The Sill of the World

Week in Seven Words #108

2012-03-02T12:13:00.000-05:00

banality
Online dating has been mostly a bore so far. When you meet people in person you experience them as the complex 3D creatures they are, and not as small photos supplemented with the same descriptions over and over - "intelligent, fun-loving, one-of-a-kind" - like personal ads in a Lake Wobegon newspaper.

fulcrum
Time has to be balanced in your mind so that you don't tip too much into the future or sink too frequently into the past.

indurated
In the night my thoughts are cold black diamonds.

reaching
I talk into the phone, knowing that he's there at the other end even though I can't hear him.

second-rate
Sometimes you look back on your week to find that one of your prominent memories involves a pitched battle with a backed-up toilet. Oh well.

slipping
When I'm feeling low about my writing I think of the words as weak magnets sliding down the front of a fridge.

sussing
At the library I spot a DVD Whisperer. He caresses their spines and speaks to each one - "Should I watch you tonight? Or you?" - then cocks his head and listens for the answer.

Worth Watching: Lilies of the Field (1963)

2012-02-29T23:47:00.002-05:00

Title: Lilies of the Field
Director: Ralph Nelson
Language: English
Rating: Unrated

Synopsis
When we first see Homer Smith (Sidney Poitier) driving along a lonely desert road, we don't know where he's coming from or where he's going. He's a drifter, skilled at construction work and apparently without a steady home or job. When his car overheats, he pulls into the closest place where he can get water: a small farm worked by a group of nuns who've come to the US from East Germany. Mother Maria (Lilia Skala), asks Homer (whom she calls "Schmidt" instead of "Smith") to help with some odd jobs on their farm. Homer does so in expectation of getting paid, only to find that instead of giving him money Mother Maria invites him to the nuns' meager meals, offers him a place to stay, and insists that he's an instrument of divine will, sent to build a chapel for the nuns and the parishioners in the surrounding area.

Characters
Homer figures out early on that the nuns aren't going to pay him; they don't have the means, a fact confirmed to Homer by one of the locals, Juan (Stanley Adams), a friendly business-minded man who isn't big on religion. Aside from Mother Maria, who's dignified and reserved, the other nuns - Sisters Agnes, Gertrude, Albertine, and Elizabeth - are like cheerful light-hearted birds, which almost masks the fact that they're living in poverty, barely able to subsist off their plot of land in the southwest US desert. So why does Homer stick around, instead of cutting his losses and driving off? We see at one point that he has the skill and confidence to land himself a job on the spot, so it's not that he can't find work anywhere. In part he stays out of a grudging sympathy for the nuns and a defensiveness on their behalf, which includes defending their choice to appoint him as a "contractor." Maybe he likes the feeling of being a part of the family as well, where he gets to break bread at their table and teach them English.

There's also the mission Mother Maria charges him with. Building the chapel becomes a test of Homer's character. He's drawn to it because it's a chance to become a part of something bigger than himself and also leave something of worth behind him. Poitier's strong performance conveys the struggle that Homer is locked into not only with Mother Maria but also with himself. Building this chapel could potentially tie him down to one spot for years, earn him no money, and burden him with people's expectations, so what's the point? He doesn't want the commitment. On the other hand it can be personally uplifting when other people look to you for help and trust you with something important to them (uplifting and often overwhelming). And Homer strikes me as someone who's rusty, possessing skills he hasn't put to use for years because he hasn't found work that's made real demands of his gifts. Deep inside he's thirsting for that kind of work.

Mother Maria is not terribly concerned about Homer's indecisiveness. She recognizes it, but acts as if it doesn't exist. As far as she's concerned, he'll build that chapel. Mother Maria has her moments of tiredness or relaxed happiness, conveyed with subtle beauty by Lilia Skala, but what comes across most is her force of will. She brought her small group of nuns across the Iron Curtain and all the way to the US. The community they serve now, made up mostly of poor laborers, doesn't have a chapel so a chapel is what she'll build. Lack of money and building materials won't stop her, and neither will Homer's intransigence. Saying 'no' to her is difficult, not because she threatens people but because it's pointless, like telling the wind to stop blowing. At the same time her unremitting faith drives the other nuns, and Homer, to persist and keep working. Together, she and Homer wake up a whole community.

Relationships
As two strong-willed people, Homer and Mother Maria share a kind of kinship even as they clash. What Homer mainly wants from her as the movie goes on is a recognition of himself as an individual. Mother Maria has a strong tendency to see people, including herself, as instruments of a larger divine will. What Homer demands is a more personal recognition.

Memorable sights and sounds
One striking sight is of the five nuns walking along the road in the desert heat to Father Murphy's outdoor services a considerable distance from their farm; they try their best not to show fatigue, especially Mother Maria, who looks like she could survive in the desert by sheer will alone. Father Murphy (Dan Frazer) is the local priest. Burned out and heat-worn, he performs his religious duties without dereliction but also without passion.

The singing in the movie is memorable. The nuns sing a melodious chant that catches at Homer; he drifts closer to listen to them. In turn he starts up a rousing Baptist song, to which they chorus "amen" in response to each line. When the nuns are singing to themselves they pronounce it 'ah-men'; in Homer's song it's 'ay-men.'

I also like the play of emotions on Mother Maria's face during the closing scene as she sits and listens while the other nuns sing obliviously. It's pretty moving.

Stand-out scenes
There are many strong scenes, including some humorous ones - along with the drama of faith, of being chosen and challenged, there's also the comedy of a Baptist drifter surrounded by European nuns.

When Homer hears the nuns trying to improve their English using recordings that were clearly meant for wealthier people ("Please send the valet up to my room") he steps in and starts to teach them some phrases as well, having fun with it; a significant phrase, and one that takes Mother Maria rather a while to utter, is "thank you." At other times Mother Maria and Homer point out different biblical verses to one another in order to communicate.

As for the construction of the chapel, it goes through several stages, reflecting changes in Homer's outlook. In this way the chapel-building takes on a kind of personality and spirit of its own.

Further thoughts
When the chapel is finished, what comes next? Mother Maria looks ahead at everything else that needs to be done. Homer considers the completed work and what's changed (and what hasn't changed enough) as a result. Satisfaction at a job well done doesn't last for long before restlessness kicks in again.

*All images link back to their sources (Wikipedia, Rottentomatoes, and Flixster community).

"When people stop in front of my place, they bring life to me."

2012-02-25T22:14:00.003-05:00

I like this guy. He's got a big heart.

This Is My Home from Mark on Vimeo.

After Googling him I found out he lives in the East Village in Manhattan. I plan to visit him at some point and bring some friends with me.

Week in Seven Words #107

2012-02-24T16:48:00.000-05:00

passive-aggressive
The clerks at the library have sullenness down to an art. They would rather be anywhere than here, scanning your books and DVDs, and they let you know it with every dead-eyed resentful look.

quiescent
On the train he nods off beside me, clutching his backpack to his stomach. He's quiet, asleep, self-contained - a great neighbor for a train ride.

ricocheting
Playing soccer in the corridor, I feel like I'm in a pinball machine, trying to keep the ball from zig-zagging into doorways and slamming off the walls.

spelunker
She can't yet clear the couch, not consistently, so she settles for crawling under it, flattening out and squirming around in the dust, only her hind feet showing us where she is.

squinch
A steel bowl and in it strawberries, and over those, blackberries - the kind of blackberries that will always bring to mind Galway Kinnell's poem "Blackberry Eating" where the berries are so plump, firm and juicy you don't just eat them, you squinch and splurge well on them.

tackling
He reads four books to me, making his way through them with determination. The most daunting one is Green Eggs and Ham - 60 odd pages - but once you've seen 'could' and 'would' a few dozen times you're less likely to trip up on those silent 'L's.

truce
The city is gentle dark and damp after the rain. I'd like to think that bad things can't happen on an evening like this.

Ten questions

2012-02-19T19:59:00.000-05:00

Over at the bookworm blog there are ten questions posed to any reader who wants to answer them.

1. What's your favorite book to film adaptation?
These days, the 1995 version of Persuasion with Amanda Root and Ciaran Hinds, adapted from the Jane Austen novel. (In my thinking here, I'm not including movies that have overshadowed the books they're based on.)

2. What's the last book you read?
Bird by Bird by Ann Lamott. I recommend it, especially if you're struggling, stuck or starting out in writing (come to think of it, when do writers not struggle?). Or read it if you want to laugh; it's both funny and painful. In fact there are many good lessons in it even for people who aren't writers.

3. Describe yourself using just one word.
Wondering.

4. Juice or Soda?
Juice.

5. Do you have any pets?
Not recently. I used to have pet frogs, newts, and fish as a kid. But some people dear to me have just brought a puppy into their home, so I expect I'll be seeing her often and she'll be sort of like a pet to me too. Except I'm not the one paper-training her right now, thankfully.

6. Who is your hero?
At the moment it's Marie Curie: brilliant scientist, innovator, humanitarian, and teacher, and also a wife and mother. She broke ground in many ways, both for humanity as a whole and for women. She was the first scientist to win two Nobel prizes in different disciplines.

7. Give me some blogging advice.
Off the top of my head I can't think of any suggestions; I like your blog as it is. Maybe for people in general - have fun with your blog, instead of seeing it as a ball-and-chain that's dragging you down. If it is, rethink things and change it, or give yourself a break from blogging. It shouldn't bring you misery.

8. When was the last time you laughed out loud?
This morning.

9. If you could travel to any place in the world, where would it be?
I'd like to travel around the US for a few months, do a cross-country trip.

10. If you could meet any author, dead or living, who would it be?
What would you ask them?
George Eliot. I'd want to discuss her books with her, mostly Middlemarch, and hear her thoughts on them.

Edit: Just changed the blog title to reflect the fact that there are ten questions, and that I can in fact count.

Week in Seven Words #106

2012-02-19T18:30:00.000-05:00

bewilderment
Of all the emotions I read in the puppy's eyes (or read into them), bewilderment is most prominent. Why doesn't she get to piddle on the floor and run around wherever she wants and chew on the DVD player? Why do her keepers alternate between belly rubs and scoldings?

chafing
Some of them yield to a lack of responsibility, the close of their life where they can be tended to and spend their time drawing, watching videos, or staring out of windows. Others bristle, even gently, against the activities suggested to them. They shrink away or turn stony when someone addresses them in a patronizing babying voice. Their body or mind might be turning on them, and there might be no one left who bothers to visit, but they aren't going to settle happily before a pile of coloring pages and play with crayons.

chirography
I don't know what he's writing about, as he sits in the subway car with a notebook propped on his knee, but his hand-writing is beautiful. I hope the words are beautiful too. I think he could make art of a grocery list with his languid looping script.

heartfelt
Because she can't see so well, she dictates the Valentine to me, a week before Valentine's Day. I write her words out on a red, purple and pink construction paper heart, and I wonder if the person she's writing to is real, or still alive and living at the address she remembers. She has a great memory for addresses. Her words are straightforward - "thank you for visiting me, I'm sorry I couldn't see you at the time" - and I hope this person is real and that the Valentine arrives at the right place.

landmarks
An empty bandshell, the grand avenue of elms, an angel in a dead fountain. The bridge I cross shows up in sharp reflection on cloudy water.

promise
I hope to be worthy of the risks I'm taking.

ruction
Geese and ducks struggle over crumbs from bread and muffins. Two of the ducks whirl in a circle of combat on the water, a taut coil of movement, until one of them breaks free and skips away like a stone across the surface of the lake.

Visual DNA Personality Test

2012-02-13T10:42:00.002-05:00

You answer each question by choosing an image. What I like is that sometimes you can't fully articulate why you're choosing it, only that it stirs up certain associations or represents a hope or longing. Whoever made this test was thoughtful about the image choices presented.

Here's the test, if you're interested. It's fun too and gives you a decent write-up in the results. The overarching label I got was 'Seeker,' which by the description was quite accurate.

Week in Seven Words #105

2012-02-10T16:20:00.000-05:00

coding
The online coding tutorial rewards you with a blue check mark on every exercise you successfully complete, and it's a good feeling to see one surface on the page, a sense of progress and mastery, even if you later realize that you have to go back to those old exercises because you've forgotten something important about the correct placement of semi-colons and the script you're trying to write isn't working anymore.

freeing
I like brainstorming on the train. The rocking motion seems to loosen things up in the mind.

impregnable
The blue doors on the school are like portals in a fortress, admitting no one. I expect that at any moment a sphinx will alight on the steps and demand an answer to a riddle in exchange for entrance.

marigold
The Shakespeare Garden is quietly alive in the winter sunlight. And on a plaque I find this passage from The Winter's Tale:
The marigold, that goes to bed wi' the sun
And with him rises weeping...
The marigold flowers are nowhere in sight; only the promise of them.

relaxed
Boats drifting by on the river. I don't need to know where they're going.

unruffled
Ducks and seagulls are scattered across the lake. When they take wing the water hardly stirs.

whimsies
Two of my favorite things are Thing 1 and Thing 2 from The Cat in the Hat.

Urban trees

2012-02-08T20:44:00.002-05:00

It's no secret that I love trees. My little blogger photo is a tree, and I've posted photos of them before. Now I have an excuse to post more. This past day was Tu B'Shevat, a Jewish holiday also called the "New Year of Trees." One custom to commemorate the day is to plant trees; another is to sample fruits and grains from the Seven Species.

So here are a few tree photos set in cities, where trees are needed keenly for the life and character they bring to any kind of neighborhood.

Week in Seven Words #104

2012-02-06T21:00:00.000-05:00

bingo
During a bingo game at an assisted living center for seniors I'm reminded of junior high. Several participants are warm and easy going, but some huddle together and make pointed comments about people at other tables. They play where they've just eaten lunch, in what looks like a school cafeteria. And they compete for prizes of chocolate and deodorant.

desiderate
At the bus stop there's snow and biting wind, a long view of the street and no bus in sight.

extras
An Angus Deluxe at McDonald's with its side of fries and accompanying soft drink is a luxury meal to her.

glitter
We take turns coloring the snake in, stripe by stripe, before she douses it in liquid glitter to give it a golden sheen.

mephitic
A heavy smell of rot in the subway station - dank coats, garbage on the lines, deposits of black grit on the pipes overhead.

recognition
I'm glad I'm reading this, to laugh, think and be encouraged.

self-conscious
At the group interview the candidates glance around awkwardly, both commiserating and competing with each other.

Good Short Fiction: Two tales from The Oxford Book of American Short Stories

2012-01-31T19:30:00.000-05:00

Collection: The Oxford Book of American Short Stories
Editor: Joyce Carol Oates

Title: The Middle Years
Author: Henry James
What many people want is more time to devote to their calling in life. In "The Middle Years" Dencombe is a novelist who has moved to the seaside to try to revive his failing health. As he looks over his latest novel he realizes that he's reached the full flowering of his talents only now, at a point in his life when he's too ill to work. When he was younger and healthier he wasted years and made many mistakes as he slowly learned to write well:

It had taken too much of his life to produce too little of his art. The art had come, but it had come after everything else. At such a rate a first existence was too short - long enough only to collect material; so that to fructify, to use the material, one should have a second age, an extension.

In the course of the story Dencombe is befriended by the young and optimistic Dr. Hugh, the personal doctor of a countess who has also come to the seaside to convalesce. The part of the story involving the countess and her female companion, a pianist, seemed flat compared to Dencombe's musings about art and life and his connection with the doctor. The doctor's companionship gives Dencombe an opportunity to share some wisdom, confide his doubts, and maybe even experience some hope - not necessarily the hope that he'll live much longer, but the thought that maybe he really did do what he could with his life. The best parts of the story are marked with that painful mix of triumph and futility that's so much a part of what makes people beautiful.

"A second chance - that's the delusion. There never was to be but one. We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art."

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Title: Sweat
Author: Zora Neale Hurston
Delia Jones, a pious washerwoman living in the segregated South, has survived years of marriage to the brutal and ultimately pitiful Sykes, who has recently taken up with another woman. Although it's gotten to the point where she can better stand up for herself against his physical abuse, she'll now have to resist his attempts to kick her out of their home, which she paid for through her own labor - doing laundry for white people. Sykes tries to end this battle of wills by bringing home a snake, which he keeps in a box as a pet; Delia is terrified of snakes, but digs her heels in harder and refuses to leave.

Sweat has a pressure cooker atmosphere, heat and tension rising; you know the snake isn't going to stay confined, not for long - and Sykes may have set himself up to fall on his own sword. One of the strongest points to this story is Delia's endurance. Suffering has toughened her but hasn't made her brutal or spiritually brittle; she has become stubborn, intent, grateful for small joys, and hopeful of better things to come. She believes in the dignity of her hard work; Sykes is likely resentful of her job, as he relies on the income, but for Delia it has at least and bolstered her self-respect and allowed her some measure of security. Delia isn't a saint; she's just as strong as she can be, repeatedly tested. And Sykes isn't a one-dimensional monster. He's brutish and evil, but he's human too, which makes his circumstances, choices and the sum of his life all the more sad and horrible. At the end, he and Delia share one look of mutual knowledge; there's a little bit of Sykes in Delia, and a little bit of Delia in Sykes.

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This post has been linked to on Short Stories on Wednesday #29 at the Breadcrumb Reads blog.

Worth Watching: Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987)

2012-01-30T20:30:00.000-05:00

Title: Planes, Trains and Automobiles
Director: John Hughes
Language: English
Rating: R (because of the f-word monologue)

Synopsis
A couple of days before Thanksgiving, Neal Page (Steve Martin) is wrapping up a tedious business meeting in New York City and plans to fly home to Chicago right after. When he leaves the meeting to rush to the airport, he doesn't expect the stressful convoluted journey that follows: a snow storm diverting his flight from Chicago to Wichita, and from there a scramble to get to Chicago via train, bus and car, in the company of a cheerful blabber-mouthed shower curtain ring salesman, Del Griffith (John Candy), who makes it his personal mission to get Neal home in time for Thanksgiving dinner.

Characters
This is a good buddy film and road trip movie, because it's funny, because Steve Martin and John Candy are wonderful here (the best I've seen them), and because the movie has surprising moments of depth and sadness. Beneath the humor there's sometimes a good amount of pain, and you don't expect it in a movie like this. The characters have humanity.

Del blabs on and on, leaves a mess behind him and laughs at corny jokes. He's big-hearted and friendly, has a large body, lugs a heavy trunk around - a big guy in a number of ways. You can't not notice him. He strikes me as someone who's grateful for any good company or bit of friendliness that comes his way. Happy with little pleasures. And when he's hurt his eyes show the pain and wounded defiance. He's expansive when it comes to laughter and conversation (or one-sided chatter) but when he's hurt he handles his feelings with restraint, with a bruised dignity.

It isn't surprising that Neal hurts Del a few times during the movie. Neal is fastidious and reserved, jealous of his personal space. To be thrown into close quarters with a loud messy stranger while his travel plans fall apart is painful for him. He tends to seethe and wince for a while and then snap, hitting at Del or at others with pointed sarcastic insults. But just as Del can be both annoying and lovable, Neal can be "a cold-hearted cynic" (as Del puts it) without coming across as really hateful; inside he's just tired and wants to get home to his wife and kids.

Relationships
From Del, Neal learns to lighten up a little and be more compassionate to others. From Neal, Del learns... it's hard to say. I guess he realizes at one point, sitting in a burned out shell of a car on a snowy night, that he could try to shut up from time to time. Because Neal is the more finicky character, the one who lacks the common touch, his subtle and gradual change of heart is the real focus of the movie.

Del is his friend, whether Neal likes it or not, and most of the time he really doesn't like it; for much of the movie he goes along with Del out of desperation, because he wants to get home. So that's Del's job: to bring him home, and to wear him down while also unintentionally showing him how to be a better person. And they do have some lovely moments of bonding.

Memorable sights and sounds
Owen. Owen wins for memorable sights and sounds. He's a minor character but he looms large in the mind and senses. The way he says "Stubbville." The way he snorts - not a long loud snort, but a little hog noise that makes his unsmiling face contort. And the look on Neal and Del's faces as they take him in, sort of marveling at him and at the circumstances that have brought him into their lives.

Then there's one of my favorite moments in the film: John Candy doing the Mess Around. It's night. Del is driving while Neal sleeps in the passenger seat. And suddenly Ray Charles is on the radio. This is a beautiful moment, because Del is shimmying and bopping his head and puffing on a cigarette as he pretends to play the piano on the dashboard. John Candy, you are missed.

Stand-out scenes
There are a number of little lines and scenes that jump out. Some of the lines don't sound like much when you aren't familiar with the movie. For instance, "you're going the wrong way." But the "you're going the wrong way" scene is a great example of how the filmmakers and actors took what could have been a conventional scenario in a road trip movie and turned it into something unique and funny.

The same can be said for Neal's f-word monologue. It isn't just about the f-word and its gratuitous use. The lines are delivered with exquisite timing and emphasis (Steve Martin I suspect had a lot of fun with this scene). For reasons that I'll leave you to discover, Neal has sort of lost it. Broken down a little from the stress and frustration. But he doesn't rave at people. He still has a certain composure. He can explain himself reasonably well. On the receiving end of his monologue is a woman who works at a car rental agency. She has sweet plump cheeks and a hint of poison in her smile. And the final word belongs to her. (She's played by Edie McClurg, who's also the school secretary in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.) One of the things I like about this movie is that as far as I can remember Neal never gets away with being insulting or rude to anyone; there are always consequences for him, or some sort of sharp wake-up call.

Finally when talking about stand-out scenes I have to mention the part where Neal and Del reach Chicago. It gets to me every time.

Further thoughts
One of the reasons I'm fond of this movie is because I grew up with it. This might have been the first R-rated film I watched (except for some of the language most of the film is pretty tame, especially by today's standards). I've lost count of how many times I've watched it or parts of it over the years, usually around Thanksgiving. It's a kind of comfort movie for me.

*All images link back to their source (Rottentomatoes)

Site with free programming lessons

2012-01-28T23:15:00.000-05:00

I found what looks like an awesome site, Code Year, that will teach you computer programming by sending you a free lesson every Monday. The first few lessons of the year are up on the website for anyone (like me) who didn't discover this at the start of the year. I'm excited about this, because I was planning to develop my computer skills this year beyond what I know of Microsoft Office, a handful of statistics programs, and basic html.

A guest among gorillas

2012-01-26T12:20:00.002-05:00

Fewer than one thousand wild mountain gorillas are left in the world. About two and a half minutes into this video, there's an awesome encounter between a man and a small group of these gorillas. There are some moments of tension initially, especially before the large one settles down (notice how the man is keeping his head down at first and also making sure to avoid eye contact, which can be a sign of aggressive intent), but mostly it's an experience of joy and wonder. I love how they settle around, sniff him out, groom him a bit. He's a novelty, but non-threatening and vaguely similar to them so he remains welcomed, fortunately for him.

Week in Seven Words #103

2012-01-26T10:00:00.000-05:00

bibliophilic
The takeout sushi and blaring battery-powered car have distracted him for long enough. He crawls to the bookcase in the corner of the room and uses a shelf to pull himself up and stand before it. We think it's wonderful that he's interested in books at his tender preliterate age, and when he starts to scratch the spines of the books, up and down, it looks like he's trying to break through them to get to the good stuff inside. One of his older siblings tells us that he likes scratching them because of the funny sounds they make, a raspy choir of book spines; we shouldn't start calling him a scholar yet. But maybe that's how a kid starts loving books, because of the weird sounds and sensations, the look and feel of them.

concealing
Snow coming down like curtains around the world.

inspired
He tells me what he needs for inspiration. It isn't the recreation room with its tables full of old folks bent over pieces of paper. It isn't the ballet playing on the large T.V. in the corner, though he watches it from time to time with a far-off look in his eye, Romeo locked in dance with Juliet to the music of Prokofiev. What he needs is a room with a piano and sunlight and peaceful solitude.

phlebotomy
I stare out the window and pretend that the lab technician is not currently rooting around in the crook of my elbow trying to coax blood out of my vein.

propel
Blow up a balloon and pinch the end shut between your fingers. Then tape it to a straw. Slip the straw onto a wire or long piece of string, and tie the wire/string between two chairs or the walls of a room. Release the balloon. As the air flows out, the balloon-straw contraption rockets forward. Most of the time. Sometimes the balloon makes a horrible whining noise and deflates in agony without moving.

reconstructive
On Martin Luther King Day there's a sing-a-long at the nursing home. The pianist and singer, who isn't much younger than the residents, grew up in the segregated South. The audience, mostly wheelchair-bound and living in different states of lucidity and coherence, were a part of that era too; it's likely that there are civil rights protesters and activists among them, and people who went to hear King speak. Some of them remember, and for others this is a pleasant interlude of songs unconnected to anything past or future. But often they know the words; the words and melodies and sentiments of old beloved songs stay with them even when other things crumble.

subterrane
People expect cutesyness from young kids. They want to imagine that a first or second grader for instance doesn't have any serious fears or frighteningly complicated thoughts. Probably because as adults we often can't handle those kinds of thoughts well ourselves, and we hope that children won't demand more of us than the regular pat reassurances.

Extracts: Love and growth in Journal of a Solitude

2012-01-20T12:00:00.000-05:00

Growth is demanding and may seem dangerous, for there is loss as well as gain in growth. But why go on living if one has ceased to grow? And what more demanding atmosphere for growth than love in any form, than any relationship which can call out and requires of us our most secret and deepest selves? - from Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton

Good Short Fiction: Two tales from 50 Great American Short Stories

2012-01-18T13:30:00.000-05:00

Collection: 50 Great American Short Stories
Editor: Milton Crane

Title: The Girls in their Summer Dresses
Author: Irwin Shaw
This story is like a hard piece of candy. It seems bright and sweet at first but when you crack into it you find out it's surprisingly brittle and hollow in the center.

A husband and wife take a stroll down 5th Avenue. They've decided to spend the day together instead of meeting up with friends. It's meant to be an intimate time for them, but the husband keeps looking at other women with a gleam in his eye that his wife recognizes from when he first laid eyes on her over five years ago.

What follows is a conversation that exposes and widens the distance between them, the thinness of their intimacy. The husband (who at some points reminds me of a kid in a candy store) tries to be easygoing throughout, and says quietly devastating things in a reassuring voice, as if that will soften the blow.

And I can imagine what the wife is thinking. Not only the question that's voiced - whether looking and coveting will ever lead to adultery - but also the question of why he married her to begin with. If he looks at other women the same way, what makes her special? It's never clear why he married her specifically; she has a number of good qualities, but are they sufficient for him? And if he sees some of the same qualities in other women, or if those women are just as intriguing in their own way, where does that leave her? When he says, "I love you," on what level does he mean it? At one point she says, desperate, "I've made a good wife, a good housekeeper, a good friend. I'd do any damn thing for you." He tells her that he knows; he clasps her hand in his. But he can't tell her what she hopes to hear, not without lying.

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Title: A New England Nun
Author: Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
Louisa Ellis and Joe Dagget are engaged but haven't seen each other for years. Joe has been working abroad; Louisa has lived alone. When he returns it's clear that they've grown apart; they behave like kindly acquaintances. What's more, Louisa has carved out a life for herself. Her house may be small, but it's hers. She has her own little garden, and a large dog that has a fearsome reputation in the village. Inside her home everything has its place, and she lives in peace.

Freeman writes about rooms, interiors, and personal space like no author I've come across yet. This is where her characters really come alive: in privacy, living quietly beyond the notice of other people. Her descriptions of 19th century New England village life and the countryside are also lovely.

Louisa could sew linen seams, and distil roses, and dust and polish and fold away in lavender, as long as she listed. That afternoon she sat with her needlework at the window, and felt fairly steeped in peace.

When Joe visits Louisa's house he feels out of place, a bull in a china shop. And by marrying him she knows she'll have to give up her home and move in with him and his mother. The fact that she has independent means of her own, however modest, gives her more of a choice of how to live her life. Both she and Joe are honorable enough to keep their promises to each other, even if their hearts aren't in it; they would still get along tolerably well. She also senses that this will be her last chance to get married, and that if she asked almost anyone they would say that she should. But who can understand, as she does, the pleasures and blessings of her calm, solitary domain?

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Other stories from this collection include The Blue-Winged Teal (by Wallace Stegner) and The National Pastime (by John Cheever)

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A New England Nun also appears in Great American Short Stories: From Hawthorne to Hemingway

Week in Seven Words #102

2012-01-17T12:06:00.004-05:00

carpus
I'm pointed to Clockwords: Prelude, a game where the object is to quickly type words with certain designated letters, so that the letters can be shot at mechanical spiders who are out to steal secrets from your laboratory. As in Scrabble, the letters have different values, and can be further imbued with special powers, like the ability to explode and take out more spiders, who make a pulpy sound when hit. The game is amusing, and carpal-tunnel-syndrome-inducing. Mentally challenging, but a little depressing too (will I waste my words on spiders? Wear out my fingers and wrists for this?).

dreich
Stumping around outside on a cold soggy dreich day where the trees look like stale gray vegetables found in the bottom of a fridge drawer.

laryngitis
Feels like rock and gravel are getting scraped away from my throat so that my voice will eventually find its way out.

mouth-watering
A small lump of warm bread pudding with cinnamon and raisins, dissolving around my fork.

no
As a toddler he hears it all the time - no, don't dismantle the phone; no, don't put your sneakers on the cushions; no, don't wander off with strangers. No.

optimism
One of the first books I'm reading this year is a collection of dystopian short fiction.

rumination
I love how we take the stories apart, studying and discussing them. What's best is when we raise questions the author hadn't consciously asked but wove in while getting to know the characters and living through their struggles.

The beauty of fire escapes

2012-01-09T19:41:00.000-05:00

Week in Seven Words #101

2012-01-08T19:10:00.000-05:00

anamnesis
This past fall I visited the 9/11 Memorial in New York City; where each tower stood, water spills for thirty feet into a pool and then descends into a dark square hole that looks like the mouth of an abyss. I think of the memorial as I walk in Times Square, where the city doesn't seem to have a past, but exists only in the colorful flashy present.

bird's-eye
High Line Park in NYC was built on a long section of elevated train tracks, now half-buried in long yellow grasses and shrubs. There are many interesting perspectives from the park: streets flowing across the city, the Hudson River bearing its freight, a view of slanting roofs, balconies and elevated patios, the Empire State Building peeking over a swarm of apartment buildings.

coasting
New Year's Eve: a fun movie, some intense video games, and a couple of hours of ~~noise~~ music made more bearable by the vodka cranberry I've been nursing since half past eight.

daredevils
Balloons tumble down East Houston Street between the wheels of buses and cars.

glaciate
A cold unyielding wind that numbs my jaw.

shifting
The street is full of bright signs with Chinese characters and tiny restaurants accessed via basement stairs, a center for Buddhism and red banners everywhere, and then suddenly you find an old splendid synagogue rising into a blue sky.

splashy
It's a day for walking and peeking into shop windows along the way. Mannequins in glittering dresses are on display, flowers entwined around reflections of the street outside, earrings and brooches in neat rows, stacked cups in different rainbow colors.

Week in Seven Words #100

2012-01-08T19:09:00.000-05:00

chocolatier
Tempting chocolate truffles in a golden box.

coordination
Group photo: fitting thirteen people on and in front of a sofa, then programming the camera's self-timer. The first couple of times nothing happens, and we sit there smiling at the camera as it stares back at us with its glossy black eye. On the third try the person adjusting the camera gets it to work but doesn't arrive back at the sofa on time, so the photo shows her from behind as she tries to dive back in next to her husband. Finally it works. After a moment's hush we cheer, and the sudden noise makes the baby startle and burst into tears.

glee
He's beaming as he rocks back and forth on the large green plastic rocking horse; it's a hand-me-down from older siblings who now sit beside him clapping and singing "Yankee Doodle Went to Town" to make him go more quickly.

invitation
Settled on a cluster of rocks by the lake, an elderly woman scatters crumbs around her and calmly greets the wheeling gulls.

perpetuity
A display at the train station shows an old-fashioned village where lights glow from little homes, happy figurines have snowball fights or glide among the evergreens on sleds, and a train travels round and round it all on a looping track. The display draws people who smile and pause to lean over it. They tip themselves for a moment into the village where everything is repeating, moving without going anywhere; no progress and no end, and for a few seconds, peace.

unplanned
There are joys planned out for them: food brought from the outside and musicians who do their best to sing beloved old songs. There are also moments of spontaneous joy that feel more real and lasting even though they're over quickly - as the party winds down they bat a balloon around; it glances off their fingers and stays airborne for a few happy minutes.

unseasonal
It's winter but feels like autumn. Turtle Pond looks like a sheet soaked in deep blue ink, and beyond it the Great Lawn is green and gold. The shadows of trees stretch out on the grass as if they're taking a leisurely nap.

Coughing Through Shostakovich

2012-01-02T09:29:00.003-05:00

One of my short stories, "Coughing Through Shostakovich," has been published in Subtle Fiction and can be found here.

Several pieces of music crop up in the piece, including this one by Tchaikovsky (here it's performed by Eugene Ugorski on violin and Konstantin Lifschitz on piano; in the short story it's the main character playing it solo on violin):

11 things I (re)learned in 2011

2011-12-30T16:15:00.000-05:00

1) You can only fool yourself for so long.

Any part of your life feel like a sham? Answer that question honestly. You can't hide behind a job title or among other people. The turmoil and falseness will tear you apart inside, and cracks will form on the surface. It's best to have a reckoning with yourself, no matter how painful. What abilities, relationships and personal traits have you left untended? What fears and pains did you ignore as they festered? Did you manage to do some good? What don't you regret? And what comes next?

2) Don't expect too much from others.

I almost wrote this as "don’t expect much of anyone," but it sounded like a bit of grumbling misanthropy, which isn't my intention. What I mean is that people don't owe you things - not love or success or approval - and they're not to be confronted with a feeling of entitlement or burdened with too many lofty expectations. There might be people in your life who are generally much better than others at understanding you and treating you with love, care and generosity of spirit, but they're still human, and they can't read minds. This isn't about accepting bad treatment from others; it's about seeing them as they are and not putting unreasonable burdens on them. With an attitude of not expecting too much you're more likely to receive good things with gratitude instead of taking them for granted. And if you're in a bad situation or the target of toxic behavior you might be able to deal with it more effectively instead of spending a lot of time railing at everyone and everything about the unfairness of it all.

3) Demand the best of yourself

By"the best" I don't mean someone else's best or a set of superhuman expectations that you will either never try to live up to or will inevitably fall far short of if you do try, resulting in shame, guilt, inertia, melancholy, and perhaps an eensy bit of satisfaction that you managed to sabotage yourself so nicely. Don't set up your life so that you're spending most of your time licking your wounds and feeling sorry for yourself. What do you love and hope for? What do you want to give to the world? How do you want to improve? Set goals, plan out the steps you'll need to take towards them, and expect that if you mess up or if things don't go your way, you'll pick yourself up, reassess, learn and keep going. Over and over.

4) You can't demand the best of yourself without being able to forgive yourself

A lack of forgiveness suggests little hope and faith. Under these circumstances it's much harder to work well, live well, and see your own efforts as worthwhile because you're not really focused on the future (or on the present) anyway. It's also much harder to avoid similar mistakes or poor choices in the future and to repair past wrongs, because you feel that your efforts will be useless. Guilt and regret are meant to prod you towards meaningful change; they aren't signs that everything you do is futile and that there's no hope for you. Don't be so hard on yourself. Pining for inhuman perfection will keep you from being productive, loving, and engaged with life.

5) Figure out why you're procrastinating

It's not always easy to identify 'wasted time,' because 'wasted time' can give you inspired ideas and necessary relaxation. Or it can wear you down and make you miss opportunities. It's also a matter of attitude: you look at what you did yesterday or the day before, and you may see something good in it, some potential, or just dismiss it out of hand as lost time. Either way it's not coming back. Often it's a gut feeling: you know you're wasting time and putting off the important things, but you can't seem to stop procrastinating. Why? Ask yourself what it is you're afraid of or what you hope to avoid. Are you setting yourself up to fail? Maybe you think the work is fundamentally worthless or pointless; you can't think of a meaningful purpose for it. Maybe you want to keep things exactly as they are and not face any surprises. In any case, really think about why it is you're procrastinating (sincerely think about it, and don't just use it as yet another exercise in pointless procrastination).

6) An all-or-nothing attitude is counterproductive

One way to hold back from doing anything meaningful is by telling yourself that you won't bring about a perfect outcome or solution. Either you want everything "just right" (whatever that means), or it's not worth doing at all: another example of superhuman expectations. With that attitude there wouldn't be civilization. No society can prevent or justly punish all crimes; does this mean we should stop writing and enforcing laws and stop fighting to redress judicial wrongs? Contributing to a charity won't prevent or stop every instance of hunger or sickness or pain in the world, but could it improve the life of at least one person? An all-or-nothing attitude is an excuse not to work towards anything worthwhile for yourself and others.

7) Instability is a fundamental part of life

Circumstances are always changing. You're changing. Life is fragile. Living involves a series of adjustments, sometimes minute, other times huge and staggering. If you pretend otherwise you will stagnate and be blindsided by circumstance. There's a lifelong struggle for balance as you deal with all the shifts around you and in you. You want to have a steady sense of self, a steady purpose, without being too inflexible or too changeable.

8) There's no escaping from yourself

So don't be passive about your life. And don't let others tell you what you should be; they're not the ones who will live every second of every day with the results of those choices. Hear other people out, learn from them, value meaningful criticism, but ultimately make your own choices. Words of approval and acceptance can feel like everything but they aren't, especially if they come from people who want you to compromise yourself. They might have the best intentions. They might think their advice will spare you from future pain and disappointment. Their good intentions might also be mixed up with (or superseded entirely by) other motives: the need to control you, the need to live through you, etc. If you're not what they want you to be then you become difficult and unmanageable.

9) Being kind is undervalued

It's seen as a weakness, or as a trait to develop in yourself if you aren't clever, good-looking, young, or rich. There's a misconception that it's easy to be kind, because anyone can do kind things. And it's true; anyone can. But it's not always easy. Not when you're having a bad day, when your temper is foul or when you're frustrated and other people are right there as perfect targets for your anger. It's not easy when you're feeling short-changed and bitter, or when the people you're kind to respond rudely or ignore your efforts. Part of being truly kind is also discerning the individual needs of different people, as opposed to pushing the same kind of charity or help on everyone regardless of who they are and what they really want or need; this can be very difficult to do well (and under some circumstances almost impossible).

10) Have patience

You will rarely get immediate results. You will rarely get the exact results you expect.

11) "Success is not final, failure is not fatal; it is the courage to continue that counts."

You said it, Churchill.

Be well, and have a great new year.

Week in Seven Words #99

2011-12-30T15:56:00.001-05:00

destination

Near the athletic complex I walk through a network of trails and elevated walkways without being sure where I'll wind up: on the main street or on a lonely embankment by the river.

diametric

Two people in stark contrast: one of them doesn't say outright that he cares but shows it, while the other one proclaims in a smooth, affected voice that he cares (really really cares) but gives little evidence of it in his actions.

finality

The last of my old office is cleaned out. I close the door behind me and look back only once.

mapping

I carry a notebook with me because I never know when I might see my way through a dead end in the plot.

mild

Lunch at the park on a stone ledge with the sunlight sinking in between the trees; I can't think of a December where I was able to eat comfortably outdoors.

striving

I watch a movie to relax a little and celebrate, and as it turns out some of the themes are fitting for the day: people strive, accomplish, and move on. They don't rest on their laurels.

wedded

Two candles on the menorah tip towards each other and share a flame.

Worth Watching: Pillow Talk (1959)

2011-12-27T21:06:00.000-05:00

Title: Pillow Talk
Director: Michael Gordon
Language: English
Rating: Unrated

Synopsis
Jan Morrow (Doris Day) is an interior decorator who leads an uncomplicated life fending off the advances of a friend and client, Jonathan Forbes (Tony Randall), and preparing hangover remedies for her maid, Alma (Thelma Ritter). The one disturbance in her life is that she doesn't have a private phone line in her home but has to share a party line with a man she's never laid eyes on before: Brad Allen (Rock Hudson), a songwriter who holds up the line sweet-talking a succession of women. Jan and Brad bicker over the phone, with Brad initially writing her off as a prude with bedroom problems, but when he realizes who she is and what she looks like he decides to seduce her. Figuring that she'd reject him out of hand if he reveals his true identity, he masks his voice with what's supposed to be a Texan accent and introduces himself as Rex Stetson. One thing leads to another, the truth comes to light, the lothario loses his heart, and Jan gets her revenge as only an interior decorator can.

Characters
Rock Hudson's character annoyed me for most of the film with his fake Texan accent and relentless dishonesty, and by the time he gets around to humbling himself a little I still didn't like him all that much. At least he's lovely to look at and seemed to have fun with his part.

Doris Day plays Jan as a sharp self-possessed woman with a warm smile. It's not often that she falls in love but when she does her feet get knocked out from under her. Day delivers her witty lines crisply, and she's overall a delightful leading lady.

But the film is worth watching most for Tony Randall and Thelma Ritter. Randall gets good screen time as Jonathan Forbes, not only because he's trying to woo Jan but because he's also Brad Allen's best friend. Jonathan is sly, neurotic, rich, and in his own way quite honest about himself; the film gives him some terrific lines, and he fills the screen with a simmering manic energy. He's the kind of guy who courts a woman by telling her that his previous three marriages "were just a revolt against my mother" and reacts to his best friend's dishonesty by saying: "I should have listened to my psychiatrist; he told me never to trust anyone but him!"

Then there's Thelma Ritter as Jan's maid, Alma, who reports to work each morning with a hangover (telling the elevator man, after a ride up to her employer's apartment, "you don't have to break the sound barrier"). Even when she's woozy Alma can still see things pretty clearly; she's straightforward, straight-talking, and likes her drinks neat. I looked forward to Ritter's appearances in the film, just as I did with Randall. At some point I was even hoping for a bizarre twist where Alma and Jonathan decide to get hitched, with Alma mothering him and Jonathan keeping her supplied with quality liquor.

Relationships
You know Jan and Brad will get together at the end; even their names sound similar. Enough said about them. I thought Jonathan and Brad's friendship was a treat. It's fun to have a friend like Jonathan; he doesn't stay mad at you, and when he's cackling over your downfall he's still courteous enough to fix you a drink. As for him and Jan, they may have no romantic chemistry, but their banter can be really sweet and funny.

Memorable sights and sounds
Jan is a snappy dresser. Snappy clothes, snappy dialogue, sharp colors, and a classy Doris Day.

There's also a memorable interior decorating job towards the end.

Stand-out scenes
At one point Brad figures that in order to win over Jan, he'll need to get to her through Alma. He doesn't count on Alma drinking him under the table.

Another good scene features Perry Blackwell, a pianist and singer, performing at a club. She sings "Roly Poly" with Doris Day (which got stuck in my head), and a couple of other songs including one that takes a sly jab at Brad and his lying.

Further thoughts
If this movie were a drink it would be a strawberry kiwi daiquiri with a little turquoise umbrella sticking out the top.

*All images link back to their sources (Rotten Tomatoes and Virtual History).

Worth Watching: The Defiant Ones (1958)

2011-12-22T21:57:00.000-05:00

Title: The Defiant Ones
Director: Stanley Kramer
Language: English
Rating: PG

Synopsis
'Joker' Jackson (Tony Curtis) and Noah Cullen (Sidney Poitier) are both serving time in a chain gang in the southern US. When a van transporting them crashes on a rainy night they take the opportunity to escape. The problem is they're chained to one another, a highly unusual circumstance in the segregated South. In order to outpace their pursuers and survive they're forced to tone down their mutual animosity and work together. As they struggle through forests and swamps and narrowly escape a lynch mob, a bond slowly forms between them which is tested when they reach a farm run by a lonely woman (Cara Williams) who seems to offer them their first real shot at freedom.

Characters
Brilliant acting from both Curtis and Poitier. Curtis plays 'Joker' Jackson as a man with a giant chip on his shoulder. He feels he's always been short-changed in life and never became anyone important; even the crime he's serving time for was a petty theft, nothing memorable and bold. Jackson's face often twists up as he thinks about all the things he wants in life that remain out of reach. As for Cullen, he knows all too well what that's like, and unlike Jackson he doesn't have a chance at real upward mobility; as a black man in the segregated South he's been told from an early age that he has to just grin and bear it. "Be nice," he mutters at one point, mimicking people who have given him well-meaning advice. "Be nice."

Poitier plays Noah Cullen as reflective, coolly defiant and principled, with anger simmering inside him. He's not one to shy away from confrontation. He was put in the chain gang for assault, and he doesn't let Jackson talk down to him or get away with racist insults. Because that's one of Jackson's few consolations - poor as he is, he can try to claim superiority to Cullen. But Cullen fights back, physically and verbally. At the same time there are moments even early on when he treats Jackson with a tired sympathy, an understanding of Jackson's festering disappointments. And Jackson himself, when he can push aside his bitterness, shows concern and a troubled conscience, especially as the film unfolds.

The well-written dialogue and the performances turned in by Curtis and Poitier would have been enough to make this a strong film, but there are a couple of memorable supporting characters who also add to its richness. One of them is Sheriff Max Muller (Theodore Bikel) who's in charge of the search party pursuing the escaped convicts. Instead of making him a stereotypically ruthless and relentless hunting machine, the filmmakers wrote him as a decent guy who balances justice with mercy. He prefers to have the convicts back alive and not as bullet-ridden or dog-bitten carcasses. At several points he needs to persuade some of his colleagues to use restraint.

And then there's the lonely woman on the farm (Cara Williams). I'll call her Lonely Woman (like the song sung by Sarah Vaughan) because it seems the filmmakers didn't give her a name, though oddly enough they named her young son Billy (Kevin Coughlin) even though his part is smaller. Lonely Woman is lonely because her husband abandoned her and Billy, and there's no one around for miles; her farm is relatively isolated, making it ideal for two convicts to spend the night. Though one of the primary purposes of her character is to show how Jackson has changed in the course of the film, she's an interesting person in her own right. When a couple of chained convicts turn up at her home she takes it in stride. She's watchful, cautious, with a sharp eye for opportunity. Like Jackson she's desperate to see the world and leave her current life behind her.

Relationships
I like how Jackson and Cullen confront one another repeatedly in this film, not just in angry and violent conflict but also in conversation; their speech is more intense than their physical fights, especially when they're reminiscing or assessing their lives. Jackson can't keep on ignoring Cullen's humanity. By the end of the film he'll be placed in a position where he'll have to decide what's worth more: his own freedom or Cullen's life.

As for Lonely Woman, she and Jackson are kindred spirits. Had Jackson met her at the start of the film her racist attitude towards Cullen wouldn't have given him pause, but by the time he stumbles into her farmhouse he's grown in understanding, while she's had no similar opportunity. Their brief connection is nonetheless powerful, and I admire Tony Curtis and Cara Williams for the way they let their characters' attraction simmer through long speculative glances across the kitchen - and then later in a soul-baring conversation in the dark, their faces full of yearning.

Memorable sights and sounds
Cullen's singing, especially at the end of the film. He sings because he can; there's no law against it. He sings with a kind of strained brightness, as if he's dragging his voice out into the sunlight. His singing can serve as a wall between himself and his circumstances, a shield he holds up to deflect attack. He also uses it to provoke others; I suspect he secretly itches for someone to try to shut him up.

Stand-out scenes
I mentioned earlier the soul-baring conversation between Lonely Woman and Jackson; it's a luminous scene. They have real humanity. They're flawed, their attitudes can be downright ugly, but they also evoke sympathy. That's part of the beauty of the The Defiant Ones.

One of the stand-out conversations between Jackson and Cullen takes place at night when they're hiding on the outskirts of a village and waiting for the opportunity to break into the grocery store and steal some food. It's probably their most civil exchange in the movie so far. It doesn't mean they suddenly like each other, only that they relate to each other as men who are frustrated at every turn, well-acquainted with disappointment but not resigned to their lot in life. As they talk they watch lights in the village houses slowly flick off. What follows is near-death, a desperate and despicable protest made by Jackson as he pleads for his life, and a wonderful appearance by Lon Chaney Jr. as one of those rare people who can be a voice of reason when everyone else is calling for blood.

Further thoughts
These questions keep coming up implicitly throughout the film: what does it take to get other people's respect? And what does it mean to really respect yourself?

*All images link back to their sources (Fanpix and Rotten Tomatoes).

Good Short Fiction: "Puss-Cat" and "The White Cat"

2011-12-21T09:31:00.003-05:00

Collection: Tails of Wonder and Imagination: Cat Stories
Editor: Ellen Datlow

Title: Puss-Cat
Author: Reggie Oliver
Godfrey is a washed up theater actor who used to perform in supporting roles alongside the late Sir Roderick Bentley, a legendary thespian. In the story Godfrey is sitting around talking about Roderick ("Roddy") over drinks, and even though Godfrey is an interesting man in his own right - world-weary and full of forced cheer, his tongue loosened by drink - you sense that his life has revolved and will always revolve around Roddy. "Puss-cat" is the term of endearment that Roddy, an insatiable womanizer, used for all of his girlfriends and mistresses, and Godfrey spends the most time talking about one of them: Yolande, an ingenue who caught Roderick's attention after she berated him for hurting a stray cat that hung around the theater where they were rehearsing. As Godfrey puts it:

Yolande, you see, was one of those people who is instantly drawn to anything even more defenceless than herself.

There's so much deliciousness in this story, the way it's crafted in a loose narrative where each detail slips in at just the right moment. In Godfrey's reminiscences the characters come alive: Roddy, grand and careless, the charismatic egotist par excellence, and Yolande, who is way in over her head when it comes to love and life and the often sordid business of theater. And Godfrey himself, with his witty asides and drink-deadened heart, what little surprises he has in store for us. I love how the humor in the story can suddenly give way to a deep bruising darkness.

I also love the detail about each theater having its own cat, a stray who saunters around and owns the place (and keeps mice from chewing on wires and cables). Isn't it curious that Roddy, a man of the theater who calls all his girlfriends "puss-cat," really hates cats? Theater cats are a critical part of this tale.

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Title: The White Cat
Author: Joyce Carol Oates

There was a gentleman of independent means who, at about the age of fifty-six, conceived of a passionate hatred for his much-younger wife's white Persian cat.

Julius Muir is in his fifties; Alissa, his wife, is in her thirties. It's her second marriage, and his first. She's pursuing an acting career in the city and spends a lot of time with her circle of theater friends, including men her own age. Julius meantime hangs around his large estate outside the city collecting valuables and wondering why he still feels lonely.

Into this picture of marital health steps Miranda, the cat. Miranda seems to show affection for everyone but Julius, and it drives him up the wall. He bought her, didn't he? Out of his loving, considerate heart he gave her as a gift to his wife, to cuddle and dote on. He sustains her, provides her with a home. Why won't she let him touch her? Why won't she love him? If someone were to ask him, "Julius, dear boy, is it really the cat that's bothering you or is it your wife?" he would say that of course it's not his wife. He loves his wife; it's just her cat he can't stand. Her beautiful ungrateful cat.

So he starts plotting how to kill the cat and make it look like an accident. It's a sad spectacle for the most part. Creepy and pitiable. He married a woman who is unsuited to him and to his ideal of marriage, and he thinks offing her cat will change things? But he's not really thinking, is he; he's going off the deep end.

Sometimes a story has a dominant color, and for this one it's a pale icy blue. Husband and wife may be cordial to one another but there's a chill on the marriage. Even Julius Muir's passions give off little heat. I see him bluish and oxygen-starved, with little to nourish him from within or from without.

Love can't be bought or demanded. And revenge doesn't always go as planned. It's painful to watch Julius square off against a house cat, and feel the futility of everything he does. Tormented by the thought that maybe a man like him can't inspire love.

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This post has been linked to at Short Stories on Wednesday #23 at the Breadcrumb Reads blog.

Week in Seven Words #98

2011-12-18T22:44:00.009-05:00

antique
It's an older part of the city, and it's nearly empty. I like it that way - quiet with cobblestone paths, grass, old bridges over dried-up streams, old brick homes topped with ornate weathervanes, gardens abandoned in winter, their fountains dry.

burger
It comes on a soft bun with dark green lettuce, raw onion, salsa, guacamole, and spicy chipotle sauce. They call it the El Mariachi burger. It's a good burger.

distinctive
80s teen movie: stale classrooms, social misfits, angst, puffy hair, and Molly Ringwald.

harmonic
Different authors writing on completely different topics can have a beautiful resonance in one's mind. While picking over a creative problem, I come across an essay on Aldous Huxley by the departed Christopher Hitchens and some wonderful passages from May Sarton's Journal of a Solitude, and they sound an intriguing chord in my thoughts.

jitterbug
At the park I follow a faint thread of music and find two pairs of swing dancers by the fountain.

now
I'm starting to really understand what a precious gift this time is. So much is up in the air, but it's a beautiful opportunity nonetheless. I'll kick myself if I miss out on it and don't do what I'm called to do at the moment.

unsuited
At the supermarket it's non-stop holiday jingles. And I want to know why so many of the recent recordings are sung in a breathy melodramatic quaver. It's a holiday jingle. Sleigh bells ring-ting-tingling should hopefully not evoke emotional torment.

Week in Seven Words #97

2011-12-18T22:41:00.006-05:00

blah
The world's a mop bucket.

drencher
A cold and squelchy afternoon. Rain plops onto my red umbrella.

essentials
On the train some people carry large open bags full of smaller rustling bags, magazines, paperback novels, crumbled cookies and leaky sandwiches; one woman pulls out a Yuletide stocking and starts stuffing it with chocolates. Other people are more spare and self-contained: all they need is a laptop and headphones, and they're settled inside a world within a moving world.

jangled
Even when there are no new messages or calls coming in, email and phone can be so distracting.

laundry
Washing jeans by hand requires some energy and open-mindedness (agitating the soapy water is the fun part, rinsing is slightly less fun). Smelling of lavender they dry nicely even indoors, in that little nook by the window fan.

thoughtless
It's a terrible thing when someone holds out a hope to you and then snatches it back.

warmhearted
As we walk at dusk he tells me that I brighten his day.

Queen liked Scrabble

2011-12-16T13:34:00.013-05:00

I like Queen; I've listened to their music since I was a kid. I haven't looked up the more recent concerts with Brian May and Roger Taylor, because for me Queen isn't Queen without the four of them: May, Taylor, John Deacon, and of course Freddie Mercury.

I'm also a fan of Scrabble. So it was a delight to find this little Youtube clip of the group playing Scrabble while touring. They've never really fit the stereotypical rocker image (a few years ago May - lead guitarist, the guy with the big curly head of hair - completed his PhD in astrophysics).

Autumn in Philly

2011-12-14T23:10:00.005-05:00

I've posted twice on Autumn in New York, but Philadelphia is beautiful too in the fall.

Good Short Fiction: "A Good Man is Hard to Find" and "Haircut"

2011-12-13T22:10:00.049-05:00

Collection: The House of Fiction (2nd ed.)
Editors: Caroline Gordon and Allen Tate

Title: A Good Man is Hard to Find
Author: Flannery O'Connor
A family goes on a road trip - a father, a mother with a baby on her lap, two bratty older kids, and a grandmother who has smuggled along her cat - and they end their journey at the mercy of a killer who has escaped from jail. The killer, known as The Misfit, is much more philosophical than merciful. He and the grandmother talk about faith and morals as his lackeys lead the family two and three at a time deeper into the forest. The tension, suspense, and feeling of dread remain intense even on a second reading; knowing what will happen allows you to recognize foreshadowing details. This is a story I still think about, mostly the conversation between the grandmother and the killer.

The grandmother had the peculiar feeling that the bespectacled man was someone she knew. His face was as familiar to her as if she had known him all her life but she could not recall who he was.

Throughout the story the grandmother shows a powerful streak of selfishness and shortsightedness, but there's something heart-breaking about her too even from the start. Her family is dismissive of her, ignoring or scoffing at her opinions. To get what she wants at one point she tells a lie, a seemingly harmless embellishment that nudges them off the main road and into the killer's territory; when she realizes that she's lied just as much to herself as to her family, that her memory of cherished past events is faulty, her violent reaction leads to their car crashing. The grandmother places a lot of stock in good blood and respectable manners, and seems to believe that those qualities alone are sufficient protections against evil; she's too well-bred to ever be evil herself, she thinks, and her lady-like ways will surely shield her from attack. When confronted by The Misfit she tries to save her skin by saying she's a lady. At the very end, grieving and desperate, with everything she cares about stripped from her, it seems she has a moment of redemption or understanding.

The Misfit, as if throwing the grandmother's values back in her face, has a thoughtful air and gentlemanly manners that stand out all the more when contrasted with his brutality. In his conversation with the grandmother he seems to want a sympathetic audience, someone to understand his take on morality and grant him some generosity of soul; but when the grandmother reaches out for him at the end, he can't bear it. He hates her touch, maybe because she isn't good enough or strong enough to reach him at that point, or maybe because her compassion reminds him of everything he's rejected throughout his tired rootless life.

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Title: Haircut
Author: Ring Lardner
In "Haircut" a small-town barber reminisces about a fellow townsman, Jim Kendall, who died recently. He refers to Kendall as a good-natured prankster, but every anecdote he shares unintentionally reveals that Kendall was a cruel man, the kind of guy who could destroy a reputation or a life with a laugh and gloat about it after.

Like the barber, Kendall's friends and acquaintances were cheerful callous bystanders; they laughed along with him and didn't care about the scars he left on others. When Kendall dies it's not at any of their hands. The barber talks about some other people who in one way or another never fit into the town's society and so were naturally the butt of Kendall's attacks; if Kendall had power over someone, including members of his own family, he would exploit it. At the end, after he's brought about misery and heartbreak, he dies in a way that he might have found kind of funny had he ever been able to laugh at himself.

I admire Lardner's skill with characterization, and how he tells a compelling story through the barber's secondhand account. The barber and others like him are willfully blind to evil. They encourage it, delight in it, and let it run rampant. If enough people are laughing, then nothing can possibly be wrong; it's just a joke.

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This post has been linked to at Short Stories on Wednesday #22 at the Breadcrumb Reads blog.

Week in Seven Words #96

2011-12-09T09:36:00.005-05:00

aa
Thanks to my Scrabble partner I find out that this is a kind of rough basaltic lava. It's also a great way to get rid of superfluous vowels and fit words into tight corners of the board.

flavor
It's a small cozy café with pizza, lasagna, salads and soups, and only a handful of tables. What makes the place itself special is one of the people who works there. He flirts and jokes, and in the middle of our meal walks up to us and shares a tale about a carpenter who reunites a pair of estranged brothers by building a bridge over the river that separates their properties.

priorities
I'm heading down the street on wobbly legs. Clearly I need to lie down. But first, a stop at the library.

residuum
Recently this stretch of sidewalk had a leafy golden roof, grand and bright like a corridor in an Oriental palace. Now it looks gutted, the leaves gone and the branches like brittle kindling.

smarting
As I approach the river the wind rakes through me, and even the buildings shiver.

sprightly
I bring Fantasia with me and watch them laugh at the dancing hippos and the fairies spreading rime and dewdrops on pliant leaves.

trepidation
With every phone call I feel a spike of tension. I don't know what the news will be on the other end. I can only pray for the best.

Good Short Fiction: "The Blue-Winged Teal" and "The National Pastime"

2011-12-07T16:08:00.008-05:00

Collection: 50 Great American Short Stories
Editor: Milton Crane

Title: The Blue-Winged Teal
Author: Wallace Stegner
After Henry Lederer's mother dies, he leaves school to stay with his father, John, who has quickly slipped back into the kind of life he led before his marriage: a life of poolrooms, cheap hotel rooms, and girlfriends with "unreal hair" and perfume "like some gaseous poison tainting the clothes it touched." Henry's mother had held the family together; when she was alive his father had possessed a decent job and home. Now Henry can barely stand to look at his father, whose regression to his old sordid life seems to reveal contempt and disrespect for Henry's mother.

Henry had no desire to ease the strain that had been between them for months. He did not forgive his father the poolhall, or forget the way the old man had sprung back into the old pattern, as if his wife had been a jailer and he was now released.

Henry plans to tell his father that he's leaving; he'll go and get a job elsewhere and eventually return to school.

They could part without an open quarrel, maybe, but they would part without love. They could part right now, within an hour.

The evening he decides to announce that he's leaving, he discovers something that changes the way he sees his father and himself. In the poolhall his father brings up Henry's mother in a conversation that touches on chinaware and blue-winged teals, and Henry sees his father's eyes before the older man hurries from the room.

You know nothing at all, you know less than nothing because you know things wrong.

Henry's father is drowning. People struggle with grief in different ways; they may destroy themselves. Could Henry help prop his father up, the way his mother did? Maybe his father is too old and too lost, beyond help, or maybe Henry doesn't have it in him to stay there in the poolhall underworld and try to pull his father out bit by bit without losing himself in the darkness. Henry is young, and he wants his own life; he wants the sunlight and the wider world. Maybe the only consolation offered to the sad, damaged characters in "The Blue-Winged Teal" is the son's more sympathetic understanding of his father.

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Title: The National Pastime
Author: John Cheever

To be an American and unable to play baseball is comparable to being a Polynesian and unable to swim.

A classic American image is a father and son playing catch with a baseball on the lawn outside their home. As a young boy, Eben had once dreamed of becoming a professional baseball player and on a fateful Sunday afternoon had asked his father to play catch with him. His father, Leander, at first refused, then grudgingly consented following a private quarrel with Eben's mother. The two of them faced each other on the lawn, and what happened next scarred Eben for years to come:

Then I turned my head to see something - a boat on the river. He threw the ball, and it got me in the nape of the neck and stretched me out unconscious... When I came to, my nose was bleeding and my mouth was full of blood. I felt that I was being drowned.

From then on, baseball makes Eben feel physically sick. Through his childhood and into his adulthood, he tries with mixed success to hide his fear. His abnormal feelings towards baseball stem from his abnormal relationship with his father. Leander, the son of a ship's master, is dramatic and mentally unstable. He resents his son's very existence. He quotes from Shakespeare and could be a Shakespearean character himself, a wild and wily king presiding over his country house outside of St. Botolph's, Massachusetts. He haunts his son, even from afar.

The story follows Eben into adulthood. He marries, becomes a father. His life with his wife and kids is loving and untroubled, free of the dysfunctional family dynamics that marked his childhood. For a long while he can't really make peace with his past or lay it to rest, and the taste of blood in his mouth emerges during baseball games like a nasty smell from behind a closed door. Wounds deeply inflicted can emerge in absurd ways, and Cheever writes about the characters and their circumstances with a touch of dark humor. Leander himself is a mix of tragic and comic, a mean old man and an eccentric codger.

"It's good to live it again"

2011-12-04T22:01:00.006-05:00

A little over a year ago I posted photos of autumn in New York - more specifically Central Park - that I took on Thanksgiving weekend 2010.

Now just this past Thanksgiving I returned to Central Park with my camera, for another taste of my favorite season in one of the loveliest places I know of.

Cast-offs

2011-12-01T15:59:00.004-05:00

"Cast-offs" is a short story I wrote that's been published in the December issue of Halfway Down the Stairs. Their theme for December is Farewell.

If you're interested in reading the story, here's the link. I'll also add it to the list of my writing at the top of the page.

Week in Seven Words #95

2011-11-30T22:00:00.005-05:00

cornucopian
My plate has something of everything: turkey and spicy beef, mashed yams and herbed potatoes, cranberry sauce, broccoli and Brussels sprouts, and a slender wedge of potato pashtida (a Jewish/Israeli frittata/quiche type of food, cooked here without a crust). Apple cider is served for drinks, and for dessert there's some of the sweet corn bread that was baking while we ate dinner.

countenance
Infants can look more solemn, critical and perceptive than the adults around them.

cupcakes
While gift-shopping at a bookstore I see cupcakes everywhere: cupcake calendars, cupcake recipe books, cupcakes on cards. Maybe there's always been a plethora of cupcake products, and I haven't noticed. Now they leap out at me in shades of pastel lavender and dark blotchy chocolate, kittenish pink and creamy white, sporting sprinkles or periwinkle candles.

offshoot
We leave the paved path by the lake and go down a muddier offshoot; damp and soft, it coils past rocks and crackling bushes with berries.

orthography
I love the painstaking way they spell and write, focusing intently on each letter as if they realize how vulnerable language is to error and miscommunication. And each word they spell correctly is a door springing open.

refraction
My new glasses seem to have finally made peace with my brain and eyes.

salvaged
She uses scrap paper, old shoeboxes, felt, string and other odds and ends for her crafts projects; things that her family might have thrown out become the cards and presents she gives them on special occasions.

Good Short Fiction: 3 tales from The Oxford Book of English Short Stories

2011-11-30T09:20:00.005-05:00

Collection: The Oxford Book of English Short Stories
Editor: A.S. Byatt

Title: The Destructors
Author: Graham Greene
In London several boys have formed a gang. They content themselves with playing games and committing petty infractions, until a new member makes a more radical suggestion: to destroy the one house in the neighborhood that wasn't bombed during the Blitz. The man who lives there knows some of the boys, and they have nothing against him personally. But the thought of tearing down the home and everything in it - every possession, every piece of furniture, every plank and pipe and wall panel - is irresistible. They wait for the man to leave his house on a brief holiday, and they begin their work.

As I read this I thought of William Golding's Lord of the Flies and found Greene's story to be more chilling in some ways. The destruction here takes place in the heart of civilization, and it isn't driven by anything like revenge, anger, bloodlust or other out-of-control emotions. The boys don't steal anything, and they even admit that they don't hate the homeowner. In systematically destroying the house from the inside, while leaving the outer walls to collapse last, they work like single-minded termites. It's a kind of pure impersonal evil, not fueled by any emotion or ideology, except perhaps for the excitement of destruction and some deep-seated antipathy towards anything beautiful and worthwhile; maybe this uncompromising need to destroy lies at the core of every evil act. They spare nothing in the house, and wipe out every vestige of the man's identity within it. That this happens in a neighborhood already scarred by the Second World War makes it even more disturbing. The house survived the bombings only to succumb to a different manifestation of evil that seems inescapable; it's a part of day-to-day life, in wartime and peacetime, and exists even in the hearts of children.

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Title: Solid Objects
Author: Virginia Woolf
The story begins with two men arguing politics as they walk along a beach. We don't hear the substance of their argument, and soon they give it up in favor of resting on the sand for a while. One of them throws pieces of slate out onto the ocean, letting them skim over the waves; the other man, whose name is John, wriggles his fingers into the sand - a childlike gesture - and finds a piece of green glass resembling a gemstone.

From then on he becomes obsessed with finding broken discarded objects that have an interesting appearance, such as fantastically shaped pieces of pottery and china, smooth lumps of iron and chunks of rock.

Anything so long as it was an object of some kind, more or less round, perhaps with a dying flame deep sunk in its mass, anything—china, glass, amber, rock, marble—even the smooth oval egg of a prehistoric bird would do.

As he combs through alleys, shrubs, and train tracks, his political career quietly implodes. Human affairs seem like background noise or faded wallpaper in comparison to the vivid objects that John finds; the objects endure as John's life slips by in his constant search for more of them. Each new find has to be more interesting than the last one. John's ambitions have been diverted into strange channels; the story never touches on what his political positions were, or what he had hoped to get out of life before discovering that first piece of green glass on the beach. None of it seems to matter.

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Title: The Toys of Peace
Author: Saki (Hector Hugh Munro)

Harvey Bope has been asked by his sister to buy some peaceful toys for her sons, Bertie and Eric, when he next visits. The National Peace Council has recommended that boys be given toys that have nothing to do with war, so as to foster more peaceful impulses in them. Harvey is skeptical that "peace toys" will have any impact on his nephews' inclinations, but he decides to try the experiment. He brings them something altogether different from "the 'Siege of Adrianople' toy" they received from their Aunt Susan:

"It's a fort!" exclaimed Bertie.

"It isn't, it's the palace of the Mpret of Albania," said Eric, immensely proud of his knowledge of the exotic title; "it's got no windows, you see, so that passers-by can't fire in at the Royal Family."

"It's a municipal dust-bin," said Harvey hurriedly; "you see all the refuse and litter of a town is collected there, instead of lying about and injuring the health of the citizens."

In addition to the municipal dust-bin he's brought other civic buildings (including a municipal wash-house), along with figurines of civilian leaders and authorities. The kinds of toys, and the boys' reaction to them, are hilarious. The boys' resourcefulness is also a delight, as they later turn the peaceful figurines and buildings into war toys:

Peeping in through the doorway Harvey observed that the municipal dustbin had been pierced with holes to accommodate the muzzles of imaginary cannon...

Clever and funny as the story is, it also has an underlying sadness. When Harvey observes at the end that he and his sister "have begun too late" in their peace toy experiment, you sense that he's not just talking about the boys' ages but about humanity as a whole. War is so much a part of human history and human nature.

Bertie and Eric, inspired by the all the riveting gruesome accounts of past battles they've read about, play at war with swashbuckling dialogue and cheerful slaughter. There's still an innocence to their play, because they don't know what it's like to be in real battle. In their lifetime there will be two world wars. H.H. Munro himself didn't survive WWI; when the war began he voluntarily fought as a soldier and was killed in France in 1916. The collection in which this story first appeared, The Toys of Peace, and Other Papers, was published posthumously in 1919.

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Other recommended stories in this collection include At Hiruharama (by Penelope Fitzgerald) and Nuns at Luncheon (by Aldous Huxley).

A smurf, a goose head and gratitude

2011-11-24T13:34:00.007-05:00

It's funny how I thought I'd be able to walk through Times Square this morning. I caught the tail-end of the Thanksgiving Parade. I'm not a fan of standing around watching parades, so the short time I was there was good enough for me. I'm glad I didn't remember about the parade's location in advance either, because the floats were a pleasant surprise. Giant smurfs make me smile. The dangling head of what looks like Mother Goose both creeped me out a little and made me smile, not that I have anything against Mother Goose.

To get to the 1-line subway platform at the Times Square stop, I wound up making a detour around the crowds and into the Port Authority station, which felt like a rabbit warren. Good thing the signs were clear so I could know where I was going.

Here's a nice video from a Jewish site. The topic is blessings as a form of gratitude; as long as we're alive we can express gratitude. Whether or not you're Jewish or religious the video gives a sense of perspective on life's problems and a reminder of things to be grateful for, so I thought I'd share it on Thanksgiving.

Worth Watching: Miss Potter (2006)

2011-11-22T20:42:00.007-05:00

Title: Miss Potter
Director: Chris Noonan
Language: English
Rating: PG

Synopsis
Based on events in the life of Beatrix Potter, the film begins with Beatrix (Renée Zellweger) seeking out publishers for The Tale of Peter Rabbit. In one publishing house she's grudgingly assigned to the most inexperienced editor, Norman Warne (Ewan McGregor), with the expectation that her book will flop. Instead Beatrix becomes a popular and successful author, with Peter Rabbit the first of many characters she introduces to the world. The film depicts her vivid imagination, her love of writing, art, and the natural world, and the way she uproots herself, with love and losses along the way, from the London home she shares with her parents to Hill Top Farm in England's Lake District.

Characters
The gentleness of the film tempers the characters. Even Beatrix's mother, Helen (Barbara Flynn), is not as abrasive as she might have been; she isn't malicious but exasperated, unable to understand her daughter's talents and inclinations (though it feels as if the film flattened her character to turn her into a mouthpiece of upper class snobbery). Beatrix gets sniffed at for being an unmarried lady with literary and artistic dreams, and until she meets Norman her work is viewed with condescension. But the film has no real villains.

What Beatrix struggles against is a world of stultifying constraints and soft expectations. Her conviction and passion about her work keep her from getting dragged down into a narrower life with a stale social circle and handful of acceptable activities. Beatrix resists, sometimes angrily but for the most part playfully. At the start of the film she has no friends except for the characters she's imagined. The income she eventually earns as a best-selling author allows her much greater freedom from other people's control and grants her the ability to lead her own life, a world inhabited by her characters and by the people she loves.

Beatrix Potter's drawings are the most vibrant characters in the film, and the other characters - Beatrix herself, Norman, Beatrix's kindly father, Rupert (Bill Paterson), who gave up his own artistic dreams - tend to be at their most lively when their thoughts and hearts are caught up with Peter Rabbit and Jemima Puddleduck.

Relationships
The film shows the self-realization of an individual, an author and artist who finds her true home and reaches a kind of peace in her life. Norman and his sister, Millie (Emily Watson), are the first people who see Beatrix for who she is, unconditionally.

At first Beatrix and Norman are partners and co-conspirators; Beatrix wants to get her work published, and Norman wants to prove that he can back a successful book. Their partnership develops into a warm friendship full of mutual admiration, which further develops into love. Both of them are awkward and shy. They grow towards one another like two odd plants mingling their leaves and letting their stems intertwine.

Millie and Beatrix, who are close steadfast friends, make for an interesting contrast in character. Millie is more bold and outspoken than Beatrix; she likes to make a statement, to joke and say shocking things, whereas Beatrix tends to be more quiet and reflective, calling little attention to herself outside of her work. But even though Beatrix is more subdued, she has firmer convictions and sticks to them more consistently, working on her books and later on land conservation in the Lake District.

Memorable sights and sounds
Lakes, trees, golden grass and wooded slopes, farmhouses with airy dusty rooms full of treasures: these are some of the visual delights offered by the film. Beatrix's room in London is also lovely, with its window seat and long table full of watercolors.

Her art is beautiful. Occasionally the film animates the creatures to show how alive they are to her, but even better are the shots that linger over the still images, warm and full of life, giving you the sense that if you look away the animals really will start moving around.

Stand-out scenes
I loved the opening sequence, with close-ups of Beatrix preparing the instruments of her art and starting to paint in blue colors. A glass of water clouds up with blue.

There's also a poignant scene where in the midst of grief Beatrix tries to paint, and her creatures flee from dark fish and birds that threaten to consume them. She's isolated in her room, until Millie comes and helps bring her back out into the world.

Further thoughts
The film would go well with a blanket and a mug of tea on a rainy afternoon. It's gentle, warm, poignant and quietly inspiring.

I like how it shows the joy an artist and writer takes in her work and the world around her, though I would have also wanted to see Beatrix's scientific pursuits, particularly her interest in mycology, the study of fungi. It would have been interesting to get a deeper look into the mind of someone who can observe the world with both an exacting scientific eye and with imagination and whimsy.

The first lines of the film: "There's something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You can never quite tell where they'll take you."

*All images link back to their source (Flixster community).

Week in Seven Words #94

2011-11-20T11:11:00.009-05:00

anew
With new determination I open up a Microsoft Word document that's been untouched for months, and I begin again.

concinnity
At the concert we sit closest to the violists and bass players. This way we're more aware of all the layers in the music, its rich harmonies, and the one moment where the lead bass player strikes a note out of tune. We're happy to hear all of it.

density
They sit around a table in the cafeteria pouring liquids of different densities into tall plastic containers - corn syrup, dish washing soap, vegetable oil, water, alcohol - and mostly they don't care about the bigger picture, only that it's fun to look at the liquid layers and see if their friends have made a mess. But from time to time they'll connect what they're doing to chemistry and to the properties of the world, before returning to the really important questions: will something spill? Or blow up?

interlude
On two different subway trips, a musical duo sing in Spanish and strum on guitars as they stroll from car to car.

low-key
The mild cold I come down with helps me mellow out a little.

origination
One school I visit reminds of a nest with birds huddled close beside a clutch of eggs. Another school reminds me of an airport terminal where litter blows across the clean bare floors.

ursine
At bedtime their parents slip out of the room for a short while to unwind, and I read them a story, then another one: The Berenstain Bears in their treehouse with the pink-trimmed windows poking out of the upper leaves. Brother and Sister Bear learn that if they watch too much TV or fight all day, they'll miss out on life.

Week in Seven Words #93

2011-11-20T09:45:00.007-05:00

cradled
I'm walking on the open palm of a beautiful day. There's water, gold and orange trees, blue skies holding rain clouds at bay. I feel raw and tired inside but the day is gentle.

cultivation
School is giving him a certain knowingness. He's starting to pick up spelling and reading, the ways of the world, the lingo of kindergarten (awesome!).

lane
Taking the long way home I find a lovely street, quiet and shaded with trees. I'm glad I chose to walk off some of my restlessness and map out a new neighborhood on foot.

locus
Two branches of the public library within a block of each other. A prime piece of real estate.

persistence
In the room where I've been run through a proofreading test I see a motivational poster on the wall depicting a pencil stub and the word Persistence, followed by this line: We've exhausted all possibilities... let's get started.

subway
In a strange way I've missed this: the stale breath of the station, the rumble of approaching trains, the clatter of trains pulling into or speeding past the platform.

treasured
Dusk settles in the afternoon. Buildings and statues catch the last light and hold it close for as long as they can.

Good Short Fiction: 3 Tales from Great American Short Stories

2011-11-18T12:57:00.011-05:00

Collection: Great American Short Stories: From Hawthorne to Hemingway
Editor: Corinne Demas

Title: The Birthmark
Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
After a scientist marries a woman of beautiful character and appearance, he becomes obsessed with the birthmark on her cheek, her one apparent flaw. He's convinced that as a scientist he has the means to rid her of this imperfection.

The birthmark, shaped like a small hand, is a symbol of his wife's humanity and mortality. Most men wouldn't have considered it a flaw but instead would have seen it as a distinct feature, perfectly imperfect and uniquely hers; the reason it becomes a flaw here is because the scientist can't stop fixating on it, to the point where normal relations and companionship with his wife become impossible. She loves him deeply and permits him to proceed with his experimentation, but after reading through a journal of his previous work she wisely grasps his limitations:

Much as he had accomplished, she could not but observe that his most splendid successes were almost invariably failures, if compared with the ideal at which he aimed. His brightest diamonds were the merest pebbles, and felt to be so by himself, in comparison with the inestimable gems which lay hidden beyond his reach.

With heavy symbolism Hawthorne illustrates the arrogance and idealism of scientists who think they have the capacity to undo anything in nature. Like other quests for impossible perfection this one ends in disaster. Hawthorne's cautionary tale addresses people's low tolerance for messiness and even harmless deviations from the norm, and their conviction that science can and should remove any flaw or limitation.

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Title: The Flight of Betsey Lane
Author: Sarah Orne Jewett
Betsey Lane, Lavina Dow, and Peggy Bond are three old ladies living on a poor-farm in New England. Betsey is the youngest and still dreams of traveling; when she hears about the Philadelphia Centennial, she's determined to attend. She's seen very little of the world and isn't going to miss out on this chance.

Jewett writes fresh, vivid characters. Their lives aren't whitewashed; they're forgotten by the community and spend most of the day in a cluttered room carrying out small chores. At the same time they're comfortable with themselves and, in a quiet way, full of life; they aren't pitiful.

They were close together, knee to knee, picking over a bushel of beans, and commanding a view of the dandelion-starred, green yard below, and of the winding, sandy road that led to the village, two miles away. Some captive bees were scolding among the cobwebs of the rafters overhead, or thumping against the upper panes of glass... There was a cheerful feeling of activity, and even an air of comfort, about the Byfleet Poor-house. Almost every one was possessed of a most interesting past, though there was less to be said about the future.

Betsey does get to go to the Centennial, and who knows what will come next. She's open to possibilities and doesn't let age, lack of money, or other people's expectations kill her spirit of curiosity and exploration.

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Title: Paul's Case
Author: Willa Cather
Paul is young, impatient, sensitive and impractical. He has a love of beauty and refinement, a taste for flowers, champagne and theater. If he could, he'd escape from his lower-middle-class family. He covets the lifestyle that only lots of money could give him but hates the thought of the decades' worth of drudgery required to even have a shot at wealth. The one job he loves is working as an usher at a music hall, because it brings him closer to brilliance and color; he overlooks the fact that art itself demands patient toil. It seems he wants only to feel, to revel in elegance and sensuousness. But life can't be lived that way, and Paul knows it; only he keeps hoping that somehow he can lose himself in his dreams.

Paul eventually shows the extent of his desperation and foolishness; he can give himself over to vivid dreams, but at a crucial point he fails to imagine that life can ever be better for him. There's also no one he can talk to about his dilemma. His need for escape is not just a lazy ploy to avoid work. He's out of place in his family and community and has a tendency to be high-strung and feel everything acutely. He doesn't fit in anywhere except for the rarefied places that he craves but that are denied to him. It's as if he was born into the wrong world, and he refuses to adapt to it in any way. By the end of the story he's given himself a taste of a dream life, while knowing that it can't last; after that he denies himself a return to his real life, with its complexities, sordidness, and (he realizes too late) possibilities. Cather's complex portrait shows a boy who, by choice and by his nature, fails to negotiate with reality.

When Paul went down to dinner the music of the orchestra came floating up the elevator shaft to greet him. His head whirled as he stepped into the thronged corridor, and he sank back into one of the chairs against the wall to get his breath. The lights, the chatter, the perfumes, the bewildering medley of color--he had, for a moment, the feeling of not being able to stand it. But only for a moment; these were his own people, he told himself. He went slowly about the corridors, through the writing-rooms, smoking-rooms, reception-rooms, as though he were exploring the chambers of an enchanted palace, built and peopled for him alone.

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Other stories from this volume include: The Cask of Amontillado (by Edgar Allan Poe) and A New England Nun (by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman).

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This post (and this one) have been linked to at Short Stories on Wednesday #19 at the Breadcrumb Reads blog.

Extracts: As long as you're alive

2011-11-14T16:40:00.004-05:00

"But you're alive and as long as you're alive everything's really all right, in spite of everything else. No matter what happens, as along as you're alive everything's all right."
- from Camilla by Madeleine L'Engle

Good Short Fiction: 4 tales from The Oxford Book of Latin American Short Stories

2011-11-13T14:11:00.011-05:00

Collection: The Oxford Book of Latin American Short Stories
Editor: Roberto González Echevarría

Title: Journey Back to the Source
Author: Alejo Carpentier
Translator: Harriet de Onís

Journey Back to the Source tells the story of Don Marcial's life from end to beginning. Time flows backwards.

Crow's-feet, frowns, and double chins vanished, and flesh grew firm again. One day the smell of fresh paint filled the house.

Sometimes the story seems like a video being rewound, but often there's a forward-moving feeling to the backwards flow of time. Don Marcial is escaping from what he's become, retracing a path towards innocence. There is no other way to reclaim this innocence, except to go forward into the past.

And a splendid evening party was given in the music room on the day he achieved minority. He was delighted to know that his signature was no longer legally valid, and that worm-eaten registers and documents would now vanish from his world. He had reached the point at which courts of justice were no longer to be feared, because his bodily existence was ignored by the law.

The story is full of rich language and psychological insight, as in the following observation of Don Marcial on his death bed:

What had begun as a candid, detailed confession of his many sins grew gradually more reticent, painful, and full of evasions.

The final lines of the story blend beginnings with endings.

Then he shut his eyes - they saw nothing but nebulous giants - and entered a warm, damp body full of shadows... Clothed in this body's substance, he slipped toward life.

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Title: Midnight Mass
Author: Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
Translators: William L. Grossman and Helen Caldwell
A seventeen-year-old student is visiting an older male relative, a man who openly cheats on his wife. One evening before midnight mass, when the rest of the household is asleep, the student and the wife have a long conversation.

This isn't a Mrs. Robinson sort of scenario. It's something more intimate. The two are intensely aware of one another. She speaks more freely and has a more open expression than he's ever seen. He observes her closely, noting minute changes in her appearance: shifts in her posture, the expression in her eyes, the way she moves her hands and arms.

Usually her gestures were slow, her attitude calm. Now, however, she rose suddenly, moved to the other side of the room, and, in her chaste disarray, walked about between the window and the door of her husband's study. Although thin, she always walked with a certain rocking gait as if she carried her weight with difficulty.

On that one evening time is suspended. There's an atmosphere of possibility and revelation. The neglected wife is seen for who she is and for what she could be, and that's part of the intensity of her conversation with the student. They are alone together, removed from other people and from daily life.

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Title: The Switchman
Author: Juan José Arreola
Translator: George D. Schade
A traveler arrives at an empty train station and wonders when his train will come. He speaks to an an elderly switchman who seems to find it funny that the traveler expects any train to show up at all. At length the switchman describes the irregularities, inefficiencies, and convolutions of the country's rail system.

The elaborate description of train troubles is what first drew me into the story; the switchman talks about inaccurate railway maps and about trains that stop where they shouldn't, don't move for days on end or just appear at random hours.

"This country is famous for its railroads, as you know. Up to now it's been impossible to organize them properly, but great progress has been made in publishing timetables and issuing tickets. Railroad guides include and link all the towns in the country; they sell tickets for even the smallest and most remote villages. Now all that is needed is for the trains to follow what the guides indicate and really pass by the stations. The inhabitants of this country hope this will happen; meanwhile, they accept the service's irregularities and their patriotism keeps them from showing any displeasure."

I could see the trains as a metaphor not only for life and its unpredictability but also for people's tendency to passively give themselves over to a governing power:

"The hope is that one day the passengers will capitulate to fate, give themselves into the hands of an omnipotent management, and no longer care to know where they are going or where they have come from."

Does the right train ever come? And by the end, does the traveler still care about its destination? What he might content himself with is just the feeling of being on a train, of going somewhere (anywhere) or at least having the illusion of motion.

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Title: The Third Bank of the River
Author: João Guimarães Rosa
Translator: William L. Grossman

This story makes sense to me on a gut level (I think).

When the narrator is a child his father decides one day to get into a rowboat and live out on the river.

Father did not come back. Nor did he go anywhere, really. He just rowed and floated across and around, out there in the river. Everyone was appalled. What had never happened, what could not possibly happen, was happening. Our relatives, neighbors, and friends came over to discuss the phenomenon.

The father's strongest connection is with his son, the narrator, who leaves provisions for him on the river bank; they don't interact in any other way. The father remains on the water in all kinds of weather, in all seasons, staying mostly out of sight and not speaking to anyone. Years pass, and the narrator is the only family member who doesn't move away from the river. Then one day he figures out what he needs to do to get his father back on land.

It's an eerie and absurd story. There's never a clear explanation for why the father chooses this course in life and what it even represents. It's as if he's pursuing an obscure path or calling that his son, the narrator, might be drawn to one day. Or maybe the narrator will escape from his duties and from the burden of his father's legacy and leave the old man behind on the river, completely cut off from everyone.

Pumpkin personalities

2011-11-07T15:22:00.006-05:00

Week in Seven Words #92

2011-11-05T20:39:00.016-04:00

chutzpah
A library has no business being closed.

detours
Side streets beckon to us as we walk. Their houses and trees are pressed close, their sidewalks are rumpled and scratchy with fallen leaves. They're dotted with pumpkins, and their windows peek out from shutters and flower boxes.

jolted
Revelations on a Friday afternoon. I have just enough time to send out some emails and make a couple of calls before I abstain from technology for the next twenty-five hours. Monday will be here soon enough. Meanwhile I need to retreat into my Friday night and wait. Patiently.

multifunctional
In the park the fountain is drained. The water has given way to scattered leaves and children barreling around in the basin on tricycles.

proliferation
'What-ifs' and 'if-onlys' can breed and multiply and take hold of your soul if you let them.

solace
What comforts me: singing aloud, which brings a kind of catharsis. Meaningful reading, which shores up my sense of purpose. Another person's laughter, which spreads joy.

wince
It hurts me to see you hurt, she says, grimacing at my bandaged wrist.

Week in Seven Words #91

2011-11-05T20:32:00.005-04:00

entreat
Soliciting food, the cat butts its head against my shins. Under the table its eyes glow, beseeching.

expansive
The lake in Central Park isn't as large as it seems to us. From where we sit it seems to spread out for many blocks, disappearing in a bend beyond the bright trees and sliding away past the Bow Bridge.

ichthyology
Fifteen minutes of people-watching from inside a coffee shop. The large window shows a rainy street, umbrellas writhing and jerking in the wind, people swimming through the rain and flopping breathless into the shop.

nestled
After tea and a warm shower, I slip into the large comfortable bed and lie awake for several minutes as the room seems to hum around me.

parry
At the walk-in flu shot clinic there are three tables set up, each with a nurse. As I fill out the forms, I hear a startled "Owww!" from a lady at the first table. Maybe she's sensitive, I think uneasily. The next woman who goes there clenches her fists as her face crumples in agony. A man follows her and bites down on his lip until it bleeds. My companion notices the nurse's technique: a swooping sideways thrust that seems to go for the bone. When the guy organizing the clinic tries to nudge us towards the stab-happy nurse, we plant ourselves next to the other tables instead.

spectacles
I look for a pair of glasses that are unobtrusive, that don't leap out of my face in brash designs or completely alter the shape of my eyes. Good glasses shouldn't call attention to themselves. But that also means they're more difficult to find on the shelves, among the showier models.

zesty
Dinner guests mixing together are a kind of recipe as well; each person is a different ingredient with his or her own flavor. Unusual combinations can prove delicious. (And yes, I sound like Hannibal Lecter.)

Worth Watching: The King's Speech (2010)

2011-10-31T12:54:00.011-04:00

Title: The King's Speech
Director: Tom Hooper
Language: English
Rating: R (because His Royal Highness doesn't stammer when he's cursing a blue streak)

Synopsis
The Duke of York (Colin Firth), known as "Bertie" to his family, is second in line to the throne after his older brother. Bertie prefers to stay out of the public eye; the few speeches required of him are disastrous on account of his stammer. At the arrangement of his wife, Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter), he undergoes speech therapy with Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), who demands great effort and openness from him. In spite of some progress, Bertie still stumbles during moments of nerves and high emotion. After his father, George V (Michael Gambon), dies and his brother, Edward VIII (Guy Pearce), abdicates the throne, Bertie becomes King George VI. On the eve of WWII he's required to broadcast an important speech with a strength and eloquence he's convinced he'll never possess.

Characters
Lionel Logue is intent, passionate, wry, and just a little bit bonkers (in a manner unique to Geoffrey Rush). His character is also deepened by personal disappointments and struggles, such as his inability to start up a career as a Shakespearean actor.

From Colin Firth's Bertie you get a sense of a decent man who's fun to be around when he can relax, which isn't often. The few people who make him feel at ease are his wife and daughters (the elder of the two became Queen Elizabeth II in 1952). As his wife, Helena Bonham Carter is good at mixing upper-class restraint and properness with the sense of fun and play that she's brought to other very different movie roles.

I got a kick out of the fact that they made Winston Churchill a character, though I laughed too because I recognized the actor who plays him (Timothy Spall) from only one other role: Peter Pettigrew in the Harry Potter films. He doesn't look sufficiently different from Peter here and doesn't have a large enough part to make himself a distinct character, so I kept thinking of him as an animagus politician. Another "cross-over" moment that briefly threw me out of the film was the scene where Lionel Logue's wife, Myrtle (Elizabeth Ehle), meets Bertie for the first time. Ehle starred as Elizabeth Bennet in the BBC's grand 1995 production of Pride and Prejudice, which also made Colin Firth famous as Mr. Darcy; it's probably still the role that Firth is most strongly associated with. So to have the two of them meet in a quiet room tipped the movie back into the Regency era for a few seconds, and I expected him to launch into a pompous marriage proposal. But then I was tilted right back to the 1930s because Myrtle Logue treated the king with a nervous deference that Elizabeth Bennet would never have felt in the presence of Mr. Darcy.

Relationships and conflicts
Bertie and Lionel become friends, though it's a struggle, and they fight along the way. Bertie hates appearing vulnerable, and he's had to deal with so many quacks that it takes him time to trust someone; he's also conscious of the difference in station between him and Lionel, and it isn't easy for him to get used to Lionel's informality. Add to that the pressure of his public duties and the fact that he had thought, with great relief, that he'd never be king, and friction between the two men is inevitable. With the exception of his wife and daughters, Bertie tends to be reserved around everyone, in part as a defense mechanism against the mocking he's endured over his stuttering (in the film his older brother taunts him at one point too).

Bertie is sweet to his daughters and has a steady source of warm support and companionship from his wife, who consoles him, cheers him up, banters with him, and occasionally sits on him or stuffs things into his mouth. Firth and Bonham Carter play well off each other.

Memorable sights and sounds
Lionel runs Bertie through various exercises that lend themselves to interesting visuals (like Bertie rolling around on the floor) and sounds (vowels belted out with mixed dignity and silliness). At a few points in the movie Bertie also speaks in song; if he couches his sentences in the melody of a familiar song he stutters much less or not at all. This use of song sometimes has a comic effect but at other times is used to highlight a personal melancholy or loneliness.

I also loved Bertie's expression as he hears himself deliver a soliloquy from Hamlet. Lionel had him record it while being drowned out by music so that he couldn't actually hear himself speak. Later on, after breaking off in disgust from Lionel Logue and his unconventional methods, Bertie listens to his own voice speaking steadily and it's a wonderful moment. Shakespeare in general is woven nicely into the movie (including Lionel's audition for the part of Richard III).

Stand-out scenes
The King Edward's Chair scene. Bertie's confidence initially lapses, and it seems that he's going to give up again on working with Lionel. But after Lionel artfully and insolently drapes himself over King Edward's Chair (the throne used during a monarch's coronation) Bertie's anger at Lionel's presumption prompts him to eventually shout out that he has a voice! Bertie also shows himself to have a feeling and respect for tradition that contrasts with his older brother's depicted carelessness in abdicating the throne to be with Mrs. Wallis Simpson.

Another great scene is the climactic delivery of the speech on the eve of WWII ("In this grave hour, perhaps the most fateful in our history..."). The movie cuts back and forth between Bertie picking his way through it word by word, with Lionel standing opposite him, gesturing and coaching, and the king's large audience including various people in their homes, Bertie's family in the palace, and his older brother and Mrs. Simpson.

Further thoughts
Though the movie isn't a documentary and was made to show a man overcoming challenges to rise to the occasion, it still interests me to think about how the filmmakers played around with history and with the characters. For the sake of drama, the relationship between Lionel and Bertie was compressed to a shorter period of time, when in fact they had been working together since the 1920s; and who knows if they ever got to be this informal with one another by the end. I haven't read enough about the characters in general to venture a guess as to what they were like with each other. The movie also omits the whole issue of Neville Chamberlain and appeasement (along with George VI's public show of support for Chamberlain after the Munich Pact) and depicts Churchill and George VI as being friendly and supportive of one another from the very beginning. The filmmakers shape it so that everyone seems more or less united at the war's start, with George VI hoping that his speech impediment won't prevent him from being a resolute figurehead, a symbol of strength and resistance. And it's true that during the war, he and his wife appeared often in public, and visited various places in the UK and abroad, to boost morale.

Here's an actual recording of George VI, delivering the speech on September 3rd, 1939:

The text of the speech is here.

*All images link back to their source (Flixster community).

Week in Seven Words #90

2011-10-28T16:23:00.007-04:00

crackling
After lunch we emerge from the sukkah to find that the day has brightened, the trees sketching flame onto mild blue skies.

hospitable
In the main room of their apartment the light will be on all day and all night. The walls are pale and bright, and after the food is cleared away games are laid out on the table. Desserts make the rounds, and I get into an intense conversation that lasts until the early morning hours.

somewhere
It's a quiet street for the most part, but then a car will cut through the dark with its headlights, or a bike will whirr by, and down the block I'll hear one half of a cellphone conversation. Everyone moves with a destination in mind; there are no meanderers just taking in the trees and the muted street lamps. I wonder where they're going. One woman swings a grocery bag between limp fingers and lets herself into a house. She disappears, and the door clicks shut behind her.

strata
Our conversation is a series of cloud patterns: dense and concentrated sometimes, at other times gapping or thinning, spilling sunlight.

tantalizing
A squirrel steals into the sukkah, where an unattended backpack calls to it. Maybe there's food inside, a sandwich half-eaten or a cookie from the cafeteria. The squirrel worries the zipper on one of the smaller pockets before climbing on top of the backpack and nuzzling against the folds and straps.

vigorous
My first glimpse of the holiday evening festivities: people bobbing up and down before a lighted window. As I come closer to the building, I hear a faint roar of singing and stomping.

wide-eyed
Three women are at the center of the dancing circle. Two are holding Torah scrolls, and one is holding a young child. The child has stuck her thumb in her mouth and is staring wide-eyed at the women whirling around her.

Good Short Fiction: 4 stories from Adaptations

2011-10-23T21:44:00.007-04:00

Collection: Adaptations: From Short Story to Big Screen
Editor: Stephanie Harrison

Title: Auggie Wren's Christmas Story
Author: Paul Auster
Auggie Wren works at a cigar store. His real name isn't Auggie Wren; that's just what he told the author, Paul, to call him. Auggie is an unassuming guy. You wouldn't guess that he's a photographer and that every day for years he's been taking a photo of the same street corner ("the same people in the same spot every morning, living an instant of their lives in the field of Auggie's camera"). And you'd probably never guess how he got his camera. That's where the Christmas story comes in. A major part of the story is that he pretends to be a blind old lady's son who has come to visit her for Christmas; the old lady is on to him, but she's lonely and he's got nowhere else to be, so they pretend. Another thing that isn't clear is whether Auggie is making this story up. How much do you want it to be true? Either way it makes for a good story.

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Title: The Harvey Pekar Name Story
Author: Harvey Pekar
Illustrator: R. Crumb (Robert Crumb)
Harvey Pekar doesn't change much from one panel to another in this short comic. He's a scruffy ordinary guy who is thinking out loud about his life and more specifically his name: Harvey Pekar. It's a strange name, he thinks, and he talks about how people used to tease him for it. He then mentions other Harvey Pekars he's seen in the phone book. This is the best part of the comic - his thoughts on the multiple Pekars and how his identity might be bound up with them. Is he connected to them in a deeper way than shared names? What are they like? Maybe his life could have turned out like theirs, who knows. "Who is Harvey Pekar?" he asks. I looked at one image after another of Harvey and wondered the same thing, getting a better sense of him but also asking myself just who he is and why it's him (and not another Harvey Pekar) featured in the comic.

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Title: My Friend Flicka
Author: Mary O'Hara
When Kennie McLaughlin's father grudgingly allows him to tame one of the colts on their ranch, Kennie is drawn to a wild and fast colt that no one thinks is tameable. It's difficult to confine the young horse; she goes into a frenzy, breaks free and runs off. Her need to get away is so desperate that one day her escape attempt ends in gruesome injury:

Twenty yards of fence came down with her as she hurled herself through. Caught on the upper strands, she turned a complete somersault, landing on her back, her four legs dragging the wires down on top of her, and tangling herself in them beyond hope of escape.

The colt's chances of survival are slim; her skin is lacerated, and the wounds are infected. Even if she pulls through, there's a chance that she'll be crippled for life. Kennie needs to make a choice: he can abandon her as a lost cause and let the ranch workers shoot her, or he can try his best to nurse her back to health.

My Friend Flicka is a warm family tale, though the warmth is never cloying, and the possibility of death and serious injury is presented starkly. Part of what makes it a good story is that it shows how a young boy learns to take responsibility for another life and for his own actions. His attempts to tame the colt led to her injury; to discard her in the aftermath would be callous. Kennie and his horse form a deep bond; he's determined not to betray her and treat her life lightly.

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Title: A Reputation
Author: Richard Edward Connell
Saunders Rook is an ordinary pleasant guy who would like to be noticed a little more. So one evening when he's dining at his club, he breaks into a lull in the conversation by informing everyone that he's going to commit suicide on the Fourth of July - a pronouncement that surprises him at least as much as it surprises his audience.

He had never demanded much of life; his existence was not rigorous, but placid. He was a sub-editor on a woman's magazine - he conducted the etiquette page - and this brought him twelve hundred dollars a year. He had inherited an income of twelve hundred more. He was able to live in modest comfort, for he was an orphan and a bachelor; he had a season ticket at the opera; his health was good. If he had a cross, it was a light one: minor editors of minor magazines usually rejected his minor essays, imitations of Charles Lamb, hymning the joys of pipe-smoking and pork-chops. So it startled him not a little to hear himself announcing his imminent self-destruction.

People who overlooked him before now turn to him with breathless questions. They ask him why he's doing this. To protest the state of civilization, he says, and they go wild with interest. Suddenly everyone is talking about Saunders Rook. He gets letters from people who either beg him to reconsider or congratulate him on his determination. He's invited to dinners thrown by intellectuals and artists, and his essays are solicited for magazines (though he notices with some nervousness that a couple are scheduled for posthumous publication). One of the ironies of the story is that Saunders actually loves his life, especially now that he's getting all this attention. Still, he has a reputation to maintain, and he must always keep up the appearance that he's grown deeply disgusted with the world.

"But why do you feel that the state of civilization requires so drastic a protest?"

Deline asked this question as Saunders Rook was enjoying the third course, tender roast young guinea-fowl with mushrooms; Rook loved good food.

"Because," said Saunders Rook, with fork poised, "it's rotten."

Around the table went murmurs of approbation and interest.

Richard Connell's story pokes fun at the chattering classes and how they're quick to read profundity into Saunders Rook's words; hype, excitement and endless discussion swirl around Rook's careless statements, as if he's become a kind of prophet of the age. Connell is also careful to show us the day of reckoning: a sunny beautiful Fourth of July in Central Park, where Rook has decided to kill himself. Families are strolling and picnicking, and the city seems to be shining. Will Rook go through with it? It's the most important decision he'll ever make, and you wonder whether he'll be guided by his private self or by the demands of his public persona; maybe it's gotten to the point where his reputation really is everything. You also get the sense that no matter how he chooses, he'll fade back into obscurity at some point, once his fifteen minutes of fame are over.

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Other stories from this collection include Babylon Revisited (by F. Scott Fitzgerald), The Basement Room (by Graham Greene), Killings (by Andre Dubus) and The Sentinel (by Arthur C. Clarke).

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This post has been linked to at the Breadcrumb Reads blog in Short Stories on Wednesday #16.

Week in Seven Words #89

2011-10-19T16:50:00.006-04:00

coiling
They're sitting in the kitchen making long colorful paper chains to loop around the walls of their sukkah. The decorative chains spill over the kitchen table and pool and heap on the floor.

decumbent
Hit by an illness first thing in the morning, I find that the world is shaky when I'm out of bed. I stay under the covers, reading by the light that slides in through the blinds.

furtherance
I learn again that it's best not to put off doing something good and worthwhile with the complacent thought that there will be another opportunity for it soon.

illustrative
As I'm reading them picture books about a spiffy giant and a Gruffalo and a snail that travels the world on a whale's tail, she asks me why the pictures show some things but not others; for instance, if the story tells you that a fox ran off and hid, the picture only shows you the hiding part but not the running part. After I tell her that everything can't be shown, and that the people who write and illustrate the books have to pick and choose, her older brother starts to talk about how in movies you can't see what's going on with all of the characters either; when one character's story is on screen, other characters are off-screen, with things happening to them that we can't even see but maybe will only hear about later.

lucent
On my walk home, bright globes of light burn on either side of the path. It's nighttime and a fresh new day has begun.

precipitation
The tables and chairs are beaded with rain water.

unawares
Scrabble Junior can be as challenging as regular Scrabble, simply because Scrabble Junior lulls you into a false sense of security.

A century's worth of fashions, music and dance...

2011-10-15T22:34:00.004-04:00

As seen in East London.

Week in Seven Words #88

2011-10-12T13:20:00.003-04:00

communication
It's fitting that they find out this week, at the start of the new year. It isn't when I'd planned on telling them, but it doesn't matter. Maybe I'll be less reticent this year.

relinquish
Every day I dump books into the steely mouth of the return bin, where they rumble away into silence.

soften
The light of day's end on a pale brick wall.

symbolize
What I eat this week, among other things: pomegranate seeds and a few small pieces from the head of a trout.

talkative
Two good places for a conversation: the front steps of my apartment building at night, and a sunny paved courtyard rimmed with trees and stone ledges.

timing
On Yom Kippur, during a quiet section of the afternoon prayers, a marching band sweeps past our windows; the trumpets, drums, flutes and trombones break into the solemn hush.

willpower
Three qualities I wish for in plenitude: persistence, discipline, and courage.

Good Short Fiction: 2 tales from The Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories

2011-10-05T11:07:00.008-04:00

Collection: The Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories
Editor: Tom Shippey

Title: Lila the Werewolf
Author: Peter S. Beagle
Farrell, a musician living in NYC, keeps falling for women who have serious issues. His latest live-in girlfriend, Lila, is a werewolf, as he discovers after she moves in with him. At one point in the story he explains to his horrified best friend why he's still with her:

"The thing is, it's still only Lila, not Lon Chaney or somebody... she's got her guitar lesson one night a week, and her pottery class one night, and she cooks eggplant maybe twice a week. She calls her mother every Friday night, and one night a month she turns into a wolf. You see what I'm getting at? It's still Lila, whatever she does, and I just can't get terribly shook about it. A little bit, sure, because what the hell. But I don't know."

Farrell is a laidback guy who seems at ease in the presence of other people's weirdness, but his tolerance is put to the test in the story's climactic scene, where Lila (in werewolf form) goes into heat and starts roaming the city pursued by packs of male dogs. Farrell follows her to try to prevent any unfortunate liaisons, in a scene that's both hilarious and surreal. He's accompanied by Lila's formidable mother, who keeps popping in and out of taxi cabs, and he's trailed by his building's superintendent, who hopes to put an end to Lila once and for all. As for Lila herself, she's initially excited by the presence of her canine suitors, but by the end of the night her feelings turn from lust to bloodlust, and unfortunately that's when the little coddled lapdogs venture out to have their chance with her:

They were small, spoiled beasts, most of them, overweight and shortwinded, and many were not young. Their owners cried unmanly pet names after them, but they waddled gallantly towards their deaths, barking promises far bigger than themselves, and none of them looked back.

Owners of small dogs will not like what happens next. But even if lapdog carnage isn't your cup of tea, there's a lot to enjoy in this story, not least the author's knack for odd funny descriptions; for instance, this is what we're told about the superintendent of Farrell's apartment building: "He smelled of black friction tape and stale water" and "He roamed in the basement all day, banging on pipes and taking the elevator apart."

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Title: The Silken-Swift
Author: Theodore Sturgeon
Rita is cruel and stunning; she'll toy with men, humiliate them, and dance beyond the reach of their touch or their vengeance. Barbara is "a quiet girl whose beauty was so very contained that none of it showed"; no one notices her, but she is never alone:

... Barbara's life was very full, for she was born to receive. Others are born wishing to receive, so they wear bright masks and make attractive sounds like cicadas and operettas, so others will be forced, one way or another, to give to them. But Barbara's receptors were wide open, and always had been, so that she needed no substitute for sunlight through a tulip petal, or the sound of morning-glories climbing, or the tangy sweet smell of formic acid which is the only death cry possible to an ant, or any other of the thousand things overlooked by folk who can only wish to receive.

Del is the man who meets with both women during a terrible night in his life. After a certain point his perception of events is muddled and false. But matters are cleared up in the bogs, where "there was a pool of purest water, shaded by willows and wide-wondering aspens, cupped by banks of a moss most marvellously blue." The Silken-Swift, written in delicious evocative language, addresses the concept of purity and how it's often equated with virginity. The story also puts forward the idea of love as receiving what the world offers. Sometimes the offering is painful in the extreme. What the world offers can also be beautiful beyond measure.

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This post has been linked to at Short Stories on Wednesday #13 over at the Breadcrumb Reads blog.

Week in Seven Words #87

2011-10-03T11:06:00.006-04:00

circuit
I visit DC on Day 2 of the National Book Fair. Tents, crowds and long lines spill over the flattened grass of the Mall. In each tent presides a writer, installed behind a microphone. The books are pricey. It isn't what I imagined it would be, and find that the best parts of the day surround the fair: the Botanic Gardens, the sculpture gardens with fountains, the reflecting pool by the Capitol, the Holocaust Museum, beautiful Union Station, and beyond the Washington Monument the World War II Memorial where the water mirrors stars and powerful quotes are inscribed in stone.

multiplex
I think of two people I know who, more often than not, are humored by others. I also think of how much they know, and how they sometimes reveal a surprising hidden talent or unsuspected well of knowledge.

orchidology
At the US Botanic Garden you know you've arrived at the orchid room because nearly everyone has a camera out with the zoom on. People hover before each flower and curl their bodies towards it; they purse their lips in concentration and tilt their heads, making minute adjustments to their cameras.

strengthening
During services the shofar sounds quietly mournful, pitiful even, except for the longest notes, which are sure and strong and seem to have no end.

Tashlich (תשליך‎)
The trees fold the cool air around us, and the air has lost its city smell. We stand by the water tossing in pieces of bread to symbolize the casting away of our sins. The water simmers and churns with hungry fish that slide open-mouthed against each other. Soon a turtle joins in, bobbing among the fish like a gray balloon.

thoughtful
Teenagers from DC wander through the Holocaust Museum unsupervised. They're quiet and respectful. They light memorial candles in silence and pause before names and passages of text.

unlooked-for
A mass evacuation from Union Station; apparently there's a fire in some part of the building. The first thing people do when they get outside is take out their cell phones, either to snap photos or to inform someone that they'll be delayed. A pearly pink sunset follows, as the fire engines scream their arrival and lights flash. I get the feeling that, even as they're frustrated or anxious, most people are enjoying this turn of events to some extent; it's not a catastrophe, and it makes for an interesting story to dramatize at work or at home the next day. Even muttering about the delay brings a kind of pleasure.

Week in Seven Words #86

2011-10-03T11:04:00.004-04:00

abruptly
It's a drab gray street with little to see except for a parking garage and the neon-lit windows of an XXX shop. Expecting to soon put it behind me, I hear someone call out, and there they are, people who haven't been around in months. They've materialized across the street at the bus stop with their child.

germination
Sometimes at the end of a sluggish day, all the inspiration and energy that had stirred quietly beneath the surface will burst out like vines flowering in a bog.

hermetic
There will always be someone sitting alone on the grass talking to himself in the midst of other people.

ineffectual
A thundercloud looms over the city, delivering empty threats all afternoon. We walk undisturbed.

mutual
We feed off each other's enthusiasm.

standoffish
The fountain at Fitler Square is fenced off. It plashes with an aloof complacency at people who try to send their arms through the bars to touch the water.

transmogrification
Old brick homes with fanlights above the doors give way to derelict shops and cold glassy skyscrapers.

A good sweet year to you

2011-09-28T18:02:00.005-04:00

It looks like I'm behind schedule with the Week in Seven Words post for this week, so I plan to post two of them at a time early next week. What with holiday preparations and other things, I haven't had time for proper blog fun these past few days (overdue blog visits are also on the schedule for this weekend!)

Rosh Hashanah is starting really soon... I wish you all a happy, sweet, and successful year. Be well.

Worth Watching: You Can't Take It With You (1938)

2011-09-24T21:57:00.009-04:00

Title: You Can't Take It With You
Director: Frank Capra
Language: English
Rating: Unrated

Synopsis
Alice (Jean Arthur) and Tony (Jimmy Stewart) are in love. Alice comes from a household of fun, free artistic people presided over by her grandpa, Martin (Lionel Barrymore). Tony comes from society's upper crust; his father, the arrogant and powerful Mr. Kirby (Edward Arnold), is a banker. Martin is already a thorn in Mr. Kirby's side; his refusal to sell his house prevents Mr. Kirby from completing a lucrative deal. At last the families meet, in an evening that includes fireworks, a wrestling match, some jail time, and a courtroom scene with an adorable judge (Harry Davenport).

Characters
The film features a house full of eccentric people, so it has at least one good thing going for it right there. My favorite of the bunch is Alice's mother, Penny (Spring Byington), a sweet absent-minded lady who writes plays at her desk in the main room as fireworks rumble from the cellar, and her other daughter, Essie (Ann Miller), dances ballet while setting the table; Essie is supposed to be clumsy, so Ann Miller does her best to act like an amateur dancer. Another character I like is Mr. Poppins (Donald Meek) who is rescued by Martin from a mindless job and installed as a permanent house guest, working mostly from the cellar on his masks and mechanical toys. I don't remember if the movie ever explains how Martin has enough money to support a large household. Maybe he worked for years and saved up, or maybe he really never paid any taxes.

The wily and kind Martin, played wonderfully by Lionel Barrymore, is contrasted with the avaricious Mr. Kirby whose values slowly shift from the jail scene onwards. Mr. Kirby's character development is one of the best parts of You Can't Take It With You - it's a gradual dawning, as he realizes that he's a distant father with little joy in his life and no true friends. Edward Arnold is a subtle expressive actor, and I loved one point in the film when he's in an elevator and the doors open on a large board room full of men hungrily applauding him and waiting to gorge on the profits he'll make from a landmark deal; the close-up on his face shows dismay and spiritual exhaustion, in a powerful moment.

His son, Tony, was never cut out to be a banker. Stewart plays Tony as goofy, gallant, and mischievous - which makes him a delicious romantic lead; he's the kind of guy who can laugh at himself while softly and confidently flirting and moving in for a kiss. In the course of the film he grows up a little and takes his first steps away from the life that's been laid out for him since birth.

Like Tony Alice is also different from her family, but she has a close loving relationship with them. Of everyone in her family Alice is the least eccentric, though even she prefers sliding down banisters to taking stairs. Jean Arthur makes Alice sensible without being boring, and gentle without being meek. She has a quiet feistiness, and in the courtroom scene the underlying steel in her emerges.

Relationships
Alice and Tony are in love from the start. What they need to figure out is how to marry happily when they come from such different backgrounds. Alice's family likes Tony, but Tony's family, particularly his haughty mother (played by Mary Forbes), thinks Alice is unsuitable.

As Alice and Tony's relationship is tested, a fellowship slowly forms between Martin and Mr. Kirby. Martin at one point loses his temper and berates Mr. Kirby, then apologizes and gives him a harmonica. The harmonica becomes the symbol of their friendship, and of the simpler happier life that Mr. Kirby wants to settle into by the end. Martin effectively rescues Mr. Kirby much as he did Mr. Poppins.

Though class conflicts are central to the film, at its heart it's more about what's important in life. The film's title comes from the observation that you can't take money with you to the grave and beyond; if you're letting your heart wither as you pursue wealth, if it gets to the point where you're sacrificing everything and everyone for it, then what kind of life are you leading?

Memorable sights and sounds
Harmonicas lead to happiness. A harmonica duet has the power to reunite quarreling lovers and give them hope.

I didn't see this film primarily as a comedy though there are funny moments throughout. Jimmy Stewart screaming like a murderous toddler is among them (in the very same scene where he offers a marriage proposal). He's showing Alice how since infancy all he's ever needed to do to get what he wants is yell loudly enough. Stewart's comedic talent also extends to some awkward dancing and the mild, natural way in which he says funny things.

Stand-out scenes
The courtroom scene is a highlight, with all of Martin's friends from the neighborhood showing up in contrast to Mr. Kirby's four lawyers. This is the scene were Alice makes a stand against her future in-laws' snobbery, and Mr. Kirby is already beginning to see how impoverished his existence is.

I enjoyed all the scenes with Tony and Alice too, when it's just the two of them. They banter, confide in one another, and bring love and levity to stuffy places like Tony's office or a high-end restaurant.

Further thoughts
Sometimes the film drags along or a point is belabored. Regardless it has a heart and a strong cast of characters. One of the lessons it leaves you with is not to live an anxious miserly existence. Love your life and the people in it and don't live in constant fear.

*All images link back to their sources (Flickr; Flixster (community); Wikipedia).

Week in Seven Words #85

2011-09-21T23:51:00.004-04:00

confines
Résumés remind me of straitjackets.

fruitage
Apple sauce and apples smeared in almond butter. Autumn foods.

homey
Padding around the apartment, wearing socks to stay warm. Different books wait for me on tables and armrests.

pother
When she's fearful she likes to recruit people to her fears. She gets them excited and ready to act, agitates them, like a girl splashing around on the beach getting water in people's eyes and convincing them a shark's fin is just a dozen feet away.

sparklers
The large padded envelope she brings me is splashed with bright colors and streamers, and it yields cards and smaller envelopes like starbursts.

summertide
One lingering summer night. It's balmy out on the porch, where the trees creep close and leaves rattle on the paved path.

swing
Sing, Sing, Sing played by The Benny Goodman Orchestra beats and blares and explodes out of my laptop. It's the kind of music that can make people feel like born dancers.

Week in Seven Words #84

2011-09-15T11:14:00.005-04:00

charades
I'm a spider, a rabbit, and a table. When I'm done being a table, another player gives me pointers on how to be an even better one. It's more difficult to transmit the idea of table-ness than I'd thought.

horticulture
The community garden is tucked between old apartment buildings, the greenery running up the walls, the flowers sleepy in the odd patches of sunlight, people drifting around with rakes and watering cans, tending to the plants and to their own well-being.

kindred
A time to catch up with loved ones - blasting songs from the 50s on the car radio and singing along with unbearable falsettos; curling up on a dark curving sofa to chat and puzzle over a movie; talking behind closed doors with someone who has such faith in me it's a little scary, a relief but also nerve-wracking; stopping and listening as little ones show me things: drawings, toys, costumes and games, letters of the alphabet written with care.

stopover
Places to sit: A bench in a cathedral garden where the grass runs wild and a sculpture of an angel flanked by sun and moon rears up beyond the fence; the front steps of the cathedral, overlooking Amsterdam Avenue, where I plonk down to check on a developing pinky toe blister; the front steps of an art museum overrun with people and hopeful pigeons.

sweetener
Swirls of birthday cake flavored frozen yogurt topped with tiny chocolate-raspberry truffles. I scrape my spoon inside the paper cup to catch the last drops as I stroll down 81st street to the museum.

unmoored
I'm a rowboat on an ocean.

vocables
The game Smartmouth gives you two letters and requires you to quickly come up with a word that begins with the first letter and ends on the second; the way we're playing, the word must be at least four letters long. On Y-B we're all stumped. On E-K we're also stumped until she strolls up, glances at the letter tiles and says "Embark", after which she listens to our groans of 20/20 hindsight and strolls away. Next comes Hangman, where we try to stump the older children with 'yak', 'chrysalis', and 'unfashionably', but they're wise to our use of unusual letters and words and do well in figuring things out.

Good Short Fiction: 3 stories from Adaptations

2011-09-14T00:08:00.013-04:00

Collection: Adaptations: From Short Story to Big Screen
Editor: Stephanie Harrison

This anthology has excellent selections from both obscure and well-known authors along with a discussion of how each story came to be adapted for the big screen. The following three stories are all bleak, in different ways. I grouped them together here because they gnawed at me as I read them and when I thought about them after.

Title: Babylon Revisited
Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
Charlie Wales squandered his money, health, marriage, and guardianship of his young daughter, and has only recently gotten back on his feet. His sister-in-law, Marion, is his daughter's current legal guardian, and Charlie needs to prove to her and to her husband that he has given up his old habits of drink and dissipation. It doesn't help that he and Marion dislike one another. She blames him for the death of his wife, Helen, while he thinks she's hanging onto his daughter's guardianship out of spite and resentment of his wealth. In his heart he knows that Marion's hesitation to trust him is understandable, even as he seethes at her pettiness; he's eaten up by shame at how careless he once was with everything important.

Charlie cuts a lonely tired figure who has a long road ahead of him. He can't undo the past or shake off acquaintances from his years of wild living and big spending. What keeps him going is his dream of a future where he's settled, stable, with his daughter beside him, his one hope for redemption. Every day more time is lost, his daughter grows older; the dream might recede from him. Even though the end of the story isn't hopeless, it still hurts to read it.

He would come back someday; they couldn't make him pay forever. But he wanted his child, and nothing was much good now, beside that fact. He wasn't young anymore, with a lot of nice thoughts and dreams to have by himself. He was absolutely sure Helen wouldn't have wanted him to be so alone.

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Title: The Basement Room
Author: Graham Greene
This story sinks you into the dark, shoddy, and pathetic mess that the characters make of their lives. The bleakness is beautifully written and unrelenting.

While his parents are away a young boy stays at home with Mr. and Mrs. Baines, the husband and wife who serve as butler and housekeeper. As the story progresses he gets submerged in the darkness of their lives; they burden him with secrets, use him as an accomplice to their deceit, and by the end expose him to deadly violence. Mrs. Baines is terrifying; she reminds me in some ways of Madame Defarge from A Tale of Two Cities, keeping meticulous and bitter track of all the wrongs done to her and all the misdeeds that deserve punishment. Mr. Baines is not frightening so much as irresponsible and weak. Both of them are doomed.

The night-light stood beside the mirror and Mrs. Baines could see bitterly there her own reflection, misery and cruelty wavering in the glass, age and dust and nothing to hope for. She sobbed without tears, a dry, breathless sound; but her cruelty was a kind of pride which kept her going; it was her best quality, she would have been merely pitiable without it.

Making matters worse we get glimpses of the boy's life years into the future, on his deathbed attended only by his secretary; Greene wants to make sure we know that the boy will be scarred for life and will grow up mistrustful of others, unproductive and deeply alone. Throughout the story the reader feels as trapped as the child, swallowed up by the shadows that the adults project on every page.
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Title: Killings
Author: Andre Dubus
Matt Fowler's son has been killed. His son's killer, Richard Strout, is walking around free before the trial is set to start, and Matt and his wife, Ruth, keep seeing him everywhere; it's eating them alive. Matt decides he doesn't want to wait for a trial, which might result in a lenient sentence. He wants to kill his son's murderer. Those are the hard simple facts. But nothing else is simple.

Richard Strout is not a sympathetic character. He has always spelled trouble for other people. Matt knows this. He also knows that Richard lives, breathes, wears underwear, goes out drinking, has photos in his home, other people in his life who might care whether he lives or dies. Matt becomes conscious of "circles of love" surrounding Richard; some of those circles Richard himself has ruptured, others might still be intact. As the story draws towards the end a net seems to gather around the characters. There's a strange intimacy between them: Matt touching the muzzle of his gun to Richard's head in the dark of Richard's car. Taking control of another man's life.

It's a complex and powerful story. Some events, even gunshots, seem to take place in a world that has a hushed, underwater quality to it.

They stood still for a moment. The woods were quiet save for their breathing, and Matt remembered hearing the movements of birds and small animals after the first shot. Or maybe he had not heard them.

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Other stories from this collection are The Sentinel (by Arthur C. Clarke), along with Auggie Wren's Christmas Story (by Paul Auster), The Harvey Pekar Name Story (by Harvey Pekar), My Friend Flicka (by Mary O'Hara), and A Reputation (by Richard Edward Connell).
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This post has been linked to at Short Stories on Wednesday #10 over at Bread Crumb Reads blog.

Across the street from the WTC

2011-09-11T11:44:00.010-04:00

Across the street from the World Trade Center site is St. Paul's Chapel.

The church dates from the American colonial era and is the oldest continuously used public building in NYC. It didn't sustain structural damage on 9/11/01; trees in the churchyard took the brunt of the falling debris as the twin towers collapsed.

On his inauguration day in 1789, George Washington prayed there (NYC was the U.S. capital then) with members of Congress.

Two hundred and twelve years later, St. Paul's Chapel became a base for workers involved in rescue, recovery and clean-up following the attacks on the World Trade Center. In between shifts they could come to the church for food, foot rubs, back massages, conversation, counseling, prayers, comfort, a shoulder to cry on, soothing music, a place to sleep. The church was packed with volunteers, helping out 24/7.

Messages of support also came in from around the U.S. and the world.

If you visit the church these days you'll find 9/11 exhibits and memorials. They're often personal and very moving. The deceased are remembered (including those who died in the act of saving other people or trying to); the exhibits also recount the many acts of love, healing, assistance and selflessness that followed, along with the nightmarish work undertaken by the first responders, recovery and clean-up workers.

I was in Manhattan on 9/11; thankfully many blocks away from Ground Zero. My first sight of the attacks was an enormous mass of smoke against an otherwise lovely blue sky. I have just fragments of memory from the rest of the day: hearing on an elevator that the second tower had collapsed, and spending most of the day going from one place to another looking at TV screens for updates. Also calling and IM'ing family and friends. Thinking back on it I remember how people didn't want to be alone, but were leaving apartments, offices, dorms to gather into groups and try to make sense of what was going on.

My first bus ride down there felt like an approach towards a large, open wound. Last time I was there in late December '09 the feeling wasn't as strong but it was still present.

View of the WTC site from the churchyard of St. Paul's Chapel, December '09.

No matter how extensive the rebuilding and restoration, the place will always feel raw.

I've had many discussions with people about the attacks, their evil and their global and political ramifications. I was a teenager at the time. The attacks, and the discourse surrounding them, markedly shaped my thoughts about the world and how I evaluated other people's worldview.

WTC site, August '08.

What I've kept returning to are memories of how people rose to the occasion in the aftermath, in large and small ways. Thinking about this doesn't solve the bigger problems, it doesn't erase the horror, but it's an antidote to unhealthy pessimism and a reminder of how people can continue to be decent, brave, and unselfish even in an inferno.

WTC site, December '09.

The salvation of man is through love and in love. - Viktor Frankl

Worth Watching: Autumn Sonata (1978)

2011-09-07T21:24:00.020-04:00

Title: Autumn Sonata
Director: Ingmar Bergman
Language: Swedish (and some English)
Rating: PG

Synopsis
Eva (Liv Ullmann) and her mother, Charlotte (Ingrid Bergman), haven't seen each other in seven years. Charlotte is a brilliant and celebrated pianist, touring around the world. Eva lives a quiet life in a parsonage with her husband, Viktor (Halvar Björk); she also cares for her sister, Helena (Lena Nyman), who suffers from a progressive illness. After Charlotte's longtime companion and lover passes away, Eva invites her to visit the parsonage. Eva hopes for some sort of reconciliation with her mother, a closeness they've never shared. When Charlotte arrives tension mounts between them, and in the course of the night years of pent-up anger, bitterness, and hurt boil over.

Characters
Liv Ullmann's magnificent performance as Eva bares layers of emotion, whether she's flying into a rage or quietly sitting beside her mother as Charlotte animates the room. There are a couple of scenes where Eva is observing her mother silently; no words are necessary because Ullmann's face expresses everything: sadness, admiration, resentment, longing and wonder. This especially comes out in the scene where Charlotte is at the piano explaining and then playing a Chopin prelude that Eva plodded through earlier.

Ingrid Bergman's performance is also powerful. She handles Charlotte's complexity beautifully, the shifts in her mood - she can be lively and coquettish, then stalk around a room looking anxious and lost. Charlotte is a passionate artist, living in her own world, loving the fame and admiration that isolates her from others even as she laments her difficulty connecting with people. She has also been a distant mother; her treatment of Eva is fond but superficial. In the company of both her daughters, Charlotte feels guilt-ridden and suffocated. She's probably ashamed of them too; she can make brilliant music but was unable to produce a brilliant daughter. Eva lives as a shadow, and Helena's illness is so unbearable to Charlotte that Charlotte avoids her.

Eva's husband, Viktor, observes the mother-daughter drama with resignation. Viktor is kind and perceptive but also passive. At the film's start he addresses the viewer directly and reads from a book that Eva has written: "One must learn to live. I practice every day. My biggest obstacle is I don't know who I am. If anyone loves me as I am I may dare at last to look at myself. For me, that possibility is fairly remote." He then tells us that he wishes he could make her understand that she is "loved whole-heartedly"; the difficulty is, he can't find the right words to make her believe him. He's a friend, a gentle companion, but too tired for any passionate emotions or interventions.

Relationships
The Charlotte-Eva relationship dominates the movie. Eva can't live with her mother and can't live without her; Charlotte is a beloved mother, a hated enemy, an angel whose blessing is sorely desired, and a scapegoat blamed for every sin and mischance. The relationship at some points shifts from mother-daughter to accused and accuser, as Eva brings up every bit of childhood neglect, subtle cruelty, maternal inadequacy and selfishness ("All that was sensitive and delicate, you attacked. All that was alive, you tried to smother") and throws them in Charlotte's face. Charlotte isn't a good mother, but there are times when Eva goes too far, carried away with her need to blame Charlotte for everything, past and present. What does she want from her mother at this point? Would she be satisfied if Charlotte admitted responsibility for her mistakes? Does she still want her mother's love and approval?

Eva's own child, a boy, died at a very young age. In one scene, set in his old nursery, she tenderly speaks of how she senses him near her and feels that he's still alive. This strikes Charlotte as morbid and fanciful, detached from reality - more evidence that Eva is a disappointing neurotic daughter, an impression strengthened when Eva's musings turn philosophical: "To me, man is a tremendous creation," she says. "In man is everything from the highest to the lowest." She adds, her face dreamy and contemplative, "There are no limits. Neither to thoughts nor feelings. It's anxiety that sets limits." (This applies not only to love - once Eva moves past her anxious attitude of trying to please her mother, there is no foreseeable limit to her anger.)

Eva's warmth towards her son contrasts with Charlotte's limited ability to love. But one also wonders what sort of mother Eva would have been had her son lived and started growing apart from her, into his own self, as all children do. Would she have smothered him, stunted him, done everything she could to keep him secured to her? Or would she have been a wonderful mother? As it is she's much more of a mother to her sister, Helena, than Charlotte ever was to either of her daughters. I love how Ingmar Bergman presents these characters to us for close consideration, allowing us to see different sides of them.

Memorable sights and sounds
Autumn colors permeate the film. Fallen leaves and pink flowers. Walls and furniture in warm shades of yellow, brown, and cream. Eva, first seen in a long red dress (Charlotte will later wear a red dress too, with pearls). Eva's and Charlotte's hair. Their eyes red-rimmed with tears.

The camera often lingers on the actors' faces; I can't look away when this happens - the human face is a world in itself. Though the screenplay is powerful the dialogue is sometimes too stiff and stagey (maybe in part because I'm reading an English translation in the subtitles); the feeling of intimacy and humanity is preserved by the close-ups on the faces and the force of the actors' performances.

Stand-out scenes
There's one scene I returned to a few times: when Charlotte watches Eva play Chopin's Prelude No.2 in A minor and then plays it in turn, explaining the piece to Eva (the pianist Käbi Laretei, who was also Ingmar Bergman's ex-wife, played both Eva's version and Charlotte's). The camera settles on the actors - Liv Ullmann and Ingrid Bergman both brilliant - and the scene as a whole sums up their characters' relationship. It's also I feel the best written part of the movie; to understand a work of music and write about it clearly and unpretentiously is difficult.

"Chopin was emotional, but not mawkish. Feeling is very far from sentimentality. The prelude tells of pain, not reverie. You have to be calm, clear and harsh. Take the first bars now. It hurts but he doesn't show it. Then a short relief... but it evaporates at once, and the pain is the same. Total restraint the whole time... The prelude must be made to sound almost ugly. It is never ingratiating. It should sound wrong. You have to battle your way through it and emerge triumphant."

Later in the movie Charlotte will speak of her own childhood, spent with cold parents; music became her means of expression. Unlike Charlotte, Eva's most profound expressions of emotion and thought emerge in her reflections on human nature and her abiding love for her son. Both Charlotte and Eva are capable of deep connections, but in such different ways. The scene of the Chopin prelude echoes throughout the whole movie; when I think about it now, my skin prickles.

Further thoughts
There's a raw nerve running through the movie. The characters tap at it and flinch. They can't help themselves. They're locked together in love, pain, rage, and endless struggle.

*All images link back to their sources (Flixster (community); Wikipedia)

Week in Seven Words #83

2011-09-07T10:53:00.004-04:00

antennae
When we walk outside we're mostly silent, snug in our separate shells. But at the café we talk for hours, about books and bedbug infestations, future road trips and finding a job.

embrace
Before I'm even out of my chair she's there, catching me up in a hug.

indeterminacy
They ask me where I'll live, what I'll do. I tell them I don't know; I don't know yet. It's a dissatisfying answer that tempts people to jump in, answer for me and tell me what to do. I'm more appreciative of the responses I get from those who are open to a number of possibilities and willing to discuss them.

longanimity
The boy is barely taller than the large black dog that walks beside him. The leash is held loosely in the boy's hand, but the dog doesn't drag him or pull free; even when the boy swats at him with a broad green leaf, the dog slowly and patiently plods along, accustomed to the young child's pestering.

marina
Their Lego city has expanded to include a marina with pirates, mermaids and people on jet skis.

provender
As the storm gusts around outside I'm reminded to check that I have enough non-perishable food. Opening a cupboard I find tuna cans and chocolate-covered blueberries. I'm set.

tiffin
At the park we find a bench in the shade and catch up over lunch - pitas plump with hummous, tahini, hot sauce, falafels, and Israeli salad. It's a brilliant day. A breeze sweeps in around us, chasing away the stagnant heat. The leaves overhead are green and gold. At one point a toddler comes up to us, smiles, stares and waits to see what we'll do; his parents hang back, his mother a touch embarrassed and his father amused, both of them fondly tolerant of his need to investigate people.

Good Short Fiction: 3 stories from Carry On, Jeeves

2011-09-01T12:10:00.020-04:00

Collection: Carry On, Jeeves
Author: P.G. Wodehouse (Pelham Grenville Wodehouse)

Carry On, Jeeves centers on Bertie Wooster, a jovial air-headed upper-class English bachelor, and his manservant, the cool, impeccable and intelligent Jeeves (a "gentleman's gentleman"), who manages Bertie's life and rescues him and his friends from various mishaps. The stories are set in the early 20th century; a gentleman like Bertie could have an easy-going life waking up late, dining at his club, and drinking throughout the day. Carry On, Jeeves is a fun collection; I didn't read more than one or two stories at a time - there are plot points that tend to repeat, though Wodehouse's cleverness with the English language is always a delight and the main reason I read his work. These are the stories that stood out for me:

The Aunt and the Sluggard
Most of the stories feature one of Bertie's close friends who is usually a slacker with a silly nickname (e.g. Biffy or Sippy). In this one the layabout is nicknamed Rocky (short for Rockmetteller); he lives in a cabin out on Long Island, NY where he spends most of the month sleeping and meditating on the movements of earthworms, except for a few days where he writes bad poetry that gets lapped up by American magazines. One reason I'm recommending this story is the poetry, a fine example of Wodehouse's satirical talents:

Be!
Be!
The past is dead,
Tomorrow is not born.
Be today!
Today!

In Wooster-Jeeves stories there's often a domineering aunt or uncle making demands on a slacker nephew. Bertie suffers such oppression from his Aunt Agatha, but in this story the victim is Rocky. His aunt lives out in the Midwest and would like him to send her colorful descriptions of life in New York City; in exchange she'll give him money and keep him in her will. Most men would be ecstatic at such a deal, but Rocky isn't most men; the thought of living in NYC, away from his cabin and earthworms, is horrifying to him.

Fortunately for him Bertie happens to be visiting NYC, and the plan is to send Jeeves out to do research on the city's high life; the image of Jeeves smoking a fat cigar at a cabaret and scrutinizing 5th Avenue fashions is classic. Of course things get complicated when Rocky's aunt, so enthralled by his accounts of city life, decides to visit. Meantime Bertie and Jeeves have their own angst to work through. Another recurring plot point in these stories is Bertie rebelling against Jeeves by wearing a hideous outfit or refusing to shave his mustache. It's a regular battle of wills between them. Invariably they work through these rough patches in their relationship, with Bertie seeing the error of his ways.

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Bertie Changes His Mind
It's strange to think of a Wooster-Jeeves story as dark, but this one has a darkness to it. Rather than being told from Bertie's point-of-view, we hear the tale from Jeeves. Jeeves is always clever, resourceful and manipulative, but the way he manages Bertie in this story is a little disturbing - he squashes Bertie's unprecedented desire for a more meaningful life. At the beginning of the story Bertie is out-of-sorts and wonders if there's more to life than waking up late, drinking, and being amiable. He considers inviting his sister and her children to live with him for a time, just to see what it would be like to have kids around. To Jeeves these impulses are alarming. If Bertie seriously contemplates marriage, and finally weds and has children, it will likely result in Jeeves having to find another position. Jeeves likes things as they are; he has a comfortable situation, and he has no intention of letting Bertie disrupt the relationship they have established, with Jeeves as a fatherly puppet master and Bertie as a mostly likeable (though at times recalcitrant) child.

There's some hilarious writing here, especially when Jeeves reflects on his former employer, Montague-Todd. As for the method he uses to cure Bertie of any wishes for a family - it's both funny and humiliating. Poor Bertie. Who knows what kind of man he might have become, and what meaning his life might have had, but by the end of the story he's back to his usual self. Settling down at the end of the day he explains to Jeeves why he's contented with his life again:

"I mean, looking at the clock and wondering if you're going to be late with the good old drinks, and then you coming in with the tray always on time, never a minute late, and shoving it down on the table and biffing off, and the next night coming in and shoving it down and biffing off, and the next night - I mean, it gives you a sort of safe, restful feeling. Soothing! That's the word."

-------------

Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest
Bertie's leisurely stay in New York City is disturbed when he finds out he has to look after 23 year old Wilmot (nicknamed "Motty"), the sheltered son of one of Aunt Agatha's friends, Lady Malvern, who hails from Much Middlefold, Shropshire. Wilmot seems at first to be a peaceable twit who will sit quietly in Bertie's apartment sucking on his walking-stick and leafing through books all evening before retiring to bed with a glass of warm milk. What Bertie doesn't count on is that a young man who has never been granted much independence will go wild in a place like NYC. As he explains to Bertie at one point:

"I've been cooped up in the ancestral home at Much Middlefold, in Shropshire, and till you've been cooped up in Much Middlefold you don't know what cooping is! The only time we get any excitement is when one of the choir-boys is caught sucking chocolate during the sermon. When that happens, we talk about it for days. I've got about a month of New York, and I mean to store up a few happy memories for the long winter evenings."

If Wilmot gets in trouble going on wild benders through the city, Bertie will face the double wrath of his Aunt Agatha and of Wilmot's mother. Thankfully Jeeves finds a devious way of helping Bertie out and making sure Motty will be kept confined.

Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest has the distinction of being the first ever Wooster-Jeeves tale I read. I love Bertie's happy ramblings and how they contrast with Jeeves's worldliness, eloquence and masterful understatements. There's no one who talks like Bertie: "Won't you have an egg or something? Or a sausage or something? Or something?" and -

It's only after a bit of breakfast that I'm able to regard the world with that sunny cheeriness which makes a fellow the universal favourite. I'm never much of a lad till I've engulfed an egg or two and a beaker of coffee.

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*I've added this post to Short Stories on Wednesday #8 at the Bread Crumb Reads blog.

Week in Seven Words #82

2011-08-29T17:38:00.003-04:00

bustle
Without all the work of writing papers one would think I'd be less busy, but instead the days are cluttered with chores I'd postponed, errands to run, an apartment to neaten and organize in preparation for a new life.

conduit
I walk down a puddly brick corridor lined with trees, white flowers, and benches soaked in rainwater.

drupaceous
Slices of white peach on a damp paper plate.

gratis
Getting a library card is always a happy occasion. On this one the largest word is FREE, written in white letters on a red background. It reminds me of Emily Dickinson: How frugal is the Chariot/That bears a Human soul.

hull
The library's second floor is one long room with a raftered ceiling and some skylights showing sun and tumbling clouds. It's cozier than I expected, tables and shelves packed close together, babies crawling around among heaps of board books in the children's section by the picture window. We're in a boat voyaging across a quiet ocean; the skies are untroubled.

hypnagogic
Ten pm at the supermarket; I'm in a floaty-minded relaxed mood. Fellow shoppers include: an off-duty security guard, her face waxy with exhaustion; a mother herding a pack of squalling overtired children; a middle-aged man in a cut-off tee buying huge bottles of organic fruit juice. It's been a long day. I stop by the snow-white onions and try to figure out where the bananas have been relocated to.

temblor
The ground shakes. Shortly after, we shake hands and part. An unexpected earthquake coincides with a meeting that marks a change in the course of my life.

Short stories on Bread Crumb Reads blog

2011-08-26T10:13:00.004-04:00

Last night I discovered Bread Crumb Reads, where the hostess has a feature, Short Stories on Wednesday. She writes about stories she's read and on each post allows for visitors to link back to their blogs with their own recent reviews of short fiction (this week I linked to my recent write-up of the Oxford Book of English Detective Stories). So if you read and/or review short fiction, consider visiting and participating. Also the blog as a whole strikes me as a strong, well-written book blog with good recommendations.

Worth Watching: Love Affair (1939)

2011-08-24T22:11:00.003-04:00

Title: Love Affair
Director: Leo McCarey
Language: English
Rating: Unrated

Synopsis
Michel (Charles Boyer) and Terry (Irene Dunne) fall in love on a cruise ship. He's a wealthy French playboy and dilettante; she's a singer. Both are already engaged to be married. Once they reach the U.S., they agree that if in six months they're both single, they'll meet on the 102nd floor of the Empire State building; Michel also wants to use this time to prove to Terry and to himself that he can work for a living. The six months pass, it looks as if the promised reunion will take place, but on her way towards meeting him Terry gets hit by a car. Unsure if she'll ever be able to walk again, she decides it's best not to contact Michel until she's more certain of her prognosis.

Characters
The film could have gone overboard with melodrama, but there's an intelligence and restraint throughout, much of it coming from Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne; they don't overact.

Dunne is a subtle actress; with a twitch of an eyebrow or a sidelong look she can convey happiness, hope, or resignation. She has kind, knowing eyes, and looks sometimes like she's laughing inwardly at a private joke; she doesn't give her character any affectations. Boyer can also act with depth and range; compare him during those careless flirtations at the start to what he's like in the final scene. Boyer and Dunne have chemistry, and there's also an open friendliness between their characters that makes the romance sweeter.

The sweetest character is Michel's grandmother (Maria Ouspenskaya), who gets many well-deserved hugs. She lives in Madeira, and when the cruise ship stops there Michel and Terry visit her. It's a turning point in the film, with Terry seeing Michel as a doting grandson capable of devotion and tenderness, and Michel developing serious feelings towards Terry, who garners the approval of his grandmother.

Relationships
The romance between Terry and Michel shows different sides of love: pink champagne and kisses, warm domestic comforts, and - the part they need to work on – faith and trust in the face of hardship. Michel's grandmother, sweetheart that she is, does her part both intentionally and inadvertently in bringing them together.

They're blessed with two of the friendliest and most forgiving exes in movie history; breaking the engagements seems to go easily for them, unlike the car accident, injuries, and various plot contrivances that lead to painful misunderstandings.

Memorable sights and sounds
Charles Boyer's delicious accent and devilish eyebrows.

There's a beautiful shot of Dunne in a white dress and wide-brimmed hat standing in the chapel in Madeira; pale light slants down on her.

I also love the moment when she pushes open a glass door on her balcony, and it catches a reflection of The Empire State building. It was at the time the tallest building in the world.

Stand-out scenes
The following scenes are all bittersweet in some way.

There's Terry singing Plaisir d'Amour at the piano, as Michel's grandmother plays; the singing is meditative and enchanting. Michel studies Terry intently as she sings, at times glancing away from her and then back as if he can't help himself. He and his grandmother also exchange a couple of knowing looks. As the song goes on we hear something that sounds like a death knell in the distance, but is only the horn of the cruise ship calling the passengers back.

Terry also sings at a nightclub in a black dress and glimmering jacket. Sing, My Heart is the song; Dunne is classy, expressive, and intelligent, a joy to watch.

Pretend you're glad, my heart.
Although you're sad, my heart,
He mustn't know it.

Any mention of memorable scenes must include the final one, with its nuance and layers of emotion, and an ending that isn't unreservedly happy.

Further thoughts
I've never seen the famous remake of this movie, An Affair to Remember, with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr. I'm not in any rush to either, after watching Love Affair.

*All images link back to their sources (Rottentomatoes; Wikipedia)

Chain Gang Tap Dance - The Holst Sisters

2011-08-24T08:48:00.003-04:00

A cute and tricky dance routine from a pair of sisters I haven't been able to find out more about. Was this their only recorded performance?

Week in Seven Words #81

2011-08-24T07:21:00.005-04:00

glare
A flash of lightning fills up the window like an enraged eye peering into the room.

justification
It's the same situation with the same actors, but I describe it quite differently depending on the person I'm talking to.

manifest
Before leaving the library I drop my backpack on the sofa by the exit and start to rearrange its contents. That's when I see him wave hello from the other end of the room. He comes over, we talk, and the tightness in my chest eases. Sometimes a friend is there at the exact right moment, just when you need friendship most but don't hope for it or think to ask.

parabolic
The shape of the past few years resembles in some ways an inverted parabola, arcing up and then declining.

phrenic
Until the decision is made, it's difficult to breathe.

slops
The writing is ragged with indecision. A sluggish paragraph is cut through by a flash of insight all in capslocks, followed by a puddle of diluted thoughts that trickle off in ellipses.

treading
I look like I'm getting somewhere, typing and rifling through papers, but it's only an illusion of progress. Over time I grow tired and start to sink.

Good Short Fiction: 4 tales from The Oxford Book of English Detective Stories

2011-08-20T22:06:00.007-04:00

Collection: The Oxford Book of English Detective Stories
Editor: Patricia Craig

Title: Bring Back the Cat!
Author: Reginald Hill
Joe Sixsmith, a Brit of West Indian derivation, is a fledgling private eye called on to help find a cat that's gone missing. The owner, Mrs. Ellison, is a neurotic woman who lives in the sort of neighborhood where a man with Sixsmith's skin color would likely be mistaken for the gardener. Her family is a strange, antagonistic bunch: a husband who lounges around reading the paper and pretending he's uninterested in Sixsmith's amateurish sleuthing, and two sullen, dysfunctional teenagers - a son, Auberon, and a daughter, Tittie (an apt nickname). Next door is a cantankerous neighbor named Bullivant who has a ferocious dog (the prime suspect?).

There's more going on in this household than a missing cat, and from the start Sixsmith is in over his head. Part of what makes the story so funny is that the people he interviews sometimes assume that he knows more than he does and will make revelatory statements that startle him; at times he hits on the right line of questioning by accident. Sixsmith is not a stupid man by any means, just inexperienced, with a tendency to mull things over rather than make quick timely deductions. He's a likable guy with a dry sense of humor, and he does his best to deal with these people; by the end he's uncovered everything, inadvertently, and only realizes it after the fact.

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Title: The Killing of Michael Finnegan
Author: Michael Gilbert

After a spy is brutally murdered, his widow and two of his colleagues work together to track down the killers and attempt to foil a terrorist plot. The story contains a novel's worth of material: a back-stabbing insider, forced confessions, some politics, sharp efficient characterizations, strong emotional moments, a race against the clock, and dry humor mixed in with the seriousness and deadliness of the characters' undertakings.

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Title: The Oxford Way of Death
Author: Robert Barnard

It has happened twice in the last year that a student would begin to read his weekly essay to a normally comatose old gentleman, only to find on concluding his piece that he had been reading for some time to a corpse.

At St. Pothinus's Hall, the Fellows are for the most part aging and wedded to their ways; they don't care much about their college's poor academic record, so long as they can stay comfortably encrusted to their posts. When the Fellow responsible for teaching Ancient Persian passes away in front of his one student, the other Fellows wonder who can replace him. The mischievous Wittling, who teaches classics, finally points out a suitable candidate: Sandowa Bulewa, who is - horrors! - a woman. Not only a woman, but a young black woman who had studied at Cambridge and the Sorbonne. With the exception of the story's narrator, Peter Borthwick, who at age 47 is the second youngest man there and considered too forward-thinking, the Fellows can't stomach the thought of Sandowa Bulewa as a colleague, though Wittling is willing to give it a try if only to stir things up and make trouble. Little does he know that his suggestion will lead to his death.

The Oxford Way of Death is an excellent dark comedy, a funny and disturbing look at the amorality, conformity, and stagnation that can be found in academia. Even the forward-thinking narrator, good at stating his principles and making his indignation known, will subside like the rest. As he says: "It's amazing what we liberal intellectuals can take in our strides, when we set our minds to it."

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Title: Three is a Lucky Number
Author: Margery Allingham
"At five o'clock on a September afternoon Ronald Frederick Torbay was making preparations for his third murder." Torbay is a black widower, and one way the author builds suspense is to have him think back on his first two murders even as he's getting ready for the third. In some respects his wives have been similar - middle-aged women, unnoticed and unused to affection, who also have some money; in other ways their personalities have differed, with his current wife (and soon-to-be victim) the most sensible one so far. The story's spark comes mostly from the details, the mounting suspense, and the hope that Torbay will get his comeuppance.

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Other recommended stories from The Oxford Book of English Detective Stories: Death on the Air (by Ngaio Marsh) and Great Aunt Allie's Flypapers (by P.D. James).

Red Blues

2011-08-19T10:00:00.001-04:00

Week in Seven Words #80

2011-08-18T17:15:00.002-04:00

all-purpose
When in doubt, buy them a gift card for a book store.

assurance
I half-expect an angry email. Instead I get concern, what sounds like a willingness to understand. I'm surprised. Years ago it would have been different. I wish I had possessed the confidence and faith to speak sooner.

clunky
Sitting on the floor gives me a strange perspective of the table and its unsteady piles of intermingled books, papers, notebooks, and journals. A water bottle looks like an alien totem, and the lamp towers solemnly over the laptop. Everything seems large and somewhat foolish, like children's toys meant to be tossed around and banged up.

curdled
No matter how many papers I go through, by the end of the day I'm no closer to having it figured out.

dovelike
The reading of the Book of Lamentations starts unexpectedly from a soft-spoken man at the back of the shul.

forbearing
About an hour before the fast ends, I start getting distracted with thoughts of food. My stomach isn't rumbling, but there's an odd clench to it, as if it's disgruntled but too polite to whine.

maquis
I feel like I should have learned about Nancy Wake prior to her death at age 98. She hasn't passed unnoticed, but she and others like her ought to be better known.

Fail better

2011-08-16T17:58:00.008-04:00

"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better." - Samuel Beckett

A site that lays out the spectacular failures of successful people.

And for reasons unclear to me, I think this piece fits - there's something wistful and regretful about it, but at the same time it's clear and beautiful, and becomes light-hearted sometimes.

The Finale of Haydn's Sonata No. 53 in E minor.

Week in Seven Words #79

2011-08-10T22:29:00.004-04:00

chord
I love hearing people talk about a piece of writing that got to them in some way, whether they like it or not; the passion in their analysis is beautiful.

eyrie
The children's section of the bookstore is full of possibility and vision. Richly illustrated picture books show moonlit skies, animals reveling in meadows, wizards roaming the woods with wands flashing. The walls sing with color. It's sequestered from the rest of the store, a world apart from the blander adult aisles, the racks of sweatshirts and wrinkled magazines.

goodwill
I like this stretch of neighborhood, especially in the morning hours. On one side of the street there are trees and a branch of the public library; on the other side there's a post office, bookstore, and a smattering of tables beneath an awning. The day isn't too hot yet, people look pleasant and determined, and there are no lines at the post office.

planner
She buys me an 18-month planner. It has a pale green cover with gold butterflies and scrolling leaves.

reroute
On the phone she blocks me out, so I resort to email. For several minutes I type, explaining what it is I feel and why it is I need to be heard, a claim to attention I rarely make; and after checking that the words aren't angry or hurtful, but just too firm to ignore, I send it off instead of saving it as a draft that will never see the light of day.

rustle
The other room hums quietly with the T.V., with her footsteps, drawers opening and sliding shut. The place doesn't feel like a vacant shell.

tar
My fingers on the keys feel coated in it.

Week in Seven Words #78

2011-08-02T11:39:00.004-04:00

cascade
I could be a cartoon - a wide-eyed foolish girl in a canoe paddling towards a waterfall. I know it's there, right ahead. I can hear it, I can feel the impending descent in my bones, but I think that if I brace myself in my seat and hold the oar a little tighter I'll glide over the edge gracefully. Maybe the best I can hope for at this point is to make it amusing - the canoe shoots out, hangs in the air; I smile, look down, say "uh oh" in a goofy voice, and plummet. Laughter will help me crawl out of the wreckage later.

eupnea
Stepping out into a cool morning that promises rain, I walk slowly and focus on breathing.

excitable
The yolks sizzle and crisp in the pan. Cheese bubbles, and the salsa spits red and green.

lounging
Stunned by the heat of the afternoon, I sprawl on my bed with a book and read by the light that beats in through the blinds.

metamorphosis
The large owlish sunglasses change her face so much that only the fact that she's staring in my direction and smiling makes me stop walking and take a closer look.

overextend
For everything I do I wonder if I could be doing something better, more worthwhile. I'm so caught up in 'what-ifs' that I get little done.

vitiligo
The remaining roses are a pale brittle pink, as if they have a skin condition.

Worth Watching: Le Dîner de Cons (1998)

2011-07-31T18:36:00.003-04:00

Title: Le Dîner de Cons
Director: Francis Veber
Language: French
Rating: PG-13

Synopsis
Pierre Brochant (Thierry Lhermitte) participates in a weekly dinner where he and his friends bring along the biggest idiots they can find; it provides amusement and is also a competition to see who can invite the crowning fool of the evening. On the fateful day in which the film is set, Pierre believes he's found a fine specimen of idiocy: François Pignon (Jacques Villeret), a tax-man from the Ministry who in his spare time builds models of architectural wonders out of matchsticks. Pierre, a wealthy publisher, injures his back during golf and is forced to miss out on that evening's 'idiot dinner', but he invites François to his apartment to get to know him better before the next get-together. Thinking that Pierre is interested in publishing a book about his matchstick models, François arrives happy and eager to help Pierre with his problems (lumbar and marital), and so in a single evening Pierre's life cheerfully goes to pieces.

Characters
François Pignon is the most likeable character here, not only because he's honest and genuinely willing to help, but because the actor who plays him, Jacques Villeret, has the endearing eyes of a hush puppy and an adorably pudgy face. It's difficult to take your eyes off of Villeret, who gives a brilliant performance as a well-meaning guy whose buffoonery stems mostly from the fact that he can't think quickly on his feet and keep track of multiple details, though he appreciates mischief and cleverness. I thought the matchstick models were pretty impressive, and François makes an excellent omelet too so he's not without his talents.

For most of the evening François tries to help Pierre track down and win back his wife, Christine (Alexandra Vandernoot), who said that she's leaving him; Pierre, hampered by his bad back, is often limited to looking on in awe and horror as François attempts to set things right. This is Pierre's comeuppance. In some ways you feel bad for him (to have so much go so wrong in so little amount of time) but he brought these disasters on himself through his dishonesty and arrogance. Thierry Lhermitte, in addition to having lovely blue eyes, is a fine actor, the straight man to Villeret's loveable buffoon, and watching them together is a treat.

Two more minor characters are also worth noting. Lucien Cheval (Daniel Prévost) is a zealous tax inspector and diehard soccer fan who gets sucked into, and contributes to, the unfolding miseries in Pierre's apartment. Juste LeBlanc (Francis Huster) is Pierre's estranged friend; François inadvertently reconciles them during the film, and so Juste is at hand for a part of the evening, though even together he and Pierre can't undo what François has wrought. Juste has an infectious wheezy laugh; the situation gets to be too funny for him to handle, and I understand completely - I can't remember the last time I was laughing so hard during a movie that I had to pause it several times.

Relationships
Pierre and François don't become best buddies or anything like that. The movie ends on just the right note.

Memorable sights and sounds
The facial expressions - confusion, naïveté, and innocent glee from François, stunned disbelief from Pierre, and shrewd calculation from the tax inspector, Cheval, who with few important exceptions misses very little.

Stand-out scenes
Any time François Pignon uses a telephone is funny, whether he dials the wrong number, forgets the primary purpose of the call, gets carried away with emotion, chats about irrelevant details, and even when he does finally get it right, screws things up immediately after.

The entire scene with the tax inspector is also brilliant, with different kinds of humor from verbal wit to sight gags, multiple revelations, some plot points memorably resolved and new ones introduced.

Further thoughts
I can't think of another movie where a character says, in all seriousness, "I'm in a bind; I don't have an idiot. I've looked all over... got one on hand?" Pierre is the one who says this; and he doesn't have to look far. Pretty much everyone is an idiot in one way or another.

*All images link back to their sources (Wikipedia; moviemusereviews)

Week in Seven Words #77

2011-07-27T23:43:00.003-04:00

exhaust
Each car streams the heat from its exhaust pipe across my shins.

frangible
Time crumbles away in sweat, sleeplessness, and apathy.

heatwave
The air presses down like an iron, smoothing my clothes flat onto my skin.

kinetic
She makes her day sound exciting, each detail a delight, and something new to learn at every ordinary place she visits.

leadlight
The leaves look like pieces of green stained glass. It's reassuring to see that even when the heat is brutal and they're scorched, they can still endure beautifully.

nitpicky
He argues into his cell phone, loudly and unselfconsciously, about the precise number of tissues he used the night before to blow his nose.

pillbug
There's a little cell inside me, accessed by a hatch, and sometimes I disappear into it, curling up like a pillbug.

Growing in a mosaic garden

2011-07-25T13:57:00.002-04:00

From Isaiah Zagar's Magic Gardens in Philadelphia.

Week in Seven Words #76

2011-07-19T19:08:00.003-04:00

amphitheater
Watching The King's Speech outdoors by the Delaware River, I'm huddled knees to chest on a flight of stone steps among friends. The screen ripples slightly in the wind, and the waters beyond are a hypnotic royal blue.

bribery
He flops onto the ground and refuses to go further, but with the promise of cookies at the top of the hill he's back on his feet, grudgingly.

diversion
To stave off his fit of fussiness and tears I change his position every so often. I stand him up on the kitchen table, so he has a prime view of the backyard and of his older brother's elaborate monologue on war tactics. Then he sits on the table, his fist clutching my index finger. Next he finds himself on a soft chair, standing again on my lap and bouncing slightly to the rhythm of the William Tell Overture. I wonder what he makes of all these shifts in perspective.

grisaille
On our walk back some blocks are silent and brightly lit. Others rumble with noise and people packed around tables outdoors. The parks are shadowed and secretive. We watch the lights fade out in a church.

hiking
We find spiders, red and orange mushrooms, a bed of ferns splashed with sunshine, and trees that have tipped into the embrace of other trees. There are also slabs of rock over a trickling stream and stones set in a shaky stairwell on the hillside.

scouting
At the bookstore they fan out, searching for chapter books, picture books, bargain books on military history. Their voices drift from different pockets, across shelves, announcing discoveries and asking others to come look at curious finds.

shearing
I'm on the verge of something - I don't know what – but in spite of my fear I'd like to find out.

The life of a bohemian dog redux

2011-07-18T19:56:00.003-04:00

Someone very near and dear to me adds his interpretation to this photo.

Good Short Fiction: Great Aunt Allie's Flypapers (P.D. James)

2011-07-17T20:38:00.011-04:00

Title: Great Aunt Allie's Flypapers
Author: P.D. James (Phyllis Dorothy James)
Where I read it: The Oxford Book of English Detective Stories (edited by Patricia Craig)

Synopsis
Canon Hubert Boxdale has inherited a large sum of money from his step-grandmother, Allegra (known to the family as "Great Aunt Allie"). He's reluctant to accept the money, because he was never sure about Allie's innocence in regards to the death of his grandfather; though she wasn't convicted in court, people always suspected that she had murdered her husband to obtain his fortune. Hubert asks his godson, Superintendent Adam Dalgliesh, to reopen the decades-old murder case and see if he can settle the question of Allie's innocence with certainty.

Some reasons to read it

The characterization of Hubert, who is a good unselfish man. Thinking him naive, people often take advantage of him, but he knows what they're up to even as he keeps trying to help them. A key insight is that "his goodness had in some sense protected him." Dalgliesh will have to protect Hubert too, but not necessarily from finding out anything painful about Allie, who may very well have been innocent. Dalgliesh has great respect for his godfather, and wonders sometimes how a man like that can live "in a carnivorous world in which gentleness, humility, and unworldliness are hardly conducive to survival let alone success."
Dalgliesh told himself that he should have remembered what, as a small boy, he had discovered about Uncle Hubert's conscience; that it operated as a warning bell and that, unlike most people, he never pretended that it hadn't sounded or that he hadn't heard it or that, having heard it, something must be wrong with the mechanism.
Another person Dalgliesh comes to like during the course of the investigation is Allie herself. I won't reveal much more about her. In the timeframe of the story she has passed away, and never appears outside of other people's recollections and records, but her presence lingers throughout. The question of her innocence is answered conclusively by the end; and at the end, after we find out exactly what happened to Hubert's grandfather, we're left to reflect on the nature of innocence.
James is an engaging story-teller. Her characterizations are sharp, her writing skillful and precise; the story is rich with wry humor and keen observations of human nature. All throughout there are questions - if it wasn't Allie, then who was it? Dalgliesh tracks down witnesses and other potential suspects who are still alive; he pores over trial records. There's always the danger that the truth will be lost to time; or it might be a painful truth that's best left only partially revealed.

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Other recommended tales from The Oxford Book of English Detective Stories are Death on the Air (by Ngaio Marsh) and these stories here.

Week in Seven Words #75

2011-07-11T16:25:00.004-04:00

ataraxy
We find a rose garden and a magnolia garden facing each other across a quiet street. Both are past their season. Both are mostly empty. A breeze shimmers through them.

coda
Fireworks rumbling at the day's end.

disclosure
I share as much of the truth as I can bring myself to without distressing them unduly.

loll
It's a happy lazy day, when the sun pounds through my head; I play Scrabble, fight off sleepiness, and read out loud from a chapter book about a pig in search of hot buttered toast.

municipal
They take me on a tour through their slowly growing Lego town. In the pizza parlor a Lego lady is firing up some pies.

sheen
Chocolates wrapped in slick foil of different colors: orange, ocean blue, silver, gold, and fir green.

trammeled
We glimpse The Thinker through a sprawl of planks and chain-link fencing. He's hemmed in.

Happy Fourth!

2011-07-04T09:49:00.007-04:00

Doorways in Elfreth's Alley, Philadelphia

Week in Seven Words #74

2011-07-03T21:42:00.003-04:00

cartographical
To solve the game I sketch out maps on lined paper with squiggly tunnels and shaky rooms, roads that leap too far right or left. I love it when I haven't yet explored everything, and there are blank spaces, terra incognita.

changeable
For the exact same task, twenty minutes isn't nearly enough time on one day but a decent amount of time on another.

inflation
The quality of a mediocre film improves when you watch it in good company.

interplanetary
When talking to different friends it can feel as if I'm bouncing around from one planet to another - some are brilliant and turbulent, others are spare and rocky, a few aren't planets at all but friendly moons with valleys, caves, and silver mountains. But they're all inviting, one way or another.

meandering
I like his free associative style of speaking. He says what comes to mind, but it's never anything malicious - at worst it's irrelevant, but mostly in an amusing way.

puffy
Pizza dough slowly swelling in a bowl.

terpsichorean
At half past midnight, while walking past the brightly lit windows of a bank, I see a janitor inside mopping the floor. Several feet away his young daughter twirls around with a broom.

Good Short Fiction: Death on the Air (Ngaio Marsh)

2011-07-02T23:45:00.008-04:00

Title: Death on the Air
Author: Ngaio Marsh (Edith Ngaio Marsh)
Where I read it: The Oxford Book of English Detective Stories (edited by Patricia Craig)

Synopsis

On the 25th of December at 7:30 a.m. Mr. Septimus Tonks was found dead beside his wireless set.

Chief Detective-Inspector Roderick Alleyn investigates the death of a man who was apparently electrocuted by his own radio. As it becomes clear that this wasn't an accident, Alleyn needs to sort through a houseful of suspects including the wife and children, servants and employees, and friends of the family. Septimus Tonks was a cruel tyrannical man with no shortage of people who feared and despised him. Alleyn's investigation uncovers secret relationships, dysfunctions, and the wreckage of an unhappy home.

Some reasons to read it

Marsh attends to the technical details of the crime and to the delicate dance of timing and opportunity that makes it so difficult to pinpoint the murderer. What's most compelling about her story though are the characters and the household dynamics.
The precision of the crime contrasts with the messiness of the people. Marsh reveals to us these wounded people, and the man who liked to grind them under his thumb. Sometimes the story only suggests things that are all the more disturbing for not being entirely exposed. You wouldn't find this family sitting around the tree opening presents together.
The radio hummed, gathered volume, and found itself.
'No-oel, No-o-el,' it roared.

At the same time, they can be decent to each other in small subdued ways, Mr. Tonks excluded. Unhappy or damaged as they are, the different family members and employees understand each other. Love can grow in unforgiving soil, like a weed that's difficult to uproot.
The story is absorbing, both for the mystery and for the character portraits. I wonder at what stage Alleyn solved the crime and knew who did it; he's a man who seems to keep his cards close to his chest. Certain conversations gain significance at the end, after everything is revealed.
"I'm the least suspicious man alive. I'm merely being tidy."

----------

Other recommended tales from The Oxford Book of English Detective Stories are Great Aunt Allie's Flypapers (by P.D. James) and these stories here.

L'equip petit

2011-07-01T16:12:00.004-04:00

A documentary about little kids on an underdog soccer team (what would be a little league team here in the U.S.). They haven't scored a goal yet. They speak with seriousness and passion about the game; failure isn't fazing them. They're also having fun, as are the people who coach them.

l'equip petit from el cangrejo on Vimeo.

Week in Seven Words #73

2011-06-25T23:57:00.007-04:00

arisen
One of the best ways to be woken up early is by a phone call from someone who missed hearing your voice.

atypical
An inflatable bouncing castle has been set up outside of a bar, where the happy hour crowd is deep in mixed drinks and beer. People jump around inside the castle while on the sidewalk two entertainers dressed up as Nemo the clownfish and Elmo throw down some dance moves to hip-hop.

lampyridae
My mind feels like a firefly in a jar this afternoon, glowing, tapping against the glass.

soliloquy
In a bricked-off courtyard with bare metal chairs and tables, a fountain gurgles, staving off the silence.

sonority
When the trolley groans to a halt it makes a noise like a desert horn unearthed from sand and sounded for the first time in centuries.

surveillance
The squirrel sits up on the deserted porch, a peanut sticking out of its mouth as it monitors the sidewalk.

uncorked
A timely phone call and conversation, where he reminds me not to keep things bottled up. A couple of days later he emails me a reminder that I can tape up to the wall above my desk.

Worth Watching: The Secret of Roan Inish (1994)

2011-06-23T20:46:00.009-04:00

Title: The Secret of Roan Inish
Director: John Sayles
Language: English (and a bit of Irish Gaelic)
Rating: PG

Synopsis
Fiona Conneely (Jeni Courtney) goes to live with her grandparents near Roan Inish (Island of the Seals), which used to be her family's home. Several years ago during an evacuation of the island her baby brother, Jamie, was washed out to sea in his cradle and never seen since. As Fiona settles in with her grandparents she learns about a family story involving a selkie, a seal that can slough off its skin and become human. When she visits Roan Inish she spots signs of human life and finally comes across a young boy who runs from her approach. It's her younger brother, she's sure, but how will she convince her family that he's alive? And what will get him to stop running from her when she calls his name?

Characters
Fiona is a stalwart girl; she listens and observes, and she's not easily afraid. What drives the film is her curiosity about Roan Inish, and then her determination to bring her missing brother back and help heal her family.

Her grandparents, played warmly by Mick Lally and Eileen Colgan, give Fiona a healthy loving home, and she finds a friend in her older cousin, Eamon (Richard Sheridan), a straightforward and hard-working kid. She also encounters another relative in back of a shop, gutting and scaling fish; people say that he's not quite right in the head, but he's also the one who tells Fiona about a key part of her family's past: the story of the selkie.

The film's treatment of the selkie (Susan Lynch) is matter-of-fact. The film doesn't marvel over her appearance or add any special effects to her transformation. The focus is on the emotion of the story; the selkie is torn between her family on land and her compulsion to return to the ocean.

The ocean is a character too, murmuring on the surface, silent below, slapping the sand and rocks. The seals lounge on the rocks watching the passing boats with their dark uncanny eyes.

Relationships
The ocean's rhythm of give and take shapes the history of Fiona's family in complex ways. As Fiona seeks out her brother she finds herself contending with the ocean and with her family's past.

Her cousin, Eamon, comes to believe her claims that she's seen her missing brother. Eamon becomes an older brother figure to Fiona, and her confidant; at one point he helps her with the difficult task of preparing the abandoned cottages on Roan Inish for habitation.

At the heart of it the story is about understanding one's past and bringing family back together, in a struggle to deal with traumatic changes and a world that's quickly modernizing. Fiona's grandparents have a warm secure home but their way of life is in danger, and they may have to move inland. The cities offer jobs but also fracture families, and there's a struggle to stay rooted in one's heritage and not lose it all to modern forces. Fiona is drawn to Roan Inish in part because her family was whole when they lived there.

Memorable sights and sounds
Stars and water framed by a bedroom window, as Fiona peers through the darkness at Roan Inish. The film in some ways has the quality of a dream, though it treats magical creatures as a concrete reality - improbable but not impossible.

The visuals are beautiful throughout - fog and cloud, a grassy knoll overrun with wild flowers, the watchful eyes of the seals who stealthily change the course of boats. The selkie herself with her pensive face and wild dark hair is also a sight, stirring a stew at the hearth or letting her child's cradle float in the shallows by the beach.

Stand-out scenes
One of the best sequences is when Fiona and Eamon are rebuilding the old cottages together. They're young, determined and competent. I love when movies show children as skilled and able to work wonders without superpowers or magic (and without the movie having a patronizing attitude towards them). The soundtrack is especially lively and beautiful too in this part of the film.

Further thoughts
In a lesser film, the reunion with Jamie would have taken place with melodrama and fanfare, close-ups of teary faces. There's never a sense that the film is talking down to the audience or holding itself cheaply. The same is true for the story-tellers in the film, who weave folklore into family history and trust that the substance of their tales will compel your attention.

*All images link back to their sources (ebertfest; Wikipedia).

Extracts: Purpose and passion (or lack thereof) in life

2011-06-21T20:54:00.009-04:00

From Middlemarch:

We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our future selves, and see our own figures led with dull consent into insipid misdoing and shabby achievement. - from Chapter 79, Sunset and Sunrise

But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope. - from Chapter 51, The Dead Hand

It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self – never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardor of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted. - from Chapter 29, Waiting for Death

What are your sources of inspiration?

2011-06-18T23:48:00.007-04:00

Week in Seven Words #72

2011-06-18T22:48:00.025-04:00

edulcoration
After it's rained, the clean smell of trees, earth, and evergreen shrubs.

moppet
Two smudgy handprints on the door at knee level. A child has pressed up against the glass to look out and to try to push the door open; the handle is still out of reach.

nitty-gritty
Over an hour's worth of conversations with an insurance rep, a bank rep, and a customer service rep for a huge labyrinthine company. Not the best way to start the morning, but to my joy each person I speak to seems lucid and willing to help, and it could have dragged on longer.

pealing
Laughter is a kind of escape, a beautiful cloud of noise to sink into several seconds here and there while forgetting dignity, worries, and mostly everything else.

readjustment
No epiphanies; instead a painstaking process of discovery that could very well lead to failure. At least I'm learning; nothing's wasted, not time or brain cells, if I've learned something.

tormented
A bumblebee dying just inside the doors of a grocery store, only several feet away from the flowers in cellophane and the crates of fruit.

vertiginous
In the library the shelves are long, the aisles between them are narrow, and the books come in so many different colors and sizes, that I have trouble focusing my eyes. If I don't look mostly at the floor I get dizzy.

Worth Watching: Bringing Up Baby (1938)

2011-06-17T16:30:00.015-04:00

Title: Bringing Up Baby
Director: Howard Hawks
Language: English
Rating: Unrated

Synopsis
David Huxley (Cary Grant) is a stodgy professor who's assembling a brontosaurus skeleton and hoping to secure a million dollar donation for his museum. Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn) is a happy-go-lucky heiress who is convinced from the day they meet that she and David are meant to be. Through a series of plots and tricks that spiral out of her control, she contrives to keep him at her side for a while, away from his cold fiancée and all those dinosaur bones.

Characters
David is anxious, earnest, stuffy and adorable. Buried deep inside him is a store of latent joy and fun that only Susan will be able to bring out, if she doesn't drive him to insanity first. David never quite sheds his stodginess over the course of the movie, but just the fact that he accepts Susan into his life (as if he has a choice) means that there will be a lot more love and playfulness (and chaos) in his formerly orderly existence. I love the way Cary Grant delivers his lines and throws his whole body into the comedy of David's frustrations.

Susan is the kind of woman who spends her time at a swanky hotel chatting with the bartender and having him teach her how to flip olives from the back of her hand to her mouth. She can hunt for leopards in the dark Connecticut wilds using only a rope and a butterfly net. Her screams are shrill, her laughter silly. She doesn't understand dignity very well; it's much more fun to giggle. She has a woman's longing for a man, and a child's love of mischief and play. Hepburn plays her with a kind of devilish sweetness and innocence, an underlying intelligence to her flightiness. She's a high-society imp.

The best supporting characters are Susan's aunt, Elizabeth Random (May Robson), a formidable outspoken lady who for most of the movie believes that David is a big-game hunter who has lost his marbles; she advises Susan not to marry him: "I don't want another lunatic in the family, I've got lunatics enough already." There's also her dinner guest, Major Horace Applegate (Charlie Ruggles), an actual big game hunter who confuses the roar of a leopard with the cry of a loon.

Speaking of animals, the movie introduces you to Baby, a tame leopard, along with George, a yappy little terrier. They both bring a lot of grief to David.

Relationships
Baby and George become inseparable. This isn't important to the movie, but it is cute.

Then there's David and Susan's relationship, which is a joy and a catastrophe, as David puts it: "In moments of quiet I'm strangely drawn towards you... but, well, there haven't been any quiet moments."

But what choice does he have? He's the leading man, he has to wind up with someone by the end of the film, and from the very beginning we know that if he stays with his fiancée, Alice (Virginia Walker), he'll end up a desiccated husk of a man, imprisoned in a cold and dusty life.

Memorable sights and sounds
I Can't Give You Anything But Love, Baby is sung several times in the movie - in the middle of the woods, in front of a psychiatrist's house, etc. There's a logical reason for this.

There's also a logical reason for why David needs to stalk George. David tracks the dog on all fours sometimes, or keeps an eye on him at the dinner table, getting up with a spoon still in his hand and following George out of the room whenever necessary.

The look on David's face and the high terrified pitch to his voice are nearly identical when he first spots the leopard in Susan's bathroom and when, much later in the film, Susan professes her love for him.

Susan has some moments when she's frightened or upset too, but by and large she can handle difficult situations well and find the humor in them. Katharine Hepburn, unsurprisingly, was the only actor on the set who touched the leopard, if only in a couple of scenes; it's amazing to see it rub up against her legs as she's blithely chatting into the phone. ("Oh, David, don't be irrelevant... the point is I've got a leopard, the question is what am I going to do with it?")

Stand-out scenes
For me the film really takes off during the scene at the Ritz, with the aforementioned olive tricks, a mix-up of purses, and David and Susan tearing each other's clothes off (in a manner of speaking). Their exit from the hotel is a gem of physical comedy. And in this scene their banter and David's sniping first reach a level of comic greatness. Throughout the film in general the actors' timing and rhythm is impeccable, with the rapid back-and-forth speech, interruptions and overlapping lines, wit and double entendres.

The culmination of the film takes place in the jail. Hepburn impersonating a gangster's moll and sweet-talking her way out of her cell is a highlight, as is the way in which she returns after her escape, endangering everyone.

Further thoughts
There's a lot of funniness and clever screwball silliness in this film, with one deranged scenario building on another and then another, and by the end I was both glad I watched it and tired out from watching it; I imagine that this is how David must feel about Susan.

*All images link back to their source (UCLA cinema; Flixster community).

In the mood for an 80s music video

2011-06-17T15:58:00.005-04:00

Though I rarely listen to Cyndi Lauper's music, I've always liked this video - it's sweet, wistful, and very 80s; the first time I heard this song, it made my heart ache.