Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird

I once joked to a friend that every Miyazaki movie follows a similar trajectory: stuff happens, then five minutes before the end, we find out it was about love the whole time. Miyazaki doesn’t build his stories in the way that we’re used to. Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, and The Wind Rises don’t break down easily into the three-act structure. They feel truly idiosyncratic.

While Miyazaki’s films are remarkable things no matter your cultural background, his story structures are less unusual when considered within the framework of both Japanese storytelling tradition specifically and East Asian narratives as a whole. Henry Lien’s Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird is an introduction to those narratives, exploring East Asian storytelling and what distinguishes it from the West. In particular, he juxtaposes the Eastern preference for four-act and circular structures with the Western three-act. 

The West is so steeped in the three-act structure that many people who don’t spend most of their time thinking about the inner workings of stories are familiar with it. A thing happens. The thing intensifies. The thing resolves. That’s the flow of it. Lien uses Star Wars as an illustration, but just about every story we know and love here in the U.S. of A. adheres to the formula.

The four-act structure is similar. Similar enough, in fact, that it is often treated as nothing more than a variation on the three-act. People exist in a given world. We see them go about their lives in that world. There is a crisis. We see how that crisis and the world come to terms with one another. From that description, you can see how they might be considered two different ways of cutting the same sandwich.

Whether Lien is aware of their interchangeable status, I don’t know. He doesn’t mention it. Instead, he provides a wonderful argument for how and why the structures are distinct, tying them to philosophical outlooks reinforced by the cultures that prefer them. The three-act structure emphasizes the individual, requires a tidy resolution, and necessitates that everything obey the terms laid out in its first act. The four-act structure, on the other hand, emphasizes communities, tends to leave the ending a bit more ambiguous, and allows for so massive a change in the third act that a story may hop genres—consider the tonal shift halfway through Parasite. In point of fact, Lien says, four-act stories are entirely about the impact of that sudden third-act change, and how the world adjusts or doesn’t.

Though Lien missteps early on with some poor choices of examples, and leans throughout the book on a risible short story to illustrate some points, his observations are excellent. There’s a lot to chew on here. Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird better equipped me to think and talk about many of my favorite stories, which is a wonderful feeling. I always knew Miyazaki’s movies suddenly become about love in the last five minutes. Now I know why.

The Silence of the Lambs

It was impossible for me to read The Silence of the Lambs in a vacuum. I’ve seen the movie too many times. The book had to exist in conversation with its adaptation, which does seem unfair, the parent justifying their own existence to the child. I was immediately struck by the tone, and the degree to which the movie gets the tone right. There is a quality to the opening chapters, a studied remove, a sense that something nearby (but not here) is wrong. Director Jonathan Demme captured that perfectly. I have no idea how. How do you translate something as ephemeral as texture to a different medium? It’s a magic trick, as far as I’m concerned.

With the book fresh in my mind, I rewatched the movie. It has long been one of my favorites, and the biggest compliment I can pay this book is that I now experience the movie as an adaptation while I’m watching it. Just about everything I love about The Silence of the Lambs, it turns out, comes from the book. Even the way Demme explores the experience of women in male spaces, something that I’ve always understood to be Demme’s own exploration of the material, is right there on the page. The film is remarkably faithful to the source material.

Most, if not all, of the changes are about focusing the material. Jack Crawford, the FBI agent in charge of Behavioral Psychology, no longer has a dying wife, which makes sense. The movie is concerned entirely with Clarice Starling. No need to venture away from that. Exposition is far deadlier in a movie than it is in a book, and a number of adjustments are made to spare the audience an explanation. All in all, it’s entirely successful.

The one thing that suffers in this adaptation? Hannibal Lecter.

It feels as weird for me to say it as it probably does for you to read it. Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter is an iconic performance, one that still reverberates within culture at large. More people know references to Hannibal Lecter than have seen the movie or read the book. Hopkins won an Academy Award, for god’s sake.

Nevertheless, if there’s one character the 1991 film adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs lets down, it’s the good doctor. A series of small and individually innocuous changes come together to turn Lecter into a bogeyman. In the film, he destroyed his medical records before the FBI arrested him, something the fastidious and studied Dr. Lecter of the novel would almost certainly never consider. It’s an act of impropriety. “Discourtesy,” as he says, “is unspeakably ugly to me.” They were destroyed in the book as the result of a court order, which also feels more in keeping with Harris’s worldview in a way that I can’t entirely articulate.

There’s a scene in the novel where Lecter discusses a fellow inmate with Starling, talking about how the poor fellow has been misdiagnosed by the viscously unpleasant head of the asylum, Dr. Chilton. You get the impression in that scene that Lecter does, to some extent, care about this misdiagnosis, even if it is because the misdiagnosis itself is more of an affront to him than this unfortunate individual being left to live an unnecessarily catatonic life.

The biggest change, a throwaway bit of exposition that explains Lecter’s awareness of the presence of a human head in a Baltimore storage locker, makes it sound like the locker is his. In the novel, the story is more complex, undoubtedly trimmed down for time, but Lecter had nothing to do with the head being there. He knew about it through a patient. The problem with this, only obvious once you see it, is that Lecter becomes, through that exposition, entirely monstrous. He is no longer a terrifying human being, but a sort of a bogeyman. He puts heads in the backs of cars of storage units. In the book, Hannibal Lecter is a terrifying man. The movie is content to make him a Monster.

As for the book? Magnificent. Within 50 pages, I had stopped thinking about the movie at all. Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs is incredible, full of great writing and memorable scenes. He knows how to do quite a bit with very little. I was sad every time the subway arrived at my destination. For one blissful week, any ten-minute pause in my schedule was an opportunity to make progress. In the last year and a half, I’ve read two other books I loved this much: The Grapes of Wrath and The Poisonwood Bible. That puts The Silence of the Lambs in remarkable company.

A Man's Place by Annie Ernaux

I had a bit of an unusual experience with A Man’s Place, Nobel Prize–winner Annie Ernaux’s 1983 book inspired by her father’s death. I started out reading La place in the original French, in one of those handsome Gallimard editions that are the exact kind of anonymous that I’ve come to associate with luxury goods. I made it about 20 or so pages over the course of a week before deciding I was over it. The writing felt somehow too mannered, too self-possessed, like I was watching a pretentious art film.

I had a copy of the English translation, A Man’s Place, and decided to give that a quick look before ditching the book entirely. I started from the beginning, and a strange thing happened: I was so absorbed by what I was reading that I kept reading, clearing 20 or 30 pages of book while standing at the dining room table. What had initially seemed overly mannered and affectedly brusque in the French suddenly felt like an author maintaining the necessary distance to keep herself together.

I still can’t account for it. The French is not particularly difficult, and the English translation is nearly word-for-word how I myself would translate it were I given the task. Why, then, was this the case? More confounding, when I mentioned the issue to my friend Sara, she told me that over the years she had had multiple friends tell her that Ernaux is best read in translation. These were all French speakers, with a variety of native languages. If anyone has any theories, I’m all ears.

A Man’s Place is about Ernaux’s father. In the process of depicting his life, it cannot help but be about class and family relationships, and how those intersect. The first passage I underlined came some 30 pages into this 90-page book, when Ernaux imagines the moment her parents met. “My mother must have been impressed…when she met him at the rope factory. Before then she had worked in a margarine plant. A tall, dark man with grey eyes, he held himself upright and was a trifle conceited. ‘My husband never looked working-class.’”

Something about Ernaux’s mother using “my husband” while talking to Ernaux about her father struck me as remarkably intimate. It feels proud, warmly possessive, and immensely personal. It’s almost uncomfortable to read. I’m realizing now as I write this that Ernaux never tells us her parents’ names, and somehow that serves to make that passage all the more moving. All we are, all we have, is our relationships with those who love us, and so the people here are defined in those terms.

While Ernaux’s parents began life as working class, they managed to work their way up. They opened a grocery store and café, becoming fixtures of the local community in the process. A lot of the most interesting material here relates to the difficulties that result from successfully achieving what I guess we can’t quite call the American Dream, from managing to make more of your financial situation. Relatives appear from time to time, expecting groceries for free while referring to the pair as superior.

Most touching is the impact their transition has on their relationship with their own daughter. When her father visits her as an adult, “I described the flat, the Louis-Philippe writing desk, the hi-fi system and the red velvet armchairs. He soon lost interest. He had brought me up to enjoy the luxuries he himself had been denied, therefore he was happy, but the antique dresser and the Dunlopillo mattress meant nothing more to him than the signs of social success. He often cut me short by saying, ‘You’re quite right to make the most of it.’” He has spent his life working so she can became a part of a world that holds little for him outside of the aspirational possibility of getting there. “Every time I did well in [school], he saw it as an achievement and the hope that one day I might be better than him.” [Italics hers.]

That theme is even reflected in his language, with frequent references to the ways he would oscillate back and forth between textbook French and his native Brittany dialect. It reminded me of Elena Ferrante’s protagonists in the Neapolitan Novels, individuals who manage a similar upward climb over the course of their lives, who would resort to dialect when angry. We are who we are. We can change the surrounding circumstances, but that doesn’t mean we can change ourselves.

"The Space Between the Notes"

On Every Good Boy Does Fine by Jeremy Denk

At one point in Every Good Boy Does Fine, pianist Jeremy Denk’s wonderful memoir about his years studying the instrument, a professor mentions the old Claude Debussy chestnut, “music is the space between the notes.” I’ve heard the line before, it’s entirely possible you have too, but something about the context here caused it to click.

There are a few competing interpretations of Debussy’s sentiment. One of the most common understands it as advocation for minimalism (not Minimalism, that didn’t exist yet): write as few notes as possible. Emperor Joseph II would certainly appreciate that parsing. “The space between the notes” can be thought of as the literal space on the paper. If we take this as correct, Miles Davis was getting to a similar point when he said that music is the notes you don’t play.

That interpretation serves composers well, but it doesn’t do much for performers. The other interpretation, the one the professor was using at the time, relates to the lateral and temporal distance in between notes. He was talking about the pulse, about rhythm and phrasing.

After reading that chapter, the way I was listening to classical music changed dramatically. I went from passively hearing and appreciating moments of rubato—when a performer stretches a note for longer than indicated by the sheet music—to actively seeking them out. They have suddenly become the key to understanding something bigger. While only time can tell if this fever will settle in for the long run, at the moment I think of the application of rubato as the heart of classical music performance, if not classical music itself.

Look at Krystian Zimerman’s astonishing rendition of one of Franz Schubert’s Impromptus. This has been one of my favorite recordings for nearly a decade now. It is impossibly moving. Zimerman’s technique is impeccable. He is able to separate the voices, the melody and the accompaniment, completely. You would almost believe there were two pianos at work here, one simply plonking out the melody while the other quietly works away. That’s all masterful, sure. What makes this recording sublime, ultimately, is his use of time.

When Zimerman heads for a melodic climax, he milks it. The music slows ever so slightly. It’s almost too much, frankly. Music with too much rubato either becomes camp or, worse, ceases to be coherent. He pushes the freedom of Romanticism right to the edge, but never over. The music breathes. You could play the same passage with identical technique to a metronome, and it would be lovely, but it wouldn’t feel the same. This is the difference between describing a feeling, and embodying it.

Take a listen to Denk’s own recording of the Goldberg Variations. Pay particular attention to those first two measures, and how that music looks on the page. Notice how the left hand notes, the bottom row, always fall squarely in line with a note in the right hand.

There are many, many recordings of Bach that follow that timing with zealotry. Lord knows I do when I fumble my way through the Aria. With Bach in particular, there’s a pressure to be sehr genau, for everything to be exact. That’s not how Denk plays it, though. In that second measure, he brings in the left hand just a hair, almost imperceptibly, earlier than the right. As a result, the melody pulses with subtle life, a life missing from many otherwise excellent recordings.

To be a performer is a strange thing. You express yourself through the works of others. You have to balance your thoughts, your opinions, and your instincts against their intentions. The space between the notes is the most immediate, and personal, mode of expression musicians have. “Rubato can’t be planned,” a friend of mine said. “That’s the point.” It is an immediate, urgent expression of feeling. In those moments, the boundary between the musician and the sound vanishes.

Every Good Boy Does Fine is an excellent memoir. If you are a music performer, or interested in performance, it is indispensable. It has changed the way I listen to music. Now, the space between the notes is all I can think about.