Traitor with Don Cheadle

As fans of Don Cheadle, Jenn and I made a point of going to see Traitor on its opening weekend last year. In it, Cheadle plays Samir Horn, a former Special Forces soldier working under “deep cover” with a group of Islamic terrorists who operate in Yemen, France, and elsewhere. He reports entirely off the books to a US government official played by a (surprisingly bulky) Jeff Daniels. An FBI agent played by Guy Pearce, believing Horn is a genuine terrorist, is tracking him closely.

Is Horn in fact a US government spy? Or have his traumatic life experiences and his long exposure to radical Muslims turned him into a double agent? It’s an exciting story, intelligently written, well acted, and well directed. Yet it didn’t do particularly well at the box office ($7 million on its opening weekend).

A few days ago we watched it again on DVD, and were caught up once again in the drama. Even when you know the secrets, it’s a compelling movie.

So what was the problem? Are moviegoers not interested in seeing black leading men who are not Will Smith or Denzel Washington? (They saw Hotel Rwanda, after all.) Was this film too hard for people to follow? (It wasn’t as difficult as, say, Syriana.) Or did people find its portrayal of terrorists too sympathetic? The terrorists, particularly Horn’s friend Omar, are presented as dangerous fanatics but nonetheless human beings. Yet I don’t think most people would know this unless they actually saw the film.

Seth Godin on Acumen Fund

Marketing guru Seth Godin has been a supporter of Acumen Fund for a long time, but he doesn’t often explain why.

A few days ago in his blog, he unpacked the idea of “patient capital” that Acumen Fund employs in order to find help poor people in developing countries. Patient capital is a way of creating a middle ground between philanthropy and investment, and Godin described it in a way that many of us in tough economic times can identify with. 

The difference between being one penny behind and one penny ahead is profound.

If you’re one penny behind, then every day you fall further back. Every day, the emergencies get worse, the stress gets worse, your ability to survive (never mind thrive) gets worse.

If you’re one penny ahead, though, just a penny, then every day you build a reserve, every day you are able to invest in productivity or peace of mind, and soon you are two pennies or a dollar or five dollars a day ahead. And then you can send your daughter to college. And then you can buy something from the merchant next door. And then you can plant a better crop. And then you have a stake in the community, and then the world changes.

Acumen Fund’s approach, told by its founder in the book The Blue Sweater, is only one way to alleviate poverty, but it’s shown considerable promise.

A Tranquil Star by Primo Levi

A week or so ago I stopped into Unnameable Books, a newly relocated bookstore on Vanderbilt Avenue in Brooklyn that divides its space about half and half between new and used books. I picked up a copy of A Tranquil Star by Primo Levi, one of the few books by Levi that I was pretty sure I didn’t have already.

As I began reading, I realized that although I hadn’t bought the book before, I had read it. But that was fine.

A Tranquil Star is a bit of a posthumous grab-bag of stories, not unified by theme like, for instance, The Monkey’s Wrench. Some of the stories read like straight autobiography: “Fra Diavolo on the Po” describes the narrator’s less than inspiring military career, and “The Molecule’s Defiance” is about one of those accidents that happen in the life of an industrial chemist. Others, like “Knall” and “The Magic Paint,” are highly creative, combining the whimsical and the sinister in an effective way.

Altogether, the cool intelligence and clean prose of these tales made them a good choice for reading on muggy August days when the brain is fuzzy and the attention span short. 

Block that verb!

The writing classes I’ve taken, and heard about, always seem to stress a few guidelines: “Write what you know,” “Show, don’t tell,” and “Use active verbs.” But sometimes I wonder whether these rules are being taken a bit too literally.

Maybe some of the verbs in today’s novels are a little too active. Maybe the snap, crackle, and pop of the sentences detracts from putting the emphasis where it belongs, or exploring some of the more subtle shadings of a situation or a character’s personality. This is from page 164 of Jonathan Lethem’s novel You Don’t Love Me Yet:

The complainer hoisted bottles of wine from a rack and clapped them on the table. Matthew set to grating a brick of cheese Falmouth had thrust into his hands. Glistening blobs of tomato spattered the stove in a halo at the burner where the sauce had simmered, its savor investing through the loft.... Carl jerked the cork from a bottle while Falmouth elbowed past him, hands in oven mitts, to plunk the skillet between the candleholders. Matches were struck and touched to wicks, goblets splashed full, sauce ladled, Parmesan strewn to form a gooey lattice over oil-shiny plates of red-heaped noodles. Talk lulled as eating began, verbal noise replaced by a music of smacking lips, glasses clinked to teeth, the suck of spaghetti stretched by forks from pools of viscosity.

If Carl had only eased the cork from the bottle instead of jerking it, that would have been a bit of a relief. It’s still an active verb, but not quite as rackety a verb.

And is that really the right way to use the word “investing”?

And does Lethem really mean to make the spaghetti sauce quite as nauseating as “pools of viscosity” suggests? 

Malcolm Gladwell and Atticus Finch

For some reason I never read To Kill a Mockingbird when I was young, and for years I intended to fix that omission. (Despite my degree in English and American Literature and Language, I haven’t read Pride and Prejudice either—though I did read Emma for a survey course, and enjoyed it.) I had seen the movie on TV, at least in parts, and when I did finally read the book a couple of weeks ago I didn’t find much that was unfamiliar, though I was pleased with the assurance of the storytelling, the touches of humor, and the lack of cuteness (mostly).

Having just finished the book, I was surprised to open the New Yorker and see that the subject of Malcolm Gladwell’s latest essay is not quirks of human behavior that can benefit businesspeople, but To Kill a Mockingbird.

Gladwell addresses a controversy that I was unaware of, about whether it is right to see Atticus Finch (and it is impossible to read the book without thinking of Gregory Peck) as a hero for his lonely defense of a black man unjustly accused of rape. The point, which Gladwell agrees with, is that Atticus Finch would rather appeal to the better angels of our nature than work for structural change.

Finch will stand up to racists. He’ll use his moral authority to shame them into silence. He will leave the judge standing on the sidewalk while he shakes hands with Negroes. What he will not do is look at the problem of racism outside the immediate context of Mr. Cunningham, Mr. Levy, and the island community of Maycomb, Alabama.

Gladwell is right, if we take him on his own terms. Atticus Finch is not an activist, a Freedom Rider, or even a full-time civil rights lawyer. His actions, and those of people like him, were not going to get more rights for black people, let alone end racism. But I don’t think Harper Lee ever meant to say that they were.

What Finch does in his small Southern town is not everything, but it is something. It requires more moral courage than most people have. And the existence of people like Finch, and their influence on their neighbors, helps prepare the ground for change.