his multi-layered pastry still isn't flaky enough.

Let me add that although Ridley Scott's depiction of the battle of Waterloo is grand, it might have been a good idea for him to remind viewers which side General Blücher was on. For my money, those expansive scenes are well worth seeing, but carry less of a punch than the famously chaotic literary passages in Thackerey's Vanity Fair and Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma, both told from the point of view of a bewildered foot soldier who has trouble finding the battlefield.   

*   *   *

To keep the flavor of the Revolution alive, after the film we drove downtown to a restaurant in the North Loop called Maison Marguax, where the starter for the sourdough bread has been kept alive for more than a century, so they say. The bar is a nice place to sit on a drizzly afternoon in mid-December. I found the jambon beurre baguette a little short on ham, but the "oui burger" was robust and buttery. The pomme frites, served in a shiny metal cup, were delicious, though it seems they forgot to add the tarragon to the béarnaise sauce. But it's possible my palate simply lacks the required finesse.

All of the servers wore vests covered with intricate blue brocade and several were wearing nose rings. One young women had recently completed a degree program in Madison in home economics and was now earning some money as she pondered her next career move. Another seemed to have a slight accent, and I asked her where she was from. Marseille?  

"You've probably never heard of it," she said. "I'm from Forest Lake."

"What? I'm from Mahtomedi, just down the road. We pass Hugo often on our way to O'Brien State Park."

"I love that park," she said.

____________________

And where, you might ask, does Jesus enter into all of this? 

Not only did the Napoleonic period advanced the cause of universal brotherhood by expanding citizenship and economic opportunity to Protestants, Jews, and free-thinkers, as I mentioned above, but at the same time, the incalculable violence and bloodshed of the period convinced many that the facile truths of the Enlightenment were grossly inadequate to the task of harnessing the energies involved in those social developments.

And we've been struggling to maintain a balance between the ground of faith and the blue skies of liberty ever since.

Wordle Holiday

The New York Times recently ran a story about its popular word game, Wordle. The article offers little of interest, except to advise those who play the game to choose a starting word with a healthy mix of vowels and consonants.   Duh! Statistical analysis suggests that the most popular starting word, "adieu," isn't that great. Words like "slate," "crane," and "trace" are likely to lead more quickly to the correct solution.

Part of the appeal of Wordle, as far as I'm concerned, is that you can only play it once a day, there is only one solution, and the meaning of the words plays no part in the solution. Therefore, a good deal of whimsy can be involved in choosing an opening word. Every morning, around 5:30 or 6:00, I find myself lying in bed thinking of words such as WORSE, ASCOT, TRAIL, and CHORD, though by the time I make the coffee, do my morning stretching exercises, and get to the computer, the word I've chosen is long gone, and I have to start all over again.

I have a strip of paper here beside me listing the twelve most common letters, though on some occasions I start out with a word that includes an unlikely consonant such as W or P, just to see if I get lucky. I also tend to avoid using S and T, because I'd rather have those letters in reserve to slip in to the blank spots between the letters I happen to get right on my first guess.

If I do happen to get a few letters right on my first guess, there is a strong temptation to keep them in place and try to nail the correct  word on the next guess. That's not always the best strategy.  Better, perhaps, to select five new letters. You won't get the word right, but you'll learn more, and be in a better position to get the correct word on your third try.

The low point of my Wordle career came on the day when, after two guesses, I had correctly guessed four of the five letters and was faced with _INGE. Great! I hastily supplied what seemed to me to be the obvious missing letter. TINGE. Wrong!

Oh, how could I have missed it? The word must be HINGE. Wrong again!

By this time quite a few letters had been eliminated, and there seemed to be nothing left but BINGE. Bingo!

Well, getting a five isn't the end of the world. But clearly there was nothing at work here except bad luck. It happens, though some Wordle experts (such as the bot) would have come up with a word on the third guess that eliminated  all but one of the letters H, T, and B. Even now, I can't think of what that word might be. THROB?

The bot, in case you aren't familiar with the game, is a computer-generated feature that analyses your choices to determine the degree to which luck and skill figures in your success and how your performance measures up to the millions of other people who are playing the game. The bot also plays each game, rifling through every possible guess to figure out which one is best, so you can also see how you stack up against it.

The bot isn't infallible, however. On one day's event it ranked my skill level as lower than average, and also my luck level, when compared against the norm. Yet my score that morning was half a point better than the average. How could that be? 

So far I've played Wordle 621 times—it only takes ten minutes—and the statistics suggest I'm getting a little better at it. In fact, during the last two-week period, my score has been, on average, not only significantly better than the average NYT reader, but better than the bot. (see above)

I'm sure my luck won't hold out for long. And anyway, who cares?

Yet perhaps there is some deep meaning hidden within the progression of words: Tinge, Hinge, Binge.

 

A Promising Time for the Library

I got an email a few days ago from someone named Kristi bearing the title, "This is a promising time for your library." That struck me as a pleasant thought. I wasn't aware that anyone really cared much about my library except me; I wondered who Kristi was, and what she meant, exactly. 

It's true that several books have come my way recently via the de-acquisition cart in the lobby of the Golden Valley Library, including a handsome coffee-table book of Seth Eastman's paintings. And the other day, when Hilary and I were shopping for gifts at Magers & Quinn, I also picked up two books for myself: a collection of poems by Joyce Sutphen, Carrying Water to the Field; and Existential Monday by an obscure French philosopher named Benjamin Fondane.

To top it off, a few weeks ago I conceived the notion that it was necessary to have a decent hardcover edition of Samuel Johnson's writings at my disposal. I'm not sure why, though the Penguin paperback edition I own is looking pretty ratty. I consulted a used book consolidator online and discovered that Amazon was offering a recently compiled hardcover edition from Yale at half-price. How could I resist?

The book is handsome, but also formidable. It weighs in at a little less than four pounds, which makes it unwieldy and somewhat difficult to read. Selected essays from Johnson's two-penny sheets, the Rambler and the Idler, make up a good part of the book, and they've been arranged by theme—moral choices, men and women, war and imperialism—which is convenient.

Johnson was formidable himself, though he wasn't handsome. He's known today largely for his curmudgeonly one-liners about the weather, writing for money, and other commonplace subjects. Few read his works, I suspect. Many of the essays are occasional and short, which is good. But the language in which Johnson expresses himself tends to be wordy, syntactically complex, and riddled with specious generalities. Not so good. But right or wrong, suave or clumsy, you've got to give credit to an author who chooses a weighty subject, explores it in terms the common reader can understand, and arrives at a conclusion without unnecessary references, complications, or digressions.

The first essay I turned to happened to be about awe. It surprised me that Johnson would take up such a subject. Not so long ago young people referred to everything as "awesome," and I sometimes come upon articles offering tips about how to revive that precious yet elusive emotion. It doesn't strike me as a typically eighteenth-century topic. But his approach to that issue does fit the era in which he wrote, in which astronomic discoveries, steam engines, and spinning jennies were all the rage.

Johnson's theory is that the awe we feel in the face of an unusual phenomena is the result of our ignorance as to how it works. "The awful stillness of attention, with which the mind is overspread at the first view of an unexpected effect, ceases when we have leisure to disentangle complications and investigate causes." Johnson reiterates this argument several times and also seems determined to castigate those who are simply too lazy or too conceited to humbly and patiently investigate the inner workings of things. "To expect that the intricacies of science will be pierced by a careless glance ... is to expect a peculiar privilege, a power denied to the rest of mankind; but to suppose that the maze is inscrutable to diligence ... is to submit tamely to the tyranny of fancy, and enchain the mind in voluntary shackles."

It's worth reminding ourselves that in Johnson's day, many words had different shades of meaning than they do today. For example, nowadays the word "awful" carries connotations of disgust, whereas Johnson defines it in his famous dictionary as "that which strikes with awe, or fills with reverence." But it seems the primary association of awe with reverence hasn't changed much from his day to ours.

On the other hand, Johnson's notion that awe is inspired by ignorance, and evaporates once we've familiarized ourselves with a phenomenon, strikes me as doubtful at best. Our modern world is full of mechanical and electronic devices the workings of which remain incomprehensible and mysterious, yet we rarely hold any of them in awe. Maybe we should.

Meanwhile, I have found that if I do happen to develop a layman's understanding of how something works, it usually increases the admiration and awe I feel for it. Just now I pulled my copy of the plates created for Diderot's encyclopedia, which were designed to illustrate how everything from plate glass and rope to upholstery and marbled paper was made. Incredible.  

Nothing is more likely to inspire fleeting feelings of awe than aspects of the natural world. But perhaps this supports Johnson's thesis, insofar as such phenomena will forever remain largely inexplicable. Evolutionary theory can offer clues as to how the myriad life forms that surround us came to be, generally speaking, but it will never be able to "explain" the miraculous presence of a deer who beds down at nightfall in the back yard, much less a particular being whom we have come to know and love. 

By the same token, even a lifetime of astronomical study will do nothing to dissipate the awe we often feel when we contemplate the depths of space.   

The poets of Johnson's day had hardly begun to explore this realm of beauty and mystery. Wordsworth's "Westminster Bridge" and Keats "To Autumn" were still a long ways off. 

Johnson himself was perhaps wary of what he calls "the tyranny of fancy." I wonder what he, who loved words so well, would have made of this brief poem that I came across in the second of my purchases, Joyce Sutphen's Carrying Water to the Field:

It's Amazing

 

Another word for that is astonishing

or astounding, remarkable, or marvelous.

 

It's also slightly startling, which leads to

shocking and upsetting, perhaps a bit

 

disquieting, and that is troubling and

distressing—you could say outrageous

 

and deplorable, which leads to wicked

and more precise equations such as

 

sinful and immoral or just plain bad

and wrong. It's amazing, which is just to say

 

bewildering and unexpected, that

it happened out of the blue, and that we went

 

all the way from miraculous to absurd,

within the syllables of just one word.

 

Opening my third purchase, the slight volume of essays by Benjamin Fondane called Existential Monday, I suddenly found myself immersed in a realm driven not by awe and reverence, but by anxiety and dread. This is entirely understandable, given that Fondane was a Romanian Jew living in Nazi-occupied Paris. But Fondane's theories predate that dreadful circumstance by several decades. Writing in the zany Dada era and drawing heavily on the theories of Kierkegaard and the obscure Romanian philosopher Lev Shestov, Fondane emphasizes that every philosophic system, and especially Hegelianism and it's cartoonish offspring Marxism, will miss the mark unless it not only recognizes but also emphasizes the significance of the maverick, the outcast, the unique individual, and the once-in-a-lifetime event that shatters all systems. For example, the Resurrection. 

Fondane refers to Shestov so often that I requested a few of that thinker's books from the Hennepin County Library. And they actually had some! Now there is an amazing institution.

Meanwhile, taking a closer look at the email I mentioned above, I see that it comes from Kristi Pearson, executive director of the Hennepin County Library system. It was her library she was referring to, not mine. Then again, her library is also mine. 

She wants me to contribute, lend them of hand. Gladly. 'Tis the season.  

Thanksgiving Conversations

It's a frosty pre-winter morning, and I'm luxuriating in pleasant thoughts of Thanksgiving recently past but ever-present. I'm also listening to some random tunes by C. P. E. Bach played by jazz pianist Keith Jarrett.

The Thanksgiving holiday may have gotten started a few weeks ago during a Sunday morning breakfast with my cousin Pat. She always has good stories to tell about her high-stress position in the banking world, her daughter Natalie's horse ranch, and the perils and rewards of her volunteer activities at the nearby animal humane society. "I'm a dog-whisperer," she says. And I believe her. After years of volunteering, she has also finally reached the rare status of having her own locker.

She and Hilary always have lots of books in common to talk about. (I don't.) Family stories are also likely to emerge, though they're sometimes about people I never met. The names sound vaguely familiar... 

At our recent breakfast Pat's stories turned to someone I knew quite well: her dad. I had no idea how many different lines of work he pursued, dragging the family along with him to Colorado, Oregon, and elsewhere, before finding his calling as a forest ranger supervising firefighters in the Gila National Forest of southern New Mexico.

We had Hilary's family and a few family friends over on Thanksgiving, and it was a lively scene. I enjoyed listening to my brother-in-law David describe a trip with his wife, Debbie, to visit her family in Florida and South Carolina in an antique camper they purchased recently. 

David was also excited about a new book by Pete Jesperson, long-time manager of The Replacements, who first played in a rock-n-roll band in the Sylvestre family basement. "My parents were the only ones in the neighborhood who could stand the noise."

At dinner Hilary's mother, Dorothy, who's now 97, described to me in some detail a documentary she watched recently on our local public television station. (Now I'm the one who can't remember what the show was about!).  

It was also fun hearing Miles describe how it feels to be "in the zone" on the basketball court. Brother-in-law Jeff shared some photos on his phone of his family's newly remodeled kitchen, and we reviewed the career of film director Ridley Scott together in light of his upcoming film about Napoleon. 

After dessert several of us at the far end of the table got into a lively discussion of language usage. It ranged from the difference between "supper" and "dinner" to the excesses of the  "periodic style"--with difficulty I refrained from fetching my new copy of the Yale Selected Works of Samuel Johnson from the other room to illustrate the point. We also explored the use and misuse of the semicolon and the egregiousness of the phrase "one of the only... ."  

At one point Nora's mom, Mary, said, "My mother would have loved this conversation."

With the average age being  in the mid-sixties, of course there was also plenty of health talk: dreadful migraines, expensive medications, dietary restrictions, sore knees and hips and necks. Many of us were nevertheless eager to take a postprandial walk around the block before we fetched the pies from their cache on top of the piano.  It's a family tradition.

Back at the table, but for the most part sitting in different places, conversation continued for quite a while before everyone headed for home. To my ear, the din of multiple voices exchanging views on a variety of subjects in a single room is one of the most beautiful sounds on earth.

A long Minnesota goodbye

Later, with darkness encroaching outside the windows, while Hilary and I were doing the dishes, the phone rang. Cousin Laura had left her cell phone behind. She and her husband, Rick, stopped by the next morning to fetch it, and we sat in the living room in front of the fire chatting once again. We told a few stories about our recent trip to Duluth. Rick, stimulated by the fire, told a few stories about splitting cords of wood with a maul back in the days when he and Laura managed a sheep farm in Vermont. We discussed the likelihood of the northern lights putting on a show and the new Native American photography exhibit at the institute. Rick, a professional photographer, didn't think much of it; the rest of us found it was well worth a visit. On these and other subjects, including the dangers of "post-truth" that Rick's brother Charlie is pushing on his Boston website, we spent the morning.

But we weren't quite done with the Thanksgiving conversations. The next afternoon we drove out to Lake Minnetonka to visit my cousin Rich and his wife, Sarah. A few years ago they bought a house in Mound just down the street from their daughter Willa's place, and during their visits from Lincoln they've been spending quite a bit of time dealing with the house's sub-standard wiring and plumbing. "I know the man at the hardware store a lot better than any of the neighbors," Rick says with a grim chuckle. 

Coffee and conversation, the classic combination

We discussed a few detective novels set in Southern France and the widespread popularity of Aperol in northern Italy. And it was just our good luck that Willa stopped by on her way home from shopping—we hadn't seen her in years—and we got a chance to find out what's been going on in her life, how the boathouse remodel is coming along, and how the kids are doing. The big question facing her daughter Clare, now a fifth-grader, is: basketball or hockey? (She's going with basketball.)

On a brief foray into family history, I confirmed with Rich a vague notion I had that grandpa Toren, who had a fine tenor voice, served as cantor at the synagogue in Lincoln on Saturdays, while also singing at the Swedish Covenant church he and grandma attended on Sunday. It's true.

We also touched briefly on Grandpa Toren's role as a secretary at a Palestine peace commission of 1918. A few years ago Rich scanned all the letters grandpa sent home from Europe and sent me copies.

These are a very few fragments of the many connections and conversations that filled the holiday. Such things are hard to remember except in random snatches, and harder still to describe or recreate, unless you happen to be a novelist. The snatches above are grossly inadequate to capture or do justice to the family spirit. 

But there's no harm in trying.