The End of Literary Culture (Part 1)
12/06/2010
Sunday Night Journal — December 5, 2010
(I started this piece last Sunday, and had to stop writing to deal with a software emergency at work. But I had already seen that I was probably not going to be able to handle the subject in a blog post. I took it up again today, and once again had to stop and address a problem at work. But it had become clear that I wasn’t going to be able to fit the topic into a blog post of a thousand words or so. The more I wrote, the more the topic demanded that I write. And so I’m calling this part 1. It stops rather abruptly, and will resume next Sunday. It really should be an essay, and perhaps will find its way into my book. Thanks to Toby Danna for posting on Facebook the link to the Commentary piece which set me to thinking about this.)
How many people know that the United States has a poet laureate? Of those, how many can name him, or at least would recognize the name if they saw it? (It is “him” right now, so that eliminates half, at least, of our poets.) Of those, how many have read any of his work? My first thought in formulating those questions was that they would describe a progressively smaller group of people. But having written them out now, I think most people who would be able to answer “yes” to the first question would also be able to answer “W. S. Merwin” to the second question, and “yes” to the third.
In any case that group is quite small. Within the United States, one person in a thousand? With a population of three hundred million, that would give a number of roughly 300,000, which seems perhaps a little high to me, although I have no way of knowing whether it is. Surely not more than a million, anyway.
Perhaps more significantly, I would guess that the group of people who know those facts overlaps very heavily with the group of those who are writing or have made some attempt at writing serious literary poetry. In short: poetry in our time is of interest mainly to poets, and perhaps their friends and family.
In contrast, Joseph Epstein tells us in this recent Commentary piece that in 1956 T .S. Eliot lectured to an audience of 15,000 at the University of Minnesota. Even if we assume that some large percentage of those did not really know or care very much about Eliot’s work, they did at least know that he was a famous poet and critic, and they felt at least the they ought to care about such things, or, at very least, wanted to appear to care. Eliot was a celebrity. And he was not an entertainer, playing to the tastes of the crowd: he stood for the highest standards, and his poetry and criticism were austere. Everyone with a little education knew his name, even if they weren’t quite sure who he was and had never read a word he wrote. Bob Dylan wrote him, along with Ezra Pound, into a song (“Desolation Row”) in 1965, when it was still possible to assume that a mass audience would recognize the names.
There is no comparable figure today. There is no one of his intellectual and artistic stature, and if there were he would not be as widely known as Eliot was in 1956. There are many reasons for the near-extinction of poetry as an art for anyone other than a few specialists, and for the fact that poetry has suffered a greater decline than fiction. But the things for which Eliot was famous—poetry and criticism—are extreme indicators of a trend which has been clear for some time in literature in general. As Epstein says:
Understatedly spectacular is the way Eliot’s career strikes one today, at a time when, it is fair to say, poetry, even to bookish people, is of negligible interest and literary criticism chiefly a means to pursue academic tenure. Literary culture itself, if the sad truth be known, seems to be slowly but decisively shutting down.
I believe this is true. Literary culture is not dead, but it is either dying or becoming something different, which amounts to much the same thing. There are many reasons for this, and Epstein names the obvious ones:
…the distractions of the Internet, poor rudimentary education, the vanquishing of seriousness in university literature departments owing to the intellectually shallow enticements of modish subjects, and the allure of the pervasive entertainments of popular culture.
But there is a more fundamental problem:
Although none of these things help, literary culture is, I believe, shutting down chiefly because literature itself has become unimportant: what is being created in contemporary novels, poems, and plays no longer speaks to the heart or mind.
And here is his diagnosis:
For Eliot, literature was a moral enterprise, but moral in a way that purely secular moralists—the moralists of economics, of social science, of contemporary politics—cannot hope to grasp. He wasn’t accusing modern writers of immorality, or even amorality, but of ignorance “of our most fundamental and important beliefs; and that in consequence [contemporary literature’s] tendency is to encourage its readers to get what they can out of life while it lasts, to miss no ‘experience’ that presents itself, and to sacrifice themselves, if they make any sacrifice at all, only for the sake of tangible benefits to others in this world either now or in the future.” Not, any of this, good enough.
I think this is exactly right, and would carry it further: the current intellectual climate is extremely moralistic, but in a way that is antagonistic to what Eliot still felt justified in calling “our most fundamental and important beliefs.” The gap between the contemporary literary community and that of Eliot’s time is in part the product of something more active than mere neglect, mere failure to preserve: it involves a conscious act of destruction.
The moralism of contemporary intellectual culture, the culture which is the ungrateful inheritor of the Western literary and philosophical tradition, produces and is produced by an attitude of hostility and skepticism toward that very tradition. It is a broad movement, much larger than literary culture specifically. It is amorphous, and has no agreed-upon name. I’ve sometimes called it the cultural left, meaning that it is a cultural movement which is primarily concerned with reforming or destroying cultural institutions, as the political left is concerned with reforming or destroying political institutions. (In both cases destruction is supposed to be followed by new construction, but those plans are usually somewhat vague.) And I’ve sometimes called it the anti-culture, because its defining characteristic is opposition to the culture in which it is embedded. I think I’ll stick with this second term here.
I don’t mean that all intellectuals are part of this anti-culture, but that it is dominant enough to set the characteristic tone of intellectual life. It is strong in the academy, but that doesn’t mean that all academics are part of it. Only a minority, I suspect embrace its more explicit anti-Westernism, but most are affected by it and have made its pieties—“diversity,” multiculturalism, feminism, etc—their own. And those who oppose it will be conscious of swimming upstream.
The anti-culture is rooted in social-political progressivism, by which I mean the view that history is a record of progress toward a goal of pure freedom and equality (a contradictory dream, but that’s another story), in which effort we are the latest and greatest workers. It sees that the history of the West is full of violence and injustice, which is true enough, but it sees little else. It sees history as a power struggle, and is very much a partisan on one side of that struggle, and therefore it is narrow. It allows little or no room for balance and perspective, or any real sympathy with the past. It is sympathetic to the oppressed, or those counted as oppressed; that qualification is necessary because some of those who were in fact mistreated do not merit much sympathy or attention—persecuted Christians, for instance—because they were allied with non-progressive forces. But it has little interest in the broad humane approach which seeks to comprehend the past in its living complexity, its tangle of good and evil. In its eyes Western culture is either a criminal to be prosecuted, or a fool to be scorned or pitied.
When it reads the literature of the past thousand years or so, it sits in judgment on what it encounters. It looks for and praises what seems to anticipate its own views. It looks for and condemns what offends those views. It makes compliments of the words “subversive” and “transgressive” because it admires whatever undermines the existing order, even if it is in itself repulsive, as in the case of de Sade. (It is not of course at all tolerant of subversion or transgression directed against itself).
The thing to which it is most hostile is exactly the transcendent moral dimension which Epstein describes. Let’s be plain: its chief enemy is the Christian faith, and in particular the Catholic Church, the oldest and largest and most intransigent of the institutions which embody that faith or which sprang from it.
(to be continued)
Argh! This is too excellent and requires too much thought to be read at work. Do you think my boss would let me off for the day so I can go home and read it.
AMDG
Posted by: Janet | 12/07/2010 at 08:46 AM
Of course Mac is right that modern poets have become invisible in the wider culture. No poet is a household name in the way that Eliot or even Ezra Pound were, in the 1950s.
But I don't really agree with the cause Maclin suggests, ie an 'anticulture' which "sees that the history of the West is full of violence and injustice, which is true enough, but it sees little else. It sees history as a power struggle, and is very much a partisan on one side of that struggle, and therefore it is narrow. It allows little or no room for balance and perspective, or any real sympathy with the past. It is sympathetic to the oppressed, or those counted as oppressed; that qualification is necessary because some of those who were in fact mistreated do not merit much sympathy or attention—persecuted Christians, for instance—because they were allied with non-progressive forces. But it has little interest in the broad humane approach which seeks to comprehend the past in its living complexity, its tangle of good and evil. In its eyes Western culture is either a criminal to be prosecuted, or a fool to be scorned or pitied."
What I watch on TV (DVDs) may not be typical, but it isn't esoteric. And I am very often impressed by the 'greyness' and two-sidedness with which the past is presented. For instance, the mini-series on John Adams showed every side of him. It showed the White House being built by slaves, but it certainly did not present that as negating everything the founders stood for. It showed the moral ambiguity, and that was it.
If I wanted to look for a cause, I might start with TS Eliot himself. He might be said to herald or represent the beginning of a kind of poetry which is inaccessible to all but about 300,000 Americans out of 300 million. Working class people of my grandfather's generation (born at the end of the 19th century) knew the poetry of authors such as Tennyson and Kipling by heart. Their American equivalents would know Longfellow, for instance. In fact, just the other day I began to receite the Midnight Ride of Paul Riviere, and surprised my family and myself by how long I went on for.
This is poetry either about an event, or telling a story, or, at a pitch, describing an object which anyone can understand, and which of course rhymes and scans (usually eg five foot iambics).
By the time poets returned to such subjects and practices, they had lost their public. Their public had moved away, getting what they wanted of rhyme and scansion from pop music.
I don't say this is the only cause, but I think it is one significant cause: most people imagine that modern poetry as incomprehensible or boring. My grandfather wasn't stupid, but he would have found the Wasteland or the Four Quartets incomprehensible.
From the 1960s, the 'singer songwriters' took over a job the poets had ceased to do. I'm not saying they do it as well as the old fashioned poets, and on the other hand, I'm not even criticising 'modernist' poetry for being, well, modernist. I'm saying that it seems to be a fact that
an elitist moment in poetry was succeeded by an extremely populist moment, which may still be with us.
Of course there are lots of other factors. But I think the nature or character of modern poetry is part of the story.
Posted by: Francesca | 12/07/2010 at 09:45 AM
Yes, definitely the turn toward obscurity is a major part of the problem as regards poetry specifically, and I should have mentioned that. It's not just poetry, though, it's the whole literary culture. And remember, I'm not saying every single work of art or criticism is ruined by it, but that it's a prevailing tendency.
Janet, if I were your boss I would be happy to give you time off for such a worthy endeavor.
Posted by: Mac | 12/07/2010 at 10:21 AM
To quote Benjamin Zephaniah, "I used to think poets were boring / Until I became one of them."
But to be fair to Eliot, he did write Cats.
Posted by: Paul | 12/07/2010 at 03:47 PM
I could live without all the stuff that made Eliot famous, but The Four Quartets are just below scripture.
I had to look up Benjamin Zephaniah, of course. I'll watch one of his YT performances, but I must say that my hopes are not high that I will suggest him for the place vacated by Mr. Eliot.
Posted by: Mac | 12/07/2010 at 04:48 PM
Some of my favourite lines are:
Food is what we need,
Food is necessary,
Let me grow my food,
And them can eat their money.
Posted by: Paul | 12/08/2010 at 05:04 AM
goal of pure freedom and equality
equally nothing
AMDG
Posted by: Janet Cupo | 12/08/2010 at 06:29 AM
"equally nothing"
I think that's the dream. :-) But even in principle you could never have both: pure freedom means extreme inequality, pure equality means extreme constraint. Of course the people who have this dream have in mind only certain freedoms, mainly sexual.
Posted by: Mac | 12/08/2010 at 09:20 AM
Well, Paul, I see I may have to revisit my hasty assumption.
Posted by: Mac | 12/08/2010 at 09:22 AM
I meant to add: I agree that pop music and its lyrics have replaced literary poetry. And although it's silly to say, as for instance Dylan's more fervent admirers do, that their work is equal to that of major serious poets, it's also a mistake to write it off completely, as some Catholics and/or conservatives do. There's real art there. It's easy to look at some of the more wildly successful pop music, going all the way back to the '50s and say it's brainless. But that's far, far from the whole story.
Posted by: Mac | 12/08/2010 at 11:04 PM
I wasn't making a comment about quality (such as Simon & Garfunkel are poetical equals of Keats and Shelley), but a sort of factual guess.
Posted by: Francesca | 12/09/2010 at 02:35 AM
Right, I knew you weren't saying that, I was just talking about those who do.
I was thinking about this just a few minutes ago: it's true that Eliot was all but unreadable to many of the people who were open to poetry. And yet he was still this cultural authority whose name was widely known. That speaks to the decline of the influence of the literary culture since then. But it may also speak to the means of celebrity-ism in the 20th c., enabled by mass communications. They say a celebrity is someone who is famous for being well-known--you could say Eliot was famous for being a well-known poet.
Posted by: Mac | 12/09/2010 at 07:20 AM
Yes, how many people who know the phrase, from Desolation Row, "And Ezra Pound and TS Eliot, fighting in the captain's tower. While calypso singers laugh at them and fishermen hold flowers' could quote a line from Ezra Pound?
It's as if TS Eliot is at the very outset of celebrity culture, where radio and even TV can make even an obscure poet famous, because radio etc were used the transmit the 'old culture', and now radio and TV transmit, well, TV or media stars.
I love the Romantics, especially Keats, but I don't really like the later Victorian Romantic poets I mentioned as popular in my grandfather's generation - Tennyson or Longfellow for Americans. I'm not a fan of TS Eliot, but I like other modernist poets, such as David Jones. I remember once reading a shorter poem of Jones to a young friend, and all he could hear was its obscurity. So from the perspective of my own tastes, I would never say the poetry was better in the immediate premodernist era. But I don't think we can simply blame the ills of our contemporary culture for the lack of interest in poetry.
Maclin mentioned that he didn't agree with the Catholics and or conservatives who have absolutely no time for popular music. It made me think that it is ironic, that perhaps the same people who complain about the lack of scansion and rhyme in modern poetry don't notice its resurrection within popular music.
There are some indications which go against the notion of a complete indifference to 'high culture' in our time. I go to the Aberdeen 'art cinema' about once a month. The normal 'run' for an art movie there is about ten showings over three or four days. If it's very popular, on the brink between 'art' and 'Hollywood' a movie may run for a week. The cinema has four theatres in it. Whether it is 'art' or 'Hollywood art' (eg Coen Brothers), the number of people in any one theatre at any one showing is an *average* of about ten. Maybe 20 at the weekends, and sometimes down to 2 or 3 on weekdays. This is not *so* different from the numbers at the two big 'popular' cinemas in town, in proportion to the size of their 'theatres' (much larger). In both the popular and the art cinemas, I've sometimes been one of two people in the audience.
Our art cinema began a few years ago to broadcast live theatre. When say the National Theatre is putting on a play, for one evening it is broadcast 'live' to about 30 art cinemas around the world. I was at such a broadcast of 'Hamlet' last night, and the theatre was full. The same for a Victorian play I went to a few months ago. Aside from one or two movies, it is the only time I've ever been to it and it was full. So there was a much bigger audience for Hamlet than any popular movie.
You could say, of course, it was only going out once, and that made the difference, but there were more than ten times the number in the audience than there is for the entire showing of very many movies.
To me, this backs up my claim that it is not just the audience who has changed but that the quality and kind of the poetry also affects its degree of popularity. Simple: if we just had more Shakespeares, poets and playwrights and novelists would again today be celebrities.
Posted by: Francesca | 12/10/2010 at 12:08 PM
Simple: if we just had more Shakespeares
:D
Posted by: Paul | 12/10/2010 at 12:55 PM
Y'all reminded me that I hadn't looked up Mr. Zephaniah yet. Here's the poem Paul quoted:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAXpuW3yFJM
I have to admit it's sort of engaging. However, it's also sort of stupid.
Posted by: Mac | 12/10/2010 at 01:14 PM
I meant it as a joke of course (I find the word 'simples' funny in itself) but it is amazing that a play written 500 years ago is more appealing to us than anything contempoary film directors can come up with. The audience at last night's Hamlet was of no one class, age or social group.
Posted by: Francesca | 12/10/2010 at 01:35 PM
Well, I'm pretty much out of lunch hour and can't reply to Francesca at length, but a couple of quick points:
"I don't think we can simply blame the ills of our contemporary culture for the lack of interest in poetry."
No, and I'm not doing that. See the paragraph that begins "There is no comparable..." Certainly the causes are many. I'm just isolating and discussing this one, because I think it's pretty significant for the overall health of our culture. I'm going somewhere with it in part 2.
Also, I don't by any means think there is "a complete indifference to 'high culture' in our time". There is a greater indifference to high literary culture than there was fifty or a hundred years ago. And the interest that is there is often strongly marked by this anti-culture that I'm talking about, and that phenomenon of looking at literature through that more-or-less political lens. I should perhaps start collecting examples, but one that comes to mind immediately is the teacher of Shakespeare I heard say "We use Shakespeare to teach feminism." (This teacher is male, btw.) I have no doubt he really loves Shakespeare, but a lot of Shakespeare lovers nowadays give you the impression that they are far more interested in the cross-dressing and gender-bending than in the heavy-duty philosophical themes that fascinated critics of former times.
Film is a somewhat different case. The gulf between art and pop films is not so very great, and I'm not including film in my idea of literature, i.e. the written word (even when it's drama--the great playwrights are very readable). Whereas even a very great film, like some of Bergman's, is vastly more than its script.
"If we just had more Shakespeares..." Part of what I'm getting at is "why don't we?" Of course we couldn't, even in principle, have a poet of that class, because the language has deteriorated. But another reason is that so many of the people who can and do write well shy away from, or are contemptuous of, that moral perspective that Epstein describes.
Way out of time...
Posted by: Mac | 12/10/2010 at 01:37 PM
"The audience at last night's Hamlet was of no one class, age or social group."
I remember an engineering student I knew in college, definitely not a literary type, who loved Shakespeare.
Posted by: Mac | 12/10/2010 at 01:52 PM
I knew there was a poet laureate; isn't he or she at each presidential inauguration? Although I am extremely interested in literature, mainly the novel form, and in some cases shorter fiction. Have always wondered why my interest in poetry is not greater. I respect the important ones and have read them, such as T.S. Eliot. Perhaps their use in society is over? Is the novelist far behind. I was bemoaning to my girlfriend just the other day that I would prefer to be in the 19th century, but would like the same level of medical ability from doctors if I was, since I prefer 19th cent literature and the lives therein. I would be happy without TV, computers, cell phones, instant gratification; but cannot do without them if everyone else has them. I only bring this up because it seems like the printed form is antiquated unless it is like this, in blog form. Stories still hold interest to people, but Amazon and B&N and others are doing their best to get them on hand-held electronic devices to everyone -- I don't want to lose my books! But poetry does not usually tell a story, but more personally perhaps a little about someone's soul. As with all of this electronic nonsense, the loss of interest in poetry supports the idea that more and more modern people are losing their souls.
Posted by: Stu | 12/10/2010 at 02:21 PM
People have been predicting the end of print at least since I was in college 40 years ago, but I don't see it happening. We could be seeing the end of paper, though. It certainly looks like newspapers and magazines will be all-electronic 20 years from now if not sooner.
"Perhaps their (poets') use in society is over?"
Really skilled literary poets, maybe. But as Francesca says, song lyrics are now occupying the same psychological spot.
I've been meaning to write something about No Country For Old Men, which certainly ran counter to my impression of The Contemporary Novel. It's good art as well as a really strong story. It can be done.
Posted by: Mac | 12/10/2010 at 03:27 PM
You know I love movies, and I certainly thought No Country for Old Men was Brilliant. But the market for such movies is analogous to the market for modern poetry.
Posted by: Francesca | 12/11/2010 at 08:22 AM
"Perhaps their (poets') use in society is over?"
If this is the case we will be the first civilization in a very, very long time where this is so, and given the course the rest of the society is taking it does not bode well. I recently read Glenn Arbery's new collection "The Southern Critics" (highly recommended) and he makes that point that in a certain sense modernism in poetry, esp. the rejection of rhyme and scansion, has doomed it to obscurity. No doubt Eliot and the other modernists did not plan or foresee this, but the fact that the obscurity of modernist free verse poetry became universal led to its demise as a cultural force. The last American poet that the "common man" paid any attention to was Frost, who was still drawing large crowds to readings in the the late 50's. At this point, however, he was not considered very highly by most literary types.
While it is true that to a certain extent pop lyrics have become the replacement for what poetry once was, it can only suffer by comparison. Very few pop lyricists write material that rises to the level of poetry, and in any case almost none do so when the music is removed from the equation. As Roger Scruton has pointed out, in the popular music of the last 30 or 40 years song has been joined inextricably to singer, and the songs, in a sense, no longer stand on their own (like Autumn Leaves does, for instance). This reduces considerably their cultural impact.
"I've been meaning to write something about No Country For Old Men, which certainly ran counter to my impression of The Contemporary Novel. It's good art as well as a really strong story. It can be done."
I'd say this is more true about 'The Road' which IMO was an even better novel, and an almost equally good film. I'm also greatly impressed by much of Mark Helprin's work, and am rather firmly convinced that if he were not a political conservative he would have won any number of literary awards and had a novel or two filmed by now.
Oh, btw, the Coens new film of True Grit, which comes out next week, looks marvelous.
Posted by: Rob G | 12/11/2010 at 09:31 AM
I'm going crazy with concern about the new Coen brothers film :) I'm worried that I will fall between two stools, here when it opens in America, but in America after it closes there and opens here. Luckily, I have too many other pressing anxieties for it to weigh too heavily :)!
Posted by: Francesca | 12/11/2010 at 09:34 AM
Surely, Francesca, it's an overstatement to say that the market for movies like No Country is like that for poetry. I think it did reasonably well at the box office. Fairly artsy films aren't blockbusters, but the people involved do seem to make a pretty decent bit of money. I haven't seen No Country yet, btw. It's been on my Netflix q for a long time as a result of people recommending it here, and I wanted to read the book first. Haven't tackled The Road yet.
As for the new C brothers, True Grit, what is the deal with this?!? There are BILLBOARDS advertising it here in Alabama, hardly the best place to find people interested in the latest high-art film. Billboards cost like thousands of dollars a month. I can't recall ever having seen one advertising a specific movie before. I never saw the original TG but I suppose this implies it was a big favorite in middle America, and the film company is hoping it will carry over to this new one.
Posted by: Mac | 12/11/2010 at 12:15 PM
It is safe to say that there is NO poet in this country who makes a living from sales of his or her books. They teach, get grants, etc., but book sales are miniscule.
Posted by: Mac | 12/11/2010 at 12:16 PM
"The last American poet that the "common man" paid any attention to was Frost, who was still drawing large crowds to readings in the the late 50's. At this point, however, he was not considered very highly by most literary types."
The first is true, but I'm not so sure about the second, though I can't point you to any specific proof. Frost's reputation has had its ups and downs but I think "most literary types" have respected him, at least.
Posted by: Mac | 12/11/2010 at 12:21 PM
" in the popular music of the last 30 or 40 years song has been joined inextricably to singer, and the songs, in a sense, no longer stand on their own."
Very true, broadly speaking, and an important aspect of popular music. I often apply a mental test to a pop song: would it still be good played and sung, unadorned, by one person with merely adequate skill? Autumn Leaves certainly would. The vast majority of pop songs would not. The ones that do generally get covered a lot. Dylan's "Don't Think Twice", yes. The Stones "19th Nervous Breakdown," no. (just two that came to mind first) Tom Waits' "Georgia Lee", yes. Tom Waits' "Singapore," no.
Posted by: Mac | 12/11/2010 at 12:30 PM
The more I think about "The Road," the better I like it, and I've thought about it a great deal. We tried to watch the movie, but our screen was too small and dark. We simply could not see what was going on.
There's a book by Toby Wolff called "Old School" in which every year a famous writer visits his prep school and the students who chose, submit something they have written for the author to read. The author picks the best entry and that boy gets to talk to the author. The authors in the three years that are covered are Robert Frost, Ayn Rand, and Ernest Hemingway. It's a good read.
I wonder what you all think about the kind of poetry that is recited at poetry slams.
AMDG
Posted by: Janet Cupo | 12/11/2010 at 01:01 PM
I was really looking forward to seeing The Road. It was frozen over here that night. I got to the cinema early and went next door for a pizza. They put me next to the window. By the time I ate the pizza and went back to the cinema I was froze. I couldn't face sitting in the cold cinema. Next day I went for my interview in South Bend, and it was gone by the time I came back to Aberdeen. I should get the DVD.
Posted by: Francesca | 12/11/2010 at 02:01 PM
What a sad story!
I realized after commenting about it earlier that the No Country dvd is sitting by the tv and has been for a couple of weeks. Maybe I'll watch it soon...
Don't think much of slam poetry, from what I've heard.
I'll be offline for the next 24 hrs or so.
Posted by: Mac | 12/11/2010 at 02:11 PM
Where would I be without overstatement?!
I was going from the tiny audiences in our arts cinema.
Posted by: Francesca | 12/11/2010 at 02:57 PM
My understanding of the new True Grit is that it's not a remake, but an entirely new film based more explicitly on the novel than the John Wayne film was. It's been years since I've seen the older film, decades actually, but I vaguely remember it being somewhat comic or at least tongue-in-cheek.
Posted by: Rob G | 12/11/2010 at 10:01 PM
Yes, I think the book was the story of the girl, whereas the movie was centered on the John Wayne character. This movie is going to be about the girl.
AMDG
Posted by: Janet Cupo | 12/11/2010 at 10:08 PM
Some of 'The Road' was filmed in the Pittsburgh area and in Western Pa. generally. The ruined amusement park shown in one scene is a real park that as far as I know still operates. It's about 90 miles or so north of Pittsburgh--we used to go there in the summer when I was a kid.
Posted by: Rob G | 12/11/2010 at 10:11 PM
From the trailer, it looks like it's about the girl. I never saw True Grit.
Posted by: Francesca | 12/12/2010 at 09:53 AM