Like I said the first time I posted a Friday the 13th short story round-up, I don't believe in the superstition of the day. But I'd like to share stories I've read that have some combination of dread, distorted thoughts, strange phenomena and/or horror.
Title: A Diorama of the Infernal Regions, or the Devil’s Ninth Question
Author: Andy Duncan
Where I Read It: Fantasy: The Best of the Year 2008
This coming of age story, set in the 19th century American South, reads like the set-up to a novel, or maybe a computer game; but it feels complete too. The main character, Pearleen Sunday, was dumped as a baby on the doorstep of an unscholarly museum. It's run by a man who likes to use magic tricks, sex, tall tales, and eye-catching visuals to draw a crowd. As she's growing up, Pearleen has a variety of chores, like working the diorama of the infernal regions - a huge moving strip of canvas that depicts all kinds of hellish torture to museum visitors. But whenever she stands behind it, cranking it into motion, Pearleen sees different images from what appears to be another world.
One day, a visiting magician, Farethewell, needs a last-minute replacement for a young female assistant in his magic show. When he asks Pearleen to step in, and she sees the humiliation in store for her, she flees and leaps into the back of the diorama, which leads her to the ghost-filled mansion of an old widow, Mrs. Winchester. And though she isn't in the infernal regions as depicted by the diorama, Pearleen will still meet the devil's son-in-law.
Pearleen chooses between a coming of age experience that would turn her into a sex object and one where she discovers where she might belong and what her powers could be. It's an odd adventure and hints at more to come.
Showing posts with label clinical psychology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label clinical psychology. Show all posts
Friday, November 13, 2015
Thursday, April 2, 2015
Week in Seven Words #251
bits
Floor-to-ceiling windows frame a cityscape that looks like the inside of a computer.
diminished
She used to strike me as formidable in social settings, able to charm anyone and steer a conversation to where she liked. This time she comes across as clumsy and out of her depth, as she cuts into other people's sentences or responds to them with expressionless politeness. I feel bad for her, and wish I had more social graces, to shield her.
permeability
Fiddling with a flute of champagne on the edges of a crowd.
pursuing
Her love of science, combined with her family's alarming medical history, have pushed her towards a career researching cancer.
shamed
On top of the mental illness is the stigma, keeping people from feeling human and connected with others.
sighing
His voice is weary when he greets us, as if he regrets remembering our names.
unsullied
On pristine plates, they present dollops of food - three elegant squares of ravioli, or three hillocks of rice with a spray of vegetables.
Floor-to-ceiling windows frame a cityscape that looks like the inside of a computer.
diminished
She used to strike me as formidable in social settings, able to charm anyone and steer a conversation to where she liked. This time she comes across as clumsy and out of her depth, as she cuts into other people's sentences or responds to them with expressionless politeness. I feel bad for her, and wish I had more social graces, to shield her.
permeability
Fiddling with a flute of champagne on the edges of a crowd.
pursuing
Her love of science, combined with her family's alarming medical history, have pushed her towards a career researching cancer.
shamed
On top of the mental illness is the stigma, keeping people from feeling human and connected with others.
sighing
His voice is weary when he greets us, as if he regrets remembering our names.
unsullied
On pristine plates, they present dollops of food - three elegant squares of ravioli, or three hillocks of rice with a spray of vegetables.
Wednesday, January 28, 2015
M (1931): How Beckert Throws Society Off-Balance
Title: M
Director: Fritz Lang
Language: German
Rating: Not rated
Towards the end of M, a child murderer asks an assemblage of criminals, "Who knows what it's like to be me?"
It's a line from one of the most well-acted monologues I've ever watched on-screen, delivered by Peter Lorre - an actor usually best known for playing disturbing individuals. In this case, his character forces people to consider the limitations of earthly justice.
Lorre plays Hans Beckert, a small man, boyishly plump, who for much of the movie strolls the streets of a German city anonymously. He's responsible for a series of child murders (it's also all but explicitly stated that he has a sexual interest in his victims). The crimes remain off-screen. What we see is Beckert passing through the city, whistling "In the Hall of the Mountain King" in the presence of children he wants to prey on. He lures them with toys, candies, and balloons. What we also see is a mother, waiting for a child who never returns from school. And there are scenes of the city in a panic, people pointing fingers at each other and sending letters to the police that accuse their neighbors.
Director: Fritz Lang
Language: German
Rating: Not rated
Towards the end of M, a child murderer asks an assemblage of criminals, "Who knows what it's like to be me?"
It's a line from one of the most well-acted monologues I've ever watched on-screen, delivered by Peter Lorre - an actor usually best known for playing disturbing individuals. In this case, his character forces people to consider the limitations of earthly justice.
Lorre plays Hans Beckert, a small man, boyishly plump, who for much of the movie strolls the streets of a German city anonymously. He's responsible for a series of child murders (it's also all but explicitly stated that he has a sexual interest in his victims). The crimes remain off-screen. What we see is Beckert passing through the city, whistling "In the Hall of the Mountain King" in the presence of children he wants to prey on. He lures them with toys, candies, and balloons. What we also see is a mother, waiting for a child who never returns from school. And there are scenes of the city in a panic, people pointing fingers at each other and sending letters to the police that accuse their neighbors.
Tuesday, October 28, 2014
Arsenic and Old Lace (1944): What's in the wine and in the window seat?
Title: Arsenic and Old Lace
Director: Frank Capra
Language: English
Rating: Not Rated
So says Mortimer Brewster (Cary Grant), a drama critic who at the start of the movie gets married to Elaine Harper (Priscilla Lane) after years of confirmed bachelorhood. En route to their honeymoon, they stop by the house of Mortimer's kindly old aunts, Abby (Josephine Hull) and Martha (Jean Adair), who are known in their community as generous women, donating toys to poor children, visiting the sick, and performing other charitable acts.
As Mortimer discovers, after a look under their window seat in the front parlor, their idea of charity also includes killing off lonely old men. It takes some time for Mortimer to wrap his head around the fact that his aunts could be doing this.
Up until that point, Mortimer had assumed his family's madness was confined to his older brother, Teddy (John Alexander), who believes he's Teddy Roosevelt - and that his family's darker impulses were confined to his other brother Jonathan (Raymond Massey), a sadist who hasn't been seen in 20 years (but of course will show up, with Peter Lorre in tow to up the creep factor).
Meantime, Elaine - who doesn't know what's going on - is wondering why Mortimer suddenly seems so absent-minded and panicky, so unready to embark on their life of wedded bliss. (When there are too many bats in the family belfry, is wedded bliss possible?)
"Arsenic And Old Lace Poster". Via Wikipedia.
Priscilla Lane has a thankless role as a woman who spends most of the movie getting shoved aside and bodily carried out of rooms. As for Cary Grant, his performance took some getting used to because it was too hammy (like, huge double-takes and expressions of HUH?). The other actors, especially Hull, Adair, Massey and Alexander, were spot-on in their roles. Also, Jack Carson in the role of a friendly but oblivious policeman.
It's a strange, funny dark comedy, which frays at the end like many comedies. There are hilarious scenes, numerous twists, and jokes that take time to develop and pay off. Fun for any time of year, but especially Halloween, if like me you prefer to avoid gory slasher/monster movies.
Director: Frank Capra
Language: English
Rating: Not Rated
"Insanity runs in my family. It practically gallops."
So says Mortimer Brewster (Cary Grant), a drama critic who at the start of the movie gets married to Elaine Harper (Priscilla Lane) after years of confirmed bachelorhood. En route to their honeymoon, they stop by the house of Mortimer's kindly old aunts, Abby (Josephine Hull) and Martha (Jean Adair), who are known in their community as generous women, donating toys to poor children, visiting the sick, and performing other charitable acts.
As Mortimer discovers, after a look under their window seat in the front parlor, their idea of charity also includes killing off lonely old men. It takes some time for Mortimer to wrap his head around the fact that his aunts could be doing this.
Mortimer: What happened to him?!
Martha: He died.
Mortimer: Look, Aunt Martha, men don't just get into window seats and die!
Abby: Look now, dear, he died first.
Up until that point, Mortimer had assumed his family's madness was confined to his older brother, Teddy (John Alexander), who believes he's Teddy Roosevelt - and that his family's darker impulses were confined to his other brother Jonathan (Raymond Massey), a sadist who hasn't been seen in 20 years (but of course will show up, with Peter Lorre in tow to up the creep factor).
Meantime, Elaine - who doesn't know what's going on - is wondering why Mortimer suddenly seems so absent-minded and panicky, so unready to embark on their life of wedded bliss. (When there are too many bats in the family belfry, is wedded bliss possible?)
"Arsenic And Old Lace Poster". Via Wikipedia.
Priscilla Lane has a thankless role as a woman who spends most of the movie getting shoved aside and bodily carried out of rooms. As for Cary Grant, his performance took some getting used to because it was too hammy (like, huge double-takes and expressions of HUH?). The other actors, especially Hull, Adair, Massey and Alexander, were spot-on in their roles. Also, Jack Carson in the role of a friendly but oblivious policeman.
It's a strange, funny dark comedy, which frays at the end like many comedies. There are hilarious scenes, numerous twists, and jokes that take time to develop and pay off. Fun for any time of year, but especially Halloween, if like me you prefer to avoid gory slasher/monster movies.
Friday, August 22, 2014
Six Short Stories About Different States of Mind
Title: The Balloon of William Fuerst
Author: Lowell B. Komie
Where I Read It: Legal Fictions
A short, funny story but one with a familiar pang in it, the feeling of life getting wasted on triviality. The main character is an attorney who starts to hear air escaping from his ears - "a hiss of all the useless acts." He imagines his head is a balloon, with air leaking out. How does he think he can fix the problem, without leaving a job he feels trapped in? Maybe helium is the answer! If nothing else, at least he'll sound like a new person...
Title: Bitter Grounds
Author: Neil Gaiman
Where I Read It: Fragile Things
Before reading "Bitter Grounds," I hadn't come across any zombie fic that interested me. But this story is further proof that it's never the subject matter that's the problem, but the way it's handled. Any topic can be written about in an interesting way.
This isn't a typical zombie fic. There are no rotting corpses staggering around - no brain-eating, post-apocalyptic monsters. It's more a confusing and fascinating story of escape and loss of identity, of blurred boundaries between people and between the living and the dead. It begins with a man who can't deal with his life anymore:
Author: Lowell B. Komie
Where I Read It: Legal Fictions
A short, funny story but one with a familiar pang in it, the feeling of life getting wasted on triviality. The main character is an attorney who starts to hear air escaping from his ears - "a hiss of all the useless acts." He imagines his head is a balloon, with air leaking out. How does he think he can fix the problem, without leaving a job he feels trapped in? Maybe helium is the answer! If nothing else, at least he'll sound like a new person...
Title: Bitter Grounds
Author: Neil Gaiman
Where I Read It: Fragile Things
Before reading "Bitter Grounds," I hadn't come across any zombie fic that interested me. But this story is further proof that it's never the subject matter that's the problem, but the way it's handled. Any topic can be written about in an interesting way.
This isn't a typical zombie fic. There are no rotting corpses staggering around - no brain-eating, post-apocalyptic monsters. It's more a confusing and fascinating story of escape and loss of identity, of blurred boundaries between people and between the living and the dead. It begins with a man who can't deal with his life anymore:
"In every way that counted, I was dead. Inside somewhere maybe I was screaming and weeping and howling like an animal, but that was another person deep inside, another person who had no access to the face and lips and mouth and head, so on the surface I just shrugged and smiled and kept moving."One day, he drives and just keeps on driving, with no particular destination or purpose. And then starts to move between different identities. Through circumstances described in the story, he steps into the shoes of an anthropology professor invited to give a talk in New Orleans about tales of undead Haitian coffee girls. Nothing in this story is as it seems, and by the end, you have to wonder who is this man, and who has he met along the way? Not sure if this is a nightmare, or if he's ripped through the fragile tissues that life's made of.
Thursday, December 26, 2013
Three Stories from Stephen King's Just After Sunset
Collection: Just After Sunset
Author: Stephen King
When King finds the emotional center of a story, shows us the hearts of his characters, it makes all the difference. There are stories in this collection that have an interesting premise but don't develop. Sometimes there's too much straining for effect. But here are three stories I like because they're gripping and for the most part are told with heart. Each has its own unique atmosphere of horror.
Title: The Gingerbread Girl
Emily is running from the horrors in her life. She takes up running after her baby dies from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Separating from her husband, she moves to a family property in Florida where she'll need to use her running abilities, along with her ingenuity and will to survive, in order to escape from a psychotic neighbor. (There's a painfully suspenseful scene where the main character tries to break free from a chair she's tied to before the homicidal neighbor returns to torture her and finish her off.) At its heart the story is about someone striving for life. Emily fights to live and outpace the terrors the world holds for her.
Title: N.
Told in a collection of case notes, letters, and newspaper clippings, the story is a horrifying mystery centered on a psychiatrist and a patient, referred to as N. in the case notes, who has Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). N. has many of the usual compulsions of people with OCD, such as the need to count things a certain number of times, arrange things in certain ways and perform other rituals. But he tells his psychiatrist he's doing this for a very real reason: to prevent the reentry of a demonic entity into the world.
Given that people with OCD believe that their rituals and compulsions stave off disasters, the psychiatrist at first thinks that his patient is merely imagining this Lovecraftian entity. But when he visits the site that his patient tells him about, a remote field in rural Maine with a grouping of rocks where the creature might break through, he begins to have second thoughts. He develops his own compulsions. But is this terrifying creature of darkness real? Or has the psychiatrist merely taken on the symptoms of his patient, which does happen sometimes?
Title: Willa
The story sort of crumbles into bittersweet goo as it goes on, while still remaining sad and chilling. It starts with a group of passengers waiting in a remote Wyoming train station. The train is set to come at any moment, but David can't find his fiancée, Willa. The other passengers tell him not to go looking for her; many of them don't like her. David doesn't even realize how long she's been missing, and he remembers how she's sometimes chided him for not being able to see what's right in front of his eyes; like most people, his capacity for denial is strong. When he finds her, he discovers that some things, like their love for each other, haven't changed and that "perception and expectation together" really are powerful.
Author: Stephen King
When King finds the emotional center of a story, shows us the hearts of his characters, it makes all the difference. There are stories in this collection that have an interesting premise but don't develop. Sometimes there's too much straining for effect. But here are three stories I like because they're gripping and for the most part are told with heart. Each has its own unique atmosphere of horror.
Title: The Gingerbread Girl
Emily is running from the horrors in her life. She takes up running after her baby dies from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Separating from her husband, she moves to a family property in Florida where she'll need to use her running abilities, along with her ingenuity and will to survive, in order to escape from a psychotic neighbor. (There's a painfully suspenseful scene where the main character tries to break free from a chair she's tied to before the homicidal neighbor returns to torture her and finish her off.) At its heart the story is about someone striving for life. Emily fights to live and outpace the terrors the world holds for her.
Title: N.
Told in a collection of case notes, letters, and newspaper clippings, the story is a horrifying mystery centered on a psychiatrist and a patient, referred to as N. in the case notes, who has Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). N. has many of the usual compulsions of people with OCD, such as the need to count things a certain number of times, arrange things in certain ways and perform other rituals. But he tells his psychiatrist he's doing this for a very real reason: to prevent the reentry of a demonic entity into the world.
Given that people with OCD believe that their rituals and compulsions stave off disasters, the psychiatrist at first thinks that his patient is merely imagining this Lovecraftian entity. But when he visits the site that his patient tells him about, a remote field in rural Maine with a grouping of rocks where the creature might break through, he begins to have second thoughts. He develops his own compulsions. But is this terrifying creature of darkness real? Or has the psychiatrist merely taken on the symptoms of his patient, which does happen sometimes?
Title: Willa
The story sort of crumbles into bittersweet goo as it goes on, while still remaining sad and chilling. It starts with a group of passengers waiting in a remote Wyoming train station. The train is set to come at any moment, but David can't find his fiancée, Willa. The other passengers tell him not to go looking for her; many of them don't like her. David doesn't even realize how long she's been missing, and he remembers how she's sometimes chided him for not being able to see what's right in front of his eyes; like most people, his capacity for denial is strong. When he finds her, he discovers that some things, like their love for each other, haven't changed and that "perception and expectation together" really are powerful.
Wednesday, December 18, 2013
Week in Seven Words #192
awkwardness
A guy, a gal, and a third wheel are sandwiched together on a crowded bus. The guy and gal feel each other up and occasionally remember to include the third wheel in their whispered conversation. The third wheel laughs a lot and shares anecdotes about weird cellphone conversations she's recently had.
exposure
They find the strength to meet beneath the harsh lights and talk. They understand each other's inertia, emptiness and fear.
flaxen
Gold hair on a dappled picnic blanket.
hemmed
On one side of the park there's a broad river, tolerating a few sailboats on its shuddering back. On the other side, there are rows of buildings that look like cardboard boxes.
otherworldly
Her voice is lovely and sorrowful. She remains still as she sings, even when the children chase each other around her waving their swords and shrieking.
pimpled
Restless crowds seek junk food and bad comedy on a beautiful day.
robotic
Sometimes they don't sound human. They talk about themselves as if they're machines that need the right kind of tuning, the optimal dosages of medication to keep their parts moving.
A guy, a gal, and a third wheel are sandwiched together on a crowded bus. The guy and gal feel each other up and occasionally remember to include the third wheel in their whispered conversation. The third wheel laughs a lot and shares anecdotes about weird cellphone conversations she's recently had.
exposure
They find the strength to meet beneath the harsh lights and talk. They understand each other's inertia, emptiness and fear.
flaxen
Gold hair on a dappled picnic blanket.
hemmed
On one side of the park there's a broad river, tolerating a few sailboats on its shuddering back. On the other side, there are rows of buildings that look like cardboard boxes.
otherworldly
Her voice is lovely and sorrowful. She remains still as she sings, even when the children chase each other around her waving their swords and shrieking.
pimpled
Restless crowds seek junk food and bad comedy on a beautiful day.
robotic
Sometimes they don't sound human. They talk about themselves as if they're machines that need the right kind of tuning, the optimal dosages of medication to keep their parts moving.
Friday, October 18, 2013
Week in Seven Words #186
airless
A lack of productivity is suffocating.
bullish
The cashiers summon customers by waving red flags.
complacently
A number of people think that 'natural' automatically means 'desirable' or 'immutable.'
deadwood
Branches snap and fall, no longer able to bear their own weight.
impositions
An inability to handle uncertainty lies at the heart of so much misery and evil.
rack
Can people change in their essentials? It's hard enough to get rid of a single bad habit. What about five or ten of them? What about the dark, habitual thoughts that choke the life out of the mind?
regressed
In the library, two old men fight over a hat. The owner of the hat allegedly took a newspaper away from the other guy, who retaliated by snatching the hat away and refusing to return it. They argue loudly, the hat-owner shrill and indignant, the hat-snatcher muttering filthy insults.
A lack of productivity is suffocating.
bullish
The cashiers summon customers by waving red flags.
complacently
A number of people think that 'natural' automatically means 'desirable' or 'immutable.'
deadwood
Branches snap and fall, no longer able to bear their own weight.
impositions
An inability to handle uncertainty lies at the heart of so much misery and evil.
rack
Can people change in their essentials? It's hard enough to get rid of a single bad habit. What about five or ten of them? What about the dark, habitual thoughts that choke the life out of the mind?
regressed
In the library, two old men fight over a hat. The owner of the hat allegedly took a newspaper away from the other guy, who retaliated by snatching the hat away and refusing to return it. They argue loudly, the hat-owner shrill and indignant, the hat-snatcher muttering filthy insults.
Tuesday, April 30, 2013
Nonfiction Book of the Month: We've Got Issues
We've Got Issues by Judith Warner discusses different factors that account for the sorry state of mental health services for children and early intervention for learning disabilities in the U.S. There's much to debate in this book, but even if you disagree with some of the premises or feel that she needs to dig deeper into some of the issues, I think you'll find that her approach is refreshing, as she doesn't blindly demonize people, whether they be parents, psychiatrists, or teachers. She also points out flaws in much of how the media reports on children's mental health, including their misinterpretations of data and their use of children as mere symbols representing larger societal problems.
Sunday, March 3, 2013
Worth Watching: Lars and the Real Girl (2007)
Title: Lars and the Real Girl
Director: Craig Gillespie
Language: English
Rating: PG-13
In Lars and the Real Girl, Lars Lindstrom (Ryan Gosling) buys a sex doll but doesn't use it for sex. The doll, named Bianca, is fully clothed and gets treated with care. Lars courts her chastely, takes her around town, and introduces her to people as if she's real; he even gives her an interesting back story. Instead of functioning as a sex toy, the doll becomes his way of working through a deep-seated inability to connect with real people.
I can hear some of you going, "Okkkaaaay..." and backing away slowly. So let me give you some background on Lars. His mother died giving birth to him. He grew up with a distant father and with an older brother, Gus (Paul Schneider), who left home as soon as he could. Now Gus is married to the warm and lovely Karin (Emily Mortimer), and the two are expecting a child. Lars lives near them physically, but keeps his distance emotionally. Though he can't articulate his fears, he is deeply afraid of people's unpredictability and mortality. He also doesn't respond well to physical touch.
How do people react to Lars and Bianca? After some initial hesitation, the townspeople play along with Lars's delusion and let him heal through it. Although Gus's first impulse is to have his younger brother committed to a mental hospital, he's dissuaded from this course of action by my favorite character in the movie, Dr. Dagmar (Patricia Clarkson), who combines cool understanding and warm compassion in her role as the town's medical doctor and psychologist.
Delusions can have their own logic and reveal something real and meaningful about the people experiencing them. And people reveal a lot about themselves in the way they respond to another person's psychological difficulties. Gus's initial desire to have his brother committed stems less from concern than from embarrassment and, more deeply, guilt and personal shame.
Is it realistic, the way the other people in the community come to support Lars and treat Bianca as a town mascot? Such widespread acceptance is rare, but not impossible. Read this article, which discusses the influence of social environment on people's ability to cope with mental illness. Ostracizing and isolating people with psychological problems makes them much worse off, but unfortunately that's what we usually do in our culture. The approach taken in Lars and the Real Girl might be more conducive to healing.
The movie is funny too. It shows the absurdity of the situation, but treats the characters with kindness. I also like how Lars uses a doll to work through his issues, instead of using a real life woman as a personal crutch or savior. He has a love interest in the movie - Margo (Kelli Garner), a colleague at work who seems to like him too, in a shy way. But on some level he realizes, even in the midst of his emotional disconnection, that he's not yet ready for a real relationship with her or with anyone except Bianca. And even Bianca starts to show signs of independence as the movie progresses, proving herself to be less pliant than she appears.
Director: Craig Gillespie
Language: English
Rating: PG-13
In Lars and the Real Girl, Lars Lindstrom (Ryan Gosling) buys a sex doll but doesn't use it for sex. The doll, named Bianca, is fully clothed and gets treated with care. Lars courts her chastely, takes her around town, and introduces her to people as if she's real; he even gives her an interesting back story. Instead of functioning as a sex toy, the doll becomes his way of working through a deep-seated inability to connect with real people.
I can hear some of you going, "Okkkaaaay..." and backing away slowly. So let me give you some background on Lars. His mother died giving birth to him. He grew up with a distant father and with an older brother, Gus (Paul Schneider), who left home as soon as he could. Now Gus is married to the warm and lovely Karin (Emily Mortimer), and the two are expecting a child. Lars lives near them physically, but keeps his distance emotionally. Though he can't articulate his fears, he is deeply afraid of people's unpredictability and mortality. He also doesn't respond well to physical touch.
How do people react to Lars and Bianca? After some initial hesitation, the townspeople play along with Lars's delusion and let him heal through it. Although Gus's first impulse is to have his younger brother committed to a mental hospital, he's dissuaded from this course of action by my favorite character in the movie, Dr. Dagmar (Patricia Clarkson), who combines cool understanding and warm compassion in her role as the town's medical doctor and psychologist.
Delusions can have their own logic and reveal something real and meaningful about the people experiencing them. And people reveal a lot about themselves in the way they respond to another person's psychological difficulties. Gus's initial desire to have his brother committed stems less from concern than from embarrassment and, more deeply, guilt and personal shame.
Is it realistic, the way the other people in the community come to support Lars and treat Bianca as a town mascot? Such widespread acceptance is rare, but not impossible. Read this article, which discusses the influence of social environment on people's ability to cope with mental illness. Ostracizing and isolating people with psychological problems makes them much worse off, but unfortunately that's what we usually do in our culture. The approach taken in Lars and the Real Girl might be more conducive to healing.
The movie is funny too. It shows the absurdity of the situation, but treats the characters with kindness. I also like how Lars uses a doll to work through his issues, instead of using a real life woman as a personal crutch or savior. He has a love interest in the movie - Margo (Kelli Garner), a colleague at work who seems to like him too, in a shy way. But on some level he realizes, even in the midst of his emotional disconnection, that he's not yet ready for a real relationship with her or with anyone except Bianca. And even Bianca starts to show signs of independence as the movie progresses, proving herself to be less pliant than she appears.
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Extracts: "the indefatigable system"
In the novel Olive Kitteridge there's a scene where a man by the name of Kevin Coulson has returned to his home town because he wants to commit suicide there. He parks his car near a marina and sits for a while looking out at the ocean; the gun is wrapped in a blanket in the back seat, and he fully intends to use it later on, but for now he wants to just sit and watch the ocean. That's when his old junior high math teacher (Olive herself) spots him, taps on the car window, and plops down on the passenger seat.
There's one excerpt from that section that I particularly liked, because I think it gets at how even when the mind and heart seem set on oblivion or demise, a person can still be grasping almost hysterically at life.
He doesn't know whether he wants Olive to stay or go - there are some points when he definitely wants her to leave, because he senses she's thwarting his plan; as for Olive herself, it seems that even though she doesn't know the specifics and hasn't seen her old student in years, she senses that something's off, and she makes herself comfortable in that passenger seat.
The scene ends with everything getting turned upside down, and Kevin winds up rescuing someone from drowning in the choppy water off the marina:
I don't think we find out what happens to Kevin, after that chapter (the book is a collection of stories/episodes about Olive and various people in her family and community). But no news can be taken as good news in this case; there was a reason he had decided to return to his home town to kill himself, and if he had, people would have been talking about it for years after.
As for the book as a whole - I had mixed feelings about it; it felt sharper and stronger initially, then seemed to fade, with the writing losing its freshness, and the ending coming across as too tidy and tired. I guess I was hoping for more imagination and at some points more depth. Sometimes it felt like a compilation of fractures and disorders, one after another - adultery, anoxeria, depression, suicide, more adultery, and similar-sounding notes on futility and impotence over and over again.
In any case, the characters mostly went on living, however much their lives were constricted, off-kilter or empty-feeling. One of the best elements to the book I felt was that it contrasted the difficulty and complexity of individuals with the often glib or simplistic explanations provided by doctors and therapists (and by the individuals themselves, trying to place blame or pinpoint the source of problems); pointing to a faulty gene or an imperfect parent just can't explain the whole of it - the whole of what a person is - however much it's tempting to settle for the easy explanations.
There's one excerpt from that section that I particularly liked, because I think it gets at how even when the mind and heart seem set on oblivion or demise, a person can still be grasping almost hysterically at life.
At the very moment Kevin became aware of liking the sound of her voice, he felt adrenaline pour through him, the familiar, awful intensity, the indefatigable system that wanted to endure. He squinted hard toward the ocean. Great gray clouds were blowing in, and yet the sun, as though in contest, streamed yellow rays beneath them so that parts of the water sparkled with frenzied gaiety.
He doesn't know whether he wants Olive to stay or go - there are some points when he definitely wants her to leave, because he senses she's thwarting his plan; as for Olive herself, it seems that even though she doesn't know the specifics and hasn't seen her old student in years, she senses that something's off, and she makes herself comfortable in that passenger seat.
The scene ends with everything getting turned upside down, and Kevin winds up rescuing someone from drowning in the choppy water off the marina:
the girl... now holding him with a fierceness that matched the power of the ocean - oh, insane, ludicrous, unknowable world! Look how she wanted to live, look how she wanted to hold on.
I don't think we find out what happens to Kevin, after that chapter (the book is a collection of stories/episodes about Olive and various people in her family and community). But no news can be taken as good news in this case; there was a reason he had decided to return to his home town to kill himself, and if he had, people would have been talking about it for years after.
As for the book as a whole - I had mixed feelings about it; it felt sharper and stronger initially, then seemed to fade, with the writing losing its freshness, and the ending coming across as too tidy and tired. I guess I was hoping for more imagination and at some points more depth. Sometimes it felt like a compilation of fractures and disorders, one after another - adultery, anoxeria, depression, suicide, more adultery, and similar-sounding notes on futility and impotence over and over again.
In any case, the characters mostly went on living, however much their lives were constricted, off-kilter or empty-feeling. One of the best elements to the book I felt was that it contrasted the difficulty and complexity of individuals with the often glib or simplistic explanations provided by doctors and therapists (and by the individuals themselves, trying to place blame or pinpoint the source of problems); pointing to a faulty gene or an imperfect parent just can't explain the whole of it - the whole of what a person is - however much it's tempting to settle for the easy explanations.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
"Why don't you come and have a cup of tea?"
When so much of the news focuses on crime, deception and melodramatically bad behavior, it's great to read about people like Don Ritchie:
For almost 50 years, Don Ritchie has lived across the street from Australia's most notorious suicide spot, a rocky cliff at the entrance to Sydney Harbour called The Gap. And in that time, the man widely regarded as a guardian angel has shepherded countless people away from the edge.
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