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John Wilkes Booth and the literature of rejection

April 15, 2015

A few posts ago, I talked about “The Literature of Rejection,” a course troubled quarterback Quinn Novak takes at Stanford in the upcoming “The Penalty for Holding,” the second novel in my series “The Games Men Play.”

The fictional course looks at the men – literary and historical – who had a disproportionate rage at rejection and so took terrible revenge as assassins, mass murderers and tyrants. Among them is John Wilkes Booth, who shot President Abraham Lincoln in Ford’s Theatre in Washington D.C. 150 years ago April 14 – Good Friday that year. (Lincoln died on April 15 – the same day the RMS Titanic would sink in 1912. April 15 is now also the deadline for income taxes, so death and taxes.)

The kind of men – and they are almost always men – who make up the literature of rejection are much in the news these days. Andreas Lubitz said he was going to do something others would notice and then took 149 people with him to his death aboard the Germanwings plane that he crashed in the French Alps. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, just convicted in the Boston Marathon bombings that eerily enough also took place on April 15 (2013), is the subject, along with his brother and co-conspirator Tamerlan, of the new book “The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy” by Masha Gessen (Riverhead Books, $27.95, 273 pages).

And there’s a new book on Booth, “Fortune’s Fool” by Terry Alford (Oxford University Press, $29.95, 464 pages).

Alford’s book, praised by Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer in The Wall Street Journal as “so deeply researched and persuasively argued that it should stand as the standard portrait for years,” is inclined to repetition. If we read that Booth was handsome and well-liked once, we must read it 10 times. But Alford does offer insight into the mind of this assassin, a man who yearned to do something great on the world stage but lacked the mind, character and discipline to achieve it. ...

Our bodies, theirselves

April 3, 2015

Freud said there are no accidents so maybe it’s no coincidence that the controversy over recently enacted (and hastily revived) RFRAs (Religious Freedom Reformation Acts) has occurred at the same moment that PBS has been airing “Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies.”

What do they have in common? An undertone of misogyny. I’m not suggested that the series – which was alternately informative, hopeful, horrifying and depressing – was misogynistic. But rather that the way in which female cancers used to be treated suggests a kind of savage disregard for the female body, and you have to wonder if a more enlightened approach – lumpectomy rather than radical mastectomy, which turns out to be ineffectual for early stage and metastatic breast cancers alike; a moratorium on hysterectomies, which used to be a dime a dozen – has to do with the rise in the number of female physicians and surgeons. ...

After Eden: The Met’s resurrection of Adam

March 29, 2015

For years, he graced The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Velez Blanco Patio, just off the Great Hall – a paean to the kind of youthful male beauty that stretches back to the Archaic Greeks. But all of that came to a crashing halt on the evening of Oct. 6, 2002 when Adam, a 15th-century funerary marble by Tullio Lombardo, fell off his pedestal and smashed into 28 pieces.

It turns out that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could put Adam back together again. A dozen years after the unsettling incident, The Met unveiled the 6-foot, 3 ½-inch statue, along with a video on its reconstruction, last fall in a new, temporary space. And yet, it seems fitting to talk about the work in this season that is dedicated to Adam’s fall from spiritual grace and the Resurrection of the new Adam in the person of Jesus Christ.

Part of what makes this sculpture’s reconstitution and thus the subsequent exhibit so incredibly moving is the subject’s stunning beauty to begin with. The thick curls framing a face characterized by large eyes, a straight nose and full lips and winding about a graceful neck. The high chest, taut abs, long, slim haunches and sinewy calves and arms. Adam’s gorgeous, and so we can say with Hamlet, “What a fall was there.” ...

The shadow king

March 24, 2015

History, they say – whoever “they” are – is written by the victors.

Well, not exactly. Our age of revisionism and conspiracy theories, coupled with the unending vacuum that is the Internet, encourages us to consider just how victorious – or at least good – the victors really were and, thus, just how wronged the losers might’ve been.

That’s the backdrop of Pierre Briant’s “Darius in the Shadow of Alexander” (Harvard University Press, 579 pages, $39.95), newly translated by Jane Marie Todd and published in the United States after first appearing in French 12 years ago. In this book, Briant – emeritus professor of the Achaemenid world and Alexander’s empire at the Collège de France in Paris – explores how and why Darius III, who lost an empire to Alexander the Great, came to “haunt the realm of historical oblivion.” It is not, for obvious reasons, a biography. But it is a fascinating, extensively researched study of how branding can be as important as any battle.

Briant’s book arrives at a time when Persia (modern-day Iran) is very much in the news due to the controversial yet productive nuclear disarmament talks and Iran’s role in fighting ISIS – which some see as a play for greater power in the Middle East. Meanwhile, Israel’s recent discovery of coins bearing the likeness of Alexander go a long way to explaining why the Greeks – who knew how to spin – won and the Persians lost.

But first a bit of background: Some 130 years before the birth of Alexander in neighboring Macedon in July of 356 B.C., the Persians invaded Greece and burnt the Acropolis atop Athens, destroying its temples and worshipers. It was Greece’s 9/11 moment.

Alexander’s father – Philip II, king of powerful, rough-hewn Macedon and hegemon, or protector, of the more refined, resentful Greek city-states – seized upon Persian atrocity in his plans to invade Persia, liberating Greek nationals along its Mediterranean coast. But Philip – who loved much but none-too-well – was assassinated by a former male lover undoubtedly at the instigation of his ex-wife (and Alexander’s mother), Olympias. At 20, Alexander found himself heir not only to Macedon and the hegemony of the Greek city-states but to his mother’s dynastic ambitions and his father’s Persian dreams. ...

Anne Boleyn and the games men play

March 16, 2015

One of the nuggets I gleaned from attending the Algonkian Writers’ Conference last December in Manhattan was that when it comes to historical romance, it’s the Tudors or bust.

It figures. Working backward, there was Elizabeth I, England’s greatest ruler; her sister, the pathetic, misguided “Bloody Mary”; their baby bro, Edward VI; and, of course, the daddy from Hell, Henry VIII, with those – count ’em – six wives. No dramatist could conjure such symmetrical marital disaster – Catherine of Aragon, annulled; Anne Boleyn, beheaded; Jane Seymour, dead in childbirth; Anne of Cleves, annulled; Katherine Howard, beheaded; and Catherine Parr, survived Henry, but wait, would remarry and, you guessed it, wind up dead in childbirth.

Historian David Starkey (“Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII”) once told me that of the half-dozen, Catherine of Aragon was the only one Henry ever really loved. But his quest for a son, for proof of his manhood and for liberation from papal Rome and the memory of his older brother, Arthur, who had been Catherine’s husband, drove him into the arms of the bewitching Anne Boleyn, linchpin of the six wives’ psychodrama. Did he use Anne to gain control of the Church in England or was he, as Starkey said, so in love with her that he was willing to renounce his role as Defender of the (Roman Catholic) Faith? Perhaps a bit of both?

Anne’s rise and fall is told through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell – the blacksmith’s son-turned-chancellor – in Hilary Mantel’s Booker Prize-winning novels “Wolf Hall” and “Bring Up the Bodies.” (She’s at work on the last book in the trilogy.) Naturally, PBS’ “Masterpiece” couldn’t resist. “Wolf Hall” (April 5 through May 10) dramatizes the first two books, with British theater star Mark Rylance as Cromwell, Damian Lewis (“Homeland”) as Henry and Claire Foy (“Little Dorrit”) as Anne. “Wolf Hall” – the title refers to rival Jane Seymour’s familial estate but suggests the den of wolves the Tudors were – is a daring conceit. For what makes men like Cromwell effective, their ability to manipulate and maneuver behind the scenes, is what can make them potentially boring front and center. (Imagine the story of Bill and Hillary Clinton told from the viewpoint of their accountant.) The beauty of the books and the miniseries is that we enter Cromwell’s mind to meet a man weary of and disgusted by the power games men play but unable to relinquish them. ...

For self and country

March 8, 2015

Well, thank goodness Davis Cup is back. Sports have been in a bit of a doldrums since the Super Duper Bowl and the Aussie Open. But the Cup – the men’s team competition, pitting nation against nation – has returned for another season, although as usual, the cast keeps changing.

Fed’s out this year, having added the Cup – the one trophy missing from his case – last year. On the other hand Nole’s back. And Andy, bless ’im, keeps rolling with it. Say what you want about Andy, but he’s one of the more consistent Cup players among the top 10.

The New York Times has written that the effect of this revolving door is that fans rarely get to see the marquee names in action against one another in Cup competition. That may be true, but I would argue that it doesn’t necessarily deprive the Cup of drama. Just when it looked like the Brits would walk along over us Yanks, the Bryans (Bob and Mike) took the doubles to keep American hopes alive for Sunday, March 8. And Novak Djokovic made a surprise doubles appearance for Serbia Saturday after winning his singles match a day earlier against Croatia. In the reverse-singles Sunday, he’s slated to face off against the player experts consider to be Baby Nole, “teen starlet” (that’s what CNN calls him) Borna Coric. Indeed, Nole teammate Viktor Troicki was supposed to be in the doubles match instead of Nole, but he was so drained from his five-set victory over Borna on Friday, that coach Bogdan Obradovic decided to go with Nole. ...

A-Rod, Ray Rice and the game of ‘Who’s Sorry Now?’

February 18, 2015

Cue Connie Francis. In this “the winter of our discontent” – the season of 90-inch snowfalls, Southern ice, broken water pipes and equally shattered hearts – the lament of the woman with the catch in her voice and a torch-song life to match would seem most appropriate.

Really, it’s as if we’re all stuck in “Dr. Zhivago” – without Omar Sharif.

In this “region of ice” – thank you, Joyce Carol Oates – everyone is sorry. Ray Rice is sorry for cold-cocking his then wife-to-be, Janay Palmer, issuing an apology almost a year to the date of his Valentine’s Day (image) Massacre. (Could the holiday of hearts have been the inspiration?)

Hot on Ra-Ri’s Achilles heels comes A-Rod and his handwritten apology for steroid abuse and – the thing that always does you in more than the transgression itself – lying about it.

And speaking of lying, opprobrium and ridicule continue to snow down on disgraced anchorman Brian Williams for aggrandizing his role in the Iraq War – although Jerry Seinfeld’s line on the SNL 40th anniversary show about Williams being part of the original “Saturday Night Live” cast was one of the subtler digs. The irony is that the talk show-minded Williams probably counted as friends many of the people now making fun at his expense. Ouch.

Let’s just say Williams should be glad that he’s not A-Rod. The disdain heaped on him by The New York Times’ columnist Tyler Kepner is typical of the way in which the once and apparently future New York Yankee is now viewed. There are two schools of thought on this. One says that justice is justice and compassion, like patience, has its limits, particularly as said limited patience is often accompanied by the sneaking suspicion that the contrite are not all that contrite but actually seeking something less noble than the epic redemption found in Joseph Conrad’s “Lord Jim,” say like a return to the Yanks or the NFL. (It reminds you of the moment in “Gone With the Wind” in which Rhett Butler tells Scarlett O’Hara that she’s like the thief who isn’t sorry for what he’s done but is awfully sorry he got caught.) ...