The other good-read I discovered in a NYT's review is Girl Gone by Gillian Flynn (maybe I should do a year of just Irish surnamed authors?). I've already put Flynn's other two murder mysteries on reserve at the library.
The two main characters in this story are Nick and Amy Dunne, a 21st century over-exaggerated George and Martha from Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe. Actually, this could be a story about how they become undone.
The structure is a big part of the story. I failed to notice the big black almost bland pages that separated the book into three sections. I was plowing along as the girl was gone and her husband is investigated as the only subject of her disappearance/kidnapping/death. Half way into the book, it seems like the story is over and then I noticed part two. In that section, although Flynn continues to alternate chapters from the male and female perspective, it is Amy whose psychological profile and posing comes more clearly into focus. Now she is more like Delmar's own sociopath. Now Nick really wants to kill her.
But it is the third part that makes this book more than a clever mystery or thriller. It is here that Flynn obliquely articulates her over-theme: are we all actors and actresses in the tragi-comedy of love? Was Amy, like most young women today, assuming a popular persona or type to be attractive to eligible males? Did she assume another societally-imposed role as happy young wife? At what point in a relationship do such veneers begin to crack? How easy is it for two people to live together without falling into typecasting? Amy's parents play out the older saccharine version of a happily ever after couple but their entire life has been dedicated to profiting off a fabrication of an ideal girl, the children's series of Amazing Amy, were Amy always triumphs. So with this upbringing, Amy becomes the author of her own life and any and all nonconforming subplots are summarily ended.
Similarly, Amy comes to realize that Desi, her boyfriend from college, cannot be her savior because he too is in "character" and has prescripted (no pun intended) what their relationship had to be: ..."I look at Desi with outright disgust now. Sometimes I feel my skin must be hot with repulsion and with the effort to keep that repulsion hidden ... The manipulation, the purring persuasion, the delicate bullying. A man who finds guilt erotic. And if he doesn't get his way, he'll pull his little levers and set his punishment in motion." Wait a minute, is Amy looking in a mirror or projecting?
However, Nick is equally programmed to assume postures and dialogue that has leeched into his personality from popular culture. As he is investigated by the police, he thinks in the interrogation room: ..."I've literally seen it all, and the worst thing ... is the second hand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can't anymore. I don't know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say ... It's a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters."
Part three shows the couple being "catastrophically romantic." Where they are quasi-comfortable in their Punch and Judy hostage taking marriage.
I think Flynn's forte is not the plot twists and turns but the entire idea that if "real" people are less than real, how can an author possibly make her protagonists believable! She does so, unforgettably so.
Saturday, March 30, 2013
Need to Know
Hooray. I have just finished two excellent books. Can I hope for this streak to continue? Considering that I discovered both of them in that unreliable compendium of miserable current books, the Sunday New York Times book review section, this takes on an even more special aura ... pearls before swine. Although I finished this one last, I will review it first.
After Visiting Friends is Michael Hainey's story about finding out under what circumstances his father died when he was six years old. I don't really want to describe Hainey's father's death, the cover up or his family's omerta like repression of talking about it. Nor do I want to focus on Hainey's dogged research as an expression of his inherited and ingrained reporting instincts. I loved the book for his family.
The best metaphor I can come up with for his mother is Lot's wife. After her husband dies, she becomes as rigid, silent and steadfast as a pillar of salt, her only animation is to drive on the well being of her two young sons. Growing up in the late 50s early 60s, she has the blessing of an extended family to help her cope. Hainey's maternal grandmother and his uncle, also a newspaperman, anchor him, but anchor him next to a gaping emotional hole, the space where a boy's father should reign.
The sworn to secrecy "old boys club" of his dad's contemporary writers at the paper through up blocks and dead ends as he tries to find out any information. From decades of his mother slicing the air with her hand as the penultimate gesture of "don't go there" Hainey's search/adventure becomes more classic, more daring.
After his mother, my next favorite character is the woman at the morgue, one of those true Christians who can read Hainey's anguish and fear and who prays with him to give him strength, courage and stamina. Now I am sure many jaded cosmopolitan East Coast GQ readers will construe this as a literary device, especially attributing a deus ex machina like quality to her random call years latter with no new information but just the need to bring him to closure. No, I know these people exist. They are not preying on our weaknesses, they are praying for our peace. Even lapsed faithfuls like me and Hainey are moved by their public displays of unselfish faith and trust in a guided purpose to our actions.
The counterpoint to Hainey's need to break through a code of silence is his parallel struggle of when and how much to tell his mother about what he finally discovers. Are family secrets best kept in the closet? Should adult children discuss a parent's infidelity with the other spouse? Should Hainey remain as silent as his mother?
The book ends with him and his mom at the kitchen table after she has told him her own personal hidden secrets about his father. There can be no further tarnishing, yet no further polishing of their reputations. He is reconciled with her. But who is he and what secrets has he still kept about himself from his readers?
After Visiting Friends is Michael Hainey's story about finding out under what circumstances his father died when he was six years old. I don't really want to describe Hainey's father's death, the cover up or his family's omerta like repression of talking about it. Nor do I want to focus on Hainey's dogged research as an expression of his inherited and ingrained reporting instincts. I loved the book for his family.
The best metaphor I can come up with for his mother is Lot's wife. After her husband dies, she becomes as rigid, silent and steadfast as a pillar of salt, her only animation is to drive on the well being of her two young sons. Growing up in the late 50s early 60s, she has the blessing of an extended family to help her cope. Hainey's maternal grandmother and his uncle, also a newspaperman, anchor him, but anchor him next to a gaping emotional hole, the space where a boy's father should reign.
The sworn to secrecy "old boys club" of his dad's contemporary writers at the paper through up blocks and dead ends as he tries to find out any information. From decades of his mother slicing the air with her hand as the penultimate gesture of "don't go there" Hainey's search/adventure becomes more classic, more daring.
After his mother, my next favorite character is the woman at the morgue, one of those true Christians who can read Hainey's anguish and fear and who prays with him to give him strength, courage and stamina. Now I am sure many jaded cosmopolitan East Coast GQ readers will construe this as a literary device, especially attributing a deus ex machina like quality to her random call years latter with no new information but just the need to bring him to closure. No, I know these people exist. They are not preying on our weaknesses, they are praying for our peace. Even lapsed faithfuls like me and Hainey are moved by their public displays of unselfish faith and trust in a guided purpose to our actions.
The counterpoint to Hainey's need to break through a code of silence is his parallel struggle of when and how much to tell his mother about what he finally discovers. Are family secrets best kept in the closet? Should adult children discuss a parent's infidelity with the other spouse? Should Hainey remain as silent as his mother?
The book ends with him and his mom at the kitchen table after she has told him her own personal hidden secrets about his father. There can be no further tarnishing, yet no further polishing of their reputations. He is reconciled with her. But who is he and what secrets has he still kept about himself from his readers?
Tuesday, March 19, 2013
Y ... Why
After getting 2013 off to a slow and unsatisfying start, book-wise, I decided to venture back to last year's bucket list and nibble away at the unreviewed letters. Where I picked up many of these titles, I don't know, though probably Amazon, as now I discover our library system does not have many of them on the shelves. I hit on Disturbing the Peace by Richard Yates.
Perhaps I should have stopped as soon as I saw that Yates also wrote Revolutionary Road. Maybe I should have checked out Wiki to discover DTP is considered Yates' worst novel. It is. It reminds me a lot of Kingsley Amis and his drunken protagonists in a male dominated culture of omphaloskeptics. Or of an especially badly scripted season of Mad Men.
It's taken me a couple of years to identify a genre that I do not like at all: Amis, now Yates, Philip Roth, John Irving. The exact opposite of "chick lit" these guys, no matter what decade they wrote in, have used the novel to camouflage their own confused, near neurotic lives, endlessly questioning and propounding the following mantras:
I have not earned the fame granted to me, but give me more.
I am in an intellectually barren marriage and horny as hell and seducing any young thing at the drop of a hat (or trousers).
I drink, a lot.
I continue drinking until I am practically psychotic.
I have a nervous breakdown and since I hate shrinks, I drink.
My parents hate me.
I am a fake at work.
So these were the fathers of the middle aged men in England and America now. If they spawned writers, the themes are often just as self-indulgent. If their heirs have found other kinds of lives, they have hardly grown up to be the pride of their generation or their nation.
Give me less self-involved novels, please.
Perhaps I should have stopped as soon as I saw that Yates also wrote Revolutionary Road. Maybe I should have checked out Wiki to discover DTP is considered Yates' worst novel. It is. It reminds me a lot of Kingsley Amis and his drunken protagonists in a male dominated culture of omphaloskeptics. Or of an especially badly scripted season of Mad Men.
It's taken me a couple of years to identify a genre that I do not like at all: Amis, now Yates, Philip Roth, John Irving. The exact opposite of "chick lit" these guys, no matter what decade they wrote in, have used the novel to camouflage their own confused, near neurotic lives, endlessly questioning and propounding the following mantras:
I have not earned the fame granted to me, but give me more.
I am in an intellectually barren marriage and horny as hell and seducing any young thing at the drop of a hat (or trousers).
I drink, a lot.
I continue drinking until I am practically psychotic.
I have a nervous breakdown and since I hate shrinks, I drink.
My parents hate me.
I am a fake at work.
So these were the fathers of the middle aged men in England and America now. If they spawned writers, the themes are often just as self-indulgent. If their heirs have found other kinds of lives, they have hardly grown up to be the pride of their generation or their nation.
Give me less self-involved novels, please.
Monday, March 18, 2013
Movie War Stories
As a complement to All Quiet on the Western Front, I wanted to watch one of my favorite actresses, Audrey Tautou, in A Very Long Engagement. (Seeing recent pictures of Audrey on the Internet, it strikes me that she is no longer the French gamine/ingenue she was but is maturing into a woman who looks like my great aunt, not the Busold side, the Trembley side.)
Anyway, the stupid DVD from the library kept skipping and stalling and all I got to watch last night was the first few minutes and actually that was enough to depict the horrors that Remarque's couldn't do justice to with its scattered pen and ink abstract sketches. It was the disc and not my player as I inserted the other movie I picked up this weekend and it played fine. If I can find another copy of AVLE I want to watch it because it dawned on me that the "engagement" referred to a troop engagement as well as to moving slowly towards a marriage.
So the pitch hitting movie last night was Abe Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. Somewhere in this unruly blog I think I wrote up how much I liked the book, vampire junkie that I am. Hated the movie. For two reasons. I resent saying what I liked most about a film was its special effects; and given my sons proclivity to all things Southern and my husband's south of the Mason Dixon line family tree, I could not entertain a version, however fantastical, of Jefferson Davis conspiring with vampires to win the war. One of the most moving days of my life was visiting Gettysburg. It was bloody hot and dusty that day and the boys hung out with the reenactors on the Gray side, sitting with Lee and getting pictures taken with other generals who walked among the tents. I was heart sick when a battle began, mourning both sides, the unnecessary losses to life, family and the flower of our nation's youth. Demonizing one side was a sacrilege to both. I've already decided not to see Lincoln despite my interest in Day-Lewis performances. I recognize Hollywood demonizes certain aspects of history to get across its own political agenda. This took it beyond the pale.
Anyway, the stupid DVD from the library kept skipping and stalling and all I got to watch last night was the first few minutes and actually that was enough to depict the horrors that Remarque's couldn't do justice to with its scattered pen and ink abstract sketches. It was the disc and not my player as I inserted the other movie I picked up this weekend and it played fine. If I can find another copy of AVLE I want to watch it because it dawned on me that the "engagement" referred to a troop engagement as well as to moving slowly towards a marriage.
So the pitch hitting movie last night was Abe Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. Somewhere in this unruly blog I think I wrote up how much I liked the book, vampire junkie that I am. Hated the movie. For two reasons. I resent saying what I liked most about a film was its special effects; and given my sons proclivity to all things Southern and my husband's south of the Mason Dixon line family tree, I could not entertain a version, however fantastical, of Jefferson Davis conspiring with vampires to win the war. One of the most moving days of my life was visiting Gettysburg. It was bloody hot and dusty that day and the boys hung out with the reenactors on the Gray side, sitting with Lee and getting pictures taken with other generals who walked among the tents. I was heart sick when a battle began, mourning both sides, the unnecessary losses to life, family and the flower of our nation's youth. Demonizing one side was a sacrilege to both. I've already decided not to see Lincoln despite my interest in Day-Lewis performances. I recognize Hollywood demonizes certain aspects of history to get across its own political agenda. This took it beyond the pale.
Wars are Different, Wars are All Alike
I think I mentioned how much I disliked the book club's selection of The Things They Carried. I vowed to read a "good" war story and went back to last year's bucket list to All Quiet on the Western Front. I really to want to write this blog as a good old school compare and contrast essay, because both seem so entrenched in the specific warfare prevalent in its time and with perceptions of the enemy determined by how far the fighters were from neighboring states.
The introduction to the version I had succinctly summarized the author's intent to concentrate solely on helpless human beings, buffeted by chance, exploited by martinets, unable to exercise any intelligent control over their destinies. To me, the story shows a disillusionment of an entire age of men, men who were about to entire the mainstream of life but who became completely exiled from their community, heritage and values by the front. Unlike Tim O'Brien and his displacement in a country he doesn't understand, Paul is a soldier with his fellow classmen, often with former teachers as their military superiors: ..." For us lads of eighteen they ought to have been mediators and guides to the world of maturity, the world of work, of duty, of culture, of progress - to the future. We often made fun of them ... but in our hearts we trusted them. The idea of authority, which they represented was associated in our minds with a greater insight and manlier vision. But the first death we saw shattered this belief ... They surpassed us only in phrases and in cleverness. The first bombardment showed us our mistake, and under it the world as they had taught it to us broke in pieces."
What I find more readable than O'Brien's book is Remarque's identification with all his fellow soldiers; O'Brien, despite his descriptions of his comrades high jinx or injuries, seems to write more as a cathartic exercise in PTSD. Remarque wants his audience to know what the war did to a generation: ..."I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality case over an abyss of sorrow. I see how people are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another. I see that the keenest brains of the world invent weapons and words to make it yet more refined and enduring. And all the men of my age, here and over there, throughout the whole world, see these things; all my generation is experiencing these things with me ... What will happen afterwards? And what shall come out of us?"
Why has the military complex now decided to nation-build after a conflict but to do nothing to repair the souls and spirits of its disillusioned, depressed soldiers? Today, our newest employee returned to work after two or three days off to go home to a friend's funeral. When I welcomed her back today, she told me it was a boy who served who committed suicide. Will drones be better or worse?
The introduction to the version I had succinctly summarized the author's intent to concentrate solely on helpless human beings, buffeted by chance, exploited by martinets, unable to exercise any intelligent control over their destinies. To me, the story shows a disillusionment of an entire age of men, men who were about to entire the mainstream of life but who became completely exiled from their community, heritage and values by the front. Unlike Tim O'Brien and his displacement in a country he doesn't understand, Paul is a soldier with his fellow classmen, often with former teachers as their military superiors: ..." For us lads of eighteen they ought to have been mediators and guides to the world of maturity, the world of work, of duty, of culture, of progress - to the future. We often made fun of them ... but in our hearts we trusted them. The idea of authority, which they represented was associated in our minds with a greater insight and manlier vision. But the first death we saw shattered this belief ... They surpassed us only in phrases and in cleverness. The first bombardment showed us our mistake, and under it the world as they had taught it to us broke in pieces."
What I find more readable than O'Brien's book is Remarque's identification with all his fellow soldiers; O'Brien, despite his descriptions of his comrades high jinx or injuries, seems to write more as a cathartic exercise in PTSD. Remarque wants his audience to know what the war did to a generation: ..."I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality case over an abyss of sorrow. I see how people are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another. I see that the keenest brains of the world invent weapons and words to make it yet more refined and enduring. And all the men of my age, here and over there, throughout the whole world, see these things; all my generation is experiencing these things with me ... What will happen afterwards? And what shall come out of us?"
Why has the military complex now decided to nation-build after a conflict but to do nothing to repair the souls and spirits of its disillusioned, depressed soldiers? Today, our newest employee returned to work after two or three days off to go home to a friend's funeral. When I welcomed her back today, she told me it was a boy who served who committed suicide. Will drones be better or worse?
Tangent to Political Treatise/Essay
Ah for the Federalist Papers or at least a politician who wants to, and can, speak at length about the issues and his or her deeply held convictions and positions about them. I was standing by a fellow worker's desk and when another woman I know dropped off a book he lent to her. When I saw it was Bobby Jindal's Leadership and Crisis, I asked if I could take it to read next. It is a quick read, over and done with in three short evenings and the book owner said Jindal's later books were more in depth. Nonetheless, Jindal makes a good governor, especially for a State like Louisiana which had a lot to recover and reform.
Because I was a proponent of his advancement nationally, there were little surprises and it was not until Chapter 12 when I found dog-ear worthy quotations. In that chapter, Jindal emphasizes it is the cultural heritage of America that makes it great, not its government or economy, and it is that defining characteristic that is most at risk. He does not quote Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations but another of his works "... The Theory of Mortal Sentiment, which he considered his most important work. Smith argued here that the free market system would not work well -- and could even bring out the worst in some people -- in a society that lacked a strong moral foundation. Values like propriety, prudence, and benevolence are needed to check our inherent selfishness ..."
He goes to describe his take on the mortgage meltdown "... Predictably, after the meltdown liberals called on the government to adopt strict new regulations to ensure it will not happen again. (Good luck with that.) But more regulations can't solve what is largely an ethical problem within the culture. Unchecked avarice at every level has taken its toll on our economy."
And finally ... "To sum up, American capitalism is great, American democracy is great, and American military power is great ... But the success of America does not rely on these things alone. The success of America and the realization of the American Dream rely on our common sense of culture, a culture that admits some things are right and some things are wrong, a culture that respects and honors the dignity of the individual, a culture that defends the defenseless, values human life ..."
With these thoughts in my mind, it was fun to play dominoes this weekend with my husband and our younger son. We have been playing weekends for the past month or so, and I think of all the rounds, our son has only scored 300 points and won once. Sunday's game was going in the same direction, with me jumping off to an early lead and my husband catching up, while John had no points. In his best political satire, he, who was keeping score, looked at the tally sheet and explained "You too have too much. It should be redistributed to me who is poor." Jindal would have said "You're so lucky to be in the game."
Because I was a proponent of his advancement nationally, there were little surprises and it was not until Chapter 12 when I found dog-ear worthy quotations. In that chapter, Jindal emphasizes it is the cultural heritage of America that makes it great, not its government or economy, and it is that defining characteristic that is most at risk. He does not quote Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations but another of his works "... The Theory of Mortal Sentiment, which he considered his most important work. Smith argued here that the free market system would not work well -- and could even bring out the worst in some people -- in a society that lacked a strong moral foundation. Values like propriety, prudence, and benevolence are needed to check our inherent selfishness ..."
He goes to describe his take on the mortgage meltdown "... Predictably, after the meltdown liberals called on the government to adopt strict new regulations to ensure it will not happen again. (Good luck with that.) But more regulations can't solve what is largely an ethical problem within the culture. Unchecked avarice at every level has taken its toll on our economy."
And finally ... "To sum up, American capitalism is great, American democracy is great, and American military power is great ... But the success of America does not rely on these things alone. The success of America and the realization of the American Dream rely on our common sense of culture, a culture that admits some things are right and some things are wrong, a culture that respects and honors the dignity of the individual, a culture that defends the defenseless, values human life ..."
With these thoughts in my mind, it was fun to play dominoes this weekend with my husband and our younger son. We have been playing weekends for the past month or so, and I think of all the rounds, our son has only scored 300 points and won once. Sunday's game was going in the same direction, with me jumping off to an early lead and my husband catching up, while John had no points. In his best political satire, he, who was keeping score, looked at the tally sheet and explained "You too have too much. It should be redistributed to me who is poor." Jindal would have said "You're so lucky to be in the game."
Sunday, March 10, 2013
Not Really Silence vs Noise
When I checked out The Horse Whisperer and The Motorcycle Diaries at the same time, the talkative old guy behind the library counter commented on how mutually exclusive they would be sound-wise. He seems to have watched every movie in the stacks and I demurred to his joke. Not, Redford only stares and crouches and clucks at the horse and Ernesto and Alberto's motorcycle conks out half way through the movie.
Of course, no one else in this family would be caught dead watching The Motorcycle Diaries. Any of my comments about it being set in 1952, long before Che Guevara became a famous Communist, were still met with derision and charges that deep in my bones I was still a hippie sympathizer. Not, but it is interesting to think back now that the old guard is dying in Cuba and Venezula. What little progress. What impossible lofty, dreams.
Here again, like the scope and vista of Montana in The Horse Whisperer, TMD shows off the beauty of the geography and people of Argentina, Chile and Peru. The poverty of indigenous peoples is presented aloofly, without the heavy handed Hollywood messaging that a more current version of the story might overlay. Ernesto is young, idealistic in his need to help lepers. The extent to which is journey across South America abetted his radicalization is subtle, almost tangential.
The casting is superb. The actor who plays Alberto jumps off the screen; Che is more moody and shy. Is this the balancing buddy movie to the chick flicks I've been watching? It is Uneasy Rider.
Of course, no one else in this family would be caught dead watching The Motorcycle Diaries. Any of my comments about it being set in 1952, long before Che Guevara became a famous Communist, were still met with derision and charges that deep in my bones I was still a hippie sympathizer. Not, but it is interesting to think back now that the old guard is dying in Cuba and Venezula. What little progress. What impossible lofty, dreams.
Here again, like the scope and vista of Montana in The Horse Whisperer, TMD shows off the beauty of the geography and people of Argentina, Chile and Peru. The poverty of indigenous peoples is presented aloofly, without the heavy handed Hollywood messaging that a more current version of the story might overlay. Ernesto is young, idealistic in his need to help lepers. The extent to which is journey across South America abetted his radicalization is subtle, almost tangential.
The casting is superb. The actor who plays Alberto jumps off the screen; Che is more moody and shy. Is this the balancing buddy movie to the chick flicks I've been watching? It is Uneasy Rider.
Can It Be 15 Years Ago?
Back in the days when the boys were younger, I was working longer hours on the job, and I didn't have a DVD player, I watched way fewer movies. So when I selected The Horse Whisperer from the racks at the library last weekend, it felt like I would be watching a relatively recent movie. 1998. When that horrific accident with the horses and lumber hauler on an icy narrow road occurs, I was back in 1998. That scene was filmed up here, near Albany. As my "I hate celebrities" review indicates, I am not one to watch local movie making, forget Salt or from Beyond the Pines, and would never ever audition for being an extra. I even seem to recall that Redford rented a home near Siena.
I just checked out Wiki before writing this blog and unsurprisingly, it compares THW with The Bridges of Madison County, aging or at least middle aged actors and actresses, finding some version of love, a snippet to cherish and store away as the female leads decide their pre-affair lives are inevitable and "right."
I love horse movies. The scenery of Montana was striking. Scarlett Johansson, at least a foot shorter than she is now, is a believable look alike daughter of Kristin Scott Thomas. Another six degree of separation instance, as KST is a take off on Tina Brown, who was also portrayed of sorts by Streep in TBOMC. Is America's cadre of actors/actresses so thin that these people recycle through films that are targeted to certain market sectors? Streep keeps aging and Hope Springs.
I really thought Redford was completely miscasted as the whisperer. The story would have been more real if the male lead was not one of the industry's icon idols ... a more average looking man with special horse taming talents, someone who looked more natural around a farm and didn't always wear ironed dungarees under his chaps, would have made the attraction seem more based on talent instead of testosterone. Although I have to admit, Redford's compression of Thomas spine through her clothes as they dance is damn sexy.
I just checked out Wiki before writing this blog and unsurprisingly, it compares THW with The Bridges of Madison County, aging or at least middle aged actors and actresses, finding some version of love, a snippet to cherish and store away as the female leads decide their pre-affair lives are inevitable and "right."
I love horse movies. The scenery of Montana was striking. Scarlett Johansson, at least a foot shorter than she is now, is a believable look alike daughter of Kristin Scott Thomas. Another six degree of separation instance, as KST is a take off on Tina Brown, who was also portrayed of sorts by Streep in TBOMC. Is America's cadre of actors/actresses so thin that these people recycle through films that are targeted to certain market sectors? Streep keeps aging and Hope Springs.
I really thought Redford was completely miscasted as the whisperer. The story would have been more real if the male lead was not one of the industry's icon idols ... a more average looking man with special horse taming talents, someone who looked more natural around a farm and didn't always wear ironed dungarees under his chaps, would have made the attraction seem more based on talent instead of testosterone. Although I have to admit, Redford's compression of Thomas spine through her clothes as they dance is damn sexy.
Last Interest in Books of Ali Smith
Maybe I will learn that until I am sure, positively sure, that I want to read everything by a particular author and then go about reserving everything that I can find by him/her. From now on, I put them aside one after another. Sequence is important: I learned that yesterday ... do not put the garlic in with the onions and peppers when frying them for a recipe, add garlic later; similarly, add the tomatoes later or else you get skins and pulp and nothing round and red.
There but for The, is the cryptic title of Smith's book from 2011. It reminds me of Crash and all those movies of parallel interpretations of one event witnessed by or entailing several different, diverse people. Here someone invited to a dinner party in Greenwich, London, brings a friend with him and that friend locks himself in the hostess' guest room for months, for no apparent rhyme or reason. Smith chunks up the story into four chapters, there, but, for, the, told by respectively a woman who traveled with the subject, Miles Garth, on a school trip decades ago, the person who brought him to the dinner, the dying mother of a childhood friend of Miles' and a precocious ten year, the child of another couple at the dinner.
I draw out from Smith's stories her interest in concurrent time, perception and narration. In the first chapter, Smith uses Anna's voice to ponder the importance of talking: "... What would happen if you did just shut a door and stop speaking? Hour after hour of no words. Would you speak to yourself? Would words just stop being useful? Would you lose language altogether? Or would words mean more, would they start to mean in every direction, all somersault and assault, like a thuggery of fireworks? Would they proliferate, like untended plantlife? ... Would all things you'd ever forgotten, all layered there inside you, come bouldering up and avalanche you?"
Smith opines a story wherein the main character has nothing or very little to say, emphasizing the receiving/observing end of human communication. We are saying what we hear, even when we are only talking in our heads to ourselves -- as May Young (Smith punning with surnames again) does in her stroke-addled mind. But it is the gifted child, Brooke, who I believe is Smith's intended alter ego, the Cleverist. Brooke is babbling (ha) but not childish prattle rather encyclopedic trivia seen through the eyes of a grammar schooler. Brooke is the only one who can sneak inside and talk to Miles, who can exchange knock knock jokes with he who is self-barracaded on the other side of the door. Brooke who plays with time as well as words, skipping school to stand on the GMT meridien.
There But For The ...
Specificity
Structure
Chronology
Predictabilty
Standardization
Ambiguity
"dear reader, you do not need it"
There but for The, is the cryptic title of Smith's book from 2011. It reminds me of Crash and all those movies of parallel interpretations of one event witnessed by or entailing several different, diverse people. Here someone invited to a dinner party in Greenwich, London, brings a friend with him and that friend locks himself in the hostess' guest room for months, for no apparent rhyme or reason. Smith chunks up the story into four chapters, there, but, for, the, told by respectively a woman who traveled with the subject, Miles Garth, on a school trip decades ago, the person who brought him to the dinner, the dying mother of a childhood friend of Miles' and a precocious ten year, the child of another couple at the dinner.
I draw out from Smith's stories her interest in concurrent time, perception and narration. In the first chapter, Smith uses Anna's voice to ponder the importance of talking: "... What would happen if you did just shut a door and stop speaking? Hour after hour of no words. Would you speak to yourself? Would words just stop being useful? Would you lose language altogether? Or would words mean more, would they start to mean in every direction, all somersault and assault, like a thuggery of fireworks? Would they proliferate, like untended plantlife? ... Would all things you'd ever forgotten, all layered there inside you, come bouldering up and avalanche you?"
Smith opines a story wherein the main character has nothing or very little to say, emphasizing the receiving/observing end of human communication. We are saying what we hear, even when we are only talking in our heads to ourselves -- as May Young (Smith punning with surnames again) does in her stroke-addled mind. But it is the gifted child, Brooke, who I believe is Smith's intended alter ego, the Cleverist. Brooke is babbling (ha) but not childish prattle rather encyclopedic trivia seen through the eyes of a grammar schooler. Brooke is the only one who can sneak inside and talk to Miles, who can exchange knock knock jokes with he who is self-barracaded on the other side of the door. Brooke who plays with time as well as words, skipping school to stand on the GMT meridien.
There But For The ...
Specificity
Structure
Chronology
Predictabilty
Standardization
Ambiguity
"dear reader, you do not need it"
English Flicks
(This is a review from several weeks ago that was languishing in draft unpublished status.)
No I am not reading as diligently as I vowed. Movies beckon especially after the intriguing previews included in the Iron Lady DVD. So a couple of nights ago, I did a double feature of My Week with Marilyn and W/E. Both were good, if perhaps chick flicks … although what male would be opposed to watching Michelle Williams as Monroe.
MWWM had a great supporting cast, most notably Kenneth Branaugh as Larry Olivier. I found it difficult to watch “a week in the life of” knowing too well how short that life would be and how much worse than the pains, drugs and loneliness of Marilyn’s time on the set of the Prince and the Showgirl. How everyone either wanted to glom on to her fame or use her to advance their own. (See I still am thinking about The Frenzy of Renown even though I am only as far as Plutarch.)
W/E was beautiful but I felt the over-story of the contemporary young woman at Sotheby’s was a bit contrived. A flashback vehicle in the context of the sale seemed legit, but striving to make too many parallel experiences across the decades between a fan and her idol was stretched too thin, as thin as Wallis herself. Now, there was a woman of with and backbone as compared to the naïve and malleable MM … the difference between a penultimate flatterer and one being fawned over.
I still have one more British film to go, Anonymous, so expect one more installment of movie reviews before I once again pick up my two bedside books.
No I am not reading as diligently as I vowed. Movies beckon especially after the intriguing previews included in the Iron Lady DVD. So a couple of nights ago, I did a double feature of My Week with Marilyn and W/E. Both were good, if perhaps chick flicks … although what male would be opposed to watching Michelle Williams as Monroe.
MWWM had a great supporting cast, most notably Kenneth Branaugh as Larry Olivier. I found it difficult to watch “a week in the life of” knowing too well how short that life would be and how much worse than the pains, drugs and loneliness of Marilyn’s time on the set of the Prince and the Showgirl. How everyone either wanted to glom on to her fame or use her to advance their own. (See I still am thinking about The Frenzy of Renown even though I am only as far as Plutarch.)
W/E was beautiful but I felt the over-story of the contemporary young woman at Sotheby’s was a bit contrived. A flashback vehicle in the context of the sale seemed legit, but striving to make too many parallel experiences across the decades between a fan and her idol was stretched too thin, as thin as Wallis herself. Now, there was a woman of with and backbone as compared to the naïve and malleable MM … the difference between a penultimate flatterer and one being fawned over.
I still have one more British film to go, Anonymous, so expect one more installment of movie reviews before I once again pick up my two bedside books.
After Artful, I Curious About Why Ali Smith
Was either nominated (Orange and Man Booker Prize) or won (Encore and Satire First Book Award). So I reserved a couple of her books that I could find on the library website. Started with Girl Meets Boy - The Myth of Iphis. Not sure which came first, Smith's rewriting of Ovid's Metamorphis story or her publisher's decision to issue a collection of contemporary rewritings of these myths. I suspect the latter as after getting through this one, I rechecked the library to see if any others of the Canon Gate collection were available and they were not ... maybe it is yet another one of those soley Brit things.
Apparently this is the only one of Ovid's stories with a quasi-happy ending. Smith just updates and politically corrects the denoument to make it no longer necessary for a girl brought up as a boy to be changed into a boy at a wedding ceremony. Smith conveniently uses this myth as another opportunity to disclose the wonderous normalcy of her being a lesbian and entailed to public affirmation of her love. (She even uses the term "artful" to describe the perfection of this ecstasy.)
Smith's version is larded with almost Shakespearean collections of gender under disguise: the book's first sentence is "Let me tell you about when I was a girl, our grandfather says." He then relates to his twin granddaughters an incident where a female revolutionary dresses up as a messenger boy to elude arrest. The twins, Imogen/Midge and Anthea, live in Scotland and both are employed at a water bottling corporation, another example for Smith to use to propagandize. Melding this message with Canon Gate's intent, Smith writes:
..."I mean, do myths spring fully formed from the imagination and the needs of a society ... as if they emerged from society's subconscious? Or are myths conscious creations by the various money-making forces? For instance, is advertising a new kind of myth-making?"
The plot focuses on Anthea, the twin who dawdles about joining the firm, and tarries outside watching a demonstrator smear anti-corporate slogans on the company's facade. This being Scotland, the graffitist is wearing a kilt. As the protestor slides down the ladder, kilt a-flaring, Anthea falls in love with Robin Goodman. This is Smith at her Woodhouse best: she lives for puns. Robin, is of course, a woman, and she and Anthea become lovers, ultimately marrying at the end of the story.
I'll write up my review of another Smith novel next but I do not have to read her entire opus. These books have been sufficient for me to decide she is not my cup of tea, nor snort of Scotch. However, there are flights of writing were she sings; where she stands on the shoulders of other British Isles writers, and acknowledges not only the reiteration of recurring plots/themes but also echoes styles. Her she reminds me of Joyce: "... Rings that widen on the surface of a loch above a thrown-in stone. A drink of water offered to a thirsty traveler on the road. Nothing more than what happens when things come together, when hydrogen, say, meets oxygen (today's gimmicky NYT's puzzle clues), or a story from then meets a story from now, or stone meets water meets girl meets boy meets bird meets hand meets wing meets bone meets light meets dark meets eye meets word meets world meets grain of sand meets thirst meets hunger meets need meets dream meets life meets end meets beginning all over again, the story of nature itself, ever-inventive, making one thing out of another, and one thing into another ..." If his, if is
Apparently this is the only one of Ovid's stories with a quasi-happy ending. Smith just updates and politically corrects the denoument to make it no longer necessary for a girl brought up as a boy to be changed into a boy at a wedding ceremony. Smith conveniently uses this myth as another opportunity to disclose the wonderous normalcy of her being a lesbian and entailed to public affirmation of her love. (She even uses the term "artful" to describe the perfection of this ecstasy.)
Smith's version is larded with almost Shakespearean collections of gender under disguise: the book's first sentence is "Let me tell you about when I was a girl, our grandfather says." He then relates to his twin granddaughters an incident where a female revolutionary dresses up as a messenger boy to elude arrest. The twins, Imogen/Midge and Anthea, live in Scotland and both are employed at a water bottling corporation, another example for Smith to use to propagandize. Melding this message with Canon Gate's intent, Smith writes:
..."I mean, do myths spring fully formed from the imagination and the needs of a society ... as if they emerged from society's subconscious? Or are myths conscious creations by the various money-making forces? For instance, is advertising a new kind of myth-making?"
The plot focuses on Anthea, the twin who dawdles about joining the firm, and tarries outside watching a demonstrator smear anti-corporate slogans on the company's facade. This being Scotland, the graffitist is wearing a kilt. As the protestor slides down the ladder, kilt a-flaring, Anthea falls in love with Robin Goodman. This is Smith at her Woodhouse best: she lives for puns. Robin, is of course, a woman, and she and Anthea become lovers, ultimately marrying at the end of the story.
I'll write up my review of another Smith novel next but I do not have to read her entire opus. These books have been sufficient for me to decide she is not my cup of tea, nor snort of Scotch. However, there are flights of writing were she sings; where she stands on the shoulders of other British Isles writers, and acknowledges not only the reiteration of recurring plots/themes but also echoes styles. Her she reminds me of Joyce: "... Rings that widen on the surface of a loch above a thrown-in stone. A drink of water offered to a thirsty traveler on the road. Nothing more than what happens when things come together, when hydrogen, say, meets oxygen (today's gimmicky NYT's puzzle clues), or a story from then meets a story from now, or stone meets water meets girl meets boy meets bird meets hand meets wing meets bone meets light meets dark meets eye meets word meets world meets grain of sand meets thirst meets hunger meets need meets dream meets life meets end meets beginning all over again, the story of nature itself, ever-inventive, making one thing out of another, and one thing into another ..." If his, if is
Sunday, March 3, 2013
I Hate Celebrities
I feel like this book was the required text for a college level course. The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History runs almost 600 pages and traces the concept of fame from Alexander the Great to Grace Slick. Oh how the mighty concept has fallen! Leo Braudy wrote this book in 1986 and to my mind, things have only gotten worse.
I decided to read this book, because as this blog title boldly states, I hate celebrities. Steeped at home during my youth in healthy skepticism, I always look for the feet of clay in any hero. I now find it perplexing: my mother had outrageously high standards of excellence and nothing less than perfection attracted her praise. Yet I learned that others broadcasting of their perfection was bound to be suspect. I thought maybe this book would help me understand my distaste for what I consider to be unworthy poseurs.
Braudy does a scholarly job in tracking fame from when it was directly correlated to military exploits to governmental talent during classical ages. He contrasts the definition of other-worldly fame with the rise of Christianity. But the book didn't grab me until he got to the point where the describer of the famous overtook the man who sought fame. Aha, mespoke. The rise of the author, the one career I find meritorious of fame. Braudy starts with Horace, Ovid and Virgil as realizing they could determine and crown who was worthy of remembering and thereby become the arbiters of status, gaining status themselves. I loved it.
The book goes on and on detailing how individuals' sense of being noticed and remembered degenerated into the outlandish and outre. Ending as it does in the mid '80s, it has only gotten worse.
The main idea I garner from the book is the conceit that a person's posture or exploits are only performed to attract an audience, the ultimate bestower of renown. This is almost a Venn diagram of how to become famous: the actor, the audience, and the time all need to overlay to have a person's "life" and acts live beyond death.
This impulse to "look at me" still strikes me as unbecoming. I seek anonymity. I love being a ghost writer, the power behind the throne, or at least the public face. My efforts still seem transistory and nothing to etch on a tombstone. I want to live only in the memory of a select chosen few who understand who I am as well as how I present myself publicly and what I "do." Notice me: I dress well, I smell good, I am witty. So are many others (maybe not in this State capital). But remember me more as a progenitor, not as a "star."
I decided to read this book, because as this blog title boldly states, I hate celebrities. Steeped at home during my youth in healthy skepticism, I always look for the feet of clay in any hero. I now find it perplexing: my mother had outrageously high standards of excellence and nothing less than perfection attracted her praise. Yet I learned that others broadcasting of their perfection was bound to be suspect. I thought maybe this book would help me understand my distaste for what I consider to be unworthy poseurs.
Braudy does a scholarly job in tracking fame from when it was directly correlated to military exploits to governmental talent during classical ages. He contrasts the definition of other-worldly fame with the rise of Christianity. But the book didn't grab me until he got to the point where the describer of the famous overtook the man who sought fame. Aha, mespoke. The rise of the author, the one career I find meritorious of fame. Braudy starts with Horace, Ovid and Virgil as realizing they could determine and crown who was worthy of remembering and thereby become the arbiters of status, gaining status themselves. I loved it.
The book goes on and on detailing how individuals' sense of being noticed and remembered degenerated into the outlandish and outre. Ending as it does in the mid '80s, it has only gotten worse.
The main idea I garner from the book is the conceit that a person's posture or exploits are only performed to attract an audience, the ultimate bestower of renown. This is almost a Venn diagram of how to become famous: the actor, the audience, and the time all need to overlay to have a person's "life" and acts live beyond death.
This impulse to "look at me" still strikes me as unbecoming. I seek anonymity. I love being a ghost writer, the power behind the throne, or at least the public face. My efforts still seem transistory and nothing to etch on a tombstone. I want to live only in the memory of a select chosen few who understand who I am as well as how I present myself publicly and what I "do." Notice me: I dress well, I smell good, I am witty. So are many others (maybe not in this State capital). But remember me more as a progenitor, not as a "star."
Not My Model for Prometheus
Roseanne Montillo has compiled a history of grave robber and public autopsies couple with primitive experiments with electricity to set the stage for Mary Shelley's writing of Frankenstein, making it seem like a chronicle of current (no pun intended) events. With the title, The Lady and Her Monsters, Montillo begs the questions of who exactly were the monsters? Certainly Mary's father was cold and aloof, but what could you expect from a proper British gentlemen whose three daughters were acting like 19th Century Hilton or Khardasian girls, throwing themselves, literally running away from home, to cavort with the rock stars of their day, Bryon and Shelley. Ad Montillo also plays up the improprieties of the poets, lethargy, opium, sex addicts, with a fascination for the occult under the guise of advancing science.
Keeping these three threads together seems just slightly beyond Montillo's reach. And Mary suffers the most. More than half of the book is about grave robbing, public lynchings, and gruesome dissections. Another quarter or so tracks the paramours and illegitimate children of the poets. Mary comes off like Shirley MacLaine in the Rat Pack, unrecognized for her own talents.
My personal interest is in the subtitle, Frankenstein, the Modern Prometheus. First, one has to disassociate the monster from his namesake creator, Victor Frankenstein. VF lends himself more to the myth Prometheus stole fire from the gods, VF uses electricity as the spark of life to steal creation from God. Does the story bear re-reading as Ali Smith would suggest, so I can re-interpret the creator and not the creature as being the protagonist?
At the end of the book, Montillo grabs the reader in her epilogue, where she wants to show her theme goes on and on, as she relates the dreadful violation or remains that happened to good old Alastair Cooke of Masterpiece Theater fame, whose bones and organs were scavenged by a disreputable undertaker and sold to hospitals for transplants. It would be a stronger book if instead, or as well, Montillo emphasized the themes that the poets, and Mary herself, explored, on defining life and the aftereffects of dying. On to fame.
Keeping these three threads together seems just slightly beyond Montillo's reach. And Mary suffers the most. More than half of the book is about grave robbing, public lynchings, and gruesome dissections. Another quarter or so tracks the paramours and illegitimate children of the poets. Mary comes off like Shirley MacLaine in the Rat Pack, unrecognized for her own talents.
My personal interest is in the subtitle, Frankenstein, the Modern Prometheus. First, one has to disassociate the monster from his namesake creator, Victor Frankenstein. VF lends himself more to the myth Prometheus stole fire from the gods, VF uses electricity as the spark of life to steal creation from God. Does the story bear re-reading as Ali Smith would suggest, so I can re-interpret the creator and not the creature as being the protagonist?
At the end of the book, Montillo grabs the reader in her epilogue, where she wants to show her theme goes on and on, as she relates the dreadful violation or remains that happened to good old Alastair Cooke of Masterpiece Theater fame, whose bones and organs were scavenged by a disreputable undertaker and sold to hospitals for transplants. It would be a stronger book if instead, or as well, Montillo emphasized the themes that the poets, and Mary herself, explored, on defining life and the aftereffects of dying. On to fame.
Onerous
I really don't have too much to say about the February book club selection, Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. I did not like it.
It perfectly illustrates my theorem that the more favorable review quotes in the front of a book (here eight pages!) the less worthy the writer. How could this be a Pulitzer Prize finalist? Is America and its literati still so guilt ridden about the Viet Nam War that is still atoning by "giving a medal" to one of its aging veterans? Does few words always evoke Papa?
It was this book that urged me on to finish Ali Smith's lectures, hoping I could find something structurally to say positively about the book. Clearly, Smith convinced me that this is a book of short stories (a) because the author writes about each tale as momentous and disconnected, larger than life; and (b) because none of the stories are set with any regard to larger society. O'Brien through his soldiers is bigoted, racist and aloof.
He wants you to understand ... why else would he bring his ten year old daughter back to a field where one of his buddies drowned? It didn't mean anything to her, and even less to me.
This was not my favorite war, and is not a favorite book. I didn't even go to book club, sorry L.
It perfectly illustrates my theorem that the more favorable review quotes in the front of a book (here eight pages!) the less worthy the writer. How could this be a Pulitzer Prize finalist? Is America and its literati still so guilt ridden about the Viet Nam War that is still atoning by "giving a medal" to one of its aging veterans? Does few words always evoke Papa?
It was this book that urged me on to finish Ali Smith's lectures, hoping I could find something structurally to say positively about the book. Clearly, Smith convinced me that this is a book of short stories (a) because the author writes about each tale as momentous and disconnected, larger than life; and (b) because none of the stories are set with any regard to larger society. O'Brien through his soldiers is bigoted, racist and aloof.
He wants you to understand ... why else would he bring his ten year old daughter back to a field where one of his buddies drowned? It didn't mean anything to her, and even less to me.
This was not my favorite war, and is not a favorite book. I didn't even go to book club, sorry L.
A is for Artful
Well, I did find a one word book to start my 2013 quest, Artful by Ali Smith. A book that began as a collection of four lectures give at Oxford on literature: On Time, Form, Edge and Offer and Reflection. This was my impetus for picking the book up; over the past couple of years, I have blogged on other authors whose lectures were meaty and thought-provoking and helped me understand why I liked certain genres and styles better than others. But Smith's book is something else again, a memoir more like Didion's Year of Magical Thinking. In fact, Smith begins her story a year and a day after her lover of thirty years has died and writes about how haunted she is. Mourning becomes dementia.
The sudden death has not been covered up: her desk still evidences a critique that stopped mid-sentence; Ali cannot bear to even move a chair to where the light would be better; she hopes to enliven her loss by reading old books. At first, I found her reminiscing distracting; I wanted her to get to the literary analysis.But then I came to realize that Smith has several of my writing quirks and traits: she goes off on tangents about her life and how she interprets it through books and authors. Duh, my blog.
Her memorable insights:
On the difference between short stories and novels -- "... not to do with length, but with time. The short story will always be about brevity ... Because of this, the short story can do anything it likes with notions of time; it moves and works spatially regardless of whether it adheres to chronology or conventional plot. It is an elastic form .. In this it emphasizes the momentousness of the moment."
On the impact of art (and this quote is included for book clubber PD since it reminds me of her becoming enraptured of TS Eliot) -- "a magical shifting of the position of observer and observed, it means that the "you"of the poem becomes not just the thing seen instead of the art, but something so utterly, so wholly, that there is no place that does not see you. It's this being seen (met in the act of looking) - the exchange that happens when art and human meet - that results in the pure urgency for transformation: 'you must change your life.'
On re-reading -- "We do treat books surprisingly lightly in contemporary culture. We'd never expect to understand a piece of music on one listen, but we tend to believe we've read a book after reading it just once ... Books tend to draw us in, it takes time to understand what makes them, structurally, in thematic resonance, in afterthought, and always in correspondence with the books which came before them ... Great books are adaptable; they alter with us as we alter in life ... You can't step into the same story twice - or maybe it's that stories, books, art can't step into the same person twice ... and maybe it's this adaptability ... that makes them art ... in an elasticity and with a generosity that allows for all our comings and goings." WOW
On the poetry from her On Form lecture (and this is quoted at length as the inspiration for my reading of Shakespearean Sonnet 155 which I read at the January book club)
"Not marble nor the gilded monuments
of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme,
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone besmearched with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword, nor war's quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
Gainst death and all oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth, your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
So, till the judgement that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes.
Aah, Essex loved Elizabeth.
But this tracks to me reading of The Frenzy of Fame, and the evolution of the author, not the "hero" as being the determinant of worthiness to be remembered. Smith goes on -- "... The power of artform is stronger than stone, the poet says, and chooses the sonnet, the form concerned with arguing and persuasion, to say so. This sonnet, he says, will last longer than any gravestone - and you'll be made shinier, brighter by it."
On how literature remains with us -- "... this truth about the place where aesthetic form meets the human mind. For even if we were to find ourselves homeless, in a strange land, with nothing of ourselves left ... we'd still have another kind of home ... in the familiarity, the unchanging assurance that a known rhythm, a recognized line, the familiar shape of a story, a tune, a line of phrase or sentence gives us every time, even long after we've forgotten we even know it."
The last quote came from page 76 in a volume of 204 pages. What happened to me? What failed to resonant in the remainder of the book? Smith goes on to heal, after bouts of kleptomania, seeing a shrink, finishing Oliver Twist, emptying the house of her lovers' clothes. I think I missed the despair. She seems to lose her hypersensitivity. All the observations and anecdotes skillfully merge and re-echo but the pyre has burned out.
The sudden death has not been covered up: her desk still evidences a critique that stopped mid-sentence; Ali cannot bear to even move a chair to where the light would be better; she hopes to enliven her loss by reading old books. At first, I found her reminiscing distracting; I wanted her to get to the literary analysis.But then I came to realize that Smith has several of my writing quirks and traits: she goes off on tangents about her life and how she interprets it through books and authors. Duh, my blog.
Her memorable insights:
On the difference between short stories and novels -- "... not to do with length, but with time. The short story will always be about brevity ... Because of this, the short story can do anything it likes with notions of time; it moves and works spatially regardless of whether it adheres to chronology or conventional plot. It is an elastic form .. In this it emphasizes the momentousness of the moment."
On the impact of art (and this quote is included for book clubber PD since it reminds me of her becoming enraptured of TS Eliot) -- "a magical shifting of the position of observer and observed, it means that the "you"of the poem becomes not just the thing seen instead of the art, but something so utterly, so wholly, that there is no place that does not see you. It's this being seen (met in the act of looking) - the exchange that happens when art and human meet - that results in the pure urgency for transformation: 'you must change your life.'
On re-reading -- "We do treat books surprisingly lightly in contemporary culture. We'd never expect to understand a piece of music on one listen, but we tend to believe we've read a book after reading it just once ... Books tend to draw us in, it takes time to understand what makes them, structurally, in thematic resonance, in afterthought, and always in correspondence with the books which came before them ... Great books are adaptable; they alter with us as we alter in life ... You can't step into the same story twice - or maybe it's that stories, books, art can't step into the same person twice ... and maybe it's this adaptability ... that makes them art ... in an elasticity and with a generosity that allows for all our comings and goings." WOW
On the poetry from her On Form lecture (and this is quoted at length as the inspiration for my reading of Shakespearean Sonnet 155 which I read at the January book club)
"Not marble nor the gilded monuments
of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme,
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone besmearched with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword, nor war's quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
Gainst death and all oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth, your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
So, till the judgement that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes.
Aah, Essex loved Elizabeth.
But this tracks to me reading of The Frenzy of Fame, and the evolution of the author, not the "hero" as being the determinant of worthiness to be remembered. Smith goes on -- "... The power of artform is stronger than stone, the poet says, and chooses the sonnet, the form concerned with arguing and persuasion, to say so. This sonnet, he says, will last longer than any gravestone - and you'll be made shinier, brighter by it."
On how literature remains with us -- "... this truth about the place where aesthetic form meets the human mind. For even if we were to find ourselves homeless, in a strange land, with nothing of ourselves left ... we'd still have another kind of home ... in the familiarity, the unchanging assurance that a known rhythm, a recognized line, the familiar shape of a story, a tune, a line of phrase or sentence gives us every time, even long after we've forgotten we even know it."
The last quote came from page 76 in a volume of 204 pages. What happened to me? What failed to resonant in the remainder of the book? Smith goes on to heal, after bouts of kleptomania, seeing a shrink, finishing Oliver Twist, emptying the house of her lovers' clothes. I think I missed the despair. She seems to lose her hypersensitivity. All the observations and anecdotes skillfully merge and re-echo but the pyre has burned out.
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