Manifesting Time - an art installation by NC Weil

For at least forty years (I’ve lost track), I’ve been collecting Grandpa’s Pine Tar Soap boxes. Originally, my notion was to build a house and use them to wallpaper the bathroom. Well, it’s become unlikely that I will build such a house (darn!) – but I have continued to collect these soap boxes, flattening, bagging, and stashing them deep in cupboards. 

Recently I took a pair of wool gloves off a shelf in my closet, and was alarmed to see that they had been mostly consumed by moths. Other wool garments in there have so far escaped being ravaged, but that discovery spurred a decision – time to put those soap boxes to use, lining the closet with them. The soap is strong-smelling (although the reason I’ve been using it exclusively all these decades is that it lathers up well, cleans effectively, then washes off completely, leaving no residue of scent or soap. I challenge you to find a soap comparable to that!) – so I figured the boxes would deter moths. 

Soap Boxes? 

Since my collection began, the Grandpa Soap Company (“since 1878”) has changed the box design twice, so I have bright green (1971), dark green/ black with a smiling Grandpa (2002), and the current mostly-black version, a Grandpa playing sidekick to his product: 

The last 2 versions have come in 2 sizes, 3.25 oz (per the older style), and 4.25 oz. The factory moved from Cincinnati, OH, across the Ohio River to Erlanger, KY, between versions 1 and 2. The oldest of my boxes recommends “Grandpa’s Wonder Pine Tar Toilet Soap for toilet, bath, and shampoo.” The next iteration touts being Cruelty Free. And now the boxes say it’s plant-based, cruelty free, and vegan, and “Recognized by the National Psoriasis Foundation” as well as being “The Original Wonder Soap.” 

I found it first in a family-owned drugstore; once they discontinued it I had to special-order a dozen at a time. Chain drugstores wouldn’t order it for me, so I requested it from natural foods stores, and at some magic moment in the last decade, they began to stock it. Pine tar soap achieved its pinnacle of visibility in 2021, in a Super Bowl ad(!), when Dr. Squatch put their product in front of a mass audience – such a thrill for a longtime fan! 

I’ve been accused of obsession – my son wrote “A Statistical Analysis of an Obsession” about the hundreds of Scrabble games mi esposo and I have played, whose scorepads I’ve kept. But art often revolves around obsession – Picasso drawing, painting and sculpting bulls; Cezanne repeatedly painting Mont Saint Victoire; Samuel Beckett writing about pointlessness – that compulsion to revisit an image, an idea, a place, is a way of situating ourselves in time. Here’s this subject/object: what’s new? what’s the same? And how have I changed over that same span? So I’m not apologizing for a collection of hundreds of soap boxes, acquired over four decades and saved from mold, rodents, and people who purge. 

The Project 

I was so happy the day I realized that though I wasn’t going to wallpaper a bathroom with them, I’d found another place they could live. I emptied that closet, cleaned out 14 years’ accumulation of dust, and yes, even filled several boxes with things to get rid of. I took off the closet doors, set up a lamp and a stepladder, and measured the space. 

I taped together vertical strips of boxes to fill the different spaces, then glued them onto the walls using regular white glue, nothing volatile or toxic. As I got further into the project I started to play with the variables: 3 Grandpas, 2 sizes, and how many of each I had. 

And, serendipity! For reasons unknown, I had a single 4.25 oz box featuring a Golden Grandpa! This smiling Grandpa style is also described in French or Spanish, tho not both. The apparent gold behind Grandpa’s face in many ovals is an optical trick of my cell phone camera – there’s only one Golden Grandpa; the background of the others is silvery, no matter what it looks like in this photo. 

But, Why? 

In a world overflowing with misery, loneliness, and destruction, I offer walls of Grandpas, lovingly collected and delightedly displayed, albeit in a closet. You bet it’s silly. And over time the boxes have lost their pine tar scent, so it’s unlikely they’ll keep moths at bay. But I don’t care. I have marveled at the printing variations – really bright green vs moderate; Golden Grandpa; and the price tags from places I bought them off the shelf: Lee’s Drugs, Cash Grocer, and the many that didn’t put their name on their price sticker. 

When enough years have rolled by, and you’re still doing something, you have created a through-line from an earlier version of yourself, to your current being. And this collection, this obsession, is an element of your evolution – think of it as your Control Group in the great experiment that is your life.

Quantum Cowboys, a film by Geoff Marslett

This 2022 film, part rotoscope, part drawings, part live-action, all imagination, is an exploration of time; space; whether the universe has consistency or coincidence or is so overcrowded with multiverses that everything can happen all the time; and how the further we get from a memory/ history, the more we agree on what happened. The grand mystery with the most possible wrong answers is “what did you do yesterday?” 

If you’d rather watch things explode at high volume, then go see the new Mad Max or Godzilla. But if making you think, and wonder, and laugh, is more interesting, Quantum Cowboys is a good bet. 

In brief, Frank and Bruno are shoveling horse manure in a town about to be dedicated as Yuma, Arizona in 18-whatever. Frank becomes entangled in a shooting he doesn’t believe happened, and is so intent that after 3 years in prison he enlists Bruno to help him find the man who died, to prove he didn’t. It’s Schrodinger’s Cat all over again, and again, and again. Sometimes he’s dead, and other times he’s – not? Or only when you look?

Along the way we are treated to anachronism, odd moments that repeat under different circumstances, and slapstick. With the Western genre to play around in, where modern culture (worldwide) imagines the American West to be gunslingers, saguaros and Monument Valley with a soundtrack by Ennio Morricone, Marslett gives us a version that brings events around until finally some different resolution emerges.

Moon Tiger, by Penelope Lively

Penelope Lively is among the finest living British novelists. She moves with ease from the grand sweep of events to the telling details of select lives, and in Moon Tiger she steps from an external view of a character, to her thoughts and reactions, and into the mind of her conversant, seeing an event from an omniscient view, then through each participant. For this novel the technique is fitting: Claudia Hampton is an historian though not a dry one – she stirs up controversy, not least because she is good-looking and unattached, but also because she never hesitates to take a contrarian view of “settled events” – Cortez and Montezuma, Napoleon, Marshal Tito, the Paleolithic era… 

During WWII she works as a journalist in Cairo; in her milieu women are vastly outnumbered by young men. Talking her way onto a transport, she travels into the desert where soldiers are mustering against Rommel’s forces. Somewhere out there is her young man, the one who will not come back, whose death frees her to live independently, to build a fulfilling life without partnership or parenthood. 

“Sixty-seven-year-old Claudia, on a pavement awash with packaged American matrons, crying not in grief but in wonder that nothing is ever lost, that everything can be retrieved, that a lifetime is not linear but instant. That, inside the head, everything happens at once.” 

This book is also about the end of life. In the story’s present, Claudia lies in a hospital room, body failing and mind wandering. We are privy to her thoughts, as she writes “the history of the world” which coincides with her world of studies and experience. In flashbacks we meet the few people close to her, though she is coy, revealing slowly, almost reluctantly, her deepest secrets. For she is secretive. Her daughter knows nothing of the love of her life, not even his name, and as Claudia dies she tells the reader, perhaps because otherwise that love dies with her unknown. But she doesn’t tell Lisa. Little wonder the younger woman, raised by her grandmothers, feels so distant: all her life, Claudia has kept her further than arms-length even as she makes occasional nurturing gestures to others. 

The web of family scarcely exists, or is woven too tight. Claudia and her year-older brother Gordon are as close – and closed – as twins, shutting out even their mother. The bond continues through their lives – his marriage to a devoted supportive wife, her decade-long affair (resulting in Lisa) with a dashing half-Russian. Gordon works his way up in the Foreign Service while Claudia patches together books, a standing column in a respected paper, occasional professorships, living with as little compromise as seems possible. But finally, that makes no difference, or not enough: death awaits. And those secrets we carry, they die with us.

Bel Canto, by Ann Patchett

Ann Patchett’s 2001 novel, Bel Canto, fictionalizes the hostage lockdown of Peru’s Japanese Embassy in 1996. Distinguished guests there to celebrate Emperor Hirohito’s birthday were held at gunpoint by the Tupac Amaru terrorist organization. After an early release of women and children, the rest were held for over four months.

In Patchett’s version, the locale is the Vice Presidential residence of an unnamed South American country, and the gathering is in honor of the birthday of a Japanese industrialist the country hopes to woo into opening a factory there. The attraction that brings him is the performance by a renowned opera soprano. The terrorists storm the palatial home, but thwarted by the absence of the President whom they had hoped to capture, must rethink their strategy. After the women and children, except the opera singer, are released, the remaining forty hostages and their nineteen captors – three commanders and a group of battle-trained but unworldly teenagers – settle in.

The commanders make demands the government rejects, presenting demands of their own, and the stalemate stretches on. And as this caesura of time imposes itself on hostages and terrorists alike, the individuals begin to reveal uncelebrated aspects of themselves. Art rises to the fore: the soprano performs, and people never stirred by music take refuge in her singing. The translator who accompanies the industrialist turns out to be the most valuable hostage, able to communicate between the generals and the Red Cross official who visits daily, between hostages from different countries, and while effacing himself, becomes a messenger of hope, love, and the portals of culture.

Patchett makes some fine observations: “The hostages had begun to believe they would not be killed. If what a person wants is his life, he tends to be quiet about wanting anything else. Once the life begins to seem secure, one feels the freedom to complain.”

When a hostage suddenly sits at the piano and plays magnificently, the group is again transformed. “Every note was distinct. It was the measurement of the time which had gotten away from them. It was the interpretation of their lives in the very moment they were being lived.”

In our current situation of COVID-induced isolation, this is a story of how people cope with the suspension of their daily lives, and what resources they find within themselves and among each other, that make the time not only bearable, but an oasis. Now is the perfect time to read Bel Canto.

The Lost Time Accidents, by John Wray

This 2016 novel is a mashup of ideas from Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (Sirens of Titan and Slaughterhouse Five), Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow), and P.D. Ouspensky (A New Model of the Universe). Wray probes Time, and the possibilities of time travel and what that might mean to the power-hungry, through the lives of a singular family.

The Lost Time Accidents are the grail pursued by the offspring of Ottokar Gottfried Toula, a Czech gherkin-maker with a hobbyist's interest in time. In 1903 he discovers something about its nature, writes a few cryptic sentences, and is hit by a car and dies before he can explain further. His sons, Kaspar and Waldemar, move to Vienna and study physics. Their work coincides with publication of the Theory of General Relativity; the family feels Einstein has trespassed on their understanding of time, and ever after, they refer to him only as the Patent Clerk. Contempt for him feeds Waldemar's anti-Semitism.

Kaspar and Waldemar part on chilly terms as students: Kaspar marries the daughter of his Jewish professor, and Waldemar decamps to Czechoslovakia where privation begins his transformation into the monster he will become, the Nazis' Black Timekeeper of Czas, performing unspeakable experiments on Jewish subjects in a camp where he has complete autonomy. Kaspar and Sonja and their twin daughters leave Vienna as Nazism descends. Sonja dies en route to America, and Kaspar takes the girls to Buffalo where he joins a watchmaking company. He marries again eventually, and his son Orson, raised primarily by the twins, becomes a prolific author of pornographic sci-fi, his output reminiscent of Vonnegut's Kilgore Trout. These twins, Enzian and Gentian, function as an isolated dyad, Enzian the theorist and Gentian the practical one; they decamp to a building in Harlem where they can pursue their experiments, Enzian thinking and studying and working on time travel devices while Gentian becomes a local character, enjoying city life on her shopping expeditions.

Orson finally writes a real novel, a thinly-disguised account of his eccentric family and their preoccupation with time, which because it is published in 1969, becomes a runaway bestseller. The Revelations-like final section spurs formation of a cult, the U.S. Church of Synchronology (UCS), derisively dubbed the Fuzzy Fruits by Orson. He marries a student boarding at his house, and they have a son, named Waldemar by Enzian and Gentian. This young man is the narrator of this tale, and it falls to him to find the solution to his great-grandfather's Lost Time Accidents, and to discover how his namesake disappeared when the prison camp he ran was liberated by the Soviets. The story is told, in alternating sections, as a family history and a series of letters - confessions might be a better word - to his clandestine lover, the wife of the founder of the UCS.

If all that sounds convoluted, it is. To Wray's credit, he dodges the main pitfall of time travel stories: altering the past which alters the present. And he's a witty and vivid writer:
"The Xanthia T. Lasdun Memorial Ocean-View Manor & Garden was a thirty-six-chambered assisted-living facility in Bensonhurst, with that bleary, nicotine-stained shabbiness every neo-Tudor building in the world seems to exude. Its garden, as far as I could determine, was the condom-festooned median of lower Bay Parkway, and its ocean was the droning, alluvial parkway itself."
But Wray does enough name-dropping (Sonja models for Gustav Klimt, and Kaspar sits in on a discussion between Wittgenstein and another luminary) to remind me of people who've done past-life regressions and concluded they were Cleopatra, Napoleon, Michelangelo - never anyone ordinary.

In a mystery, which this story is in essence, it's important that the resolution be worth the effort it takes to get there. Well, not for me. Maybe Mr. Wray should read some more Ouspensky, or study Vonnegut's storytelling art. Vonnegut, you see, doesn't do suspense. He'll tell you in the moment of introducing someone, how and when that character dies, or accomplishes something or fails to. This frees him from the burden of coming up with a blockbuster climax, and allows the reader to focus on other aspects of the story. Not a bad strategy, when you don't have a breakthrough vision.

Boyhood - a Review

Richard Linklater's Oscar-nominated film Boyhood is not just a time-lapse snapshot of the lives of a family - it is an exploration of time itself, shrewd and philosophical while staying true to the ages of its characters.

We start with Mason Evans, Jr. (Ellar Coltrane) as a seven-year-old, and nine-year-old sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater), living with their mom Olivia (Patricia Arquette) in a small Texas town. Fed up with feeling stuck, Olivia packs up the kids and moves to Houston to pursue a Masters degree. Her ex, Mason Sr. (Ethan Hawke), returns from Alaska and becomes a sometime presence in his children's lives. And they grow up, all of them, in a film shot over a ten year period. Samantha develops from a blunt-spoken (smart-mouthed) older sister, to a poised and confident young woman. Mason, Jr. survives the milestones of boyhood with the awkwardness, curiosity and half-step-back contemplation that help us to remember our own experiences: not just the times we were pretty sure we knew what we were doing, but the cringe-worthy assertions and blithe mistakes we have surely stuffed into a forgettory closet.

The standard narrative story-arc - conflict, climax, resolution - is missing here. What we get in its place is the flow of life told in moments - a camping trip, a drunken rage, an embarrassing haircut, being the New Kid at school, a teenage boy's heartfelt conversation with a girl he hopes understands him, the ways a marriage sours. Along the way, Mason, Jr. and Samantha learn about themselves and their parents. The film ends with Mason in college, visiting his mom at her new apartment.

"I like your mom," one of Mason's friends tells him.
"I like her too, but she's as confused as I am," Mason says in a tone of baffled worry: how can she have lived so long and done so much, and still have no idea what her life's about? The adults around him are more cautionary than positive role models.

The moments we see are scripted, but acting works hand-in-glove with the passage of time to create the film's impact. Arquette does the most masterful job, in my estimation - her character keeps trying, keeps failing, keeps choosing a new path and trying again. Her struggles and self-doubts, and her successes, prevent her from living a life on automatic pilot. Hawke settles into a role he finds comfortable and lets it expand around him, simplifying his character's life by dulling that hunger-for-answers. He's the happier of the two - because he's stopped asking questions?

Linklater has a philosophical bent: his 2001 roto-scope animated Waking Life examines dreams and ideas in a way that gives us dreams and ideas of our own. In Boyhood the actuality of time is the driver. This cinematic journey is a long trip to a destination we can name as a point on a map while knowing nothing about it, except that if we keep going, eventually we'll find what's there.

...And Ladies of the Club

..And Ladies of the Club is a journey through time. Much is being made of Richard Linklater's new film Boyhood whose characters, filmed over a decade, grow up in real time. This novel uses the full lifespans of its characters to tell not only their stories, but to illuminate the times as they lived them.

This tome came out in 1984 as a supermarket best-seller (hundreds of thousands of copies), the first published work by Helen Hooven Santmyer, age 88 when it went paperback and hit the big time. I read it then, and recently a book group member chose it. We allowed ourselves 2 months to read it (1433 pages!) but even so, I fear I am the only one who made it to the end.

The book is well worth reading. Santmyer follows a group of women in a small Ohio town from their college (we would think of it as high school) graduation in 1868, to the ends of their lives in the early 1930's. In that span we get history as people lived it (depressions, issues of race and class, politics, the powerful impact of war on the lives of veterans) as well as changes in transportation, communication and expectations. She is a fine writer, expressive and clear, using well-crafted sentences to tell her saga.

The primary character is Anne Alexander Gordon, whose father is a doctor, and who marries a (Civil War veteran) doctor, then their son becomes one, and against the odds of his upbringing, her grandson does as well. Anne believes most deeply in a life of joy, and through her struggles she is always able to find it in unexpected places and people.

The other principal is her best friend, Sally Cochran Rausch, whose husband, an ambitious Civil War vet, becomes the town's leading citizen. He buys a decrepit rope-mill and builds the business through economic surges and crashes. Union organizers can get nowhere with his loyal workers - he demonstrates during crises that he considers it his duty to look after them. Sally is a sensualist, taking pleasure in being a gracious hostess, filling her house with music, family and friends, and holding grand parties. She is a snob, but loyal and strong.

The Club of the title is the Women's Club, formed when Anne and Sally graduate, as a way of advancing literary life in their community. At first, only high-status ladies, teachers and ministers' wives are invited to be members, but over time the group's cliquish tendency gives way to recognizing the intelligence and scholarship of lower class women, even avowed Socialists.

Characters are finely-drawn: we see generational continuity, and the foibles and mistakes of the heart that cloud futures. But we also see the enduring comfort of long friendships, the sparks of sudden love, mischievous children, adults who make the best of second-best. 

Well done!