Bang bang (or slash), you're dead. OK, now get back up....Hey, get back up....

Hitchcock directs the farmhouse scene

There's a farmhouse scene in Hitchcock's "Torn Curtain" where Paul Newman's character and a farmer's wife try hard to silence an enemy agent by killing him. 

Problem is, nothing seems to work. They try banging his head with a shovel, strangling him with a telephone cord, even forcing his upper half into a gas oven. Nothing quite does the trick.

Hitchcock has said in old interviews that he wanted to shoot that scene to show just how difficult it really is to kill another human being. The will to live is strong and turbulent within the human spirit.

A perverse intimacy
This afternoon I'd just gotten off the phone with a client who asked me to make a presentation about workplace civility when a Tweet came through from the New York Times breaking news desk. I sent the link: "You're not going to believe this," I told him. "Talk about workplace civility...!"

Recently fired, an Oklahoma man attacked his co-workers and beheaded one of them before police took him down. People who hate Muslims will say the problem is all Islam. I think the problem is, in part, that our mental health system is filled with as many holes as our gun laws (even though no gun was used in this attack). 

Beheading another human being requires such a perverse intimacy, I can't imagine a rational human having the stomach for it. You have to look into your victim's eyes and watch them suffer—for several minutes—the most barbaric pain one human can inflict on another.

We Americans understand violence in all ways but one—via reality. Rampage shootings notwithstanding, we don't have 'round-the-clock gunfights in most of our streets, where going to school includes dodging bullets. Thanks to superb moviemaking, we have an idea of what happens when a body explodes with dozens of bullet wounds. I've lived in countries where violence wasn't so sparse, where even young children became somber but matter-of-fact when another body turned up in the gutter. The first time I did see a gunshot wound up close, a grim-faced trauma unit prepared itself to save the woman's life. Watching the thoracic surgeon create an intentional wound to inflate the victim's lung was painful enough. 

We admire her style, but most Americans forget Jacqueline Kennedy was herself a victim of extreme violence on 11/22/63. 

We see the news, not the consequences. The violence to which we're accustomed isn't just "of the moment." Survivors of violence suffer decades of emotional trauma, not because they're wimps but because the human mind struggles to comprehend such experiences by reliving them. It's a hard thing to shut off. The loved ones of each victim suffer decades of bereavement. 

We can't afford to become the thing that desensitizes us. The rest of us become steadily inured—so long as it's not happening on our streets, in our homes, then it's just the stuff of TV drama. But if you think it's utter folly to hold your hand over an open flame, or to have your spouse stick a red-hot poker through your ribs, then probably you realize our national acceptance of violence could kill us from the inside out more effectively than any foreign enemy. 

The Tools and Process of a Famous Writer: Jack Kerouac

Most of us see Jack Kerouac as the leading beat of that talented beatnik crowd. His groundbreaking work On the Road, about a cross-country road trip, was said to be a celebration of freedom and spontaneity, part of Kerouac's personal myth amid a post-WWII American hedonism. 

It's not that there's more to the story, but what's there is different. And fascinating. A cursory look at Kerouac dispels a few assumptions.

•  On The Road may be regarded as an American masterpiece, but Kerouac was French-Canadian and spoke Joual, a Canadian dialect of French. English was a second language for him. Joyce Johnson, who'd been his partner for a couple years, says if you read his work you'll detect French inflections throughout.

•  He didn't write it as a spontaneous regurgitation of freewheeling thought. Everything was meticulously scrutinized and edited and revised, as if each paragraph was a poem. (As Virginia Woolf scholars might say, it takes a lot of work to make it read like stream-of-consciousness ebb and flow).

•  He didn't like to stop and reload page after page into his typewriter, so he'd tape translucent sheets of vellum together and run it through on a scroll. The finished manuscript for On the Road was 120 feet long. His notebooks are similar: hurried penciled lines filling every bit of white space, where now and then a comment stands out, like when he refers to friend Allen Ginsberg as "a mental screwball."

Kerouac passed away in 1969, age 47, an alcoholic recluse. He had one a child, a daughter he never really got to know (Jan Kerouac also died young). Still fascinating to each new generation, the subject of new documentaries and biographical screenplays, his work continues to influence the young who it view through the prism of their own experiences in a post-9/11 world.

Above: Kerouac, left, with his friend Lucien Carr (father of Caleb Carr, author of The Alienist). Right: The scrolled manuscript for On The Road, typed single-spaced . Towards the end of his life, Kerouac tried in vain to interest actor Marlon Brando in a film version of On The Road. He also considered suing the producers of a TV show ("Route 66") for plagiarism.

Four Girls, Three Minutes (September 1963)

Last year the Congressional Gold Medal was posthumously awarded to each of the four girls killed in the Birmingham church bombing. You know the story. Whenever it comes up, sympathetic heads nod: "Ah yes, the four little black girls. Terrible...."

Around 10:19 a.m. that Sunday, an anonymous caller told the church secretary, "Three minutes." At 10:22, a deafening blast tore the church apart, injuring two dozen and killing the four girls in the basement attending a Sunday school class.

When faced with large-scale evil — 16 sticks of Klan dynamite, hidden by white supremacists in a place of worship — it helps to drill down to small human details so ordinary they become points of reverence. 

But who were they? 

So this is who they were: Cynthia Wesley, 14, was adopted. An outgoing kid, she was involved with her school and church, and played in the school band. That morning, she met up with her friend Addie Mae Collins, also 14, and the two girls tossed a purse back and forth, laughing and talking as they headed for the church.

Addie Mae was a peacemaker. Warm and lovable, it was said, "To know Addie Mae was to love her." A school friend chatted with her that morning, but when they got to the fence, he turned and said, "I'll see you Monday," not realizing he'd never see her again. Her older sister was injured in the blast, with 21 shards of glass embedded in her face, rendering her blind in one eye.

Carole Robertson, 14, had been dropped off outside the church by her father, who watched her run inside before pulling away. She was a straight-A student involved with the Girl Scouts, marching band, and science club. She aspired to be a singer. At night she and her sister would listen to the radio, her favorite song being "In the Still of the Night," and she would gasp with disapproval when she saw her older siblings and their friends tossing popcorn from the black section of the movie theater at the white folks sitting below.

The youngest, Denise McNair, was only 11. Nicknamed "Niecie" by her friends, she never understood why she couldn't eat at the same lunch counter with the white kids. She was likely the poorest of the four, quiet and good-natured, active in Brownies, a kid who loved playing baseball and wanted to be a pediatrician. 

Here's what I find so remarkable about Niecie: every year she organized a neighborhood fundraiser where the local kids would sing and dance on her family driveway for an audience that then donated pennies, nickels, and dimes — the proceeds going toward Niecie's favorite cause, muscular dystrophy. She was found with a piece of brick embedded in her head. Her mother screamed for days and had to be sedated, and last year CNN reported that Mrs. McNair, now afflicted with Alzheimer's, still remembers and grieves for the child she lost 50 years ago.

To know them individually is to never forget them — nor to remember them merely as "four little black girls," generalized into a sad footnote to our Civil Rights history. Not just four little black girls, but four vibrant individuals. Four potential women. I imagine Cynthia and Addie Mae going to college, maybe starting up a business together ... Carole singing in a blues club and looking over recording contracts ... and Niecie retiring from her medical practice, still championing victims of muscular dystrophy. 

No arrests were made in 1963 but in 1970, Alabama's new attorney general, Bill Baxley, reopened the investigation and ultimately succeeded in convicting Klansman Robert Chambliss for murder. Not surprisingly, for doing so, Baxley received numerous death threats. Here's how he replied one of them.

The Tools and Process of a Famous Writer: Margaret Mitchell

Mitchell's Remington typewriter and some of those manila envelopes

In my early 20s, I was working in media services for Georgia Power Co. when a copywriter mentioned she was on her way to interview a retiree who'd started his career as copyboy to John Marsh, husband of writer Margaret Mitchell. Knowing I was an avid reader and "a Yankee fan" of Gone with the Wind (GWTW), she let me tag along. He lived in a Buckhead high-rise and, during the interview, described Marsh as a precise and meticulous editor. Afterwards I read a Mitchell biography that confirmed Marsh was one of the unsung heroes of the Pulitzer-winning novel, someone whose opinion Mitchell trusted above all others.

It's the stuff of literary legend that Mitchell started working on GWTW while recovering from a broken ankle. Actually, this recuperation began with reading nearly every book from the Atlanta library (Carnegie branch), until finally Marsh got tired of dragging home armloads of books and said, "You've read all but maths and sciences! Why don't you write a book?" To help her, he brought home a Remington typewriter.

Here are some other "backstories" you might not have heard:

•  Having been a features reporter for the Atlanta Journal Sunday magazine, Mitchell began work each day on GWTW as if she was headed into the office: she'd put on office clothes, a little make-up, prop her damaged ankle, and start tapping on her Remington.

•  She didn't work from an outline. Much of it came out of her head, but she did research extensively by scouring old newspaper articles, letters, and diaries from the period. A great many insights came from her parents and relatives who still remembered the Civil War in vivid detail. She'd grown up with their stories.

•  She had attended Smith College (Class of 1922) and it was another Smith alum, Lois Cole '24, who brought her to the attention of Harold Latham, editor in chief at Macmillan Co., then the nation's most esteemed publisher — and Cole's boss. Having been social acquaintances, Cole knew of Mitchell's manuscript about a Southern belle who survives the Civil War, and urged Latham to speak with Mitchell when he went on a cross-country search for new talent. The road to getting GWTW published solidified a close friendship between the two women that endured until Mitchell's death in 1949.

•  The manuscript was a mess. As each chapter was done, Mitchell stuck it into a manila envelope. Soon, dozens of manila envelopes were scattered throughout the Mitchells' tiny apartment (if you've ever visited this historic site in Atlanta, you'll know it's really tiny). Sometimes they were used to prop up the wobbly leg of a sofa, and Mitchell would throw a towel over them when guests dropped by.

More than that, it wasn't a fully completed manuscript — and it was disorganized as well. The first chapter was still in outline form. There were multiple versions of multiple chapters, and major gaps in the story line. It was Cole, rather than Latham, who sat with the entire pile of manila envelopes and edited the pieces into something resembling a manuscript. She also functioned as a literary agent, smoothing over nettled contract negotiations, easing Mitchell's jangled nerves during the rewrites, and consulting with Macmillan's art department on the marketing strategy.

• Mitchell knew herself to be a loquacious and over-embellishing narrator: as a writer, her struggle was to pare down her prose so the story might be "read while riding a galloping horse." It took from 1926 to 1936 to write GWTW, but if you've ever read Irene Selznick's autobiography (A Private View), you'll know it was an exhilarating moment when producer David Selznick travelled with the book galleys in his hand and noticed every passenger on his flight was avidly turning the pages of a story he hoped to make into a movie.