Thursday, November 5, 2009
Media / Lit & Lectures / News Bites Death Speaks — And There's No Agent Getting 10 Percent
Posted by Michael Miner on Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 8:21 AM
When artists imagine the dead, the undead, and the deadly, they are usually trying to terrify us. Zombies, ghouls, chainsaw murderers — our first reaction to any of these fiends is to run the other way.
But death itself — Death itself — has become a different story. Death is worldly, philosophical, a subtle conversationalist. In Meet Joe Black he’s an epigrammatic Brad Pitt. In the hands of W. Somerset Maugham he tells a wry story about bumping into a servant in the Baghdad market who then fled in terror to Samara, which is where Death had been expecting to find him in the first place.
In The Letter from Death by Lillian Moats, copiously illustrated by her son David Moats, Death is fed up. “Look around you," says Death, in an open letter to everyone everwhere. “What evidence suggests that I will be a gateway to justice, that you will die and thereby find every inequity set right?
"How you crave justice. Yet, how you fear it. Or should I say, how you fear punishment and crave reward? When you think of me -- when you think past me to concoct an afterlife -- what wishful thinking, fear and guilt stoke your imaginations!"
Moats, who lives in Downers Grove, has written three earlier books, one of them a novel that ten years ago I wrote about enthusiastically in Hot Type. “If you've tumbled down the well of self-loathing and crawled back up, and out of that wrung literature, why would you hand the tale to some fat Manhattan house that wishes you were Danielle Steel?” I wondered. “Self-publication is respectable now, and exquisite books like Lillian Moats's Legacy of Shadows can make it seem the only honorable way to publish…. From first word to last, from typography to publicity, Legacy is the way Moats wants it.”
Today, self-publication doesn’t require a defense. In the eyes of amazon.com, all books are equal. In this week’s Reader I discuss a new anthology of columns by the late Chicago gay columnist Jon-Henri Damski. The friends of Damski who put the book together turned to an on-demand press, which stores the pages on computers and prints up copies as they are ordered. There is a market for Damski’s book but it is a very local market, and in another era the book might never have found a publisher. In this era, a publisher was never in doubt.
Lillian Moats looked around for a house that would publish her letter from death, but “I was almost relieved no one picked it up right away because I’ve gotten kind of addicted to the freedom” — the freedom of doing it herself. Letter is an artisanal book published under the imprint of her Three Arts Press and as carefully designed as it was written. Each of David Moats’s intricate black-and-white drawings fills its page, and there are so many of them the book is as much to be gazed at as read. Our first glimpse of Death has him, or her, at a table, smoke curling from the cigarette in one hand as the other pulls a sheet of paper from an old upright typewriter. There’s a crumpled sheet of paper on the table. The letter isn’t writing itself; Death is laboring to get this right.
“Even as a child,” says Lilliam Moats, “mortality was really vivid to me, and I’ve looked at it in so many different ways over the years and see it differently now — I see the humor in it. But after 9/11, I just found it very unfunny the way our fears of death, and our cultural tendency to not deal with those fears, were being manipulated. So I was doing a lot of reading and research, writing a lot of notes, making a lot of observations, and it seemed there was nowhere to go with it. Then it occurred to me that only the character of death would be in a position to say these things. So that’s how it came about.”
The writing took her two years. The illustrations took David Moats a year, and he was primarily responsible for the design. He did some of the work in England, where he lives and at the moment is in a graduate program of the London School of Economics.
The Indy Booksellers recognized The Letter from Death by putting it on its October Indie Next List of "inspired recommendations."
“I’ll offer this last observation,” says Death. “To me the distortion of your original longing — longing that is so beautiful in your infancy — is the one great human tragedy from which so many others flow.
“I’m talking about the simple longing to be held, to be gazed at lovingly, to be nourished and filled. It is your common beginning. Why do you disregard it as your universal touchstone?”
Lillian Moats was free not only to create but to promote her book exactly as she wanted. After the launch party, which was at Anderson's Bookshop in Downers Grove, she made no more public appearances. “I decided I didn’t want to do readings or talks for this,” she explains, “as it just felt that this isn’t really my voice, as the other books have been. Letters are meant to be read silently and privately — at a distance. I didn’t want Lillian Moats’s voice to get in the way.”
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Check out the short play DEATH KNOCKS by Woody Allen.
NAT: Hello, Moe? Me. Listen, I don't know if somebody's playing a joke, or what, but Death was just here. We played a little gin ... No Death. In person. Or somebody who claims to be Death. But, Moe, he's such a schlep!
David Bragman
Unrelated:
How long do you think the Sun-Times will keep posting that picture of the supposed el-platform guardrail that the stroller hit? The sun-shadow is on the platform, so we're facing south (good so far; that's the direction the train pulled out of the station); But the train is to the right of the platform. That means if the photo hasn't been retouched, the pictured train is coming into the northbound platform, not leaving the southbound platform (where the incident took place).
Did they take a picture of the wrong guardrail? Or is the negative flipped? (And assuming they're in the digital age, wouldn't flipping a negative require actively manipulating a photo to make it wrong? For what purpose? Is the composition more esthetically pleasing with the train on the right?)
The coverage of this story has been a jumble. Weird unexplained quotes. The couple at Morse says they saw the baby "to the left of the inside rail." If you're looking from the platform to the baby, the left of the inside rail is between the two tracks. But it's a weird thing to say -- why not just say "the baby was between the tracks"? If you're looking from the baby back to the platform, to the left of the inside rail is in between the two rails of the southbound track. Or maybe they meant the inside rail as the one close to the platform (which is really the outside rail). I'm not demanding perfect punctuation from the couple; they're trying to tell a story that they are no doubt shaken by. But I wish the reporter had followed up. Where the baby was found is an important detail in determining what really happened.
Likewise, the sequence of post-accident events with the stroller is incoherent in all tellings. When did the nursing student get on the train? If she got on the train at Loyola, was anyone else already in the car when she boarded? At what station did the CTA supervisor take control of the train from the operator? The first account seemed to imply that happened at Granville. The nursing student's account suggests the operator removed the stroller from her booth at Thorndale, which is south of Granville. If this is true, would it even be the same operator, or was it the supervisor?
Again, I'm not expecting witnesses to think of these things as they give their account. But I expect reporters to sort through and try to figure out what really happened. Instead of post-modern, post-Mirage j-school journalism, where the goal is to get everyone's quotes, rather than figuring out the real story.
This incident is a bit of a flashpoint. You've got major constituencies that believe the city gives in to BS liability lawsuits all too easily. (See the secondcitycop blog for a taste of that). You've got a union that has long maintained that els aren't safe without conductors, though they're pulled in another direction because they also have to defend their operator. You've got loads of people who dislike and distrust the CTA and instinctively disbelieve the operator and the agency. Many, many people in comments sections relating moments when the door closed on their coat or their bag, and sympathizing that this could've happened to them (despite the fact they have no idea what went wrong here, assuming the tale is true -- did the whole stroller catch but the door-sensor failed? did just a stroller wheel catch, which the sensor might not be intended to notice? Just some strap, which the sensor clearly wouldn't catch?)
So it's a good story. And it has gotten a lot of coverage. But the coverage illuminates too little, leaving an inkblot on which everyone can impose their pre-existing bias.
The picture wasn't flipped. We can read "danger" and "American" on the guardrail and train. Why is the train in the picture arriving in the station rather than leaving it? What visual evidence am I missing?
Els run on the right track in the direction they're traveling, so this train has to be coming towards us.
Go stand on any el platform and turn to your left to look at the end of the platform, so that the track is to the right of the platform, like in that photo. You'll always be looking in the direction the next train is coming from, and never in the direction the last train left. That shot can only be taken of an arriving train.
To be more direct, at Morse, if you're looking south at a platform to the left of a train (which we are, shown by the shadows), then you're standing on the northbound side, watching a northbound train come towards you.
(The one exception would be when an el has to run on the other track, for instance because of track work. But there's no indication this train was running on the opposite track.)
"Go stand on any el platform and turn to your left to look at the end of the platform, so that the track is to the right of the platform, like in that photo. You'll always be looking in the direction the next train is coming from, and never in the direction the last train left."
Huh? It is completely the opposite.
"The couple at Morse says they saw the baby "to the left of the inside rail." If you're looking from the platform to the baby, the left of the inside rail is between the two tracks. But it's a weird thing to say -- why not just say 'the baby was between the tracks'?" If you're looking from the baby back to the platform, to the left of the inside rail is in between the two rails of the southbound track. Or maybe they meant the inside rail as the one close to the platform (which is really the outside rail)."
I don't understand. The tracks would be horizontal if you are looking at them from the platform. So if the baby was between the two tracks I don't think it would make sense to say it was to the left or the right of either rail. And I would consider the inside rail to be the one closest to the platform. Why wouldn't it be? Do you have some information that the technical terminology is the opposite? I would think a layperson, like myself or those witnesses, would consider the inside rail to be the one on the inside. And if it was past the fartherst rail, saying "to the left of the inside rail" might make sense depending on where you are standing from.
Come to think of it, that would be to the left of the outside rail (depending on where you are standing). Regardless, I don't really think the facts follow what you are trying to say, Ryan.
T. O. I.A.C.,
Let's start with the easy part. The part I explained to Mike. Perhaps I explained confusingly, asking you to visualize that my description only fits the inbound train, rather than showing that a train traveling away can't fit that photo.
Try it this way. An el train is exactly like a car, always traveling on the right. The platforms are like the sidewalks on both sides of the street.
So go out and stand in a two way street. Watch cars driving away from you. Where is the sidewalk - the one on the side of the street with the cars driving away from you? It's to the right of the cars. It's not to the left of them. But in that photo, the platform is to the left of the el car. Keep looking in the same direction. Wait for some cars coming towards you. Now look at the sidewalk on that side of the street. That sidewalk is to the left of the cars coming towards you. Ergo, the el car is coming towards the photographer, not traveling away from him.
Now on to the harder question. The relation between baby and "inside rail." I did explicitly allow for the fact that the couple might have used the terminology incorrectly in my post. But you seem to want to persist in the idea that the inside rail is the one near the platform. Consider that there is not a platform all along the tracks. For most of an el line, there is are only the four rails of the two tracks. So let's call them a, b, c and d. Putting west on the left, as in a map, they are normally arranged this way:
AB CD
where A and B are the two rails of the track on the west and C and D are the two rails of the track on the east.
Does it make any sense to call B and C the "outer rails"? Of course not. They're inside -- they're between rails A and D.
Now, where did the baby fall? We're told that the baby fell beyond the platform (after the guardrail that the stroller hit). So you're looking off the end of the platform. That's important. You're not looking in front of the platform, so the rails would appear, um, "horizontal", as you put it. Looking off the end of the platform in the direction an el car leaves, the rails are left of the platform. Thus, "left of the inside rail" is within the track geometry regardless of whether the couple understood which rail is the inside rail.
Given the understanding of geometry in this forum, I think I need to circle back and say when you perform the little experiment I described in the paragraphs 1-3, do so carefully. After all, you're standing in a street looking at cars moving away from you. That means the cars behind you are moving towards you. If you're not careful, you could get hit.
And also, given that the only two replies come from people who weren't able to visualize the geometry of an el track and platform, I think I need to revise my criticism of the Sun Times. Maybe this sort of visualization is more difficult than I thought, and I shouldn't expect that a photo editor should be able to figure it out. Although one hopes that a photo editor is a visual person, and so spatial relationships come easily. Sigh.
Maybe I need to mention that Morse has two platforms on the outside of the tracks. Parts of what I said would seem backwards if you were visualizing a station with a center platform.
I'm pretty sure that the Morse station has a center platform. I think that clarifies the confusion.
T. O. IAC,
You're right. I thought of it last night after turning the computer off, and hoped I'd get here this morning to confess my foolishness before someone else had to point it out.
I'm a knucklehead. Nevermind.
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