Categories: On Movies, Uncategorized
Eight years later Chloe, who is one, tries to wriggle around the barricade of big toys I’ve put in the way of the television plugs as I change the channel from what’s new in fashion this fall (grommets and pleather and plaid!) to MSNBC. I’d forgotten what day it is until now. One tower is left standing in the dust of the other, and Katie Couric says there are reports of a car bomb at the state department. A banner at the bottom of the screen indicates this is a replay of the 2001 September 11th coverage in real time. Eight years later. Just when I’m thinking it’s impossible to experience it the same way ever again – I know too much and I know how it ends – I gasp when the last tower buckles, wearily folds into itself, and gains momentum in the tremendous, outward stalking cloud of its demise. Like a movie, we can watch it again and again, the whole thing, in real time. Like a movie we’ve already seen, we can cringe and wish for the plot to evolve in a different direction even when we know that’s impossible. Tom Brokaw says this is a proclamation of war, that important people are being whisked to bunkers, that Airforce One will have military escorts. Other reports of other car bombs and hijackings come in, and Tom Brokaw, or maybe it’s Matt Lauer, I’m distracted by the visuals, the camera fixed on the empty spaces, explains he doesn’t mean to alarm but so many of the alarming reports they’ve heard have come true. I find myself watching just like I’d watched the first time to see if they’re right. Even though I already know. It’s a strange thing, the way you can get so lost in the horror, fiction or not, all over again. It’s a strange thing, how you can forget what day it is.
Categories: Uncategorized
Link to Inglourious Basterds Trailer
When I first saw the teaser for Inglourious Basterds – you know, Brad Pitt harping on the methodical killing of Natzees as he paces – my heart sank a little with the thought that QT might have finally lost me given the context of the modern debate on torture and the great reverential preciousness with which one is expected to handle the subject of World War II. What the hell was he doing? It didn’t even seem accurate. The greatest generation was going to have him ceremoniously flailed for this, I thought. And then this trailer surfaced and it finally clicked … I think. It reminded me of the brief exploration in The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay of the works, comic books in this case, relishing in fantastical, surreal ways the demise of Hitler and/or his SS, whether thinly disguised or not so much. That seems to be just what IB is. If it is outlandish enough to remove it from reality – therefore avoiding any need for precious handling or historical accuracy or a moral compass – can we then skip the flailing, enjoy the ride, and perhaps even find a suitable repository for our rage against the injustices in the world past and present? I don’t know. I might have it all wrong. But for now … I’m totally in.
Categories: On Movies
It’s a funny story how I ended up being pointlessly vulgar while criticizing pointless vulgarity in this review for The Ugly Truth and in doing so impressing several friends who didn’t think me capable of such things. A really funny story. Trust me – I’m working on it. In the meantime, read the review that had my mother searching for the asterisks and ampersands on her keyboard while trying to warn relatives about my critique before they could see it for themselves.
Categories: On Movies
Men’s ties lined up, plain, striped, paisley, sewn into the frenetic mosaic of a crazy quilt and knotted through with yarn – I could pretend that it was pretty or even artfully wrought because it was made and handed down by my great-grandmother. That was my first understanding of a quilt, anyway, and I’d studied it, the varying qualities of silk and polyester against my fingertips, the batting puckered, the backing slouched. I’d imagine the collecting of ties in some random corner of the house the way great-grandmother collected anything else (empty syrup bottles, shaped candles, magazines, shorn-off braids, hat boxes). I’d imagine the woman she must have been back then with her needle and thread and the haphazard progression of sewn-together ties draped across her lap. I always wanted to make a quilt.
When I found myself with a handled shopping bag full of baby clothes I couldn’t seem to give away, it occurred to me I could make a quilt out of them. I spent an afternoon ripping seams in onsies and gowns and pajamas and cutting out small squares. I spent another afternoon poring over Youtube videos to get some idea of what I was doing. On little two-minute clips the hands of various middle-aged women managed neatly cut scraps and pins as their seemingly disembodied, vaguely distant voices, ranging from whisper-thin to raspy, directed me to keep a pill bottle for worn needles or wear a thimble all day long so it becomes a part of me. In the pauses, someone admonished a dog, a child’s toy erupted in bright melodies, a dryer buzzed. Labored breathing, the plucking of a needle at cloth, the snapping of a thread broken against teeth – I watched over and over and learned more about character than quilting.
As I proceeded on my own, sewing squares together, making mistakes, ripping them out, starting over, finding a pattern in the arrangement of outgrown clothes, I had a simple revelation. This was a familiar craft. At the same time I was also at a loss to revise a novel, and as I took pictures of different configurations of quilt squares I remembered something I’d written about the main character early on, that he sees a pattern to everything. The novel is all about patterns, in fact – generations repeating lives, repeating mistakes, characters rethinking and reliving the past. The novel structure, I decided, had to enhance this as well as the eventual change in the patterns that begin to take place. Like scrap cloth, I took the novel apart, evaluated, rearranged, rewrote, added on. So Milan Kundera once decided his novel should have the structure of a symphony, and I decide my novel should have the structure of … a baby quilt.
Maybe the lesson is that inspiration can be found in the strangest places if you’re paying attention … or that when you’re having trouble with one craft you should try another to find the solution … or even that Marguerite Duras was right to suggest that “everything is writing.”
* pictured above, my daughter displays the finished quilt
Categories: On Writing
Three inches from Jane Austen’s writing table and I’ve got to be the one to touch it despite the fact that there’s a tour guide with her arms crossed standing three inches from it on the other side advising in very specific terms against this. She turns her back. My finger extends. It’s a small table, as big a round as a child’s arms in an embrace. It’s scratched in places but polished to a gleam. Poised on top – an ink well and a quill. Gah! To have to write like that, scrunched up to a tiny table with an implement that can only eek out a few words at a time in the light pushing through Coke-bottle windows like mud in a sieve. That’s what I’m thinking while I impress my fingerprint on the very edge of the table, hoping briefly for some transference of … is it creative genius? I’m not sure what to call Jane Austen or my fascination with her. She wrote basically the same story over and over, her characters exhibiting flashes of high-spiritedness only to settle into the status quo and a proper marriage. I asked a room full of young female students once how many of them would prefer to be Austen. Nearly all of them raised their hands. “Really?” I asked with snarling surprise. “You don’t want any rights? Or the opportunity to see your ambitions realized regardless of your gender? Or to hope for something in life besides a husband?” They just shrugged. I suppose there’s just something more alluring to Austen, her writing, and even her era. And three inches away, suddenly the mere fact that Austen wrote in a time in which women weren’t exactly welcome to is rebellion enough for me to stand in her drawing room in Chawton and angle to touch her writing table when no one else is looking. With a suspicious sniff the tour guide glances back over her shoulder just as my finger retreats with stealth-like speed and I become very, very engrossed with all the little buttons down my raincoat.
Categories: Random Acts of Austen
I. If the children of the household cannot be dispatched to the care of a governess, the lady novelist must first equip the young charges with any manner of diverting trinket such as a disassembled pocket-watch or a tin of buttons and imagine the young charges to be in a remote location such as Malta or Zanzibar so that the lady novelist may create for herself a moment’s refuge for the task of writing.
II. On the occasions that the lady novelist finds her literary landscapes suddenly overwrought with effeminate trappings such as lovelorn missives, dithering matriarchs, or maidens suffering lovelorn-missive-induced consumption in the care of dithering matriarchs, it is surely time for the lady novelist to set aside her plume, push up her sleeves, and educate herself in the ways of masculine folly – skeet shooting, fisticuffs, nether-regional adjustments, and the like – for the sake of broadening the lady writer’s literary appeal.
III. There will undoubtedly come a time when the lady novelist, after securing diversions for the household youth and deepening her well-spring of experience from which to draw, will put her pen to page to find it pressing against the same spot on the paper for a good hour or so with a painful deficiency of ideas or thoughts with which to encourage the pen onward – in which case the lady novelist shall indulge in writing excrement for the mere sake of maintaining the habit of writing anything at all. In other words, she shall keep a blog.
Categories: Random Acts of Austen