Mating Interruptus

I am not even going to acknowledge reading half of this book on the lust list ... the book being Mating by Norman Rush. I find the problem to be Rush's use of a female narrator. He is exploring what do women want, sexually, as an intellectual, geopolitical exercise. It would be funny if the girl was having sex and thinking of Botswana (instead of England) but she is merely thinking about having sex. Her desire for Denoon is hardly physical, more like her thesis. My neighbor found me slogging through this at the library one recent noon hour and told me he always wanted to read it ... I told him, don't bother, and now am telling the Slackers, et al.

Paradiso

Still making up for lost DVD time, watching a movie each evening. Bright Star by Jane Campion was okay for a period piece but really couldn't capture how Keats wrote such wonderful poetry; his Fanny comes across like a graft of a Valley girl and Coco Chanel. The Secret in Their Eyes was a suspenseful Argentine story beginning during the time of Eva Peron, making the entire Amanda Know Italian persecution look tame.

But the best so far was Cinema Paradiso ... or maybe I just needed a benign trigger for a good cry. The young actor who plays Toto at ten is terribly engaging, with the most expressive eyes and quick smile. He is counterpointed against Alfredo, the movie projectionist in a small Italian village just after WWII. It made me reflect on the importance of film to me, as entertainment, as stories upon which to project my life experiences. This one points out something missing in most of today's movies -- the entire neighborhood does not take in the show together. There is no chance to watch the audience as well as the screen.

Of course, the real plot of Paradiso is how one falls in love. This is classic red flame love -- no passion, almost like all the instances in the movie when the censoring parish priest rang the bell to mark those frames for cutting in which the stars kissed. Toto's love is unrequited and his life empty for 30 years until he finds his first love when he returns for Alfredo's funeral. Elena hides behind her belief that she is "old" now and reasonably comfortable with her life; they are together for only the briefest of reunions, trying to analyze whether Alfredo's part in their separation was too interfering or done from a nobler motivation. And so my tears flowed, for all those choices of my youth that were limited by family, immaturely measured against convention and still poignant. My 2011 lust list is a bucket list ... not of things left to see and do, but of refitting memories to see if love and passion looks different from the farsightedness of age instead of the blind spots of youth.

Movies, Not Books

I got a replacement DVD player last weekend and have been overdosing on movies all week, setting aside Mating (which is love as a political polemic) and Angle of Repose (which has yet to get into who loves whom). The best so far was last night, Secretariat, curiously the movie I had on reserve when the old player broke down. Maybe I'm just a sap for horse movies (are there really people out there similarly addicted to fight movies?) but I think this is just as good or better than Seabiscuit. Of course, I also love Diane Ladd in anything and this is the best role I have seen John Malkovich do in ages. 1973 seems so long ago and I am having waves of nostalgia overwhelm me.

Of all the tracks depicted, I thought Saratoga was least accurate. Disney came up to the Spa to film there but the people in the stands were decked out in too much Western style attire ... and no hats on the womenfolk. The race they showed there was his two-year old start when he finished third. The movie ended on the Belmont 31 length high-note victory, not the marginal loss to Onion later that summer at the Travers. Mom and I were there. Dad was still alive, still working. I had yet to finish my first year working at DMV.

My nostalgia is heightened because my mother died this week. Watching horse racing movies is my own personal commemoration for her, although I'm sure she's still waiting for her high Mass on Friday. We had great days together up there even when it rained and met some interesting folks in the club house. The meet was then limited to August ... Saratoga was the "August place to be" ... and that capped off our summers after we spent most of July at SPAC for the NYC Ballet, usually having something to drink in the Hall of Springs before the performance. I love how we used to dress up for both the ballet and the races. She gave me my sense of style, and I guess of treating life like performance art. Her final act was as private and gracious as she would have wanted.

Love Among the Orphans

Despite being titled All the Living, I find C. E. Morgan’s novel about finding love on a poor Kentucky tobacco farm to be about a man and a woman who are emotionally scarred from being orphans.

Aloma’s parents died when she was two; she lived with her aunt and uncle, where she perceived herself to be an unwanted burden, until she twelve and shipped off to a residential school. The only subject she excelled at was music, where playing the piano became her fantasy of escaping the dark, poor mountain hollows where even the joys of sunlight are curtailed.

Orren’s father died leaving his small tobacco farm to be operated by his widow and two sons. Orren’s mother and older brother are subsequently killed in a horrific car accident, leaving Orren determined to make a go of the farm all by himself.

Orren meets Aloma at a career day kind of event at the boarding school where she has stayed on to teach. They meet before the accident and see each other for over a year. When left alone after the funeral, he asks her to move in.

Both characters are trailing dusty clouds of pain and frustrated ambition. Orren is badly in debt, having to sell off the horses and bull, and moving into a smaller house to avoid looking at the rooms where he lived with his mother and brother. Aloma goes to the farm still believing she will ultimately take Orren away from their as she makes a career out of music somewhere else.

He withdraws farther and farther into the pressures of farming during a drought; with only a broken-down, untuned piano in the house, Aloma secures a job playing for a local church where she eventually becomes attracted to the pastor. The silences of Aloma and Orren living together and their tension and coldness they foist on each other as they grow into adulthood and self-sufficiency hardly seem to be fertile ground for an enduring love. They both seem to value more their individual motives rather than setting mutual goals as a couple.

So they story seems to be less of a red flame story of lust mellowing into a blue flamed marriage than it is one of demarcation and compromise. I almost feel like this book would have been the perfect book for Kentucky for the 2009 50 States blog list. It is the rhythm and beauty of the land, its very dustiness and isolation, the image of a blooming tobacco field that must be “deflowered” before the leaves can develop properly. That one image stays with me the longest and is a wonderful symbol of Aloma’s maturation: however brief and infrequent the beauty of her life and surroundings, she can take human satisfaction in contributing to it.

Deadly Obsession

Joseph Bosco compiled a huge body of evidence researching a true crime, known as the baseball bat murder, outside of New Orleans in 1984. The story's prinicipals are the victim Janet, married to Kerry and his closest friend Bill. After 560 pages, several grand juries and two trials, the reader is not so much left with the question of "whodunnit," but where did the passion and fury come from to inflict such brutality.

These characters are not upper crust Louisiana but lower middle class, struggling to buy a house and keep a job. Although all three went to college, they never made any use of their talents. Janet was the youngest child in a strict home and went wild from her first day on campus. Kerry never met the expectations of his father and resented him for divorcing his mother. Bill was just too cool and too slick, with a schtick for attracting girls and keeping score.

There was domestic violence in Janet and Kerry's marriage but friends who noticed that pattern since college described it as almost foreplay. Admittedly Bill added Janet to his tally and Kerry must have discovered them together and gone beserk. But the main tension and mystery of the book is why he stayed at the scene of the crime for hours, why he had blood splatter patterns more extensively on his clothes, and the biggie -- did the two guys conspire to cover for each other.

This book is sordid, not for any sex or lust, but rated X for violence. Bosco piles up mounds of taped interviews, chapters of opinions from friends, family members and fellow workers. Court testimony is quoted verbatim. Back office discussions from both defense and prosecuting attorneys lay out their plans for presenting their side of the case. No one cracks, no one explains what really happens.

In his introduction, Bosco says he writes to leave it to the reader to decide who is guilty. As hard and inconclusive as that is, I am left thankful that I was not a juror. My steady diet of murder mysteries has trained me to believe that motive will be as apparent as physical clues. And aren't I searching for "motive" anyway this year, reading why people fall and stay in love? There is no mystique in this book, and as a result, Janet, Kerry and Bill are all less than human.

Love With An Agenda

Naomi Harris Rosenblatt's book, After the Apple, is subtitled "Women in the Bible - Timeless Stories of Love, Lust, and Longing. Not.

Rosenblatt, good girl that she is, was brought up on Old Testament stories, longing to find strong women in a document written by men and extolling their role in the history of religion. Sometimes, I feel like she is clutching at straws. Rosenblatt is also a psychotherapist, one who never lets an example of male / female relationships go to waste. Granted Old Testament women are archtype heroines and there is nothing in their stories that is not repeated daily in today's graphic newspaper headlines. But nonetheless, it is quite a stretch of the imagination to conclude these women are lusty.

The women Rosenblatt writes about excel in verbal skills rather than in the art of seduction. They are advocates for their children's birthrights and for their place in history. They are vessels to pass along the religious DNA.

Sure Rosenblatt describes more interesting deviant, that is non-Jewish, women like the Queen of Sheba and Delilah, but one senses that they are merely foils to point out the sexual failings of their male counterparts. To the extent that her more normative women, be they Eve the first rebel or Sarah or Rebecca or Bathsheba, are religious prototypes, they appear less fleshy, women of words not senses.