Friday, July 30, 2010

Lake Shore Limited by Sue Miller

I got sucked into it willingly, this familiar Sue Miller terrain with its combination of realism, manipulation, and current events.  Once I was at page 100, I thought, why am I reading this soapy stuff, and then dashed through without coming up for air until I was done.

The thing about Sue Miller is that I sort of expect the worst for her characters. She has the ability to create  a feeling of suspense, as if something important is going to happen, just give it another five pages, and then the action I was expecting fails to occur.    I feel like a ninth grader unsatisfied with her ice cream choice.  Then why do I keep going?

I keep going because I am her audience. I am a middle aged, middle class, educated woman.  That is who Sue Miller writes for.  Her characters come from that class.  They are professors, doctors, architects, realtors.  They are in helping professions.  Some of them are teachers.  I recognize these people.  They are mostly married, and have sex in graphic detail.  One of the keys to happiness is orgasm.  You can tell how happy by how many orgasms the character has.

So there is this tie to the physical life of the characters in her narratives.  Lake Shore Limited is about a playwright whose live-in lover was killed in one of the planes on September 11.  Her new play touches on an act of terrorism that may have killed the wife of the main character while he is engaged in an affair and trying to break free of his wife.  When she is missing from the train that was blown up, he is at the brink of deciding whether to stay and play the dutiful bereaved widower or leave and begin his life with his new woman.

The book centers on the play and I thought why not just include the play in its entirety in the book, but the point of the book is to have each of the four main characters grasp the meaning of the play as it relates to their lives.

The structure of the book switches from each of the four characters at regular intervals. At one point, one of the characters says about another:  "Not the brightest bulb in the chandelier."  Exactly. Sometimes the characters seem awfully slow to catch on what is obvious to the reader. 

Still,  I have been mulling over this book, thinking about the dilemma of what your duty is to the dead who are killed in acts of terrorism.  It is a strange obligation that comes with the mourning of people instantly snatched up by the media and patriotism and other things unrelated to who the person was or what your relationship was with that person.   This is at heart a very thoughtful treatment of a new kind of subject.


Thursday, July 29, 2010

Wild Turkey

Yesterday while taking a walk down the driveway, I noticed something moving in the grass to my left and bent over to see what it was.  A female turkey burst up at me.  A blur of feathers and beak and talons grew to my size,  menaced me with her loud angry voice.  Her wings and feet rattled,  meant me harm.  My heart  pounded in my chest.  I was stunned and stood still, then realized that this was not what the turkey wanted.  She wanted me to go as far from her and whatever she was guarding as quickly as possible.

I ran to the road and didn't look back.

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Cheri

Colette's perfect novel adapted in this imperfect film demonstrates the difference between movies and the books they come from.  On the one hand, cigarette smoke wafting over someone's head in a long shot with the foreground a lovely border garden evokes a character and another character's feelings about that character in just a few seconds. On the other hand, Colette's tone of voice in the book is  full of archness and wisdom.  As readers we have the time to take it in, to let its seduction take hold.  The narrator's voice in the movie is a man's, and feels forced and trying to fill in the blanks and intrusive.

The moving images of the movie are beautifully apt to the Belle Epoque settings, its architecture, interiors, and gardens. The costumes are sumptuous and steal the show. The actors all do a fine job epecially the title character, Rupert Friend, as the callow youth whose beauty is his undoing. I do not agree with the casting of Michelle Pfeiffer for this part. She is so thin, and carefully preserved when what is called for is someone fleshy and just past their prime. Is it true that the camera could not record her actual face in order to give the illusion of preserved beauty in one so far past forty? She is too much a product of California, blond, lean, and hip,  to play a voluptuous Parisian courtesan. Her voice is all wrong especially in the beginning when she seems to be faking a British accent (why? because Friend is British?)

Was Helen Mirren not available? Or Charlotte Rampling?  Something about Pfeiffer's face says surfer to me.  I know that she has the chops and all that, having played loose women etc but still, that was in American pop culture type things like Scarface and Baker Boys.  This is the cream of Colette's oeuvre and she just doesn't work in the part.

Everyone else does, thank goodness.  In the end I think the movie is about the mother making one hideous decision after another, and Kathy Bates plays the mother perfectly.

Oops, said Kathy Baker by mistake.  They are so different!


Kathy Bates                           Kathy Baker

Thursday, July 22, 2010

What is it about the internet?

There have been many articles recently about the effect of constant connection to electronic devices on our brains.  Are humans becoming less human as a result? What is it that makes us human?
Do we need to stay connected to a machine to feel part of the conversation at the cost of having a conversation with a real live person we might like to sit with at leisure over coffee?

I think there is an epidemic of loneliness.  My theory:

It is an addictive habit like smoking.
It takes practice not to use it so much.

There are so many things I want to know.
The internet provides answers.
Yesterday these were the things I looked up which can give you an idea of what my life is like:

how to clean and re-season a cast iron pan (I overzealously cleaned it)
recipe for corn chowder (love to eat, love to cook with fresh summer vegetables)
national weather forecast (when will the heat move on?)
cat ear infections (poor kitty)
writers almanac (need fresh poetry, Garrison's voice)
pictures of hummingbirds (they are crazy little buggers providing endless entertainment)
cornell's website on birds (wow why so many flycatchers here?)

New York Times crosswords (another habit forming )
New York Times op eds and obituaries (okay the news comes last)
email five times (who wants to talk to me remotely, who do I owe messages to)
zen habits (where are the date stamps on these articles?)
flickr pictures of rural librarians (what would it be like to work in the country)

In the country

Waking up to the sound of birds, to the sight of a forest, to the smell of fresh air, is more than restorative, it seems necessary.  I think of what it would be like if I were in the city right now, at 7:30 AM.  The sound of the men setting up their construction, the subway under my feet,  cars, trucks, taxis, horns honking, the smell of the heat and ozone, diesel fuel particulate accumulating on my window sill.

There are trucks laboring their way up hill in the woods to build a new development somewhere.

But in the city, I guess what we don't have here in the country, is lots and lots of people with lots and lots of needs.  They need to eat so there are restaurants on every corner, a grocery store every few blocks.  They need to get dressed, and live somewhere, more shops, apartment buildings reaching the sky.  They need to get from place to place, so there are subways and buses and taxis and roads and traffic lights.  They need to use the toilet and their sinks and their bathtubs so there are sewer lines. They need to read at night so there is electricity.  They need to cool themselves so there are air conditioners and fans and the electrical grid is amazing.

Here where there are not as many people,  there are birds, lots of trees to house them and give them food. The squirrels do not beg from me as they do in Central Park.

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Funny Animation

One of the benefits of belonging to Roger Ebert's Club (a subscription you can join on his blog) is finding the extra films and clips he provides. Here is one I particularly liked, sort of seasonal to the summer.

Thursday, July 15, 2010


Accelerant

I am the solvent that feeds the flame
The foot to the floor that hurtles the car
I am the deed you want in your name
The border that sets off the civil war.

I am the heat that prickles your neck,
the pushing, the shoving, the loaded deck.
You cannot see me, I’m gas in the pipe.
Don’t fall asleep, I might kill you tonight.

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Reading War and Peace

I reached the halfway point, the end of Volume II, where Natasha is disgraced and ill, Pierre feels a new hope after looking at the comet, Anatole is banished to Petersburg,  and Andrei takes on the qualities of his father-- bitterness, cruelty, superiority.

Up to that point, all the characters were growing in tenderness and love, except Pierre, whose faulty marriage has destroyed his chance for happiness.   Andrei, after suffering a grievous wound in battle, and disillusionment among men of power and glory, had fallen in love with Natasha who returned his love.  They were both unsuitable for each other somehow, yet each recognized the excellence in the other, and loved the person for the bigness of soul found there.  Natasha saw Andrei as an honorable, intelligent, accomplished person.  Andrei saw Natasha as pure spirit, whose voice's purity expressed joy and sorrow and emotions perfectly.  Here is a quote from the Maude translation (I am reading the Pevear/Volokhonsky, hence the Andrei/Andrew discrepancy below):
After dinner Natasha, at Prince Andrew's request, went to the clavichord and began singing. Prince Andrew stood by a window talking to the ladies and listened to her. In the midst of a phrase he ceased speaking and suddenly felt tears choking him, a thing he had thought impossible for him. He looked at Natasha as she sang, and something new and joyful stirred in his soul. He felt happy and at the same time sad. He had absolutely nothing to weep about yet he was ready to weep. What about? His former love? The little princess? His disillusionments?... His hopes for the future?... Yes and no. The chief reason was a sudden, vivid sense of the terrible contrast between something infinitely great and illimitable within him and that limited and material something that he, and even she, was. This contrast weighed on and yet cheered him while she sang.

What makes reading this long book such a pleasure is the sheer scale of it.  Everything is bigger than usual in a novel.  There are more major characters, and the characters have minor characters attached to them, such as servants.  Like reading Shakespeare,  you keep referring to the cast list.  The list of major characters in War and Peace takes up two pages, and is organized by family.  Only after reading all of Volume I did I get used to all of the characters' nicknames.  Then I was able to differentiate one Nikolai from another, one Vassily from another, to remember Dolokhov's significance, and to distinguish him from Denisov.

Once I was able to do that, I began to appreciate the set pieces Tolstoy lays out before you.  There is a hunt for wolves that is right out of a fairy tale, it is fantastic, dark, bloody, and shocking, with so many omens you are sure a human being will be lost any moment, but not even the old wolf who is the prey expires -- he is merely tied onto a log and carried, pathetically snarling and writhing to the exit.

The Mummer scene is another tour de force of romantic or impressionistic sensations.  The cold of an icy winter night, the speed of the horses as they race each other, the frozen masqueraded faces -- girls sporting corked on mustaches-- as they dash off to the neighbors, Nikolai getting a little lost -- the description of the stars in the snow, or the snow in the stars.  It is all so dazzling in sensations that you forget these episodes build up to the next plot point, Nikolai finally professing his love for Sonya.

There is a pattern of illusions and disillusions.
Pierre has great ambition in the beginning.  His hopes are dashed upon marriage. He is raised up again by his joining the masons and again disillusioned at the less than stellar performance of his brothers in alms giving.

Andrei has a need for glory and honor and distinction (Where is my whiff of grapeshot) on the battlefield, and does distinguish himself only to later feel it is all useless.  His wife dies, and even though he showed no love for her that I could see, he is deeply in mourning after returning from war, and embittered by political life.  Then he sees Natasha as the freshest most innocent joyous creature, and pursues her, and regains his footing and wants to go on living.  Why he takes so long returning to her after going away for his health is beyond me.  He is deeply passive in some ways.

Nikolai -- the battle scene where he is wounded.  He thinks of his life, and what is happening as sort of a dream.

The  novel is dreamy in places.  Then it snaps into focus and becomes real  again.  When Tolstoy is going into people's heads, though, there is a swirling sense of illogic and feeling that is clearly not objective, but deeply subjective, deeply from the subject's point of view.

I am savoring every morsel.



Monday, July 12, 2010

Toy Story 3



What is new about the Toy Story franchise this time is its realism when it comes to garbage disposal.  The whole gang—Potato Head-- Mr and Mrs., Cowgirl, Pig, Woody and Buzz Lightyear—at one point face a very scary death after going through what might be a documentary style, ala Mr. Rogers perhaps, look at what happens when you throw things out in your garbage. Here is how the process works, first take the garbage from the street to the truck, then from the truck to the dump, then from the dump to the sorters, from the sorters to the choppers, from the choppers to the wait, is that an inferno down there or what are all those orange flames licking at the sides of the deep hole we are about to descend?

Up until then, we had also had a dose of reality, that is, what the preschoolers at a day care center are really like when left to their own devices.  It isn’t pretty.  It makes the first Toy Story villainous doll look like a good witch.  These children tear the toys limb from limb.


Sunday, July 11, 2010

Gasland

What could be more important than water? The natural gas industry thinks that money is.  They have seduced many citizens in depressed regions of the country with seams of natural gas buried deep within its lands to sign leases that give oil companies the rights to mine the gas in their back yards.  Up here, in the Delaware River watershed, many activists are deeply opposed to it, and are rallying to pass legislature that will prevent drilling until more is known about the health, safety, and environmental impact.














Josh Fox and leaseholder of gas drilling watch 
his water catch on fire

The problem is with local governments who never saw anything wrong with money coming into the regions.  The problem is with state governments whose environmental regulatory agencies have been decimated by budget cuts.  And of course, the problem is with federal government.  The Energy Act of 2005 exempted natural gas drilling from following the laws of Clean Water, Clean Air, etc.

Josh Fox is the director of the movie.  His muckraking is pretty effective, based on the screening I attended in Honesdale last week at the Episcopal Church.  It was standing room only, with people applauding the panel discussion leaders afterward.  The links on the Gasland website are activists who are battling with gas drillers.



Please go there and offer any support you can, especially in terms of writing, phoning, and visiting your representatives in government about this important issue.

As for the filmmaking, I wish it were less  influenced by Michael Moore, in those scenes  where the hapless filmmaker tries to interview people on the opposite side of his issue who turn him away.  When he finally does land an interview with a state agency official, the results are excellent, and remind you of the opposite side's point of view.   The original impulse to fund natural gas was not bad.  It just happens to be as filthy, short term, and patently unfair to the people who live near the drilling as any other kind of fossil fuel mine or oil rig. 

The victims in the film  who say that they don't recognize their country are heart broken and heart breaking.  A cattle rancher in Wyoming turns to the camera and says directly to anyone who is listening, this is not just happening to you, it is happening to me.  You are not alone.