Well, hello there. It’s been a minute since I’ve done this type of post. It’s not that I haven’t been watching/reading/writing/listening/cooking. It’s that I’ve been extremely occupied with a situation – researching, advocating, assisting from a distance. Well, that’s over now. So maybe I can sort of think about other matters again.
Digest time.
Writing: Not a lot. I do have a small project that came my way, due in mid-June. I’ve been doing quite a bit of reading
and thinking about writing and what that means to me at this point, which I think will, in the long run, be more useful than just staring at a blank page or screen.
I do have this book coming out very soon!
Reading: As we approach the finish line of sophomore American literature, of course I’m keeping up with that. Four Hemingway stories last week: “The Killers,” “A Clean, Well-lighted Place,” “The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” The last, in particular, gives the frustrated writer (which is all of them, probably) food for thought:
There was so much to write. He had seen the world change; not just the events; although he had seen many of them and had watched the people, but he had seen the subtler change and he could remember how the people were at different times. He had been in it and he had watched it and it was his duty to write of it; but now he never would.
Stop dithering. Get busy.
This week in fiction, it’s Faulkner: “Two Soldiers,” “Barn Burning,” and, of course, “A Rose for Emily.”
When I was a senior in high school, our English teacher (who was Senator Howard Baker’s niece, by the way) read “A Rose for Emily” out loud to us, and I will never forget the impact of the moment she reading that last sentence. Like an electric shock.
In poetry, over the past couple of weeks, we’ve tackled Stevens, Williams, Moore, Pound, Eliot and Cummings (today). I am no poet and no teacher of poetry, so our study is primarily reading biographical information, watching a video or two, and reading poems aloud. I’ve found it quite illuminating and helpful – and we’ve found points of intersection between, for example, our discussions of the Modernist project and critique of the contemporary world (particularly Pound and Eliot) and his own personal current re-reading of Tolkien.
Who are we? Creatures alienated from creation and the Creator. No wonder we’re fragmented, in crisis, never at peace.
Personally? Let’s see…
I told you about The Mountain Lion. I had been reading Tender is the Night, got about halfway through, got bogged down – but I plan to get back to it this week. I read a few Stafford stories. Oh, I grabbed The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock from the “new books” shelf, mostly because I saw that it had a chapter on religious faith, but I stayed for the rest of the book as well – it’s a creative, illuminating take on the Hitchcock. I enjoyed it – dispelled a few myths, took on some difficult issues fairly, I thought.
Right now, I’m back with Mauriac – that copy of Flesh and Blood I picked up at the estate sale a few weeks ago. I should finish it in the next day or so.
Watching: Well, my Mad Men buddy is back, so we have plunged back into season 6, which is enjoyable, as always.
Over the past week, these have been watched around here by me and either one or both of the others:
Hilary and Jackie– which I’d seen a couple of times a while back, and wanted the musician in the house to see it. I know, I know, it’s controversial and not so much about music but about sibling entanglements, manipulation and then tragic disease, but while I didn’t find it as engaging as I had twenty years ago, I still willingly had my heart broken by the story again.
Although my viewing companion, who is a Daniel Barenboim fan, was not pleased by what he learned about the man through the film (Barenboim had another family – two children – in Paris, while Jacqueline Du Pre was still alive and suffering, then dying from MS) – but that tension was broken a bit by my discovery and reporting of what Barenboim himself said upon the film’s release: “Couldn’t they have waited until I was dead?”
Catch Me If You Can, which viewing companion hadn’t ever seen – and while I’d seen it when it came out, I found myself very annoyed with it this time. Why? Is it the Spielberg style – slick, mechanical, predictable? Partly. But also because I know that the “inspired by true events” is very loosely related to what actually happened.
Metropolitan – I figured it was time to introduce the other viewing companion to Whit Stillman. Very obviously a first film, and of course arch and idiosyncratic, but with a purpose: ridiculous, superficial social mores and rituals can, sometimes actually serve to preserve something good and real. I think we will watch Barcelona together and then I’ll let him take it from there, if he wants to.
The Straight Story, reviewed by Movie Son here (who ranks it #1 in his David Lynch Definitive Ranking) – very affecting, with a spiritual dimension I had forgotten or not taken note of when I first saw it years ago – in the film’s world, Alvin Straight’s journey is a penitential pilgrimage. Yes, there are practical and prideful reasons he makes the journey the way he does – on his tractor, taking six weeks to travel three hundred miles – but there’s also a sense that at the end of a long life, one has sins requiring absolution and divisions calling for reconciliation, and that journey isn’t easy. It requires sacrifice and time, and it’s something no one can do for you. And the fact that the night before Alvin finally sees his brother again – he spends on a cemetery’s border, with nourishment brought to him by a priest – memento mori and by the way, here’s some viaticum for the journey – puts a period on that sentence, in my mind.
Next up? Not sure. Minari comes out this week on DVD – I’m hoping it will be available in one of our Redbox kiosks around these parts.
Listening: Lots of Debussy last week, but that recital happened so we are moving on. Tackling this Beethoven next, as well as the first two Ginastera Danzas Argentinas.
I listen to a lot of piano jazz. A lot.
Cooking: Had some guests last weekend – flank steak, these potatoes, this Greek green bean salad, this strawberry-basil (regular, not thai, with some mint thrown in) sorbet.